In a perfect world, we would learn from success and failure alike. Both hold instructive lessons and provide needed reality checks that may safeguard our decisions from bad information or biased advice. But, alas, our brain doesn’t work this way. Unlike an impartial outcome-weighing machine an engineer might design, it learns more from some experiences […]
Physicists are on the hunt for dark forces. These forces are not as ominous as they sound: “dark” simply refers to the fact that no one has observed them before. In this case, they would act between neutrons and electrons. One path to investigating dark forces involves using lasers to make precision measurements of isotopes […]
Scientific American has never endorsed a presidential candidate in its 175-year history. This year we are compelled to do so. We do not do this lightly. The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest […]
Between cross-talk and insults, climate change got more attention last night than in any other presidential debate in history. Voters might not have noticed. The bare-knuckle bar fight of a presidential debate was nearing the end when it turned to fuel economy standards and the Clean Power Plan. The candidates presented starkly different climate agendas. […]
Apocalypse is a word that we throw around pretty readily these days, and we can choose from a cornucopia of terrifying options—from the fierce ochre skies of western North America to the seemingly endless days of a global pandemic, to the suffering of mass migrants and the trauma from unstable political leaders (the specifics of […]
Late in the evening of October 24, 2017, an e-mail arrived containing tantalizing news of the heavens. Astronomer Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was writing to one of us (Jewitt) about a new object in the sky with a very strange trajectory. Discovered six days earlier by University of Hawaii astronomer Robert Weryk, […]
Perhaps the most unnerving aspect of COVID-19 is its startling range of severity: from completely asymptomatic to deadly. Starting early in the pandemic, researchers identified factors that put people at risk of a serious case of the disease, such as advanced age, having certain chronic diseases and being male. But these demographic trends do not […]
Mask wearing and social distancing for COVID-19 may have cut influenza cases south of the equator Credit: Katie Peek Advertisement In March, as coronavirus widened its global sweep, one health statistic quickly flattened: influenza cases. In the Southern Hemisphere, flu season would have been just taking off, but cases were virtually nonexistent. “Never in my […]
Editor’s Note (9/29/20): This story has been updated and republished in light of the Trump administration’s newly announced plans to ship millions of antigen tests to states and vulnerable communities. An inexpensive coronavirus test that millions of Americans could use at a pharmacy, in a workplace or even at home could prove to be a vital asset in allowing people to […]
The United States is not expected to electrify passenger cars fast enough to stay on track with the Paris climate accord’s goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, according to a new study. Published in the journal Nature Climate Change yesterday, the study by engineers at the University of Toronto concludes that 90% of light-duty cars on […]