Scientific American (January 16, 2024): The February 2024 issue features ‘The Milky Way’s Secret History’ – New star maps reveal our galaxy’s turbulent past; Why Aren’t We Made of Antimatter? – To understand why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, physicists are looking for a tiny signal in the electron…
Scientific American (December 19, 2023): The January 2024 issue features How Much Vitamin D Do You Need to Stay Healthy?; Inside Mathematicians’ Search for the Mysterious ‘Einstein Tile’; How Analyzing Cosmic Nothing Might Explain Everything; Why Are Alaska’s Rivers Turning Orange?; and Intervention at an Early Age May Hold Off the Onset of Depression…
Scientific American – November 2023: The issue features The New Nuclear Age – Inside America’s plan to remake its atomic arsenal; The Most Shocking Discovery in Astrophysics Is 25 Years Old – Scientists are still trying to figure out dark energy; Behind the Scenes at a U.S. Factory Building New Nuclear Bombs – The U.S. is ramping up construction of new “plutonium pits” for nuclear weapons….
One afternoon in early 1994 a couple of astronomers sitting in an air-conditioned computer room at an observatory headquarters in the coastal town of La Serena, Chile, got to talking. Nicholas Suntzeff, an associate astronomer at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, and Brian Schmidt, who had recently completed his doctoral thesis at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, were specialists in supernovae—exploding stars. Suntzeff and Schmidt decided that the time had finally come to use their expertise to tackle one of the fundamental questions in cosmology: What is the fate of the universe?
The point of the thing was to forever change our concept of power. When the U.S. military assembled a team of scientists, led by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, to build a nuclear bomb during World War II with the hope of beating the Nazis to such a terrible creation, many of those involved saw their efforts as a strange kind of civic destiny. The Manhattan Project, wrote Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, was “compelled from the beginning not by malice or hatred but by hope for a better world.” Oppenheimer himself once said, “The atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. It made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.”
Scientific American – November 2023: The issue features Woman The Hunter – New science debunks the myth that men evolved to hunt and women to gather; Interspecies Organ Transplants; Materials Made in Space; The Legacy of the Endangered Species Act, and more…
The Endangered Species Act requires that every U.S. plant and animal be saved from extinction, but after 50 years, we have to do much more to prevent a biodiversity crisis
Scientific American – October 2023: The issue features ‘Will Humans ever Live in Space – Here’s what it will take to leave planet Earth’; AI could help us to talk to animals; New origins of wine, and more…
Global warming is so rampant that some scientists say we should begin altering the stratosphere to block incoming sunlight, even if it jeopardizes rain and crops
Scientific American – September 2023: The issue features ‘Dinosaur Giants – How the biggest animals ever to walk Earth got so huge; The Science of Narcissism; Deep-Sea Mining; How AI learns What No One Taught It, and more…
At Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery the living get as much attention as the dead. Groundskeepers maintain the 478-acre historic landmark as an arboretum and habitat for more than 200 breeding and migratory bird species. But many visiting wildlife lovers aren’t interested in those native birds. They’re at the entryway, their binoculars trained on the spire atop its Gothic Revival arches. They’ve come to see the parrots.
Exposure to extreme heat can damage the central nervous system, the brain and other vital organs, and the effects can set in with terrifying speed, resulting in heat exhaustion, heat cramps or heatstroke. It also exacerbates existing medical conditions such as hypertension and heart disease and is especially perilous for people who suffer from chronic diseases. The older population is at high risk, and children, who may not be able to regulate their body temperatures as effectively as adults in extreme conditions, are also vulnerable.