Scientific American – January 2024 Preview
Tag Archives: Scientific American
Science Review: Scientific American – December 2023
The Most Shocking Discovery in Astrophysics Is 25 Years Old
A quarter of a century after detecting dark energy, scientists are still trying to figure out what it is
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?
Inside the $1.5-Trillion Nuclear Weapons Program You’ve Never Heard Of
A road trip through the communities shouldering the U.S.’s nuclear missile revival
BY ABE STREEP
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.”
Science Review: Scientific American – November 2023
The Evolutionary Reasons We Are Drawn to Horror Movies and Haunted Houses
Scary play lets people—and other animals—rehearse coping skills for disturbing challenges in the real world
By Coltan Scrivner and Athena Aktipis
Can We Save Every Species from Extinction?
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
Surgeons Aim to Transplant Organs from Pigs to Humans to Help Solve the Donor Shortage
Advances are increasing the supply of organs. But this isn’t enough. Enter the genetically modified donor pig
By Tanya Lewis
Science Review: Scientific American – October 2023
Why We’ll Never Live in Space
Medical, financial and ethical hurdles stand in the way of the dream to settle in space
By Sarah Scoles
It’s Time to Engineer the Sky
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
By Douglas Fox
Science Review: Scientific American – September 2023
Rare ‘Pinwheel’ Stars Are a Beautiful Astronomical Puzzle
The doomed class of stars named Wolf-Rayets produce mysterious pinwheel shapes
Deep-Sea Mining Could Begin Soon, Regulated or Not
Mining the seafloor could boost global production of clean energy technology—and destroy the ocean in the process
How Sauropod Dinosaurs Became the Biggest Land Animals Again and Again
New research hints at how sauropod dinosaurs got to be so gargantuan
Science Review: Scientific American – July 2023 Issue
Parrots Are Taking Over the World
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.
Extreme Heat Is Deadlier Than Hurricanes, Floods and Tornadoes Combined
When dangerous heat waves hit cities, better risk communication could save lives
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.
Brain Waves Synchronize when People Interact
The minds of social species are strikingly resonant
Science Review: Scientific American – June 2023 Issue
What Is the Future of Fusion Energy?
Nuclear fusion won’t arrive in time to fix climate change, but it could be essential for our future energy needs
- By Philip Ball
Last December physicists working on fusion claimed a breakthrough. A team at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California announced it had extracted more energy from a controlled nuclear fusion reaction than had been used to trigger it. It was a global first and a significant step for physics—but very far from enabling practical exploitation of fusion as an energy source.
Physicists Make Matter out of Light to Find Quantum Singularities
Experiments that imitate solid materials with light waves reveal the quantum basis of exotic physical effects
A Traumatized Woman with Multiple Personalities Gets Better as Her ‘Parts’ Work as a Team
Therapy for dissociative identity disorder has aimed to meld many personalities into one. But that’s not the only solution, a caring therapist shows
Science Review: Scientific American – May 2023 Issue
Synthetic Morphology Lets Scientists Create New Life-Forms
The emerging field of synthetic morphology bends boundaries between natural and artificial life
The Six Moons Most Likely to Host Life in Our Solar System
Vast quantities of liquid water may exist on moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, making life possible there, too
How Much Does ‘Nothing’ Weigh?
The Archimedes experiment will weigh the void of empty space to help solve a big cosmic puzzle
Science Review: Scientific American – April 2023 Issue
Imaginary numbers—the square roots of negative numbers—are an inescapable part of quantum theory, a study shows
Fixing the Hated Open-Design Office
Open-office designs create productivity and health problems. New insights from Deaf and autistic communities could fix them
No One Knows How the Biggest Animals on Earth—Baleen Whales—Find Their Food
How do giant filter-feeding whales find their tiny prey? The answer could be key to saving endangered species
Science Review: Scientific American – March 2023
Long COVID Now Looks like a Neurological Disease, Helping Doctors to Focus Treatments
The causes of long COVID, which disables millions, may come together in the brain and nervous system
Tiny Bubbles of Quark-Gluon Plasma Re-create the Early Universe
New experiments can re-create the young cosmos, when it was a mash of fundamental particles, more precisely than ever before
Babies Are Born with an Innate Number Sense
Plato was right: newborns do math
Boomers Daily 