Do Prisons Make Us Safer?

New research shows that prisons prevent far less violent crime than you might think | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

A New "Law" Suggests Quantum Supremacy Could Happen This Year

Quantum computers are improving at a doubly exponential rate | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Climate Change Throws a Wrench in Everglades Restoration

The drought and heat that drove a recent massive seagrass die-off could become more common in the future | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Massive Global Experiment Finds People More Likely to Return A "Missing" Wallet As the Cash It Contains Grows

Across 40 countries, a person had a greater inclination to turn in one of the study’s 17,000 wallets when the amount of money within rose | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Cold War Spy Satellites Reveal Substantial Himalayan Glacier Melt

Ice melt in the mountain range today is twice as fast as it was before 2000, once-secret images show | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Trump Administration Relaxes Emissions Limits on Power Plants

A new rule for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency allows states to set their own limits on carbon-emissions levels | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Are Omega-3 Eggs as Good as Eating Fish?

Fish are high in omega-3 fatty acids. But what if you can't eat seafood? Can omega-3 enriched eggs or peanut butter provide the same health benefits? | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

From Two Bulls, 9 Million Dairy Cows

Just two Y chromosomes exist in a huge population of U.S. Holsteins; researchers want to know what traits have been lost | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Interactive IQ Test May Better Predict Real-World Achievement

A click-and-drag version of a common intelligence assessment more closely resembles real problem-solving | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Solving Our Plastic Problem

At Scientific American 's third Science on the Hill event, experts from academia and the private sector met at the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill to talk with Scientific American Editor-in-Chief Mariette DiChristina about solutions to our plethora of plastics probl … | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Flood Insurance Program Increasingly Underwater as Payouts Shatter Records

Louisiana and Texas accounted for half the money paid out by the National Flood Insurance Program since 1973 | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

China Reveals Scientific Experiments for Next Space Station

Projects will probe topics including DNA mutation, fire behaviour and the birth of stars | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

The Quantum Internet Is Emerging, One Experiment at a Time

Breakthrough demonstrations using defective diamonds, high-flying drones, laser-bathed crystals and other exotica suggest practical, unhackable quantum networks are within reach | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Flexible Sandstone [video]

Water plus rocks equal weird things – sometimes. Itacolumite is a rare sandstone riddled with tiny holes, leaving interlocking bits of mineral. | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

"Flesh-Eating" Bacteria May Be Spreading to Beaches Once Thought Off-Limits

The bacteria, which normally live in warmer waters, have caused infections in waters near Delaware and New Jersey | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Pace of Heat Records Will Pick up With Warming

If greenhouse gases are not curbed, 60 percent of the world will set monthly records by century’s end | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Mapping the Mission

Modern satellite imagery and 3-D modeling give us a new view of how Apollo 11 played out | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

One Small Step Back in Time

Half a century after Apollo 11 , we remember how we achieved the impossible and why we need to do it again | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Adulting Tips: 5 Psychological Secrets

Whether your graduation is coming up or twenty years behind you, we all have moments when we wonder whether we’re cut out for this adulthood thing | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Why Some Amazonian Societies Survived and Others Perished amid Pre-Columbian Droughts

Confronting climate change, cultures with intensive, specialized land use were vulnerable. Those that endured cultivated multiple crops and helped edible rainforest species prosper | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

New Sensor Could Detect Electrical Failures in Ships or Buildings

A monitoring device could measure overall power consumption and identify critical malfunctions  | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Monkey Cousins Use Similar Calls

Two monkey species who last shared a common ancestor 3 million years ago have "eerily similar" alarm calls. | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

How Does Insulin Work in Our Bodies?

What is insulin and how do our bodies use it? | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Domestication Made Dogs' Facial Anatomy More Fetching to Humans

Wolves lack the muscles that allow dogs to raise their eyebrows and make puppy dog eyes | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Proposed Energy Efficiency Rules Could Slow Emissions Reductions

More efficient appliances and stricter building codes have driven significant declines in U.S. emissions to date | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Gene Increases Risk for Pot Addiction

First gene associated with cannabis abuse likely affects how people respond to the drug | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

New Space Telescope Will Map the Universe in High-energy X-rays

A German–Russian mission called SRG will detect millions of supermassive black holes, many new to science, and hundreds of thousands of stars | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

In the Wiggle of an Ear, a Surprising Insight into Bat Sonar

It could lead to drones that fly like bats | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Big Changes Needed to Fight Harassment, Group Tells US Biomedical Agency

Advisory panel says US National Institutes of Health should treat sexual harassment more seriously and do more to help affected researchers | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Storm Scents: It's True, You Can Smell Oncoming Summer Rain

Researchers have teased out the aromas associated with a rainstorm and deciphered the olfactory messages they convey | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Better Memory Through Electrical Brain Ripples

A study in mice shows improved cognitive performance when these bursting signals move around memory circuits | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Not All Military Bases Plan for Warming, Watchdog Finds

The Defense Department recognizes the risks posed by climate change, but needs to do more to protect its facilities | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

A Head Full of Fluid and Burning Eyes: NASA Astronaut Talks about His Year Living in Space

Scientific American spoke with Scott Kelly about the hardships of life in zero gravity and what it was like coming back to Earth  | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

You Contain Multitudes of Microplastics

People appear to consume between 74,000 and 121,000 microplastic particles annually, and that's probably a gross underestimate. | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

The Bitter Truth: Scientists Sequence the Almond Genome

Cracking the nut’s “cyanide problem” could make it easier to cultivate sweeter varieties of this ancient snack | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Hopes for Cutting Carbon Do Not Yet Match Reality

Prices on carbon are not strict enough to make significant dents in emissions | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Using Marijuana to Get High Dates Back Millennia

Ancient site points to weed’s role in burial rites | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Ecological Detectives Hunt for San Francisco's Vanished Waterways

Recovering “ghost creeks” from past landscapes can help protect the city’s future amid climate chaos | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

A Biodegradable Label Doesn't Make It So

At the third Scientific American “Science Meets Congress” event, “Solving the Plastic Waste Problem”, experts examined the question of biodegradability.    | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Using Ganja to Get High Dates Back Millennia

Ancient site points to weed’s role in burial rites | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Water on Europa--with a Pinch of Salt

Much like Earth’s seas, the subsurface ocean of this icy moon of Jupiter contains sodium chloride, the main ingredient of table salt | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

EPA's Science Advisory Board to Scrutinize Clean Car Rollback

Critics of the Trump administration move point to errors in the agency’s analysis | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Venus, Earth's Evil Twin, Beckons Space Agencies

Once a water-rich Eden, the hellish planet could reveal how to find habitable worlds around distant stars | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Watch a Raging Forest Fire Surround You in 360 Degrees

Nightmarish spherical videos, shot from the center of an inferno, demonstrate how they spread | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

The 2019 Worldwide Fitness Trends

The annual survey of worldwide fitness trends is now in its 13th year | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Russian Biologist Plans More CRISPR-Edited Babies

The proposal follows a Chinese scientist who claimed to have created twins from edited embryos last year | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Storms, Salty Water Caused Mystery Hole in Antarctic Sea Ice

Robotic floats and elephant seals helped solve the mystery of the formation of features called polynyas | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago

Two-for-One: Chickenpox Vaccine Lowers Shingles Risk in Children

Immunization reduces the likelihood of a painful reemergence of the virus in kids | Continue reading


@scientificamerican.com | 5 years ago