In the debate over gun control sparked by the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, most gun-rights advocates have been conspicuously silent. Not John Lott. Quite the opposite, he has been the loudest conservative voice publicly defending firearms. Mere hours after the massacre, he tweeted, “The most consistent feature of these attacks are that…
Recently, two probes that had spent the past year orbiting the moon for NASA’s GRAIL mission slammed into the lunar surface, destroying themselves and their communications connection to Earth. None of this was an accident: Crash-landings like this are a typical method of bringing unmanned lunar missions — and unmanned planetary missions in general —…
The growing evidence linking green spaces to human wellbeing could help strengthen the case for conservation, a conference has been told. Professor Ken Norris from Reading University said green spaces improved wellbeing, so that meant “they can also be linked to our health”. Ecologists need to do better when it comes to convincing people about…
The whole point of an explanation is to reduce something you don’t know to something you do. By that standard, you don’t gain much by explaining anything in terms of black holes. Appealing to the most mysterious objects known to science as an explanation sounds like using one mystery to explain another. Yet this is…
When you hear about climate change it’s most often about melting glaciers and sea ice, increasing frequency of heatwaves and powerful storms. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll hear about the acidification of the oceans too. What you don’t hear about is the saltiness of the seas. But that’s changing too, according to a new piece of…
People may not be as generous to strangers as social scientists previously believed, at least if a new study is any indication. The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may help explain a seemingly irrational behavior: People consistently give money to other people, even when it hurts their own…
Even when they are very young, orangutans may start to form ideas about their world — specifically, how and when to use certain tools. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which indicates that ape cultural traditions may not be that different from our own. Like humans, orangutans have behavioral traditions that vary by region….
Astronomers have discovered what may be five planets orbiting Tau Ceti, the closest single star beyond our solar system whose temperature and luminosity nearly match the sun’s. If the planets are there, one of them is about the right distance from the star to sport mild temperatures, oceans of liquid water, and even life. Don’t…
While it is a painful truism that brutality and violence are at least as old as humanity, so, it seems, is caring for the sick and disabled. And some archaeologists are suggesting a closer, more systematic look at how prehistoric people — who may have left only their bones — treated illness, injury and incapacitation….
The pursuit of knowledge is now a global enterprise. Scientific American and Nature have teamed up on this special report on how this trend is changing the way science is done, and how it informs the world.