The verdict is in: Global warming is occurring and emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activity are the main cause. This, according to Richard A. Muller, MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. Never mind that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of other climatologists around the world came…
The National Youth Science Camp aims to give high-achieving students a chance to experience science in a fun setting. Especially when it comes to sciences, or STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — education, learning over the summer matters, education experts say. Students need exposure to hands-on, experiential science beyond the textbook, or they…
Microbes that convert electricity into methane gas could become an important source of renewable energy, according to scientists from Stanford and Pennsylvania State universities. Researchers at both campuses are raising colonies of microorganisms, called methanogens, which have the remarkable ability to turn electrical energy into pure methane—the key ingredient in natural gas. The scientists’ goal…
Researchers trying to herd tiny particles into useful ordered formations have found an unlikely ally: entropy, a tendency generally described as “disorder.” Computer simulations by University of Michigan scientists and engineers show that the property can nudge particles to form organized structures. By analyzing the shapes of the particles beforehand, they can even predict what…
To learn about the Internet, we tend to turn to … the Internet. Blogs comment on blogs commenting on blogs. Tweets build on Tweets. It can be one hell of a beautiful snow globe. Yet perhaps the most vital investigation in years of our complex, befuddling, empowering, discouraging relationship with technology comes courtesy of Cara…
A U.S. federal court has found that a stem cell therapy offered by a Colorado clinic meets the definition of a regulated drug. The ruling could spur a U.S. Food and Drug Administration crackdown on other clinics offering untested adult stem cell treatments in the United States. The company, Regenerative Sciences Inc. in Broomfield, Colorado,…
A quest to get more discussion about science and scientific issues in the run-up to this year’s presidential election in the U.S, is starting to get noticed. Scientific American has joined this endeavor to get the U.S. presidential candidates to talk about substantive issues related to science and will be grading the candidates on their…
Dating features on the Moon and Mars is guesswork. Scott Anderson is building a tool to change that.
After decades of digging, paleoanthropologists looking for fossilized human bones have established a reasonably clear picture: Modern humans arose in Africa some 200,000 years ago and all archaic species of humans then disappeared, surviving only outside Africa, as did the Neanderthals in Europe. Geneticists studying DNA now say that, to the contrary, a previously unknown…
The huge NASA rover speeding toward an August landing on Mars may be the most capable and complex Red Planet explorer ever launched, but it’s far from the first. The 1-ton Curiosity rover — which will search for evidence that Mars is, or ever was, capable of supporting microbial life — represents humanity’s 40th effort…