The living slime that may have been the muse for the 1958 science-fiction film The Blob just got creepier: Evidence has emerged that slime mold, a brainless single-celled organism, has a form of memory. In experiments with the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, scientists at the University of Sydney noticed that the life-form avoided retracing its…
The United States ranks just 31st globally in student achievement in math. Annually, fewer than 60,000 American college graduates earn degrees in the top five engineering majors — a number woefully insufficient to fill industry needs and fuel innovation. It’s imperative that educators inspire the next generation of students — not simply to staff the…
Scientists at the University of Cambridge have used cutting-edge infrared surveys of the sky to discover a new population of enormous, rapidly growing supermassive black holes in the early Universe. The black holes were previously undetected because they sit cocooned within thick layers of dust. The new study, published in the journal Monthly Notices of…
From SciAm guest blogger Kyle Hill: The Earth is flat. A full moon leads to more crime. Humans were created less than 10,000 years ago. If you made your way through even the most general of science educations, the above statements should strike you as suspect. Having a Copernican worldview challenged by such a statement,…
Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) tore into scientists as tools of the devil in a speech at the Liberty Baptist Church Sportsman’s Banquet in September. “All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell,” said Broun, a physician, with an…
John B. Gurdon of the U.K. and Shinya Yamanaka of Japan shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in so-called cellular reprogramming, which has unleashed a wave of advances in everything from cloning to the possible treatment of diseases using stem cells. The researchers’ experiments showed how specialized, mature cells…
Learning a new language makes the brain grow, according to researchers who studied young recruits at the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy by measuring the brains of participants before and after the language training.
NASA’s Swift satellite recently detected a rising tide of high-energy X-rays from a source toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The outburst, produced by a rare X-ray nova, announced the presence of a previously unknown stellar-mass black hole. “Bright X-ray novae are so rare that they’re essentially once-a-mission events and this is the…
Despite the flurry of campaign attack ads claiming candidates are either job killers or job creators, one thing remains clear: If the United States is to hold a competitive edge in a rapidly changing global workforce, bolstering the nation’s science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workforce is essential. It’s also essential that all students, no…
A Romney presidency would pose an obvious hardship for the country’s public colleges and universities. Romney and Ryan, austerity candidates, make no secret of their desire for further cuts in public spending (with no exemption for higher education). But Romney’s now-famous “47-percent comment” highlights the danger ahead for the private revenues that public-college leaders have…