Certain apes appear to be much smarter than others, with at least one chimpanzee now called “exceptional” when compared to other chimps. The standout chimp, an adult female in her 20s named Natasha, scored off the charts in a battery of tests. The findings, published in the latest Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B,…
Over at Edge.org, Harvard University physician and social scientist Nicholas A. Christakis discusses transformative changes in the social sciences in the 21st Century: These three things—a biological hurricane, computational social science, and the rediscovery of experimentation—are going to change the social sciences in the 21st century. With that change will come, in my judgment, a…
Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have built a quantum processor that can factor a composite number – in this case the number 15 – into its constituent prime factors, 3 and 5. While the math may not be much of an achievement, performing it successfully is an important step towards factoring much larger numbers, with…
When well-meaning campaigners want us to pay attention to global warming, they often end up pitching beyond the facts. And, while this may seem justified by a noble goal, such “policy by panic” tactics rarely work, and often backfire. Remember how, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Al Gore (and many others) claimed…
So many scientific studies are making incorrect claims that a new service has sprung up to fact-check reported findings by repeating the experiments. A year-old California, company, Science Exchange, announced its “Reproducibility Initiative,” aimed at improving the trustworthiness of published papers. Scientists who want to validate their findings will be able to apply to the…
Do you think cutting-edge scientists should earn as much as star athletes, celebrity artists or Wall Street bankers? The Russian billionaire investor Yuri Milner does, and this week he put his money where his heart is, depositing $3 million in the bank accounts of each of the nine theoretical physicists he judged to be doing…
The Higgs boson-like particle whose discovery was announced on 4 July looks significantly more certain to exist. The particle has been the subject of a decades-long hunt as the last missing piece of physics’ Standard Model, explaining why matter has mass. Now one Higgs-hunting team at the Large Hadron Collider report a “5.9 sigma” levels…
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…
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…
From the editors at SciAm: Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, died on July 23 of pancreatic cancer. She was 61. Outside her trail-blazing career as an astronaut, Ride was also a major champion of STEM education. In 2010, she helped found an initiative called Change the Equation [a CEO-driven initiative to increase…