2017-10-08 所属栏目:科学美国人

When is a sneeze more than a sneeze? For African wild dogs, it turns out that sneezes are a form of voting. Gather a bunch of wild dogs together and a sneezing chorus becomes a way

2017-10-08 所属栏目:科学美国人

In the frog world, romance is often accompanied by a song. "It's the norm. The vast majority of frogs have males calling to attract females."

Sandra Goutte is an evolutionary bio

2017-10-08 所属栏目:科学美国人

To study the heavens, it's all about the photons. "We in astronomy are always greedy. We want every photon we can collect." Drew Phillips, astronomer at University of California O

2017-10-08 所属栏目:科学美国人

Take any square kilometer of Earth’s surface. About once a year an extraordinary event occurs in the sky directly above that patch of land or sea: the hefty nucleus of a heav

2017-10-08 所属栏目:科学美国人

In 1869, the Smiley family purchased a parcel of land about 100 miles north of New York City. Over time, some of their property and much of the surrounding landscape became the Moh

2017-10-08 所属栏目:科学美国人

One of the consequences of a warming world is that high mountain habitats, which used to be too chilly for trees, are heating up. "There is now newly available real estate above wh

2017-10-08 所属栏目:科学美国人

The Mauna Loa Observatory sits on the side of a Hawaiian volcano, 11,000 feet above the Pacific. And for nearly 60 years, an instrument there has been sniffing the local air—

2017-10-08 所属栏目:科学美国人

Ben Van Allen collects caterpillars. While doing postdoctoral research at Louisiana State University, Van Allen saw that some of the caterpillars were having others for lunch. Rath

2017-09-13 所属栏目:科学美国人

Internet companies often receive requests by law enforcement for customer info to help with ongoing investigations. Rarely, however, will a court order hit up a Web hosting company

2017-09-12 所属栏目:科学美国人

Just as humans understand the shape of our surroundings by how light reflects off objects, bats use reflections of sounds they produce instead—what’s called echolocatio

2017-09-08 所属栏目:科学美国人

As Houston begins recovery efforts from Hurricane Harvey, a new storm threat—Hurricane Irma—is barreling west towards the Caribbean and Florida. We have few defenses ag

2017-09-07 所属栏目:科学美国人

Up in California’s High Sierra, above the dense pine forests, rocky habitats reign. And if you look carefully among the boulders, you might see a pika—a rabbit relative

2017-09-04 所属栏目:科学美国人

On March 11, 1437, Korean royal astronomers noticed something out of the ordinary in the night sky. "There was a brand new star they'd never seen before, between two of the well-k

2017-09-04 所属栏目:科学美国人

When birds face the destruction of their habitat, some species don’t make it while others survive. But what happens at the very beginning of the process, just as a bird's ha

2017-08-31 所属栏目:科学美国人

As the world's oceans heat up, salmon are migrating earlier. Plankton are shifting their range. But warmer water temperatures also mean warmer fish—and faster-running metabo

2017-08-30 所属栏目:科学美国人

In the fight to conserve tropical rainforests, here's a tool you don't often hear about: orange peels. Specifically, 12,000 tons of them, dumped on the land. "You don't usually

2017-08-28 所属栏目:科学美国人

<sounds of people watching the total solar eclipse>

You&rsquo;ve all taken off your glasses by now, along with the family and friends of my friend Dennis Meredith. Because the Gre

2017-08-25 所属栏目:科学美国人

“I expected to have this interesting intellectual experience, and instead it was just completely visceral.”Author and journalist David Baron talking about the first tim

2017-08-24 所属栏目:科学美国人

“I expected to have this interesting intellectual experience, and instead it was just completely visceral.”

Author and journalist David Baron talking about the first t

2017-08-21 所属栏目:科学美国人

More than 900 years ago, the Pueblo people were thriving in New Mexico&rsquo;s Chaco Canyon. While they were there, the region experienced what the whole country is looking forward

2017-08-21 所属栏目:科学美国人

When you install an app on your smartphone, you&rsquo;re often asked whether you&rsquo;d like to share your list of contacts with that app. That might be a convenient way to connec

2017-08-18 所属栏目:科学美国人

Fifty years ago, British inventors made and marketed the first electronic “breathalyzer”. The alcohol gauge has become standard issue for U.S. law enforcement cracking

2017-08-15 所属栏目:科学美国人

Polar Bears spend most of their time roaming the sea ice in search of seals. And seals spend most of their time underneath that ice, avoiding the top predator. But climate change i

2017-08-11 所属栏目:科学美国人

You wouldn't think studying lizards is a particularly dangerous profession. Until, that is, sheriffs approach you with their guns drawn. "We get the cops called on us sometimes."

2017-08-10 所属栏目:科学美国人

Twitter has more than 300 million monthly active users. But researchers have estimated that between about 30 million and 50 million of those are Twitter bots—automated accoun