2016-06-17 所属栏目:科学美国人

Think it’s your inability to resist cheesecake that’s making it tough to fit into your skinny jeans? Well, your bacteria may share some of the blame. Because a new stud

2016-06-16 所属栏目:科学美国人

“So I just don’t approach, at least initially, a group of musk oxen.”

Joel Berger, with the Wildlife Conservation Society and Colorado State University.

“

2016-06-14 所属栏目:科学美国人

When you think of a leader, you may think of an individual who is above all bold. But a new study of fish called sticklebacks shows that shy individuals actually prefer to follow f

2016-06-14 所属栏目:科学美国人

Tourists snorkeling off the Greek island of Zakynthos in 2013 thought they had made a fabulous discovery: the remains of a lost city. They saw what appeared to be paving stones and

2016-06-13 所属栏目:科学美国人

LEDs use only a quarter the energy of incandescent bulbs. But despite their efficiency, there is one thing they're not that good at: "They have a hard time giving directional ligh

2016-06-13 所属栏目:科学美国人

In April the world learned that more than 90 percent of Australia's Great Barrier Reef had become bleached. That is, warming waters or other conditions cause the algae living in t

2016-06-12 所属栏目:科学美国人

From Wolf to Woof Twice
从 狼 到“汪”是肿么回事In Jack London's The Call of the Wild, a pet dog named Buck winds up in the Yukon… where he succumbs to his desir

2016-06-12 所属栏目:科学美国人

Ever order a drink, and feel stiffed on the pour? Well, before you bother the bartender, take a closer look at the size of your glass. "So people will generally perceive there to b

2016-06-07 所属栏目:科学美国人

The redder, the better. And I’m not talking about beets, roses or presidential candidates. I’m talking birds. Well, some birds. In various species, red coloration in a

2016-06-06 所属栏目:科学美国人

It's one of the underwater world's classic partnerships: clownfish and Nemo hides out in the anemone, which helps keep predatory fish at bay. "But at the same time there are oth

2016-06-03 所属栏目:科学美国人

The first life on Earth appeared about four billion years ago. One place these pioneering organisms may have emerged is at hydrothermal vents, deep underwater. Where unusual chemis

2016-06-03 所属栏目:科学美国人

The sound of a cracking knee isn't particularly pleasant. But it gets worse when you listen up close. [knee-cracking recording] "It does for most people. But for me, it just makes

2016-06-03 所属栏目:科学美国人

If you were searching for a lifeform unlike anything known to science, where would you look? Scientists at Charles University, in Prague, looked in the poop of a pet chinchilla. "T

2016-05-26 所属栏目:科学美国人

This campaign season, there's been plenty of name calling and lots of accusations. David Clementson, a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University, has been keeping tabs. "I mean t

2016-05-25 所属栏目:科学美国人

Ring-tailed lemurs are a chatty lot. They vocalize to exchange information. And they also communicate via a veritable smorgasbord of stinky secretions they use to mark their territ

2016-05-25 所属栏目:科学美国人

Beer. It’s hugely popular today, but that’s nothing new: people have been drinking beer for thousands of years, all around the world. And now a brewing site some 5,000

2016-05-24 所属栏目:科学美国人

Bridget Jones, in print and on screen, called them the “Smug Marrieds”—the happy couples that seemed to have it all. But maybe the fictional Jones should have cal

2016-05-24 所属栏目:科学美国人

For as long as we’ve been sending spacecraft to Mars, we’ve been finding signs of water. The Red Planet’s sinuous river valleys, flood-carved canyons and buried g

2016-05-19 所属栏目:科学美国人

[Audio from movie]A scene from the movie Gravity. In real life, gravity is always bringing us down—particularly scientists who attempt to measure gravitational force. Try as

2016-05-18 所属栏目:科学美国人

Residents of the southern U.S. might be familiar with this dusty summer phenomenon: [TV Weather montage: "We are breathing dust that at one point originated over Africa… Dus

2016-05-13 所属栏目:科学美国人

“My previous books have been specifically about topics in physics. But this time I wanted to take a step back and ask questions about how all of the different ways we have of

2016-05-12 所属栏目:科学美国人

There's nothing like that fresh, rain-washed air after a storm, right? "The idea has always been 'the rain is cleaning.'" Mary Gilles, a chemist at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. She an

2016-05-11 所属栏目:科学美国人

“Land Rover in some better breeze at the moment…flying a hull, making some good distance back now in that breeze in the middle of the course that has slowly materializ

2016-05-09 所属栏目:科学美国人

The global population is now nearly seven and a half billion. And that’s just humans. Because our planet is also home to one-and-a-half-billion cows, another billion sheep, a

2016-05-04 所属栏目:科学美国人

Urban gentrification is thought to happen like this: artists move into lower income neighborhoods, looking for cheap gallery and living space. "So they move into these neighborhood