2016-05-03 所属栏目:科学美国人

Ever try to work in a coffee shop, but your concentration gets derailed by all the talking, not to mention the steaming and the pouring? The problem might not be that you’re

2016-05-03 所属栏目:科学美国人

In what may be hailed as one of the most significant scientific advances of all time, researchers have discovered a use for Adam Sandler and Brussels sprouts. Because when you look

2016-04-29 所属栏目:科学美国人

Here's a way to fight the ongoing drought in California: use more wastewater for irrigation. The state's water board suggested that strategy a few years ago, but so far, of the t

2016-04-28 所属栏目:科学美国人

Plants, just like animals, get injured. For plants, it’s often because some herbivore is snacking on them. And, also like animals, plants usually seal those wounds up quickly

2016-04-27 所属栏目:科学美国人

Picture a brave fireman carrying a pet from a burning building. Now, imagine that global warming is the burning building, a cherry tree is the pet, and a bear is the fireman. You&r

2016-04-26 所属栏目:科学美国人

YouTube is full of videos that promise more power and influence. All you've got to do is: [YouTube montage: "Get a deeper voice… How to have a deep voice… You don'

2016-04-25 所属栏目:科学美国人

Communication on Twitter is artificially constrained: 140 characters per tweet, max. So it turns out the more words in a tweet, the shorter each word tends to be—at least acc

2016-04-22 所属栏目:科学美国人

[Pretty bird song]Some birds produce beautiful songs.[Woodpecker drumming]Woodpeckers are not among them. The most familiar sound they make is when they tap on tree trunks with the

2016-04-21 所属栏目:科学美国人

“It’s not just gamblers using science. In many cases, science has benefited enormously from people studying the house.”Mathematician Adam Kucharski. He’s th

2016-04-20 所属栏目:科学美国人

Water laced with heavy metals—like the drinking water in Flint, Michigan—can be stripped of contaminants using chemicals, filters, membranes, even electric current. But

2016-04-19 所属栏目:科学美国人

The floor of Yosemite Valley is littered with piles of rocks that crumbled off the park’s iconic cliffs. These rockfalls happen all the time, because Yosemite’s granite

2016-04-18 所属栏目:科学美国人

Chances are you’ve never seen a binturong. It’s a tree-dwelling mammal about the size of a raccoon that’s native to Southeast Asia. But if you’ve ever been

2016-04-15 所属栏目:科学美国人

One of the great promises of stem-cell biology is to use a patient’s own cells as a template to build a real, working organ or tissue in the lab. One prime example: a treatme

2016-04-14 所属栏目:科学美国人

The Hebrew bible was first written down some 2,600 years ago. And scholars have argued that only a population with sufficiently widespread literacy could have accomplished the task

2016-04-13 所属栏目:科学美国人

Ask anyone what sound a frog makes and they'll probably say "ribbit." But there’s only one frog that makes that sound: the Pacific chorus frog. It may have become the go-to

2016-04-12 所属栏目:科学美国人

This isn't your typical choir practice. And it’s not held in a traditional practice space. These singers are all dealing with cancer, theirs or a loved one’s. "There a

2016-04-08 所属栏目:科学美国人

Four billion years ago, our solar system was a very different… very violent place. "This is the time when life was just emerging on our planet." Stephen Mojzsis, a geologist

2016-04-07 所属栏目:科学美国人

"She has this thing where she goes to a movie theater, watching a horror movie and there was a wolf howling in the background.” University of Cambridge zoologist Arik Kershen

2016-04-06 所属栏目:科学美国人

Humans have always considered themselves special compared with other animals. One reason is the complexity of our language—bounded by unique rules, such as syntax, where we s

2016-04-05 所属栏目:科学美国人

Our smartphones, tablets, laptops—they all compute things electronically. But, think outside that silicon box for a second: "There's nothing special about electrons and usin

2016-04-02 所属栏目:科学美国人

Lasers are the preferred weapons for interplanetary warfare in countless works of science fiction. But they might actually be better at keeping the peace. Because a new study finds

2016-04-02 所属栏目:科学美国人

The news last month that gravitational waves had been discovered made waves throughout the world of science. The finding, from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observato

2016-03-31 所属栏目:科学美国人

City dwellers can attest that the animals they share the city with—the pigeons, rats, roaches—can be pretty brazen when they're prowling for a bite. While visiting Bar

2016-03-31 所属栏目:科学美国人

The baseball season is almost here. To get you up to speed, the excellent new documentary Fastball opens today in select theaters.

Fastball is all about, you guessed it, the heate

2016-03-30 所属栏目:科学美国人

Black holes are not all created equal. There are the regular star-sized ones. And then the supermassive black holes. Which really live up to their name. "So the Milky Way has a sup