2016-03-29 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 heater,

2016-03-28 所属栏目:科学美国人

Humans aren’t the only creatures who love junk food—many animals are known to enjoy sifting through our garbage to find edible treats. And now we learn that some storks

2016-03-23 所属栏目:科学美国人

President Obama arrived in Cuba March 20th, the first visit by a U.S. leader since Calvin Coolidge in1928. Last spring I spoke to Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology researcher Eduar

2016-03-23 所属栏目:科学美国人

“Gorongosa, which was a jewel of Southern Africa…had great populations of lions, elephants, hippos, buffalo, etcetera. Absolutely decimated. So if you went there in th

2016-03-21 所属栏目:科学美国人

The 2016 presidential candidates have subjected voters nationwide to a cognitive challenge: can you untangle what one candidate is saying while the others talk over him? [Political

2016-03-18 所属栏目:科学美国人

Stick your head underwater and you’ll quickly discover that the ocean has a soundtrack. Waves crash, whales sing, and occasionally, an underwater earthquake rumbles from the

2016-03-16 所属栏目:科学美国人

"What you're listening to is what I like to call the beautiful chaos of the bat echolocation stream." Laura Kloepper, a bioacoustician at Saint Mary's College in Indiana. "So you

2016-03-15 所属栏目:科学美国人

2002 was a tough year for the people who live along the shores of Lake Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It started off with a bang, when the Nyiragongo volcano erupted

2016-03-14 所属栏目:科学美国人

Chimpanzees spend about half their day chewing. "And for context, think about how much time a day you spend chewing." Daniel Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at

2016-03-11 所属栏目:科学美国人

"Both of us were in the lab when we just saw a spider, and I'm really afraid of them. So I started to scream for her to come and pick it up because she's not afraid of them.&rdqu

2016-03-10 所属栏目:科学美国人

Hall of Famer Ted Williams once famously commented that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports. Although Williams—a .344 career hitter—made it look eas

2016-03-09 所属栏目:科学美国人

Monarch butterflies are famous for their long haul to Mexico—a migration of more than 2,500 miles. But far more impressive is a species of dragonfly, Pantala flavescens. It'

2016-03-08 所属栏目:科学美国人

Florida’s Everglades are home to lots of large wading birds, like egrets and herons. But the ‘Glades also have lots of raccoons and possums. For the mammals, the birds&

2016-03-07 所属栏目:科学美国人

Carl Sagan once referred to our home planet as [CLIP: "a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."] And that poetic description holds true for a lot of exoplanets, too. In fact one of

2016-03-04 所属栏目:科学美国人

“It’s not surprising that in these studies people conformed, because…they’re being pulled in two directions, it’s authority, they might get in troubl

2016-03-03 所属栏目:科学美国人

When a virus invades your cells, it kicks your immune machinery into motion. The first responders are signaling proteins, called interferons. "And they trigger downstream immune re

2016-03-01 所属栏目:科学美国人

The Paris Climate Agreement pledges to limit global temperature rise to "well below 2 degrees Celsius." "But really nobody—and certainly not the United States—has laid

2016-02-26 所属栏目:科学美国人

Radio waves are invisible to our eyes. But if you could see them, the sky would dance with random tiny flashes. Thousands of what are called “fast radio bursts” are est

2016-02-25 所属栏目:科学美国人

What do you do when hackers kidnap your data and hold it for ransom? Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in California recently faced that question. The hospital’s manageme

2016-02-24 所属栏目:科学美国人

“Take this quote from Mickey Mantle. After hitting this monstrous home run, he said he couldn’t really explain it, he just saw the ball as big a grapefruit.”Jessi

2016-02-23 所属栏目:科学美国人

“Human papillomavirus, or HPV, now causes the majority of tonsillar cancers in the United States and many western nations. And the risk of these cancers has been increasing.&

2016-02-22 所属栏目:科学美国人

Mantis shrimp are well known for their powerful punch… strong enough to crack aquarium glass. But they also have incredible technicolor vision. "They can see in 12 different

2016-02-19 所属栏目:科学美国人

“We’ve been dealing with an epidemic in the United States related to opioids.”Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the Natio

2016-02-18 所属栏目:科学美国人

The massive ice sheet topping Greenland is losing nearly 300 billion tons a year to melting, according to NASA estimates. And all that meltwater means rising seas. But it's also d

2016-02-18 所属栏目:科学美国人

“There are about 50,000 elephants a year being killed right now with only about 450,000 left in Africa.”Samuel Wasser, director of the Center for Conservation Biology a