Now in its second year, the $50,000 Science in Action award, sponsored by Scientific American as part of the Google Science Fair, an annual global competition for teens ages 13 to 18, honors a project that can make a practical difference by addressing an environmental, health or resources challenge. Submissions should be innovative, easy to [...]

Our readers have been clamoring for more digital ways to access Scientific American Mind. So today is particularly exciting for the Mind team: our tablet edition for the iPad is now live! Check out our free trial issue in the Apple App Store on your iPad. In addition to all the articles that appear in [...]

Last year, Sakhiwe Shongwe and Bonkhe Mahlalela of Swaziland, both then 14, won the first Scientific American-sponsored $50,000 Science in Action award as part of the Google Science Fair. Their project, which they titled a Unique Simplified Hydroponics Method, or USHM, used mostly freely available waste materials (cardboard boxes for containers, sawdust or grass as [...]

We have launched a new and improved search page for ScientificAmerican.com. We started by researching how other sites handle search. The majority of the web sites we reviewed use Google for their site search but we found some good examples on U.K. news sites and at NYTimes.com. Keeping in mind best practices, common implementations and [...]

Six months after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans, Scientific American published an article I wrote, called “Protecting New Orleans.” It explained the options that were likely to best protect that city and the entire Mississippi Delta region against future storms. I interviewed many scientists, engineers and local, state and federal politicians, and although they were [...]

Parallel universes are a staple of science fiction, and it’s no wonder. They allow us to explore the question, “What if?” in a way that lets us step completely outside of the world we know, rather than question how that world might have turned out differently. For cosmologists, the question isn’t “What if the South [...]

ScienceSeeker Awards have been announced earlier today. If you are not sure what this is, ScienceSeeker is the main portal for collecting, connecting and filtering science writing online, especially on science blogs (Note: it is a project of ScienceOnline of which I am one of the co-founders and co-chairmen). It is also the main tool [...]

While many of us strive to live healthy lives, the task can be daunting and the information overwhelming. Should we be more concerned with our diet or with keeping our weight down? How important is exercise? What kinds of diseases should we really be worried about? In this eBook, “Eat, Move, Think: Living Healthy,” we’ve [...]

Monday, May 13, 2013 | 7:00 P.M.–8:30 P.M. The New York Academy of Sciences For more information about the event click here. School has traditionally been about teaching kids new knowledge and skills. Most people have long believed that each child’s temperament and capacity for learning are more or less inborn—or at least, not the [...]

One of the pleasures of Scientific American is how very international it is, just like science itself: In addition to the domestic (U.S. and Canada) and global English editions, the magazine is translated into 14 languages. Scientific American Mind also appears in about half a dozen. Last week, representatives of nearly all of them gathered [...]