More than 30,000 people visited the White House for the 135th annual Easter Egg Roll on Monday—and I spent several happy hours there myself doing science activities with dozens of kids and their families with the Lawrence Hall of Science. If you couldn’t make it to Washington, D.C., you can find instructions to make the [...]

Magicians need to resort to trick props to pull a rabbit out of a hat. But we pulled DNA out of a banana with nothing more than a few household ingredients during a Scientific American Google Hangout on December 20. (See Scientific American Goes Bananas on December 20. No artifice or foolery was involved: just [...]

Editor’s note: Join the Hangout by visiting Scientific American’s Google Plus page at 1 p.m. Eastern on Thursday. That’s right. Using ordinary household items and a humble piece of fruit, we’re going to perform a seemingly magical feat of science while you watch on a Google Science Fair Hangout on December 20 at 1 p.m. [...]

When I wrote my end-of-the-year update for staff, Bora Zivkovic, our chief blogs editor, reminded me that others are also interested in the goings on at Scientific American. It’s never a good idea to say no to Bora. So here’s a summary of some highlights for 2011: AWARDS We won a 2011 National Magazine Award [...]

I’ve been meaning to tell you all about a wonderful experience that we at Scientific American had last week participating in our First Family Science Night. With the New York Academy of Sciences and the Children’s Aid Society–and an army of wonderful science grad students–we enjoyed a series of our Bring Science Home activities with [...]