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 [...]

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 [...]

What is it like to win a Nobel Prize? Should you worry about picking something “important” to work on as a scientist? How can art help in trying to understand how the universe works? And what is the real key to success? You can find out by watching today’s Google Science Fair Hangout with Sir [...]

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. [...]

On May 21, the 13 finalists of the $50,000 Scientific American Science in Action award, powered by the Google Science Fair, were announced. In this blog series, we shed light on the students behind the projects. Meet Sabera Tulukder and Sakhiwe Shongwe. On June 6, the winner of the Science in Action award will be announced. Sabera Tulukder, [...]

On May 21, the 13 finalists of the $50,000 Scientific American Science in Action award, powered by the Google Science Fair, were announced. In this blog series, we shed light on the students behind the projects. On June 6, the winner of the Science in Action award will be announced. Grace Brosofsky, a 16 year-old [...]

On May 21, the 13 finalists of the $50,000 Scientific American Science in Action award, powered by the Google Science Fair, were announced. In this blog series, we shed light on the students behind the projects. On June 6, the winner of the Science in Action award will be announced. Katherine Zimmerman, a 16 year-old [...]

On May 21, the 13 finalists of the $50,000 Scientific American Science in Action award, powered by the Google Science Fair, were announced. In this blog series, we shed light on the students behind the projects. On June 6, the winner of Science in Action award will be announced. Carlos Vega García, a 13 year-old from Las [...]

On May 21, the 13 finalists of the $50,000 Scientific American Science in Action award, powered by the Google Science Fair, were announced. In this blog series, we would like to shed light on the students behind the projects. On June 6, the winner of Science in Action award will be announced. Mark Liang, a [...]

Two teenagers from the southern African country of Swaziland have won Scientific American’s inaugural Science in Action award, part of the Google Science Fair. The prize is awarded to a project that addresses a social, environmental or health issue to make a practical difference in the lives of a group or community. This year’s winners [...]

Earlier this summer Google quietly embedded a powerful new tool in their image works: the reverse search. The concept is simple. Drag an image into the search bar (as above), and Google will return locations where the same image appears on the web. If you’ve not used the reverse search, try it out! This technology, [...]

For years, a friend I’ll call Chip, knowing my obsession with war, has been telling me: "Cyber War! That’s what you should be writing about! Real war is passé!" Chip keeps sending me stories about all the damage digital attacks do—or rather, might do, because as far as I can tell cyber war hasn’t claimed [...]

When users seek information from Google, the search engine relies on a proprietary algorithm called PageRank™ to determine the order of the sites that show up in search results. Now, two researchers say a similar algorithm can be used to determine which species are critical to the preservation of ecosystems, allowing scientists to focus conservation [...]

She looked perfectly normal. But what was she doing roaming around at night on the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif? She’d been drawn out of her home, following the light, and now was taking mincing steps across a white bed sheet. Had she just taken “the flight of the living dead”? Was she actually [...]

With the imminent arrival of Google‘s latest Android operating system later this month, Apple’s iOS upgrades this fall and Microsoft’s relentless push to make Windows relevant to mobile devices, a lot of people are talking about smartphones and tablets. The next few months will also likely see an increasing number of people talking to these [...]

In a widely anticipated announcement today, the new company Planetary Resources revealed their plans for near-Earth asteroid domination. The group has mapped out a multi-stage process to map, observe, capture, tow and eventually mine asteroids for valuables. “A single 500-meter platinum-rich asteroid contains the equivalent of all the platinum group metals mined in history,” reads [...]

DURBAN, South Africa—I rented a cellphone during my sojourn here to cover the recent climate change negotiations. A local number enabled me to keep in touch with home and office but also, perhaps more importantly, to make appointments on the fly with ever harried international negotiators. The Nokia 2330—which was dubbed, affectionately, my “hellphone” by [...]

The launch of the Google+ social network casts a shadow over Google’s previous efforts in this arena, including Orkut, Wave and Buzz, all of which still have active Web sites. For the most part Google+’s predecessors will coexist alongside the new social network as Google determines what works and what doesn’t. Google launched Orkut in [...]

China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency has struck back against Google following the Internet giant’s claims earlier this week that recent hacker attempts to steal G-mail user passwords appeared to have originated from China. Xinhua called Google’s statements "evil-intentioned" in an article published Friday and quoted Dai Yiqi, a cyber security researcher with Tsinghua University, as [...]

Internet video will comprise more than half of all Internet traffic, wireless devices will become the predominant way to surf the Web, and there will be more networked devices than people on this planet within the next few years. So says a Cisco Systems annual Visual Networking Index (VNI) report issued Wednesday to highlight the [...]

Microsoft added a key piece to its flagging mobile operating system business Tuesday when the company announced it is buying voice and video communications provider Skype Global for $8.5 billion. Despite heavily hyping its Windows Phone 7 operating system late last year, Microsoft has struggled to gain traction against Apple’s iPhone as well as against [...]

The fuel of the future isn’t gasoline, ethanol or even hydrogen—it’s education. Specifically, the science and engineering education that will enable a fresh group of smart young people to tackle the world’s ongoing energy crisis. Solve the energy crisis and you go a long way’s toward solving a host of environmental problems: pollution, environmental health [...]

Speculation abounds that Apple will introduce its much-anticipated iPad 2.0 at a Wednesday meeting at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Any new tablet computer Apple might unveil will enter the market with much more serious competition that its predecessor. As it did a decade ago when its iPod took the digital music [...]

A couple of years ago, when the massive and amazing all-in-one scienceblogging.org was launching, the organizers asked if I thought there were enough artists blogging about science-related artwork to make an RSS feed that would update a few times a day or week, that could collect science-based artists under one roof. I said sure, and [...]

I’m going to be participating in a Google+ Hangout “On Air” tomorrow night. Google+ Hangouts are multi-user video-chats, but they’re limited to 10 users. Hangouts “On Air” are, apparently, open to everyone to watch (though limited in the number of people who can actively participate, or something like that). Anyway, AV Flox (twitter, G+), who [...]