Our robotic overlords must be delighted by the way iPhone users have taken to Siri. I met her on Friday. But apparently, she was talking to me before we were formally introduced: When S arrived at the rail station to pick me up, Siri had been reading my text messages aloud and sending me his [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

Who will win the first $50,000 Science in Action prize, sponsored by Scientific American? This award, offered as part of the 2012 Google Science Fair, will recognize a student project that addresses a social, environmental, ethical, health or welfare issue to make a practical difference to the lives of a group or community, and that [...]

Above all, science is a collaborative enterprise, where researchers working together can span the continents. Increasingly, nonspecialists—citizen scientists—are pitching in as well. Whale.FM—a collaborative effort of Scientific American, Zooniverse and the research institutions WHOI, TNO, the University of Oxford and SMRU—lets citizen scientists help marine researchers who are studying what whales are saying. (You can [...]

Scientific American is very happy to help expand the Google Science Fair this year with the new $50,000 Science in Action Award. The international online fair, launched in 2011, has three age categories, for teens from 13 to 18. The Science in Action Award will honor a project that addresses a social, environmental or health [...]

In November 2011, Scientific American, Zooniverse and a team of research partners launched the Web site Whale.FM, a citizen-science project devoted to cataloging the calls made by Pilot whales and Killer whales (Orcas), both of which are actually dolphin species. Different whale families have their own dialects and closely related families share calls. Underwater microphones, [...]

Improving science education is not just important to me as the editor in chief of a science magazine for the usual reasons of maintaining our country’s well-being and global competitiveness: It’s also very personal. I have two school-age daughters myself—and they think science is cool. So when I got the top editor’s job at Scientific [...]

We’re counting down the days here until the Scientific American tweet-up at the American Museum of Natural History on Wednesday, January 18, starting at 6 p.m. Full details are on my earlier blog post. We’ll enjoy talks, a tour of the “Beyond Planet Earth” exhibition–and some conversations over cocktails. Attendance is free for followers of [...]

In 1984, Fred Waitzkin published Searching for Bobby Fischer, the story of three years in the lives of Fred and his chess prodigy son, Josh Waitzkin. The book became an internationally acclaimed bestseller. Five years later, Paramount released the movie version of Searching for Bobby Fischer, which has become a cult classic. Waitzkin also wrote Mortal Games (1993), [...]

With one misstep and the snap of a trap, Tinka was broken. The 50-year-old chimpanzee’s hands were mangled and left severely deformed and almost useless. Most of the muscles of his left wrist were paralyzed, and he was left with a limited range of movement. His left hand just sat there in a hooked position, [...]

Sugata Mitra gave street kids in a slum in New Delhi access to a computer connected to the Internet, and found that they quickly taught themselves how to use it. This was the moment he says he discovered a new way of teaching. He calls it the grandmother technique, and it goes like this: expose [...]

Bumblebees, it turns out, don’t bumble. Using tiny radar tracking devices, motion-activated cameras and artificial flowers, scientists have learned how the bees themselves quickly learn the best routes to take when they go foraging from flower to flower. In fact, their cognitive competence in this area seems to match that of bigger-brained animals. A team [...]

In kindergarten, several of my friends and I were very serious about learning to tie our shoes. I remember sitting on the edge of the playground, looping laces into bunny ears and twisting them into a knot over and over again until I had it just right. A few years later, whistling became my new [...]

Infant mortality is at its lowest rate ever. Now fewer than three percent of babies worldwide die within the first five weeks of life, which is surely cause for celebration. Many of the infants who have been saved, however, did not enter this world easily. A new analysis published online Thursday in The Lancet found [...]

If there is one general rule about the limitations of the human mind, it is that we are terrible at multitasking. The old phrase “united we stand, divided we fall” applies equally well to the mechanisms of attention as it does to a patriotic cause. When devoted to a single task, the brain excels; when [...]

At Scientific American, we appreciate the value of a good experiment. So in May, we launched Bring Science Home as a series of free science activities for parents to do together with their six- to 12-year-old kids. We made sure the activities would be fun and easy to do, so families could complete them in [...]

We all know how to get to Carnegie Hall: practice. The same holds true for a range of goals—from improving a golf swing to giving a good presentation. As a graduate student at the University of Washington, David Haak wondered if this principle could be used to help boost the performance of students—especially those considered [...]

A robot must protect its own existence. This mid-20th-century dictate to the robotic clade from science fiction author and biochemist Isaac Asimov seems cleanly in step with Darwinian theory and the biological world of survival of the fittest. But as scientists continue to witness animals and other organisms habitually sacrificing themselves for the greater good [...]

Some people are incurable contrarians or imperturbable logicians. But most of us, whether we like it or not, allow other people’s opinions and advice to color our own experiences and opinions. Have you found that restaurant to really be as good as people say it is? New findings suggests that a person’s willingness to coolly [...]

In Australia, some dolphins suit up for dinner. Before poking through seafloor mud for a delectable crustacean or cephalopod, the dolphins protect their sensitive snouts with marine sponges. What’s more, dolphins teach each other this behavior. It’s a kind of cultural learning observed in other highly intelligent animals, such as chimpanzees, who teach one another [...]

On Monday, May 13, at 7pm, I’ll be moderating a panel at The New York Academy of Sciences. If you are in the area, please attend! Here a description of the event: Social and Emotional Learning: Preparing Our Children to Excel Monday, May 13, 2013 | 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM The New York Academy [...]

How many times have you arrived someplace but had no memory of the trip there? Have you ever been sitting in an auditorium daydreaming, not registering what the people on stage are saying or playing? We often spin through our days lost in mental time travel, thinking about something from the past, or future, leaving [...]

In MindUP, a social and emotional learning program pioneered by actor Goldie Hawn, children learn to be mindful—that is, attuned to the present without judgment. This skill engenders a healthy outlook on life, hones the ability to pay attention and creates a sense of calm, preparing the mind for learning. (For more on the brain [...]

Mindfulness, the practice of being present and in the moment, is easier for some people than for others. But it is a skill that many believe is worth cultivating—some say, starting with children. Preventing your mind from taking you into the past or future can, after all, be an antidote to depression (which can result [...]

People have long tried tricks to aid their memories. One of the most useful of these so-called mnemonic devices, I’ve found, involves associating names with word pictures or with other people you know well. I was just at a party, for example, and met a man who shared a last name with someone I’ve known [...]

A little shuteye refreshes. Right, but what does that really mean? Not talking here about leaping out of bed ready for a five-mile run upon awakening, but rather about what’s happening at the level of individual brain cells deep inside your head. A new study by R. Douglas Fields, a pioneer in researching out-of-the-mainstream  brain [...]

In 1988, a three-year-old child is led into a brightly colored testing room in a psychology department in Bloomington, Indiana. A small toy is brought out and put onto a table in front of the child. The toy was wooden, blue, about two inches square, and U-shaped. “This is a dax.” The researchers picked a [...]

A juvenile chimpanzee in the Ivory Coast’s Tai Forest watches as her mother carefully places a soft coula nut onto a hard, flat rock. In her other hand, mom has a chunk of hard wood. Mom smashes the nut with her makeshift hammer, once, twice, three times. Having broken the outer shell, she plucks out [...]

The more scientists discover about desert ants, the more impressive they seem. Decades of research have established that ants use path integration – an innate form of mental trigonometry – in order to navigate the visually featureless environments that are the salt pans of Tunisia. They do this by calibrating a mental clock based on [...]

Classical conditioning is one of those introductory psychology terms that gets thrown around. Many people have a general idea that it is one of the most basic forms of associative learning, and people often know that Ivan Pavlov’s 1927 experiment with dogs has something to do with it, but that is often where it ends. [...]

Botanically, a tomato is a fruit: a seed-bearing structure that grows from the flowering part of a plant. In 1893, however, the highest court in the land ruled in the case of Nix v. Hedden that the tomato was a vegetable, subject to vegetable import tariffs. Unfortunately, the vegetal confusion did not end in 1893. [...]

Earlier this week, scientist Anna Wilkinson won an IgNobel prize for her research on contagious yawning (really, the lack thereof) in red-footed tortoises. In case you’re not familiar with them, the IgNobel Prizes are given for research that “first makes you laugh, then makes you think.” Read Scicurious’s coverage of the awards here. Since I’ve [...]

When this headline from The Telegraph flashed across Google Reader, I couldn’t help but be amused: Scientists explain why the office party so often ends in embarrassment. From the article: Now scientists have come up with an explanation for why the office party is so often the cause of embarrassing and inappropriate behaviour. Researchers have [...]

What is culture? One simple definition might be: a distinctive behavior shared by two or more individuals, which persists over time, and that ignorant individuals acquire through socially-aided learning. There are at least four different ways to learn a particular behavior or problem-solving strategy. That is to say, there are four different ways to learn. [...]

It’s an ordinary afternoon at Copenhagen Central Station. At 2:32pm, a man who appears to be a run-of-the-mill street performer sets up a drum in the center of a large hall. A cellist joins him. A woman approaches with her flute. The melody is sort of recognizable… It sounds sort of like Ravel’s Bolero. Pretty [...]

She: “What are you writing about?” Me: “Cognition in cold-blooded animals.” She: “Hot.” Most people who study cognition focus on mammals or birds. But I hope I’ve convinced you that other animals are important to investigate as well. One research group at the University of Vienna likes cold-blooded critters. Turtles and lizards and such. They [...]