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 [...]

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 [...]

BRONX–Marine biology and subway construction were the hot topics here today among two groups of Girl Scouts at IS 131, Albert Einstein School. Shenica Odom of the Girl Scouts Council of Greater New York had asked Scientific American to participate this spring in its Career Exploration Program, designed to encourage about 1,200 girls in the [...]

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 [...]

The following excerpt from Save Our Science: How to Inspire a New Generation of Scientists (TED Books, 2013) by Ainissa Ramirez—a science evangelist, material scientist and one of Scientific American’s Google Science Fair judges—has been reproduced with permission from TED Books. The artist Pablo Picasso once said that all children are born artists and that [...]

This year, Scientific American funded the first Science in Action award, a $50,000 prize as part of the Google Science Fair. The prize also includes a year of mentoring to advance the work. The 14-year-old winners, Sakhiwe Shongwe and Bonkhe Malalela, developed a simplified system for hydroponics, which increased crop yields by 140 percent. Their [...]

On Monday Google will announce the winners of its second annual Google Science Fair. As SA did last year, we’ve partnered with Google on the competition, and editor in chief Mariette DiChristina serves as a judge. This year, SA helped expand the honors by sponsoring the Science In Action award for a project that addresses [...]

Invited Guest Post by Evelyn Lamb (@evelynjlamb) Later today the setting sun will align with Manhattan’s street grid to produce a striking phenomenon dubbed “Manhattanhenge.” Taking its name from the more famous Stonehenge in England, where the sun rises over the prominent Heel Stone on the summer solstice, Manhattanhenge happens twice a year, once about [...]

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 [...]

My family is gearing up for a big weekend of science in New York City. First, there’s the annual World Science Festival, which this year is bringing free activities like bug hunting, weather forecasting and marine ecology research to Brooklyn Bridge Park among many other locations. (Check the full slate of activities here.) Then, on Tuesday comes [...]

Molly Josephs, who teaches 5th, 7th and 9th grade biology at The Dalton School in Manhattan, wrote to me recently about the educational value of nature films for kids. “I would love to write something about the power, intelligence, and importance of nature films for families to watch together in order to cultivate curiosity and [...]

Just wanted to give a quick heads up to those of you who follow on the blog but not on Twitter or Facebook (personal, blog) that Chris Chambers and I have a piece in the Guardian today responding to the recent pseudoscience on why more girls don’t pursue science in places like the US and [...]

I have a million thoughts swirling in my head after Science Online 2013, and a million more things I want to learn about and accomplish for Science Online 2014. I find reflection after these conferences a useful way to organize all those thoughts, and make an action plan for what I need to learn and [...]

Earlier this week, the Women in Science group at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign convened a panel on using social media to promote science. Melanie Tannenbaum, Bill Hammack, Joanne Manaster and I were the panelists, and Jo Holley was the organizer. There were a few things that I found interesting about our varying responses as [...]

As you all know, the gig that takes up a lot more of my time is that I am an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I would like to accept at least one graduate student into our program this year to be advised by me. I get emails and messages [...]

It’s that time of year when I take stock of how many more times I’ll be away from my family before the semester is through. I’ve pared things down quite a bit this year after traveling too much last year, and so my talks are semi-local, but open to the public. Stay tuned because there [...]

Writing down all the factors in our sporting or academic lives in which we have no control is a bit disempowering. You mean I’m up against all that, and there isn’t anything I can do? Except that there is! We are both more and less in control of our lives than we think. In The [...]

I’ve accumulated a number of interesting readings over the last few weeks, most related in at least some way to ladybusiness, and I thought I would give my readers a chance to procrastinate too. Parenting PhD in Parenting: 4 Ways Parents Can Help Break Down Society’s Gender Assumptions. This is the fourth in a four-part [...]

Posters are one of the first ways junior scientists learn to communicate information. In high school students use those three-part poster boards for science fairs. In undergrad research symposia and beyond, scientists make a single flat poster, the dimensions varying by the conference but usually in a horizontal layout. The research poster is how much [...]

Kevin Zelnio’s #iamscience movement has launched a number of blogger origin stories and a Kickstarter project that has met its first funding goal (don’t stop donating yet though). Alongside this movement is one launched about the same time via a tumblr and related to SoNYC. My colleagues and I wanted to find a way to contribute our voices [...]

I have been traveling and speaking a lot this semester, perhaps too much. Because we’ve both had so many traveling commitments this year, for the last month I’ve hardly seen my husband, because he’s away one week and I’m away the next. But a few of my speaking engagements have been on campus, which certainly [...]

For years I’ve been thinking and hoping that quantum physics would become the next hacker revolution. DIYers in their basements, garages, and hackerspaces have already pioneered radio communications, PCs, household robots, and cheap 3-D printers—why not quantum entanglement, cryptography, computers, and teleportation? In recent years, physics educators have streamlined quantum experiments to the point where [...]

In my blogging career (and even before), I’ve spent a fair bit of time bemoaning the low level of scientific education/literacy/competence among the American public. Indeed, I have expressed the unpopular opinion that all college students ought to do the equivalent of a minor in some particular science as one of their graduation requirements. I [...]

Super-storm Sandy did major damage to the East Coast, especially New Jersey and New York City. The offices of DonorsChoose are in New York City. Their fabulous staff is safe (and mostly dry) and their computer servers are up, which means the Science Bloggers for Students drive has been operational and ready to receive your [...]

We’re coming into the home stretch of our annual DonorsChoose Science Bloggers for Students drive: Science Bloggers for Students: No Apocalypse in Sight (Transcript below) And, now until the end of the drive, you can get your donations matched (up to $100 per donor) thanks to the generosity of the DonorsChoose.org Board of Directors. Just [...]

There’s a guest post on the Washington Post “Answer Sheet” blog by David Bernstein entitled “Why are you forcing my son to take chemistry?” in which the author argues against his 15-year-old son’s school’s requirement that all its students take a year of chemistry. Derek Lowe provides a concise summary of the gist: My son [...]

Since 2006, science bloggers have been working with DonorsChoose.org and our readers to help public school students and teachers get the resources they need to make learning come alive. Is there an origin story for the annual Science Bloggers for Students drive? As a matter of fact*, there is: Science Bloggers for Students Origin Story [...]

As part of my day-job as a philosophy professor, I regularly teach a semester-long “Ethics in Science” course at my university. Among other things, the course is intended to help science majors figure out why being ethical might matter to them if they continue on their path to becoming working scientists and devote their careers [...]

Plagiarism — presenting the words or ideas (among other things) of someone else as one’s own rather than properly citing their source — is one of the banes of my professorial existence. One of my dearest hopes at the beginning of each academic term is that this will be the term with no instances of [...]

It is probably no surprise to my regular readers that I get a little exercised about the science wars that play out across the U.S. in various school boards and court actions. It’s probably unavoidable, given that I think about science for a living — when you’ve got a horse in the race, you end [...]

One of the courses I teach regularly at my university is “Ethics in Science,” a course that explores (among other things) what’s involved in being a good scientist in one’s interactions with the phenomena about which one is building knowledge, in one’s interactions with other scientists, and in one’s interactions with the rest of the [...]

A few weeks back, Chemjobber had an interesting post looking at the pros and cons of a PhD program in chemistry at a time when job prospects for PhD chemists are grim. The post was itself a response to a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education by a neuroscience graduate student named Jon Bardin [...]

I am honored to have been invited to give the keynote bridge talk between the 2011 Midwest Regional Zebrafish Conference and the 2011 Zebrafish and Education Summit in Rochester, MN on August 5, 2011. I eagerly agreed to speak as I am intrigued and enthused by the science education program for schools that was begun [...]

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." ~Albert Einstein In 2007, a few graduate students at the National University of Colombia grew interested in astrobiology, the search for extraterrestrial [...]

I find online science communication fascinating. I am enthusiastic about its possibilities and intrigued by its challenges. With an interest in online communication, comes an interest in text. While videos, animations and images are powerful too, the written word is often the simplest and the default mode of online communication–-think blog posts, tweets, status updates, [...]

"Science is messy. And the bigger the claims, the more intense the criticism." This is how Brian Vastag opened his Washington Post article chronicling the publication of NASA’s arsenic bacteria paper along seven critical comments and a follow-up response. It describes the situation – and science – well, but it’s not the story that those [...]

We learned all kinds of things from our parents—manners, safety, housekeeping, how to make a cake, how to pump our legs to make ourselves go high on a swing and where to find crayfish in a creek. As they showed us how to reach these small successes in our daily life, they also taught us [...]

A recent University of Massachusetts Amherst study found having academic contact with female professionals in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) can have positive influences on students—female students in particular. For girls and young women studying these subjects in school, being able to identify female role models helps them imagine themselves as STEM professionals. The [...]

"When will we know when we can declare victory? For years I proceeded on the assumption that victory was equal participation of men and women in all branches of science and engineering. Today I’m not so sure…. It’s possible that we will come to understand that some fraction of the asymmetries in the distribution of [...]

President Obama has restored science to its rightful place in the White House, says John Holdren, Obama’s senior science advisor. “Science is again where it should be,” he told an audience of 200 as part of a lecture series at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. on Wednesday, although he warned that the [...]

October 21 is the anniversary of Martin Gardner’s birth. Gardner (1914-2010) is a legend in recreational (and professional) mathematics circles. Although he had little mathematical training, his 1956-1981 Scientific American column “Mathematical Games” has had a huge impact on the way people view math. In a Science Talk podcast shortly after Gardner’s death, Douglas Hofstadter, [...]

In an opinion piece for the New York Times on Sunday, political science professor Andrew Hacker asks, “Is Algebra Necessary?” and answers, “No.” It’s not just algebra: geometry and calculus are on the chopping block, too. It’s not that he doesn’t think math is important; he wants the traditional sequence to be replaced by a [...]

Sally Ride, the first U.S. woman in space, died today at age 61, according to the Web site of her science-education company, Sally Ride Science. The cause was pancreatic cancer. Ride was born May 26, 1951, in Los Angeles and attended Stanford University, where she received bachelor’s degrees in physics and English, as well as [...]

On the last day of formal plenary talks at the 62nd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, the laureates dispensed several lessons while describing their research experiences to the attending students, from developing expertise to enduring in the face of doubt. (You can read all our coverage of the Lindau meeting this week, including the “30 under [...]

This year, the first Google Science Fair in partnership with Scientific American, CERN, LEGO and National Geographic drew more than 10,000 students from 91 countries. As the chief judge and master of ceremonies for the awards event on July 11 at Google’s Mountain View, Calif., campus, I was delighted to meet and hear directly about [...]

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 [...]

Stanford University has opened up to the public an introductory artificial intelligence class, taught by two luminaries in the field. Anyone with high-speed Internet, anywhere in the world, can enroll in the online course. Just don’t expect a lot of face time with the professors. As of Tuesday afternoon, more than 70,000 people had signed [...]

Today is the end of a series of dispatches we posted on our Expeditions blog – The ‘Problems Without Passports’ program at USC takes two experienced instructors and a number of students to do underwater research on the islands of Guam and Palau. I have immensely enjoyed working with the group and reading their posts [...]

The World Science Festival is a place where one goes to see the giants of science, many of whom are household names (at least in scientifically inclined households) like E. O. Wilson, Steven Pinker and James Watson, people on top of their game in their scientific fields, as well as science supporters in other walks [...]

Last year, in the inaugural Flame Challenge, Alan Alda and the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University challenged scientists to explain what a flame is to an 11-year-old. This year, the subject was time. In particular, we were instructed to “Answer the question — ‘What is time?’ — in a way an 11-year-old [...]

In his delightful memoir “Uncle Tungsten”, the eminent neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks recounts the swashbuckling chemical adventures of his teenage years, sparked when a sympathetic uncle got him hooked on to the wonders of chemistry. For me the most memorable image from that book is one of the young Sacks standing on a bridge [...]

As the economy continues to chart its own tortuous, uncertain course, there seems to have been a fair amount of much-needed discussion on the kinds of skills new grads should possess. These skills of course have to be driven by market demand. As chemist George Whitesides asks for instance, what’s the point of getting a [...]

Empirical research on the effects of science fair participation seems scant, but the research that does exist suggests that participation is generally a positive experience for students, that participation increases scientific literacy, and, importantly, that participation results in an increased understanding the process of science. One study conducted in Canada, for example, found that in [...]

I grew up watching M*A*S*H reruns with my dad, so even early in life, Alan Alda, who played Dr. Hawkeye Pierce throughout the show’s eleven seasons, was a familiar name and face. You might also recognize him from TV shows like The West Wing or movies like Murder at 1600. What you might not know [...]

Longtime science blog readers will certainly remember the popular cognitive psychology blog Cognitive Daily, written by Greta and Dave Munger, that had a fantastic five-year run at Scienceblogs. While Dave is still involved in the science blogging community through projects like Research Blogging and Science Seeker, and of course writing his own blogs, Greta has [...]

This January, John Hawks (of his eponymous weblog) and I are moderating a session as part of the education track at Science Online in North Carolina. Blogging in the undergraduate science classroom (how to maximize the potential of course blogs) (discussion) – Jason Goldman and John Hawks This session will mainly feature a roundtable discussion [...]

#Solidarity4Wilmot prevails. Thank you! Charges dropped against Kiera Wilmot. Yes! And YES!! Anyone else doing backflips? This news, combined with her full expulsion from school (for next year) being over turned makes me very, very happy for her. (Though I’m thinking ahead – would returning to Bartow High School be in her best interest? Others [...]

Thank you, thank you, thank you for reaching out and speaking up for #KieraWilmot and showing #Solidarity4Wilmot.  I teared up as I read all of the offers of support to assist Kiera and other students all over the country. I was amazed, but not at all surprised. I know this community of educators, teachers, scientists, [...]

Here’s what we now know. Kiera Wilmot was re-creating the Drano Aluminum foil experiment at school. She was outside, before the morning bell. She recreated one of those Wow! Science experiments, the kind we see on Myth Busters or You’ve Been Warned! Folks love those shows. They love doing that crazy stuff at home (although [...]

News of Kiera Wilmot’s arrest has seriously unnerved me. She is the Florida high school student who was experimenting with common household chemicals in science class that resulted in a minor explosion. There were no injuries and no damage to school property; however, she was taken away in handcuffs, formally arrested and expelled from school. [...]

Undergraduate Diversity Travel Awards to Botanical Society of America Meetings The PLANTS program (funded by the National Science Foundation and Botanical Society of America) encourages the participation of undergraduates from underrepresented groups at the annual meetings of the BSA and affiliated organizations (this year in New Orleans, Louisiana, July 27-31, 2013). These meetings focus on [...]

More and more I realize that having a scientifically literate public is imperative. As much as we hear news stories about new jobs and economic relief that STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) will have on our nation and our lives, the truth is, if individuals aren’t ready for these great new, high-paying opportunities then that [...]

It is easier to cultivate a pre-existing interest in STEM fields than create it where none exists, states the report…Of the STEM disciplines, male students tend to gravitate toward fields of engineering and technology, while females far prefer science fields, including chemistry, biology, environmental science, and marine biology…Ethnically, Asian Americans express the highest interest in [...]

A Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore– And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over– like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does [...]

  Where you able to participate in Computer Science Education Week?  Where there any memorable moments? My favorite Tweets and links about Computer Science Education Week “@drugmonkeyblog: #thatsofreud RT @funkyNMR: This is how computer scientits read “50 Shades of Grey” http://btfy.me/x6r2dy ” #CSEdWeek lol “@ileducprof: Clemson leads U.S. in recruiting tenure-track black faculty in computer [...]

5. Fast, affordable Computers. Once upon a time computers would take up entire floors in buildings.  The original Super Computer, the CDC 6600, could have easily earned its moniker because that’s how much square footage it took up at University of California at Berkeley. By the time I was introduced to computers – the mid [...]