I have three beautiful nieces. One is thirteen, one just turned two, and the littlest one will be celebrating her first birthday on Friday. They’re all experiencing various stages of change and undergoing assorted adjustments. The thirteen-year-old is in middle school, and is negotiating a new social landscape with both her friends and her parents. [...]

Maker Faire invites young Makers to enter a world of innovation and imagination. If you can dream it, you can build it—particularly as experienced Makers are on-hand and willing to share what they know. How can we better encourage a broader participation in this science and technology showcase by underrepresented groups—beginning in the very neighborhood [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

Remember MacGyver from the old TV series? He could build a laser from a pair of eyeglasses, a match, and some dental floss and then mount it on a shark, or so it seemed. We’re not asking you to do that, exactly. Rather, we thought it’d be fun if science enthusiasts like you could explain [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Guest post by math educators Maria Droujkova and Yelena McManaman, authors of the new family math book “Moebius Noodles: Adventurous Math for the Playground Crowd” Children dream big. They crave exciting and beautiful adventures and they love to pretend-play. Just ask them who they want to be when they grow up. The answers will run [...]

Guest Post by Jonathan Olsen and Sarah Gross, teachers at High Technology High School in Lincroft, New Jersey Women and girls are historically underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields and much has been written lately about why girls in school seem disinterested in these areas.  As STEM becomes more important in our increasingly interconnected [...]

A group of Tier 1 research universities — the Stanfords, Harvards and MITs of the world – will join the White House-led effort to train 100,000 new math and science teachers by the year 2022. A $22.5 million gift from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), announced by the White House Monday morning, will make [...]

  Invited Guest Post by Helene Brazier-Mitouart I have a Ph.D. in Cell Biology and Health and I am currently doing research in cancer biology as a postdoctoral associate at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. Besides having a passion for making scientific discoveries, I also have a great interest in teaching science [...]

Invited Guest Post by Marissa Fessenden (@marisfessenden) U.S. business and policy leaders have made it a priority to increase the number of students pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering and math, collectively known as STEM. But one source of STEM talent is often overlooked: young people with autism spectrum disorders. A study published late last [...]

Like many families in the path of superstorm Sandy, we’ve spent much of the last week indoors trying to stay sane. Fortunately, we live in a part of Brooklyn that was spared the worst storm damage, so I had the luxury of finally reading the children’s science books that have been piling up on my [...]

Two weeks ago, I set out in search of milkweed hoping to find an egg laid by a Monarch butterfly. With no previous egg-hunting experience, I was armed only with what I had read in the terrific book “My Monarch Journal” by Connie Muther and Anita Bibeau.  The book gives step-by-step instructions, accompanied by detailed, [...]

This year’s Google Science Fair winner, Brittany Wenger, 17, from Sarasota, Florida, spent more than 600 hours coding a sophisticated computer program to help doctors detect breast cancer using a less invasive form of biopsy. I spoke to her this morning at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. How did you feel when you heard [...]

An expectant crowd gathered last night inside an airplane hangar at a flight school in Palo Alto, California to hear the winners of the second annual Google Science Fair. The grand prize went to Brittany Wenger, 17, of Sarasota, Florida, who wrote a computer program to help doctors diagnose breast cancer less invasively.  Jonah Kohn, [...]

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 [...]

NASA doesn’t have a lock on space exploration anymore. Just ask Lauren Rojas, a seventh grader in Antioch, Calif., who recently launched a balloon to 93,625 feet* using a do-it-yourself balloon kit from High Altitude Science. In addition to an altimeter, thermometer, satellite tracker and a host of cameras, Rojas added a decorative rocket ship [...]

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 [...]

As my Amtrak train rolled past the “Lancaster” sign, the window view alighted on the upright figure of an Amish farmer and his mule-team-pulled hand plow, working the verdant Pennsylvania land just as his forefathers have done here for more than two centuries. I remembered that I was only some 33 miles from Dover, Pa., [...]

The honorees stood, backs ramrod straight, facing the audience at the White House. Each was about to receive either the National Medal of Science or the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. As the moment stretched, the silence of anticipation filled the room. Suddenly, a cellphone chirped—literally—with a sound of a cricket in an empty [...]

WASHINGTON—Is a "mystery tube" the key to improving science education in the United States? The prop, a cylinder with two pieces of string running through it, briefly took center stage here at a packed symposium on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education, part of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement [...]

Back in October, I opened my email to find an interesting invitation for me to apply for a trip to India as part of a special International Reporting Project bloggers’ trip focusing on child survival and related issues of health and development. The trip described in full “The trip will focus on issues of child [...]