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 [...]

The Miss America pageant is often judged to be somewhat of an insult to women. So I was once surprised to learn that the Miss America Organization is the world’s largest provider of scholarship assistance to younger women. A total of $45 million in cash and scholarships was given out last year by MAO and [...]

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 [...]

One of the pleasures of editing a magazine like Scientific American, with its 166-year history as the country’s longest continuously published magazine, is getting a “you are there” view of science as it was whenever I take a spin through our digital archives. The other day, while reading some 100-year-old prose, I was reminded of [...]

On December 6, 1989, in Montreal, fourteen women were murdered for being women in what their murderer perceived to be a space that rightly belonged to men: Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student [...]

There has been a lot of discussion of Dario Maestripieri’s disappointment at the unattractiveness of his female colleagues in the neuroscience community. Indeed, it’s notable how much of this discussion has been in public channels, not just private emails or conversations conducted with sound waves which then dissipate into the aether. No doubt, this is [...]

Imagine an academic scientist goes to a big professional meeting in his field. For whatever reason, he then decides to share the following “impression” of that meeting with his Facebook friends: My impression of the Conference of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans. There are thousands of people at the conference and an unusually [...]

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Last year, I shared my reflections on Ada herself. This year, I’d like to celebrate the day by pointing you to a book about another pioneering woman of science, Maria Mitchell. Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer among the American Romantics by Renée Bergland Boston: Beacon Press [...]

By now, you may have seen the recently published study by Ross-Macusin et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled “Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students”, or the nice discussion by Ilana Yurkiewicz of why these findings matter. Briefly, the study involved having science faculty from research-focused universities rate [...]

Kevin Zelnio kicked it off on Twitter with a hashtag, and then wrote a blog post that shared the details of his personal journey with science. Lots of folks have followed suit and shared their stories, too — so many that I can’t even begin to link them without leaving something wonderful out. (Search the [...]

This year at ScienceOnline, the conference banquet featured storytelling organized by The Monti, a North Carolina non-profit organization dedicated to building community by getting people to share their true stories with each other. Conference goers were asked to share stories on the theme of “connections”. The stories had to be true, and storytellers had to [...]

A few things people have suggested in the discussion of “Womanspace” on multiple blogs and social networking platforms: That the story does not advance any gendered stereotypes (or, it it does, that these are not negative stereotypes, or that they reflect most poorly upon the hapless men in the story rather than upon the highly [...]

"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 [...]

When I was at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston last week, I popped by the American Junior Academy of Science poster session featuring the work of high school scientists. I’ll admit one of the reasons was because I saw an Evelyn from Texas in the abstract booklet. Being rather [...]

Anyone with necklaces or lace-up shoes has some first-hand experience with knots, but believe it or not (knot?), there is an entire mathematical discipline dedicated to studying knots and some closely related concepts. A mathematical knot is almost like a real-world knot, but it can’t have any ends. So if you’re thinking of a shoelace, [...]

As a child – okay, even still as an adult – I couldn’t get enough of adventure stories with animals at the center, whether in text or on the screen. Jack London’s Call of the Wild comes to mind, or Disney’s The Jungle Book. More recently, books like Bonobo Handshake, by Vanessa Woods (see my [...]