NEW YORK—Sparks flew Thursday night at a New York Academy of Sciences panel discussion about whether or not certain recent research into the H5N1 avian flu virus has created a major biosecurity threat and what, if anything, to do about it. The research in question comes from the labs of Ron Fouchier at the Erasmus [...]

Butterflies are not merely beautiful. They use a complex pattern of rapid wing flapping and body deformation to execute impressive aerial acrobatics. This ability has not escaped the U.S. military, which is turning to these insects for ideas on how to create ever-smaller drone aircraft to execute reconnaissance, search-and-rescue and environmental monitoring missions. [View a [...]

Conventional wisdom has it that putting the words “quantum gravity” and “experiment” in the same sentence is like bringing matter into contact with antimatter. All you get is a big explosion; the two just don’t go together. The distinctively quantum features of gravity only show up in extreme settings such as the belly of a [...]

Lyme disease is notoriously tough to diagnose. The symptoms often don’t appear for one or two weeks after a bite and can vary from feeling flu-ish to longer-term neurological damage. And ticks seem to lie in wait throughout much of the U.S., prepared to pounce and infect a passerby. Part of the difficulty in confirming [...]

Why not bring elephants to Australia? That’s the proposal made by biologist David Bowman of the University of Tasmania in a comment published February 2 in Nature. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) The pachyderms could help to polish off gamba grass, introduced from Africa to Australia in the 1930s as fodder for [...]

Spiders’ silk has been the envy of materials engineers for decades. Its combination of flexibility and durability has been difficult to match with even the most advanced technology. “It is stronger than steel and tougher than Kevlar by weight,” Markus Buehler, an engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a prepared statement. A new [...]

Fermilab is dead. Long live Fermilab! The Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., which had been the top U.S. particle collider—and for many years the most powerful such machine in the world—shut down last September. The collider’s physics breakthroughs, including the 1995 discovery of the top quark, were so eminent that [...]

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved a new drug that tackles the underlying cause of  cystic fibrosis (CF) in 4 percent of patients. The drug, called ivacaftor (brand name Kalydeco), acts by helping the body make better use of a protein that works incorrectly in cystic fibrosis patients. The underlying research behind this [...]

Government declarations of war on drugs or disease often end in losing battles. That’s why the news that the Obama Administration’s drafting of a plan that targets 2025 as a goal for preventing or treating Alzheimer’s met with skepticism in some quarters. “No one set a deadline for the ‘War on cancer’ or in the [...]

Humanity has weathered many a climate change, from the ice age of 80,000 years ago to the droughts of the late 19th century that helped kill between 30 and 50 million people around the world via famine. But such shifts have transformed or eliminated specific human societies, including the ancient Sumerians and the Ming Dynasty [...]