Scientific American launched its e-Book program this summer, starting with The Science of Sports: Winning in the Olympics. Each month, we add new titles selected from the most relevant issues facing science today. For October, our newest e-Book reminds readers that politics makes strange bedfellows. This maxim becomes even more vivid when politics is put under [...]

James Abram Garfield was born on this day, November 19, in 1831. Had an unstable, delusional stalker’s bullets and nineteenth-century medical “care” not cut short his life just six months into his presidency, he would be 181 today (more on that later). Garfield was an intelligent man who studied some math in college, but contemporary [...]

Storm-ravaged New Jersey could set off a tempest of its own on Election Day if the state lets constituents vote via e-mail and fax, cautioned a group of legal, technology and election experts during a press conference on Monday. These experts are challenging N.J. Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno’s executive order issued late last week that [...]

How do you know that a real-live human being is behind the past 14 weeks of blog posts exploring the individual questions posed to presidential candidates by ScienceDebate.org? Because people make mistakes. Last week I inadvertently posted the vaccine answers to the analysis about rare earth elements. Thanks to sijodk for politely pointing out the [...]

With just over a week left in this year’s presidential election, all eyes are focused on Ohio, Florida and a few other battleground states. Many of the themes that kept cropping up in this year’s live debates–China, the economy  and regulation–can also be found in the next-to-last of the 14 ScienceDebate questions, on the rare [...]

If you blinked you missed the fact that President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney dealt with a few science issues in the Town Hall debate this week at Hofstra University. So, for a change of pace from our ongoing weekly look at one of  ScienceDebate.org’s 14 questions about the “Top American Science Questions,” I’ve [...]

The biggest challenge to voting accuracy in the U.S. isn’t hanging chads or hacked voting machines—it’s the mail. A new report by the Voting Technology Project (VTP)—a joint venture between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—finds that even though absentee ballots account for about only a quarter of all ballots [...]

No matter who is elected president of the United States on November 6, there are bound to be new cuts to next year’s federal budget. The question is whether they will be really really big or just sort of big. Congress can avoid the really, really big (and semi-random) cuts during its lame-duck session between [...]

Somebody please ask Governor Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama to talk about climate change at the next debate for crying out loud! Or what to do about growing fresh water shortages or protecting the Internet or addressing any of the other fundamental challenges the U.S. faces in the coming years that are based on [...]

We have passed the halfway point in our weekly examination of the 14 top science questions that President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney need to address as part of their quests to lead the United States for the next four years. Question #8 tackles increasing concerns about the health of the U.S. freshwater supply. [...]

We now have responses to the Top Science Questions facing the US from Governor Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama. So I thought I’d look at some of the specifics in their answers to the next question in our weekly list–number 7, on agriculture and food safety. (For this election-year project, Scientific American partnered with [...]

The Atlantic featured a captivating fantasy in its November issue about a scenario to assassinate the U.S. president in 2016 by using a bioweapon specifically tailored to his genetic makeup—a virus that targeted the commander in chief and no one else. A great plot for a Hollywood thriller. But will we really see four years [...]