The Statue of Liberty. She is a symbol of freedom, an icon of New York City, and today is her birthday. In honor to celebrate, I’d like to share some images from an article from the August 14th, 1886 Scientific American that highlighted the methods of assembling Lady Liberty. After all, what’s birth without a [...]

Every single day, all across the globe, extraordinarily creative and talented students sit in our classrooms bored out of their minds. These budding innovators may differ drastically in what particular domain captivates their attention, whether it’s science and engineering, architecture and design, arts, music and entertainment, business and finance, law, or health care. Nevertheless, as Richard Florida [...]

A recent survey by Intel found that only 28 percent of teenagers had ever considered becoming engineers and that only 5 percent associated engineering with the word “cool.” That’s not terribly surprising given that engineering ranks in the bottom half of professions with which teens are familiar, falling below teacher, doctor, nurse, police officer, chef, [...]

Editor’s Note: Students from Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering are working in Tanzania to help improve sanitation and energy technologies in local villages. This series chronicles work being done by the student-led group, known as  Dartmouth Humanitarian Engineering (DHE) [formerly known as Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects (HELP)], to design "rocket stoves" in the village of [...]

Editor’s Note: Students from Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering are working in Tanzania to help improve sanitation and energy technologies in local villages. This series chronicles work being done by the student-led group, known as  Dartmouth Humanitarian Engineering (DHE) [formerly known as Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects (HELP)], to design "rocket stoves" in the village of [...]

Editor’s Note: Students from Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering are working in Tanzania to help improve sanitation and energy technologies in local villages. This series chronicles work being done by the student-led group, known as Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects (HELP), to design "rocket stoves" in the village of Mwamgongo and top-light updraft design (TLUD) gasification [...]

Editor’s Note: Students from Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering are working in Tanzania to help improve sanitation and energy technologies in local villages. This series chronicles work being done by the student-led group, known as Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects (HELP), to design "rocket stoves" in the village of Mwamgongo and top-light updraft design (TLUD) gasification [...]

The MTV Video Music Awards are being broadcast tonight. Since 1984, these awards have recognized the top popular musicians, videos, and songs each year. Young musicians who dream of one day having their very own “Moonman” statue might be interested in getting the best guitar for their money. Luckily, science is here to help. Kazutaka [...]

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., [...]

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 [...]

This Sunday, August 29, is the fifth anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans, which touched off one of the most egregious and most publicized tragedies in modern American history. Scientific American published an article in 2001 that predicted precisely the kind of destruction the storm wrought, based on computer models of hurricane [...]

That sound you do not hear is a half-million people not sighing in relief as the reservoir that slakes the thirst of the population of Raleigh, NC, and many surrounding smaller towns nears capacity for the first time in nearly a year. And on this World Water Day, when many turn their attention to the [...]

I am writing this to you from New Delhi, India as I am here with the International Reporting Project as a New Media Specialist! We have been in the crowded, bustling, port city of Mumbai, the central city of Nagpur (home of several tiger refuges), the rural village area of Gadchiroli, and finally to the [...]

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 [...]

This is a follow up to my last post about Science Video Brainstorming. Thank you everyone who has kindly donated toward my trip to VidCon 2012! I have enough for a plane ticket! Please continue your generous donations in any amount so I can have a place to stay and food to eat! Recall that [...]

In Carin’s recent post about the winners of the Inaugural Science Online Film Festival, we were introduced to the first place video, ”Copier: A Playful Look at How it Works”, created by  Bill Hammack.  I am very pleased to introduce this week my university colleague, friend, and an incredible source of advice for my own videos. In his [...]

At their most fundamental level, brains are made up of neurons. And those neurons collectively comprise the two main types of brain tissue: white matter is made up primarily of axons, and grey matter is made up of synapses, or the connections between neurons. (Want a primer on the neuron? Check out this explainer post [...]