So far I’ve told you about the phytoplankton we’re studying — the coccolithophores, how we figure out where they’re going to be, and how we collect them. But there’s a key element that’s missing in this description: the virus that infects them. And a lot of you wanted to know about it. What kind of [...]

NEW YORK—For a spot news junkie, the sight of a podium-studded dais surrounded by people holding up recording devices is irresistible, especially on a hot summer day. So, I was delighted to happen this morning upon such a press conference on my way to the Scientific American office. The event was held to announce a [...]

At least 15,000 years ago intrepid Siberians crossed the newly exposed Bering land bridge to arrive in the unpeopled Americas. But was this influx the only ancient wave from East Asia? Researchers have been studying archeological, linguistic and genetic evidence for years in a quest to understand how the first Americans arrived and spread through [...]

In his new book “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism”, the philosopher of technology Evgeny Morozov develops the concept of “technological solutionism”, the tendency to define problems primarily or purely based on whether or not a certain technology can address them. This is a concerning trend since it foreshadows a future [...]

Remember that news-making ENCODE study with its claims that “80% of the genome is functional”? Remember how those claims were the starting point for a public relations disaster which pronounced (for the umpteenth time) the “death of junk DNA”? Even mainstream journalists bought into this misleading claim. I wrote a post on ENCODE where I [...]

Leo Szilard – brilliant, peripatetic Hungarian physicist, habitué of hotel lobbies, soothsayer without peer – first grasped the implications of a nuclear chain reaction in 1933 while stepping off the curb at a traffic light in London. Szilard has many distinctions to his name; not only did he file a patent for the first nuclear reactor [...]