Observations
Masks and Emasculation: Why Some Men Refuse to Take Safety Precautions
They think it makes them look weak, and avoiding that is evidently more important to them than demonstrating responsible behavior
Blogs
Observations
How a Landmark Physics Paper from the 1970s Uncannily Describes the COVID-19 Pandemic
Phil Anderson’s article “More Is Different” describes how different levels of complexity require new ways of thinking. And as the virus multiplies and spreads, that’s just what the human race desperately needs...
Observations
The Fight against COVID-19 Threatens to Cause Collateral Health Damage
The pandemic is no excuse to abandon chronic disease management and prevention
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New adhesive is stickier than gecko feet and doesn't lose its grip
Researchers say they have developed an adhesive that can stick stronger than the toes of geckos. The little lizard can dash up walls and hang from the ceiling by a single toe, thanks to microscopic hairs on the soles of its feet that latch onto nooks and crannies on surfaces...
Customer appreciation: Why Phoenix Solar is investing $615 million in cylindrical solar cells
Munich-based Phoenix Solar AG, a German photovoltaic system installer, has committed $615 million (450 million Euros) to purchasing Solyndra's cylindrical solar cells as a core part of its future rooftop installation business...
Mercury taking shape in images of previously unseen terrain
NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, launched in 2004, completed its second flyby of Mercury early Monday morning, passing within 125 miles (200 kilometers) of the planet’s surface and snapping striking photographs of never-before-seen terrain...
Am I a narcissist? Part II: Ask my staff
A few weeks ago, I found out that my presence on Facebook can indicate just how narcissistic I am, thanks to a study in the October issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin ...
Chalfie, Shimomura and Tsien win Chemistry Nobel for lighting up cells
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Mass., and Boston University; Martin Chalfie, of Columbia University, New York; and Roger Tsien, of the University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California...
ArXiv, the wire service for physicists and mathematicians, marks a milestone
Earlier this month, a free repository at Cornell University for technical papers that has become a wire service of sorts for physicists, mathematicians and other disciplines, named ArXiv, marked a major milestone as the number of papers collected there reached the half-million mark...
Open access publisher BioMed Central sold to Springer
Open access pioneer BioMed Central has been acquired by Springer, ScientificAmerican.com has learned. Open access is the movement, recently bolstered by Congress, to make studies available for free online, instead of charging taxpayers who funded the research (and others) to read them...
Work on broken symmetry garners Physics Nobel
Three men who study broken symmetry -- the phenomenon that "conceals nature’s order under an apparently jumbled surface," according to the Nobel Foundation -- have won the Nobel Prize in Physics: Yoichiro Nambu, of the University of Chicago; Makoto Kobayashi, of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan; and Toshihide Maskawa, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan...
Bolivia tries to bolster public health with traditional medicine
The U.S. has a decidedly ambivalent relationship with alternative medicine, though large numbers of Americans routinely ingest nostrums from ginkgo to garlic. In Bolivia, by contrast, the status of holistic medicine has risen at even the highest levels of government...
Smart car key helps keep junior in line on his big night out
Parents worried about teens' safety (not to mention the safety of everyone else on the road) when they take the new car for a spin will soon be able to control how fast the kids drive and how loudly they crank up the tunes...
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