Health
Left-sided Cancer: Blame your bed and TV?
Curiously, the cancer rate is 10 percent higher in the left breast than in the right. This left-side bias holds true for both men and women and it also applies to the skin cancer melanoma...
Guest Blog
Commentary invited by editors of Scientific American
Mind & Brain
Rockin' scientists: N.Y.U. brain researchers put down their data sets, then get down with their rock band
You might be surprised if you knew just how many scientists out there play in rock bands. When the sun goes down, garages, basements and living rooms throughout the land are filled with guys and gals who have shed their lab coats and strapped on their guitars...
The Sciences
The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature
Editor's Note: We are republishing this article by Paul Dirac from the May 1963 issue of Scientific American , as it might be of interest to listeners to the June 24, 2010, and June 25, 2010 Science Talk podcasts, featuring award-winning writer and physicist Graham Farmelo discussing The Strangest Man , his biography of the Nobel Prize-winning British theoretical physicist...
Biology
A genome story: 10th anniversary commentary by Francis Collins
For those of you who like stories with simple plots and tidy endings, I must confess the tale of the Human Genome Project isn't one of those. The story didn't reach its conclusion when we unveiled the first draft of the human genetic blueprint at the White House on June 26, 2000...
Space & Physics
How to find a habitable exoplanet: Don't look for one
Most planetary scientists will tell you that the objects they study are more complex and harder to categorize than almost anything else out there in the universe.
Mind & Brain
The Dothraki response to a call for science in a created language
This is a response to an open letter from Joshua Hartshorne entitled “Fantasy TV in the service of science,” posted as a guest blog by Scientific American about Dothraki, a language created by the Language Creation Society for the HBO adaptation of George R...
Culture
Michelangelo’s Secret Message in the Sistine Chapel: A Juxtaposition of God and the Human Brain
At the age of 17 he began dissecting corpses from the church graveyard. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
The Sciences
Now ain't that special? The implications of creating the first synthetic bacteria
Is life special, so special that we cannot understand it, much less create it? Are living things endowed with some sort of special power, force or property that distinguishes the inorganic from the organic, the living from the dead? Can life be nothing more than the precise interaction of physical stuff?...
Mind & Brain
Fantasy TV in the service of science: An open letter to HBO about "Dothraki"
Editor's note: Joshua Hartshorne is a graduate student at Harvard University's Psychology Department interested in human behavior and language. He wrote the open letter below because HBO is currently creating a new fantasy language, called "Dothraki," for an upcoming television adaptation of George R...
Evolution
Dismiss dinosaurs as failures...and pave a path to a bleak future
Dinosaurs are frequently cited as the ultimate exemplars of failure. “Dead as a dinosaur” is now deeply embedded in our vernacular. Yet death for a species, and even for groups of species, is as inevitable as your death...
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Everything you always wanted to know about raising science-literate kids
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Explore the science behind the dog in your bed
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Climate science in a changing world
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Illusions, Delusions, and Everyday Deceptions
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Mathematics: learning it, doing it, celebrating it.
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Adventures in the good science of rock-breaking.
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The Artful Amoeba
A Blog About the Weird Wonderfulness of Life on Earth
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Exploring and celebrating diversity in science.
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