Queen Victoria's curse: New DNA evidence solves medical and murder mysteries
Queen Victoria and many of her descendants carried what was once called "Royal disease"—now known as hemophilia, a blood clotting disorder.
Opinion, arguments & analyses from guest experts and from the editors of Scientific American
Queen Victoria and many of her descendants carried what was once called "Royal disease"—now known as hemophilia, a blood clotting disorder.
FAJARDO, Puerto Rico—I first heard about Matt Hedman's talk while going out to dinner on Tuesday night. Best talk of the meeting, I was told. Everywhere I went yesterday, I kept hearing about this guy Matt Hedman...
Waters in the Gulf of Alaska were surprisingly acidic this summer, an indication they are absorbing high levels of carbon dioxide. Farther north, a polar bear in search of food wandered dangerously close to a town where it would have been killed...
FAJARDO, Puerto Rico—Part of the fun of coming to astronomy conferences is seeing the nonplussed reaction of local people in restaurants and bars--it's not often you get a crowd of people sweeping through your town to talk about Titanian lakes, lunar soil, and the prospects for life beyond the solar system...
Editor's Note: A team of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students traveled up New York's Hudson River on the New Clermont , a 6.7-meter boat outfitted with a pair of 2.2-kilowatt hydrogen fuel cells to power the boat's motor...
Thanks to the much-heralded International Year of Astronomy, this much we know: Galileo used a telescope to observe the moon in 1609. But the inventor of the revolutionary resolutionary device remains unknown, and its early history is muddied by simultaneous discoveries and competing claims...
The first doses of approved vaccines for the H1N1 "swine" flu will start trickling in across the U.S. on Tuesday. The first to arrive, 600,000 doses of MedImmune's FluMist nasal spray, will be for healthy people ages two to 49, the Associated Press reported...
The number of women who die from breast cancer has decreased slowly (about 2 percent per year) but steadily since 1990, according to a new report by the American Cancer Society (ACS), released to mark the start of Breast Cancer Awareness Month...
The revolution in neuroscience is often characterized as a revolution in new imaging technology.A long overdue reassessment of neuroimaging machines—in particular the functional magnetic resonance imager—has underlined that what you see is not always what you get.A study published this year in Perspectives on Psychological Science noted that many papers in social neuroscience, the field that examines the neurobiology of social behavior, suffered from faulty analyses that produced "voodoo correlations" in their data...
In a pair of flybys by a robotic explorer last year, planetary scientists began to unravel some of the mysteries of Mercury, a planet that is difficult to study from Earth and that had not been visited by a spacecraft since the 1970s...