The so-called birthers cant accept that President Obama is really a natural-born American citizen. Part of whats behind this seemingly irrational belief may lie in whats called implicit social cognitionthe deep-rooted assumptions we all carry around,...
A friends four year old daughter recently complained to me about how badly her mosquito bite itched. She was about to burst into tears. The fact that an uncomfortable itchy sensation can drive many of us to distraction led many scientists to believe...
Orchids are botany's great mimics, all in the service of getting pollinated. Some have evolved to resemble female wasps to attract males. Others produce odors that smell like potential mates or like more attractive flowers. Now a study published in t...
This is Scientific American's 60 Seconds Science. I'm Steve Mirsky. Got a minute? In 1900 legendary physicist Max Planck described the way energy gets dissipated from any nonreflective object, called a blackbody. But even Max said if something else i...
This is Scientific Americans Sixty-second Science. Im Cynthia Graber. This will just take a minute. Poor old spleen, it never got the recognition it deserved. Until now. Scientists had known that the spleen is part of our immune systems. But it was c...
People swing their arms when they walk. But did you ever wonder why? Does it help us keep our balance? Is it a relic from our evolutionary past? Is it because we look like doofuses if we dont? Now, a report in the Royal Society journal Biological Sci...
