Quick, name a famous female scientist. If you said Marie Curie, you're not alone. In fact, a lot of people can't think of a single example. Well, England's Royal Society is fixing to rectify that. On Friday, October 19th, it's sponsoring a Wiki-editi...
Researchers have known about these high-pitched squeaky songs for years. But they only recently discovered that mice can learn the songs of other mice. Such vocal learning is a rarity among animals. We know of only three kinds of birdsparrots, hummin...
Pet turtles can be unsanitary. But Chinese soft-shelled turtles really up the ante on distasteful behavior. They perform a variation on urinationthrough their mouths. Most land-based vertebrates produce urine to get rid of water-soluble toxic waste,...
This is Scientific American-60 Second Science. I am Christopher Intagliata. Gotta a minute? Hair helps keep you warm, right? But hair can also keep you cooler than bare skin, as long as the hair is not too thick. So says a study in a journal-Plus O...
Hair helps keep you warm, right? But hair can also keep you cooler than bare skin, as long as the hair is not too thick. So says a study in the journal PLoS ONE. Researchers studied elephants, which have very thin coats of hair. It's easy for the bea...
Nobel weeka fine time to celebrate sciences most notable achievements. As you raise your glass to this years laureates, why not toast one of chemistrys most delectable discoveries. Because its the 100th anniversary of the Maillard reaction, without w...
Sauropods like Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus were the biggest beasts to ever roam the Earth. And these dinosaurs had enormously long necks. Which poses an anatomical problem: they needed to move their necks side to side and up and down to graze, but t...
They say the beauty is in the eye of the holder. For f* Rainbow f*, that's definitely right. That's in right eye. The birds depend on their right eye for scoping out potential mates. Many males are choosy when picking a partner and the Rainbow or goo...
A rabbit might outrun a fox, but stalks of wheat arent making any quick getaways. Plants, for the most part, dont flee from predators. But some primitive marine plants are breaking the rules. Marine scientists at the University of Rhode Island School...
The black mamba is one of the world's most venomous snakesits bite can kill a human in just half an hour. But along with deadly neurotoxins, the black mamba's venom has a special ingredient: a painkiller as potent as morphine. So says a study in the...