Many of us talk with our hands. But some researchers suspect we may listen with our hands, too. Cognitive scientists had subjects listen to spoken sentences, each in the third person and present tense, such as John walks to work. As they listened, th...
Cigarettes are bad for your health. But thats only if you smoke em. If you use them to line your nest, they might actually do you some good. Because birds that decorate their digs with discarded cigarette butts are less bothered by parasites. Thats a...
Mercury tends to show up in strange places, like swordfish and sharks. Now researchers have detected small amounts of mercury in the fog that bathes the California redwoods, near Santa Cruz. The mercury levels they've measured are in parts per trilli...
In the last decade scientists have managed to sequence the genomes of everything from bacteria and fruit flies to individual human beings. But often overlooked are the genomic sequences of our food. We know the genomes of apples, bananas, potatoes, w...
You might say blue-green algae are optimists: they put things in the best possible lightliterally. Actually, the organisms arent really algae. Theyre photosynthetic ocean bacteria. And they can fine-tune their photosynthetic apparatus to take advanta...
Ticks are bad news. They spread Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. And theyre also responsible for an unusual food allergyto meat. Yup, get bit by one of these buggers and it could be bye-bye BBQ. The strange allergy has been linked to th...
Ticks are bad news. They spread Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. And theyre also responsible for an unusual food allergyto meat. Yup, get bit by one of these buggers and it could be bye-bye BBQ. The strange allergy has been linked to th...
A crocodiles thick, rough skin looks like an impenetrable suit of armor. But the crocs skin actually confers a delicate sense of touch thats among the most acute in the animal kingdom. Thats according to a study in The Journal of Experimental Biology...
This is Scientific American sixty seconds science. I am Karen Hopkin. This will take just a minute. Your morning coffee. A baking pie. That turkey in the oven. There are some smells you just cant get enough of. But mix them and other scents all toget...
No matter how seldom you've opened that calculus textbook on your shelf, the chances of worms having eaten it are pretty low. But books written back in the Renaissance have had much better odds of becoming worm food. Now we know that the holes left b...