Column

  1. Science & Society

    Coming soon: Science News any way you want it

    On October 2, we will launch a new and expanded Science News website. And starting with the October 19 issue, all print subscribers will have access to a new iPad version of Science News, at no additional charge. You’ll also notice a smart new look for the magazine.

    By
  2. Math

    Born half a century ago, chaos theory languished for years

    By
  3. Probing Wikipedia editors’ hive mind for rules on cooperative behavior

    Wikipedia, Encyclopedia, cooperation.

    By
  4. Calling neuroscience pointless misses the point

    Despite the adage, there actually is such a thing as bad publicity, a fact that brain scientists have lately discovered. A couple of high-profile opinion pieces in the New York Times have questioned the usefulness of neuroscience, claiming, as columnist David Brooks did in June, that studying brain activity will never reveal the mind. Or […]

    By
  5. Killer whales, grandmas and what men want: Evolutionary biologists consider menopause

    Menopause seems like a cruel prank that Mother Nature plays on women. First come the hot flashes, night sweats, vaginal dryness, irregular periods, irritability and weight gain. Then menstruation stops and fertility ends. Why, many women ask, must they suffer through this? Evolutionary biologists, it turns out, ask themselves more or less the same question. […]

    By
  6. Space

    Belief in multiverse requires exceptional vision

    If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. That’s an old philosophy, one that many scientists swallowed whole. But as Ziva David of NCIS would say, it’s total salami. After all, you can’t see bacteria and viruses, but they can still kill you. Yet some scientists still invoke that philosophy to deny the scientific status […]

    By
  7. Space

    Long the stuff of fantasy, wormholes may be coming soon to a telescope near you

    For decades now, black holes have been the rock stars of popular astrophysics, both fact and fiction. Physicists rely on them to explain all sorts of mysterious astrophenomena, and black holes have been essential plot devices in various films, from Star Trek (2009) to Galaxy Quest (1999) to (obviously) The Black Hole (1979). But black […]

    By
  8. Math

    Flatland and its sequel bring the math of higher dimensions to the silver screen

    In 1884, Edwin Abbott wrote a strange and enchanting novella called Flatland, in which a square who lives in a two-dimensional world comes to comprehend the existence of a third dimension but is unable to persuade his compatriots of his discovery. Through the book, Abbott skewered hierarchical Victorian values while simultaneously giving a glimpse of […]

    By
  9. Math

    Systems biology tunes in to cancer networks

    If cable TV systems had a channel called The Cancer Network, doctors would be wise to tune in. But there’s no such channel. So for now, they’ll just have to read articles in scientific journals that publish papers on the science of networks. Scientists in the new field of systems biology have made a lot […]

    By
  10. Tech

    What parents just don’t understand about online privacy

    Not long ago, police and school officials in Old Saybrook, Conn., held a high school assembly on Internet safety. The purpose of the assembly, wrote New Haven Register reporter Susan Misur, was to make students aware of how public their photos, tweets and profiles are online. To make this point, the presentation included a slide […]

    By
  11. Anthropology

    Human ancestors scrambled to their feet, a new explanation for bipedalism asserts

    By
  12. Math

    A field where breakthroughs are hard to come by produces two big advances on a single day

    Problems in number theory often have a certain exasperating charm: They are extraordinarily simple to state, but so difficult to prove that centuries of effort haven’t sufficed to crack them. So it’s pretty remarkable that on one day this May, mathematicians announced results on two of these mathematical conundrums. Both proofs address one of the […]

    By