Feature
- Math
Crafty Geometry
By mastering traditional handicrafts such as knitting and crocheting, mathematicians are better able to understand complex surfaces.
- Computing
What a Flake
New ways to simulate ice-crystal growth yield patterns remarkably similar to the beautiful and intricate shapes of snowflakes and may shed light on how those real-life shapes come about.
- Health & Medicine
Salad Doubts
Researchers are looking into new ways to sanitize harvested produce and prevent foodborne pathogens from infecting people.
- Humans
Peer Review under the Microscope
The traditional method for communicating results of scientific research could get its biggest facelift in hundreds of years.
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The Predator’s Gaze
A new wave of research is trying to untangle the origins and nature of psychopathy, a personality style characterized by a lack of conscience, empathy, or guilt that attracts intense interest from the legal system.
- Health & Medicine
Milk Therapy
Breast milk has long been known to be the best food for babies, but compounds in breast milk promise to be a tonic for many adult ills as well.
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Inherit the Warmer Wind
The genetic makeup of organisms ranging from fruit flies to birds appears to be changing in response to global warming.
- Astronomy
What’s a Planet?
Recent observations have blurred distinctions among stars, brown dwarfs, and planets.
- Math
The Mind of the Swarm
Mathematics is helping explain how animals form flocks, swarms, and schools.
- Chemistry
Chemical Pop-Up Books
Chemists and engineers have designed two-dimensional structures that self-fold into functional, three-dimensional objects, such as miniature chemistry laboratories and drug-delivery devices.
- Anthropology
Evolution’s Mystery Woman
A heated debate has broken out among anthropologists over whether a highly publicized partial skeleton initially attributed to a new, tiny species of human cousins actually comes from a pygmy Homo sapiens with a developmental disorder.
- Earth
Dashing Rogues
Rogue waves, which tower over the waves that surround them, are probably more common than scientists had previously suspected.
