Science News

All Stories by Science News

  1. Science Future for January 28, 2012

    February 9 Learn about the science of wine and even stomp some grapes with your bare feet at the Durham, N.C., Museum of Life + Science. See bit.ly/syIeOC February 13 Enjoy an after-hours tour highlighting displays of love in exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Learn more at bit.ly/zRko4O

  2. SN Online

    SCIENCE & SOCIETYPlants, algae and fungi can now be named online and in English. Read “Botanists et al freed from Latin, paper.” Thomas Libby, Evan Chang-Siu, Pauline Jennings, Courtesy of PolyPEDAL Lab & CiBER/UC Berkeley LIFE Videos and robots show how reptiles use their tails to balance in midair. See “Measuring the leap of a […]

  3. Letters

    The eyes have it Just finished the latest issue of your spectacular magazine. I’ve been a reader for many years, but this is the first time I’ve felt compelled to write in. In the article about the tadpole (“Tiny voltage grows eyes in strange places,” SN: 12/31/11, p. 5), the final sentence is a quote […]

  4. Auroras by Dan Bortolotti

    Striking images illuminate this exploration of one of nature’s greatest light shows. Firefly, 2011, 143 p., $29.95

  5. You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself by David McRaney

    Forty-six of the brain’s everyday fallacies and cognitive biases are highlighted in an expansion of the author’s blog about the neuro­science of self-delusion. Gotham Books, 2011, 300 p., $22.50

  6. Mushroom by Nicholas P. Money

    Mushroom lore and history mingle with science and medicine in a biologist’s exploration of the fungal kingdom. Oxford, 2011, 201 p., $24.95

  7. Part Wild: One Woman’s Journey with a Creature Caught Between the Worlds of Wolves and Dogs by Ceiridwen Terrill

    The cultural history and genetic story of dog domestication is told through the adventures of a wolf-husky hybrid adopted by a science writer. Simon & Schuster, 2011, 274 p., $25

  8. 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True by Guy P. Harrison

    A journalist turns a skeptical eye on beliefs ranging from astrology to Atlantis, showing that scientific discovery can be just as fascinating as myth. Prometheus, 2011, 458 p., $18

  9. BOOK REVIEW: Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain by Michael S. Gazzaniga

    Review by Laura Sanders.

  10. BOOK REVIEW: My Beautiful Genome: Exposing Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time by Lone Frank

    Review by Tina Hesman Saey.

  11. Make pituitary hormone

    A pituitary hormone goes from labor drug to love drug.

  12. Letters

    Skaters slide Regarding the article “Skateboarders rock at physics” (SN: 12/3/11, p. 10), the skateboarders’ “intuitive” conclusion that the ball will roll faster down the blue ramp (which is longer but has two steeper sections compared with the shorter red ramp with a single shallower section) depends on the particular geometries chosen for the two […]