Humans
- Health & Medicine
A Faulty Eye Witness: Hallucinations
Treatment for Oliver Sacks' cancer damaged an eye and triggered something he never expected: his brain to display things that simply didn’t exist.
By Janet Raloff - Health & Medicine
A Faulty Eye Witness, Part I
Oliver Sacks shared observations from his latest journal on how losing sight in one eye changed a man's life. Sacks had intimate knowledge of every detail – because he’s the patient.
By Janet Raloff - Chemistry
Deciding Who’s First
Oxygen serves as the focus of who to credit with a discovery – and why.
By Janet Raloff - Humans
Son of Furby
How Star Wars' robots catalyzed an MIT program to build companionable robots.
By Janet Raloff - Health & Medicine
High doses
Emergency room patients are exposed to high doses of radiation from CT scans and other nuclear medicine.
By Tia Ghose - Life
Tracing human roots
Using a new method of data analysis, researchers have found that the Americas were peopled in two different migrations.
By Tia Ghose - Climate
Already feeling the heat
Long-delayed U.S. government summary of climate change science sees effects on energy, transportation, farming, and water.
By Susan Milius - Agriculture
Vertical Agriculture
Instead of farming in the country, one Columbia University scientist would do it in the city, spanning floor upon floor of buildings--from basements to the tops of high rise structures.
By Janet Raloff - Archaeology
Domain of the dead
Researchers say that Stonehenge functioned as the largest cemetery of its time.
By Bruce Bower - Archaeology
Footprints in the ash
Humans may have been walking around what is now central Mexico 40,000 years ago.
By Sid Perkins - Health & Medicine
Reading minds … or at least brain scans
By analyzing brain activity, computers can tell what word is on your mind.
By Tia Ghose - Earth
Political Science
New York's mayor argues that science should not only inform action, but also prod it.
By Janet Raloff