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Features and Background
Lessons from the wolf: Restoring the top predator to Yellowstone has altered the balance of the park's flora and fauna far more than expected ... [more]
Now there is a new reason to avoid a side of fries: they're loaded with trans-fatty acids, which are coming under fire from nutrition experts ... [more]
Deleting huge chunks of seemingly vital DNA from lab mice has had a surprising result: no apparent effect whatsoever ... [more]
Psychologists and designers have come up with thoughtful pill boxes that make storing drugs safely child's play for adults ... [more]
Yo-yo dieting may be good for the waistline (at least intermittently), but it's bad for the immune system ... [more]
A genetically-modified virus that exploits the selfish behaviour of cancer cells may offer a powerful and selective way of killing tumours ... [more]
Tech '54, where are you? How much has technology really changed our daily lives? Highly wired writer Larry Smith spent ten days in the big city living with the technology of 50 years ago: no web, no cell, no laptop, no ATM card ... [more]
Air-fresheners are causing a stink: researchers have found that plug-ins can react with ozone to produce carcinogenic compounds ... [more]
With fears of bioterror growing in the US and abroad, researchers have prototyped a number of different biosensors -- but will they ever make it into the field? (registration required) ... [more]
The electricity blackout that left 50 million North Americans without power in August 2003 had an unexpected benefit: it gave cities a breath of fresh air ... [more]
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Paralysed rats have regained 70% of their normal walking function in a new three-part treatment for spinal cord injuries, which involves the regeneration of nerve cells and brain-body communication ... [more]
Some music makes us weep, some makes our spirits soar. Now an Australian music psychologist says he can mathematically quantify the emotional impact of different compositions ... [more]
Few shores are immune from the tide of ocean-borne plastic trash. But the problem runs deeper: the world's oceans and beaches are awash with microscopic plastic fragments ... [more]
Humans like to regard themselves as exceptional. But it seems that even bird-brained ravens have theories of mind ... [more]
Gullies on Mars that appear to have been carved by flowing water may have been created by powdery landslides instead ... [more]
Dinner, pets, and plagues by the bucketful: The burgeoning trade in wild animals is leading to ecodisasters (registration required) ... [more]
Teens do have some excuse for being unreasonable, it seems: the brain's centre of reasoning is among the last areas to mature ... [more]
Foiled by effective tests for performance-enhancing drugs, the miscreants of the sports world are turning to substances normally found in the human body ... [more]
Weird sex is all around us. Protozoa, arthropods, fish and flowers maintain their evolutionary status by bending the rules of gender ... [more]
Even as the Pentagon struggles with the low-tech reality of war in Iraq, it looks to increasingly bizarre-sounding technology for next-gen fighting systems ... [more]
Drowning your sleepiness an oversized mug of coffee may not be the best strategy for staying alert: a little bit of caffeine, often, is more likely to do the trick ... [more]
Waste not: NASA-supported researchers are working to develop a microbial fuel cell that can extract electricity from human waste ... [more]
The quest to rid the world of polio is back on track, with anti-vaccine rumours having been convincingly laid to rest ... [more]
Researchers have built a computer model that can reproduce an important aspect of the human brain's short-term memory: small-world networks ... [more]
The universe just keeps getting more impressive. Astrophysicists say it may be a billion years older than they thought ... [more], and cosmologists report that it's at least a hefty 78 billion light years across ... [more]
A tiny protein called ADDL could be the key to Alzheimer's ... [more]
Researchers continue to struggle with the enormity of obesity, in the search for a chemical cure for the seriously overweight (registration required) ... [more]
The surface of the Earth is seeing less sunlight than it did 50 years ago -- though things may be brightening up as pollution levels drop ... [more]
GM food could feed the world's poor, says a UN report -- but the developing world is missing out as the biotech industry concentrates on developing lucrative cash crops rather than low-profit staples ... [more]
When future astronauts pack for a long trip through space, they may want to toss in some strawberries and spinach for the ride, to help ward off radiation-induced brain damage ... [more]
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Books and Media
There's no question that the population bomb is still ticking, warn Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich in One With Nineveh. The question is: why do so many people remain unconvinced and unconcerned? ... [more]
In BioEvolution, Michael Fumento blends science writing with attack journalism to target opposition to biotechnology ... [more]
Call it Nice City: No hardcore blood and guts, just low tech checkers and bridge, rated G for grandma -- and it's the wrinkled future of online gaming ... [more]
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With Ancient Wine, Patrick E McGovern treads archaeological grapes in ancient vineyards, producing an account of vinicultural history and prehistory that is like a good bottle of wine ... [more]
If you want good information, you should ask around -- a lot, says James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds: large groups are more accurate than any expert ... [more]
Clues and corpses: Clea Koff shows how forensic science can shed light on human rights abuses in The Bone Woman ... [more]
Several significant new books could settle the debate about climate change right now -- if people take the trouble to read them, says Verlyn Klinkenborg (registration required) ... [more]
Brains and the Beast: Frans de Waal reviews Clive Wynne's Do Animals Think? ... [more] and Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings by Duane Rumbaugh and David Washburn ... [more], and considers whether the behaviorist's insistence on distinguishing animal from human cognition can be reconciled with evolutionary continuity ... [more]
Armand Marie Leroi's Mutants: On the Form, Varieties and Errors of the Human Body presents a scientific investigation of genetic variability that rises above prurience ... [more]
Professors, Inc.: Sheldon Krimsky worries in Science in the Private Interest that the pursuit of private profit will spell the demise of public-interest science ... [more]
Science coverage in the media is growing, but there's an inherent bias: stories with the "wow!" factor generally win out over more important but duller options (registration required) ... [more]
Equations for traffic and marriage: Human behaviour en masse follows the laws of physics in surprising ways, says Philip Ball in Critical Mass ... [more]
Boy gets girl with the aid of a cyber Cyrano in Turing, Christos Papadimitriou's pedagogical novel about computation ... [more]
A tightwad's guide to ad blockers Sick of obnoxious ads hogging bandwidth? Switching browsers or employing a few simple hacks can keep annoying marketing pitches at bay ... [more]
In Locust, entomologist Jeffrey A. Lockwood probes the mystery of the scourge of the West: massive hordes of locusts that swarmed across the western US in the 1870s, before disappearing with hardly a trace ... [more]
When it comes to communication and the media, weblogs are the new black, and getting more and more stylish by the day -- and now some bloggers are even gaining coveted journalistic credentials ... [more]
It's getting crowded at Troy! Brad Pitt isn't the only Achilles on the block: there are a few on television these days, too. So how is The Iliad holding up on screen? ... [more]
Scouring the internet to compile lists involves visiting many different web pages -- but the next step in search engine technology could do all the work with a single mouse click ... [more]
Reeling from information overload, fueled by our ubiquitous email, TV and cellphones, info-environmentalists argue that we need to take positive action to reclaim mental greenspace ... [more]
Sol searching: JB Zirker's Sunquakes demonstrates how much has been accomplished in just a few decades by the relatively new discipline of helioseismology ... [more]
If the corporation were a person, would that person be a psychopath? This is the provocative question at the centre of an award-winning documentary film ... [more]
The kingmaker: Walt Mossberg makes or breaks tech products from his pundit perch at a little rag called The Wall Street Journal ... [more]
A 25th-anniversary edition of Pamela McCorduck's AI classic, Machines Who Think, chronicles the heady early days of the fledgling science of artificial intelligence, and takes a look at where we are headed now ... [more]
It has always been hard to get people to take global warming seriously because it happens too slowly. But The Day After Tomorrow has put global warming on the fast track ... [more]
The film Godsend arrives at a time when the politics and science of cloning remain unresolved. Will the movie help bury US cloning efforts for good? ... [more]
Turn off the TV: By age 65, the average person in the US will have watched nine years of television. What grand dreams might have been chased with those hours instead? ... [more]
Products should be designed around their users' emotions, says Don Norman in Emotional Design. Martyn Perks worries that emotional appeal could too easily become a substitute for good design ... [more]
In Everything's Relative, Tony Rothman corrects misattributions and debunks legends about a score of well-known discoveries and inventions (registration required) ... [more]
This is your TV on steroids: So long, analog broadcasting! Why the dawn of the digital era may spell good news for viewers -- and plenty of it ... [more]
A fish out of water: Snakehead author Eric Jay Dolin explains how an ecological nightmare became a media darling ... [more]
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Analysis and Opinion
Two studies, two trials and a debate: Most drug trials are sponsored by pharmaceutical companies. And that, some critics say, can lead to a conflict of interest (registration required) ... [more]
People of the forest: Anthropologist Conrad Feather has trained an Amazon tribe to use GPS, so they can stake a claim to their land and drive loggers out ... [more]
Tiny silicon identity chips being put in everyday objects and even implanted under the skin are changing the way we consume. Will they also invade our privacy? ... [more]
In defence of the boffin: The Beagle has landed, but no one knows quite where. Another defeat for a British boffin? Or just a small hiccup on the way to scientific greatness? ... [more]
Wicked innovation: We can lament the mischief of hackers, thieves, and tricksters, says Michael Schrage -- or we can learn lessons in innovation from them ... [more]
The explosion of the Hindenburg gave airships a bad name, but Hokan Colting, lover of all things dirigible, plans to change all that ... [more]
Printing problems: David Feige ponders the inexact science of fingerprint analysis ... [more]
Database nation: Declan McCullagh considers the upside of "zero privacy" ... [more]
They were meant to show that gender was determined by nurture, not nature: one identical twin raised as a boy and the other as a girl. But both Brian Reimer and David -- formerly Brenda -- Reimer took their own lives, bringing to an end the tragic story of Dr Money's sex experiment ... [more] ... [more]
Up in the air! The explosion of the Hindenburg gave airships a bad name, but Hokan Colting plans to change all that ... [more]
Science and self-government: Wilfred McClay discusses why biotechnology is not a subject for experts alone, and why the greatest challenge in the years ahead may be "choosing limits" ... [more]
Researchers have yet to develop a foolproof lie-detection technology. That hasn't stopped interrogators from relying on their old, flawed standby: the polygraph ... [more]
The multi-billion-dollar US ballistic missile shield won't work, warns an independent scientists' group ... [more]
A way with whales: After years of studying sperm whales, Hal Whitehead believes these huge mammals have cultures and sophisticated patterns of cooperation ... [more]
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US science is on the brink of becoming another victim of 9-11, warns Albert H Teich, as new policies cause long-term damage to science and technology efforts (registration required) ... [more]
The mystery of the Permian extinction has been solved. Or has it? ... [more]
The rise of the cyberbully demands new rules, says Mark Franek. Big Brother may not be watching, but parents, teachers, and decisionmakers in the technology industry should be ... [more]
The world has a historic chance to halt the Aids epidemic, with an initiative to put 3 million Aids sufferers on anti-retroviral drugs by the end of 2005, says the director-general of the World Health Organisation ... [more]
Hydrogen hopes: Can hydrogen live up to its promise as the clean fuel of the future? ... [more]
It's crunch time for Korea's cloners: A moment of triumph for South Korean science appears to have been marred by doubts about ethical lab practice ... [more]
The Stewart inquiry into mobile phones shows the danger of taking public fears over science too seriously, says Dick Taverne ... [more]
After 30 years of pursuing its Sisyphean task of quantifying the biological basis of human social behavior, evolutionary psychology is trying to shed its just-so story stigma (registration required) ... [more]
Calculating doom: Is catastrophe on the cards? A mathematical assessment of overall risk looks at eternity as a lottery, says John Allen Paulos ... [more]
Dance of life and death: Reptile expert Harry Greene's fascination with snakes stemmed from an interest in death -- but they can tell us plenty about life too ... [more]
String theory suggests that the big bang was not the origin of the universe but simply the outcome of a preexisting state. Gabriele Veneziano considers the myth of the beginning of time ... [more]
The enchanted glass: Francis Bacon and experimental psychologists show why the facts in science never just speak for themselves, says Michael Shermer ... [more]
Once shunned for his AIDS theories, Peter Duesberg is back in the spotlight, with a contrarian view of cancer ... [more]
William John Hoyt, Jr considers how anti-vaccination fever fanned the fires created by questionable research to produce worldwide epidemics of a nearly-eliminated disease: whooping cough ... [more]
If not pills, what? In the wake of new data on kids and antidepressants, the focus is shifting to talk therapies ... [more]
Women don't need to see videos of destroyed fetuses to understand the reality of abortion, says Ann Furedi. Women know that abortion stops a beating heart and ends a life that would become a child. That is, after all, the point of the procedure ... [more]
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