This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. Im Karen Hopkin. This will just take a minute. The first time you visit your boyfriends place, he no doubt tidies up, to give you the illusion that he doesnt live like an animal. Well, animals, too, ca...
This is Scientific Americans 60-Second Science, Im Molly Webster. Got a minute? Some consumers buy organically grown foods because they believe the products are healthier, tastier and better for the environment. But is this assessment true? To find o...
Always finding excuses to skip the gym? Congratsyou might be able to blame your genes. Because the mere desire to exercise may be inherited, at least in mice. So says a study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The experiment started b...
In 1980, a scientist looking at bone fragments under an ultraviolet microscope noticed the bones were glowing greena hallmark of the antibiotic tetracycline. The drug latches onto calcium and gets deposited in bone. Nothing unusual. Except these bone...
Diseases can spread quickly. Someone with a cold infects a few casual contacts, who in turn infect others. Ideas can also spread that way, along so-called random networks. But Damon Centola at MIT says that ideas and beliefs spread faster and more ef...
We all know that elephants arent really scared of mice. But a new study shows that theyre really not crazy about something even smaller: ants. In fact, elephants dislike ants so much that they avoid acacia trees that harbor the tiny, six-legged necta...
Theres been an unexpected development in our understanding of drug resistance in bacteria. The accepted scenario was a simple case of evolutionary selection. In a bacterial population exposed to a killer drug, a few lucky individuals might have a gen...
