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Osama Bin Laden is dead . At least, that's what we've been told, and I tend to believe such things. But how do they know it's him

Machine readable congressional transcripts will bring the power to find political gaffes to everyone. Forget leaked cables: there's enough juicy political nonsense lurking in the public record to satisfy the 24-hour news cycle until 2012

If the solar system were a Peanuts cartoon, the role of Pigpen would be played by a comet.

If you speak multiple languages, you might have multiple personalities.

We learned all kinds of things from our parents--manners, safety, housekeeping, how to make a cake, how to pump our legs to make ourselves go high on a swing and where to find crayfish in a creek. As they showed us how to reach these small successes in our daily life, they also taught us science knowledge--even though they may not have known a lot about psychology, physiology, chemistry, physics or animal adaptation. In learning by doing, young children get support for their later formal education: they build a set of experiences that they can recall and relate to new information in middle school science classes and beyond.

Even if one was allowed to make a volcano explode, creating the flows of interest looks impossible In "Too Hard for Science?" I interview scientists about ideas they would love to explore that they don't think could be investigated. For instance, they might involve machines beyond the realm of possibility, such as particle accelerators as big as the sun, or they might be completely unethical, such as lethal experiments involving people.

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As a kid, I often spent an afternoon after a big rain storm with my brothers tromping down to a local drainage stream to see what the water had washed in. And it wasn't unusual to find us sitting around the kitchen table with our hands coated in a green, oozy cornstarch-and-water mixture, wondering at its weird properties.

Key concepts Liquids and solids [More]

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You don't need an advanced degree in physics or biology to participate in scientific research, just a curiosity about the world around you and an interest in observing, measuring and reporting what you hear and see. The Internet makes it easy these days to take part as an amateur in sophisticated science projects around the world, and now Scientific American is making it even easier for you to find the right one through our new Citizen Science initiative

From DNA matching to tracking technology, this report reveals how science aided in bringing down the master terrorist [More]

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER--When NASA scrubbed the shuttle Endeavour 's final launch here on Friday, engineers said there was a best-case and a worst-case scenario. Well, guess what: it was the worst case. The trouble began when an electric heater for the hydraulics system failed to turn on

Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor accident has focused new attention on how much ionizing radiation people are exposed to from different sources (see list below). By far the largest source is medical imaging technology (see " Graphic Science: Exposed " in the May 2011 issue). Americans, on average, are exposed to 3.1 millisieverts of radiation a year from natural background factors such as radon gas from the Earth and cosmic rays from the universe