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Thinking, Fast and Slow [More]

A fighter pilot heads back to base after a long mission, feeling spent. A warning light flashes on the control panel

The Apollo 1 Command Module after the fire that claimed the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. Credit: NASA. NASA s Apollo program began with one of the worst disasters the organization has ever faced

We've all heard exercise is good for your physical and mental well-being.

Carmakers learned years ago it's not easy to make a practical hydrogen fuel cell. Yet hydrogen fuel cells do work, and they're greener than batteries.

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photo by Thomas Shahan As the science media today is carrying news of how spiders use defocus to judge distance , I thought it an opportune moment to share the portfolio of a master of spider portraiture. Oklahoma artist Thomas Shahan may scarcely be out of college, but he is recognized worldwide for his startling portrayals of jumping spiders.

By Jo Marchant of Nature magazine Prion diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) are able to jump species much more easily than previously thought.

Jumping Spider: image courtesy of Science/AAAS To figure out how far away our dinner plate is our brain melds the slightly different images coming from our two eyes.

The moon of today is a static orb with little to no internal activity; for all intents and purposes it appears to be a dead, dusty pebble of a world.

Here s the sort of crazy idea that animates our office conversation at Scientific American . It all started with my colleague Michael Moyer s joke that a certain politician could build his moon base using a balloon: just capture the hot air and float all the way up. Ha ha, we all know that balloons don t work in outer space

The color of a candidate’s skin failed to sway voters to depress the lever for either Obama or McCain in the 2008 election, immediate analyses of that contest seemed to suggest. Some pundits hailed it as the first postracial election. [More]

The gardening cycle has been thrown off the rails in Debbie Ricigliano's Howard County, Md., vegetable garden in past years. Shrubs are blooming earlier, cherry buds are opening in the fall and flower bulbs are emerging when they shouldn't.

Key concepts [More]

Among the first things you notice when you step into the corner office of Harvard University professor Joanna Aizenberg are the playthings. Behind her desk sit a sand dollar, an azure butterfly mounted in a box, a plastic stand with long fibers that erupt in color when a switch is pulled, and haphazard rows of toys. Especially numerous are the Rubik’s cubes--the classic three-by-three, of course, but also ones with four, five, six and even seven mini cubes along each edge.