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By K. [More]

By K. [More]

Key concepts Physical science [More]

Bring Science Home At Scientific American , we appreciate the value of a good experiment. So in May, we launched Bring Science Home as a series of free science activities for parents to do together with their six- to 12-year-old kids. We made sure the activities would be fun and easy to do, so families could complete them in an hour or less and usually with items or ingredients they already had around the house.

For decades scholars and public health officials have known that people with greater income or formal education tend to live longer and enjoy better health than their counterparts who have less money or schooling. The trend holds true wherever researchers look--in poor countries or rich ones, in Europe, Asia or the Americas--but two notable exceptions stand out.

Credit: Wikipedia/NASA NANTES, France--Makemake may well have the most exotic name of the dwarf planets, and it now looks to be just as unusual on its surface. [More]

Last week a few of my twitter pals and I had a conversation about how we are proud to describe ourselves as ‘crazy’ and ‘ridiculous’. Sparked by Mark Changizi’s article at the Huffington Post on ‘What to do about all the crazy, ridiculous research ‘ out there, the general consensus was that sometimes what seem to be the most outlandish ideas are the ones that lead to the biggest advancements in science and elsewhere.

Editor's note: This story originally appeared in 2008. We are reposting a version of it in light of the death of Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs from complications from pancreatic cancer.

Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple , died Wednesday at age 56. The cause was pancreatic cancer. Jobs had been battling cancer for at least 6 years, telling his employees in 2004 that he was being treated for the disease, and undergoing a l iver transplant in 2009.

The Apple co-founder passed away October 5, but our digital lives leaped ahead dramatically as a result of his leadership [More]

Camelia-Lucia Cimpianu, an early-career scientist who attended the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting this summer in Germany, is trying to decide between a career as a researcher or a practising doctor. In this film, she seeks advice from Nobel Laureate Ferid Murad who faced the same dilemma as a medical student in the 1960s. Murad chose the bench, and he subsequently discovered that nitric oxide acts as a signalling molecule in the cardiovascular system.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to ease a new air pollution rule that would require power plants in 27 states to slash emissions, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The EPA plans to propose as early as this week allowing certain states and companies to emit more pollutants than it previously permitted, the report said.

NANTES, France--The shape of Comet Hartley 2 has inspired a number of colorful descriptors--it's been called a pickle, a peanut, a dog bone and a bowling pin. [More]

When it comes to climate change denial, not all human beings are created equal. As a recent study shows, conservative white males are less likely to believe in climate change

Listen to the announcement of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, to Daniel Shechtman of the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology. [More]