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Editor Jane Berentson discusses her recent visit to the headquarters of The Kauffman Foundation, which opened its first charter school in August. For years, my colleagues and I have consumed research from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation the way nonfoodies consume fine restaurant meals—appreciative of the product's quality but not especially curious about its source. Kauffman, one of the 30 largest foundations in the United States, fosters entrepreneurship with grants, research, education, and policy recommendations

Tohoku University, Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) announced on August 22, 2011 that Kenichi Uchida, a PhD student, and Professor Eiji Saitoh of Tohoku University and their colleagues have succeeded in injecting spin current into a magnetic material by acoustic wave spin pumping.

Being smart is the most expensive thing we do. Not in terms of money, but in a currency that is vital to all living things: energy

By Jeff Tollefson of Nature magazine US researchers have used computer modeling to identify an organic molecule with useful electrical properties - proof-of-concept for an approach that could soon yield new compounds to harvest solar energy in photovoltaic cells. Al

In the series “A Modest Proposal,” my colleagues and I will propose inventions and projects that I think are eminently doable and would love made real. [More]

To humans, ultraviolet (UV) radiation is a menace: we cannot see it, yet it is all around us, increasing our risks of melanoma, cataracts and other ills. It is especially harmful in the upper latitudes, where a thinning ozone layer has become less and less effective at blocking the sun’s UV rays, and ice and snow reflect them back up at us. All these facts have caused biologists to wonder: How have Arctic mammals adapted to handle acute UV exposure--not only tolerating the intense light conditions at the poles, but even using it as an evolutionary advantage

(PhysOrg.com) -- Science has taken one more step towards creating a true real-life cloaking device. Assistant Professor Andrea Alůin and his colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin have successfully created a cloaking device capable of "hiding" a 3D object in free space from microwaves

If you’ve never watched bees carefully, you’re missing out.

Last October I had an article in Scientific American about what it would mean for time to end--how the world might cease to unfold in a unidirectional sequence of cause and effect. Some processes, for example, could cause time to morph into just another dimension of space . Last week experimenters announced that they have simulated such a temporal calamity in the laboratory

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and their colleagues have discovered a new relation among electric and magnetic fields and differences in temperature, which may lead to more efficient thermoelectric devices that convert heat into electricity or electricity into heat.

Autism, a developmental disorder that causes deficits in social behavior and communication, affects four times as many boys as girls.

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazine Ahead of a key international meeting on tuna catches, an assessment is painting a bleak picture of the conservation status of some of the world's most commercially valuable fish species. Bruce Collette, who studies ocean fish at the National Marine Fisheries Service Systematics Laboratory in Washington DC, and his colleagues conducted the first global assessment of the scrombids and billfish, groups of fish that include some of the species with the highest value as seafood, such as tuna and marlin, as well as staples such as mackerel.

By Katharine Sanderson of Nature magazine The most direct evidence yet for ancient photosynthesis has been uncovered in a fossil of a matted carpet of microbes that lived on a beach 3.3 billion years ago. Frances Westall at the Centre for Molecular Biophysics, a laboratory of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), in Orleans and her colleagues looked at the well-preserved Josefsdal Chert microbial mat--a thin sheet formed by layer upon layer of tiny organisms--from the Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa. These layers of ancient microorganisms grew at a time when Earth's atmosphere did not contain oxygen

By Ed Yong of Nature magazine The wrinkles that develop on wet fingers could be an adaptation to give us better grip in slippery conditions, the latest theory suggests. The hypothesis, from Mark Changizi, an evolutionary neurobiologist at 2AI Labs in Boise, Idaho, and his colleagues goes against the common belief that fingers turn prune-like simply because they absorb water. Changizi thinks that the wrinkles act like rain treads on tires

Jennifer Schnidman Medbery knew that teaching math at a New Orleans charter school would be tough, even though the school, Sci Academy, had attracted a "dream team" staff. What surprised her was that the most challenging aspect of the job wasn't connecting with the kids, so much as it was keeping track of their progress and behavior on a day-to-day basis.