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Editor's note (6/1/2011): We are making the text of this July 1985 article freely available for 30 days to coincide with the publication of a paper on entropy and quantum systems by Vlatko Vedral. He authored our June 2011 cover story and blogs about his latest work , which discusses the research featured in this 1985 article. A computation, whether it is performed by electronic machinery, on an abacus or in a biological system such as the brain, is a physical process

Editor's note: This article appears in print with the title "In Search of the Black Swan." Half a world away from Japan’s stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, deep in the pine forests of Georgia, hundreds of workers are prepping the ground for an American nuclear renaissance they still believe is on the way. Bulldozers rumble across sunken plateaus of fresh, hard-packed backfill that covers miles of recently buried piping and storm drains.

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Susan Freinkel 's book, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story . Combs are one of our oldest tools, used by humans across cultures and ages for decoration, detangling, and delousing

CEOs of two breakthrough, webby businesses show Fast Company how office policies built on frankness, trust, and occasionally awkward closeness engender a culture of success. Inside the multi-million dollar video streaming giant, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar has gone to extraordinary lengths to subvert his own power: He has no office, has a makeshift desk partly built from empty boxes, and personally takes each new hire out to lunch to learn what he or she thinks the company can do better.

Editor's Note: The following blog post first appeared May 19 on the World Science Festival's Web site. Most people look for the key to postponing old age in mega-antioxidant-loaded juices, extreme exercise regimens, or expensive skin creams

Editor's Note: This post was intially published May 12 on the World Science Festival's Web site .

Editor's Note: The following blog post first appeared May 15 on the World Science Festival's Web site [More]

Jane Pratt, founding editor of Sassy, was social media before social media existed. Today she’s launching xoJane.com , her answer to Sassy for a constantly connected generation. Sassy, the cool girl’s anti-glossy--whose winking, edgy-for-a-teen-mag coverlines (Long-Distance Romance: Sucky Or Not?; Do You Need Armpit Hair To Be a Feminist?) could easily be Twitterbait 20 years later--created the voice that informed a thousand snark-filled blogs

Editor's note: This article was printed with the title, "O Mercaptan, My Mercaptan" in the May issue. Friday, February 25, 2011: A date which will live in odiferous infamy. At least at my house

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do about It (University of California Press, April 4, 2011). Elena Githeko was normally energetic and chatty. But on a Tuesday morning in 2003, Elena's mother, Anne Mwangi, found her daughter quiet and listless, her forehead warm with fever

Back in 1995, a few of the editors at Scientific American decided to resurrect a tradition of a previous generation of editors, who saw fit to publish a joke column in each April issue. This particular April Fools piece came to be with a little luck: back then. as the editor of the Amateur Scientist column, I use to look for projects that gave some hands-on insight to one of the feature articles in the same issue

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from the new book Demand Better! Revive Our Broken Health Care System (Second River Healthcare Press, March 2011) by Sanjaya Kumar, chief medical officer at Quantros, and David B. Nash, dean of the Jefferson School of Population Health at Thomas Jefferson University. In the following chapter they explore the striking dearth of data and persistent uncertainty that clinicians often face when having to make decisions

Editor's note: This article originally appeared in the April 1861 issue of Scientific American.

Editor's note: The following is an edited excerpt from a chapter in Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking (The Cooking Lab, 2011), a six-volume set consisting of 2,348 pages of text and photography. Scientific research on foodborne pathogens provides the foundation for all food safety rules.

Editor's note (3/11/11): This article is from the forthcoming April issue of S cientific Aemrican . We are posting the text of the article early in light of the deadly Japan earthquake and resulting tsunami