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Welcome to the Scientific American podcast Science Talk, posted on December 11th, 2011. I’m Steve Mirsky. Rumors are flying about the search for the long-sought Higgs boson at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider

The Advances section of Scientific American 's December issue helps parents find educational toys for the holidays, pushes cooking into the future, remembers Steve Jobs, takes a look at faster-than-light neutrinos, investigates turtle yawning and more. For those interested in learning more about the developments described in this section, a list of selected further reading follows.

SAN FRANCISCO The public at times questions scientific results produced by government agencies, thinking that the findings may be meant to support particular political policies or positions or to deflect criticism of those policies. Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a formal scientific integrity policy yesterday that is intended to combat that cynicism

The tiny hairs on the abdomen of a cricket have inspired researchers at the University of Twente, to make a new type of sensor which is ultra sensitive to air flows. These synthetic cricket hairs can now also be tuned very precisely for a certain range of frequencies: the hairs are 10 times more sensitive in this range

One of the pleasures of editing a magazine like Scientific American, with its 166-year history as the country’s longest continuously published magazine, is getting a “you are there” view of science as it was whenever I take a spin through our digital archives . The other day, while reading some 100-year-old prose, I was reminded of a famous incident.

Editor's Note: This article was originally published in Volume 205, Number 6 of Scientific American in December 1961. [More]

Energy efficiency is not just for appliances and vehicles on Earth--spacecraft that conserve fuel can provide a boost to humanity, too. In a recent article for

Editor's note: This essay, by renowned evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, was published in the August 1994 issue of Scientific American with the title, " Sex, Death and Kefir ." Margulis died on Tuesday in her home, according to a statement released by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she was a Distinguished University Professor of Geosciences.

Sageworks CEO Brian Hamilton discusses which industries are hot and which are not in 2012. The year 2011 has seen a surprising amount of growth and recovery among private companies in the United States, reports Brian Hamilton, co-founder and CEO of Sageworks, which tracks the financial performance of privately-held companies. Sageworks, which also ranked No.

Naomi Oreskes is a science historian, professor at the University of California, San Diego, and co-author (with Erik Conway) of "Merchants of Doubt," a book that examined how a handful of scientists obscure the facts on a range of issues, including tobacco use and climate change.

The Advances section of Scientific American 's November issue took readers into the air with the world's highest flying geese, back in time with an unlikely ancestor, into space to rendezvous with some garbage, to the Internet for a new way of conducting clinical trials, and beyond. For readers interested in learning more about the developments described in this section, a list of further background material follows: "On the Trail of Space Trash" [More]

In the November 2011 issue of Scientific American, author Bijal Trivedi looks at the ongoing controversies surrounding the use of genetically modified mosquitoes to fight dengue fever.

The ground shook violently in L'Aquila, Italy, early in the morning of April 6, 2009, more violently than it had during the tremors the area had been experiencing for months. After the dust settled and the recovery effort was over, 308 people were dead. Now the local prosecutor is charging the scientific committee responsible for predicting earthquakes with failing to give the people of L'Aquila adequate warning.

An article in the November issue of Scientific American investigates the scientific truths about fracturing deep shales to harvest natural gas. But the story continues to develop in the news, so we've created this Storify file to track ongoing developments. Come back each week for the latest

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.