2018-07-20 所属栏目:科学美国人

Homo sapiens has an outsized influence on the behavior of other animals. We have long hunted them. More recently, we destroy habitats to build housing and coffee shops, and we buil

2018-07-19 所属栏目:科学美国人

How many moons does Jupiter have? If you said four, you might be Galileo. If you said 69, you were right. Until the announcement this morning by the International Astronomical Unio

2018-07-18 所属栏目:科学美国人

If you've ever watched a moth flutter clumsily around a light on your porch, the insect might seem like a sad match for a predatory bat. The flying mammal is practically a fighter

2018-07-17 所属栏目:科学美国人

Hi, I’m Scientific American podcast editor Steve Mirsky. And here’s a short piece from the July 2018 issue of the magazine, in the section called Advances: Dispatches f

2018-07-16 所属栏目:科学美国人

During intense exercise—sprinting, for example—your body breaks down glucose and produces what’s called lactate. That substance can build up faster than it can be

2018-07-16 所属栏目:科学美国人

“The general public, if you look at the broad numbers, it’s like 60 percent of vineyards around the world, in the New World, have been planted with just five or six var

2018-07-11 所属栏目:科学美国人

A good disguise keeps you hidden, right? Well, sometimes the best disguise is actually the most dazzling. Because research reveals that flashy metallic iridescence can visually baf

2018-07-09 所属栏目:科学美国人

When primatologists observe chimpanzees, they take note of activities like fighting, playing, touching, and grooming. And it turns out you can learn a lot about humans—we are

2018-07-06 所属栏目:科学美国人

“The nine incredible galleries will feature 115 species of marine life held in 800,000 gallons of water. And this includes 18 species of sharks and rays.”

Cristi&aacut

2018-07-05 所属栏目:科学美国人

Most critters seem better able to survive big cities if they’re smaller than usual. But a few others are better adapted to urban areas if they’re larger. That's the re

2018-07-04 所属栏目:科学美国人

Tally up all your "regular spots"—places you visit on a weekly basis like restaurants, markets, parks. And what do you get? A new study says that most of us limit our hangout

2018-07-03 所属栏目:科学美国人

<lion roar sound>

The animal kingdom is full of species that use sound—growls and bellows and roars—to signal size. Dogs do it. <dog growls> Red deer do it. <red deer

2018-06-29 所属栏目:科学美国人

Musicians are said to have better language skills. And scientific studies have backed that up. But it's not clear why that might be the case.

Now a study of 74 Chinese kindergar

2018-06-27 所属栏目:科学美国人

<Bird singing> That&rsquo;s a female Northern Cardinal. And here&rsquo;s a female Venezuelan Troupial. <bird singing> Many people assume that male songbirds are the ones doing the

2018-06-26 所属栏目:科学美国人

Travel the U.S. and you'll hear English spoken in a multitude of ways. And it turns out the same can go for songbirds—specifically the swamp sparrow. <swamp sparrow sound>Sc

2018-06-25 所属栏目:科学美国人

Beluga whales rely on a sharp sense of hearing to communicate, to navigate and to feed. <beluga sounds> But the ocean is a noisy place. There's commercial shipping, navy sonar, oi

2018-06-22 所属栏目:科学美国人

Potato Chips! Does the mere mention of the salty snack send you searching for a vending machine? Well, you can blame the one&ndash;two punch of fat and carbohydrates. Because a new

2018-06-20 所属栏目:科学美国人

Thirty-nine years ago, Voyager 1 swung by Jupiter on its journey to interstellar space. As it did, it picked up spooky low-frequency radio signals <CLIP: Voyager 1 whistlers>

The

2018-06-19 所属栏目:科学美国人

Coral reefs are already appreciated for their beauty. But they provide another, more tangible benefit, too.

"Every day waves are coming ashore. And of course during storms you mig

2018-06-19 所属栏目:科学美国人

They weigh about 3,000 pounds and eat about 100 pounds of plants each day. So your average adult hippo produces quite a lot of poop. By some estimates, a single hippo blasts out mo

2018-06-15 所属栏目:科学美国人

Need a quick breath check before your big meeting&hellip;or your big date? Well, scientists from South Korea may be able to help. They&rsquo;ve engineered a portable device that de

2018-06-14 所属栏目:科学美国人

“On average, gun violence claims the lives of nearly 100 people a day in the United States. People are dying of gun violence in our homes, in our churches, in our schools, on

2018-06-12 所属栏目:科学美国人

It's an idea straight out of Star Wars: suck the humidity from dry desert air, and turn it into drinking water.

<<Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope: "What I really need is a

2018-06-12 所属栏目:科学美国人

Men inherit their Y chromosomes from their fathers. And they get an almost exact copy, other than a few mutations. Meaning very little changes about the Y chromosome from generatio

2018-06-07 所属栏目:科学美国人

Getting a vaccine can be a painful experience, especially when you&rsquo;re a kid. But getting told the shot might “hurt a bit” could actually make it worse.

“W