Is geekness important in your choice of a Republican candidate? Maybe to the five Republicans who still read Scientific American it is - and progressive scribe Chris Mims is here to outline the…

  Over in print media today, New Scientist's cover article was on a "new" idea for what dark matter is. Apparently, dark matter should be composed of Dark Atoms, in a theory introduced by…

Through my colleague Marco Cirelli I got to know about the effort of 36 high-school student of Charlottesville (VA), who are fund-raising for a trip to CERN this spring. I thus visited their home…

Photo: Michele Pokrandt Orchidaceae get their name from the Greek ὄρχις (órkhis), which literally means "testicle", a nod to the naughty nub shape of their roots. In Greek mythology, Orchis was…

Dragonflies, from the order Odonata, have been around for over 250 million years.  I've seen fossil dragonflies from the Eocene some 50 million years ago that would have been exquisite monsters…

Time to ring in a new year with pressure waves.  We can see, but not, hear true sonic waves generated from stars, as the planet-hunting Kepler space telescope is finding.  We also get to…

For the last two days we have had our BBC television naturalist Chris Packham presenting us with “Nature’s Weirdest Events”. Here are my three favourites from this session. Exploding toads In…

Welcome to the world's slowest clock. The 'argon-argon clock' works by measuring the ratio of the amount of radioactive potassium in a sample of rock to the amount of its decay product, argon. As…

It's not correlation/causation (though less and less is, since science has learned that causation is now teaching us less and less about how to actually fix things) but some in the social fields are…

One of the most effective arguments for science solutions to agriculture issues is the misuse of pesticides.  It's one area where activists and scientists agree. Brown planthoppers are one of a…