SSS 2009-04-01

This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkin. This will just take a minute. Coffee before biking? You may have to stop on the side of the road sooner, but new research suggests that caffeine can help you get more bang from your w

SSS 2009-02-04

This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Steve Mirsky . Got a minute ? Indiana Jones (I hate snakesI hate em!) would have totally despised a snake that lived some 60 million years ago. Because researchers working in Colombia have found th

SSS 2009-10-08

Homes are rising on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. No, it's not a return of Hoovervilles thanks to the Great Recession. These are solar homes competing in the U.S. Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon, which starts October 8. From Cornell Un

SSS 2009-10-02

When there are Nobel prizes there are Ig Nobel prizes, which were handed out at Harvard on October 1st. The awards honor research that makes people laugh and then makes them think. Among this years winners: The physics prize went to a study of why pr

SSS 2009-03-11

This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Cynthia Graber. This will just take a minute. Conscious planning for the future was thought to be a cognitive behavior unique to humans. Not anymore. Researchers in Sweden have found a zoo chimp th

SSS 2009-07-08

This is Scientific American's 60-second Science. I'm Cynthia Graber, this will just take a minute. Sex might seem like one of those little gifts from evolution. But its pretty inefficient from an evolutionary perspective. Itd be much easier to reprod

SSS 2009-05-06

This is scientific American 60 second science. Im Cynthia Graber. This'll just take a minute. When eBay first came onto the scene more than a decade ago, archaeologists were petrified. Easily buying and selling antiquities online might increase the l

SSS 2009-10-30

You can teach your dog to lie down. But you cant teach him to lie, or to know when youre lying. Because a new report shows that Spot cant spot deception. The studys in the journal Behavioural Processes. Weve all known pooches who run and hide when th

SSS 2009-09-21

Youve heard of waterboarding used as a means to get suspected terrorists to talk. Some people object to such methods on the grounds that they amount to torture. But in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, psychologist Shane OMara of Trinity Coll

SSS 2009-09-22

Scary music plays a key role in ramping up the fear factor in movies. The soundtrack has such an effect that I put my hands over my ears during the most frightening moments. Now researchers at Tel Aviv University report that scary music is even scari

SSS 2009-09-23

We all know that drinking can cloud judgment. Thats why you should never e-mail an ex after youve had a few. But for teenagers, doing dumb things now because of alcohol may be just the start. Because research with animals suggests that drinking durin

SSS 2009-09-24

For all you space buffs who like to keep track of where the water is, it looks like you can add our very own moon to your list. Because according to a trio of papers appearing in the journal Science, the lunar surface is wetter than we realized. Fort

SSS 2009-09-25

Every year, millions of monarch butterflies fly thousands of miles to alight in one specific forest in Mexico. How do they know what direction to flutter? Scientists had thought that an insect GPS system in their brains steered them in the right dire

SSS 2009-09-28

Ever get a ringing in your ears after a loud blast of music on your iPod? Thats one example of the usually temporary condition called tinnitus, the sensation of sound even when no sound is being produced. But a new inventioncreated by high school stu

SSS 2009-09-29

A quiet restaurant. Good wine. An animated conversation. Then, mid-sentence, you catch him steal a quick sideways downward glance at his BlackBerry. And the nickname CrackBerry comes to mind. You might think: for some, the Internet is an addiction. W

SSS 2009-09-30

Believe it or not, depression can be good for your health. Ok, not that kind of depression. An economic depression. According to work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, people actually got healthier during the Great Dep

SSS 2009-08-20

Maybe its happened to you. You go for a walk in the woods and, after wandering around for a few hours trying to find your way back to the car, you realize that youve basically been walking in circles. Well, youre not alone. Because scientists have fo

SSS 2009-08-21

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch may be disappearing, and not in a good way. New research presented at the biannual meeting of the American Chemical Society reveals that polystyrene actually can break down in seawater. Polystyrene is probably better k

SSS 2009-08-24

Two years ago, Duke University Medical Center researchers said that the supposedly useless appendix is actually where good gut bacteria safely hide out during some unpleasant intestinal conditions. Now the research team has looked at the appendix ove

SSS 2009-08-25

A big clue about whats behind the disappearing honeybees, also known as colony collapse disorder, or CCD: May Berenbaums team at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign found that bees ribosomes were torn up. The ribosomes make the proteins tha