Science News

An obscure family of chemicals – important to the metalworking industry but virtually unknown to the public – is suddenly the subject of scrutiny from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. [More]

Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, and the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum is behind a majority of those deaths. Although newer drug combinations (of artemisinins ) proved effective after resistance to widely used treatments appeared, hints of resistance to this newer therapy are also beginning to emerge, creating a darkening cloud over a field already beset with challenges. [More]

Editor's Note: William Gilly , a professor of cell and developmental biology and marine and organismal biology at Stanford University, is traveling with a group of students on board the Don José in the Sea of Cortez. They will monitor and track Humboldt squid and sperm whales in their watery habitats. This is the group's eighth blog post. [More]

The Japanese space agency is preparing to launch what could become the first spacecraft to sail across the solar system on sunlight. IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun), piggybacking on the launch of a Venus climate orbiter, is scheduled for a May 20 liftoff at 5:58 P.M., Eastern Daylight Time, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The two missions will blast off from JAXA's Tanegashima Space Center , a launch complex on a small island in southern Japan. [More]

Dear EarthTalk: I’ve often cooked canned foods in their own can, things like condensed milk and mushroom soup. I put the can without opening it in the pressure cooker, cover it with water and let it cook for 30 minutes. The results are amazing. Is it safe to do that? Can metals leach into my food? --Mercedes Kupres, via e-mail

As a tendril of oil from BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster creeps south in the Gulf of Mexico--potentially already caught up in the swirl of a massive conveyor of ocean water known as the Loop Current--the larger question is, where will the at least 5 million gallons of oil already spilled end up? [More]

It seems that no matter what governments and organizations do lately, tiger poaching continues to climb, driving the big cats closer and closer to extinction. But now two countries are resorting to extreme measures to help combat the dramatic decline in tiger populations, while a third is trying a new idea to boost its own tiger numbers.

Tigers vs. tourists? [More]

Want to feed a hungry world? According to David Gracer, add bugs to the menu. Gracer is, he says, a normal guy who’s also an entomophagist, an advocate for insects as food. He gave a talk about ingesting insects at a May 16th TEDxCambridge conference called “How We Eat.” The event was a spin-off of the popular TED talks.

Here’s one of the reasons Gracer’s a fan: "They can’t give us pandemics. So the mass production of insects--farm insects--really easy. There’s no cricket flu on par with avian flu or swine flu or E. coli ."

The best science transforms our conception of the universe and our place in it and helps us to understand and cope with changes beyond our control. Relativity, natural selection, germ theory, heliocentrism and other explanations of natural phenomena have remade our intellectual and cultural landscapes. The same holds true for inventions as diverse as the Internet, formal logic, agriculture and the wheel.

What dramatic new events are in store for humanity? Here we contemplate 12 possibilities and rate their likelihood of happening by 2050. Some will no doubt bring to mind long-standing dystopian visions: extinction-causing asteroid collisions, war-waging intelligent machines, Frankenstein’s monster. Yet the best thinking today suggests that many events will not unfold as expected. In fact, a scenario could be seen as sobering and disappointing to one person and curious and uplifting to another. One thing is certain: they all have the power to forever reshape how we think about ourselves and how we live our lives.

The board of editors at Scientific American is not simply made up of wordsmiths who assist contributors with grammar and spelling--as vital as those tasks are to a polished publication. Rather, one of our critical roles for readers is that we keep up with what’s happening in science, enabling Scientific American to be the authoritative source for the information that matters to our audience. We go to conferences and meetings, pore over other publications, and routinely confer with our researcher sources and authors. As editors, we think short-term--what’s the news that readers need to know right now, in a given issue?--and we also consider the longer view about what will come about in the months ahead.

In addition to reacting to news as it breaks, in other words, we work to anticipate what will happen. Case in point: the cover story for this issue, “ 12 Events That Will Change Everything .”