Scientific American Online

Thirty years ago most psychologists, philosophers and psychiatrists thought that babies and young children were irrational, egocentric and amoral. They believed children were locked in the concrete here and now--unable to understand cause and effect, imagine the experiences of other people, or appreciate the difference between reality and fantasy. People still often think of children as defective adults.

But in the past three decades scientists have discovered that even the youngest children know more than we would ever have thought possible. Moreover, studies suggest that children learn about the world in much the same way that scientists do--by conducting experiments, analyzing statistics, and forming intuitive theories of the physical, biological and psychological realms. Since about 2000, researchers have started to understand the underlying computational, evolutionary and neurological mechanisms that underpin these remarkable early abilities. These revolutionary findings not only change our ideas about babies, they give us a fresh perspective on human nature itself.

By Vincent Fribault

By Meredith Wadman

On the same day in late May that J. [More]

By Geoff Brumfiel

The proton seems to be 0.00000000000003 millimeters smaller than researchers previously thought, according to work published in the July 8 issue of Nature.

The difference is so infinitesimal that it might defy belief that anyone, even physicists, would care. [More]

WAKEHURST PLACE, England -- Scientists at the Millennium Seed Bank in this idyllic rural area some 30 miles south of London are racing against time to gather seeds from as many of the world's plant species as they can before habitat loss and climate change erases them from the face of the Earth.

In the decade since they started, it has been an uphill struggle against tight budgets, political whims and local suspicion. Now the toxic combination of the global recession, the rise of the climate skepticism , the failure to advance a global treaty and empty government coffers risk making it far harder.

Editor's Note: Vienna, Austria-based science writer Chelsea Wald is taking part in a two-week Marine Biological Laboratory journalism fellowship at Toolik Field Station , an environmental research post inside the Arctic Circle. To see the current conditions in Toolik, check out the Webcam .

Doing science in the Arctic is hard. Polar field researchers can spend most of their time surviving, with little time left over for science. But that's not the case at Toolik Field Station, I discovered during my two-week stay, which ended last Thursday. There, I was never hungry, rarely cold, and always in good company. No wonder some scientists affectionately call Toolik "the Hilton of the North." [More]

When it comes to elections, sometimes we vote with our heads and sometimes with our hearts. But scientists at Stanford say we might also be voting with our pompoms. Because they’ve found that our behavior at the polls is influenced by the results of local sporting events, work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . [Andrew Healy, Neil Malhotra and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, http://bit.ly/cURQ2E ] [More]

By Vincent Fribault

PAYERNE, Switzerland, July 7 (Reuters) - A solar-powered aircraft designed to fly round the clock without traditional aviation fuel or polluting emissions headed on Wednesday into its crucial first night flight.

By Erwin Seba

HOUSTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has told Texas pollution regulators that flexible permits issued by the state since 1994 for refineries, chemical plants and power plants did not meet the standards set by the U.S. Clean Air Act.

One star dies, another is born. The remains of the old are gathered up, at least in some small measure, to become part of the new. That is the astronomical circle of life, the reason that stars have evolved through the eons, each generation incorporating new elements synthesized in the stars that came before. Unlike the earliest stars of hydrogen and helium, stars nowadays contain heavier elements passed down to them by their predecessors, such as carbon, iron and oxygen. [More]

By Peter Griffiths

LONDON (Reuters) - Emails stolen from one of the world's leading climate change research centers contained no evidence to undermine the case for manmade global warming, a report found on Wednesday.

How much money do you put away each month toward retirement? Maybe you sock away all you can, already dreaming of that Florida condo. Or maybe you can’t even imagine where you’ll be then, what you’ll want to use the money for, even what you’ll be like: when you think about yourself far in the future, it’s almost like thinking about someone else. A growing body of work suggests that the more you feel your future self is really you, the more you’ll put in his or her--whoops, your--bank account.

When making decisions, we often treat our future self the way we would treat another person, found a study in 2008 by Princeton psychologist Emily Pronin. People in the study often shied away from doing something helpful but unpleasant when they had to do it right at that moment. But when their help was needed a few months or a year down the line, they were more likely to sign up--just as likely as they were to suggest that someone else should help out.

This spring I was stranded in Europe for a week, a minor victim of Mother Nature, as most airports on the continent were closed after the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. This remote natural event did not result in a huge human death toll but still caused hundreds of millions of dollars of lost revenue for almost all the world’s major airlines. More important, it disrupted millions of people’s lives.

Such is the nature of our modern interconnected society, where a catastrophe in one corner of the world can nonetheless affect almost immediately the livelihood and well-being of people around the globe.

One of the world's only two populations of North Pacific right whale ( Eubalaena japonica ) has declined to the point where it will probably not survive. [More]

The presence of strong gusts and flat, wide-open spaces would appear tailor-made for the production of electricity from wind energy, yet the reality of harvesting renewable energy is never that straightforward. As Scientific American reported last week , Latin America is beginning to tap into the wind as a source of clean (or at least not fossil fuel-derived) energy. But further investigation into the situation in Colombia reveals the difficulties inherent in building out a wind-energy infrastructure. [More]

Last year, on the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species , Darwin's stock soared higher than Apple's. It's 2010--time for a market adjustment.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett once called the theory of evolution by natural selection "the single best idea anyone has ever had." I'm inclined to agree. But Darwinism sticks in the craw of some really smart people. I don't mean intelligent-designers (aka IDiots) and other religious ignorami but knowledgeable scientists and scholars.

By Jane Qiu

SHANGHAI, China--China is setting its sights on exploring and exploiting the deep sea. [More]

By Timothy Gardner and Tom Doggett