Scientific American Online

Charles Darwin is famous for his prolific writing about biology. In addition to publishing his theory of evolution , Darwin wrote books about coral reefs, earthworms and carnivorous plants. But the eminent naturalist made important contributions to more than just the life sciences. It turns out Darwin was also an early experimental psychologist. [More]

Lung cancer affects both smokers and nonsmokers , killing more than half of the people who get it within five years. It has been notoriously hard to treat, frequently resulting in widespread resistance and nasty side effects from high doses of drugs. [More]

Editor's Note: Martin Gardner , who wrote the "Mathematical Games" column for Scientific American magazine for 25 years and published more than 70 books, died May 22 at 95. Scientific American editor Steve Mirsky solicited the following tributes and remembrances of Gardner from various colleagues. We also invite readers to share their comments below regarding Gardner, his column and/or its impact. [More]

An extremely rare " grolar bear "--a polar-grizzly bear hybrid--was shot and killed by an Inuit hunter in Canada's Northwest Territories last month.

Global warming has reportedly been driving grizzly bears ( Ursus arctos horribilis ) farther north in search of food, bringing them into polar bear ( U. maritimus ) territory. Polar bears, meanwhile, are finding themselves stranded on land instead of their usual sea ice, bringing them into contact with the grizzlies.

Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here .

Solar arrays can do more than feed energy into the power grid. They might also be able to help the grid cope with a problem many people aren't aware of: the fact that electrical appliances not only consume energy, but also momentarily store and release it. The worst culprits are motors and transformers, whose internal magnetic fields represent a significant cache of energy, giving these devices a type of electrical inertia that causes them to get out of sync with the grid. To describe the problem and a possible solution, I've invited a two-part guest blog from Arnold Mckinley of Xslent Energy Technologies . Here's part one.

MIAMI--The more we learn about planetary systems throughout the galaxy, the more our own solar system appears to be rather unique. A research group measured the orbital tilt of two large objects circling the star Upsilon Andromedae, some 44 light-years away, finding that the two orbits are out of alignment by about 30 degrees. In contrast, the planets of our own solar system--and especially the massive ones--hew closely to a common orbital plane. The researchers announced their finding, published in the June 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal , on Monday at the semiannual meeting of the American Astronomical Society being held here this week. [More]

Social networking is all the rage. Seems the more people we know, the better we feel. But that drive for being connected may enrich more than our social lives. Because a study in the journal Science shows that the more diverse our personal networks, the stronger the local economy. [Nathan Eagle et al, http://tiny.cc/d7zex ]

The fact that having broad social ties can financially benefit an individual makes sense. The more people you know, the more job opportunities you might be made aware of. After all, that’s what networking is all about. [More]

LEH, INDIA--In the high-altitude desert of the Indian trans-Himalayas, one man is buying time for villagers suffering from global warming by creating artificial glaciers.   [More]

Martin Gardner died May 22nd at 95. [More]

As you read this sentence, you probably think that this moment--right now--is what is happening. The present moment feels special. It is real. However much you may remember the past or anticipate the future, you live in the present. Of course, the moment during which you read that sentence is no longer happening. This one is. In other words, it feels as though time flows, in the sense that the present is constantly updating itself. We have a deep intuition that the future is open until it becomes present and that the past is fixed. As time flows, this structure of fixed past, immediate present and open future gets carried forward in time. This structure is built into our language, thought and behavior. How we live our lives hangs on it.

Yet as natural as this way of thinking is, you will not find it reflected in science. The equations of physics do not tell us which events are occurring right now--they are like a map without the “you are here” symbol. The present moment does not exist in them, and therefore neither does the flow of time. Additionally, Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity suggest not only that there is no single special present but also that all moments are equally real [see “ That Mysterious Flow ,” by Paul Davies; Scientific American , September 2002]. Fundamentally, the future is no more open than the past.

Whaling has been banned since 1986. And yet the actual number of whales killed each year has been increasing steadily. Japan, Iceland, Norway and indigenous groups hunted and killed at least 17,000 whales over the last decade.  

[audio clip of minke whale song]

Editor's note: In light of the recent death of Martin Gardner, we are republishing this column from the March 2002 issue of Scientific American.

In 1950 Martin Gardner published an article in the Antioch Review entitled "The Hermit Scientist," about what we would today call pseudoscientists. It was Gardner's first publication of a skeptical nature (he was the math games columnist for Scientific American for more than a quarter of a century). In 1952 he expanded it into a book called In the Name of Science , with the descriptive subtitle "An entertaining survey of the high priests and cultists of science, past and present." Published by Putnam, the book sold so poorly that it was quickly remaindered and lay dormant until 1957, when it was republished by Dover. It has come down to us as Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science , which is still in print and is arguably the skeptic classic of the past half a century. [More]

News of Martin Gardner's death began circulating on Saturday night. For those of you who are unfamiliar with his work, here's a taste of the kinds of puzzles he was famous for bringing to the world. Of course, he did much more: 15 years ago, I had the great honor of meeting him and his wife for a profile of him, which you can read here .

I still have the trick pen he gave me as a souvenir, one that I'll show anyone who comes by my desk. (I'll try to post a video of the pen.) It brings back fond memories of being shown his stash of magic tricks and gag gifts, his thoughtful comments on irrational beliefs, his experiences with mathematicians like Paul Erdős and the Gardners' feeding of feral kittens that came to the back deck of the house every afternoon.

[More]

Call them the Silicon Valley garages of climate policy.

Traces of chemicals known to cause human cancer lurk everywhere. But after decades of research, figuring out how many people might contract cancer because of them remains an elusive goal.

New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope appear to confirm a dour prognosis for a scorching hot extrasolar planet--the distant world is being consumed by its host star. [More]