Scientific American Online

The member nations of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) at their meeting in Doha, Qatar, this week passed resolutions to aid tigers, elephants and rhinos, three of the species most victimized by the illegal wildlife trade. [More]

Even if a grown man could pull 95,000 kilograms, he still would get shown up by the newly crowned world's strongest insect--proportionally speaking. [More]

Back in May 2009, the Hubble Space Telescope got its final tune-up . The seven astronauts of the STS-125 mission flew to Hubble on space shuttle Atlantis, grabbed the observatory with a robotic arm and pulled Hubble into the shuttle's open payload bay for repair. They then commenced an intensive servicing itinerary that spanned five spacewalks. Although the mission was not without its hiccups--some of the instruments were never meant to be repaired in space and proved difficult to work on-- the Atlantis crew left Hubble revitalized , with one camera repaired, another replaced altogether, a new spectrograph installed and a slew of old or failing parts swapped out. [More]

Dan Nocera is a salesman who doesn't need the sale. For his entire career, he's pursued a simple question: Just how do plants take sunlight, combine it with water and get energy out of it?

After 25 years of study, he's begun to mimic the process in a small, cheap gadget. It runs on just a bottle of water a day.

Advances in science and technology can launch from unassuming springboards. In 1609 Galileo tweaked a toylike spyglass , pointed it at the moon and Jupiter (not the neighbors), and astronomy took a quantum leap. About 150 years later, Benjamin Franklin reportedly used a kite to experiment with one of the earliest-known electrical capacitors. Continuing that tradition, these researchers prove toys inspire more than child's play. [More]

Of all scientific fields, neuroscience has the greatest potential for revolutionary advances, philosophical and practical. Someday, brain researchers may figure out how precisely the brain encodes thoughts like the ones I’m thinking now. Cracking the neural code could help solve the mind-body problem, ending millennia of pointless metaphysical chitchat. We may finally understand how brains work and why sometimes they don’t. We might even discover truly effective treatments for depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and dementia and chuck our current quasi-therapies.   [More]

Here are two seemingly unrelated facts. One: from the late 1940s through 1963, we tested atomic bombs in the atmosphere. Two: wine lovers are sometimes duped into spending exorbitant amounts for fake vintage bottles that weren’t from the year they were supposedly grown.

But Graham Jones at Australia’s University of Adelaide thought he could use bomb information against counterfeit wines. [He talked about his research at the meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco.] Carbon dating works by comparing the amount of carbon 14, which is a less common and less stable form of carbon, to the more abundant carbon 12.

In his wonderful new book The Checklist Manifesto (Metropolitan Books, 2009), surgeon and author Atul Gawande explains how successful surgery depends on the complex interactions of surgeons, nurses, anesthetists and other specialists, who must possess not only highly specialized skills but also the ability to work as a team in the face of rapidly arising challenges. The same applies to an airliner’s pilot, co-pilot and crew. Special tools such as checklists, decision trees and artificial intelligence built into instrumentation are key.

Information technology empowers complex group processes in striking new ways, but the breakthroughs are especially exciting in very low income settings. There mobile telephony and wireless broadband are ending the grinding isolation of rural communities and enabling workers--even those with fairly rudimentary training--to interconnect more successfully and to tap into expert systems and artificial intelligence.

As drivers await the arrival of General Motors's much-anticipated Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid car later this year, GM unveiled an electric vehicle of an entirely different stripe on Wednesday at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai . The company's Electric Networked Vehicle (EN-V) is a mini electric vehicle built for two, unless you are using it to go shopping, in which case you might have room for yourself and a bag of groceries. [More]

Editor's Note: The main text of this article, originally published in the March 1998 issue of Scientific American, is being made available in light of the recent nomination of one of the authors, Carl Wieman, as associate director for science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Both authors won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001 for their discovery of the Bose-Einstein condensate. ( Wolfgang Ketterle also shared the prize that year for his contributions.) The issue containing the full article with all artwork is available for purchase (PDF).

By Quirin Schiermeier

The pitch-black lakes hidden beneath Antarctica's ice sheet will finally start to release their secrets next year. [More]

MIAMI (Reuters) - At least 431 manatees have died in Florida waters so far this year, exceeding in less than three months the total for any full calendar year on record, authorities said on Tuesday.

A preliminary report from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission attributed most of the deaths of the marine mammals to "cold stress syndrome" during this year's unusually harsh winter.

By Meredith Wadman

The historic health-care bill that passed the U.S. [More]

Taking the stairs, taking a hike, taking a yoga class, or any other moderate physical activity recently helped thousands of healthy women maintain their weight for 13 years without cutting calories, a new study reports. The only catch is that it only worked for women with a normal body mass index (BMI) who exercised for an hour daily. [More]

The most expensive wine ever sold in the U.S. was a Montrachet 1978 from Domaine de la Romanee-Cont, according to a report by Forbes.com. Following a bidding war between two avid collectors, the seven-bottle lot sold for a whopping $167,500 (almost $24,000 per bottle) in a 2001 auction at New York City's Sotheby's. [More]

The triennial meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) is still underway in Doha, Qatar, this week, but so far news coming out of the conference is a mixed bag. Some trees have been protected, tigers gained a few friends, and a rare salamander got some attention, but all hopes to save the critically endangered bluefin tuna were sunk in a secret ballot that put commerce ahead of science and conservation. [More]

Nobody lives in the global average climate. Nor are the massive grid cells favored by climate models run on today's supercomputers as useful as they could be for planning purposes, given that they can encompass 10,000 square kilometers. Now the National Science Foundation (NSF), along with the U.S. Energy and Agriculture departments are teaming up to financially support the development of new computer models aimed at revealing the anticipated effects of climate change at the regional level. [More]

LAGO DE SAN IGNACIO, Baja California - The season of migration has come again to the warm blue waters off the coast of Mexico. Mother gray whales are nursing their newborn calves, plumping them up for the 6,000-mile trip next month to summer feeding grounds in the Arctic.

Ellen Heber-Katz, a scientist at The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, used to study autoimmunity--that was until she noticed something strange in the mice she was using to model lupus: The small holes that she had poked in their ears to distinguish the animals from one another kept closing. At first she thought her postdoc, Lise Clark, had forgotten to make the holes in the first place. But Clark clearly remembered doing it. Together, Heber-Katz and Clark pierced new holes. Within days, they closed, too. “Every day they got smaller and smaller and then just disappeared,” Heber-Katz says. And, there was no scar--the tissue was perfect. They wondered: “If we could find out what it was that was creating this response, we could treat wounds that way!”

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - Former heads of Sprint Nextel Corp and RadioShack Corp have launched a company aimed at refurbishing or recycling the estimated 65,000 metric tons of old cellphones U.S. consumers ditch every year and named Sprint as its first customer.

Ron LeMay, once Chief Executive for Sprint's wireless business and David Edmonson, former CEO of electronics retailer RadioShack founded eRecyclingCorps to set up phone trade-in schemes for operators to encourage consumers to return old phones to carriers instead of putting them in the trash.