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On August 6, 1960, Hughes Research Laboratories scientist Theodore Maiman published a study in Nature (pdf) describing his experiments with "stimulated optical radiation in ruby." ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) With this research, he took the laser--originally "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation"--out of the realm of science fiction and created a tool that would change the world in ways few people could have conceived of at the time. [More]

After more than a century of popular sci-fi fantasies that feature deadly energy weapons, including War of the Worlds , Flash Gordon , Buck Rogers , Star Trek and Star Wars , it looks like the ray gun has finally arrived in the real world. [More]

Even cobras need to defend themselves sometimes. [More]

As hundreds of thousands of gallons of dispersants were dropped into the Gulf of Mexico to control the oil spill , Philip Howard did a little digging. He wanted to figure out what was in the chemicals that were being dumped on the Gulf’s fish, turtles and other marine life.

But he didn’t get very far.

Scientists are on the verge of building an artificial brain! How do I know? Terry Sejnowski of the Salk Institute said so right here on ScientificAmerican.com . He wrote that the goal of reverse-engineering the brain--which the National Academy of Engineering recently posed as one of its "grand challenges"--is "becoming increasingly plausible." Scientists are learning more and more about the brain, and computers are becoming more and more powerful. So naturally computers will soon be able to mimic the brain's workings. So says Sejnowski.

The Health Show http://healthshow.org

Bisphenol A. Also called BPA, it's used to make shatter-proof plastic known as polycarbonate, found in everything from water bottles to medical devices to the lining of food packaging. As much as 2.7 million tons of plastics are manufactured each year with BPA. But it's also an endocrine disruptor posing a threat to fetuses and young children. And it’s been linked to cancer and metabolic disorders leading to obesity.

So how can plastics be properly disposed of to avoid releasing BPA into the environment? Some fungus may help. So say researchers publishing in the journal Biomacromolecules . [Trishul Artham and Mukesh Doble, http://bit.ly/9hEfIw ]

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 fifth blog post. [More]

The Encyclopedia of Weather and Climate Change: A Complete Visual Guide by Juliane L. Frye, Hans-F. Graf, Richard Grotjahn, Marilyn N. Raphael, Clive Saunders and Richard Whitaker. University of California Press, 2010