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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. And even if the first ray guns out of the lab can barely fit on the bed of a 30-ton off-road truck rather than in a soldier’s palm, the novel, “speed-of-light” capabilities that lasers could bring to the battlefield has drawn the keen interest of the Pentagon brass, which spends about $400 million a year on directed-energy beam weapons....

Bigger Is Better? I am concerned that, like most of our renewable efforts recently, Matthew L. Wald’s overview of renewable energy technology, “The Power of Renewables,” is oriented toward projects made by large corporations. This strategy will further entrench vested energy interests, when energy should be diffused to the general public. Windmills on your roof need not generate anywhere near the number of volts required by big windmills, which need to be matched and phased to the grid....

When ballots were tallied from Election Day last week, science-oriented candidates for U.S. Congress looked like real winners. Seven Democrats with degrees in science, technology, engineering, and medicine are headed to the House of Representatives; one won in the Senate. In addition, two Republicans with science backgrounds won House seats. The Democrats were endorsed by a science advocacy group, 314 Action, but the Republicans were not. It was not a clean sweep for science, though: Five other candidates who did get the group’s backing failed in their bids....

Last month, 17-year-old Eric Chen from San Diego, California became the third Grand Prize winner in Google Science Fair history. Judges awarded him $50,000, a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands, a year of mentoring, and other prizes. At a meeting in Google Headquarters after the awards were announced, Chen spoke about how he created 6 new flu drug candidates, and why more kids should be doing researchWhat inspired your project?...

“They” are the mysterious tribespeople who reside as close as six miles from the invisible boundary that marks the beginning of their territory here in the Curare–Los Ingleses Indigenous Reserve in southeastern Colombia. Unlike the Carijona and the other tribes that live on the periphery of this territory, which extends into the neighboring Río Puré National Natural Park and other areas, this enigmatic group has had virtually no exposure to modern civilization....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. This is the second part of my series on Big Data. If you haven’t listened to the first episode go check it out now at Quick and Dirty Tips Website. In the last Tech Talker episode, we we talked about what Big Data is and how it produces huge databases of information that is processed and leveraged by corporations, government, and scientists to chart trends, make smarter business decisions, or unveil incredible discoveries about our world....

Serious outbreaks of the novel coronavirus have now hit several countries outside of China as far apart as Iran, South Korea and Italy. U.S. health officials now say it is likely to start spreading here at the community level, and they are warning that the disruptions to daily life could be “severe.” “It’s not so much of a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more of a question of exactly when this will happen,” said Nancy Messonnier, director of the U....

The Wright 30-horse-power aeroplane in flight above the North Carolina coast, in a drawing prepared from descriptions by observers of the experiments. Upon the return of the newspaper correspondents and photographers from North Carolina, considerable more information was obtainable regarding the recent flights made by the Wright brothers in testing their aeroplane than has hitherto been available Unfortunately, not one of these men is a qualified technical observer, for which reason we are little better off for details than we were before....

The F-150 notwithstanding, Americans are choosing more efficient cars. George Will has been described as an “intellectual,” as “erudite,” “brilliant,”even “brainy.” If you’ve ever heard him on television, you’d have to admit that his opinion of his own intellect seems to be quite high. And yet for such an erudite and brainy fellow, it’s amazing how often he gets it wrong when it comes to things environmental. (No comment on his other positions....

After years of fumbling while reading the written word, Christian Boer, a graphic designer from the Netherlands, has developed a way to help tackle his dyslexia. The 30-year-old created a font called Dyslexie that has proved to decrease the number of errors made by dyslexics while reading. The font works by tweaking the appearance of certain letters of the alphabet that dyslexics commonly misconstrue, such as “d” and “b,” to make them more recognizable....

SAN FRANCISCO—What happened in Vegas didn’t stay in Vegas. And now federal scientists are watching their travel funding disappear. Limits put in place after a now-infamous General Services Administration conference in Las Vegas two years ago – which featured a magician, a $75,000 bike-building exercise and other lavish touches – have cut the number of federal researchers attending scientific gatherings like the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting, held here this week....

Key Concepts Physics Sound Magnetism Electricity Introduction Do you like to listen to music? Have you ever wondered how a TV, computer or phone turns music into sound that your ears can hear? In this project you will build your own speaker from household materials and find out how speakers convert electrical signals into sound. Background Sounds, such as songs or the audio track on a movie, can be stored as an electronic file....

Stove Soot Traditional cookstoves, fueled by wood and crop waste, emit smoke containing particles. Depending on their makeup, these particles can absorb or reflect solar energy, thereby heating or cooling the atmosphere. A recent field study in Honduras characterized the smoke released from stoves and measured the amount of global warming–related soot within the emissions. It found that traditional cookstoves may contribute to atmospheric warming more than previously thought.—Alison Snyder...

Strange tales of lactating men or male pregnancy pains crop up in the news from time to time, despite the fact that men cannot get pregnant. Does that mean men are also susceptible to bouts with prenatal and postpartum depression? Previous research has found rates of depression in new dads that range from 1 percent to 25 percent, but a new meta-analysis, published May 19 in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, assessed 43 studies of a total of more than 28,000 fathers and found that an average of 10....

Mark Oppenheimer, a part-time stay-at-home father of two young girls, is used to stares. “When I’m walking down the street with one baby strapped to my chest and the other in a stroller—and the kids all look happy—and I walk by a group of mothers, they’re just blown away,” he says. “The easiest way in the world to get a smile is to be a man with a baby.” Fatherhood has undergone a profound change in the past half a century....

In the flat farmland outside Decatur, Ill., a dump truck filled with ears of corn rolls into a warehouse at one end of an ethanol plant run by commodities giant Archer-Daniels-Midland Company. The corn is sent into a big fermentation vat that converts it to ethanol, which will be trucked to a refinery that will blend it with gasoline for sale nationwide. The fermentation process releases carbon dioxide, which is captured in a large flue, then sent by pipeline to a wellhead....

It’s speculation season once again for Nobel Prize watchers. Monday morning winners of the prestigious Lasker Awards for three areas of research in medicine and biology were named, and the so-called “American Nobels” often presage their European counterpart. Eighty-six Lasker laureates have gone on to receive a Nobel Prize, including 47 in the last three decades, according to the Lasker Foundation. This year Kazutoshi Mori and Peter Walter will receive a Lasker for discovering how the body fixes misshapen proteins—which would otherwise cause damage or disease—in a part of the cell called the endoplasmic reticulum....

Beginning in the 2000 presidential election, the broadcast networks began showing Republican-won states in red and Democratic-won states in blue. Soon pundits were talking about the red states and the blue states as if they were two different countries, one dominated by evangelicals and the other by secularists. The nation, some claimed, was engaged in a culture war. The 2004 presidential election map followed much the same pattern, reinforcing the notion....

Astronomers have discovered the oldest supermassive black hole ever found—a behemoth that grew to 800 million times the mass of the sun when the universe was just 5 percent of its current age, a new study finds. This newfound giant black hole, which formed just 690 million years after the Big Bang, could one day help shed light on a number of cosmic mysteries, such as how black holes could have reached gargantuan sizes quickly after the Big Bang and how the universe got cleared of the murky fog that once filled the entire cosmos, the researchers said in the new study....

I ran into Ira Flatow early one February morning in 1997 in Seattle. We were about to enter the venue of the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for a day of lectures. The host of NPR’s immensely popular Science Friday eyeballed me. “You don’t look so good,” he said, observing my greenish hue. “I don’t feel so good,” I muttered before deciding to retreat from the retreat and return to my hotel room....