SSS 2012-05-11

This is Scientific Americans 60 second Science, I am Sophie Bushwick, got a minute? One family generally dines on Chinese takeout while their neighbors eat home-cooked meatloaf. You say potato, I say potahto. And humans arent the only primate species

SSS 2012-05-14

This is Scientific Americans 60 second Science, I am Cynthia Graber, This will just take a minute. Scientists are looking for Earth-like planets around other stars. But one way to limit the search can be to figure out where an Earth-like planet canno

SSS 2012-05-15

Have you ever wanted to turn down the volume at a deafening concert or noisy bar? Envy the whale: a new study finds that toothed whales can reduce their own auditory sensitivity when they expect a loud sound. The work is presented at this weeks Acous

SSS 2012-05-16

This is Scientific American 60 second Science, I am Karen Hopkin, This will just take a minute. If youve ever spent time watching chimps at the zoo, youve probably wondered: what are they thinking? Well, the answer might be simple: could be theyre fi

SSS 2012-05-17

Turns out youre not just what you eat. Youre when you eat. Because a new study in mice suggests that, in the battle of the bulge, the timing of meals influences the piling on of pounds. In the experiment, researchers gave groups of mice either standa

SSS 2012-05-18

Does an ice-cold drink actually taste better than the same beverage at room temperature? Depends on what its taste is: a new study finds that the intensity of some flavors varies with temperature. The work is in the journal Chemosensory Perception. R

SSS 2012-06-01

This is Scientific Americans 60 second Science, I am Cynthia Craber, this will just take a minute. The biggest risk for breast cancer patients is usually not original tumor, which is removed by surgery. The cancer becomes particularly deadly if it me

SSS 2012-06-04

This is Scientific Americans 60 second science, I am John Matson. Were just hours away from the last transit of Venus until the year 2117. A transit is when a planet passes in front of the sun, revealing itself as a tiny black dot on the suns face. T

SSS 2012-06-05

This is Scientific American's 60 seconds science. I'm Kellen Horgon. This will just take a minute. Have you ever wondered what happens to mosquitos in the rain, a raindrop is like 15 times heavier than those little suckers. So getting hit by one, he'

SSS 2012-06-06

Some dinosaurs were really huge, and now we may have a better way to estimate just how heavy these giants were. Researchers have developed a method to weigh dinosaurs based on laser scans of their skeletons. The study is in the journal Biology Letter

SSS 2012-06-07

Sometimes women and men break a nail working on a tough task. Because our keratin claws are no match for the club-like appendages of a critter called the peacock mantis shrimp. They can hammer through crab exoskeletons and even mollusk shells to find

SSS 2012-06-08

This is Scientific Americans' Sixty-Second Science, I'm Christopher Intagliata, got a minute? Vampire spiders, as the name suggests, like blood. And they feast on blood-filled mosquitoes to get it. But only female mosquitoes suck blood. So how do spi

SSS 2012-06-11

City kids have smorgasbord of food choices. But they also face food allergies more than do their country cousins. Researchers mapped food allergies in children across the U.S. And they found more cases per capita in areas with high population densiti

SSS 2012-06-12

In the day of the dinosaur, insects had wingspans of nearly 2.5 feet. So why are today's bugs so puny? According to researchers at U.C. Santa Cruz, we may have birds and bats to thank. Their concludes appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy

SSS 2012-06-13

After a hurricane or earthquake, people often band together and cooperate to deal with the recovery. And were not the only species that becomes more cooperative in tough times.Female Yuhina birds in Taiwan usually fight over space in the community ne

SSS 2012-06-14

Plants that use animals to disperse their seeds can find themselves in a pickle: They need to make fruit tasty enough to entice the local fauna, but they also need to make sure that their animal asssistants don't digest the very seeds that are meant

SSS 2012-06-18

Deer tick and Lime disease go hand in hand in some places but you can't always put blame on Bambi. Because new research shows the incidence of Lime disease tracks less with the abundance of deer than those with disappearance of foxes. The study is in

SSS 2012-05-02

This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science, I am Rose Eveleth. Got a minute? Sound and touch may seem completely separate, except possibly when playing the game Operation. But it turns out that the two senses are actually quite entwined: a new st

SSS 2012-03-06

This is Scientific American 60 Second Science, I am Cynthia Graber, this will just take a minute~ How can we search for life on exoplanets? Step one: examine the Earth as if it were an exoplanet. Thats the idea behind a recent look at earthshine. Res

SSS 2012-03-07

This is Scientific American 60 second Science, I am Sophie Bushwick, got a minute~ Theyre called hydogels: Jell-O-like materials made of networks of long-chain molecules in water. And theyre as flexible as living tissue. But hydrogels could not recov