In This Ancient Garden, Plants Can Cure or Kill You
Apothecaries founded this famous garden—one of the most ancient botanical gardens in Europe—to teach their students which plants poison and which plants cure.
Jeffery DelViscio is chief multimedia editor in charge of video and podcasts at Scientific American. Follow Jeffery DelViscio on Twitter @jeffdelviscio
Apothecaries founded this famous garden—one of the most ancient botanical gardens in Europe—to teach their students which plants poison and which plants cure.
Here’s how scientists are planning on getting underground fungi data from space using satellites.
Atmospheric carbon is a currency that plants use to “buy” nutrients from fungi in the soil. To find out where this economy will go next, the devil is in the details. And the details are in the dirt...
Like us, plants and fungi have complex economies. By burning fossil fuels, we’ve been devaluing their currency.
A sleep researcher who studies what dreams can tell us about the possible onset of some mental disorders believes lucid dreamers might hold a lot of answers in their head.
Here’s what a historian who has studied J. Robert Oppenheimer for two decades has to say about the new Christopher Nolan film on the father of the atomic bomb.
The famous climate pattern El Niño could usher in a new hottest year on record and will have domino effects on the world’s weather.
Researchers, using the galaxy as a detector, believe they have detected gravitational waves from monster black holes for the first time.
The party drug MDMA could soon be approved for treating people with severe PTSD.
Where is it coming from? How long will it last? What's in the smoke? Whose health is at risk? How do you clean your own air?
Some of the most violent cosmic collisions occur silently in the vacuum of space, but with the right instrumental ears, we can still hear it happen. Here’s how.
We learn the story of “Ella,” a patient with 12 different personalities, or “parts,” and of her therapist, who helped her form a peaceful community—many selves in one body and mind...
Very high HDL cholesterol levels almost double your risk of heart problems.
These two researchers journey toward the center of Earth—via windows to the crust—to find bacteria that can breathe iron, arsenic and other metals that would kill us pretty quickly...
Our first known interstellar visitor is now long gone, but new research has some ideas about why it moved the way it did while it was in our cosmic neighborhood.
Vera Rubin went from a teenager with a cardboard telescope to the “mother of dark matter.” Some of her colleagues and mentees weigh in on her fascinating life and how she was a champion for women in astronomy...
In the inaugural episode of Cosmos, Quickly, we blast off with Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno of the Space Force, who is charged with protecting our space in space, particularly from Russia and China...
Every year on Pi Day, we have a reason to celebrate one of math’s most famous symbols. But this year we speak to someone who has captured it in song.
By using one of the most complicated and powerful machines on the planet, scientists have found a way to glimpse back to the very beginning of time itself.
A new era in Scientific American audio history is about to drop starting next week. Get ready for a science variety show guaranteed to quench your curiosity in under 10 minutes...
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