Scientific American Magazine

Unless the major nuclear powers begin to live up to their obligations under the Nonproliferation Treaty, it seems likely that a large number of near-nuclear countries will emulate India and join the "nuclear club"

The discovery of textures that are indistinguishable even though their constituent elements are different suggests how the visual system organizes patterns into the percepts "figure" and "ground"

The abnormal hemoglobin of people who suffer from sickle-cell anemia is made to behave like normal hemoglobin in experiments with the administration of the simple chemical sodium cyanate

The dinosaurs were not obsolescent reptiles but were a novel group of "warm-blooded" animals. And the birds are their descendants

They consist of cellulose fibers bound together by molecules made of many sugar units. The structure of those molecules is now known well enough to account for some of the properties of the cell wall

The tridacnids, related to cockles, include the largest bivalve in evolutionary history. Their size is probably due to the fact that photosynthetic algae live in their tissues and nourish them

The sun turns once every 27 days, but some parts turn faster than others. Such variations are clues to interrelated phenomena from the dense core outward to the solar wind that envelops the earth

The hot-working of metals was long more an art than a science. The study of how metals behave at the level of atoms in crystal lattices is doing much to put the art on a more rational footing