What Makes Food Taste So Good?
Deliciousness is the happy result of a surprising blend of factors, some of which have nothing to do with your taste buds
Michael Moyer is the editor in charge of physics and space coverage at Scientific American. Previously he spent eight years at Popular Science magazine, where he was the articles editor. He was awarded the 2005 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award for his article "Journey to the 10th Dimension," and has appeared on CBS, ABC, CNN, Fox and the Discovery Channel. He studied physics at the University of California at Berkeley and at Columbia University.
What Makes Food Taste So Good?
Deliciousness is the happy result of a surprising blend of factors, some of which have nothing to do with your taste buds
Do We Live in a Holographic Universe?
An experiment going up outside of Chicago will attempt to measure the intimate connections among information, matter and spacetime. If it works, it could rewrite the rules for 21st-century physics
World Cup Prediction Mathematics Explained
The World Cup is back, and everyone's got a pick for the winner. Gamblers have been predicting the outcome of sporting contests since the first foot race across the savannah, but in recent years a unique type of statistical analysis has taken over the prediction business.
Fox News Tells SciAm Editor Not to Talk About Climate Change
This morning I appeared on the nation’s number-one-rated morning show, Fox and Friends. Afterwards I tweeted out a few things that have garnered some attention, including this: Fox & Friends producer wanted to talk about future trends.
Twin Earth May Be Better than Earth for Life
Pseudo-Earths are out there. That's the message of today's exciting announcement that a planet about the same size as Earth lives in its star's habitable zone--the temperate region around a star where liquid water might flow.
What Stephen Hawking Really Meant When He Said There Are No Black Holes
A decades-old paradox returns
Faraway Planets May Be Far Better for Life
Astronomers have come up with a shopping list of what a planet needs to support life, perhaps even better than our Earth does, making them "superhabitable." Michael Moyer reports
What an Exomoon Would Look Like from Earth [Video]
Moons orbiting distant planets might be visible in existing spacecraft data
How the Geocentric Model of the Universe Worked [Video]
The ancient cosmology could explain the apparent motion of the planets using just their movements around circles
Amazon’s Drone Delivery Plan Not Ready For Liftoff—Yet
Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, recently announced that his company is working on a fleet of autonomous drone aircraft that would deliver packages to your door.
Scientists Find First Neutrinos from Distant Space
The world has heard the first faint whispers of the most powerful cataclysms in the universe. Scientists working on the IceCube experiment in Antarctica report that they have found 28 neutrinos that must have come to earth from explosions in the distant universe—the first time scientists have found neutrinos coming from outside our own solar [...]
High-Energy Neutrinos Herald a New Dawn of Particle Astronomy
Neutrinos from deep space are opening up a new kind of astronomy
Besides Higgs, Who Might Get the Physics Nobel?
Tomorrow’s Nobel Prize in physics is widely anticipated to go to Peter Higgs, perhaps along with Francois Englert, for their nearly 50-year-old prediction of a new particle that we now call the Higgs boson.
Space-Based Atom Interferometers Could Find Gravitational Waves
As ground-based gravitational-wave detectors get ready to score their first direct measurement of the ripples of spacetime, thoughts turn to space-based detectors that could see all the way back to the big bang
The Flavor Connection [Interactive]
Scientists link common flavor compounds across the world's favorite ingredients
Why Does Food Taste So Delicious?
Food is a primal, everyday part of our lives—yet rich with mystery
Wormholes May Save Physics From Black Hole Infernos
Are black holes surrounded by walls of fire? Does this imply that one (or more) of our most cherished physical principles—and here I’m talking about biggies like quantum theory, the conservation of information or Einstein’s equivalence principle—is wrong?
A Cosmic Map of the Exoplanets [Interactive]
An interactive graphic charts the location and distance to 861 known exoplanets, highlighting those that might hold life
Summer Blockbuster: A Black Hole Swallows a Cloud
This summer's best fireworks may take place at the center of our galaxy
Physicists Debate the Many Varieties of Nothingness
It s Official: We ve Found the Higgs Boson. But Which One?
Recommended: To Save Everything Click Here
Books and recommendations from Scientific American
Millionaire Plans Manned Mission to Mars in 2018
Sorry, the Government Is Not Creating Free Nationwide Wi-Fi Networks