Showing results by author "Scientific American" in All Categories

On June 5, 1981, the scientific community received a wake-up call from the CDC in the form of a terrible new illness that the world would soon know as AIDS. Three decades later, remarkable progress has been made, but much more remains to be understood and to be done. In this audiobook, we explore where the disease came from, how it works, how it spreads, the search for a vaccine, and cultural and sociological factors.

For going on two decades, Scientific American’s “Ask the Experts” column has been answering reader questions on all fields of science. We’ve taken your questions from the basic to the esoteric and reached out to top scientists, professors, and researchers to find out why the sky is blue or whether we really only use 10 percent of our brains. Now, we’ve combed through our archives and have compiled some of the most interesting questions (and answers) into a series of books.

Anxiety and depression are two of the most common conditions affecting mental health and overall quality of life, but there are tools for managing them. In this audiobook, we’ll explore how depression shows up in the brain, different manifestations of depression and anxiety, various talk therapies, technological innovations, lifestyle interventions, and more.

In this audiobook, The Human Odyssey, we explore the evolution of those characteristics that make us human. The first section looks at our family tree and why some branches survived and not others. Swings in climate are emerging as a factor in what traits succeeded and failed; meanwhile, DNA analyses show that Homo sapiens interbred with other human species, which played a key role in our survival.

We harbor roughly the same number of microbes as we have cells. This complex ecosystem is crucial to our health, affecting many processes including immunity, child development, and bone density regulation. Research in this area has exploded, and in this audiobook, we highlight some of the most exciting work on how the microbiome develops, its influence on brain and behavior, and implications in both contributing to and treating various disorders.

How exactly do children become the adults they were meant to be? In this audiobook, Understanding Child Development, we investigate this profoundly complicated process from infancy through early childhood (the teenage years will be covered in a separate audiobook). Included in this collection are several seminal studies on infant cognition where researchers found evidence that many of our abilities are “pre-programmed.”

Did NASA really spend millions creating a pen that would write in space? Is chocolate poisonous to dogs? Does stress cause gray hair? These questions are a sample of the urban lore investigated in this audiobook, Fact or Fiction: Science Tackles 58 Popular Myths. Drawing from Scientific American’s “Fact or Fiction” and “Strange But True” columns, we’ve selected 58 of the most surprising, fascinating, useful, and just plain wacky topics confronted by our writers over the years.

The second title in our series - Astronomy - looks skyward and explains a variety of universal phenomena and theories. Are you curious about how planets acquire rings or what creates those gorgeous spiral arms around galaxies? Or maybe you want to know why the Big Bang didn’t collapse into a black hole. Astrophysicists, professors, and scientists tackle questions about stars, planets, asteroids, galaxies, and nebulae, the expanding universe as well as the oddities - black holes, wormholes, and dark matter.

In science fiction, artificial intelligence takes the shape of computers that can speak like people, think for themselves, and sometimes act against us. Reality of course is vastly different, though in many ways computers surpass their fictional counterparts. This book reviews work in the field and covers topics from chess-playing to quantum computing. The writers tackle how to make computers more powerful, how we define consciousness, what the hard problems are, and even how computers might be built once the limits of silicon chips have been reached.

Instead of “what if the South won the Civil War?” cosmologists ask, “what if the constants that make up the fundamental building blocks of physics were different?” Physicists argue that any slight change to the laws of physics would mean a disruption in the evolution of the universe - and our existence. With the many factors that had to align for us to exist, it can seem like the laws of physics might seem finely tuned to make our existence possible. Instead of a supernatural or divine explanation, this book explores the possibility is that our universe isn’t the only one.

Terrible lizards. That’s what the word dinosaurs means. Yet dinosaurs are not true lizards, and they are not necessarily terrible, either. Paleontologists have overturned many misconceptions, and in Dinosaurs!, we look at what the latest research tells us and what we still have to learn about these endlessly fascinating creatures.

Genetic engineering, which refers to the direct manipulation of DNA, became a reality in the 1970s. In this audiobook, we take a look at how far the field has come, starting with a revolutionary gene-editing tool called CRISPR that’s taking the research world by storm. We then examine how CRISPR and other approaches are being investigated to treat disease, the fantastic-sounding research being done in synthetic biology, controversial efforts in modifying crops and saving species, as well as the numerous ethical issues raised in these areas.

Addiction is costly on many levels to the individuals affected, their families, and society as a whole, but science may soon be able to offer treatment options to make the road to recovery a little smoother. First, we investigate why and how people succumb to a veritable prison of the mind as sections one and two delve respectively into the psychology and the neurochemistry behind addiction. Subsequent sections break out addictive substances individually: recreational drugs, prescription drugs, alcohol, and nicotine. Finally, section seven examines new avenues for overcoming addiction.

In this installment of the Ask the Experts series, Chemistry, our professors, scientists, and researchers tackle reader questions about the substances that compose all matter, their properties, and how they interact and change. Queries range from elementary questions, such as why some elements change color over a flame, to how chemistry works in everyday life, to how certain substances affect the body and more.

Is time an illusion? Is time travel possible? Could time end? In this audiobook, A Question of Time, we take an interdisciplinary look at the fourth dimension, exploring the latest thinking on the nature of time and the ways it dominates our physical and mental worlds.

Brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s affect an estimated one in six Americans and are increasing in incidence as the population ages. In this audiobook, we examine these and other conditions involving the damage and loss of neurons, including other forms of dementia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and multiple sclerosis (MS).

How many people achieve a cult following because of their writing in mathematics? Only a handful, and Martin Gardner is among the most well-known and well-loved. Not only did he present a notoriously difficult subject in an engaging and accessible way, but in doing so, he attracted an incredibly broad readership. His “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American ran nearly every month for 26 years and was one of the most popular in the magazine’s history.

Our nearest planetary neighbor has been the subject of endless fascination and wide-ranging theories throughout history. Is there life on Mars? Was there ever life on Mars? What was the atmosphere like thousands or millions of years ago? From Percival Lowell, who built his own observatory so he could dedicate himself to studying the red planet, to NASA landing the car-sized Curiosity rover in 2012, this book traces Scientific American's coverage of the observation and exploration of Mars.

The sense of position and movement is often called the sixth sense; the brain’s connection to the immune system might be a seventh. In this audiobook, we examine the diverse functions of the brain beyond the five senses, including the glymphatic system for maintaining brain health, the processes behind intuition, and new research raising questions about “brain death.”

Understanding why we age and how to prevent age-related physical and mental decline can help us to live in the moment and enjoy our health at any age. In this audiobook, we explore the latest thinking in why we age, strategies to help maintain good health, as well as research into the limits of human longevity.