The Crucial Vaccine Benefit We're Not Talking about Enough

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Public Health The Crucial Vaccine Benefit We're Not Talking about Enough The vaccines not only prevent people from getting sick; they also cut down on transmission by those who get infected after immunization By Daniel P. Oran,Eric Topol

Space & Physics Announcing a New Plan for Solving the Mystery of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena The newly organized Galileo Project will use a three-pronged approach to replace unreliable eyewitness reports with reproducible scientific observations By Avi Loeb

Behavior The Olympics without Fans Is Harming Athletes' Performance Simone Biles drops out of an event, citing the lack of an audience By Maddie Bender

Medicine Fauci on COVID Drugs, Vaccines and Getting Back to Normal The U.S.'s top infectious disease specialist describes a new Biden administration program to develop and test antivirals—and what he's most worried about as the nation reopens By Charles Schmidt

Cognition Quantum Mechanics, Plato's Cave and the Blind Piranha Can we ever really know the world? By John Horgan

Space & Physics Learning to Live in Steven Weinberg's Pointless Universe The late physicist's most infamous statement still beguiles scientists and vexes believers By Dan Falk

Climate Change 'Advanced' Nuclear Reactors? Don't Hold Your Breath With little hard evidence, their developers maintain they'll be cheaper, safer and more secure than existing power plants By Elliott Negin

Space & Physics Avi Loeb's Galileo Project Will Search for Evidence of Alien Visitation With nearly $2 million in private funding, the controversial new initiative is targeting unidentified phenomena in Earth's skies and beyond By Adam Mann

Behavior Why So Many Young People Hate STEM Courses Take it from someone who almost gave up on her dream of being a scientist By Rhea Wanchoo

Animals Caffeine Boosts Bees' Focus and Helps Them Learn By associating caffeinated sugar water and a target scent, researchers teach bumblebees to stay on task By Tess Joosse

Engineering Entire Buildings Can Be Wrapped in Jackets to Save Energy Apartment buildings, or blocks of row houses, can be upgraded in one installation By Willem Marx

Astronomy Why an Asteroid Strike Is like a Pandemic Both are low-probability but catastrophic events—and both can be mitigated if we act early enough By Casey Dreier

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BRING SCIENCE HOME Paper Bridges What shape makes the best bridge? Become a paper bridge engineer and learn about how shape plays a role in designing sturdy structures. Can you come up with an even stronger shape? Credit: George Retseck Have you ever walked, ridden your bike or driven in a car over a long bridge? Bridges have to be sturdy enough to support the weight of many people and cars without collapsing. One important part of designing a bridge is selecting the right materials. Another is making sure those materials comprising it are shaped in a way to make them strongest. In this project you will build a simple "bridge" using materials you already have on hand—paper and tape! Can you build a miniature bridge that doesn't collapse?

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Why Do Variants Such as Delta Become Dominant?

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July 30, 2021

Epidemiology Why Do Variants Such as Delta Become Dominant? Mutations that make a virus more transmissible are only part of the equation By Sara Reardon

Climate Change Infrastructure Deal Whittles Down Climate Spending The bipartisan legislation includes less funding for public transit and electric vehicles By Adam Aton,E&E News

Public Health COVID, Quickly, Episode 12: Masking Up Again and Why People Refuse Shots Today we bring you a new episode in our podcast series COVID, Quickly. Every two weeks, Scientific American's senior health editors Tanya Lewis and Josh Fischman catch you up on the essential developments in the pandemic: from vaccines to new variants and everything in between. You can listen to all past episodes here. By Tanya Lewis,Josh Fischman,Maddie Bender | 06:18

Climate Change Act on Climate Emergency Now to Prevent Millions of Deaths, Study Shows The human toll of carbon emissions will vastly magnify climate change's economic costs By Andrea Thompson

Computing The Question Medical AI Can't Answer It's unable to tell us why it came to a particular decision—and that's crucial information By Jason H. Moore

Engineering Entire Buildings Can Be Wrapped in Jackets to Save Energy Apartment buildings, or blocks of row houses, can be upgraded in one installation By Willem Marx

Extraterrestrial Life Harvard's Avi Loeb Thinks We Should Study UFOs--and He's Not Wrong As a SETI scientist, I'm grateful that he has the freedom—and the guts—to go where few would dare to go By Seth Shostak

Energy The 'Hydrogen Olympics' Lit a Torch for the Clean Fuel's Future An energy expert explains why Japan—along with much of the rest of the world—is committing to the clean-burning fuel By Tess Joosse

Animals Caffeine Boosts Bees' Focus and Helps Them Learn By associating caffeinated sugar water and a target scent, researchers teach bumblebees to stay on task By Tess Joosse

Space & Physics China's Space Station Is Preparing to Host 1,000 Science Experiments The spaceborne studies will cover diverse topics, from dark matter and gravitational waves to the growth of cancer and pathogenic bacteria By Smriti Mallapaty,Nature magazine

Computing AI Creates False Documents That Fake Out Hackers The algorithm hides sensitive information in a sea of decoys By Sophie Bushwick

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FROM THE ARCHIVE How Dangerous Is the Delta Variant, and Will It Cause a COVID Surge in the U.S.? A new, more transmissible form of SARS-CoV-2 is rapidly spreading in the country and poses a threat to unvaccinated and partially vaccinated people By Tanya Lewis | June 2021

QUOTE OF THE DAY "[Delta's] rate of increase is unlike any other in the history of this pandemic." Vaughn Cooper, evolutionary biologist at the University of Pittsburgh

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