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Have you ever died and come back to life? Me neither. No one has. But plenty of people say that they have, and their experiences were the subject of an episode of Larry King Live last December on which I appeared as the token skeptic among a tableful of believers, including CNN’s medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, New Age author Deepak Chopra, a football referee who “died” on the playing field, and an 11-year-old boy named James Leininger who believes he is the reincarnation of a World War II fighter pilot....

Key Concepts Biology Physiology Physics Mechanical strength Introduction Have you ever wondered how strong hair is? When we talk about our hair we usually discuss color, length or texture. But what about hair strength? If you look at a strand of hair, it looks like a very thin string. In fact, it is on average only about 0.1 millimeter thick. It doesn’t seem like such a thin string could be very strong....

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the September 1997 issue of Scientific American (a PDF version of the original is available for purchase below). We have resurfaced this article to commemorate the end of the Tevatron. In March 1995 scientists gathered at a hastily called meeting at Fermilab—the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., near Chicago—to witness a historic event. In back-to-back seminars, physicists from rival experiments within the lab announced the discovery of a new particle, the top quark....

Modern astronomy paints a vivid picture of the universe having been born in a cataclysmic bang and filled with exotic stars ranging from gargantuan red supergiants that span the size of a modest solar system to hyperdense white dwarf stars and black holes that are smaller than Earth. These discoveries are all the more remarkable because astronomers infer them from the faintest glimmers of light, sometimes just a handful of photons....

“Why did our universe get created? Why was it just right for us to end up having star formation and galaxy formation and eventually planets and primordial goo and then humans?” asks physicist Amanda Peet of the University of Toronto. “I want to know about these questions just because they’re questions out there that we can ask about the universe.” Peet will delve into some of those mysteries Wednesday, May 6 at 7 P....

A spider, seemingly possessed, spins an uncharacterisitic web—just before wasp larvae nesting on its abdomen suck the last nourishing juices from the spider’s dying body and make a cocoon in the weird web. A worm gets into the brain of a shy, shade-loving snail, compelling it to crawl out of its safe home and into the open where it gets attacked by a bird—which is destined to be the parasite’s next host....

Nutrition Diva podcast listener Adele writes: “My husband is allergic to fish so he buys omega-3 eggs instead. Do you get the same benefits from eating omega-3 eggs as you would from eating fish?" How Do They Make Omega-3 Eggs? You’ve probably seen omega-3 enriched eggs at the grocery store. Perhaps you’ve wondered how they get the omega-3 into the eggs? It’s actually a pretty low tech method: They feed the hens flaxseed, which is high in omega-3 fatty acids....

The U.S.’s famed Arecibo Observatory survived all manners of threats since its construction in a bowl-shaped natural sinkhole in the forested hills of Puerto Rico in 1963. It persisted through everything from hurricanes and earthquakes to wild swings of the federal budgetary scythe. That history made it all the more shocking last week when the catastrophic failure of multiple massive suspension cables sent a 900-ton (817-metric-ton) equipment platform plummeting straight through the 305-meter radio dish that was Arecibo’s heart, shattering it beyond repair....

Bill Bryson’s bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, A Walk in the Woods and Notes from a Small Island, which in a national poll was voted the book that best represents Britain. His acclaimed book on the history of science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, won the Royal Society’s Aventis Prize as well as the Descartes Prize, the European Union’s highest literary award. He has written books on language, on Shakespeare, and on his own childhood in the memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid....

First, the scientists created maps showing where each species is likely to occur today, explains lead author Vitor Gomes of the Federal University of Pará in Brazil. Layering those maps atop one another allowed Gomes and his colleagues to calculate how many species are present, on average, within areas of 10 by 10 kilometers. At this moment, they determined, any given area probably has on average almost 1,500 of the 6,394 tree species for which sufficient data were available....

Deep in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia sits a very choice piece of real estate. It’s nothing so newfangled as a ski lodge or one of the traditional wood houses that dot the local countryside. Rather it’s a primeval limestone cave, called Denisova, that overlooks a rushing river and the surrounding forest. Multiple human species, or hominins, have sought shelter in this cave over the past 300,000 years, such is its allure....

When Brad Bernstein first looked at cancer tumors cell by cell in 2014, what he found dismayed him: he realized that in any single tumor, there is not one type of cancer cell at work but many. “I was a little depressed when I saw it,” says Bernstein, a pathologist at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. “Some of the toughest tumors out there are really heterogeneous mixtures [of cells]....

Rumors and myths about COVID-19 vaccine effects on all aspects of reproduction and sexual functioning have spread like a Delta variant of viral misinformation across social media platforms, where people swap rumors of erectile dysfunction and fertility disruptions following vaccination. Yet studies so far have not linked the vaccines with problems related to pregnancy, menstrual cycles, erectile performance or sperm quality. The evidence does show that COVID-19 can involve problems in all of these areas....

Ebola survivors are teaching scientists some surprising lessons. Long-term studies have revealed that the virus lasts longer in survivors’ bodies than previously suspected. The findings, presented on September 12 at an Ebola-virus conference in Antwerp, Belgium, underscore the need for extended tracking of people who have beaten Ebola and other rare infections. Researchers have long known that the virus can persist in people who have recovered from the infection. But the size of the West African outbreak, coupled with improved monitoring technologies, is changing how scientists view life after Ebola—and how to prevent future outbreaks....

It might be time to pencil in “awe cultivation” on your to-do list. Although religious thinkers like Søren Kierkegaard cast awe as a state of existential fear and trembling, new research by psychologists at Stanford and the University of Minnesota shows that experiencing awe can actually increase well-being, by giving people the sense that they have more time available. That sounds much more enjoyable than trying to power through one more hour on Redbull and fumes....

When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) begins smashing protons together this fall inside its 17-mile- (27-kilometer-) circumference underground particle racetrack near Geneva, Switzerland, it will usher in a new era not only of physics but also of computing. Before the year is out, the LHC is projected to begin pumping out a tsunami of raw data equivalent to one DVD (five gigabytes) every five seconds. Its annual output of 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) will soon dwarf that of any other scientific experiment in history....

Puerto Rico’s power grid has suffered multiple blows from recent disasters. Hurricane Maria, a devastating and deadly storm, pummeled the island in 2017, causing widespread damage and months of an agonizing blackout for many residents. It was almost a year before the last house was reconnected to the grid. That storm highlighted the fragile state of Puerto Rico’s grid and prompted calls for change. In 2020 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) allocated almost $9....

U.S. EPA said yesterday it will for the first time regulate existing sources of methane from the oil and gas industry. The announcement came as part of a new joint U.S.-Canada pact to cut domestic emissions of the potent greenhouse gas (Greenwire, March 10). Both countries agreed to reduce emissions from the oil and gas sector by 40 to 45 percent below 2012 levels by 2025. Scientists and environmentalists praised the decision as an important step toward reducing U....

In a clean room inside a clean room at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, a petite telescope is perched on a stand for a final series of checkouts prior to launch. The extra fastidiousness is because the observatory’s four cameras will fly without protective covers—one of several simplifying design decisions made to help ensure the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, will meet its goal of measuring the masses of at least 50 small, rocky and potentially Earth-like worlds as part of the first all-sky, exoplanet survey....

Minerals are geologic time capsules of the environments in which they form. With the right approach, their mysteries can be cracked open to reveal key features of the ancient Earth or other planets. Geologists have traditionally classified minerals by their unique combinations of chemical formula and crystal structure—capturing how, for instance, differences in the way carbon atoms are stacked together lead to slippery graphite layers or rigid diamond. But this 200-year-old formal classification system omits a significant consideration: how the mineral forms....