Like many families in the path of superstorm Sandy, we’ve spent much of the last week indoors trying to stay sane. Fortunately, we live in a part of Brooklyn that was spared the worst storm damage, so I had the luxury of finally reading the children’s science books that have been piling up on my [...]

An education advisor to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign said last night that a Romney administration would not use federal funds to encourage states to adopt higher standards in math and science. President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top Program has offered grants to states that adopt certain reforms, including the Common Core State Standards in [...]

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney staked out a softer position than usual last night on the role of the federal government in American life. Regulation? It’s “essential.” The role of government in education? It can be “very important.” As a result, Romney and President Obama agreed more than they disagreed on how to improve students’ [...]

Guest post by Michael R. Duffey There is a wide variety of creative projects which can help introduce children to the world of microcontrollers.  A microcontroller is simply a small computer that can interact with the outside world.  It can connect different types of “inputs” (such as sensing a motion, force, or temperature change) to [...]

Two weeks ago, I set out in search of milkweed hoping to find an egg laid by a Monarch butterfly. With no previous egg-hunting experience, I was armed only with what I had read in the terrific book “My Monarch Journal” by Connie Muther and Anita Bibeau.  The book gives step-by-step instructions, accompanied by detailed, [...]

Last week, my parents’ yard in Western Massachusetts was overrun with fuzzy black and white creatures known as Hickory Tussock Moth caterpillars (Lophocampa caryae).  Just after a rainstorm, I noticed that the caterpillars were hanging from trees like spiders, lowering themselves from branches on lines of silk (see video below; apologies for the commentary in [...]

This year’s Google Science Fair winner, Brittany Wenger, 17, from Sarasota, Florida, spent more than 600 hours coding a sophisticated computer program to help doctors detect breast cancer using a less invasive form of biopsy. I spoke to her this morning at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. How did you feel when you heard [...]

An expectant crowd gathered last night inside an airplane hangar at a flight school in Palo Alto, California to hear the winners of the second annual Google Science Fair. The grand prize went to Brittany Wenger, 17, of Sarasota, Florida, who wrote a computer program to help doctors diagnose breast cancer less invasively.  Jonah Kohn, [...]

This year, Scientific American funded the first Science in Action award, a $50,000 prize as part of the Google Science Fair. The prize also includes a year of mentoring to advance the work. The 14-year-old winners, Sakhiwe Shongwe and Bonkhe Malalela, developed a simplified system for hydroponics, which increased crop yields by 140 percent. Their [...]

On Monday Google will announce the winners of its second annual Google Science Fair. As SA did last year, we’ve partnered with Google on the competition, and editor in chief Mariette DiChristina serves as a judge. This year, SA helped expand the honors by sponsoring the Science In Action award for a project that addresses [...]