New Horizons in Science

The shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords last January raised questions about the effectiveness of gun laws—whether they keep guns out of the hands of criminals and prevent crimes. It was tempting to point a finger at Arizona’s gun laws as too weak, and somehow responsible for the shooting of Giffords, who is still undergoing intensive more…

Compassion is experiencing a renaissance. After years of stressing the importance of self-enhancement, some social psychologists are examining—empirically—one of mankind's oldest ideas: that compassion for others is a critical part of leading a happy, fulfilling life. That’s easy for any of us to say, of course, but Heidi Wayment and her colleagues are working toward more…

Sixteenth-century Parisians—lacking movies, television, and Angry Birds—would often amuse themselves by stepping out for a cat-burning. As Steven Pinker has written, a live cat would be lowered into a fire, where, howling with pain, it would roast until it was black, while les citoyens, along with kings and queens, would shriek with laughter. France has happily more…

The web is full of any number of get-smart-quick schemes, from listening to Mozart (too late if you can read this) to trying to read Stephen Hawking’s books. Most psychologists thought they knew better—intelligence is something we’re born with, and the way to boost it is to choose the right parents (again, too late). At least more…

To Anthony Barnhart, there is one word that describes how every magic trick is accomplished: psychology. Our brains evolved to perform a variety of tricks that have proven essential for our survival, but that, when manipulated by magicians, leave us painfully (and sometimes happily!) vulnerable to deception. The brain fills in missing pieces of the visual more…

About a thousand years ago, a crater that now stands on the outskirts of Flagstaff erupted for somewhere between 23 and 115 days. How can volcanologists be so sure of the elapsed time of an event that occurred so long ago? Michael Ort’s reconstruction of the Sunset Crater eruption is a marvel of historical and scientific more…

For nearly a century, a wooden contraption vaguely resembling Coney Island’s Cyclone roller coaster (or insert your own favorite rickety wooden roller) carried water from Arizona’s Fossil Creek down a flume and into two hydropower plants—a marvel of low-tech engineering. But the plant, built mostly by Apaches, outlived its usefulness a few years ago. And Arizona more…

Just south of the Mexico-Arizona border, at least a dozen manufacturers produce close to half a million water bottles a year—in a town of about 9,000 people. Those bottles, along with other goods produced and sold to migrants planning to cross the border into the United States, end up scattered across the desert on the American more…

Rob Knight's research on the bacterial communities growing on and inside the human body almost makes human beings seem like little more than scaffolds for bacteria. Knight and his collaborators were among the first to look at the nature and consequences of these bacterial communities, finding, for example, unique features in the gut microbes of obese more…

“Human beings do not stand outside nature; we are a part of it,” says Sean Carroll. “Ultimately we are made of particles, evolving and interacting according to the laws of physics. And we know what those laws are—the progress of modern science has reached a point where the laws underlying everyday life are completely understood.” The more…

Livestock grazing is a flashpoint of environmental conflict in the West. Amid the sharp rhetoric, unlikely partnerships are forming to explore new approaches for sustaining biodiversity and food production on public rangelands. In 1993, a quarreling group of ranchers and environmentalists formed the Diablo Trust, a collaborative management group, and began working together on practical more…

Jut Wynne has tracked invasive arthropods on Easter Island; catalogued new genera and species of arthropods in the American Southwest; studied bats in Europe, Belize, and in the Southwest; discovered new caves; and worked on a project with NASA to help determine how best to spot caves on Mars. All this, and he’s still working on more…

Science writing has “adequately and sometimes brilliantly focused on climate change studies built from meteorological models or technological monitoring of weather shifts,” says Gary Paul Nabhan. But he’s concerned that science writers have devoted less attention to observations from field ecologists and indigenous farmers, fishers, hunters and foragers. And yet, traditional ecological knowledge and natural history, or more…

In Arizona’s Hopi reservation, farmers plant their crops in the same terraced gardens that their ancestors have used for 800 years. When Miguel Vasquez approached the Hopi about studying their culture and customs, they asked him to help restore and conserve their traditional practices. That included documenting their traditional agricultural methods (the Hopi, Vasquez says, more…

When a cholera epidemic broke out in Haiti late in 2010, news reports quickly blamed the outbreak on UN peacekeepers from Nepal, touching off a cataclysmic international blame game that deeply offended Nepal, damaged the UN and sparked outrage in Haiti. Determining whether such accusations are true is not easy, but it’s the kind of thing more…

The aim of NASA’s Kepler mission, which was launched in 2009, is to search for habitable planets outside the solar system. Astronomers have discovered and catalogued three kinds of exoplanets that seem unlikely to be habitable—gas giants, hot super-Earths, and ice giants. Kepler’s particular mission is to look for planets no bigger than twice Earth’s more…