Margaret Wertheim

Illustration by Dana Collins MEN OF THE MIDDLE AGES SADLY REALIZED THAT the great dragons were long since gone from European soil. Only feeble remnants remained, paltry debased descendants of the grand saurians of the past: frilled snakes and lizards, and small, feathered, scaly-headed beasts not much bigger than a......

Smilodon fatalis, the official state fossil of California, leans forward poised on his toes and ready to spring. Pity a poor pronghorn on the other side of that leap; even without his fabled incisors, this saber-tooth cat was a killer. Yet for all his might, smilodon is definitively fatalis. Extinct......

Illustration by Dana Collins HOW HUMAN ARE YOU ON A GIVEN DAY? LAST weekend at the annual Loebner Prize competition, Paul Pareti was rated the most human among a field of 10 candidates. Pareti soundly beat his fellow human, Robby Garner, who came in a dismal eighth. Competing against these......

Illustration by Allison Taylor EVERY NOW AND THEN SCIENCE THROWS US A curve ball, a technology at once staggeringly useful and breathtakingly dangerous. The most obvious case, of course, is nuclear power. Down on the farm another revolution is brewing, with proponents promising a radical new way to deliver drugs......

Illustration by Brian Stauffer STRANGE THINGS ARE HAPPENING among the corn rows, quite apart from crop circles. More and more foreign bits of DNA are being woven into our food supply: viral DNA, bacterial DNA and insect DNA are now routinely engineered into crops destined for the table. Asleep at......

I GREW UP IN BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA, A SUBTROPICAL landscape teeming with alien life. In the mornings wallabies bounded about the house; at nights we looked out on a sea of cane toads; on summer evenings the skies filled with clouds of bats. Vast colonies of black-and-yellow caterpillars balled themselves into......

What is life? What exactly is the essence of this incredible, irreducible phenomenon? Although Beltway politicians are not usually known for their philosophical reflections, this question has been paramount in recent congressional debates about ”therapeutic cloning.“ Last summer, the House voted overwhelmingly to ban human cloning of any type, for......

The first of a new, biweekly column on science from the author of The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace and Pythagoras’ Trousers: God, Physics and the Gender Wars I‘ve signed the petition, signature number 134,042 (www.gotfuturama.comcancelled), so clearly I’m not the only one mourning the passing of Futurama. Though, frankly, and......