Scientific American > Quotes

“Acceleration means studying material that is part of the standard curriculum for older students. Enrichment involves learning information that falls outside the usual curriculum—say,”
― Scientific American, The Science of Education: Back to School

“For instance, one reason that the Ebola virus doesn’t spread widely among humans is that it is too efficient—mortality is as high as 90 percent—which”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“If you had been blind all your life and could suddenly see, could you distinguish by sight what you knew already by touch—say, a cube from a sphere? Would flowers look like flowers you’d felt and faces like faces, or would they all be confusing patterns?”
― Scientific American Editors, His Brain, Her Brain

“And educators should recognize that physical education is about building the brain as well as the body and should put it center stage in the curriculum. If teachers want their students to pay attention, they should consider letting them jump, stomp and”
― Scientific American, The Science of Education: Back to School

“In fact, children’s gendered toy choice is one of the largest sex differences in behavior, second only to sexual preference itself!”
― Scientific American Editors, His Brain, Her Brain

“There are now more than 200,000 Americans with spinal cord damage, a number that, ironically, has grown because of improved acute care in the hours immediately following injuries; people who once would have died from traumatic damage now survive.”
― Scientific American, Tomorrow's Medicine

“Chinese mathematicians before our era calculated rapidly with bamboo counting rods, using red rods for positive numbers (cheng) and black rods for negative numbers (fu).”
― Scientific American Editors, The Magic and Mystery of Numbers

“consciousness? And what makes a certain type of information correspond”
― Scientific American, The Secrets of Consciousness

“How Aging Stems from Trade-Offs Aging occurs because our body must make a trade-off between reproducing and staying in good repair, according to the author’s “disposable soma” theory. Given a limited supply of energy, the amount that goes to making and protecting sperm and eggs tips the scale away from ensuring that “somatic” cells—skin, bone, muscle, and so on—remain in good condition. As a result, cells accumulate damage over time, which ultimately causes some organ or another to become diseased. If bodily functioning is sufficiently compromised, death ensues.”
― Scientific American Editors, Tomorrow's Medicine

“Someday there may be a vaccine that can fend off all subtypes of influenza, but such a vaccine remains a dream for now.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“Still, this particularly virulent and infectious strain of the flu virus is thought to have killed as many as 40 million people around the world between 1918 and 1919.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“Various pathogens that can cause life-threatening infections such as HIV, hepatitis C virus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Plasmodium parasites (the source of malaria) can evade antibodies, and an effective vaccine against these pathogens would need to stimulate robust T cell responses.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“In fact, so-called gifted students may fail to do well because they are unusually smart. Ensuring that a gifted child reaches his or her potential requires an understanding of what can go wrong and how to satisfy the unusual learning requirements”
― Scientific American, The Science of Education: Back to School

“We would not accept a situation in which every home and business had to operate its own power plant, library, printing press and water reservoir. Why should we do so for computers?”
― Scientific American, A.I. and Genius Machines

“accepted fact of life among professional-class Manhattan parents in recent years, despite the absence of proof: admission to what is considered an “elite” preschool is a necessary first step to admission to the Ivy League.”
― Scientific American, The Science of Education: Back to School

“In the U.S., livestock farms often bar health officials from testing their pigs even though precursors of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic are thought to have kicked around U.S. pig farms for years before emerging in Mexico.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“The point is that the science is accurate in describing how the universe works, independent of the metaphysical implications one derives from it. The same is of course true for evolution, which happened and is happening, whether or not one chooses to believe in God.”
― Scientific American Editors, Evolution vs. Creationism: Inside the Controversy

“This neuronal correlate of consciousness—the transient assembly—satisfies all the items on the shopping list of phenomena above. The efficacy of an alarm clock is explained as a very vigorous sensory input that triggers a large, synchronous assembly. Dreams and wakefulness differ because dreams result from a small assembly driven by weak internal stimuli, whereas wakefulness results from a larger assembly driven by stronger external stimuli. Anesthetics restrict the size of assemblies, thus inducing unconsciousness. Self-consciousness can arise only in a brain large and interconnected enough to devise extensive neuronal networks. The degree of consciousness in an animal or a human fetus depends on the sizes of their assemblies, too.”
― Scientific American, The Secrets of Consciousness

“Pupils actually learn better if conditions are arranged so that they have to make errors. Specifically, people remember things better and longer if they are given tests so challenging that they are bound to fail.”
― Scientific American, The Science of Education: Back to School

“In 2008 Haynes asked volunteers to carry out a simple task—to choose whether to press the left or right button on a remote control while in the fMRI scanner. When Haynes set his MVPA algorithm to learn which patterns corresponded with this decision, he was astounded to find strong signals in the prefrontal and parietal cortices (areas involved in processing novel or complex goals) up to 10 seconds before the volunteer consciously decided to act. This result has deep ramifications. Does it mean that we have no free will? Or does free will kick in only for more complex decisions? More research will be needed to answer these questions—but it is exciting that MVPA has moved such concerns, once strictly the domain of philosophy, into the province of scientific study.”
― Scientific American, The Secrets of Consciousness

“what events are happening at the same time depends on how fast you are going.”
― Scientific American, A Question of Time: The Ultimate Paradox

“Scientists isolated an influenza strain from a human for the first time in 1933. Since then, they have learned that influenza viruses come in two main “flavors”— types A and B—that differ in certain of their internal proteins. A third type (C) does not seem to cause serious disease.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“In one proposal three years ago Brett McInnes of the National University of Singapore drew on ideas from the leading candidate for a quantum theory of gravity—string theory.”
― Scientific American, A Question of Time: The Ultimate Paradox

“In science class we would never look at the evidence against the existence of God, but it seems to be perfectly acceptable to challenge the scientific standpoint in the religion class,”
― Scientific American Editors, Evolution vs. Creationism: Inside the Controversy

“Many natural infections have at least one benefit in that a bout of illness confers lifelong immunity against the causative pathogen. An ideal vaccine would also offer such lasting protection, preferably with a single dose, and perhaps even protect against related threats, such as all members of the ever evolving family of human flu viruses.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“for many in theoretical physics have come to believe that time fundamentally does not even exist.”
― Scientific American, A Question of Time: The Ultimate Paradox

“The Dog Killer in Your Pocket Here’s another danger that might surprise you Just as dog owners often don’t realize their canine friends are too heavy, they may have a blind spot about another threat. Surprisingly, the lowly penny can become a lethal weapon against dogs—specifically pennies minted after 1982. Although all pennies are equal in value—one cent, no matter what year it is—their compositions are not. Pennies that were produced between 1962 and 1982 are predominantly copper (95 percent), whereas pennies churned out in 1982 and after are mostly zinc (97.5 percent). Zinc is an essential mineral but is undesirable in excessive amounts. When pennies meet the acid in a dog’s stomach, the zinc gets released rapidly, which can destroy red blood cells and, in turn, lead to a number of debilitating conditions, including kidney or liver damage.”
― Scientific American Editors, Our Furry Friends: The Science of Pets

“reveals a real gender gap for SSRI efficacy. Several recent studies suggest that these heavily prescribed medications— 17 million people reported taking them between 2003 and 2006, according to the CDC—work best in the presence of estrogen.”
― Scientific American Editors, His Brain, Her Brain

“Solitude is the precondition for having a conversation with yourself. This capacity to be with yourself and discover yourself is the bedrock of development.”
― Scientific American Editors, Evolution: The Human Odyssey

“a psychologist and director of the Autism Research Center at the University of Cambridge, argues that excesses in testosterone during the first months of brain development may make boys vulnerable to autism and other neuropsychiatric disorders.”
― Scientific American Editors, His Brain, Her Brain