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March-April 2026

Volume: 114 Number: 2

A deep photographic exposure captures a time-lapsed view of 3I/ATLAS, an interstellar object and only the third large one confirmed to have passed through our Solar System from elsewhere. 3I/ATLAS has a bright dust tail (color enhanced in this image) that is typical of comets. However, the prior two interstellar objects were quite different, showing the range of small bodies in the universe. The first interstellar object detected, 1I/ʻOumuamua, did not have a dust tail but had unexpected accelerations not caused by gravity that were too strong to be from forces created by radiation. As Darryl Z. Seligman describes in “The Discovery of Dark Comets,” studying this strange interstellar object inspired him and his colleagues to take a closer look at comets in the Solar System that also seem to defy standard definition, and which might belong to an entirely new astronomical category. (Cover image by Dan Bartlett.)

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    May-June 2009

    Volume: 97 Number: 3

    • "The Origin of Life," by James Trefil, Harold Morowitz and Eric Smith

    • "Fermi, Pasta, Ulam and the Birth of Experimental Mathematics," by Mason A. Porter, Norman J. Zabusky, Bambi Hu and David K. Campbell

    • "The Deprived Human Brain," by Charles A. Nelson III, Elizabeth A. Furtado, Nathan A. Fox and Charles H. Zeanah, Jr.

    • "Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil," by Charles A. S. Hall and John W. Day, Jr.

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  • March-April - 2009 - Volume: 97 - Number: 2

    March-April 2009

    Volume: 97 Number: 2

    • "Real-time Flood Forecasting," by Chintu Lai, Ting-Kuei Tsay, Chen-Chien and I-Ling Wu

    • "Knowing When to Stop," by Theodore P. Hill

    • "The Long-lived Transistor," by Robert W. Keyes

    • "A Cipher to Thomas Jefferson," by Lawren M. Smithline

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  • January-February - 2009 - Volume: 97 - Number: 1

    January-February 2009

    Volume: 97 Number: 1

    • "Getting the Most from Energy," by Thomas Casten and Phillip Schewe

    • "Healing Heat: Harnessing Infection to Fight Cancer," by Uwe Hobohm

    • "Kashmir Valley Megaearthquakes," by Susan Hough, Roger Billham and Ismail Bhat

    • "The Bones of Copernicus," by Dennis Danielson

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  • November-December - 2008 - Volume: 96 - Number: 6

    November-December 2008

    Volume: 96 Number: 6

    • "Genomics Confounds Gene Classification," by Michael Seringhaus and Mark Gerstein

    • "Virtual Fossils from 425 Million-year-old Volcanic Ash," by Derek E. Briggs, Derek J. Siveter, David J. Siveter and Mark Sutton

    • "UV Lights Up Marine Fish," by Jill P. Zamzow, Peter A. Nelson and George S. Losey

    • "Rocket Science and Russian Spies," by Joseph A. Castellano

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  • September-October - 2008 - Volume: 96 - Number: 5

    September-October 2008

    Volume: 96 Number: 5

    • "Evolution 'for the Good of the Group'," by David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson

    • "Fifty Years of Earth-Observation Satellites," by Andrew J. Tatem, Scott J. Goetz and Simon I. Hay

    • "Water News: Bad, Good and Virtual," by Vaclav Smil

    • "Statins: From Fungus to Pharma," by Philip A. Rea

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  • July-August - 2008 - Volume: 96 - Number: 4

    July-August 2008

    Volume: 96 Number: 4

    • "Binary Stars with Habitable Planets," by Nader Haghighipour

    • "Ecological Responses to Climate Change on the Antarctic Peninsula," by Norman D. Cook and Takefumi Hayashi

    • "The Psychoacoustics of Harmony Perception," by Vaclav Smil

    • "The First Discovery of DNA," by Ralf Dahm

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  • May-June - 2008 - Volume: 96 - Number: 3

    May-June 2008

    Volume: 96 Number: 3

    • "The Two-Faced Moon," by P. Surdas Mohit

    • "The Neglected Side of Parkinson's Disease," by Ted L. Rothstein and C. Warren Olanow

    • "Twisting Light to Trap Atoms," by Sonja Franke-Arnold and Aidan S. Arnold

    • "Tip-of-the-Tongue States Yield Language Insights," by Lise Abrams

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  • March-April - 2008 - Volume: 96 - Number: 2

    March-April 2008

    Volume: 96 Number: 2

    • "Bird Song and the Problem of Honest Communication," by William A. Searcy and Stephen Nowicki

    • "Safer Vehicles for People and the Planet," by Thomas P. Wenzel and Marc Ross

    • "Tectonic Plates Come Apart at the Seams," by J. Brendan Murphy, Gabriel Gutiérrez-Alonso, R. Damian Nance, Javier Fernández-Suárez, J. Duncan Keppie, Cecilio Quesada, Rob A. Strachan and Jaroslav Dostal

    • "The Rise of Coffee," by Fernando E. Vega

    • "Mesa Verde Migrations," by Timothy A. Kohler, Mark D. Varien, Aaron Wright, Kristin A. Kuckelman

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  • January-February - 2008 - Volume: 96 - Number: 1

    January-February 2008

    Volume: 96 Number: 1

    • "The Phenotypic Plasticity of Death Valley's Pupfish," by Sean C. Lema

    • "Salivary Diagnostics," by David T. Wong

    • "A Stone-Age Meeting of Minds," by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge

    • "The Past and Future of the Periodic Table," by Eric R. Scerri

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  • November-December - 2007 - Volume: 95 - Number: 6

    November-December 2007

    Volume: 95 Number: 6

    • "Safer Salads," by Jorge M. Fonseca and Sadhana Ravishankar

    • "Breeding Better Buildings," by Rafal Kicinger and Tomasz Arciszewski

    • "The Origins of Larvae," by Donald I. Williamson and Sonya E. Vickers

    • "The Other Evolution Wars," by David Kaiser

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