Scientific American Magazine

Turboprop and turbojet engines make possible a large variety of airplanes that can take off and land vertically. Many designs are being tested, and a few are going into production

In contrast to radio astronomy, which works with signals that are broadcast by objects in space, this new discipline investigates the solar system with the echoes of signals sent out from earth

There is not much doubt that computers can think, but they still cannot perceive. Recently, however, progress has been made toward enabling machines to recognize meaningful patterns such as letters

Where the land meets the sea, the waves usually lay down a strip of sand or other uniform material. The constant shifting of this material has created a conservation problem for beach-loving man

How are stimuli such as light and pressure converted into nerve impulses? The answer is sought by experiments with the Pacinian corpuscle, a specialized ending of the nerves of the sense of touch

In a primarily agricultural country such as Haiti the market is the central economic institution. Chaotic though they may seem, these gatherings possess an elaborate underlying order

A new geometrical analysis shows that there is some order in the disorderly arrangements of the molecules of a liquid. The method may lead to a general theory of the liquid state

Not every virus is harmful to its host. Among the beneficent Viruses is one that causes a desirable streaking of tulips and another that enables an insect to feed on plants on which it would normally starve