Stories by Seth Fletcher

Scientific American contributor Keren Elazari argues in a 2014 TED talk that securing cyberspace is impossible without the help of hackers.

I'm not a scold about scientific accuracy in film. As long as a movie is not built on a fundamentally stupid premise (“Lucy,” the Scarlet Johansson vehicle predicated on the false notion that humans use only 10 percent of their brains, comes to mind), I am happy to let myself be entertained.

Daniel Dennett and Deb Roy explain why digital technology will drive organizations into an evolutionary arms race

Each of the telescopes that the astronomers of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) are currently working to bring into their black-hole-observing, planet-size array is a special case.

Over the holidays, while visiting family in Southwest Missouri, where I grew up, I saw one of the oddest sights on local roadways since armadillos started showing up as road kill: multiple Chevrolet Volts.

This week millions of people will find themselves standing in an airport-security line, hoping their supposedly travel-size toiletries don’t create a national security incident.

Tell us what big tech announcement or new gadget made you roll your eyes

In our May 2014 issue, Sridhar Kota, a professor of engineering at the University of Michigan and founder and president of the company FlexSys, published an article about his long-running campaign to take complex, multipart machines and redesign them as flexible, one-piece devices (subscription required).

Not long ago I came across a piece in the Scientific American archives from the earliest days of very-long baseline radio interferometry, the technique employed by the Event Horizon Telescope.

Gold medallions? Unfortunately martial-looking instruments of science? Send us your stories and photos

10 problem-solving, planet-improving, lifesaving advances set to drive progress in the years ahead

A closer look at some of the breakthroughs on the cover of the December issue of Scientific American

Wired has a fun piece about physicist and black-hole guru Kip Thorne's work on the film Interstellar, which comes out November 7. We've known the premise of the film for a long time: Earth is a disaster, the human race is on the verge of extinction, and mankind must find a new home.

The Michigan start-up Sakti3 says its solid-state cells more than double the energy density of today’s best Li-Ion batteries

Before they can see Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, the astronomers of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) must complete an epic to-do list.

How hard can it be to determine whether a computer works as promised? Step one: turn it on. Step two: Try to solve some problems. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

A few months ago I went to Cambridge, Mass. to check in with the Event Horizon Telescope crew and found Shep Doeleman, the project leader, fresh off the completion of a major purchase.

For the past year, astronomers around the world have been watching the center of the Milky Way in anticipation of a once-per-eon event. Right around now (or, technically, 24,000 years ago--that's roughly how far away the galactic center is in light years), a cloud of gas and dust plummeting toward our galaxy's supermassive black hole, [...]

Looking into the galactic center is hard. So much dust and gas lies between us and the center of the Milky Way that very little of the visible light emitted there makes it to us.

The image you see here is a computer-generated model of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, which we call Sagittarius A*. More precisely, it is a model of the "shadow" that Sagittarius A*, with its mass of four million suns, should cast.

Scientific American technology editor Seth Fletcher talks about the recent Consumer Electronics Show and astronomy editor Clara Moskowitz discusses last month's American Astronomical Society conference  

 

We’ve come a long way since Oregon Trail

A couple days ago I found myself sitting in a digital cave with an enormous fire-eating hell-demon. Naturally, I was at the annual Consumer Electronics Show.

Geneticist and transparency advocate Richard Jefferson explains how technology could transform the process of problem solving