December 2001
Scientific American Magazine

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Cover; December 2001; by Staff Editor; 1 Page(s)

Table of Contents; December 2001; by Staff Editor; 2 Page(s)

SA Perspectives: Here's Looking at You; December 2001; by Staff Editors; 1 Page(s)

Is Big Brother watching out for you?

Letters to the Editors; December 2001; by Staff Editor; 2 Page(s)

50, 100 and 150 Years Ago; December 2001; by Staff Editor; 1 Page(s)

Training Babies, Eating Insects, Hunting Bears

Better Killing through Chemistry; December 2001; by George Musser; 2 Page(s)

Buying chemical weapons material through the mail is quick and easy

Evaluating the Threat; December 2001; by Ed Regis; 3 Page(s)

Does mass biopanic portend mass destruction?

Reseizing the Controls; December 2001; by Steven Ashley; 2 Page(s)

Remotely piloted hijack rescues may be a bad idea

New Scan Briefs; December 2001; by Gary Stix; 1 Page(s)

Inside Attacks; Cure or Poison?; Plague Redux; Defusing Anthrax; www.sciam.com - On Terrorism

Trillions Entwined; December 2001; by Graham P. Collins; 1 Page(s)

Clouds of atoms are linked by a weird quantum yoke

Stem Cell Showstopper?; December 2001; by Carol Ezzell; 1 Page(s)

Without cloning, they aren't likely to work

By the Numbers: Why Do Prisons Grow?; December 2001; by Rodger Doyle; 1 Page(s)

The Nobel Prizes for 2001; December 2001; by Alison McCook; 1 Page(s)

Innovations: The Undying Pulse; December 2001; by Gary Stix; 3 Page(s)

Fiber-optic technology nurtured at Bell Labs from before divestiture is ready to go commercial. But will the patience of its creators yield any competitive advantage?

Staking Claims: Patent Pamphleteer; December 2001; by Gary Stix; 1 Page(s)

Gregory Aharonian's e-mail newsletter decries the issuance of a flood of bad patents while dishing dirt about the goings-on inside the patent office

Skeptic: More Baloney Detection; December 2001; by Michael Shermer; 1 Page(s)

How to draw boundaries between science and pseudoscience, Part II

Profile: Thawing Scott's Legacy; December 2001; by Sarah Simpson; 2 Page(s)

A pioneer in atmospheric ozone studies, Susan Solomon rewrites the history of a fatal expedition

Vessels of Death or Life; December 2001; by Rakesh K. Jain and Peter F. Carmeliet; 8 Page(s)

Angiogenesis - the formation of new blood vessels - might one day be manipulated to treat disorders from cancer to heart disease. First-generation drugs are now in the final phase of human testing

Photonic Crystals: Semiconductors of Light; December 2001; by Eli Yablonovitch; 8 Page(s)

Nanostructured materials containing ordered arrays of holes could lead to an optoelectronics revolution, doing for light what silicon did for electrons

How We Came to Be Human; December 2001; by Ian Tattersall; 8 Page(s)

The acquisition of language and the capacity for symbolic art may lie at the very heart of the extraordinary cognitive abilities that set us apart from the rest of creation

The First Stars in the Universe; December 2001; by Richard B. Larson and Volker Bromm; 8 Page(s)

Exceptionally massive and bright, the earliest stars changed the course of cosmic history

India, Pakistan and the Bomb; December 2001; by M.V. Ramana and A.H. Nayyar, sidebar by David Albright; 12 Page(s)

The Indian subcontinent is the most likely place in the world for a nuclear war

Origins of Personal Computing; December 2001; by M. Mitchell Waldrop; 8 Page(s)

Forget Gates, Jobs and Wozniak. The foundations of modern interactive computers were laid decades earlier

Working Knowledge: In the Fast Lane; December 2001; by Mark Fischetti; 2 Page(s)

Electronic toll takers

Technicalities: Long-Distance Robots; December 2001; by Mark Alpert; 2 Page(s)

The technology of telepresence makes the world even smaller

Reviews: Spontaneous, Unedited, Naked; December 2001; by Anne Eisenberg, Staff Editors; 3 Page(s)

Language and the Internet defends the literacy of the online generation. Also, The Editors Recommend

On the Web; December 2001; by Staff Editors; 1 Page(s)

Puzzling Adventures: Fashion Gang; December 2001; by Dennis E. Shasha; 1 Page(s)

Fashionable mathematics

Anti Gravity: The Importance of Being Ernst; December 2001; by Steve Mirsky; 1 Page(s)

Thoughts on an evolution expert who has taken seriously the warning "publish or perish"

Annual Index 2001; December 2001; by Staff Editors; 3 Page(s)

Endpoints; December 2001; by Staff Editors; 1 Page(s)

What happens when lightning strikes an airplane?