American Scientist

Chilis have been laid out to dry along the walkway in front of a modern Maya house in Quintana Roo, Mexico, in this 1988 photograph. In “The Enduring Forest Gardens of the Ancient Maya,” archaeologist Anabel Ford looks back on her 50-plus years of studying the ancient Maya, through which she came to know their descendants as field team members, collaborators, and friends. Through these relationships, she saw the ways that their contemporary lifeways connected to the archaeological questions she had about ancient Maya settlements and farming practices. Her work overturned assumptions in her field about how the ancient Maya lived and why their society collapsed. Collaborating with local Maya to document their unique approaches to forest gardening became key to these breakthroughs and has led to new ways of presenting Maya monuments and temples to the public. (Photograph by Macduff Everton.) Discover more: https://lnkd.in/e_hgYcus

Today at Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society #IFoRE24 conference in DC, regenerative engineering pioneer Cato Laurencin of the University of Connecticut accepted the Gold Key Award, and during his speech he highlighted his article that was published in American Scientist. It's always really gratifying when our authors tell us how much they got out of the experience of working with our dedicated team of artists and editors.

In recent years, only about a quarter of grant proposals to the NSF have gotten funded, so American researchers were excited when the recent CHIPS and Science Act (hereafter CHIPS, which stands for Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors) was signed into law in August 2022, doubling the NSF’s budget. CHIPS aims to bolster American manufacturing, supply chains, and national security by investing in STEM R&D and education. Image: Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Learn more: https://lnkd.in/ehVjJ22X

Johanna Teske explores the similarities between running and science, particularly astronomy, emphasizing the unpredictable nature of both activities. Chris Lintott's book, 'Accidental Astronomy: How Random Discoveries Shape the Science of Space' also discusses the Hubble Deep Field image, which revealed distant galaxies and reshaped our understanding of the universe, underscoring the role of chance in scientific progress. Image: NASA Read more: https://lnkd.in/eZaYtjMs

Drugs targeting the kidneys for the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus are a recent development, despite the long-known association between the disease and renal function. These drugs, called gliflozins, trace their origins to the chance relocation of a researcher’s apple orchard and the discovery of phlorizin, a compound found in apple tree bark. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/e_ftVnGz

The fruiting bodies of myxomycetes take on a wide range of shapes and sizes, but some have surface characteristics that make them appear beautifully iridescent. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/enekVF8k

What do Robert F. Kennedy, Eva Perón, Michael J. Fox, and Malala Yousafzai have in common? They have all had encounters with neurosurgery. In his recent book Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery, neurosurgeon Theodore H. Schwartz gives readers a fascinating window into a field of medicine that is a mystery to most people outside of the field, complete with compassion and even humor. Read more: https://lnkd.in/e7mm2juN

In his 1767 dissertation, Johannes Roos, a student of the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, likened the natural world to a vast, multivaulted museum. The largest rooms were public, open to all, but innumerable tiny rooms were locked, accessible only to specialists with the skill, and luck, to discover the keys. The microscope was Roos’s key to the smallest museum rooms—the mundus invisibilis (invisible world). Discover more: https://lnkd.in/gTxqky6T

Some restless infants don’t wait for birth to let out their first cry. They cry in the womb, a rare but well-documented phenomenon called vagitus uterinus (from the Latin word vagire, meaning to wail). Legend has it that Bartholomew the Apostle cried out in utero. The Iranian prophet Zarathustra is said to have been “noisy” before his birth. Accounts of vagitus uterinus appear in writings from Babylon, Assyria, ancient Greece, Rome, and India. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/eQ6yB88R

If you’ve ever yearned for a fresh take on the age-old questions “Are we alone?” and “Where did we come from?” then look no further than Sara Imari Walker’s new book, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eS4TyvMV