Scientific American Video

Synthetic biology is the attempt to make life more or less from scratch. It could have huge implications for everything from biofuels to drug synthesis. Not to mention the whole playing God thing.

DARPA's grand challenge required that a driverless car navigate traffic, obstacles, all the things you'd find in a real driving situation - watch as "Boss," does its thing.

The winner of the DARPA grand challenge had to do much more than navigate a driving course -- this driverless car, nicknamed "boss," also had to avoid traffic and other obstacles. An interview.

At the beginning of '07 Bill Gates wrote an article for Scientific American about our robot-filled future. We got a chance to follow up with him on that vision at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show.

Microsoft Surface is a touch-sensitive technology that is part of Microsoft's new push to give computers more natural interfaces. Gates sat down and gave Scientific American a tour.

CES happens every year in Vegas, the only convention complex big enough to accomodate all the vendors that flock there every year.

Knowing when a volcano will erupt is as important to our safety as it is to governments who might want to use artificially induced volcanic eruptions as a superweapon...

When you're concentrating on something and miss something else that should be obvious, that's the attentional blink. New research shows that meditators can avoid this gap in perception.

Explaining evo-devo and the Pax-6 gene in just under a couple minutes, using borrowed metaphors and cut-rate special effects, has never been this fun (before)!

If one day all humans vanished, our infrastructure would collapse surprisingly quickly -- in some cases, within days

Moore's Law says that the power (or number of transistors) of microchips doubles every 18 months - but what does that really mean? You'd be surprised...

Dark matter is weird stuff - you can't see it or touch it, yet it's all around us. And it's literally holding the galaxy together. Come along as Scientific American editor George Musser explains what it's all about -- in about a minute and a half, using nothing but stuff he has in his office - not a trivial feat!