Most Popular Articles 2016

By The Editors

The most popular articles on our website over the year, 2016.

January 2, 2017

In compiling a top-10 list of the year’s most popular articles on American Scientist, we decided to look at what you—our readers—have been searching for, not only among our most recent issues but in our archives as well. So here are the most popular articles on our website for 2016.

A recent addition to the human family tree doesn't fit in clearly yet.
(July–August 2016 by John Hawks)

Representatives of <em>Homo naledi</em> stood between 140 and 160 centimeters tall, but had a brain that was quite small for this size. Also, their teeth more closely resemble those of earlier hominin species. <strong>Image courtesy of John Hawks.</strong>

Pulsed terawatt lasers create some surprising effects when shone through the air—including the channeling of light.
(March-April 2006 by Jérôme Kasparian)

In an experiment to test how well the Teramobile system works when the air is not clear, an artificial cloud of water droplets was formed within this 10-meter-long pipe. To the delight of the author and his colleagues, the droplets did not block the propagation of light filaments. Why not? Although such droplets may extinguish a filament in one position, the scattered photons then contribute to the formation of a new filament elsewhere. <strong>Photograph courtesy of Alexis Gratié/DAVM/Université Lyon 3</strong>

New evidence points to an alternative explanation for a civilization’s collapse. (September–October 2006 by Terry Hunt)

British artist William Hodges traveled to Easter Island (or Rapa Nui, as the island’s inhabitants refer to it) in the 1770s, inspiring this painting of several of the stone statues that have made this locale famous. The island continues to draw both tourists and scientists, in part because of the mystery surrounding the fate of its civilization. A popular account of Rapa Nui’s history casts the inhabitants as the perpetrators and victims of an ecological catastrophe that resulted from overexploiting the island’s resources. New evidence from archaeological work and comparative ecology, however, reveals that this story may need to be rewritten. <strong>National Maritime Museum, London</strong>

Untangling this constant from Le Gran K could provide a new definition of the gram. (March–April 2007 by Ronald Fox and Theodore Hill)

For the past 117 years Avogadro's number, the number of molecules in a mole of a given substance, has been approximated by experimental methods based on a kilogram cylinder of metal. In 1983, when the speed of light was specified as an integer, Avogadro's number became the last fundamental constant to be based on such an artifact. The authors propose to remedy that inconsistency by choosing an integer value for the constant.

Few remember the man who discovered the “molecule of life” three-quarters of a century before Watson and Crick revealed its structure.
(July–August 2008 by Ralf Dahm)

DNA’s double helix is so iconic that it even appears in artwork. The molecule’s structure was elucidated in the 1950s, although DNA was discovered long before. In the late 1860s, a Swiss researcher named Friedrich Miescher stumbled across the molecule and then worked meticulously to isolate it from several types of cells. <strong>GIPhotoStock Z/Alamy</strong>

These ambling, eight-legged microscopic “bears of the moss” are cute, ubiquitous, all but indestructible, and a model organism for teaching science.
(September–October 2011 by William R. Miller)

In space, flames don’t extinguish under the same low-oxygen conditions that would put them out on Earth, setting the stage for dangerous flare-ups.
(January–February 2016 by Indrek S. Wichman, Sandra L. Olson, Fletcher J. Miller, and Ashwin Hariharan)

In microgravity, flames given so little oxygen that on Earth they would extinguish, do not go out but break up into tiny, two-dimensional caps called flamelets. Much like smoldering coals in a banked hearth, these flamelets can persist for long periods under near-limit conditions and, if oxygen is reintroduced, ignite a larger flame, with serious implications for fire safety on space missions. <strong>Image courtesy of Indrek S. Wichman, Sandra L. Olson, Fletcher J. Miller, and Ashwin Hariharan.</strong>

At one time or another, most of us have proved empirically, and painfully, the old mother’s tale that it’s possible to get sunburned on a cloudy day.
(May–June 2006 by David Schoonmaker)

Ultraviolet radiation can be enhanced well above clear-sky values on cloudy days, especially when there are cirrus and cumulus clouds in the sky. <strong>G. Schuster/zefa/Corbis</strong>

If the reader is to grasp what the writer means, the writer must understand what the reader needs.
(November–December 1990 by George Gopen and Judith Swan)
Update (January, 2018): This article was republished in 2008 in a "classics" section of our old website no longer available. The full feature is now available in The Long View blog.

It may seem obvious that a scientific document is incomplete without the interpretation of the writer; it may not be so obvious that the document cannot "exist" without the interpretation of each reader.

Having babies isn’t easy—and the standard explanation may be wrong.
(November–December 2013 by Pat Shipman)

The obstetrical dilemma hypothesis postulates that newborn brain size is limited by the disadvantages to the mother’s locomotion posed by wider hips. The energetics-of-gestation-and-growth hypothesis postulates that the baby’s head size is limited by the metabolic cost to the mother of carrying a large baby. <strong>Illustration by Tom Dunne.</strong>

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