Are You A Scientific American?

I used to subscribe to this magazine while in high school. Now I just pick a copy up when I get a chance. I think I read my first copy of this magazine in a library, and took a liking to it. I recommend this magazine to anyone who is interested in science and in what our scientists are up to.

Compared To Other Science Magazines

This magazine is much more interesting and intellectual than Popular Science. Though it is not as "breakthrough" of a magazine as say Science. Despite this, I find Scientific American much more interesting than any other science magazine that I have yet read.

What I Like

Perhaps the best part of this magazine is the ratio of ads to columns. Many magazines these days have more ads than column, this is awful if you think about it. You are paying good money to get a book of advertisements. I would much rather pay an extra couple dollars for an improvement in content. Scientific American, however, has much more content than ads. In fact, most of their ads are actually pretty interesting.

Another great thing about Scientific American is the illustrations. Almost every article they feature, there are many pictures and graphs to help explain what they are talking about. Now, do not get me wrong. If you have no knowledge of science you may have no clue what they are talking about. However, for those of us with scientific knowledge they do make complicated articles much less complicated.

This magazine covers all areas of science and technology. Unlike some magazines that just cover the chemistry or the technology of science, this magazine covers it all. They tell you all about the newest technology, the newest breakthroughs in biology, chemistry, physics, and every other faction of science.

What I Dislike

The price, if you buy them one by one, is a little expensive. They only come out once a month, so the price is definitely easy, at five dollars a magazine at the newsstand plus tax. However, it is a much better deal to get a subscription. In this case you are spending about twenty-five dollars a year instead of fifty. So the price at the newsstand is a downer.

There is only one more thing I think the magazine could improve. While they do have comics they can be dry to those not interested in the topics. Not a single friend of mine has picked up this magazine from my coffee table. This shows me that instead of being tempting to new readers it is simply a magazine aimed at the science community. In order to get more people interested in science; they could have some more low key articles. Putting more articles in on off the wall stuff would make this work.

Aside from those two minor qualms I cannot think of another single thing I dislike about this magazine. As it is I am already nitpicking. This is really a great magazine.

Favorite Article

The best article I have read lately was in the Special Industry Report Section. It was titled The Business Of The Human Genome. This basically refers to the scientific project that has been going on for years called The Human Genome Project. I have particular interest in this project due to my high school biology teacher. He was asked to be a part of this project, because of the outstanding biology lab that we had. We had DNA replicators, synthesizers, and sequencers.

The Human Genome Project's goal was to basically read the entire DNA sequence of a human. They wanted to know exactly what the sequence of bases was that made up different genes. They succeeded recently, and supposedly we can get the entire sequence off of the Internet. The sequence basically shows what order guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine are present.

I like that this article shows all aspects of the project. It shows the past of the project, the present, and the future repercussions. It also shows all of the affects it will have on everything in technology, such as medicine.

The one thing I do not like about this article is that in all twenty something pages of it; there is only one advertisement. Now, how am I to make good purchasing decisions without having some annoying ads in the middle of that? I am, of course, kidding. This article was written amazingly well, and leaves nothing to the imagination, well maybe a little.

Recommendation

I recommend this magazine to anyone interested in science. Your brain will thank you for filling up on intellectual facts as opposed to what you get from watching the TV or from reading the liberal slanted newspaper. If you have never read this magazine before I encourage you to pick up a copy. You may like it enough to fill out one of those subscription cards in the middle. I think I may fill one out now, I missed this magazine.