In PEAK, your survival often depends on the tools you find. You’ll find a bunch of creative and unexpected tools, but only a few are as strange and effective as the Magic Bean. At first glance, it ...

Besides the fact that this is bean-harvest season, it’s a good time to think about incorporating this highly nutritious and health-promoting food into our meal plans. Beans are legumes — plants with ...

Enchanted beans are no longer a fairy tale proposition for agriculture. Thumb-sized plastic beans, packed with a world of sensor circuitry, might soon be ready for grain bins and storage facilities.

The Magic Bean in PEAK is one of those things that seems so weird yet brilliant at the same time. It looks harmless, as it's just a small pink seedling with a little green sprout; however, once you ...

When Brian DeDecker drives past the bucolic green soybean fields en route to his childhood home in rural Illinois, his mind drifts not to the past but to the future. As a first-generation college ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American A friend of mine once recounted his evening ...