Students often receive feedback that conveys expectations linked to their socioeconomic background | Continue reading
Those fascinated with true crime podcasts may be more vulnerable to conspiratorial beliefs | Continue reading
As space agencies turn their gaze to the moon, we need to consider what werewolves might mean for lunar exploration—and vice versa | Continue reading
Postreproductive life was once thought to be confined to humans and a couple of toothed whales, but some wild chimpanzees experience it, too | Continue reading
Worsening heat waves in agricultural areas of the U.S. are affecting bird reproduction and nestling survival | Continue reading
“Pepper X” is officially the hottest pepper in the world, weighing in with 2.693 million Scoville heat units. The creator reveals his process and experience tasting the pepper | Continue reading
Researchers have documented that social media can harm teens | Continue reading
Flemmie Pansy Kittrell, the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in nutrition in 1936, showed the importance of good health and developed a program that became the model for Head Start | Continue reading
To improve machine learning, the answer might be taking a different approach to robot education rather than just feeding models more data | Continue reading
People may learn from and replicate the skewed perspective of an artificial intelligence algorithm, and they carry this bias beyond their interactions with the AI | Continue reading
Physicians need to be aware of how their choice of words and patient labels affect patients | Continue reading
Defunct satellites and other pieces of orbital debris are pumping metals into Earth’s fragile upper atmosphere, with effects unknown | Continue reading
Tropical Storm Otis rapidly intensified into a Category 5 hurricane overnight in a region that has never seen landfall by a storm of such power before | Continue reading
Temperatures are skyrocketing. Extinctions are accelerating. Groundwater is being depleted. Humanity can limit damage, but it will take collective global action | Continue reading
A planet-vaporizing impact is the leading explanation for a distant star’s curiously fluctuating light | Continue reading
Meat-eating may not have made us human after all, say paleoanthropologists | Continue reading
Can something spring back to life if it last moved around when woolly mammoths roamed the earth? The answer appears to be yes. | Continue reading
Lessons from how we tackled acid rain can be applied to our world today | Continue reading
Scientists have found a feedback loop between poor sleep and migraine attacks, and breaking the cycle could be key to treatments | Continue reading
In many places around the world, groundwater is being pumped out faster than nature replenishes it. A new model points to a possible solution | Continue reading
Strange patterns in the orbits of small objects in the outer solar system could be explained by gaps in our understanding of gravity rather than an as-yet-unseen new world | Continue reading
It’s possible for fossil-fuel demand to peak before the end of the decade, but emissions would still remain high enough to increase the global average temperature by more than two degrees Celsius, according to the World Energy Outlook | Continue reading
A recent study found that Hurricane Ian led to a spike in cases of vibriosis, a life-threatening illness caused by water-borne vibrio bacteria | Continue reading
While spicy food can cause pain, it isn’t linked to higher mortality rates | Continue reading
The overall picture of Earth’s health is grim, although there are bright spots: solar and wind power are on the rise, and deforestation has slowed | Continue reading
The number 1 is among the happiest numbers, 4 is sad, and both are narcissistic | Continue reading
Tiny mice found mummified at the summits of Andean volcanoes appear to be living in the harsh environment, which resembles Mars more than it does Earth | Continue reading
Tiny mice found mummified at the summits of Andean volcanoes appear to be living in the harsh environment, which resembles Mars more than it does Earth | Continue reading
As the climate warms, Arctic cyclones are lasting longer and becoming stronger, leading to more sea ice loss | Continue reading
In the rush to build and train ever-larger AI models, developers have swept up much of the searchable Internet, quite possibly including some of your own public (and possibly private) data. | Continue reading
A Stanford researcher is growing crystals on the International Space Station to withstand the extreme environments of Venus. | Continue reading
Researcher Debbie G. Senesky builds materials that can work on Venus | Continue reading
While contempt for news organizations is intense in the wake of Trump, archived hate mail to reporters shows that even in the 1950s—supposedly the height of public trust in journalism—some Americans always despised the press | Continue reading
A neural network can identify Wikipedia references that are unlikely to support an article’s claims—and scour the web for better sources | Continue reading
Superbolts of lightning that are up to 1,000 times more intense than ordinary lightning may form because of a particular setup between storm clouds and Earth’s surface | Continue reading
The downsides of spacefaring, infiltrating Florida’s gator poachers, and more books out this month | Continue reading
Coral trysts by moonlight in French Polynesia, polluted Antarctic wilderness, mummified bees in Portugal, and more in this month’s Quick Hits | Continue reading
The Cochrane Library, a trusted source of health information, misled the public by prioritizing rigor over reality | Continue reading
Science in meter and verse | Continue reading
Letters to the editors for the June 2023 issue of Scientific American | Continue reading
A new study finds that we respond to simple commands, such as smiling or frowning, in certain phases of sleep | Continue reading
If you’re a silphid beetle, a dead body is all your children really want, and it's your job—no matter how difficult it is—to get it for them. | Continue reading
Astronomers have found high-altitude clouds formed from quartz crystals on the gas-giant world WASP-17b | Continue reading
The Endangered Species Act requires that every U.S. plant and animal be saved from extinction, but after 50 years, we have to do much more to prevent a biodiversity crisis | Continue reading
Methane traps more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, but pulling it from the air could prove to be a more complex task than removing CO2 | Continue reading
A new study calculated the average “global human day,” revealing which activities take up most of our time | Continue reading
A new study calculated the average “global human day,” revealing which activities take up most of our time | Continue reading
The Greenland Ice Sheet could experience runaway melting if the world overshoots climate targets, but even then quick action could stabilize it | Continue reading