Science

In a first for the U.S. Space Force since its inception six years ago, the military branch has announced the deployment of weapons in space. Speaking at the Air and…

The Fusion Industry Association dropped a white paper this week, and it’s aimed at a pretty specific audience: the Agreement States that’ll soon be responsible for licensing and overseeing commercial…

The mathematics community is still in shock. On September 8, 2026, OpenAI announced that an artificial intelligence model may have solved one of the most significant problems in the field,…

Supermassive black holes may have a much larger influence on their surroundings than scientists previously realized. New observations suggest that winds driven by these enormous objects can carry energy across…

Under the ocean, things aren’t quite so bright. Much of the Sun’s rays bounce right off the ocean’s surface, and the ones that do penetrate the water are absorbed and…

Cultural warning: This article discusses the deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, including through disease and frontier violence, and features images of deceased people. It’s difficult to comprehend…

WORD FREQUENCY “Discerning Chicks,” by Cody Cottier [Advances], describes the so-called bouba-kiki effect, in which people around the world think “bouba” sounds round and “kiki” sounds spiky. The effect may…

Image: © Anna Bliokh | iStock The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and the United States Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have announced a strategic partnership…

Quantum teleportation is poised to change the world. It sounds like science fiction – that the quantum state of one system can be transferred, or ‘teleported’, to another system a…

Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners. For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to our weekly news roundup. Last Friday marked the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks….

What was so special about Rushville, Nebraska? It seemed like this small Midwestern town was harboring more than just secrets, and the fifth episode of Lanterns confirmed just as much…

What This Story Is About Tennessee, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the United Kingdom are expanding their partnership to speed the development of commercial fusion energy. Why It Matters The…

The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has moved to lift all rules putting limits on greenhouse gas emissions from coal and natural gas–fueled power plants, a move that climate…

A volcanic eruption 22 million years ago froze a snapshot of the Andes in their youth, revealing a slow-and-steady formation of this formidable mountain range. The eruption, which originated from…

Everyone’s favorite Star Trek movie is different. And everyone’s least favorite Star Trek movie is different, too. What gets more interesting is the cinematic Treks that are neither bad nor…

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) announced that Hyundai Motor Group became an investor in its recent $1 billion fundraising round. This investment sparks a new partnership between the two companies, which…

Top mathematicians are increasingly pushing back against the tech industry’s artificial-intelligence-powered incursion into their field. A statement released last Friday and signed by 25 winners of the Fields Medal, math’s…

Scientists at the Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute (Stevens INI) at the Keck School of Medicine of USC have uncovered evidence that two neighboring types of brain…

Very few, if any, animals single-handedly represent an entire geological episode lasting nearly 100 million years.  But Tyrannosaurus rex is no regular animal. Furthering that fact, a spate of recent…

In women’s reproductive years, their brains are exposed to high levels of sex hormones, and their neurons may come to depend on those hormones to function optimally. But leading up…

Tapeworms are typically thought of as a gut problem: Eat undercooked meat and you could be left with an intestinal parasite. But there’s another, more unsettling way these creatures can…

Sep 14, 2026 At the headquarters of the start-up Focused Energy in Darmstadt, an industrial city in the western German state of Hesse, an international team of specialists is working…

The human brain is creatively malleable, producing breathtaking art such as The Starry Night (twice) and the Large Hadron Collider to reveal different sides of reality, including the bowling-pin-shaped atomic…

Fog has an eerie and enchanting way of coloring how humans perceive our surroundings—and scientists are discovering that the atmospheric phenomenon may remake microbes’ experience of their environment, too. Ecologists…

Underlying, less visible health problems sometimes manifest themselves through connected changes in the body that show up before any actual symptoms. These can be useful ‘warning signs’ for getting scans…

Plastic bottles and cookies may seem to have nothing in common, but researchers are finding a way to connect the two. By engineering yeast, scientists have developed a system that…

Most plants turn toward the Sun. Sunlight means food, energy, and life. But a tiny plant discovered on the shaded floor of a Thai forest appears determined to break that…

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. One of my first memories involves accidentally killing a robot. I was five years old when Tamagotchis first launched globally…

The largest global survey of physicists ever conducted has revealed just how unsettled some of the biggest questions in modern physics remain. Researchers found surprisingly little agreement on topics ranging…