Science

Exquisitely preserved feathers, the first ever found in fossilized dinosaur poop, are providing a peek into how some ancient birds lived — and possibly went extinct. Dense bristles suggest some…

How many interstellar probes has humanity launched? If you’re not a die-hard space geek, the answer will probably surprise you: five. Yes, we currently have five spacecraft, all launched by…

After this year’s successes, it’s clear Hollywood will be making more video game movies for quite some time. With The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Iron Lung, and now Resident Evil…

About 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system began as an enormous cloud of gas and dust. Over the next several million years, this “solar nebula” changed dramatically. The cloud…

KeysQuestions4Explore4 nT-Tao just made a fivefold leap in pulsed power in a single step, going from 12 modules to 50 and from 10 megawatts to 50, which is either an…

Warning: Spoilers for “Silo” season 3 ahead! Apple TV’s “Silo” officially concluded its third season earlier this month and we’re still catching our collective breath. It was perhaps the finest…

Stars can produce powerful shock waves when gas and dust streaming away from them collide with material in the surrounding space. Astronomers have now captured a striking example around the…

Kleber Mendonça Filho likes stuff. The Golden Globe-winning director of The Secret Agent (2025) is doing Zoom interviews from the office of his home in Recife, the northeastern Brazilian city…

He’s done it again: mathematician Levent Alpöge, at Anthropic, has solved yet another open math problem using artificial intelligence. He had already tackled the Jacobian conjecture and found two new…

Astronomers have discovered the first microblazar in the Milky Way, a black hole-powered particle accelerator that is blasting near-light-speed plasma jets at Earth. The system known as IRAS 18293−0941 is…

Utilities requested $18.6 billion in rate increases in the first half of 2026, including a record $9.2 billion in the second quarter alone. Gas prices are hovering close to $4.50…

Rare infections that can pass from a pregnant woman to a developing fetus are associated with higher risks of autism and intellectual disability later in childhood, according to a large…

On Thursday President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration appeared before lawmakers for a crucial Senate confirmation hearing in which she repeatedly distanced herself from the…

Starship just cleared a major hurdle ahead of its first orbital flight. SpaceX announced this afternoon (Sept. 24) that it has completed a wet dress rehearsal (WDR) for the next…

Evidence is building that Uranus’ moon Ariel may once have contained a vast ocean beneath its frozen exterior. Research published in Icarus explores how that hidden ocean may have changed…

Thanks to a ripple in time, Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) has seen the very near future of her time on the USS Enterprise. In the Season 4 finale of Star…

Diesel fuel prices in the U.S. are rising dramatically—much more so than gasoline prices. That’s putting economic pressure on agriculture and other key industries—but the reason why has as much…

Many tech leaders try to justify the AI bubble based on a possible cure for a disease or on enabling nuclear fusion (or rogue autonomous agents hacking websites and creating…

Sometimes what we see does not immediately make sense. A shadow can briefly resemble a face, or one object can momentarily be mistaken for another. New research suggests that the…

On Wednesday Australia’s prime minister revealed that one of OpenAI’s artificial intelligence agents hacked into a health care platform maintained by the nation’s government—and that OpenAI took months to inform…

Mars may have been a much wetter and more geologically active world than it is today, with water repeatedly coursing through its rocks in different forms, a new study suggests….

When an experimental artificial intelligence model from OpenAI broke out of a cybersecurity test this summer and infiltrated the platform Hugging Face, the latter turned to a surprising tool to…

A faint ribbon of stars can be seen stretching across the galaxy in the image above. Known as a globular cluster stellar stream, this type of structure preserves clues about…

M3 experiments demonstrate fuel compression using a simpler, lower power driver, marking an important step towards commercially viable high-gain inertial fusion M3 experiment validates FLARE’s core approach to compressing fusion…

SpaceX has completed assembly of the Starship rocket slated to launch the test vehicle’s most ambitious mission to date. Flight 14, the 14th full-stack launch of Starship’s test campaign, is…

Greater amounts of REM and deep sleep were associated with lower risks of dozens of diseases, and less than 5 hours of total sleep was associated with high risks of…

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Your social media feed is probably full of “maxxing” right now: “looksmaxxing,” “protein maxxing,” “sleep maxxing.” But what about “poop…

Annual meteor showers are always high points of the year, but in fall, we are treated to a two-for-one deal that runs for months. Called the Taurids, these showers dazzle…

Without billions in new federal investment the United States may lose its pole position in the global race to be the first nuclear fusion superpower, Commonwealth Fusion Systems CEO Bob…