Even before I could make out the silhouette of Platform Holly on the foggy horizon, I could see and smell oil. Ripples of iridescent liquid floated on the sea’s surface, reflecting the cloudy sky. But the oil wasn’t coming from...
How few corners can a shape have and still tile the plane?” mathematician Gábor Domokos asked me over pizza. His deceptively simple question was about the geometry of tilings, also called tessellations—arrangements of shapes, called tiles or cells, that fill...
The numbers in this triangle are arranged according to a certain system. What would the next row be?Show puzzle solutionIn each row n of the triangle, the integers from 1 to n are in alphabetical order. In the next row...
November 19, 20242 min readBook Review: An Expansive New Translation of a Haruki Murakami ClassicIn End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland, the title is flipped, but cyberpunk pleasures remainBy Matt Bell End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland: A...
The world is full of things to learn. Where to start? How to choose what to pay attention to? What motivates someone to seek new knowledge?The desire to learn is partly a preference for novelty: we tend to seek out...
Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science...
Remember ivermectin, the antiparasitic drug that right-wing media figures wrongly touted as a cure for COVID? How about hydroxychloroquine, the malaria treatment taken by thousands who then suffered side-effects after Donald Trump recommended it as a COVID treatment? And recall...
A southern giant hornet in ThailandRushen Southern giant hornets, a species native to Asia, have been sighted in Europe for the first time, raising concerns about their potential impact on native insects. Between 2022 and 2023, Omar Sánchez Fernández at...
Bluesky sign-ups continue to growAnna Barclay/Getty Images As a technology reporter, I like to think I’m an early adopter. I first signed up to the social network Bluesky around 18 months ago, when the platform saw a small surge in...
November 19, 20243 min readExotic Powder Pulls Carbon Dioxide from the Air at a Record RateA unique crystalline compound soaks up CO2 with great efficiencyBy Alec Luhn Boris Zhitkov/Getty ImagesThis story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean...
