November 13, 20244 min readThe U.S. Must Lead the Global Fight against SuperbugsAntimicrobial resistance could claim 39 million lives by 2050, yet the pipeline for new antibiotics is drying up. U.S. policy makers can help fix itBy Howard DeanColored scanning...
November 13, 20245 min readThe Mathematical Mind Offers Neuroscientists a Master Class in ConcentrationExpertise bulks up the brain’s ability to think deeply, a skill that may generalize across tasksBy Hanna Poikonen Malte Mueller/Getty ImagesThink of the last time you concentrated...
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Plenty of us only think about insects when we’re trying to keep them out of our homes. But the truth is that our fates and fortunes are totally intertwined with...
Eurasian reed warblers migrate between Europe and AfricaAGAMI Photo Agency / Alamy Stock Many migratory birds use Earth’s magnetic field as a compass, but some can also use information from that field to determine more or less where they are...
Wildfires in the tropics drove some increase in CO2 emissions but the bulk was driven by burning fossil fuelsCarl De Souza/AFP/Getty Images Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels in 2024 are set to blow past last year’s record levels,...
Fruit-flavored gummies. Tinctures. Creams.Today’s cannabis is not simply dried flowers in plastic baggies or the special ingredient in dorm-room brownies. These days, it comes in candy form, suppositories and even vaporizable dab and wax concentrates. This new cannabis is heavily...
If you cook with stainless steel pans, you are probably familiar with the Leidenfrost effectFranck Celestini A jet of liquid can bounce off of a hot plate without ever touching it. This extension of the Leidenfrost effect – the phenomenon...
Predicting how trees grow could help guide planting efforts in urban areas such as New York CityYukinori Hasumi/Getty Images Artificial intelligence coupled with Google Street View images has created hundreds of thousands of “digital twins” of trees across North America....
The International Space StationMSFC/NASA Samantha Harvey, who has won the UK’s top fiction award, the Booker prize, for her novel Orbital, has created a new genre: nature writing about space. “I see it as a kind of space pastoral,” Harvey...
Space explorers need grit, strength and resolve to navigate the hostile environments beyond Earth. This might explain why around 60 percent of NASA’s astronauts have come from military service. A smaller fraction have had medical experience. And Jonny Kim is...
