Anthony Fauci became a household name during the COVID pandemic. But the genially stubborn infectious disease doctor, who spent decades helming one the U.S. government’s most important medical research institutes, had made his mark well before that.Born and raised in...
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to the second episode of our Friday Fascination miniseries “The New Conservationists.” Today we’re heading into the field, under the sea and to the savanna, with researchers...
Beer is best served cold, and it turns out that math can help with that. Cláudio de Castro Pellegrini of the Federal University of São João del-Rei in Brazil recently set out to formulate an equation to determine the optimal...
December 16, 20243 min readThe 6 Most Hilarious Things We Learned about Animals in 2024From a comb jelly with two butts to wing-slapping ants, this animal research made us laugh this yearBy Andrea Thompson Ken Griffiths/Alamy Stock PhotoScience has the...
How this moment for AI will change society forever (and how it won't)There is no doubt that the latest advances in artificial intelligence from OpenAI, Google, Baidu and others are more impressive than what came before, but are we in...
An adult skull from the Charterhouse Warren mass grave in the UK, featuring cut marks and a blunt force fractureIan R. Carwright/Institute of Archaeology Oxford University Around 4000 years ago, at least 37 men, woman and children were brutally butchered,...
As the end of 2024 approaches, I would like to say a big thank you to everyone who has shared their dilemmas with me over the past year. For my festive column, let us address a nearly universal complaint: holiday...
The vampire-like Hylomys macarong hedgehogAlexei V. Abramov An extraordinary 234 new species were described by scientists in the Greater Mekong region of South-East Asia in 2023. The finds, announced in a report from conservation organisation WWF, include 173 species of...
A category of synthetic organisms dubbed “mirror life,” whose component molecules are mirror images of their natural counterpart, could pose unprecedented risks to human life and ecosystems, according to a perspective article by leading experts, including Nobel Prize winners. The...
Climbing rates of colon and rectal cancer among people under 50 years old is a striking recent trend that has alarmed and puzzled clinicians racing to figure out why. Now a new study published in Gut offers what might be...
