Righting a man’s microbial wrongs stopped his body from producing intoxicating amounts of alcohol Science Photo Library / Alamy A man in Massachusetts whose gut started brewing its own alcohol, which made him heavily intoxicated, has finally recovered after swallowing multiple doses of bacteria from a healthy person’s faeces. The man, a retired US Marine…
Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. Over the past few years GLP-1 drugs have gone from relatively obscure diabetes medications to household names for weight loss. The trend really took off in 2021, when the FDA approved semaglutide for weight loss, sold under the brand names Ozempic…
Quantum computers could benefit from a path around the Heisenberg uncertainty principle Marijan Murat/dpa/Alamy The Heisenberg uncertainty principle puts a limit on how precisely we can measure certain properties of quantum objects. But researchers may have found a way to bypass this limitation using a quantum version of a neural network. Given, for example, a…
January 9, 2026 4 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Stevie Wonder’s Rule for AI at CES: ‘Make Life Better for the Living’ At CES 2026, Stevie Wonder offered a simple test for tech. And in the smart glasses boom, the most persuasive tools aren’t about perfect sight but day-to-day independence. By Eric Sullivan…
Microbial activity in the gut might affect our quality of sleep Oleksandra Troian / Alamy We know that diet has a role in sleep conditions – and now it seems that dietary fibre in particular might help address them. Links have previously been found between several sleep conditions and the gut microbiome, especially through a…
NASA’s unprecedented decision to prematurely end a mission to the International Space Station (ISS) because of a sick astronaut is shining a light on how the agency prepares for medical problems and emergencies in space. The decision, announced by NASA’s new administrator Jared Isaacman during a press briefing on Thursday, marks the first time any…
Trees floating towards the Arctic Ocean Carl Christoph Stadie/The Alfred Wegener Institute Cutting down swathes of boreal forest and sinking the trees into the depths of the Arctic Ocean could remove up to 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. Coniferous trees prone to wildfires could be felled and carried to…
Astronomers have spotted a distant star that seems to have exploded twice. The blast may be the first-ever known “superkilonova” — a chimera of a supernova and a neutron star merger, researchers report in the Dec. 20 Astrophysical Journal Letters. “The reason it would be amazing if true is that this would be producing objects…
No one likes to do something they find unpleasant. Who among us hasn’t put off icky things such as a tedious work assignment, a fridge deep clean or a difficult conversation? The reason why someone just can’t seem to get started isn’t a mere failure of willpower: it is rooted in neurobiology. In a new…
The four crew members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-11 mission to the International Space Station SpaceX For the first time, astronauts are being evacuated from the International Space Station (ISS) for medical reasons. The exact nature of the “medical situation” has not been identified for privacy reasons, nor has the astronaut it has affected. But four…
