You might not have heard of leucovorin, but it is being championed by the US government to address rising rates of autism Hannah Beier/Reuters The US government made waves last year when it announced it would be approving the little-known drug leucovorin for children with cerebral folate deficiency, a condition that appears to be connected…
Some baby ants don’t ask for help when they contract deadly infections — they ask to be killed. Terminally ill worker ant pupae actively emit a “find me and destroy me” chemical signal, prompting other workers to eliminate them, behavioral ecologist Sylvia Cremer and colleagues report December 2 in Nature Communications. This final altruistic act…
January 5, 2026 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Why Does Life Keep Evolving These Geometric Patterns? A global catalog shows how creatures across the tree of life balance rigidity with flexibility in remarkably consistent ways By Anirban Mukhopadhyay edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier The same tile structures with soft joints between are…
Neutrinos rarely interact with normal matter Shutterstock / betibup33 Notoriously ghostly particles called neutrinos may have revealed a crack in our understanding of all the particles and forces in the universe. The standard model of particle physics, which catalogues all the particles and forces we know to exist, is one of the biggest successes of…
Is it an asteroid or an alien in Van Jensen’s Godfall? Shutterstock / Vadim Sadovski Welcome to January, a month when many of us are keen to escape from the world into the pages of a book. Thankfully, science fiction is here to help, whether that’s with a story set on a generation ship where things aren’t as they seem, courtesy of…
For me, this year is going to be all about self-care via the stars. It has been 20 years since I first felt palpable envy at someone being able to navigate the night sky. In 2006, I was at a conference in La Jolla, California, reporting for New Scientist. Among the delegates was astrophysicist Neil…
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Strife will be a highlight of March Joby Sessions/SFX Magazine/Future via Getty Images I may have to eat my hat later, but I reckon 2026 is shaping up to be an excellent year for science fiction. With eight months of books announced, the table is already loaded with delightful offerings. In…
plainpicture/Michiru Nakayama Lots of science books will be published over the course of the coming year – tonnes, in fact. After spending last month wading through the books and publisher catalogues that came into our offices, I have decided on the science books that I am most excited about, arranged in categories so it is…
A drastic surge in demand has put drugs like Wegovy, Victoza and Ozempic in short supply Michael Siluk/Alamy The blockbuster weight-loss drug semaglutide and its rivals promise to help reverse the global obesity epidemic – if only more of the people who would benefit from these treatments could afford them. But this year could see…
Russia shows off its weaponry at a military parade in Moscow Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images In February 2026, for the first time in decades, there will be no active treaty limiting the size of the US and Russian nuclear arsenals. Experts are divided on whether the New START treaty genuinely made the world safer, but there…
