An artist’s impression of PSR J2322-2650b NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI) Astronomers have found what appears to be one of the strangest known worlds in the universe. It orbits a type of rapidly spinning neutron star called a pulsar – this in itself is unusual, but it is far from the weirdest thing about…
The Terra Hunting Experiment will track the wobbles of dozens of stars nightly for years in the most focused hunt yet for an Earth twin.
December 17, 2025 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Scientists Denounce Trump’s Plan to Kill Crucial Atmospheric Science Center The U.S. government is dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research, jettisoning key climate science projects in the process By Andrea Thompson edited by Claire Cameron Mesa Laboratory at The National Center for Atmospheric…
Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis debated the nature of galaxies like Andromeda in 1920 Bettmann/Getty Images; NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA; FM Archive/Alamy Astronomers and cosmologists aren’t known for being incredible at adjectives. Take the Very Large Telescope, or the European Extremely Large Telescope, or even the big bang. But they weren’t wrong about the 1920 event now referred…
3-D microscopy shows that the giant bacterium Thiovulum imperiosus squeezes its DNA into peripheral pouches, not a central mass like typical bacteria.
This article was made possible by the support of Yakult and produced independently by Scientific American’s board of editors. There are microbes living in medicine cabinets across the U.S., next to the aspirin and the Band-Aids. And people want them there. Indeed, consumers probably paid good money for them. Probiotics are capsules or pills with…
In the future, a caregiving machine might gently lift an elderly person out of bed in the morning and help them get dressed. A cleaning bot could trundle through a child’s room, picking up scattered objects, depositing toys on shelves and tucking away dirty laundry. And in a factory, mechanical hands may assemble a next-generation…
The most exciting rock known to science is a school-desk-sized chunk of mudstone currently stuck on Mars. Formed from fine, water-washed sediments on the floor of a long-lost lake—some 3.5 billion years ago, when Mars was a warmer, wetter world—the rock was found in 2024 by scientists using NASA’s Perseverance rover to explore what’s now…
The nine rectangles A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H and I overlap one another. Rectangle A intersects rectangles D and F; this relation can be written in shorthand as A(D, F). Furthermore, B(F, G) C(G, H) D(A, H) E(H, I) F(A, B, I) G(B, C, I) H(C, D, E) I(E, F, G) Label…
December 16, 2025 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm RFK, Jr.–Backed Lyme Disease Conspiracy Theory May Be Probed under New Bill President Donald Trump is expected to sign a defense bill this week that orders an investigation into whether the U.S. military bioengineered Lyme disease By Claire Cameron edited by Andrea Thompson Oleg…
