Watching the solar eclipse in Menan, Idaho in 2017 Natalie Behring/Getty Images As one year draws to a close, I like to get excited about what the year ahead has in store for me in terms of astronomical events, and pop them in my calendar. For 2026, top of my list are the planets lining…
December 9, 2025 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Breakthrough in Digital Screens Takes Color Resolution to Incredibly Small Scale These miniature displays can be the size of your pupil, with as many pixels as you have photoreceptors—opening the way to improved virtual reality By Simon Makin edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier Visual…
Sample New Scientist’s bucket list of all-time cultural greats this holiday season Bill McConkey Time flows ever onwards with reassuring uniformity – at least, that’s how it feels to mere mortals unplugged from the weirder parts of physics. But everyone knows that the exception to this rule is the period between Christmas and New Year,…
The world may seem orderly, but randomness and chaos shape everything in the universe, from enormous galaxies all the way down to subatomic particles. Take a chilly window sheeting over with ice: even one oddly shaped snowflake can exert an influence on the final frosty pattern. Understanding how random fluctuations can ripple out to produce…
Whatever you’re tucking into this festive season, chances are you didn’t have to kill it yourself or forage it from the wild. For that, you can thank your ancestors who, starting around 10,000 years ago, pulled off one of humanity’s most dramatic transformations: they began shifting from their traditional lifestyle of hunting and gathering to…
December 8, 2025 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm This Weekend’s Geminids Meteor Shower Should Be Spectacular As far as annual meteor showers are concerned, 2025 has saved the best for last. This year’s Geminids are not to be missed By Lee Billings edited by Clara Moskowitz The Geminid meteor shower, as seen…
Adobe Stock Photo/Phoebe Watts A blue Earth ascends over the barren surface of the moon, against the black void of space. This famous photograph, Earthrise, was taken on Christmas Eve of 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders. After almost six decades, we take this image for granted. But imagine a different Earthrise, in which…
Climate journalist Emma Pattee has been worried about the so-called big one—an off-the-charts earthquake—hitting her town in Portland, Ore., for some time now. She’s not alone: scientists estimate at least a 37 percent likelihood that such a temblor will strike the Pacific Northwest, which sits along the Cascadia subduction zone, in the next 50 years….
Lyndon Stratford / Alamy Stock P In a grey-walled room in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, a strange activity is underfoot. Wearing a cap covered in sensors and positioning themselves into a chair, a person places their bare feet over two holes in a platform. Beneath this lies a robot, which uses a metal probe…
December 10, 2025 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Uterine Fibroids Significantly Raise Risk of Heart Disease In a new study, women diagnosed with these common growths had a more than 80 percent higher risk of developing heart disease over a 10-year period than their peers did By Claire Cameron edited by Clara…
