Artist’s impression of sparks from flint and pyrite Craig Williams, The Trustees of the British Museum Around 400,000 years ago, a band of Neanderthals, or their ancestors, in Britain struck flint with pyrite and built a fire repeatedly in the same spot. Archaeologists studying the site think it is the earliest evidence of humans starting…
December 11, 2025 3 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Satirical Art Exhibit Takes on Tech Titans and Our AI Future Billionaire-headed machines lampoon tech power and the way our images quietly become fuel for AI By Deni Ellis Béchard edited by Eric Sullivan A wax head of Elon Musk is seen on a…
Scientists tested the approach on Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes, which are endemic to Tanzania, where they transmit malaria James Gathany/CDC via AP/Alamy A genetic technology known as a gene drive could help prevent malaria by spreading genes in wild mosquitoes that stop them transmitting the parasite. Tests in a lab in Tanzania have now confirmed that…
December 13, 2025 4 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Why Humanoid Robots Still Can’t Survive in the Real World General-purpose robots remain rare not for a lack of hardware but because we still can’t give machines the physical intuition humans learn through experience By Deni Ellis Béchard edited by Eric Sullivan BERLIN, GERMANY…
“I have never needed much of an excuse to throw myself into a cold lake…” Kajsa Swanson/Alamy I have come to realise that my day is littered with small rituals. Each morning, I stir a spoonful of creatine into my water, drink it to wash down a multivitamin, then eat some plain but bacteria-laden yogurt….
December 11, 2025 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm COVID Vaccines Slashed Kids’ ER Visits by 76 Percent, Study Finds A report published by the CDC reaffirms the effectiveness of COVID vaccines at preventing severe disease in children By Tanya Lewis edited by Andrea Thompson A child picks out a Band-Aid as he…
These beautiful, enigmatic images were captured by scientist and photographer Felice Frankel in her everyday life. Before you read further, see if you can tell what they depict – we’ll reveal all below each photograph. The images appear in Frankel’s new book Phenomenal Moments: Revealing the hidden science around us. Each close-up, many of which…
Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. In 2022 OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT onto the world. In the years following generative AI has wormed its way into our inboxes, our classrooms and our medical records, raising questions about what role these technologies should have in our society. A Pew…
There is a long history of doing physics by imagination. Albert Einstein built his special theory of relativity after imagining himself chasing a beam of light. Erwin Schrödinger gave us a cat that was both alive and dead. The German mathematician David Hilbert demonstrated the counterintuitiveness of infinity by imagining a hotel with an infinite…
December 12, 2025 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm In a First, Photos Show Moths Sipping a Moose’s Tears Moths sometimes drink the tears of other animals, but the behavior has mostly been observed in the tropics. New photographs show only the second observation outside of that area By Gennaro Tomma edited by…
