It’s always amazing, and more than a little humbling, when the universe reminds us that our “common sense” is provincial, falling apart on cosmic scales. If you’re on the surface of Earth—and I’m betting you are—there are many ways to reliably estimate the distance to some object. One we use almost subconsciously is to compare…
December 5, 2025 3 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Aluminum Is Crucial to Vaccines—And Safe. Why Are CDC Advisers Debating It? RFK Jr.’s vaccine advisory panel will be discussing the inclusion of adjuvants in childhood vaccinations today. Here’s what’s at stake By Heidi Ledford & Nature magazine Many childhood vaccines contain small amounts…
A scientist has identified a possible astronomical explanation for the Star of Bethlehem, as described in the Bible
In 2008 Ecuador ratified a new national constitution with a radical addition. In the first national declaration of its kind, articles 71 to 74 of the document granted rights to nature, recognizing Pacha Mama, or Mother Earth, as a living entity with the rights to exist, persist and be restored when damaged. In his latest…
December 4, 2025 Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Why Leftover Pizza Might Actually Be Healthier Researchers have discovered that cooling starchy foods—from pizza to rice—creates “resistant starch,” a carb that behaves like fiber and alters your blood sugar response By Tom Lum edited by Kelso Harper This video is part of “Innovations In: Type 1…
The Tsimané people in Bolivia consider humility to be a sign of a worthwhile individual David Mercado/Reuters It is a trope so well worn that it has become a cliché: hunter-gatherers sharing their spoils equally among the tribe with a noble generosity absent from high-income societies. Only it isn’t an accurate picture, according to a…
December 6, 2025 5 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Are We Seeing the First Steps Toward AI Superintelligence? Today’s leading AI models can already write and refine their own software. The question is whether that self-improvement can ever snowball into true superintelligence By Deni Ellis Béchard edited by Eric Sullivan KTSDESIGN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY…
A simulated image representing the projected contamination by satellite trails in a future space telescope image NASA / Borlaff, Marcum, Howell One in three images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope could be ruined if space companies’ plans to launch hundreds of thousands of satellites go ahead. More than three-quarters of the nearly 14,000 satellites…
A full decade after SpaceX pioneered reusable rocketry with the first-ever successful landing of its Falcon 9 booster, the rest of the world is finally catching up. The revolutionary value of rapid, reusable transportation to orbit is indisputable, evinced by SpaceX’s overwhelming dominance of space launch services and its profitable—and disruptive—megaconstellation of Starlink broadband satellites,…
In The Occupant, Abby (Ella Balinska) struggles across Georgian wilds TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy Some ideas are so compelling, so intuitive, one would sooner recycle them than take them apart to explore. So, in 1950, Isaac Asimov fixed up some puzzle stories into a fiendish, Agatha Christie-in-space sci-fi novel, I, Robot, while in 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space…
