December 4, 2025 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Can We Image Alien Earths? This Newfound Object Could Show the Way Using direct imaging, astronomers have found a brown dwarf that could help test technology for taking snapshots of Earth-like exoplanets By Claire Cameron edited by Lee Billings The coronagraph for NASA’s Roman…
Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more Locked out The phrase “you couldn’t make it up”, Feedback feels, is often misunderstood. It doesn’t mean there are limits to the imagination, but rather that there are some developments you can’t include in a fictional story because people would…
In Common Side Effects, Marshall makes a key discovery Warner Bros. Discovery Cataclysms, conspiracies and rebellions featured in many of 2025’s biggest sci-fi shows. And while all that instability reflects poorly on the state of our world, at least it did make for fantastic television. Here are six series that should be on your to-watch…
Each year around this time, we ask the staff of Scientific American to recommend the best books they read this year. Here are the 67 new favorites and old classics that kept us turning the pages in 2025. Happy reading! Jump to your favorite section here: On supporting science journalism If you’re enjoying this article,…
Could the super-rich be secretly pursuing human cloning? Juan Roballo/Shutterstock Over decades of covering the incredible advances being made in biology, I’ve seen how some ideas become fashionable, get intense media coverage for a few years, and then fade from public view again. Take human cloning. After the first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, hit…
Scientists announced on Wednesday that they have found no evidence for the hypothetical “sterile neutrino,” an extra version of the ghostly neutrino particles that are ubiquitous in the universe. The finding comes from the U.S. Department of Energy–run Fermilab’s MicroBooNE experiment. Sterile neutrinos are a popular theoretical prediction because they could help explain the cosmos’…
Camera trap photo of a Sumatran tiger in the Leuser ecosystem, Indonesia Figel et al. 2025, BKSDA-Aceh, DLHK A camera trap survey has identified more than double the number of critically endangered Sumatran tigers than studies have found elsewhere on the Indonesian island, in a positive sign for protection efforts. Sumatran tigers are the last…
December 3, 2025 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Autonomous Deep-Sea Robots to Lead New Search for Missing Flight MH370 Texas-based firm Ocean Infinity will send swarms of autonomous underwater vehicles into the southern Indian Ocean in a high-risk attempt to locate this missing jet By Eric Sullivan edited by Claire Cameron ROB…
Spider silk threads Martin J. Ramirez/Royal Society Publishing These twisting threads wrapped in thinner, looping strands are the silk of an Australian net-casting spider (Asianopis subrufa), a consummate ambush predator. Instead of building a web and waiting for prey to fall into it, this spider holds its net in its front four legs and throws…
On August 16, 2012, residents of the tiny Dutch village of Huizinge were rattled by an inexplicably large 3.6 magnitude earthquake. Gas extraction in the nearby Groningen gas field, one of the largest onshore gas fields in the world, was the trigger. The area typically does not experience natural earthquakes, and this was the worst…
