COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago (centre) with his advisers and UN climate secretary Simon Stiell (left) Pablo PORCIUNCULA / AFP via Getty Images The United Nations COP30 climate summit in Brazil was flooded by torrential rainfall, stormed by protesters and partially burned down by an electrical fire. The final session was briefly suspended due…
November 24, 2025 4 min read Psychedelics and Immortality Take Center Stage at MAHA Summit The Make America Healthy Again summit, attended by RFK, Jr., and J.D. Vance, gave a sense of what’s driving U.S. health policy By Max Kozlov & Nature magazine Vice President J.D. Vance (right) and Secretary of Health and Human Services…
Climate campaigners march on the sidelines of the COP30 summit in Belém, Brazil PABLO PORCIUNCULA/AFP via Getty Images Ten years on from the Paris Agreement, we should be seeing a massive ratcheting up of climate action. Instead, the past four years have seen almost no progress – including at the latest COP summit, which failed…
November 24, 2025 3 min read First Human Dies of Rare H5N5 Bird Flu Strain. Here’s What You Need to Know H5N1 bird flu has been circulating in U.S. wildlife since late 2021 but has caused only one human fatality. Now a different type of bird flu has also caused a death By Meghan Bartels…
The swimming machinery of sperm has ancient origins Christoph Burgstedt/Alamy The evolutionary origin of sperm can be traced back to a single-celled ancestor of all living animals. Almost all animals reproduce by having a single-celled stage of their life cycle, involving two types of sex cells, or gametes. Eggs are larger cells containing genetic material…
Bats beware. The ability to fly won’t save you from hungry, determined rats. In a first, brown rats were filmed hunting bats by catching them midair. The finding, published in the November Global Ecology and Conservation, puts a spotlight on bat conservation in urban areas. The observation happened by chance, says Florian Gloza-Rausch, a biologist at…
November 24, 2025 5 min read Is the U.S. in Store for Another Brutal Flu Season? U.S. flu rates remain low, but experts are keeping an eye on a new strain that’s been linked to unexpectedly early and severe seasons in several other countries By Lauren J. Young edited by Tanya Lewis Influenza is picking…
The ball rolls across the floor because it was kicked, just as Earth orbits the sun because it is tugged by gravity. The connection between cause and effect is fundamental to how we understand the world – or at least, it is for the world we see, governed by classical physics. Notoriously, everything gets murkier…
Takanori Takebe is on a mission to find out if people can breathe through their butts. As a medical doctor and stem cell biologist, Takebe spends most of his time trying to develop lab-made livers to treat organ failure. His side quest to explore backside breathing began several years ago, when his father caught pneumonia…
Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to our weekly science news roundup. Let’s kick things off with some climate news. Last week the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference, better known as COP, wrapped up in Brazil. I talked to Zoya Teirstein, a senior staff…
