November 19, 2025 2 min read JWST May Have Seen the First Stars in the Universe Although these findings from JWST are yet to be confirmed, they mark the closest astronomers have come to locating the universe’s most ancient stars By Humberto Basilio edited by Claire Cameron & Lee Billings Galaxy cluster MACS0416 magnifies the…
Quantum 2.0 visits the edges of our knowledge about the quantum world RICHARD KAIL/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Quantum 2.0Paul Davies, Penguin (UK, out 27th November); University of Chicago Press (US, out February 2026) Physicist Paul Davies’s Quantum 2.0: The past, present and future of quantum physics ends on a beautiful note. “To be aware of the…
November 19, 2025 3 min read Fluoride in Tap Water Not Linked to Lower Child IQ, Massive Study Finds Researchers tracked thousands of Americans for decades, finding no links between ingesting recommended levels of fluoride and lower cognitive skills By Humberto Basilio edited by Claire Cameron Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images A new decades-long study has found…
The warming of the Arctic Ocean now reaches to its deepest waters Mozgova/Shutterstock Warmer Atlantic water from near Greenland is heating up the depths of the Arctic Ocean, which was previously thought of as one of the few places not significantly affected by climate change. The sea ice on top of the Arctic Ocean has…
The Arctic char, a red-pink bellied relative of trout and salmon, is a staple food source for millions of people living in the Arctic. But that dynamic is being embrangled by climate change, as the Arctic is warming two to four times faster than the rest of the world. Marianne Falardeau, a polar marine ecologist…
November 19, 2025 3 min read Kissing May Have Evolved 21.5 Million Years Ago Humans and their ancestors have likely been kissing for a very long time By Stephanie Pappas edited by Jeanna Bryner Photo by Stefano Bianchetti/Getty Images; Illustration by Scientific American For humans, kissing holds major cultural cachet, accompanying confessions of romantic love,…
A mosquito proboscis adapted as a nozzle for a 3D printer Changhong Cao et al. 2025 A severed mosquito proboscis can be turned into an extremely fine nozzle for 3D printing, and this could help create replacement tissues and organs for transplants. Changhong Cao at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and his colleagues developed the…
Flu vaccines that take a page from the COVID-19 vaccine platform are making progress in clinical trials. In a phase 3 trial, Pfizer’s mRNA flu vaccine outperformed a traditional vaccine, researchers report in the Nov. 20 New England Journal of Medicine. The trial compared the two vaccines during the 2022–2023 flu season, assessing whether the…
November 19, 2025 2 min read NASA’s Latest Images Bring Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Into View NASA spacecraft across the inner solar system captured new views of Comet 3I/ATLAS—the third known interstellar object By Meghan Bartels edited by Claire Cameron This movie shows Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) observations of Comet 3I/ATLAS from…
An artist’s impression of the Kuiper belt ESO/M. Kornmesser The Kuiper belt, a disc of icy rocks on the outermost edges of the solar system, seems to have more structure than we thought. In 2011, researchers found a cluster of objects there on similar orbits that they dubbed the “kernel” of the Kuiper belt –…
