November 18, 2025 4 min read Heart Rate Irregularity Sounds Bad, but Here’s Why You Want a Bit of It Milliseconds of variability, now detected by fitness watches, can improve well-being By Lydia Denworth edited by Josh Fischman Earlier this year I got an Oura ring to track the state of my health. Soon I…
Rostislav Zatonskiy/Alamy Women aren’t just “little men”. And yet, it has long been convenient for medical science to act as if they are, focusing studies on male rodents and men because they lack the complicated hormone cycles of females, and then transferring any findings over onto women. Thankfully, in recent decades, there has been widespread…
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Romantic kissing may go a long way back in our evolutionary past ATHVisions/Getty Images Early humans like Neanderthals probably kissed, and our ape ancestors could have done so as far back as 21 million years ago. There is wide debate over when humans began kissing romantically. Ancient texts hint that sexual kissing was practised in…
The U.S. is in the grips of a botulism outbreak tied to a premium infant formula brand. At least 23 babies have been affected. All the reported cases of the paralyzing bacterial infection occurred between August and November and have been linked to powdered infant formula produced by ByHeart, according to a Food and Drug…
Artists painted in places where echoes and resonance created otherworldly sonic effects Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images Deep underground, thousands of years of silence are abruptly broken by a researcher singing. His voice seems to awaken the walls of the cavern as the intimate space comes alive with the sound of our ancestors. Then he follows the…
When it comes to learning something new, old-fashioned Googling might be the smarter move compared with asking ChatGPT. Large language models, or LLMs — the artificial intelligence systems that power chatbots like ChatGPT — are increasingly being used as sources of quick answers. But in a new study, people who used a traditional search engine…
November 18, 2025 2 min read Five Essential Reads on Plastic, Power, and Pollution If you enjoyed Beth Gardiner’s feature about big oil’s bet on plastics, here are more books curated by Scientific American By Brianne Kane edited by Jeanna Bryner The fossil-fuel industry is pivoting to plastics: massive companies are launching new refineries and…
The Eixample district in Barcelona, Spain Shutterstock/BearFotos More than 80 per cent of people worldwide now live in towns and cities, according to a major United Nations report, and this figure is set to rise further, underscoring the need to ensure urban areas benefit both our health and the planet. The most recent edition of…
In 2025, more than 3,800 research grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation were terminated or frozen as part of the Trump administration’s effort to realign funding priorities. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week’s scientific breakthroughs every Thursday. The cuts — totaling about $3 billion in remaining…
