Artificial sweeteners may have gut microbiome benefits Robert K. Chin/Alamy Using low-calorie sweeteners in place of sugar seems to give beneficial gut microbes a boost and help people maintain weight loss. The finding, from one of the longest trials of sweeteners to date, indicates these products may not be as harmful as some studies have…
Carly Kay is the Fall 2025 science writing intern at Science News. She holds a bachelor’s degree in communication from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
October 17, 2025 2 min read Flu Cases Surge Early in Japan, Sparking Global Health Concerns School closures and hospitalizations from an unexpected early spike in flu cases in Japan has experts concerned about what lies ahead for other countries By Rachel Fieldhouse & Nature magazine Paulo Fridman/Contributor/Getty Images Japan’s health authorities have declared an…
Childhood hardships can leave their mark throughout life Ton Photograph/Getty Images People who experience severe hardship early in life seem to have higher amounts of a certain protein in their brain, a discovery that could explain why childhood adversity often causes lifelong mental health problems. What’s more, drugs that target this protein may one day…
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. For generations a massive iron meteorite sat in the Somali desert, becoming a landmark where children played and herders sharpened their knives. Then in 2020 a group of armed men arrived to steal it. The El Ali meteorite contains three minerals never before seen naturally…
People transgress. They get punished. They start cooperating. This basic intuition that people are rational, and so respond to punishment by changing their behaviour, lies at the heart of Western legal systems, economic theories of crime and evolutionary theories of cooperation. The only problem is that decades of research suggest that punishment doesn’t actually seem…
This article is part of “Innovations In: Type 1 Diabetes,” an editorially independent special report that was produced with financial support from Vertex. Edward Damiano carved his life into precise 90-minute intervals. In 2000 his then 11-month-old son, David, developed type 1 diabetes when an autoimmune response in his tiny body attacked the beta cells…
Can you undo a spinning top? Shutterstock Imagine spinning a top and then letting it come to rest. Is there a way for you to spin the top again so it ends up in the exact position it started, as if you had never spun it at all? Surprisingly, yes, say mathematicians who have discovered…
It started with an innocent mistake. Texas entrepreneur Chris Bentley had founded a company to buy drilling rights for oil and gas. He realized that a batch of letters he’d sent to landowners, offering to lease their rights, had incorrect information, including monetary amounts and other details. But instead of correcting the errors, Bentley doubled…
Biofuels are contributing to environmental harm Dave Reede/Alamy It’s obvious, isn’t it. Plants turn sunlight into food – stored energy – so if we turn that food into fuels, we should get sustainable biofuels with zero carbon emissions, right? Wrong, utterly wrong. The growth in biofuels is, in fact, increasing emissions, and also hurting both…
