Alistair Berg/Getty Images Let’s start off with a fact: you do not, no matter what you’ve heard, eat a credit card’s worth of microplastics each week. At least, not in the course of a normal human diet. But this popular claim has raised alarm, especially as it has been followed by a flurry of studies…
March 4, 2026 4 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm People who took GLP-1 drugs had lower risk of all kinds of drug and alcohol addiction A large epidemiological study of more than 600,000 veterans with diabetes suggests GLP-1 weight-loss medications may reduce drug- and alcohol-related overdoses and deaths By Lauren J. Young edited…
Falling cats seem to twist the front half of their body first Evolve/Photoshot/ZUMAPRESS/Alamy When falling cats turn themselves the right way up before they hit the ground, they have a secret trick: a region of their spine that is exceptional at twisting. “We compared the flexibility of the thoracic spine and lumbar spine in cats,…
Astronomers’ favorite fable just got a new twist. The “Goldilocks zone” — the region of space not too close and not too far from a star where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface — now has a chemical equivalent. Researchers have found that a narrow range of planetary conditions are necessary to ensure…
March 4, 2026 3 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Pioneering gene therapy may treat a deadly seizure disorder New gene therapy results bring hope for treating Dravet syndrome, a rare and often fatal seizure condition By Allison Parshall edited by Claire Cameron In antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) gene therapies, specially programmed RNA or DNA…
Higher sea levels put cities at risk of flooding caused by storm surges, as seen in Sri Lanka during Cyclone Ditwah in 2025 Thomas Wyness / Alamy Stock Photo Almost all research on the impacts of future sea-level rise has assumed today’s sea levels are lower than they actually are due to a “methodological blind…
Two of Saturn’s satellites — its largest and one of its weirdest — may owe their current forms and orbits to a two-moon pileup about 400 million years ago. A smashup between a doomed moon and the massive moon Titan could have birthed the spongy-looking Hyperion, a study submitted February 9 to arXiv.org suggests. Ensuing…
March 4, 2026 1 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm NASA unveils dazzling new images of the ‘Cat’s Eye Nebula’ The space-based telescopes Hubble and Euclid combined forces to capture the vibrant remains of a dying star in stunning new detail By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron ESA/Hubble/NASA/ESA Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA/Q1-2025/J.-C. Cuillandre/E. Bertin/CEA…
Artwork of a Hybodus shark, a predator that evolved in the late Permian and survived the mass extinction CHRISTIAN DARKIN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY The worst known mass extinction wiped out over 80 per cent of marine species. But despite these huge losses, many ecosystems did not collapse, with a variety of animals and even top predators…
Hundreds of global and regional studies on sea level rise and coastal flooding may have underestimated sea levels by an average of 20 to 30 centimeters. Out of 385 peer-reviewed studies published from 2009 to 2025, around 99 percent incorrectly estimated ocean height, leading to sea level approximations that were off by as much as…
