Tales of Militant ChemistryAlice LovejoyUniv. of California Press, $27.95 Despite the digitalization of pictures and movies, some cinephiles and moviemakers still favor film. For instance, Christopher Nolan’s 2023 blockbuster Oppenheimer, a thriller about the theoretical physicist who oversaw the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb, was shot on Kodak’s 70 millimeter film. But…
September 16, 2025 4 min read Readers Respond to the May 2025 Issue Letters to the editors for the May 2025 issue of Scientific American By Aaron Shattuck Scientific American, May 2025 SPEEDY COMETS “Dark Comets,” by Robin George Andrews, describes a group of objects in our solar system with “unexplained” acceleration. That made me…
Large dinosaurs like titanosaurs would have had a huge impact on their environment CHRISTIAN JEGOU/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY The impact dinosaurs had on Earth was so big that their extinction seems to have caused dramatic and wide-ranging changes to the planet’s landscapes, such as shifting rivers. There is a marked difference between some rock formations in…
Satellite image of the lunar south pole and Schrödinger basin NASA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY The moon might be more hospitable to life than we thought, increasing the risk of future moon missions contaminating the lifeless lunar surface. Space missions must follow policies on “planetary protection” to avoid contaminating other bodies of the solar system with microbes…
People receiving covid-19 vaccines in Bangkok, Thailand in 2021 AFP via Getty Images The covid-19 vaccines cost $79 billion to develop and deliver globally, but provided health and economic benefits worth between $5 trillion and $38 trillion globally in the first year alone, based on avoided infections, hospitalisations and deaths. That is a return on…
September 15, 2025 2 min read Freaky ‘Rubber Hand’ Illusion Works on Octopuses, Too Octopuses’ response to a human illusion suggests a sense of body ownership By Gennaro Tomma edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier An octopus awaits a species-specific version of the “rubber hand” experiment. In the classic “rubber hand” illusion, illusion, a participant is…
Modern Mars barely has an atmosphere NASA/JPL/USGS Mars’s atmosphere may have once been hundreds of times thicker than it is today, acting as a blanket that protected it from frequent asteroids that ravaged other planets. While the sun and most planets were still forming around 4 million years after the origin of the solar system,…
September 15, 2025 3 min read Death Rates from Chronic Diseases Dropped in Most Countries A report finds that death rates from cancer and heart disease have declined since 2010 in roughly 150 countries. Experts explain potential reasons why By Mohana Basu & Nature magazine Chiyoda ward in Tokyo was the first municipal government in…
A proposed Xe-100 plant in the US from X-Energy uses similar technology to one planned in the UK Centrica The UK government has announced plans to build more than a dozen small nuclear reactors across the country, ushering in what it calls a new “golden age” for nuclear power. One of the ultimate goals is…
Update: After this story was published, an updated draft agenda for the ACIP meeting was posted. According to the schedule, the committee will no longer consider the RSV vaccine, but it will vote on the three other shots described in this story: COVID-19, hepatitis B and MMRV. Next week, the panel of top advisers who…
