Clare Fieseler’s and Jason Jaacks’ reporting was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center and co-published with the Post and Courier. Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Scattered across the deep ocean floor are trillions of potato-sized black rocks packed with valuable metals such cobalt and copper. Mining companies want…
Astronauts practise chest compression techniques during an emergency training session aboard the International Space Station JSC/NASA Microgravity makes it tricky to do simple tasks like eating, using the toilet and showering, so it is no wonder that performing CPR on someone whose heart stops beating in space is an extremely demanding procedure. But a mechanical…
Thylacines were once found throughout Australia and New Guinea Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images The loss of crucial genes over millions of years before the arrival of humans in Australia may have left thylacines more vulnerable to extinction. The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus) was the last survivor of a family of marsupials known as Thylacinidae…
August 26, 2025 3 min read SpaceX Successfully Launches Starship Spacecraft after String of Mishaps Overcoming three recent failed tries, Elon Musk’s rocket company successfully flew its reusable jumbo booster and upper-stage Starship spacecraft By Dan Vergano edited by Clara Moskowitz An earlier SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy booster are moved to the launch pad…
The cells in Ling He’s lab dish looked nothing like cancer cells. Which was odd, because they had been extracted from the tumours of people with an aggressive brain cancer called glioblastoma. Glioblastoma cells can grow and spread rapidly, invading the brain with tentacle-like projections that push into surrounding tissue, suppressing the immune system as…
Some of the most promising places to look for extraterrestrials have remained, so far, mostly hidden from astronomers. Now a game-changing instrument called NIRPS (Near-Infrared Planet Searcher) is leading the search for the most tantalizing targets in the cosmos: potentially Earth-like worlds around nearby red dwarf stars. Red dwarfs, or M dwarfs, are the most…
An adult female sailback houndshark Jack Sagumai et al. (2025) One of the rarest sharks in the world has turned up in Papua New Guinea, some 50 years after it was last reported. Adorned with a curiously large and deep dorsal fin, the sailback houndshark (Gogolia filewoodi) was first described by scientists in 1973, when…
August 26, 2025 3 min read Repeated Heat Waves Can Age You as Much as Smoking or Drinking A new long-term study suggests that the more heat waves people are exposed to, the more their body’s aging process accelerates By Freda Kreier & Nature magazine An elderly man is seen resting under a tree at…
Many useful metals unearthed from U.S. mines are discarded. When mining operations dig for valuable metals, they often exhume ore containing other metals too. These by-product elements are usually treated as waste, but recovering even small fractions could offset the need to import them, researchers report August 21 in Science. For instance, recovering just 1…
Infrared images of 3I/ATLAS captured by the James Webb Space Telescope NASA/James Webb Space Telescope The interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS is one of the most carbon dioxide-rich comets ever seen, which may suggest it formed in an environment quite unlike our own solar system. Astronomers have been observing 3I/ATLAS since July, when it was discovered to…
