Scientific American Celebrates 180 Years with Stories of Scientific U-turns In honor of SciAm’s 180th birthday, we’re spotlighting the biggest “wait, what?” moments in science history. By Rachel Feltman, Jeffery DelViscio & Alex Sugiura Drawings of Mars showing its ‘canals’ and polar ice caps in drawings created from observations made at the Lowell Observatory in…
A strange and mysterious extinct dog breed from far southern South America might not have been a dog at all. The “Fuegian dogs” that lived with the Indigenous peoples of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago were semi-tame culpeos, foxlike animals native to South America, researchers report. The study, published July 14 in the Journal of…
August 25, 2025 2 min read How You Search the Internet Can Reinforce Your Beliefs—Without You Realizing It Users’ Internet search questions can strengthen echo chambers, even on factual topics, but there are simple ways to lessen the effect By Simon Makin edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier People’s views are becoming more and more polarized,…
August 14, 2025 2 min read Climate Change’s Effect on Sudan’s Cholera Outbreak Explained An ongoing civil war in Sudan has forced millions of people to flee their homes and move to camps, where a lack of water and sanitation infrastructure, along with heavy rains, are fueling a massive cholera outbreak. What role does the…
Letters to the editors for the April 2025 issue of Scientific American
To astronomers in the 1990s, these three facts were self-evident: The universe is expanding; all the matter in the universe is gravitationally attracting all the other matter in the universe; therefore, the expansion of the universe is slowing. Two scientific collaborations assigned themselves the task of determining the rate of that deceleration. Find that rate,…
You can see it coming in right there, that little spot,” says neuroscientist and engineer Laura Lewis. A remarkably bright pulsing dot has appeared on the monitor in front of us. We are watching, in real time, the brain activity of a graduate student named Nick, who is having an afternoon nap inside an imaging…
This article was made possible by the support of Yakult and produced independently by Scientific American‘s board of editors. Recently a friend I’ll call Anne told me she had cut gluten out of her diet to try to reduce joint pain in her hands. “I feel so much better,” she said. Anne is just one…
The sense of smell, it turns out, is highly individual—a scent that is enticingly floral to one person may be off-putting and chemical to another. Researchers in Germany -recently asked 1,227 participants to describe and rate 73 odors and found their answers to be strikingly variable. “It depends on what people have associated with the…
It was the telegram exchange that sparked an identity crisis for humankind. In 1960 a young Jane Goodall working in a remote forest in Tanzania observed a chimpanzee she named David Greybeard using blades of grass and twigs to fish nutritious termites out of their nest. The primatologist wrote to her mentor, Kenyan paleoanthropologist Louis…
