If there is a beginning time point for the Age of Scientific Reversal, it may be 1887—the year when Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley conducted what is often called the world’s most famous failed physics experiment. For more than two centuries researchers had proposed that light was a wave of some kind traveling…
August 24, 2025 4 min read Truth, Romance and the Divine: How AI Chatbots May Fuel Psychotic Thinking A new wave of delusional thinking fueled by artificial intelligence has researchers investigating the dark side of AI companionship By Conor Feehly edited by Allison Parshall Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images You are consulting with an artificial intelligence chatbot…
Wildfires, like this one in Greece, are blunting Earth’s natural carbon sink Thanassis Stavrakis/AP Photo/Alamy Climate change is increasingly affecting the ability of Earth’s natural carbon sinks to soak up excess carbon dioxide, and this means more of this greenhouse gas emitted by human activity is staying in the atmosphere, leading to further warming. These…
In 1957, just four years after Francis Crick and other scientists solved the riddle of DNA’s structure—the now famous double helix—Crick laid out what he called the “central dogma” of molecular biology, which his colleague James Watson later said implied that biological information flows inexorably from DNA to RNA to proteins. Although Watson was oversimplifying,…
Ferran Traite Soler/Getty Images “I’ve always prided myself on my can-do attitude,” a reader told me this month. “Recently, however, I’ve started to feel resentful of the amount of work my boss puts at my door compared to colleagues. The more I do, the more he seems to expect of me, and I now feel…
August 19, 2025 4 min read Plastics Started as a Sustainability Solution. What Went Wrong? Synthetic polymers were supposed to free us from the limitations of our natural resources. Instead they led to an environmental crisis By Jen Schwartz edited by Seth Fletcher In 1864 Scientific American published a competition launched by a billiard-table manufacturing…
Bees often struggle to get the nutrients they need from flowers Ran Zisovitch/Shutterstock An artificial “superfood” that provides essential nutrients for bees results in colonies producing much more larvae, suggesting it could help tackle the global decline in honeybees. Bees need to eat pollen from a range of flowers to get the nutrients they need,…
The NASA spacecraft tasked with uncovering the secrets of Jupiter, king of the planets, is running out of time. The Juno probe has already survived far longer than anticipated—its path around the solar system’s largest planet has repeatedly flown it through a tempest of radiation that should have corroded away its instruments and electronics long…
The Thunderbird nuclear fusion reactor Berlinguette Group, UBC Cold fusion, one of the most notorious blunders in science, is making a return – of sorts. Scientists have resurrected an experiment that was once claimed to show room-temperature nuclear fusion, offering the tantalising possibility of producing energy via the same mechanism as within in the sun,…
Billions of nerve cells send signals coursing through our bodies, serving as conduits through which the brain performs its essential functions. For millennia physicians thought damage to nerves was irreversible. In ancient Greece, founders of modern medicine such as Hippocrates and Galen refused to operate on damaged nerves for fear of causing pain, convulsions or…
