On a gray Sunday morning in March, I told an AI chatbot my life story. Introducing herself as Isabella, she spoke with a friendly female voice that would have been well-suited to a human therapist, were it not for its distinctly mechanical cadence. Aside from that, there wasn’t anything humanlike about her; she appeared on…
Golam Khandaker’s mother has had arthritis for as long as he can remember. She also lives with depression, and it always struck Khandaker how precisely her arthritis flare-ups coincide with her most severe episodes of low mood. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that these bouts of painful inflammation might cause her to feel low. But as…
The Haenyeo women who dive deep into the East China Sea to harvest sea urchins and shellfish spend the most time underwater of any humans ever studied — one to five hours a day, researchers report August 18 in Current Biology. “It’s as close as you get to studying a mermaid,” says Chris McKnight, a marine…
August 17, 2025 4 min read Can Cosmic Rays Help Alien Life Thrive? Beneath the surfaces of distant planets, microbes might subsist on harsh radiation rather than starlight, a new study suggests By Emma R. Hasson edited by Lee Billings Cosmic radiation could be a boon for subsurface life on worlds such as Europa (left),…
A view of Ganymede from NASA’s Juno spacecraft JunoCam/NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kalleheikki Kannisto Jupiter’s moon Ganymede could be a vast dark matter detector, and upcoming space missions might be able to spot distinctive dark matter craters on its ancient surface. Physicists searching for dark matter usually look for tiny, extremely light particles that interact weakly with standard matter,…
Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Let’s kick off the week with a quick roundup of some of the latest science news. First, a public health update from one of our colleagues at Scientific American, senior health editor Josh Fischman. He’s here to update us on an ongoing…
The Pacific Ocean released heat into the atmosphere in 2023 blickwinkel/Alamy An unusual “triple dip” La Niña that suppressed ocean temperatures in the Pacific Ocean for three years running may have primed the planet for the dramatic surge in global heat experienced in 2023. While global temperatures had been expected to increase around this time,…
Our arteries get stiffer with age, and covid-19 may not help peterschreiber.media/Alamy Covid-19 seems to accelerate the ageing of blood vessels, but perhaps only among women. The infection has previously been linked to cardiovascular complications, like heart disease, but how it has this effect isn’t entirely clear. To learn more, Rosa Maria Bruno at the…
Vaping is a healthier option than smoking, but it still isn’t risk-free Matthew Horwood/Getty Images An array of fungi, some of which have been linked to lung complications, have been collected from e-cigarette mouthpieces. The use of vapes is generally recommended as a way to transition away from smoking, but their long-term health impacts are…
How couples meet could impact the quality of their relationship Good Faces/Unsplash People who meet their partners online seem to experience less relationship satisfaction and a lower intensity of love than those who first connected in person, according to a study covering 50 countries worldwide. The advent of the internet has changed the way people…
