What Is the Legionnaires’ Disease Outbreak That Has Killed Two People in New York City? Fifty-eight people have been infected—and two have died—in a New York City outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease—a severe type of pneumonia caused by a bacterium commonly associated with air-conditioning systems and cooling towers By Meghan Bartels edited by Lauren J. Young…
How can you keep your brain healthy for longer? Tom Wang / Alamy As we get older, a few cognitive slip-ups might seem inevitable. But what’s become apparent over the past decade or so is that not everyone’s brain ages in the same way. Some people remain razor-sharp, even when their brains are riddled with…
Under a newly released action plan for artificial intelligence, the technology will be integrated into U.S. government functions. The plan, announced July 23, is another step in the Trump administration’s push for an “AI-first strategy.” In July, for instance, the U.S. Department of Defense handed out $200 million contracts to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI….
Call them nature’s own luxury high-rise condo rentals. Squamellaria plants, from the same family as coffee and quinine, are fat aerial tubers perched high in tropical trees. In Fiji, one of the traditional names translates as “testicle of the tree;” they can grow to about the size of a basketball and sprout some leafy shoots….
Terracotta Is a 3,000-Year-Old Solution to Fighting Extreme Heat Companies are adapting this humble clay-based ceramic to keep people cool—without electricity By Jyoti Thakur edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier Cooling facade built from terracotta A little over 20 percent of India’s households own an air conditioner or cooler, and fewer than a third have refrigerators—leaving…
High-intensity yoga for less than 30 minutes, twice a week, may be the best workout routine for catching high-quality shut-eye, a new study shows. But before people jump on the yoga trend, researchers say more experiments are needed to confirm the study’s findings. While exercise in general is known to improve sleep, a meta-analysis published…
Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! And happy August. For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Let’s kick off the month with a quick roundup of some of the latest news in science. First, we have Andrea Thompson, senior news editor for sustainability at Scientific American, to tell us about last week’s earthquake and the…
How many atoms are there in the observable universe? Current estimates point to a number we would write as 1 followed by 80 zeroes, or 1080. If you peered inside each of these atoms and counted their subatomic particles, you could count a bit higher. But what happens beyond that? Take 1090 – even if…
One question has preoccupied humankind for thousands of years: Do infinities exist? More than 2,300 years ago Aristotle distinguished between two types of infinity: potential and actual. The former deals with abstract scenarios that would result from repeated processes. For example, if you were asked to imagine counting forever, adding 1 to the previous number,…
Illustration of Tyrannosaurus rex Roger Harris/Getty Images/Science Photo Library A closer look at the skulls of gigantic dinosaurs reveals some preferred to shred their prey, while others attacked with bone-crushing force. Andre Rowe and Emily Rayfield at the University of Bristol in the UK looked at the skulls of 18 species of theropods from across…
