The Milky Way, above Uluru in Australia Stefan Liebermann/mauritius images GmbH/Alamy Because I’m based in the northern hemisphere, my suggestions of what to look for in the skies can sometimes be skewed towards what we can see from that half of the planet. So, in this month’s column I’ll focus on a feature of our…
This story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center. Inside a tent fastened to the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet, the members of the GreenDrill expedition huddled around a drilling rig. The machine whined and shook as it spun. For days the drillers had been inching through ancient, solid ice to reach the…
Climate change will reduce the supply of most staple crops, including corn Jon Rehg/Shutterstock Rising global temperatures are likely to cause deep losses to the world’s most important crops – despite farmers’ best efforts to adapt. A global analysis of crop yields suggests that, by the end of the century, each degree Celsius of warming…
Contributors to Scientific American’s July/August 2025 Issue Writers, artists, photographers and researchers share the stories behind the stories By Allison Parshall edited by Jen Schwartz Jeffery DelViscioGreenland’s Frozen Secret In the spring of 2024 Jeffery DelViscio (seen freezing above), who is Scientific American’s chief multimedia editor, spent a month on a scientific expedition on the…
Ice could offer a way of storing messages long-term in cold environments Anton Petrus/Getty Images Information could potentially be stored in ice for millennia, simply by making subtle changes to the shape and position of internal bubbles, which can then be converted into binary or Morse codes. Mengjie Song at the Beijing Institute of Technology…
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Ticks carry more zoonotic pathogens than any other known vector Sergey Aleshin/Getty Images Tucked away in a ground-floor lab in Richmond, Virginia, is a bank of industrial freezers containing thousands of transparent, thumb-sized plastic tubes. Each is filled with a clear, yellowish fluid – blood serum taken from opossums, raccoons, black bears, coyotes, vultures and…
Global warming is set to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius soon, meaning the world will most likely fail to meet the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of striving to cap the average temperature increase at 1.5 degrees C. Even if Earth warms more than that, though, this key aim isn’t a lost cause. Scientists say we could…
Juan Salvo (Ricardo Darín) braves the killer snow in Buenos Aires Mariano Landet/Netflix The EternautNetflix To make good art, you must be specific. Perhaps that is too sweeping a statement – and so rather contradictory – but it is a fundamental principle I live by. It is no good chasing the lowest common denominator in the…
American Education Demands a Fact-Based Curriculum, Not Religious Ideology One hundred years after the Scopes trial, religious ideologues are still trying to supplant evidence-based curricula with myths, to the detriment of a well-informed society By The Editors In July of 1925 hundreds of reporters and other onlookers crowded into a sweltering courtroom in Dayton, Tenn.,…
