February 23, 2026 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Why the Northeast blizzard’s snow is ideal for snowballs and snowmen School is out as heavy, wet snow blankets parts of the Northeast. Though it will be a pain to shovel, it makes for perfect snowballs and the most structurally sound snowmen By Stephanie…
If you slipped under the covers at 2am, knowing your alarm was set for 6am, how do you think you would feel the next morning? You may be imagining a day of aching eyes and clouded thoughts, but it is perfectly possible to wake up feeling clear-headed and positive, then spend the day happily socialising,…
February 23, 2026 3 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Ancient art could hold clues to the origins of written language Thousands of markings on objects made around 40,000 years ago may have been more than just doodles, a new analysis suggests By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron A 40,000-year-old mammoth figurine…
The Adorant figurine, approximately 38,000 years old, consists of a small, ivory plate bearing an anthropomorphic figure and multiple sequences of notches and dots Landesmuseum Württemberg / Hendrik Zwietasch, CC BY 4.0 Stone Age people 40,000 years ago used a simple form of writing comparable in complexity to the earliest stages of the world’s first…
A mass grave from roughly 3,000 years ago in what is now Serbia is filled with the remains of women and children and may indicate they were targeted for organized slaughter. The 9th century B.C. burial pit holds 77 individuals. More than 60 percent were children and more than 70 percent were female, an unusually high…
February 23, 2026 3 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Who should shovel the snow? This weird math puzzle can help Blizzards are a real-life example of what game theorists call the “snowdrift problem,” a cousin of the prisoner’s dilemma that offers clues to why we choose to cooperate By Joseph Howlett edited by…
Learning to recognise birds may strengthen your cognitive reserve steve young/Alamy Expert birdwatchers have brain differences that may underlie their remarkable ability to identify unfamiliar birds and suggest that birdwatching can reshape the brain in much the same way as learning a language or a musical instrument does. Such activities may bolster cognitive reserve, the…
Shrouded from astronomers’ view by dense clouds, Earth’s “sister planet” Venus is slowly giving up some of its secrets. A lava tube beneath the Venusian surface — the first ever detected — could help explain how the planet formed, researchers report February 9 in Nature Communications. The detection was made by re-analyzing orbital radar data…
I should begin with a confession: this letter was written by an artificial intelligence. Now, before you reach for the “cancel” button or send a heated e-mail, let me clarify. This letter wasn’t exactly “written” by an AI in the sense that a machine dreamed up these ideas while I was out for lunch. It…
Orlando Gili/Millenium Images Your friends are likely to have more friends than you do. Don’t worry, it’s nothing personal. It’s just about how networks organise. We can represent a friendship group as a network. Draw a node (dot) for each person and a line between two nodes if those two people are friends. By doing…
