From ancient nomads to modern job-hoppers, the urge to move may be written partly into our DNA. People’s tendency to set down roots far from where they were born is partly inherited and grounded in early brain development, researchers report February 6 at bioRxiv.org. What’s more, the underlying genetic signatures appear both in modern populations…
February 23, 2026 4 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Poetry was humanity’s first language technology. AI is the next Sasha Stiles turned GPT-2 experiments into a self-writing poem at a Museum of Modern Art installation—and a new way to think about text-generating AI optimization By Deni Ellis Béchard edited by Eric Sullivan A…
Your brain has a neurological trick for drowning out chaos olaser/Getty Images Recently, I was scrolling TikTok when my brain failed me. I watched a video of Donald Trump berating CNN journalist Kaitlan Collins for “not smiling”, after she questioned him on matters concerning sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And I scrolled past. I didn’t pause….
Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to our weekly science news roundup. Let’s start off with a vaccine 180. In a sudden turn of events last Wednesday the U.S. Food and Drug Administration agreed to review Moderna’s new mRNA flu vaccine, according to the company….
More than 100 years ago Hungarian-born mathematician George Pólya found himself trapped in a loop of social awkwardness. A professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, he enjoyed solitary strolls through the woods outside the city. During one of these rambles, he walked by one of his students and the student’s fiancée. Then,…
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The first time her husband went on a date with another woman, Kelly felt sick to her stomach. Consumed by jealousy, she threw up twice and cried for three hours straight until he came home. The second time he had a date night, with a different woman, Kelly sat on the couch wrapped in a…
This article was made possible by the support of Yakult and produced independently by Scientific American’s board of editors. My mother lived with Alzheimer’s disease for 12 years. Even with a lot of help, caregiving took a toll on me. It was physically hard to transfer her from bed to wheelchair, hard on my time…
LIFE’S POSSIBILITIES In “Life’s Big Bangs,” Asher Elbein reports on geochemist Abderrazak El Albani’s controversial argument that complex life emerged much earlier than thought and possibly did so multiple times, based on evidence from rock layers more than two billion years old. As David M. Ewalt kindly points out in “It’s Good to Be Wrong….
A winter bomb cyclone is expected to bring blizzard conditions across parts of the East Coast from Maryland up through southeastern New England Sunday night into Monday morning. But what, exactly, is a blizzard? A blizzard doesn’t always mean “a lot of snow,” though it can certainly bring heavy snowfalls, as this storm is expected…
