You can have too much of a good thing when it comes to exercising REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson While exercise is important for a long and healthy life, ultramarathons may accelerate the ageing of cells in our blood. Athletes who ran 170 kilometres over mountainous terrain accumulated more age-related damage to their red blood cells than those…
February 21, 2026 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Incredible image shows what 2026’s first solar eclipse looked like from space A satellite captured a recent “ring of fire” eclipse from a stunning new angle By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron The “ring of fire” solar eclipse on February 17 ESA/Royal…
A scanning electron micrograph of Bifidobacteria bacteria – the main genus found in the large intestine of infants DR GARY GAUGLER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY An unprecedented look at how the gut microbiome varies among babies in different parts of the world reveals that infants in the West lack a microbe that is common elsewhere. This could…
On February 5 Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6, its most powerful artificial intelligence model. Among the model’s new features is the ability to coordinate teams of autonomous agents—multiple AIs that divide up the work and complete it in parallel. Twelve days after Opus 4.6’s release, the company dropped Sonnet 4.6, a cheaper model that nearly…
Fatherhood came as something of a shock to Mat Lewis-Carter. His partner, Chess, got pregnant unexpectedly and, despite the excitement, he struggled to adjust to the news. When his baby daughter arrived in July 2021, Lewis-Carter didn’t immediately feel a connection. He began to “spiral”, going on long runs to escape the house over the…
February 21, 2026 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm NASA reveals new problem with Artemis II rocket, further delaying launch Just a day after NASA set a March 6 target date for its upcoming moon mission, the agency’s head announced it will roll back the rocket from the pad entirely By Claire Cameron…
Close-up of a piece of glass with Microsoft Flight Simulator map data written into it Microsoft Research An automated system for storing large amounts of information in glass could change the future of data centres. Our world runs on data, from the internet and readouts of countless industrial sensors to scientific data from particle colliders,…
People who can’t stop scratching itches may finally have a culprit to blame. In mice (and probably people), a protein called TRPV4 is involved both in starting an itch and stopping it after scratching, says neuroscientist Roberta Gualdani. She will present the finding February 24 at the annual meeting of the Biophysical Society in San…
February 21, 2026 3 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm ‘An AlphaFold 4’—scientists marvel at DeepMind drug spin-off’s exclusive new AI Isomorphic Lab’s proprietary drug-discovery model is a major advance, but scientists developing open-source tools are left guessing how to achieve similar results By Ewen Callaway & Nature magazine The AI tool includes predictions…
Dwight Ellefsen/FPG/Archive The Laws of ThoughtTom Griffiths, William Collins (UK) Macmillan (US) FOR nearly 70 years, cognitive researchers have been fighting a civil war. On one side is computationalism, which argues intelligence is best explained by rules, symbols and logic that can be expressed in equations. On the other is connectionism, where intelligence emerges from…
