For more than four years, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has been on the prowl within Jezero Crater, a site on the Red Planet that eons ago harbored a sprawling river delta, a large, deep lake and—just maybe—ancient Martian life. Since its touchdown in February 2021, the car-sized, nuclear-powered robot has traveled far and wide across…
Large hailstones can be very damaging imageBROKER.com/Alamy Hailstones the size of golfballs are increasingly raining down on Europe as the climate warms, causing expensive damage to cars and buildings. Very large hail, classified as hailstones that measure 5 centimetres or more in diameter, is one of the most costly forms of extreme weather, capable of…
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman. Today we’re taking you on another one of our Friday Fascination field trips with an auditory journey to Brookhaven National Laboratory. This Long Island facility boasts seven Nobel Prize–winning discoveries and more than 70 years of groundbreaking research into energy and the environment. Earlier…
Is your favourite sci-fi novel included here, or have we forgotten it? Almost exactly a year ago, I asked our team of expert science writers here at New Scientist to name their favourite science fiction novels. Personal tastes meant we ended up with a wonderfully eclectic list, ranging from classics by the likes of Margaret…
I’m a zero at mental arithmetic. It’s true—I struggle with this skill—but I want to focus on the phrase itself. In our language, we often equate zero with something negative. But zero is the only real number that is neither positive nor negative. It is neutral. Why the negative association? Humankind has long harbored strong…
Living things produce “biophotons” Tim Robberts/Getty Images All living things, including humans, constantly emit a ghostly glow – and it appears to vanish almost as soon as we die. Monitoring this signal could one day help track forest health or even detect diseases in people. The existence of this barely perceptible glow has been controversial,…
Linguists Find Proof of Sweeping Language Pattern Once Deemed a ‘Hoax’ Inuit languages really do have many words for snow, linguists found—and other languages have conceptual specialties, too, potentially revealing what a culture values By Cody Cottier edited by Allison Parshall In 1884 the anthropologist Franz Boas returned from Baffin Island with a discovery that…
A juvenile chimpanzee drumming in Bossou, Guinea Cyril Ruoso/naturepl.com Musicality may have emerged in a common ancestor of chimps and humans, as both species share similarities in how they drum. Catherine Hobaiter at the University of St Andrews, UK, and her colleagues examined 371 examples of drumming from two of Africa’s four chimpanzee subspecies: the…
What do we really know about the deep ocean? Whether Earth’s ocean is an ecological paradise teeming with wildlife or a mysterious, stormy underworld hiding mythological sea monsters, it goes without saying that our ignorance of the aqueous abyss has shaped our perception of what could exist there. But in terms of actually tallying up…
Climate change is already making our lives worse AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP via Getty Images When you think of threats from climate change, you probably envision flooding and wind from supercharged hurricanes, or unprecedented heatwaves. A survey of people in the US from late 2024 found that the majority of people see extreme weather as the greatest…
