AI chatbots may seem medical–book smart but their grades falter when interacting with real people. In the lab, AI chatbots could identify medical issues with 95 percent accuracy and correctly recommend actions such as calling a doctor or going to urgent care more than 56 percent of the time. When humans conversationally presented medical scenarios…
Over the course of his career, Joseph McMullen has dealt with some of the most powerful agencies in the country: the FBI, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But in early 2024 the San Diego–based civil rights attorney faced a problem of scale. He had three federal trials in three months—two involving…
Moving too quickly in medicine can be disastrous. The previous century is littered with examples, from the scandal of thalidomide – a morning sickness drug that had never been tested on pregnant animals – to the embrace of low-fat diets, based on scanty evidence. But there’s also danger in moving too slowly, and the body…
Imagine we had somehow filmed the whole history of the universe and you could play the movie in reverse. It would start off much as things stand today: a vast and elegant web of galaxies and nebulae. But as the tape rewinds, everything begins to shrink until it reaches an evanescent pinprick of energy –…
Psychedelics may enable the brain to form new connections wildpixel/Getty Images A single dose of the psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT) had a rapid and sustained effect on depressive symptoms in a small trial. DMT – a fast-acting and extremely potent psychedelic found in numerous plants across the world – is subject to the strictest international…
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. First up, the Trump administration announced last week it would be rescinding a scientific finding that has served as the foundation for U.S. federal climate policy since 2009. [CLIP: President Donald Trump speaking…
Some atoms seem to be particularly stable because of their numbers of protons and neutrons Shutterstock/ktsdesign A special set of numbers has formed the backbone of nuclear physics research for decades, and now we finally know how it arises from the quantum mix of nuclear particles and forces. Nearly 80 years ago, physicist Maria Goeppert…
February 16, 2026 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Astronomers spot one of the largest spinning structures in the universe This enormous chain of hundreds of galaxies—a cosmic filament—is twisting through space 400 million light-years away By Humberto Basilio edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier Artist’s interpretation of the newfound spinning filament. The first…
Heat normally flows from hot to cold klyaksun/Shutterstock A forgotten cup of coffee will gradually cool down as its heat flows into the cooler surrounding air, but in the quantum realm, it appears this experience can be turned on its head. As a result, we may need to update the second law of thermodynamics, a…
Game developers didn’t have it easy in the 1990s. Because they had extremely limited computing power, they had to write their code as efficiently as possible. Consider the first-person shooter Quake III Arena, usually called Quake 3, for example: players navigated a three-dimensional world, so the programmers had to find the cleverest ways to handle…
