February 9, 2026 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Yellowstone’s earthquakes spark microbial boom deep underground Earthquake swarms can supercharge microbial growth By Damien Pine edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier A swarm of 2,182 earthquakes at Yellowstone National Park was key for a new finding about microbes. Cheryl Ramalho/Getty Images With some luck,…
Cognitive training could arm the brain against the effects of dementia Gary Burchell/Getty Images Cognitive “speed training” can reduce the risk of a dementia diagnosis by 25 per cent – that’s according to results from the world’s first randomised controlled trial of any intervention against the condition. “There was a lot of scepticism about whether…
Two small scraps of elk hide, joined by a cord of twisted fibers and preserved for roughly 12,400 years in an Oregon rock shelter, are the earliest sewn items ever found. Just a few square centimeters, the fragments may also be the world’s oldest pieces of clothing. They are “definitely sewn, because we have cordage…
Imagine that you want to know the most efficient way to make a torus—a doughnut-shaped mathematical object—from origami paper. But this torus, which is a surface, looks drastically different than the outside of a glazed bakery doughnut. Instead of seeming almost perfectly smooth, the torus that you envision is jagged with many faces, each of…
Hostility and discord are hallmarks of the internet more so than collaboration and cooperation. So the fact that a public encyclopaedia, editable by anyone, has become one of the most useful repositories of knowledge in the world is, frankly, unbelievable. “Thank God it works in practice, because it would never work in theory,” says Anusha…
Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. You’ve probably been in this situation: you just had a big lunch or a tall carbonated drink, and out of nowhere a burp rises in your throat unbidden. [CLIP: A person burps loudly.] On supporting science journalism If you’re enjoying this…
The first few exoplanets were discovered in the early 1990s. But it wasn’t until the early 2000s, when astronomers began carrying out large-scale, long-term surveys of other stars, that we started to get the first hints that our solar system – with its neat arrangement of four rocky planets, then four gassy giants – might…
February 4, 2026 3 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Why bits of continents keep turning up in the middle of oceans It turns out that continental breakups are just as messy as human ones, with the events leaving fragments scattered far from home By Evan Howell edited by Andrea Thompson Zabargad Island in…
A site on Isbjørne Island where Palaeo-Inuit people erected a circular tent Matthew Walls, Mari Kleist, Pauline Knudsen Humans were voyaging to remote islands off the north-west coast of Greenland 4500 years ago. This required them to cross over 50 kilometres of open water – one of the longest sea journeys made by Indigenous peoples…
Scientists have found a key brain network that’s disrupted by Parkinson’s disease, according to a study published today in Nature. The results change doctors’ understanding of what causes Parkinson’s symptoms and may unlock more effective and precise treatments. Parkinson’s has long been considered a movement disorder. Its hallmark symptoms include involuntary muscle contractions, tremor and…
