February 6, 2026 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Snakes on a train? King cobras may be riding the rails in India A new study suggests king cobras may be accidentally boarding trains across India By Richard Kemeny edited by Andrea Thompson A king cobra of a species close to the one that…
Lockdowns in 2020 led to lower emissions of nitrogen oxides from transport Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images A drop in pollution during the covid lockdowns changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, driving a surge in methane levels that has concerning implications for future global warming. Methane lasts only about a decade in the atmosphere…
The famed collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory has ended operations, but if all goes to plan, a new collider will rise from its ashes.
I get e-mail. Most messages are press releases about astronomical discoveries—okay, scratch that; most of them are spam, but science announcements are an easy second place. But I also get questions from readers asking about various aspects of the universe that they’re struggling to understand. I love this! For one thing, it shows that people…
If given the choice, opting for a labour induction in the early morning could speed things along Iuliia Burmistrova/Getty Images The best time to induce labour is in the early morning, research suggests. By aligning with our natural body clocks, early-morning inductions seem to shorten labour times and reduce the need for Caesarean sections. “It’s…
In 1918 Katharine Burr Blodgett arrived at the General Electric Company’s legendary research laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y., a facility known as the “House of Magic.” She was just 20 years old when she entered a world built almost entirely for men. She joined the lab as an assistant to the brilliant and eccentric Irving Langmuir,…
A farmer spraying pesticides on a cotton field Tao Weiming/VCG via Getty Images More than 60 years after Rachel Carson warned of the dangers of pesticides in her book Silent Spring, the harm they are doing to wildlife may be greater than ever. “In more or less all countries, the trend is towards increasing applied…
A new batch of more than three million pages of investigative files about Jeffrey Epstein that was released by the Department of Justice on January 30 show how the disgraced financier and convicted child sex offender sought relationships with news outlets—including Scientific American—through his connections with scientists. New Scientist turns up in more than 50…
The issue of whether statins really cause a plethora of side effects may have finally been put to bed Benjamin John/Alamy The long list of side effects associated with statins is vastly overstated, according to the most rigorous assessment of the evidence to date. This is prompting calls for the drugs’ packaging to be updated,…
For more than a century, psychologists thought that the infant experience was, as the psychologist and philosopher William James famously put it, a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” But new research suggests babies are born with a surprisingly sophisticated neurological toolkit that can organize the visual world into categories and pick out the beat in a song….
