The use of melatonin gummies to help kids sleep is on the rise Shutterstock/neko_de_mar Arriving at a friend’s house party recently, I was impressed to find that her three children were already sound asleep. It was only 7pm. The music blared and the guest chatter became increasingly lively, but still they snoozed on. “They’re great…
You have probably heard the parable of the blind men and the elephant. One feels the trunk and says it’s a snake, another feels a leg and claims it’s a tree. It warns of how focusing on single parts can obscure the whole. Neuroscience made the same mistake for decades, viewing the brain as a…
The Mediterranean diet is the crème de la crème of healthy eating. Filled with fibre, vegetables, legumes, fruit, nuts, some fish and minimal meat and dairy, it brings a smorgasbord of health – and planetary – benefits, all while being utterly delicious. “It’s not only healthy, it’s also extremely tasty,” says Luigi Fontana at the…
Today’s most powerful AI tools – the ones that can summarise documents, generate artwork, write poetry or predict how incredibly complex proteins fold – all stand on the shoulders of the “transformer”. This neural network architecture, first announced in 2017 at an unassuming conference centre in California, enables machines to process information in a way…
Once upon a time, science worked on the assumption that there was such a thing as a “normal” brain that neatly conformed to society. Those who were different might be diagnosed with an illness or mental health condition, and were treated as though something was wrong with them. Over the decades, scientists honed the concept that…
Chemistry can be a messy, sluggish business, frequently involving cocktails of chemicals in round-bottomed flasks that must later be painstakingly separated. But in 2001, K. Barry Sharpless and his colleagues outlined an idea they called click chemistry that broke the mould. The snappy name, which was Sharpless’s wife Janet Dueser’s idea, summed it up well: a new set…
In 2005, physicists David Frame and Myles Allen were on their way to a scientific conference in Exeter, UK, and had been, in Frame’s words, “fiddling about” with a climate model to prepare for their presentation. At the time, most research focused on stabilising the number of greenhouse gas molecules in the atmosphere to prevent…
Step back 1000 years, look up at the night sky and you might notice some extra dots of light compared with today. Back then, Chinese astronomers called these “guest stars” and believed them to be harbingers of great change. We now know these were likely to have been supernovae – explosions borne from dying stars – and…
February 1, 2026 1 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm U.S. quietly declassifies Cold–War era ‘JUMPSEAT’ surveillance satellites The National Reconnaissance Office has now declassified a satellite program used to spy on America’s adversaries By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron National Reconnaissance Office Some forty years ago, the U.S. launched a series…
Ryoji Ikeda’s data-cosm [n°1] Alice Lubbock Thomas LewtonFeatures editor, London Since the mid-2000s, electronic musician and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda has transformed vast quantities of data into immersive installations that transport you inside invisible scientific realms. When visiting his new work data-cosm [n°1], which sets out to “chart the full spectrum of data on nature”,…
