Does skill have any influence on the outcome when playing Snakes and Ladders? Sipa US/Alamy Have you ever played snakes and ladders (also known as Chutes and Ladders)? Are you sure? This game has its origins in ancient Indian games in which players roll dice to progress across a board of squares, such as Pachisi….
Forty years ago today, disaster struck NASA’s human spaceflight program when the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after blastoff, killing all seven people onboard. The tragedy nearly brought the shuttle program to an early end. Decades later, the mistakes that led to the Challenger disaster, as well as fallout from the similar 2003 loss…
Space scientist Maggie Aderin has a new book out this month Steven May / Alamy Stock Photo It’s nowhere near early enough for those of us in the northern hemisphere to start struggling against winter’s somnolent spell, so there’s no need for excuses as you take to your bed with a pile of good books….
January 28, 2026 3 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Google DeepMind unleashes new AI to investigate DNA’s ‘dark matter’ DeepMind’s AlphaGenome AI model could help solve the problem of predicting how variations in noncoding DNA shape gene expression By Tanya Lewis edited by Claire Cameron DNA is the blueprint for life, influencing everything…
Athletes wearing a friction-reducing swimsuit dominated the 2008 Beijing Olympics Adam Pretty/Getty Images Friction: A biographyJennifer R. Vail, Harvard University Press IN 2009, World Aquatics banned a specific type of swimsuit from all international competitions in water sports, ruling that it gave athletes an unfair advantage. The development of this swimsuit included using NASA’s testing…
January 29, 2026 3 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Svalbard’s polar bears are showing remarkable resilience to climate change These polar bears appear to be maintaining their physical health despite the loss of sea ice—their preferred hunting grounds By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron A sedated polar bear lies on the…
Health workers by a triage tent for people suspected of having covid‑19 in Lisbon, Portugal, in April 2020 PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA/AFP via Getty Images The Great ShadowSusan Wise Bauer, St. Martin’s Press It may be perverse to say it, but this is a fine time to publish a book about the history of sickness….
January 31, 2026 1 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Largest galaxy survey yet confirms that the Universe is not clumpy enough The six-year results from the Dark Energy Survey highlight unresolved tensions in standard cosmological theory By Nature magazine The Dark Energy Survey observed around 150 million galaxies visible in Earth’s southern sky….
Pilot-wave theory may act like waves steering bottles on the sea Philip Thurston/Getty Images Beyond the QuantumAntony Valentini, Oxford University Press Physics, it is fair to say, hasn’t gone to plan. After decades of hopeful searching, dark matter still hasn’t been directly detected. We found the Higgs boson, but nothing to pave the way forward….
January 31, 2026 3 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Software is becoming something you speak into existence Coding for the rest of us finally feels possible now that tools like Claude Code turn plain English into working software By Deni Ellis Béchard edited by Eric Sullivan A person holds a smartphone displaying the…
