Physicists are searching for what lies underneath the particles we know
Scientific American
The crater, named after geologist and lunar surface expert Tom McGetchin, spans more than two football fields wide
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It was thought that complex cells couldn’t survive above a certain temperature, but a tiny amoeba has proven that assumption wrong
The virus is currently most prevalent in California and the southern U.S., but experts expect it to go national in the coming weeks
Google made a major breakthrough in quantum computing. To prevent the results from being misused, the company kept them secret. That backfired
The president also said artificial intelligence should be rebranded as “super intelligence”
Earth’s annual checkup shows that we’re at increasing risk of moving away from the environment we’re adapted to
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The research into how electromagnetic waves and radio frequency radiation influence health has been plagued by low-quality studies
“This is probably going to be the superlative El Niño event of our lives so far,” a climate scientist says
OpenAI’s proof seems eligible for a $1-million prize—but only by using a controversial loophole
October 2026 Issue
Some of the biggest questions in science—about the origins of space, life and consciousness—aren't just unanswered. They may be unanswerable. That doesn't stop scientists from trying.
Elsewhere in the issue: The Desperate Hunt for Dark Matter | The Battle over Elon Musk's Colossus Data Center | Rewriting the History of American Apples
In parallel, a race by amateurs and mathematicians has found all 25,000 cases of one “inverse Galois problem”
2025 was a brutal year of budget cuts and workforce attrition at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the home base for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Experts worry Goddard—and NASA’s space science—may never recover
The Parthenon sits atop a platform that is curved into a subtle hill shape that some say makes the structure appear straighter—but is that true?
Advocates and scientists warn that giving political appointees power over research grants would “upend” U.S. science
From orbital weapons to AI risks and weaker emissions rules
The space telescope is set to reveal thousands of new exoplanets and scour the universe for signs of dark matter and energy
Understanding how human language evolved is one of the hardest problems in science to unpick
The human brain uses about the same amount of wattage as a lightbulb
The National Weather Service is speeding ahead with changing the name of the Great Lake
Discussions
“The filling of the night sky with data center satellites is a horrible plan. Humankind will cease to have any connection to the universe, already severely impaired by lighting pollution at night. Earth-based astronomy will be made ineffective. I am a retired earth scientist who was an early adopter of computers, the internet, and the web; but I am against…”
— vonseg1@sbcglobal.net
A new report from Google, Google DeepMind and M.I.T. finds that researchers are using AI—a lot. It’s just not helping as much in the lab
Don’t have the energy to catch your own meal? This dolphin has a gross solution
OpenAI’s claimed proof of the Navier-Stokes problem is a mathematical tour de force, but any real-world applications may be years away—if they ever arrive at all
Our sun is on a long, strange trip to its eventual demise. Here are the key stops along the way
As Bangladesh faces a deadly measles outbreak, experts assess what it would take for the U.S. to reach similar levels
Science is helping to peel back the layers of how dogs process the world around them
A quarter of a century after the Twin Towers fell, those who lived through the attacks are still seeking care for myriad illnesses, including cancers, post-traumatic stress disorder, and more
The Atlantic Ocean has never seen a year without a hurricane since reliable records began
The cat is smaller than a house cat but has the spots of a leopard
An Anthropic researcher quit over fears of runaway AI. His colleague who still works there agreed. Security experts argue that the incidents that are already on record call for tighter oversight, not panic
Artificial general intelligence was once a term confined to technical science papers, but its meaning has slipped
More than 100,000 people in the country are over 100 years old
The surprising real-world applications of high-dimensional sphere packing and the 48-year-old barrier that OpenAI just broke
What happens when machines surpass the most brilliant human minds? Mathematicians are finding out
A search for the most complex elliptic curves has taken mathematicians years. Claude beat the record in days
The dinosaurs were once considered reptilian, but the new results suggest we may need to rethink their evolution
Our understanding of consciousness could be fundamentally wrong
A high-ranking official announced yesterday that the U.S. military has deployed weapons into orbit to counter threats from Russia and China
And how they might have helped save the future of American apples
After months of headaches and visual hallucinations, a woman was finally revealed to have brain cysts filled with tapeworm larvae
A new declaration from winners of the Fields Medal reflects many mathematicians’ growing alarm over a “severe misalignment” between the tech industry and their field a week after AI toppled one of math’s biggest open problems