Scientific American

SpaceX is now targeting the evening of May 21 to launch the latest and largest version of its Starship megarocket for the first time

Denver’s hockey team is studded with stars, but training and playing the game some 5,000 feet above sea level may give their athletic performance a boost over that of their rivals

A massive digitization project has nearly doubled the known extent of the first continent-scale road network

The sudden resolution of a well-known conjecture highlights the growing adoption of AI as an assistant in high-level mathematics

The intimidating legacy of the scariest problem in mathematics

This company says its pulsed plasma machine will deliver electricity to the grid by 2029. Some physicists warn that its promises are outrunning what the technology has proved

Will computers based on quantum physics really change the world?

Start your morning with today’s Spellements. Create as many words as you can from our daily selection of letters—including one tied to recent science news. Play now.

Ozempic and just getting older take off muscle. New therapies could retain it

Sharla Boehm, a math teacher, spent her summers coding. She’d go on to build what would eventually evolve into the Internet

Thursday's flight could be the most pivotal test of the Starship megarocket

The new image shows the galaxy NGC 1266, a transitional object with a clutch of young stars that likely collided with a smaller galaxy 500 million years ago

Research suggests depression assessment questionnaires can’t reliably compare people with differing intelligence

The wobbly, lanky arachnids known as harvestmen or daddy longlegs may be overlooked as predators of small vertebrates such as frogs, researchers say

Mosaic depictions of a weapon-wielding female gladiator are the first physical evidence showing women in ancient Rome could be skilled beast hunters

Researchers discovered the copy of the 1,300-year-old poem lurking inside a historical text in an Italian library

The science of de-extinction does not exist, but Colossal Biosciences’ “artificial egg” is an interesting technical feat

Here are six ways to build a quantum computer

A deadly Ebola outbreak in parts of Africa is raising international alarm. Still, experts stress that the chance of a pandemic is low

The Trump administration warned that too much screen time for children has been linked to poor sleep, bad behavior, and less physical and social activity

Scientific American spoke to one of the people who are currently being monitored for possible hantavirus infection at the National Quarantine Unit in Nebraska

Some extinct human ancestors and modern-day apes appear to share wrist traits that raise the question of whether our last common ancestor walked on its knuckles

New trove of fossils reveals that ancestral animals likely emerged in the deep sea

Eight of the top 10 officials at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have now been pushed out since President Donald Trump took office

A decade after Ebola vaccines changed outbreak response, a new epidemic in central Africa is caused by a strain the world never fully prepared for

NASA’s Psyche snapped images as it flew by Mars last week. The spacecraft used the planet’s gravity to give itself a boost on its journey toward its target asteroid

The asteroid will swing by Earth on Monday and be close enough to be visible using an amateur telescope

Nuclear power could enable long-term lunar missions, but NASA’s timeline may be too ambitious

A Bermuda high parked over the western Atlantic is pulling sweltering air up from the south, challenging records in parts of the eastern U.S.

If you switch a lamp on and off an infinite number of times, will the light end up on or off? Somehow math says both

March was a scorching 9.35 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the 20th-century average for the month, capping the hottest 12-month stretch for the U.S. since records began in 1895

Commercial satellites can now watch much of Earth in near-real time. Militaries are learning new ways to fool them

As world health leaders face deadly outbreaks of hantavirus and Ebola, a major pandemic preparedness report finds we are less safe from viral outbreaks than before COVID

Sometimes science does make our world turn upside down

To build its moon base, NASA needs a lot of power

At least six Americans are believed to have been exposed to the Ebola virus, and one person who appears to have contracted the virus has been evacuated to Germany

The long-tailed pygmy rice rat is the primary host for Andes virus, the type of hantavirus responsible for sickening passengers on the MV Hondius cruise ship

What you should know about hantavirus, why PCOS is getting a new name, and how some fish hide in an unusual spot

Clinical trials for treatments against Ebola Bundibugyo virus are ‘in a strong position’ to be launched quickly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda

Researchers know very little about how long the Andes version of the hantavirus can remain in human hosts

This snail became the first animal living on deep-sea hydrothermal vents to be added to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species—it also turns poisonous sulfur into armor

Door-building spiders; a new quantum liquid