Scientific American

An ancient sample shows calcite threading through this material’s cracks and pores, offering possible lessons for making modern concrete last longer

A 23-year-old student overturned an ancient conjecture about one of math’s simplest operations

Erythrulose—a sugar found in raspberries—is also prevalent in a giant molecular cloud close to our galaxy’s core, scientists have discovered

Hundreds of thousands of scientists, including Nobel laureates, warn that changes to the way federal grants are approved would greatly damage American science

Alpha-gal syndrome is increasing across the U.S., driven by lone star ticks

Record-breaking heat waves are beginning to blur together—here’s why and what’s making them so unbearable

What’s the secret to prompting an AI to solve math problems that have left humans stumped? Tell it to believe in itself

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.

The signature of Sak Tahn Waax, or “White-Chested Fox,” was found inscribed in a 1,000-year-old chamber beneath present-day Guatemala

Steel support columns in the Midtown building, which is being converted from offices into apartments, may have been overloaded, experts say

Several children who had aggressive recurrent brain tumors remained disease-free years after this treatment, according to an early-stage trial

This climate system is tied to more powerful typhoons, as well as famine and wildfires

New research identifies five distinct sleep subtypes, revealing links between brain patterns, behavior and health

Scientists have long suspected that this star cluster was a hotspot for a certain kind of black hole. But for decades, they had been unable to spot any

Cyclosporiasis case numbers have skyrocketed from several dozen nationwide in June to now more than 1,000 in the state of Michigan alone

The sport supplement is popular among health influencers and athletes, who say creatine can help build stronger muscles and sharper brains—but is it legit?

Smoke from northern Minnesota and western Ontario wildfires may drift over the Great Lakes and Northeast this week, bringing hazardous levels of air pollution to major cities

A recent study in the journal Nature carries cosmos-quaking implications for our understanding of the universe—except a new preprint says that it’s wrong

Tennis players can return high-speed balls using a combination of reaction and predicting the future

This massive dinosaur skeleton sold for more than $50.1 million on Tuesday

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is an independent group that offers guidance on what health screenings and medications health insurance should cover

The SpudCell certainly resembles a living cell, but a key structure inside the cell falls short of the real thing

Corn has taken the heat for recent Midwest summer humidity—unjustly, according to corn experts

A best-yet measurement of one of general relativity’s most mind-boggling effects is “another feather in Einstein’s cap”

Bacteria send protein packages to dormant neighbors to endure antibiotic attack

The sheer amount of insects that free-range cats consume might surprise you

During World War II, statistics helped the Allies estimate the number of enemy tanks, which proved essential in the decisive move against Nazi Germany

A strange class of comet could explain the enigmatic behavior of ‘Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object—and even shed light on how Earth became habitable

Other planets have moons, too. Do they get eclipses like we do?

To align Coordinated Universal Time with Earth’s rotation, a second occasionally gets added to the year. That may change in 2027

Reliance on artificial-intelligence tools degrades the abilities of physicians and software engineers, studies show

Female mammals have long thought to be born with all the eggs they would ever have, but new research is challenging that consensus

The exoplanet telescope TESS revealed a distant world using an entirely different detection method than the one it was built around

New archaeology has uncovered everything from musket balls to wig curlers at the site of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the first major clash of the American Revolution

Living at altitudes with less than half the oxygen at sea level, these mice have adapted to their environment in unique ways

Anthropeum is a daily game that uses the Met’s open-access data to showcase underrepresented art and artifacts

The space agency has put out a call for its Moon & Mars Exploration Analog, which recreates the challenges of a long-duration space mission

Pigeons seem to defy a century-old psychology law about how rewards and consequences help us learn

China’s Tianwen-2 aims to collect samples from asteroid Kamo’oalewa and return them to Earth

Training people to pay attention to the right visual cues nearly doubled how accurately they could spot AI-generated faces

A new study claims that the universe isn’t entirely the same no matter where you look—a radical proposal