Scientific American

Culture is humanity’s secret for world domination. This calculation shows just how powerful it is

The long-anticipated “Schedule F” order strips job protections meant to safeguard federal employees from political interference

Microsoft’s announcement of a new quantum computing breakthrough with its Majorana 2 chip continues a trend of bold claims followed by scant evidence

This prototype could help the world prepare for AI malware threats, according to the researchers who made it

New-generation GLP-1 drugs, such as retatrutide, are achieving higher rates of weight loss. How much weight is too much and too fast to lose?

Could a predecessor to the phonograph have appeared a century earlier?

This marks the first case of the New World screwworm in U.S. livestock since the parasite was eliminated in the country in the 1960s

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.

MAVEN was the first successful mission designed to study the atmosphere of Mars. It also became a vital node of NASA’s communications network at the Red Planet

China is pulling ahead of the rest of the world in sinking data centers that power AI into the ocean as an alternate way to keep them cool

Put your science knowledge to the test with this week’s news quiz. Play now.

From slow elevators to perfectly split pizza, math quietly explains the quirks of everyday life

Unprecedented results against a stubbornly hard-to-treat cancer are boosting optimism that other challenging tumors will be next

Bumblebees appear to be capable of coming up with creative solutions to new problems to get a sugary reward—and their strategies include cheating

More than 5,300 years after Ötzi’s death, researchers identified yeasts in his gut microbiome that continue to be active—and they used it to make bread

A new investigation alleges that official organizations in Tanzania have imperiled the country's artifacts and remains at four critical human heritage sites they were supposed to protect

A breeze is emanating from Sagittarius A* at the heart of our galaxy

The Ocean Observatories Initiative has been collecting data on physical, chemical, geological and biological conditions in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for the past decade

Deep surveys of the sky have turned up galaxies vastly larger than our own. Are there even bigger ones yet to be seen?

A blip of light in the outer reaches of the Milky Way might be a bizarre black hole born at the beginning of time itself—and the long-sought solution to the mystery of dark matter. Astronomers are calling it “Phoebe”

A group of researchers have proposed rules to prevent artificial intelligence from overpowering humans in math

By encoding mathematical statements into numbers, mathematician Kurt Gödel used ordinary arithmetic to check whether a statement can be proved

Even though astronomers didn’t detect alien tech signals from a rare interstellar visitor, the results are worthwhile, they say

A deadly Ebola outbreak is spreading fast—and U.S. cuts to foreign aid are making it worse

The past year has been “filled with turmoil” for science, National Academy of Sciences president Marcia McNutt said during her State of the Science address

The transplanted pig organs functioned for 36 hours before showing signs of rejection

China apparently didn’t issue any airspace or maritime notices ahead of the maiden launch of this rocket on Monday

This order asks artificial intelligence companies to give the U.S. government up to 30 days to assess frontier models before they are released

A new analysis of red lines inside a cave in Wales suggests they were made deliberately by ancient humans some 17,000 years ago

It's not clear why the National Science Foundation may be limiting funding to certain U.S. universities