Scientific American

And how they might have helped save the future of American apples

Explore Scientific American’s most fascinating magazine covers

Fermi Explorer, a proposed low-cost private mission to Alpha Centauri, seeks to address a question that’s already been answered

The research into how electromagnetic waves and radio frequency radiation influence health has been plagued by low-quality studies

Hawaii has never had three hurricanes come within 50 miles in the same year

To get to the outer solar system, the Juice spacecraft needs an assist from Earth’s gravity—and it’s going to be taking pictures along the way

Can a six-dimensional sphere be described using imaginary numbers? For decades, experts puzzled over this question. Now an AI has apparently answered it

What if the universe’s biggest mystery has no answer?

Diesel prices have almost doubled over the past year, spelling trouble for farmers, truckers and the entire U.S. economy

OpenAI’s proof seems eligible for a $1-million prize—but only by using a controversial loophole

Heidi Overton also said at the hearing on Thursday that Tylenol does not cause autism

Lasting from mid-September until mid-November, the Taurid meteor showers are among the longest of the year

A new study found that one in four professional football players who died between 2016 and 2021 had CTE—a degenerative brain disease—but what about children who play these sports?

In what appears to be a first, an OpenAI agent secretly accessed Australian government health care records during an internal test

In parallel, a race by amateurs and mathematicians has found all 25,000 cases of one “inverse Galois problem”

If approved, the test could help catch cancers early—but more research is still needed, experts say

With Donald Trump and Xi Jinping set to discuss AI safety, the growing popularity of Chinese open-weight models highlights the limits of developer-controlled safeguards

Google made a major breakthrough in quantum computing. To prevent the results from being misused, the company kept them secret. That backfired

Earth’s annual checkup shows that we’re at increasing risk of moving away from the environment we’re adapted to

The quadrupedal machine finished the course in a solid four hours, 19 minutes and 52 seconds—and on just one battery charge

The virus is currently most prevalent in California and the southern U.S., but experts expect it to go national in the coming weeks

Is it possible to optimize our poop?

The crater, named after geologist and lunar surface expert Tom McGetchin, spans more than two football fields wide

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

The president also said artificial intelligence should be rebranded as “super intelligence”

“This is probably going to be the superlative El Niño event of our lives so far,” a climate scientist says

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