Editor's Note (1/11/16): David Bowie, one of the most progressive songwriters of his generation, who sang about outer space and aliens, died on Sunday, January 10, two days after his 69th birthday and the release of his latest album, Blackstar .
Recent experimental optical clocks are so precise that even a small change in elevation or velocity makes them register the passage of time differently
A timely conversation with physicist Sean M. Carroll about how our one-way trip from the past to the future is entangled with entropy and the origin of the universe
Imported seasonings are rife with all sorts of extras
The bonanza in spotting Pluto's peers nears its end
Additional resources for Advances articles in the February 2014 issue
Researchers are forecasting which memes will spread far and wide
The massive annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience brought together tens of thousands of researchers exploring the workings of mind and brain
A gigantic star in the Whirlpool galaxy has vanished, solving a supernova mystery
![Astronomers Puzzle Over Newfound Asteroid That Acts Like a Comet [Video]](/sciam/cache/file/4946D2A1-2E73-405C-9CD7A72881F410AE_small.jpg)
An oddball cometlike asteroid could explain how rocky bodies develop wispy comet tails—or just add more confusion
The list of known exoplanets is growing so long, so fast, that it is becoming difficult to properly appreciate the new discoveries. For those of us who grew up when our solar system accounted for the only nine worlds known in the entire universe, how are we to grasp the fact that astronomers now discover [...]
Low-carbon power depends on climate-unfriendly metals
Books and recommendations from Scientific American
What once appeared to be an unremarkable star among billions in the Whirlpool Galaxy has vanished in a brilliant supernova
For more than nine years, NASA’s Cassini probe has orbited Saturn, examining its rings and moons in unprecedented detail and sending back images of things and places humans had never seen.
Early data from the rover teases out new details of Mars’s atmosphere and how it changed over billions of years
A new telescope array reveals a gas cloud forming a star perhaps 100 times as massive as the sun
The star Tau Boo’s magnetic cycle is at least 10 times faster than the sun’s
Credit: NASA About the Voyager 1 spacecraft, this much is clear: the NASA probe has traveled farther than any other. Voyager 1 is now more than 18.5 billion kilometers from the sun—almost 125 times the distance between Earth and the sun.
Get 50% off digital subscriptions of Scientific American and Scientific American MIND!
![Astronaut Chris Hadfield Covers David Bowie's "Space Oddity" in Space [Video]](/blogs/cache/file/1A1822B6-0261-4314-9ED1A120856C5614_small.jpg)
