Animals
'Chatty Turtles' Flip the Script on the Evolutionary Origins of Vocalization in Animals
Recordings of more than 50 species of turtles and other animals help scientists reassess the origins of acoustic communication in vertebrates.
Stories by Pakinam Amer
Endangered Species
An Unblinking History of the Conservation Movement
In her new book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, science journalist Michelle Nijhuis looks into the past of the wildlife conservation field, warts and all, to try to chart its future...
Animals
Inside the Nail-Biting Quest to Find the ‘Loneliest Whale’
It is a tale of sound: the song of a solitary whale that vocalizes at a unique frequency of 52 hertz, which no other whale—as the story goes—can seemingly understand. It is also a tale about science and ocean life, laced with fantasy and mystery and mostly shrouded in darkness...
Conservation
The Deepest Dive to Find the Secrets of the Whales
On Earth Day, Scientific American sits down with National Geographic underwater photographer Brian Skerry to talk about free diving with whales and filming the giant mammals within five meters or less...
Space & Physics
First in Space: New Yuri Gagarin Biography Shares Hidden Side of Cosmonaut
It’s been 60 years, to the day, since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human to travel to space in a tiny capsule attached to an R-7 ballistic missile, a powerful rocket originally designed to carry a three- to five-megaton nuclear warhead...
Computing
AI Can Now Debate with Humans and Sometimes Convince Them, Too
Today on the Science Talk podcast, Noam Slonim of IBM Research speaks to Scientific American about an impressive feat of computer engineering: an AI-powered autonomous system that can engage in complex debate with humans over issues ranging from subsidizing preschool and the merit of space exploration to the pros and cons of genetic engineering. In a new Nature paper, Slonim and his colleagues show that across 80 debate topics, Project Debater’s computational argument technology has performed very decently—with a human audience being the judge of that...
Computing
Machine Learning Pwns Old-School Atari Games
You can call it the “revenge of the computer scientist.” An algorithm that made headlines for mastering the notoriously difficult Atari 2600 game Montezuma’s Revenge can now beat more games, achieving near perfect scores, and help robots explore real-world environments...
Culture
On Finding Yourself in a Butterfly’s Wings
Today on the Science Talk podcast, Alexis Gambis, a New York University biologist and independent filmmaker, speaks about making Son of Monarchs , which won the 2021 Alfred P...
Culture
Science Meets Magical Realism in Son of Monarchs
A new film that just premiered at Sundance tells of migration, loss and transformation on the wing
