Culture

To celebrate Scientific American’s 180th anniversary, we invited readers to place our magazine covers in the wild. See our staff’s favorite submissions

Winners of the annual Ig Nobel awards include the science of tipsy bats and the physics of cacio e pepe

Writers, artists, photographers and researchers share the stories behind the stories

Science may need to increasingly rely on wealthy patrons, but privately funded projects don’t always pan out

Letters to the editors for the May 2025 issue of Scientific American

The start of the workweek can be a biologically measurable stressor, with consequences for long-term health that can stretch into retirement

We surveyed people in the U.S. about artificial-intelligence-generated art. Their answers told us a lot about how we value human creativity

A community science project finds that modest reminders to find joy in the day can have benefits that are on par with those of more ambitious well-being interventions

Winning more than $1 billion in Powerball is an exciting possibility, but keeping a cool math mind can help you decide whether that opportunity is worth your $2 bet

The downfall of a long-standing theory in psychology raises a question: How much does the environment we’re raised in change how we literally see the world?

Money talks louder in some languages than others

Letters to the editors for the April 2025 issue of Scientific American