Here’s What Oppenheimer Gets Right—And Wrong—About Nuclear History
Here’s what a historian who has studied J. Robert Oppenheimer for two decades has to say about the new Christopher Nolan film on the father of the atomic bomb.

Here’s What Oppenheimer Gets Right—And Wrong—About Nuclear History
Here’s what a historian who has studied J. Robert Oppenheimer for two decades has to say about the new Christopher Nolan film on the father of the atomic bomb.
How Stress Messes With Your Gut
Inflammatory bowel disease flare-ups can be traced to mental stress
Should We Care About AI’s Emergent Abilities?
Here’s how large language models, or LLMs, actually work.
What That Jazz Beat Tells Us about Hearing and The Brain
Very small delays in swing jazz point to our evolution as a supremely auditory species.
Who Was Alessandra Giliani, 14th-Century Teen Anatomist?
Was a teenager named Alessandra Giliani the Western world’s first female anatomist? In 14th-century Italy, women were strictly barred from medical research. One flouted that rule—disguised as a man.
Just like People, Orangutans Get Smoker’s Voice
New research has discovered that wildfire smoke hurts these primates’ voice—and health.
Doctor AI Will See You Now
ChatGPT and other AI programs can offer medical advice. But how good are they?
El Niño is Back. What Does That Mean For You?
The famous climate pattern El Niño could usher in a new hottest year on record and will have domino effects on the world’s weather.
The Kavli Prize Presents: How Your Brain Maps the World [Sponsored]
John O’Keefe shared the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience in 2014 for discovering that neurons in the hippocampus encode an animal’s location and create a cognitive map for navigation.
This podcast was produced for the Kavli Prize by Scientific American Custom Media, a division separate from the magazine’s board of editors.
The Universe Is Abuzz with Giant Gravitational Waves, and Scientists Just Heard Them (Maybe)
Researchers, using the galaxy as a detector, believe they have detected gravitational waves from monster black holes for the first time.
Poisons and Perils on the Salton Sea
Toxic dust plagues marginalized communities on the shores of this disappearing salt lake.
These Ants Are Probably Better at Navigating Than You Are
Desert ants living in the featureless salt plains of Tunisia count their steps and erect tall entrances at their nests to find their way back home.