The Sciences

Scientists and engineers react with elation to the historic interplanetary flight

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter successfully hovered for 40 seconds in Mars’s thin atmosphere

Astronomers hope to use innovations from the subatomic world to construct breathtakingly large arrays of optical observatories

Australia’s critically endangered regent honeyeaters are losing what amounts to their culture—and that could jeopardize their success at landing a mate.

It’s hard to say at this point, but a crucial first step is to establish whether they exist so any future arrival won’t come as a complete surprise

Despite promising technology demonstrations, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for the growing problem of taking out the orbital trash

The interplanetary aircraft will launch no earlier than next week because of glitches in its flight-control software

Research shows the bill will improve public health, and its “dangers” have been debunked

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. In this new episode marking the 60th anniversary of this historic space flight—the first of its kind—Scientific American talks to Stephen Walker, an award-winning filmmaker, director and book author, about the daring launch that changed the course of human history and charted a map to the skies and beyond.

Walker discusses his new book Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space, out today, and how Gagarin’s journey—an enormous mission that was fraught with danger and planned in complete secrecy—happened on the heels of a cold war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and sparked a relentless space race between a rising superpower and an ailing one, respectively.

Walker, whose films have won an Emmy and a BAFTA, revisits the complex politics and pioneering science of this era from a fresh perspective. He talks about his hunt for eyewitnesses, decades after the event; how he uncovered never-before-seen footage of the space mission; and, most importantly, how he still managed to put the human story at the heart of a tale at the intersection of political rivalry, cutting-edge technology, and humankind’s ambition to conquer space and explore new frontiers.

The anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic voyage to orbit is a chance to reflect on how far human spaceflight has come—and where it’s going next

Bill Nelson, Biden’s nominee, exemplifies the agency’s pork-barrel, male-dominated past

Scientists have known for decades that oyster mushrooms feasted on roundworms—and they’ve finally figured out how their toxins work