Videos

Some avian species use tools and can recognize themselves in the mirror. How do tiny brains pull off such big feats?

Sometimes the best solution to a sticky situation is a quick escape, and few escapes are faster than a trap-jaw ant’s.

Fire tornadoes are terrifying forces of nature. They're rare, but as wildfires become bigger and more frequent, they may grow more common.

Read more about the phenomena, here.

Inside the effort to understand wildfire season’s scariest phenomena

The Chandra X-ray observatory is celebrating 20 years in space this year, and oh, the things it has seen. Belinda Wilkes, who directs the telescopes operation, takes you on a dizzying visual tour of Chandra's universe.

Why do all the pictures you take underwater look blandly blue-green? The answer has to do with how light travels through water. Derya Akkaynak, an oceangoing engineer, has figured out a way to recover the colorful brilliance of the deep.

You have probably already heard, or at least heard of, white noise. Maybe you grew up when televisions were still analog. If so, you might remember the shhh that accompanied “snow” on a cathode-ray tube screen. It lived in special place between the few channels on the dial that actually had programming. And in that snow, you could see—and hear—residual cosmic radiation born in the big bang.

Or maybe you grew up in the age of apps and downloaded one of the many designed for relaxation or helping people focus. Perhaps you have even purchased a white noise machine to lull your newborn—or yourself—to sleep.

But what is white noise, exactly? Why does it affect humans the way it seems to? And what, for that matter, is pink, violet, brown or blue noise? What does color even have to do with it at all? Watch this video, and you may find that the hues of noise are all around you—and that you never recognized what you were hearing.

Paul Romer, an expert in what’s known as endogenous growth theory and winner of the 2018 Nobel prize in economics, speaks to Scientific American about seeing economic growth as increased value, akin to when ingredients in a recipe are used to create a dish worth more than the original raw materials. His research concludes that investment in people, knowledge and innovation are primary growth factors.

Jennifer Doudna, winner of the 2018 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, talks to Scientific American about what it’s like to work in perhaps the hottest research area in all of biology. She also discusses the challenges of the technology, as well as the ethical ramifications of the ability to make specific gene changes in organisms.

A. James Hudspeth, winner of the 2018 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, spoke with Scientific American editor emerita Mariette DiChristina about his efforts to regenerate lost or damaged inner-ear cells that make hearing possible. They also discussed the cultural cohesion of the deaf community and why, for its members, the lack of aural communication is not a problem requiring a solution.

We take you inside a single fireworks shell to show you how it all works