Scientific American

Poor preparation and a failure to properly apply the coating may be just a few of the reasons why the Reflecting Pool’s new paint job appears to be peeling off

Training people to pay attention to the right visual cues nearly doubled how accurately they could spot AI-generated faces

A new study claims that the universe isn’t entirely the same no matter where you look—a radical proposal

Pigeons seem to defy a century-old psychology law about how rewards and consequences help us learn

Famed AI wins in Go let human players rethink their moves in a whole new way

Inside the quest to rescue NASA’s aging Swift observatory

This Silicon Valley-backed venture is unraveling the mangled remains of scrolls ruined by the 79 C.E. eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Herculaneum and Pompeii

Start your morning with today’s Spellements. Create as many words as you can from our daily selection of letters—including one tied to recent science news. Play now.

A prolonged, intense heat wave will make temperatures feel as hot as 115 degrees Fahrenheit in the eastern U.S. this week

Billions of emerging insects will likely trigger predator population surges—but some species mysteriously opt out of such bounties

After decades of debate, the scientific case is clear for Europe’s Future Circular Collider, a colossal successor to the Large Hadron Collider. But transforming this megaproject from vision to reality is far from guaranteed

A handful of start-up firms are testing therapies that target specific epigenetic markers to treat everything from high cholesterol to a rare muscular disorder

The great American brain drain could define science for a generation

Three companies will receive a total of $600 million to executive four moon landings, laying the groundwork for a planned crewed outpost on the surface

This brilliant new image, taken by Europe’s Euclid space telescope, offers a preview of the kind of imaging that will be possible with NASA’s upcoming Roman telescope

A new model flags people at high risk of sudden cardiac death from a routine ECG—and reveals a warning sign in the heart’s electrical activity

Temperatures in New York’s Central Park haven’t surpassed 100 degrees Fahrenheit since 2012; but that may be about to change

As Kew Botanic Gardens completes a scan of its collections, AI tools could help in the fight against biodiversity loss

How Emmy Noether's theorem uses the Lagrangian to provide a formula for calculating the quantity of symmetries in a system—like the orbit of planets.

The speedy machine displaces the U.S.’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s El Capitan at the top of the TOP500 rankings of the world’s fastest supercomputers

The toxin behind two outbreaks in seven months is hard to find—and just a handful of labs are equipped to look for it at all

A field guide to the space rocks you might see streaking across the night sky

Our solar system is a celestial shooting gallery, chock-full of flying projectiles that one day could threaten Earth—so what can we do about it?

Noether's work helped prove the conservation of energy in physics, a key foundation for Einstein's theory of relativity

Key differences in the chemical structure of butter and margarine mean choosing one or the other has a big effect on your baking

This “extraordinary” event was likely caused by seismic waves bouncing off Earth’s core, researchers found

Two people were the first to receive the therapy for a condition that damages the spinal cord and optic nerve

Construction of the Deep Synoptic Array is about to start in rural Nevada. It will reveal untold galaxies in stunning detail and help explain how they form and grow

A galaxy appears to be missing the invisible substance thought to hold such objects together, further challenging long-held assumptions about how galaxies form

Knowing what kind of tick bit you and where you got it can help inform next steps

How did we get here?

Some mathematicians have predicted when humanity’s downfall might occur—though the circumstances are unspecified

Julie Elie has been studying zebra finch vocalizations for years. Now, she has won the Coller-Dolittle Prize for progress toward a world where humans can talk to animals

Mikhail Verbitsky was detained at an Armenian airport last Thursday on charges of inciting terrorism

The first participant has been treated in a landmark clinical trial of cellular reprogramming, which aims to rejuvenate aging cells

The discovery of a completely new type of gravitational wave could reveal what happens near a black hole’s event horizon

Extremely curved spacetime can warp cause and effect, creating channels for backward communication

Fathers show changes in some of the same brain areas as mothers, but the effect of parenthood on dads isn’t nearly as well studied

This operation opens the door to treating more people living with HIV who have end-stage organ disease

The Trump administration wanted the surface of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to be “American flag blue.” A water-treatment expert explains why the pool is still algal green and why the bloom could keep coming back

Scorching temperatures across France rose to a record-breaking average 30 degrees on Wednesday