Science

I routinely control my own dreams. During a recent episode, in my dream laboratory, my experience went like this: I was asleep on a twin mattress in the dark lab room, wrapped in a cozy duvet and a blanket of silence. But I felt like I was awake. The sensation of being watched hung over […]

December 17, 2024 2 min read Book Review: The Surprising Comeback of Our Least Appreciated Sense The nose knows more than we thought By Dana Dunham The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell and the Extraordinary Power of the Noseby Jonas Olofsson. Mariner, 2025 ($28) As COVID spread across the world in early 2020,

December 17, 2024 2 min read How Earth’s Biggest Mass Extinctions Stack Up Earth’s deadliest mass extinctions have important commonalities—and significant differences By Clara Moskowitz & Rick Simonson Life on our planet has experienced many mass extinctions over its 4.5 billion years. Scientists see evidence for at least five major episodes that eradicated creatures great

December 17, 2024 4 min read Book Review: This Relationship Shaped Rachel Carson’s Environmental Ethos The connection between queer love and the power to imagine a more sustainable future By Brooke Borel NONFICTION Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Loveby Lida Maxwell.Stanford University Press, 2025 ($25) On a summer night in the mid-1950s, two

December 17, 2024 2 min read Book Review: In a Drowning New York City, Can All of Natural History Be Saved? In the often-gloomy genre of climate fiction, a new novel hits a high-water mark for its empathy By Alan Scherstuhl All the Water in the World: A Novelby Eiren Caffall. St. Martin’sPress, 2025 ($29)

December 17, 2024 4 min read Contributors to Scientific American’s January 2025 Issue Writers, artists, photographers and researchers share the stories behind the stories By Allison Parshall Doug Gimesy The Next Viral Plague Photojournalist Doug Gimesy (above) is a font of knowledge about flying foxes. He first photographed a colony of these fuzzy bats eight

French mathematician Édouard Lucas was born in Amiens in 1842 and died in Paris 49 years later. He wrote the four-volume work Recréations Mathématiques, which became a classic of recreational mathematics. In 1883, under the pseudonym “N. Claus de Siam” (an anagram of “Lucas d’Amiens”), he marketed a solitaire game that he called the Tower

December 17, 2024 3 min read It’s Never Been a Better Time to Look Up Astronomy is a bright spot amid turbulence on Earth By The Editors A JWST photograph shows the NGC 602 star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud. ESA/Webb, NASA and CSA, P. Zeidler, E. Sabbi, A. Nota, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb) Things

The vagus nerve is a vine of nerve fibers with roots in nearly every organ and shoots in the brain. It helps us detect a racing heart, rising blood pressure, stomachache, discomfort, an overzealous immune system and even alarm calls from microbes in our gut. When it senses trouble, the vagus helps to steady our

December 17, 2024 3 min read January 2025: Science History from 50, 100 and 150 Years Ago The J particle; a nitroglycerin engine By Mark Fischetti 1925, Exercise in Motion: “Years before the motion picture was invented, Mr. Eadweard Muybridge, at the University of Pennsylvania, used electrically timed cameras to study the exact movements of