Science

February 18, 2025 5 min read ‘City Killer’ Asteroid’s Earth Impact Risk Rises and Falls Again Asteroid 2024 YR4’s risk of hitting Earth is shifting with new data, astronomers say By Lee Billings edited by Dean Visser The asteroid 2024 YR4 probably won’t come nearly as close to Earth anytime soon as the space rock […]

CLIMATEWIRE | The Trump administration has fired hundreds of Federal Emergency Management Agency employees and is now targeting staff involved with climate change, equity or diversity, according to interviews and emails obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News. After firing probationary employees over Presidents Day weekend, FEMA is being directed to “come up with employee reductions far

In the corridors of NASA buildings across the United States, Pride flags and pictures celebrating women in science are being taken down. Scientists are adding space-mission stickers to their laptops to cover ones that displayed rainbows and other symbols of LGBT+ support. Employees are stripping pronouns from their e-mail signatures and holding darkly humorous conversations

“There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong,” according to H. L. Mencken. Today we might ponder his words to diagnose the revival of another neat, plausible and boneheaded idea: ringing the planet with orbiting missiles to somehow make the U.S. safer. In January President Donald Trump called for a

February 19, 2025 3 min read The Latest on Bird Flu in Humans, Chickens, and More Bird flu headlines include three new human cases, millions of dead birds in poultry flocks and new personnel moves from the Trump administration By Meghan Bartels edited by Lauren J. Young Edwin Remsberg/Getty Images We’re regularly rounding up the

[CLIP: Theme music] Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. You probably don’t spend too much time thinking about the air you breathe—at least relative to the amount of time you spend actually breathing it, which, unless you do a lot of free diving, should be pretty much always.  On supporting science

CLIMATEWIRE | Scientists across the country are in turmoil as President Donald Trump wages an assault on U.S. research. They’re worried about their funding and job security. They’re censoring their language around topics like climate change and diversity. And they’re wondering what kinds of science they’ll be allowed to conduct in a rapidly shifting U.S.

This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. Twenty years ago Dutch farmer Hubrecht Janse realized the tide was about to turn on his third-generation family business in the Netherlands. In 2004 the country’s government installed a sluice gate in a dam that separated the glittering blue Lake Veere from the North Sea.

February 18, 2025 3 min read Science History from 50, 100 and 150 Years Ago Color blindness; the end of fire By Mark Fischetti 1975, Color Blindness: “People with protanopia cannot distinguish between green and red or colors in between. Color blocks (top row) simulate the appearance of lights that they judge as identical. People

February 18, 2025 4 min read Contributors to Scientific American’s March 2025 Issue Writers, artists, photographers and researchers share the stories behind the stories By Allison Parshall edited by Jen Schwartz Jesse BurkeThe Imperfect Bloom For Jesse Burke (above), photographing a flower farm was a dream assignment. “When you send me to a farm,” he