Letters to the editors for the June 2025 issue of Scientific American
Category: 1. Edi-Choice
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NASA Is Crucial to the U.S. Winning the New Space Race
October 14, 2025
4 min read
The U.S. Won’t Win the New Space Race by Defunding NASA
The U.S. wants to remain a superpower in space. It can’t without supporting NASA
In the early 1400s, nearly a century before Columbus’s fateful…
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Workouts Help to Treat Cancer and Improve Survival
To improve the quality of life of people with cancer, oncologists have regularly recommended exercise. Staying fit can make patients feel and function better. But exercise itself was never considered a formal treatment for the disease.
“The…
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How we sharpened the James Webb telescope’s vision from a million kilometres away
After Christmas dinner in 2021, our family was glued to the television, watching the nail-biting launch of NASA’s US$10 billion (AU$15 billion) James Webb Space Telescope. There had not been such a leap forward in telescope technology…
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SpaceX launches 24 of Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet satellites to orbit
Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband megaconstellation continues to grow.
Twenty-four more Project Kuiper satellites took flight on Monday (Oct. 13), lifting off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 9:58…
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JWST may have found the Universe’s first stars powered by dark matter
In the early universe, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the first stars emerged from vast, untouched clouds of hydrogen and helium. Recent observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggest that some of these early…
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Astronomers detect million-solar-mass object in distant universe
Astronomers have detected one of the darkest objects ever seen at a record cosmic distance—only with the assistance of gravity. The discovery is an important step toward the observation of dark matter and the confirmation of the underlying…
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“Carter Catastrophe”: The Math Equation That Predicts The End Of Humanity
Since we became a (semi) intelligent species and started studying the cosmos, humanity has been on a long journey to realizing we are not the center of the universe, the galaxy, or even the Solar System.
While disappointing for an egotistical…
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Shapeshifting ‘braided river’ in Tibet is the highest in the world, and is becoming increasingly unstable — Earth from space
QUICK FACTS
Where is it? Yarlung Zangbo River, Tibet Autonomous Region of China [29.2814054, 91.3256581]
What’s in the photo? The braided branches of a river winding through the Tibetan Plateau
Which satellite took the photo? Landsat 9
When was it…
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New issue: What we got wrong about ADHD and why it matters
Life on Mars?
NASA’s Perseverance rover has discovered strange leopard-spot patterns on a rock that resembles evidence of ancient microbial life. And scientists think it may be the first ‘clearest sign’ that there was once life on Mars.
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