Category: 1. Edi-Choice

A red circle is inscribed inside a blue square. The arrangement leaves gaps in the square’s four corners, two of which are filled with smaller circles that just barely touch the big red circle and the two corner sides of the blue square. This,…

Deepfakes first spread as a tool of a specific and devastating kind of abuse: nonconsensual sexual imagery. Early iterations often were technically crude, with obvious doctoring or voices that didn’t quite sound real. What’s changed is the…

This article was made possible by the support of Yakult and produced independently by Scientific American’s board of editors.

My mother lived with Alzheimer’s disease for 12 years. Even with a lot of help, caregiving took a toll on me. It was…

LIFE’S POSSIBILITIES

In “Life’s Big Bangs,” Asher Elbein reports on geochemist Abderrazak El Albani’s controversial argument that complex life emerged much earlier than thought and possibly did so multiple times, based on evidence from…

This crossword is inspired by the March 2026 issue of Scientific American. Read it here. Print readers, check your answers by selecting “Assist” above and then “Reveal Grid” or by selecting “Print” and then “Solution.”

We’d love…

Twelve years ago Stephanie Dinkins traveled to Vermont to meet a robot. Bina48, a humanoid bust with dark skin, was designed to hold conversations about memory, identity and consciousness. Dinkins, a photographer by training, wanted to understand…

Over the course of his career, Joseph McMullen has dealt with some of the most powerful agencies in the country: the FBI, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But in early 2024 the San Diego–based civil rights…

More than 100 years ago Hungarian-born mathematician George Pólya found himself trapped in a loop of social awkwardness. A professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, he enjoyed solitary strolls through the woods outside the…

The first time her husband went on a date with another woman, Kelly felt sick to her stomach. Consumed by jealousy, she threw up twice and cried for three hours straight until he came home. The second time he had a date night, with a different…

When astronomers glimpsed the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in July 2022, they saw the kind of universe most of them have come to expect. There were dazzling blue bursts of light, glowing trails of stardust, curtains of…