Category: 1. Edi-Choice

I get e-mail.

Most messages are press releases about astronomical discoveries—okay, scratch that; most of them are spam, but science announcements are an easy second place. But I also get questions from readers asking about various aspects of…

Snakes on a train? King cobras may be riding the rails in India

By Richard Kemeny edited by Andrea Thompson

New research suggests that dark matter, the universe’s most puzzling and mysterious substance, may not exist. But removing dark matter from our cosmological models could hinge on the possibility that gravity behaves differently on very large…

Human-made ivory and stone tools have been found in a 14,000-year-old layer of Alaskan earth, providing evidence of some of the first people to inhabit the Americas.

The tools resemble those made by people of the Clovis culture, which is…

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman.

Think of a psychiatric condition, something like attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, panic disorder or anorexia nervosa….

The structure of the local universe is surprisingly flat, according to new research, and this cosmic quirk may save our Milky Way from colliding with countless other massive, nearby galaxies — except one.

For decades, astronomers have made the…

Imagine adding several rings of pointed teeth to a vacuum hose and you’ve probably got a fairly good idea of what a lamprey looks like. 

These ancient fish have been on the planet since before the time of the dinosaurs – but scientists in…

In a breakthrough, Israeli researchers have measured invisible particles known as cosmic rays deep inside a dust cloud 400 light-years from Earth.

The peer-reviewed study detecting these previously unobserved particles could help shed light…