Category: 1. Edi-Choice

On a breezy afternoon last autumn in Cambridge, Mass., in a laboratory thrumming with the huff-whish-huff sound of refrigeration pumps, Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student Jiaruo Li was crafting a new device for storing digital…

Operating since 1903, Rio Tinto’s Kennecott Mine near Salt Lake City remains one of the most productive mines in the world, where workers pulled 134,000 metric tons of copper from the earth last year, along with significant amounts of gold,…

When I first took up birding, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I couldn’t believe I had only just discovered, in middle age, the joys of avian observation. It was the perfect hobby. I could watch birds anywhere. And I could do it…

Divide this grid into four identical, nonoverlapping shapes along the square boundaries. Each shape must contain two of the same letters.

Show puzzle solution

There are four different solutions, which differ only slightly from one another.

For Lawrence J. Geisse, M.D.

Entering the operating theater,
 I climbed onto the gurney
resting my head
      on the mock headrest

a geisha dreaming
 on a woodblock.
The whine of the machine’s…

Through my swim mask, I could see what Wendell Haag’s finger was pointing at two feet below me on the riverbed. But I couldn’t immediately see that it was alive. It looked like a rock with some kind of grayish goo stuck to it. We were in the…

On the final day of the Cretaceous period, some 66 million years ago, Earth was teeming with a dazzling variety of dinosaurs. In North America, the superpredator Tyrannosaurus rex stalked its favorite prey, the three-horned Triceratops. In Asia,…

The moon’s stores of water-ice, hidden in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar south pole, probably arrived on the surface of our nearest neighbor gradually rather than in one big event, according to new research.

Furthermore, these…

This crossword is inspired by the most recent 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…

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

My husband, a fitness fanatic, drinks powdered creatine mixed in water every day. “There’s good evidence it helps…