One hundred years after the death of the French astronomer and populariser of science Camille Flammarion, the CNRS physicist Jean-Philippe Uzan follows in the footsteps of his predecessor’s celebrated book Popular Astronomy, providing…
Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman.
Over the past couple of weeks oil—specifically, Venezuelan oil—has been all over the headlines.
It started late on January 2,…
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Tune in today (Jan. 16) to bid farewell to interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, courtesy of a livestream from the Virtual Telescope Project featuring…
January 15, 2026
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What Is Beige Fat, and Is It Healthy?
This mysterious type of fat cell may play an important role in heart health, new research shows
A mouse aorta…
Artificial sweeteners were supposed to make sugary foods and beverages healthier, but today, some of the most popular zero-calorie substitutes are raising new concerns.
An up-and-coming natural alternative could one day be produced on a much…
On the 18th day of the Artemis I mission, NASA unexpectedly lost contact with its moonship, with the silence lasting for over four hours.
The outage began when the Goldstone station…
This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image over the South Atlantic Ocean features a close-up view of the A23a iceberg, once the world’s largest. The unusually cloud-free image shows the first signs that the iceberg will soon disintegrate…
This piece is part of a special project on deep time examining what the Western U.S. was like thousands, millions and even billions of years ago, and how that history is still visible and consequential today. Read…
For cyclists the most dangerous shark in the world isn’t the Great White but a lesser-known, entirely metaphorical species, one that quietly circles us in middle age: the risk of heart problems. Only about 40 people suffered unprovoked…
Plants must breathe carbon dioxide to live, but every breath causes them to lose water that they naturally want to conserve. How do they manage this dilemma? Until now, observing this mechanism in real time presented a technical obstacle…
