60-second Science

A sleep researcher who studies what dreams can tell us about the possible onset of some mental disorders believes lucid dreamers might hold a lot of answers in their head.

Here’s what a historian who has studied J. Robert Oppenheimer for two decades has to say about the new Christopher Nolan film on the father of the atomic bomb.

Inflammatory bowel disease flare-ups can be traced to mental stress

Here’s how large language models, or LLMs, actually work. 

Very small delays in swing jazz point to our evolution as a supremely auditory species.

New research has discovered that wildfire smoke hurts these primates’ voice—and health.

ChatGPT and other AI programs can offer medical advice. But how good are they?

The famous climate pattern El Niño could usher in a new hottest year on record and will have domino effects on the world’s weather.

John O’Keefe shared the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience in 2014 for discovering that neurons in the hippocampus encode an animal’s location and create a cognitive map for navigation. This podcast was produced for the Kavli Prize by Scientific American Custom Media, a division separate from the magazine’s board of editors.

Researchers, using the galaxy as a detector, believe they have detected gravitational waves from monster black holes for the first time.

Toxic dust plagues marginalized communities on the shores of this disappearing salt lake.

Desert ants living in the featureless salt plains of Tunisia count their steps and erect tall entrances at their nests to find their way back home.

Your body has a secret cooling method, and scientists explain how to use it.

Along with an expert, we take you into some of nature's most monstrous storms. 

The James Webb Space Telescope is giving us our first glimpse of stars in the early universe.

In 2013 a new user named Cleo took an online math forum by storm with unproved answers. Today she’s an urban legend. But who was she?

The party drug MDMA could soon be approved for treating people with severe PTSD.

Where is it coming from? How long will it last? What's in the smoke? Whose health is at risk? How do you clean your own air?

Terror birds were the grizzly bears of birds, the great white sharks of the land, Jack the Ripper but with feathers. They were also truly fascinating.

Officially, these prehistoric birds are the dromornithids, but everyone who studies them calls them thunderbirds—and for good reason.