60-second Science

You might not think that you can generate more body acceleration than a big-league baseball pitcher, but new research shows you can.

The painter described falling into the briefest of slumbers to refresh his mind. Now scientists have shown the method is effective at inducing creativity.

Wildfires, appearing dead in winter, are actually smoldering and then bouncing back to life in spring to consume increasingly more land in the Far North.

A new podcast is on a mission to retrieve unsung female scientists from oblivion.

A volcanologist says the eruption on the island of La Palma is a unique window into the “personality” of basaltic volcanoes.

Today we bring you a new episode in our podcast series COVID, Quickly. Every two weeks, Scientific American’s senior health editors Tanya Lewis and Josh Fischman catch you up on the essential developments in the pandemic: from vaccines to new variants and everything in between. You can listen to all past episodes here.

A 15-year study of where carbon lies in boreal forests has unearthed a surprising finding.

The scientists found several previously hidden galaxies that date back to 13 billion years ago—and many more might be missing from our current census of the early universe.

Today we bring you a new episode in our podcast series COVID, Quickly. Every two weeks, Scientific American’s senior health editors Tanya Lewis and Josh Fischman catch you up on the essential developments in the pandemic: from vaccines to new variants and everything in between. You can listen to all past episodes here.

A new study finds that, for robots, overlords are less persuasive than peers.

The Miller-Urey experiment showed that the conditions of early Earth could be simulated in a glass flask. New research finds the flask itself played an underappreciated, though outsize, role.

Today we bring you a new episode in our podcast series COVID, Quickly. Every two weeks, Scientific American’s senior health editors Tanya Lewis and Josh Fischman catch you up on the essential developments in the pandemic: from vaccines to new variants and everything in between. You can listen to all past episodes here.

A fossil bed in Patagonia provides evidence of complex social structure in dinosaurs as early as 193 million years ago. And scientists say that herding behavior could have been key to the beasts’ success.

Ultrasound triggered cells home in on tumors and then self destruct to deliver damage or therapeutics from inside.

Today we bring you a new episode in our podcast series COVID, Quickly. Every two weeks, Scientific American’s senior health editors Tanya Lewis and Josh Fischman catch you up on the essential developments in the pandemic: from vaccines to new variants and everything in between. You can listen to all past episodes here.

You read that right. Researchers have taken the chemical defenses of some insects and turned them into sounds, which, it turns out, repel people just as well.

Over millions of years of evolution, some beetles have learned to dampen the stench of decay to help their young thrive.

By dating the remnants of trees felled in Newfoundland, scientists have determined that the Norse people likely first set foot in the Americas in the year A.D. 1021.

Today we bring you a new episode in our podcast series COVID, Quickly. Every two weeks, Scientific American’s senior health editors Tanya Lewis and Josh Fischman catch you up on the essential developments in the pandemic: from vaccines to new variants and everything in between. You can listen to all past episodes here.

New research using a camera that can “see" sound” shows some elephants can produce high-pitched buzzing with their lips.