60-second Science

Nearly 200 years after his death, the German composer’s musical scratch was pieced together by machine—with a lot of human help.

Ewine van Dishoeck received the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics in 2018 for elucidating the life cycle of interstellar clouds and the formation of stars and planets. What other mysteries of space are left to be uncovered?

Here’s what we can learn about climate change and infrastructure from Denali National Park’s only road.

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.

The speed of these self-propelling droplets on a hot-oil surface seemed to defy physics until researchers broke out the super-slow-motion camera.

New research uses night vision to see how nocturnal bees navigate the dark.

Photoferrotrophs have been around for billions of years on Earth, and new research suggests that they have played an outsize roll in the natural capture of carbon dioxide.

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 shows that the prehistoric giants were even cooler than we thought

The rodents’ personalities may help them to secure territory and avoid prey.

One researcher’s poorly timed attention lapse flipped a car—and pushed science forward.

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.

Gerd Binnig shared The Kavli Prize in Nanoscience in 2016 for inventing the atomic force microscope. What transformative impact has this invention had on nanoscience?

Researcher Matthew Austin has become a wildflower pollinator, sans the wings.

The greater sac-winged bat develops its own language in much the way we do.

Theresa and Donald Dardar lived their whole lives in coastal Louisiana. They knew the “big one” might come someday. It did, and now everything is uncertain.

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.

Researchers have developed a microprocessor built on high-performance plastic rather than silicon—and they say it could enable smarter food labels and supply chain management.

An educational experiment used escape rooms and the undead to set the stage for a terrible situation that would become all too real

The last time this tiny wheel animalcule was moving around, woolly mammoths roamed the earth.