One of history’s dark jokes is that the Roman Empire, for all its vaunted accomplishments, only made a single great ...

An attosecond—or 0.000000000000000001 second—is no time at all for a person. That is not so for electrons, atoms and ...

Babies lacking in key gut bacteria are at greater risk of developing asthma, allergies or eczema Dirty diapers are more than ...

To celebrate Scientific American ’s 180th anniversary, we’re publishing a jigsaw every weekday to show off some of our most ...

Forecasts and warnings largely worked during the recent flooding catastrophe in Texas. Those systems are expected to degrade as President Donald Trump’s cuts to the National Weather Service, satellite ...

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific ...

Treating adult psychopathy is extremely difficult, but there is hope for children with CU traits. Long-term studies have found that around half of them do not progress to psychopathy and instead ...

In Chile's Atacama Desert, a mountain of more than 59,000 tons of clothing can now be seen from space. This so-called garment graveyard comprises fast-fashion discards inherited from the U.S ...

1975, Particle Annihilation: “A positron propagates as a wave toward an electron in the bulk of a crystal (left). When the two particles annihilate each other, the resulting gamma rays carry ...

But the asteroid Psyche, circling the sun between Mars and Jupiter, may have an exposed metal core. Radar reflections indicate this is at least partially so, says Jim Bell, an Arizona State ...

This artist’s concept shows an example of a gravitational assist maneuver, used by spacecraft to travel through the solar system. In this example, the spacecraft flies close by Mars, then by ...

McKenzie: It’s just, like, a sea of red bellies. Young: A flurry of different migratory birds, including red knots, ruddy turnstones and sanderlings, are making a pit stop on their long ...