The quake was a strike-slip event, and strong aftershocks could follow

The Category 3 storm intensified overnight—and is headed toward the U.S. Gulf Coast. Here’s what to know

The movie is based on the true story of how Facebook employee Frances Haugen blew the whistle on the company’s safety practices

Meta’s and OpenAI’s new agents can streamline your life. Artificial intelligence researchers helped me test how far to trust them

When compared with similar stars, where does sun fit in?

In a new study, people who had worse fevers after a COVID shot tended to have similar gut characteristics

Scientists have called out several math and computer science results as the most significant in the company’s overwhelming new deluge of achievements

The “slop drop” contains a number of groundbreaking proofs, but how it was generated remains unclear and contentious

Detected by the MeerKAT array, this “fast radio burst” comes from three billion years after the big bang and could help map the universe’s otherwise-invisible intergalactic matter

It’s been a blistering year. A record-hot September doesn’t bode well for the rest of it

The first crewed lunar mission in more than a half-century brought back more than 800 gigabytes of data on colorful craters, flashing meteoroids, and much more

Isaias just became the latest-forming first hurricane of the Atlantic storm season since reliable records began, meteorologists say

Sea level on the California coast is likely to be pushed to extremes this winter by compounding forces, but these extremes could be the norm by the end of the century

With a little help from knot theory, scientists have invented a “robust knit” to fight laddering

Russian authorities reported earlier this week that an employee at a lab in Siberia that studies plague and other infectious diseases had died of pneumonia of “unknown” cause

The secret to Jonathan the tortoise’s extreme longevity may be in keeping genes tidy

Tropical Storm Isaias is expected to become a hurricane by Thursday, meteorologists say

A new study explores what goes on in the brain when mice get high on marijuana

Anthropic and OpenAI accused Chinese AI developers of mining their models’ answers to train cheaper copycats. Here’s how distillation works and why it’s so hard to stop

Behind the headlines about AI agents lies a deeper debate over accountability, safety and control.

The prize recognizes Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai's work showing autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.

A month after resolving one of the six biggest open problems in mathematics, the company says its new internal model has toppled heaps more—this time without the multimillion-dollar price tag

The Draconids and Orionids both peak this month

“With today’s science we usually can’t show with high confidence that dangerous behavior isn’t there”

Francis Halzen is a leader in the study of neutrinos, ghostly particles from across the universe that hint at exciting new physics

In math and Mario Land, there are questions that are algorithmically undecidable, meaning they will demonstrably never have an answer

The country’s space program is new and ambitious, having already sent a mission into Mars orbit

Red and white dwarf stars may be hungrier than we thought

Movement and creativity go hand in hand. Scientists are working to discover why

Your feces can tell you a lot about your health

An El Niño–driven ocean surge threatens coastal flooding, researchers warn that a plan to loosen vaccine requirements will increase measles risks in Florida, and experts debunk a viral TikTok cold remedy

Karl Deisseroth, Georg Nagel and Peter Hegemann developed optogenetics, which uses light and genetics to control individual cells

Attachment is the term psychologists use for the most significant relationships that hold people’s lives together

Philosopher and 2026 MacArthur “genius grant” recipient Felipe De Brigard explains how our brains use imagination to reconstruct the past

Pairing artificial intelligence with acoustic technology helped reveal an Erturian tomb in new light

In the movie, a giant iceberg from Greenland floats into the sea, imperiling millions—but is that even possible?

So far this year has been ridiculously hot. If it stays that way, 2026 could set a sobering new record

An unexplained high-energy neutrino detected three years ago could be linked to a primordial black hole, perhaps one more even unusual than previously thought

The nonprofit start-up Pioneer Labs claims to have made the first-ever “microbe for Mars.” Other experts aren’t so sure

A future NASA telescope could spot atmospheric phenomena on planets orbiting other stars

How foraging can change the way we think about food and nature

Project Suncatcher is aimed at testing Google's AI chips in the harsh environment of space

An analysis of ancient sea-level changes reveals that the whole solid Earth has shifted multiple times

Today Project Suncatcher is sending four AI processors into orbit on a SpaceX rocket to see whether the building blocks of a data center can survive space

Scientists are piecing together why elephants make these low calls and what they might mean

_Scientific American_ spoke to the Michigan Senate candidate about how his background in medicine has shaped his outlook

As the planet changes, so will this nostalgia-triggering scent

The site, located on the island of Lismore, may have been established by Saint Mo Luóc in the sixth century C.E.

The new push loosens U.S. regulations for sterilizing spacecraft bound for the Red Planet and calls for modernizing the science of “planetary protection”

El Niño has stymied storm formation even more than forecasters expected