Scientific American

Pigeons seem to defy a century-old psychology law about how rewards and consequences help us learn

A new model flags people at high risk of sudden cardiac death from a routine ECG—and reveals a warning sign in the heart’s electrical activity

Poor preparation and a failure to properly apply the coating may be just a few of the reasons why the Reflecting Pool’s new paint job appears to be peeling off

Astronomers have for the first time observed an atmosphere around a giant planet orbiting a white dwarf

A new study claims that the universe isn’t entirely the same no matter where you look—a radical proposal

The bionic bugs could be called up for aquatic search and rescue missions, according to the researchers

Training people to pay attention to the right visual cues nearly doubled how accurately they could spot AI-generated faces

Start your morning with today’s Spellements. Create as many words as you can from our daily selection of letters—including one tied to recent science news. Play now.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has started a 10-year survey of the changing night sky

Famed AI wins in Go let human players rethink their moves in a whole new way

A new decision rules that geofence warrants are Fourth Amendment searches, but it stops short of banning police access to revealing location histories

How Emmy Noether's theorem uses the Lagrangian to provide a formula for calculating the quantity of symmetries in a system—like the orbit of planets.

This Silicon Valley-backed venture is unraveling the mangled remains of scrolls ruined by the 79 C.E. eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Herculaneum and Pompeii

A new quantum computer sets a high watermark for accuracy. Are we on the verge of a big breakthrough?

This brilliant new image, taken by Europe’s Euclid space telescope, offers a preview of the kind of imaging that will be possible with NASA’s upcoming Roman telescope

Billions of emerging insects will likely trigger predator population surges—but some species mysteriously opt out of such bounties

After decades of debate, the scientific case is clear for Europe’s Future Circular Collider, a colossal successor to the Large Hadron Collider. But transforming this megaproject from vision to reality is far from guaranteed

The toxin behind two outbreaks in seven months is hard to find—and just a handful of labs are equipped to look for it at all

A prolonged, intense heat wave will make temperatures feel as hot as 115 degrees Fahrenheit in the eastern U.S. this week

Three companies will receive a total of $600 million to executive four moon landings, laying the groundwork for a planned crewed outpost on the surface

Inside the quest to rescue NASA’s aging Swift observatory

A handful of start-up firms are testing therapies that target specific epigenetic markers to treat everything from high cholesterol to a rare muscular disorder

Temperatures in New York’s Central Park haven’t surpassed 100 degrees Fahrenheit since 2012; but that may be about to change

As Kew Botanic Gardens completes a scan of its collections, AI tools could help in the fight against biodiversity loss

The speedy machine displaces the U.S.’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s El Capitan at the top of the TOP500 rankings of the world’s fastest supercomputers

Two people were the first to receive the therapy for a condition that damages the spinal cord and optic nerve

Noether's work helped prove the conservation of energy in physics, a key foundation for Einstein's theory of relativity

Knowing what kind of tick bit you and where you got it can help inform next steps

Fathers show changes in some of the same brain areas as mothers, but the effect of parenthood on dads isn’t nearly as well studied

This operation opens the door to treating more people living with HIV who have end-stage organ disease