Category Science

It’s springtime in your backyard. You watch a pair of little brown songbirds flit about, their white throats flashing in the sun. One of the birds has striking black and white stripes on its crown and occasionally belts out its…

Olivine rock naturally reacts with carbon dioxide, but it is a slow business Renhour48 via Wikimedia/CC0 1.0 Universal A new process could enable crushed rocks to capture carbon dioxide from the air much more quickly, turbocharging a carbon removal technique…

February 18, 2025 4 min read Contributors to Scientific American’s March 2025 Issue Writers, artists, photographers and researchers share the stories behind the stories By Allison Parshall edited by Jen Schwartz Jesse BurkeThe Imperfect Bloom For Jesse Burke (above), photographing…

The Rhône glacier in the Swiss Alps in 2024 FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images Glaciers worldwide have shrunk by more than 5 per cent on average since 2000, according to the most comprehensive assessment yet. This rapid rate of melting…

[CLIP: Theme music] Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. You probably don’t spend too much time thinking about the air you breathe—at least relative to the amount of time you spend actually breathing it, which, unless…

Women lining up at a mobile tent for reproductive health services at a clinic in Zimbabwe MSI Zimbabwe/Arete/Tendai Marima The day Donald Trump took office as president of the United States, he issued an order temporarily pausing foreign aid, including…

In the corridors of NASA buildings across the United States, Pride flags and pictures celebrating women in science are being taken down. Scientists are adding space-mission stickers to their laptops to cover ones that displayed rainbows and other symbols of…

Horizon International Images/Alamy On a cosmological timescale, humanity’s existence is a mere blip. Yet, in our short lifetime, we have done outsized damage to Earth, so much so that some believe we need to invent a new geological epoch, the…

CLIMATEWIRE | The Trump administration has fired hundreds of Federal Emergency Management Agency employees and is now targeting staff involved with climate change, equity or diversity, according to interviews and emails obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News. After firing probationary employees…

Humans have been selectively breeding cats and dogs for thousands of years to make more desirable pets. A new startup called the Los Angeles Project aims to speed up that process with genetic engineering to make glow-in-the-dark rabbits, hypoallergenic cats…