Category Science

THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. We crafted our first rodent car from a plastic cereal container. After trial and error, my colleagues and I found that rats could learn to drive forward by…

Scientists have revealed how mass is distributed within two fundamental subatomic particles – the pion and the nucleon – through advanced numerical calculations. The research provides crucial insights that will guide future experiments at the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), where scientists…

A team of scientists using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has discovered three impossibly massive galaxies from the dawn of time that are forming stars at rates that shouldn’t be possible. Dubbed the “Red Monsters” due to their dust-enshrouded appearance,…

In a discovery that challenges basic physics principles, researchers have shown that under specific conditions, a laser beam can block light and cast a visible shadow. The finding, made using a ruby crystal and precisely configured lasers, demonstrates an effect…

[CLIP: Sound of Arecibo message being sent] Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. On November 16, 1974, humanity sent an unprecedented message into the stars. [CLIP: Frank Drake gives a speech on the day of the…

Imagine your heart racing every time you hear fireworks, not from excitement but from fear. This reaction, tied to a single traumatic memory, is a hallmark of stress-induced memory overgeneralization. New research from The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) sheds…

Bathed in a ghostly purple-red light, these floating lettuces are barely distinguishable from those grown outdoors, but require one-tenth as much land. The high-tech greenhouse where they live, in Maasbree in the Netherlands, is one possible remedy for a global…

Every now and again I’ll get a weird thought in my head that sits there demanding an answer. Sometimes it’s trivial, and sometimes it sounds silly but then leads into some fun insights. This time, my brain decided to fixate…

Meat lovers and environmental advocates rarely see eye-to-eye, but a Stanford engineering team might be creating a path forward for both. By pioneering new methods to analyze food texture using mechanical testing and machine learning, researchers are bringing plant-based meats…

A reconstruction of the famous hominin Lucy Frank Nowikowski/Alamy This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month. One hundred years ago, on 28 November…