Category Science

A strain of bird flu never seen before in the United States has been detected among poultry at a California farm. The virus, called highly pathogenic H5N9, is a type of avian influenza, otherwise known as “bird flu.” This is…

A number of federal employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US federal agency that monitors and models the oceans and atmosphere for the purpose of predicting changes in climate and weather, have received orders to temporarily…

An illustration representing the ultra-thin material graphene Science Photo Library/Alamy Why do cold thin sheets of carbon offer no resistance to electric currents? Two experiments are bringing us closer to an answer – and maybe even to practical room-temperature superconductors.…

Vegavis iaai was an ancient relative of ducks and geese, but it dived for fish like grebes or loons Mark Witton A 69-million-year-old skull found in Antarctica has been identified as a relative of geese and ducks, making it the…

An engineer named Nikhil Rajpal is representing Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), according to multiple sources. Government records reviewed by WIRED show that Rajpal has working email…

In poker, the value of the cards in your hand is often less important than what your competitors think you might hold. You don’t need a royal flush as long as you can convince others you have one. Sam Altman,…

February 5, 2025 3 min read Trump Administration Shutters Climate Health Office A climate office at the Department of Health and Human Services has been shuttered, and its staff was placed on administrative leave By Ariel Wittenberg & E&E News…

Evolution, ethnography, epidemics—this is the soup from which Dengue Boy, a brilliantly strange new novel by the Argentine author Michel Nieva, emerges. The eponymous Dengue Boy is a mosquito–human hybrid who might be an experiment, a genetic mutant, or the…

Manipulating a type of neuron may make snacks easier to resist 5m3photos/Getty Images Neurons in the brains of mice tell them to stop eating when they’ve had enough food – and since people probably have the same cells, we might…

[CLIP: Theme music] Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman. No matter what you believe, I’m willing to bet you’ve been feeling a lot of outrage lately. To me personally, it feels unavoidable: I can’t look…