Category Science

[CLIP: Theme music] Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Unless you’re really on the low end of our listener age bell curve, chances are you grew up learning about our solar system’s nine planets. Of course,…

Most chocolate comes from cocoa plants taken from Central America to Ghana and Ivory Coast Issouf Sanogo/AFP via Getty Images Wild ChocolateRowan Jacobsen (Bloomsbury Publishing) I thought I knew the basics about the chocolate industry. Most comes from hundreds of thousands…

At the end of a year and the beginning of the next, it’s traditional to look back and muse over what happened and to look forward and hope for what might come. But for me, as an astronomer, it means…

An intelligent approach? Feedback’s ears always prick up when we see a publication with a self-aggrandising title. So we latched with interest onto a social media post by Rebecca Sear, a demographer at Brunel University London, who noted that publisher…

January 10, 2025 3 min read U.S. TikTok Ban Looms as Supreme Court Hears Arguments TikTok is on the clock: ByteDance, the app’s China-based owner, must sell it by January 19 or face a ban By Ben Guarino edited by…

Italian ryegrass is a common weed in arable crops John Cussans Weeds resistant to the herbicide glyphosate have found been found in the UK for first time. The species in question, called Italian ryegrass, is very widespread in the UK,…

Aaron Skarlupka, a hunter in northeast Wisconsin, was recently thrilled when he got his first harvest of the season: an eight-point white-tailed buck. Skarlupka’s son, who was along for the chilly morning hunt in the woods, convinced his dad to…

A transmission electron micrograph of a section through pancreas tissue, showing cells that produce insulin STEVE GSCHMEISSNER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Alamy The first human trial of insulin-producing cells that have been gene-edited to evade immune attack is a success so far. The…

CLIMATEWIRE | As historic fires rip through the Los Angeles area, President-elect Donald Trump is demanding Gov. Gavin Newsom “open up the water main” and allow “beautiful, clean, freshwater to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA!” At first glance, it seems to make…

The second is whether we’re continuing to deal more and more people into the transformation. We’ve got over 100,000 farmers and ranchers that are now taking on climate-smart agricultural practices. Will that climate action, that distributed climate action, continue to…