Scientific American

Scientific American, often referred to as SciAm, is a well-known American magazine that focuses on popular science. For over 170 years, it has provided monthly insights into scientific topics for an educated audience, ensuring the writing is clear and accompanied by high-quality color graphics. Renowned scientists, such as Albert Einstein, have written articles for this magazine. It is recognized as the oldest magazine in the U.S. that has been published continuously on a monthly basis.

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The National Weather Service Is Understaffed and Facing Huge Cuts—That Could Cost Lives

2 days ago | scientificamerican.com | Andrea Thompson

Just more than 100 years ago, on March 18, 1925, a tornado slashed across the U.S. Midwest with no warning at all and killed 695 people—a massive number for a single outbreak. Today those in a twister’s path get a take-cover notice eight to 18 minutes before a strike on average. And as recently as 1992, what looked like a minor tropical disturbance intensified with shocking speed into Hurricane Andrew.
Breeding for ‘Cuteness’ Is Making Dogs and Cats Look More Alike

3 days ago | scientificamerican.com | Rachel Nuwer

What do Persian cats, Pekingese dogs and pugs have in common? They all share a dramatically distorted skull, with a flat, round face and a nose pushed up between their eyes. This unnatural morphology is the product of decades or centuries of artificial selection to make our pedigreed animals more closely resemble the intrinsic cuteness of human babies.
Kosmos-482 Falls, Cuttlefish Wave, and the Wealthy Warm the Climate

3 days ago | scientificamerican.com | Rachel Feltman |Fonda Mwangi |Alex Sugiura

Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Let’s catch up on some of the science news you may have missed last week. First, a space-junk update. By the time you listen to this a Soviet-era spacecraft may or may not have crash-landed on Earth. Kosmos-482, which the U.S.S.R. launched back in 1972, was meant to follow the successful probes Venera 7 and Venera 8 in landing on and studying Venus.
Large Hadron Collider Physicists Turn Lead into Gold-For a Fraction of a Second

5 days ago | scientificamerican.com | Elizabeth Gibney

The dream of seventeenth-century alchemists has been realized by physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), who have turned lead into gold — albeit for only a fraction of a second and at tremendous cost. The not-so-mysterious transmutation happened at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory, near Geneva, Switzerland, where the multi-billion-dollar LHC smashes together ions of lead for a portion of each experimental run. Early chemists hoped to turn abundant lead into precious gold.
Today’s Children Face a Lifetime of Extreme Heat because of Climate Change

5 days ago | scientificamerican.com | Celeste Biever

Just over half of the children born in 2020 will face unprecedented exposure to heatwaves over their lifetime — even under a conservative projection for how climate change will unfold over the next 75 years. The figure rises to 92% of today’s five-year-olds if more pessimistic climate predictions come to pass, and compares with just 16% of people born in 1960 under any future climate scenario.
Stronger Solar Activity Cycles May Be in the Sun’s Forecast

5 days ago | scientificamerican.com | Meghan Bartels

A year ago this weekend, the sun’s activity created some of the most spectacular auroras on record, with displays visible as far south as Florida. The incredible spectacles last May (and another auroral outburst last October) were partly a matter of luck because several factors, some of them serendipitous, affect the appearance of aurora. But the sun had been primed to put on a show as it approached the maximum phase of its 11-year activity cycle—and that high activity continues today.
Hospitals Use This Program to Evacuate in Disasters. Trump Wants to Cut It

5 days ago | scientificamerican.com | Ariel Wittenberg

CLIMATEWIRE | When the McBride wildfire erupted in New Mexico three years ago, David Merritt had a math problem. The fire was closing in on a Lincoln County hospital with 11 admitted patients, but the ambulance drivers who would normally evacuate those patients were busy fighting the blaze. High winds ruled out air evacuations. There were also only two ways out of the town of Ruidoso, and the way leading to the next-nearest hospital was in the evacuation zone.
Linguists Find Proof of Sweeping Language Pattern Once Deemed a ‘Hoax’

6 days ago | scientificamerican.com | Cody Cottier

In 1884 the anthropologist Franz Boas returned from Baffin Island with a discovery that would kick off decades of linguistic wrangling: by his count, the local Inuit language had four words for snow, suggesting a link between language and physical environment. A great game of telephone inflated the number until, in 1984, the New York Times published an editorial claiming the Inuit have “100 synonyms” for the frozen white stuff we lump under a single term.
The Strange and Surprising History of the Once-Rejected Zero

6 days ago | scientificamerican.com | Manon Bischoff

I’m a zero at mental arithmetic. It’s true—I struggle with this skill—but I want to focus on the phrase itself. In our language, we often equate zero with something negative. But zero is the only real number that is neither positive nor negative. It is neutral. Why the negative association? Humankind has long harbored strong feelings toward zero; it was even banned in some places at one point. Xenophobia and ideology held back this powerful concept. Yet today all of mathematics is based on this number.
Measuring Gluons and Quarks at the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, the Nation’s Only Particle Collider

6 days ago | scientificamerican.com | Rachel Feltman |Naeem Amarsy |Fonda Mwangi |Kelso Harper |Carin Leong |Jeffery DelViscio

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman. Today we’re taking you on another one of our Friday Fascination field trips with an auditory journey to Brookhaven National Laboratory. This Long Island facility boasts seven Nobel Prize–winning discoveries and more than 70 years of groundbreaking research into energy and the environment.