Scientific American.com

NASA’s presumptive next leader wants to outsource more of the space agency’s interplanetary science. The newly launched ESCAPADE mission to Mars offers a sanity check for those plans

RNA has been extracted from an ancient woolly mammoth, providing insight into its last moments on Earth

The Shenzhou 20 spacecraft was too damaged to bring its crew home from China’s Tiangong space station. Those astronauts have now returned via the Shenzhou 21 craft, leaving its crew without a return ride until the nation sends a new spacecraft to the station

City-dwelling raccoons seem to be evolving a shorter snout—a telltale feature of our pets and other domesticated animals

Data from 11,587 cities show that, rain or shine, some places are just better for bikes and pedestrians

Centuries before other galaxies were known to exist, astronomers called them “spiral nebulas.” Today the defunct term still sparks confusion

From COVID shots to cancer therapy, mRNA is changing medicine.

After delays, Jeff Bezos’s rocket company successfully launched a NASA mission to study Mars on Thursday

Nearly two million U.S. turkeys have died from bird flu in recent months. An agricultural economist explains what ongoing outbreaks could mean for Thanksgiving meals

A surprising diversity of dog shapes and sizes evolved long before the Victorians began making modern breeds

A trove of e-mails from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was released by a congressional committee on Wednesday

The milestone makes machine-learning trailblazer Yoshua Bengio the most cited researcher on Google Scholar

After studying mice in the 1910s, Maude Slye concluded that vulnerability to cancer was hereditary. She thought she had a solution to eliminate it, but she made some crucial mistakes

Oceanographers hope to find otherworldly ecosystems at hydrothermal vents on the Arctic seafloor

An 18-year dataset from the North Sea reveals that rogue waves are not freak accidents but particular products of ordinary swells stacking up—an insight that could make prediction possible

“Kryptos has not been solved,” said artist Jim Sanborn after releasing his parting clues to the “K4” section of his sculpture puzzle

Ten years after the Paris climate agreement, the limited progress we’ve made in reducing global warming means that there will be less extreme heat in the future than there would be without the accord

Early findings indicate that Epstein-Barr virus may also cause the autoimmune disease lupus

The International Energy Agency says weak climate action and energy security fears are effectively delaying peak fossil fuel consumption

A severe geomagnetic storm brought spectacular auroras to much of the U.S. on Tuesday night