Astronomy

Science in meter and verse

Trade impulse clothing purchases for botanical dyes, upcycled apparel, creative mending, flexible sizing, and more

Toxic cigars; dueling with a swordfish

Letters to the editors for the March 2025 issue of Scientific American

To boost mood and manliness, men are spending lots of money on the hormone testosterone—yet they may see trouble instead of benefits

One hundred years after the Scopes trial, religious ideologues are still trying to supplant evidence-based curricula with myths, to the detriment of a well-informed society

Staff at the European Southern Observatory have a system to clean the La Silla Observatory's delicate mirrors without breaking them.

AI is shedding new light on the 12,000-year conversation between cats and their humans, suggesting that house cats wield a far richer vocabulary than once thought

Using NASA's Chandra X-ray space telescope, astronomers have discovered an entire galaxy cluster wrapped in a 20 million light-year-wide envelope of charged particles.

The beads are over 3.3 billion years old, and date from the formation of the "Man in the Moon."

Do you know the names of some of the brightest stars?

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket placed 26 Starlink internet broadband satellites into low Earth orbit, lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on June 16, 2025.

When the Sun rages and storms in Earth's direction, it changes our planet's atmosphere. The atmosphere puffs up, meaning satellites in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) meet more resistance. This resistance creates orbital decay, dragging satellites to lower altitudes. One researcher says we can change the design of satellites to decrease their susceptibility.

Gas clouds in the Milky Way's Galactic Center contain copious amounts of star-forming gas. But for some reason, few massive stars form there, even though similar gas clouds elsewhere in the galaxy easily form massive stars. The clouds also form fewer stars overall. Are they a new type of molecular cloud?

About 3 billion years after the Big Bang, star formation exploded across the cosmos. During the era dubbed "cosmic noon.” It was also when galaxies and supermassive black holes were growing faster than at any other time in the history of the universe. Now astronomers have discovered a monster from this frenzied period: a supermassive black hole unleashing jets that stretch over 300,000 light-years into space, revealing the sheer violence of its feeding frenzy.

A gaggle of companies are searching the US Midwest for underground hydrogen fuel produced by a billion-year-old split in the continent – New Scientist visited one of the first to start drilling

A gaggle of companies are searching the US Midwest for underground hydrogen fuel produced by a billion-year-old split in the continent – New Scientist visited one of the first to start drilling

Leaks aboard the International Space Station, as well as on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, delayed Axiom's next private astronaut mission, but the crew now has a target launch date of June 22.

Iranian Shahed drones, Ukrainian quadcopters and the U.S.’s Golden Horde program reveal three paths to massed autonomy, and each rewrites the rules of air defense

Using machine learning to analyse data from the Event Horizon Telescope, researchers found the black hole at the centre of our galaxy is spinning almost as fast as possible