Scientific American.com

A person in Arizona recently died of pneumonic plague—a rare and severe form of the disease. An expert explains how the bacteria that spurred the Black Death centuries ago continues to claim lives

Bird flu fears have focused on the poultry and dairy industries and human health. But wild animals are threatened, too—at scales no one fully understands

The H5N1 avian flu is circulating in cows and other mammals. Whether it will make a permanent leap to humans is another question

Your favorite word game with a twist of science

Bird flu was nearly everywhere in the U.S.—in chickens, cows, pet cats and even humans. Cases have gone down, but experts warn that it hasn’t disappeared

Influenza viruses like bird flu can mix and match their genomes, and this has played a role in at least three of the last four flu pandemics

Newly discovered “Gwada-negative” is the rarest of 48 known blood groups

When large masses of water are moved from one place to another, this changes the shape of Earth and leads to a phenomenon called true polar wander

Many states, including Texas, have not used billions of dollars from FEMA intended to reduce damage from flooding and other disasters

Better assessment of stress and tailored approaches to combat it could give clinicians the tools they need to fend off lasting damage to health

Illnesses from stealthy pathogens known as Vibrio are advancing northward along numerous coasts, potentially ruining your summer vacation

This AI system can analyze up to one million DNA letters at once, predicting how tiny changes in noncoding regions trigger everything from cancer to rare genetic disorders—and potentially revolutionizing personalized medicine

Super Agers author Eric Topol unpacks the rise of biological age tests—from organ clocks to immune system clocks—and how they might revolutionize early diagnosis of disease

While bariatric surgery can result in significant weight loss, weight stigma can persist years after the surgery.

Elon Musk has launched xAI’s Grok 4—calling it the “world’s smartest AI” and claiming it can ace Ph.D.-level exams and outpace rivals such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s o3 on tough benchmarks

Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has said she will hold a hearing on geoengineering as conspiracy theories have swirled around cloud seeding after the recent floods in Texas

Alexander Clapp, author of new nonfiction book Waste Wars, tracks the worldwide black market trade of our garbage

Words frequently used by ChatGPT, including “delve” and “meticulous,” are getting more common in spoken language, according to an analysis of more than 700,000 hours of videos and podcasts

Today’s large language models are hardly related to the kinds of machine intelligence we see in science fiction, according to Martha Wells, author of the Murderbot Diaries series

A new global overview of Mars suggests dust, rather than water, is the source of mysterious streaks there