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Science in meter and verse

You have around 35 trillion red blood cells moving around your body at all times. Typically they are rounded and flexible. What happens when they aren’t?

A delightful course on keeping (and cracking) secrets

Letters to the editors for the May 2024 issue of Scientific American

Research is revealing the key to motivating empathy—and making it stick

Days spent in a desk chair can lead to heart disease or cancer. Getting up often and exercising more vigorously can stave off the ill effects

Writers, artists, photographers and researchers share the stories behind the stories

This month’s issue covers the reasons it’s so hard to go back to the moon, the science of empathy and new advances in treating sickle cell disease

Illuminating the experience of people living with sickle cell could improve patients’ lives and enhance all of medicine

A biography of the scientist whose work led to fears of a ‘population bomb’

When different chickadee species meet, they sometimes choose each other as mates—with surprising results

Best baseball batting order; mummies demystified

Improving sickle cell care by expanding treatment options, advancing new therapies and amplifying the voices of people with the disease

A new generation of treatments addresses the trauma that often underlies addiction

In Pillars of Creation, Richard Panek gets up close to the JWST

Life expectancy for people with sickle cell in the U.S. has increased to about 50 years, but some people with the disease still face stigma and other barriers in health care

NASA's Artemis moon program faces challenges the Apollo missions never did

Increased funding and new public health policies for sickle cell research are needed to ease the burden on low-income nations and improve patient care

Sickle cell disease causes severe pain that’s hard to treat, but researchers are finding new ways to offer relief

The difficulties of the Svalbard seed repository illustrate why we need to prevent climate disaster rather than plan for it