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Human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases have raised global temperatures, causing major impacts on Earth’s ecosystems and human society, as the first installment of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made unequivocally clear in August. The second installment of that report, released on February 28, makes the stark and game-changing … Read more
Patent rulings and scientific honors don’t always mesh, as the team that won the Nobel Prize for creating the genome editor CRISPR learned yesterday. After a 7-year patent battle, a U.S. court rejected its intellectual property claim to a key use of CRISPR, potentially costing it many millions in licensing fees. According to a ruling … Read more
Screens brighten with the flow of words. Perhaps they are emails, hastily scrawled on smart devices, or emoji-laden messages exchanged between friends or families. On this same river of the digital, millions flock to binge their favorite television programming, to stream pornography, or enter the sprawling worlds of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, or simply … Read more
Mars missions have been launching from Earth with regularity since the 1960s, bent on exploring our planetary neighbor. With its potential for liquid water — and therefore, life — Mars is an alluring target. But it’s a difficult journey, and only about half of all Mars missions successfully make it to the Red Planet, according … Read more
It’s been a tough two years. I hope you and yours are as safe and healthy as possible at this stage of the COVID pandemic. Like everyone, we at Scientific American have been thinking about this terrible disease constantly and trying to make sense of it. We’ve published hundreds of articles about the coronavirus itself, … Read more
As Ukrainian researchers have feared for their lives and careers after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, mathematicians have been grappling over what to do about a prominent mathematical conference that was set to be held in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in July. The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is “the largest and most significant conference on pure and … Read more
When a Venus flytrap snaps its fleshy lobes around an unsuspecting insect, it’s game over for the prey. The plant’s unusual habit of snacking on animals has captured the imagination of people ranging from Charles Darwin to playwright Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken (the latter two created the 1982 musical Little Shop of Horrors, … Read more
The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) is starting its first operational science work as it embarks on a mission to better understand our sun. DKIST is a nearly $300 million science observatory perched atop the 10,062-foot (3,067 meters) Mount Haleakalā in Maui, Hawaii. One of its main functions will be to study the corona, the … Read more
A powerful Earth-observation satellite will launch to orbit today (March 1), and you can watch the action live. The GOES-T weather satellite is scheduled to lift off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today during a two-hour window that opens at 4:38 p.m. EST (2138 GMT). … Read more
Europe’s ExoMars rover, built to search for traces of life on the Red Planet, is unlikely to launch as planned in September aboard a Russian rocket as a result of sanctions rolled out by European countries in response to Russian aggression in Ukraine. The ExoMars mission, which comprises the Trace Gas Orbiter (in orbit around … Read more