60-second Science

A new study finds that, for robots, overlords are less persuasive than peers.

The Miller-Urey experiment showed that the conditions of early Earth could be simulated in a glass flask. New research finds the flask itself played an underappreciated, though outsize, role.

Today we bring you a new episode in our podcast series COVID, Quickly. Every two weeks, Scientific American’s senior health editors Tanya Lewis and Josh Fischman catch you up on the essential developments in the pandemic: from vaccines to new variants and everything in between. You can listen to all past episodes here.

A fossil bed in Patagonia provides evidence of complex social structure in dinosaurs as early as 193 million years ago. And scientists say that herding behavior could have been key to the beasts’ success.

Ultrasound triggered cells home in on tumors and then self destruct to deliver damage or therapeutics from inside.

Today we bring you a new episode in our podcast series COVID, Quickly. Every two weeks, Scientific American’s senior health editors Tanya Lewis and Josh Fischman catch you up on the essential developments in the pandemic: from vaccines to new variants and everything in between. You can listen to all past episodes here.

You read that right. Researchers have taken the chemical defenses of some insects and turned them into sounds, which, it turns out, repel people just as well.

Over millions of years of evolution, some beetles have learned to dampen the stench of decay to help their young thrive.

By dating the remnants of trees felled in Newfoundland, scientists have determined that the Norse people likely first set foot in the Americas in the year A.D. 1021.

Today we bring you a new episode in our podcast series COVID, Quickly. Every two weeks, Scientific American’s senior health editors Tanya Lewis and Josh Fischman catch you up on the essential developments in the pandemic: from vaccines to new variants and everything in between. You can listen to all past episodes here.

New research using a camera that can “see" sound” shows some elephants can produce high-pitched buzzing with their lips.

Nearly 200 years after his death, the German composer’s musical scratch was pieced together by machine—with a lot of human help.

Ewine van Dishoeck received the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics in 2018 for elucidating the life cycle of interstellar clouds and the formation of stars and planets. What other mysteries of space are left to be uncovered?

Here’s what we can learn about climate change and infrastructure from Denali National Park’s only road.

Today we bring you a new episode in our podcast series COVID, Quickly. Every two weeks, Scientific American’s senior health editors Tanya Lewis and Josh Fischman catch you up on the essential developments in the pandemic: from vaccines to new variants and everything in between. You can listen to all past episodes here.

The speed of these self-propelling droplets on a hot-oil surface seemed to defy physics until researchers broke out the super-slow-motion camera.

New research uses night vision to see how nocturnal bees navigate the dark.

Photoferrotrophs have been around for billions of years on Earth, and new research suggests that they have played an outsize roll in the natural capture of carbon dioxide.

Today we bring you a new episode in our podcast series COVID, Quickly. Every two weeks, Scientific American’s senior health editors Tanya Lewis and Josh Fischman catch you up on the essential developments in the pandemic: from vaccines to new variants and everything in between. You can listen to all past episodes here.

New research shows that the prehistoric giants were even cooler than we thought