60-second Science

As the world warms, many animals are getting smaller. For birds, new research shows what they have upstairs may just make a different in how much smaller they get.

A research team finds seven tiny dwarf galaxies stripped of their dark matter that nonetheless persisted despite the theft.

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 glitch in speech initiation gives rise to the repetition that characterizes stuttering.

In the newest season of Lost Women of Science, we enter a world of secrecy, computers and nuclear weapons—and see how Klára Dán von Neumann was a part of all of it.

Think of the process as a kind of marine fecal transplant—except the restorative bacteria do not come from stool; they come from other corals.

By dating nearly a quarter-million stars, astronomers were able to reconstruct the history of our galaxy—and they say it has lived an “enormously sheltered life.”

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.

Florida manatees are “talking” up a storm, and a team that has been recording those sounds for seven years is starting to understand the chatter.

Science—and experience—show that we most definitely see faces in inanimate objects. But new research finds that, more often than not, we perceive those illusory faces as male.

A nearly two-year-long study of Hawaiian corals suggests some species may be better equipped to handle warmer, more acidic waters than previously believed.

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 detecting digital fakes generated by machine learning might be a job best done with humans still in the loop. 

New fossils are changing a decades-old story about the species that roamed the Mediterranean 80 million years ago.

It is not clear whether the act has medicinal benefit or is merely a cultural practice among the animals.

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.

Using software designed to align DNA sequences, scientists cataloged the mutations that arose as folk songs evolved

The city has deployed a system of sensors to flag highly polluting vehicles. Nearly all of them have been repaired, helping to clean Hong Kong’s air.

In Rockport, Me., an array of nearly 11,000 solar panels will soon begin a solar harvest as the sweet berries growing below them ripen on the bush.

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.