New research on asexuality shows why it’s so important for doctors and therapists to distinguish between episodes of low libido and a consistent lack of sexual attraction (January 2024 feature)

New results break with decades of conventional wisdom for the gradient descent algorithm.

The strong force holds our atoms together. Scientists may have observed its small-scale fluctuations for the first time

This warm, fuzzy color can be found all over the natural world, from land to sea to space

Hotspots beneath cities deform the ground, causing important infrastructure to crack under stress (Appeared in October 2023 issue)

Bacteria choose to swarm based on what happened to their great-grandparents (Appeared in February 2024 issue)

A quantum approach to data analysis that relies on the study of shapes will likely remain an example of a quantum advantage — albeit for increasingly unlikely scenarios.

Decades of data support the use and safety of puberty-pausing medications, which give transgender adolescents and their families time to weigh important medical decisions

New technology gleans the gist of stories a person hears while laying in a brain scanner

A team of physicists has entangled three photons over a considerable distance, which could lead to more powerful quantum cryptography.

Yael Tauman Kalai’s breakthroughs secure the digital world, from cloud computing to our quantum future.

Here’s how the winners of NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge are making food out of thin air

Infections of a new strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa that have led to blindness and death highlight the worsening antibiotic resistance crisis

A surprisingly simple answer to a mathematical puzzle intrigues the math world (Appeared in June 2023 issue)

Image-generating AI is getting better at re-creating what people are looking at from their fMRI data. But this isn’t mind reading—yet

Chloroplasts’ choreography keeps plant cells powered (Appeared in May 2023 issue)

A severe geomagnetic storm created auroras that were visible as far south as Arizona in the U.S.

Boris Eldagsen submitted an AI-generated image to a photography contest as a “cheeky monkey” and sparked a debate about AI’s place in the art world

Efforts to build a better digital “nose” suggest that our perception of scents reflects both the structure of aromatic molecules and the metabolic processes that make them.

Laser beams could be used to deflect lightning strikes from vulnerable places such as airports and wind farms. (Appeared in April 2023 print issue)

One in three cases of maternal sepsis can be prevented with a single dose of antibiotic, a study in low- and middle-income countries shows

Before exploding as supernovae, massive Wolf-Rayet stars spew gas and dust into space, seeding the formation of future stellar and planetary systems

The pandemic fungus in the television program The Last of Us is real. But an expert says other fungi are much more threatening to humans

These merging supermassive black holes are among the closest ever observed and could help unlock deeper secrets of cosmic history

Cynthia Rudin wants machine learning models, responsible for increasingly important decisions, to show their work.

A thin film can switch from releasing heat to trapping it, and wrapping the coating around buildings could make them more energy-efficient

People are infected by bacteria that, after contacting heavy metals, develop drug-resistant traits

A new radiation-based mechanism adds to the ways that amino acids could have been made in space and brought to the young Earth.

A pandemic program could help reveal the true threat of antibiotic resistance to public health.

Our brains are easily fooled into taking ownership of a virtual body, decades of psychology research shows

You’ve never seen anything like it.

Cultured meat promises to be better for animals, public health and the planet. Will we eat it?

This massive bacteria is breaking all the rules

And what are the iconic clogs even made of, anyway?

The ancestor we deserve.

Scientists have found more of the ingredients for life as we know it in a gaseous cloud toward the center of the Milky Way

Scientists are recruiting phages, bacteria’s natural predators, as the antibiotic resistance crisis worsens.

Our first look at their genome reveals new details of their microscopic lives

The drought may have contributed to the rise of Islam.

The answer could lie in the “junk” portion of the parasite’s DNA.

With microscopic human tissues and advanced algorithms, testing new drugs in humans could become more efficient

As the long-awaited launch of the James Webb Space Telescope approaches, astronomers just picked its successor’s successor.