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I was walking out of a classroom at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where students and I had been talking about the way planets form, when I was stopped by my colleague Ben Weiss. He studies magnetism in space rocks, and he was very excited. Weiss pulled me down the hall to his office to show me new data on one of these rocks, a meteorite called Allende. It was information that could change almost everything planetary geologists thought about the solar system....

After more than a decade, the mountain pine beetle epidemic that surged through British Columbia appears finally to be in remission. Having devastated the province’s lodgepole pine forests, the insect is running out of food. But forest managers now see new beetle infestations appearing at the edge of the Boreal Forest, in Alberta, and in the Yukon and Northwest Territories – areas well outside the insect’s historical range. As a warming climate lifts the temperature limitations that once kept the beetle in check, scientists fear it may continue its push across the continent, perhaps as far as the Atlantic Coast....

The risk of radiation exposure is not a show-stopper for a long-term manned mission to Mars, new results from NASA’s Curiosity rover suggest. A mission consisting of a 180-day cruise to Mars, a 500-day stay on the Red Planet and a 180-day return flight to Earth would expose astronauts to a cumulative radiation dose of about 1.01 sieverts, measurements by Curiosity’s Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) instrument indicate. To put that in perspective: The European Space Agency generally limits its astronauts to a total career radiation dose of 1 sievert, which is associated with a 5-percent increase in lifetime fatal cancer risk....

When in our evolution did we humans become so clever, so creative, so boundlessly ingenious? Writer Heather Pringle tackles exactly this question in the cover story of the March issue of Scientific American. The answer, in a nutshell, is rather earlier than scientists traditionally thought, which itself raises all sorts of questions about what factors kindled our ancestors’ cognitive prowess. Pringle marshals considerable evidence of surprisingly ancient innovation—from sophisticated tools to spectacular works of art—to make her case....

A slight alteration to the custom of riding a horse may have dramatically changed the way wars were fought. Humans rode bareback or mounted horses with a simple blanket after they first domesticated the animals, thousands of years after the dawn of agriculture. The leather saddle first straddled a horse’s back in China perhaps as far back as the third century B.C. But the saddle was only one step toward transforming the use of cavalry as a means of waging war....

Arthur is an alleged john, a man who patronizes prostitutes. After his arrest on September 5, 2008, a photograph of this 41-year-old appeared on the Web site of the Chicago Police Department. Arthur (not his real name) was far from the only person so branded on this Internet portal. Samuel, 59, and Jos, 34, (whose names were also changed to protect their privacy) were on this online pillory for a month after their September 5 arrests....

Editor’s Note (12/21/21): This article is being showcased in a special collection about equity in health care that was made possible by the support of Takeda. The article was published independently and without sponsorship. The COVID pandemic, combined with growing support for racial justice, has brought the issue of inequity in health care to the fore. This issue is nothing new—racial and ethnic disparities have been well documented in terms of unequal medical delivery and measures of health treatment outcomes—but now is the time for the medical community to make meaningful changes and address these gaps in care....

The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

The fourth in a four-part series on Pakistan’s flood disaster. Click here for part one, here for part two and here for part three. NOWSHERA, Pakistan – “I wonder if humanity exists in other parts of Pakistan.” Salma Begum 32, fumes when asked what the government and international community have done for her family in the weeks since the disastrous flooding here. The only support she has seen comes from the local branch of the Ummah Welfare Trust, a U....

If intelligent life is out there, it probably resides in a solar system with many planets. The more planets a star has, a recent study found, the more circular the orbits tend to be. Because planets on circular orbits do not move toward or away from their star, their climates may be stable enough to foster advanced life. Our own solar system fits that pattern. The sun has eight or nine planets (depending on how you count), and most of them have fairly circular paths....

Show an infant something unusual or surprising—say, reveal a toy that had been hidden—and the baby will perk up and pay attention. A new study investigates why this is so and finds evidence that young children are wired to focus on the unexpected to learn how the physical world works. Aimee Stahl, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at Johns Hopkins University, and her colleagues studied a group of 110 11-month-old babies....

Parents anticipate sex differences from the first prenatal ultrasound but then seem amazed when their son goes gaga over trucks or their daughter will wear nothing but pink. Boys and girls are obviously different, and in many cases the gaps between them seem stark. But stereotypes do not always hold up to scientific scrutiny. Are boys really more aggressive and girls really more empathetic—or do we just see what we expect in them?...

Welcome to Scientific American’s 175th anniversary issue! We’ve had a blast putting it together and hope you enjoy it. Scientific American is the oldest continuously published magazine in the U.S. For our demisemiseptcentennial (also known as, no kidding, a quartoseptcentennial), we are presenting a mix of surprising history stories (featuring Harry Houdini, M. C. Escher and federal censors burning copies of our magazine) and deeper looks at some of the most transformative, thrilling, dizzying discoveries of the past 175 years....

Rosey has lived with bulimia for more than a decade. The 31-year-old resident of Melbourne, Australia, started therapy for her eating disorder six years ago. Although she says she had never considered herself “cured,” she had reached a point in her recovery that felt hopeful and manageable. Then along came the novel coronavirus. When mandatory COVID-19 lockdowns began in Australia in March, Rosey’s anxiety went into overdrive. “I’m single, I live alone, my family lives in another state, and I’m not able to see friends,” she says, adding that her need for control—something she has now lost in almost every area of her life—has played a major role in the resurgence of symptoms: “To have everything I knew and had control over, including how I managed my illness, ripped away has been one of the hardest things....

JAKE, AGED 16, has a terrific relationship with his grandmother Rita, who is 70. They live close by, and they even take a Spanish-language class together twice a week at a local college. After class they sometimes stop at a caf for a snack. On one occasion Rita tells Jake, “I think it’s great how fast you pick up new grammar. It takes me a lot longer.” Jake replies: “Yeah, but you don’t seem to make as many silly mistakes on the quizzes as I do....

This seems like a good moment to speak to the idea of uncertainty. Our world appears to be in a perpetual state of it. We have recently experienced rising global temperatures, melting glaciers, floods, wildfires and record-breaking hurricanes. And now a worldwide pandemic rages as humanity races to protect itself against a virus that has already claimed millions of lives. Throughout history, science has been our species’ hedge against the uncertainties of our world....

The power of the sun has edged a little closer to Earth. Under x-ray assault, the rapid implosion of a plastic shell onto icy isotopes of hydrogen has produced fusion and, for the first time, 170 micrograms of this superheated fusion fuel released more energy than it absorbed. Experimental shots of the 192 lasers at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have reproduced such fusion at least four times since September 2013....

Editor’s note: The following is the introduction to a special e-publication called Determining the Age of the Earth (click the link to see a table of contents). Published earlier this year, the collection draws articles from the archives of Scientific American. In the collection, this introduction appears with the title, “Stumbling Toward an Understanding of Geologic Timescales.” Aristotle thought the earth had existed eternally. Roman poet Lucretius, intellectual heir to the Greek atomists, believed its formation must have been relatively recent, given that there were no records going back beyond the Trojan War....

This month, my Scientific American column explored the dawn of rental software such as Adobe Photoshop CC. You can’t buy it; you have to pay by the month or the year to use it. (CC stands for Creative Cloud, but it didn’t take unhappy customers to come up with alternative acronyms like Credit Card—and Cash Cow.) It is, to be sure, a complicated shift away from the “pay once and own it” model that’s been in place for years....

January 20, 2014, was going to be either a very good or a very bad day for the men and women working on the Rosetta space probe. The 3,000-kilogram robotic spacecraft had been launched by the European Space Agency nearly 10 years earlier and was en route to an August encounter with an obscure comet bearing the unwieldy name 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P for short). If all went according to plan, Rosetta would do something that has never been attempted before: it would loop into a tight orbit around the comet, deploy a lander named Philae to touch down on its surface, and shadow the frozen body as it crackled to life, warmed by the heat of the sun....