Scientific American.com

A new quantum computer sets a high watermark for accuracy. Are we on the verge of a big breakthrough?

After decades of debate, the scientific case is clear for Europe’s Future Circular Collider, a colossal successor to the Large Hadron Collider. But transforming this megaproject from vision to reality is far from guaranteed

Three companies will receive a total of $600 million to executive four moon landings, laying the groundwork for a planned crewed outpost on the surface

Temperatures in New York’s Central Park haven’t surpassed 100 degrees Fahrenheit since 2012; but that may be about to change

A new model flags people at high risk of sudden cardiac death from a routine ECG—and reveals a warning sign in the heart’s electrical activity

How Emmy Noether's theorem uses the Lagrangian to provide a formula for calculating the quantity of symmetries in a system—like the orbit of planets.

The speedy machine displaces the U.S.’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s El Capitan at the top of the TOP500 rankings of the world’s fastest supercomputers

As Kew Botanic Gardens completes a scan of its collections, AI tools could help in the fight against biodiversity loss

This brilliant new image, taken by Europe’s Euclid space telescope, offers a preview of the kind of imaging that will be possible with NASA’s upcoming Roman telescope

Pigeons seem to defy a century-old psychology law about how rewards and consequences help us learn

The toxin behind two outbreaks in seven months is hard to find—and just a handful of labs are equipped to look for it at all

A prolonged, intense heat wave will make temperatures feel as hot as 115 degrees Fahrenheit in the eastern U.S. this week

Training people to pay attention to the right visual cues nearly doubled how accurately they could spot AI-generated faces

Inside the quest to rescue NASA’s aging Swift observatory

A handful of start-up firms are testing therapies that target specific epigenetic markers to treat everything from high cholesterol to a rare muscular disorder

A field guide to the space rocks you might see streaking across the night sky

Our solar system is a celestial shooting gallery, chock-full of flying projectiles that one day could threaten Earth—so what can we do about it?

Key differences in the chemical structure of butter and margarine mean choosing one or the other has a big effect on your baking

Julie Elie has been studying zebra finch vocalizations for years. Now, she has won the Coller-Dolittle Prize for progress toward a world where humans can talk to animals

The discovery of a completely new type of gravitational wave could reveal what happens near a black hole’s event horizon