In July of 1925 hundreds of reporters and other onlookers crowded into a sweltering courtroom in Dayton, Tenn., to watch what would become widely recognized as the trial of the century. Against a ...

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. It goes without saying that a lot has changed at Scientific American since our first issue came out in 1845. But the ...

In January, Chinese artificial-intelligence start-up DeepSeek blew up the dam. The company released a chatbot that rivals industry leaders such as OpenAI’s Chat-GPT o1 and Anthropic’s Claude, and its ...

In “The Quantum Bubble That Could Destroy the Universe,” Matthew von Hippel discusses vacuum decay, in which a change in the Higgs field would create an expanding quantum bubble that would transform ...

A poster-size version of the front page of the very first issue of this magazine hangs in the lobby of Springer Nature’s New York City office. I walk past it multiple times a day, and one line of text ...

In the quest for a reliable way to detect any stirrings of a sentient “I” in artificial intelligence systems, researchers are turning to one area of experience—pain—that inarguably unites a vast swath ...

We’re celebrating 180 years of Scientific American. Explore our legacy of discovery and look ahead to the future. In 1864 Scientific American published a competition launched by a billiard-table ...

Where in the brain does consciousness originate? Theories abound, but neuroscientists still haven’t coalesced around one explanation, largely because it’s such a hard question to probe with the ...

This piece is part of Scientific American’s column The Science of Parenting. For more, go here. Mental health concerns. Exposure to pornography. Addiction. Loneliness. Bullying. Adolescents’ use of ...

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. TikTok’s algorithm, which shapes what more than a billion users see, has developed an almost mystical reputation for ...