60-second Science

ChatGPT and other AI programs can offer medical advice. But how good are they?

The famous climate pattern El Niño could usher in a new hottest year on record and will have domino effects on the world’s weather.

John O’Keefe shared the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience in 2014 for discovering that neurons in the hippocampus encode an animal’s location and create a cognitive map for navigation. This podcast was produced for the Kavli Prize by Scientific American Custom Media, a division separate from the magazine’s board of editors.

Researchers, using the galaxy as a detector, believe they have detected gravitational waves from monster black holes for the first time.

Toxic dust plagues marginalized communities on the shores of this disappearing salt lake.

Desert ants living in the featureless salt plains of Tunisia count their steps and erect tall entrances at their nests to find their way back home.

Your body has a secret cooling method, and scientists explain how to use it.

Along with an expert, we take you into some of nature's most monstrous storms. 

The James Webb Space Telescope is giving us our first glimpse of stars in the early universe.

In 2013 a new user named Cleo took an online math forum by storm with unproved answers. Today she’s an urban legend. But who was she?

The party drug MDMA could soon be approved for treating people with severe PTSD.

Where is it coming from? How long will it last? What's in the smoke? Whose health is at risk? How do you clean your own air?

Terror birds were the grizzly bears of birds, the great white sharks of the land, Jack the Ripper but with feathers. They were also truly fascinating.

Officially, these prehistoric birds are the dromornithids, but everyone who studies them calls them thunderbirds—and for good reason.

The elephant bird was the heaviest bird to ever walk the earth. Also, its eggs were 150 times the size of a chicken egg and thick as a dinner plate.

The fossil was a prehistoric bird called Pelagornis sandersi, and its wings stretched out twice as wide as those of the great albatross. 

James Rothman shared The Kavli Prize in Neuroscience in 2010 for discovering the molecular basis of neurotransmitter release. How did a biochemist come to win such a prestigious prize in neuroscience?

What you pay for tests, vaccines, and medicine will change

From North America to South Asia, summer heat waves are becoming longer, stronger and more frequent with climate change.

From the technology upsetting jobs and causing intellectual property issues to models making up fake answers to questions, here’s why we’re concerned about generative AI.