Wow—thank you @rebeccarhelm.bsky.social for investigating this video. When I saw it a few weeks ago I wondered whether it was legit. It’s absolutely incredible!

I love this whole wonderfully evocative thread about Ötzi the Iceman and his final journey so much 😍😭🧪

Chimpanzees get a surprising amount of alcohol from the fruit they eat. This discovery might bolster the "drunken monkey hypothesis" for humanity's love of liquor 🧪🍸

New dome-headed dino just dropped. 🧪 (Very fun story by @jack-tamisiea.bsky.social)

Right now, millions of birds are migrating south before the onset of the boreal winter. @ksepkalab.bsky.social and I explore the evolutionary origins of this amazing behavior in our article for @sciam.bsky.social! www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-...

I loved talking with Marty Martin and Art Woods about how our understanding of human origins has evolved since 1845 for their excellent podcast, Big Biology 🧪

The LIGO project is one of the coolest things going, and the Trump admin wants to effectively cancel it. Here's hoping it can keep on making amazing discoveries like this one 🧪

You absolutely need to know about this fish that has Forehead Sex Teeth 🧪

Look, who are you to judge the spotted ratfish and it's personal kinks. It likes things a little spicy. So what?

Behold the gloriously weird Spotted Ratfish. It has teeth on its forehead for sex. The teeth line a cartilaginous appendage called a tenaculum that in males can be erected and used to grasp a female during mating 🧪

I wrote about how Hurricane Katrina helped spur pretty remarkable improvements in hurricane forecasts since 20 years ago and how current and planned budget cuts by the Trump administration to research could set us back.

It's Scientific American's 180th birthday! To celebrate we have stories on 180-degree turns in science--times when scientists did an about-face in light of new evidence. My essay looks at how the notion of human uniqueness has evolved. Turns out a lot of other species share our "special" abilities 🧪

It's Scientific American's 180th birthday! To celebrate we have stories on 180-degree turns in science--times when scientists did an about-face in light of new evidence. My essay looks at how the notion of human uniqueness has evolved. Turns out a lot of other species share our "special" abilities 🧪

Feast your eyes on this spectacularly spiky ankylosaur 😍 🧪

I have a real shitshow of a science story here for all my friends: 🧪 www.scientificamerican.com/article/thes...

Fossil teeth reveal a new species of human ancestor, one that co-existed with the earliest known members of our own genus. I love thinking about how, although Homo sapiens is the only human species around today, for most of human prehistory, multiple human species roamed the earth 🤯 🧪

A blue bee! This is the blue carpenter bee, Xylocopa tumida. I was SO excited to find this animal just before dawn at Trus Madi Entomology Camp in Borneo. So full of beauty.

🧪 I've been interested in female agency in ape dispersal for a long time, v cool to see new work in gorillas. It's fascinating to imagine their, and young female chimpanzee, experience in making these choices - going off alone into forest, encountering other groups, trying to find friends

mRNA Vaccine Tech Could Transform Medicine and Cure Diseases. RFK, Jr. Just Pulled Its Funding.

Stone tools from Sulawesi at least a million years old may be even more ancient than those found on Flores, suggesting an even earlier presence of hominins on Wallacea www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It’s only early August but the fall migration of birds is already under way! Here’s what I’ve been seeing lately and how you can watch this incredible spectacle 🧪🪶 www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-...

It’s only early August but the fall migration of birds is already under way! Here’s what I’ve been seeing lately and how you can watch this incredible spectacle 🧪🪶 www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-...

Yes I AM blaming every still-packed box and undone chore on these quirks of Earth's rotation and no I am not open to feedback about that decision. (Come on Earth's wild ride with me!): 🧪 www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-...

New world record longest lightning strike just dropped! 🧪 (by @dodecalemma.bsky.social for @sciam.bsky.social)

My brother did not ask me to do this, nor did he know I was going to, but I made him a mashed potato volcano for his birthday. The number of potatoes this required was shocking but otherwise it was relatively simple to do. A side effect is a freezer full of leftover mashed potatoes.

New story by my colleague @mfischetti.bsky.social showing where the magnitude-8.8 Russia earthquake ranks among the strongest ever recorded. 🧪

Now on @sciam.bsky.social, by @nadiadrake.bsky.social: The U.S. has axed CMB-S4, its boldest cosmology experiment in generations. Tight budgets and crumbling infrastructure helped doom the project, which was meant to test cosmic inflation. RIP. www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-...

“I thought I would be helping people,” says Michael Pasqua, a life scientist and program manager for the EPA’s safe drinking water efforts in Wisconsin. 🧪 (by @meghanbartels.bsky.social in @sciam.bsky.social)

For 40 years, virus detectives have flocked to NJ beaches to track avian influenza. Their clues? Bird poop 💩 I followed that team to explain H5N1's history in a special Science Quickly podcast series. Featured today in @sciam.bsky.social's bird flu issue: www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/epis...

We finally made it to Bluesky—just a few billion years after the Big Bang, and only slightly late to the party ✨🌌 We’re sharing some of our best stories from the year so far to kick off our Bluesky journey!

In this month's issue of Nature Ecology & Evolution, we celebrate 200 years since the birth of Henry Walter Bates, who gave the first scientific account of mimicry in butterflies [thread] 🦋 Editorial: Bates’ many contributions www.nature.com/articles/s41...

100 years after the Scopes trial, in which John Scopes was found guilty of breaking a law against teaching human evolution in school, U.S. education is still under attack from the same religiously motivated political forces that led to the Scopes verdict 🧪 www.scientificamerican.com/article/amer...

And here is a whole host of expert comment on the Moa/Colossal announcement -- well worth a read, with lots to think about. www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/2025/07/09/m...

Our excellent graphics editor @jenchristiansen.com gives a great History of Scientific American talk to each new class of interns here. Today we all learned that SciAm is older than STAMPS (in the U.S. at least). Also, please look at this screenshot of our early AOL page.

We'll be talkin' birds in a couple hours!

Fun! @evoswami.bsky.social is quoted from the interview on @sciam.bsky.social by @katewong.bsky.social on "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" from @npr.org! (min 34:50) www.npr.org/2025/05/24/1...

Help save SAPIENS magazine! The Wenner-Gren Foundation, our funder, may decide to close the magazine in the coming weeks. But the Board of Trustees hasn't made its final decision. A letter from you could help! Sign here: actionnetwork.org/letters/urge...

Technology has made it easier than ever to find and identify birds, but something wonderful happens when you put your phone away and just *watch* these incredible animals. Maine birder Derek Lovitch makes the case for slow, analog bird-watching 🪶🧪

THE WARBLERS ARE COMING!!! Found these guys this morning in Connecticut in a big mixed flock of migrants. Black-throated Green Warbler, Black-and-white Warbler, Palm Warbler and a very dull Pine Warbler. Hooray for spring migration! 🪶

For Earth Day, trying to channel, if only for a moment, the utter bliss of this Gray Squirrel ensconced in the perfect tree nook and savoring a delicious nut

Out in Cape Cod Bay on the Miss Emily fishing boat this morning with a team of scientists studying the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale. First whales spotted at 7:25! 🧪🐋

I know we could all use some good news right now, and I love Ice Age animals and Game of Thrones as much as the next person. But as someone who writes about evolution and extinction, ecology and conservation, for a living, I’ve gotta say this Dire Wolf hoopla is deeply problematic. A short thread 🧵🧪

This was actually a really delightful piece to write, albeit for the dumbest possible reason. 🧪

Want a not-so-fun fact? Red-winged Blackbirds are one of the most common species in North America. Their populations are declining like virtually every songbird on the continent. That means we’ve lost more individual Red-wingeds than any other bird species in the last 100 years.

Kanzi the bonobo, who learned language and made stone tools, has died. Here's what we learned about ape and human cognition from this remarkable individual. (Don't miss the story about how Kanzi described the scary beaver he discovered in his habitat 🦫🥲) 🧪 www.scientificamerican.com/article/kanz...

"Systematic bone tool production at 1.5 million years ago" really interesting stuff here: "early Acheulean toolmakers unravelled technological repertoires that were previously thought to have appeared routinely more than 1 million years later."

And the quiz bird is…a Bufflehead! Thanks for playing, folks! 🪶

QUIZ BIRD: I love being quizzed on bird identification when I’m out birdwatching with more experienced birders—helps me learn! I sent this photo to a friend who indulges this whim, thinking I might stump him. Nope. Care to guess? (North Shore of Massachusetts, February 21, 2025) 🪶

My Valentine. Magellanic Woodpecker (male) in Tierra del Fuego national park. This was one of the birds I most wanted to see on my recent trip to Antarctica and Argentina. 🪶