RealClear Science

Russia's 'Starlink' Could Threaten All of Europe Technical problems have plagued Russia’s fledgling Starlink-like satellite megaconstellation RASSVET since its first launches. But analysts say that despite the apparent teething problems, RASSVET is set to give Russia a distinct advantage and self-sufficiency in the war against Ukraine, and possibly against Europe in the future. Read Full Article »

"Carbon monoxide" and "brain health" aren't terms normally found in the same sentence, at least not in a good way. But a massive new study reports that people with higher levels of exhaled CO were less likely to develop Parkinson's disease. The finding isn't as crazy as it sounds, but neither is a very different explanation. Read Full Article » Show comments Hide Comments

Teen Has Memory More Powerful Than Almost All Humans For most of us, our memories are as fragile as they are precious. Even some of the most important events in our lives can quickly become a blur, missing key details and warping with time. In some very rare cases, however, memories are as vivid as the day they were written. Read Full Article »

Phil Plait Scientific American September 26, 2026 How many interstellar probes has humanity launched? If you're not a die-hard space geek, the answer will probably surprise you: five. Yes, we currently have five spacecraft, all launched by NASA, heading out into the great beyond. Pioneers 10 and 11, along with the New Horizons probe that passed Pluto in 2015, are well on their way to crossing the fuzzy boundary between our solar system and the rest of the galaxy.

In my first months as a physics journalist nearly a decade ago, I kept running into an inscrutable string of characters: AdS/CFT. Thoroughly intimidated, I decided to just ignore it. But I couldn’t keep my head in the sand for long. I soon learned that those characters are shorthand for a surprising connection between the seemingly inharmonious worlds of gravity and quantum mechanics. Read Full Article »

Someone coughs in a waiting room, gathers their belongings, and leaves. Two hours later, the measles virus they released can still infect someone arriving for their appointment. With this virus, people do not even have to cross paths to share an infection. Read Full Article » Show comments Hide Comments

Vitor Melo Wall Street Journal September 26, 2026 Will AI take our jobs? Even for those who aren’t worried about human extinction, much of the conversation about the technology begins and ends there. A Gallup survey released last week found that 27% of American workers fear technology will make their job obsolete, a record high, and double the share in 2017. Read Full Article » Show comments Hide Comments

Europeans spend up to 90% of their lives indoors, according to official estimates. Yet while outdoor air pollution has become a familiar public concern, the air inside our homes, schools and workplaces has largely gone unnoticed. That is changing. Researchers across Europe are investigating what is really in indoor air, how it affects our health and what can be done about it. Read Full Article »

Nathan Cofnas, the self-professed “race realist” who made international headlines when he accused Cambridge academic Jason Arday of plagiarism, has defended his “hereditarianism” position as scientific. I would argue, instead, that such beliefs are pseudoscientific. Read Full Article » Show comments Hide Comments

The list of supplements sold in the United States is long and wordy: curcumin, turmeric, berberine, magnesium glycinate, L-lycine, milk thistle, and many, many, many more. Though each has its ardent devotees who swear their daily pill or powder turbocharges their health, objective scientific studies suggest these anecdotes are just that and nothing more. Read Full Article » Show comments Hide Comments