Animals
Explainer: What is an invasive species?
These foreign organisms hitchhike, spread widely and stir up trouble in native ecosystems.
Featured Articles in this Issue
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Cover Story
Burps and farts: Why the body is such a gas
People make a lot of gas, and it’s got to come out one end or the other. Understanding those farts and burps could tell us a lot about our health.
Explainer
Technically Fiction
Artificial Intelligence
AI … in space!
In WALL-E, artificial intelligence runs an entire ship. Real-life AI, though, is too finicky and prone to mistakes to manage that.
Profile
Oceans
Seals helped this oceanographer study the Southern Ocean
Oceanographer Lily Dove uses remote robots to study Antarctica’s perilous oceans.
Features
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Antarctica faces a green and weedy future
Warming is allowing alien species to invade a land that had been isolated for 30 million years. They now threaten local ecosystems unique to Antarctica.
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Burps and farts: Why the body is such a gas
People make a lot of gas, and it’s got to come out one end or the other. Understanding those farts and burps could tell us a lot about our health.
More Stories from the November 1, 2026 issue
- Space
NASA’s DART spacecraft changed 2 asteroids’ orbit around the sun
In 2022, NASA smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid. New data show how that impact changed the orbit around the sun of this space rock — and its partner.
- Life
Fog — it’s alive!
Low-lying fog clouds host living microbes. That may be good news, because some of them can remove toxic air pollutants, such as formaldehyde.
- Humans
Humans have used fire far longer than anyone realized
Cave dirt suggests one ancestral species was using fire around 1.8 million years ago. That pushes back the earliest known use by about 800,000 years.
- Physics
Trying to break a photon would create a quantum mess
Attempting to cut a light particle in half would spawn up to infinite new photons, a new model shows.
- Animals
Like living mood rings, these bees change color when it turns humid
Humidity makes North American sweat bees change color. This trait could be widespread among shiny insects, some biologists now suspect.
- Archaeology
Mystery solved: Why earthquakes haven’t wrecked Egypt’s Great Pyramid
Its materials, shape and internal design have helped this ancient wonder withstand strong shaking.
- Chemistry
Experiment: Make your own marshmallows!
Soft, sticky marshmallows can be made with just three ingredients. Finding the right ratio of sugar and corn syrup is key to making this sweet treat.
