Brain
Explainer: How to read brain activity
Electricity underlies the chattering of brain cells. Here’s how scientists eavesdrop on those conversations.
Featured Articles in this Issue
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Cover Story
The lives of black holes, from birth to death
After more than a century, scientists are just beginning to understand black holes — the most bizarre and powerful things in the universe.
Explainer
Technically Fiction
Animals
The Cyclops may be an ancient myth, but one-eyed creatures are real
The iconic Cyclops of The Odyssey might look like a massive, one-eyed person, but it might have more in common with creatures other than humans.
Profile
Space
Art helped this astrophysicist make sense of math
Ronald Gamble takes cues from the arts to study supermassive black holes and their spacetime geometry.
Features
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Got brain rot?
Excessive scrolling through social media or viral videos can mess with your mental health — and possibly alter your brain’s development, studies show.
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The lives of black holes, from birth to death
After more than a century, scientists are just beginning to understand black holes — the most bizarre and powerful things in the universe.
More Stories from the October 1, 2026 issue
- Archaeology
The mystery of the ‘Plain of Jars’ in Laos may now be solved
The remains of at least 37 people sit in an ancient stone “jar.” They suggest thousands of such jars in Laos are burial vaults.
- Physics
Physics explains why gold doesn’t ‘rust’
Metals like copper tarnish when they react with oxygen in the air. Gold doesn’t, thanks to a quick rearrangement of atoms on its surface.
- Animals
Giant school bus–sized octopuses may have once ruled the oceans
Some of these predators were as long as whales. Roaming the seas more than 72 million years ago, the octopuses appear to have been the largest invertebrates ever known.
- Microbes
Fuzzy microbes may fuel cows’ methane burps
Production of this potent greenhouse gas is triggered by a newfound feature of these microbes — one with a funny name: hydrogenobody.
- Environment
Hawaii is turning fishnets and other plastic trash into roads
Scientists are testing whether plastic pollution from the ocean can be transformed into safe and durable highways.
- Physics
Experiment: Measure fake blood spatter
Future forensic scientists, get out your corn syrup and red food coloring! It’s time to fake a crime scene.
