Latest from Scientific American
Scientific American
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Scientific American
Cover Art Jigsaw: September 1964
By Sarah Lewin Frasier To celebrate Scientific American's 180th anniversary, we're publishing a jigsaw every weekday to show off some of our most fascinating magazine covers over the years. Take a tour here through the covers so far. We'd love to hear from you! E-mail us at games@ to share your experience.
Scientific American
5 hours ago
- Science
- Scientific American
Spellements: Friday, July 25, 2025
How to Play Click the timer at the top of the game page to pause and see a clue to the science-related word in this puzzle! The objective of the game is to find words that can be made with the given letters such that all the words include the letter in the center. You can enter letters by clicking on them or typing them in. Press Enter to submit a word. Letters can be used multiple times in a single word, and words must contain four letters or more for this size layout. Select the Play Together icon in the navigation bar to invite a friend to work together on this puzzle. Pangrams, words which incorporate all the letters available, appear in bold and receive bonus points. One such word is always drawn from a recent Scientific American article—look out for a popup when you find it! You can view hints for words in the puzzle by hitting the life preserver icon in the game display. The dictionary we use for this game misses a lot of science words, such as apatite and coati. Let us know at games@ any extra science terms you found, along with your name and place of residence,
Scientific American
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Scientific American
Killer Sudoku: July 25, 2025
Can you crack Killer Sudoku's mathematical twist? The objective of Sudoku is to fill each row, column and sub-grid with exactly one of each number from 1-9. In Killer Sudoku, the digits in each inner shape (marked by dots) must add up to the number in the top corner of that box. No digit can be repeated within an inner shape, row, column or sub-grid. For more, select "How to Play" in the game's dropdown menu. Use the "Play Together" option in the navigation bar to invite a friend to play this puzzle with you and enter numbers at the same time.
Scientific American
13 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Scientific American
Hulk Hogan Dies at Age 71. Wrestling Icon's Court Battle Highlighted Need for Digital Privacy
Hulk Hogan died today, reportedly of cardiac arrest, at age 71 in Clearwater, Fla. Born Terry Bollea, Hogan was a star wrestler in a do-rag—a six-foot-seven-inch, 302-pound powerhouse in his prime with a gift for showmanship and an affinity for tearing his shirt off before matches. But he was also a common target of digital manipulation, exploitation and online hoaxes, spurring him to champion privacy rights in the digital age. For those who have followed Hogan's life closely, this isn't the first time his death has been announced. According to the Internet, he died in 2014 and did so again in 2015 —both times by gunshot—and then passed away yet again in 2024. (The latter claim appeared on a Reddit subreddit dedicated to lies, though some people took it seriously.) Even in the months leading up to his actual death, online rumors claimed that he was on his deathbed or had died. And during that decade of hoaxes—long after the height of his wrestling career—his image was used countless times for digital manipulations. Photographs of Hogan flexing the biceps that he called '24-inch pythons' were often edited to swap out his face, with its iconic horseshoe mustache, and replace it with the face of one of the many people who wanted to be seen inhabiting his body—or with the face of someone else whom others wanted to see on it for their own reasons. But while Hogan couldn't prevent the seemingly endless digital manipulations, he became a landmark figure of the digital era for his efforts to defend his right to privacy. Years before 'deepfake' was a household word and artificial intelligence systems could allow anyone to puppeteer the image of a legend, Hogan found himself naked—literally—before the Web. In 2012 Gawker, a digital media company known for gossip scoops, acquired a 2006 sex tape involving Hogan (which he asserted had not been filmed with his knowledge or consent) and posted an excerpt online. Hogan sued, and a jury awarded him a total of $140 million in damages, though he settled for $31 million. Behind the scenes of what looked like a tabloid circus was a proxy battle between tech moguls. Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who had been outed as gay by Gawker years before, funded Hogan's lawsuit. The case, which bankrupted Gawker, would become a major test for First Amendment rights in a time when clicks were increasingly becoming currency and online privacy had few protections. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Though Hogan's final headline won't stop the next hoax video or cloned voice, his life—and the ways it was constantly remixed, misreported and monetized—illustrate how the fight over a single leaked tape previewed the question of individual privacy rights in a world where manipulating pixels has become almost effortless. The years to come will no doubt see Hogan's image in AI-generated content, and legal cases around digital privacy issues promise to become only more complicated.
Scientific American
14 hours ago
- Science
- Scientific American
‘Arsenic Life' Microbe Study Retracted after 15 Years of Controversy
'Can you imagine eating toxic waste for breakfast?' Science magazine asked in a 2010 press release touting a newly discovered microbe controversially claimed to 'live and grow entirely off arsenic.' The claim was controversial because it flew in the face of well-established biochemistry. Of the many elements thought crucial for life, one of the most important is phosphorus, which serves as a building block for DNA and other biomolecules. But in samples from California's Mono Lake, a research team had found evidence of a bacterium swapping out phosphorus for arsenic. If true, the result would've rewritten textbooks and led to radical revisions in our understanding of where and how life might crop up elsewhere in the cosmos. The trouble was: many experts weren't convinced. Now, some 15 years later, the venerable scientific journal has retracted this 'arsenic life' study, once the star of a NASA news conference because of its epochal astrobiological implications. First elevating an early-career U.S. Geological Survey researcher, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, to acclaim, then to controversy, the study convulsed the scientific community for two years, raising questions over how science is both conducted and publicized. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. ' Science has decided that this Research Article meets the criteria for retraction by today's standards,' said the journal's editor-in-chief Holden Thorp in the July 24 retraction notice. While Science 's earlier standards only allowed for the retraction of a study because of fraud or misconduct, he explained, the journal now allows for removal if a paper's experiments don't support its key conclusions. He pointed to two 2012 studies, also published by Science, that suggested the Mono Lake microbe, dubbed GFAJ-1, merely sequestered arsenic extraordinarily well internally and didn't rely on it for its metabolism or reproduction. 'Given the evidence that the results were based on contamination, Science believes that the key conclusion of the paper is based on flawed data,' states a follow-up blog post co-authored by Thorp and Valda Vinson, executive editor for the Science journals. Ten Science studies have been retracted for unintended error since 2019, according to a spokesperson for the journal. The study's authors, including Wolfe-Simon, protested the retraction in a letter to Science. 'Claims should be made, tested, challenged, and ultimately judged on the scientific merits by the scientific community itself,' they wrote. One of the study's authors, geochemist Ariel Anbar of Arizona State University, calls the retraction explanation 'unbelievably misleading,' saying the evidence for contamination in the original study was weak and should be adjudicated by scientists, not the journal. 'You would think that if Science wanted to retract this paper after nearly 15 years, they would be able to come up with a clear, convincing argument for the published record—developed transparently and presented coherently. You would be wrong.' A NASA official has also asked Science to reconsider the retraction, saying the journal has 'singled out' the study and that the decision upends scientific standards. In some respects, the arsenic life saga is less about the disputed result itself and more about the zeitgeist in which it emerged. The study debuted at a seminal moment when the stately and slow tradition of scientific peer review was speeding up and moving online, opening up to the wider scientific community and closely coupling with the 24/7 churn of social media and digital news. With the benefit of hindsight, the ensuing furor was if nothing else a warning about 'big, if true' research results rapidly rolled out to breathless fanfare—in this case the now notorious NASA news conference. Wolfe-Simon, then a 33-year-old NASA astrobiology fellow, became a scientific celebrity practically overnight—and also a lightning rod for controversy. The research team's decision to engage minimally with online criticism while handling disagreements in the more formal, slow-moving world of scientific journals played badly in the burgeoning blogosphere era, with effects that linger clearly today. 'Over the years, Science has continued to receive media inquiries about the Wolfe-Simon Research Article, highlighting the extent to which the paper is still part of scientific discussions,' Thorp noted in the retraction statement. In February questions of retracting the study were apparently revived by a New York Times profile of Wolfe-Simon that portrayed her and the search for arsenic life in sympathetic terms. Amid the profile's publication, Anbar says, he and other study authors received queries about a retraction from the journal, followed by a notification of its decision to proceed with a plan to retract (against the authors' stated disagreement). The authors eventually okayed a draft of the retraction that made it clear that there was no misconduct, but the stated basis for retraction was still vague, Anbar says. 'My conclusion is that, yes, the paper should be retracted so that a statement of caution appears whenever it is accessed,' says Patricia Foster, an emerita professor of biology and research ethicist at Indiana University, noting that it was still generating fresh citations in peer-reviewed science papers. But, she adds, it's important that the retraction notice makes clear that no research misconduct is suspected about the work. Leonid Kruglyak of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, a co-author of one of the 2012 papers that found that GFAJ-1 merely sequestered arsenic, also agrees with Science 's retraction. It is now appropriate based on the new standards for retracting papers with seriously flawed conclusions such as the GFAJ-1 study, he says. 'I don't think this is really a dispute, except on the part of the authors themselves.' One critic of the retraction, however, is chemist Steven Benner of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, who sat on the 2010 NASA news conference as a skeptical voice. Science, he says, shouldn't act as a 'gatekeeper' by retracting a study that might be wrong but wasn't fraudulent; doing so carries its own threat to open scientific research, in his view. 'The paper should stay, and it has simply met the fate of many papers that were wrong,' he says. 'It's an object lesson on how wonky results get fixed.'
