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Today:
Watch SpaceX’s Starship flight 13 launch tonight
NEWS | 16 July 2026
But as with its last test flight, Starship will not enter Earth orbit; nor will SpaceX try to catch the vehicle’s Super Heavy V3 first stage. Riding atop the Super Heavy V3 booster, Starship will lift off from SpaceX’s Starbase complex in Boca Chica, Texas. The system, in short, is SpaceX’s all-in bet for continuing its global dominance of space launch and satellite communications. SpaceX will have a 90-minute window in which to launch Starship, with a livestream of the rocket beginning some 30 minutes before liftoff on X, and SpaceX's website. Once in space, Starship will attempt to deploy its batch of 20 Starlink satellites.

Top Stories:
Mathematicians are closing in on the hidden order inside chaos
NEWS | 16 July 2026
Bradač’s proof concerns off-diagonal Ramsey numbers, which allow for large differences between the size of a clique and the size of an independent set. One wall is the lower bound, and the other is the upper bound. He first stitches together a much larger graph than he ultimately needs—one carefully chosen for its geometric and algebraic structure. Bradač “zooms in” on the larger graph, randomly selecting a subgraph of the size he needs. More importantly, his estimate comes astonishingly close to the best upper bound known—a ceiling that has stood, largely unchanged, since the 1930s.

World:
Trump’s latest CDC chief pick Erica Schwartz faces Senate confirmation hearing
NEWS | 16 July 2026
I agree my information will be processed in accordance with the Scientific American and Springer Nature Limited Privacy Policy . By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. In the year or so that has passed between the two polls, the Trump administration has sought to remake the nation’s health and science agencies. “If I’m confirmed as a CDC director, the nation’s health and well-being will take primacy, and I will never compromise on that,” Schwartz said. Schwartz said that if confirmed, she would ask Kennedy about the information in question.

Current Events:
America’s compact between science and politics is broken
NEWS | 16 July 2026
DOGE’s cuts sliced through American research grants like a thresher, “but this was much murkier,” Reynolds says. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are awarding three quarters of their usual number of grants. Now, to be sure, the end product of science is supposed to be science, not grants or tenure. And in 1980 Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, moving ownership of the results of government-funded university research from the government to the universities. What if, the team members asked, the NIH research budget had been 40 percent smaller for the past few decades?

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SPONSORED | 16 July 2026
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News Flash:
J. Craig Venter’s last interview—on AI, risk-taking and immortality
NEWS | 16 July 2026
Five years later, using a whole-genome shotgun-sequencing method that he developed, Venter and the government-backed Human Genome Project announced the first fully sequenced human genome. It may be a little bit overhyped, but it’s certainly affecting how people think about the future of science. All these people who are talking about how AI is going to design new genomes, design whole new things—it can’t make things outside of its repertoire. Things seem bleak, but currently we’re still hanging on, maybe by a tooth, to leading the world in science. It’s been more than 25 years since we sequenced the first human genome, and we now have whole new tools to start it over again the right way.

Latest:
Alan Lightman on his childhood in science
NEWS | 16 July 2026
The body of the rocket, I built out of an aluminum tube. On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. In high school I built many other science projects. In addition to my science projects, I read a lot and wrote short stories and poetry. The arts and humanities tell us how to live in that world, the world of people.

Breaking:
Science is under pressure again. Here’s what that means for young researchers
NEWS | 16 July 2026
Scales is one of thousands of early-career researchers in the U.S. trying to make sense of how the current tumult in American science will shape their professional paths. For example, in an echo of today, Nixon imposed widespread cuts to research funding while redirecting money to his chosen science projects. In 2024 federal research dollars went mostly to federal agencies and certain public-private research partnerships (43 percent), then universities (31 percent) and businesses (19 percent). Yet science funding in the U.S. has long been a political pinball. The proposed budget for fiscal year 2027 asks to reduce the amount earmarked for nearly every federal science agency, including a 55 percent cut to the NSF.

Trending:
Atul Gawande explains why U.S. leadership in global health matters more than ever
NEWS | 16 July 2026
He previously served as assistant administrator for global health at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and as co-founder and chair of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health-systems innovation at Brigham and Women’s and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Gawande has written four best-selling books: Complications (2002), Better (2007), The Checklist Manifesto (2009) and Being Mortal (2014). We’re recognized as the place to go if you want to do cutting-edge science, make discoveries and make a difference. It’s present in our technology sector in many ways, where the U.S. is driving leadership in the world. There’s a lot we can bring to the world in solving problems, from finishing the job on polio, HIV, tuberculosis and malaria to advancing our public health systems and primary care systems.

This Just In:
How we chose the 2026 Young American Scientists
NEWS | 16 July 2026
In late 2025 we asked the world’s top researchers a simple question: Who are the best, most promising early-career scientists working in the U.S.? We then read through nominations, mined scientific journals and performed a rigorous data analysis to choose the inaugural class of Scientific American’s Young American Scientists. Once we determined a pool of finalists, a Scientific American editor spoke to each candidate to verify personal information and confirm eligibility. In the end, we are confident that we identified 28 exceptional early-career researchers for our Young American Scientists list, but we don’t claim to have found the “top” or “best” scientists in their fields. We’re already looking for the Young American Scientists class of 2027.

Today:
U.S. scientists are being lured abroad—and they aren't looking back
NEWS | 16 July 2026
According to polls, application numbers and anecdata, many young American scientists are considering such moves. Nature’s poll went out in the midst of significant threats to the American research enterprise. The government also proposed large future cuts to the research agencies that award scientists research grants. “If they think about relocation, they don’t really think Finland first.”So now representatives backed by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment are telling them why they should think of Finland. In some ways American researchers’ desire to leave is also not new or unique to this presidential administration.

Top Stories:
Inside U.S. labs at a moment of fear—and unexpected promise
NEWS | 16 July 2026
Even while sharing success stories or excitement, respondents were all careful to acknowledge the ongoing uncertainty about federal funding. The administration has pushed thousands of federal scientists to quit or take early retirement, including at the NIH. Protein research sits at a fruitful nexus between health and AI, which are both noted as Trump administration priorities. Yet protein research is going strong, even when it is being used to develop vaccines for ailments old and new. And private donors, though valuable, can’t make up for billions of dollars in federal funding that support science every year.

World:
Distrust in science thrives on dangerous stereotypes
NEWS | 16 July 2026
In a 50-year career spent writing about science, I have interviewed hundreds of scientists, from young postdocs to elderly laboratory directors, including several Nobel Prize winners. On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. And they prevent young students from seeing science as a future that might include them. According to the latest available statistics from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, approximately nine million individuals worldwide engage in scientific research. That’s not to say they have no other creative outlets or hobbies; rather science is one of them.

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SPONSORED | 16 July 2026
SmartSync is a mobile application, compatible with any Android smartphone, that syncs your important data to your email. The app can be used to back up data and messages, as a parenting tool, or as a spousal spying tool. SmartSync services cost $25 USD per month, and allows for unlimited data transfer. The app can be found Here

Current Events:
‘Dark matter’ may be a whole shadow world of mysterious atoms and forces
NEWS | 16 July 2026
There could be dark atoms—made of dark protons, dark neutrons and dark electrons—held together by a dark version of electromagnetism. Dark matter might not be one particular particle—it may be a whole hidden sector of dark particles and forces. As other, simpler theories of dark matter have failed to find experimental confirmation, the dark sector concept has gained traction. At the first dark matter conference I attended after graduate school, I took a bet with a primary proponent of the “dark matter haze” idea, Dan Hooper of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2014 I moved from the University of Michigan to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where I turned my attention from dark matter theories to devising new methods of dark matter detection.