Social Sciences

For some parents, bed-sharing is the only way their baby can sleep. Rather than talking to parents about how to do it safely, we try to pretend it doesn’t exist

In the 1970s a young psychologist challenged a popular theory of how we acquire language, launching a fierce debate that continues to this day

How “heart-centered” archaeology is helping to find the Indigenous children who never came home from residential schools

Fossils and stone tools show that a cave in Saudi Arabia has been used as shelter by humans for millennia, up to the present day

The tale of how the "backfire effect" ultimately, itself, backfired, and what scientists can learn from being wrong

A novel about the tensions between nature and modernity, animal social networks, and more books out now

Science in meter and verse

Pavlov’s dogs; Mercury’s dark side

Reducing noise improves health, JWST’s galaxies change astronomy, and there’s new hope for people with prostate cancer

Letters to the editors for the January 2024 issue of Scientific American

What makes a word survive or go extinct?

Making schools more welcoming for all can make for a fair and just society