Plus, how to detect an AI-generated voice ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
November 3, 2026—It's midterms day in the U.S. Plus, the science of detecting an AI voice, and self-flying airplanes are about to take off.
—Andrea Gawrylewski,
Chief Newsletter Editor
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Reliable Robotics' Cessna Caravan taxis itself at Albuquerque International Sunport in New Mexico. Reliable Robotics
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A start-up company valued at more than $1 billion wants to fly cargo planes with no one in the cockpit. First, it needs to prove to regulators that the planes are safe without a human aboard. | 4 min read
Join the discussion: Would you board a plane without a human in the cockpit? Share your thoughts here.
A child in upstate New York died yesterday after contracting measles. This marks the state’s first death from the disease in 30 years, as the outbreak continues to spread across the country. | 3 min read
Important science alert: Do cats fart? We looked into the limited science on feline flatulence. | 4 min read
New toxicology tests on the mummies of Incan children found the kids were given not just cocaine but also alcohol and chemicals found in ayahuasca before they were sacrificed to the gods. | 3 min read
What if a scientific calculator needed only two buttons? A physicist has proposed such a device—but in practice its calculations are highly convoluted. | 5 min read
We sat down with author John Scalzi to talk about his tentacle-filled 20th novel, Monsters of Ohio, which mixes sci-fi horror and small-town politics. | 5 min read
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The Midterms Are Here
Today the U.S. is holding midterm elections and voters will be deciding who has control of Congress. It’s a critical election for science. Since 2025 the government has sought to redirect research grant money toward artificial intelligence, technology, and nuclear energy and has reduced funding for climate, health and social science projects. The administration has repeatedly proposed mass cuts to NASA and National Science Foundation budgets and has laid off thousands of federal workers, including researchers. Amid all this, the administration has also sought to discredit vaccines, slash climate and food safety regulations and pull the U.S. back from global collaborations in science. The results of today’s vote could determine how money is allocated to science and how science legislation around health and energy might play out in the coming years.
Hot issues:
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Funding science. Should either the House of Representatives or the Senate, or both, flip to Democratic control, there could be a flood of investigations from subcommittees into what has happened to federal science during the last two years. The White House would still exert control over federal agencies and departments, and the Supreme Court. But a stronger political opposition in Congress could lead to more dealmaking, says Arthur Caplan, a professor emeritus of population health and bioethics at New York University.
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Health and food safety: Health care costs are one of the top issues for voters, one recent poll found. Many voters may also be worried about public health, particularly given the ongoing measles crisis and the summer’s cyclosporiasis outbreak, says Collette Delawalla, founder and CEO of the science advocacy group Stand Up for Science. “They’re concerned about rollbacks at the [Environmental Protection Agency] and their water not being safe to drink or data centers polluting the air around them.”
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Gas and electricity prices are soaring, and while people may not be voting outright for more renewable energy, an obvious alternative to fossil fuels is green energy. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA), which was recently introduced to the Senate, has drawn fire for promoting fossil fuels at the expense of renewable energy.
What the experts say: “This election's critical,” says Gretchen Goldman, president and CEO of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “This cycle is critical in terms of how the federal government is run and what kinds of checks and balances we’ll have in the next two years.”
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AI Voice Cloning
Just a couple years ago, cloning your own voice with AI took hours of voice recordings and a group of specialized tools. Now, you can do it in a few minutes—and it’s hard to spot the fake. In a study of 600 listeners and more than 200 cloned voices, listeners were able to spot the AI-generated voice only 60 percent of the time. AI-generated voice clones can be used to impersonate anyone, steal their identity, or hack into their bank account. Audio forensics researchers say that one way to spot an AI-generated fake isn’t by listening for unnatural sounds (AI is too good for that now), but by looking at an audio waveform of the voice.
Spotting fakes: An audio waveform is a way of visualizing sound. Each tiny vibration of the sound of a voice produces a repetitive bump in the audio wave. Tiny variations in the length of those cycles, known as jitter, and the height of their peaks, known as shimmer, are some of the many features that can be weighed together by a detection model to tell if a voice is AI-generated.
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Amanda Montañez; Source: Shafik Quoraishee (waveform)
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Journalist Shafik Quoraishee compared the waveforms of recordings of his voice against an AI-generated clone and found that the clone tended to have higher jitter and lower shimmer, but background noise in the real-voice recording made the two less distinguishable. Click through to hear real-life and AI versions of Quoraishee’s voice.
What the experts say: There is no single measurement that can instantly distinguish AI audio from a real person’s voice. “You would expect to immediately see giveaways,” says Sarah Barrington, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies artificial intelligence voice cloning. “That is absolutely not the case.” —Emma Gometz, Newsletter Editor
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EXCLUSIVE SUBSCRIBER EVENT
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Inside Social Media Addiction: Join Us Live
Why is social media so hard to put down? Join Scientific American associate editor Allison Parshall and neuroscientist Eva Telzer on November 5 (this Thursday!) for a virtual discussion exploring the science behind social media addiction and how to build healthier relationships with technology.
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Can you reassemble this image of our May 1989 cover? The complete image shows the aurora cascading over Arctic trees. These lights, which come from electrons striking oxygen and nitrogen in the lower ionosphere, are strongest during solar storms. Also in this issue: The future of the Amazon rainforest’s biodiversity, a look at how fiber-optic instruments could change medical procedures and marsupial frogs that incubate their eggs in external pouches. Unlimited subscribers can read the entire issue here.
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In case you missed it yesterday, a discussion is underway on our site over whether we should make daylight saving time permanent (as a proposed act making its way through Congress would do). Reader Reid Hester posted the following: "Follow the data. Standard time has way fewer health risks relative to permanent daylight savings time." I agree with Reid's simple prescription to rely on what the evidence says. Every time someone says to me that science has no business in politics, I remind myself that scientific research can help us make choices—individually and at a national scale—for the better.
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—Andrea Gawrylewski,
Chief Newsletter Editor
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