April 14, 2026

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Unlikely paths to discovery

Sometimes innovation can be traced back to bizarre places: a muddy streambed, a volcanic ash field or even a hotel-company boardroom

By David M. Ewalt edited by Jeanna Bryner

Scientific American, May 2026

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In 1952 Collier’s magazine published an article detailing aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun’s vision for a space station, promising a spot where scientists and even tourists could stay “within the next 10 or 15 years.”

Fifteen years later Hilton Hotels president Barron Hilton gave a speech at the American Astronautical Society in Dallas, where he laid out an idea for an orbiting hotel he expected to build within his lifetime. Thirty-two years after that, the company revived the idea with a new plan to build a space station hotel out of recycled space shuttle external fuel tanks.

Another 12 years passed, and Forbes magazine published an article about Robert Bigelow, another hotel-chain billionaire who was pouring money into a venture building inflatable space stations and who predicted a fully functional habitat by 2016. (I should know; I wrote it.)

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Eight years after that, Barron Hilton died at the age of 91. A year after that, Bigelow’s aerospace company laid off its entire workforce. Six years later—today—there’s still no space hotel.

I share this history in part because I am acutely aware of the risk a magazine takes when it promises readers they will soon be able to vacation in space. But I’m also excited about Scientific American’s take, which you’ll find as part of our package of stories about “The Science of Luxury.” We don’t usually write about topics such as high-end fragrances or haute horology, but luxury goods often live at the technological cutting edge, and their manufacturers are doing science as innovative as what you’d find in a university lab.

Our cover story, “Your Heart in Flames,” is a more traditional SciAm story but one that might get your pulse racing as much as a trip to space. Cardiologists have long puzzled over the fact that up to a quarter of the people admitted to hospitals for heart attacks and strokes every year don’t exhibit any typical risk factors and have even worse outcomes than those who do.

Contributing editor Melinda Wenner Moyer tracks the scientists who’ve spent decades unraveling the mystery and finds that a growing body of research suggests the culprit isn’t one of the “fearsome foursome” of risk factors (hypertension, smoking, high LDL cholesterol and type 2 diabetes). Instead it might be chronic inflammation, an immune system alarm that refuses to switch off. It’s a thrilling, sometimes contentious shift that could rewrite how we prevent the world’s deadliest disease.

Elsewhere in the issue, paleontologist Steve Brusatte shares a possible solution to another scientific detective story: how birds—and only birds—survived the asteroid impact that wiped out every other dinosaur in the end-Cretaceous. Brusatte overturns the old myth of a clean dinosaur extinction and reveals that survival came down to sheer circumstance, a matter of inhabiting the right places, eating the right foods and growing at the right pace when the skies went dark.

Writer Robert Kunzig takes us on a different kind of journey into an ecological crisis: the mysterious collapse of North America’s freshwater mussels. Once the continent was home to more than 300 species, but now 10 percent of those are extinct already, and many more are endangered. Kunzig accompanies the biologists racing to solve the puzzle, including researchers who raise rare mussels in tiny concrete silos and ecologists who suspect that an invasive clam may be starving young mussels out of existence.

Science is full of mysteries, and sometimes the path to discovery begins in places we don’t expect: a muddy streambed, a volcanic ash field, even a hotel-company boardroom or a corporate fragrance lab. I hope this issue serves as enjoyable and enlightening proof of that fact.

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