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Today:
The Greatest U-turns in Science
NEWS | 06 September 2026
Synthetic polymers were supposed to free us from the limitations of our natural resources. Instead they led to an environmental crisis

Top Stories:
Innovations In: Solutions for Health Equity
NEWS | 06 September 2026
We talk to Cristina Gonzalez, a physician at New York University, who runs a lab that uses simulations to help medical professionals check their implicit bias at the exam room door.

World:
How the 2024 Presidential Election Will Shape Science, Health and the Environment
NEWS | 06 September 2026
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris represent very different futures when it comes to science-related policy issues that deeply affect our lives. Scientific American has rounded up the U.S. presidential candidates’ stances on some of the most important of these areas, including health care, reproductive rights, climate change, artificial intelligence, gun violence, nuclear weapons, education and immigration. Each article takes a deep dive, based on expert interviews and scientific consensus, into what a Trump or Harris presidency might mean for each of these issues during the next term—and possibly for years to come.

Current Events:
The New Science of Diet, Weight and Health
NEWS | 06 September 2026
What humans really evolved to eat, why some people can be heavy but healthy, and what revolutionary weight-loss drugs are teaching us about appetite, pleasure and the brain itself

Sponsored:
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SPONSORED | 06 September 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

News Flash:
Mathematicians discover the worst way to hang a painting
NEWS | 06 September 2026
You have two nails in the wall and a painting with a string on its back, which can easily be rested on the nails to hang the painting. If you remove one nail, the painting will still hang on the other. But mathematicians said, “We can make it worse.” In 1997 A. Spivak posed the following riddle: Is there a way to hang the painting so that removing either nail will cause the painting to fall? At the workshop Verhoeff and the participants tackled the 2-out-of-4 problem, in which a painting will fall if any two of four nails are removed. Although the problem’s framing might sound silly, the underlying mechanics have deep connections to group theory, knot theory, graph theory, and other areas of mathematics.

Latest:
New brain scan tool could help treat Huntington’s disease, a devastating genetic condition
NEWS | 06 September 2026
Huntington’s disease is an inherited condition that gradually robs people of their ability to move, speak and even think clearly—there is no cureAbout 8,000 people in the U.K. are living with Huntington’s disease, a devastating inherited condition that gradually affects movement, thinking and mood. Huntington’s disease is an inherited condition caused by a faulty gene. For our study, we analyzed scans from 56 people with Huntington’s disease and 57 healthy volunteers of a similar age and sex. We focused on the basal ganglia, where we expected to see the effects of Huntington’s disease. Our study was a snapshot, comparing people with Huntington’s disease and healthy volunteers at a single point in time.

Breaking:
Geometry Reveals the Tricks behind Gerrymandering
NEWS | 06 September 2026
Then all the districts would look the same, with four red voters and six blue voters each. This can often be seen in strange-shaped electoral districts, similar to the one in Massachusetts at the beginning of the 19th century. In the three winning red districts, four blue votes each are wasted—so in total, (2 x 3) + (3 x 4) = 18 blue votes that are surplus ones. Apparently, the natural conditions, along with the requirements for voting districts, are such that Republicans are automatically at a disadvantage. Meanwhile, some U.S. states (mainly those where Democrats are in the majority) use independent commissions that redraw voting districts.

Trending:
2026 Ig Nobels honor cockroach milk, interspecies kissing, taunting venomous snakes, and more
NEWS | 06 September 2026
From left: Ig Nobel Soil Science Prize winners Marcel van der Heijden, Franz Bender, Atlant Bieri and Pia Viviani react on stage during the award ceremony for the Ig Nobel Prizes in Zurich on September 3, 2026. By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. At last, this burning question is getting the recognition it so sorely deserves: the team answering it has received one of the 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes. The annual awards, which recognize the most absurd research science can offer, were handed out at a ceremony in Zurich on Thursday. (Their results, based on advanced x-ray crystallography, indicate cockroach milk is more than three times as energy-dense as ordinary dairy.)

This Just In:
Pentagon pauses controversial testosterone policy guidelines
NEWS | 06 September 2026
The Pentagon is pausing guidelines for a controversial policy that has required testosterone testing for service members aged 30 and older, Reuters reports. The policy, which was announced in July, mandated that military personnel would get testosterone screening as part of their annual physical starting at age 30. In a statement to Scientific American, a Pentagon official confirmed the removal and said it was a temporary move, pending further updates. “The ‘Interim Guidance on Testosterone Deficiency Screenings for Active Duty and Reserve Component Personnel’ remains in effect” in the meantime, the spokesperson said. There’s also some evidence it can help treat low libido in postmenopausal women.

Today:
‘Unparalleled’ study finds psilocybin protects against nerve damage from chemotherapy
NEWS | 06 September 2026
Past research has shown psilocybin’s potential to treat this kind of nerve damage in mice, but the new results are the first to show it can prevent such damage, too. One of Amit’s colleagues noticed that mice that had been given psilocybin avoided nerve damage after chemotherapy. Chemotherapy attacks “microtubules,” which are different structures in nerve cells that help transport mitochondria like a “railroad system,” Amit explained. Anecdotally, the team has heard of chemotherapy patients who enrolled in psilocybin trials for other reasons and have said they’ve seen improvement in nerve-related symptoms, too. With no other way for these patients to prevent nerve damage and pain, he said, “I think that it’s definitely worth a shot.”

Top Stories:
The spacecraft BepiColombo is finally nearing Mercury after 8 years in space
NEWS | 06 September 2026
By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. After an eight-year voyage in space, BepiColombo’s two component science orbiters, which will together observe Mercury, have split off from the spacecraft’s Mercury Transfer Module: the ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter were released and gave out a strong signal to Earth, according to an ESA livestream of the procedure. Now that they’ve separated from the transfer module, the Mercury Planetary Orbiter and Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter will remain joined together until November, when they’ll enter orbit around Mercury. The ESA orbiter will gather data on Mercury’s topography and interior structure and will put Einstein’s general theory of relativity to the test, while the JAXA orbiter will study the planet’s magnetosphere and magnetic field. During one such flyby in 2021, the spacecraft captured some photographs of the surface from just 199 kilometers (123 miles) away.

World:
GLP-1 weight-loss medication could slow aging and extend lifespan
NEWS | 06 September 2026
Not only that, but semaglutide outperformed dieting in terms of maintaining memory and keeping blood sugar in check. Perhaps, she reasoned, by slowing aging itself through the same calorie restriction effect, the drug would push back the diseases that aging can bring on. The overlap was significant: both calorie restriction and the GLP-1 quieted down inflammation and fat processing, and both stepped up the genes for handling blood sugar and maintaining proteins. The results suggests semaglutide mimics calorie restriction but has an additional power: the GLP-1 mice had better memory scores, curiosity levels and blood sugar. “In that sense, it’s more than just a calorie restriction,” Chen says.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 06 September 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:
An endangered pygmy raccoon turned trash into toys—and taught her family how, too
NEWS | 06 September 2026
Pygmy raccoons, found only on Cozumel Island, have shown evidence of “material culture”—use of objects that they pass on to others. It started when the pygmy raccoon dove into the wrong trash bin—not the bin known by her family for its tasty food scraps but the one with paper and plastic waste. Last January Nessie O’Neil, a graduate student in biology at Miami University in Ohio, watched as a young pygmy raccoon plucked a receipt from the paper trash. The raccoon used her paws to repeatedly dunk the receipt into a bowl of water (a common exploratory behavior). Soon after, the pioneering pygmy raccoon died, likely from a combination of malnutrition and toxic exposure to human trash, according to the study.