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Today:
Math Puzzle: Go to great lengths
NEWS | 16 June 2026
A square is divided into eight rectangles of equal area. What are the lengths of the sides of the square? Show puzzle solution If the rectangle with width 8 has length a, its area is A = 8a. This puzzle originally appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft and was reproduced with permission. It was translated from the original German version with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by our editors.

Top Stories:
Tonima Tasmin Ananna
NEWS | 16 June 2026
Quick Facts Tonima Tasmin Ananna Age 35 Field Astrophysics Institution Wayne State UniversityTonima Tasmin Ananna says that when she was growing up in Dhaka, Bangladesh, rolling blackouts were the best time to look up at the stars. (Tori tend to reside farther out than the accretion disk and aren’t necessarily oriented along the same plane.) One insight arising from Ananna’s work is that a torus obscuring an AGN creates a useful opportunity—a diagnostic for determining otherwise hidden aspects of the black hole’s behavior. The radiation emanating from an AGN’s accretion disk also appears to dictate the size and orientation of its obscuring torus. “Supermassive black holes are monstrous,” Ananna says.

World:
Poem: ‘The Soliloquy of Schrödinger’s Cat’
NEWS | 16 June 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. On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. The universe cares naught for thy despairAnd cannot bend its nature to thy will. That untold wondrous mysteries still aboundTo challenge and exalt the greatest mindsIs surely life’s most precious gift of all.

Current Events:
These young scientists are on our radar
NEWS | 16 June 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. Daniel ClarkeIcahn School of Medicine at Mount SinaiDaniel Clarke develops programs that enable scientists to mine the immense amount of data gathered through genomics, proteomics and other –omics. Being able to synthesize all that information helps scientists unravel the inner workings of a cell and how it goes awry in disease. Yet researchers like him, who create the tools that scientists use every day, rarely get the recognition they deserve, says the scientist who brought him to Scientific American’s attention.

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SPONSORED | 16 June 2026
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News Flash:
Alan Lightman on his childhood in science
NEWS | 16 June 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.

Latest:
Atul Gawande
NEWS | 16 June 2026
Atul Gawande is a surgeon, author and public health expert. Gawande has written four best-selling books: Complications (2002), Better (2007), The Checklist Manifesto (2009) and Being Mortal (2014). By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. We’re recognized as the place to go if you want to do cutting-edge science, make discoveries and make a difference. I feel for young people in science right now because the hardest-hit positions were the entry-level positions.

Breaking:
The new story of the Milky Way's surprisingly turbulent past
NEWS | 16 June 2026
Astronomer Bob Benjamin has spent more than 20 years trying to figure out what the Milky Way looks like. They’d seen other galaxies merging with one another and looking unkempt, but they didn’t know whether an earlier Milky Way might have done the same. “It’s been shocking.”In short, the maps show not the Milky Way in static equilibrium, as researchers expected, but the galaxy’s departure from it. The maps show not the Milky Way in static equilibrium, as researchers expected, but the galaxy’s departure from it. By 2023 astronomers had mapped only about two billion of the Milky Way’s 100 billion stars.

Trending:
‘Dark matter’ may be a whole shadow world of mysterious atoms and forces
NEWS | 16 June 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.

This Just In:
Why we'll never live in space
NEWS | 16 June 2026
Just how profoundly difficult would it be to live beyond Earth—especially considering that outer space seems designed to kill us? Medical researcher Sonja Schrepfer of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles has dug into two of the conditions that afflict space explorers. Their book on the modern space economy, Space to Grow, was published in 2025. “I inevitably encountered the same argument: space travel represents humanity’s destiny,” he says of the impetus for writing his essay “The Case against Space.” Space explorers are often portrayed as braver and better than those who remain on their home planet: they’re the ones pushing civilization forward. NASA’s Scientific Visualization StudioIn some ways, the desire for simpler living is part of what motivates space explorers.

Today:
The puzzle of the first black holes
NEWS | 16 June 2026
These stars also probably formed in dense clusters, so it is likely that the black holes created by their deaths would have merged, giving rise to black holes of several thousand solar masses. A merger would give the black hole seed a copious new source of gas to eat, so the black hole should start growing rapidly. Finding the first seed black holes could help reveal how the relation between black holes and their host galaxies evolved over time. Scientists spotted a ringlike shadow around the black hole’s boundary—a feature that general relativity predicts will occur as a black hole’s strong gravity deflects light. Many revelations are in store in the very near future, and our understanding of black holes stands to be transformed.

Top Stories:
Dark matter hunters may never find the universe’s missing mass
NEWS | 16 June 2026
The modifications would also need to explain why, if dark matter is just a modification to gravity—which is universally associated with all matter—not all galaxies and clusters appear to contain dark matter. Moreover, the most sophisticated attempts to formulate self-consistent theories of modified gravity to explain away dark matter end up invoking a type of dark matter anyway, to match the ripples we observe in the cosmic microwave background, leftover light from the big bang. Furthermore, although many versions of supersymmetry predict WIMP dark matter, the converse isn’t true; WIMPs are viable dark matter candidates even in a universe without supersymmetry. Some, for instance, include massive aggregate objects composed of many tinier constituents—akin to dark matter atoms composed of different dark particles. Light dark matter and dark sectors could also exist without relying on the WIMP mechanism to produce the right amount of dark matter—there are myriad other possibilities for how to generate the observed abundance of dark matter.

World:
The universe’s first light could reveal secrets of the cosmic dawn
NEWS | 16 June 2026
The end of the cosmic dark ages and the start of the cosmic dawn mark the time when the universe as we know it began to take shape. These two missions will join a dozen others based in Earth’s most austere reaches, all aimed at studying this lightless era of the universe, the cosmic dark ages, and the ushering in of the cosmic dawn. Dark matter invisibly clumped together during these cosmic dark ages, and gravity quietly shepherded matter to form the superstructure of the universe. One surprising discrepancy involves the timeline of the cosmic dark ages, the epoch of reionization and the cosmic dawn. The projects aiming to investigate the cosmic dark ages and the cosmic dawn will try to find the oldest, earliest objects that put light into the universe.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 16 June 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:
Disclosure Day and interspecies communication—alien language isn’t just weird noises
NEWS | 16 June 2026
Feltman: So how did you get interested in the idea of alien languages? So the types of clicking that we saw in the trailer is not like a human language where these clicks are much more occasional. I’m certainly not one of these folks that can, like, speak a constructed language or use a constructed language. It’s object first, which is unlike human languages. And then, yeah, the smells would stick around, so you could have, like, layered things that we just don’t have in human language.