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Today:
Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS captured speeding through the solar system by Jupiter-bound spacecraft
NEWS | 28 February 2026
Every new piece of data offers a glimpse at the space beyond our solar system. Comet 3I/ATLAS, as seen from ESA’s JUICE. “You can’t project that back with any accuracy to figure out where it started on its path.”The trajectory of Comet 3I/ATLAS as it passes through the solar system. Just three interstellar objects have ever been discovered passing through our solar system. And despite the scramble to observe it as it goes, Comet 3I/ATLAS remains very much a mystery.

Top Stories:
Glyphosate is driving a rift in MAHA. Here’s what the science says about its effects on health
NEWS | 28 February 2026
Here’s what the science says about its effects on healthOf all the pesticides out there, few have sparked more controversy than glyphosate. The world’s most used weed killer, glyphosate is perhaps better known by the brand name Roundup. In 2018 researchers at the National Cancer Institute found “no association” between glyphosate exposure and non-Hodgkin lymphoma in farmworkers. But one year later, in 2019, a meta-analysis found a “compelling link” between glyphosate exposure and the cancer. Scientists may be able to look at geographical data to estimate long-term glyphosate exposure instead, but that’s still an imprecise measure.

World:
How AI copilots became everyday infrastructure
NEWS | 28 February 2026
From the exam room to the classroom, artificial intelligence is no longer just a tool—it's infrastructure. By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. In the three years since ChatGPT was released, AI has shifted from a browser-based novelty to a kind of background infrastructure. The College Board reports that 84 percent of high school students now use AI for schoolwork. The advent of AI is often framed as a battle of human versus machine, but that view misses the point.

Current Events:
AI Is entering health care, and nurses are being asked to trust it
NEWS | 28 February 2026
Obermeyer, the professor at Berkeley’s School of Public Health, found that some algorithms used in patient care turned out to be racist. Unlike with drugs, there is no single gatekeeper for AI; hospitals are often left to validate tools on their own. Those savings did not materialize,” says Nigam Shah, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and chief data scientist for Stanford Health Care. AI tools also need to say why they’re recommending something and identify the specific signals that triggered the alert, not just present a score. To include more staff members in the process of developing AI tools, some institutions have implemented a bottom-up approach in addition to a top-down approach.

Sponsored:
SmartSync Data Sync App
SPONSORED | 28 February 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:
What are JWST’s Little Red Dots? Astronomers may finally have an answer
NEWS | 28 February 2026
Everywhere JWST looked, the telescope found at least one specimen of what are now commonly called Little Red Dots (LRDs). The Little Red Dots may be a totally new class of cosmic object. The redness of the Little Red Dots is an important signal about their identity, and they seem to be red for at least two reasons. Little Red Dots are everywhere in JWST images because the telescope is designed to see red light, especially the mid-infrared wavelengths these objects emit. Although most astronomers are convinced the Little Red Dots are black holes of some kind—infant, gas-shrouded, direct collapse, or stellar—many questions remain.

Latest:
Polyamory isn’t all about sex
NEWS | 28 February 2026
Where popular portrayals of polyamory most miss the mark, though, is in the idea that the practice is primarily about having sex with multiple partners. Polyamory is mostly about intimacy, not sex, say the people involved in it, and it has ethics at its core. And despite the perception that polyamory is justification for bed-hopping, polyamorous relationships are generally not fleeting. I talked with Kim, Mark and Marina at a polyamory conference in Denver in 2018. It’s because of monogamy!’ In our case, there were other problems in the relationship that had nothing to do with polyamory.

Breaking:
Photographer finds thousands of Triassic dinosaur prints on sheer mountain cliffs
NEWS | 28 February 2026
About 2,000 fossil footprints appear on this part of the mountain site’s walls, researchers say. A newfound site in the Italian Alps holds one of the largest collections of Triassic dinosaur footprints ever seenMountain photographer stumbles on one of the largest ever collections of Triassic dinosaur printsI 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. Last September photographer Elio Della Ferrera spotted thousands of dinosaur tracks traversing vertical rock faces in the Fraele Valley of Stelvio National Park, high in the Italian Alps. Some of the prints, spanning as many as 40 centimeters across, date back about 210 million years, making the newly identified site one of the richest deposits of Triassic dinosaur tracks in the world.

Trending:
Mathematicians Discover a New Kind of Shape That’s All over Nature
NEWS | 28 February 2026
Violet FrancesWhen the trio eventually identified a space-filling 3D shape with just two corners, Domokos thought they’d found their answer. By mapping an infinite category of polyhedral tilings to soft tilings, he proved the existence of an infinite class of soft cells. But the researchers struggled to identify these 3D soft cells in the real world. Zebra stripes, river estuaries, cross sections of onions, seashells, heads of wheat, red blood cells, plants and fungi all resembled 2D soft cells. Asked where he thinks soft cells belong in the scientific landscape, he doesn’t skip a beat.

This Just In:
These Mysterious Shapes Are at the Heart of Math’s Biggest Puzzles
NEWS | 28 February 2026
When most people think of shapes, they imagine a triangle, a rectangle, or maybe even a fancier-sounding rhombus or trapezoid. We asked mathematicians to choose their favorite shapes and surfaces and tell us why they find them so exciting and intriguing. We can construct every hyperbolic surface by sewing together hyperbolic pairs of pants and describe all of them entirely in terms of the boundary lengths and twist angles in this decomposition. A topological image of a curve (shape) is a set of points in the plane that satisfies an equation and has a complicated topological structure. The slice-ribbon conjecture, a major open problem in low-dimensional topology, says every such simple knot in 4D comes from a ribbon disk.

Today:
How Squishy Math Is Revealing Doughnuts in the Brain
NEWS | 28 February 2026
A computer’s inability to see these relationships is a problem for scientists who want to identify circular patterns within huge masses of data points. To expand this structure into a simplicial complex, the mathematicians colored in this hollow triangle with a solid, two-dimensional triangle. They converted each of these maps into a simplicial complex and analyzed how its shape changed in time using the tools of topology. Because this mesh contains fewer data points, its simplicial complex contains shapes of lower dimensions. In effect, as the researchers recorded the state of the system at different instants, they accumulated high-dimensional data points.

Top Stories:
Babies Are Born with an Innate Number Sense
NEWS | 28 February 2026
The ideal subjects for testing an innate number sense are newborn infants because they haven’t had time to learn much of anything. Rather the number sense enabled you to see the number like you see colors and shapes. Núñez concludes that whatever the number sense is representing, it cannot be number. Consequently, it’s hard to see why the imprecision of the number sense should be taken to suggest that it’s representing some attribute other than number. But that’s no reason to suppose their number sense isn’t representing number.

World:
Citizens' Assemblies Are Upgrading Democracy: Fair Algorithms Are Part of the Program
NEWS | 28 February 2026
The Irish citizens’ assembly is just one example of a widespread phenomenon. Citizens’ assemblies in France, Germany, the U.K., Washington State, and elsewhere have charted pathways for reducing carbon emissions. The effectiveness of citizens’ assemblies isn’t surprising. Descriptive representation, in turn, lends legitimacy to the assembly: citizens seem to find decisions more acceptable when they are made by people like themselves. Our algorithm was released as open source in 2020 and has since become a common method for selecting citizens’ assemblies.

Sponsored:
SmartSync Data Sync App
SPONSORED | 28 February 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:
How a teen’s AI model could help stop poaching in rainforests
NEWS | 28 February 2026
One way of monitoring poaching activity is to put recorders in the forest to listen for gunshots. Hedwig: Our goal is to use acoustic monitoring to contribute to the conservation of the central African rainforest. Hedwig: Acoustic monitoring is really great at recording these soundscapes and getting this really amazing picture of biodiversity by eavesdropping on nature. Hobson: In 2022 Richard was part of a team that published a research paper focused on detecting gunshots from acoustic monitoring recordings. Hedley: If you’re monitoring poaching, you need to know that the poaching is happening now, not six weeks ago.