Wiki News Live
Today:
Could Tutankhamun's tomb hold clues to a mysterious Egyptian queen?
NEWS | 12 October 2026
Some researchers have raised the possibility that these concealed chambers—if they exist—could contain the burial place of Nefertiti, Tutankhamun’s stepmother and mother-in-law. These include “hidden” hieroglyphics that were painted over on the north wall of Tutankhamun’s tomb. A team has now published a review of archaeological and geophysical investigations at Tutankhamun’s burial chamber (also known as KV62), including results from a survey carried out between 2023 and 2024. The debate surrounding Tutankhamun’s tomb raises similar issues. Currently, the hidden chamber theory remains exactly what a good scientific hypothesis should be: intriguing, testable, and worthy of investigation.

Top Stories:
Mathematicians invented a knitting stitch that stops mistakes from spreading
NEWS | 12 October 2026
In a recent paper in Physical Review X, a team of researchers mathematically investigated knitting to invent a new, more resilient stitch. The process is called defect propagation, and the researchers say it’s one of the defining characteristics of knittable fabrics. Amanda Montañez; Source: “Topological Defect Propagation to Classify Knitted Fabrics,” by Daisuke S. Shimamoto et al., in Physical Review X, Vol. 16; July 14, 2026 (reference)Researchers have mathematically described stitch defects in the past, says applied mathematician Alexander Omelchenko of Constructor University in Germany, but only as static objects. Amanda Montañez; Source: “Topological Defect Propagation to Classify Knitted Fabrics,” by Daisuke S. Shimamoto et al., in Physical Review X, Vol.

World:
The Social Reckoning is a ‘surreal’ portrait of social media’s harms, scientist says
NEWS | 12 October 2026
The movie is based on the true story of how Facebook employee Frances Haugen blew the whistle on the company’s safety practicesWe took a social media scientist to The Social Reckoning . It also gave urgency to research investigating how social media affects people’s mental health, especially that of children. Among these scientists is Laura Edelson, a social media safety researcher at Northeastern University, who has studied Facebook’s moderation practices during the January 6 insurrection, the way that misinformation spreads on Facebook and social media privacy across multiple platforms. We took Edelson to see The Social Reckoning to find out what the film gets right about social media’s potential harms. That [means that] the more extreme your message is, the better it will perform on both social media.

Current Events:
Major earthquake strikes Panama—damage and injuries are expected
NEWS | 12 October 2026
By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. A major earthquake struck Panama on Friday afternoon, but how many people have been affected remains unclear. The quake struck at 12:56 P.M. local time and was initially measured as an 8.0 magnitude by the U.S. Geological Survey, but that was later downgraded slightly to a 7.7. The quake struck around nine miles (14 kilometers) southwest of Pitaloza Arriba, a small village in Panama’s Herrera Province. “There’s a complicated zone of faulting that’s at that juncture, and so this earthquake was on one of those faults,” she says.

News Flash:
The most exciting claims from OpenAI’s heap of new proofs
NEWS | 12 October 2026
On Tuesday afternoon OpenAI dropped more than 700 manuscripts reporting proofs, solutions and progress on 372 open problems across theoretical research. OpenAI’s repository contains several papers claiming to completely resolve the equivalent of the Yang-Mills problem for this simpler model. Problem 102 claims to do just that, proving that the unique games problem is hard. Unitary SynthesisOver in the land of quantum computing, meanwhile, Problem 283 could give a better picture at how difficult truly quantum problems are. On an objective level, this is so close to n log n that the distinction almost doesn’t matter.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 12 October 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

Latest:
The ‘Kelvin wave’ hitting California is a potent warning about sea-level rise
NEWS | 12 October 2026
Kelvin waves are a typical feature of El Niño, says Severine Fournier, an ocean circulation researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. And more Kelvin waves are developing and expected to arrive in the next several months. The one hitting now is about as big as Kelvin waves get, Swain says. The sea-level rise caused by Kelvin waves typically tops out at about 18 inches, Swain says. (Local sea rise can differ depending on whether geological forces are also simultaneously pushing up coastlines.)

Breaking:
OpenAI unleashes hundreds more math results upon a field already in shock
NEWS | 12 October 2026
OpenAI revealed the results in a GitHub repository at 6 P.M. EDT. “We should ask for receipts.” (The OpenAI spokesperson also told Scientific American that some results might have taken multiple attempts.) The OpenAI spokesperson told Scientific American that the team is taking the advisory group’s guidelines seriously and doing its best to comply but added that the company is not bound by these recommendations. OpenAI told Scientific American that the company is working to release the model as quickly and responsibly as possible. Such results may even be coming too fast for the labs themselves—the OpenAI spokesperson told Scientific American that many of the company’s newly released results are not yet understood by its own mathematicians.

Trending:
Why taking a break from exercise might not mean you need to start from scratch
NEWS | 12 October 2026
More than muscleWe are exercise physiologists who study how cells remember exercise. Our lab and others have shown that the body is able to store a form of exercise memory across different organs. Using this strategy, our team found that skeletal muscle memory accelerates muscle growth. My colleagues and I found that liver cells also store exercise memory and uses it to feed muscle more efficiently. Immune cells store memory so they can recognize pathogens faster and more strongly the next time they encounter them.

This Just In:
Hurricane Isaias just set a new record for Atlantic storms
NEWS | 12 October 2026
Isaias just became the latest-forming first hurricane of the Atlantic storm season since reliable records began, meteorologists sayI agree my information will be processed in accordance with the Scientific American Inc. Privacy Policy . Isaias is officially the first hurricane of this year’s Atlantic season—marking the latest arrival of a first hurricane in the region since reliable tracking began. As Scientific American previously reported, the Atlantic hurricane season has been historically quiet this year. That’s in no small part because of a strong, brewing El Niño, which typically dampens Atlantic hurricanes with unfavorable wind conditions. Still, Isaias beat the previous record by a stunning 27 days, hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy wrote on social media.

Today:
I gave Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots my passwords for a week
NEWS | 12 October 2026
Jolly, the mascot for Meta's Muse AI agent, greets visitors at Meta Connect in September. Muse and OpenAI's Dots are designed to feel like friends. But Muse and dots offer this type of service to a huge commercial audience with almost no learning curve. OpenAI announced its new agents, dots, at DevDay 2026 a few weeks after Meta rolled out Muse. But as the test week went on, I found myself handing Mark and Sam more and more logistical problems and tedious tasks.

Top Stories:
How Hurricane Isaias got so dangerously strong so fast
NEWS | 12 October 2026
Hurricane Isaias as it approached the U.S. Gulf Coast as a Category 3 hurricane on October 9, 2026. Just one day ago Hurricane Isaias was a Category 1 hurricane. This blob of exceptionally warm water formed by spinning off of the Gulf’s Loop Current that is notorious for boosting hurricane strength. Warm ocean water fuels tropical cyclones, explains Kim Wood, an associate professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. As a storm’s wind pushes the ocean’s surface water, water deeper down swells up to replace it, they add.

World:
Mathematicians marvel, and grumble, at OpenAI’s trove of new results
NEWS | 12 October 2026
It’s been two days since OpenAI’s “slop drop” of AI-generated results on 372 open math and computer science problems. “Yesterday will be the day when a new era of math and mathematical physics began,” Harvard University mathematician Michael Douglas told Scientific American on Tuesday. Many of the results, experts say, are far better written than the Navier-Stokes proof, suggesting that OpenAI’s math team is working to overcome its model’s inability to explain its math clearly to humans. The community’s reaction to the way OpenAI chose to drop the results has been mixed, to say the least. “We urge mathematicians to discontinue their work with OpenAI and to return to a vision of science that centers human understanding.”

Current Events:
Why does weed cause anxiety? A new brain study investigates cannabis paranoia
NEWS | 12 October 2026
By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. Whether you are smoking or eating it, marijuana can be relaxing—or it can cause feelings of anxiety, panic and paranoia. The effect is driven by a specific group of neurons in the central amygdala, a brain region that processes fear and anxiety. In other words, the drug essentially weakens the central amygdala’s “brake,” Patel says, allowing fear and anxiety to run wild. When the researchers silenced the somatostatin neurons, the mice stopped trying so hard to avoid the threatening odor in their midst.

News Flash:
Just how sunlike is the sun?
NEWS | 12 October 2026
Is the sun a sunlike star? Sunlike stars are stars like the sun. The sun is the sun, so it’s the most sunlike of them all! When asked that question, they immediately shoot another right back: What do you mean by “sunlike”? So the sun is a sunlike star.