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Today:
What's best for baking—butter or margarine? A food scientist explains
NEWS | 25 October 2026
Today, I am a food scientist and study how foods such as butter and margarine can have subtle chemical differences, with a big impact on how they act in food. Fatty acids are long chains of carbon surrounded by hydrogen atoms. While the backbone is always the same, the number of carbons in the fatty acids can vary. Both butter and margarine have a combination of saturated and unsaturated fatty acids. While both are mainly made of triglycerides, the fats in butter are naturally occurring, while fats in margarine are industrially modified.

Top Stories:
Why the paint is peeling off the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool—experts explain
NEWS | 25 October 2026
President Donald Trump ordered the pool’s renovation in April, and that order included painting its floor and walls blue. This material is polyurea coating—a fast-curing and durable surface membrane that can seal in water and is often used to coat swimming pools. For one, the blue material likely has no direct relation to the large algal blooms that are also plaguing the monument, according to Tim Auerhahn, chairman of the Aquatic Council. “The material that you’re adhering that polyurea coating to is questionable,” he says. “If you’ve met one coating failure, you’ve met one coating failure,” he says.

World:
Scientists pop the cork on the hidden chemistry inside wine bottles
NEWS | 25 October 2026
At the Food and Wine Science & Technology laboratory, located in the heart of France’s Burgundy wine region, it would be more concerning if there weren’t any. One of the biggest questions in modern enology—the science of wine and wine making—is: How does oxygen slowly enter a sealed bottle over time? “Usually, people don’t pay attention to the cork stopper,” says Julie Chanut, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Food and Wine Science & Technology lab. “You open your bottle of wine, and you just throw it.”But a cork is more than a plug. The work also highlights how much remains unknown regarding the chemistry of wine bottles and their cork sealing systems.

Current Events:
Jenny Bergner: Young American Scientist recreating cosmic chemistry to understand how planets form
NEWS | 25 October 2026
By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. To do so, she leads a team studying the exotic chemistry that happens under the crushing cold and near-perfect vacuum of interstellar space. She complements the telescope data with lab experiments, placing molecules in an ultracold, ultralow-pressure vacuum to form disordered, porous ices similar to those found in space. Next she and her co-workers bombard that ice with photons to mimic the radiation of interstellar space. This article is part of “The Young American Scientists,” an editorially independent project that was produced with financial support from Regeneron.

Sponsored:
SmartSync Data Sync App
SPONSORED | 25 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

News Flash:
Steven Chavez: Young American Scientist trying to make catalysts work better
NEWS | 25 October 2026
By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. Quick Facts Steven Chavez Age 34 Field Chemical Engineering Institution University of California, Los AngelesSteven Chavez’s path to chemical engineering started with a teacher, Kelly Silva. Chavez is specifically focused on understanding how catalysts work over time and what happens when they fail. Christie Hemm KlokChavez is exploring these questions by studying catalysts under different wavelengths of light. This article is part of “The Young American Scientists,” an editorially independent project that was produced with financial support from Regeneron.

Latest:
Nobel laureate Omar Yaghi on how he fell in love with chemistry
NEWS | 25 October 2026
Yaghi is also founding director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute, which is aimed at creating research centers in developing countries. Scientific American spoke to Yaghi about the state of science today, the coming artificial-intelligence revolution, and how researchers can prepare. “I think the love for things like [science] comes from the most humble and unexceptional circumstances.” —Omar Yaghi U.C. What worries me is that we are not preparing for what I think is an AI revolution. When I was a kid, the way I fell in love with chemistry was through chemistry drawings, molecular drawings.

Breaking:
Have you ever tried supplementing creatine or followed a keto diet?
NEWS | 25 October 2026
I was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2022 and decided to try & fight it w/exercise, supplements, & diet. B1, B3, B6, & B12, exercised religiously, took creatine, went Mediterranean with my diet, & added supplements that are reported to help with ATP production to invigorate mitochondria. A little over 2 months ago, I received test results from a DAT scan showing I am 107% of normal. Was the original diagnosis in error or did attacking PD through exercise, diet, & supplements stall disease progression. And if so, which of these variables was individually responsible or was it a combined affect?

Trending:
Do we live in a multiverse?
NEWS | 25 October 2026
The idea of living in a multiverse is not only unsettling but totally unscientific circumventing the real foundational contradictions and deficiencies in quantum mechanics formulations. In addition, the new physics, including the effects of gravity, predicts a natural transition boundary between the classical and quantum behaviors without a collapse eliminating the need for the bizarre and radical Multiverse hypothesis. References:[1] Resolving Collapse of Wavefunction and Quantum Foundational Paradoxes via Integrating New Physics of Particle Instability with Gravity, International Journal of Quantum Foundations 12 (2026) 1–22. This paper describes the new relativistic physics of a spontaneously self-decaying or self-forming quantum particle and its spontaneous complementary wave-particle behavior representing the spontaneous mass-energy equivalence principle. RUE/RWP models are shown to predict a deterministic natural transition of physical reality from quantum to classical without the need for collapse or the bizarre "Multiverse" hypothesis.

This Just In:
Do you think social media is addicting?
NEWS | 25 October 2026
I turned off notifications when I realized that I'd get one, and then look up 45 minutes later to realize I'd been scrolling mindlessly. I also started reading novels again in the evening. I was so eager to get back to my book that I wasn't even tempted to log on. And after a month or so of that, I didn't even miss social media at all. (I also have had an "I do not watch online videos" policy for years - if someone sends me a video, I tell them to just summarize it for me or tell me the punchline.

Today:
What did you think of the documentary "You Can See Everything"?
NEWS | 25 October 2026
It certainly works as a film--human engagement, mystery, surprises--but it left me wondering about, you guessed it, the science, which has yet to be worked out in the case of small blood test machine. The film also asked me how to find the difference between nonfiction and fiction, truth and lies, love and manipulation. All of these differences have come to the forefront of our interface with the world now that AI has become part of it.

Top Stories:
Do you seek out a good thrill or scare?
NEWS | 25 October 2026
When we were young kids, we would go upstairs in winter when it was dark, get on hands and knees, crawl around, and pretend to be quiet bears. We would sneak up on each other and scare the other bear. When the screams got too much, our mother would call a halt and make us come downstairs into the light. No one ever suggested or taught us this scary game. And we kept up playing Bear until we grew out of it.

World:
Would you like a robot helping in the home?
NEWS | 25 October 2026
My mom refused to get a microwave oven because it didn't brown the food, and after O.D.ing on TV as a child, I raised my own kids without a TV. All of that said -- I am not resistant to a machine that will fold my laundry (just as I'm grateful not to have to use a washboard and wringer). But I think a more significant question is raised in this week's newsletter: will our "smart" devices, robots included, spy on us and spread malware? Robot vacuum cleaners already measure rooms and send the information back to their companies. If we let a robot butler into our home, are we voluntarily inviting Big Brother in?

Current Events:
How has this year's fall foliage been where you live?
NEWS | 25 October 2026
Leaves change color primarily because of seasonal shifts in sunlight. But extreme weather conditions, such as droughts, heavy rainfall or heat, can affect the timeline of the color change. How have this year's leaf colors been where you live? Share your observations here.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 25 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