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Today:
What archaeology reveals about the rise of all-powerful rulers
NEWS | 08 September 2026
It wasn’t just this one mode with one all-powerful king like the Classic Maya along the Usumacinta River had. The Classic Maya glorified their rulers, they had very elaborate burials and fancy palaces much bigger than any other house. We refer to these as “external resources.”With monopolized external resources, you don’t have to depend on getting a little bit from many people. So over the last decade or so, archaeologists have made tunnels under the three biggest pyramids in Teotihuacan, looking for the ruler’s burial. Whereas in Teotihuacan, I think the principal financing came from labor taxes, perhaps some sort of tax on farmers and small-scale craft production.

Top Stories:
What’s the tech behind the record-breaking RSA-260 crack?
NEWS | 08 September 2026
So factoring an RSA number amounts to decryption, and someone who could find primes from the number could also break encryption schemes. Confirming Lu’s achievement is as simple as inputting the known RSA-260 number in a calculator and then dividing by the 130-digit string he provided. The last time an RSA number was factored was in 2020. And with the hardness increasing exponentially as the numbers grow, no regular computers are likely to break RSA encryption anytime soon. Instead advances in quantum computing are far more likely to pose a problem than throwing months of computation at testing each and every prime number.

World:
These smart bricks know what object they make up
NEWS | 08 September 2026
By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. Yet somehow, as an organism grows, cells know where to go and what to be without top-down direction. Each cube’s neural network told it how to update its vector based on its neighbors’. After the neural network was trained, cubes named their object class with 85 to 100 percent accuracy—houses proved trickiest. When up to 197 were connected into a shape, they accurately identified what object they were 100 percent of the time.

Current Events:
Mathematicians discover the worst way to hang a painting
NEWS | 08 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.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 08 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:
New brain scan tool could help treat Huntington’s disease, a devastating genetic condition
NEWS | 08 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.

Latest:
2026 Ig Nobels honor cockroach milk, interspecies kissing, taunting venomous snakes, and more
NEWS | 08 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.)

Breaking:
OpenAI’s latest math breakthroughs commit research misconduct, experts say
NEWS | 08 September 2026
OpenAI’s newest chatbot may be a whiz at math, but it seems to be lagging far behind humans in its academic rigor. But over the days following the announcement, as flesh-and-blood experts pored over the nearly 250-page paper in detail, many grew frustrated. Two of the most exciting results, the experts say, incorporate preexisting ideas from the recent mathematical literature without properly citing them. The OpenAI paper establishes at least one group that lacks this property. Like a number of recent AI breakthroughs, it pasted together ideas from the mathematical literature to build a new theorem.

Trending:
Geometry Reveals the Tricks behind Gerrymandering
NEWS | 08 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.

This Just In:
‘Unparalleled’ study finds psilocybin protects against nerve damage from chemotherapy
NEWS | 08 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.”

Today:
Have we finally found dark matter?
NEWS | 08 September 2026
Yet the collision is also out of sync with the kind of dark matter signal they’ve been searching for. The universe we see when we look out into space is almost impossible to countenance without dark matter. This dark matter is ubiquitous and plentiful, but we have no idea what it’s made of. Detectors like LZ are predicated on a guess: that dark matter is made of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). “We shouldn’t be comfortable claiming specific things about dark matter or about new physics based on one event,” Morå says.

Top Stories:
Pentagon pauses controversial testosterone policy guidelines
NEWS | 08 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.

World:
Top medical leaders urge Americans to get their flu and COVID shots in lieu of CDC vaccine campaign
NEWS | 08 September 2026
But leaders of some of the country’s largest medical organizations are urging Americans to get their shots to avoid serious illness. The recommendations come as an increasing number of people opt not to get themselves or their children vaccinated for various diseases. The consortium’s research review for the COVID shots finds that they cut the risk of hospitalization for adults older than age 65 by 53 percent and reduce that risk for pregnant women by 58 percent. The CDC recommends vaccinations against the flu and COVID for most Americans, including pregnant women and healthy children. “Last year Vaccines for Children covered all of the recommended vaccines that we had put in our vaccine schedule,” Racine said.

Current Events:
GLP-1 weight-loss medication could slow aging and extend lifespan
NEWS | 08 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:
SmartSync Data Sync App
SPONSORED | 08 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