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Today:
Mathematicians launch First Proof, a first-of-its-kind math exam for AI
NEWS | 10 February 2026
Because mathematical proofs follow a checkable sequence of logical steps, their conclusion is true or false beyond any subjective measure. Start-ups dedicated to AI for mathematics have recently recruited a number of high-profile mathematicians. The start-up Axiom Math made headlines last week for successfully tackling several research-level (though far from groundbreaking) math questions. To set the exam, 11 mathematical luminaries—including one Fields Medal winner—contributed math problems that had arisen in their research. But if an AI were to solve these lemmas, it would demonstrate what many mathematicians see as the technology’s near-term potential: a helpful tool to speed up the more tedious parts of math research.

Top Stories:
Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show highlighted Puerto Rico’s power grid. Here’s why
NEWS | 10 February 2026
Dancing linemen who dangled from power poles during the Super Bowl halftime show by Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny were a pointed reference to the island’s power grid, which has been hit hard by a series of hurricanes and, experts agree, is in dire need of modernization. Widespread blackouts have become a regular feature of life in Puerto Rico. The Trump administration canceled the majority of the funding this past spring, however. It’s not the first time that Bad Bunny (whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) has called out Puerto Rico’s grid problems. Puerto Rico is a U.S. commonwealth; Bad Bunny supports the Puerto Rican independence movement.

World:
Elon Musk says SpaceX will prioritize establishing a city on the moon instead of building a Mars colony
NEWS | 10 February 2026
Elon Musk says SpaceX will prioritize a city on the moon instead of a colony on MarsI agree my information will be processed in accordance with the Scientific American and Springer Nature Limited Privacy Policy . On Sunday Elon Musk said that SpaceX is prioritizing the establishment of a “self-growing city” on the moon over and above his long stated ambition to settle Mars. In a post on his social media platform X, Musk wrote that a lunar city could be built within the next decade. “The mission of SpaceX remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars,” Musk wrote. In his X post on Sunday, Musk said that SpaceX would resume working toward Mars in the next five to seven years.

Current Events:
What is consciousness? Science faces its hardest problem yet
NEWS | 10 February 2026
Faced with an existential unknown, the public is turning to the field of consciousness science for answers. That same year neuroscientists invented a new way to observe the working brain called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In a conscious brain (whether awake or dreaming), the disturbance ripples outward as neurons cause neighbors in their networks to fire. Brains do a lot more than run algorithms that process information, Seth says. “It’s like [how] simulating a storm will not get you wet,” Massimini says, “or simulating a black hole will not bend space and time.”In consciousness science, everything comes back to the measurement problem.

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SPONSORED | 10 February 2026
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News Flash:
JWST could finally spot the very first stars in the universe
NEWS | 10 February 2026
Known as dinosaur stars for both their primeval nature and their immense size, Population III stars existed only when the universe was very young. By far the most abundant form of matter in the universe, dark matter has evaded detection by the most advanced laboratories on Earth. If these structures are dominated by dark matter, they will rule out certain theories of dark matter under which it couldn’t form such small structures. Future observations of these and other lensed stars can tell us more about what dark matter can and can’t be. These studies also suggest that dark matter may have bizarre quantum properties that scientists call “fuzzy,” giving dark matter weird wavelike characteristics.

Latest:
Life’s evil twins—mirror cells—could doom Earth if scientists don’t stop them
NEWS | 10 February 2026
Already biochemists can create increasingly complex mirror molecules, including enzymes that build mirror RNA. Groups of chiral molecules are usually referred to as “left-handed” or “right-handed,” depending on which orientation they have in common. Your immune system also has an adaptive system of specialized immune cells and antibodies that attack and destroy invading microbes. As the danger of mirror cells became more apparent, a team of scientists began working on what to do. Cyanobacteria are simple organisms that derive nutrition directly from sunlight and carbon dioxide, and they often don’t require any chiral nutrients.

Breaking:
How extremophile molds are destroying museum artifacts
NEWS | 10 February 2026
Most frustrating for curators, these xerophilic molds are undetectable by conventional means. Hats from Denmark’s Roskilde Museum that have been stored in a climate-controlled warehouse outside Copenhagen exhibit shimmery, whitish patches from xerophilic molds. Genetic analysis revealed they were four related species of xerophilic molds in a group known as Aspergillus section restricti. To that end, Sterflinger and her team in Vienna are busy trying to determine just how little water xerophilic molds can survive on. Letting go of the shame is the only way we can learn about these molds, Pinzari says.

Trending:
Can a buried time capsule beat Earth’s geology and deep time?
NEWS | 10 February 2026
The same is true for anyone aspiring today to send such an envoy into the geological deep future. If we aspire to send a time capsule deep into the future, then Holland’s work is sobering. Some of this rock is from pieces of deep ocean crust that occasionally got smudged onto the sides of the continents during collisions and outlived the rest of their plates. If it’s stupid to put our time capsule on the deep ocean floor, which gets continuously destroyed, what about these narrower perches just offshore? If so, it would only mirror its more mature counterparts across the Atlantic today: two crescents of deep ocean trench where the seafloor is similarly being fed to the mantle.

This Just In:
Mathematicians Discover a New Kind of Shape That’s All over Nature
NEWS | 10 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.

Today:
These Mysterious Shapes Are at the Heart of Math’s Biggest Puzzles
NEWS | 10 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.

Top Stories:
How Squishy Math Is Revealing Doughnuts in the Brain
NEWS | 10 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.

World:
Babies Are Born with an Innate Number Sense
NEWS | 10 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.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 10 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:
Inside Mathematicians' Search for the Mysterious 'Einstein Tile'
NEWS | 10 February 2026
If we achieve our goal of constructing a tiling, we say that the set of shapes “admits” the tiling and, more generally, that the shapes tile the plane. Jen ChristiansenHow can we determine whether a given set of shapes tiles the plane? Many aperiodic tile sets, including Penrose's, can be shown to tile the plane with substitution systems like these. Perhaps our rules were just an overly complicated way to construct hat tilings, and periodic tilings existed, too. The hat became an immediate source of inspiration for artists, designers and puzzle creators (you can now buy hat tiling sets on Etsy, for instance).