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Today:
What Zootopia 2 gets right about the science of snakes
NEWS | 16 March 2026
Here’s what would happen if they suddenly vanished just like in the Oscar-nominated film Zootopia 2At its core, Zootopia 2 is a defense of snakes. Along the way, they discover why snakes like Gary were driven out of the city of Zootopia. “We aren’t the bad guys.” Gary inspires Hopps and Wilde (Jason Bateman) to try to prove snakes aren’t so bad and bring them back to Zootopia. If snakes were somehow excluded from the animal world, as they were from society in Zootopia 2, that would almost certainly have disastrous consequences. Snakes may occasionally carry Salmonella, but in general, snake diseases don’t pose nearly as much risk to humans as rodents do, Taylor says.

Top Stories:
Can DNA testing tell identical twins on trial apart?
NEWS | 16 March 2026
In a French criminal trial, conventional DNA analysis couldn’t distinguish between twin brothers, but emerging scientific methods could help in such casesAn identical twin commits a crime and leaves their DNA at the scene. Deep diveWhole-genome sequencing can make it possible to tell identical twins apart. Other researchers have reported success in distinguishing between twins by sequencing DNA found in the mitochondria, the powerhouses of cells. Compared with nuclear DNA, which is used in genome sequencing and STR analysis, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutates more often, meaning it is more likely to differ between twins. Weston says that it is important to combine DNA evidence with other types of evidence, such as fingerprints, when prosecuting someone, because there are many reasons why someone’s DNA might be present at a crime scene.

World:
Fresh claim of making elusive ‘hexagonal’ diamond is the strongest yet
NEWS | 16 March 2026
Conventional diamond, called cubic diamond, is known as the hardest substance in the world. And others argued that lonsdaleite wasn’t hexagonal diamond at all; they said it was just cubic diamond with several defects. However, the pattern of diffraction peaks obtained from highly defective cubic diamond would closely mimic hexagonal diamond, Tschauner says. A third group also reported in 2025 that it had made “nearly pure” hexagonal diamond that was harder than cubic diamond. Mao says that tiny traces of cubic diamond that contaminated the samples produced by both his group and Shan’s could explain why their hexagonal diamond is not as hard as predicted.

Current Events:
How AI copilots became everyday infrastructure
NEWS | 16 March 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.

Sponsored:
SmartSync Data Sync App
SPONSORED | 16 March 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:
Deepfakes are getting faster than fact-checks, says digital forensics expert Hany Farid
NEWS | 16 March 2026
When you say “trust infrastructure” in the age of generative AI, what are its core layers right now? Fraud is now being supercharged by generative AI in terms of voice scams at the individual level—Grandma getting a call, the CEO getting a call. BerkeleyWhat has changed as generative AI has improved, and how is your company GetReal responding? If every time you get on a call the technology’s like, “Oh, Eric’s fake, Hany’s fake,” you’re just going to ignore it. Section 230 most likely doesn’t protect you from generative AI, because generative AI is not third-party content.

Latest:
What are JWST’s Little Red Dots? Astronomers may finally have an answer
NEWS | 16 March 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.

Breaking:
Polyamory isn’t all about sex
NEWS | 16 March 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.

Trending:
Photographer finds thousands of Triassic dinosaur prints on sheer mountain cliffs
NEWS | 16 March 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.

This Just In:
Surprising ways that sunlight might heal autoimmune diseases
NEWS | 16 March 2026
Now scientists are hoping to decipher the pathways through which UV light causes the immune system to back down from its alarm state. This finding was a breakthrough in our understanding of how skin cancer develops, but it also seemed nonsensical from an evolutionary perspective. How could it possibly be beneficial for our immune system to relax in the presence of a common carcinogen? PLE sufferers develop itchy rashes and plaques after sun exposure, but they are less likely to develop skin cancer. Skin cancer was known to be caused by sunlight, but Apperly suggested that something about the sun was also conferring protection against internal cancers.

Today:
New treatments can free kids from the deadly threat of peanut allergy
NEWS | 16 March 2026
“One out of 10 individuals in the U.S., more than 33 million, has a food allergy,” says Sung Poblete, CEO of Food Allergy Research and Education, an advocacy organization. Based on those results, and anticipating more data, the FDA immediately approved Xolair as a protection against peanut allergy. The results revealed that the occurrence of peanut allergy in Israeli kids was one-tenth the rate among U.K. ones. The babies were tested for preexisting peanut allergy, and if they were negative, they went into one of two groups. But “an allergist isn’t going to see somebody who doesn’t have peanut allergy already,” NIH’s Fulkerson says.

Top Stories:
How much vitamin D do you need to stay healthy?
NEWS | 16 March 2026
Numerous celebrities and vitamin companies raised hopes that vitamin D could be a panacea, says JoAnn Manson, an endocrinologist and epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and a lead investigator on some of the biggest vitamin D studies to date. These observational studies looked for associations between vitamin D levels and a particular health issue or compared vitamin D status among people with a condition and those without. Holick made a name for himself espousing the health-promoting powers of vitamin D and wrote a book called The Vitamin D Solution: A 3-Step Strategy to Cure Our Most Common Health Problems. Given the VITAL trial’s large size and wide scope, many vitamin D researchers hoped it would put many of the purported benefits of vitamin D supplements to rest. Manson is quick to caution that more isn’t necessarily better when it comes to vitamin D. “Vitamin D is essential to good health, but we require only small to moderate amounts,” she says.

World:
Personalized mRNA vaccines will revolutionize cancer treatment—if federal funding cuts don’t doom them
NEWS | 16 March 2026
Personalized melanoma vaccines could be available as early as 2028, with mRNA vaccines for other cancers to follow. Another threat to personalized mRNA vaccines for cancer was coming into focus: mounting federal hostility to vaccines. After obtaining positive results for the mRNA vaccine for melanoma, Sahin agreed to partner with Balachandran to develop an mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer. Lennard Lee, an adviser to the U.K.’s National Health Service overseeing the rollout of clinical trials for cancer vaccines, says the pandemic gave regulators there a running start on trials for mRNA cancer vaccines. By May 2025 another threat to personalized mRNA vaccines for cancer was coming into focus: mounting federal hostility to vaccines.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 16 March 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:
These new cancer drugs improve outcomes for people with hard-to-treat tumors
NEWS | 16 March 2026
This drug for breast cancer was the first to use a tumor-specific protein as a homing beacon to find and kill cancer cells. It was really so satisfying.” —Shanu Modi, MSK Cancer CenterEnhertu belongs to an ingenious and growing class of targeted cancer drugs called antibody-drug conjugates, or ADCs. If highly toxic forms of chemotherapy could be strapped onto antibodies, the toxins would reach only the cancer cells and no others. A negative result typically means 10 percent or fewer of the tumor’s cells have HER2 on their surfaces. Another explanation for these nasty effects is that there are no protein targets that are exclusive to cancer cells.