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Today:
Epstein files show a complicated relationship with science and journalism
NEWS | 06 February 2026
New Scientist turns up in more than 50 documents released by the DOJ, and National Geographic appears in nearly 200 documents. The released Epstein files also include at least 260 documents referencing Scientific American. “I never received any funding from him, and none of those interactions involved Scientific American in any way,” Wolfe says. “He had no influence on any coverage decided by the editors or by me personally.”Many of the Epstein files that mention Scientific American are simply forwarded articles. The e-mail does not appear to have originated from a Scientific American staffer, and no such page was ever created.

Top Stories:
Katharine Burr Blodgett’s brilliant career began at the ‘House of Magic’
NEWS | 06 February 2026
Last summer, producer Sophia Levin and I visited Schenectady, where Katharine Blodgett lived for more than 60 years. She just hadn't made the connection between the Katharine Blodgett we just asked her about, and that story. And maybe part of that call of fate was to work for the brilliant, but odd, and never boring Irving Langmuir. Irving Langmuir was born in Brooklyn, New York, on January 31st, 1881, making him almost exactly 17 years older than Katharine Blodgett. Katie Hafner: Katharine Blodgett has a rich personal life to the great dismay of some.

World:
Where did Luna 9 land on the moon?
NEWS | 06 February 2026
An artist’s rendition of the Soviet Luna 9 lander on the surface of the moon. Scientists have spent decades searching for the final resting place of Luna 9, the first spacecraft to soft-land on the moon. Sixty years ago the Soviet Luna 9 became the first human-made object to achieve a soft landing on the moon—or, for that matter, any celestial body. Luna 9 was a product of the second generation of Soviet lunar probes, a program designated Ye-6. LROC photo (left) and a three-dimensional reconstruction of the Luna 9 landing site (right).

Current Events:
These two habits are linked to more than a third of all cancer cases
NEWS | 06 February 2026
Nearly 40% of new cancer cases worldwide are potentially preventable, according to one of the first investigations of its kind, which analysed dozens of cancer types in almost 200 countries. Overall, tobacco smoking was the leading contributor to worldwide cancer cases, followed by infections and drinking alcohol. Drinking and smokingIn 2022, there were a total of 18.7 million new cancer cases worldwide. Lung, stomach and cervical cancers made up nearly half of all preventable cancer cases. Globally, smoking was the biggest risk factor for men, accounting for almost one-quarter of the 4.3 million preventable cancer cases.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 06 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

News Flash:
Your guide to 29 wildly different theories of consciousness
NEWS | 06 February 2026
By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. Some of these theories have many publications to their name, such as global workspace theories, higher-order theories and integrated information theory, three of the field’s leading models. This may explain why quantum theories of consciousness, which are fascinating but not yet grounded in much evidence, have been proposed so many times. Predictive processing theories, which are also influential in the field, are notably absent, perhaps because they originated as theories of perception rather than consciousness. 11; April 2021 (data)THEORY CHARACTERISTICSAll of these proposals are wildly different, and only some are supported by evidence.

Latest:
JWST could finally spot the very first stars in the universe
NEWS | 06 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.

Breaking:
Life’s evil twins—mirror cells—could doom Earth if scientists don’t stop them
NEWS | 06 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.

Trending:
How extremophile molds are destroying museum artifacts
NEWS | 06 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.

This Just In:
Can a buried time capsule beat Earth’s geology and deep time?
NEWS | 06 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.

Today:
Mathematicians Discover a New Kind of Shape That’s All over Nature
NEWS | 06 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.

Top Stories:
These Mysterious Shapes Are at the Heart of Math’s Biggest Puzzles
NEWS | 06 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.

World:
How Squishy Math Is Revealing Doughnuts in the Brain
NEWS | 06 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.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 06 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:
Citizens' Assemblies Are Upgrading Democracy: Fair Algorithms Are Part of the Program
NEWS | 06 February 2026
The Irish citizens’ assembly is just one example of a widespread phenomenon. Citizens’ assemblies in France, Germany, the U.K., Washington State, and elsewhere have charted pathways for reducing carbon emissions. The effectiveness of citizens’ assemblies isn’t surprising. Descriptive representation, in turn, lends legitimacy to the assembly: citizens seem to find decisions more acceptable when they are made by people like themselves. Our algorithm was released as open source in 2020 and has since become a common method for selecting citizens’ assemblies.