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Today:
Why 52 Cards Is the Perfect Number for Poker—Mathematically
NEWS | 12 January 2026
What’s the perfect number of cards for playing poker? A full house, for example, with three cards of the same value (fives or kings, for instance) and two cards of another, is less likely than a flush with any five cards of the same suit. In a recent paper posted to the preprint server arXiv.org, computer scientist Christopher Williamson examines how the game of poker changes as the number of cards per suit increases or decreases. Amanda Montañez“Thirteen is kind of the sweet spot,” Williamson says regarding how many cards a deck should have in each suit. Although the usual number of cards in a deck is purely historical—it’s said to symbolize 52 weeks in the year and the four seasons—Williamson was delighted to find a more mathematical justification.

Top Stories:
Woodpeckers’ Secret Strength Revealed—Plus, Flu Surge, AI Sleep Predictions and CES 2026 Trends
NEWS | 12 January 2026
Why flu cases are spiking, how AI predicts disease from your sleep, and what surprising biomechanics lie behind woodpeckers’ powerful pecks. The researchers built what’s known as a foundation model, a kind of AI model that trains itself on massive datasets and then applies that information in specific contexts. In the new study researchers trained their model, called SleepFM, on polysomnography sleep data. For more on how tech is shaking things up let’s head to Las Vegas, where Scientific American’s senior tech editor, Eric Sullivan, was on the ground at the CES technology conference. So CES 2026 felt like the year that AI jumped out of the chat box and into the real world.

World:
NASA Announces Return Date for ISS Astronauts After Medical Evacuation Announcement
NEWS | 12 January 2026
The International Space Station, as seen from the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft on November 8, 2021. Four ISS crew members are set to touch down on Thursday after NASA announced the first medical evacuation in the space station’s historyI agree my information will be processed in accordance with the Scientific American and Springer Nature Limited Privacy Policy . NASA has revealed the return date for four International Space Station (ISS) crew members who are being evacuated from the station after one fell ill with an unknown condition. NASA has not revealed the extent of the sick crew member’s medical issue. They had been expected to remain on the ISS until mid-February, when the replacement crew, Crew-12, are still anticipated to arrive.

Current Events:
These Orcas Are on the Brink—And So Is the Science That Could Save Them
NEWS | 12 January 2026
These Orcas Are on the Brink—And So Is the Science That Could Save ThemLike many people who visit San Juan Island, I came here for the orcas. The southern resident orcas have lived off the coast of the Pacific Northwest for thousands of years. In the 1980s, as human teens donned parachute pants and leg warmers, southern resident adolescents took to wearing dead salmon “hats” on their heads. Research biologist Kim Parsons first studied the southern resident orcas in the early 1990s, just before the population experienced a steep decline. Toward the end of our encounter with the southern residents, a mother and baby beelined toward our boat.

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SPONSORED | 12 January 2026
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News Flash:
Meet Your Future Robot Servants, Caregivers and Explorers
NEWS | 12 January 2026
To see how close we’re getting to this vision, I visit the Stanford Robotics Center, which has 3,000 square feet for experiments and opened in November 2024 at Stanford University. In practice, this meant the robot used its gripper to grab and lift hot metal casts from an assembly line. In a departure from other designs for robot hands, which tend to emphasize fingers, Liu inserted a GelSight sensor into a rubber palm. I follow the Stanford Robotics Center’s ceiling ripples down a passage that leads to a large pool, still under construction, that will host the merperson-shaped robot OceanOne. “It is the only [robot] in the world capable of reaching the seabed” and sensing it with haptic feedback, Khatib says.

Latest:
Interoception Is Our Sixth Sense, and It May Be Key to Mental Health
NEWS | 12 January 2026
Studies have implicated problems with this inner sense in a wide variety of conditions, including anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder and borderline personality disorder. Some researchers and clinicians now think that problems in interoception might contribute to many mental illnesses. They found that people with a range of psychiatric disorders, including anxiety disorders and schizophrenia, shared similar alterations in the insula, a key brain region linked with interoception during body-sensing-related tasks. Some experts say answers may come from treatment trials investigating whether interventions that target disturbances in this inner sense might boost mental health. These conditions tend to overlap with anxiety disorders, and Green is now advocating for interoception-based therapies to help affected people.

Breaking:
Global Warming Could Skew Reptile Sex Ratios and Lead to Extinctions
NEWS | 12 January 2026
Newly hatched green sea turtles climb across the sand at Alagadi Beach on the island of Cyprus. The scent of freshly dug sand is often their first clue that a green sea turtle has arrived. Since the 1990s green sea turtles have been laying their first nests at Alagadi Beach almost one day earlier each year. In other words, the sea turtles seem to be adjusting their habits in response to warming. If tuatara sex ratios reach a crisis, Cree suspects it will be a symptom of a larger emergency that’s already underway.

Trending:
Heart and Kidney Diseases, plus Type 2 Diabetes, May Be One Illness Treatable with Ozempic-like Drugs
NEWS | 12 January 2026
More than a century before Bies entered the hospital, doctors had noticed that many of the conditions CKM syndrome comprises often occur together. Heart disease causes 40 to 50 percent of all deaths in people with advanced chronic kidney disease. But at the time, the physician didn’t mention that this illness also increased her risk of heart disease. In 2024 researchers compared one drug with a placebo in more than 3,500 participants with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease. “Although they are clearly related, CKM syndrome and metabolic syndrome have some very important differences,” he says.

This Just In:
Mathematicians Discover a New Kind of Shape That’s All over Nature
NEWS | 12 January 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 | 12 January 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 | 12 January 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 | 12 January 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 | 12 January 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 | 12 January 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).