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Today:
Excerpt—The Great Shadow, by Susan Wise Bauer
NEWS | 18 December 2025
In an exclusive excerpt of her new book The Great Shadow , historian Susan Wise Bauer explores how sickness is distinct from injury and has shaped the way we think about ourselves and our worldAdapted from The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy, by Susan Wise Bauer. CHAPTER 1: THE PRISMOur bodies are the crossroads where our most private selves meet the world outside, the matrix where our thoughts and emotions and beliefs are formed. Sickness is the great mirror that reflects back our most urgent question: Why does calamity descend without warning? Our evolving understanding of what makes us sick, and how, is a prism through which our perception of the outside world has always filtered. It is the constant presence of sickness, not injury, that has shaped the way we think about ourselves and our world.

Top Stories:
Scientists Are Baffled by This Bizarre Lemon-Shaped Exoplanet
NEWS | 18 December 2025
That May Be the Least Weird Thing about ItI 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. Astronomers have discovered a bizarre lemon-shaped exoplanet orbiting a dense, rapidly spinning dead star. But those details are perhaps the least weird thing about it. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers found that the planet’s atmosphere is enriched in carbon—but devoid of nitrogen and oxygen.

World:
Strange Cosmic Blast May Be First-Ever Superkilonova Observed
NEWS | 18 December 2025
Astronomers may have discovered a never-before-seen cosmic explosion that effectively combines a supernova with a kilonova—the blast that results when two dead, dense stars collide. When massive stars run out of fuel for nuclear fusion, they collapse, triggering a huge explosion called a supernova that blasts light out into space. These cataclysms sometimes leave behind a small dead core—a dense object made mostly of neutrons called a neutron star. When two neutron stars collide, the resulting explosion is known as a kilonova. The two dead stars then collided, the scientists propose, generating a kilonova.

Current Events:
Why a Critical Orca Community Is Slipping toward Extinction
NEWS | 18 December 2025
Kelso Harper: Oh, whale aficionado—I don’t know if I can claim that title, but the people I spoke to certainly can. It’s one of the best places in the world to see orcas, in part because there are some resident populations that frequent the area. And so people can actually gather on the coastline and sometimes see whales just a few feet off the shore. And then of course, there’s whale-watching tours, etcetera, but you’ll find a lot of orca paraphernalia in the little town of Friday Harbor on San Juan Island. She said it was a really, really hard decision for her.

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SPONSORED | 18 December 2025
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News Flash:
Mysterious Bright Flashes in the Night Sky Baffle Astronomers
NEWS | 18 December 2025
These “nuclear transients,” the second overall category of transients, have turned up only in the past decade. Astronomers must distinguish the flashes of nuclear transients from supermassive black holes whose behavior varies. Or they could be supermassive black holes moving from inactive flickering to active fiery accretion—black holes “turning on,” Graham says. “The holy grail is understanding what produced the transient,” says Eliot Quataert of Princeton, a theoretical astrophysicist studying nuclear transients. Both tidal disruption events and quasi-periodic eruptions hold evidence about supermassive black holes that are quiescent and therefore invisible, as well as about the all but theoretical class of black holes whose masses are between those of stellar black holes and supermassive ones.

Latest:
Meet Your Future Robot Servants, Caregivers and Explorers
NEWS | 18 December 2025
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.

Breaking:
Global Warming Could Skew Reptile Sex Ratios and Lead to Extinctions
NEWS | 18 December 2025
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 | 18 December 2025
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 | 18 December 2025
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 | 18 December 2025
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 | 18 December 2025
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 | 18 December 2025
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 | 18 December 2025
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 | 18 December 2025
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).