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Today:
NASA readies for Artemis II mission, AI-powered speech gives stroke patients hope, and researchers discover oldest cave art ever
NEWS | 26 January 2026
First, we have an update on humans going back to the moon. In the coming weeks the first launch window will open for NASA’s Artemis II mission. There was, obviously, Artemis I, but Artemis I was uncrewed—there were no astronauts on board. One would be that the crew of Artemis II will be the farthest humans from Earth ever. In other news about communication a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature reveals the oldest cave art reportedly ever found.

Top Stories:
Babies who attend daycare share 'good' germs, too
NEWS | 26 January 2026
The study, published today in Nature, analysed the gut microbiomes of infants during their first year of nursery. After four months, the babies at a nursery already shared 15–20% of their microbial species. Research has shown that people who live together start to share microbial strains. However, the most drastic effect on the microbiota in babies came from the use of antibiotics. It is probably a combination of diet and lifestyle that maintains the diversity of bacteria in the gut microbiota later in life, says Segata.

World:
Want to live longer? The tiniest of lifestyle changes can dramatically boost longevity
NEWS | 26 January 2026
New research suggests that getting even just a few more minutes of sleep and exercise and eating an extra cup of vegetables every day can significantly boost longevityWant to live longer? Tiny changes to your sleep, exercise and diet could add a year to your lifeWant to live longer but don’t want to change what you’re already doing to try and live a healthy life? New research suggests that people don’t need to pursue major lifestyle changes to see meaningful improvements in health. What stood out most about these results was that practicing good sleep, exercise and diet together was important, Koemel says. He adds that these tweaks to sleep, diet and exercise do not necessarily give you a “magic button” for longer life—but they could kickstart healthy habits that stick.

Current Events:
What is consciousness? Science faces its hardest problem yet
NEWS | 26 January 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.

Sponsored:
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SPONSORED | 26 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

News Flash:
JWST could finally spot the very first stars in the universe
NEWS | 26 January 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 | 26 January 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 | 26 January 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 | 26 January 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 | 26 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 | 26 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 | 26 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 | 26 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 | 26 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 | 26 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).