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Today:
Male Neanderthals and female humans likely interbred more often than the other way around
NEWS | 27 February 2026
These genomic signals are the telltale signs that overlapping populations of ancient anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals had sex. Exactly what these interactions looked like is a mystery, but a new study suggests that when our species and Neanderthals did interbreed, it was primarily between male Neanderthals and anatomically modern female humans. There’s less Neanderthal DNA on humans’ X chromosome than there is on most other chromosomes today. But it’s unclear why male Neanderthals might selectively mate with anatomically modern female humans, or vice versa. And these genomes provide just a snapshot of what sex between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans may have looked like at a point in time.

Top Stories:
Department of Homeland Security detains Columbia student identified as neuroscience researcher
NEWS | 27 February 2026
By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. Department of Homeland Security agents detained a student at Columbia University, the institution’s acting president said in a statement on Thursday. The student, identified as Ellie Aghayeva by the university’s student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, was later released on Thursday, according to an update posted to a social media account belonging to Aghayeva. The book was published by the Living Lab, which was run by former Columbia University faculty member Alfredo Spagna, who is also a co-author of the book. The DHS action comes just under a year after federal immigration agents detained another Columbia student, Mahmoud Khalil, in March 2025.

World:
Katharine Burr Blodgett made a breakthrough when she discovered ‘invisible glass’
NEWS | 27 February 2026
As soon as he got back to the lab, Langmuir suggested to Katharine Blodgett that they circle back to monolayers. Non-reflecting glass or invisible glass as the press started to call it, had the potential for wide applications. On the same day, The New York Daily News ran the headline: “Her Discovery Makes All Glass Invisible”. “Magician Makes Glass Invisible,” and “It’s Witchcraft!” and “Formula for Invisible Glass is Found by Woman Scientist”, and I love this one -“The Invisible Glass Lady Throws No Stones.” In March 1939, a journalist traveled to Schenectady to watch Katharine dip the glass into the trough 44 times. The article called her discovery ‘invisible glass”, which we know irked Katharine because it is not really accurate.

Current Events:
How AI copilots became everyday infrastructure
NEWS | 27 February 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:
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SPONSORED | 27 February 2026
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News Flash:
Deepfakes are getting faster than fact-checks, says digital forensics expert Hany Farid
NEWS | 27 February 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 | 27 February 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 | 27 February 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 | 27 February 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:
Mathematicians Discover a New Kind of Shape That’s All over Nature
NEWS | 27 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.

Today:
These Mysterious Shapes Are at the Heart of Math’s Biggest Puzzles
NEWS | 27 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.

Top Stories:
How Squishy Math Is Revealing Doughnuts in the Brain
NEWS | 27 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.

World:
Babies Are Born with an Innate Number Sense
NEWS | 27 February 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 | 27 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:
Inside Mathematicians' Search for the Mysterious 'Einstein Tile'
NEWS | 27 February 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).