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Today:
Killer Whales and Dolphins May Team Up to Hunt Salmon
NEWS | 12 December 2025
Sarah Fortune, a marine ecologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, and her colleagues used drones and camera-equipped tags to study the killer whales over two weeks in August 2020. “We kept finding that when the killer whales were feeding, the dolphins were there,” Fortune says. The researchers noticed that the hunting killer whales they were studying seemed to show a noticeable preference for following dolphins. In one particularly striking observation, a killer whale snagged a salmon and dined while nearby dolphins gobbled up loose pieces of the fish. “Killer whales that are salmon specialists, that is what they rely on,” Fortune says.

Top Stories:
Before Flowers Existed, Ancient Cycad Plants Lured Insects with Heat
NEWS | 12 December 2025
The cones heat up during pollen release. Some areas of the cones can heat differentially, and these patterns serve as pollination guides. The words “pollination” and “flower” may seem inseparable, but plants began courting insects millions of years before they evolved flashy petals. Beetles of the species Rhopalotria furfuracea on a male cone of Z. furfuracea, whose cones produce heat during pollination. Whereas flowering plants can tweak hue, saturation and patterning, yielding almost infinite combinations to target different pollinators, cycads can only adjust heat intensity.

World:
Photos Reveal Moths Sipping Tears from a Moose
NEWS | 12 December 2025
Moths hover around the face of a moose, drinking its tears, as seen in trail camera images from the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont. Moths sometimes drink the tears of other animals, but the behavior has mostly been observed in the tropics. “At first, I wasn’t sure what it was.”Only after skimming through the sequence of images did he realize he was looking at moths drinking the tears of a bull moose. A colleague recently filmed another instance of moths drinking a moose’s tears in Vermont. Moths—and some other insects, such as bees—are thought to feed on other animals’ tears to get minerals and other nutrients.

Current Events:
What Time Is It on Mars?
NEWS | 12 December 2025
Keeping track of your schedule on Mars would be different than doing so on Earth. Well, for one thing, while Mars is a rocky world like our own, it’s much smaller, about a tenth the mass of Earth. But this also means a clock on Mars feels less gravity than one on Earth, so it will run faster. First, you have to define what the average surface of Mars is. At some point—maybe not soon but someday—humans may live on Mars and will need to sync their clocks to those on Earth.

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SPONSORED | 12 December 2025
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News Flash:
Personalized mRNA Vaccines Will Revolutionize Cancer Treatment—If Federal Funding Cuts Don’t Doom Them
NEWS | 12 December 2025
Personalized melanoma vaccines could be available as early as 2028, with mRNA vaccines for other cancers to follow. Another threat to personalized mRNA vaccines for cancer was coming into focus: mounting federal hostility to vaccines. After obtaining positive results for the mRNA vaccine for melanoma, Sahin agreed to partner with Balachandran to develop an mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer. Lennard Lee, an adviser to the U.K.’s National Health Service overseeing the rollout of clinical trials for cancer vaccines, says the pandemic gave regulators there a running start on trials for mRNA cancer vaccines. By May another threat to personalized mRNA vaccines for cancer was coming into focus: mounting federal hostility to vaccines.

Latest:
NASA’s Mars Sample Return Mission in Jeopardy as U.S. Considers Abandoning Retrieval
NEWS | 12 December 2025
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took this selfie on Mars in July 2024. The Perseverance rover is the first phase of a multistep mission to bring bits of Mars to Earth known as Mars Sample Return (MSR), and the next step is dangling by a thread. Now that Perseverance has scooped up prized samples, scientists are faced with the prospect of leaving them on Mars to languish. “I’m on record for having criticized Mars Sample Return,” says Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis. The plan called for widespread cuts, scrapping existing space missions, shelving many climate programs and ending Mars Sample Return—which the administration described as “financially unstable”—in favor of one day sending humans to Mars.

Breaking:
New Pill Can Save Moms from Postpartum Depression within Days
NEWS | 12 December 2025
Emerging research on the biology of postpartum depression shows that it is not like other severe mood disorders neurologically or biochemically. Leos finally got relief from her postpartum depression with a new medication, zuranolone; she felt better within days of her first dose. Arin YoonGrowing knowledge of the neurobiology of postpartum depression is also pointing toward methods for earlier and more reliable detection. “That’s a game changer.”For centuries medicine has struggled to fully grasp the causes and consequences of postpartum depression. Because postpartum depression has been lumped in with major depression, the two have often been treated the same way.

Trending:
Can AI ‘Griefbots’ Help Us Heal?
NEWS | 12 December 2025
And that’s exactly the therapeutic effect Robert Neimeyer, a therapist and professor at the University of Memphis, had told me might be possible with AI ghosts. One of the few completed studies of digital ghost users, however, found that the AIs were largely beneficial for mourners. Ten grieving people who underwent in-depth interviews for the study said digital ghosts helped them in ways people could not. Creating and interacting with an AI ghost, Kurzweil argues, “is not like [getting] a painting. Like Wales, I had found that the work of creating a digital ghost wasn’t just pouring data into an app.

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