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Today:
Science Quiz: Weird ice and quantum collapse
NEWS | 31 January 2026
Test your science knowledge with this weekly news quiz! We’d love to hear from you! E-mail us at games@sciam.com to share your experience.

Top Stories:
Largest galaxy survey yet confirms that the Universe is not clumpy enough
NEWS | 31 January 2026
Largest galaxy survey yet confirms that the Universe is not clumpy enoughI 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 released the most ambitious cosmic map assembled so far, confirming that matter in the Universe is less clumpy than standard cosmological theory would predict. From 2013 to 2019, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) team repeatedly imaged a large section of Earth’s southern sky to collect the positions, colours and shapes of around 150 million galaxies. On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing.

World:
How Claude Code is bringing vibe coding to everyone
NEWS | 31 January 2026
Enter Claude Code, software created by the AI company Anthropic for “vibe coding”—writing code with natural language. What makes Claude Code different is the ease of use and the speed at which it understands problems. Tensions peaked last August, when Wired reported that Anthropic claimed OpenAI staff were using Claude Code ahead of the launch of GPT-5. Though both Codex and Claude Code are powerful, in my experience, Claude Code simply builds websites faster, even fairly complex ones requiring interactive 3D presentations. When Claude Code works, it’s sparkling or simmering.

Current Events:
3,000-light-year-long jet offers new clues to first black hole ever imaged
NEWS | 31 January 2026
The galaxy Messier 87 (M87) and a 3,000-light-year-long jet of plasma blasting from its central black hole. Located at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87), the supermassive black hole M87* holds a special place in the science history books: it’s the first black hole ever imaged and is the origin of what NASA has called “one of nature’s most amazing phenomena.” That’s because the black hole is spewing out a gigantic jet of material that is blazing a 3,000-light-year-long trail through the cosmos. M87* is both a messy and greedy eater: as dust and gas falls toward it, the black hole shoots out powerful jets of charged particles. The first image of the black hole at the center of the galaxy M87. Event Horizon Telescope CollaborationThe results could inform future studies of M87*’s superlative jet and the mechanics of similar supermassive black holes.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 31 January 2026
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News Flash:
Your guide to 29 wildly different theories of consciousness
NEWS | 31 January 2026
By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. Some of these theories have many publications to their name, such as global workspace theories, higher-order theories and integrated information theory, three of the field’s leading models. This may explain why quantum theories of consciousness, which are fascinating but not yet grounded in much evidence, have been proposed so many times. Predictive processing theories, which are also influential in the field, are notably absent, perhaps because they originated as theories of perception rather than consciousness. 11; April 2021 (data)THEORY CHARACTERISTICSAll of these proposals are wildly different, and only some are supported by evidence.

Latest:
JWST could finally spot the very first stars in the universe
NEWS | 31 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.

Breaking:
Life’s evil twins—mirror cells—could doom Earth if scientists don’t stop them
NEWS | 31 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.

Trending:
How extremophile molds are destroying museum artifacts
NEWS | 31 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.

This Just In:
Can a buried time capsule beat Earth’s geology and deep time?
NEWS | 31 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.

Today:
Mathematicians Discover a New Kind of Shape That’s All over Nature
NEWS | 31 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.

Top Stories:
These Mysterious Shapes Are at the Heart of Math’s Biggest Puzzles
NEWS | 31 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.

World:
How Squishy Math Is Revealing Doughnuts in the Brain
NEWS | 31 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.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 31 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:
Citizens' Assemblies Are Upgrading Democracy: Fair Algorithms Are Part of the Program
NEWS | 31 January 2026
The Irish citizens’ assembly is just one example of a widespread phenomenon. Citizens’ assemblies in France, Germany, the U.K., Washington State, and elsewhere have charted pathways for reducing carbon emissions. The effectiveness of citizens’ assemblies isn’t surprising. Descriptive representation, in turn, lends legitimacy to the assembly: citizens seem to find decisions more acceptable when they are made by people like themselves. Our algorithm was released as open source in 2020 and has since become a common method for selecting citizens’ assemblies.