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Today:
Math Puzzle: Falling Through
NEWS | 23 December 2025
Some say the reason most manhole covers are round is that a circle cannot fall through a smaller circular hole. Which of these other two-dimensional shapes cannot fall through a hole that is the same shape but slightly smaller? Amanda MontañezShow puzzle solution Shapes 1, 2 and 3 can all fall through their own holes. Amanda MontañezChallenge problem: Can you find another shape that cannot fall through a slightly smaller hole of the same shape? The Reuleaux triangle is another example and thus another shape that cannot fall through a slightly smaller hole of the same shape.

Top Stories:
CIA Kryptos Puzzle Creator Releases Final Clues
NEWS | 23 December 2025
WASHINGTON, D.C.—New clues to the storied Kryptos puzzle sculpture installed on the grounds of the CIA came to light on Wednesday. Installed at the CIA headquarters in 1990, Kryptos is a curved copper panel that holds letters to make four coded messages. Sanborn also formally announced that a long-hinted-at “K5” coded message will be released when K4 is solved. The “BERLINCLOCK” mentioned in previous K4 clues refers to the World Clock in Berlin. During the lead-in to the auction of Kryptos materials, Sanborn developed an artificial intelligence answering system to automate responses to those claiming they have deciphered K4.

World:
How to Identify a Prime Number without a Computer
NEWS | 23 December 2025
Prime Numbers with a Special StructureAnyone who has observed the record-breaking prime numbers of recent years may have noticed that they mostly have a similar structure: 2p – 1 (where p is a prime number). That is to say, every Mersenne prime has this property, and conversely, every s p – 2 defines a Mersenne prime 2p – 1. He was thus able to show that it was indeed a prime number. To this day, it remains the largest prime number found without the aid of a computer. As it turns out, finite number systems are a field if and only if p is a prime number.

Current Events:
Mathematicians’ Chalkboard Writing Shows When Inspiration Strikes
NEWS | 23 December 2025
I 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. If you want to know when mathematicians are about to have a breakthrough, you don’t need to look inside their heads. The researchers recorded six mathematicians at chalkboards as they each spent about 40 minutes working on two math proofs and thinking aloud. In this way, the mathematician and chalkboard together acted as what cognitive scientists would call one extended and semiobservable mind.

News Flash:
How an Error in Cult Classic Game Doom Sparked New Appreciation for Pi
NEWS | 23 December 2025
That’s not because of the incorrect pi value but rather a reflection of how little computing power was available in the 1990s. When Pi Is Wrong in a Computer GameBecause Doom is an open-source computer game, you can download the code—and modify it. As a player moved straight in the game world, surrounding objects would move to different sides. The Doom world Gotszling has created is incredibly strange. One small mistake by a game developer has sparked a much larger experiment into the strange circle number.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 23 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

Latest:
How the CIA’s Kryptos Sculpture Gave Up Its Final Secret
NEWS | 23 December 2025
The Caesar cipher obscures messages by shifting every letter of the alphabet by some fixed amount. A Caesar cipher has only 25 possible keys, but a full substitution cipher has 403,291,461,126,605,635,584,000,000. To encrypt the first two Kryptos messages, K1 and K2—which contain 63 and 372 characters, respectively—Sanborn used the next level up: the Vigenère cipher. All of them were shifted according to the same key letter: S. Now you can conduct frequency analysis on just that pile. At least three independent efforts deciphered the first three Kryptos messages.

Breaking:
U.S. Plan to Drop Some Childhood Vaccines to Align with Denmark Will Endanger Children, Experts Say
NEWS | 23 December 2025
The cancellation was apparently prompted by concerns that changes to the vaccine schedule would spark legal challenges the administration might lose, Politico reported. But it doesn’t make sense to compare the U.S. to countries, such as Denmark, that have a vastly different health care system. “I cannot understate the value of universal health care and the extremely organized health care infrastructure” in Denmark. “Denmark or other places have universal health coverage where people don’t fall into health care gaps like they do in the United States. In the U.S., a change to the vaccine schedule would also affect who would be able to get a vaccine.

Trending:
Will There Be a White Christmas This Year? It Depends on Where You Live
NEWS | 23 December 2025
Are you dreaming of a white Christmas? Dreaming of a white Christmas or not, the chances of actually seeing snow on December 25 come down to both the prevailing climate wherever you live and the weather leading up to and on the day. And in many places, they are getting slimmer as global temperatures rise and winter weather gets wetter. Broadly, the first day of snow is falling later than it used to across the U.S., and the odds of a white Christmas are shrinking. As for this year, current forecasts aren’t in favor of a snowy Christmas for most of the country.

This Just In:
Trump Administration Targets Offshore Wind Farms, Citing National Security Concerns
NEWS | 23 December 2025
The Trump administration on Monday announced it was “pausing—effective immediately” leases for five large offshore wind farms being built off the East Coast. Around 5.8 gigawatts of offshore wind was expected to come online in the U.S. between 2025 to 2029—enough to power millions of homes across the Eastern Seaboard. A statement announcing the decision on Monday indicated that wind turbines caused radar “clutter,” referencing a 2024 Energy Department report that looked into wind turbines’ effect on radar systems. "Instead, this administration has baselessly and unlawfully attacked wind energy," he added. Indeed, wind farm operators, scientists and the military have collaborated on minimizing radar effects of wind farms for decades.

Today:
The Best Space Photos of 2025 Reveal the Most Jaw-Dropping Views of the Cosmos
NEWS | 23 December 2025
Astronomers entered a mind-blowing new era this year with the first light of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. In November a flurry of solar outbursts stunned sky watchers as far south as Mexico and Florida with jaw-dropping auroras. Images of Earth from space offer a dramatic source of perspective on daily life. Ripples in a Celestial PondNASA/ESA/Imad Pasha/Yale University/Pieter van Dokkum/Yale UniversityThe iconic Hubble Space Telescope celebrated its 35th birthday this year, and the beloved observatory is still going strong. Within weeks, the Hubble Space Telescope had spotted the otherworldly object and photographed the glowing coma of gas surrounding the comet’s body.

Top Stories:
Spellements: Monday, December 22, 2025
NEWS | 23 December 2025
You can enter letters by clicking on them or typing them in. Letters can be used multiple times in a single word, and words must contain three letters or more for this size layout. Select the Play Together icon in the navigation bar to invite a friend to work together on this puzzle. You can view hints for words in the puzzle by hitting the life preserver icon in the game display. The dictionary we use for this game misses a lot of science words, such as apatite and coati.

World:
Ancient Romans Guarding Hadrian’s Wall Were Riddled with Worms and Parasites
NEWS | 23 December 2025
Romans living in ancient Britain were plagued by intestinal parasites, all of which are spread by fecal contaminationI agree my information will be processed in accordance with the Scientific American and Springer Nature Limited Privacy Policy . Ancient Romans in Britain were riddled with intestinal parasites that spread through human feces. A new analysis of the sewer system at Vindolanda, a Roman fort near Hadrian’s Wall, found that residents in ancient times were infected with at least three gut parasites—roundworm, whipworm and Giardia duodenalis. The conditions almost certainly affected the Romans’ ability to protect Hadrian’s Wall, a vital defense structure built by the Romans in C.E. Ultimately the findings suggest life for a Roman soldier at Hadrian’s Wall was pretty miserable, the researchers said.

Current Events:
2025’s Scientific Landscape Upended as Federal Overhauls, Public Health Setbacks, Climate Rollbacks and Cosmic Surprises Collide
NEWS | 23 December 2025
So the biggest story is probably climate action and the hostility to climate science in the United States. They’ve also been quashing climate science, reducing funding to it and including things like removing mentions of climate change and climate science from government websites. The Trump administration also pulled us out of the Paris climate agreements. The annual United Nations meeting to sort of further negotiate how to implement the Paris climate agreement happened in November, and that was a big disappointment to climate advocates and climate scientists. One really interesting point is that the Trump administration is making a really big push on nuclear energy.

News Flash:
Disney and OpenAI Signal the Arrival of AI Video Streaming
NEWS | 23 December 2025
And just as skeptics often deride AI video as wasteful, 19th-century critics dismissed early cinema as a “foolish curiosity.”Yet a recent agreement between Disney and OpenAI offers a glimpse of a different future. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI and use its tools to build “new experiences for Disney+ subscribers,” according to a Disney and OpenAI joint press release. “Instead of denoising or generating the whole video all at once, you generate frame by frame,” says Tianwei Yin, a research scientist at AI image editing start-up Reve, who co-developed the CausVid video-generation software. But it will be soon.” He went on to say that watching AI videos as they are generated in real time is also on the horizon. And though the financial burden of AI videos seems prohibitive, millions of people globally are involved in producing and training AI models, and the costs of technologies usually decrease.