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Today:
Spellements: Wednesday, January 7, 2026
NEWS | 08 January 2026
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 four 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.

Top Stories:
Trump Wants Venezuela’s Oil. Why Does It Have So Much?
NEWS | 08 January 2026
President Donald Trump’s push to take control of Venezuela’s oil has focused global attention on the South American nation’s vast reserves. In 2024 the country claimed more than 300 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves, the highest of any nation. The runners up were Saudi Arabia, with more than 260 billion barrels, and Iran, with more than 200 billion barrels. The global total was 1,566 billion barrels. Hence, Venezuela’s more than 300 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves were formed.

World:
Doctor Visits for Flu Hit Highest Level in Almost 30 Years
NEWS | 08 January 2026
By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. Doctor visits for flulike illnesses in the U.S. have reached their highest level in the nearly 30 years that the CDC has tracked the statistic, according to the country’s top public health body. Amanda Montañez; Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (data)At the local level, some 45 states saw high or very high “influenzalike” activity. The new numbers don’t cover the full post-holiday-travel period, so the rates of doctor visits and hospitalizations could yet rise. The data release follows Monday’s announcement of new CDC vaccination recommendations for children.

Current Events:
Jellyfish and Sea Anemones Sleep Just Like Us
NEWS | 08 January 2026
Sea anemones and jellyfish don’t have brains, but the way their neurons behave during sleep shows some surprising similarities to humansI agree my information will be processed in accordance with the Scientific American and Springer Nature Limited Privacy Policy . Jellyfish and sea anemones are curious creatures: these organisms evolved without a brain and, as scientists discovered only in the past few years, don’t need one to sleep. And now a new study shows that how these animals sleep is surprisingly similar to humans, suggesting that sleep may have evolved before even the most primitive brains. The findings, published on Tuesday in Nature Communications, also help answer one of science’s prevailing mysteries: Why do animals sleep? Sea anemones also appear to sleep for around a third of the day.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 08 January 2026
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News Flash:
Mysterious Bright Flashes in the Night Sky Baffle Astronomers
NEWS | 08 January 2026
These “nuclear transients,” the second overall category of transients, have turned up only in the past decade. Astronomers must distinguish the flashes of nuclear transients from supermassive black holes whose behavior varies. Or they could be supermassive black holes moving from inactive flickering to active fiery accretion—black holes “turning on,” Graham says. “The holy grail is understanding what produced the transient,” says Eliot Quataert of Princeton, a theoretical astrophysicist studying nuclear transients. Both tidal disruption events and quasi-periodic eruptions hold evidence about supermassive black holes that are quiescent and therefore invisible, as well as about the all but theoretical class of black holes whose masses are between those of stellar black holes and supermassive ones.

Latest:
Meet Your Future Robot Servants, Caregivers and Explorers
NEWS | 08 January 2026
To see how close we’re getting to this vision, I visit the Stanford Robotics Center, which has 3,000 square feet for experiments and opened in November 2024 at Stanford University. In practice, this meant the robot used its gripper to grab and lift hot metal casts from an assembly line. In a departure from other designs for robot hands, which tend to emphasize fingers, Liu inserted a GelSight sensor into a rubber palm. I follow the Stanford Robotics Center’s ceiling ripples down a passage that leads to a large pool, still under construction, that will host the merperson-shaped robot OceanOne. “It is the only [robot] in the world capable of reaching the seabed” and sensing it with haptic feedback, Khatib says.

Breaking:
Interoception Is Our Sixth Sense, and It May Be Key to Mental Health
NEWS | 08 January 2026
Studies have implicated problems with this inner sense in a wide variety of conditions, including anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder and borderline personality disorder. Some researchers and clinicians now think that problems in interoception might contribute to many mental illnesses. They found that people with a range of psychiatric disorders, including anxiety disorders and schizophrenia, shared similar alterations in the insula, a key brain region linked with interoception during body-sensing-related tasks. Some experts say answers may come from treatment trials investigating whether interventions that target disturbances in this inner sense might boost mental health. These conditions tend to overlap with anxiety disorders, and Green is now advocating for interoception-based therapies to help affected people.

Trending:
Global Warming Could Skew Reptile Sex Ratios and Lead to Extinctions
NEWS | 08 January 2026
Newly hatched green sea turtles climb across the sand at Alagadi Beach on the island of Cyprus. The scent of freshly dug sand is often their first clue that a green sea turtle has arrived. Since the 1990s green sea turtles have been laying their first nests at Alagadi Beach almost one day earlier each year. In other words, the sea turtles seem to be adjusting their habits in response to warming. If tuatara sex ratios reach a crisis, Cree suspects it will be a symptom of a larger emergency that’s already underway.

This Just In:
Heart and Kidney Diseases, plus Type 2 Diabetes, May Be One Illness Treatable with Ozempic-like Drugs
NEWS | 08 January 2026
More than a century before Bies entered the hospital, doctors had noticed that many of the conditions CKM syndrome comprises often occur together. Heart disease causes 40 to 50 percent of all deaths in people with advanced chronic kidney disease. But at the time, the physician didn’t mention that this illness also increased her risk of heart disease. In 2024 researchers compared one drug with a placebo in more than 3,500 participants with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease. “Although they are clearly related, CKM syndrome and metabolic syndrome have some very important differences,” he says.

Today:
Mathematicians Discover a New Kind of Shape That’s All over Nature
NEWS | 08 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 | 08 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 | 08 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 | 08 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 | 08 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.