Wiki News Live
Today:
Eroding the Clean Air Act Will Make America Sicker, Dirtier and Poorer
NEWS | 16 January 2026
The Clean Air Act has saved millions of lives, but the EPA will stop calculating those benefits for at least some proposed regulationsFor more than five decades, the Clean Air Act has prevented millions of premature deaths, hospitalizations, and lost work and school days. But now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is abruptly changing how it enforces at least parts of the Clean Air Act by not calculating the economic benefits of some regulations. The Clean Air Act was enacted precisely because the health effects of bad air are population-wide and difficult to evaluate. The Clean Air Act’s regulations “pay for themselves; they pay for the entire EPA,” Heinzerling agrees. The EPA spokesperson also noted that the previous Biden administration did not calculate the value of health benefits for some rules under the Clean Air Act, including for PM 2.5 .

Top Stories:
Kratsios Calls Patchwork State AI Laws ‘Anti-Innovation’ at House Science AI Hearing
NEWS | 16 January 2026
Michael Kratsios, director of White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, testified before the House Science Committee's Research and Technology Subcommittee, in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on January 14. In a roughly two-hour hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building, Democrats also pressed him on budget cuts to science agencies and the administration’s push to limit state-level AI rules. Since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, the administration has framed AI as a central scientific priority, and its approach to AI policy has emphasized two initiatives in particular. Kratsios pointed to what the White House calls “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” which is framed around innovation, infrastructure, and international diplomacy and security. Kratsios pointed to the administration’s U.S. Tech Force, which he described as designed to bring AI and technology specialists to the public sector.

World:
A Controversial U.S. Study of Hepatitis B Vaccines Will Continue in Africa, HHS says
NEWS | 16 January 2026
A controversial hepatitis B vaccine safety trial will go on as planned in Africa, amid concerns over its ethics and design from medical experts. Hepatitis B is widespread in Guinea-Bissau, with prevalance of about 18.7 percent, and shortens lives—it’s linked to long-term liver cancer and cirrhosis. “This research aims to fill existing evidence gaps to help inform global hepatitis B vaccine policy and we will ensure the highest scientific and ethical standards are met,” said an HHS spokesperson in a statement. “The planned study represents the world’s first and perhaps only opportunity to test the overall health effects of [hepatitis B vaccine],” according to the statement. The Africa CDC has not responded to a request for comment.

Current Events:
Incredible Cheetah Mummies Show Big Cats Once Roamed the Arabian Peninsula
NEWS | 16 January 2026
Of the 61 cheetahs found, seven were naturally mummified—dried and preserved by the Saudi Arabian desert. The older cheetah remains were more genetically similar to a Northwest African subspecies, whereas the more recent cheetah remains were more similar to the Asiatic cheetah, which is now mostly confined to a very small population in Iran. “The geographic story is something we are continuing to tease out.”The study doesn’t answer why cheetahs disappeared from Saudi Arabia. In turn, Boug hopes the research can help inform rewilding efforts in the kingdom, including the possible reintroduction of the big cats to the landscape. “The key insight from our discovery is that more than one subspecies of cheetah inhabited Saudi Arabia,” Boug says.

Sponsored:
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SPONSORED | 16 January 2026
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News Flash:
Mysterious Bright Flashes in the Night Sky Baffle Astronomers
NEWS | 16 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 | 16 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 | 16 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 | 16 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 | 16 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 | 16 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 | 16 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 | 16 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 | 16 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 | 16 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.