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Today:
NASA Telescopes Capture Colliding Spiral Galaxies in Sparkling Detail
NEWS | 31 December 2025
By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. Two space telescopes really are better than one. This month NASA released a new image that combines observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory of two spiral galaxies on a cosmic collision course. The two space telescopes have very different trajectories—giving them each a heady vantage point on the universe. When galaxies merge, they can trigger explosive bursts of star formation, and astronomers are keen to observe these collisions to understand how galaxies evolve over time.

Top Stories:
NASA’s New Chief Hints Iconic Space Shuttle Might Not Be Moving to Texas After All
NEWS | 31 December 2025
NASA’s new boss Jared Isaacman hinted that he could break with Texas lawmakers’ push to move iconic space shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian to HoustonI 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. The great Texas space shuttle saga has taken a new twist: Jared Isaacman, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead NASA, indicated that the space shuttle Discovery may not move from its retirement home in a Smithsonian museum to Houston after all despite a Texas lawmaker push over the past year to make it happen. Yet in a recent interview with CNBC, Isaacman said that whether the spacecraft can be moved remained to be seen. NASA and the Smithsonian have estimated that moving Discovery would cost at least $120 million.

World:
These Are the Most Exciting Space Science Events for 2026
NEWS | 31 December 2025
Return to the MoonThe most obviously exciting space event for the coming year is the launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission, which could occur as early as February. Artemis II will also be a critical test of hardware for later Artemis missions: it will be the first crewed flight of NASA’s giant Space Launch System rocket and accompanying Orion spacecraft. Fortunately, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could clear things up with additional observations of the asteroid in spring 2026. China’s Xuntian space telescope may launch as well; one of its primary goals is to make similar science observations. NASA/Ball Aerospace (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)The Rise of Reusable RocketryIn terms of sheer effect, however, the biggest events for space science in 2026 aren’t really acts of science at all.

Current Events:
15 Million Years before the Megalodon, This Giant Ancient Shark Prowled the Oceans
NEWS | 31 December 2025
Older discoveries had suggested that truly giant sharks such as megalodons (which could reach 17 meters) evolved around 100 million years ago. But the new analysis suggests that giant sharks came on the scene earlier than previously thought. The team behind the discovery now plans to look for other ancient giant shark remains to try and color in some more of sharks’ evolutionary tree. But the new analysis suggests that giant sharks came on the scene earlier than previously thought. The team behind the discovery now plans to look for other ancient giant shark remains to try and color in some more of sharks’ evolutionary tree.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 31 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

News Flash:
Mysterious Bright Flashes in the Night Sky Baffle Astronomers
NEWS | 31 December 2025
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 | 31 December 2025
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 | 31 December 2025
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 | 31 December 2025
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 | 31 December 2025
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 | 31 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.

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

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

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 31 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:
Citizens' Assemblies Are Upgrading Democracy: Fair Algorithms Are Part of the Program
NEWS | 31 December 2025
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.