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Today:
Woodpeckers’ Secret Strength Revealed—Plus, Flu Surge, AI Sleep Predictions and CES 2026 Trends
NEWS | 13 January 2026
Why flu cases are spiking, how AI predicts disease from your sleep, and what surprising biomechanics lie behind woodpeckers’ powerful pecks. The researchers built what’s known as a foundation model, a kind of AI model that trains itself on massive datasets and then applies that information in specific contexts. In the new study researchers trained their model, called SleepFM, on polysomnography sleep data. For more on how tech is shaking things up let’s head to Las Vegas, where Scientific American’s senior tech editor, Eric Sullivan, was on the ground at the CES technology conference. So CES 2026 felt like the year that AI jumped out of the chat box and into the real world.

Top Stories:
NASA Announces Return Date for ISS Astronauts After Medical Evacuation Announcement
NEWS | 13 January 2026
The International Space Station, as seen from the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft on November 8, 2021. Four ISS crew members are set to touch down on Thursday after NASA announced the first medical evacuation in the space station’s historyI agree my information will be processed in accordance with the Scientific American and Springer Nature Limited Privacy Policy . NASA has revealed the return date for four International Space Station (ISS) crew members who are being evacuated from the station after one fell ill with an unknown condition. NASA has not revealed the extent of the sick crew member’s medical issue. They had been expected to remain on the ISS until mid-February, when the replacement crew, Crew-12, are still anticipated to arrive.

World:
Why 2026 Is a Mathematically Special Number
NEWS | 13 January 2026
Fortunately the OEIS reveals plenty of more accessible and entertaining mathematical quirks linked to the number 2,026. Among other things, 2,026 belongs to the group of almost prime numbers because it only has 1, 2, 1,013, and 2,026 as divisors—narrowly missing the chance to be a prime number. It can also be used to generate a prime number. A prime number in this sequence is 5 × 102026 + 77—that is, 5 followed by 2,026 zeros plus 77. The Magnetic Towers of HanoiThe number 2,026 is related to an extension of the classic mathematical game the Tower of Hanoi.

Current Events:
How Prepared Are ISS Astronauts for Medical Emergencies?
NEWS | 13 January 2026
It also speaks to the preparedness of astronauts and the space station to deal with medical issues that arise. Once astronauts are onboard the ISS, surgeons on the ground regularly talk to them about their health and tell them how to perform medical procedures as needed. And on her first day at the station, Coleman recalls working out how she would perform CPR in near weightlessness. “We don’t have an operating room on ISS, and we really don’t have all of the support infrastructures that we need for any major complications,” former ISS mission commander Feustel says. “It’s nontrivial to decide you’re going to end a space mission, given how much effort is put into executing one in the first place.”

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 13 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

News Flash:
Mysterious Bright Flashes in the Night Sky Baffle Astronomers
NEWS | 13 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 | 13 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 | 13 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 | 13 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 | 13 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 | 13 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 | 13 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 | 13 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 | 13 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 | 13 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.