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American popular-science magazine, published since 1845, covering research, technology and mathematics for general readers.
US flu positivity reached 3.6% in the CDC's Oct. 9 FluView, six times the 0.6% recorded a year earlier. Scientific American reports it is too early to call the season severe, but the early H1N1 rise gives teams a reason to move vaccination dates up.
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Pioneer Labs unveiled sPL.001 on September 22, the first of five planned engineered microbes for Mars. It is meant to make habitat bioplastic, and Scientific American calls the larger terraforming goal deeply speculative.
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Honeybees performed more waggle-dance circuits when a feeder they advertised proved full, a Hebrew University study found. Dancers whose feeder was empty did not add circuits, and unverified dancers recruited less.
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NASA's PUNCH mission has released a video of a year of the sun's corona, recovered from images that Earthshine first overwhelmed. An outside solar scientist said the sunlit electrons in it show how many particles the corona holds and the shape of its magnetic field.
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Anthropic says Claude found a CRISPR-like repeat array beside a reverse transcriptase gene in a bacteriophage, function unknown. The company's researchers say they have no idea yet what it does, so the finding is a lead for lab validation.
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Hurricane Isaias killed at least four people after landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast as a Category 2 storm with 105 mph winds, Scientific American reported. Two meteorologists quoted there say a quiet season narrows where storms can form without softening the one that does.
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NIH is weighing a rule that would replace the averaged 1-to-9 impact score with three bands: top 25%, next 25% and bottom 50%. Critics, including a University of Maryland biologist, say the change would reduce transparency for applicants and the public.
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Eran Sharon's lab at Hebrew University of Jerusalem says rose petals curl by a different geometry than other plants, Scientific American reports. Strips cut from the petals point to a cone-like structure that should carry no internal tension.
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OpenAI and Anthropic each deny training on data an NYU mathematician and a Copenhagen biologist uploaded, Scientific American reports. A Stanford privacy researcher says the companies' practices are too opaque for experts to judge either case.
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Researchers used a CRISPR-based tool called Y-CUT to delete the Y chromosome from cloned male mouse embryos and got healthy, fertile females. The study is not yet peer-reviewed, and the idea of rescuing small populations depends on species whose XO females can breed.
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Imperial College London researchers say they got lettuce and tobacco plants to make myoglobin for the first time. Because myoglobin comes from animal tissue, it could give plant-based meat a smell closer to red meat than the soy leghemoglobin Impossible Foods uses.
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Exercise physiologists say mice that trained for four to eight weeks, stopped, then retrained grew bigger muscle fibers than mice with no training history. Only a liver-enzyme finding extends to people, so the case for softer guidance on breaks rests mostly on mice.
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Researchers who tracked more than 170 people around a COVID shot found that those who ran a fever had more gut inflammation, in a study in Science. The human link is correlational, and the team has only begun testing whether the bacteria behind the fever can be reduced.
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Five impact flashes Artemis II astronauts saw on the farside led NASA to estimate a one-in-10,000-per-decade chance of a similar strike on a Moon base. The crew counted them by eye and with handheld cameras on a flight carrying minimal science payloads, and the count gives planners of the south-pole base a background rate to design against.
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Researchers say two 5th-century BC Etruscan tombs were built as immersive sensory spaces, citing exceptionally long echoes in one of them. Their own account leaves open whether the sound was designed or simply came with the room.
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Contiguous U.S. temperatures averaged 57.98 degrees F from January to August 2026, the hottest such stretch since records began in 1895, NOAA data show. Only a cooler-than-normal fall would keep 2026 from an annual record, Zeke Hausfather says.
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NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has returned NASA's Mars missions to COSPAR's 1964 limit of one-in-10,000 contamination odds per mission. The looser rule applies now, and a review due in December 2026 is meant to recommend lowering the threshold further.
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El Niño kept the Atlantic free of hurricanes through September for the first time in reliable records by holding wind shear high over warm water. The mark could still fall if the National Hurricane Center upgrades Tropical Storm Fay in its post-season review.
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Anthropic released an AI-generated proof of a percolation conjecture that Fields medallist Hugo Duminil-Copin had tried and failed to prove. What it shows about AI research depends on expert checking and on how much of the argument humans built first.
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The US said on September 14 that it has weapons in space, the first nation to acknowledge such weapons publicly. The open question is which kind it has, because the kinds differ widely in how much debris they would leave in orbits every nation shares.
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Science · September 24, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers
Science · September 15, 2026 · Confirmed3 publishers
Science · August 27, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers