How to spot misinformation about hantavirus ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
May 18, 2026—Today, the math behind sending a private code over public channels. Plus, why hantavirus misinformation is bubbling up, and an asteroid that's flying between the Earth and moon today.
—Andrea Gawrylewski
Chief Newsletter Editor
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- Though public health officials have said the hantavirus outbreak poses a low risk to the public, misinformation about the disease is spreading fast. Social media and COVID trauma play a part. | 4 min read
- The long-tailed pygmy rice rat has a body about the size of a AAA battery and is the primary host for Andes virus, the type of hantavirus that sickened passengers on the MV Hondius cruise ship. | 3 min read
- Several studies are underway to investigate how the virus spreads, the WHO announced. For example, it can persist in semen for years but is not necessarily contagious. The prevailing theory is that it likely spreads from person to person through aerosolized droplets of saliva and other oral fluids that carry high viral load. | 3 min read
- Global leaders are facing deadly outbreaks of hantavirus and Ebola. The world is more at risk of a pandemic and less safe from deadly viral outbreaks now than it was before COVID, a major pandemic preparedness report found. | 3 min read
- Over the course of May 9 and May 10, scientists at the Nebraska Public Health Laboratory worked around the clock to develop a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test for Andes hantavirus. We spoke to the director of the lab. | 6 min read
Join the discussion: What do you want to know about hantavirus? Post your questions here and we'll respond in future articles and newsletters.
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Getty Images/Erik Simonsen
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- A newly-discovered asteroid estimated to be about as big as the Lincoln Memorial is set to fly between the moon and Earth today at 5:23 P.M. EDT. Scientists say there is no risk of a collision with our planet. Watch here. | 1 min
- Eight of the top 10 officials at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have been pushed out since President Trump took office. | 4 min read
- NASA released new details about the Artemis III mission, scheduled to launch at the end of 2027. But key pieces of information, such as the identities of the mission’s astronauts, remain a mystery. | 5 min read
- One start-up company is poised to run drug experiments and even develop pharmaceuticals in orbit. If it works, it could launch a space-based manufacturing industry—but it's going to cost. | 4 min read
- Here are four ways that marijuana affects the developing teenage brain. | 4 min read
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Cryptographers long struggled with the “key-distribution problem”: how can two people exchange encrypted messages if they first need a shared secret code—and have no secure way to share it? In 1976, Stanford researchers Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman proposed a breakthrough solution now known as the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Their method lets two strangers create a shared secret over a completely public channel, even while eavesdroppers watch every step. The idea became one of the foundational technologies of the modern Internet, helping secure online banking, shopping, messaging apps and encrypted “https” websites.
How it works: The system works by exploiting a mathematical “one-way function”—a calculation that is easy to perform but extremely difficult to reverse. Imagine creating a new flavored cola: two people publicly share a base ingredient (like club soda), secretly add their own private ingredients, exchange the mixtures, and then each add their private ingredient again, ultimately arriving at the same final recipe without ever revealing their own secret ingredients. Computers accomplish this with modular arithmetic and large prime numbers. Each person performs exponentiation calculations, exchanges the results publicly and then computes a final shared number. An eavesdropper can see all the exchanged information but faces the enormously difficult “discrete logarithm problem” if they try to reconstruct the secret.
Why this matters: This discovery transformed secure communication because it solved a problem that had previously required physical secrecy—couriers, covert meetings or even wartime espionage. Modern digital commerce and private communication now rely on the assumption that the discrete logarithm problem is computationally impractical to solve with ordinary computers.
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A SPECIAL EVENT WITH SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
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What’s a Quantum Computer Good For, Anyway?
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Quantum computing’s revolutionary potential is one of the most tantalizing prospects for technological breakthroughs in the 21st century. But what’s real and what’s hype? In principle, quantum computers offer enormous performance boosts for certain applications in cryptography, telecommunications, materials science, and fundamental physics. In practice, such breakthroughs remain as yet unrealized. Join Scientific American editors Lee Billings, Clara Moskowitz and Eric Sullivan for an engaging discussion on the promise and peril of quantum computing.
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- Scientists confirmed a new fish species discovered off Papua New Guinea. They named it Solenostomus snuffleupagus, a nod to its remarkable resemblance to Big Bird’s beloved friend Mr. Snuffleupagus. Must be those cute droopy eyes. | 2 min read
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Which of the following is the least likely to be a palindrome (read the same forward and backward, like the number 1,331)?
1. A random four-digit number (from 1,000 to 9,999)
2. A random five-digit number (from 10,000 to 99,999)
3. A random four-digit even number
4. A random four-digit odd number
Click here for the solution.
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- Climate change is causing a tick boom. But Internet posters are blaming a global conspiracy. | Grist
- For people in eating disorder recovery, going on a GLP-1 can supercharge a relapse. | New York Magazine
- AI chatbots are giving out people's phone numbers. | MIT Technology Review
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Welcome to a new week of scientific discovery! We're fielding all your questions about hantavirus, so post them here or reply to this email.
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Send any other thoughts, ideas or feedback on this newsletter to newsletters@sciam.com. See you tomorrow!
—Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor
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