November 4, 2024: Voting technology is more secure than it's ever been, an amateur mathematician found the longest prime number on record, and mpox is mutating. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | • Anxiety about tomorrow's election is peaking. Here's how to manage the stress, according to a psychiatrist and researcher. | 5 min read | | | Voting technology is more secure than it's ever been. This is the result of a shift in American voting procedures more than two decades in the making: Most people now vote by machines that efficiently scan paper ballots. Or they use touch screens and other forms of direct-recording electronic machines ("DREs"), which also generate backup paper records. Those physical paper trails are an election safeguard— ballots are verifiable, auditable and recountable, as I wrote on Saturday. Why this matters: Claims of voter fraud or subverted elections are rampant, but they aren't based in fact. An Associated Press investigation of the 2020 presidential election found fewer than 475 instances of fraud out of 25.5 million ballots cast in battleground states, which is to say fraud had no influence at all in President Joe Biden's victory. And when Georgia audited the nearly five million votes in the state that election, hand-counts confirmed what the machines had recorded, with extremely small margins of error (in most counties, the margin between hand-counted ballots and those scanned by machines was zero).
What the experts say: "The checks and balances that have been put into place around paper ballots have never functioned more effectively in the U.S. than they do now….Election officials are better trained. They're more aware. It feels kind of strange to talk about this as a golden age of elections amid all the anxiety, but I don't see any other way to interpret the facts," says Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting. Lindeman has already voted in New York State, and he is "very confident" his vote will be counted accurately. --Ben Guarino, technology editor | | | Amanda Montañez; Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Data + Science Lab (data) | | | In October, amateur mathematician Luke Durant discovered a new prime number, and it's 41 million digits long. Yup, the number has 41,024,230 digits (for comparison, the approximate number of total atoms in the observable universe is only about 80 digits long). A prime number is a number that can be divided only by itself and 1; so 3, 7, 13, 17, and 19 are all primes, whereas 15 is not.
How he did it: Prime number hunters use a computing trick devised by 17th-century French mathematician Marin Mersenne, who discovered that multiplying 2 by itself some number of times (2^n) and then subtracting 1, you sometimes get a prime number. Durant assembled a global supercomputer across 17 countries by buying processing time from various cloud GPU providers to crunch through larger and larger iterations of the Mersenne calculation, churning through about 12 times as many numbers as every other computer involved in the Mersenne prime search combined.
What the experts say: Mathematicians have been studying primes for thousands of years, and every whole number is part of a set of a unique combination of primes–for example, 27 is made by multiplying 3 (a prime number) three times. | | | • Voting is just the beginning. After you cast your ballot tomorrow, consider involving yourself in local issues related to science that matter to you. For example, many cities have carbon emissions reduction goals, but more rural municipalities may not. Engaging on a local level can be a strong antidote to the frustrations of national politics, write the editors of Scientific American. "There is much that our current judiciary throws back to state and local governments to decide. So this is your chance," they say. | 4 min read | | | Your ballot this year may have some questions and propositions closely related to science and health. Some highlights, reported by Science: - Question 2 in Rhode Island would allocate $87.5 million to the construction of a University of Rhode Island Biomedical Sciences building.
- Question 2 in Maine asks voters if they'd like to authorize $25 million in funding for research and innovation in biomedical sciences, renewable energy, forestry, agriculture and other science areas.
- Voters in Washington state will decide whether to keep a market-based cap-and-invest program for carbon aimed at reducing emissions from major industrial polluters.
| Thank you for voting and for being a part of this science-loving community. Email me anytime with feedback or comments: newsletters@sciam.com. See you tomorrow. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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