December 12, 2024: We're covering "Disease X," the next wave of AI agents and the year's coolest mathematical discoveries. —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | | The nonvenomous Arizona mountain kingsnake, which resembles a venomous coral snake, has a survival advantage by warning off would-be predators that avoid colorful coral snakes. Daniel Heuclin/Nature Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo | | | • The Arctic looks dramatically different now than it did 20 years ago due to rapidly rising temperatures, increasing precipitation, thawing permafrost and melting ice. | 4 min read | | | Are you enjoying this newsletter? If you want to dive deeper into the articles I link to, consider a subscription to Scientific American. We have special discounts for Today in Science readers! | | | The quest for an einstein tile—a shape never seen before in mathematics. Miriam Martincic | This year in mathematics has been a busy one. Mathematicians discovered the biggest prime number yet, a new formula for pi, patterns in Johann Sebastian Bach's music and a new shape that had never been described mathematically before—soft cells. The latter shapes can be found inside the red blood cells currently speeding through any living person. Soft cells also are found inside nautilus shells. Why this is cool: The puzzle that led to the discovery of soft cells was to find a shape with the fewest corners that still could fit together to completely cover a surface, no gaps allowed. The search for answers to this so-called "tessellation," or tiling geometry, problem led mathematician Gábor Domokos and his colleagues to the soft-cells discovery. Read science writer Elise Cutts' first-person story about the discovery, which she discussed over pizza with Domokos in Budapest a year before the solution emerged.
What the experts say: Not all of this year's cool findings are as useful as pi and tiling questions, including the "einstein tile" solution, one version of which is illustrated in the photo above. But all of them are fascinating, even the 41-million-digit prime number finding, writes Scientific American editor Clara Moskowitz. | | | A mystery illness that has killed at least 31 people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), most of whom were malnourished young children, might be malaria, but health experts think more than one disease is involved. To learn more about the troubling situation, science journalist Paul Adepoju interviewed virologist Placide Mbala, of the DRC's National Institute of Biomedical Research. A multidisciplinary team, with support from the World Health Organization and Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, currently is collecting and analyzing high-quality samples of the pathogen, which will make it possible to respond more effectively with treatments and prevention.
Why this matters: Poor roads across vast distances, weak communication infrastructure and recurring violence have delayed the response to the outbreak, beyond isolating and tending to sick people, along with grassroots public-health messages.
What the experts say: "When it comes to Disease X in DRC, one thing we often forget is that most diseases come from animals. There's a transmission from animal to human. And what that means is that we don't often make peace with nature," says ThankGod Ebenezer, founder of the African BioGenome Project. | | | • The next wave in consumer tech driven by AI could be "agents"—large language models, analogous to chatbots, that can not only fill out forms, book travel and perform other mundane tasks with minimal human oversight. These commercialized agents could also make complex decisions across time for businesses and individuals. The rise of agents poses a host of ethical, financial and legal questions. If they go unaddressed or unregulated, as occurred with the ascendancy of social media in the 2010s, we might push "past a point of no return," writes freelance science journalist Webb Wright. | 7 min read | | | Today is National Ding-a-Ling Day, which isn't a celebration of nincompoops; rather it's meant to prod us to make phone calls to long-lost friends, classmates, and former neighbors whom we recall with fondness. I'm more likely to reach out in writing, but the rhyme with "ring" reminded me of the answer to a recent WQXR-FM Know-It-All New Yorker quiz. It basically asked which holiday season sound was created in 1900 by a 16-year-old in New York City. The sound was the ringing of bells by those charity volunteers who stand outside stores this time of year, soliciting cash donations to be placed in their accompanying red kettle. Amelia Kunkel reportedly was frustrated by people ignoring her kettle stand, so she bought a small bell to ring to better gain the attention of passers-by. The idea caught on. Back in 1869, Scientific American published an historical essay about the origin of bells, which you can find at the top of this page. | —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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