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July 21, 2025—Today we're covering Yellowstone's newest hydrothermal feature, wandering minds and why bird flu appears to have faded.
—Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | A new thermal pool in the Porcelain Basin area of Norris Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park, shown here, likely formed in a series of mildly explosive events. USGS/Mike Poland | | - A new baby hydrothermal feature at Yellowstone National Park has an otherworldly milky texture from dissolved silica. | 2 min read
- Humid heat is blanketing the eastern U.S. this week, exacerbated by "corn sweat" in the Midwest. | 3 min read
- A breakthrough proof is bringing mathematics closer to a grand unified theory after more than 50 years of work. | 8 min read
- Math is quietly in crisis over NSF cuts amounting to a 72 percent reduction in federal funding. | 5 min read
- Most computers use just two digits to represent all numbers, but some hobbyist machines are developed to operate with three digits. And they're more efficient than you might expect. | 5 min read
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Bird flu reports are still coming in, albeit at lower rates. "Farmers reported just three million poultry birds killed by the virus or culled to stop it in March and April combined compared with 23 million and 12 million in January and February, respectively," writes Scientific American senior news reporter Meghan Bartels. That same figure was five million in May, one million in June, and even lower in July. But since the virus emerged in poultry in 2022, infections have tended to go down in the summer and rise again in the autumn. And we don't have good data on viral activity in cattle, milk and humans. How it works: Poultry farmers are motivated to report outbreaks and the resulting culled flocks because the federal government partially compensates these losses. But there's no such compensation for lost milk, so there's less incentive to report. Plus, avian influenza is less fatal in cattle, making it harder to detect, and animal movement in the dairy industry makes the condition harder to contain. What the experts say: "No news in my world is not good news," says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan. "We're just not collecting any data, and those are two very, very different things … [A bird flu pandemic in humans] is a huge risk, but it's also a risk that may never come to pass. But we won't know if we just stop looking for it." | | If your mind wanders while performing simple tasks, you might be better at learning hidden patterns, a new study suggests. Participants who performed a mundane arrow-direction matching task and who let their minds wander adapted significantly faster than more focused folks to the task's hidden patterns. Recordings of the brain's electrical activity during the experiment also revealed that actively wandering minds produce more of the slow waves that are dominant during sleep compared with non-wandering minds. The researchers think that mind wandering might be like a form of light sleep that provides some of that state's learning benefits. Why this matters: The results challenge the widely held belief that a wandering mind necessarily detracts from performance. Our brains might be capable of learning despite little to no conscious focus on the material at hand, the research suggests.
What the experts say: "We know that people spend significant amounts of time not focused on what they are doing," says Jonathan Smallwood, a psychology researcher at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, who was not involved in the research. "The authors' work is important because it helps us understand how reasonably complex forms of behavior can continue when people are focused on other things—and that even though our thoughts were elsewhere, the external behavior can still leave its mark on the person." —Nora Bradford, news intern
| | - Last night, a commercial SkyWest Airlines flight nearly collided with a B-52 bomber upon approach to Minot Airport in North Dakota. A split-second decision by the SkyWest pilot possibly prevented a disaster that air-traffic controllers may not have foreseen. The event, and similar ones preceding it, raise questions about whether an AI system could improve air-traffic-control safety or even replace human air-traffic controllers, writes Scientific American senior editor Mark Fischetti. | 2 min read
| | The Yellowstone National Park thermal pool story above brought back memories of a visit I made to that park some time ago, during a cross-country drive. Farther afield, in my lifetime, I am fortunate to count a total of five visits to Grand Canyon National Park, including one by raft. I haven't tallied the total number of U.S. national parks I've visited. I suspect that many of you have. Let us know your national park stats and highlights. | | —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | | | |
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