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October 6, 2025—The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is announced, we visit a room where sound gets swallowed, and physicists devise a surprising explanation for dark energy. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | How does your immune system know what's you and what's an outside germ invader or foreign material? The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded today to three scientists who conducted fundamental research on the immune system. Specifically, the scientists studied peripheral immune tolerance, a system that pumps the brakes on the immune system and keeps it from harming the body. The details: The work of prize winner Shimon Sakaguchi, now a distinguished professor at Osaka University, in Japan, helped him establish a new class of immune cells: regulatory T cells. Winners Mary E. Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell, both then researchers at the biotech company Celltech Chiroscience, pinpointed a mutant gene called Foxp3 as the key gene that controls T regulatory cells. Why this matters: The immune system is the first line of defense against germs and illness. Run amok, this system sometimes mistakes the body's own cells for foreign bodies, which can cause autoimmune diseases like arthritis and type I diabetes. The awardees' body of work has spurred hundreds of clinical trials on potential new treatments, such as therapies that may propagate regulatory T cells that can suppress overreactive immune responses in an autoimmune disease or organ transplant. | | Jeffery DelViscio, Kelso Harper, Fonda Mwangi, Naeem Amarsy/Scientific American | | At the Nokia Bell Labs in New Jersey, there's a room so quiet you can hear your own heartbeat. The room is a historic anechoic chamber (anechoic means "lacks echo"), and it absorbs 99.999 percent of the sound that's emitted. In the most recent episode of Science Quickly, host Rachel Feltman interviews Seth Cluett, an artist-in-residence at Nokia Labs, inside of the anechoic chamber. How it works: The room is a roughly 30 by 30 cube lined with long wedge panels in groups of three, offset in an orthogonal grid-like pattern. Organized this way, the panels capture sound waves before they're able to bounce back to their source. With two-foot thick walls and a gap of air that captures sound in between the room and the outer walls, the design almost entirely eliminates any outside sound. What can be done: Scientists have tested countless sound technologies in this anechoic chamber, such as the tools we use to record sound on our mobile phones. The lab also studies psychoacoustics, or how acoustic research pairs with psychology, including investigating why some phone tones are more memorable than others. In addition to science, numerous art-related projects have been conducted in the room, explains Cluett, including the research that led to the first computer singing, which was used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. —Andrea Tamayo, Newsletter Writer
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- A traveling salesman who lives in city A wants to visit all cities from B to P over the course of a week, though not necessarily in alphabetical order, and return to A at the end. He plans to enter each city exactly once. The blue lines are the only roads connecting the 16 cities. The traveling salesman may use only a straight route between any two cities; he is not allowed to turn at the intersection of two streets. How many different routes are possible? Click here for the solution.
| | Welcome to a new week of scientific discovery, especially at the start of Nobel season. We'll be back tomorrow with our exclusive take on the Nobel Prize for physics, and then chemistry on Wednesday, so lots of exciting science is on the way. Scientific American has not only been around since long before the start of the Nobel Prizes, but more than 130 Nobel laureates have written more than 200 articles in our pages. Here's a sampling. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor
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