Week in Science: Do GLP-1s pose risks to older adults?

Plus, the winners of math's Nobel prizes                    

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July 24—The number of older adults in the U.S. on GLP-1s is set to skyrocket—which could begin a risky experiment. Plus, meet the winners of "math's Nobel Prizes" this year and an autonomous agent from OpenAI hacked into another artificial intelligence start-up company's infrastructure. Do you think you know what happened in the world of science this week? Take our Friday quiz. —Emma Gometz, Newsletter Editor How are you liking this newsletter? Email newsletters@sciam.com anytime.

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America is embarking on a risky experiment with GLP-1s and aging Are GLP-1s for life? What we know about getting older on weight-loss drugs Liz Seegert

How a Futurama writer’s plot problem led to a totally new math proof In an episode of the cartoon, a machine lets characters swap bodies, but they can’t switch back with the same person. Math helps all the characters return to their original bodies Manon Bischoff

Travel with Scientific American Discover the Wonder: The Monarch Butterfly Migration Reservations now open! Take an extraordinary trip to the Mexican mountains to witness the annual monarch butterfly migration. See oyamel fir forests transformed into living tapestries with Chief Newsletter Editor Andrea Gawrylewski as your guide. Learn More

Four young mathematicians awarded the 2026 Fields Medals The 2026 Fields Medals recognize breakthroughs in the math of messy fluids, tangled knots, spinning pencils, and more Joseph Howlett

Ancient Egyptian princesses were ‘powerful’ weapon users, new analysis suggests These findings challenge a long-held belief about weapons found in female burial sites Jackie Flynn Mogensen

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OpenAI admits its agent went rogue, triggering a major hack This incident underscores concerns over the increasingly powerful cybersecurity capabilities of new AI models Claire Cameron

This adorable bobtail squid is raising a family at –1.6 degrees Celsius The Arctic Ocean is one of the most extreme environments on Earth, but that’s not stopping this cephalopod Sanidhya Sharma

Permanent daylight savings is bad for Americans’ health—here’s what science says could be better More sunlight in the evenings doesn’t always equate to better health Claire Maldarelli

Mesmerizing NASA time-lapse reveals Mars’s craters, polar ice caps and deserts The Psyche spacecraft flew by Mars earlier this year on its way to a metal-rich asteroid, capturing the images along the way Sam Macdonald

The real danger in OpenAI’s Hugging Face hack This agent pursued its objective far beyond what researchers intended, revealing how difficult to contain powerful AI systems can be Chris Stokel-Walker

Neanderthals may have been just as smart as modern human peers A new skull-based analysis of Neanderthal brains suggests that these ancient hominins’ range of intelligence largely overlapped with our own Cody Cottier

U.S. cities have the worst air quality in the world right now—here’s how to stay safe Wildfire smoke may be as much as 10 times more dangerous than other forms of air pollution, research suggests Jackie Flynn Mogensen

A SpaceX rocket is about to crash into the moon—scientists will be watching Astronomers have a plan to observe an errant piece of a SpaceX rocket as it hits the moon to better understand impact events Claire Cameron

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