Millions will be able to watch tomorrow as the moon turns an eerie color ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
March 2, 2025—U.S. cracks 1,000 measles cases. Plus, can math predict bad weather? And a blood-red lunar eclipse is happening tomorrow. Let's get to it! —Andrea Gawrylewski
Chief Newsletter Editor | | - A total lunar eclipse tomorrow will make the moon appear blood red to millions of skywatchers across the globe. | 2 min read
- The Trump administration wants to boost manufacturing of glyphosate, the world's most common weed killer. Here's what that could mean for health. | 5 min read
- In a canal in the Dutch city of Utrecht, fish are beginning to amass behind a lock called the Weerdsluis. For the sixth year in a row, you can help them get the attention of the lock's operators by ringing the fish doorbell. | 3 min read
- Why mathematicians hate the movie Good Will Hunting. | 7 min read
- Roboticist Benjie Holson created the "Humanoid Olympic Games"—a set of increasingly difficult tests for humanoid robots to complete. Holson thought the challenges would take years to be solved. It took months. | 5 min read
- Older people with exceptional memory have a surprisingly high number of young neurons, a study finds. | 3 min read
- The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has been paging astronomers 800,000 times a night. | 2 min read
| | Below is a sneak peek at tomorrow's edition of Proof Positive, a new weekly newsletter on math, written by theoretical physicist and math-lover Manon Bischoff. I think you'll love Manon's approachable way of explaining the math of everyday phenomena (and just some geeky math stuff). Plus, each newsletter will point you toward all our great math articles and include fun math puzzles. If you're a math lover or just math-curious, sign up for Proof Positive here. | | | Can Math Predict Bad Weather? | A few years ago I took a vacation in southern Spain. While admiring the centuries-old Moorish architecture of the city of Córdoba, it occurred to me that if you were to dig a tunnel straight through Earth, you would end up in Hamilton, New Zealand, about 100 kilometers south of Auckland. That makes the two places extremely special because few points on Earth have a habitable "antipode" on exactly the other side of the world. And antipodes have a curious characteristic: if I determine the exact temperature and barometric pressure in Córdoba, it is possible that the same weather conditions are prevailing in Hamilton at that time. Is that a coincidence? Not quite. In fact, it follows from purely mathematical considerations that there are always antipodes on Earth where this is the case: in both places, it is equally warm or cold, and their air pressure is identical. When I heard this for the first time, I was skeptical. How can a science that deals with abstract structures such as numbers, matrices and geometric spaces say anything about the weather? Nevertheless, this strange fact can be proven beyond doubt, thanks to the Borsuk-Ulam theorem, conjectured by mathematician Stanisław Ulam in the early 20th century and proved by mathematician Karol Borsuk in 1933.
| | If you dig a hole through the center of our planet, you'll usually end up in the ocean. In fact, few places have diametrically opposed points that are habitable. Citynoise/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5) | | To understand the theorem, it helps to start with a simple object: instead of looking at the surface of a sphere, start with an ordinary circle. Borsuk-Ulam's theorem is formulated in such a general way that it can be generalized to any dimension n. For n = 1, one works with a circular line—for example, the equator of Earth … | | The U.S. has officially surpassed 1,000 cases of measles in 2026, meaning that in just two months, the national total is already nearing half of all the 2,281 confirmed cases reported in 2025. More than a dozen states have reported outbreaks, but the majority of this year's infections are in South Carolina. Unvaccinated people account for more than 90 percent of cases in that state. The accelerating climb in cases is alarming public health experts.
What the experts say: "This is 100 percent a reflection of the recent declines in vaccination rates," says Amy Winter, a demographer and epidemiologist at the College of Public Health at the University of Georgia. "With immunity dropping, we are at real risk of measles becoming endemic again [in the U.S.] and infecting more people and potentially even killing more people," says Walter Orenstein, an epidemiologist and a professor emeritus at the Emory University School of Medicine.
Why this matters: The disease can cause an itchy rash, fever, severe brain inflammation and death. Babies under 12 months old who are too young for the vaccine, and people who are immunocompromised or have a medical condition that prevents them from receiving the vaccine are most at risk if herd immunity drops. Measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, but that measles-free status will likely be revoked in the coming months, experts say.
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There are 36 cards labeled with the numbers 1 through 36 and then placed face down on a table. If four cards are revealed one after the other, what is the probability that each card's number is larger than the last? For example, one such sequence of cards is 3, 15, 17, 33. | | - A close advisor to RFK, Jr., not only works as an anti-vaccine activist, but he also wants kids—including his own—to get polio, measles, and other diseases. | The Atlantic
- U.S. Congress rejected unprecedented cuts to science budgets. But funding to several federal agencies is still not flowing. | Nature
- The family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cells were taken without her consent in 1951 and used to develop vaccines and other medical treatments, reached a settlement with the pharmaceutical giant Novartis. | The New York Times
| | Do you like math? So-called math anxiety can develop as early as age six. There seems to be a narrative in the U.S. that math is extremely hard, and some people are very quick to say, "I'm terrible at math." Experts believe the fear around math may stem from this narrative, but also from a host of factors during early education, from grueling testing schedules to mixed teaching methods. We at Scientific American embrace math and some of my favorite articles investigate the math behind pop culture trends, video games and even who should shovel the snow. Math is the invisible language that forms the backbone of nearly every element of reality. Let's learn as much as we can! To that end, I do recommend you sign up for our new math newsletter, Proof Positive. | | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor
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