Today in Science: ChatGPT solves 60-year-old math problem

It thought of a solution no human ever did ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­

April 24, 2026—Happy Friday! A handy new material that's kind of like plastic and kind of like glass. Plus, some rare good news on the mental health front, and ChatGPT solved a 60-year-old math conjecture. —Andrea Gawrylewski Chief Newsletter Editor TOP NEWS A view of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope inside a clean room at the space agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center. NASA/Sydney Rohde The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will launch in early September, NASA announced this week. The observatory will probe the accelerating expansion of the universe and chart vast numbers of distant planets, stars and galaxies. | 4 min read  A rift in Earth’s crust is just a few million years away from splitting the continent of Africa into two—and creating a new ocean, according to new research. | 2 min read President Trump has promised to secure Iran’s nuclear “dust.” Here's how the U.S. would remove it (first of all, it's actually a gas). | 4 min read Wildfire “red flag” warnings are in effect for a huge swath of the central U.S. Here's what that means. | 3 min read An amateur solved a 60-year old math conjecture by asking ChatGPT. The AI used a method no human had thought of. | 4 min read  Spring bird migrations are ramping up. Artificial light at night affects birds’ circadian rhythms and their navigational sense. | 3 min read Two neurogeneticists who discovered a common root of two neurological diseases won the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. | 7 min read More News Support science journalism you can trust with a subscription to Scientific American. Try it out for 90 days for just $1! TOP STORY Not Plastic, Not Glass As anyone who’s used Tupperware knows, plastic and glass have different strengths and weaknesses. Glass melts slowly but shatters easily, whereas plastic solidifies and melts abruptly but can better withstand impact. “Compleximers” are a new substance that melts slowly like glass and is impact-resistant like plastic. Someday this paradoxical stuff could make it easier to fashion and fix sturdy protective gear like helmets. How it works: For decades scientists have observed that the lower the melting rate of glass or plastic, the less impact it can bear. But a recent study describing compleximers showed they completely defy this law. The trick could lie in the material’s structure: its long chains of molecules, called polymers, are held together by ionic bonds. In this structure, charged molecules in the material make the polymer chains cling to one another, and those bonds hold over longer distances than other chemical bonds. What the experts say: Ionic interactions could make compleximers easier to work with. For example, their slow melting means compleximer-based objects would be easier to fix than ones made of durable plastics like thermosets. “Just by heating it with a heat gun, you can repair a scratch or a crack,” says Jasper van der Gucht, a physical chemist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. —Emma Gometz, newsletter editor

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INFOGRAPHIC OF THE DAY Since 2005, people in the U.S. struggling with thoughts of suicide have been able to call a hotline number for help. In July 2022, the hotline number was shortened from a ten-digit number to simply “988.” After the shortening, the number of calls doubled, and an analysis of suicide mortality across the country found that deaths by suicide among young adults have fallen by 11 percent since the hotline was introduced. Amanda Montañez; Source: “Suicide Mortality among Adolescents and Young Adults after Launch of a Suicide and Crisis Lifeline,” by Vishal R. Patel et al., in JAMA. Published online April 22, 2026 (data) IMAGE OF THE WEEK NASA/ESA/STScI/Joseph DePasquale/STScI The Hubble Space Telescope turns 36 this year. To celebrate, it released an incredible new image of the Trifid Nebula, a formation dubbed the “Cosmic Sea Lemon” or a “Cosmic Sea Slug” hidden inside a stellar nursery some 5,000 light-years away. PLAY NOW Test how well you paid attention to the news this week with today's science quiz. Also, check out today's Spellements puzzle. If you spot any missing science terms from the puzzle, email them to games@sciam.com.  More Games MOST POPULAR STORIES OF THE WEEK What is Mythos, Anthropic’s unreleased AI model, and how worried should we be? | 3 min read Master of chaos wins $3-million math prize for ‘blowing up’ equations | 5 min read NASA’s 2028 moonshot may be delayed because of lack of space suits, watchdog report warns | 4 min read Thanks for reading Today in Science this week. We'll reveal the results to your favorite dinosaur poll on Monday. If you haven't already logged your answer, there's still time!  And reach out to me anytime: newsletters@sciam.com.  See you Monday! —Andrea Gawrylewski Chief Newsletter Editor

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