The most expensive dino fossil ever sold

Gus the T. rex just sold for $50,000,000 ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­

July 14, 2026—Sometimes, ChatGPT just needs a little encouragement. Plus, a conversation with surgeon Atul Gawande on the state of American science, and Gus the T. Rex just became the most expensive dino sold at auction. —Andrea Gawrylewski Chief Newsletter Editor TODAY'S NEWS Gus. TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP via Getty Images Today, a 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex fossil named “Gus” sold at Sotheby's for $50,130,000, becoming the most expensive dinosaur ever to sell at auction. | 2 min read Join the discussion: Do you think private buyers should be allowed to own important scientific specimens? Click here to share your thoughts. Earlier this month, scientists at the University of Minnesota announced they created a synthetic cell. The so-called SpudCell certainly resembles a living cell, but a key structure inside the cell falls short of the real thing, other experts say. | 4 min read Nearly 300,000 scientists and science advocates have left comments opposing a proposed rule that would give political appointees say over science grants. | 3 min read Record-breaking heat waves across the U.S. (and the globe) are beginning to blur together—here’s why and what’s making them so unbearable. | 3 min read We’ve long known that the Maya did math. But archaeologists  decoded a mysterious scrap of plaster they found preserved from at least 1,100 years ago in Guatemala, inscribed with the name of the first Mesoamerican mathematician that scientists have identified by name. | 3 min read Hazardous air pollution will blanket the cities of the Northeast this week as smoke from northern Minnesota wildfires drifts over the Great Lakes. | 2 min read Support the newsletter. Feed your curiosity. Subscribe to Scientific American for 90 days for just $1. TOP STORIES Encouragement Required OpenAI’s new LLM Sol just solved a 50-year-old math problem—and all it took was telling the AI not to give up. The model produced a proof for a conjecture that states almost any graph will have a “cycle double cover,” which is a special set of loops that cover the entire graph exactly twice—each edge is part of exactly two loops. For years, mathematicians have only been able to prove that certain graphs have a cycle double cover, but never a general proof. Last Friday, after lots of stern yet gentle encouragement, Sol generated one. ​ How it happened: When faced with a known challenging problem, LLMs tend to get out of solving it themselves by returning to the person prompting them with a statement about how the problem remains unsolved, or with information about who tried to solve it before. The hardest part is getting an AI to actually put an effort into solving it. (This feels true for humans, too!) The prompters behind the proof said they told Sol not to dismiss the problem and gave it some firm encouragement: “Spend at least 8 hours on this before even thinking of returning or giving up.” What the experts say: Once a problem gets a reputation for being “hard,” experts and students might spend less time on it, too, says Andrew Sutherland, a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This can make perceived difficulty a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy—for AI and humans alike. —Emma Gometz, Newsletter Editor Priyanka Parashar/Mint/Getty Images Implementing Innovation Atul Gawande is a surgeon, author and public health expert. He holds a chair and professorship in surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and at Harvard Medical School, respectively. He previously served as assistant administrator for global health at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and has written four books. We sat down with Gawande to discuss the state of American science. An abbreviated version of that conversation is below. Scientific American: How would you describe the current state of American science? Atul Gawande: Oh, it’s tough. We start out with an amazing base that’s been built up over decades. It’s the talent, it’s the resources, it’s the openness to the world and our brand. We’re recognized as the place to go if you want to do cutting-edge science, make discoveries and make a difference. But the past year has been gutting. It’s not just the cuts, it’s the weakening of core institutions such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation and then the places that deploy discoveries, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and USAID. SA: What gives you optimism right now? AG: The reality is that the demand for people who will bring hard-nosed careful science and the spirit of curiosity, inquiry and problem-solving is there. It’s present in our technology sector in many ways, where the U.S. is driving leadership in the world. SA: How has your field changed in the past few years? AG: My fields are public health, surgery and health-care delivery in the U.S. And what I’d say is, over the past few years, these are spaces where we did not normally think of bringing molecular science and population health science and implementing innovation. But we’re getting dramatic results when we do. Understanding how to create better systems and ways for teams to collaborate can have extraordinary results. We’ve cut the death rate for surgery by more than a third with some simple changes, including a checklist that has people working together more effectively. And this is happening across many other sectors as we think about how we bring the complexity of an enormous amount of capability into primary care, into childbirth, and beyond.  Read the full interview here.​

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YOUNG AMERICAN SCIENTISTS Kelso Harper, Marta Hill Erini Lambrides is an astrophysicist at NASA and the University of Maryland studying supermassive black holes and the phenomenon called Little Red Dots. These dots are pockmarks in images from the James Webb Space Telescope that seem to indicate the brief—in universal time—period when these black holes were growing. There are so many of them, she says, that they are rewriting astrophysicists’ understanding of the beginnings of galaxies and the formation of black holes. Read all Young American Scientists profiles here. PUZZLER Can you unscramble this image of our cover from the October 1929 issue? The reassembled cover shows an autogiro (a type of aircraft now more widely known as a gyroplane or gyrocopter) and the associated article features a “Non-technical Explanation” of its operation. Former Scientific American editor Kate Wong wrote an excellent article on the sale of Gus. In it, she gathers feedback from many paleontologists who hold strong opinions on the sale of fossils to private buyers. I highly recommend you check out her story in Wired, but this quote from Kristi Curry Rogers, a paleontologist at Macalester College, has stayed with me all day: “A scientifically important fossil isn't just a static object; it's a permanent source of data that future generations of scientists will study with tools that haven't even been invented yet—but only if the fossil remains in the public trust,” she told Kate. “Think about all the cool discoveries that have been made in the last 50 years about dinosaur diets, body temperatures, coloration, reproduction, vocalization, neurobiology—none of these discoveries would have been possible if the fossils had disappeared into private collections." Thanks for reading and let me know what you think about this newsletter by sending comments to: newsletters@sciam.com. See you tomorrow. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor

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