Center Pierre-Louis: For scientific American‘S science quicklyI’m Kendra Pierre-Louis on behalf of Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to our weekly science news roundup.
First of all, if it seems like almost everyone you know has the flu, or is recovering from the flu or has just recovered from the flu, you’re not entirely wrong.
In the US, more than 8 percent of visits to a health care provider in the week ending Dec. 27 were for respiratory illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s the highest rate the agency has recorded since it began tracking in 1997. So far this season, the flu has hospitalized an estimated 120,000 people and killed 5,000, including nine children, according to the CDC.
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The surge comes as the CDC withdrew its flu vaccine guidance for children. In early January the agency reversed its decade-long recommendation that everyone over the age of six months be vaccinated. The agency now advises parents to discuss influenza vaccination with their child’s doctor. Last year, shortly after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was sworn in as Secretary of Health and Human Services, the CDC canceled a promotional campaign encouraging flu vaccination that health officials had deemed effective. They also removed webpages related to the campaign.
Much of the increase in cases and hospitalizations this flu season appears to be driven by a new variant of H3N2 known as subclade K. The good news is that vaccinated people are less likely to be hospitalized or die from the flu, and research shows that even if they do get the flu, they may be less likely to infect others.
Although the current vaccine is not a perfect fit for subtype K because it was developed months before the variant was identified, it still reduces the risk of severe disease, according to preliminary data from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.
And of course, wearing securely fitting masks like N95s and KN95s in indoor public places can also help reduce your chances of getting the flu. If you do get sick, drink plenty of fluids, stay home and rest as much as you can – although the flu may make it difficult to sleep.
If we talk about sleep, a new study A new way to potentially predict future disease risk while you’re catching your Z’s is being led by Stanford University researchers.Jade‘S.
The researchers created a Foundation Model, which is a type of AI model that trains itself on massive datasets and then applies that information to specific contexts. Large language models like ChatGPT and multimodal diffusion models like the video AI app Sora2 are examples of foundation models.
In the new study, researchers trained their model, called SleepFM, on polysomnography sleep data. Scientists call it the “gold standard” of sleep assessment. It uses sensors to record a variety of physiological data such as eye and leg movements and brain activity while the patient sleeps (or at least tries to). The team was able to train their model on nearly 600,000 hours of polysomnography data from 65,000 patients, which was far more information than any person could process on their own.
Once the model was trained the researchers began testing it, first analyzing basic aspects such as the different stages of sleep. The team says it found that SleepFM performed as well, if not better, than many sleep models currently in use. The researchers then explored whether their model could predict health outcomes based on sleep behavior. They went back to the Stanford Sleep Medicine Center to find out. The center provided sleep data for more than half of the patients on whom the team trained the model and obtained information about their long-term health outcomes.
Ultimately, researchers found that SleepFM was successful in predicting Parkinson’s disease, dementia, hypertensive heart disease, heart attacks, prostate cancer, breast cancer, and death. These are also all health consequences to which poor sleep is thought to contribute.
Perhaps most interestingly, according to Emmanuel Mignot, co-senior author of the study, the best predictor for disease was not when they looked at a single unit of data – such as heart data – but when they combined the information. He says, “For example, a brain that appears to be asleep but a heart that appears to be awake appears to be causing trouble.” SleepFM is a reminder of the many ways technology can impact our lives.
For more on how technology is shaking things up, let’s go to Las Vegas, where scientific american Senior Technical Editor, Eric Sullivan, was on the ground at the CES technology conference. Here he is.
Eric Sullivan: CES is America’s largest consumer technology conference. It takes place every January in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was launched in 1967 and continued to roam in cities for some time. More than 150,000 people are gathering in it, which is slightly less than last year.
CES matters because it’s an opportunity for all these different people involved in technology, at every level, to come together and brainstorm and check out the latest products and explore trends that will ultimately help drive their business decisions in the new year.
And hence there is a lot of media there also. Media is a very small segment, but we are there to observe trends and try to understand where different areas in the technology industry are headed.
So CES 2026 felt like the year that AI moved out of the chat box and into the real world. AI appeared in physical manifestations of all kinds of products. And physical AI is actual hardware that operates alongside humans in the real world and includes humanoid robots, which were everywhere this year.
I think one of the challenges I faced was trying to figure out the perception of the technology and the actual reality when it comes to humanoid robots and whether it was really a leap forward. However, this is clearly a major trend in the industry.
There was continued discussion about artificial intelligence at CES this year, including accessibility technology. You know, I think one of the most enlightening things I heard was from none other than Stevie Wonder, who I saw walking around the expo floor. There were some operators with him, but I was able to sit down with him and ask him some questions.
And he is not new to the world of technology. Stevie Wonder has been using technology in his music for decades. So I was curious to know if he plans to use any artificial intelligence in his new album, i.e., this will be his first album in 20 years. He did not give any vague answer. He said, “I will not let my music be programmed. I will not use it to discredit me and the music I have made.”
So I think he wasn’t rejecting technology so much as he was protecting what he considered the human sphere. Human domain. He said, “We can keep talking about technology. Let’s see how you make things better in people’s lives – not to simulate life but to make life better by living life.”
And, I think that quote really stuck with me, and it really framed the rest of the expo for me – the notion that technology, at its best, isn’t necessarily this shiny object that’s trying to replace humans. This is technology that is trying to improve the lives of the people present here.
So my takeaway from CES 2026 is that AI is now mainstream. It is dominating the chips that are developed, the platforms that are built, the computations that are being developed, and AI is entering the physical world in the form of robots, the devices we wear, the devices we interact with every day.
And I think the best announcements we saw at CES were the ones that made those two lanes really feel connected. You can read more about my experiences at CES 2026 on Scientific American.com.
Pierre-Louis: And finally, some fun animal news. Research led by Brown University scientists provides new insight into just how adept woodpeckers, nature’s original headbangers, are at chopping wood.
The small birds can pierce solid wood with a force 30 times their body weight, while biting their beaks 13 times per second. To find out, researchers humanely captured eight downy woodpeckers. Once the birds were in the laboratory, researchers carefully inserted electrodes into the animals’ muscles to record their pecking signals.
According to the study, the electrodes revealed that for woodpeckers, pecking is a whole-body affair. The birds tense their tails and bellies in preparation, tense their hip flexors and tense the backs of their heads, reminiscent of how you or I might tighten the backs of our wrists when hammering a nail.
Brown biologist and lead author of the study, Nicholas Antonson, said: Science“Woodpeckers are really nature’s hammer in a sense.”
That’s all for today’s episode. Tune in Wednesday, when we dive deeper into the strange world of seed oils.
science quickly It is produced by me, Kendra Pierre-Louis, with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak, and Jeff DelVisio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Scheana Poses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. agree scientific American For more latest and in-depth science news.
For scientific American, This is Center Pierre-Louis. have a great week!
