Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific AmericanIt is Science quicklymy name is Kendra Pierre-Louis, I’m replacing Rachel Feltman. You are listening to our weekly summary of scientific news.
First of all, if you feel like almost everyone you know has the flu, is recovering from it, or is just getting over it, you’re not entirely wrong.
In the United States, more than 8% of all visits to a health care provider during the week ended December 27 were for respiratory illnesses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s the highest rate the agency has recorded since it began tracking the situation in 1997. According to the CDC, so far this season, the flu has contributed to about 120,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths, including nine in children.
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The surge comes even as the CDC has rolled back its flu vaccine guidelines for children. In early January, the agency reversed its decade-old recommendation that everyone over six months get vaccinated. The agency now advises parents to discuss flu 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 found effective. They also removed web pages linked to the campaigns.
Much of the rise in cases and hospitalizations this flu season appears to be due to a new variation 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 suggests that even if they do get the flu, they are less likely to infect other people.
Although the current vaccine does not perfectly match the K subclade, since it was developed months before the variant was identified, it nevertheless reduces the risk of severe disease, according to preliminary data from University of Pennsylvania researchers.
And of course, wearing well-fitted masks such as N95 and KN95 in indoor public spaces can also help reduce the risk of catching the flu. If you get sick, drink plenty of fluids, stay home, and get as much rest as you can, although the flu can make it difficult to sleep.
Speaking of sleep, a new study led by Stanford University researchers details a new way to potentially predict future disease risk while you catch your Zzzz‘s.
The researchers built what’s called a base model, a kind of AI model that trains on massive data sets and then applies that information in specific contexts. Examples of core models are large language models like ChatGPT and multimodal delivery models like the AI video application Sora 2.
In the new study, the researchers trained their model, called SleepFM, on sleep polysomnography data. Scientists call it the “gold standard” in sleep assessment. It uses sensors to record a host of body 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 polysomnographic data from 65,000 patients, far more information than anyone could process on their own.
Once the model was trained, the researchers began testing it, first analyzing fundamental aspects of sleep, such as the different stages. The team says they found that SleepFM worked as well, if not better, than most sleep models currently in use. The researchers then studied whether their model could predict health outcomes based on sleep behavior. To figure this out, they returned to the Stanford Sleep Medicine Center. The center provided sleep data for more than half of the patients the team trained the model on and retrieved information about their long-term health outcomes.
Ultimately, researchers found that SleepFM successfully predicted Parkinson’s disease, dementia, hypertensive heart disease, heart attacks, prostate cancer, breast cancer, and death. These are also health problems that poor sleep is thought to contribute to.
Perhaps most interesting is that, according to Emmanuel Mignot, co-senior author of the study, the best predictors of disease lay not in looking at a single unit of data – such as cardiac data – but in the combination of information. He says: “A brain that seems asleep but a heart that seems awake, for example, seems to spell trouble. » SleepFM reminds us of the many ways technology can impact our lives.
To learn more about how technology is shaking things up, let’s head to Las Vegas, where ScientificAmerican Eric Sullivan, Senior Technical Editor, was on the ground at the CES technology conference. Here it is.
Eric Sullivan: CES is the largest consumer technology conference in America. This happens every January in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was launched in 1967 and bounced around cities for a while. It brings together more than 150,000 people, a little less last year.
CES is important because it’s an opportunity for all of these different people involved in technology, at all levels, to come together, discuss and check out the latest products to try to locate the trends that will ultimately help them make their business decisions as they head into the new year.
And so there’s also a lot of media there. Media is a much smaller segment, but we’re here to observe trends and try to get a sense of where different sectors of the tech industry are going.
So CES 2026 seemed to be the year AI moved out of the talk box and into the real world. AI has appeared in the physical manifestations of all kinds of products. And physical AI is real hardware that works alongside humans in the real world and that includes humanoid robots, which were also everywhere this year.
I think one of the challenges I faced was trying to understand the perception of technology as it relates to humanoid robots and the actual reality of whether it was actually a leap forward. However, this is clearly a major trend in the industry.
From all the incessant talk at CES this year about artificial intelligence, including in accessibility technologies. You know, I think some of the most insightful things I heard came from none other than Stevie Wonder, who I spotted walking across the exhibit floor. He was accompanied by a few teachers, but I was able to sit nearby and ask him a few questions.
And he’s not new to the world of technology. Stevie Wonder has used technology in his music for decades. So I was curious to know if he would consider using artificial intelligence in his new album, which will be his first album in 20 years. He didn’t hesitate. He said: “I’m not going to let my music be programmed. I’m not going to use it to make myself and make the music that I made.”
So I think he wasn’t rejecting technology so much as he was protecting what he considers human territory. The human domain. He said: “We can keep talking about technology. Let’s see how you can make things better for people in their lives – not to imitate life but to make life better for the living.”
And I think that quote really stood out to me, and it really framed the rest of the exhibition for me – the idea that technology, at its best, is not necessarily the shiny object that’s trying to replace human beings. It’s technology that tries to improve the lives of those who are here.
So what I take away from CES 2026 is that AI is now an infrastructure. It dominates the chips developed, the platforms created, the computing developed, and AI enters the physical world in the form of robots, devices that we wear and interact with every day.
And I think the best announcements we saw at CES were the ones that really made it seem like these two pathways are connected. You can find out more at my experiences at CES 2026 on scientificamerican.com
Pierre-Louis: And finally, some fun animal news. Research led by Brown University scientists offers new insight into how nature’s first headbangers, woodpeckers, are so adept at pounding wood.
These small birds can pierce solid wood with a force of up to 30 times their own weight while striking their beaks up to 13 times per second. To find out how, researchers humanely captured eight downy woodpeckers. Once the birds were in the lab, the researchers carefully inserted electrodes into the animals’ muscles to record signals when they pecked.
According to the study, the electrodes revealed that for woodpeckers, the pecking involves the entire body. The birds tightened their tails and abs in preparation, pushing their hip flexors and tightening the backs of their heads, mirroring the way you or I might squeeze the backs of our wrists while hammering a nail.
Nicholas Antonson, a Brown biologist and lead author of the study, said SciAm“Woodpeckers really are nature’s hammer in a sense.”
That’s all for today’s episode. Tune in Wednesday for a deep dive into the strange world of seed oils.
Science quickly is produced by me, Kendra Pierre-Louis, with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck check in on our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more recent and in-depth scientific news.
For Scientific American, This is Kendra Pierre-Louis. Have a good week!
