White supremacy has never rested solely on violence or coercion. It has depended just as much on deception: a widely accepted story about race that framed inequality as natural, inevitable, and even necessary. Central to that story was the invention of “whiteness,” not as a biological fact, but as a political and social tool designed […]
The space around Earth has become increasingly cluttered with decades of accumulated debris left over from rocket launches, derelict satellites, and the occasional antisatellite weapon test—not to mention growing mega constellations of thousands of active satellites. This influx of traffic means satellite operators have a fast-shrinking window of time to avoid a catastrophic collision in an emergency.
“While we had many months in the past, we now have less than a week for a close passage of serious concern—quite possibly a major collision,” says Aaron Boley, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia.
A new “Collision Realization and Significant Harm (CRASH) Clock” measure, described by Boley and his colleagues in a preprint posted to the server arXiv.org, shows how the rise of mega constellations has created an “orbital house of cards.” The clock uses statistics to estimate how long spacecraft now have to avoid a dangerous close pass or a collision, Boley says.
That reaction window has shrunk considerably since satellite mega constellations took off with the launch of SpaceX’s first Starlink satellites in 2019. The researchers’ latest, unpublished calculations suggest that the CRASH clock value stood at about 5.5 days as of June 2025, compared with 164 days back in January 2018. The clock suggests the average satellite in low-Earth orbit currently faces a 17 percent chance of a close approach that could lead to a collision within 24 hours, which means satellites must make more frequent evasive maneuvers than they used to.
“As a concept, the CRASH Clock is powerful because it turns ‘space is getting crowded’ into a time-based metric people can understand,” says Aaron Rosengren, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study. “The exact number matters less than the trend.”
The calculation looks at the current orbits of all cataloged objects and makes simplified assumptions about factors such as satellite distributions in orbit. It doesn’t account for different maneuvering policies or risk thresholds among satellite operators.
Spacecraft may not always be able to act quickly enough to avoid a crash, especially if software glitches or powerful solar storms interfere. In 2019, a European Space Agency science satellite had to dodge a SpaceX Starlink satellite, in part because of a “bug” in the communication system used between the agency and Starlink. More recently, this month, SpaceX described a near miss between one of its Starlink vehicles and a newly launched Chinese satellite.
The risk of collision and the cascading buildup of space debris—described as Kessler-Cour-Palais Syndrome—is only growing as companies and governments launch more satellites into similar orbits. The more than 9,000 Starlink satellites that are currently active account for about two thirds of all active satellites. Rivals such as Amazon’s Project Kuiper and Chinese companies are also racing to build their own mega constellations. Future plans for orbital space mirrors and space data centers may further complicate the situation.
The challenge is to coordinate collision avoidance among so many independent organizations that use different tools for monitoring space and do not all share information equally, Rosengren says. “The biggest driver is simple arithmetic,” he adds. “Far more satellites in the same orbital bands means far more close approaches, and the screening and response workload grows extremely fast.”
This holiday season, an unexpected treat has stepped into the limelight and onto the buffet table at many a festive gathering: the Jell-O shot. But the shot in question, which is currently going viral on TikTok and popping up on high-end menus across New York City, is nothing like the ones you probably remember from the sticky basement of a college frat party. Instead, these treats are sleek, refined, classy, and coveted—in short, the opposite of electric green slime in a plastic cup.
Brooklyn-based Solid Wiggles, cofounded by pastry chef Jena Derman and mixologist Jack Schramm, is among the pioneers of this Jell-O shot revival. Founded in 2020, the company describes its mission as “reimagining the nostalgic Jell-O shot” with its “cocktail jellies” that double as edible art. Flavors include margarita, espresso martini, and mezcal negroni, all presented in eye-catching cubes with expertly layered colors, flavors, and designs. A 40-piece, full-menu sampler costs $115.
After just five years in business, Solid Wiggles are on the menu at 20 bars and restaurants in the U.S., including NYC’s ultrapopular restaurant Tatiana, helmed by James Beard award-winning chef Kwame Onwuachi. According to Derman, the brand’s sales have roughly doubled every year for the past three years, and it’s gearing up to release its own cookbook with Penguin Random House in 2026.
A clear trend is emerging: the Jell-O shot is getting a rebrand as a classy treat for a more mature drinker (foodie?) In a growing number of circles, it’s no longer a kitschy throwback, but instead a fashionable food statement.
The Jell-O shot’s tasteful rebrand
To get a taste of the Jell-O shot’s newfound popularity, one need only search the term on TikTok and browse through some of the most popular videos.
“Maturing is realizing your friends will take jello shots if you call them ‘edible cocktails,’” reads the caption of one recent TikTok with 13,000 likes, starring Jell-O shots with encased maraschino cherries cut into cubes.
Another TikTok of “lychee martini jello-shots with cherries,” once again artfully cubed (and this time dusted in powdered sugar), amassed nearly 140,000 likes in just two days. And a third YouTube Short, also sharing a lychee martini shot recipe, recently surpassed half a million views.
“I’m 27, and a real shot sends chills through my literal spine these days,” creator @babytamazz explains in the clip. “I’m still gonna take them, but a Jell-O shot is just preferred at this time. Plus, they’re so fun and bitchy and an awesome party pull.”
Perhaps the most popular video, though, was created by the publication Punch and features Solid Wiggles’ unique take on the Jell-O shot. Derman says it’s now been viewed more than eight million times across social media, leading to what she described as a “colossal” spike in sales just before the holidays.
Solid Wiggles has spent five years trying to convince consumers that the Jell-O shot can be cool—and, clearly, it’s paying off.
All year, top Democrats have shown a striking awareness of one of their biggest problems.
The party, Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told NPR this month, needs to show how it will “shake up the status quo.”
“Embrace change,” Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan urged on “The Daily Show” in May. “The Democratic Party should be leading, rather than just saying: ‘No, no, no. Status quo, status quo.’”
“We have become the party of the status quo, when we’re not,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told NBC News in March.
As they try to repair their political brand before the midterm elections, Democrats are rushing to redefine themselves as Washington disrupters, eager to challenge a government that many Americans believe has failed to improve their lives.
For years, Democratic leaders have cast their party as a firewall against the threats to American democracy they argue are posed by President Trump and his political movement. With their fierce opposition to Mr. Trump, Democrats became the party of institutional preservation, championing political norms, expertise, and the role of the federal government.
But with Republicans now in control of Washington, many Democratic politicians are trying to revamp their image with promises to upend existing power structures, whether they are the Trump administration, Congress or even their own party orthodoxy. It is a message for an electorate that barely trusts government, politicians, or Washington to accomplish any change at all.
“I took on the powerful and corrupt Democrats,” Mayor Paige Cognetti of Scranton, a Democrat running for a swing House seat in northeast Pennsylvania, said in a video announcing her run that was widely praised across her party. “We can stand tall against a Washington that takes advantage of working people.”
Combating a ‘Corrupt System’
But changing the party’s image won’t be easy for Democrats.
For much of the past year, they have fiercely opposed efforts by the Trump administration to drastically cut the size of the federal government. They have protested the shuttering of agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development, defended federal workers, and backed lawsuits filed by federal unions and advocacy groups.
Democrats know that those actions have affected how voters view their party. In the spring, congressional lawmakers were briefed in private meetings on polling by Navigator Research, a progressive public opinion firm, showing that a majority of voters described Democrats as focused on “preserving the way government works,” while only 20 percent said the same of Republicans, according to slides of the presentation given to The New York Times.
The challenge Democrats face is how to simultaneously defend government institutions that Mr. Trump is trying to gut while also offering a forward-looking message that resonates with voters who believe politics and democracy are broken.
“We have to embrace the need for change and reform. At the same time, I’m not interested in throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” said Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a Democrat chosen by his party’s House campaign arm to recruit candidates. “We end programs that aren’t working, we reform agencies that are not delivering, and then we preserve those that are.”
Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California who is trying to position himself as a leader of his party, said Democrats needed to do more than simply oppose Mr. Trump to restore the trust and support of voters.
“We can’t start with just, ‘We want to return to normalcy,’” he said. “What we need is a vision for change and holding elites accountable that is consistent with our values and our Constitution, and that we have a positive vision of building things up, not just a negative vision of tearing things down.”
What that vision is, exactly, remains unclear. Deep divisions on policy issues, including taxes and the role of money in politics, are already dividing the party in increasingly contentious primary races across the country.
Government-Critical Veterans of Government
Many Democratic candidates believe they will connect with voters better if they start by acknowledging that government — including their own party — has not always worked. The problem is that many of those candidates have been part of state and federal government for years.
In Minnesota, both Democrats competing for the state’s open Senate seat have cast themselves as independent-minded fighters eager to upend the status quo.
.
“The Democratic Party should be leading, rather than just saying: ‘No, no, no. Status quo, status quo,’” Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, left, said in May. Next to her on the Capitol steps is Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey.Credit…Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
This year has seen some amazing advancements in fundamental mathematics. Researchers have made breakthroughs in geometry, topology, chaos theory, and more. And a startling three of our top 10 discoveries involve the perennially fascinating prime numbers.
Without further ado, here are some of the most fascinating math findings Scientific American wrote about in 2025:
A New Shape
A newfound shape called a noperthedron has 90 vertices, 240 edges, and 152 faces. The baroque shape has a surprising property that disproves a long-standing geometrical conjecture: no matter how you shift or rotate it, one noperthedron can’t fall through a straight hole in an identical noperthedron.
Prime Number Patterns
Prime numbers, divisible only by themselves and 1, have long fascinated mathematicians. Discovering new ones is difficult as you get to larger and larger numbers. But this year, mathematicians have found a set of probabilistic patterns that govern how the primes are distributed. The patterns involve random chaotic behavior and fractals.
A Grand Unified Theory
A “gargantuan” effort involving nine mathematicians and five papers spanning almost 1,000 pages recently proved the geometric Langlands conjecture. The conjecture connects the properties of different Riemann surfaces, which are structures with coordinates that have real and imaginary parts. It is part of a broader set of problems called the Langlands program, which, if fully proven, could provide a “grand unified theory of mathematics.”
Knot Complexity
A long-standing conjecture stated that if you attach the ends of two different knots to each other, the complexity of the new knot you create will be the sum of the individual knots’ complexity. But the recent discovery of a knot that is simpler than the sum of its parts disproves that assumption.
Fibonacci Problems
The Fibonacci sequence, in which each term is the sum of the previous two (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, …) shows up throughout nature. And now mathematicians have found that it also provides an answer to a variation of a classic quandary called the pick-up sticks problem: If you have a number of sticks with random lengths between 0 and 1, what are the chances that no three of those sticks can form a triangle?
Detecting Primes
The largest known prime number, 2136,279,841 − 1, is 41,024,320 digits long, but mathematicians aren’t satisfied—they want to find even bigger primes. This year, a team identified a new approach for finding undiscovered prime numbers. The strategy involves partitions, or ways numbers can add up to make other numbers.
125-Year-Old Problem Solved
In 1900 mathematician David Hilbert presented a series of major unsolved problems. One of them was the goal of determining the fewest possible mathematical assumptions behind the laws of physics. Researchers later broke up this task into subgoals, and this year mathematicians claimed to have completed one of them: they unified three physical theories to explain the motion of fluids. If the achievement is confirmed, it will be a major step toward solving Hilbert’s sixth problem.
Triangles to Squares
How many pieces must you cut a triangle into to be able to rearrange it into a square? In 1902, a newspaper reader found a way to do it with four pieces, but no one has managed to do it in fewer pieces since then. This year, researchers finally proved that a triangle cut into fewer than four pieces cannot be turned into a square.
Moving Sofas
Anyone who’s moved houses can appreciate the dilemma of trying to fit a large couch around a corner. Mathematicians formally recognized the question around 60 years ago when they dubbed it the “moving sofa problem”: What is the largest shape that can turn a right angle in a narrow corridor without getting stuck? Researchers have now found a solution.
Catching Prime Numbers
Another breakthrough on the prime front is a new method for estimating how many prime numbers exist within any given range of numbers. The strategy first relies on eliminating all numbers that are multiples of other primes and therefore can’t be primes themselves. It then accounts for numbers that get crossed off the list more than once. The study’s authors also discovered a limit to how precise any estimate of this sort can be, showing that the fundamental mysteries of primes will remain elusive, at least for now.
From graceful figure skaters to brutish ice hockey players, the act of wearing ice skates can transform a frozen pond from a nightmare to navigate into a dream.
Although ice itself is normally a slick, low-friction surface that’s very hard to steady yourself on and move across in a controlled fashion, the act of ice skates makes it not only possible, but easy.
This is due to a combination of properties that are specific to water and its solid form, ice, that are only rarely found in nature. The ability to ice skate truly is a miracle of physics.
Imagine there’s a large, flat sheet of ice out in front of you, and someone unceremoniously shoves you across it at a high speed. What are you to do? If you’re wearing conventional shoes without crampons or blades attached to them, you’re going to have a difficult time. Ice is a very low-friction surface, and there’s very little you’re going to be able to do to change your momentum without slipping and perhaps falling down. You’re bound to simply slide along until either you run into an obstacle or slowly come to rest, likely a long way from where you began.
But if you put thin blades on the bottoms of your shoes — e.g., wear ice skates — you’ll discover that the situation is very much different in this case. As long as you can remain on your feet, with only your blades touching the ice, you’ll find that you can control your motion relatively easily, simply by applying forces through your feet (and the blades) to the ice down below. You can speed up, slow down, or change direction at will, and only if you fall or lose control of your skates (and body) will you wind up in a similar situation to the no ice skate case. It might seem miraculous, but there’s physics behind what you’re experiencing at each and every step. Here’s how it all works.
On Earth, the most common form that ice takes is with a hexagonal crystalline ice structure, which explains why snowflakes typically exhibit hexagonal symmetry as well as the shape of these lab-grown plate-on-pedestal crystals.
Credit: K.G. Libbrecht, arXiv preprint, 2015
Here on the surface of Earth, at normal atmospheric pressure and wherever you have sub-freezing temperatures, almost all of the ice you’ll encounter comes in a very specific configuration: normal hexagonal crystalline ice, sometimes known as Ice Ih. Ice, just like water, is made up of primarily a very simple molecule (H2O) with two hydrogen atoms anchored by a single oxygen atom, and with a very specific bond angle between them. Whereas in liquid water, the bond angle is 104.5° between the connecting lines of each O-H bond, in normal hexagonal crystalline ice, the bond is lengthened into the shape of a more perfect tetrahedron: 109.5°.
Under different temperature and pressure conditions found on Earth and elsewhere in the Universe, different possibilities arise for how those various molecules bind together, creating a massive variety of possible configurations. At present, there are a whopping 20 known phases of ice, including:
Ice Ih, which is normal hexagonal crystalline ice and the most common form of ice found on or near Earth’s surface,
Ice Ic, which is a cubic crystalline variant of ice whose oxygen atoms are arranged in a diamond structure, that often appear at the lower temperatures found in the upper atmosphere.
And amorphous ice, which has no crystalline structure and is sometimes formed at ambient atmospheric pressure,
in addition to the higher-pressure/temperature phases of ice: Ice 2 through Ice 18.
At a variety of temperatures and pressures, water will take on a variety of states: solid, liquid, and gas. With high enough pressures, so long as your ice temperature remains above -8 F (-22 C), ice can melt from the Ih phase, the most common phase found on Earth, into the liquid phase.
Credit: Cmglee/Wikimedia Commons
However, it’s the most common form of ice, plain old Ice Ih, that’s relevant for the problem of ice skating. Normally, under this configuration, the water molecules within ice are arranged in a hexagonal crystal lattice, and adding new water molecules to these icy structures will simply result in the growth of the main crystal in the same ongoing pattern. Adding more molecules won’t change the structure of your ice; it will simply cause those new molecules to bind together to the available spaces open in the underlying lattice, keeping the same “type” of ice but just making more and more of it.
If you want to change the form of ice that you have, you can always either heat it or cool it, or apply a varying amount of pressure to it. Those changes in temperatures and/or pressures can often coax ice into a new configuration, as it’s sometimes more energetically favorable for those molecules (and the atoms within them) to arrange themselves into a different form of ice.
However, the most common fate of hexagonal crystalline ice — the type of ice found on Earth’s surface — is that either heating it or compressing it will simply cause it to melt.
.
The grooves seen on the rink ice after ice skaters have passed over it aren’t due to the ice skates “scratching” the surface of the ice, but rather to the pressure from the blades melting the ice beneath them, with the ice then re-freezing after the blades have left them. Credit: Adobe Stock/Big Think/Ben Gibson
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Maciej Frolow/Getty
[Photos: @solidwiggles]
“The Democratic Party should be leading, rather than just saying: ‘No, no, no. Status quo, status quo,’” Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, left, said in May. Next to her on the Capitol steps is Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey.Credit…Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
OsakaWayne Studios/Getty Images
On Earth, the most common form that ice takes is with a hexagonal crystalline ice structure, which explains why snowflakes typically exhibit hexagonal symmetry as well as the shape of these lab-grown plate-on-pedestal crystals.
At a variety of temperatures and pressures, water will take on a variety of states: solid, liquid, and gas. With high enough pressures, so long as your ice temperature remains above -8 F (-22 C), ice can melt from the Ih phase, the most common phase found on Earth, into the liquid phase.
The grooves seen on the rink ice after ice skaters have passed over it aren’t due to the ice skates “scratching” the surface of the ice, but rather to the pressure from the blades melting the ice beneath them, with the ice then re-freezing after the blades have left them. Credit: Adobe Stock/Big Think/Ben Gibson
