James' World 2

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Giant utility deals do not come along often. Mergers in this heavily regulated industry require approvals from multiple agencies and often face pushback from politicians and local civic groups worried about rising electricity prices.

But two of the largest power companies in the United States, NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy, are giving it a try, with a $67 billion tie-up announced in May. Sysco, the big food distributor, also went big in March with the $29 billion acquisition of Jetro Restaurant Depot, a supplier to independent restaurants, a deal that could reshape the food supply industry. And this month, Stripe and the private equity firm Advent International offered about $53 billion to acquire PayPal, in what would be one of the largest-ever deals in financial services.

Companies across America are seizing on what may be the most favorable regulatory environment for businesses in years to complete deals that might have been unlikely under previous presidencies. The rush is on to get them done before President Trump’s term runs out.

“There is a ‘now or never’ attitude for attempting transformational combinations,” lawyers at Hunton Andrews Kurth wrote in a note this year.

Although Mr. Trump plays no formal role in approving most mergers, he has publicly weighed in on deals. Some executives, recognizing that the administration is more transactional than its predecessors, have stopped by the White House during their efforts to get his administration’s blessing for them.

The regulators the president has appointed to oversee deals have taken a more flexible approach. For example, the Justice Department said last week that it would fast-track its review of some mergers, asking fewer questions upfront. That new policy was a sign the department was “open for business,” lawyers at Wilmer Hale wrote in a memo for clients.

“You have a federal antitrust enforcement regime that is viewed generally as meaningfully more accommodative than the Biden administration,” said Edward Lee, a partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis. “Obviously, or in terms of dealmakers and dealmaking animal spirits, that’s always a good thing.”

Analysts at Goldman Sachs said they expected busy deal activity to continue into the second half of the year, citing, among other factors, a “friendly” regulatory backdrop. The firm’s list of potential targets for acquisitions include the copper company Freeport-McMoRan, as the building of A.I. data centers increases demand for the metal. Analysts expect the boom in data centers to spur other deals as well, particularly in power and energy.

Banking executives have picked up talks about merging their own businesses, as regulators have unwound the Biden administration’s efforts to make those deals harder. There has long been a debate about how stringently to monitor banking deals, because some critics argue they could force the closure of vital community branches or consolidate risk among fewer banks. Some, though, including former Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, have argued that more consolidation among the roughly 4,100 small U.S. banks could help steady industry volatility.

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NextEra Energy, led by John Ketchum, its chief executive, and Dominion Energy announced their merger in May. Credit…Danielle Villasana/Reuters

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In French author Marcel Proust’s 1906 novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), a bite of madeleine cake triggers a flood of childhood memories. Scientists call this phenomenon “Proust’s madeleine,” and it was even featured on The Sopranos. Now a study in PLOS Biology suggests these vivid memories of early childhood smells are encoded in very specific parts of the brain.

“Smells are exceptional cues for accessing autobiographical memories,” says the study’s co-senior author Nathalie Mandairon of the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center in France. Scientists suspected for decades that the phenomenon involved certain brain areas, specifically long-lived “granule” cells in the brain’s olfactory bulb, or smell center. These relatively tiny cells are created on the very first day of a child’s life and are primed to capture pleasurable smells from their first decade—which may explain why childhood memories evoked by smells can be so vivid even when they were thought to be forgotten.

Mandairon’s team surveyed more than 600 volunteers and found that most had remembered pleasant childhood experiences from the “Proust’s madeleine” phenomenon. The researchers then exposed mice to pleasing natural scents when they were about three to four weeks old, an age that roughly corresponds to early childhood in humans. Normal mice were drawn to the scents—but not mice whose granule cells had been silenced by optical fibers that the researchers implanted in the animals’ brains to switch these cells on and off.

The reaction confirmed that early smells are imprinted in the granule cells of the brain’s olfactory bulb, perhaps because these cells can make “privileged connections” with the brain areas for pleasure and reward, the study says. The human responses suggested that mainly positive memories are linked to the phenomenon.

Physical chemist Hervé This, director of France’s AgroParisTech-INRAE International Center for Molecular and Physical Gastronomy, says the study gives a “fascinating” explanation of the brain areas involved. But he would have liked to see it account for negative childhood memories as well because “unpleasantness is equally significant.” He adds that he has experienced the phenomenon himself: pâté lorrain has to be cooked for exactly one hour to match the taste from his childhood.

Another expert, however, broadly welcomes the study but thinks that the singular role of smell in memory may only be an illusion: Every sense has the power to evoke strong memories, says biophysicist Luca Turin of England’s University of Buckingham. “The only peculiarity of smell [is] that it is like a password and needs to be exact,” he adds.

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Hmmmm … Central Park covers approx 843 acres in Manhattan. Check it out! It has an interesting history!

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The Gottesman Pool at the Davis Center, managed by NYC Parks, is the City’s newest public pool—offering free swimming to all in the beauty of Central Park.

Come cool off with NYC Parks this summer: Swim season runs from June 27–September 13, 2026.

Hours:
Open daily, 11:00 am–7:00 pm (closed from 3:00 pm–4:00 daily for cleaning)
*Adult lap swimming hours: Monday–Friday, 7:00 am–8:30 am (Registration is required at nycgovparks.org)

Learn To Swim

NYC Parks offers free swimming lessons at recreation centers across the City—including the Gottesman Pool at the Davis Center. Registration for this popular program takes place by lottery. Learn to Swim classes are held for tots and one guardian, and for children. You may enter the lottery once per session.

Lottery results will be confirmed on the last day of each registration date. Check your email from NYC Parks for confirmation.

Registration Dates

You must enter the lottery before the following date for a chance to be selected:

Registration for all programs started at noon on Friday, June 12, 2026.

• Session I Registration: ends Friday, June 26, 2026
• Session II Registration: ends on Wednesday, July 8, 2026.
• Session III Registration: ends on Friday, July 24, 2026.
• Advanced Child Learn to Swim Registration: ends on Thursday, August 20, 2026.

Program Dates

• Session I: July 6–July 21, 2026
• Session II: July 22–August 6, 2026
• Session III: August 7–August 21, 2026
• Advanced Child Learn to Swim: August 24–August 28, 2026

This program is managed by NYC Parks. For more information, visit nycgovparks.org or call the Citywide Aquatics team at 718.760.6969.

Adult Lap Swimming

July 6–August 28, 2026
Mondays–Fridays | 7:00 am–8:30 am

Join us before the pool opens for early bird lap swimming! Swimmers also have the option to participate in a long-distance lap swim challenge while enjoying their morning swim. An awards ceremony will be held at the end of August to celebrate the health and fitness achievements of swimmers who complete 25 miles or more.

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Gottesman Pool at the Davis Center

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Tech giants are setting records every few months for how much they are spending on artificial intelligence — but this time, some jitters are also growing.

On Thursday, Amazon said its capital expenditures totaled $53 billion in the second quarter, up 69 percent from a year earlier, as it built A.I. data centers and other infrastructure. It joined a parade of other big tech companies, with Meta on Wednesday reporting that its costs had risen 55 percent from last year, while Microsoft said its capital expenditures had soared 69 percent. Last week, Google also disclosed that its costs had jumped and said it would boost its spending further.

These numbers are only set to skyrocket. Across this year and next, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are expected to spend a staggering $1.5 trillion building data centers and stuffing them with advanced chips, according to Wall Street estimates compiled by FactSet.

“The scale of it is nuts,” said Melissa Otto, who leads research at S&P Global’s Visible Alpha division.

Alarms are rising as Wall Street and others question when this spending can be justified. On Thursday, Amazon’s share price rose almost 10 percent in after-hours trading after its cloud computing division saw its fastest growth since early 2022, and shares of Microsoft, which did not change its spending forecast, jumped more than 15 percent.

But Meta’s stock sank more than 7 percent on Thursday after it revealed its A.I. outlays and that costs were growing faster than its revenue. And last week, for the first time since going public in 2004, Google said it had “negative free cash flow,” which meant it was spending more on day-to-day operations and building new infrastructure than it was taking in from its businesses. Google’s stock fell more than 6 percent the next day.

Even so, the companies insist they are doing the right thing. “As long as we see these attractive opportunities to invest, we will continue to invest,” Anat Ashkenazi, Alphabet’s finance chief, told Wall Street analysts last week.

More than a dozen years ago, tech companies became the largest enterprises on the planet, fueled by their software and digital businesses. But A.I. has flipped tech’s “asset-light” model on its head. Multibillion-dollar data centers, which the industry likes to call “A.I. factories,” have become critical investments for developing advanced systems and making them available to customers.

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Meta’s Eagle Mountain Data Center in Utah. Meta, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are expected to spend $1.5 trillion building data centers through next year. Credit…Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times

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On July 20, 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 lander became the first spacecraft to safely touch down on Mars. Shortly after, it beamed back our first close-up image of the surface—a drab view of pebbles strewn at the lander’s feet.

“I don’t think we’d have been surprised if there were blades of grass,” recalls Tom Young, Viking’s mission director. Scientists had speculated for years about what scenes would await Viking 1 and its twin, Viking 2, which landed elsewhere on Mars a few weeks later. Most thought any Martians would, at most, be simple, small life-forms—although Carl Sagan had impishly suggested that polar-bear-sized creatures could populate the landscape.

Humans have imagined other inhabited worlds for millennia. And we’ve even “discovered” life on Mars more than once across the last century or two. Yet each time we’ve built sharper tools and taken a closer look, all those claims have evaporated, much like the Red Planet’s ancient seas. By the time the Viking landers launched, we knew there were no signs of life that could be seen from orbit.

But there was still hope that perhaps something stirred there—hope enough to launch the Viking landers on an audacious mission to look for it. Their results, however, weren’t conclusive. Most experts agree the twin spacecraft failed to find definitive signs of organisms in scoops of Martian soil, but some scientists continue to believe they did.

Even now, a half-century later, the outcome of those investigations fuels debate, and the Viking landers remain the only missions ever sent to the surface of another world to search for extant alien life. The ambiguity that wafted from their soil samples has become emblematic of the uncertainty that plagues the greater search for extraterrestrial life—not just on Mars and our sun’s other worlds but across the observable universe. Our knowledge of life’s physical limits and the unearthly forms it might take remains so incomplete that we could all too easily declare a discovery where none truly exists—or fail to recognize genuine extraterrestrial biology hidden in plain view.

As a result, astrobiologists have, for decades, defaulted to a conservative burden of proof that leans into two aphorisms coined by Sagan when he wasn’t musing about Martian polar bears: life, he and his co-authors wrote, should be considered a “hypothesis of last resort,” largely because “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

But what if Sagan had it all wrong? If we live in a universe where life is common and not extraordinary at all, setting such an extraordinarily high bar for its discovery beyond Earth can backfire. What if life’s fingerprints have been on Mars all along, and we were too cautious to admit that we’d found them?

Already, a growing pile of evidence suggests ancient Mars could very well have been an inhabited planet—and may still be. Our search for life there is a bit like bobbing for apples blindfolded—except we don’t know what an “apple” might feel like, and the apples may exist only in scattered pieces. What’s needed, many scientists argue, is a clearer way of separating signs of “life” from “nonlife,” a quantitative method that leverages statistics and probabilities to guide our interpretations of biology’s potential fingerprints.

“There’s all these different lines of evidence that keep coming together that make me go, ‘Gosh, it’s becoming more and more difficult to explain everything on Mars abiotically,’” says Amy Williams, an astrobiologist at the University of Florida. “I’m not yet ready to say that we’ve found evidence for life, but I think the story is building to help us understand what that potential is—to put a probability on that instead of just saying ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”

Present-day Mars is marginally habitable at best, but 3.5 billion years ago the planet was almost certainly a more life-friendly world. Ancient Mars was warmer, with a thicker atmosphere and a global magnetic field that protected its surface from cosmic radiation; seas and lakes filled its basins, and rivers tumbled through its valleys. Over eons, Mars lost its magnetic field and, with it, those bodies of water and thick, insulating atmosphere.

Yet across the sweep of Mars’s lifetime, organic compounds—life’s building blocks—have rained down on the planet, delivered by meteorites and cosmic dust.

“If we live in a universe where life takes advantage of watery environments when there’s juicy chemistry going on—which is the way I picture the universe, but that’s unvalidated intuition—then something should have started happening in some of those places on Mars,” says astrobiologist David Grinspoon of the Planetary Science Institute. “So there’s this predisposition to think, ‘Either there should have been an origin of life on Mars—or we’re really wrong about something on Earth.’”

Since 2012 NASA’s Curiosity rover has been searching for signs of ancient habitable environments in Gale Crater. And in 2021 the agency’s Perseverance rover touched down in Jezero Crater with the goal of looking specifically for ancient biosignatures, not present-day life. Now, based on the results of those robotic explorations, many experts suspect that ancient Mars was indeed a biological world, even if they can’t yet prove it.

“The evidence for habitable environments and life on early Mars is getting stronger every time we look at it,” says Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

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A rare cancer tied to past industrial work has long left patients with few options and little time. Mesothelioma, most often caused by asbestos exposure, develops slowly and strikes decades later. By the time symptoms appear, the disease is often advanced. Survival averages about one year, and long-term outcomes remain poor.

Now, new research by the University of Vermont offers a different approach. Instead of protecting cells from damage, scientists are turning cancer’s own survival system against it. Early clinical results suggest the strategy may slow disease and extend lives.

A Disease With Few Options

Mesothelioma affects about 30,000 people worldwide each year. Many patients worked in shipbuilding, oil refining, or construction, where asbestos exposure was common.

Current treatments, including chemotherapy and immunotherapy, provide limited benefit. Most patients face a median survival of around 12 months. The five-year survival rate is near 10 percent.

“It’s a disease of a significant unmet medical need,” said Brian Cunniff, a professor at the University of Vermont.

Researchers have spent years searching for better treatments. Many past efforts focused on reducing harmful molecules inside cancer cells. This new study takes the opposite approach.

Turning A Survival Mechanism Into A Weakness

Cancer cells grow quickly and consume large amounts of energy. This process produces unstable molecules called reactive oxygen species. These molecules can damage cells if they build up.

To survive, tumor cells increase their defenses. They produce antioxidant enzymes that neutralize these harmful compounds. One key enzyme is called peroxiredoxin 3, or PRX3.

PRX3 works inside mitochondria, the parts of cells that produce energy. It removes hydrogen peroxide, a damaging molecule that forms during metabolism.

Scientists realized that mesothelioma cells depend heavily on this system. Without it, the cells could be overwhelmed by their own stress.

The idea was simple but bold. Instead of reducing oxidative stress, increase it. Block PRX3 and allow harmful molecules to accumulate. Push the cancer cells past their limit.

Lab Results Show Strong Effects

To test this idea, researchers removed PRX3 from mesothelioma cells in the laboratory. The results were immediate.

Cells without PRX3 grew more slowly. Their ability to multiply dropped sharply. Energy production declined, and oxidative stress increased.

In animal studies, the effect was even more dramatic. When these altered cells were introduced into mice, they failed to form tumors.

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A new therapy targets cancer’s stress defenses, showing promise in early trials for mesothelioma patients with limited treatment options. (CREDIT: Shutterstock)

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