James' World 2

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Astronomers have found nearly 6,000 exoplanets orbiting other stars. But for every confirmed detection, there are countless mere hints, inconclusive observations that could just as well be blips of cosmic noise or glitches in a telescope. Most are too tenuous to take seriously, but every so often, one of these candidate planets is so tantalizing and potentially transformative that it can’t be ignore.

That’s certainly the case for one recently spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) around a sunlike star called Alpha Centauri A, part of the nearest star system to Earth. If the finding were confirmed to represent a planet—and not instead a clump of dust or some instrumental aberration—it would be a gas giant, akin to a warmer version of our own Saturn. It would orbit within Alpha Centauri A’s habitable zone, the starlight-bathed region where liquid water can persist on a planet’s surface. But the world itself would likely be lifeless, smothered beneath thick layers of gas. Any accompanying moons, however, could have better chances for harboring oceans—and perhaps even life.

Announced on August 7 and described in two preprint papers that have been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the candidate and its possibilities call to mind worlds from science fiction, such as the jungle moon of Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar films—which, incidentally, orbits a gas giant called Polyphemos around, yes, Alpha Centauri A. But there’s still a chance that the real-world JWST discovery will prove to be a mirage.

“If it’s real, it’s amazing,” says Elisabeth Matthews, an exoplanet-focused astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. “It’s a really exciting candidate—quite an intriguing candidate,” she says. “The authors work hard to make a case for why this, frankly, small and faint blob of light is believable, but I think there are still some open questions that need to be answered to really be 100 percent sure.”

The finding has been nearly a decade in the making, says Charles Beichman, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology and a co-author of the two new papers. In 2017, nearly half a decade before JWST would launch, he sent an e-mail to scientists positing that the telescope’s giant 6.5-meter mirror, paired with its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), might be able to see planets orbiting Alpha Centauri A. “When you stop laughing, let’s think about doing this project,” Beichman told them.

It was a bold suggestion, particularly when JWST was still on the ground, he admits. The telescope “was never really meant to look at a star that’s this bright, moving this fast and located, as Alpha Centauri is, right in the middle of the galactic plane, where there’s thousands of stars,” Beichman says.

Despite those obstacles, the appeal was irresistible. Alpha Centauri A is about the same size and age as our sun. And the star and its two companions, the slightly smaller Alpha Centauri B and the tiny red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, comprise the nearest stellar system to our own—just about four and a half light-years away. Because the Alpha Centauri system is spitting distance from us, astronomically speaking, it’s a bright, perennially popular target for scientists who may not be able to conduct similar observations on dimmer, more distant stars.

This is especially true for direct imaging, the technical term for when astronomers actually manage to take an exoplanet’s picture. Most exoplanetary discoveries instead arise through far more indirect means, such as the dip in a star’s light caused by a world passing between its sun and our telescope or the tiny wobbling of a star caused by an orbiting planet’s gravitational tug. Only in rare cases can astronomers truly see an alien world; typically, a planet needs to be very big and bright—as well as rather far from its sun—to offer any hope for astronomers to glimpse it against the overwhelming glare of its star.

But because Alpha Centauri A is cosmically close, Beichman and his colleagues thought that they could use JWST’s stunning power to accomplish the feat even for a planet that orbits relatively close to the star, within just a few times the distance between Earth and our sun. “Alpha Centauri just lets us cheat because it’s closer than everybody else,” Beichman says.

Although proximity makes for easier studies, this is counterbalanced against the system’s vexing complexity. Alpha Centauri A is the brightest star of the three in the system, but its stellar companion Alpha Centauri B is still quite bright—and quite close, crowding into telescopes’ field of view. Although JWST is equipped with a coronagraph—a masking tool to block out the glare from one star—it can’t do much to curtail this second, planet-obscuring source of light.

For Aniket Sanghi, a Ph.D. student in astrophysics at Caltech and a co-author of the two new papers, that difficulty only made the task more alluring. “I was looking for the next challenging object to work on, and Alpha Centauri A turned out to be one of the most challenging objects,” Sanghi says.

Faced with the brightness of not one but two stars overpowering JWST’s exoplanet-hunting optics, the researchers turned to a surprising strategy: enlisting yet another star. They found a particularly nondescript star that they could use as a stand-in. By observing this other star centered on and blocked by the coronagraph and then off-center and unmasked, the researchers were able to model how its light flowed through JWST’s optics. This created a template by which Alpha Centauri B’s light could then be subtracted out from the precious images of Alpha Centauri A.

And when the researchers tackled the feat in August 2024, they found exactly what they hoped for: a faint blob of light nestled near the blocked-out Alpha Centauri A. “As a direct imager, you’re always confounded by artifacts,” Sanghi says. “You’re very skeptical of anything you see. But this one just popped out so clearly.”

Sanghi and his colleagues tried to undermine their own data, striving to explain how the blob could be stray light within JWST’s optics or a background object in the sky, but nothing quite stuck.

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Dear GEP,

My 8-year-old has been begging me for a puppy, and I worry I am losing my resolve. Part of me thinks it could be sweet and give him some good company; part of me thinks it will ruin our lives. Are pets really worth it? Could we just get goldfish or what?

I have a photographic memory of the Christmas morning when a 10-year-old me was given the gift she’d been begging for — a Chinese box turtle we named Ping — carried down to the living room in his then-squeaky-clean glass enclosure like a little prince on parade. Despite Ping later being set free by the well-meaning people who had graciously inherited him (and likely killed within five minutes of freedom), Ping had a good life. He ate his lettuce pieces and chicken bits, swam in his plastic pool, occasionally scuttled across our kitchen floor. But, looking back, it’s not like my life was necessarily greatly enhanced by Ping — or by Dandelion the rabbit, or the pair of newts who lived in our bathroom, or Mei Li, the cat who hated people. Which is probably why, as an adult, I have never thought of pets as more than a nuisance.

Given my early cat trauma, I have often cited some combination of landlord restrictions and vague allergies whenever my kids brought up pets. But when we moved out of our two-bedroom apartment into a larger house last fall, I began to run out of excuses. I also began to wonder if I was missing out on something. We had been a little family, not stable by any means but at least consistent, for years now. Couldn’t we stand growing a bit? Around Christmas, I indulged myself in looking at the available cats at the local animal shelter. I imagined something simpler than my kids but more rewarding than my Peloton. In January, we brought home a 6-month-old tuxedo cat we named Midnight. (Sorry, shelter volunteers, but “Jerry” is not a cat name.) I am almost embarrassed to tell you how much I love this cat.

And when I asked my son, who gets easily anxious and dysregulated easily, why he was seeming so chill lately, he answered immediately: “Midnight.” Far from ruining our lives, our kitty does provide the company you are speculating a dog might — he snuggles with the kids when they are upset, provides me with the maternal adoration my children are slowly losing, and regularly serves as a peace offering when we hurt each other. I don’t know that the leopard gecko we tried to talk our kids down to would have achieved all this. With all due respect to goldfish, my experience tells me that they mostly just swim in circles.

But every family is different, and our experience is just our own. I surveyed a few dozen parents, with and without pets, to see what was going on in their households. Plenty of parents are ambivalent about family pets or fully against getting them. Angela, a mom of two, put it like this: “the last thing I need is another dependent!” Other parents who have said no to pets cited being at the limits of caretaking already (“Aren’t kids enough unpaid labor??”), as well as space issues, the expense and logistics of caring for them when traveling, and for one mom, the smell. (After 30 years, I can still perform olfactory teleportation and conjure the rankness of Ping’s cage.) One mother, Kate, admitted that she regrets adopting a cat for her kids: Like Mei Li, the cat’s love language is attacking humans, and Kate’s kids are now begging for a dog instead.

More of the parents I spoke to, however, believed that their animals, and what their animals meant to their children, were well worth it.

When Margaret and Brent, parents to 5-year-old Tycho, first started dating, a central component of their courtship was texting each other pictures of pit bull puppies. But after they had their son, Margaret felt overwhelmed by the idea of taking on another responsibility. “What if we end up with a dog who has medical complications or serious behavioral issues?” she wondered. When she pushed through her worries and adopted Phoebe, a sweet brown pit bull mix, they gained an essential family member. Tycho, who is autistic, took to Phoebe instantly, running alongside her at the beach and adding her name as one of his first spoken words. Phoebe is not only like a sibling to Tycho, whose older half-brothers are out of the house, but she helps him through transitions, something that can often cause him great distress. “If he gets to hold the leash,” Margaret admits, “he’ll kind of go anywhere.”

Several of the parents I surveyed used the terms “sibling” or “best friend” to describe their kids’ relationship with their pets (usually dogs or cats), in all the good and challenging ways, the latter often leading to growth, especially for only children. As one parent of a 19-month-old put it: “Sometimes she wants to smother [the dog] in love, other times she is frustrated by his presence. But he is teaching her to tolerate the existence of another being in our family that requires attention, care, and love.” Another parent referred to their dog as “screen-free entertainment.”

As far as having another dependent, for us, a cat feels like a good balance. Do the kids actually help? Studies are inconclusive, but my anecdotal experience is don’t count on it. While I was surprised to hear from my mom that I was actually a dutiful cleaner of Ping’s cage and attender of his vet appointments, my kids have been a real disappointment in terms of practical help with Midnight. Despite having had a democratic chore-picking session when we first got him, they have pretty much done zero daily feeding or cleaning. But they do care for him on their own unhelpful but sweet timelines, brushing him when they’re in the mood or clearing out his litter box when it feels like a game.

But other kids, it seems, are better than mine! Kim, father to Oscar, 7, and dog-father to Zazzie, claims that Oscar completes dog-related chores each morning. Darina’s 8-year-old actually walks one of their dogs! And Joy’s 9-year-old daughter not only feeds the dogs twice a day (“90% of the time, and only complains/drags her feet some of the time”) but also feeds and cleans the cage of her bearded dragon.

Of course, we couldn’t have had Midnight in our old apartment (there’s the space thing), and he’s already set us back a few hundred bucks. (Margaret told me, unapologetically, that she’s spent at least $10,000 on Phoebe’s medical bills.) But we were gifted a feeder by my sister, we bought some very cheap secondhand toys, and we are hoping keeping him inside will help.

Did my cat solve all my problems as a parent? Definitely not. (As if any one parenting move would!) But the family pet did accelerate progress on some of my parenting goals: to engage my kids in the practice of care (notice I say “practice” in a way that is divorced from any actual outcome), to have some mutual interests, and to build play into our daily life as a way to offset some of the nagging, fighting, and yes, screens.

It’s good that you’re thinking, my friend, about whether to get a pet. I have seen too many impulsive puppy decisions go awry! And you’re right: It might be a pain in the butt, or completely neglected, or a total psycho that corners you and then jumps up at your face, clawing away (sorry, I really should work through that). But you might be satisfied or find a kind of joy that sits right next to your parenting joy, but has a slightly different character. Like all things parenting, it might be a bust, but I bet something interesting will happen along the way. I can’t imagine my life without these 10 pounds of feline flesh.

I’ll admit, though, we do all smell a bit like cat now, but like most people in love, we hardly notice.

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Romper

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President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he will impose a 100% tariff on computer chips, raising the specter of higher prices for electronics, autos, household appliances, and other essential products dependent on the processors powering the digital age.

“We’ll be putting a tariff of approximately 100% on chips and semiconductors,” Trump said in the Oval Office while meeting with Apple CEO Tim Cook. “But if you’re building in the United States of America, there’s no charge.”

The announcement came more than three months after Trump temporarily exempted most electronics from his administration’s most onerous tariffs.

The Republican president said companies that make computer chips in the U.S. would be spared the import tax. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a shortage of computer chips increased the price of autos and contributed to higher inflation.

Investors seemed to interpret the potential tariff exemptions as a positive for Apple and other major tech companies that have been making huge financial commitments to manufacture more chips and other components in the U.S..

Big Tech already has made collective commitments to invest about $1.5 trillion in the U.S. since Trump moved back into the White House in January. That figure includes a $600 billion promise from Apple after the iPhone maker boosted its commitment by tacking another $100 billion on to a previous commitment made in February.

Now the question is whether the deal brokered between Cook and Trump will be enough to insulate the millions of iPhones made in China and India from the tariffs that the administration has already imposed and reduce the pressure on the company to raise prices on the new models expected to be unveiled next month.

Wall Street certainly seems to think so. After Apple’s stock price gained 5% in Wednesday regular trading sessions, the shares rose by another 3% in extended trading after Trump announced some tech companies won’t be hit with the latest tariffs while Cook stood alongside him.

The shares of AI chipmaker Nvidia, which also has recently made big commitments to the U.S., rose slightly in extended trading to add to the $1 trillion gain in market value the Silicon Valley company has made since the start of Trump’s second administration.

The stock price of computer chip pioneer Intel, which has fallen on hard times, also climbed in extended trading.

Inquiries sent to chip makers Nvidia and Intel were not immediately answered. The chip industry’s main trade group, the Semiconductor Industry Association, declined to comment on Trump’s latest tariffs.

Demand for computer chips has been climbing worldwide, with sales increasing 19.6% in the year-ended in June, according to the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics organization.

Trump’s tariff threats mark a significant break from existing plans to revive computer chip production in the U.S. that were drawn up during the administration of President Joe Biden.

Since taking over from Biden, Trump has been deploying tariffs to incentivize more domestic production. Essentially, the president is betting that the threat of dramatically higher chip costs would force most companies to open factories domestically, despite the risk that tariffs could squeeze corporate profits and push up prices for mobile phones, TVs, and refrigerators.

By contrast, the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act that Biden signed into law in 2022 provided more than $50 billion to support new computer chip plants, fund research, and train workers for the industry. The mix of funding support, tax credits, and other financial incentives were meant to draw in private investment, a strategy that Trump has vocally opposed.

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President Donald Trump makes an announcement about Apple in the Oval Office, Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) © The Associated Press

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A little-known illness called Legionnaires’ disease has infected at least 58 people in New York City’s Central Harlem neighborhood in the past two weeks. Two people have died during the outbreak, which has been tied to cooling towers that tested positive for the disease-causing bacterium Legionella pneumophila, according to a statement from city health officials on August 4.

The disease is a severe pneumonia and one of two infections caused by bacteria in the genus Legionella, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (The bacteria can also cause a milder illness called Pontiac fever, which can manifest with fever, muscle aches, and headaches.) When diagnosed early, Legionnaires’ can be treated successfully with antibiotics.

Health care providers report about 6,000 cases of Legionnaires’ disease annually in the U.S., although some cases are likely mistaken as other types of pneumonia. In addition, the infection often does not cause symptoms in healthy people. Individuals who are aged 50 or older, as well as current or former smokers and people with underlying lung or immune issues, are most vulnerable to Legionnaires’. The disease became five times more prevalent between 2000 and 2018 for reasons experts have struggled to identify.

Legionnaires’ does not typically spread between people directly; instead, people catch the infection by inhaling mist that contains the pathogen. The bacterium particularly thrives in stagnant water between 77 and 113 degrees Fahrenheit (25 and 45 degrees Celsius). Water systems such as cooling towers, large air-conditioning systems, spas, and hot tubs can then aerosolize the microbe, making bacterial control in these types of structures a vital prevention measure.

When the current outbreak was first identified, New York City health officials directed an investigation into all cooling towers in the affected neighborhood. These towers evaporate water to dispel heat, and they are a common feature in large buildings in the city. But such structures have long been known to cause some of the largest Legionnaires’ outbreaks on record. New York City laws require cooling towers to be registered, tested, and disinfected regularly to reduce the presence of Legionella bacteria.

Legionnaires’ was first identified at a convention of the American Legion’s Department of Pennsylvania (hence the name) that was held in late July 1976. Scientists who helped identified the Legionella bacterium that caused an outbreak among at least 221 people at the convention called the detective work “one of the largest and most complex investigations of an epidemic ever undertaken” in an article published in the October 1979 issue of Scientific American.

Scientists had to rule out potential causes, including foodborne pathogens and metal poisoning, among other challenges, before managing to identify the previously unknown bacterium. Simultaneously, investigators pored through reports of other then recent, mysterious outbreaks of pneumonialike diseases, piecing together an image of an infection that “has turned out to be not very rare after all,” the researchers wrote in their 1979 article.

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Fluctuations in shape are an inevitable part of being alive, and while few have access to the resources of Rihanna—including super-stylist Jahleel Weaver—anyone navigating a changing body (bear with me) could take a cue from her latest maternity look: a spring summer 2001 Issey Miyake dress made from semi-sheer pleats in a gradient of sorbet tones with a shoulder-engulfing neckline. She paired the dress with neon green and silver Ottolinger X Puma Mostro sneakers, a blossoming pink rose ring, and silver floral earrings.

Originally worn by a straight-sized model in Miyake’s September 2000 show—staged in collaboration with Japanese electronic duo Silent Poets, and inspired by a futuristic tribe—the look reinforces the late designer’s interest in seeing the body as something fluid, rather than fixed. It’s why his designs—in particular his Pleats Please line—are that rare thing in luxury fashion: accommodating of bigger bodies. “Few brands have done what Issey Miyake has in the luxury designer space,” writer Tracy Achonwa wrote British Vogue in March. “Catering to women who want the best plus-size, high-end clothing, [the brand] boasts a cleverly designed textile that expands with accordion-like pleats.”

Not everyone will get it. “Rihanna steps out in odd attire,” read one tabloid headline. Her own fans weren’t much kinder: “What is up with what she’s wearing?” But tell me, what is the point of being one of the world’s most famous billionaires if you can’t step outside the margins of what’s considered normal, and wear things others wouldn’t? Now pregnant with her third child, Rihanna is leaning full tilt into these sorts of bizarro-chic silhouettes—like the so-called “condom dress” from Pieter Mulier’s fall 2025 collection for Alaïa, which she recently wore to dinner at her favorite restaurant of all time, Giorgio Baldi—as her own form shifts. Good for her. To quote Miyake himself: “The space created between the clothes and the body is what interests me and communicates the most.”

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Walmart, Apple, and Amazon, the most successful companies in the U.S., base their corporate strategies on data: consumer behavior data, market research, financial, product, and competitive analysis data.

Any CEO who deliberately relied on falsified data, or who demanded cooked books, would be fired immediately — and likely sued by the Board of Directors.

Any CEO of any company who tried to manipulate the appearance of short-term success for his own personal gain, at the expense of long-term viability for the company, would also be fired and likely sued for malfeasance, and worse.

A successful CEO knows that falsifying economic or financial data can lead to charges of securities fraud, wire fraud, and other financial crimes, because false data can ruin investors, corporations, and markets overnight.

Enter Donald Trump, whose self-proclaimed governing philosophy is “running the country like it’s a business.” Debunking the lie of his own manufactured image as a “successful businessman,” last Friday, Trump angrily fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Commissioner because he didn’t like her data, even as he wears 34 felony convictions for falsifying records.

Dr. Erika McEntarfer, a widely respected statistician, enjoyed bipartisan support, including confirmation votes from Marco Rubio and JD Vance. Appointed commissioner under the Biden administration, she holds a Ph.D. in economics from Virginia Tech, and served at the Census Bureau for two decades under both parties prior to her BLS appointment.

By federal law, McEntarfer’s appointment ends in 2028. Trump fired her anyway because he was embarrassed by jobs data that didn’t match his own hype. In May, the White House said that April’s jobs report “proved” that Trump was “revitalizing” the economy. In June, Trump posted, “GREAT JOBS NUMBERS.” After the Labor Department released revised jobs figures for those months — a common practice because jobs reports are sample projections that get adjusted when actual employer data come in — Trump fired the messenger.

Trump’s penchant for hiding and falsifying data has put American corporations and the economy in more danger. Just as he scrubbed government websites of climate data to bolster his fossil fuel donors, just as he ordered the Smithsonian to remove an exhibit accurately reflecting his own impeachments, Trump thinks reality is whatever he says it is.

As he fantasizes about returning America to the Gilded Age, where robber barons extracted the earth’s resources for unimaginable profit while laborers worked for starvation wages, he’s forgetting that his oligarch donors need accurate economic data too. At least oligarchs creating real products and delivering real services—as opposed to merely speculating- in Trump’s image—need real, reliable, and uncooked data.

McEntarfer should sue

When Trump fired McEntarfer in a social media post, he declared that her numbers were “phony.” He wrote on Friday, “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” adding: “But, the good news is, our Country is doing GREAT!”

He said the numbers had been manipulated for political purposes and announced he fired McEntarfer as a result.

Trump also baselessly accused McEntarfer of manipulating jobs numbers before the November election to advantage Kamala Harris. Trump said to reporters, “I believe the numbers were phony, just like they were before the election, and there were other times. So you know what I did? I fired her, and you know what? I did the right thing.”

When asked what his source was, he said, “my opinion,” confirming that there was no evidence to back up his reckless claims, claims that permanently tanked the reputation of a celebrated career professional.

Presidents are not immune from civil prosecution

No doubt Trump slurred McEntarfer based on his own “opinion” to avoid defamation liability, but an opinion that implies a false fact is still defamatory, it is still actionable, and presidents are not immune from civil lawsuits for defamation.

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