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Tornadoes threaten huge swaths of the U.S. this weekend amid a season already marked by unusually high storm activity, even as the National Weather Service faces budget cuts likely to impede its ability to respond to severe weather.

What to Expect

The National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center has forecast severe thunderstorms with scattered tornadoes—some of them intense—across parts of Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Ohio for the afternoon and evening of May 16.

“Today we’re expecting a severe weather outbreak across the mid-Mississippi, Tennessee, and Ohio valleys,” says Jenni Pittman, a meteorologist and deputy chief of the Science and Technology Integration division at the National Weather Service’s Central Region Headquarters. These regions stretch farther east than the historically prevalent “Tornado Alley” of the mid- to late 1900s.

“Then we see a renewed chance for severe weather Sunday, continuing Monday and continuing Tuesday as well,” Pittman says. “A lot of the risks on Sunday through Tuesday are going to be from the High Plains pretty much through the Midwest.” National Weather Service maps show these risks concentrated in Kansas and Oklahoma.

This weekend’s predicted tornadoes would follow a slight lull in the region, she adds. “We’ve had a little bit of a break here in May, which is typically a pretty busy severe weather month,” Pittman says. “April was very active, and the rest of May does look pretty active as well.”

This Year in Tornadoes

As of May 15, the National Weather Service has tallied 779 tornadoes in its local storm reports—a preliminary number but a helpful metric for tracking the season’s severity. For comparison, between 2005 and 2015, that same tally averaged 624; between 2010 and 2024, it was 592.

“As of mid-May, the U.S. is running well above the typical number of tornadoes to this point in the year,” says Rich Thompson, chief of forecast operations for the Storm Prediction Center.

This year to date also stands out against individual years. The most active tornado season of recent years was 2011, when hundreds of storms struck in late April; by mid-May the tally stood at more than 1,300 storms, with more than 2,200 by the end of the year.

That year also demonstrated the close connection between just a few days of serious storms and a bad season. “Intense tornadoes are disproportionately responsible for damage, injuries, and deaths, and such tornadoes are more common on a few ‘outbreak’ days,” Thompson says. “Thus, the number of outbreak days often determines the severity of the season, with 2011 being the prime example of multiple high-impact tornado outbreaks.”

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So much for that. These days, Musk is reduced to begging his followers on X to call their senators and congressmen [sic, obviously] to vote down the Big Beautiful Bill. His nominal reason is that Donald Trump’s budget plan will increase the deficit, but reports indicate that Musk is annoyed an EV credit is getting cut. That makes it harder to sell Teslas in an environment where it’s already hard to sell Teslas. Also, Musk may be annoyed that he didn’t get to stay past his statutory limit as an unpaid advisor and that the FAA isn’t using Starlink, according to Axios.

The cracks have been showing in the MAGA-tech alliance for some time now. When Scott Bessent got Musk’s IRS pick ejected in April, that was notable. (Bessent’s deputy now runs the IRS.) Musk wasn’t politically savvy enough to get Bessent on his side before installing his pick; an end-run like that is insulting, and Musk had been making enemies. Take, for instance, Marco Rubio, who was

furious when Musk destroyed USAID — that was Rubio’s department, and getting rid of it cut his power. Sean Duffy, the reality TV star who is for some reason, running the Department of Transportation, had to intervene to stop DOGE from firing air traffic controllers, while the lack of air traffic controllers remains a hot-button issue.

These men should not have been especially difficult to finesse, but then Musk is known for his bull-in-a-china-shop approach. It is rare that a person in a position of power — a cabinet seat, say — willingly gives up even an inch of leverage. Making enemies of Bessent, Rubio, and Duffy was a strategic error.

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Most people have never heard of vacuum decay, but if it happened, it would be the biggest natural disaster in the universe. Sure, an asteroid could destroy a city or wipe out life on Earth. A supernova could fry the ozone layer. If a blast of energy from a spinning black hole hit our planet, it could rip apart the entire solar system. As dramatic as these disasters are, they’d still leave behind rocks, gas, and dust. With time that matter could come together again, making new stars and planets and maybe life.

Vacuum decay is different. This cataclysm would result from a change in the Higgs field, a quantum field that pervades all of space. It would be triggered by pure chance, creating a bubble that would expand at almost the speed of light, transforming all in its path. Inside that bubble, the laws of physics we take for granted would change, making matter as we know it (and, consequently, life) impossible.

According to physicists’ current best estimates, vacuum decay is extremely unlikely, with an almost unthinkably small chance of its taking place close enough to our part of the universe to affect us. Still, the chance isn’t zero, and some recent estimates suggest the likelihood might be slightly less minuscule than we used to think. Ultimately, though, the possibility of an apocalyptic quantum bubble shouldn’t cause anyone to lose any sleep.

Even so, scientists have been studying how and why this scenario might play out. The answers to these questions don’t just reveal some fascinating aspects of the quantum world—they may also turn the questions on their heads: rather than making us worry about the threat a vacuum bubble poses, the fact that the universe has survived this long without one may teach us something about the deepest unsolved problems in physics.

All the objects we’re used to—every animal, vegetable, and mineral—are made up of atoms, and those atoms are made up of ripples in quantum fields. Each field is like a setting on a kind of universal control panel. If you could jiggle the electron switch on the control panel, you’d see an electron pop into existence. Most of these switches have a default value of zero: electrons aren’t likely to be in most places, for example. These defaults are sticky—it takes effort, in the form of energy, to push a switch out of its default position. How much energy it requires is determined by Albert Einstein’s famous equation E = mc², which defines the relation between energy and mass: the more massive a particle, the stickier the default for the switch of its field.

Inside the bubble the laws of physics we take for granted would change.

You might think that in truly empty space, all these switches are set to zero. That’s true for most quantum fields, but some have a different default. One such case is a quantum field proposed by several physicists in 1964, including British physicist Peter Higgs, for whom it was later named. Try to set the Higgs field to zero, and it will resist. The universe “wants” to have a certain amount of Higgsness in it, a default called a vacuum expectation value. It is this amount of Higgs field, instead of zero, that one finds in the vacuum of empty space.

Pushing the Higgs field from this default setting is quite difficult. Scientists finally accomplished it in 2012, when an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva managed to measure the tiniest, briefest possible shift in the Higgs field. Just as jiggling the electron switch makes an electron, jiggling the Higgs switch makes a particle called a Higgs boson. These particles swiftly vanish after we create them, with the Higgs switch rushing back to its default while knocking other, easier-to-shift switches around, creating particles such as electrons or photons instead. But LHC scientists managed to create enough Higgs bosons to definitively detect them and prove the Higgs field exists.

The Higgs field is special because it controls the mass of all other particles. In effect, it serves as a kind of master switch, determining how sticky all the other switches’ defaults are. If you could grab the Higgs switch and drag it toward zero, you’d find that all the other switches became much easier to flick. In other words, a lower Higgs value would mean it took less energy to make an electron or a quark.

Physicists think of the task of moving the Higgs field from its default value as being a bit like rolling a boulder up a hill. If the boulder rests at the bottom of a valley, you can try to push it upward, but if you let it go, it will just roll down again.

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The Trump administration signed a proclamation Wednesday suspending travel to the U.S. for citizens from 12 countries: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.

Citing national security interests, the proclamation states that the identified countries lack sufficient vetting and screening processes needed to detect foreign nationals who may pose safety or terrorism threats to the U.S.

The proclamation also partially restricted entrance for nationals of seven other countries: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.

Other considerations include a country’s information-sharing policies, presence of terrorists, visa overstay rates, and whether citizens who are sent back are readily accepted, it said.

The ban is set to take effect on Monday at 12:01 a.m. ET.

In a video released by the White House Wednesday night, Trump said that on his first day in office, he directed the secretary of state to perform a security review of “high-risk regions” to make travel restriction recommendations.

He also cited the Sunday attack on Jewish protestors in Boulder, Colorado, in the video. The man charged in the attack, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, is an Egyptian national. Egypt is not named in the new travel ban.

The policy mirrors a similar travel ban announced in January 2017, one week into Trump’s first term, which banned travel from seven Muslim-majority countries. That policy, while largely criticized, was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018.

That ban was later ended by President Joe Biden in 2021.

Democratic lawmakers have voiced opposition to the ban on social media. They include Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass, who posted on X, “Make no mistake: Trump’s latest travel ban will NOT make America safer. We cannot continue to allow the Trump administration to write bigotry and hatred into U.S. immigration policy.”

The new policy applies to foreigners from the named countries who are outside of the United States and who lack visas to enter as of Monday, June 9.

Certain travelers are excepted from the rule, it states, including U.S. permanent residents, athletes traveling to attend major sporting events, and immediate family members with “clear and convincing evidence of identity and family relationship,” citing DNA as an example.

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