James' World 2

Hmmmm … Extremely enlightening article! How did Picard and Kirk meet?

Click the link below the bottom picture

.

What shape is the universe? This question is far more intriguing and truly unresolved than any debate over the shape of our planet, despite the claims of flat-Earthers.

We occupy only a tiny space within a gigantic cosmos. Our vantage point is limited. Nevertheless, cosmologists are now fairly certain that our universe is flat.

But that doesn’t explain the exact shape of space. It could extend infinitely along the three spatial dimensions or resemble a three-dimensional generalization of a donut’s surface—or take on even wilder forms. The mathematics of flat space is astonishingly versatile, and new research is upending the traditional thinking about the layout of our cosmos.

Triangles in the Sky

Carl Friedrich Gauss, a German astronomer who lived in the late 1700s and early 1800s, was one of the first mathematicians to study geometry in curved spaces. He knew, for example, that the sum of the angles of a triangle in a plane is 180 degrees and that it is greater on a sphere. On spherical surfaces, such as that of Earth, an equilateral triangle can consist of three right angles, for instance. Other geometries, such as the shape of a Pringles chip, can have angle sums of less than 180 degrees.

The same principle applies not only to triangles on 2D surfaces but also in 3D space. Depending on the curvature of space, the sum of the angles can vary. Gauss may have seen the triangle as a good starting point for investigating the shape of the universe, though this is debated. He is said to have measured the distances between three German mountain peaks (Hohenhagen, Brocken and Inselberg) and determined their angles. His result: the sum was close enough to 180 degrees that it suggested that there was a flat plane between the mountain peaks.

Unfortunately, although the triangle method is helpful for thinking about the curvature of space, it’s not going to answer the question of whether our universe is curved or flat. The cosmos is gigantic. Even if Gauss or another astronomer used a large telescope, triangulating the distances between stars wouldn’t work. Stars within our own or in neighboring galaxies are too close to us, measured against the vast scale of the universe. Furthermore, we must take into account that the observed objects are moving and that, as a result of gravity, the light traveling to us follows partially curved paths.

But experts can use other tricks to deduce the shape of our universe. For example, they look deep into the past—all the way to the oldest radiation, dating back to around 13.8 billion years ago.

A Brief History of the Universe

Exactly how our universe originated is still unclear. Fortunately, the precise details are not necessary to deduce its shape. Much can already be worked out from the oldest light that reaches us: the cosmic microwave background.

When our universe was very young, it consisted of very hot, dense matter. The building blocks of atomic nuclei, quarks and gluons, floated around loosely in a kind of primordial soup. The medium was so dense that photons could not move freely within it.

As the universe expanded, it cooled; gradually, the first atomic nuclei and eventually atoms formed. As a result, the universe became transparent: photons could move freely. And this light, which originated around 370,000 years after the big bang, is what we can observe.

The signal that reaches us from that time is surprisingly uniformly distributed across the sky, no matter where the detectors are pointed. This means that matter must have been very evenly distributed at this early stage. This observation leads to the cosmological principle: the universe must be homogeneous and isotropic. In other words, matter in the cosmos is uniformly distributed, in the same way in all directions. From Einstein’s equations of general relativity, it then follows that the curvature of space is constant on large scales.

This significantly restricts the possible geometry of the cosmos. If the curvature is constant, then three different cases can be distinguished:

1. No curvature: in this case, you have a Euclidean geometry, as on a flat surface.
2. Positive curvature: this corresponds to a spherical geometry, similar to that on a sphere.
3. Negative curvature: the geometry is hyperbolic, like a Pringles chip.

To determine which of the three cases is realized in the universe, one can again use cosmic microwave radiation. It is almost homogeneous, but not quite: there are tiny fluctuations within it that provide a clue to the geometry of the universe.

The small fluctuations in microwave radiation result from tiny density differences in the hot, bubbling primordial soup. And we can calculate how strong these fluctuations were in the early universe: the largest correspond to the greatest distance the density waves could travel.

These density fluctuations are also visible in our sky, specifically in the cosmic background. How large they appear depends on the geometry of the universe: If the universe is positively curved, the density fluctuations should appear larger than they actually are. With negative curvature, they should appear smaller. And without curvature, they should correspond exactly to the theoretical value (much as the angles of a triangle in flat space will sum to 180 degrees). According to measurements by cosmologists, this last scenario applies to our universe.

So the Universe Is Flat—But How Flat?

Density fluctuation measurements, along with other cosmological data, suggest that our universe is flat. But that still doesn’t mean we know the true shape of our universe.

Because curved 3D spaces are difficult to visualize, we can start with 2D examples. If our universe were 2D and flat, most people would imagine a flat surface. But that’s not the only 2D shape with flat geometry. Another example is the surface of a torus, which resembles a bagel or donut.

A bagel looks curved, but in a crucial sense, it isn’t. You could, in theory, form a torus by taking a flat (and exceptionally stretchy) sheet of paper and gluing the opposite sides together to create a cylinder. You could then twist this sheet so the open cylinder ends meet, creating a hollow ring or torus.

In fact, there are three other variations of a flat space in two dimensions: a cylinder, a Möbius strip and a Klein bottle.

In three dimensions, the possibilities are even more diverse. In 1934, mathematician Werner Nowacki proved that there are 18 different flat 3D shapes. If our universe is truly flat, then it has one of these 18 shapes.

We can rule out some candidates because eight of the 18 are “nonorientable.” If you were to fly a rocket through a nonorientable universe, you would eventually return to your starting point, but in a mirrored form: your right would now be left, and vice versa. According to experts, such universes contradict the laws of physics.

That leaves 10 different forms that the universe can have:

1. An infinitely extended 3D space with x, y, and z axes.
2. A 3D generalization of the torus: in this case, one can imagine gluing together the opposite faces of a cube.
3. A half-twist torus: same as #2, but one pair of surfaces is twisted by 180 degrees, like a Möbius strip.
4. A quarter-twist torus: same as #2, but a pair of surfaces is joined by twisting them by 90 degrees.
5. A third-twist prism: instead of looking at the faces of a cube, one can also use a six-sided prism. Here, opposite faces are also glued together, but one face is rotated by 120 degrees.
6. A sixth-twist prism: same as #5, but one side is rotated by 60 degrees.
7. A shape called a Hantzsche-Wendt manifold that consists of two cubes stacked on top of each other, with the faces of the cubes joined together in a complex way.
8. A space consisting of infinitely many flat planes that can be twisted relative to each other.
9. A space consisting of an infinitely tall “chimney”: four surfaces arranged as the sides of a parallelogram. Opposite surfaces are glued together.
10. Same as #9, but one of the pairs of surfaces is rotated by 180 degrees.

All of these shapes share the same flat geometry, but each possess their own unique characteristics. Experts can therefore search for clues and evidence of these features to determine the precise shape of the universe using increasingly detailed cosmological data.

Infinitely Many Copies of Ourselves

Many of these candidates for the shape of the universe are compact, meaning they do not extend outward infinitely. Instead a striking characteristic that they share is repetition. In a torus-shaped universe, for example, light from our Earth would eventually reach Earth again, so we would see our reflection.

That said, our universe is gigantic, and light travels at a finite speed. This means that even if the light from our solar system or galaxy were to reach us again someday, we most likely wouldn’t recognize the image. This is because its shape at that time would probably bear little resemblance to our current surroundings. Furthermore, our cosmos might be so vast that light simply hasn’t had enough time to traverse it.

But there could be other clues if we are living in a compact universe. The shape of the cosmos influences, among other things, how matter and light interacted in the early universe. And this should be reflected in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Researchers have searched for repeating structures within it, such as identical circular arrangements that would indicate a compact universe. To do this, they had to make some geometric considerations: because we receive the microwave radiation on the spherical Earth, the signal has the shape of a spherical surface. Our universe could have a more complex shape, however—and traces of this should be reflected in the spherical data we receive.

When experts searched for identical circular structures in cosmic microwave background radiation data during the 2000s and 2010s, they found nothing. Therefore, most cosmologists assumed that the universe had a fairly simple structure: it would be flat and extend infinitely in all three spatial dimensions. Research into the shape of the universe stalled because of a lack of new evidence—until the Collaboration for Observations, Models and Predictions of Anomalies and Cosmic Topology (COMPACT) was launched in 2022.

Researchers in the collaboration are comparing the latest data on the cosmological microwave background radiation with the various possible shapes of the universe. They have discovered that the lack of evidence for identical circular structures in the cosmic microwave background is far less restrictive than previously thought. In fact, it is quite plausible that we would not identify any of these structures in a compact universe. Furthermore, the experts are working on identifying other features in cosmological data that would point to complex shapes for the universe. The COMPACT team is still analyzing the data and developing suitable models. Exciting new results are expected in the coming months and years.

All of this means that the universe could be far more complex than previously thought. And the question of the shape of our cosmos is not merely academic. The topology of spacetime was likely determined by the quantum processes that occurred shortly after the big bang. Therefore, if we knew more precisely about the shape of the universe, we could learn more about the complex processes at its beginning—or so the hope goes.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

The result? A hiring environment where the signals employers have traditionally relied on to evaluate candidates have become deeply unreliable. Now, both sides are operating with diminishing trust in each other. 

What’s Driving the Deception?

Hiring today is not facing a character problem, but a structural one. When candidates believe that presenting themselves accurately will cost them a job offer, the rational response is to become the person they think the employer is looking for. But when this approach becomes standard, those who still choose to tell the truth take on an “honesty tax,” the systemic disadvantage honest candidates face when exaggeration becomes the market norm.

GCheck’s Trust in Hiring Report revealed that 93% of job seekers have lied or embellished their experience during the hiring process, while 60% do not believe they would have been hired had they presented their qualifications more accurately. This is beyond a confession—it’s a market signal. 

Part of what drives this dynamic is opacity on the employer side. When candidates do not know what will be verified, they assume the answer is minimal, and they calibrate their self-presentation accordingly. In fact, GCheck found that although 88% of job seekers believe misrepresentation puts businesses at risk, 53% assumed employers wouldn’t verify their claims, and only about a quarter (26%) report ever being caught lying or exaggerating.

Verification that is invisible to candidates is not a deterrent. It is permission. And thanks to artificial intelligence, candidates can disguise their true skills and identity almost instantaneously. 

AI Accelerates Dishonesty in Hiring

LinkedIn’s 2025 Work Change Report estimates that 70% of the skills used in most jobs will change by 2030, driven largely by AI. When job seekers navigate a market where the definition of “qualified” is constantly shifting, the pressure to appear more capable than they are significantly intensifies. AI has not created that pressure, but it has handed candidates sophisticated tools to act on it at every stage of the hiring process.

Employer concerns have moved beyond job seekers’ using AI to compile resumes or assist with writing. Now, the degree to which AI has migrated into live interviews and assessments is worrisome. 

GCheck found that 61% of candidates have used AI to rehearse interview answers until they sounded more impressive than authentic, and 25% reported deploying an AI avatar in place of their own face during a virtual interview. ​

The result is a hiring process where trust is eroding on both sides. On one hand, candidates feel pressure to optimize and automate their performance in a highly mediated, virtual environment; on the other, employers struggle to assess who is genuinely behind the screen. When interviews are increasingly remote, scripted, and technology driven, the lines between preparation and performance become blurred. This highlights how broken and transactional the modern hiring process has become. 

There’s also an emerging phenomenon of systematic embellishment, distortion or fabrication of professional qualifications across resumes, interviews, and references as a deliberate competitive strategy driven by market pressure and weak verification expectations. It’s been dubbed “careerfishing,” and it’s no longer the behavior of a fringe group. 

What Employers Must Do to Rebuild Trust

Rebuilding trust in hiring is not only a technology problem, but also a standards and transparency issue. Employers who treat verification as a confidential back-end process get exactly what opacity produces: candidates who assume they can game the system, largely because they can. Three leadership-level shifts matter most here:

• Make verification standards visible. Communicate what will be checked before a candidate applies. Transparency disrupts embellishment at its source, not after the offer. The FTC’s guidance on employment background checks under the FCRA already mandates disclosure at specific stages. Moving that clarity upstream changes candidate behavior earlier in the process in measurable ways. For example, candidates who know credentials or work samples will be actually verified are less likely to exaggerate or rely on AI-generated materials they cannot defend later. 

• Make screening decisions reviewable by a person. Candidates who know a human will review findings, not only an algorithm, engage with the process more honestly.

• Make verification proportionate to actual risk. Applying the same screening depth to every role signals to candidates that the process is performative. Calibrating scope to genuine role risk makes verification more credible, more defensible, and more likely to deter the embellishment it is meant to catch.

.

[Images: Adobe Stock]

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Ken Paxton’s victory in Texas on Tuesday transformed the deep red state into the nation’s newest political battleground, expanding the Senate map, previewing lines of attack from both parties, and offering a test of President Trump’s influence in the general election.

Democrats still face an uphill battle in their quest to turn Texas blue, even with the excitement surrounding their nominee, James Talarico, a state legislator and seminary student who is pitching a brand of inclusive politics.

But the ascension of Mr. Paxton, a scandal-plagued state attorney general who trounced Senator John Cornyn after receiving the “Complete and Total Endorsement” of President Trump last week, promised a general election clash as big as, well, Texas.

Expanding the map.

Many Democrats, and some Republicans, said that they thought the nomination of Mr. Paxton could put Texas into play for Democrats, joining the relatively small number of battleground states that could decide control of the Senate.

With the Republicans holding 53 seats in the Senate, Democrats will have to defend all the seats they currently hold and flip four more seats in order to win control in November. Party leaders initially focused on flipping Alaska, Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio. But with Mr. Trump’s approval rating sagging, some now see Texas as offering another possible path.

And, already, there are signs that the role Mr. Trump played in ousting another incumbent Republican senator — the president backed the challenger who defeated Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana this month in a primary — risks hampering his agenda on Capitol Hill.

Opening with attacks.

Both Mr. Paxton and Mr. Talarico framed the Texas race in existential terms on Tuesday night. Mr. Paxton cast Mr. Talarico as a “weird” liberal, while Mr. Talarico described Mr. Paxton as a tool of billionaire donors stealing public resources from regular working people.

“Without a shadow of a doubt, I will be the Democrats’ number one target in November,” Mr. Paxton told supporters at his victory night party.

Moments before Mr. Paxton took the stage in Plano, Texas, Mr. Talarico’s campaign released a video calling his opponent the “most corrupt politician in America.”

“For 50 years, megadonors and their puppet politicians like Ken Paxton have stolen from us with their bribes, bailouts, and billionaire tax breaks,” Mr. Talarico said. “That ends this year. In this state. In this race.”

Can Democrats finally put Texas in play?

No Democrat has won statewide in Texas since 1994. But many Democrats said that they believed the nomination of Mr. Paxton, with all his baggage, could offer them their best chance of victory in years.

While Mr. Trump’s late endorsement helped propel Mr. Paxton’s decisive victory in the low-turnout Republican primary, it is not clear how it will play in the general election, given the president’s low approval ratings, the unpopular Iran war and rising gas prices.

“Paxton doesn’t know how to broaden his appeal,” said Matt Mackowiak, a senior adviser to Mr. Cornyn. “He runs generals like they’re primaries. I don’t know that he’s run in an environment like this.”

Former Representative Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat who came within three points of knocking out Senator Ted Cruz in 2018, predicted Mr. Paxton’s appeal to Republican primary voters will not translate to the much broader electorate in November.

“He’s too extreme, and he’s too tied to Trump, whose popularity continues to decline,” Mr. O’Rourke said.

Bobby Pulido, a moderate Democrat and Latin Grammy Award-winning Tejano singer who is running for Congress in South Texas, said that he thought the race would be competitive. “The Rio Grande Valley has conservative voters that are not necessarily MAGA,” he said. “And Paxton is definitely a MAGA candidate.”

Mr. Talarico was quick to extend an invitation to Mr. Cornyn’s supporters on Tuesday night, thanking the senator for his service to the state and telling his backers in a social media post that they have “a place” in his campaign.

A record-setting race is about to get more expensive.

After waging the most expensive Senate primary campaign in the country’s recent history — with $128 million worth of ads run in the Republican contest — both sides are preparing for a general

election contest that strategists estimate could cost tens of millions of dollars more.

.

Ken Paxton defeated Senator John Cornyn in a runoff for the Republican nomination on Tuesday, setting up a marquee race against James Talarico, the Democrat. Credit…Desiree Rios for The New York Times

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Last year, less than a month after being named acting administrator of NASA, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy made an eyebrow-raising announcement to the world: NASA was going to put a nuclear reactor on the moon. As part of strengthening U.S. national security in space, he said, this reactor would be designed, built, flown and delivered to the lunar surface by 2030. To many observers, this declaration sounded wild. Why would you want to put a nuclear reactor on the moon?

The thing is, if America (or any spacefaring nation) wants to establish a permanent presence on the moon—an inhabited station that can operate during the frigid and lengthy lunar night—solar power won’t cut it. Through its Artemis program, which just sent four astronauts on a trip around the moon, NASA wants to transform our planet’s argent companion into a scientific outpost, a mining site, and a rocket launchpad pointed at Mars. To do that, nuclear power is the sole option. “It’s the only way we can sustain a lunar base properly long-term,” says Simon Middleburgh, co-director of the Nuclear Futures Institute at Bangor University in Wales. It’s no wonder, then, that China and Russia are teaming up to put their own nuclear reactor on the moon by 2035 to electrify what they call the International Lunar Research Station—their planned base on the lunar south pole. Sooner or later, from one nation or another, “nuclear power on the moon will happen,” Middleburgh says. “It’s inevitable.”

Nuclear power plants are safer than many suspect. But putting reactors in space is a concept with a checkered history. One notorious reactor caused an international incident in 1978 after it came apart in Earth’s atmosphere. And nobody has ever designed a reactor for the moon, a hostile volcanic desert subject to extreme temperature swings, frequent asteroid strikes, and protracted quakes.

Experts questioned both the timing and the scale of the nuclear power plant Duffy is proposing. Placing a reactor capable of powering 80 American households on the lunar south pole—an environment no human has yet set foot in—by 2030 sounds rushed, if not impossible. And the last thing anyone wants is for the U.S. to barrel through the conception, construction, launch, and landing of a lunar nuclear reactor. “I think the worst-case scenario might be [that] in the quest to be first we skip important design and safety steps,” says Bhavya Lal, a professor of space policy at the RAND School of Public Policy and former acting chief technologist and associate administrator for technology, policy and strategy at NASA. “It’s good to be first—competition is good—but we need to do it right.”

If the U.S. does succeed, its nuclear-powered moon base could become a solar system–exploring foothold among the stars. But mistakes can happen. And whether you’ve accidentally spray-painted an ancient reserve of water ice with radioactive waste or fatally stranded your astronauts in the lunar darkness without any power, a nuclear disaster on the moon would be, in Middleburgh’s words, “a humanity-defining shit show.”

Katy Huff wants to clear something up: uranium, the infamous radioactive element used to power nuclear plants and, with some tweaking, give most nukes their annihilative terror, is dull—at least in a manner of speaking.

Huff, a nuclear engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was the assistant secretary for nuclear energy in the Biden administration. Nuclear power is her jam. But it’s important to know that unused nuclear fuel is “radiologically very boring,” she said during a recent video call. “It’s not particularly radioactive.” She gestured to an object on her desk. “I have some uranium in that cardboard box right there.” The fact that you can hold uranium in your hand without consequence may come as a surprise to many. “You can pick it up. It’s toxic more than anything else; it’s like lead,” Middleburgh says. “So don’t eat it.”Uranium becomes dangerous—and helpful—when you chuck it into a nuclear reactor and fire neutrons at it. The impact causes the uranium’s unstable atomic nuclei to snap apart and emit more neutrons, which cause more nuclei to rupture—and voilà, you have a heat-emitting nuclear fission reaction. As long as the reaction doesn’t spiral out of control, you can use the heat to turn a fluid (often water) into steam. That steam rotates a turbine, which makes electricity.

You don’t want to hold the uranium fuel after it’s been blasted with neutrons. “Then it breaks apart and becomes fission products that are highly radioactive, which is why nuclear waste is dangerous,” Huff says. But because that nuclear cascade can continue for a very long time, it’s a fabulous power source—particularly in space, where it won’t need refueling for years, maybe decades.

The concept of nuclear power in space isn’t new. Starting in the 1960s, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union sent plenty of radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs, into space to power all kinds of things, from Earth-orbiting satellites and the Apollo-era scientific experiments on the moon to Mars rovers and deep-space probes. Plutonium, uranium’s ferocious chemical cousin, was often used in these devices. RTGs, though, are not nuclear reactors. They are more like nuclear batteries: screaming-hot radioactive caches providing a small but lasting source of heat that can produce electricity.

But an RTG would be insufficient to power a moon base. Astronauts need more than just energy to keep the lights on. They need a constant source of heat in the night and a way to vent that heat when the mercury soars during lunar daytime. If they want machines that can extract precious water from the lunar soil—water for hydrating both astronauts and crops and, crucially, to be electrically split into hydrogen and oxygen gas to make rocket fuel—then they’ll need oodles of electricity to power them.

.

Tavis Coburn

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Sensing his moment, Mosoff struck, raising paddle 2529 for the first time. Another flourish wasn’t needed. The gavel came down, and Mosoff had made history—purchasing the most expensive bottle of American whiskey ever recorded: $162,500 for an Old Rip Van Winkle 20-Year-Old Single Barrel “Sam’s” bourbon.

“There was no part of me that felt, ‘What have you done?’” Mosoff, 41, tells TIME by video call from his home in New York City. “To this day, I’ve never had a single moment of regret.”

Mosoff’s acquisition captured the headlines, but there were plenty of other stars at The Great American Whiskey Collection, which collectively raised $2.5 million on Jan. 24, doubling pre-sale predictions, making it both the world’s most valuable sale of American whiskey as well as the most valuable single-owner spirits auction ever held in New York. All 319 lots were sold.

It’s just the latest signal that American whiskey is finally emerging from the shadows. While rare bottles of scotch can easily fetch seven figures—the most expensive is a $2.7 million Macallan Adami 1926, also sold by Sotheby’s— and Japanese whisky changes hands for hundreds of thousands of dollars, American whiskey has traditionally been the poorer cousin. (Note the extra “e” in the spelling for American and Irish whiskey.) 

But as the U.S. prepares to celebrate its 250th year, Mosoff says it’s high time American whiskey got due credit for both quality and cultural significance. “American whiskey is still sometimes seen as not quite the same [as scotch],” says Mosoff. “But there are these historically important bottles and producers that have not yet made their mark on the global stage.”It’s overdue recognition that would track the buzz around American wine, with some neat historical parallels. In 1976, in an event to mark the U.S. bicentennial, Steven Spurrier, a British wine merchant, organized a wine tasting in Paris that pitted French bottles against Californian. Spurrier, who predominantly sold French vintages, wasn’t expecting anything other than a trouncing for the parvenu.

In the end, the all-French panel ranked a Napa County wine best in both the white and red category, prompting at least one judge to withdraw her ballot in horror. What became known as the “Judgment of Paris” was the final vindication that American wine had come of age.

“Overnight, that basically changes the entire wine world,” says Mosoff. “And I think that American whiskey is at that same inflection point.”

American whiskey’s lower price point means collectors are buoyed by a nascent American whiskey boom, especially if Asian and European collectors start getting in on the action.

“Prices will continue to go up as long as prices are proportionally so much lower than other categories,” says Jonny Fowle, vice president and global head of spirits for Sotheby’s. “If you’re buying bottles at $10,000, they can quite easily double in price. There’s so much room for growth.”

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________