James' World 2

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Chinese scientists have discovered the largest whale “graveyard” ever found. It contains nearly 500 whale skeletons, all collected by chance, and spreads across 750 miles of seafloor and five million years of evolutionary history.

“They’ve really captured something novel,” says Nick Pyenson, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the new research. The discovery is detailed in a study published today in Nature. “It’s a cool study; it’s really neat to see,” Pyenson says.

The discovery is centered on the Diamantina Fracture Zone, which travels west from the southwesternmost tip of Australia into the Indian Ocean along a rift valley that formed some 50 million years ago, when the Down Under continent split from Antarctica.

In early 2023, Chinese scientists used a crewed submersible vehicle to scout along the fracture and spotted what they quickly realized was a whale fossil at some 23,000 feet (7,000 meters) below the surface. Over the course of some 30 additional dives, the researchers discovered an incredible array of whale remains, as well as traces of the animals’ activity at most of the sites they explored.

Five of the whale skeletons they found were recent enough to be hosting the type of dynamic ecosystem that scientists associate with “whale falls.” Such systems support a shifting cast of scavengers and then microbes specialized to these fleeting feasts. (Because scientists only discovered whale falls less than 50 years ago, Pyenson says that researchers don’t have an accurate estimate for how long these pop-up ecosystems can last.)

In the Diamantina zone, all five of the whale falls the scientists found were in the later stages of being consumed, with the bones fully exposed and host to teeming microbial communities. The researchers also observed animals ranging from bone-eating worms to squat lobsters, from spoon worms to jellyfish—and the scientists suspect that some of these creatures may represent undescribed species.

These tantalizing observations only scratch the surface of this discovery. Perhaps more interesting still are the hundreds of barren whale remains that the researchers saw during their dives. In these cases, the whale bones managed to fossilize before scavengers and microbes could demolish the massive carcasses. And because sediment accumulates so slowly at these depths, the fossils have remained exposed for thousands or even millions of years.

The researchers were able to use their submersible to collect 33 samples of the fossils, which were dated to between 5.26 million and 120,000 years old—a stunning range, Pyenson says. For him, the site is the marine equivalent of the famous La Brea Tar Pits in downtown Los Angeles, a site that has gathered and preserved carcasses over a range of geological time.

The “paper reminded me of a trailer for the first in a series of epic movies,” wrote Stephen Godfrey, a paleontologist at the Calvert Marine Museum, who was not involved in the finding, in a piece accompanying the paper that was also published in Nature. “I hope that there will be many more of these blockbusters to come.”

“It shouldn’t be surprising that we find this kind of site,” Pyenson says. “What they’re documenting here is probably not unique.” He believes it might be possible to find similarly massive numbers of whale remains along common migration “superhighways”—at least those routes that have remained more or less stable over millions of years.

“That’s what’s really cool,” Pyenson says. “It really underscores the value of protecting and better understanding these deep-sea environments.”

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Charles Duhigg explains why trying to eliminate a bad habit is neurologically futile, and what to do instead.

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Sound on

Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of The Power of Habit, which spent over three years on bestseller lists and has been translated into 40 languages,[…]

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Hmmmm … Sic Semper Tyrannis – TARADO!

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Iran’s military leaders have greeted the cease-fire agreement with President Trump as a triumph, crowing that “through the imposition of their divine and iron will,” they had “humiliated American and Zionist enemies.”

Mostly, they’re right.

Mostly, because it’s worth remembering that the current regime in Iran is far less formidable than it was before the Hamas assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Back then, Iran had potent allies and proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen. Its nuclear program was intact and steadily accumulating ever larger quantities of highly enriched uranium. It had a powerful military-industrial base, a weak but functional economy, and a government that — for all its repressiveness — was internationally recognized as legitimate.

Today, much of that is either gone or diminished. Iran is no longer within sprinting distance of a bomb. Its ally in Syria was deposed. Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis have lost much of their fighting strength. The Iranian rial is the world’s most worthless currency. The leadership rules an unhappy population that — outside of die-hard loyalists — would almost certainly overthrow it if given the chance. Its latest ballistic missile salvo against Israel failed to land a serious single blow. Its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz strained, but did not strangle, the world’s energy markets.

Those are real achievements against an evil, ambitious regime. Yet the outcome of war rarely rests on a tally of relative strength. War is a contest of wills. And in that contest, the hard men of Tehran appear to have scored a decisive victory over the vain man of Washington.

I write this as someone who supported the war from the outset and hoped to see Trump carry it through to a decisive result: if not regime change, then at least a deal in which Iran would be forced to relinquish all of its enrichment capabilities and access to the Strait was unfettered. Those goals were well within the president’s reach, particularly if he had continued to attack Iran’s military-industrial infrastructure until it agreed to terms, rather than conducting most of the negotiations after the fighting had mostly stopped.

But Trump got spooked after the regime didn’t instantly crumble, and energy prices shot up. He then effectively abandoned the war he had started after less than six weeks of sustained combat — combat in which the United States lost fewer service members than in the 1983 invasion of Grenada. He compounded the error with an almost comical succession of military threats and last-minute climb-downs, each of them signaling indecision and weakness to Iranian adversaries practiced in the study of weakness.

Tehran took the measure of Trump’s courage. What it found was a bone spur.

All this may seem odd for a president who once loudly complained that the United States hadn’t “fought to win” a war since 1945, who demanded “unconditional surrender” from Tehran and who had repeatedly lambasted his predecessor for the humiliating exit from Afghanistan. Then again, it’s not odd for a president whose very essence is betrayal of everyone and everything, his own words not least.

Though the details of the deal remain murky — a telling indicator of its likely shoddiness, since the administration would surely trumpet the terms of a strong agreement — it’s already clear that Trump has betrayed his promise to the Iranian people, after they were massacred in January to quell antigovernment protests, that “help is on its way.” As in Venezuela, to say nothing of China and Russia, this administration’s message to oppressed people everywhere is that their rights come last.

Trump is also on his way to betraying Israel, our principal ally in this fight, by pushing Jerusalem to stand down in its effort to stop Hezbollah’s attacks on its north, in that way handing Tehran the victory of creating a diplomatic linkage between Lebanon and Hormuz. If Iran is now allowed to extract some kind of service fee for permitting ships to transit the Strait, Trump will have also betrayed our allies in the Persian Gulf by giving Iran financial and strategic leverage to which it has no right, and which it didn’t previously have.

The worst betrayal, however, is of Americans who supported the war — not only neocons like me but also most of Trump’s MAGA base — because we believed that Iran, which has waged a 47-year war against us, posed an increasingly intolerable threat to our security and vital interests.

This cease-fire neither ends nor eases that threat; it hardens and magnifies it. It removes the one point of U.S. leverage over Iran — the naval blockade of its ports — before there’s any negotiation over its nuclear program, which the Iranians will almost surely drag out until Trump is out of office. It reminds the world of the adage that while it can be dangerous to be America’s enemy, it is fatal to be its friend. And it gives Iran’s leaders something even more vital: The confidence that, whatever Trump may threaten, they can withstand the most any American president or Israeli prime minister can throw at them.

There’s a word for this: debacle. Not because the war, for all its costs or errors of execution, was a mistake. It’s because this pretense of a peace is an act of geopolitical self-harm that will haunt our standing in the world for years to come.

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Photo illustration by Tam Stockton for The New York Times

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When Emma Scales decided she wanted to be a scientist, it seemed logical—simple, even. She’d grown up in coastal New Jersey, attended a high school that emphasized marine biology, and learned about the connections among sea creatures large and small. She felt a calling to better understand and protect a world she loved.

Now a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, Scales is studying symbiosis, specifically the way bacteria can grow inside fungi and create a mutual-use arrangement. It’s what she calls a “Russian nesting doll” system. But these days, little seems simple or logical. Scales’s research is aimed largely at protecting food crops, and at Cornell, she’s recently watched laboratories shut down because of federal funding cuts, including labs running practical programs meant to help strengthen U.S. agriculture. Since 2025, the Trump administration has cut more than 7,800 grants, removed 25,000 scientists and related personnel from their jobs, and, as of January 2026, proposed budget cuts equaling about $32 billion. Cornell has recovered its funding, but doing so came with its own heavy costs, and warning signs are still flashing.

Scales is one of thousands of early-career researchers in the U.S. trying to make sense of how the current tumult in American science will shape their professional paths. Between lost funding and stalled programs, the young scientists of today are facing uncertainty in the job market and the possibility of having to leave the U.S. or, in some cases, leave science completely.

But Scales has decided to fight back, joining with other graduate students trying to protect universities. “They are scrubbing science of the influence of some of its most brilliant scientists. Work that has taken decades to build is being wiped out,” she says. When the research community gets a chance to rebuild, she wonders, how long will it take to regain what’s been lost?

Julia Menzel, an American early-career science historian currently at the University of Toronto, has similar questions. “There has got to be some way to dull the negative impact this has on people trying to start their careers in science,” she insists. “If we lose a generation of scientists, we are going to see very negative consequences.”

Menzel’s research, which she began while completing a Ph.D. in the history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells us that the country has faced these kinds of challenges before. Administrations hostile to evidence have previously worked to dismantle the U.S. scientific enterprise. And history is cyclical—many science historians point to similarities between the eras of Donald Trump and Richard Nixon and the ways these presidents sowed distrust of science among Americans to push their agendas. For example, in an echo of today, Nixon imposed widespread cuts to research funding while redirecting money to his chosen science projects. In subsequent administrations, science regained both money and status, in part because of strategic advocacy by scientists. Will such a pattern repeat this time around?

David Kaiser, a physicist and historian of science at M.I.T. who mentored Menzel, believes that the past tells us to hold on, that we don’t yet know the end of the story. But the solution may come from young scientists like Scales who take on the task of rebuilding science as a profession. They may need to use a new blueprint. They may need to invent their future. But first, they need to survive the present. “There’s now a deeply felt uncertainty about science,” Kaiser says with a sharp edge of worry. “There are so many students, so gifted and earnest, who go into research because they want to help the world. And they are marching toward a future that looks nothing like what I had hoped for them.”

The U.S. has long been committed to supporting R&D. In 2023, the country’s investment in research was about 3.45 percent of its gross domestic product, making it the fifth-highest worldwide. The National Science Foundation says the total amount spent on science in 2024 was $993 billion. Of that, almost 19 percent came from the federal government. Nearly 76 percent came from industry. In 2024, federal research dollars went mostly to federal agencies and certain public-private research partnerships (43 percent), then universities (31 percent) and businesses (19 percent).

The return on investment for science is equally enormous. The National Institutes of Health alone provide more than $69 billion toward the U.S. GDP through research, and a medical-research advocacy group reports that every NIH dollar spent on research returns $2.57 in new economic activity. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has found returns of up to 300 percent from government research and development since the days after World War II.

Science itself is not partisan, and research is supposed to inform policymaking. Yet science funding in the U.S. has long been a political pinball.

President Barack Obama promised that “the days of science taking a back seat to ideology” were over in 2009, saying he hoped to double federal research spending during a time when federal spending was in a minor upswing. But a Congress dominated by the Tea Party thwarted him. In the end, according to an analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, congressionally approved funding by federal agencies instead dropped a full 10 percent, when adjusted for inflation.

The first Trump administration immediately sought to deepen those cuts. This move, too, was stymied by congressional resistance. The budget of the NIH—the largest supporter of research at U.S. universities—went from about $30 billion in 2015 to more than $48 billion in 2025, in part because of President Joe Biden’s call for greater investment in research. Biden, in fact, campaigned on a promise to respect scientific advice; Trump responded by mocking Biden for listening to scientists.

The second Trump administration has further targeted science funding. It has frozen grants and other money across the spectrum of research. The proposed budget for fiscal year 2027 asks to reduce the amount earmarked for nearly every federal science agency, including a 55 percent cut to the NSF. And although Congress has voted to restore much of the funding and federal judges have tried to intervene, the administration has used internal agency decisions and presidential memos to slash budgets as often as possible—and, on occasion, simply held back money authorized by Congress. “I don’t think anyone was prepared for the aggressiveness and suddenness of the cuts,” says University of Maryland, College Park, historian of science Melinda Baldwin. “I can’t really think of a similar moment in the past where funding has been cut off that fast.”But government hasn’t always been the primary funder of science. In the 19th century, research was largely practical, seen as the purview of independent businesspeople. Take Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, which revolutionized the mechanical aspects of farming in the early 1800s, or Alexander Graham Bell’s commercial development of the telephone later that century. Both men had benefactors supporting their efforts.

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Pepe Serra

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Key Takeaways

• Big Think has launched its first-ever online store, a collaboration with the infographic poster company Pop Chart.
• Our first poster with Pop Chart is “A Visual History of the Universe,” which features stunning illustrations of the universe from its earliest moments to the present.
• Check out Big Think’s store on Pop Chart to find the poster — as well as T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, notebooks, and, soon, our quarterly print magazines. 

Every few months, I round up useless or unused objects in my house, walk to the alley, and plop them into the dumpster without a second thought. I am no collector or hoarder. I only really value a few physical possessions: my three guitars, my books and magazines, and a small collection of posters and art (my favorite being a painting of a stork whose eyes stare right through you, made by my late grandpa).

That last category is something I could use much more of: beautiful things to look at. One piece that’ll soon hang on the wall of my office comes from my colleague, Ben Gibson, a design director at Big Think.

He recently created a poster called “A Visual History of the Universe,” made with help from Dr. Ethan Siegel, an astrophysicist and author of the Big Think column Starts With A Bang. It’s a poster that strikes a rare balance between being aesthetically stunning while also teaching you something useful — in this case, scientists’ best explanation for how everything around you came to be.

Ben’s been striking that balance since he was a kid.

“I had always loved looking at things like maps, charts, and cutaway illustrations, and spent a lot of hours (too many!) trying to draw them myself,” he said.

In 2010, he cofounded the infographics poster company Pop Chart with Patrick Mulligan after the two met while working at Penguin Books.

“Patrick also loved this stuff, and we started finding ways to incorporate these things into the books we were working on at Penguin — but we realized we needed a bigger canvas.”

The first poster the two produced was a chart of rapper names, diagrammed according to semantics. They’ve since sold hundreds of thousands of infographic posters and other products, becoming a design shop for advertising, events, publishing, and custom merchandise, with clients like HBO, Nike, Wieden + Kennedy, The New York Times, and the MoMA Design Store.

Pop Chart’s posters cover everything from literature’s most famous opening lines (as analyzed through the Reed-Kellogg system) to a visual breakdown of the Beatles’ discography by instruments featured on each song to a taxonomical diagram of every species of bird in North America — a bestseller that Ben said took about four months of “pretty painstaking research, illustration, and design to complete.”

The New York Times has dubbed Pop Chart “the poster mavens.” Fast Company described their posters as “catnip for uber-geeks.” Popular Science called them the “master of the infographic poster.”

Now, Big Think is calling them a partner. On Pop Chart, we recently launched Big Think’s first-ever store, where you can find our “A Visual History of the Universe” poster, along with Big Think T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, notebooks, and much more.

We’ll be designing and releasing many more posters over the coming months. It’s a natural partnership: Like Big Think, Pop Chart is always “uncovering deeper, surprising, and fascinating layers” about the world, Ben said. Big Think does that with articles and videos. Pop Chart turns those ideas into something worth hanging on your wall.

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Ideas worth displaying.

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The framework deal between the United States and Iran sets the stage for an end to the bursts of violence and debilitating disruption of energy deliveries and trade in the Persian Gulf. But don’t expect economies around the globe to simply pick up where they left off before the United States and Israel began bombing Iran on Feb. 28.

The war has set in motion changes that will be hard to reverse.

The global energy order is being reshaped.

The near shutdown in oil and gas deliveries from the Middle East and the leap in prices are causing a shift in power. Energy producers from the Gulf to the Americas are jockeying to maintain or increase their dominance, and customers are struggling to reduce their dependency and shore up their supply.

As a result, the energy market is changing, the energy mix is changing, and the energy players are changing.

The profound vulnerability of countries throughout Asia, Europe, and elsewhere that depend on imported energy is supercharging the hunt for alternatives. In some places, like South Korea and Japan, that has led to an increased use of dirtier fuels like coal.

But over the longer term, this energy shock — the second in just four years — is likely to accelerate a transition to renewables like solar and wind as well as nuclear power.

Improvements in electric battery technology and efficiency make the shift more feasible than it was when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted a global energy shock in 2022, said Daan Walter at Ember, an energy research group in London.

In many places, for instance, electric vehicles are increasingly affordable. And in April, wind and solar generated more electricity globally than gas for the first time.

“This is a big turnaround,” Mr. Walter said. “So what was five years ago, maybe barely competitive, now is almost already clearly cheaper.”

Investments in renewables have also become a better bet, promising returns in closer to two years instead of 30, he said.

Relations among producers are also changing. The war heightened tensions between the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and prompted the Emirates to leave the OPEC Plus oil cartel. The impact of that departure will be fully felt only when oil production in the region picks up. But a weakened Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries could add to volatility in oil markets.

The split has also encouraged the Saudis to move closer to Russia. Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, featured Saudi Arabia this month as the “guest of honor” at an economic forum in St. Petersburg.

Russia, the second-largest producer of crude oil and gas after the United States, has been strengthened in other ways by the war. The Trump administration temporarily lifted sanctions imposed on Russia, allowing Moscow to pump up profits from its oil exports when its economy is ailing.

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, and Guyana are building their oil production capacity as the world looks for alternative suppliers.

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Fishermen repairing a boat in the port of Tyre in southern Lebanon. The war with Iran has shaken trust in the Middle East’s peace, stability, and prosperity. Credit…Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times

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“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king, the palace instead becomes a circus. — Turkish proverb,”

 

Hmmmmm…History is repeating itself yet again!

 

Isaiah 59:14

New Living Translation

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You might find these videos enlightening!

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A. R. Bernard: one of many

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https://www.youtube.com

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El Niño is officially here—and the whole planet is likely to feel the brunt of it in the coming months.

The weather pattern officially took hold within the past month, according to a statement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released on June 11. In addition, forecasts are very confident that this will be a strong El Niño throughout the fall and into the winter—possibly even among the strongest El Niños on record, which occurred during 1982–1983, 1997–1998, and 2015–2016.

The announcement is not a surprise—May’s installment of the forecast noted that models suggested El Niño would form this month, and scientists have long been seeing hints of it brewing. “The models started showing signs of it last November,” says Emily Becker, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Miami, who works on the official NOAA El Niño forecast.

The confirmation that El Niño is here, however, lets scientists warn communities around the world about what they might face throughout the rest of this year.

What is El Niño?

To understand what the planet is in store for, let’s start by explaining what El Niño is: The phenomenon is one phase of a global climate pattern that scientists call the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, which incorporates both the oceans and the atmosphere and has its roots in the Pacific Ocean around the equator. Under average conditions, this region’s surface waters are characterized by a “warm pool” in the west and a “cold tongue” stretching out to the east, says Antonietta Capotondi, a physical oceanographer at the University of Colorado Boulder.

During an El Niño, that cold tongue is completely overpowered, with warm waters stretching throughout the equatorial Pacific, sometimes aided by a planetary-scale ocean wave called a Kelvin wave, Capotondi notes. One such wave has been plowing across the Pacific. (During El Niño’s counterpart, called La Niña, which occurred last year, the cold tongue expands westward.)

Formal demarcations of an El Niño vary internationally, but at their root, they look for sustained sea surface temperatures that are noticeably warmer than average across a set swath of the eastern Pacific. Temperatures in NOAA’s defining region spiked higher than the average in mid-April and have remained high ever since.

These changes in the ocean temperatures change where heat is pumped into the atmosphere, which in turn causes changes to wind patterns. As an El Niño takes hold in the atmosphere, winds blowing from east to west over the region slacken, says Sarah Larson, an atmospheric scientist at North Carolina State University.

How El Niño changes the weather

These changes in heat distribution and wind patterns create a domino effect through the atmosphere that has major implications for the weather people around the world experience in the coming months. Changes in wind patterns tend to strengthen the eastern Pacific hurricane season while dampening the Atlantic hurricane season. Across North America, El Niño tends to push the jet stream south. By winter, when the phenomenon is strongest, the southern U.S. tends to be wetter than normal, while the northern swath of the country and much of Canada tends to be warmer than usual, Larson notes.

Globally, El Niño can contribute to record-breaking heat spells in addition to shifting rainfall patterns around the planet. The burgeoning El Niño is already interfering with India’s monsoon, leading to low rainfall estimates for the crucial season. Recent El Niños have also worsened wildfire conditions in regions that include the Amazon, Canada, and Australia. Meanwhile, the Horn of Africa can see flooding from unusually intense rainfall.

These patterns can have important real-world consequences, worsening famines, fires, and floods in various parts of the globe. The patterns of El Niño—and scientists’ ability to read the strength of an event months in advance—offer experts somewhere to start understanding and preparing for potential effects months in advance.

“El Niño pushes the future odds in certain directions,” said Michelle L’Heureux, a physical scientist at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, who leads the team that produces the official El Niño forecast, to Scientific American before producing the new outlook. “Stronger events tend to shift the odds a bit more than weaker events, so this forecast is an opportunity to assess risk and prepare based on El Niño’s typical influence.”

A record hot year is likely

Pacific El Niño events unfold slowly—the closely watched patch of ocean will likely continue warming compared with its average temperature all the way through November or December, when the phenomenon usually peaks before the planet’s systems trend back toward normal. And El Niño unfolds a little bit differently each time, so the exact effects aren’t certain. “There’s always plenty of variability,” Becker says.

But the event will raise global temperatures, likely to record levels. Whether that happens this year, next year, or both is still uncertain. It is unclear, though, how climate change is influencing the strength or timing of El Niño events. And seeing a very strong El Niño this year isn’t necessarily a concerning sign about climate change, Becker notes.

All told, the El Niño–Southern Oscillation is a key factor shaping Earth’s climate each year. “It’s one of the most important emergent features of the climate system beyond the seasons,” says Maike Sonnewald, a physical oceanographer at the University of California, Davis.

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Satellite imagery showing the difference from average sea surface temperatures at the equator in the tropical Pacific Ocean (depicted using various shades of red and orange for warmth) during the first week of June 2026, as compared with the baseline used by NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch. NOAA Satellites

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