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Tim Andrews was so close to death, he was ready to risk what little life he might have left.

The retired grocery store manager was told he would have to wait five years before reaching the top of the transplant list and qualifying for a new, life-saving kidney. He knew he wasn’t going to make it. Already, he could no longer walk or hold down food.

So last year, he volunteered for an experimental surgery at the leading edge of scientific research: He agreed to get a pig kidney to replace his own failing organ. 

“I’m gonna die anyways, why wouldn’t I do something for all these [other people with kidney disease] that are suffering?” said Andrews, of Concord, New Hampshire.

“I don’t care if I die the next day as long as you learn something,” he told his doctor.

One pig- and one human-kidney transplant later, Andrews, 68, says he is now thinking of his future in terms of decades instead of days.

“I’m laughing again,” Andrews chuckled, remembering his time as a self-proclaimed “pig man.”

In the process, Andrews has become an example of how far transplantation has come and what it could look like in the future when there are enough organs for everyone in need and when the medication that enables a transplant’s success doesn’t threaten a recipient’s long-term survival. Andrews’ success as a transplant patient represents a decades-long American journey, one of many USA TODAY is profiling as part of its coverage of the United States’ 250th anniversary year.

The first-ever successful organ transplant took place in 1954, just a few miles from where Andrews received his own. The distance the field has traveled since −and has yet to go − represents a remarkable and very American medical journey, characterized by big ideas, big risks, perseverance, and issues of fairness and eye-popping prices.

The result: Andrews is alive and much healthier than he was two years ago.

“Oh my God, I’m in a science-fiction movie!” said Andrews, chuckling again, and adding that he’s always been a sci-fi buff. “How did I end up here?”

The wait for an organ

More than 100,000 Americans now sit on an organ transplant list, and most of them are waiting for a kidney. Like Andrews, they worry they won’t last long enough to get the ultimate gift.

For kidneys and some liver transplants, live donation is possible ‒ that is, someone can donate one of their two kidneys or a part of their liver and live out the rest of their lives normally. But not everyone can find a living match among friends, relatives or total strangers.

Andrews, like many, eventually benefited from a deceased organ donor. Only about three in 1,000 people die in a way that allows them to donate an organ like a kidney, lungs, or heart.

The science is getting better, enabling more organs to be used from patients who die older, sicker, or further from a hospital.

“We’re expanding the pool by using what we used to call ‘marginal’ organs,” said Dr. Nahel Elias, surgical director for kidney transplantation at Massachusetts General Hospital, where Andrews had his surgeries. “But at the end of the day, dead people are dead for a reason. Young, healthy people don’t just drop dead.”

And there simply aren’t enough organs for the people who need them, Elias and other experts said.

That’s where the idea of using pig organs comes in. For decades, researchers have been working toward the goal of using animal organs to save people. Some view the trade as unethical, but Americans already eat more than 130 million pigs every year, and pig, cow, and even shark tissue have long been used in medical settings.

Pig organs are similar enough in size and function to humans’, but transplanting entire organs was completely out of reach until about a decade ago, when scientists began mastering gene editing well enough to breed pigs whose organs are less likely to be rejected by the human immune system.

But xenotransplantation, as it is known, is still very much a work in progress, with just 10 Americans, including Andrews, having undergone a transplant. Only six are still alive. Andrews holds the record as of this writing. He lived 271 days with a pig organ.

Clinical trials started in 2026 to test pig organs in more people. The goal, doctors say, is to count their survival in years, not days.

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When Warner Bros. Discovery investors approved Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition offer last month, it seemed like the latest chapter in a story of corporate consolidation in Hollywood and the American media that’s been in full force since the 1980s. This chapter includes the potential end of one of the great movie studios, as well as putting CNN under the same roof as the now imperiled CBS News. But despite appearances, the end of this story hasn’t been written. This time, there’s real opposition to this kind of corporate consolidation — and a blueprint for how to win.

In 2023, the two of us, one a Hollywood actor and the other an antimonopoly policy analyst, met on a Zoom call during the Writers Guild strike. We came together because we recognized the root cause of the strike: A handful of corporations were swallowing an entire industry and leaving those who work in it worse off. Netflix, Amazon, and Disney were accumulating power, combining their production capacity with their enormous distribution platforms to form what could quickly become the kind of oligopolistic entities not seen in Hollywood in decades.

On that Zoom call, we talked about the consequences of consolidation for the people who make movies and TV, as well as for audiences. Mark had starred in “I Know This Much Is True,” a 2020 mini-series about how America treats mental illness, and we both wondered: Would a show like that still be made if an entity like HBO, which will come under Paramount’s control as part of this merger, were no longer free to take these kinds of creative risks?

The same question applies to “Spotlight,” the Oscar-winning movie about corruption and pedophilia in the Catholic Church, which was produced by an independent studio. Competition and opportunities for brave storytelling are intrinsically related, and we both knew that having lots of competitive outlets to produce art and lots of paths to distribute it helps to ensure that riskier, more controversial films and TV shows keep getting made.

When we spoke, Mark, like a good organizer, kept asking, “What’s the plan?” At the time, there wasn’t one. Now there is.

It is straightforward: Convince state attorneys general to do what President Trump’s antitrust enforcers likely will not, and block the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. on antitrust grounds.

After that? Go on the offensive and work to break up the studio streaming system that is stultifying Hollywood.

This plan is already in motion. Within weeks of Paramount winning the bidding war for Warner Bros., we helped bring together a loose coalition of civil society groups, unions, and actors, and this coalition enlisted over 1,000 artists to sign an open letter indicating our support of state attorneys general efforts to block the takeover. Many more subsequently added their voices, and the letter now has nearly 5,000 signatories.

But the most revealing thing about that letter wasn’t the people who signed. It was the people who didn’t. Not because they disagreed — because they were afraid.

There are many reasons to block this deal, but we now believe the most fundamental one is what we encountered when asking artists to use their voices: fear. A deep, ugly, and pervasive fear of speaking out.

We heard time and time again from artists, when asked to sign this letter, that they supported it but were afraid of retribution. Their fear is not unjustified. When the editorial director of The Ankler, one of the last independent trade magazines, who also founded the publication and serves as one of its columnists, was seen at an event carrying a bag of “Block the Merger” buttons, Paramount reportedly pulled its advertising in response. (The editorial director, Richard Rushfield, was among the letter’s signatories, but said he was not handing out the buttons.) One of us, Mr. Ruffalo, was suggested as a guest for a CNN discussion of the merger, but a producer later said that the network had decided to pass on the segment, and reportedly told the organizers behind the letter, “It’s a delicate subject for us at CNN given Warner Bros. Discovery is our parent company, and there are legal considerations around what we can and cannot cover or say while the merger is ongoing.” (A CNN spokesperson later said that “no one advised any editorial employee at CNN not to pursue this story.”) This merger will cause many harms in Hollywood, but one is already in effect: People are afraid to say what they think about their own industry.

While this particular merger involves Hollywood, this fear of speaking out is something many in America already know. In 2019, Representative David Cicilline, then leading an investigation into Big Tech, noted that smaller firms’ reliance on the giants for access to consumers “makes them concerned about raising their voice, raising concerns about the monopoly power of these platforms.” The most notorious monopoly in America, Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, has a track record of alleged coercion.

David Ellison, the leader of Paramount, has said that if this merger is allowed, he will provide artists with more avenues for work. But we should know better than to trust promises by the ultrarich. After Disney bought Fox in 2019, the combined entity released far fewer movies than it did before the companies merged. Time Warner has been sold twice in just the last 10 years — once to AT&T and once to Discovery — and each deal was followed by layoffs and price hikes. If this deal goes through, the consequences for the entertainment industry could be catastrophic, with thousands more workers laid off. Employment in film and TV in Los Angeles has already dropped by 30 percent over the past four years.

Hollywood has long put out important truth-telling films, from “All the President’s Men” to the documentary “Citizenfour.” Some of the most celebrated films and TV shows — such as “The Godfather,” “All in the Family” and “M*A*S*H” — explored daring, controversial themes. Much of this content was created when film and TV functioned through open markets involving separate studios, exhibitors, and distributors. After the industry allowed widespread consolidation, streaming companies began to take over. If a studio like Warner Bros. ceases to exist as an independent entity, we will lose yet another company to fund, produce and distribute that kind of art.

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Félix Decombat

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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

The abstract concepts and complex equations found in the study of physics can feel as esoteric as they do intimidating. But today’s guest believes that physics can actually be deeply poetic, philosophical and even political.

Theoretical physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s new book, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie, weaves together cosmology, quantum mechanics, history, queer theory and pop culture—from Star Trek to Missy Elliott—to bring readers on a mind-altering journey to the boundaries of the universe. By exploring the edges of what we know about spacetime, she argues, we can gain a new perspective on the limitless possibilities of our own existence.

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Chanda recently came by the office to chat with SciAm associate books editor Bri Kane. Here’s their conversation.

Bri Kane: I am so excited to talk to you about all of my biggest and weirdest physics questions today [Laughs], but I wanted to start off with the poetry that you talk about in this book. You say that when physics is at its best, it’s very poetic. How is physics poetic to you?

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I mean, I think the universe is poetic. There’s something really beautiful and elegant, particularly for me, as a theoretical physicist, how all the pieces come together. There’s a poetry to that. There’s a rhythm to it and—rhythm and patterns, right? So I think what we do in physics is look for patterns and try and establish patterns. And poetry is often very pattern-based, whether you’re talking about meter or the structure of the poem on the page. So I see a lot of links.

Kane: Yeah, I mean, this book really connects a lot of different subjects in science and then brings them all to the center in physics. But one that I thought was really interesting is there’s a lot of history in this book and a lot of history that I didn’t know about. [Laughs.] There’s a lot of people that you talk about as being the first in their field or newly realized as the first in their field. And so I wanted to ask you about Mozi from the Zhou kingdom.

Prescod-Weinstein: So I should start by saying I didn’t come into the book thinking, “I’m gonna write about Zhou kingdom philosophers from, you know, before China was established,” and so even figuring out, “How do I talk about this?” because the reference point is going to be—this is stuff that’s written in ancient Chinese.

And as I was writing about Newton’s laws and trying to figure out, “How do I make Newton’s laws interesting to me?” ’cause I actually hated frosh physics. I did not enjoy it. It wasn’t my jam. I was someone who was, like, really hype about quantum mechanics, quantum physics, general relativity, that kind of thing. And in doing some research, I saw a little note somewhere that actually this philosopher from the Zhou kingdom, Mozi, had come up with one of Newton’s laws, like, a millennium before Newton had.

And so I chased this down, and it was a real moment of synergy of understanding how much we in the sciences depend on the humanities because someone had taken the time to do the translation. And it just opened this whole world to me of people asking these questions about “How do I explain the difference between extent in space and duration in time?” and the different ways that these people who lived very close to the land and in a different way were trying to have these conversations with themselves about the difference between space and time, or maybe the lack of difference between space and time.

Kane: Yeah, I mean, as you say in the book, we have been looking to the stars since there were stars, since we were able to look at them. I mean, it’s something that has always inspired us and also helped us reflect on ourselves, which I thought was really interesting ’cause physics can be kind of intimidating to people as a field, but it’s also very philosophical and poetic, as you’re saying, and it can be really exciting. It can also be pretty funny. I mean, I laughed out loud at a few lines in this book, and, and physics does not normally

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Lawyers for Leon Black, the billionaire investor who has been accused in a civil lawsuit of raping a teenage girl inside Jeffrey Epstein’s New York townhouse in 2002, reached out to a powerful federal judge in 2024 to raise doubts about the alleged victim’s claims, a Guardian investigation has found.

The move set off a months-long court proceeding, which was conducted outside public view and led the US district judge Jed Rakoff to reverse a $2.5m award that had been granted to the alleged victim in a separate Epstein-related class action lawsuit, according to court records. She was later given a much smaller settlement in the class action case.

Jane Doe, as she is known in court filings, has claimed she was trafficked by Epstein and raped by Black when she was a teenager more than two decades ago.

The Guardian’s investigation is revealing new details about the private communications in Black’s legal campaign, which undermined Doe in her civil lawsuit against the Wall Street billionaire.

In a recent court order, Doe faced a significant setback when Jessica Clarke – the federal judge presiding over her civil lawsuit against Black – sanctioned Doe and her former lawyer for “serious, sanctionable misconduct in this case”. Judge Clarke said Doe’s former lawyer had “repeatedly lied to the court and opposing counsel”, and directed her client to destroy a social media account. Doe was sanctioned for having “falsified” some sonogram images that appeared in personal journals, which were submitted to the court as evidence of her abuse by Epstein.

However, it was not a complete victory for Black, as the judge also ruled that the high-stakes lawsuit could proceed.

Black, the 74-year-old former Apollo Global Management CEO, paid Epstein $170m, according to an investigation by the Senate finance committee, which he says was for tax and estate planning. Black has denied allegations that he raped or ever met Doe, who is now 40 years old. He has never been charged with any crimes in connection to Epstein or otherwise.

The Epstein scandal has prompted questions about why the accused sex trafficker’s elite circle of friends and associates has not faced greater scrutiny. That may change. Black is due to testify before the House oversight committee on 26 June, according to a person familiar with the matter, as part of the committee’s investigation into, among other things, Epstein’s sex-trafficking rings. He is also facing questions from the Democratic senator Ron Wyden, who claimed in a recent letter to Black that the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice “remove any lingering doubt” as to whether Black was “connected to women in Epstein’s network” and alleged that “powerful associates in the US and abroad were surveilling and paying off women on [Black’s] behalf”.

Black’s attorney, Susan Estrich, called Wyden’s assertions “outrageous and false” in an emailed statement, and characterized the senator’s comments as a “politically motivated attack”.

The Guardian’s investigation, based on access to extensive court records, many of which are still under seal but are due to be unsealed soon, reveals how Black and his legal team’s private pleas to a federal judge led to a legal battle involving extensive written submissions and multiple hearings in a case in which he was not a party.

It included an extraordinary personal appeal from Black to Judge Rakoff, a well-known and respected jurist based in the southern district of New York. The written message, which was obtained by the Guardian, portrayed Black as a victim, invoking the death of Black’s father, disputing Doe’s credibility and citing the damage the allegations have done to Black’s reputation. It was submitted by the billionaire’s lawyers days before Rakoff denied the $2.5m award that Doe was due to receive in the Epstein-related class action lawsuit.

In another twist, Black’s legal effort was bolstered by a high-profile lawyer who is publicly heralded as an advocate for Epstein’s victims.

All these communications occurred outside public view.

In an exclusive statement to the Guardian in which Doe described her feelings about what has transpired, she said: “We are often taught that the justice system is there to protect victims and correct wrongs. My experience has shown me that it is far more complicated than that.
Justice is not always blind. It is often shaped by power, access, and who is able to withstand the process.
I am still here. And I am not done.”

Jane Doe takes Leon Black to court

In July 2023, Jane Doe alleged in a legal complaint filed against Leon Black in the southern district of New York that Jeffrey Epstein introduced her to Black at Epstein’s townhouse in late spring of 2002. She was 16 years old.

Black, who is worth an estimated $14bn, was the chair and chief executive officer of Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm he co-founded and led until he stepped down in March 2021, in the wake of revelations he had paid tens of millions of dollars to Epstein. Black has said the payments were for legitimate financial advice and that he was “completely unaware” of misconduct by Epstein, who in emails released earlier this year by the Department of Justice sometimes referred to Black as “Mr Big”.

Apollo announced in January 2021 that an internal review by the Dechert LLP law firm, which Apollo’s board commissioned to investigate Black’s “previous professional relationship” with Epstein, found Black’s payments to Epstein were for “bona fide” financial services. The report found there was “no evidence” that Black was involved in Epstein’s criminal activities. That review has since faced scrutiny, however, including by Senator Wyden, who claimed his staff uncovered evidence that money paid by Black to Epstein “was used to finance Epstein’s sex-trafficking operations”. Black’s lawyer called Wyden’s “attack” on the Dechert report “completely baseless”.

In her legal complaint, Doe alleged that Epstein told her that Black was his “special friend” and that because she was Epstein’s “special girl”, he had chosen her to give Black the same kind of “massage treatment” that she gave to him. Doe understood, according to her legal complaint, this meant that she was expected to strip naked and have sex. But when Doe and Black went up to a third-floor massage room, she alleged in her complaint, Black threw her down on the massage table and then abused her vaginally and anally with sex toys. He then bit her vagina, she alleged, causing bleeding and extreme pain. Reflexively, the complaint says, Doe kicked him. In response, the complaint alleges, he became enraged, then raped her.

Doe alleged in her complaint that the internal abrasions she suffered from the alleged attack that day continued to cause her pain more than 20 years later. The complaint describes Doe as having autism. While she has an above-average IQ, the complaint alleges, her neurodivergence makes her “extremely trusting”.

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Illustration: Guardian Design/Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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On the campaign trail in Florida farm country, a long-shot Republican candidate for governor is selling $40 T-shirts that say “No American should die for Israel.”

A few hours west, Laura Loomer, the far-right media figure, is preparing a pitch to donors to help fund a new outlet: a weekly newsletter taking on the right-wing podcasters critical of Israel.

Rarely is foreign policy a major political issue in a midterm election year. But the war in Iran has helped turn the U.S. relationship with Israel into a marquee topic among Republicans, pushing allies of President Trump like Ms. Loomer to escalate their attacks on conservative critics of the relationship and creating new fault lines on America’s far right.

“It’s like a psychosis. It’s literally a psychosis,” Ms. Loomer said in an interview last week, referring to the turn against Israel among some conservatives. “It really is Israel derangement syndrome.”

Ms. Loomer, who gained prominence last year after pushing Mr. Trump to fire White House officials she deemed disloyal, is emerging as one of the president’s most aggressive, pro-Israel enforcers. Her attacks on what used to be her fellow allies of Mr. Trump are evidence of the urgency that some in the president’s camp — and supporters of a close relationship with Israel — see in seeking to blunt the influence of right-wing critics of the Jewish state.

On her X account with nearly two million followers, Ms. Loomer refers to Israel as “our greatest ally” and discloses purported personal details about prominent critics of Israel and Mr. Trump.

Ms. Loomer said she has been honing her pitch to donors as she has prepared to roll out her newsletter, The Loomer Rumor, which she said was meant to showcase her “opposition research” while targeting right-wing figures critical of Israel — a group that she calls the “Woke Reich.” Its best-known voice is Tucker Carlson, who has broken with Mr. Trump over the war in Iran. Mr. Carlson has accused Israel of pushing Mr. Trump into war, which he says makes the president a “slave” to foreign interests.

The war has added to a tectonic shift in public opinion on American foreign policy that began with the Gaza war — a bipartisan swing away from Israel. It is a change that has already divided Democrats and is now penetrating a Republican Party whose leaders, buoyed by Evangelical voters, long positioned it as pro-Israel. And it is palpable even in Florida, where Ms. Loomer lives, and support for Israel runs so deep that the legislature last year lifted credit-rating limits to allow local governments to buy more Israeli bonds.

“It’s been very shocking,” said Chase Tramont, a Republican member of the Florida House of Representatives. “You have so many younger folks on the right that are actually singing the same tune that the radical left is singing.”

Mr. Tramont, a pastor, described U.S. support for Israel as “grounded in historical precedent, biblical values and America First policies.” He introduced a bill last year to require Florida schools and state agencies to refer to the Israeli-occupied West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical names for the region that are widely used in Israel.

But staunchly pro-Israel politicians like Mr. Tramont, 46, are starting to seem like a minority among younger Republicans. A Pew Research Center survey in March found that 57 percent of Republicans under 50 have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 50 percent last year and 35 percent in 2022, and about the same share as Americans overall. Among Republicans 50 and older, 75 percent still support Israel, a figure that has barely budged since 2022.

The result is a contrast between the Trump administration’s Israel-aligned foreign policy and the trajectory of public opinion on the right. The five-week bombing of Iran this year was the first time the United States and Israel launched and fought a war side by side. And yet in the podcast “manosphere” that widely endorsed Mr. Trump in 2024, the loudest voices are critics of Israel like Mr. Carlson.

“The great irony in this is that you have the U.S. and Israel jointly conducting a war,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a senior State Department official in the George W. Bush administration and a longtime proponent of a close relationship with Israel. “The thing that’s bizarre here is that the administration is not actually setting the tone in some ways.”

Mr. Cohen is among those who see the shift against Israel as driven, in part, by ingrained antisemitism. “There always was an anti-Israel and also antisemitic part of the Republican Party,” he said.

Mr. Carlson said on his show last week that for American politicians, “love for Israel is accompanied by contempt for the United States, maybe even hatred for the United States.” He rejects accusations of antisemitism, arguing that his critique of Israel is driven by his view of U.S. interests. In Florida, he has praised James Fishback, 31, as a Republican contender in the state governor’s race.

At a campaign stop last Wednesday in the small farming town of Monticello, outside Tallahassee, Mr. Fishback railed against gun laws and foreign workers. He said Americans should accept “several mass shootings a year” as the cost of their gun rights, and called the H-1B skilled worker visa program a “scam” that he would seek to end.

But the T-shirt he hawked at a coffee shop was the one saying that no American should die for Israel. Sean Lozano, the deputy campaign manager, said it was their best seller.

“It does very well with the younger crowd,” he said.

Mr. Fishback is in the single digits in primary polls and has faced accusations, which he denies, from a former fiancée who has said their relationship began while she was still a minor. But his ability to generate buzz among young people has shown how Israel has the potential to emerge as a campaign issue, especially amid evidence that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel helped pull Mr. Trump into the unpopular war on Iran.

In Monticello, Mr. Fishback drew applause when he promised to pardon a Florida International University student arrested after what her supporters said was a joke about Mr. Netanyahu bombing a university event. Answering a question about traffic cameras, Mr. Fishback ended with warning of a future in which government surveillance “has flagged you for making an antisemitic remark in the park.” He said Florida should divest from its Israeli bonds because taxpayer money should not “be sent to any foreign country.”

“That’s not antisemitism,” Mr. Fishback said. “That is just calling it as it is.”

Several older people in the audience, who all declined to give their full names, said they were put off by Mr. Fishback’s fixation on Israel. One 70-year-old woman, who described herself as a born-again Christian, said that she loved Mr. Netanyahu and that the United States needed to walk hand in hand with Israel.

But many of the younger attendees, mostly men, said they had come to see Mr. Fishback because of his views on Israel and his opposition to the Iran war. A university student, Garrett Wilson, 20, said he broke with Mr. Trump’s foreign policy after the assassination of Charlie Kirk and referred to the false conspiracy theories that Israel may have had something to do with his death. (Mr. Fishback said those accusations were “unsubstantiated by the evidence.”)

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Laura Loomer, the far-right media figure, has emerged as one of the president’s most aggressive, pro-Israel enforcers. Credit…Annie Flanagan for The New York Times

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After winning a Breakthrough Prize, the world’s most lucrative science award, theoretical physicist David Gross is using the moment to warn of nuclear war’s existential threat—and how we can escape it

David Gross, a celebrated U.S. theoretical physicist, calls himself an optimist—especially concerning the future of his field. He’s certain that somewhere out there lurks a final, unified theory of nature, just waiting to be discovered. But he’s pessimistic about our chances of actually discovering it; on balance, he estimates, it’s more likely that we’ll destroy ourselves in nuclear warfare first. And as the latest recipient of a $3-million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, he’s using the opportunity to warn the world of this dire peril.

When Gross speaks, especially about prospects of a unified theory, people tend to listen—after all, he’s responsible for some of the biggest steps we’ve taken toward devising one.

Such a theory would, by definition, unify three known fundamental forces—electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces—with a fourth, gravity, reconciling a long-standing schism between these domains. In the early 1970s, Gross co-discovered a phenomenon called asymptotic freedom—a counterintuitive property of the strong nuclear force showing that interactions between quarks (the subatomic constituents of neutrons and protons) weaken at shorter distances and strengthen at longer ones. In other words, the farther apart you try to pull quarks, the harder they’ll resist. But if you pile them together inside a proton, they will frolic freely, almost as if they have no resistance at all.

The idea has been exhaustively confirmed in high-energy experiments, and it helped establish a theory of the strong force called quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which became a cornerstone of the Standard Model of particle physics. It also netted Gross a share of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics. In the aftermath of QCD’s ascendance, his quest for unification turned more speculative as he formulated foundational aspects of string theory, specifically a mathematically elegant hybrid type he co-developed in the 1980s called heterotic string theory, which mixes other types to describe fundamental particles. Unlike asymptotic freedom, however, heterotic string theory (and string theory in general) has yet to be validated by experiments.

Although the connection between these technical contributions and the existential threat of nuclear warfare may seem tenuous, Gross maintains it’s quite clear: Centuries of further theoretical and experimental progress may be required to find and verify a final theory—but planning for such a future is shortsighted when global nuclear war could effectively end human civilization itself in a single afternoon. Reducing that risk, he says, is therefore at least as important for discovering a unified theory as performing the fundamental physics work itself.

In a conversation with Scientific American, Gross discussed his Breakthrough Prize, the reasons for slow progress toward a unified theory and the folly of ballistic missile defense. And he explained why the current status quo means everyone now on Earth still faces the threat of nuclear annihilation.

You’ve won several major awards during your long career—the Dirac Medal in 1988, the Harvey Prize in 2000, and, of course, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004. Now you’ve won this year’s $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics as well. Do you consider this the capstone?

Nothing really compares to the Nobel Prize, but this one is certainly the most lucrative. I’ve been heavily involved in raising money for my institute, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and for many others like it around the world. So with this Breakthrough Prize, it’s nice to finally have some money to give to other people!

You know, this is a “lifetime achievement” prize, which carries the suggestion that my lifetime is drawing to a close. So that’s a bit of a bummer. But I’m still extremely honored and pleased by it—the way these Breakthrough Prizes work is that the selections are informed by the opinions of previous recipients, and in this case, those are some of the people I respect most in my field. And this prize is more flexible and open-ended than most others; it can go to people whose work is still somewhat speculative and is as yet unconfirmed by nature.

You seem to hit both sides here, in that some of your work—asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics, for example—has been well validated by experimentation, whereas other aspects, such as heterotic string theory, remain quite speculative. Is that a fair assessment?

Well, I’ve had a long life so far! I’ve seen extreme swings in fundamental physics. When I was beginning, it was during a period of experimental supremacy, with enormous discoveries being made all the time—and on the theoretical side, almost nothing was understood. That was an exciting period for a theorist. And now it’s sort of the opposite. There are a lot of great theoretical ideas and progress, but nature hasn’t been so kind with its discovery. And living through both periods—and everything in between—has, of course, shaped my work.

It used to be that the data were all there, and one tried to make predictions based on flimsy ideas. Now, new data aren’t coming, but the theory is so much more understood. So the goal now is to advance the theory and hopefully to make contact with experiment, but that’s getting harder all the time. In the past, you could make a prediction or try to calculate something and have it tested experimentally within a year! Now it’s “look, we’re planning the future of the field on a 30-to-60-year time scale.”

What’s caused that slowdown? Just things getting more expensive?

Not exactly. The projects themselves have gotten bigger, which makes them take longer. But they haven’t really become more expensive: given inflation, technological growth, and our increased understanding of the physics, we can build better machines with less money now.

What’s changed has to do with the scales of distance or energy that we’re exploring, rather than the scale of time that we usually think about when discussing our progress into the future. From the point of view of physics, the most important scale is the size, or the distance, that we can probe, with smaller distances requiring greater energies to reach.

So in the 20th century, we went from molecular to atomic to nuclear physics, to where we were studying the structure of the atomic nucleus. Across the past two centuries, we’ve progressed by roughly 15 or 20 orders of magnitude. And this enormous progress gave us a very complete “standard” theory of particle physics.

But the next scale that is suggested by experimental observation and theoretical extrapolation is many orders of magnitude removed from the current scale that we can easily explore. We seem to have another 20 orders of magnitude to go! And it gets worse: One of the major implications of asymptotic freedom in QCD and other quantum field theories is that the physics changes very slowly as we go to shorter and shorter distances. Specifically, it changes logarithmically.

Let’s compare that with another scale, which is the amount of money it takes to reach those higher and higher energies to go to those shorter and shorter distances. For this, the cost scales at least as the energy squared, if not even more. So the physics potential is increasing only logarithmically, while the cost is increasing like the energy squared—there’s an exponential difference between them. And that’s just a fact of life we’ll have to deal with if we want to understand nature at these small scales.

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Almost 150 people, including 17 Americans, are stranded on a cruise ship off the coast of West Africa, after a suspected hantavirus outbreak on the vessel killed at least three people and left several others ill.

The MV Hondius, operated by tour company Oceanwide Expeditions, left Ushuaia, Argentina, last month on a journey through remote parts of the Atlantic Ocean. Along the way, several passengers became sick with a rapidly progressing respiratory illness, the company said.

Seven cases of the rare rodent-borne hantavirus have been identified so far, including two confirmed cases and five suspected cases, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Monday.

The vessel with 149 people on board is currently anchored off Praia, the capital of Cape Verde, an archipelago nation off the west coast of Africa, after being refused entry to the port.

There is no plan yet for disembarking the remaining crew and passengers, with Oceanwide Expeditions saying they are considering sailing on to Spain’s Canary Islands.

Hantavirus can cause a severe and often deadly respiratory illness called hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which killed Betsy Arakawa, the wife of the late actor Gene Hackman, last year.

Humans most commonly become infected through contact with rodents such as rats and mice, especially with their urine, droppings, and saliva, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Just one type of hantavirus, the Andes virus, is known to be able to transmit from person to person, but it is rare. It is primarily found in Chile and Argentina, where the ship originated.

Still, health authorities emphasized that the outbreak does not represent a public health threat. “There is no need for panic or travel restrictions,” said Hans Kluge, WHO’s regional director for Europe.

Here’s what we know about the outbreak on the ship.

Where had the ship been?

The MV Hondius first left Ushuaia in Argentina over a month ago. According to the MarineTraffic ship-tracking site, the Dutch-flagged passenger cruise ship made stops in Antarctica before returning to Ushuaia for a night and leaving again on April 1. It then stopped at the British overseas territory of Saint Helena before anchoring Sunday off Praia, MarineTraffic said.

Along the way, passengers visited some of the world’s most remote islands, where they would have seen much wildlife, including whales, dolphins, penguins, and seabirds, according to the trip’s itinerary.

When it reached Praia, the vessel was not authorized to dock at the port, with Cape Verde’s Health Ministry citing a need to protect the country’s public health. Authorities there sent staff to visit the ship and assess the situation.

What do we know about the victims?

The first suspected case was a 70-year-old Dutchman, who suddenly fell ill on the ship with a fever, headache, abdominal pain, and diarrhea, South Africa’s Health Department told CNN. He died on board on April 11 after going into respiratory distress, WHO said.

The man’s wife, who was 69 years old and also Dutch, was taken to South Africa but collapsed at an airport while trying to fly home to the Netherlands and died at a nearby hospital on April 26. She tested positive for a variant of hantavirus, Oceanwide Expeditions confirmed Monday.

“The beautiful journey they experienced together was abruptly and permanently cut short,” the couple’s family said in a statement sent to CNN by Dutch charity Namens de Familie, which supports people receiving media attention after personal tragedy.

“We are still unable to comprehend that we have lost them. We wish to bring them home and commemorate them in peace and privacy,” they said.

After the ship left Saint Helena, a British national onboard fell sick on April 27. He is now in a critical condition at private medical facility in Johannesburg, the company said. He is the second confirmed hantavirus case.

CNN has reached out to the British Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office.

On May 2, a German national died on board the MV Hondius. While her cause of death has not yet been established, it is being treated as a suspected case.

And two crew members — one British and one Dutch national — are currently experiencing acute respiratory symptoms, requiring urgent care, Oceanwide Expeditions said. Hantavirus has not been confirmed in either case.

What happens next?

Dutch authorities are actively preparing to evacuate the two symptomatic crew members and an individual associated with the passenger that passed away on May 2, the tour operator said.

The evacuation will involve two specialized aircraft equipped with medical equipment and staffed by trained medical crews. It’s not yet clear when this will take place.

“Sailing on to Las Palmas or Tenerife is being considered, where further medical screening and handling could take place, organized and supervised by the WHO and Dutch health services,” the company said, confirming that passengers will not disembark in Cape Verde.

Strict health and safety procedures are currently in place on the ship, including isolation measures, hygiene protocols, and medical monitoring. The company said the atmosphere “remains calm” and that passengers were “generally composed.”

One passenger, travel vlogger Jake Rosmarin, spoke of the fear and uncertainty percolating through the ship on Monday.

“What’s happening right now is very real for all of us here. We’re not just a story. We’re not just headlines,” he said in a video posted on Instagram, his voice cracking with emotion.

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Seven cases of the rare rodent-borne hantavirus have been identified

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One of this year’s top Senate contests is something of a bizarro-world race.

The Republican candidate, despite being the incumbent, is little known and still trying to introduce himself to voters. He used his first ad to talk about starting his life in a foster home.

The Democratic candidate, despite being out of office, is a household name after spending half a century in politics. His first ad was very different — a scathing attack aiming to define his rival by tying him to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier.

This is the upside-down picture in Ohio, where Senator Jon Husted, a Republican appointed last year to replace Vice President JD Vance, is hoping to fend off former Senator Sherrod Brown, a three-term Democrat who was unseated in 2024.

The race is central to determining which party controls the Senate in 2027. Democrats need to flip at least four Republican-held seats in November, and Ohio is widely seen as one of the most competitive contests.

The election is a test of how far even a Republican-dominated state has swung left during President Trump’s second term and of whether Mr. Brown, as he has done in the past, can outperform his party in a state where Democrats have been trounced in the last three presidential elections.

Now, as the general election begins — Mr. Brown faces only token opposition in the primary contest on Tuesday and Mr. Husted is unopposed — both sides are beginning an advertising war expected to exceed the $550 million spent on Ohio’s 2024 Senate race. The winner will serve the final two years of Mr. Vance’s term and then face re-election again in 2028.

Mr. Brown’s opening salvo last week sought to capitalize on Mr. Husted’s relatively low profile by highlighting $116,000 in campaign contributions he received in the past from Leslie Wexner, an Ohio billionaire who was the source of much of Mr. Epstein’s wealth. The ad was an attempt to both depress Republican turnout and hammer Mr. Husted as tied to corruption in Washington and Columbus, Ohio’s capital.

“Of all 535 members of Congress, who’s taken the most money from associates of Jeffrey Epstein?” the narrator asks in Mr. Brown’s first TV ad, which began airing on Friday. “Jon Husted, that’s who.”

Mr. Husted’s campaign manager, Drew Thompson, argued that Mr. Brown had Epstein ties, too, pointing to his past acceptance of campaign donations from Mr. Wexner’s wife — $12,700 in increments between 2011 and 2017.

“Who knows what that paid for?” Mr. Thompson said. “That’s why Ohioans voted him out after 32 years in Washington.”

National party leaders are watching the Ohio race closely.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, spent months urging Mr. Brown, 73, to attempt a comeback. Part of Mr. Schumer’s appeal to Mr. Brown was that he was the only Ohio Democrat who could win in an increasingly red state.

Mr. Trump carried Ohio by 11 percentage points in 2024 as Mr. Brown lost by three points, a gap that has encouraged Democrats to think that a better political environment will help the famously rumpled senator return to Washington.

The Ohio Senate race is expected to be one of the nation’s most expensive contests.

The main super PAC for Senate Republicans, the Senate Leadership Fund, has already earmarked at least $79 million for television and digital advertising, mail, and get-out-the-vote efforts. Its Democratic counterpart, Senate Majority PAC, will reserve about $40 million just on television advertising, according to a spokeswoman, Lauren French.

“Sherrod is doing it because he knows he’s probably the only one who can prevail,” said Aaron Pickrell, a Columbus-based Democratic strategist who ran the Ohio re-election campaign for President Barack Obama in 2012, the last time the state was truly a presidential battleground. “A lot of people don’t think we can win. To have Sherrod run ensures that there’s a level of resources commitment.”

Though he has been in office since the turn of the millennium, Mr. Husted has rarely been in a hard-fought general election.

He served for years in the State House representing a Republican-leaning district near Dayton, where he attended college and was a cornerback on a national championship football team. He became speaker of the Ohio House and briefly served in the State Senate before coasting to victory in statewide campaigns for secretary of state. Then he became the running mate and lieutenant governor to Gov. Mike DeWine, who appointed him to replace Mr. Vance last year.

Now Mr. Husted is a sitting senator who lacks the usual advantages of incumbency in a year when an unpopular Mr. Trump is forecast to be a drag on all Republicans. He has long presented himself as a business-friendly Republican in the style of Mr. DeWine and former Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, though since entering the Senate, he has adopted a more Trump-friendly demeanor.

Mr. Brown, on the other hand, is a challenger with 50 years in elected office at a time when Democrats across the country are looking for fresh faces.

“The only challenge for Sherrod is that he’s an older guy,” said Nan Whaley, a former mayor of Dayton, Ohio, who was the Democratic nominee for governor in 2022. But she added, “In Ohio, that’s handy. Our voters are older here in Ohio.”

Ohio Republicans expect to paint Mr. Brown, long an economic populist, as a left-winger out of touch with normal Americans.

“This is not J.F.K.’s Democrat Party,” said former Representative Brad Wenstrup of Ohio, a Republican who spent a dozen years in Congress. “It’s pretty far left.”

If Mr. Husted is known for anything in Ohio, it is for being placed in the awkward position of having to testify for the defense in a major corruption trial involving top energy executives in the state. Mr. Husted already testified once in a related case that resulted in a mistrial. He is expected to be called to testify again in October — timing that Ohio Democrats hope will lead to a pre-election news cycle that will lift Mr. Brown’s chances in November.

Available polling suggests that the race is either a dead heat or that Mr. Husted is narrowly ahead, but even in conservative Ohio, the political environment is shifting against Republicans.

“I tell everybody I think every Republican is going to have a tough time because you’re running into a headwind,” said former Representative Jim Renacci, an Ohio Republican who lost a Senate race to Mr. Brown in 2018. “It’s almost a match of where I was in 2018.”

More on the 2026 Midterm Elections

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• Close Midterm Races: Democratic officials have added eight candidates to a list of top contenders in congressional midterm battlegrounds, wading into a handful of contested primaries to make clear the party leadership’s preference.

• U.S. Senate Race in Texas: Many of the wealthy donors who have bankrolled Ken Paxton, the firebrand Texas attorney general, have decided to watch the race from the sidelines, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

• Did Harris Pick the Wrong Race?: Some Democrats wish Kamala Harris had decided to run for governor in California, where Democrats are struggling to break through, rather than weigh another White House run.

• U.S. Senate Race in Ohio: The unusual contest — with a little-known incumbent and a well-known challenger — shows how Democrats are hoping to capitalize on G.O.P. voters’ anger at the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

• Louisiana Primary: Voters and key voting rights groups filed multiple lawsuits against the governor of Louisiana over his order to suspend the state’s House primary, arguing that he had overstepped his executive powers by delaying the election to give lawmakers time to draw a new congressional map.

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Former Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, left, is running again for the chamber against Senator Jon Husted, a Republican who was appointed to his seat by the governor to replace Vice President JD Vance. Credit…Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times; Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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European Great Tits and 36 other bird species on the continent are more afraid of women than they are of men, according to a recent study—and researchers have no idea why.

In the study, men could get about a meter closer to birds than women could before the animals flew away, according to the results. This pattern remained regardless of what the men and women were wearing, what their height was or how they tried to approach the creatures. That suggests birds may be able to suss out the sex of a human, though the researchers aren’t sure how.

“I fully believe our results, that urban birds react differently based on the sex of the person approaching them, but I can’t explain them right now,” said Daniel Blumstein, a co-author of the study and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a statement.

The researchers looked at birds living in urban centers in five European countries. They included birds that are known to flee as soon as a human approaches, such as magpies, and those that tend to flap off later, such as pigeons. The outsize fear response to women was consistent across the species.

In the paper, the team hypothesized that birds may be sensing chemical signals, such as pheromones, or using cues such as body shape to recognize a person’s sex. But more research is needed before they can come to any conclusions. Notably, previous findings in mammals also suggest these animals can tell men and women apart: for example, lab rats have been observed to feel greater stress when male researchers handle them than when female researchers do so.

“We have identified a phenomenon, but we really don’t know why. However, what our results do highlight is the birds’ sophisticated ability to evaluate their environment,” said study co-author Federico Morelli, an associate professor at the University of Turin, in the same statement.

“There are several possibilities for what cues birds are picking up on. It could be smells, it could be people’s [gait]. But how do we test this? Perhaps a study resembling Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks,” said Blumstein, referring to the famous British comedy show sketch.

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Rapid eye movement, or REM sleep, is the final phase of the four-stage cycle that occurs during sleep. Unlike non-REM sleep, the fourth phase is characterized by an increase in brain activity and autonomic nervous system functions, which are closer to what is seen during the awakened state. Similar to non-REM sleep stages, this stage of sleep is primarily controlled by the brainstem and hypothalamus, with added contributions from the hippocampus and amygdala. Additionally, REM sleep is associated with an increase in occurrence of vivid dreams. While non-REM sleep has been associated with rest and recovery, the purpose and benefits of REM sleep are still unknown. However, many theories hypothesize that REM sleep is useful for learning and memory formation.

Key Takeaways: What Is REM Sleep?

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REM sleep is an active stage of sleep characterized by increased brain wave activity. Jamie Grill / Getty Images

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