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“I am convinced that we would not have found these people if the DNA that was found at this theft hadn’t matched with this database,” said Gaëtan Poitevin, a criminal lawyer in Marseille whose master’s thesis was on France’s DNA database.

How does the DNA database work?

France’s database, the National Automated Genetic Fingerprint File, had 4.4 million DNA profiles at the end of last year. Those profiles have been collected over almost three decades from people suspected or convicted of crimes, as well as people killed in natural disasters.

It has become a staple of police investigations, with forensic investigators collecting bits of saliva, sweat, hair, skin, semen, and blood, then sending them to be sequenced at public and certified private labs. The labs send the results to be compared to the contents of the enormous database, looking for exact matches.

“In just a few hours now, we can have a positive DNA result,” said Olivier Halnais, the head of the national union of forensic police officers.

How did France’s DNA database start?

France began its DNA database in 1998, after the serial killer Guy Georges, known as the “Eastern Paris killer,” was finally arrested.

Mr. Georges had been imprisoned for assaulting a woman with a weapon, and the police collected his DNA. But France had no centralized database at the time, so officers were unable to check his DNA against that found at the scenes of five murders of women who had also been raped.

After his release from prison, Mr. Georges went on to rape and kill two more women. He was arrested again and eventually convicted of the murders of seven women. The case spurred the creation of a national DNA database.

Initially, the database contained only the DNA of sexual offenders. But, over the next five years, it grew to include people convicted — or merely suspected — of a much wider range of crimes, including murder, terrorism, drug trafficking, assault, theft, and property damage.

The process of being removed from the DNA database is so onerous that few pursue it, Mr. Poitevin said. Those who refuse to give a DNA sample face at least a year in prison and a fine of at least 15,000 euros, almost $17,400.

From 2018 to 2022, an average of 680 people a year were convicted of refusing to provide DNA, less than one percent of people charged each year, according to the Justice Ministry.

“Among my clients, absolutely zero refuse, because for them, it’s an admission of guilt,” said Mr. Poitevin.

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Members of a forensic team inspect a window at the site where burglars broke into the Louvre and made off with eight of France’s historic crown jewels last month. Credit…Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters

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The iconic shower scene in Psycho was originally supposed to play out without music. Instead, composer Bernard Herrmann created “The Murder”: as the killing transpires, violins shriek and scream along with the victim.

The film’s director, Alfred Hitchcock, reportedly later said that “33 percent of the effect of Psycho was due to the music.” In most horror flicks, the emotional current that carries the viewers is the music, which accelerates their anticipation and heightens the jump scares. It’s not just screaming violins, either: undulating synthesizers drive John Carpenter’s Halloween; “evil” clarinets underpin Hereditary; a recording from the 1930s enhances Get Out.

Studies have shown that certain fearful music activates the brain’s alarm-response system. So what is it that makes some music sound scary? Psychoacoustics researchers have found that some auditory features that are common in horror music are inherently frightening. The most obvious way music can scare us is by literally imitating screams, like Psycho does. Here, the instruments mimic a quality of human screams called roughness. When we scream, we press a high volume of air through our vocal cords, causing them to vibrate chaotically. This creates a sound wave with an amplitude that fluctuates rapidly, which our ears and brains perceive as rough or harsh.

To imitate this musically, violinists must push the limits of their instruments. “They’re pushing into that string, literally—just pushing the capacity of the instrument. You feel the whole instrument almost resisting the sound,” explains Caitlyn Trevor, a music cognition researcher and founder of the sound design consulting company SonicUXR. In a 2020 study, when Trevor was a researcher at the University of Zurich, she and her colleagues studied horror movie soundtracks and found many of these screamlike musical cues.

Rough vocalizations seem to have privileged access to our brain. In a study published in May, scientists found that the sound of a distant scream could elicit a response from the brain even in the deepest stage of sleep. When you hear a scream, it quickly activates the amygdala, a brain structure involved in processing danger, and it can trigger a cascade of alarm reactions in the nervous system. The short burst of sound may also trigger our startle reflex, which bypasses higher-order brain regions and goes straight to our body to help us respond fast.

Most horror music is not about directly inducing terror, however. Those moments of auditory release are usually preceded by long, roiling tracks that build suspense. “There are actually two very different types of music that are ‘scary’ or ‘fearful,’” Trevor explains. In 2023, she co-authored a study examining the musical differences between these two types of horror movie tracks. Participants rated the emotional effects of different excerpts. The results showed a distinction between anxiety-inducing and terrifying music; the two types “sometimes have completely opposite acoustic features,” Trevor says. Where terrifying music was loud, brash, and dense (a chorus of screamlike string instruments from Midsommar was ranked the most terrifying of all the examples in the study), anxiety-inducing music tended to be more varied. Here is where composers have the most room to play, using subtle auditory cues that are biologically ingrained to keep listeners on edge.

For example, some horror movies use (or are rumored to use) very low-frequency sounds on the border of human perception to give an intangible sense of doom. “Certain sounds mimic danger out there in the world,” explains Susan Rogers, a music producer and music cognition researcher at Berklee College of Music. “A low rumble is something we have evolved to be alert to,” she says—perhaps signaling a stampede, a storm, an earthquake or something else dangerous in the environment.

Fast tempos, especially ones that sound like a heartbeat, can also put us on edge, Rogers explains. In the theme from John Carpenter’s Halloween, a low thudding that is reminiscent of a heartbeat drives the music forward. “A predictable rhythm gives you a sense of momentum and that [the filmmakers are] leading toward something,” Trevor says. The listener doesn’t know where the music or the story are going, but they feel relentless and inevitable.

More commonly, though, horror movie music builds suspense by making itself unpredictable. Suspenseful music, Trevor found in her 2023 study, often keeps us on edge by sprinkling in bits of sound in unexpected places. Sometimes these scores use an unpredictable or lopsided beat, dropping notes here and there, to prevent the listener from settling into the rhythm, she adds.

“The soundtrack and the sound design are integral to letting you predict what’s going to happen, so sound designers in horror movies can use the technique of violating our predictions to get us to experience fear,” Rogers says. The brain is a prediction machine, and it allows us to tune out expected or constant noise. “Whether it’s a car engine or a rainstorm, we know how it’s going to go, so we move our spotlight of attention onto other things,” she continues. If you hear footsteps coming up the stairs, you might predict that they’ll continue until they reach the top; but if they stop halfway, you become alert. These sorts of “prediction errors” activate the amygdala and a memory-forming region called the hippocampus.

But some of the most frightening features of horror movie music are culturally learned and might not be inherently scary. For example, composers often build tension in music using dissonance, when the pitches of two or more notes seem to clash against one another. The idea that some harmonies are inherently dissonant has some truth—if two notes are too close together in pitch, the soundwaves can interfere, causing a “beating” pattern that can be unpleasant or grating on the ear. “But only at the most basic level is that universal. Above that, the musical concept of consonance and dissonance is entirely learned,” Rogers says.

Other harmonies that were once assumed to be inherently dissonant—for example, the so-called devil’s chord, or tritone, which is used often in horror movies—are perceived differently across different cultures. A 2016 study found that the Tsimane’ people of rural Bolivia, a group whose music does not use harmony, rated the tritone and other “dissonant” intervals as equally pleasant as “nondissonant” intervals.

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‘I’ve Always Had a Hard Time Making Friends — How Do I Not Be So Anxious About Putting Myself Out There?’

Hi Tefi!!

So I just recently turned 21! And as I’m starting to really enter “adulthood,” I guess I’ve realized that some of the relationships in my life don’t feel fulfilling on my end. I’ve always had a hard time making friends — I’m really quiet and shy when I first meet people, and I low-key come across as awkward. Obviously, that kind of turns people away, and if I’m being honest, I feel like that also holds me back from trying to talk to new people because I’m scared they won’t like me.

I have a small friend group, but I feel like they all have someone (either in the group or outside) who they’d rather hang out with. I feel like I’m a good friend. I’m genuinely caring and supportive, and I’d like to think I’m really funny. I don’t know, Tefi. I just feel like my friends hang out with me out of convenience, ’cause I’m the only one who drives. I also have a nine-to-five job, so it’s rare for me to be free during the week, but it sucks because I see them going out and hanging out and then when I finally get a day off, they’re all busy and can’t hang out. I don’t necessarily think there’s anything malicious behind it. I just think they’re not being very considerate of me or my feelings.

There are like three girls outside my social circle who I’d really like to be friends with, but I’m too scared to reach out and ask to hang out. Because I guess I don’t ever want them to feel pressured into hanging out with me or something, you know? But we’re always liking each other’s Instagram Stories and commenting, so I just feel like we’d be great friends. But I don’t know, I’m anxious about it.

I don’t want to go through my 20s all sad and lonely, but I don’t really know how to NOT be so anxious about putting myself out there more.

Sorry, this was so long! Thank you for your advice in advance!!
—Feeling Lonely

My sweet, sweet, lonely angel,

I caught myself smiling when I read “adulthood.” You’re right! You are an adult. But also, I can clearly remember myself at 21 and not feeling “adult” at all. I’m over a decade older than you, and I still think, Holy fuck, everyone is going to find out I’m really 17 cosplaying as 35. And by the way, you aren’t alone. I get ten-plus emails in the “Ask Tefi” inbox every single day asking me what to do about loneliness.

You’re currently in a weird period of life: outgrowing some of your friends. It fucking sucks, but it’s just one of those things we all go through. Now I have terrible news, and I need you to still like me after I tell you: You have to be brave and ask those girls to hang out.

Sometimes I go to events and I’ll feel like the biggest dork loser at the party. I even avoid checking my emails all day, so just in case no one talks to me, I can read them then and have something to do with my hands. I’ll see the coolest girls and I’ll think, how do I talk to them? Why would they talk to me? But! We have to be brave. And we have to reach out our hand ready to shake someone else’s and say, “Hi, I’m me. Who are you? It’s nice to meet you.”

Maybe that can be our act of bravery this week. Bravery isn’t like doing our own stunts in a movie or taming a wild animal. Sometimes bravery looks like wanting more friends and trying.

All my love,
Your friend Tefi

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With a half-mile remaining, Obiri and Lokedi were matching each other stride for stride when Obiri made one final surge, pumping her arms as she separated herself from Lokedi. Obiri finished in 2 hours 19 minutes 51 seconds to obliterate Margaret Okayo’s course record from 2003 by over two minutes.

Lokedi was 16 seconds behind Obiri, and Sheila Chepkirui, who had been hoping to defend her title from last year, placed third.

Obiri, who also won in 2023, recalled her feelings in Central Park: “I say, ‘This is my time, Sharon, let me make a move.’”

For Kipruto — who has now won world marathon majors in Tokyo, Chicago, Boston, and New York — his win was the narrowest margin of victory in the New York race’s history. In 2005, Paul Tergat edged Hendrick Ramaala by one second.

“I think there’s no secret in winning and finishing on the podium,” said Kipruto, who finished in 2:08:09. “Just believe in yourself and have patience and believe in training, what you are doing. I think that’s kept me running.”

While the leading men approached the race in a fairly steady fashion, the women seemed determined to infuse the proceedings with early drama. There were surges and counter-surges, and only a few of the top contenders could manage so much movement. By the midpoint of the race, a half-dozen women were still in the mix, including the New York race’s three most recent champions: Chepkirui, Obiri, and Lokedi.

One runner who constantly seemed to be tracking them was Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands, who must have been an unsettling sight for the leaders. A six-time Olympic medalist — including in Paris, where she was the women’s marathon champion — Hassan was making her New York debut just nine weeks after winning the Sydney Marathon, another major.

“I was so afraid, like, ‘Sifan is coming’,” Obiri said. “She’s so strong. She broke us in the Olympics. So that was on my mind.”

On Sunday, Hassan seemed in danger of being dropped more than once before clawing her way back to the leaders. But by Mile 20, she had fallen behind them for good and eventually faded to a sixth-place result.

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Hellen Obiri of Kenya became a two-time champion after winning the race. Credit…Ishika Samant/Getty Images

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Inside the Democratic Party — in its backrooms and its group chats, its conferences and its online flame wars — an increasingly bitter debate has taken hold over what the party needs to become to beat back Trumpism. Does it need to be more populist? More moderate? More socialist? Embrace the abundance agenda? Produce more vertical video?

The answer is yes, yes to all of it — but to none of it in particular. The Democratic Party does not need to choose to be one thing. It needs to choose to be more things.

In two days, there will be elections for governor of New Jersey, for mayor of New York City, and for governor of Virginia. Democrats are leading in all of these races. As of now, the RealClearPolitics polling averages show the Democrat up by about seven points in Virginia and about three points in New Jersey. These are not unusual leads in what have become reliably Democratic states. You can imagine a world where the violence and corruption of President Trump’s first nine months in office had led to a collapse in support for him and his party. We’ll see what Election Day brings. But we do not look to be in that world.

That’s all the more true if you look a year out, to the midterms. In the RealClearPolitics polling average, Democrats are leading by about 2.5 points when you ask Americans which party they want to see control Congress. At about this time in 2017, Democrats were up just over 10 points in the same average.

The news gets worse. To win the House back next year, Democrats will need to overcome the chain of redistricting Republicans are setting off across the country: Republicans have already redrawn the maps in Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas; they are seeking to do the same in Florida and Indiana, and they have others in their sights.

The Senate is even harder for Democrats: They will need to flip four seats in the 2026 midterms to win back control. That would mean defending seats in Georgia and Michigan, winning in Maine and North Carolina — no easy task — and then winning at least two seats in states that Trump won by 10 points or more, such as Alaska, Florida, Iowa, Ohio or Texas. That’s not some quirk of the 2026 Senate map. There are 24 states that Trump won by 10 points or more in 2024.

Any enduring majority — any real power — will require Democrats to solve a problem they do not yet know how to solve: The number of places in which the Democratic Party is competitive has shrunk. When the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, Democrats held Senate seats in Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and West Virginia. How many of those states remain in reach for Democrats today?

n American politics, power is not decided by a popular vote. In the Electoral College, in the House of Representatives, and particularly in the Senate, it is apportioned by place. Democrats don’t just need to win more people. They also need to win more places. That will require a more pluralistic approach to politics. It will require the Democratic Party to see internal difference as a strength that requires cultivation rather than a flaw that demands purification.

Think of it this way: If Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayor’s race running as a democratic socialist in New York City and Rob Sand wins the Iowa governor’s race next year running as a moderate who hates political parties, did the Democratic Party move left or right? Neither: It got bigger. It found a way to represent more kinds of people in more kinds of places.

That is the spirit it needs to embrace. Not moderation. Not progressivism. But, in the older political sense of the term, representation.

In 1962, Bernard Crick, a political theorist and a democratic socialist, published a strange little book called “In Defense of Politics.” Politics, for Crick, was something precious and specific: It “arises from accepting the fact of the simultaneous existence of different groups, hence different interests and different traditions, within a territorial unit under a common rule.”

The fact of difference is not always accepted. There are other forms of social order, like tyranny or oligarchy, that actively suppress it. But to practice politics as Crick defines it is to accept the reality of difference — that is to say, it is to accept the reality of other people whose values and views differ deeply from yours.

In my favorite line from the book, Crick writes, “Politics involves genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people, not tasks set for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy.”

I love that. I think the path to a better politics — perhaps even a political majority — lives within it.

The endless fantasy in politics is persuasion without representation: You elect us to represent you, and where we disagree, we will explain to you why you are wrong. The result of that politics tends to be neither persuasion nor representation: People know when you are not listening to them. And they know how to respond: They stop listening to you. They vote for people who they feel do listen to them.

I am not a pessimist on the possibility of persuasion. But I believe it is rare outside a context of mutual respect. And if I were to say where the Democratic Party went wrong over the last decade, it’s there. In too many places, Democrats sought persuasion without representation, and so they got neither.

A Democratic strategist who has conducted countless focus groups told me that when he asks people to describe the two parties, they often describe Republicans as “crazy” and Democrats as “preachy.” One woman said to him, “I’ll take crazy over preachy. At least crazy doesn’t look down on me.”

That echoes what I have heard from the kinds of voters Democrats lament losing. I feel as if I have the same conversation over and over again: Sometimes people tell me about issues where the Democratic Party departed from them. But they first describe a more fundamental feeling of alienation: The Democratic Party, they came to believe, does not like them.

Many of these people voted for Democrats until a few years ago. They didn’t feel their fundamental beliefs had changed. But they began to feel like “deplorables.” They began to feel unwanted.

When I’d push on the experiences they had — when I would ask which Democrats, who were they talking about — I often found they were reacting to a cultural vibe or an online skirmish as much or more than a flesh-and-blood party. But they had felt something change, and I knew they were right.

Something had changed. It had changed on the left. It had changed on the right. The structure of American life changed in a way that has made the genuine relationships of politics much harder. Instead of representing many different kinds of people in many different kinds of places, the parties now tilt toward the place in which the elite of both sides spend most of their time and get most of their information. The first party that finds its way out of this trap will be the one able to build a majority in this era.

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Tim Enthoven

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The Los Angeles Dodgers won their second consecutive title in stunning fashion in the early hours of Sunday morning, depriving the Toronto Blue Jays of a first World Series in 32 years in a stomach churning, epic Game 7. Will Smith’s solo home run with two outs at the top of the 11th inning off Shane Bieber gave LA a 5-4 lead before Yoshinobu Yamamoto, pitching in relief just a day after throwing 96 pitches, got Alejandro Kirk to ground out into a World Series-ending double play, bringing a ninth title to the Dodgers organization.

“Man, they’re a special group of guys,” Smith said after the game. “We just never gave up, kept fighting, pitching our asses off, hitting, taking great at-bats. Finally punched through there. Man, that was a fight for seven games. That’s a really good Toronto Blue Jays team. I’m just excited. There’s nothing better than this.”

The Dodgers, heavy favorites to win the Fall Classic against the underdog Jays, won by the skin of their teeth. Their victory came despite their anemic offense, which generated just 17 runs across the series, and was arguably saved by one man: Yamamoto. So the $400m Dodgers get what they came for, yet another World Series title, one that will leave fans north of the US-Canadian border wondering what could have been. They will believe – perhaps correctly – that through seven games, the Jays were the better team.

Toronto were just two outs from glory, ensuring this defeat is all the more excruciating. The beginning of the Jays’ end began in the ninth inning, a frame which brought baseball fans one of the most extraordinary sequences of events in recent World Series memory.

With Toronto leading 4-3, Miguel Rojas, the Dodgers’ No 9 hitter, blasted a game-tying home run off Blue Jays closer Jeff Hoffman to tie the score at 4-4. It was a blast that ripped the soul out of the home fans in Toronto.

“I was never trying to hit a home run,” said Rojas. “I think this is the first home run against a right-handed pitcher during the whole year, and it came in the biggest part of my life and my career … I can’t really describe right now the emotions that I feel.”

Still, there was hope.

In the bottom of the inning, Yamamoto hit Alejandro Kirk to load the bases with one out. Then Rojas returned for another closeup, scooping up a Daulton Varsho grounder, throwing it home, and barely forcing out Isiah Kiner-Falefa at the plate. The play was so close it was reviewed, and the Blue Jays came within a whisker of winning the World Series on an overturned call. However, the decision was upheld at the Dodgers lived on.

On the very next play, Ernie Clement hit a ball to deep left-field where Andy Pages made a circus catch while colliding with teammate Kiké Hernandez. With Jays fans gasping for air, the 2025 season headed into extra innings.

“[Yamamoto] was the MVP of this series. That was incredible. I talked to him yesterday. I was like, ‘Hey, if you can give us one, we’re going to win.’ He gave us three. That was special,” said Smith. “He’ll have a few months off. I know he is going to need it, but yeah, I’m just happy for him. That was awesome.”

Toronto’s loss ends a dream season on the lowest of notes. A year after the frustrated Jays fan base demanded front office change, they made it to the 11th inning of the World Series without Shohei Ohtani, who they heavily courted after the 2023 season before he joined the Dodgers. And without Roki Sasaki, who they also did everything to sign last winter before he too signed for the Dodgers. They rode the April momentum of re-signing star first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr to a long-term deal, all the way into October, when a 22-year-old hurler with virtually no big league experience, Trey Yesavage, energized their postseason run.

But it wasn’t enough to unseat the majestic Dodgers and the series MVP, Yamamoto, whose manager proclaimed the pitcher “The Goat” in the postgame celebrations.

LA were down 3-0 in the third after Bo Bichette’s three-run blast off Ohtani forced the two-way master, who had a quiet night, into a rare walk of shame to the dugout.

The Dodgers looked to rebound in the fourth, when the 41-year-old Max Scherzer, rock solid through three innings, gave up a double to Smith, a single to Freddie Freeman, and walked Max Muncy, loading the bases. Teoscar Hernandez, loaded with a bat full of October magic, hit a sinking line drive to center, but Varsho made a sliding catch that prevented a possible base-clearing hit and held the Dodgers to a single run. Then Guerrero made a diving catch off a Tommy Edman line drive to retire the side. The Jays defense had rescued Scherzer, and the future Hall-of-Fame had finished four innings, allowing just a single run.

A contentious bottom of the fifth saw Dodgers reliever Justin Wrobleski brush back Andrés Gimenez before hitting him in the hand. The shortstop took issue, and the benches cleared, bringing temporary venom to the evening. Gimenez would exact revenge in the sixth inning with an RBI double off Tyler Glasnow, putting Toronto up 4-2.

Muncy narrowed Toronto’s lead with a solo eighth-inning home run off Yesavage, who was pitching in relief off the back of 17 strikeouts in 11 innings as a starter. That brought LA within a run before Rojas’s home run evened the score.

Three usual starters – Yamamoto, Glasnow, and Blake Snell – emerged from the Dodgers bullpen to hold Toronto to a single run after the third inning, allowing LA to keep the Jays in their sights. Ultimately, it was the Jays’ inability to break LA’s relievers on the night – they were just 3 for 17 with runners in scoring position – which led to their doom.

Now the Dodgers head back to the US with the first back-to-back titles MLB has seen since the 1999 and 2000 New York Yankees, needing just one more ring for the true dynasty.

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Yoshinobu Yamamoto is mobbed by his teammates after securing the World Series for the Dodgers. Photograph: Patrick Smith/Getty Images

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Galaxies are spooky places.

Space itself is scary enough—dark, vast, cold, and empty—but galaxies have all manner of terrifying beasts lurking inside. Most of these astrophysical monsters are stars with various behavioral issues, such as explosive supernovae or ridiculously powerful (and tempestuous) magnetars. Getting too close to one of these stellar tantrums guarantees a very bad time.

On top of that, galaxies themselves can be terrifying. In a recent The Universe column, I wrote about particularly nasty cosmic nightmares called active galaxies. You see, all big galaxies have a supermassive black hole haunting their heart, and some of these black holes have billions of times the mass of the sun. If matter is falling into one of these black holes at a high rate, that infalling material heats up to frightening temperatures and blasts out high-energy radiation. This also drives intense winds of subatomic particles that flow away at high speed to wreak havoc around the galactic core. That’s all bad enough, but the spin of the black hole can also launch twin beams of matter called jets that can scream across space like death rays, cooking everything in their path for many thousands of light-years.

This doesn’t sound like a clement environment! After the article was published, I received quite a few inquiries from readers asking some unsettling questions: How dangerous is it to live in an active galaxy—and is the Milky Way one?

As usual, the answer is: it depends. The Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, called Sgr A*, seems to be pretty sedate at present, but we don’t know just how active our galaxy was in its youth. We can see echoes of previous events around the galactic center, however, stretching away from the Milky Way’s heart are two immense bubbles of hot gas that are softly glowing with gamma rays. It’s unclear if these bubbles, called Fermi Bubbles, are blown by some wind of material from Sgr A* after a snack or if a burst of star formation created enough high-mass stars to expel winds that expand the gas.

And as for the more fundamental question of active galaxy hazards, this hasn’t been very well studied, but I did find a couple of papers that tackled it under limited circumstances. The results, not too surprisingly, show that the two most important factors are how powerful the active galaxy is and how far you are from it.

In extreme cases, even being outside the active galaxy will not keep you safe. A prime example of this is the galaxy pair 3C321, where a jet from one of the galaxies is slamming into the other about 20,000 light-years away. Being in the path of all that high-energy radiation must be rough, but the impact of the jet is also causing clouds of gas in the second galaxy to collapse, which triggers scads of star formation. That, in turn, means the creation of many high-mass stars, which explode as supernovae in just a few million years.

Opinions vary on how close a planet can be to an exploding star and survive, but a few hundred light-years is a conservative estimate. On a galactic scale, that’s very close, so on average, it’s unlikely to afflict any particular world. Then again, on galactic scales, a few million years is an instant, so all those jet-sparked supernovae would be detonating almost simultaneously—which can’t be good for any worlds in the general vicinity. I’d advise you stay away from jets.

What about the other effects? The wind of subatomic particles is a problem—two problems, really. One is that if the wind strikes a planet such as Earth, it can deposit energy in the atmosphere, heating it up. This causes the air to expand, making it more prone to be lost to space. The other is that when those particles hit the atmosphere, they can trigger a few different kinds of chemical reactions, including the creation of nitrogen oxides, major components of smog. This has several effects, but one of the most deleterious is that smog destroys ozone, a molecule composed of three oxygen atoms. Ozone absorbs energetic ultraviolet light from the host star that can otherwise reach the surface and be harmful to life.

In a paper published earlier this year in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of astronomers modeled these two effects from an active galaxy. The researchers first assumed the galaxy had a black hole similar to our Milky Way’s Sgr A*, with a mass of four million suns. They then calculated the energy from the wind, finding that it could erode the atmosphere of an Earth-like world as far out as 1,300 light-years—or just deplete the planet’s ozone if it was within about 3,000 light-years. These might seem like worrisomely large distances, but the Milky Way is 60,000 light-years in radius, and our solar system is about 26,000 light-years out from the center, so we’re safe from nasty winds.

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Where Things Stand

• Food stamps: A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to continue paying for food stamps during the federal shutdown. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, aids roughly 42 million people and was set to run out of funds on Saturday without intervention. The judge ordered distribution of funds “as soon as possible.” Read more ›

• Boat strikes: Mexico said it had not found any survivors from U.S. military strikes on Monday off the Central and South American coasts that killed 14 people, days after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that one person had survived the strikes. U.S. officials said the boats were smuggling drugs, and the Pentagon said that had it notified a nearby Mexican military boat and that Mexican officials had assumed responsibility for the rescue. Read more ›

• Air travel: Insufficient staffing at air traffic control facilities caused a second day of widespread delays, as several large airports reported service interruptions. The controllers’ union released a statement on Friday that effectively endorsed congressional Republicans’ approach to ending the shutdown.

A judge permanently bars Trump from requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration.

A federal judge in Washington permanently barred the Trump administration on Friday from requiring proof of citizenship on federal voter registration forms, a change dictated in an executive order President Trump signed in March.

The ruling definitively halted the effort to compel the Elections Assistance Commission, an independent body, to adopt nationwide changes to voting procedures at a time when the president has also called for requiring voter identification in elections and ending mail-in voting. For months, voting rights groups have warned that those changes, in tandem with the deployment of the national guard to the streets of Democratic-led cities, resembled steps of a voter-suppression strategy.

What is happening with SNAP benefits during the shutdown?

A federal judge told the Trump administration on Friday to continue funding for food stamps during the government shutdown, a legal victory for local officials and nonprofits that sought to spare roughly 42 million Americans from losing the benefits in a matter of days.

But it is unclear if or when food stamps will soon reach those who rely on them to purchase groceries. Here’s what we know about the status of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

The White House put new limits on reporters’ access to the press secretary’s office.

The Trump administration on Friday took another step to micromanage the news-gathering activities of journalists who work from the White House, the latest move in a gradual crackdown that has broken with decades of precedent.

For generations, White House reporters have been allowed to roam freely from the press briefing room into a warren of offices in the West Wing, known as “Upper Press,” that houses the press secretary and other senior press aides. Journalists could ask impromptu questions of administration officials and, during breaking news, quickly obtain information for their audiences.

As pain from the shutdown grows, Trump attends to other matters.

American families are worried about losing food stamp benefits. Hundreds of thousands of federal government workers have no idea when they will next be paid. Several airports have been experiencing delays because of staffing shortages.

The pain of the government shutdown is growing more acute as it grinds toward the five-week mark, with Congress showing little movement toward a resolution. But President Trump has been attending to other matters.

Immigration agents clash with Chicago-area residents on Halloween.

Federal immigration agents fanned out across Chicago and its North Shore suburbs on Halloween, chasing suspects through front yards, driving S.U.V.s onto sidewalks, and using chemical agents during confrontations with furious residents.

Several people, including at least one woman who said that she was a U.S. citizen, were arrested after appearing to interfere with immigration operations. In Evanston, a suburb north of Chicago, Border Patrol agents detained at least one additional person after a car rear-ended the agents’ vehicle on Friday, according to the Evanston police.

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President Trump speaking to reporters as he arrived in Palm Beach, Fla., on Friday.Credit…Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

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