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A potential new type of celestial object has all the makings of a normal small galaxy. It’s rich with the same hydrogen gas that births suns and planets, and it lies within a halo of dark matter, the same invisible stuff that holds galaxies together. Yet it’s missing one key component of glittering galaxies like our own Milky Way: stars.

Nicknamed Cloud-9, the gas cloud is technically the best-yet example of a RELHIC, or Reionization-Limited H I Cloud. The “H I” stands for Cloud-9’s bounty of neutral hydrogen, and “RELHIC” refers to what astronomers believe the object to be: a primordial fossil—or relic—from the universe’s early epochs that, for some reason, never managed to form stars or become a full-fledged galaxy. That makes Cloud-9 a “failed galaxy,” said Rachael Beaton, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, during a January 5 press conference at the American Astronomical Society’s 247th meeting in Phoenix, Ariz.

Based on their understanding of dark matter’s behavior and the hierarchical process of galaxy formation, astronomers have long predicted that such starless objects should exist throughout the cosmos. But until recently, RELHICs had been notoriously difficult to spot.

The results—presented by Beaton at the meeting and published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters last November—bolster the case that we’ve finally found one of these elusive phantom galaxies. Cloud-9 first burst onto the astronomy scene in 2023, when the Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope in China’s province of Guizhou discovered a nearly 5,000-light-year-wide spherical cloud of hydrogen gas about 14 million light-years from Earth that appeared to be a faint dwarf galaxy, albeit bereft of visible stars. More in-depth studies on the cloud showed that it contains about a million solar masses of hydrogen and some five billion solar masses of dark matter, but researchers couldn’t confirm it to be truly starless. Perhaps, instead, it was indeed a strange sort of dwarf galaxy that was sparsely populated with very old and dim stars.

So Beaton and her colleagues peered once again at the object through the keen gaze of the Hubble Space Telescope. And in all of Hubble’s observations, she said, it found hints of just one star within Cloud-9. It could be that other stars simply went by undetected, but based on further simulations, the team found that the cloud probably couldn’t host more than some 3,000 solar masses worth of stars—a meager smattering that would preclude the object being a dwarf galaxy. This new result not only makes Cloud-9 the foremost REHLIC candidate in astronomers’ catalogs but also a milestone for verifying the common prediction that “not every dark matter halo will have a galaxy in it,” Beaton said.

While the fresh information from Hubble “certainly eliminates the possibility that [Cloud-9] is a dwarf galaxy,” there’s still much left to learn about this peculiar object, says Kristine Spekkens, an astronomer at Queen’s University in Ontario, who was not involved with the work. For instance, she says, Cloud-9 doesn’t have quite as smooth a shape as astronomers would expect. Better mapping of its gas distribution could provide more insights into how exactly it formed and evolved over cosmic time.

Still, it will be difficult to definitively confirm that Cloud-9 is in fact a RELHIC so long as it remains in a league completely of its own, says Ethan Nadler, an astronomer at the University of California, San Diego, who didn’t take part in the Hubble observations. While dubbing the cloud officially “starless” will be challenging, finding similar objects may help researchers shed some light on this dark area of astronomy.

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President Donald Trump’s military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is flatly illegal under international law and almost certainly illegal under federal law—an unauthorized use of force against a foreign nation that pushes executive power past its breaking point. Yet there is no real chance that the courts will curb it, even as the mission evolves into a possible occupation of Venezuela and an expansion of hostilities to its neighbors. Nor is there any signal that Congress will impose restraints on what appears to be the dawn of a new conflict overseas, surrendering its constitutional war powers to Trump without objection. And even if Congress does try to assert its authority to oversee (or end) military action in South America, it will face an uphill battle in a judiciary that persistently favors the commander in chief.

This inversion of our constitutional order sets a perilous precedent that even many celebrating Maduro’s fall may come to regret. It marks the death knell of the post–World War II settlement that, however imperfect, wrestled the anarchy of war into a framework designed to condition armed aggression on legal justification. The executive branch’s consolidation of power now reverberates far beyond the United States’ shores as a saber-rattling president abandons any pretense that the law can constrain his resort to military force. Indeed, the legal theories the administration has floated to defend its actions draw on a historical source Trump once disavowed: the arch-interventionist claim that the U.S. has an inalienable right to police the world.

It is difficult to tally all the ways in which the Maduro operation was illegal, but start with a point that few dispute: This act violated international law. Trump’s invasion of Venezuela to capture its president cannot be squared with Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter, which bars member nations from deploying “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” This principle—the most important rule of international law today—should bind the United States, which ratified the charter in 1945. And it clearly prohibits the American government from invading another country to make an arrest.

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So what is the government’s legal defense of its military incursion into Venezuela? Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Alex Wong/Getty Images and Luis Jaimes/AFP via Getty Images.

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What the Research Suggests

Much of the science on the link between inconsistent sleep and poor health is based on observational studies, which can’t prove cause and effect. Their results are also often restricted by various limitations (including if the study was performed on a small number of people, or on people of only certain ages, ethnicities, or occupations). It’s also difficult to accurately track people’s sleep patterns over months or years, and some studies define sleep consistency in different ways.

Despite these limitations, scientists have found some patterns. Those who tend to deviate most from a consistent sleep schedule seem to be at higher risk of certain health conditions like cardiovascular disease, obesity, mental health issues like depression and anxiety, and dementia.

In a 2020 study, researchers analyzed the sleep patterns of nearly 2,000 adults aged 45 to 84 in the United States. They concluded that those with the most irregular sleep schedules were more than twice as likely to develop cardiovascular disease than those with more regular sleep patterns.

In another study published in 2024, researchers analyzed sleep data from more than 88,000 adults in the United Kingdom and assigned “sleep regularity” scores to all of them. Those who scored lowest, meaning they had the most irregular sleep schedules, were about 50 percent more likely to develop dementia than those who scored in the middle of the range.

Scientists aren’t sure how frequent or how severe your sleep irregularity has to be to increase your health risk, said Soomi Lee, an associate professor of sleep and aging at Penn State. But the more you deviate from your typical sleep time — whether that’s within a 24-hour period or across weeks or months — the more the risks seem to increase, she said.

In a large review of studies published in 2023, a group of sleep scientists concluded that there was enough evidence to recommend maintaining a regular sleep schedule to help protect metabolic, mental, and cardiovascular health.

Why Inconsistent Sleep May Put Health at Risk

Researchers are still untangling why inconsistent sleep patterns might negatively affect health, but their leading theory has to do with the body’s circadian rhythm, Dr. Lee said.

Your circadian rhythm makes up a roughly 24-hour internal clock that governs your sleep-wake cycle as well as the ebbs and flows of your hormones, metabolism, cardiovascular function, immune system, appetite, and mood.

When you stray from your typical sleep schedule, the bodily functions that rely on those rhythms are thrown off, too. For example, staying up late or sleeping in may affect your hormone levels. Cortisol, which regulates stress, could be released at odd times or in more erratic ways. This can increase stress and inflammation throughout the body that, over time, may affect cardiovascular or metabolic health, Dr. Chaput said.

A misaligned circadian rhythm may also cause you to feel hungry outside of your regular mealtimes, said Dr. Andrew Varga, an associate professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. That could lead you to eat at unusual hours, such as late at night, possibly resulting in digestive issues or, in the long run, weight gain or obesity, he said.

How to Keep Sleep Consistent

With work, school, parenting demands, and social obligations, it can be challenging to sleep consistently. But experts have some tips.

Setting an alarm to go off an hour before your bedtime every night can remind you that it’s time to start getting ready for sleep, Dr. Varga said. Doing something relaxing during that hour, such as reading or meditating, can help you wind down for bed.

It’s also important to expose yourself to sunlight every morning — ideally for 20 to 30 minutes at the same time every day, said Dr. Nishay Chitkara, the director of sleep medicine at NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue. While standing in front of a window can be beneficial, he said, it’s best to go outside to do this, even if it’s cloudy. A bright artificial indoor light, like a light therapy box, can help, too.

Light is the main cue that regulates your circadian rhythm. When it hits your eyes in the morning, your body begins its countdown to later that evening — when it releases hormones telling your body it’s time to go to bed.

You may not feel exhausted from inconsistent sleep in the same way you might after a night of tossing and turning, Dr. Lee added. But try your best to stick with a sleep routine regardless. The more consistent you are, she said, the better your health will be in the long run.

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Joyce Lee for The New York Times

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As norovirus surged across the U.S. last winter, the only thing more horrifying than descriptions of the highly contagious illness—violent projectile vomiting!—was learning that nothing seemed to kill the microbe that causes it. Hand sanitizers made with alcohol are useless. Water needs to be above 150 degrees Fahrenheit to kill the virus, which is too hot for handwashing. Rubbing with soapy water and rinsing can physically remove the virus from your hands and send it down the drain, but won’t effectively kill it. Bleach dismantles norovirus, but you can’t spray bleach on skin or food or many other things, and norovirus can live on surfaces for weeks.

During the early days of the COVID pandemic, however, I had learned about a disinfecting agent called hypochlorous acid, or HOCl. My dad, a now retired otolaryngologist, had been wondering whether there was something he might put up patients’ noses—and his own—to reduce viral load and decrease the chance of COVID infection without, of course, irritating the mucosa or otherwise doing harm. He was imagining a preventive tool, another layer of protection for health-care workers in addition to masks and face shields.

Hypochlorous acid is a weak acid with a pH slightly below neutral. It should not be confused with sodium hypochlorite (NaClO), the main active ingredient in household bleach products, even though they both involve chlorine. Chemically, they are not the same. Sodium hypochlorite is a strong base with a pH of 11 to 13, and when added to water for consumer products, it can be irritating and toxic. Hypochlorous acid, in contrast, is safe on skin.

All mammals naturally make hypochlorous acid to fight infection. When you cut yourself, for instance, white blood cells known as neutrophils go to the site of injury, capturing any invading pathogens. Once the pathogen is engulfed, the cell releases biocides, including hypochlorous acid, a powerful oxidant that kills invading microbes within milliseconds by tearing apart their cell membranes and breaking strands of their DNA.

Hypochlorous acid is a well-studied disinfectant that appears to be extremely effective and safe—so why isn’t it a household name?

The synthetic form of hypochlorous acid destroys a broad spectrum of harmful microbes—including highly resistant spores and viruses such as norovirus. Like most disinfectants, it kills pathogens by penetrating their cell walls. But compared with bleach, hypochlorous acid has been shown to be more than 100 times more effective at much lower concentrations, and it works much faster.

Hypochlorous acid isn’t new. It’s listed as one of the World Health Organization’s essential medicines and is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use on food products and in certain clinical applications. It’s increasingly used in industrial and commercial settings, such as water-treatment plants, hospitals, and nursing homes. It doesn’t irritate the skin, eyes or lungs. In fact, optometrists use it to clean eyes before procedures, and people have been treating wounds with it for more than a century. It breaks down quickly, doesn’t produce toxic waste, and isn’t harmful to animals or the environment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency lists it as a surface disinfectant for the COVID-causing virus SARS-CoV-2.

Hypochlorous acid is a well-studied disinfectant that appears to be extremely effective and safe—so why isn’t it a household name?Scientists have known about the powers of hypochlorous acid for nearly 200 years. In 1834, French chemist Antoine-Jérôme Balard made hypochlorous acid when he added a dilute mix of mercury oxide in water to chlorine gas. Later in the 19th century, English chemist and physicist Michael Faraday developed a technique for synthesizing HOCl from salt and water via a process called electrochemical activation.

Before the advent of antibiotics, hypochlorous acid was a go-to disinfectant. It was used as a wound sanitizer during World War I. The authors of a 1915 article in the British Medical Journal set out to investigate antiseptics that could be used to dress wounds in the field. They compared the efficacy of sodium hypochlorite (bleach) with that of hypochlorous acid and “found that hypochlorous acid is a more potent germicide than its salts.” They “accordingly devised a method in which the free acid is employed as the antiseptic agent.”

For all its benefits, hypochlorous acid solution has one major weakness: it’s highly unstable. It remains stable only in a solution with a pH between about 4 and 6. The solution is still made using salt, water, and electricity through the process of electrolysis. Within minutes of exposure to light or air, hypochlorous acid starts to deteriorate back into salt water, making it useless as a disinfectant. If the solution were to get too acidic, it would start converting into chlorine gas. If it were to get too alkaline, it would gain a higher percentage of hypochlorite. This lack of shelf stability is the biggest reason hypochlorous acid sprays never became a staple of the cleaning-products aisle.

For decades, hypochlorous acid lingered in the background, used as a disinfectant in specific industrial and commercial contexts that could justify a pricey, on-site manufacturing process to create products on demand. But COVID accelerated the need for different methods of disinfection that would be safe, effective, and easy to use in a wide range of environments. According to an article in the magazine Health Facilities Management, during the pandemic, “many countries introduced continuous HOCl misting and fogging tunnels for entry and exit corridors at mass transit facilities.” Since then, use of HOCl in places such as kitchens, gyms, nursing homes, and medical offices has been rising significantly.

Hypochlorous acid consumer products are now proliferating, thanks to the development of new manufacturing processes that reportedly make an extended shelf life possible while keeping costs low. The more reputable of these companies claim their products are effective within two years of the manufacturing date stamped on the bottle if stored correctly (ideally at room temperature, away from sunlight).

Most common are surface sanitizers sold by the bottle and marketed as all-purpose disinfectants for your home, although pure hypochlorous acid isn’t really a cleaner—it’s not meant to get rid of grime and grease. Like all disinfectants, once hypochlorous acid is applied, it must be left to sit for a period of time. But unlike some germicides that require up to 10 minutes to kill harmful stuff, hypochlorous acid requires only one minute. You don’t have to wipe it up, either, but because it doesn’t dry quickly, I found it was easier to do so on hard surfaces such as counters.

A frustrating thing about the finicky nature of hypochlorous acid is that you can’t really decant it from its original bottle into a smaller one without potentially affecting its quality and longevity. When I needed hypochlorous acid that was suitable for air travel, I had to buy a two-ounce bottle of Magic Molecule, an FDA-cleared product launched in 2023. These bottles are conveniently sized but don’t last long, and not being able to refill them results in significant plastic waste.

Other companies have taken a different approach to the shelf-life problem. Force of Nature, for example, sells countertop electrolysis machines for home use. The idea is that you can make as much disinfectant as you need for a week or two, as often as you want, using salt tablets you buy from the company. The process takes about eight minutes. Force of Nature also includes vinegar in its formulation, which gives the product cleansing abilities that the company recommends for use on hard surfaces or carpets. Other businesses sell devices that let you add your own salt. In online forums dedicated to fans of hypochlorous acid, members discuss how they use these devices. Some use pH test strips to make sure each batch of hypochlorous acid is within the correct range. Some people, however, are skeptical that at-home machines can consistently make pure HOCl.

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Richard Borge

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President Donald Trump said he believes the U.S. oil industry could get expanded operations in Venezuela “up and running” in fewer than 18 months.

“I think we can do it in less time than that, but it’ll be a lot of money,” Trump told NBC News in an interview Monday.

“A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent, and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue,” he said.

Whether the U.S. government ultimately agrees to reimburse the oil industry’s costs in Venezuela, or alternatively, decides that future revenue is sufficient repayment, will likely be a key factor for the oil companies as they consider their options.

Trump declined to say how much money he believes it would cost companies to repair and upgrade Venezuela’s aging oil infrastructure.

“It’ll be a very substantial amount of money will be spent” by the oil companies, Trump said. “But they’ll do very well.”

“And the country will do well,” he added.

Despite Trump’s optimism, oil companies have appeared skeptical of quickly entering, expanding or investing in Venezuela. A history of state asset seizures, the ongoing U.S. sanctions, and the latest political instability all feed into this caution.

Trump said he believed that tapping Venezuela’s oil reserves is “going to reduce oil prices.”

Gas prices are already at multiyear lows. The average retail gas price on Monday was $2.81, according to AAA. That’s the lowest since March 2021.

“Having a Venezuela that’s an oil producer is good for the United States because it keeps the price of oil down,” Trump also added.

While lower oil prices could make gas cheaper at the pump, it would likely also mean lower revenues for the same big oil companies that Trump is counting on to bankroll the rebuilding of Venezuela’s oil industry to the tune of billions of dollars in foreign investment.

Asked if the administration had briefed any oil companies ahead of Saturday’s military operation to capture deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, Trump said, “No. But we’ve been talking to the concept of, ‘what if we did it?'”

Trump told NBC News it was “too soon” to say whether he had personally spoken to top executives at America’s three largest oil producers, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips.

“I speak to everybody,” he said.

ConocoPhillips declined to comment Monday on Trump’s plans for Venezuela’s oil reserves. Chevron told NBC News it does not comment “on commercial matters or speculate on future investments.” Exxon did not immediately respond to questions.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright plans to meet with executives from Exxon and ConocoPhillips this week about Venezuela’s oil industry, Bloomberg News reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Wright will be a point person for the Trump administration’s broader campaign to rebuild Venezuela’s oil infrastructure, a White House official said Monday.

The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. oil industry is eager to return to Venezuela, nearly two decades after the country last nationalized billions of dollars’ worth of oil company assets.

“They want to go in so badly,” Trump told reporters Sunday evening.

Despite Venezuela’s massive reserves of crude oil, large U.S. oil firms have a good reason to pause before committing to expand operations in Venezuela.

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Is it possible that our esteemed 47th “Great Businessman”, “get coal miner’s jobs back” President, is a batshit crazy scam artist?  Are there bats in the belfry at the second white house, Mar-A-Largo?  Can we get a definitive answer, so already great America won’t  be the laughing stock of the world?

 I recently watched the Armageddon  movie and the USA lead the charge to solve the problem.   I want to know where do we go from here? This crazy man won’t shut up, look at what happened in the ‘House of Represenatives’. Do they want to gain power for themselves while destroying America. if we arn’t very careful  America will suffer a ‘Red Dawn’. check out the movie which could be our furture!

Beware America!

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In the five years since the Capitol was stormed, no new facts have emerged to undermine the basic findings of congressional and Justice Department investigators that many of the rioters acted in the misguided belief, pushed relentlessly by Mr. Trump, that he had been robbed of victory in 2020 — and that in attacking the Capitol they not only injured about 140 police officers but also struck at a cornerstone of American democracy: the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

Even so, Mr. Trump has long maintained that the rioters endured horrible, even illegal, mistreatment during their prosecutions.

And yet if that is true, some pardoned rioters are now asking, then why haven’t their persecutors been thrown in jail? And if the rioters are martyrs to a righteous cause, as the president and his allies have often said, then why haven’t they been made whole through financial reparations?

While this disillusionment is not universal, some so-called J6ers have even begun to ask why, after nearly a year in power, Mr. Trump’s law enforcement agencies have yet to provide any proof of the conspiracy theory they promoted to help him reclaim the presidency: that deep-state agents lured Trump supporters into storming the Capitol to derail the MAGA movement and justify political reprisals.

What J6ers rarely seem to acknowledge is the possibility that Mr. Trump’s government has failed to reveal the hidden truth about Jan. 6 because there is no hidden truth, no deep-state conspiracy, and therefore no legal reason to bring further charges related to the riot.

Still, their questions have nurtured new conspiracy theories from the old, focused not on the Biden administration, but on those in power now, Trump loyalists like the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, and Attorney General Pam Bondi. The theories have intensified as the fifth anniversary of Jan. 6 has arrived — a milestone that many rioters believe marks the final chance to punish the shadowy government agents who supposedly entrapped them in what they have come to call the “fedsurrection.”

“If the true perpetrators of Jan. 6 aren’t held accountable before the statute of limitations expires on Jan. 6, 2026, count me OUT of the midterms,” Shane Jenkins, whose several felony convictions for Jan. 6 included assaulting law enforcement, wrote last month. “I’ll be running AGAINST the GOP.”

By feeding a steady diet of unfounded conspiracy theories not only to the J6ers but also to others in their base, Mr. Trump and his allies have spawned what some experts have likened to a zombie army of followers. And now, by failing to follow these theories to their logical conclusions, they are seeing that army begin to turn on them.

“When you’re told day after day that you’re a victim — when you’re told that for four years straight — it sinks in,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow with the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. “They’ve become conspiratorial-minded people looking for the next thing to mobilize for.”

“There’s this zombie specter of Jan. 6 defendants who are just looking for that red meat,” Mr. Lewis added.

Another Conspiracy Theory Takes Hold

All of this was on display at the end of the year, when many pardoned rioters reacted in fury as competing solutions were offered to an enduring mystery arising from the Capitol attack: Who planted pipe bombs outside the Republican and Democratic Party headquarters on the night before Jan. 6?

The first answer was put forward in early November, when Steve Baker, one of the rioters, published an article in the right-wing news outlet The Blaze, saying he had found a “forensic match” between the hooded suspect caught on video prowling Capitol Hill that night and a former Capitol Police officer who had fought the mob on Jan. 6 and then went to work for the C.I.A. Mr. Baker’s report fit neatly into the “fedsurrection” narrative, linking the bombs to a former law enforcement official with ties to the country’s premier intelligence agency.

But The Blaze scoop fell flat. Federal officials, including Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the F.B.I. at the time, dismissed it as untrue, and the former officer’s lawyers said that when the suspect was supposedly setting the bombs, their client was home, playing with her dogs.

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Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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When we imagine a planet, we think of one like ours, orbiting a star. But some have a far lonelier existence, drifting through interstellar space without a sun to call their own. Known as “rogue” or “free-floating” planets, these worlds are often challenging to study. With no known star and no orbit from which to estimate their size, they’ve generally flown under the radar—until now.

In a new study published in Science on Thursday, scientists show how they measured the mass of one such rogue planet for the first time—a breakthrough that could enable further studies of these strange, lonely worlds.

Instead of looking at the planet’s orbit, the research team, led by Subo Dong of Peking University, instead analyzed how the planet’s gravity bent the light from a distant star, in a so-called microlensing event, from two separate vantage points: Earth and the now-retired Gaia space observatory.

The technique resembles how our eyes’ depth perception works, Dong says: the microlensing event was seen by Gaia about two hours later than by scientists on Earth. That difference in time allowed the researchers to measure the planet’s distance and estimate its mass.

“What’s really great about this work, and really noteworthy, is that it’s the first time we’ve got a mass for these objects,” says Gavin Coleman, a postdoctoral researcher at Queen Mary University of London, who authored a related commentary also published in Science but was not involved in the study. “This was purely because the authors had both ground-based observations and Gaia, looking at observations from two different places.”

What they found is that the planet has about the same mass as Saturn. But the findings also offer a hint about its past: “Knowing [its mass] is the starting point,” Dong says. “We can start to understand, okay, what could be the origin, the history of this planet?”

Dong hopes the study offers a jumping-off point for more research to better understand these mysterious cosmic bodies. That pursuit gets a boost later this year from NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, set to launch in September, says David Bennet, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park, and NASA. Able to image the entire sky 1,000 times faster than the Hubble Space Telescope can, Roman could help identify hundreds of rogue planets. And with this work, researchers will have a way to estimate their masses, too.

“The door is open to study this new emerging population of planets,” Dong says.

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NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

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Summary

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Venezuela’s seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores attend their arraignment with defense lawyers Barry Pollack and Mark Donnelly

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When a strong state operates under the principle that war is just another extension of policy, it is tempted to operate a bit like a mob boss. Every interaction with a weaker nation is tinged in some way with the threat of force: Nice little country you have there — shame if something happened to it.

This is not fanciful. In a telephone conversation with The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer, President Trump threatened Venezuela’s new leader, Delcy Rodríguez, who served as Maduro’s vice president. “If she doesn’t do what’s right,” Trump said, “she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

Diplomacy and economic pressure are almost always still a first resort for powerful nations, but if they fail to achieve the intended results, well, you can watch footage from the American strike in Venezuela to know what can happen next.

But the Clausewitzian view isn’t the only option for nations and their leaders. There is a better model for international affairs, one that acknowledges the existence of evil and the reality of national interests but also draws lines designed to preserve peace and human life.

Carl von Clausewitz, meet Thomas Aquinas.

In the Summa Theologica, written in the 13th century, Aquinas outlined three cardinal requirements of what came to be known as just war theory.

First, war must be waged through the lawful operation of a sovereign and not through the private adventurism of ambitious individuals.

Second, the war must be based on a just cause. National self-defense or collective self-defense are obviously just, for example.

Third, there must be a just purpose, namely the advancement of good and the avoidance of evil.

One way to think about the shifting patterns of warfare is that humanity seesaws between Clausewitz and Aquinas. Strong nations impose their will on the weak and then — eventually — try to impose their will on one another. When catastrophe results, as it invariably does, they turn back to Aquinas.

You can actually see the results of this shifting approach across the sweep of history. An analysis of global deaths in conflict shows that war is always with us, but its intensity waxes and wanes. Periods of extreme suffering and death are followed by periods of relative quiet, followed again by an age of horror.

Consider history since World War I. After the ongoing slaughter of trench warfare, the world attempted to ban aggressive warfare and to establish an international institution — the League of Nations — to keep the peace.

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Alex Brandon/Associated Press

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