James' World 2

Hmmmm … MAGA is next lookout!

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Federal officials sought to portray a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident killed by Border Patrol agents on Saturday as a domestic terrorist, saying he wanted to “massacre” law enforcement, even as videos emerged that appeared to directly contradict their account.

The man, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, was an intensive-care nurse described by the Minneapolis police chief as a U.S. citizen with no criminal record. Federal officials said he was armed, but there is no sign in videos analyzed by The New York Times that he pulled his weapon, or that agents even knew he had one until he was already pinned on the sidewalk.

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Videos Appear to Contradict Federal Account of Killing

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Cases of winter viruses in the U.S. have exploded in recent months—and soon kids may be less protected from them, thanks to new vaccine guidelines.

Amid a worsening respiratory illness season, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently rolled back its universal childhood vaccine recommendations from addressing 17 diseases to just 11. The CDC no longer recommends that all children be vaccinated against influenza and rotavirus—instead, it recommends these vaccines based on individual discussions with doctors only. And the agency recommends that vaccines that protect against meningococcal bacteria and hepatitis A and B be given to children in high-risk groups only.

All of these vaccines remain available to parents who want their kids to receive them, and they are fully covered by both private and public insurance. Nevertheless, public health experts warn that the changes will reduce vaccination rates and increase disease rates.

Concerningly, the changes prominently affect seasonal diseases that spike during the winter and are notorious for causing high rates of pediatric hospitalizations and even deaths—most notably, influenza. The timing couldn’t be worse: nationwide health care visits for flu-like symptoms recently hit a record high in nearly 30 years of tracking.

“The speed at which the flu season is ramping up in terms of total cases is quite impressive,” says Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. And he anticipates the numbers will only grow. “We’re closer to the beginning than the end of the flu season,” Pekosz says.

It’s still too early to understand whether certain age groups are being hit worse this year than others, he adds, although the CDC has already reported 17 pediatric deaths this season. But the 2024–2025 flu season was remarkably deadly for kids—289 children were reported to have died of the virus, the highest number of pediatric deaths from flu since the CDC started tracking pediatric flu deaths in 2004. Of those who died that had a known vaccination status, only one in 10 was fully vaccinated—a testament to the flu shot’s protection.

Children are more likely than those in any other age group to catch the flu. Yet only slightly more than half of two-year-old children in the U.S. were fully vaccinated against the flu in 2023, the latest year for which full data are available. Until this month the CDC recommended annual shots beginning at six months of age. “Uptake for the flu vaccine has been relatively low and dropping,” says Flor Muñoz, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at Baylor College of Medicine. So far this flu season, childhood vaccination is at less than 43 percent. More children may still get vaccinated, but for comparison, the pediatric uptake rate at this point in the 2019–2020 season, before COVID truly hit, was 54 percent.

The CDC’s new policy entirely removes the formal recommendation for the influenza vaccine for kids, leaving discussions of the vaccine entirely in the hands of parents and care providers. “To me, it doesn’t really make much sense to take away that recommendation when you know, scientifically, that there’s a benefit,” Pekosz says.

Instead, decisions about flu vaccination will be made through shared clinical decision-making—having health care providers discuss the risks and benefits of a medical intervention with the patient or their family.

But providers already routinely have these discussions with parents, says Kathryn Edwards, a pediatric infectious disease specialist and vaccinologist, now emerita at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. “Parents are always part of the decision for vaccines to be administered.”

Shared clinical decision-making now applies to vaccines for three key infections; the COVID vaccine received the designation this summer, and the new guidelines extended it to the rotavirus vaccine, as well as influenza. Rotavirus causes a diarrheal infection that spreads year-round but is most common in the winter and spring. The disease has largely flown under the radar because vaccines introduced in 2006 starkly reduced hospitalization rates from the virus. This vaccine is administered orally and has had a relatively high uptake—vaccination rates have hovered between about 70 percent and 75 percent since the 2010s. Muñoz fears that the move away from a universal recommendation to shared clinical decision-making could result in increasing cases of and hospitalizations from rotavirus as soon as this year.

Experts worry the CDC’s new approach to vaccines will erode other recent victories for children’s health as well. Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, is another “big hitter” winter infection, alongside flu, Edwards says. Traditionally, nine in 10 children have caught the virus within their first two years, and it sends more than 58,000 kids younger than five years old to the hospital every year in the U.S. The disease is the leading cause of hospitalization in babies.

An RSV vaccine for pregnant people and a protective antibody shot for babies were both approved for general use in 2023. In the 2024–2025 season, the prevention efforts caused “a remarkable reduction in the burden of RSV,” Edwards says. The new guidelines don’t change RSV vaccinations for either pregnant people or babies, but Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has questioned the antibody shots’ safety despite evidence from clinical trials.

Other standard childhood vaccines—including against polio, measles, whooping cough, and chickenpox—remain fully recommended for all children, but experts still worry that the broad hits to the vaccine schedule will ultimately reduce those vaccines’ usage as well.

In addition, reducing pediatric vaccine coverage for very contagious infections will increase overall cases for everyone as children spread illness among their peers and older family members. And for seasonal illnesses, the risk runs highest during the winter. “We are really surrounded by a sea of viral infections,” Edwards says.

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Note: There are links in Delayed Orgasm, Sober Sex, S.T.I. Decline, and Romantasy.

Click each link read the associated article then click the next link etc.. The set of links appears after each article.

Give yourself a Gold Star if you can read all of the articles. Have fun!

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What to Know About Your Sexual Health

Sexual health can be an important part of personal well-being. The information below can help you demystify this often misunderstood topic.

• How to Improve Libido: Experts say scheduling sex is fine, but there are even more effective ways to cultivate intimacy.

• Delayed Orgasm: The condition affects one in 10 men over 40, and can make sex difficult.

• Sober Sex: For those who rely on alcohol to loosen up, getting intimate without it can be tricky. But there are big payoffs, experts say.

• S.T.I. Decline: After decades of unrelenting increases, rates of sexually transmitted infections in the United States are showing hints of a downturn.

• Romantasy: Books in this genre have helped some readers talk openly about yearning, sex, and desire. And it’s spilling over into their bedrooms.

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Does string theory—the controversial “theory of everything” from physics—tell us anything about consciousness and the human brain?

Outside of the theory itself being devised by conscious humans using their brains, there’s scant reason to think so. In a nutshell, string theory is a sprawling realm of theoretical physics that assumes that tiny vibrating strings are the fundamental basis of reality. If valid, it offers ways for unifying the quantum mechanics that govern the universe on small scales with the gravitational force that shapes the cosmos at larger scales. But the proposed strings are so unimaginably minuscule, and their associated math is so difficult and diverse, that the theory is widely considered to be experimentally unverifiable. Consciousness, meanwhile, is a notoriously slippery and ill-defined thing, but it generally seems to be an emergent property of biology, such as assemblages of neurons within our brains.

No meaningful overlap exists between these vastly disparate domains. Or does it? A new paper, published last week in Nature, posits that some of the arcane math of string theory actually helps explain the wiring of a brain’s neurons—as well as the branching of other “physical networks” such as tree limbs, blood vessels, and anthills. “The work,” trumpets one institutional press release, “represents the first time string theory … has successfully described real biological structures.”

Senior author Albert-László Barabási, a distinguished professor and network scientist at Northeastern University, emphasizes that the paper isn’t claiming any profound, direct relationship between string theory and neuroscience. Rather, it’s showing how mathematical techniques that have been developed in string theory can be used to better describe how physical networks organize themselves. But even so, using string theory’s math to understand neural wiring would be a surprisingly practical feat, given that the theory is so tenuously tethered to physical reality that skeptical physicists have called it “not even wrong.”

The potential linkage, Barabási says, springs from the fact that “physical networks are physically costly and thus try to optimize themselves,” even if we don’t yet know what exactly they optimize. The simplest approach would be a “wiring diagram” following the shortest routes between any two nodes to minimize length, but detailed three-dimensional scans and maps of physical networks have revealed more complex branching geometries and connections that show that some different optimization must be occurring. So instead Barabási and his team sought to explain how the structure of physical networks optimizes for minimal surface area rather than other factors such as length or volume.

“For many of these networks, like the vascular system that carries blood or the neurons that use ion channels to pump out neurotransmitters, you’re really talking about a tube, and the greatest cost is to build the surface,” he says. “But modeling surface minimization is a hell of a mathematical problem because you need to create locally smooth surfaces that patch into each other in a continuous way.”

Barabási’s former postdoc and the study’s first author, Xiangyi Meng, now an assistant professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, realized that the seemingly intractable calculation was essentially identical to one for which string theorists had already developed sophisticated tools.

“While the mathematics of minimal surfaces has deep historical roots, our work relies on a specific advancement that classical geometry does not offer,” Meng says—namely, a subtype of string theory called “covariant closed string field theory,” which was developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Barton Zwiebach and others in the 1980s.

Covariant closed string field theory allows physicists to compute the smoothest, most efficient interactions—akin to minimal surfaces—between certain types of strings by treating them as vertices (corners) and edges; this approach is important for string-theory-based attempts to unify gravity and quantum mechanics. In the case of physical networks, Meng says, it offers a way to represent their growth as a series of sleevelike surfaces that are smoothly sewn together. “Crucially, classical minimization tends to collapse sleevelike surfaces into trivial wires,” he says. “Zwiebach’s formulation prevents this, maintaining a finite thickness for every link. This fundamental insight is what allows us to model the three-dimensional reality of physical networks, such as of neurons or veins, which must retain volume to function.”

The team then tested its approach against high-resolution 3D scans of physical networks, including those of neurons, blood vessels, tree branches, and corals. In each case, they found that the string theory model produced a closer match than simpler classical predictions. In particular, the team’s model more accurately replicated the observed numbers and alignments of branches. “So what we were seeing is a behavior that’s not specific to the brain but universal across physical networks,” Barabási says. “It’s a very important step, I think, in understanding the mechanisms of how brains and other physical networks wire themselves and why they’re unusual.”

“This paper nicely shows that if you think [of physical networks] in terms of surface-area costs rather than wire length, things start to make more sense,” says Michael Winding, a systems neuroscientist at the Francis Crick Institute in England, who was not involved with the work. “That’s genuinely interesting. People usually think about surface area in terms of its effect on electrical properties—like how fast signals move within a neuron, rather than as a construction cost to build a neuron.”

As for whether comprehending the wiring of the brain really demands techniques from the frontiers of theoretical physics, questions remain. Bona fide experts in both domains are few and far between. But one, Vijay Balasubramanian, a string theorist and brain-focused biophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania, is skeptical.

“I’m not sure that this study marks a critical breakthrough in our understanding of physical networks, and many experts may find the claimed relationship to string theory unconvincing,” he says. “So any assertion of revolutionary importance here seems premature. That said, this effort to apply physical principles to understanding biological networks makes a welcome addition to the scholarship in biophysics and neuroscience and will hopefully inspire further investigations.”

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To help start the conversation, we asked experts what they wished men knew about their sexual organs. Here’s what they said.

Erectile dysfunction can be a sign of chronic disease.

Around 50 percent of men over 40 will suffer from erectile dysfunction at some point, and the issue can represent broader problems with circulation.

Good blood flow is essential for achieving and maintaining an erection, and that is only possible with a healthy heart. A 2008 Dutch study of 1,248 men ages 50 to 75 found that those who said they had erectile dysfunction were at least 60 percent more likely to have a heart attack or stroke in the six years after the study concluded.

“Think of the penis as a barometer of somebody’s overall cardiovascular health,” said Dr. Matthew Ziegelmann, a urologist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

Difficulties with physical arousal may be a sign of Type 2 diabetes or high cholesterol, for instance, both of which damage the lining of arteries and elevate the risk of a stroke or heart attack.

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Claire Merchlinsky/The New York Times; Photographs by Getty

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The moon is going nuclear. On Tuesday, NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy announced a commitment to build a fission reactor on the lunar surface.

NASA has been exploring nuclear power for the moon for years, but the endeavor got a boost late last year in an order from President Donald Trump to build one to ensure “American space superiority.”

The reactor will be capable of operating “for years without the need to refuel,” according to NASA. It will provide power for the agency’s Artemis program, which seeks to establish a long-term human presence on the moon—and eventually Mars.

“America is committed to returning to the Moon, building the infrastructure to stay, and making the investments required for the next giant leap to Mars and beyond,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman in a statement.

Nuclear power may be an ideal fuel source in the sometimes dark, cold moon environment. While many lunar landers are equipped with batteries and solar panels to keep them running for the length of their mission, they ultimately run out of fuel—either because of a lack of sunlight as the moon turns on its axis or because their batteries die.

The space agency’s partnership with the DOE could help speed NASA’s efforts to build moon-ready reactors. Aside from any technical hurdles, putting a nuclear reactor on the moon will require a significant amount of engineering to make sure it works as desired on the lunar surface.

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Key Takeaways

• The Sun is by far the dominant body in our Solar System in many ways: in terms of size, mass, and energy, but also for generating the effects of space weather through the rapid motion of many charged particles.

• Most commonly, we learn about solar flares and coronal mass ejections, and those events do indeed create the majority of auroral displays that occur here on Earth: the Aurora Borealis and the Aurora Australis, in particular.

• However, there’s a third class of space weather event that is much rarer: solar radiation storms. The last major one was in 2003, but a new one in January of 2026 just triggered a spectacular auroral show. Here’s why.

Starting on the night of January 19, 2026, planet Earth was treated to a global show that had only been seen once before in the 21st century: a spectacular auroral display that wasn’t triggered by a solar flare or by a coronal mass ejection, but instead by a completely different form of space weather known as a solar radiation storm. Whereas solar flares normally involve the ejection of plasma from the Sun’s photosphere and coronal mass ejections typically involve accelerated plasma particles from the Sun’s corona, a solar radiation storm is simply an intensification of the charged ions normally emitted by the Sun as part of the solar wind. Only, in a radiation storm, both the density and speed of the emitted particles get greatly enhanced.

We’re currently still in the peak years of our current sunspot cycle: the 11-year solar cycle that’s been tracked for centuries, where “peak years” see 100+ sunspots on the Sun while “valley years” see a largely featureless Sun. While several notable auroral displays have graced Earth in recent years, there’s only been one other severe (S4 or higher-class) solar radiation storm this century: back in 2003. Whereas most space weather events take around 3-4 days to traverse the Sun-Earth distance, the particles ejected from the Sun early on January 19, 2026 (UTC) were already triggering spectacular auroral displays less than 24 hours later. Here’s the science of how it all happened, and what dangers — and displays — such events hold in store for our world.

The solar corona, as shown here, is imaged out to 25 solar radii during the 2006 total solar eclipse. The longer the duration of a total solar eclipse, the darker the sky becomes, and the better the corona and background astronomical objects can be seen. In truth, the Sun’s atmosphere even encompasses the Earth and the entirety of the Solar System. The solar wind, as well as many other Sun-driven features, extend out beyond the orbit of Pluto.

The first thing you should understand — and not only people, but even most physicists, don’t fully appreciate this — is that the Earth, and all of the planets in the Solar System, are actually inside the atmosphere of the Sun. We usually think about the Sun as being a ball of plasma with a wispy, extended atmosphere and a halo-like corona surrounding it, but those are only the locations where the plasma density is the greatest. In reality, the Sun is a powerful enough, hot enough engine that it fills everything inside our heliosphere, which extends out to beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto, with that hot, ionized plasma.

While we typically only view the extended atmosphere of the Sun under favorable viewing conditions, like during a total solar eclipse from Earth, or from up in space with the advent of a Sun-blocking coronagraph, we’ve been able to track a wide variety of its effects. We know that it produces light, sure, but it also consistently produces a stream of ions, mostly protons but also electrons, heavier atomic nuclei, and even small amounts of antimatter, known as the solar wind. That solar wind is guided by the Sun’s magnetic field, which is driven by internal processes inside the Sun, and particularly energetic outbursts come when magnetic field lines “snap” and reconnect at, near, just outside, or even fully inside the Sun’s photosphere.

Solar coronal loops, such as those observed by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite here in 2014, follow the path of the magnetic field on the Sun. When these loops ‘break’ in just the right way, they can emit coronal mass ejections, which have the potential to impact Earth. The connection between the solar corona just above the photosphere and the outer phenomena that pervade the rest of the Solar System relies on spacecraft throughout the Solar System, with the Stereo A and B spacecraft, the Parker Solar Probe, and an array of Sun-facing spacecraft located at the L1 Lagrange point (between the Earth and Sun) playing roles of paramount importance.

When those magnetic reconnection events occur internally, normally where sunspots are located, a solar flare often results. When those reconnection events occur externally, fully outside of the Sun’s photosphere, a coronal mass ejection often results. But when those reconnection events occur outside the surface but before you reach the corona, it typically just rapidly accelerates the charged particles that exist in that region outside of the photosphere. That creates the conditions for what’s known as a solar radiation storm, which can then be accompanied — usually afterwards — by either a solar flare (if the reconnection propagates backwards to the Sun’s interior) or a coronal mass ejection (if the reconnection propagates forwards to the Sun’s corona).

The 2003 event, known as the Halloween solar storms because they peaked from mid-October to early November, included both solar flares and coronal mass ejections, including the strongest solar flare ever recorded by the GOES (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite) system, and that was the last severe solar radiation storm that affected the Earth. On January 19, 2026, another one occurred, and it indeed was also followed up by an X-class solar flare and a coronal mass ejection. However, solar flares and coronal mass ejections are common; what was highly uncommon was the solar radiation storm, and the ultra-fast (and large flux of) solar wind particles that came towards Earth.

Above, you can see a graph of the solar wind speed just prior to the start of the solar outburst that created the radiation storm. Note that, prior to the initiation of the storm, the solar wind speed was relatively stable and typical: at around 250-300 km/s, or about 0.1% the speed of light. Under these conditions, it takes the solar wind approximately 5-7 days to traverse the Earth-Sun distance. During normal circumstances, we don’t see a major auroral event, and that’s due to the combined facts that:

• The Sun’s magnetic field is weak,

• The Earth’s magnetic field (at least close to Earth’s surface) is strong,

• There’s only a low density of solar wind particles, and they move at relatively slow speeds,

• making Earth’s magnetic field effective at diverting the majority of solar wind particles away from the planet.

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This photograph shows the Aurora Borealis as taken over Loch Calder in northern Scotland on the night of January 19, 2026. Although this was the largest solar radiation storm experienced on Earth since 2003, the aurora appeared brilliantly for only brief periods of time, due to the alignment of the Earth’s and Sun’s magnetic field only being favorable for a period of approximately two hours during the event. Credit: David Proudfoot/BlueSky

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On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will consider whether President Trump violated the Federal Reserve Act when he tried to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. Economists have raised the alarm, and Wall Street is watching, because presidential control of monetary policy would likely put upward pressure on inflation and interest rates.

But there is something far more fundamental at stake: Will the president be able to escape one of the central constraints on executive power in our constitutional system?

The Constitution is built on an Anglo-American tradition of checks and balances. It separates control of the sword from control of the purse. To check the chief executive, who holds the sword, the framers vested in an elected legislature the “power of the purse.” Congress controls spending not merely to ensure popular consent to taxation, but also to protect liberty. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 58, the purse is “the most complete and effectual weapon” the people’s representatives possess to secure “a redress of every grievance” and to enact “every just and salutary measure.”

Presidential control of the central bank would threaten this design. A president with effective command of the monetary levers could impose a de facto “inflation tax,” reducing the real value of money and the federal debt while sidestepping the ordinary process of taxation. And there are other, more pressing dangers.

The White House could also direct the use of central bank tools to advance its policy priorities while evading congressional control over appropriations. The Federal Reserve today possesses authorities to buy financial assets and extend credit to banks and other depository institutions and, in unusual and exigent circumstances, nonbank entities. Because the Fed can expand its balance sheet without a hard budget constraint (it creates money at the stroke of a key), the White House could press Fed officials to repurpose its powers to confer financial benefits on favored actors or to impose costs on political opponents nearly without limit.

As abuses of these authorities would be difficult to challenge in court, de facto presidential control of the central bank balance sheet might lead to large-scale lending to private sector enterprises or foreign governments that commit to acting favorably on the president’s agenda. And because the Fed operates critical payments infrastructure — the rails that settle trillions of dollars daily — the White House could move to politicize access in ways that would chill dissent and disrupt civil society.

Although it may not look it at first glance, those issues are directly before the court in the Cook case. The court, having never addressed a presidential attempt to remove a Fed governor before, must decide for the first time what the law means when it says that a president can remove a Fed governor only “for cause.” How the justices read those two words now will determine whether the board becomes an arm of the White House.

The law, the constitutional implications, and our history provide guideposts. “For cause” is a legal term of art that Congress imported from state law. The idea was to enlist the judiciary to police removals so that the executive could not replace officials for political reasons, but for only serious misconduct or failure in office.

President Trump’s position is that courts should defer to virtually any stated grounds short of an explicit policy dispute. That approach would drain “for cause” of content and convert judicial review into a rubber stamp. Worse, a ruling adopting that theory would put the monetary levers within easy presidential reach.

Alternatively, the president could prevail if the court finds the asserted grounds against Ms. Cook meet the “for cause” standard. But the case rests on unproven allegations of private misconduct that took place before she joined the Fed. And the president afforded Ms. Cook no formal process — no formal notice, no formal opportunity to respond. The factual record is therefore skewed and incomplete. If presidents can fire Fed governors based on unproven allegations, the barrier between the White House and the central bank would effectively collapse.

If the president can dominate the central bank, Congress’s “power of the purse” is diluted, and the incentives for abuse multiply. The result would be precisely the concentration of power that the Constitution was designed to prevent.

We don’t have to use our imagination to see how things could go wrong. The administration has already shown a willingness to politicize foreign lending and weaponize tariffs. Just last week, we learned that the Justice Department is threatening Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chair, with a criminal prosecution. Meanwhile, World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency business co-founded by the president, applied for a national trust bank charter, which could allow direct access to Federal Reserve payment services. If World Liberty Financial or other cryptocurrency firms run into trouble, do we want the White House deciding whether the Fed loosens the purse strings?

The court must not lose sight of the larger constitutional stakes present in this statutory scheme.

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Photo Illustration by Philotheus Nisch for The New York Times

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