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This episode is part of “The Young American Scientists,” an editorially independent project that was produced with financial support from Regeneron.

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. This week, we’ve been celebrating some of the winners of SciAm’s first-ever Young American Scientist awards.

Today’s guest is Jaye Gardiner. She’s an assistant professor of biology at Tufts University, where her lab has a unique spin on cancer research.

Thanks for chatting with us, Jaye.

So a lot of scientists study the ways that viruses and cancers can interact, but the way you’re doing it is a little unconventional and might surprise our listeners. So, could you tell us more about why your perspective is so unique?

Jaye Gardiner: Yeah. So up to 20 percent of all cancers are actually caused by viruses, so if you think of things like human papillomavirus [HPV] that can cause cervical cancer, head and neck cancers, penile or anal cancers. You have the hepatitis viruses of, like, B and C, that can cause liver cancer, viruses that can cause lymphomas or leukemias.

[In] all of those, the virus changes something in the cell that’s supposed to tamp down its ability to divide endlessly. So, kind of at the heart of all cancers, or at least in the malignant cells, we’re thinking more about the cell cycle and trying to stop that from going on endlessly. The way that I’m thinking about it is more about the contributions to the environment.

So if you use an analogy like the seed and soil, so your tumor cell is the seed, the microenvironment is the soil that can either nourish it or keep it at bay. When our bodies are healthy, that soil is very dry and arid, so it doesn’t allow that seed to germinate. So I want to understand if ways that we have viral infections could cause that soil to be much more rich and fertile, giving all of the nutrients that’s needed to allow that seed to grow whenever it shows up.

Feltman: So speaking of that microenvironment that you compare to soil, uh, I know a lot of your work focuses on the extracellular matrix. Can you explain for us exactly what that is?

Gardiner: The extracellular matrix you can think of as the noncellular components, so no cells whatsoever. These are just, kind of, molecules that can make fibers and kind of create networks and support for your tissues. So things like collagen, that we hear a lot about, or hyaluronic acid, those are components of the extracellular matrix, or ECM.

A really great way to think about it…. So it’s really important for us to heal wounds, right? So if we cut open our hand, we wanna have that close up normally without having a scar. The scar, if it does happen, is an accumulation of the extracellular matrix, where those fibroblasts were there for too long, secreting the extracellular matrix for much longer than they should have. If we think about that now for an entire organ or for fibrosis, we’ll use the lung as an example, where you have to be able to inhale and exhale, your lungs have to expand. If you have scar tissue there, so all of this extracellular matrix being deposited, now that organ can’t function normally.

So you’ve made it, like, really hard and rigid. It can’t open and close. You can’t get the air in. That leads to complications for the patient. So if you think about that in any of the organs that we have, they all have very specific functions that usually require them to be a little bit flexible; otherwise, they would’ve been hard like bone in the first place.

So extracellular matrix—incredibly important, not just for your hair and fingernails and youthful-looking skin, but has a real impact in a lot of diseases as well.

Feltman: Are there any specific viruses that you’re particularly interested in?

Gardiner: So right now, my interests—we’ll start with coxsackievirus, specifically clade B. Any parent out there, you might have heard of the effects of a clade A coxsackievirus, ’cause it can cause hand, foot, and mouth disease, so something very common among children.

But clade B, [when] most people are infected with it, [it] just causes kind of like a common cold. So you wouldn’t really be able to differentiate it between a different virus that caused the cold. But the reason why I’m interested in it is that there have been some studies that showed that virus, even though it’s considered a respiratory virus, so it would primarily be in your lungs, can also infect your pancreas.

And for coxsackievirus in particular, B3, if we want to get very specific, you can actually cause both acute, so a short time to resolve, or chronic, a long time to resolve, form of fibrosis in the pancreas. And so fibrosis is a predisposition for any type of cancer, so now if we have a virus that can cause these long-term fibroses in an organ, now we’ve already set that soil up for that cancer when it takes off.

Feltman: So, as we continue to learn more about how these different viruses can affect the extracellular matrix and contribute to cancer risk, what do you think the impact of that knowledge could be?

Gardiner: I think it would probably redefine what we think of as the causes for cancer, or at least broaden our scope in how we deal and manage with colds.

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Jeffery DelViscio

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Key Points

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Hmmmm ,,,.  Sic Semper Tyrannis – Tarado

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Death Toll

More than 3,000 Iranians were reported to have been killed in the conflict. Israel says 26 Israelis have been killed. Thousands of people in both countries have been injured.

The U.S. military says 13 of its members have been killed.

Israel renewed attacks on Lebanon on March 18 as part of the wider war, and about 3,700 people have been killed there, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

Strikes, mainly by Iran, have also killed people across the Middle East, including workers from South Asian countries in the Persian Gulf.

The U.S. military killed three Indian civilian sailors in a strike on a commercial ship near Oman, raising tensions between the United States and India.

In the deadliest known civilian casualty incident, a U.S. missile strike demolished an Iranian school, killing at least 175 people on the first day of the war, according to Iranian officials.

Financial Costs

Iran’s economy was already deeply troubled before the war. But now it is in free fall. Prices for food and other basic goods have skyrocketed, and daily life is a struggle.

The scale of devastation has been great, with hundreds of schools and health care facilities damaged or destroyed in the war, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, the country’s primary humanitarian relief organization.

For U.S. taxpayers and consumers, the cost of the war is at least $132 billion, according to an estimate by Moody’s Analytics. That factors in military spending, rising energy and commodity prices and interest rates, said Mark Zandi, the company’s chief economist.

A top Pentagon official told Congress last month that the cost had risen to around $29 billion for the military. That estimate did not include the price of repairing more than a dozen U.S. bases in the region damaged by Iranian attacks.

The costs of repair and maintenance, as well as keeping carrier strike groups at sea, also need to be factored in. “It costs a lot of money to just keep everyone and all this apparatus deployed there,” said Linda Bilmes, a public finance expert and senior lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.

ran also severely damaged other U.S. assets in the region, including a valuable military radar jet on a tarmac in Saudi Arabia and the U.S. Embassy compound in Riyadh.

Energy Prices

Americans have paid roughly $60 billion more for gasoline and diesel since the conflict began as a result of higher prices, according to an Iran War Energy Cost Tracker from Brown University. That’s about an extra $460 per household.

When the United States and Israel started the war with Iran, Americans were paying, on average, $2.98 a gallon at the pump, according to AAA, the motor club.

Since then, gas prices have seen large spikes and are now around $4 a gallon.

Oil prices surged when the Iranian military attacked some commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital passageway for shipping. That disrupted the global flow of petroleum. Crude oil is the main ingredient for gas.

The global benchmark for crude oil has dropped since a peace agreement framework was announced days ago. It is currently near $80 a barrel. At one point in March, prices climbed to around $120 a barrel.

Those high fuel prices have trickled down the chain and inflated many other costs tied to fuel, like airline fares and the transportation of commodities and manufactured goods.

Fertilizer and Food

Disruptions to global trade from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have squeezed prices of commodities such as sulfur, a key ingredient of certain fertilizers.

A Council on Foreign Relations report earlier this month by Máximo Torero Cullen, the chief economist of the Food and Agriculture Organization, said the disruptions in the strait would have consequences that “extend well beyond agriculture, threatening higher food prices, higher food inflation, reduced economic growth and increased hunger worldwide.”

More on the Fighting in the Middle East

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• Iran’s Economy: For the first time in decades, Iran’s status as an international economic outlaw could be nearing an end, allowing a leading oil producer to re-establish ties with the rest of the globe.

• J.D. Vance Defends U.S.-Iran Deal: The vice president said the United States had leverage to dictate the outcome of the next round of negotiations. But he claimed incorrectly that Iran got no new benefit from the lifting of oil sanctions.

• Israel’s Reaction to Agreement: The deal is disastrous for Israel, analysts said, because it accomplishes none of Israel’s goals and arguably leaves the country in worse shape. Leading figures from a right-wing Israeli broadcaster are openly attacking President Trump.

• Frustration in the Region: The preliminary deal struck this week between Iran and the United States left out a provision on missiles and drones, leaving officials in the region with a sense of frustration, according to analysts.

• Hegseth Berates NATO Allies: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a meeting of NATO defense ministers to criticize their reluctance to assist in American strikes against Iran, suggesting that the Pentagon would reduce the number of troops it keeps in Europe as a result.

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Service members carrying the remains of one of six U.S. soldiers killed in Kuwait during the dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base in March. Credit…Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

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If something is allowed by the laws of physics, then scientists can assume that it probably exists. Under that reasoning, certain exotic structures of spacetime called closed timelike curves may be real—and they may allow a message to travel from the future to the past.

A new study has calculated how much information can be sent backward through time via closed timelike curves. Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts that these spacetime pathways can form under intensely bending, rotating space—such as around a spinning black hole. “Spacetime can curve around so much that you can be innocently going forward in time and then you meet yourself in the past,” says study co-author Seth Lloyd, a quantum information scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

According to general relativity, in a rotating black hole, the singularity—the theoretical point of infinite density at the center—is really a one-dimensional ring, with closed timelike curves arcing around it. No one knows if these spacetime structures actually exist in our universe, but they are plausible. We do know, however, that black holes are plentiful in space and that most of them spin. “So they might very well exist,” Lloyd says.

Inspiration for the study came in part from a movie. “In early 2025, I watched the film Interstellar,” says Kaiyuan Ji, a graduate student at Cornell University who, with his advisor Mark Wilde, collaborated with Lloyd on the new research. The findings were published recently in Physical Review Letters.

In the movie, an astronaut played by Matthew McConaughey travels up close to a black hole and sends a message to his daughter in the past. Ji realized the plot was mathematically equivalent to a question he and his colleagues had posed in previous research.

The group decided to investigate how best to use closed timelike curves to transmit information between the future and the past. “The strategy has a different structure than communicating forward in time,” Ji says. “The key difference is that the sender in the future has memory of what happened in the past, and that causes a causal loop. You now have the ability to bend the probability of success.”

The researchers assumed that the channel might have some noise—interference preventing the maximum amount of information from passing through. But the sender’s memory of the past can help counter that noise, they found. “Let’s say you drop a message into a black hole in the future and it emerges from the same black hole in the past, but the message gets corrupted or parts of it get lost,” Lloyd says. “The receiver in the past can say, ‘Hey, if you’re going to send me a message last Tuesday, I know the closed timelike curve was super noisy then. Can you send multiple copies or try on Wednesday?’”

The findings could have interesting implications for quantum computing, says Giulio Chiribella, a quantum information scientist at the University of Hong Kong, who was not involved in the study. Chiribella has studied the probability of simulating closed timelike curves in a laboratory on Earth.

“We don’t know if [these curves] exist in our universe, but we do know that if they exist, they have powerful consequences,” he says. “For example, they induce radically new scenarios where the order of events becomes indefinite, boosting quantum computation and quantum communication beyond the limits of conventional setups.”

In the past, scientists have found that closed timelike curves can’t be used for paradoxical time travel. An experiment in a 2011 paper co-authored by Lloyd simulated these pathways in a laboratory and effectively sent a photon (a particle of light) back in time by less than a second. The researchers were curious whether the photon might be able to destroy the past version of itself—akin to a person traveling back in time to kill their grandfather, thus preventing themselves from ever being born. The so-called grandfather paradox is a prickly aspect of time travel, but in the case of closed timelike curves, it seems that quantum physics permits only self-consistent versions of time travel. In other words, you can visit the past, but you can’t change the future—no grandfather murder allowed.

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Today, the HISTORY Channel has officially launched Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise, a new eight-part podcast series examining one of the most consequential periods in American history. Available now on major podcast platforms, the project is hosted by bestselling author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell and features commentary from former President Barack Obama.

Produced in partnership with Higher Ground, Pushkin Industries, Audible, and The HISTORY Channel, the series revisits the years following the Civil War, when the United States confronted questions about citizenship, democracy, and what freedom would mean for millions of newly emancipated Black Americans.

While many history lessons end with the Confederacy’s defeat and the abolition of slavery, Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise focuses on the turbulent years that followed. The series also examines why many of those efforts ultimately fell short and how the consequences remain visible today. Obama appears in conversations with Gladwell at both the beginning and conclusion of the series. Their discussions frame the broader themes explored throughout the project, including political power, civic participation, and the unfinished work of American democracy.

“The Reconstruction Era was a brief but pivotal and turbulent chapter in our nation’s history – one that is often overlooked, even though its consequences are still felt today,” said Obama. “In confronting this period honestly, I hope audiences can rediscover an essential part of our past and remember that even in moments of deep conflict and contradiction, persistence and perseverance remain powerful sources of hope.”

Several prominent historians, writers, and cultural commentators also contribute to the podcast. Among them are Jelani Cobb, Eric Foner, Kellie Carter Jackson, Kidada Williams, Manisha Sinha, David Blight, Kai Wright, Ashley C. Ford, and Wyatt Cenac. Their perspectives help illuminate the debates, conflicts, and possibilities that emerged during Reconstruction.

Drawing from letters, court documents, eyewitness accounts, diaries, and historical records, the series paints a detailed portrait of a country attempting to rebuild itself after slavery. Listeners are introduced to political leaders, formerly enslaved people, educators, organizers, and reformers whose efforts helped redefine the nation’s future, even as many of their gains faced fierce resistance.

The release arrives as part of HISTORY Honors 250, a broad initiative commemorating the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States in 2026. Through original programming and special projects, the campaign seeks to revisit pivotal moments, influential figures, and lesser-known stories that have contributed to the country’s development.

For Higher Ground, the podcast adds to a growing slate of audio projects developed in partnership with Audible. Previous productions have included Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast, Your Mama’s Kitchen hosted by Michele Norris, The Wonder of Stevie hosted by Wesley Morris, and Fela Kuti: Fear No Man.

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President Barack Obama and Malcolm Gladwell (2026). Photo Credit: Higher Ground Productions | Photo: Eli Turner | Courtesy of A+E Global Media)

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Israel awoke to a frightening new reality on Thursday as it absorbed, with disbelief and largely in silence, the terms of President Trump’s preliminary agreement to end the war with Iran.

It accomplishes none of Israel’s war aims, analysts and officials said, and arguably leaves the country in worse shape on each of them.

Regime change? The government in Tehran is emerging from the war even more hard-line and emboldened, despite being decapitated at the outset of the conflict in late February. The deal’s requirement that American forces retreat from the “proximity” of Iran within 30 days means that Iran can boast that it has chased the U.S. military out of the region.

Ballistic missiles and proxy militias? The agreement does nothing to address Iran’s missile arsenal or its support of Israel’s enemies, like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

Worse still for Israel, by constraining its military in Lebanon — indeed, by requiring that Israel withdraw its forces from that country — the agreement seeks to handcuff Israel in a way that it was not before the war.

The hundreds of billions of dollars that Iran may receive in sanctions relief, unfrozen assets, or reconstruction aid could wind up funding more missiles in Iran and aiding Tehran’s militia allies around the Middle East.

And Iran’s nuclear program? The existential threat to Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has tried to eliminate throughout his career, and which was Mr. Trump’s primary reason for joining the wars on Iran, was left for a later stage of U.S.-Iran negotiations.

“It’s a bad agreement in which the Americans are paying with cash, and got, at the maximum, a letter of intent,” Yaakov Amidror, a hawkish former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, said in an interview.

David Horovitz, the editor of The Times of Israel, called it “a catastrophic capitulation,” in the headline of a fiery opinion column.

And Nir Dvori, an analyst for Israel’s Channel 12 News, likened the deal to a “diplomatic Oct. 7” — a cataclysmic disaster for which Israel was wholly unprepared.

Mr. Netanyahu addressed the U.S.-Iran agreement only briefly on Thursday, saying “additional challenges lie ahead of us,” requiring “calmness, a firm stance on our security interests, and at the same time, maintaining the important connection with our American friends.”

The prime minister said Israel would stick to its ultimate goal: “Iran will not have nuclear weapons.”

He also vowed that Israel would restore security in the north, near its border with Lebanon. “That requires maintaining the security zone in southern Lebanon, and it requires that we not withdraw from it as long as Israel’s security needs demand it,” he said.

Otherwise, it was left to minor ministers and backbench lawmakers to try put the best possible face on the agreement.

Amichai Chikli, the diaspora affairs minister, speculated in a radio interview that Mr. Netanyahu would know how to say no to Mr. Trump about pulling out of Lebanon just as he knew how “to bring the United States into this war.”

But others more soberly grappled with the degree to which Mr. Netanyahu’s triumphalist rhetoric from early in the war had proved fantastical. He had repeatedly and confidently assured Israelis that the country and its alliance with the United States were “changing the face of the Middle East” to Israel’s advantage.

“We are remaking the region,” Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser, said on Thursday.

“Iran came out stronger, and I believe is now the regional hegemon,” he added. “They stood up to the U.S., the global superpower. They can have missiles, and there’s nothing in the agreement about the nuclear issue except we’ll talk about it. This is an Iranian victory over the U.S. and Israel.”

Even as they reeled from the terms of the agreement, Israelis across the political spectrum seemed also to be reckoning with Mr. Trump, the nature of his support for Israel, and the degree to which Mr. Netanyahu has tied Israel’s fortunes to the American leader’s good will.

On Wednesday at the Group of 7 summit in France, the president had again spoken of Mr. Netanyahu with disdain, suggesting he was excitable and prone to overreacting to Hezbollah’s attacks. He belittled him publicly as the “very small partner” in the relationship and said that Israel would have been annihilated if it had not been for him.

Mr. Trump suggested that Syria could do a better job than Israel of cracking down on Hezbollah in Lebanon without killing as many civilians. And he minimized the ballistic-missile threat from Iran — which forced millions of Israelis to run in and out of shelters throughout the war. He said it was only fair for Iran to have missiles because other countries in the region did as well.

The reactions in Israel evoked a bad divorce.

Hanoch Milwidsky, a lawmaker from Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party, posted a video on social media of himself removing a red MAGA hat and replacing it with a blue one with the Hebrew words for “total victory.”

Ben-Dror Yemini, a columnist at Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s largest newspaper, wrote that Mr. Netanyahu had led Israel into “the most severe collapse in its history.”

“Trump reneged on every promise, turned Iran into a power, strengthened Hezbollah, and as a final flourish, gave Israel a kick and humiliation,” he wrote.

Dahlia Scheindlin, an American-born Israeli pollster, said it was “slowly sinking in” for Israelis that Mr. Netanyahu had staked the entire U.S.-Israeli relationship on his personal bond with a president prone to “temper tantrums” over “simple slights.”

“I think he was hoping that he could employ the tools that he has always employed with American presidents,” she said. “You know, tread carefully and strategically, but push the boundaries, and try to run circles around them if you can,” she added.

“I think that with a bit of a back-and-forth dance, it was largely working for him with Trump,” she said. “But he hit his limit.”

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem on Monday. Credit…Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

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You’re halfway through a challenging exam when you notice your focus starting to slip. The words on the page blur together, and you find your mind wandering to what you’re going to have for dinner that night. Does that sound familiar? This mental fatigue isn’t a character flaw—it’s a universal human experience that reveals something essential about how people’s minds function.

We are behavioral scientists who study how economic circumstances shape human cognition and behavior. In a recent study of more than 1,600 children, we found that the ability to sustain mental effort over time—or “cognitive endurance”—functions much like physical stamina. Almost universally, the longer people spend on a task, the worse they perform on it. But just as athletes can train to run longer distances, kids are able to strengthen their capacity for sustained thinking through simple but dedicated practice, allowing them to continue to perform at a higher level for longer stretches of time. In an era of social media and short-form content designed to minimize mental friction and demand minimal effort, the capacity for sustained thinking may be getting less practice than ever—making it more important to understand how it develops and how it can be strengthened.

Could Environment Shape Concentration?

A few years ago, while we were analyzing standardized test results from around the world with our colleagues Christina Brown of the University of Chicago and Geeta Kingdon of University College London, we noticed a remarkably consistent pattern: students performed worse on questions that appeared later in exams, even after accounting for the difficulty of the questions.

This performance decline was much steeper among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Children in poor countries showed three times the rate of performance decline compared with those in wealthy nations. This could be because disadvantaged children get fewer opportunities to train their focus. Cognitive skills generally improve with deliberate, focused and progressively more challenging training. And when looking at the activities the kids spent time on in school, we found that richer students were more likely to engage in independent, focused practice by doing activities such as working through problems on their own, reading silently, or concentrating on individual tasks. In contrast, students at disadvantaged schools were more likely to spend much of the day in passive activities such as listening to lectures, practicing rote memorization or copying from the board.

These patterns suggested that the school experience itself—particularly the amount of sustained mental effort the school day requires—could be molding students’ cognitive endurance.

Training the Mind Like a Muscle

To test whether cognitive endurance could be improved, we designed an experiment with 1,636 elementary school students in India. Students were randomly assigned to one of three groups during their study hall periods. Those in the control group continued with their usual routine—copying a few math problems from the board before spending most of the class time as they liked, resulting in minimal sustained mental effort.

In contrast, the other two “treatment” groups engaged in 20 minutes of continuous cognitive practice during these study hall periods. The members of one group solved math problems on tablets in a simple application that adapted to their ability level but didn’t have any gamified features to hold their attention. This gave these students focused practice in a specific subject area. But it was also possible that simply practicing concentration, regardless of the task, could increase mental endurance. To test that, the final group completed cognitively demanding games such as mazes and shape puzzles called tangrams that contained no academic content. These app-based games also adapted their difficulty based on performance, which kept them challenging for the students.

The results were striking. Both treatment groups showed significant improvements in their ability to maintain performance throughout tests, regardless of the type of training they had received. When students took listening comprehension, reasoning or math assessments, the performance of those who had received cognitive practice declined 22 percent more slowly than that of students in the control group. It didn’t matter whether the students had practiced with academic content or nonacademic games—the benefits were nearly identical for both groups. This suggests that the act of concentrating mattered more than what students were concentrating on.

The students who practiced concentrating also improved on standardized tests of sustained attention, including those that tested their reaction times or their ability to spot target symbols hidden in a grid. They also showed better focus in the classroom, according to ratings from their teachers—for example, they fidgeted less and followed through on multistep instructions. This seems to have translated to better grades across a wide range of subjects, too—students who received either form of cognitive practice earned grades that were about 0.09 standard deviations higher in Hindi, English, and math than those who didn’t. In comparison, this effect was roughly half to three-quarters as large as that of assigning a student to a class with seven fewer students per teacher. These were substantial improvements, considering the intervention required only 20 to 50 minutes per week over six months.

Beyond the Classroom

The implications of these findings extend beyond education. We also found evidence that disadvantaged groups, whose members are likely to have received less practice in sustaining focus, show more rapid declines in performance over time in other contexts. For example, we found that data entry workers made more errors as their shifts progressed and that less educated workers showed much steeper declines. Even voting behavior reflects these patterns: studies have found that, when a given proposition appears later in the ballot in California, voters are more likely to choose the default option. We showed that these declines are especially pronounced in lower-income neighborhoods.

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The ads are often for startups you’ve never heard of, selling a service or software that’s somehow related to AI. And while the ad voice is direct, in that it’s written as if it’s speaking directly to you, the viewer, the copy is intentionally cryptic. “Own Your Inference.” “Put AI Agents to Work for People.” Sometimes it’s menacing. “Stop Hiring Humans.”

These kinds of ads seem to be everywhere lately, but that doesn’t mean that they make much sense. Now, comedians Harris Alterman and Dave Ross are emphasizing just how banal and meaningless the AI ad age is turning out to be by creating their own fake tech ads that skewer the medium simply by amping up its tropes: AI industry gobbledegook and design minimalism.

The ads, which they put up as banners in a New York City subway station (much like the controversial, real ads for the AI companion Friend last fall), ask asinine questions. “What if forks were spoons?,” “What if Texas was upside-down?,” and “What if the Rizzler was purple?” One fake ad is for a company with a human name, “Dennis.”

Another advertises a faux company that recently rebranded. “Zipline is now Froggle,” the ad says matter-of-factly. “The cloud-based online safety you know and love, now in the palm of your hand.” An ad for a brand called Fivetable confidently states, “We Put the Q in QR1777,” and Wireflow promises, “you pay us, we pay you.”

Alterman and Ross were especially inspired by a real ad for the product development software company Linear, which shows cursors pointing toward God’s outstretched hand, as in Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam,” and another for Dawn, an AI mental-health app, that says “Racing Thoughts Don’t Do Waiting Rooms.”

They call the lack of distinctiveness around AI advertising in its design, voice, and fonts “slop voice,” and note that while these ads sound like they’re speaking to you, they’re really talking to someone else: a high tech, SaaS-speaking in-group. And it’s ok if the copy alienates everyone else.

“People are confused by tech advertising,” they tell Fast Company in an email. “99% of the people reading these ads have no idea what they’re talking about. It feels like 20 people in tech, advertising to 20 other people in tech. Do you really need to put up ads? Can’t you guys just get in a group chat together?”

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[Photo: courtesy Harris Alderman and Dave Ross]

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President Trump on Wednesday issued a fiery defense of his deal with Iran, lashing out at critics who have said the agreement achieves even less than the one President Barack Obama negotiated, and threatening to bomb Iran again if it doesn’t adhere to the agreement.

Appearing at the Group of 7 summit of global leaders in Évian-les-Bains, France, Mr. Trump denied that the United States was, in effect, paying Iran to agree to the recently negotiated peace deal. And in an expletive-laden rant, he proclaimed that his deal was better than the one Mr. Obama signed with Tehran in 2015.

“And you know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama, and they said, ‘He’s a stupid son of a bitch,’” Mr. Trump said.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Obama said he would not be commenting on Wednesday, but referred to his remarks from an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America” over the weekend. In it, he said that he doubted that the new deal would be “significantly different or a significant improvement” from the one his administration negotiated. He said that it was a reminder that the United States cannot just “bully our way or bomb our way to solutions.”

Mr. Trump’s remarks came as a senior U.S. official disclosed what the official said was the full text of the deal. The official read it aloud on a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House.

The deal would, among other things, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, outline a $300 billon plan for Iran’s reconstruction and at least temporarily lift restrictions on the country’s oil exports, according to the official. But it would push talks about Iran’s nuclear program — the central reason given for the U.S.-Israeli attacks that began in February — into a 60-day negotiation period.

Mr. Trump had denied reports that the deal included U.S. investment in the reconstruction fund or any immediate sanctions relief, two of the points that have drawn the most attention. But the $300 billion fund it outlines could provide Iran with much more money than the deal Mr. Obama negotiated.

The deal says the United States will work with regional partners to “develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least” $300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of Iran. The fund will go into effect once a final deal is reached within 60 days, the agreement states.

Mr. Trump left open the possibility that Persian Gulf states could provide the money for the fund. Mr. Trump has railed against Mr. Obama for providing $1.7 billion in cash to Iran after the 2015 nuclear agreement was signed.

But he said on Wednesday that the U.S. military had so badly damaged Iran during the war that the country needed help.

“Unlike Barack Hussein Obama, who sent Iran pallets of cash, any relief they receive under this deal, they’ll have to get based on merit — and it won’t be from us,” he said. “We don’t have to give them anything. But some people may want to invest.”

A diplomat said that work on the fund was already underway.

Commitments amounting to half of the $300 billion figure have already been made, including from companies in the United States, the Middle East, Asia, South America, and Africa, said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.

The fund would be a conduit for private investment, not a reconstruction or reparations program, the diplomat said. Details about the funding pledges were initially reported by Reuters.

Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance have already electronically signed a framework agreement on the deal, along with the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who led that country’s negotiating team, a senior U.S. official said. American and Iranian leaders are expected to formally sign the agreement in Switzerland.

Once the agreement is formally signed, the United States will issue waivers allowing Iran to export its crude oil. Critics have said that relief for the Iranian oil industry rewards Tehran merely for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the critical oil shipping route that was open before Iran effectively closed it at the start of the war.

In an effort to resolve the fate of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, which could be used to build at least 10 bombs, experts say, the deal requires Iran to weaken it by “down-blending” it — or effectively diluting it — on site, under the supervision of international atomic inspectors. It does not require Iran to give up that material and ship it out of the country.

The agreement says the United States will also lift sanctions on Iran “in an agreed-upon schedule as part of the final deal” that the two sides would negotiate within 60 days. Relief from crushing economic sanctions may be the ultimate lever that can persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear program. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal brokered by Mr. Obama traded sanctions relief for strict caps on Tehran’s nuclear activity.

The new deal calls on Iran to allow commercial ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz safely and “with no charge for 60 days only.” After that, it indicates, Iran and Oman will work out a deal to administer ship traffic in the strait in consultation with other Gulf nations. Mr. Trump has said the passageway must be “permanently toll-free.” But Iran has said it plans to charge “fees” in exchange for unspecified “services” it provides there.

The deal also seeks to end the war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon, by committing the United States, Iran, and their allies to immediately stopping military operations on “all fronts, including in Lebanon.” Neither Israel nor Hezbollah have signed on to the deal, and both have indicated that they will not be bound by it.

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President Trump and other U.S. officials at a news conference amid the Group of 7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, on Wednesday. Credit…Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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