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Humans have chased immortality perhaps for as long as we have known we will die. But merely persisting forever may not be all it’s cracked up to be—especially if you are reduced to just lying there, unable to eat or do much of anything at all. That grim reality may be the eternal condition of severed sea cucumber tissue, according to a new study.

When humans lose a chunk of flesh, it dies and decays. That isn’t so with Psolus fabricii, a sea cucumber that is native to the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. Its amputated bits just keep living. These lost pieces of tissue even repair their wounds and continue to grow—although not into new organisms. After observing tissues that survived in natural seawater tanks for more than three years, researchers declared them biologically immortal in a paper published today in Science Advances. “Something like this has never been seen before,” says lead author Sara Jobson, a doctoral student at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Sea cucumbers are masters of regeneration. But so are many lizards and salamanders, and yet, when detached, their limbs and tail deteriorate just like human tissue would. With the amputated pieces of P. fabricii, Jobson says, it’s “as if the tail dropped off and healed and wiggled around in the wild on its own.” She and her colleagues don’t entirely know what enables this feat, but they have a few clues: The severed tissues retain a strong immune system and chemical defenses to ward off microbial infection; their cells keep dividing to form new tissue; and, for fuel, they either absorb dissolved amino acids or cannibalize their own muscle.

These are all hallmarks of living systems, but severed P. fabricii tissue sits in a biological gray zone. “We often call them, lovingly, our little lab zombies,” Jobson says. “Because we don’t know: Do they count as alive? Do they count as dead?” They don’t reproduce. They don’t have a mouth or a gut. Yet they are complex biological structures enduring, somehow, apart from their original organism—perhaps indefinitely. “We haven’t seen any signs that they’re degrading or dying,” Jobson says. Whether this is an immortality worth living is another question.

Still, Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, a molecular biologist and president of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Missouri, says it’s “quite likely premature” to call this immortality. To further show that these tissues likely live forever, researchers will have to investigate whether their telomeres—DNA sequences at the end of chromosomes that shorten with age—stay the same length after many rounds of cell division. Sánchez Alvarado adds, however, that “what is remarkable here is not infinite time per se but the sustained coordination” of so many biological processes for so long in an animal’s discarded parts.

Even if the zombie P. fabricii tissues are in fact slowly succumbing to entropy, they’ve outlasted the severed tissue of other sea cucumber species tested for this study by a long shot (the silver medalist perished before three and a half months). Their extreme longevity poses an evolutionary mystery: If reproduction is the basic imperative of life, why should the nonreproductive scraps of an organism remain viable at all, let alone for years? “It doesn’t regrow into a new sea cucumber, as far as we can tell,” Jobson says, “so the purpose of it is very unclear.” It’s possible the whole bizarre situation is just a by-product of P. fabricii’s regenerative powers.

Whatever the case, Jobson reckons that self-sufficient sea cucumber fragments—immortal or not, with or without a purpose in this world—are drifting through Earth’s oceans right now. “Maybe,” she says, “there’s a ton of zombies out there.”

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Leave it to Queen Latifah to turn a major career milestone into a full-on family affair. The legendary musician, actress, producer, and entrepreneur hosted the 2026 American Music Awards on Monday, May 25, 2026, and she did not come alone. Latifah brought her partner, Eboni Nichols, and their 6-year-old son, Rebel, to the show, making it one of the sweetest moments on the red carpet for the night.

This year’s AMAs carried extra special significance. The year 2026 marks 30 years since Latifah first took hosting duties at the show, and she returned to welcome audiences to what remains the world’s largest fan-voted awards show. Only a legend gets to celebrate that kind of anniversary on that kind of stage, and she wore every one of those 30 years like a crown. 

The family outing took on an even warmer dimension with the addition of a very special guest. Kaayia James Union Wade, the 7-year-old daughter of Gabrielle Union and NBA legend Dwyane Wade, joined the group for the evening. Formerly known to millions of fans online as the “Shady Baby,” Union Wade has already built her own cultural footprint, charming the internet with her unshakeable confidence. Seeing her step into a night this big, surrounded by people who clearly adore her, was a reminder that this next generation is already something special. And she was not the only young star making her presence felt.

Teyana Taylor also brought her two daughters, Iman “Junie” Tayla and Rue Rose, to the show where she was a performer, making it clear that the 2026 AMAs was as much a celebration of family as it was of music.

As for Latifah, it’s not every day that she opens the door to her personal world. She has long been intentional about keeping her relationship with Nichols and their family out of the spotlight, which made the moment feel all the more significant. Choosing to mark this particular milestone with the people she loves most was a statement in itself.

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LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – MAY 25: EDITORIAL USE ONLY (L-R) Kaavia James Union Wade, Eboni Nichols, Rebel Nichols Owens and Queen Latifah attend the 52nd American Music Awards at MGM Grand Garden Arena on May 25, 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic)

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Ball State University in Indiana has agreed to pay $225,000 to a former administrator who was fired for her Facebook post accusing Charlie Kirk of spreading fear, the latest legal settlement awarded to a worker dismissed for criticizing the conservative activist after he was assassinated.

“As a public university, Ball State cannot fire an employee for protected speech made as a private citizen,” the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, which sued on the administrator’s behalf, said in a statement this week announcing the settlement.

Employers in several states have also settled with or reinstated workers.

Scores of people — health care workers, lawyers, journalists, waiters and waitresses — were fired or faced other repercussions for their negative comments about Mr. Kirk, igniting a debate over how far employers can go in restricting employees’ political expression that occurs outside the workplace. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said it was tracking 13 lawsuits in federal court from people who had been disciplined or terminated for their comments about Mr. Kirk.

The Ball State case involved a health care administrator for the university named Suzanne Swierc (pronounced “swirtz”). She became one of many Americans targeted in a campaign by Mr. Kirk’s followers, including Vice President JD Vance, to expose and retaliate against those who had spoken critically of Mr. Kirk after his assassination last fall on a Utah university campus.

“If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends,” she wrote on her Facebook page several hours after he was killed. Her post expressed disdain for Mr. Kirk’s loyal fans but also condemned his death as the kind of violence she said was too common in American politics.

Her settings were private, but one of her followers took a screenshot without her knowledge and sent it to others.

Ms. Swierc’s post spread widely after it was publicized by Indiana’s attorney general, Todd Rokita, who had urged people to alert his office to anyone “celebrating or glorifying the tragedy,” according to her lawsuit.

Mr. Rokita’s action — together with a post by Libs of TikTok, a social media account known for mocking left-wing politics — prompted a deluge of phone calls, texts, voice mail messages, and threats to both Ms. Swierc and the university. Even Elon Musk weighed in.

The university, which admitted no wrongdoing as part of the settlement, said that after Ms. Swierc posted her comment, on Sept. 10, 2025, the university’s operations were seriously impeded. Though the First Amendment broadly protects political expression, the right to free speech is not as absolute as many assume — especially when a workplace is involved. The Supreme Court has established that a public institution like Ball State can restrict employee speech on matters of public concern if the comments interfere with the institution’s ability to function.

Ball State’s president, Geoffrey S. Mearns, wrote in an email to university leadership this week that “disruptive and disturbing” phone calls, as well as “more than 130 emails,” including from donors threatening to withhold contributions, “prevented our staff from performing their usual responsibilities.”

Some staff members who fielded the calls said they had been threatened with violence and felt uncomfortable being on campus, he said.

Ms. Swierc’s post, he added, had damaged her credibility to interact with students who did not share her views about Mr. Kirk. “I concluded that I had the legal authority to terminate Ms. Swierc’s employment,” he said in his email.

But the First Amendment makes such cases difficult to defend, as the recent spate of settlements in Kirk-related cases has shown. Florida officials agreed last week to pay $485,000 to Brittney Brown, a biologist, after the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission terminated her over a meme she reposted to her private Instagram account. In Tennessee, a professor at Austin Peay State University received a $500,000 settlement and was reinstated after posting about Mr. Kirk’s support for expansive gun rights. Clemson University in South Carolina rescinded its firing of an assistant professor in another case.

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Suzanne Swierc was fired from her job as a health care administrator at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind. Credit…Kaiti Sullivan for The New York Times

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Hmmmm … Extremely enlightening article! How did Picard and Kirk meet?

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What shape is the universe? This question is far more intriguing and truly unresolved than any debate over the shape of our planet, despite the claims of flat-Earthers.

We occupy only a tiny space within a gigantic cosmos. Our vantage point is limited. Nevertheless, cosmologists are now fairly certain that our universe is flat.

But that doesn’t explain the exact shape of space. It could extend infinitely along the three spatial dimensions or resemble a three-dimensional generalization of a donut’s surface—or take on even wilder forms. The mathematics of flat space is astonishingly versatile, and new research is upending the traditional thinking about the layout of our cosmos.

Triangles in the Sky

Carl Friedrich Gauss, a German astronomer who lived in the late 1700s and early 1800s, was one of the first mathematicians to study geometry in curved spaces. He knew, for example, that the sum of the angles of a triangle in a plane is 180 degrees and that it is greater on a sphere. On spherical surfaces, such as that of Earth, an equilateral triangle can consist of three right angles, for instance. Other geometries, such as the shape of a Pringles chip, can have angle sums of less than 180 degrees.

The same principle applies not only to triangles on 2D surfaces but also in 3D space. Depending on the curvature of space, the sum of the angles can vary. Gauss may have seen the triangle as a good starting point for investigating the shape of the universe, though this is debated. He is said to have measured the distances between three German mountain peaks (Hohenhagen, Brocken and Inselberg) and determined their angles. His result: the sum was close enough to 180 degrees that it suggested that there was a flat plane between the mountain peaks.

Unfortunately, although the triangle method is helpful for thinking about the curvature of space, it’s not going to answer the question of whether our universe is curved or flat. The cosmos is gigantic. Even if Gauss or another astronomer used a large telescope, triangulating the distances between stars wouldn’t work. Stars within our own or in neighboring galaxies are too close to us, measured against the vast scale of the universe. Furthermore, we must take into account that the observed objects are moving and that, as a result of gravity, the light traveling to us follows partially curved paths.

But experts can use other tricks to deduce the shape of our universe. For example, they look deep into the past—all the way to the oldest radiation, dating back to around 13.8 billion years ago.

A Brief History of the Universe

Exactly how our universe originated is still unclear. Fortunately, the precise details are not necessary to deduce its shape. Much can already be worked out from the oldest light that reaches us: the cosmic microwave background.

When our universe was very young, it consisted of very hot, dense matter. The building blocks of atomic nuclei, quarks and gluons, floated around loosely in a kind of primordial soup. The medium was so dense that photons could not move freely within it.

As the universe expanded, it cooled; gradually, the first atomic nuclei and eventually atoms formed. As a result, the universe became transparent: photons could move freely. And this light, which originated around 370,000 years after the big bang, is what we can observe.

The signal that reaches us from that time is surprisingly uniformly distributed across the sky, no matter where the detectors are pointed. This means that matter must have been very evenly distributed at this early stage. This observation leads to the cosmological principle: the universe must be homogeneous and isotropic. In other words, matter in the cosmos is uniformly distributed, in the same way in all directions. From Einstein’s equations of general relativity, it then follows that the curvature of space is constant on large scales.

This significantly restricts the possible geometry of the cosmos. If the curvature is constant, then three different cases can be distinguished:

1. No curvature: in this case, you have a Euclidean geometry, as on a flat surface.
2. Positive curvature: this corresponds to a spherical geometry, similar to that on a sphere.
3. Negative curvature: the geometry is hyperbolic, like a Pringles chip.

To determine which of the three cases is realized in the universe, one can again use cosmic microwave radiation. It is almost homogeneous, but not quite: there are tiny fluctuations within it that provide a clue to the geometry of the universe.

The small fluctuations in microwave radiation result from tiny density differences in the hot, bubbling primordial soup. And we can calculate how strong these fluctuations were in the early universe: the largest correspond to the greatest distance the density waves could travel.

These density fluctuations are also visible in our sky, specifically in the cosmic background. How large they appear depends on the geometry of the universe: If the universe is positively curved, the density fluctuations should appear larger than they actually are. With negative curvature, they should appear smaller. And without curvature, they should correspond exactly to the theoretical value (much as the angles of a triangle in flat space will sum to 180 degrees). According to measurements by cosmologists, this last scenario applies to our universe.

So the Universe Is Flat—But How Flat?

Density fluctuation measurements, along with other cosmological data, suggest that our universe is flat. But that still doesn’t mean we know the true shape of our universe.

Because curved 3D spaces are difficult to visualize, we can start with 2D examples. If our universe were 2D and flat, most people would imagine a flat surface. But that’s not the only 2D shape with flat geometry. Another example is the surface of a torus, which resembles a bagel or donut.

A bagel looks curved, but in a crucial sense, it isn’t. You could, in theory, form a torus by taking a flat (and exceptionally stretchy) sheet of paper and gluing the opposite sides together to create a cylinder. You could then twist this sheet so the open cylinder ends meet, creating a hollow ring or torus.

In fact, there are three other variations of a flat space in two dimensions: a cylinder, a Möbius strip and a Klein bottle.

In three dimensions, the possibilities are even more diverse. In 1934, mathematician Werner Nowacki proved that there are 18 different flat 3D shapes. If our universe is truly flat, then it has one of these 18 shapes.

We can rule out some candidates because eight of the 18 are “nonorientable.” If you were to fly a rocket through a nonorientable universe, you would eventually return to your starting point, but in a mirrored form: your right would now be left, and vice versa. According to experts, such universes contradict the laws of physics.

That leaves 10 different forms that the universe can have:

1. An infinitely extended 3D space with x, y, and z axes.
2. A 3D generalization of the torus: in this case, one can imagine gluing together the opposite faces of a cube.
3. A half-twist torus: same as #2, but one pair of surfaces is twisted by 180 degrees, like a Möbius strip.
4. A quarter-twist torus: same as #2, but a pair of surfaces is joined by twisting them by 90 degrees.
5. A third-twist prism: instead of looking at the faces of a cube, one can also use a six-sided prism. Here, opposite faces are also glued together, but one face is rotated by 120 degrees.
6. A sixth-twist prism: same as #5, but one side is rotated by 60 degrees.
7. A shape called a Hantzsche-Wendt manifold that consists of two cubes stacked on top of each other, with the faces of the cubes joined together in a complex way.
8. A space consisting of infinitely many flat planes that can be twisted relative to each other.
9. A space consisting of an infinitely tall “chimney”: four surfaces arranged as the sides of a parallelogram. Opposite surfaces are glued together.
10. Same as #9, but one of the pairs of surfaces is rotated by 180 degrees.

All of these shapes share the same flat geometry, but each possess their own unique characteristics. Experts can therefore search for clues and evidence of these features to determine the precise shape of the universe using increasingly detailed cosmological data.

Infinitely Many Copies of Ourselves

Many of these candidates for the shape of the universe are compact, meaning they do not extend outward infinitely. Instead a striking characteristic that they share is repetition. In a torus-shaped universe, for example, light from our Earth would eventually reach Earth again, so we would see our reflection.

That said, our universe is gigantic, and light travels at a finite speed. This means that even if the light from our solar system or galaxy were to reach us again someday, we most likely wouldn’t recognize the image. This is because its shape at that time would probably bear little resemblance to our current surroundings. Furthermore, our cosmos might be so vast that light simply hasn’t had enough time to traverse it.

But there could be other clues if we are living in a compact universe. The shape of the cosmos influences, among other things, how matter and light interacted in the early universe. And this should be reflected in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Researchers have searched for repeating structures within it, such as identical circular arrangements that would indicate a compact universe. To do this, they had to make some geometric considerations: because we receive the microwave radiation on the spherical Earth, the signal has the shape of a spherical surface. Our universe could have a more complex shape, however—and traces of this should be reflected in the spherical data we receive.

When experts searched for identical circular structures in cosmic microwave background radiation data during the 2000s and 2010s, they found nothing. Therefore, most cosmologists assumed that the universe had a fairly simple structure: it would be flat and extend infinitely in all three spatial dimensions. Research into the shape of the universe stalled because of a lack of new evidence—until the Collaboration for Observations, Models and Predictions of Anomalies and Cosmic Topology (COMPACT) was launched in 2022.

Researchers in the collaboration are comparing the latest data on the cosmological microwave background radiation with the various possible shapes of the universe. They have discovered that the lack of evidence for identical circular structures in the cosmic microwave background is far less restrictive than previously thought. In fact, it is quite plausible that we would not identify any of these structures in a compact universe. Furthermore, the experts are working on identifying other features in cosmological data that would point to complex shapes for the universe. The COMPACT team is still analyzing the data and developing suitable models. Exciting new results are expected in the coming months and years.

All of this means that the universe could be far more complex than previously thought. And the question of the shape of our cosmos is not merely academic. The topology of spacetime was likely determined by the quantum processes that occurred shortly after the big bang. Therefore, if we knew more precisely about the shape of the universe, we could learn more about the complex processes at its beginning—or so the hope goes.

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The result? A hiring environment where the signals employers have traditionally relied on to evaluate candidates have become deeply unreliable. Now, both sides are operating with diminishing trust in each other. 

What’s Driving the Deception?

Hiring today is not facing a character problem, but a structural one. When candidates believe that presenting themselves accurately will cost them a job offer, the rational response is to become the person they think the employer is looking for. But when this approach becomes standard, those who still choose to tell the truth take on an “honesty tax,” the systemic disadvantage honest candidates face when exaggeration becomes the market norm.

GCheck’s Trust in Hiring Report revealed that 93% of job seekers have lied or embellished their experience during the hiring process, while 60% do not believe they would have been hired had they presented their qualifications more accurately. This is beyond a confession—it’s a market signal. 

Part of what drives this dynamic is opacity on the employer side. When candidates do not know what will be verified, they assume the answer is minimal, and they calibrate their self-presentation accordingly. In fact, GCheck found that although 88% of job seekers believe misrepresentation puts businesses at risk, 53% assumed employers wouldn’t verify their claims, and only about a quarter (26%) report ever being caught lying or exaggerating.

Verification that is invisible to candidates is not a deterrent. It is permission. And thanks to artificial intelligence, candidates can disguise their true skills and identity almost instantaneously. 

AI Accelerates Dishonesty in Hiring

LinkedIn’s 2025 Work Change Report estimates that 70% of the skills used in most jobs will change by 2030, driven largely by AI. When job seekers navigate a market where the definition of “qualified” is constantly shifting, the pressure to appear more capable than they are significantly intensifies. AI has not created that pressure, but it has handed candidates sophisticated tools to act on it at every stage of the hiring process.

Employer concerns have moved beyond job seekers’ using AI to compile resumes or assist with writing. Now, the degree to which AI has migrated into live interviews and assessments is worrisome. 

GCheck found that 61% of candidates have used AI to rehearse interview answers until they sounded more impressive than authentic, and 25% reported deploying an AI avatar in place of their own face during a virtual interview. ​

The result is a hiring process where trust is eroding on both sides. On one hand, candidates feel pressure to optimize and automate their performance in a highly mediated, virtual environment; on the other, employers struggle to assess who is genuinely behind the screen. When interviews are increasingly remote, scripted, and technology driven, the lines between preparation and performance become blurred. This highlights how broken and transactional the modern hiring process has become. 

There’s also an emerging phenomenon of systematic embellishment, distortion or fabrication of professional qualifications across resumes, interviews, and references as a deliberate competitive strategy driven by market pressure and weak verification expectations. It’s been dubbed “careerfishing,” and it’s no longer the behavior of a fringe group. 

What Employers Must Do to Rebuild Trust

Rebuilding trust in hiring is not only a technology problem, but also a standards and transparency issue. Employers who treat verification as a confidential back-end process get exactly what opacity produces: candidates who assume they can game the system, largely because they can. Three leadership-level shifts matter most here:

• Make verification standards visible. Communicate what will be checked before a candidate applies. Transparency disrupts embellishment at its source, not after the offer. The FTC’s guidance on employment background checks under the FCRA already mandates disclosure at specific stages. Moving that clarity upstream changes candidate behavior earlier in the process in measurable ways. For example, candidates who know credentials or work samples will be actually verified are less likely to exaggerate or rely on AI-generated materials they cannot defend later. 

• Make screening decisions reviewable by a person. Candidates who know a human will review findings, not only an algorithm, engage with the process more honestly.

• Make verification proportionate to actual risk. Applying the same screening depth to every role signals to candidates that the process is performative. Calibrating scope to genuine role risk makes verification more credible, more defensible, and more likely to deter the embellishment it is meant to catch.

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Ken Paxton’s victory in Texas on Tuesday transformed the deep red state into the nation’s newest political battleground, expanding the Senate map, previewing lines of attack from both parties, and offering a test of President Trump’s influence in the general election.

Democrats still face an uphill battle in their quest to turn Texas blue, even with the excitement surrounding their nominee, James Talarico, a state legislator and seminary student who is pitching a brand of inclusive politics.

But the ascension of Mr. Paxton, a scandal-plagued state attorney general who trounced Senator John Cornyn after receiving the “Complete and Total Endorsement” of President Trump last week, promised a general election clash as big as, well, Texas.

Expanding the map.

Many Democrats, and some Republicans, said that they thought the nomination of Mr. Paxton could put Texas into play for Democrats, joining the relatively small number of battleground states that could decide control of the Senate.

With the Republicans holding 53 seats in the Senate, Democrats will have to defend all the seats they currently hold and flip four more seats in order to win control in November. Party leaders initially focused on flipping Alaska, Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio. But with Mr. Trump’s approval rating sagging, some now see Texas as offering another possible path.

And, already, there are signs that the role Mr. Trump played in ousting another incumbent Republican senator — the president backed the challenger who defeated Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana this month in a primary — risks hampering his agenda on Capitol Hill.

Opening with attacks.

Both Mr. Paxton and Mr. Talarico framed the Texas race in existential terms on Tuesday night. Mr. Paxton cast Mr. Talarico as a “weird” liberal, while Mr. Talarico described Mr. Paxton as a tool of billionaire donors stealing public resources from regular working people.

“Without a shadow of a doubt, I will be the Democrats’ number one target in November,” Mr. Paxton told supporters at his victory night party.

Moments before Mr. Paxton took the stage in Plano, Texas, Mr. Talarico’s campaign released a video calling his opponent the “most corrupt politician in America.”

“For 50 years, megadonors and their puppet politicians like Ken Paxton have stolen from us with their bribes, bailouts, and billionaire tax breaks,” Mr. Talarico said. “That ends this year. In this state. In this race.”

Can Democrats finally put Texas in play?

No Democrat has won statewide in Texas since 1994. But many Democrats said that they believed the nomination of Mr. Paxton, with all his baggage, could offer them their best chance of victory in years.

While Mr. Trump’s late endorsement helped propel Mr. Paxton’s decisive victory in the low-turnout Republican primary, it is not clear how it will play in the general election, given the president’s low approval ratings, the unpopular Iran war and rising gas prices.

“Paxton doesn’t know how to broaden his appeal,” said Matt Mackowiak, a senior adviser to Mr. Cornyn. “He runs generals like they’re primaries. I don’t know that he’s run in an environment like this.”

Former Representative Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat who came within three points of knocking out Senator Ted Cruz in 2018, predicted Mr. Paxton’s appeal to Republican primary voters will not translate to the much broader electorate in November.

“He’s too extreme, and he’s too tied to Trump, whose popularity continues to decline,” Mr. O’Rourke said.

Bobby Pulido, a moderate Democrat and Latin Grammy Award-winning Tejano singer who is running for Congress in South Texas, said that he thought the race would be competitive. “The Rio Grande Valley has conservative voters that are not necessarily MAGA,” he said. “And Paxton is definitely a MAGA candidate.”

Mr. Talarico was quick to extend an invitation to Mr. Cornyn’s supporters on Tuesday night, thanking the senator for his service to the state and telling his backers in a social media post that they have “a place” in his campaign.

A record-setting race is about to get more expensive.

After waging the most expensive Senate primary campaign in the country’s recent history — with $128 million worth of ads run in the Republican contest — both sides are preparing for a general

election contest that strategists estimate could cost tens of millions of dollars more.

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Ken Paxton defeated Senator John Cornyn in a runoff for the Republican nomination on Tuesday, setting up a marquee race against James Talarico, the Democrat. Credit…Desiree Rios for The New York Times

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Last year, less than a month after being named acting administrator of NASA, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy made an eyebrow-raising announcement to the world: NASA was going to put a nuclear reactor on the moon. As part of strengthening U.S. national security in space, he said, this reactor would be designed, built, flown and delivered to the lunar surface by 2030. To many observers, this declaration sounded wild. Why would you want to put a nuclear reactor on the moon?

The thing is, if America (or any spacefaring nation) wants to establish a permanent presence on the moon—an inhabited station that can operate during the frigid and lengthy lunar night—solar power won’t cut it. Through its Artemis program, which just sent four astronauts on a trip around the moon, NASA wants to transform our planet’s argent companion into a scientific outpost, a mining site, and a rocket launchpad pointed at Mars. To do that, nuclear power is the sole option. “It’s the only way we can sustain a lunar base properly long-term,” says Simon Middleburgh, co-director of the Nuclear Futures Institute at Bangor University in Wales. It’s no wonder, then, that China and Russia are teaming up to put their own nuclear reactor on the moon by 2035 to electrify what they call the International Lunar Research Station—their planned base on the lunar south pole. Sooner or later, from one nation or another, “nuclear power on the moon will happen,” Middleburgh says. “It’s inevitable.”

Nuclear power plants are safer than many suspect. But putting reactors in space is a concept with a checkered history. One notorious reactor caused an international incident in 1978 after it came apart in Earth’s atmosphere. And nobody has ever designed a reactor for the moon, a hostile volcanic desert subject to extreme temperature swings, frequent asteroid strikes, and protracted quakes.

Experts questioned both the timing and the scale of the nuclear power plant Duffy is proposing. Placing a reactor capable of powering 80 American households on the lunar south pole—an environment no human has yet set foot in—by 2030 sounds rushed, if not impossible. And the last thing anyone wants is for the U.S. to barrel through the conception, construction, launch, and landing of a lunar nuclear reactor. “I think the worst-case scenario might be [that] in the quest to be first we skip important design and safety steps,” says Bhavya Lal, a professor of space policy at the RAND School of Public Policy and former acting chief technologist and associate administrator for technology, policy and strategy at NASA. “It’s good to be first—competition is good—but we need to do it right.”

If the U.S. does succeed, its nuclear-powered moon base could become a solar system–exploring foothold among the stars. But mistakes can happen. And whether you’ve accidentally spray-painted an ancient reserve of water ice with radioactive waste or fatally stranded your astronauts in the lunar darkness without any power, a nuclear disaster on the moon would be, in Middleburgh’s words, “a humanity-defining shit show.”

Katy Huff wants to clear something up: uranium, the infamous radioactive element used to power nuclear plants and, with some tweaking, give most nukes their annihilative terror, is dull—at least in a manner of speaking.

Huff, a nuclear engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was the assistant secretary for nuclear energy in the Biden administration. Nuclear power is her jam. But it’s important to know that unused nuclear fuel is “radiologically very boring,” she said during a recent video call. “It’s not particularly radioactive.” She gestured to an object on her desk. “I have some uranium in that cardboard box right there.” The fact that you can hold uranium in your hand without consequence may come as a surprise to many. “You can pick it up. It’s toxic more than anything else; it’s like lead,” Middleburgh says. “So don’t eat it.”Uranium becomes dangerous—and helpful—when you chuck it into a nuclear reactor and fire neutrons at it. The impact causes the uranium’s unstable atomic nuclei to snap apart and emit more neutrons, which cause more nuclei to rupture—and voilà, you have a heat-emitting nuclear fission reaction. As long as the reaction doesn’t spiral out of control, you can use the heat to turn a fluid (often water) into steam. That steam rotates a turbine, which makes electricity.

You don’t want to hold the uranium fuel after it’s been blasted with neutrons. “Then it breaks apart and becomes fission products that are highly radioactive, which is why nuclear waste is dangerous,” Huff says. But because that nuclear cascade can continue for a very long time, it’s a fabulous power source—particularly in space, where it won’t need refueling for years, maybe decades.

The concept of nuclear power in space isn’t new. Starting in the 1960s, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union sent plenty of radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs, into space to power all kinds of things, from Earth-orbiting satellites and the Apollo-era scientific experiments on the moon to Mars rovers and deep-space probes. Plutonium, uranium’s ferocious chemical cousin, was often used in these devices. RTGs, though, are not nuclear reactors. They are more like nuclear batteries: screaming-hot radioactive caches providing a small but lasting source of heat that can produce electricity.

But an RTG would be insufficient to power a moon base. Astronauts need more than just energy to keep the lights on. They need a constant source of heat in the night and a way to vent that heat when the mercury soars during lunar daytime. If they want machines that can extract precious water from the lunar soil—water for hydrating both astronauts and crops and, crucially, to be electrically split into hydrogen and oxygen gas to make rocket fuel—then they’ll need oodles of electricity to power them.

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Tavis Coburn

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Sensing his moment, Mosoff struck, raising paddle 2529 for the first time. Another flourish wasn’t needed. The gavel came down, and Mosoff had made history—purchasing the most expensive bottle of American whiskey ever recorded: $162,500 for an Old Rip Van Winkle 20-Year-Old Single Barrel “Sam’s” bourbon.

“There was no part of me that felt, ‘What have you done?’” Mosoff, 41, tells TIME by video call from his home in New York City. “To this day, I’ve never had a single moment of regret.”

Mosoff’s acquisition captured the headlines, but there were plenty of other stars at The Great American Whiskey Collection, which collectively raised $2.5 million on Jan. 24, doubling pre-sale predictions, making it both the world’s most valuable sale of American whiskey as well as the most valuable single-owner spirits auction ever held in New York. All 319 lots were sold.

It’s just the latest signal that American whiskey is finally emerging from the shadows. While rare bottles of scotch can easily fetch seven figures—the most expensive is a $2.7 million Macallan Adami 1926, also sold by Sotheby’s— and Japanese whisky changes hands for hundreds of thousands of dollars, American whiskey has traditionally been the poorer cousin. (Note the extra “e” in the spelling for American and Irish whiskey.) 

But as the U.S. prepares to celebrate its 250th year, Mosoff says it’s high time American whiskey got due credit for both quality and cultural significance. “American whiskey is still sometimes seen as not quite the same [as scotch],” says Mosoff. “But there are these historically important bottles and producers that have not yet made their mark on the global stage.”It’s overdue recognition that would track the buzz around American wine, with some neat historical parallels. In 1976, in an event to mark the U.S. bicentennial, Steven Spurrier, a British wine merchant, organized a wine tasting in Paris that pitted French bottles against Californian. Spurrier, who predominantly sold French vintages, wasn’t expecting anything other than a trouncing for the parvenu.

In the end, the all-French panel ranked a Napa County wine best in both the white and red category, prompting at least one judge to withdraw her ballot in horror. What became known as the “Judgment of Paris” was the final vindication that American wine had come of age.

“Overnight, that basically changes the entire wine world,” says Mosoff. “And I think that American whiskey is at that same inflection point.”

American whiskey’s lower price point means collectors are buoyed by a nascent American whiskey boom, especially if Asian and European collectors start getting in on the action.

“Prices will continue to go up as long as prices are proportionally so much lower than other categories,” says Jonny Fowle, vice president and global head of spirits for Sotheby’s. “If you’re buying bottles at $10,000, they can quite easily double in price. There’s so much room for growth.”

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Grand juries are the heart of the criminal justice system, the inner sanctum where prosecutors, working unchecked and in secret, have enormous power to indict their fellow citizens.

But under President Trump, the Justice Department has had serious difficulties presenting cases to grand juries, running into problems that would have seemed unthinkable a year ago.

In the past several months, prosecutors have repeatedly failed to persuade grand juries that the cases they have brought warrant criminal charges. And if it were not unusual enough, they have also been admonished at least three times since last November by federal judges who have accused them of misconduct.

The latest setback came in Chicago, where a judge cited a remarkable list of grand jury errors in a case that was dismissed against four Democratic activists about to face trial for impeding the police during a protest last fall at a suburban immigration detention facility.

The blunders shocked the judge, April M. Perry, who recounted from the bench on Thursday how prosecutors had spoken to grand jurors outside the grand jury room — a major breach of protocol — and had improperly coached them that the evidence they had presented was particularly strong.

The prosecutors also stacked the deck in their own favor by removing from the panel some grand jurors who had voted against them when considering an earlier version of the charges. Making matters even worse, they tried to hide these maneuvers by redacting the grand jury transcripts — that is, until Judge Perry ordered them to give her the full copies.

The government’s missteps were bad enough to necessitate tossing out the case against the critics of the president’s immigration plan just days before it was supposed to go to trial.

But the mistakes also pointed to a more important problem: As Mr. Trump has demanded more and more charges against those he perceives as his opponents, prosecutors have felt pressure to push weak cases through grand juries. And that, in turn, has led to an erosion in faith in the Justice Department by both the grand jurors themselves and the judges considering the cases.

“Your sole goal is to do justice. Your client is justice itself,” Judge Perry told Andrew S. Boutros, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney who appeared in court to apologize for his subordinates’ mistakes. “I do believe deeply in the presumption of regularity and that most government attorneys are doing the best they can to do the right thing. That trust has been broken.”

Natalie Baldassare, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said that the Chicago case and the handful of others in which prosecutors have been scolded for their grand jury presentations were an anomaly.

“These few cases are not representative of D.O.J.’s overall achievements to date,” Ms. Baldassare said, “and we will not be deterred in our efforts to hold criminals accountable and keep the American people safe.”

There are almost no statistics that gauge how often prosecutors fail to secure indictments or are chastised by judges because of their grand jury presentations, if only because such events used to be rare. Legal experts say it is just as uncommon for jurists like Judge Perry to shine a spotlight on grand jury proceedings, which are held in secret, although that, too, has been happening more often.

Barbara L. McQuade, the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said that in her 20 years in the Justice Department, she had never worked on a case — or even heard of one — in which a judge had examined grand jury transcripts because of concerns about misconduct.

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The examples of grand jury malfeasance come on top of the many cases in which Justice Department prosecutors have failed to get grand jurors to return indictments. Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times

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Daddy longlegs haven’t been considered predators of much of anything, let alone vertebrates. But a new study published recently in Ecology and Evolution has compiled observations showing that the gangly arachnids (also called harvestmen) have an appetite for flesh—or at least for frog legs.

“We were shocked,” says study co-author Luís Fernando García, an arachnologist at the University of the Republic in Uruguay. “The literature often says that harvestmen are omnivores, that they are slow, they are weak.”

Some of the earliest evidence challenging that idea came in 2008, when García’s co-author Osvaldo Villarreal—an arachnologist at the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research—and other researchers reported a harvestman chowing down on a rain frog in a Venezuelan national park. Seeing the photos and videos of a harvestman pinning down a struggling frog was “a real wow moment,” Villarreal says.

About a decade later, another research team in Brazil encountered a harvestman eating a frog. Then, other co-authors on the new study found multiple harvestmen species feeding on frogs in Ecuador and Colombia between 2020 and 2025. “We found that it might be not so occasional that harvestmen could prey upon frogs,” García says.

The team compiled known sightings of frog-eating harvestmen and found that many of these events involved frogs that were still alive, which hints that the daddy longlegs might be hunting rather than scavenging, García says.

It’s still unclear how the somewhat unathletic arachnids are capturing strong, leaping prey, particularly because they don’t have venom like their spider and scorpion relatives do. Their primarily pinching mouthparts are typically used to nibble at very small insects, fungi, and plants, says Jose Valdez of the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research, who was not involved with the new paper.

Many tropical harvestman species like those in the study are larger and burlier than their temperate kin, which makes the occasional amphibian feast more feasible. And the study authors suggest that some harvestmen species may rely on their armored exoskeleton and spined appendages for restraining struggling frogs. But they are relatively understudied.

“There is so much we don’t know about them despite them being in so many backyards and forests all over the world,” Valdez says.

For García, the findings hint that our understanding of harvestmen behavior may be biased towards species living in temperate latitudes. In the tropics, food webs are less unidirectional—vertebrates that normally eat invertebrates such as insects and arachnids can easily find the tables turned.

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