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China’s economy last quarter grew at the slowest rate in three years, reflecting a broader slump that the country’s leaders signaled earlier this year when they set the lowest growth target in more than three decades.

On Wednesday, that National Bureau of Statistics said that the economy expanded by 4.3 percent in the second quarter, compared to a year ago, down from a 5 percent pace in the first quarter and short of economists’ expectations.

Although China’s factories are churning out chips and electric cars to supply a global boom in artificial intelligence and energy-saving products, many Chinese people are feeling squeezed at home.

A long-running property crisis has no end in sight, with steep declines in construction dragging down economic growth. Jobs outside of factories are hard to come by, and paychecks are not growing. Retail sales of consumer goods have been choppy. They fell in May, for the first time since the end of Covid-19 lockdowns in late 2022, before recovering somewhat in June.

That is in stark contrast to China’s relentless strength in manufacturing and trade, with a government report released on Tuesday showing China’s exports surging by 27 percent in June compared with a year earlier, driven by shipments of chips, batteries and cars. China’s trade surplus in June, at more than $125 billion, was second largest on record.

In other words, China’s mighty export machine is masking weaknesses elsewhere.

“You get this A.I. boom, which is a global thing, and China is part of the leading nations on the frontier,” said Yu Song, the chief China economist at UBS Securities. “Without this, China’s economy would be in a much worse state.”

When measured on a quarter-to-quarter basis, China’s economy expanded by only 0.9 percent in the second quarter. When projected out for a year, the second-quarter data implies that the economy was growing at an annual rate of 3.6 percent, sharply down from a pace of more than 6 percent in the first quarter.

The second-quarter annualized rate also missed official targets. Shortcomings in China’s economic growth drivers prompted the ruling Communist Party earlier this year to set the lowest annual growth target in decades, with a goal of between 4.5 percent and 5 percent this year.

Stepping back to consider the trends in the first half of the year, economists say that China’s manufacturing and export prowess, however robust, cannot carry growth on its own.

Industrial production rose by 5.4 percent in the first six months of the year, versus the same period last year. High-tech manufacturing rose by more than 13 percent over that period. But fixed asset investment — which includes infrastructure, property construction and manufacturing — fell by 5.7 percent. Real estate development dropped 18 percent.

The value of China’s exports surged by more than 20 percent in the first half. But consumer spending, which a Moody’s Analytics report said “remains the economy’s weakest link,” faltered. Retail sales of consumer goods increased by 1.3 percent over the first half of the year.

The effects of the war in Iran have pinched Chinese households, with rising fuel prices prompting them to drive and fly less, at a time when many were already worried about the economy and choosing to save more.

China has softened the blow of rising fuel costs by controlling the price at the pump, but the cost of filling up for drivers is still double-digit percentages higher than a year ago.

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Shoppers at an electric car showroom in Shanghai. Chinese consumers have embraced a culture of thriftiness, as many are not feeling the benefits of economic growth. Credit…Qilai Shen for The New York Times

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It’s boiling hot in the U.S. Midwest—which means it’s time for “corn sweat” to hit the headlines, drawing ire from millions sweltering under sky-high humidity and adding insult to heat-wave injury. Cities that include Minneapolis, Des Moines and Indianapolis will wilt under heat index temperatures nearing or even exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit for most of the week.

The phenomenon of corn sweat has only gone mainstream within the past decade, although farmers and meteorologists based in the so-called Corn Belt—centered around Nebraska, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois—have long recognized the increased humidity that can occur over farm fields. But agricultural scientists say it’s time for the slander to stop: corn doesn’t “sweat” any more than other major crops. Rather, the issue is the sheer amount of acreage that has been carefully managed to maximize yields.

Corn “sweat” isn’t really sweat; instead, it is water vapor that corn releases through a phenomenon called transpiration. “This is a natural mechanism,” says Bruno Basso, an agricultural systems scientist at Michigan State University. “Plants have to transpire.”

Specifically, plants have to transpire because photosynthesis converts carbon dioxide and water into sugar plus oxygen and water. “This is a simple equation,” says Avat Shefooka, a crop physiologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Under ideal conditions, the amount of water that a particular plant loses through transpiration is determined primarily by its total leaf area and the density of the small pores called stomata through which the plant takes in carbon dioxide and releases water vapor and oxygen. A larger leaf area—corn has a larger leaf area compared with those of other crop plants, such as soybeans—and more stomata mean higher water loss.

Of course, conditions in the field are often not ideal. High temperatures, low humidity, wind, and sunlight all leave the local atmosphere thirstier, which pulls additional water through any plant, not just corn, like sucking on a straw, says Meetpal Kukal, an agricultural hydrologist at the University of Idaho Boise. The only way to cut off excess transpiration is to reduce the amount of water a plant can access in the soil—creating a drought, which hurts both the plant and a farmer’s yield. Farmers tend to do the opposite: irrigating crops to ensure plants have all the water they need to produce as much as possible.

That’s particularly true of corn, which covers the largest share of irrigated cropland in the U.S.—comprising a huge volume of plants with access to plenty of water for the atmosphere to suck up. Moreover, there is a lot of corn—as of the end of June, corn covered about 95 million acres of the U.S.—4 percent of the nation’s total land area. Soybeans, by contrast, cover less land, and less of that acreage is irrigated, which, at this scale, matters more than the quirks of individual plants.

Those statistics are why Kukal says corn sweat isn’t really about corn—it’s about agriculture’s scale and yield-optimization practices. “A hundred years ago, all of this was grasslands and prairies,” he says. “We were not pumping feet and feet of water on this land.” He also notes that, in recent decades, breeders have engineered corn plants to stand more upright, allowing farmers to pack plants closer together and resulting in more water vapor transpired per field.

All that water vapor becomes most problematic during a heat wave, when an area of stagnant, high-pressure air traps any water vapor released, says Amir Souri, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Because water vapor is a greenhouse gas, “it can act as a blanket,” raising temperatures further, he says.

That trapped heat exacerbates the fact that increased humidity makes any given temperature feel hotter to humans than a thermometer indicates. The result is sweaty humans ready to blame something, anything—even corn that’s just doing its thing.

“This is a sign of a healthy corn crop,” says Jake McNeal, an agronomist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, of the much-maligned corn sweat. “If you want corn to sweat less, plant less corn or give it less water,” he adds—but either way, know that you’ll pay the price in corn.

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On the 136th day of his war against Iran, President Trump came up with a new plan. He would impose tolls on ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for protecting them from Iranian forces.

But that was then. On Day 137, he had another new plan. No tolls after all.

Mr. Trump’s 180-degree reversal on Tuesday in the face of protests from his Arab allies, who were not so excited about paying tolls, reflected how adrift he seems to be in prosecuting his war against Iran. What was supposed to be a clean four-to-six-week operation is now in its messy 20th week. Improvisation and impulse are not working.

A president who has made flexing his power on the world stage a hallmark of his second term has found in Iran an opponent that so far will not bend to his will and a geopolitical conflict that cannot be won through nasty social media posts or tariff threats. The memorandum of understanding that he brokered with Tehran last month to halt the fighting turns out to have been a memorandum of misunderstanding, and Mr. Trump now seems to have neither a clear military nor diplomatic strategy.

“He’s encountered a country that is not willing to play by his set of rules, which is you bend and kiss the ring and tell him how great he is and try to get whatever concession he’s willing to give,” said Vali Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies who has advised presidents and secretaries of state on the Middle East.

Mr. Trump’s no-end-in-sight venture in the Middle East has become a fresh lesson in why the region has been a sinkhole for presidential ambition for generations. The instruments of power that help advance U.S. interests elsewhere around the globe do not necessarily work there, as many of Mr. Trump’s predecessors have discovered.

It has been especially frustrating for Mr. Trump, who has reveled in getting his way since returning to office last year and even boasted that he might be the most powerful man in world history. But while he has successfully pressured NATO allies into increasing military spending, extracted concessions from trading partners, and essentially took over Venezuela with a one-night surgical commando raid, it is not clear that he can get his way in the Persian desert.

“Trump’s forceful approach to the world in his second term has benefited from some luck and the occasional willingness of other states to facilitate an off-ramp,” said Suzanne Maloney, vice president and director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. “Nothing in the past 47 years should have led him to believe that Tehran would follow that route.”

John Hannah, a former national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and now a senior fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, in the past has supported the limited use of military force to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. But he said that by going for “a massive decapitation strike,” Mr. Trump had clearly underestimated the theocratic power structure that took power in the 1979 Iranian revolution and overestimated American capacity to topple it.

“In retrospect, this was clearly a war based on fatally flawed assumptions,” Mr. Hannah said, “none more damaging than the president’s apparent conviction that Iran’s revolutionary regime was a flimsy house of cards ready to collapse in a hail of American airstrikes and bellicose Truth Social posts.”

“Compounding the error,” he added, “there was no rigorous national security apparatus around the president prepared to speak truth to power and subject his wrongheaded assumptions to systematic questioning based on the knowledge and experience of real foreign policy, defense and intelligence professionals.”

The cease-fire that has now collapsed amid nightly strikes was not even a particularly far-reaching agreement. It was meant to be a stopgap to quiet the guns for 60 days so that the two sides could negotiate the truly thorny disputes, particularly the future of Iran’s nuclear program. If a temporary deal cannot last, it is hard to see how the two sides can get to a permanent accord requiring painful compromises.

Mr. Trump seems uncertain how to proceed. He has turned back to the use of military force and ordered the resumption of a naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. He has threatened to take “a nice, big fat shot” at Pickaxe Mountain, a fortified site near one of Iran’s main nuclear facilities. But with popular opinion against the war, he has given little indication that he is willing to resume the sort of full-fledged bombardment that marked the beginning of the war.

At the same time, he has suggested there will be further negotiations but has not articulated how talks that failed before could succeed now. In fact, he has expressed deep skepticism that they could, although of course that might simply be a way of lowering expectations. Instead, Mr. Trump seems to think that he can outlast the Iranians because their economy is in dire shape, while the Iranians seem to think that they can outlast him because of the politics of gas prices heading into midterm elections at home.

Trump’s in a box, and he’s facing a brutal and tenacious adversary whose objectives — maintaining leverage over the strait and a newfound desire for hegemony over the Gulf — now hold him hostage,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East peace negotiator who served presidents of both parties and is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Iran consumed and tarnished the legacy of one president,” he added, referring to Jimmy Carter and the 1979-81 hostage crisis. “And the way it appears now, with time on Iran’s side, not on Trump’s, it could very well tarnish or ruin the legacy of another.”

Other foreign policy experts rejected the analogy and cautioned against overstating the impact of the Iran war on Mr. Trump’s presidency.

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A banner in Tehran last week threatening President Trump. Credit…Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times

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On June 17, 1775, some 1,000 rebel colonial troops faced down the British war machine on a hill on a peninsula north of Boston, allegedly conserving scarce ammunition by waiting to fire until they could see the whites of the redcoats’ eyes.

The Battle of Bunker Hill, as it became famously—albeit misleadingly—known, happened as the revolutionaries were looking to keep British troops contained in the city and had scrambled to fortify its surroundings. Though the British ultimately won the battle, but they suffered heavy losses, leaving George Washington time to eventually roust them from the region the next spring.

Though the battle became part of Revolutionary War lore, being widely known is no guarantee of being fully understood. That’s why archaeologists decided to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary with a new excavation at the battle site using much more detailed radar scans than were available during a previous survey in the 1990s. The dig focused on the “Rebel Redoubt” fortification patriots had constructed on Breed’s Hill—the actual site of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Scientific American spoke to Joe Bagley, Boston’s city archaeologist, about what the team found.

What did you find at the site? Was there anything particularly exciting?

From the actual battle itself, we found seven musket balls and three gunflints. The gunflints could have been from either side, because they used the same gunflints. The musket balls are both provincial (or the American side) and British, based on their size. We have an expert that’s going to be studying them each very carefully and give us a full report of who shot it, what happened, how was it fired, what did it hit—that kind of thing. We’ll have an exact accounting of all of that.

The other thing that was really exciting was that we started to find a lot of tea ware, such as broken teacups and bowls—things that would be in a dining set, a fairly fancy one. We found wig curlers—which would have been a men’s object—and really fancy buttons. So there’s all this really nice stuff. From the June battle through March the following year, there were about a hundred soldiers and six officers stationed at the redoubt, so it looks like we’re finding stuff from them. Were they taken from nearby houses? Were they brought overseas with the troops? That’s some of the research that we still need to do.

There’s a lot more stuff on the site than we were really expecting, and our job is now going to be going through all of it. We have to wash it, we have to sort it, we have to catalog it, and then we have to figure out what it says about the site. That’s going to be a minute to go through.

What big questions about the battle were you hoping the dig could shed light on?

One of the big questions that we have is basically: How structured was the effort going into the battle from the folks that were organizing what they didn’t realize was going to be the first battle of the Revolution?

Farmers marched to the site, having no idea that they were going there to build a fort, and they had absolutely no idea that the next day they were going to be starting a massive battle with the world’s biggest army. What were they being asked to do, and how big of an ask was it? Was it just like, it’s the middle of the night, we’re going to try to fortify this hill? Were they trying to go for a really structured fort, or were they trying to just bang it out?

“When the first gunflint came out, it drove home the horror of the whole thing”—Joe Bagley, Boston’s city archaeologist

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An earlier version of the survey that happened up there concluded that the fort was basically a sloppy oval on the top of the hill, and then every map after that was drawing these crisp little squares and angles, like they were out there with a protractor making the fort. The results that we’re seeing from the radar really do look like they were building this much more structured, designed, angular fort, and I think that just speaks to the ambition of folks in this early phase.

It’s also just trying to have an accurate representation of what actually happened up there. For me, when the first gunflint came out, it drove home the horror of the whole thing. There’s this tendency to romanticize and dramatize things, but the reality is this was hell. These folks were scared—they were brave, but they were terrified. [The British] set fire to [nearby Charlestown], so there was this black column of smoke that went up and over the actual battlefield by hundreds of feet, probably thousands of feet. The sounds of all the muskets going off, the cannons, the screaming. It was a bloody, gory war. And hundreds of people were killed—people were walking and slipping in blood.

We were basically digging on the site of a massacre, and I think that’s an important part of the story that people need to remember. If we’re just talking about the heroism of the whole thing, it downplays the reality of how tough it is.

What was it like to excavate there?

I’m not a big military buff, but I knew that was a place where people died, and that is a huge responsibility. To know I’m going to be trying to tell the story of people who didn’t get to tell their story after that day—that’s a heavy thing. To be there on that day with them when you find the musket ball that went through them or the gunflint that was in their pocket that slipped out as they were running for their lives—it’s like you’re right there. The last time this interacted with another person was the day that the person that put it in their pocket died or fled for their life. It’s a tingling moment.

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The death of Senator Lindsey Graham has triggered a dual-track process in South Carolina to fill his vacant seat in the chamber and his spot as the Republican nominee on the November ballot.

Graham, a prominent foreign policy hawk who served in the Senate since 2003 and became one of President Donald Trump’s closest allies, died Saturday night following what his office described as a “brief and sudden illness.” He was 71.

The fourth-term senator had secured the GOP nomination for a fifth term in the state’s June 9 primary. His death introduces sudden political uncertainty just months ahead of the November midterm elections, where Republicans are fighting to protect a narrow 53-47 Senate majority.

Trump paid tribute to Graham early Sunday, calling him “one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known” and a “true American Patriot.”

Graham, who served as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee at the time of his death, first entered federal politics in 1994 when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Newsweek has contacted the South Carolina governor’s office and South Carolina’s State Election Commission for comment outside of office hours.

Appointing a Temporary Successor

The path forward to replace Graham follows two distinct avenues under South Carolina law: an interim appointment to the active Senate seat and a separate process to name a new nominee for the upcoming general election.

Republican South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster praised Graham as “the fiercest of fighters for South Carolina and America — and a loyal and steadfast friend.”

McMaster will hold the authority to make an immediate, temporary appointment to fill the vacant seat. Under the South Carolina code of laws, the governor can appoint a successor to serve until January 3 following the next general election.

However, that appointment is strictly temporary and does not automatically grant the appointee the Republican nomination to face Democratic challenger Annie Andrews in November.

A Special Primary Timeline

Determining the permanent Republican nominee will require a separate process dictated by South Carolina Code § 7-11-55.

The statute mandates that the death of a nominee selected through a primary election creates a vacancy that must be resolved through a special primary election.

• Filing Period: The filing window for candidates seeking the nomination opens on the second Tuesday following the vacancy, which places the opening date on July 21.
• Filing Close: The filing period remains open for one week, closing on July 28.
• Special Primary: The special primary election will be held on the second Tuesday following the close of filing, scheduling the vote for August 11.
• Run-Off Election: If no candidate secures a majority, a run-off election must be held two weeks later, on August 25.

State law requires the final nomination to be officially certified no less than two weeks before the general election, establishing an October 20 deadline. If certification occurs later than that window, the office must be filled via a separate special election held the month after the general election.

Ballot Management

Because election logistics are already underway, the statute addresses the potential complications of printed ballots. Election officials are not legally required to reprint ballots that have already been finalized, though they are permitted to reprint them or cover the deceased candidate’s name where feasible.

Under South Carolina Code § 7-13-370, votes cast for a deceased candidate whose name remains on a printed ballot will automatically be counted for the newly certified nominee.

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U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, is seen during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on May 12 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

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On an early morning in January, Jake Linsley woke up to a text from Amazon that was lighting up his phone.

“I thought it was saying, ‘Your package is delayed,’” Linsley said in an interview. “I read it again and was like, ‘Holy s—, I got fired.’”

Linsley, who worked as a finance manager at Amazon for nearly six years, was one of roughly 16,000 employees swept up in the company’s mass layoffs in late January. Combined with the more than 14,000 staffers let go three months earlier, it marked the steepest cuts in Amazon’s history.

As an Amazon employee, Linsley was part of an American corporate elite: working for a tech giant with opportunities for growth, promotion, high salaries, and enviable perks. But he and the other laid-off workers suddenly entered the harsh reality of a job market being rapidly reshaped by artificial intelligence — and competing with hordes of others who had been let go by Meta, Salesforce and Cisco. In some cases, the jobs they’d been hired to do simply don’t exist anymore. And the tech giants continue to cut roles in part to fund the hundreds of billions of dollars they’re investing in AI.

The tech sector has laid off roughly 140,000 employees in the U.S. so far this year, more than any other industry, according to consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. In May, layoffs across the industry reached their highest for any month since August 2024, before easing in June.

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Helen of Troy is starting wars again. But this time the legendarily beautiful, semi-divine queen of myth, whose adulterous elopement with the Trojan prince Paris brought on the 10-year-long Trojan War, has launched a thousand tweets.

In the buildup to the release of Christopher Nolan’s $250 million, all-IMAX retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey,” the director revealed that he had chosen the Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o to play Helen. A firestorm of controversy followed, fueled largely by self-appointed guardians of the Homeric epics who consider the casting of a Black woman as Helen to be a grotesque violation — a “woke” gesture designed to “destroy Western civilization and everything that helped create it,” as one voice on X put it.

X’s owner, Elon Musk, used the platform to accuse Mr. Nolan of “pissing on Homer’s grave,” referring to the director as an “anti-White racist,” and suggesting that he chose Ms. Nyong’o in a cynical bid to win over Oscar voters. (“He wants the awards.”) Donald Trump Jr. has also complained about the casting of Mr. Nolan’s movie, wishing that Hollywood would “stop pushing this crap on us.”

“Not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is ‘the most beautiful woman in the world,’” the conservative commentator Matt Walsh declared.

Some of Mr. Nolan’s equally vocal defenders have argued that it’s silly to complain about “authenticity” when speaking of mythological figures; Helen, after all, was hatched from a swan’s egg, so how literal can we really be? A few classicists reason that Mr. Nolan’s colorblindness is in fact authentic, since the Greeks didn’t have a concept of race in the way that we do. (If they had, they surely would object to the choice to cast the open-faced, all-American Matt Damon as the wily Mediterranean Odysseus.)

Still, it seems safe to assume that Mr. Nolan’s choice of Ms. Nyong’o was meant to be pointed. The last major big-screen depiction of Helen was in the 2004 “Troy” (Donald Jr. was a fan), in which she was played by the extremely Aryan-looking German actress Diane Kruger.

So what is Mr. Nolan up to? As it turns out, the auteur is using Helen just as the Greek authors did: to provoke, challenge and discomfit how we think about beauty and identity, about who we are and how we relate to our world.

It’s worth noting that we actually have no idea what Helen looked like. Homer confines his descriptions to generic banalities — “she looked awfully like the immortal gods” — while the two visual adjectives he gives her, “beautiful-haired” and “white-armed,” are conventional and used of other female characters as well. (She is also described as “shudder-inducing”; go try to cast that.) Later authors, such as the playwright Euripides, introduce new adjectives, for instance, “reddish-blonde.” But on the whole, the Greeks didn’t care much what she looked like.

What they did care about was how she talked. Already in Homer’s telling, Helen is an effective and indeed seductive speaker. In the “Iliad,” she eloquently rues her mad infatuation with Paris, delivers some nice jabs in an argument with no less a debate opponent than the goddess Aphrodite and effectively has the last word in the epic, pronouncing a powerful final eulogy for the fallen Trojan hero Hector. In the “Odyssey,” she beguiles a group of dinner guests with tales of her efforts to help the Greek cause from behind enemy lines in Troy. But her cuckolded husband, Menelaus, with whom she has long since been reunited, counters with a very different tale, one in which it’s clear that she was working to betray the Greeks.

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Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times

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Of all the dietary supplements out there, creatine is perhaps the one with the most fervent fan base. Long a favorite among athletes looking for a workout boost, creatine has been credited with tamping down perimenopausal mood swings, controlling blood sugar, and perhaps even helping recovery from concussions.

But what does the science say? It’s important to note that creatine is a dietary supplement, and it is not regulated in the same way as medications, which need to go through rounds of clinical trials to gain approval for sale by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. And the nutrition supplement market is notoriously rife with overblown claims and false advertising.

When it comes to creatine, however, experts say there is some solid evidence backing the supplement up.

Creatine is generally considered safe, and unlike many supplements, it has been studied for decades, particularly for its role in boosting strength and power in athletics, says Katherine Basbaum, a registered dietitian at the University of Virginia Health. In more recent years, some studies have suggested that creatine may support brain and muscle health as we age, too.

But it’s far from a “magic bullet,” cautions Bonnie Jortberg, a professor of family medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine. “You’re not going to start taking creatine, then all of a sudden feel like a new person.”

To help sort the science from the hype, Scientific American spoke with health and nutrition experts about how creatine works and who might benefit the most from taking it.

What does creatine do to your body?

Creatine is a natural compound that your body produces and uses for energy, Basbaum explains. It’s made using three amino acids—arginine, glycine and methionine. You can also get creatine from your diet, by eating foods such as seafood and meats, or by taking a supplement, such as creatine monohydrate.

Once ingested, creatine gets converted into a compound called creatine phosphate (also known as phosphocreatine), which helps supply adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, to your muscles. “Your brain and your muscles need energy,” Basbaum says. Creatine helps provide a rapid-acting and immediately available source of ATP. That’s why creatine can help athletes: more ready-to-use energy means more power in the gym and potentially more muscle growth.

Is creatine FDA-approved?

Creatine monohydrate is the most-studied form of creatine. Still, the FDA doesn’t assess and approve dietary supplements in the same way as for drugs. Rather, the agency has designated creatine monohydrate as a “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS) substance.

Decades of clinical evidence back that designation up. A 2025 analysis of more than 650 studies found creatine has no significant side effects compared with placebo. “The safety profile on creatines is very good,” says Richard Kreider, the first author on that paper and director of the Exercise & Sport Nutrition Lab at Texas A&M University.

Creatine is also among the most popular sports supplements in the world, and the tally of adverse events associated with creatine in international registries is “very tiny,” Kreider says—around 0.0007 percent of adverse event reports mentioned creatine, his team’s analysis found.

“There have now been, over the last 30 years, billions of servings, literally billions of servings, provided in dietary supplements. This is not new,” he says. (Kreider has conducted industry-sponsored creatine research and has served as an advisor for dietary supplement makers.)

What do we know—or not know—about creatine?

Overall, the strongest and most extensive evidence for creatine is as an “ergogenic aid” to support athletic performance, Basbaum says.

Research shows it may help you lift slightly heavier weights at the gym, for instance, or push out a few more repetitions or help your muscles recover faster afterward.

More recent evidence suggests creatine may help us stay healthy as we age, too. “What had started as a supplement for athletes and performance has now blossomed over the last 20 to 25 years into a supplement that clinical trials are showing efficacy in a number of therapeutic interventions,” Kreider says.

The most promising of these avenues is “active aging,” he says. As we get older, our muscles tend to get weaker. Research suggests creatine, when combined with resistance training, may help maintain strength and muscle mass and prevent falls and injuries such as hip fractures in older populations, Kreider says.

Creatine could also be helpful during perimenopause and menopause, when women may have a harder time building and maintaining muscle, Basbaum says.

There is also preliminary evidence to suggest creatine may help support brain cognition for women during this time of life, possibly by supplying more ATP to brain cells, Jortberg says.

“These are limited studies, but I think they’re promising. [Findings suggest] that creatine may be beneficial—‘may be’ is the keyword there—when it comes to mental cognition,” Jortberg adds.

To improve athletic performance, the International Society of Sports Nutrition recommends people take about three to five grams of creatine monohydrate per day. For more rapid results, some athletes might start with a “loading” period of about 0.3 gram per kilogram of creatine monohydrate for five to seven days, the organization says.

But the exact amount will vary based on your body’s needs.

Is there anyone who shouldn’t take creatine?

Experts were divided on this question. Creatine is generally considered safe, but Jortberg says that kidney problems could interfere with your body’s ability to process the supplement.

“People who might have any kind of a kidney issue or any kind of compromised kidney function should absolutely not be taking a creatine supplement,” she says.

Kreider, on the other hand, argues that those fears are overblown. “The fact is that there’s no evidence that creatine causes any adverse effect to kidney function, even in patients with kidney disease,” he says.

Still, the experts Scientific American spoke to agreed that if you’re interested in taking creatine, it’s best to consult a doctor first.

“Anytime you take a dietary supplement of any kind, it goes without saying that it’s good to check with your health care provider,” Basbaum says, “creatine or otherwise.”

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Actress Sheryl Lee Ralph is making the most of her first-ever Paris Haute Couture Week. And, lucky for us, she’s documenting every fashionable moment along the way.

The Emmy Award-winning actress took to Instagram to share her excitement, telling followers she’s “having a grand time” during couture week. Between multiple outfit changes and full hair-and-makeup transformations for each show, the 69-year-old style icon joked that the whirlwind schedule is all part of the “fashion fun.”

For Stéphane Rolland, Ralph embraced the designer’s signature sculptural aesthetic in a sleek black, long-sleeved gown featuring a dramatic white chiffon detail cascading from the neckline. She completed the look with architectural platform heels and layered diamond necklaces that added just the right amount of sparkle.

At Georges Hobeika, she leaned into gilded glamour in a gold-toned ensemble adorned with leaf-inspired embellishments. Her monochromatic beauty look echoed the warm metallic palette, while spiral gold earrings, a diamond tennis bracelet, a Rolex watch, and statement rings completed the sophisticated styling.

For her final appearance at the Tony Ward Couture show, Ralph opted for an ethereal gold gown reminiscent of a modern-day Cinderella. The belted silhouette featured champagne-hued underlayers and shimmering silver embellishments throughout. Meanwhile, a sleek, slicked-back bun kept the focus on the intricately detailed dress.

Scroll ahead to see Sheryl Lee Ralph’s stunning looks from her stylish debut at Paris Haute Couture Week.

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