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Six days before the election, more than two dozen of President Trump’s top strategists logged onto a private video call.

The mood was grim. The discussion began with talk of cyanide.

“Do you want the white pill first, or the black pill first?” asked Tony Fabrizio, the president’s chief pollster.

Tim Saler, one of the Republican Party’s top data consultants, laid out two scenarios. In the first, the $400 million MAGA Inc. super PAC was reaching the voters that it had wanted and expected to vote. “That’s the optimistic scenario,” he said.

The other was a wipeout.

“I’m getting my affairs in order,” James Blair, who left the White House to oversee the president’s midterm strategy, said to laughter, according to four people on the call. “I suggest everybody else do the same.”

For roughly 30 minutes, the call ran on gallows humor: funeral arrangements, prison food, presidential pardons, even a brief riff on fleeing the country.

“At least Bibi won. He’ll protect us,” Mr. Blair said sarcastically of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose country had voted the day before. (Mr. Netanyahu’s bloc fell short of a majority, and his party soon claimed the election had been stolen.)

“Maybe we could get asylum in Israel,” Mr. Fabrizio said.

Collapse at the Polls

The scope of the Republican wreckage would become clear a week later.

Democrats stormed to a huge House majority and won control of the Senate, a remarkable feat powered by victories in Republican strongholds — Kansas, South Carolina, Texas — that few could have imagined a year ago.

This account of the Republican Party’s collapse is based on interviews with more than 70 people — among them lawmakers, political strategists, party leaders, pollsters, White House officials and congressional aides — who were directly involved in the midterm elections, many of whom were granted anonymity to describe private conversations and decisions.

The scale of the defeat was far from inevitable.

Republicans had record fund-raising, the world’s richest man, a favorable Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance and a demoralized, unpopular opposition.

In the Senate, they had a map that required Democrats to compete in states they hadn’t won in decades.

And in the House, the Trump team demolished the tradition of redrawing congressional lines only once a decade in order to carve up new districts to help the G.O.P. bolster its narrow majority.

What Republicans could not overcome was a president who lost the public’s trust on the economy and so much more. And what they had not counted on was an unpopular war in the Middle East — one that would close the Strait of Hormuz and push gas prices past $4 a gallon — that would rage all the way through the election.

And Democrats were ready, this time, to seize on the G.O.P. stumbles.

A Stark Warning on the Iran War

The slide deck that Mr. Blair had circulated over the summer to officials in the West Wing was stark.

One slide linked Republicans’ polling numbers to an Iran war timeline.

It showed how the Democratic advantage had ballooned during active hostilities, shrunk during talks over a “memorandum of understanding” and then spiked again when the cease-fire collapsed.

By the end of July, Democrats had a 10-point edge on the congressional ballot.

The “bottom line” was hard to miss. It was in highlighter yellow: Republicans could still conceivably win the House if Democrats had only a four-point edge. “But that won’t happen without an extended cease-fire, Hormuz open & gas prices falling,” the slide warned.

“A final result approaching D+10 would likely cost us the Senate.”

The results on Tuesday were even worse: Mr. Trump’s party is on track to lose the national popular congressional vote by about 13 points, according to estimates by The New York Times. It is shaping up to be the worst loss in a half-century, since the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.

Even before the polls had closed, Mr. Trump had begun to ruminate on what might have been.

“If we never went into Iran, what do you think would happen in the midterms?” the president had asked privately, according to a person who spoke to him.

An Unchecked Second Term

What made the war such a potent force is that it told a simple story for voters.

As a candidate, Mr. Trump had promised no new wars. He started a new war.

He promised lower prices. Gas prices soared and inflation rose.

The story of the G.O.P. midterm implosion was not only a story of broken promises; it was also a story of radical overreach. After Mr. Trump came back from pariah status after Jan. 6, 2021, some advisers believed he had convinced himself that the rules of politics had been suspended for him alone. That illusion was obliterated on Tuesday night.

Over nearly two years, hubris had become the governing philosophy of Mr. Trump’s second presidency.

There was a seemingly endless string of investigative pieces revealing that Mr. Trump, his family and their close associates had used the presidency to enrich themselves brazenly. Those reports began to resonate with voters; an early October poll from Fox News showed corruption as the top voter concern. (Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said: “The President only acts in the best interest of the American people. There are no conflicts of interest.”)

In 2025, Mr. Trump began a trade war with the entire world — the pain of which was still being felt more than a year later on farms all over the suddenly competitive states of Kansas, Texas and Iowa.

Throughout it all, the president flashed indifference to the struggles of Americans that his policies had exacerbated.

Soaring gas prices? “A small price to pay,” Mr. Trump insisted.

Some members of his team grew exasperated as Mr. Trump spoke seemingly more about his new ballroom than the border, golf courses than grocery prices, interior decorations than inflation.

On the eve of the midterms, he focused his closing pitch on his refurbishment of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, joking that he was considering renaming it for himself rather than Abraham Lincoln.

Unlike in the past, Democrats mostly ignored the daily Trump distractions and sought to connect corruption to costs. They also told a story of a government focused on elites while average people struggled — from Jeffrey Epstein’s protected associates to the president’s $2.2 billion in personal profits.

In the House, Democrats quickly and unexpectedly countered Mr. Trump’s redistricting push and pursued strong candidates deep into red territory to spread the map. In the Senate, they found a series of blue-chip recruits who put once unthinkable states into play. In the final, frenzied weeks of the campaign, Republicans were redirecting cash from the usual swing states of North Carolina and Georgia to try to shore up traditional strongholds in South Carolina and even Mississippi.

The war in Iran, said Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader and now the speaker-in-waiting, helped “supercharge” the contrast between the two parties.

Republicans had tried to frame the midterms as a choice between “common sense and crazy,” relentlessly attacking the rising democratic socialist wing of the left.

Yet Mr. Trump’s own pollster’s final survey, taken two weeks before the election, showed that while both the MAGA Republican brand and democratic socialists were unpopular with voters, MAGA carried more baggage. When Republicans who were not planning to cast ballots were asked what it would take to earn back their vote, their top two answers were ending the war and addressing inflation.

On that final call before Election Day, Mr. Trump’s advisers were both clear-eyed and cynical about the state of the race, referring at one point to a Trump ally who ran for governor of Minnesota and demanded a recount in his primary despite losing in a landslide.

“Look, it’s fine,” Mr. Blair told the group acerbically. “I think we’ll just pull a Mike Lindell and demand a recount regardless of how many points we’re down.”

Alex Pfeiffer, a spokesman for the MAGA Inc. super PAC, said that the group’s “sober and clear-eyed view of the political environment,” led to investing in House races Republicans are leading in, in Maine, Florida, Tennessee, New York and Texas.

“The people peddling these made up quotes and false gossip not only demean and belittle the historic and generous investment by the president into the party’s midterm effort, but they also slander the hard work of the many who contributed to this effort,” he said in a statement. “They are cowards and losers.”

A White House official, who declined to speak on the record, said in response to the reporting for this article: “President Trump was not on the ballot, and it’s proven that Trump voters show up when he is on the ballot. Candidate quality matters, and President Trump did a better job promoting many of the candidates on the ballot than the candidates did themselves.”

The official repeated that the president, who acknowledged earlier on Wednesday that the war affected the midterms, had over and over again said Iran can’t procure a nuclear weapon.

The Anti-Recruiter

While Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, painstakingly recruited top-tier Senate candidates, Mr. Trump took a series of steps that endangered the Republican majority.

After Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa flirted with opposing Mr. Trump’s most controversial nominees and Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina voted against his signature tax-and-spending bill, Mr. Trump’s allies threatened to end their careers. Both decided to retire, creating vulnerable open seats that had been held by Republicans.

In North Carolina, Mr. Trump cleared the field for Michael Whatley, a former lobbyist and Republican National Committee chairman, who proved a lackluster candidate and lost to Roy Cooper, the state’s popular Democratic former governor.

After Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died in July, Mr. Trump supported tapping his sister, Darline, to not just replace him temporarily but also to run for a full six-year term. In doing so, he elevated an inexperienced candidate with no fund-raising base, and she went on to lose in a state that had not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1998.

But no candidate proved more costly to the party than Ken Paxton, the scandal-ridden Texas attorney general. Mr. Trump endorsed him over Senator John Cornyn, the Republican incumbent, ignoring a year of warnings that Mr. Paxton would put the seat in jeopardy. Republicans were ultimately forced to spend close to $300 million in Texas — money that could have gone to shore up candidates in other states. Mr. Paxton lost by 12 points.

On another recent call, the Trump team mocked the haplessness of some of the Republicans they were trying to elect.

“I have seen the enemy,” Mr. Blair told the group a week earlier. “And it is us.”

Mr. Fabrizio replied: “In many places.”

The Democrats’ Playbook

In May 2025, Mr. Schumer arrived at Wildflower Farms, an upscale resort in New York’s Hudson Valley, for a secretive retreat with donors and party officials. He desperately needed to expand the Senate map.

At the Wildflower retreat, James Talarico, a youthful-looking state legislator in Texas, had delivered a five-minute speech for the assembled crowd on the importance of storytelling in campaigns. Mr. Schumer was smitten. He told at least two attendees afterward that he wanted to get Mr. Talarico to run for the Senate.

To win control of the Senate, Democrats needed to hold all of their seats and flip at least four, including in states that Mr. Trump won handily in 2024.

Mr. Schumer spent months wooing Mr. Cooper and took at least three trips to Ohio to coax former Senator Sherrod Brown, who had lost in 2024 but had a populist brand that matched the country’s mood.“If you retire and we lose the majority by one vote, you won’t enjoy your retirement,” Mr. Schumer recalled telling Mr. Brown, 73.

Both ran and won.

In the House, where Democrats had fallen three seats short in 2024, recruiters went hunting in districts Mr. Trump had carried by 10 points or more, betting early that the emboldened president would overreach.

An election post-mortem by the Democratic House Majority PAC circulated in April 2025 found two factors stood out among the party’s stronger 2024 candidates: being “perceived as moderate” and focusing on the economy.

“If we wanted to compete deeper in red districts, we needed to find candidates who are not immediately off-putting,” said Mike Smith, the PAC’s president.

They set about recruiting candidates with distinctive biographies: military veterans, doctors, farmers, a smokejumper, a Tejano music star — just about anyone who didn’t scream professional politician.

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President Trump at a campaign rally in Kalispell, Mont., last month. Credit…

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Major cities across the world—including hotspots such as New Orleans, Mexico City, Jakarta and Rome—are sinking by up to several inches every year.

Those are the findings of an exhaustive new survey published in Nature Cities, in which researchers used satellite radar to track 465 urban areas of more than a million people from 2014 to 2023. The results, displayed in an interactive map, shows that sinking isn’t just “a local curiosity” for a small handful of cities, but “a global urban problem,” says study coauthor Guoquan Wang, a geophysicist at the University of Houston.

Satellites can measure the land’s gradual sinking, called subsidence, by taking radar images of the same area over time to determine the shift in the radar signal’s travel—even a change of mere millimeters (twenty-fifths of an inch) of ground can result in a signal taking slightly longer to return than the past. The new work, which examined small chunks of land—just a few houses wide—all over the world, is “the most comprehensive and systematic exploration of subsidence in urban cities,” says Roland Bürgmann, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study.

Sinking was most severe in Southeast Asia, West and Central Asia and North America, but it also turned up in South America and Africa, both of which are generally less studied in regards to land subsidence; For almost half the cities in the dataset, no satellite radar study had ever been done before.

Different factors can contribute to urban subsidence. In New York City, for instance, the weight of buildings compresses the region’s soft soils. But the biggest driver is usually water utilities, industries and other groups pumping out water from under the ground. Groundwater helps hold up the soil like air in a cushion: pump it out, and the ground slowly sags.

And the real danger is uneven sinking. “If the whole city were to smoothly subside altogether by an inch or so, it wouldn’t be that big of a problem,” Bürgmann says. But when one neighborhood drops faster than the next, the strain builds.

Over time such strain can crack foundations, break sewer lines, damage subway systems and worsen flooding. In Jakarta, the sinking and flooding has become so severe that Indonesia is building a brand-new capital city on the island of Borneo.

Once it happens, sinking is “cumulative and largely irreversible,” Wang says, but cities have successfully stopped continued subsidence before. Tokyo once sank “way faster than many cities today,” says Manoochehr Shirzaei, a geoscientist at Virginia Tech, who was a peer reviewer for the study, until officials drew up policies to halt it. These included regulations around groundwater pumping and a shift toward alternative surface water sources. In China, Beijing and the nearby city of Tianjin “stopped pumping groundwater and replaced it with surface water” piped from the Yangtze River basin, Wang says, and sinking has since halted in parts of the region.

“In most places, we have plenty of time to react,” Shirzaei says, “but we have to do it.”

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Traveling to far-off places for vacation or to visit loved ones during the holidays is fun, but the journey to get there can feel like an endurance event that entails marathon bouts of sitting or racing from one airport gate to the next. And that can leave you with achy joints or stiffness that you didn’t have when you embarked. What’s a tired traveler to do?

Your antidote: Gentle movement, like stretching, which will help you feel refreshed and ready to enjoy the rest of your trip.

“Our bodies are designed to move, and staying in the same position for hours can leave the hips, back, neck, shoulders, and legs feeling tight and uncomfortable. Stretching is a great way to give your joints and muscles some much-needed motion, and you can do it anywhere—like the airport, a rest area parking lot, the car, or even your plane or train seat,” says Lindsey Benoit O’Connell, C.S.C.S., a certified meditation teacher and breathwork facilitator and founder of The LAB Wellness. “Stretching and the breathwork involved in it can also help tame travel stress.”

Next time you take a trip, try these stretches for travel days.

Best Stretches for Travel Days

An on-the-go stretch session doesn’t just help unwind your muscles and mind. Stretching also helps increase circulation throughout your body, including to your legs. That’s important because sitting for long periods (like on a flight or road trip) is a risk factor for deep vein thrombosis, or a blood clot in the leg, particularly in people prone to them.

Aim to hold each stretch for at least 30 seconds, but feel free to hold as long as feels good.

1. Seated Figure Four

Why it works:

This stretch helps improve flexibility and range of motion in the muscles around the hips and glutes, helping to counteract stiffness or joint aches caused by a long day of sitting while traveling.

How to do it:

1. Sit toward the front of a chair, both feet flat on the ground.
2. Cross right ankle over left thigh, flex right foot, and gently hinge forward at hips until you feel a stretch along the outer hip and glute.
3. Hold for at least 30 seconds.
4. Then switch sides.

2. Seated Spinal Rotation

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A $1.4 billion cryptocurrency windfall. Well-timed stock trades. A wedding after-party bankrolled by a Kremlin-connected businessman.

For nearly two years, congressional Democrats were powerless to probe these potential scandals and conflicts looming over President Trump and his family businesses. But after pulling off a landslide midterm election victory that amounted to a sweeping rebuke of the president, they will soon seize control of Congress — and with it, the power to open investigations, hold hearings and issue subpoenas.

Representative Robert Garcia, the California Democrat poised to chair the House Oversight Committee, summed up the threat succinctly in a statement late Tuesday: “Lawyer up.”

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Garcia said that his warning was meant chiefly for people at the White House who “engaged in corruption” and enriched themselves. “The Trump crime family is the top of our investigative priorities,” he said.

Subpoenas, though, do not guarantee a fruitful investigation.

Some of the president’s business associates and allies are expected to fight some of the subpoenas in court, which could become a lengthy process. And even if the Democrats shed new light on moneymaking ventures, there is no indication that the Trump family violated the law — potentially complicating any effort to pursue impeachment proceedings against the president.

Still, Mr. Garcia and other congressional leaders believe they will find a target-rich environment.

After winning back the White House two years ago, Mr. Trump abandoned his first-term pledge to rein in his family’s deal making, enabling new ventures that enriched the president, his sons and some of his advisers. He shrugged off concerns about conflicts of interest, contending that he “found out that nobody cared.”

He turned out to be wrong. An AP exit poll found that government corruption was a crucial issue for many voters, and that roughly seven in 10 voters said Congress was doing “not enough” to provide checks and balances on the presidency.

In the House, the Oversight and Judiciary committees will lead the investigative efforts, which will not be limited to the Trump family business. Senator Maggie Hassan, the New Hampshire Democrat in line to chair the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, is expected to conduct her own investigations as well.

“We need to zero in quickly on the forms of systemic pay-to-play corruption that are destroying the rule of law and have cost the public huge amounts of money,” Representative Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat expected to lead the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement.

Here are some of the main issues that Democrats are expected to investigate.

Crypto

Mr. Trump’s financial returns have multiplied during his second term, largely thanks to his crypto businesses. Those ventures pulled in at least $1.4 billion in revenue last year, a windfall that posed unparalleled potential conflicts of interest.

Congressional investigators will most likely focus on the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Last year, an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought a huge stake in World Liberty. Four months later, the Emiratis struck a deal with the Trump administration — over the objections of some national security officials — for the export of valuable computer chips.

Mr. Trump also collected hundreds of millions of dollars from sales of his $TRUMP memecoin, a type of cryptocurrency that is typically treated like a collectible, and World Liberty’s sale of its own digital tokens. The buyers included foreign entities and businesses seeking relief from the Trump administration.

Donald Trump Jr.

The activities of the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., are another top priority for Democrats.

Mr. Trump Jr. has not made things easy for himself. He allowed a Russian businessman with ties to the Kremlin to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to help finance his wedding after-party in the Bahamas this year, drawing outrage from congressional Democrats. The president has said that his son repaid the businessman, Umar Kremlev, but Mr. Garcia has flagged it as an investigative target.

Mr. Raskin has also begun investigating 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a senior partner. Several of the companies that 1789 has invested in have received government funding while others benefited from Trump policies.

In a statement, a spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. said that he “is a private citizen who holds no position in government and has broken no laws.”

The statement added that Mr. Trump Jr. “has never sought to influence government policy or official decision making for the benefit of his personal business interests and has every right to pursue lawful and legitimate business and investment opportunities.”

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President Trump at the site of the White House ballroom on Wednesday. An AP exit poll found that government corruption was a crucial issue for many voters, and that roughly seven in 10 voters said Congress was doing “not enough” to provide checks and balances on the presidency. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

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Happy Monday, listeners! And happy November. For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to our weekly science news roundup.

We’ll start with an update on the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Last Tuesday, data from the country’s Ministry of Health confirmed more than 10,000 cases since May. And nearly half of those people have died.

This is the fastest known Ebola outbreak in history. For context, the deadliest outbreak on record, which occurred in West Africa between 2014 and 2016, resulted in 28,000 cases and 11,000 deaths. But that outbreak lasted more than two years, and the current outbreak in the DRC was declared less than 200 days ago. And the difference in their trajectories is striking. On day 187 of the current outbreak, the official case count was 10,060. On day 186 of the West Africa outbreak, just 544 cases had been recorded.

There are a few factors making this outbreak tough to manage. The first is the actual species of Ebola-causing virus fueling the outbreak. Of the six known species in this genus, four cause the kind of severe hemorrhagic fever you probably think of when you hear the word “Ebola.” The West African epidemic was caused by one of those four viruses, which is somewhat confusingly now called the Ebola virus but used to be called the Zaire virus, and which has the highest fatality rate of the four. Fortunately, an extremely effective vaccine was developed and deployed to help end that epidemic.

This latest outbreak is caused by a different species: the Bundibugyo virus. It’s much less common, having only caused two other known outbreaks in the past.

Another factor in the outbreak’s breakneck growth is that the DRC is really struggling to track cases and administer care. The Associated Press reports that at least half of all deaths have been in people who were never admitted to treatment centers. And contact tracing isn’t going well, either. An outbreak is considered under control when 95% of all new cases come from contact with previously known and recorded cases. But at present, something like 80% of new cases are emerging from unknown sources.

In other words, there are still lots of people out transmitting the disease that haven’t yet been identified by contact tracers. Distrust of the government and, by extension, of health workers is also a huge issue, with many reportedly believing the outbreak is a hoax. Last month a nurse was killed and another health care worker was severely injured as they attempted to respond to reports of Ebola.

However there is some good news, which is that clinical trials are ongoing to find a good vaccine candidate. Last Monday the first participant was vaccinated. The clinical trial is called Tumaini, which means “hope” in Swahili. The trial is made up of people who have recently been in close contact with individuals now confirmed to have the Bundibugyo virus. The first vaccine up for testing is the one tailored to prevent the Ebola virus, but several Bundibugyo-specific inoculations are currently in development and will be tested as well.

Now let’s get into some news about artificial intelligence. Just a few weeks after dropping hundreds of AI-generated math breakthroughs on a field that’s already in crisis, OpenAI is piling on more. Here to tell us more about this shake-up is artificial intelligence and technology reporter Peter Hall. He’s currently working as an editorial fellow at Scientific American. Thanks so much for coming on to chat, Peter.

Peter Hall: Good to meet you and good to talk with you.

Feltman: So could you give our listeners a little bit of backstory for how this has been heating up?

Hall: Yeah. So over the past few months OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as other players, have really been trying to flex the ability of their models by, um, proving or disproving famous math conjectures.

And last week OpenAI introduced these three results across math, physics and theoretical computer science that are quite big. And Anthropic also released the same result, almost at the same time on the same day.

Feltman: And so, to give our listeners a little bit of context, what kinds of problems are we talking about and what does this process usually look like, you know, when human mathematicians are involved?

Hall: So there’s a huge collection of problems that mathematicians have conjectured or guessed over decades of research. For the proofs from last week, these centered around problems related to Millennium Prize Problems, which are these group of seven problems that the Clay Mathematics Institute published in 2000 as a collection of problems that have existed across math and physics and computer science that are so noteworthy and so important and so difficult that they would get a million-dollar prize for a solution to them.

Feltman: So is there any controversy about whether what OpenAI and Anthropic are presenting are actually solutions to these problems, that they’re solved?

Hall: Right. So that’s the other side of the coin is that, usually, you know, math research is published in journals or on preprint servers or in conferences. It’s discussed among mathematicians.

These don’t really follow the same blueprint there. These are just kind of, like, put in GitHub repos as just a collection of AI-generated text and programming that they claim not only shows that the result is true but also has verified it in a programming language called Lean, which is meant specifically for mathematics.

So definitely the aspect of, like, how intelligible these results are and what kind of insights people are gaining from them has been a huge point of controversy—and you know, who gets the credit when a model is just outputting a bunch of ideas that we don’t really know exactly what they’re building off of.

Feltman: It’s like when that monkey took a selfie, except I had more respect for both the monkey and the photographer than I unfortunately do for a lot of AI companies. Well, what are the potential benefits to the mathematics community of these proofs being out there? You know, are there any upsides?

Hall: You know with previous drops, there has been efforts from the communities to go through the proof, really, you know, with a very fine-tooth comb and turn it into something that is expository and something that we can look at the techniques for and really understand some sort of mathematical insight for it.

You know, the hope is that solutions like these and the proof steps, even if they’re not written the best right now, can at some point down the line be turned into something that is useful. Like, you know, I can use the ideas from this to solve some other problem that I’ve seen elsewhere in my research.

Feltman: Well thank you so much for coming on to talk through this with us.

Hall: Of course. Thank you.

Feltman: Now for some research on an extremely timely subject: daylight saving time. DST just ended for those of us in the United States—not counting several territories, including Puerto Rico, and the exempt states Hawaii and Arizona,minus the Navajo Nation, which does still observe DST. Complicated, right? And it’s not like “springing forward” and “falling back” are much fun to deal with, either. Research suggests that shifting our clocks back and forth by an hour takes a toll on the body and the mind.

permanent and therefore “preserve” an hour of afternoon sunlight as we head deeper into fall. Last week President Donald Trump blasted the Senate for failing to take a vote in time to implement permanent DST this year, claiming in a social media post that literally no one wanted to change their clocks. While that’s characteristically hyperbolic, recent survey data does suggest that almost half of U.S. adults are opposed to all the falling and springing.

But according to a new analysis published in Current Biology, making DST permanent could have serious, dangerous consequences for school-age children. Researchers at the University of Washington who study how school start times impact adolescent health decided to quantify exactly how many more trips to school would happen in darkness if we switched to year-round DST. They found that the Sunshine Protection Act would lead to more than two billion dark morning commutes for children. They also confirmed that fatal morning crashes involving kids aged five to 18 are more likely to occur if the sun has yet to rise. So those additional dark commutes really do pose a risk.

The researchers aren’t arguing in favor of continuing to swap our clocks back and forth; in fact, they point out that while permanent DST would be the worst-case scenario for dark school commutes, our current system creates twice as many dark mornings as would occur under permanent standard time.

Listen: I’m as bummed out by an afternoon sunset as anyone else. But as long as we can get rid of the twice-a-year upheaval, I’m personally good with whatever. And keeping kids safe as they wait for the bus—or, even better, as they walk or bike to school, because we love a pedestrian-friendly commute—seems pretty worthwhile to me.

That’s all for this week’s science news roundup. We’ll be back on Wednesday to talk about how soybeans quietly swept the nation and on Friday we’re going to talk about how AI swept everywhere.

Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak, Allison Rodgers and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Marielle Issa and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for m

ore up-to-date and in-depth science news.For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great week!

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Good lord, it’s been a bad week for gaming. You don’t need to be a news hound or a Nostradamus to see where the problems are coming from: AI. From hardware to software to platforms to funding, “AI” is causing nothing but headaches for most gamers, and anyone else connected to the industry.

The billionaires want your RAM

Over a couple of cheeky pints with a fellow CEO, ChatGPT’s chief Sam Altman said the quiet part out loud: Your computer’s RAM would be far better utilized in one of OpenAI’s data centers. He was talking specifically about running AI models — which is possible to do on local hardware, especially on newer designs like Nvidia’s RTX Spark chips — but the sentiment follows for gaming PCs and consoles, too.

From Altman’s perspective as a billionaire profiting off the AI boom, yeah, of course all that hardware would be better in his hands, rented back to corporations and consumers one token at a time. The sentiment comes off as unimaginably elitist, even if it makes cold, robotic sense for pure allocation. One of the richest people on the planet thinks he should have powerful hardware, not you.And that sure seems to be the way the market is trending, with RAM in laptops and phones going backward for the first time in recent memory, even as every new device crows about AI capability. Remember that big push Microsoft had for “Copilot+” laptops that met a minimum spec, a minimum that its latest (and still very expensive) Surface devices can’t even meet?

It’s kind of ironic that Microsoft is having so much trouble with its Xbox platform. The cheapest Xbox is now $500, and the next-gen “Helix” model is projected to cost $1,200 to $1,800 to produce. Microsoft has been struggling to keep Xbox competitive for over a decade, but it’s hard to feel bad for the company that’s also pushing AI in every one of its products, so much that it had to apologize to Windows users.

Pity Sony and Nintendo, at least theoretically, as their price increases are beyond their control. Pity Framework and Valve for trying to make cool hardware at the worst time imaginable. But don’t shed a tear for Microsoft — it has sewn the wind.

AI slop floods the game platforms

CEOs being out-of-touch elitists isn’t new (here I’ll mention Epic CEO Tim Sweeney for a very specific reason), and we’ve been dealing with a nightmare of hardware prices for a year or so. But Steam’s recent Next Fest event highlighted how the AI problem is affecting the software side, too.

Next Fest has become a calendar event for gamers, a time when developers and publishers release demos for their exciting upcoming titles. But this year, with Steam absolutely infested with AI slop, things felt a little different. Though there was plenty of new stuff to try for PC gamers. But some developers are now wary of publishing demos, for fear that their games will be used as templates for vibe-coded copycats.

The fears are not unfounded. While shovelware and clones have always been a part of the gaming market, being able to point an LLM at an existing game is a new problem. It’s not as if you’re just slapping the cover into a Xerox machine and getting an instant, perfect copy…but it’s not so far removed from that, either. Fraudulent copies of games have already appeared on Steam and other platforms, and developers have been sent extortion messages threatening to use AI to copy their games if they don’t pay up. The problem is so widespread that Anthropic added more stringent, game-specific copyright protections to its Claude LLM.

Steam has moderation tools to stop outright fraud and intentional customer confusion. And Steam, more than other platforms, has at least made token attempts to inform players when generative AI is being used. But Valve has stopped short of allowing end users to filter out projects that are partly or mostly built with generative AI.

Valve is either unwilling or unable to be the slop police. It’s trying to walk a fine line between quality control and developer freedom. On one side, you get a walled garden that’s inaccessible to indie developers. On the other…well, you get the hellscape of slop that open platforms like Itch.io are turning into. New games and programs are flooding the market, growing exponentially, and almost all of it appears to be low-quality, vibe-coded garbage. It’s only accelerating the problem of discoverability.

Big games are becoming unsustainable

The problems don’t end with the smaller side of the game industry, either. Even while hardware becomes unaffordable, the trend of ballooning costs for AAA game development is making those games harder and harder to make. As graphics and game scope are pushed ever higher, reaching a possible pinnacle with the upcoming GTAVI, big games are getting the same budgets and gambles as Hollywood blockbusters. And it’s becoming a higher ratio of losses to wins.

Nowhere is this more evident than Mass Effect. After spending years in development, the much-anticipated sequel to the sci-fi RPG series was cancelled. EA also shut down its subsidiary Bioware, a legendary developer that struggled to deliver hits in the age of live services. It came shortly after the publisher went private, acquired by a private equity firm. EA seems to want lucrative sports games (and their associated gacha gambling) and more bankable IP like Star Wars. And, yeah, that also mirrors Hollywood woes.

But Mass Effect isn’t the only recent casualty. Microsoft returns to this tale of woe, as Gears of War: E-Day is estimated to have cost half a billion dollars to develop, yet sold less than half a million copies. Highguard, Saros, and Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 are all examples of recent releases for massively ambitious games that flopped hard enough to result in massive layoffs.

AI is a factor here, too. Aside from the bubble taking up room in terms of pure investment, publishers appear to be pointing to AI as a means of cutting headcount. The game development industry has been a bloodbath of layoffs for years, and it only seems to be accelerating, as companies like Nvidia and Epic promise they can pump out AAA-quality titles for a fraction of the cost by utilizing AI. Generated assets are starting to appear consistently in games as big as Fortnite and Call of Duty.

But those tokens aren’t free, and they’re getting more expensive. It remains unclear whether AI code and assets can consistently deliver returns for game developers big and small, no matter how hard the CEOs try to will them into being. This means the trends will continue, and accelerate. There will be more consolidation around existing, bankable franchises like GTA and Madden, and fewer new ideas coming from the biggest developers with the most resources.

No light at the end of the tunnel

Here’s where I offer a ray of hope to you, newsletter reader. Or at least it’s where I should offer that ray of hope. In a typical editorial, we’d place the good news here.

But I can’t. Because as amazing as some parts of the game industry have so recently become, the bad far outweighs the good. There is no ready solution to a tidal wave of AI slop making platforms unusable. No reining in CEOs who want to own everything of value and deliver as little as possible to consumers. No reversing the trend that drives creation costs higher and higher, and sends developers into unemployment lines.

The natural end to all of this is a crash, reminiscent of the video game industry collapse in the 1980s or the dot-com bubble pop of the early 2000s. With prices for the next generation of consoles looking more like used cars than entertainment devices, that crash seems almost inevitable. PC gamers would be spared that particular tribulation, but would find cold comfort as gaming hardware remains unaffordable, and the industry shifts further towards integrated graphics.

All of that may be academic, as the more likely catalyst for a game industry collapse is just the pop of the AI bubble. That would have catastrophic fallout for electronics in general and the economy as a whole.

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Credit: EA/OpenAI

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Joanna Freytag still remembers being in her garden when she got the call. It was Marvin, Edward’s riding buddy. “I’m so sorry, Joanna,” he told her. “I’m so sorry,” he said, again and again, until she cut him off: “What’s going on? Is he dead?”

When Joanna arrived at the hospital, she heard Edward long before she reached his room. “I could hear him cursing up a storm from a mile away,” she recalls. This wasn’t like him: Her husband rarely raised his voice and almost never cursed.

His behavior grew stranger in the coming days. He insisted that the television was mounted too high on the wall and asked Joanna to lower it. He also refused to get dressed. “It took us about two days to finally make him put some clothes on,” she says.

To Joanna, Edward seemed like a different person, but the sudden emergence of his inner toddler was exactly what might be expected from an injury affecting the frontal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for inhibition and self-control.

Perhaps the most famous case of this kind of injury is that of Phineas Gage, a 19th-century railroad worker who accidentally launched a tamping iron into his head. The three-foot-long metal spike obliterated much of his left frontal lobe and drastically altered his personality, rendering Gage, according to his doctor, “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom).”

Gage recovered and eventually moved to Chile, where he worked as a stagecoach driver. He seems to have largely reclaimed his personality and executive function before he died from an epileptic seizure, 12 years after his accident. There is no record, however, of his developing any talent like the one that Edward soon discovered.

About two weeks after Edward’s crash, Joanna was driving him home after a visit to her mother when Edward reached over and turned on the radio.

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SadieDingfelder

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In the 1600s, fishers in Peru saw that every few years around Christmastime, the waters there warmed, and they caught fewer anchovies. They called this “El Niño” – the boy – after the Christ child.

In the early 20th century, the physicist Gilbert Walker noticed that the prevailing low atmospheric pressure and rainy weather over the western Pacific and dry, high pressure over the eastern Pacific periodically flipped. But it wasn’t until 1969 that meteorologist Jacob Bjerknes linked the two, showing that swells of warm water in the Pacific Ocean end up wreaking havoc on weather across the globe.

Under normal conditions, the sun’s heat and Earth’s spin fuel east-to-west trade winds around the tropics, which blow water into a “warm pool” near Indonesia. As this warm pool grows, it builds up energy. “It could be a bit like a coiled spring waiting to emerge,” says Richard Allan at the University of Reading, UK.

Every two to seven years, natural chaotic disturbances release that spring. Bursts of westerly winds can blow against and slow the easterly trade winds, allowing swells of warm water to roll across the Pacific Ocean, raising sea levels along the coasts of Peru, Colombia and Ecuador. These so-called Kelvin waves indicate that El Niño is coming.

A self-reinforcing cycle called the Bjerknes feedback kicks in. The blob of warm water suppresses the upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich deep water that normally makes Peru’s anchovy fishery so rich, further warming the surface water. The warm sea heats the air above it and causes it to expand. The resulting fall in atmospheric pressure slows the trade winds down even more, since winds flow from high to low pressure. This allows still more warm water to slosh back into the eastern Pacific.

The swathe of warm water stretching across the tropical Pacific releases trillions of joules of heat energy into the atmosphere, raising worldwide temperatures on top of global warming. This is why scientists expect 2027 to be the hottest year on record. But it also drastically alters weather patterns, bringing drought and wildfires to some areas and storms and flooding to others.

Normally, warm air rises over the warm pool, carrying moisture that falls out in thunderstorms, which is why rainforests flourish in places like Indonesia. Denuded of moisture, this warm, dry air then reaches the top of the troposphere and spreads out to the east and west. It descends over the eastern Pacific and the Horn of Africa, fuelling a belt of such air loops around the tropics called the Walker circulation.

During El Niño, however, the warming of the eastern Pacific moves this upward convection eastward, shifting the entire Walker circulation. Now dry, warm air that was sinking over the Horn of Africa and the eastern Pacific is sinking over Indonesia and the Amazon, encouraging drought and wildfires there. Over eastern Africa, warm air is rising, increasing rainfall and the risk of flooding.

Meanwhile, the warming waters also create a stronger temperature contrast between the tropical and northern Pacific, strengthening the jet stream and bringing more storms and wet weather to the southern US. It can bring storms and rain to the UK as well, in certain circumstances.

“If this deep convection in the atmosphere moves around, it changes things locally, but it also then starts to change the whole circulation of the atmosphere,” says Tim Stockdale at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. “That’s why El Niño is a big deal, not just some local process.”

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Meta and Fourier developed Max in just three months before starting work on its successor, Max 2, in September (representational age).Fourier/YouTube

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Like a lot of Americans, I’ve grown accustomed to Supreme Court justices speaking out much more frequently and informally than they once did. Yet still there was more than one moment in a public conversation Elena Kagan had at Catholic University last month when I almost couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

The justices like to say that their opinions speak for themselves. In the old days, they nurtured the mystique of their delicate yet elevated position in government, rarely if ever revealing their own feelings about the law, American politics or life in general. Anyone who wanted to know what a justice really thought, they claimed, would do best simply to read their rulings.

That is no longer true. Today’s bench is among the most voluble in the court’s history — the justices seem constantly to be writing books, giving speeches, engaging with interviewers and, increasingly, complaining about the institution they serve and (sometimes) the colleagues they serve with.

Even by that new standard, Justice Kagan’s comments, which came during an hour-plus sit-down interview at Catholic University’s law school, broke the judicial omertà, both in what she said explicitly about her conservative counterparts’ blasé attitude toward American democracy and in what she appeared to say about the dangerously compromised state of the court in 2026.

The Catholic University law professor J. Joel Alicea, who interviewed Justice Kagan, started the conversation by asking her about rulings involving partisan gerrymandering, voting rights and money in politics, all of which were decided on party-line votes with her and the other Democratic appointees in the minority.

“The court got it wrong” in each of these cases, Justice Kagan said, because of a “lack of appropriate concern or understanding of the consequences of their decisions.” She pointed to the Republican-appointed majority’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in April, which was followed almost immediately by a mad scramble in states across the South to pass new, more partisan gerrymanders aimed at erasing Black lawmakers’ districts.

Protecting Black political participation and representation was precisely what the Voting Rights Act was enacted to do, she noted. By eliminating the last meaningful tool of that landmark law, she explained, “the court kind of said, ‘Oh, well.’” Whether that was meant in the sense of “we don’t care if Black political representation plummets” or in the sense of “it won’t plummet,” Justice Kagan concluded, “the court has kind of blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works, and has created a democracy that does not work as well as it should.”

This wasn’t the first time she has leveled such sweeping criticisms; you can find similar charges in her dissenting opinions in that and other democracy-related cases, in which she skewered her right-wing colleagues for misunderstanding the law and disregarding Americans’ democratic rights.

But Justice Kagan was offering this critique off the bench, in public — where the justices know their words carry a special significance, particularly before the midterms. Even more surprising, of all the Democratic appointees, if not all nine justices, Justice Kagan has a reputation as the most restrained and institutionalist.

At a judicial conference in July, Justice Kagan took pains to defend her conservative counterparts against accusations that they were acting as a rubber stamp for the Trump administration. So it was that much more remarkable to hear her admit, just a few months later, such wide-ranging frustrations with her fellow justices.

And she wasn’t done: “This court is deeply conservative, and in that way very different from the court I joined 16 years ago.” That court, she added, “was by no means liberal” — it still had a 5-4 conservative majority and had only months earlier decided Citizens United v. F.E.C., which transformed the role of money in politics (and in which Justice Kagan, then serving as President Obama’s solicitor general, had argued the losing side). Still, as recently as 2017, “nobody in America thought the court was in the pocket of any one group or any one party or any one anything,” she said. “The court had a kind of legitimacy. And when the court has a kind of legitimacy of that kind, it helps to create a stable country.”

Her implication, of course, is that today’s court, dominated by a right-wing supermajority that rules consistently in favor of a longstanding conservative agenda, lacks that “kind of legitimacy” — about as serious a charge as a sitting justice can make.

Justice Kagan had one more dig, which verged on the personal. Reflecting on the role of originalism in the court’s jurisprudence, she said, “I’ve never thought originalism really works,” adding that the “cartwheels” originalists perform to reach their preferred outcomes are “almost embarrassing.” In sum, she said, “the whole project is kind of misconceived, and it’s not a very good match with the Constitution we have.”

Originalism has been the coin of the conservative judicial realm for decades and is currently ascendant at the Supreme Court; as Justice Kagan said ruefully at her own confirmation hearings, “We are all originalists.” Calling it “misconceived” and its practitioners “embarrassing” may sound relatively mild to ears accustomed to the crude invective of the Trump era, but it suggests that the interpersonal conflicts on the bench aren’t getting resolved anytime soon.

I would go so far as to infer a deeper message in Justice Kagan’s remarks: When taken together, her critiques of her colleagues — their disregard for democratic rights, their undermining of the court’s legitimacy and their “misconceived” commitment to originalism — offer a coherent case for reforming the court.

It goes something like this: The conservative majority has been arrogating outsize power to itself over the past several years, claiming the authority to decide many of the most contested questions of American legal and political life, while Congress has stood idly by. Even when the court rules that it has no power to act, as it did in the partisan gerrymandering case, it has “deleterious effects” on democracy, as Justice Kagan pointed out. (That ruling has also disproportionately benefited Republican political interests, which goes to her point about legitimacy.)

Next, pair the court’s arrogation of political power with the fact that the right-wing justices apparently consider themselves accountable to no one. As Justice Samuel Alito wrongly claimed about Congress in 2023, “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”

Finally, consider this in the broader context of judicial life tenure, a functionally impossible-to-amend Constitution and — to Justice Kagan’s point about originalism — a majority in thrall to a theory of constitutional interpretation that privileges the supposed consensus of people living more than two centuries ago over the values and wishes of those alive today.

Put it all together, and the American people have no way to push the Constitution in a more democratic direction. No way to stop six justices from deciding that protecting democratic rights like voting — “just about the most important thing that the court does,” as Justice Kagan described it at Catholic University — is no longer necessary.

The court’s profoundly antidemocratic attitude was summed up neatly by Chief Justice John Roberts, who said in a 2009 interview: “The most important thing for the public to understand is that we are not a political branch of government. They don’t elect us. If they don’t like what we’re doing, it’s more or less just too bad.”

The chief justice offered one remedy: impeachment followed by conviction in the Senate. However, as he also noted, that has never happened in American history. Impeaching even a single justice would be an enormous lift.

There is a better and easier solution, and Justice Kagan’s critiques last month point directly to it: major court reform imposed by Congress.

Structural failures demand structural repairs. Whether these repairs take the form of term limits, an expanded bench, binding ethics rules, restrictions of the court’s jurisdiction or other measures, they are the only way for the American people, through their elected representatives, to reclaim power over a court gone rogue.

Is this what Justice Kagan was saying, implicitly, in her talk at Catholic University? I can’t be certain, but I’m comfortable speculating.

In this moment of rock-bottom public confidence in the court, Justice Kagan was not unaware that she was speaking outside of the formal boundaries of court decisions, and thus challenging the public appearance of judicial comity. Indeed this may be Kagan’s restraint showing up after all: With her comments, she is ringing alarm bells about the seriousness of problems at the court.

And while the justices may have concluded that they are the final word in interpreting the Constitution, no one gave them power over how we interpret their own words.

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Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times

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