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Math’s most prestigious prizes were announced today at the International Congress of Mathematicians. Following a lively brass-band performance by the West Philadelphia Orchestra in a massive auditorium at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, the president of the International Mathematical Union bestowed the prizes to four mathematicians for work ranging from the theory of knots to the motion of fluids.

The Fields Medals went to Hong Wang of New York University and France’s Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES), Yu Deng of the University of Chicago, John Pardon of Stony Brook University and Jacob Tsimerman of the University of Toronto.

In the awards’ 90-year history, Wang is only the third woman to win one, after mathematicians Maryam Mirzakhani and Maryna Viazovska in 2014 and 2022, respectively. Wang and Deng represent the prizes’ only Chinese-born recipients besides mathematician Shing-Tung Yau, who won a Fields Medal in 1982.

The awards, often referred to as math’s Nobel Prizes, are named for John Charles Fields, a Canadian mathematician who led the push for their creation in the 1920s as a way to bring the international math community together. But unlike the Nobels, they are only bestowed every four years and, starting in 1966, only go to researchers who are less than 40 years old.

Hong Wang

When Wang rose to speak during a symposium at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., this past February, she opened with a characteristic note of humility. “Thank you for having me; it’s a great honor,” she said. “Especially when I saw the speaker list, I thought, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t speak.’”

But no one in the rapt audience shared Wang’s opinion. At age 34, her work at the interface of two mathematical fields—taking collections of wavelike equations and using them to explore how shapes fill space—had already transformed both subjects. In particular, a 2025 proof of the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture that she co-authored with mathematician Joshua Zahl marked a triumphant end to what had been a fervent, field-defining 50-year search.

Now Wang possesses the ultimate qualification for any list of mathematical greats: a Fields Medal.

The Kakeya conjecture is the answer to a mathematical game: swirl your pencil around in the air so that it points in every direction exactly once while also swiveling it through as little space as possible. Wang and Zahl proved a fundamental limit to how small that space can possibly be.

“She solved the ‘holy grail’ problem,” says Nets Katz, a mathematician at Rice University, adding that this is only one of the accomplishments that “has made her a central figure” in the area. Wang’s Fields Medal, he says, “is well deserved.”

Wang remembers being excited when Mirzakhani became the first woman to win a Fields medal in 2014. But like it was for the late Mirzakhani, who was a reticent public figure, this aspect of the achievement is somewhat secondary to Wang. “I didn’t think too much about it,” she says.

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The mania had started with something real. The safety bicycle: equal wheels, pneumatic tires, a chain drive. The first bicycle model where the rider’s feet could actually touch the road if they needed to stop.

Too bad speculators didn’t keep their feet on solid ground.

“Suddenly, everyone wants to own a bicycle,” says Will Quinn, associate professor of finance at Queen’s University Belfast and co-author of Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles.

The year was 1897, and the bicycle boom had hit Birmingham hard. Tradesmen north of the city bent and brazed steel into frames. When the owner of Dunlop Tires, Ernest Terah Hooley, saw the surge, he jumped. He bribed journalists, packed company boards with noblemen, bought companies for cheap and sold them to the public at a markup.

Ernest Hooley, one of the British entrepreneurs behind the Birmingham bicycle boom. He’d go on to declare bankruptcy four times. (Photo by the Print Collector/Getty Images)

People began daytrading bicycle shares. Nearly every small bicycle company in Birmingham, ~400, went public; there was a rush on the London Stock Exchange and share prices boomed by 10x.

“About a year after that, three quarters of them have gone bankrupt,” says Quinn, who has studied 300 years of financial bubbles.

At the time, The Economist wrote that investors had subscribed millions “on the assumption that high prices would be maintained, but that delusion has been rudely knocked on the head.”

By the end of 1898, the small investors who had bought in late lost the most; the promoters and early insiders had long since cashed out.

But it wasn’t all bad: it created jobs. It left thousands with bicycles. And it laid the foundation for what would become the automotive industry.

The bicycle boom in Birmingham inspired new bike-friendly women’s clothing designs too. (Photo by London Stereoscopic Company/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

From the bicycle frenzy to the dot-com boom to today’s AI race, financial history is littered with bubbles.

So what happens when they pop?

For Quinn and his co-author, Queen’s University Belfast professor John Turner, the bubble is a poor metaphor. They prefer fire.

The necessary ingredients for this kind of fire, according to Turner:

• Fuel: from low interest rates and freely available credit.
• Marketability: regulatory or technological changes that enable people to buy and sell the bubble asset more easily.
• Speculators: new investors entering the market, and experienced investors unable to short the market.

From there, Turner says, you need a spark: a radical new technology, let’s say, that promises to upend the world.

With the caveat that no one can predict the future (or, as Georgetown University finance professor Jim Angel told The Hustle, “you really only know after the fact, and everybody wakes up with a hangover and goes, ‘what were we thinking?’”), we asked five experts to weigh in on what an AI bubble would mean for the stock market, the job market, and the everyday lives of Americans.

For the stock market

First off, the amount of money being spent on AI is unprecedented. Morgan Stanley predicted hyperscalers will spend a collective $1.4T by 2028. Wells Fargo estimated $1.1T by 2027.

“It’s an extraordinary amount of money,” says Ryan Cummings, chief of staff at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policymaking.

That kind of spend brings behemoth revenue expectations for the companies on the receiving end of the outlay, like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Alphabet.

“If you don’t hit those revenues this year, you need more next year,” he says. “The burden increases over time the longer you go on without hitting those targets.”

Investors are watching how capital expenditure spending on the AI infrastructure build-out tracks against revenue. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

And there’s good reason to be wary of much-touted upcoming IPOs from Anthropic and OpenAI.

“All these firms are receiving these very, very high valuations,” Cummings says. “But they’re all being priced as though they’re all going to be the winner of AI. We know not all firms are going to make it.”

Still, if the bubble does pop, most of the damage will be localized to investors unless major institutions are borrowing money to try to capitalize on the boom.

“You don’t know who’s swimming naked til the tide goes out,” Angel says. “To discover some banks lost their shirts — that can have knock-on effects through the rest of the economy.”

For the job market

Like everything else AI-related, experts are divided on what it will mean for the job market.

“In the short term, there’s a construction boom,” says Azeem Azhar, tech entrepreneur and founder of Exponential Views research group. “From a labor market perspective, that’s a really, really good thing because it creates all sorts of new jobs.”

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Five experts weigh in.

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A Senate committee voted Thursday to hold Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the scientist who led the country’s Covid response, in contempt of Congress for declining to answer questions during a hearing last week.

Dr. Fauci invoked his constitutional right under the Fifth Amendment to remain silent, refusing to respond to a single question during the three-hour session of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Republicans on the panel, led by the chairman, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, say that he is ineligible for Fifth Amendment protection. The reason, they say, is that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. granted him an unconditional pardon for public service actions during a period that includes the pandemic.

Many people, including Trump administration officials, and even the president himself, have invoked the Fifth Amendment. But the case is unique, legal scholars say, because of the tension between the reach of a presidential pardon and that of the Fifth Amendment.

The potential consequences could be grave for Dr. Fauci. Here are some things to know.

Why did Mr. Biden pardon Dr. Fauci?

Almost immediately after President Trump was elected to a second term in 2024, Republicans vowed to pursue several prominent figures, among them Dr. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, for his management of the pandemic. On his last day in office, Mr. Biden issued Dr. Fauci, and others, an unconditional “pre-emptive pardon” that protects him from federal prosecution for his actions from 2014 through Jan. 19, 2025.

Why did the Senate committee seek his testimony?

There were many pandemic-related issues that senators sought to explore. They accused Dr. Fauci of funding research that led to the creation of the coronavirus and of lying to Congress about it under oath, allegations that Dr. Fauci has long denied. They sought to hold him responsible for school lockdowns, masking and vaccine mandates, and other Covid-era restrictions imposed by states, communities and employers.

Is Dr. Fauci eligible to plead the Fifth?

This is the question at the heart of the legal debate.

Republican senators on the committee contend that because Dr. Fauci had a presidential pardon, he was already protected: By refusing to answer their questions, he had effectively violated their subpoena of him. “You don’t have any rights under the Fifth Amendment because you’ve been pardoned, as you very well know,” Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, told Dr. Fauci at the hearing.

Legal scholars say the issue is not that clear.

Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert at George Washington University Law School, said that the impact of pardons on a witness’s ability to invoke the Fifth was “murky,” noting that there is little case law on the issue.

“There are good-faith arguments that his pardon would afford him effective immunity,” rendering Dr. Fauci ineligible for the Fifth Amendment protection, Mr. Turley said in an interview. He noted that there were also claims that Dr. Fauci’s opening statement could be construed as waiving his Fifth Amendment privilege, negating the cloak of immunity granted by the pardon itself.

Other scholars maintain that Dr. Fauci’s invocation of the Fifth was proper because he was legally vulnerable. His pardon period ended roughly 18 months before the Senate hearing, from which fresh, contemporaneous charges could have emerged. Mr. Paul has said for years that Dr. Fauci belongs in prison.

Pleading the Fifth Amendment is an acceptable strategy, “given the pretext of the investigation, which is that they are looking for a way to put him in jail, and given the president’s own track record of vindictive prosecutions,” said Kimberly Wehle, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law who is an expert on the pardon power.

In his opening statement to the committee, Dr. Fauci essentially said he believed that the purpose of the hearing was to capture evidence against a preselected defendant.

If the committee wanted frank testimony and a full exploration of unresolved pandemic questions, senators could have offered him limited or full immunity covering the testimony, a number of law experts said.

Not doing so “debunks their claim that he’s completely protected by presidential pardon,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, who is a constitutional law professor. “It’s only because they imagine that he can still be prosecuted that they wouldn’t offer him immunity.”

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Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing last week. Credit…Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

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A magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck just south of the city of Kumamoto on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu on Tuesday afternoon local time. The earthquake has ignited fires and damaged roads and buildings, including a mall where rescue workers are seeking to extract trapped people.

The earthquake occurred along a strike-slip fault, where the two sides of a fracture in Earth’s crust slide past each other, located in what independent earthquake scientist Amilcar Carrera-Cevallos calls “one of the most seismically complex spots in Japan.”

“Kyushu sits at a real tectonic crossroads,” he says. On one side, the Philippine Sea Plate is subducting under the Eurasian Plate at a rate of about 40 to 50 millimeters (1.6 to two inches) per year. But on the other side, there is also a so-called back-arc basin that is pulling apart. “That stretching reaches into central Kyushu and creates the Beppu-Shimabara graben, a rift zone riddled with active faults and volcanoes like Aso and Unzen,” Carrera-Cevallos says. “So you’ve got subduction pushing from one side and rifting pulling from the other, all crossed by a major strike-slip fault, the Median Tectonic Line.”

The earthquake occurred in a local fracture inside the crust of the Eurasian Plate and was very shallow, at about 10 kilometers (six miles) below the surface. That shallowness “is a big part of why the shaking reached Shindo 7—the highest level on Japan’s scale—and why buildings and bridges collapsed,” Carrera-Cevallos says. It was also right under a population center, says Allen Husker, a California Institute of Technology geophysicist. If the quake had occurred closer to the subduction trench, the damage would’ve been less severe.

This earthquake happened along the same fault zone as a spate of deadly temblors in 2016. Those were also strike-slip earthquakes and hit some of the same towns. “The big difference is what happens next,” Carrera-Cevallos says. “In 2016 a smaller [magnitude] 6.2 earthquake struck first, and then, about a day and a half later, a much bigger [magnitude] 7.0 hit nearby on a different fault. Nobody expected that second, larger quake.”

Carrera-Cevallos says he is struck by how it did not take a strong subduction quake to create the highest level of shaking and cause substantial damage. This creates a difficult problem in structural engineering that aims to contend with seismological risk. Local faults “are numerous [and] poorly mapped compared to subduction interfaces, and they produce very high peak ground accelerations close to the source—exactly the kind of near-fault, high-frequency shaking that’s toughest on older, unreinforced structures,” he says. “This is a seismically mature, well-monitored region, but events like this remind us that even well-understood tectonic settings can still surprise us in their details.”

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In the wee hours of 31 May 2025, billions of tons of charged particles erupted from the Sun and began to hurtle in our direction. Spacecraft tracked the liftoff of that huge burst of plasma, enabling U.S. officials to predict when the eruption would strike Earth, within a 12-hour window. But a new view of the Sun’s roiling outer atmosphere could have enabled scientists to peg the solar storm’s arrival time much more precisely—to within just half an hour.

That precision comes from PUNCH, a NASA mission keeping an eye on a part of space that’s been a blind spot for space weather. Like a sensitive 3D camera whose field of view covers half the sky, it watches everything escaping the Sun’s atmosphere and traveling toward us. “We can track space weather all the way across the inner Solar System,” says Craig DeForest, the mission’s principal investigator.

He and his colleagues have now shown that based on those observations, they could have forecast within minutes when the 2025 storm would have struck Earth’s magnetic field, threatening satellites, power grids, and other technologies. NASA announced the result today; the team will elaborate on the findings at the Committee on Space Research’s meeting on 7 August.

Today’s space weather forecasts extrapolate from observations near the Sun to predict solar storms’ arrivals. But how a giant blob of plasma will travel depends on the environment it interacts with along the way. Howard Singer, chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), likens the situation to observing a hurricane forming off Africa’s west coast and trying to predict when it might hit Florida. If our next observation is right before it hits Florida, instead of somewhere in between, our forecasts will provide only so much warning—and be only so precise. “That’s where we are now for something leaving the Sun,” he says.

Space weather forecasters would receive a major boost from the equivalent of the weather satellites that track weather systems moving across the globe, DeForest says. Enter PUNCH, launched in March 2025. It combines four synchronized satellites that orbit Earth some 620 kilometers up, taking pictures of a swath of sky 90° wide centered on the Sun. Its instruments remove 99% of background light to reveal the solar wind—streams of particles from the Sun—and the plasma bursts, or coronal mass ejections (CMEs), that scatter sunlight to create a visible glow. PUNCH provides “a massive increase in visibility around the Sun,” says Lisa Upton, solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute.

DeForest and his colleagues wanted to test what all this extra visibility would do for forecasting. So in a proof of concept, they tracked the May 2025 CME as it left the Sun. Meanwhile, the team plugged PUNCH’s data into a model that uses the CME’s evolving size and shape—approximated as a “ludicrous ice cream cone,” according to the researchers’ paper—to predict its arrival time.

Traveling at an average of 1380 kilometers per second, the CME reached Earth after nearly 30 hours, causing a “G4” geomagnetic storm, severe enough to threaten infrastructure. Models using PUNCH observations could have pinpointed the arrival to between 5 and 5:30 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time on 1 June—enabling operators of satellites, electric utilities, and other systems to prepare 8 hours ahead of time. “We analyzed one event in a deliberately crude way and found this amazing result,” DeForest says.

Now comes the heavy lifting: analyzing dozens of other CMEs that PUNCH has tracked to see how precisely its data could have forecast arrival times. If PUNCH performs well, its data could be used in other research models for space weather. “You have lots of models all trying to forecast the same thing, but you need data sets to validate which is correct,” says Jamie Favors, who directs NASA’s Space Weather Program.

Already, forecasters are testing a prototype product called QuickPUNCH to gauge how much a steady stream of rapid-turnaround images of slightly lower quality can improve CME arrival time predictions. Forecasters have a winning streak they want to sustain: In 2011, modeling advances allowed SWPC to shrink its prediction error for solar storm arrival time from 15 hours down to six, according to Daniel Baker, a space physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “If PUNCH can help give better information about CME size and shape,” he adds, “I could imagine getting regular accuracy of
2 to 3 hours in arrival times.”

It’s not just arrival time that matters. The intensity of a geomagnetic storm depends partly on the orientation of the magnetic field embedded in the plasma. If that field’s orientation is aligned with Earth’s field, Upton says, the storm’s effects will be far milder than if they’re opposed. Where things stand today, “We don’t really have that information until 30 to 40 minutes before it hits,” Singer says. But by sensing both visible light and its polarization, PUNCH can capture the front of an approaching CME in 3D, allowing researchers to model the strength and orientation of the front’s magnetic field hours before impact.

DeForest likes to emphasize that PUNCH is not just a space weather sentinel. For him, one of the mission’s most satisfying early successes is among its most profound. As PUNCH has gazed out at what he calls a “dynamic ocean of solar storms”—even spotting a comet’s tail shuddering in the solar wind, like smoke from a blown-out candle—the mission has offered an unparalleled glimpse of where we sit within the Solar System. “For the first time,” he says, “we can see our neighborhood in space.”

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PUNCH’s four satellites in Earth orbit (seen here in an artist’s conception) observe the Sun’s atmosphere.NASA

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Several thousand people packed Linda Mar Beach, south of San Francisco, on Saturday to catch a glimpse of tail-wagging joy rides at the 10th annual World Dog Surfing Championships.

Competitors included Labrador retrievers, French bulldogs, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, an Australian cattle dog and a miniature pinscher.

Some of the dogs wore goggles; others wore brightly colored life jackets. They balanced on foam boards that their owners pushed carefully into choppy waves. James Wall came to judge the competition, bringing along his 15-year-old pit bull, Faith, a retired legend of dog surfing and the pioneer of an 180-degree move known as the helicopter.

Mr. Wall said the sport had evolved from a novelty of “dogs in goofy costumes” into a not-uncommon sight at some California beaches.

About 30 top dogs in the United States compete in a circuit of events that often double as fund-raisers for animal centers and pet adoptions, Mr. Wall said. The dogs are scored on tricks, the size of the wave they catch, how long they can stay on the board and how much they seem to be enjoying it all.

The championship on Saturday, which awarded winners with medals and dog food, had no clear favorite in the pack.

“Any dog, any day, any wave,” Mr. Wall said.“Rippin” Rosie, a 5-year-old Labrador retriever, emerged as the winner of the extra large dog category and the overall “Surfing Spirit” award.

Her owner, Steve Drottar, said he had raised four Labrador retrievers, but Rosie was the first to take to riding the water instead of jumping in it. Mr. Wall said he found Faith as a puppy in a parking garage.

Her decade-plus surfing has netted him around $40,000, which includes free GoPro equipment and video licensing deals showing Faith surfing across menu tablets at Outback Steakhouse and Olive Garden restaurants.

He’s convinced any dog — be it a Chihuahua or Great Dane — can learn to surf with the right human teaching them.

Training a dog to surf is like training a dog to do anything, Mr. Wall said.

“It’s a matter of practice,” he said. “You make it rewarding. You show them it’s a friendly, fun time.” Interest in dog surfing has only grown, he added.

“Now it’s a viral thing,” Mr. Wall said. “How can you look at a dog having a good time and not smile?”

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Visuals by Jason Henry

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When it comes to animal intelligence, octopuses have few rivals. Some species of the cephalopods lug coconut shells around for mobile shelter; others radically transform their bodies to mimic deadlier creatures. Almost two decades ago in Germany, a particularly wily octopus named Otto short-circuited his aquarium’s electrical system by shooting jets of water at an overhead light that perhaps caused an objectionable glare.

Octopuses are as clever, in their own way, as such famously brainy animals as crows, dolphins or chimpanzees. But they’re endowed with a fundamentally different intelligence, one shaped by a separate evolutionary path and defined by a nervous system that’s distributed throughout their bodies rather than centralized like that of the brains of most animals.

Now researchers have discovered another surprise in octopuses’ biology: a mutation, never documented in any other animal, that makes their cells remarkably accurate at creating proteins and that appeared just as they began evolving large nervous systems. “We can’t make a direct relation [between] a slight change in the accuracy of protein synthesis and so-called advanced intelligence,” says Nicholas Bellono, a Harvard University molecular biologist. But he notes that the timing “maps perfectly” with the emergence of sophisticated behaviors in octopuses.

Bellono and his colleagues, who published their work today in Current Biology, stumbled upon this evolutionary innovation by accident. Co-lead author Richard Han, then a graduate student in the lab of Harvard Medical School cell biologist Amy Lee, was examining octopus RNA—the molecules that carry the genetic instructions that cells use to build proteins—when he noticed an unusual break in the genetic sequences that formed ribosomes, the cell’s protein-making machines. This stretch of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) is identical across every other animal that’s been studied, so the deviation jumped out at Han. “Finding a difference here was really unexpected for us,” he says.

To figure out how this break affected ribosome function, the researchers engineered it into Escherichia coli bacteria. The altered bacteria made fewer mistakes when building proteins, which lowered the risk of misfolded molecules clumping together into disease-causing toxic aggregates. Next, the researchers compared octopus and squid tissue and found that the former did, in fact, have fewer and smaller protein clumps.

Though the advantages are obvious, it’s unclear why octopuses alone evolved this rRNA break. It seems exclusive to shallow-water octopus species, which split off from their deep-water counterparts roughly 100 million years ago to colonize a highly complex environment. Faced with more predators, prey, and competition, their nervous systems rapidly ballooned to meet the new demands. And neurons, being long-lived, are especially vulnerable to protein clumps, according to the new study’s co-lead author Rishav Mitra, a postdoctoral fellow in Bellono’s lab. By preventing misfolded proteins, he says, the rRNA break “might help these neurons to work well.”

Other researchers say that a connection between the break and octopus intelligence is plausible, though it lacks direct evidence. “These associations are intriguing,” says Eli Eisenberg, a geneticist at Tel Aviv University, who wasn’t involved with the study, “but more proof is needed to support the hypothesis that they contributed to the evolution of neural complexity or cognitive capacity.” To truly establish that link, he says, you’d have to alter the rRNA break and test for changes in learning, sensory processing or problem-solving. “These experiments would of course be highly challenging,” Eisenberg adds.

The real value of this finding may lie in potential health care applications. In humans, protein clumps play a role in many neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Lee hopes it will be possible to design drugs that target ribosomes to mimic the octopus’s useful trick for superaccurate protein synthesis, reducing the burden of misfolded molecules. If we “use nature as a guide to understand how that happens naturally,” she says, “then we can probably find ways to put it into human cells.”

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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Archaeologists discovered a silver amulet containing an 18-line text showing the oldest known devotion to Christianity north of the Alps.
• Computer technology helped unravel the mystery of the text hidden within a silver amulet from the third century A.D.
• The find rewrites the history of Christianity’s spread in the northern Roman Empire.

An 1,800-year-old silver amulet discovered buried in a Frankfurt, Germany, grave, still next to the chin of the man who wore it, has 18 lines of text written in Latin on just 1.37 inches of silver foil. That could be enough to rewrite the known history of Christianity in the Roman Empire.

The amulet—and the inscription—are the oldest evidence of Christianity found north of the Alps.

Every other link to reliable evidence of Christian life in the northern Alpine area of the Roman Empire is at least 50 years younger, all coming from the fourth century A.D. But the amulet, found in a grave dating between 230 and 270 A.D. and now known as “The Frankfurt Inscription,” was made to better decipher the inscription.

“This extraordinary find affects many areas of research and will keep science busy for a long time,” Ina Hartwig, Frankfurt’s head of culture and science, said in a translated statement. “This applies to archaeology as well as to religious studies, philology, and anthropology. Such a significant find here in Frankfurt is truly something extraordinary.”

The amulet was found in what was once the Roman city of Nida at an archaeological site outside of Frankfurt in 2018. During excavation of the area, crews uncovered an entire Roman cemetery wherein the plot designated as “grave 134,” a small silver amulet, known as a phylactery, was located right under the chin of the occupant’s skeleton. He likely wore it around his neck and was buried with it.

Following the find, the Archaeological Museum Frankfurt restored the silver amulet, which included a thin silver foil with an inscription, as seen by microscopic examinations and X-rays in 2019. The wafer-thin silver foil was too brittle to roll out.

In May 2024, a breakthrough came when using a state-of-the-art computer tomograph at the Leibniz Center for Archaeology in Mainz. “The challenge in the analysis was that the silver sheet was rolled, but of course after around 1,800 years it was also crumpled and pressed,” Ivan Calandra, laboratory manager for imaging procedures at the center, said in a statement.

“Using the CT, we were able to scan it in a very high resolution and create a 3D model.” The virtual object was then scanned piece by piece, slowly revealing the words, allowing experts to finally get a look at the inscribed text on the individual fragments from the scan.

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Douglas Sacha//Getty Images

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Key points

• Conflict plays an especially strong role in how people organize social relationships.
• After watching TV drama, brains begin distinguishing characters according to their rivalries and hostilities.
• Negative relationships appeared more clearly in the brain’s social map than friendships did.

Our minds constantly build maps of our relationships, and enemies seem to make a stronger impression than friends. We remember who trusts whom, who competes for influence, and who might turn against someone else. A new study suggests that antagonism may serve as one of the strongest landmarks on these internal maps.

The study followed 21 college students who had never watched the television drama “Suits.” Before viewing the show, they entered a brain scanner and looked at images of eight main characters. After watching six episodes, they returned for another scan and rated each character pair by relationship strength and whether the connection felt friendly or hostile.

The results suggest that a few hours of storytelling can reshape how the brain responds to unfamiliar faces. Antagonistic relationships left a clearer neural pattern than friendships.

The Mind Stores Relationships, Not Just People

Before watching the drama, participants knew nothing about the characters. But after six episodes, the same image carried a social biography, a history of loyalty, ambition, betrayal, or conflict.

Brain responses to the characters became more distinct after participants learned their stories. Each person seemed to gain a clearer position within an internal social map. This reflects how social knowledge works in everyday life. We rarely understand people in isolation, but as a friend, rival, ally, outsider, or threat.

For most of history, this ability helped people navigate small communities where survival depended on knowing the relationships in our social network. Modern life surrounds us with far larger networks, but the mind still tries to transform social complexity into a map it can use.

The study offers a glimpse into how the brain constructs that map. The clearest changes appeared when participants viewed characters linked by antagonistic relationships. Patterns in parts of the frontal and parietal regions of the brain increasingly reflected hostility after participants watched the drama. These areas help people interpret motives, consider another person’s perspective, evaluate social behavior, and think about the relationships between individuals. The findings suggest that they may also help organize negative social ties.

Why might hostility receive such special treatment? Conflict demands prediction. The mind may therefore give rivalry a sharper place in memory than friendships because hostility can change the meaning of an entire social network

How Stories Train the Social Brain

Yet these mental maps do not require direct experience. Participants never met the characters, yet their brains still formed detailed representations of their relationships.

Stories allow people to rehearse social life without living through every danger themselves. A drama presents an artificial society compressed into a few hours. Viewers watch alliances form, secrets spread, and rivalries escalate. The stakes belong to fictional characters, but the mental work belongs to the audience.

This may help explain why humans devote so much time to stories. Novels, television shows, theater, gossip, and mythology all simulate social reality. They teach us to track motives and anticipate betrayal. They also let us practice deciding whom to trust.

The brain also appeared to attach richer histories to the individual characters. Another brain area became more active after participants watched the drama. This region, called the precuneus, contributes to memory, reflection, and thinking about people’s inner lives. After viewers learned each character’s story, a face could retrieve scenes, intentions, choices, and emotional associations. Once a narrative gives someone a history, the brain begins treating the face as an entrance to a larger collection of knowledge

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William A. Haseltine, Ph.D., is the Chair and President of ACCESS Health International

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Mr. Trump is hardly the first U.S. president who has struggled to read Iran. Each of his predecessors since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution has tried to decode Iran’s murky power structure and the mind-set of its political leadership.

Most have come up short; some have been burned badly. A rare exception is President Barack Obama, whose 2015 nuclear deal with Iran was a 20-month diplomatic effort. Mr. Obama considered it a major achievement, despite criticism from Republicans and some Democrats that Iran had lured him into a flawed deal by feigning moderation.

But Mr. Trump may be the president who “has least understood Iran’s leadership,” said Kenneth Pollack, a former C.I.A. analyst and National Security Council official who has studied Iran for decades.

“In many ways, Trump represents the epitome of America’s frustrations with Iran,” Mr. Pollack said. “He has been both the most desirous of making a deal with Iran, and the one who used the most force against it. He has found that neither got him what he wanted.”

Mr. Trump often speaks as though massive force will produce a quick deal.

After the war opened with a Feb. 28 airstrike that killed Iran’s supreme leader of nearly 40 years, Ali Khamenei, Mr. Trump called on Iran’s people to rise up and “take over” their government. He added that he would then “choose” Iran’s next leader.

More senior Iranian officials would also be killed in airstrikes. But no popular uprising emerged.

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Mourners gathered at Azadi Square in Tehran last month, holding flags during the funeral procession for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader killed by an airstrike at the beginning of the U.S.-Iran war in February. Credit…Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times

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