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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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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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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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How handy would it be if you could make your tattoos invisible for a job interview in the morning, and reveal them again for a party in the evening? This sounds like science fiction, but it may soon be reality.

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have developed invisible tattoo ink than can be revealed with a UV torch and stays visible until switched off with white light. They have published their research in the journal Matter & Light.

They created different motifs with this ink ranging from a lantern that reveals its light when activated, to multicolored scales like those in the much-loved children’s book The Rainbow Fish.

The pigments used in these inks are so-called photochromic dyes(from the Greek “photos”, which means “light” and “chroma”, which means “color”). In other words, they are compounds that change colour when exposed to light. These dyes have been used for years in color-changing sunglasses.

Light carries energy, and photochromic compounds are designed in such a way that this energy is enough to cause a chemical change that alters the shape and therefore the properties of the molecule.

In the case of the “invisible” tattoo ink, two or three seconds of bright ultraviolet (UV) light is enough to form a new ring in the dye molecule, which switches a colorless pigment to a colored one. A variety of colors are available depending on the exact structure of the molecule.

A blast of bright white light reverses the reaction, breaking the ring and turning the colour off again. For a long time, the challenge with this chemistry was that the colored form of the dye was relatively unstable and quickly reverted to the more stable, colorless form—especially at higher temperatures.

Another issue was fatigue: after a certain number of on-off cycles, the dyes degraded and took on a permanent coloured hue. Have you ever bought transition lens sunglasses and noticed that they became less effective over time? This is due to the same deterioration of photochromic compounds in the lenses. But thanks to recent research efforts, remarkably stable dyes have been designed that reliably hold their colour for months and can undergo over 10,000 activation and deactivation cycles without degrading.

Carson Bruns’ team at the University of Colorado Boulder showed that these pigments could be formulated into tattoo inks by encapsulating them in poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA), a polymer approved for medical use in bone cement, dentures and intraocular lenses. This family of inks is known as PhotoTat.

Time to market

So, when will you be able to get one of these switchable tattoos? A red pigment was already launched in 2024 under the name Magic Ink by Colorado-based biotech company Hyprskn. A 2 millilitre (ml) vial will set you back £77, which is about 100 times more expensive than regular tattoo ink due to the specialised dyes and formulation process required. The ink is fully compliant with the EU’s Reach (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals) safety regulations.

Now, Bruns’ research team has developed three more PhotoTat inks – blue, magenta and yellow – that can combine into 16 other colours. “So far,” Bruns says, “the only person who’s tested this ink is me. I actually have hundreds of these tattoos on my legs now and they’ve all gone really well.”

Some challenges remain though: direct sunlight contains enough UV radiation to activate the tattoos unless they are protected by sunscreen. Indoor light will slowly switch them off over a period of several days.

In addition, the blue ink currently degrades after only 10–100 activations, leaving a permanent, purple-coloured mark. Most importantly, the inks need to undergo thorough toxicity and safety testing before they can be rolled out to tattoo shops for general use, which will likely take several years. Don’t get your hopes up just yet about your new “business during the day, party at night” look.

When Hyprskn launched Magic Ink, the reception in the tattoo community was mixed. While some tattoo enthusiasts viewed it as a revolutionary creative tool, others thought it was an overpriced gimmick. Bruns does not only see his photochromic tattoo inks as fashion accessories, however.

He also envisages medical applications, for example for patients who need permanent skin markings to guide radiation therapy or identify sites for biopsies. Bruns argues that these markings “become a permanent reminder of a traumatic experience” which can be mitigated by making the tattoo invisible once it is no longer needed in a clinical setting.

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Take Aways

• MIT researchers engineered M13 bacteriophage particles to control how densely they display antigens, strengthening targeted immune responses in mice.
• Higher-density vaccines improved protection in melanoma and colorectal tumor-cell challenge experiments, with a roughly sevenfold higher fraction of neoantigen-specific T cells in the colorectal model.
• The platform could support personalized cancer vaccines, but this study vaccinated mice before tumor-cell injections and did not establish effectiveness in people.

 

Packing more cancer targets onto a tiny viral scaffold helped mice mount a stronger defense against injected tumor cells. The finding points to a controllable feature of vaccine design: how densely a delivery particle displays the molecular markers that immune cells learn to recognize. It could help researchers refine personalized cancer vaccines.

The MIT study, published in Advanced Healthcare Materials, uses an engineered bacteriophage called M13. Shengnan Huang, a research scientist at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, led the work. Senior author Angela Belcher is MIT’s James Mason Crafts Professor of Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering.

The results come from laboratory experiments and small mouse studies, not clinical trials. The work focused on improving the design of a vaccine formulation. Mice received vaccines before researchers injected tumor cells, testing protection against a later challenge. Whether the same density adjustments improve treatment of established tumors requires further testing.

Turning a bacterial virus into a vaccine carrier

M13 is a bacteriophage, a virus that infects bacteria rather than human cells. Its single-stranded DNA sits inside a long protein shell, or capsid. The engineered particles in this study measured approximately 200 nanometers in length.

The researchers attached antigens, molecular targets recognized by immune cells, to a major capsid protein called pVIII. Each particle contained a mixture of ordinary pVIII and antigen-bearing versions. Altering that mixture changed the density of antigen displayed along the particle’s surface.

The viral DNA also supplies an immune-stimulating signal through Toll-like receptor 9, or TLR9. That gives M13 its own adjuvant activity, helping amplify the response to its antigen cargo. Combining the target and this immune activation signal within one scaffold is part of the platform’s appeal.

Making antigen density adjustable

Huang first worked with SIINFEKL, a short peptide commonly used as a model antigen in mouse immunology. Adding negatively charged amino acids alongside it helped antigen-bearing proteins assemble into the capsid. Changing where the proteins were produced in the genetic system further altered their relative abundance.

The team also introduced a regulatory mutation that reduced production of the antigen-bearing protein. Together, these methods adjusted its proportion from about 6% to 70.4% of the major coat proteins. That corresponds to roughly 36 to 420 antigen-bearing copies per 200-nanometer particle.

The highest density came with a manufacturing drawback: particle yield fell substantially. A mutation lowered display to approximately 34.7% while improving production. The work therefore identified a trade-off between maximizing antigen display and producing enough stable particles for further development.

“The antigen is the specific target we want to initiate the immune response against, which means we have to ensure the right dose of antigen to make sure that we can have a strong immune response,” Huang says. Her explanation highlights why the team investigated both particle design and the resulting immune activity.

How immune cells handled the particles

The researchers compared particles carrying approximately 6% and 34.7% antigen-bearing coat proteins. In laboratory tests, dendritic cells took up the higher-density particles about 2.8 times more efficiently. These antigen-presenting cells help teach T cells which molecular targets to recognize.

Higher-density particles also improved antigen presentation, the display of processed peptide fragments on the immune cell’s surface. Comparable presentation required roughly half as much particle uptake with the denser version. This suggests that changing surface display affected more than the number of particles reaching a cell.

Not every immune measurement increased. The two versions produced similar results for a dendritic-cell activation marker and TLR9 activation, consistent with their identical DNA cargo. The precise reasons for the uptake and presentation differences remain unresolved, including possible effects on surface charge and intracellular processing.

The particles also remained structurally stable in the reported tests. Blood measurements in mice showed little induction of two inflammatory signals, IL-6 and TNF-alpha. Those limited findings support further development but cannot establish a vaccine’s safety in people or rule out other adverse effects.

Testing protection against later tumor challenges

Mice received equal numbers of the two particle types on days zero and seven. On day 15, researchers injected melanoma cells engineered to express SIINFEKL. The higher-density vaccine produced stronger protection, slower tumor progression and a larger fraction of antigen-specific CD8 T cells, which can attack matching tumor cells.

That T-cell fraction rose from approximately 7.4% to 17.5%. The reported melanoma experiments included five to six mice per group for key immune and tumor measurements. These findings add to research investigating how nanoparticle vaccines can prepare an immune response before tumor exposure.

The researchers then switched to a mutated ADPGK peptide found in the mouse colorectal cancer model MC-38. Such tumor-specific targets are called neoantigens. Increasing their display raised the neoantigen-specific CD8 T-cell fraction from approximately 1.1% to 7.4%, a roughly sevenfold increase.

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Artist’s illustration of antigen-coated M13 particles interacting with an immune cell. MIT researchers found that denser antigen displays strengthened targeted immune responses and improved tumor protection in mice vaccinated before exposure to cancer cells. (CREDIT: The Brighter Side of News)

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A federal judge in Alaska has dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit that pre-emptively challenged the results in a U.S. Senate race featuring two candidates with the same name — a Republican incumbent and another man who could be a spoiler.

The ruling is the latest in a series of court defeats for the Trump administration, which has been seeking to intervene in state-administered elections.

On Friday, the U.S. District Court in California blocked the administration from threatening to prosecute state and local election officials who do not comply with the department’s directives on handling ballots.

Also on Friday, a federal appeals court panel denied a request to order California officials to set aside about 20,000 mail-in ballots that the administration claimed had been sent to possible noncitizens.

In Alaska, the Justice Department filed its lawsuit last month at President Trump’s direction, asking the judge to block certification of the state’s U.S. Senate election results if Senator Daniel S. Sullivan loses but would have won had votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired teacher, gone to the incumbent instead.

In that scenario, the suit also demands an investigation into whether voters who selected the retired teacher actually intended to vote for the senator.

Federal officials have not made clear how an investigation into anonymous ballots would be conducted.

In her Sunday ruling, Chief Judge Sharon Gleason of U.S. District Court in Alaska wrote that she did not see how the federal government’s proposed solution to any confusion would solve the problem if it even existed — or how the approach could work given the right to a secret ballot is a core principle of American democracy.

The federal government, she wrote, “offers no rebuttal to the concerns regarding preservation of the secrecy of voting and provides no explanation of how its request for ballot segregation and a court-ordered investigation by law enforcement officers into certain voters’ intent could be implemented while preserving the secrecy of the ballot.”

Kiersten Pels, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, said the administration plans to appeal the dismissal and noted that the judge didn’t not address “the argument of the United States that Daniel J. Sullivan (a/k/a Decoy Dan) entered the race as a frivolous candidate to confuse voters.”

The administration’s lawsuit accuses Daniel J. Sulivan of trying to “dupe Alaska’s voters into believing that he is Senator Sullivan.” Daniel J. Sullivan has said he voted for Democrats in the last three presidential races and for Mary Peltola, the current Democratic Senate nominee on the ballot, in her 2022 and 2024 campaigns for Congress.

The suit also notes that he switched his party affiliation from Independent to Republican only when he filed to run, and that his campaign website uses the same dark blue and yellow color scheme as the incumbent’s.

A New York Times investigation revealed that a Democratic operative connected to Ms. Peltola’s campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee enlisted Daniel J. Sullivan to run as part of a broader effort to recruit independent and third-party candidates who might peel votes away from the incumbent.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, has ordered a criminal investigation into the Peltola campaign even as the state elections division, overseen by his lieutenant governor, also a Republican, fought the Trump administration’s civil lawsuit.

Ms. Peltola and national Democrats have denied any connection to Daniel J. Sullivan’s candidacy, and they joined the civil case as additional defendants along with national Democrats, the League of Women Voters and Common Cause, a self-described nonpartisan government watchdog organization.

Daniel S. Sullivan, the incumbent senator, promised in an interview with CNN Sunday to support any election results but also suggested, without offering explanation or details, that the election could be “stolen.”

In its defense in the Justice Department’s lawsuit, lawyers with the state of Alaska noted that state courts had already rejected an attempt by the state’s elections agency to take Daniel J. Sullivan off the ballot and that the final ballot was designed to differentiate between the two men: It lists the senator as “Dan S. Sullivan” and notes his party affiliation and incumbency, and the other man is “Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.” with no party affiliation included.

Alaska also uses ranked choice voting in state and federal general elections, meaning voters are familiar with the system. Any voter confused by the existence of two Dan Sullivans could simply rank both candidates.

Judge Gleason had already expressed skepticism of the Trump administration’s case in a ruling last month agreeing to a speedy hearing. In that order, she pointed out that the federal lawsuit came after Alaskans had already begun casting ballots for November and nearly four months after the Alaska Supreme Court directed the state Division of Elections to include Daniel J. Sullivan on the ballot.

In Sunday’s dismissal ruling, she noted that federal lawyers, in their filings, said they were not attempting to interfere in the time, place and manner of Alaskan elections — matters the U.S. Constitution leaves in the hands of states.

But, Judge Gleason said, the federal government’s proposed answers to any voter confusion were “a court order preventing the State from certifying the election if certain circumstances occur; a court order requiring the State to segregate and preserve certain ballots; and a court order permitting the United States to conduct an investigation into the intent of those voters who cast ballots for Daniel J. Sullivan.

“These requests certainly involve the time, place, and manner of Alaska’s election,” she wrote.

If anything, the judge added, such federal intervention amid an ongoing election would cause the precise sort of voter confusion the administration says it is trying to prevent.

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Sullivan, left, a candidate in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race, and incumbent U.S. Senator Dan S. Sullivan, right.Becky Bohrer/Associated Press, Doug Mills/The New York Times

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