James' World 2

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Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, has been relentlessly attacked by President Trump.Credit…Amber Baesler/Associated Press

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1975

Earth Fires Seeds into Space

“Imagine that the earth has been watched over the aeons by an extremely patient extraterrestrial observer. Nothing, save a little hydrogen and helium, leaves the planet. And then, less than 20 years ago, the planet suddenly begins, like a dandelion gone to seed, to fire tiny capsules throughout the inner solar system. First, they go into orbit around the earth. Six capsules set down on the moon, and from each two small organisms emerge. Five little spacecraft enter the hellhole of Venus’s atmosphere. More than a dozen are dispatched to Mars. Two spacecraft successfully traverse the asteroid belt, fly close to Jupiter, and are ejected by its gravity into interstellar space.

It is clear, the observer might report, that something interesting is happening. We have entered, almost without noticing it, an age of exploration unparalleled since the Renaissance, when in just 30 years European people moved across the Western ocean to bring the entire globe within their ken. Our new ocean is the shallow disk of space occupied by the solar system. Centuries hence, our age may be remembered chiefly as the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded. —Carl Sagan”

1925

Television via Radio

“C. Francis Jenkins, radio photographic experimenter of Washington, D.C., has demonstrated apparatus by which moving objects, including a Dutch windmill and motion picture film, were sent by radio for five miles and reproduced on a miniature screen, 10 by eight inches. The transmitter was set up at station NOF, near Anacostia, D.C., and the receiver in Jenkins’s laboratory. He predicts that the process will be perfected so that scenes at baseball games and prize fights can be broadcast over long distances.”

Clearly Written Books

“Below are some of the recent books that can be recommended for clearness of treatment, obtainable from the Scientific American Book Department.

Red-Lead and How to Use it in Paint, by Sabin
White-Lead. Its Use in Paint, by Sabin
The Science of Knitting, by Tompkins
Carbureting and Combustion in Alcohol Engines, by Sorel, Woodward, Preston
Evolution and Animal Intelligence, by Holmes
I Believe in God and in Evolution, by Keen
God or Gorilla, by McCann”

1875

Cincinnati is the Center of the U.S.

“The center of our population has traveled westward, keeping curiously near the 39th parallel of latitude, never getting more than 20 miles north or two miles south of it. In 80 years, it has traveled only 400 miles, and it is now found nearly 50 miles eastward of Cincinnati, Ohio.”

Spiritualist Rebuke

“Most of the organs of the spiritualists in this country are filled with insipid ghost matter, very tiresome and useless to all whose brains have not been softened by the spirit craze. The Spiritual Scientist, a weekly periodical, is an exception. Its editorial columns exhibit talent, while its conductors, with boldness, condemn as unworthy of true believers the printing of the unauthenticated trashy stuff delivered by common mediums. To its contemporary, the Banner of Light, it administers a severe rebuke for its agency in this matter, and alleges that for the past 10 or 12 years, that journal has poured out a weekly stream of pretended spirit communications, of which not more than two in a hundred had contained anything beyond childish nonsense.”

Huge Ganoids Ruled the Seas

“Professor J. S. Newberry gave descriptions of some newly discovered ancient fishes found in the rocks of Ohio. Among these was the entire bony structure of Dinichthys terrelli, the hugest of the old armor-plated ganoids. The dorsal shield weighed 30 pounds. Professor Newberry explained that the dipnoans of Africa and South America were descended from these ancient plated ganoids, and were the last remnants of a group of fishes which in the Devonian age not only ruled the seas, but were the most powerful and highly organized of living beings.”

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1975, Sun Loops: “Loops on the sun are shown in a false-color picture made with the Harvard College Observatory ultraviolet spectroheliograph aboard the Skylab crewed orbiting satellite. The loops, which are part of the inner corona, extend some 150,000 kilometers from the sun’s western edge. Black and blue areas represent the least intense radiation, yellow and magenta the more intense, and red the most intense.” Scientific American, Vol. 233, No 3; September 1975

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The New York attorney general’s office sued Donald Trump and his real estate business in 2022, accusing them of inflating his net worth to obtain favorable loan terms. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

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It was the telegram exchange that sparked an identity crisis for humankind. In 1960, a young Jane Goodall, working in a remote forest in Tanzania, observed a chimpanzee she named David Greybeard using blades of grass and twigs to fish nutritious termites out of their nest. The primatologist wrote to her mentor, Kenyan paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, to tell him about her observation, which flew in the face of the conventional wisdom that held that only humans made tools. Leakey replied: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human.

”For decades—centuries, even—scholars have attempted to draw a hard line between our kind and the other organisms with whom we share the planet. They have argued that only humans have culture—sets of learned behaviors, such as toolmaking, that are passed down from generation to generation. They have proposed that only humans think symbolically, using signs to represent objects or ideas. That our species alone is self-aware, capable of planning for the future and experiencing emotions such as joy and fear, love and grief. That only humans are conscious, possessed of an inner world of subjective experience.

For his part, Charles Darwin, writing in the late 1800s, opined that nonhuman animals have the same cognitive abilities and emotions that humans have and that any differences were a matter of degree and not kind. In the absence of any way to reliably read animal minds, however, scientists who studied animal behavior and cognition took the position that ascribing human thoughts, feelings, and motivations to animals—anthropomorphism—was a cardinal sin. But in recent decades, examples of other species demonstrating these capabilities have emerged from across the tree of life. The findings have spurred fresh thinking about what, exactly, distinguishes Homo sapiens, with our vaunted intellect, from every other species on Earth.

Let’s look first at our evolutionary nearest and dearest. We, H. sapiens, possess much larger brains than our closest living relatives, the chimps and bonobos, do—around three times as large. The brain requires 20 percent of our energy budget despite making up only 2 percent of our body mass. Naturally, anthropologists have wondered why we evolved such energetically expensive brains. At the same time, we know that H. sapiens is the sole surviving member of what was once a diverse group of humanoids. Surely our big brains and all the clever things they allow us to do were a major reason for our success as a species, a vital factor in why we alone went on to spread across the globe and thrive in every ecosystem we set our sights on, outcompeting other branches of humanity until we were the last hominin standing.

Yet virtually every trait that anthropologists have identified as one that might have set our kind apart has subsequently been found in another member of the family. Our closest evolutionary cousins, the Neandertals, left behind decorations that suggest they used symbols, which may indicate a capacity for language. The same goes for our smaller-brained relative Homo erectus. And some 3.3 million years ago, long before brain size began to expand in our lineage, an unknown hominin—possibly Australopithecus afarensis—shaped basalt cobbles into cutting tools, demonstrating an understanding of the material properties of stone and a vision for how to transform a lump of rock into a useful implement.It’s not just our closest hominin and great ape relatives that share our powers of cognition. Humans were long thought to be the only moral animals, uniquely equipped with a sense of right and wrong. But we now know that is not the case. The late primatologist Frans de Waal and Sarah F. Brosnan found in laboratory experiments that brown capuchin monkeys would decline a reward of a slice of cucumber if they observed another monkey receiving a better treat (a grape) for the same task. The monkeys’ rejection of unequal payment for equivalent work demonstrated that they have a sense of fairness and experience moral outrage when they get a raw deal.

Other animals exhibit other elements of morality—including empathy. Mice, for instance, can share the emotional state of another individual, exhibiting increased sensitivity to pain if they see a companion showing signs of pain. Dogs recognize distress in their owners and will offer consolation. Rats will sacrifice their own gains to alleviate the suffering of a conspecific, forgoing a food reward if taking the food means inflicting pain on another rat.

Empathy and other complex emotions were long considered beyond the experience of nonhuman creatures. But mounting evidence indicates that they are widespread among mammals. Some of the most striking examples involve emotional responses to death. In 2018, an orca known as Tahlequah made headlines around the world when she carried her dead calf with her for 17 days while she swam 1,000 miles across the Salish Sea. In 2024, Tahlequah lost another calf. This time, she held on to its corpse for at least 11 days before releasing it. Researchers characterized the mother orca’s reaction to these losses as grief.

Apes, monkeys, and elephants have been observed to mourn the loss of bonded individuals, too. It’s not just large-brained mammals that appear to express sorrow, however. Barbara King, who is known for her research and writing on animal cognition and emotion, has described compelling examples of grief in peccaries, donkeys, and ferrets, among others.

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Sam Falconer

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Residential buildings in Lviv were hit during the overnight strikes

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“Every town, every neighborhood, every housing unit is another nail in the coffin of this dangerous idea,” Mr. Smotrich said on Wednesday.

At the same time, the Israeli military said it was advancing plans to take over Gaza City, with troops already on the city’s outskirts and tents being moved into southern Gaza for displaced people.

An additional 60,000 reservists would be told to report for duty in September, while troops have already obtained “operational control” over 75 percent of the Gaza Strip, the military said in statements. The United Nations has put that number closer to 90 percent.

The military “has begun the next phase of the war,” Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, said.

The looming assault aims to prevent Hamas — which led the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, onslaught on southern Israel that started the war — from regrouping and planning future attacks, an Israeli military official, who requested anonymity in line with military protocol, told journalists at a briefing on Wednesday.

About 1,200 people were killed and around 250 others kidnapped during the 2023 assault. After nearly two years of Israel’s retaliatory war against Hamas, the Gaza Strip has been largely leveled, and parts of it have been brought to the brink of famine. More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Gazan health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

For Mr. Netanyahu, “it doesn’t matter if these steps — the war in Gaza and the quasi-annexation in the West Bank — would damage Israel’s relations with the Arab world,” said Michael Milshtein, an Israeli analyst and former military intelligence officer.

He said both developments also showed that Mr. Netanyahu believes he can continue to depend on American support, even as Arab and European nations sharply condemn Israel’s actions.

World leaders quickly condemned the announcements on Gaza City.

“The military offensive in Gaza that Israel is preparing can only lead to disaster for both peoples and risks plunging the entire region into a cycle of permanent war,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said on social media.

France is among a growing number of countries that, frustrated with Israel’s war in Gaza, have declared in recent months that they will recognize a Palestinian state at the annual U.N. General Assembly in September. While the United States has for years endorsed a so-called two-state solution, it has blocked recent efforts to recognize full Palestinian statehood under current conditions.

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An Israeli military vehicle on Israel’s side of the border with Gaza on Tuesday.Credit…Amir Cohen/Reuters

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April Reese: Aging isn’t what it used to be—for one thing, we’re living longer than ever. Back in 1900, the average life expectancy in the United States was just 47 years. Today, it’s 78 years, with women living about five years longer than men. We’ve eradicated many of the infectious diseases that took so many lives a century ago, and heart disease is now treatable. But with so many of us sticking around for longer, we’ve just begun to understand why our bodies change as we age. It turns out that the skin can tell us a lot about how well we’re aging, and we’re not talking about wrinkles here. Thanks to major advances in longevity research, we now have a whole new toolbox for analyzing the skin, and no matter what age we are, we can use that information to take better care of not just our skin, but our overall health as we grow older.

Scientific American Custom Media recently sat down with Andrea Maier, a

professor of medicine and director of the Academy for Healthy Longevity at the National University of Singapore, and collaborator with L’Oreal, the beauty company, to learn more about her work. Andrea, we all know that skin changes as we grow older, but what can it tell us about how well we’re aging?

Andrea Maier: So, skin health is a key biomarker of overall longevity, and skin is the largest organ we have. We very often forget how large it is and how important it is. It’s really reflecting how well we are aging from the inside.

April Reese: There seems to be a lot of attention and investment in longevity research right now. Why do you think that is?

Andrea Maier: The investment in longevity is huge at this moment in time. We see a huge consumer drive and asking for products and for interventions to be healthier for longer. So, it is not only that we have major discoveries in research, but there’s also the consumer drive to really ask to get innovative products to the market, but also to advance medicine. And that’s the reason why we coined a new term, and that’s precision geromedicine. And what does it mean? It’s healthy longevity medicine to really optimize the health of aging individuals, not only the 70 and 80 year olds, but especially the 30- to 50-year-old who are at the moment aging.

April Reese: Well, I’m 57, so I definitely identify with that. I think a lot of people, when they think of longevity and advances in the science, like personalized data, they’re focusing on, okay, I can use this to look better. But longevity science is about far more than that, right? Why is this new ability to make individualized skin assessments so important for our health?

Andrea Maier: This is a very, very important trend. We now know that the aging process is very different between individuals. So, if you are looking at individuals of your same chronological age, they might have a very different biological age, which means they can, or you can, age faster or slower compared to your peers. And that’s not only occurring at the inner side, but especially also in the skin. And we can now measure changes in the skin

during the chronological aging process, so think about skin elasticity, hydration state or the barrier function. So, while measuring that, we can also adapt on what kind of products to use, so the first thing is always, where do you stand in the aging process? What is your need to then find an intervention?

April Reese: Okay. So, L’Oreal has developed a tool that can read your skin to reveal your biological age. It’s about the size of a portable speaker. The idea is that you can then use that information to create a science-based skincare plan and choose the right products for your skin. I asked Vania Lacascade, the company’s chief innovation officer, how it works.

Vania Lacascade: It is called L’Oreal Cell BioPrint. So, this device is, it uses advanced proteomics to analyze your skin, and it takes only just five minutes. We’ve created it in partnership with the Korean startup, NanoEnTek, and it literally decodes your skin biology like a cellular fingerprint. So, it provides you with your biological skin age, with your skin’s reactivity to ingredients like retinol, for example, and also it provides you with personalized predictive insights to anticipate your future skin concerns.

April Reese: We’ve seen several of these advances in longevity science and technology in recent years. How do you see longevity research influencing the world of health and beauty in the future?

Vania Lacascade: 20 percent of the global population is projected to be over 60 by 2040, and longevity is only meaningful if those added years are lived in robust health. And we’re entering an era where the pursuit of health, well-being, and beauty are converging and this across age, gender and origin. So, we know that research on longevity has truly revolutionized medicine and healthcare, and we’re shifting from a reactive to a truly proactive and preventive approach. So, longevity is really a movement that is profoundly transforming our relationship to beauty. It’s truly a mindset shift, and frankly, it concerns all of us because we all have this desire to age well, right?

We have 4,000 researchers who have used all the data we have accumulated on skin biology over the 100 years of beauty expertise we have, and we’ve powered all the science with our beauty tech teams worldwide to build our own science for longevity and beauty, powered by AI. And we call it Longevity Integrative Science. So, we’re not just striving to extend the lifespan of our skin cells; we are aiming to truly enhance their health span, and for that, we’re targeting truly the root cause of biological aging.

April Reese: Your science team just created something called the wheel of longevity for beauty, which, from what I understand, allows you to get a detailed, individualized picture of those root causes. Can you describe how that works?

Vania Lacascade: So, this one is decoding skin aging at cellular, molecular, and tissue levels. So, this will combine nine hallmarks of aging, spanning from DNA damage or microbiome, mitochondria dysfunction, or cell senescence, for example. And then, our AI and tech teams have developed a proprietary longevity AI cloud. So, what is it? It’s an AI algorithm that is able to analyze 267 skin biomarkers to really help us to target super precisely the biological changes that are invisible to the naked eye. So, it’s really a powerful new way to deal with this arena of longevity when it comes to skin health. What we believe actually is that you can choose your skin health journey now, throughout life. We truly think that it’ll become possible.

April Reese: And how might these advances in longevity research influence the way we view aging in beauty?

Vania Lacascade: This longevity revolution offers a remarkable opportunity for us to redefine how we perceive age and beauty. It’s replacing ageist beauty standards with a positive, optimistic message, embracing longevity as a way of life, but with this philosophy of lifelong beauty, we can even open a more inclusive and empowering view of beauty.

April Reese: Vania Lacascade is the chief innovation officer at L’Oreal. Andrea Maier is a professor of medicine at the Academy for Healthy Longevity at the National University of Singapore. For over 110 years, L’Oreal has devoted itself to fulfilling the beauty aspirations of consumers around the world.

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Getty Images/Katsiaryna Shautsova

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Here at CNET, we’ve tested nearly 140 portable power stations and counting in our Louisville, Kentucky, testing lab. Some of the qualifications we use to help us determine the best portable power stations are capacity, charging time and and charging options. The Anker Solix C1000 Gen 2 is the latest model from Anker to attempt to tick all three boxes.

The standout feature here is Anker’s HyperFlash technology, which it says allows the power station to do a full recharge to 100% in 49 minutes while plugged into a standard wall outlet. This works as long as UltraFast Charge Mode is enabled in the app. If true, this is significantly faster than the first-generation C1000 and notably even better than the EcoFlow River 3, our best small portable power station, which managed to charge to full in 1 hour during our testing, and the Bluetti AC70 (full charge in 1.5 hours). It also beats out the DJI Power 500 (100% charge in 70 minutes) and the Bluetti HandsFree 2 backpack power station (80% in 45 minutes).

The battery itself has a 1,024-watt-hour capacity (2,000 watts), putting it on par with some of our other top picks, including the Jackery Explorer 1000 Plus, though we’ll actually have to put it through its paces in the lab to see how it fares for sure. It comes with UL-1778 certification and has less than 10 milliseconds UPS switchover, so it should work for CPAPs, Wi-Fi, and more sensitive electronics.

In other specs, you’re looking at 2,000-watt AC output and support up to 3,000 watts with SurgePad. Anker says it’s capable of powering laptops and refrigerators, running a fridge for 4.7 hours, a microwave for 1.3 hours, and a TV for 7.5 hours. You get LifePo4 cells that should be good for 4,000 discharge cycles, which Anker estimates should last a decade.

The entire unit weighs 24.9 pounds and is 14% smaller and 11% lighter than Anker’s previous generation. It also comes with tons of input and output options. You can find 2,000-watt AC plugs, two 140-watt USB-C ports, one 15-watt USB-C port, one 12-watt USB-A, and one 120-watt car cigarette output. It supports 600-watt solar input to recharge off-grid. The one downside is that there isn’t a battery capacity expansion as many other portable power stations offer, including our favorites from EcoFlow.

Price and availability

The Solix C1000 Gen 2 will be available on Anker Solix’s website starting Tuesday. At full price, it’ll cost $799, but at launch, you can get it for $429 if you register by Sept. 8.

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The Solix C1000 can recharge to 100% in 49 minutes.  Anker

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It is rare to hear Mr. Trump say something so soul-searchingly self-deprecating, which this surely was. Rarer still is any acknowledgment from him of his own mortality. He is old — 79, to be exact — and does not ever want to be reminded of that fact. “You know, there’s a certain point at which you don’t want to hear ‘Happy Birthday,’” he said when he turned 78. “You just want to pretend the day doesn’t exist.”

He also said then: “My father lived a long time, my mother lived a long time, and they were happy, and they were great. So maybe we’re going to live a long time. I hope so.”

Mr. Trump’s memories of his parents have stirred thoughts of heaven and hell in him in the past. After he was convicted on 34 felony counts, he talked at rallies about what his parents must be thinking. “Now my beautiful parents are up in heaven, I think they are,” he said at one rally. “They’re up there, looking down. They say, ‘How did this happen to my son?’”

But other times, he confessed he was not so sure his father made it past the pearly gates.

“I know my mother’s in heaven,” he said at a Madison Square Garden rally in October. “I’m not 100 percent sure about my father, but it’s close.”

At the White House briefing later on Tuesday, Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, was asked if Mr. Trump was joking when he talked about going to heaven, or if “there was a spiritual motivation behind his peace deals.”“I think the president was serious,” Ms. Leavitt said. “I think the president wants to get to heaven — as I hope we all do in this room as well.”

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