In an unexpected turnaround, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) on Sunday handed out a record 2,599 of its prestigious graduate fellowships to young researchers — after briefly slashing the number to a low of just 1,000 last year.
The rebound “is a significant boost for early-career researchers and the future of US science,” says Joshua Weitz, a biologist at the University of Maryland in College Park.
The surprise increase comes at a time when many in the US science community have been worrying about the fate of the NSF, a major funder of basic science, and its Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). Last year, and again this year, the administration of US President Donald Trump called to cut the NSF’s budget by more than half.
The GRFP seemed to be in further trouble when the call for the programme’s 2026 applications went out more than two months late, and the eligibility criteria for the fellowships changed. As of this year, undergraduates and first-year master’s and PhD students can apply — but second-year graduate students, as had been the norm for decades, cannot. Between January and April, at least 65 applications were also ‘returned without review’ (sent back to applicants without a score), according to data shared with Nature by Grant Witness, a watchdog project that tracks changes to research funding. This has sparked concerns that the type of science that NSF would fund had also changed.
But some of these worries have been allayed with the announcement of a record-breaking number of GRFP awardees this year.
Brian Stone, who is standing in as NSF director until a permanent one is confirmed, said in a statement that the continuation of the programme reflects the Trump administration’s “strong focus on building talent and investing in individual researchers”. He added: “I’m excited to see how these emerging STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] leaders will shape the future.”
The agency did not respond to Nature’s queries about changes to the programme or applications returned without review. On its website, the NSF states that “the number of applications returned without review this year has not changed substantially since last year.”
Award winners
Almost 14,000 young researchers applied for a 2026 GRFP award, submitting a research plan and personal statement that were reviewed by an independent panel of researchers. Typically, only about one in every six applicants receive one of the prestigious fellowships.
In addition to covering tuition, the fellowships come with an annual stipend of US$37,000 for three years. Since 1952, when the GRFP began, it has supported more than 70,000 researchers, and at least 40 of those have gone on to receive Nobel prizes.
After rumours swirled that the Trump administration would request a massive cut to the NSF’s approximately $9-billion budget for the 2026 fiscal year, in April last year, the agency cut in half the approximately 2,000 GRFP awards usually handed out. Months later, however, 500 awards were added — mostly in areas in which the Trump administration wants the United States to be a world leader, including artificial intelligence and quantum science — bringing the total to 1,500.
In February this year, NSF leaders announced at a board meeting that they intended to reshape the agency to fund more research on quantum science and AI, something reflected in the newly announced awards. Fifty-three of the latest GRFP awards are categorized as being for quantum science, a 39% increase from the previous year, and 103 are listed under AI or machine learning, a 17% increase.
Meanwhile, research fields funded by the agency’s engineering directorate saw the largest boost in GRFP awardees in 2026, from 406 (or 27% of the total) last year to 914 (or 35% of the total) this year.
But there were gains in other fields, too. Research funded by the biological sciences directorate rebounded, going from 214 awardees (or 14% of the total) last year to 486 (or 19% of the total) this year. Many researchers had been particularly worried about the biological sciences, given the reorientation of the NSF to focus on quantum and AI. With the exception of 2025, biological sciences applicants have received between 21% and 27% of the GRFP awards during the past decade.
After the awards were announced on Sunday, many of the awardees from the record-breaking cohort took to the Internet to celebrate. “Beyond grateful and still in disbelief,” posted Lena Kemmelmeier, a psychology PhD student at the University of California, San Diego, on the social-media platform Bluesky. “Thank you to my wonderful lab mates.”
Another student, posting anonymously on the social-media platform Reddit, where many GRFP hopefuls have commiserated, shared their excitement: “I’m a first-gen PhD student, and this is such a huge accomplishment for me!! I’m tearing up in the middle of writing this, and my hands are shaking!”
Iran has rejected a new round of peace talks, even as President Donald Trump said U.S. negotiators would travel to Pakistan to resume negotiations aimed at ending the conflict.
Tehran’s refusal, reported Sunday by its state news agency IRNA, cited what it described as Washington’s “excessive demands,” “unrealistic expectations,” and the continuation of a U.S. naval blockade. The report did not name a specific official.
The move follows Trump accusing Iran of committing a “total violation” of a cease-fire after Iranian forces fired on ships near the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday.
“Iran decided to fire bullets yesterday in the Strait of Hormuz — A Total Violation of our Ceasefire Agreement!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday morning. He warned that unless Iran agreed to a deal, the United States would “knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran.”
Trump said U.S. envoys would arrive in Pakistan on Monday evening for a new round of talks, in what appeared to be the first official confirmation that negotiations would resume after an earlier round ended without a breakthrough.
Earlier on Sunday, a White House official told TIME that Vice President JD Vance, who led the previous round of talks with Iran, was planning to once again lead the U.S. delegation in Islamabad. The plan marked a shift after Trump told a reporter that Vance would not make the trip. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a former adviser on Middle East negotiations, would also attend, the official said.
The renewed push comes amid concerns from former diplomats, who in recent reporting by TIME questioned whether Witkoff and Kushner have the experience needed to secure a deal and warned that missteps could prolong the conflict.
The Strait of Hormuz, a flashpoint in the talks, remained effectively closed on Sunday. Tracking data showed almost no vessel movement through the strait after Saturday’s attacks, when at least two ships reported being fired upon by gunboats linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Iranian officials said they would not allow ships to pass while the U.S. blockade remained in place. “It is impossible for others to pass through the Strait of Hormuz while we cannot,” Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, said in remarks broadcast on state television, according to the Associated Press.
The confrontation has raised fears of further escalation in a waterway that normally carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply. Iran’s closure of the strait has stranded hundreds of vessels in the Gulf and driven up shipping costs, with crews avoiding the area amid fears of attacks.
In a sign of limited exceptions to the shutdown, the cruise operator Tui said on Sunday that two of its ships, Mein Schiff 4 and Mein Schiff 5, had passed through the strait after receiving approval from relevant authorities and would proceed to the Mediterranean.
The main sticking points remain Iran’s nuclear program, particularly its stockpile of enriched uranium, and control over the Strait of Hormuz.
“There is still a big distance between us,” said Qalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator, while insisting that Iran remained committed to diplomacy.
Security measures were tightened in Islamabad ahead of the expected talks, with Pakistani authorities restricting movement near the site of last week’s discussions.
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said on Saturday that American forces were continuing to enforce the naval blockade, with 23 ships complying with orders to turn around since it began. The U.S. military is now preparing to board Iran-linked oil tankers and seize commercial vessels in international waters in the coming days, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing U.S. officials.
The standoff has intensified pressure on negotiations aimed at ending a conflict that began on Feb. 28, when the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran over its nuclear and missile programs. The war has since killed several thousand people across Iran, Lebanon, and other parts of the region and displaced millions.
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Donald Trump speaks about the conflict in Iran in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on April 6, 2026.Brendan Smialowski-AFP
Some 60 years ago, American legislators set out to tackle a problem that was driving employment and education rates down, driving health care and welfare costs up, and making American family life significantly less stable: Many American women, and particularly poor women and teenagers, were having more children than they wanted or could afford. Close to half of births were to women who had not intended to get pregnant.
Decreasing the unintended pregnancy rate was a bipartisan wish. In 1969, President Richard Nixon recognized that “unwanted or untimely childbearing is one of several forces which are driving many families into poverty.” A year later, Congress passed Title X: the first federal program entirely dedicated to family planning and reproductive health care.
It would go on to become one of the most successful federal programs of the last century, with one study finding it prevented some 20 million unintended pregnancies in just 20 of its 50 years by providing women with free and low-cost birth control. It has significantly reduced child poverty. In 1957, nearly one in 10 teenage girls gave birth. Today, the rate is closer to one in 100. For every dollar spent on family planning funds, the government saves $7 in Medicaid costs.
But President Trump seems intent on killing Title X. This month, the Department of Health and Human Services quietly issued new funding guidelines that have effectively subverted the program’s entire purpose. Instead of getting highly effective contraception methods to the country’s poorest women so that they may decide if and when to have children, Title X under Mr. Trump seems aimed at getting more women pregnant, whether they want to be or not. And it appears to cater to three influential parts of the Trump coalition: The anti-abortion movement, the MAHA, or Make America Healthy Again, movement, and pronatalists who want to see birthrates rise at nearly any cost.
More than half of patients at Title X clinics use modern contraceptive methods to prevent pregnancy. But the word “contraception” comes up just once in the Title X funding document, and only in a section on “reducing overmedicalization in health care.” Instead, in a change pulled directly from Project 2025, H.H.S. tells Title X clinics to emphasize “fertility-awareness-based methods,” a broad category that includes things like tracking your periods or your body temperature to estimate which days you might be fertile. These methods can be helpful for getting pregnant, but are generally far less so for preventing pregnancy. Fertility awareness methods have typical-use failure rates between 12 and 24 percent in the first year, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The intrauterine device, by contrast, has a failure rate of less than 1 percent.
The health department seems to want to shift taxpayer dollars away from reliable contraception and toward counseling men on erectile dysfunction, testosterone levels, and sperm motility, each of which merits three mentions in the new guidance, while IUDs and birth control pills earn none. The document is a mishmash of Make America Healthy Again talking points on lifestyle changes, conservative bromides on marriage before babies, and pronatalist nods to fertility.
Some of the guidance sounds sensible on its face. H.H.S. cribs from MAHA when it says it will focus on chronic disease in order to promote “healthy pregnancies and family formation.” But contraception use is a significant part of how women ensure they have healthy pregnancies and form the families they desire, and it’s also a common treatment for chronic diseases, including endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome. Yet it doesn’t come up in the section spelling out the department’s top Title X spending priorities. What does? Addressing “exposure to harmful chemical and environmental toxins,” low sperm count, and pornography use.
The new Title X guidance also includes many mentions of infertility. It’s true that men and women desire more support in having wanted pregnancies, but H.H.S.’s prescription, which includes “sleep” and counseling on “marriage prior to childbearing,” is unsatisfying. On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump declared himself the “father” of in vitro fertilization, yet I.V.F. is absent from his administration’s family planning funding goals.
The good news is that, at least for now, Title X funds are still required to go to clinics that provide or refer out for a range of modern contraceptive options. The bad news is that this is only because of a Biden-era rule that the administration has already signaled it might try to rescind. The threat to the program is all the more concerning because, according to the most recent data available, it still hasn’t fully recovered from draconian regulations put in place during Mr. Trump’s first term, which led to an exodus of clinics and cut the number of patients served by half.
An H.H.S. employee told Politico that the new guidance was catering to the anti-abortion wing of the G.O.P. There’s a terrible irony here — by reducing unintended pregnancy, Title X has prevented more than 9 million abortions — but it’s not surprising: Most of the major “pro-life” groups in the United States either oppose contraception or stay mum on the topic. The old anti-abortion movement strategy was to attack contraception as immoral, though few Americans share that view. The new tactic is more MAHA-coded, and with a pronatalist twist: Sow fear that modern contraceptives are unnatural, and push holistic alternatives instead; generate alarm about declining birthrates and blame the dip on working women (in reality, it largely comes from fewer teen pregnancies).
Women who are able to plan their pregnancies wind up in better physical and psychological health, birth healthier infants, make more money, are less likely to get divorced, are less likely to rely on public assistance, and invest more in their children, who, in turn, do better educationally and behaviorally. Modern contraception is nothing short of a medical miracle — one that has saved the lives of millions of women and babies worldwide.
Not satisfied with the end of legal abortion in America, the anti-abortion movement seems poised to end the era of affordable contraception. The result isn’t just the end of Title X as we knew it. It’s the demise of a long-held bipartisan consensus that a woman’s ability to shape her own future, even if she was poor, was worth something — and certainly worth the government’s investment.
In the wake of Anthropic’s announcement of its latest artificial intelligence model, Mythos, on April 7, the company has stood by an unusual decision: refusing to release it to the public. Not since OpenAI temporarily withheld its GPT-2 model in 2019 has a major developer deemed a system too dangerous for the public. More than a week later, that choice is still reverberating through finance and regulatory circles.
“The fallout—for economies, public safety, and national security—could be severe,” Anthropic said on its website. But while officials scramble to gauge the implications of the model’s unprecedented hacking capabilities, cybersecurity experts are divided over whether Mythos marks a major break from what came before or an expected step down an already troubling path.
Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment from Scientific American.
A 245-page technical document released alongside the announcement outlines what the company presents as a major leap in capability. The model operates like a senior software engineer, demonstrating an ability to spot subtle bugs and self-correct mistakes. It also scored 31 percentage points higher than Anthropic’s previous cutting-edge model, Opus 4.6, on the USAMO 2026 Mathematical Olympiad, a grueling, two-day proof-based competition.
But that same coding prowess makes Mythos a formidable offensive weapon, and Anthropic says it can outstrip all but the most skilled humans at identifying and exploiting software vulnerabilities. In tests, it found critical faults in every widely used operating system and web browser. Of those vulernabilities, 99 percent have not yet been patched. And Anthropic has disclosed only a fraction of what it says it has found. Independent evaluations suggest the danger is real, if more bounded than the company has implied: an assessment by the U.K.’s AI Security Institute (AISI), which was granted early access, found the model succeeded in expert-level hacking tasks 73 percent of the time. Prior to April 2025, no AI model could complete those tasks at all.
Instead of a public rollout, Anthropic is limiting access to a clutch of organizations to use defensively, allowing them to scan their networks and patch problems before the flaws become public knowledge. That initiative is called Project Glasswing. The initial group includes Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon Web Services, JPMorgan Chase, and Nvidia.
Mythos is the first of a new crop of AI models that have been trained on next-generation graphics processing units (GPUs)—the advanced chips that power AI training—and its capabilities have continued to rattle financial firms well beyond the initial announcement: on Thursday, German banks said they were consulting authorities and cyber experts about the risks, while the Bank of England said AI risk testing had intensified after Mythos came into view.
Yet the cybersecurity community remains split on the true severity of the threat. “The Anthropic announcement was very dramatic and was a PR success, if nothing else,” says Peter Swire, a professor at the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy at the Georgia Institute of Technology and former advisor to the Clinton and Obama administrations. Swire notes that among his colleagues, “a large fraction of the cybersecurity professors believe this is pretty much what was expected, and pretty much more of the same.”
Ciaran Martin, professor of practice at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford and former CEO of the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Center, shares that view. “It’s a big deal, but it’s unlikely to prove to be the end of the world,” he says. “I would not be at the more apocalyptic end of the scale.”
AISI acknowledged limits to the AI’s abilities. During testing, Mythos faced near-nonexistent software defenses that lacked many protections present in the real world—a scenario Martin compares to a soccer forward scoring a goal against the world’s worst goalkeeper.
Neither expert denies that Mythos is a significant advance, but suggest the decisive regulatory action is partly driven by institutional self-preservation. “CISOs [chief information security officers] and cybersecurity vendors have a rational incentive to point out the potentially very severe consequences of a new development,” Swire explains, even if their internal estimates assume the actual impact will be a fraction of what Anthropic’s press release claims. As Martin notes, it is rare for any organization “to suffer commercial detriment by predicting calamity.”
“One risk after Mythos is that it will be easier to turn a vulnerability, a known flaw, into an exploit, something that somebody actually takes advantage of,” Swire says. “Every cybersecurity defender should take Mythos seriously, but the expected harm to defense is likely to be far lower than the worst-case scenarios would suggest.”
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Instead of a public rollout, Anthropic is using its Project Glasswing initiative to offer a small group of organizations access to its Mythos AI model for cybersecurity testing. Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images
BEIJING (AP) — A humanoid robot that won a half-marathon race for robots in Beijing on Sunday ran faster than the human world record in a show of China’s technological leaps.
The winner from Honor, a Chinese smartphone maker, completed the 21-kilometer (13-mile) race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, according to a WeChat post by the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, also known as Beijing E-Town, where the race kicked off.
That was faster than the human world record holder, Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo, who finished the same distance in about 57 minutes in March at the Lisbon road race.
The performance by the robot marked a significant step forward from last year’s inaugural race, during which the winning robot finished in 2 hours, 40 minutes, and 42 seconds.
But the competition, which was held alongside a race for humans, wasn’t without hiccups — one robot fell flat at the start line, another bumped into a barrier.
Du Xiaodi, Honor’s test development engineer, said his team was happy with the results. Du said its robot design was modeled on outstanding human athletes, with long legs of about 95 cm (around 37 inches), and was equipped with what he called a powerful liquid-cooling system, which was largely developed in-house.
“Looking ahead, some of these technologies might be transferred to other areas. For example, structural reliability and liquid-cooling technology could be applied in future industrial scenarios,” he said.
While it will still take time to achieve widespread commercialization of humanoid robots, spectators were already impressed by the robots. Sun Zhigang, who had been in the audience last year, watched Sunday’s race with his son.
“I feel enormous changes this year,” Sun said. “It’s the first time robots have surpassed humans, and that’s something I never imagined.”
Wang Wen, who came with his family, said robots seemed to have stolen much of the spotlight from human runners in the event.
“The robots’ speed far exceeds that of humans,” he said. “This may signal the arrival of sort of a new era.”
Beijing E-Town said about 40% of the robots navigated the course autonomously, while the others were remotely controlled.
State media outlet Global Times reported that a separate, remotely-controlled robot from Honor was the first to cross the finish line in 48 minutes and 19 seconds. But it said the winning one used autonomous navigation and received the championship under the event’s weighted scoring rules.
State broadcaster CCTV reported that the runners-up, which were also from Honor and used autonomous navigation, finished the race in about 51 minutes and 53 minutes, respectively. A robot served as a traffic officer to direct the participants with its arm gestures and voice, CCTV added.
In China, technology has evolved into an area of competition with the U.S., with national security implications. Beijing’s latest five-year plan vows to “target the frontiers of science and technology.” Speeding up the development of products like humanoid robots and their applications is part of the 2026-2030 plan for the world’s second-largest economy.
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A humanoid robot sprints to victory in Beijing, beating the human half-marathon world record
As I was gathering material on the absence of young people at anti-Trump demonstrations, I came across evidence of powerful technological forces weakening persistence and cognitive tenacity across the board.
Most interesting, the most immediate danger posed by artificial intelligence may not be the futuristic moment when A.I. becomes so smart and so independent of human control — in other words, conscious — that it takes over politics, economics, and the social order.
Instead, it may be the current power of A.I. to undermine persistence, curiosity, and personal effort, encouraging in their place growing passivity and indifference, that poses the more proximate threat.
Before we get to that, though, let’s start where I began, with the question of youth inaction on President Trump, and go on from there.
In May 1970, President Richard Nixon’s frustration with the student protests against the Vietnam War reached a boiling point. “You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses,” he told a gathering of civilian employees at the Pentagon.
“Listen,” the president said, “the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are burning up the books, storming around about this issue. You name it.”
Today, the United States would appear ripe for a resurgence of student activism, beyond the flourishing of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus in 2023 and 2024 in particular.
We have a president who has directly attacked the finances and the intellectual freedom of colleges and universities, is building the technology for a surveillance state, undermines free and fair elections, and took the nation into an unjustified war with no explanation, while causing domestic economic havoc.
But one ingredient is missing: a substantial anti-Trump youth movement.
Dana Fisher, a professor in the School of International Service at American University, tracks the demographics of participants in major anti-Trump demonstrations. In a phone interview, I asked what she had found about the mobilization of students and younger men and women.
She replied, “We’re not seeing them in the streets at No Kings events.”
She provided the following data about the three No Kings protests: “At No Kings 1 (June 14, 2025) the median age was 36, at No Kings 2 (Oct. 18, 2025) the median age was 44, and at No Kings 3 (March 28, 2026) it was 48. Clearly, it’s getting older.”
The participants in the initial No Kings Day demonstrations, Fisher wrote, were “predominantly white, highly educated, female and middle-aged.”
It’s not as if young men and women are indifferent to President Trump.
The Spring 2026 Yale Youth Poll found that “younger voters overwhelmingly disapprove of Trump and plan to vote for Democrats in 2026. Fifty-seven percent of all voters disapprove of Donald Trump’s job performance as president, including 68 percent of voters aged 18 to 22 and 72 percent of voters aged 23 to 29.”
So what’s going on? I asked a wide range of experts for their thoughts. Some pointed to such structural developments as the explosion in social media usage and public access to artificial intelligence, both of which weaken users’ sense of efficacy and agency.
Those adverse effects are most acute for young liberals, especially young liberal women, suggesting that the political costs of social media and A.I. will be borne disproportionately by the Democratic Party.
Richard Braungart, a sociology professor emeritus at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and co-editor of “Youth Movements and Generational Politics, 19th-21st Centuries,” argued in an email that over 70 years the United States has undergone a moral and ideological transformation that has created a hostile environment for the liberal activist young:
After the 1960s domination by young people and the political left, the country moved to the political right with the popular presidency of Ronald Reagan, where liberalism (freedom, equality, self-determination, civil society), big government and the public sector were portrayed as “the problem” and the enemy.
America was to be saved, enriched and elevated by big business, the private sector, social Darwinism and economic neoliberalism.
In America, Braungart contended, “We are now living in an autocratic capitalist utopia that won’t allow counter-ideological positions to exist. It is considered unpatriotic in this capitalist utopia to have democratic parties and networks share power.”
Braungart concluded:
There is a widening gap and split between spirituality and materialism in our society today. I grew up in a world of moral and spiritual values (Marshall Plan, U.S.A.I.D., CARE, good government that served the people), which, unlike today, heavily influenced political decisions. Politicians were held accountable for their moral lapses and flagrant violations (Joe McCarthy).
These days, Americans are living in a crumbling moral wasteland, where corruption and raw-power politics rule supreme and are carried out without ethics, morality, personal responsibility, accountability, nor concern for people, the environment and a healthy future for upcoming generations.
Even at a glance, the planets in our solar system are wildly diverse. Huge and small, airless and densely packed with atmosphere, they have a wide range of characteristics distinguishing them. But if I was backed into a corner, which one would I choose as the oddest of them all?
Easy: Venus is the weirdest planet in the solar system.
There’s a reason we call it Earth’s evil twin. For reasons that are still unclear, long ago it suffered a massive runaway greenhouse effect, filling its atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon dioxide. The result is a planet with 90 times the surface pressure of Earth’s, a temperature above 460 degrees Celsius (860 degrees Fahrenheit), and clouds made of sulfuric acid.
Yet in its troposphere at an altitude of about 50 to 60 kilometers, Venus’s pressure and temperature are similar to those of Earth at sea level. The acid clouds and poisonous air would still be a problem, but in theory, it’s possible that humans could someday live in floating habitats high in the Cytherean skies—strange indeed.
Jupiter is the weirdest planet in the solar system. With a width of 11 Earths wide and a mass that is more than 300 times that of our planet, it’s a gas giant—a colossal bag of hydrogen and helium that turns into a bizarre liquid mix lower in its atmosphere and eventually becomes metallic even deeper down. As far as we can tell, Jupiter has a core of metal and rock, but it’s fuzzy and mushy—not at all like the obvious delineated layers we enjoy on our home world. And it has a powerful magnetic field that billows in the solar wind to stretch outward for hundreds of millions of kilometers, making this the largest continuous structure in the solar system after the sun’s heliosphere. If our eyes could see it, Jupiter’s magnetosphere would appear bigger than the full moon in the sky!
Mercury is the weirdest planet in our solar system. Scorched by the sun, it’s locked in a gravitational tug-of-war with our star that, over time, has forced the planet to spin three times for every two times it orbits the sun. Coupled with its elliptical orbit, this has strange effects; there are spots on the surface where, in the morning, you could watch the sun rise for a time, then set and then rise again, all near the same spot in the sky. And despite Mercury’s intense irradiation, there are deep, cold craters near its poles that never see sunlight and harbor water ice. It’s a planet of paradoxes.
Neptune is the weirdest planet in the solar system. The most distant major planet from the sun and the last stop before interstellar space, Neptune is only dimly illuminated by our star, receiving just 0.1 percent as much light as Earth does. It was discovered not by direct observation but with gravitational effect on Uranus, although it was spotted, unrecognized at the time, by Galileo centuries earlier. Its internal heat powers our solar system’s fastest winds, measured at an incredible 2,200 kilometers per hour—faster than the speed of sound. Don’t ever try to fly a kite at Neptune. It’ll tear your arms off.
Mars is the weirdest planet in the solar system. A tenth the mass of Earth, it nonetheless has the solar system’s tallest mountain and grandest canyon. It’s covered in fine-grained dust composed of various kinds of iron oxide: rust. The atmosphere is lousy with the stuff, tinting the air a butterscotch color—except near the sun in the sky, where light scattering creates a blue aura that is best visible at sunset. This makes it the opposite of Earth, with its blue skies and red sunsets.
Uranus is the weirdest planet in the solar system. Eons ago, some catastrophic event knocked the huge ice giant on its side, and it now orbits the sun with an axial tilt of 98 degrees. This gives it extreme seasons, each lasting 21 Earth years. At its north pole, for example, it takes about four decades after sunrise for our star to set again. And for years, at the height of summer, the sun is nearly directly overhead. On top of this, Uranus’s magnetic field axis is offset from the center of the planet by about 8,000 km. This may have the same cause as the world’s tilt; perhaps it was hit by another massive planet not long after it formed, knocking Uranus catawampus. On top of all that, it may also rain diamonds there.
Saturn is the weirdest planet in the solar system. It’s actually lower in density than water; the oldest joke in astronomy is that if you threw Saturn in a bathtub, it would float, but it would leave a ring. Its gorgeous ring system is the most spectacular thing in our planetary neighborhood, yet if you gathered up all the ice ring particles, they would only make a small moon less than 400 km wide—one more satellite to add to Saturn’s horde of known moons, some 285 in all. And as impressive as its rings may be, the planet also boasts an immense hexagonal vortex almost 30,000 km across at its north pole—so huge Earth could comfortably pass through one of its sides. This is actually a natural atmospheric feature that still looks very much like an alien portal into another place in time and space.
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An illustration of our solar system showing the planets far closer together than they are in reality in order to represent the all of the bodies with some detail. NASA/JPL-Caltech
Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair taps into the nostalgia we are all feeling lately, revisiting a lovably chaotic and perfectly relatable sitcom family. The tempers are still short, and the feelings are still messy in this four-part revival, streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ April 10, 2026.
The original Malcolm in the Middle, in the early 2000s, starred Frankie Muniz as the analytical, neurotic protagonist narrating his family’s daily misadventures. When your mother shaves your father’s back in the kitchen, and you bond with your brothers over the destruction of property, there’s a lot to unpack.
All About the ‘Malcom in the Middle’ Revival
Photo: Disney/David figure
Now, Malcolm has gone from moody boy genius to happy single dad who is busy running a charity and avoiding his parents and five siblings. The writer and executive producer Linwood Boomer, who also created the original series, makes us feel right at home with this family again. And the majority of the original cast is back.Bryan Cranston and Jane Kaczmarek return as Malcolm’s father and mother, Hal and Lois. Chris Kennedy Masterson is back as the eldest
brother, Francis, Justin Berfield as the next brother, Reese, and Emy Coligado as Francis’ wife, Piama. Erik Per Sullivan, who played Dewey, retired from acting, but the new Dewey, Caleb Ellsworth-Clark, bears an uncanny resemblance. Anthony Timpano appears as Jamie, the little brother born in the show’s fourth season. Hal and Lois have completed their family with Kelly (Vaughan Murrae), who is nonbinary.
Cranston, Kaczmarek, and Muniz spoke with Parents about this nostalgic revival and what it was like getting the family back together.
“I noticed at the table read in Vancouver before we shot anything, that all of the actors who were on the original show, we slipped back into our characters seamlessly,” Cranston, also an executive producer for the revival, tells Parents. “So it made me think that somewhere in the recesses of our brains, even after a 20-year absence, we were able to pull it back and be these people again. It was astonishing and so gratifying to listen to everyone’s character just rise.”
Kaczmarek reflects on how good the casting was from the beginning, “Because we kind of had an essence to this character that we didn’t really have to conjure, certainly after 151 episodes. Those voices were still alive in us.”
Hal and Lois are still madly in love, and Lois is planning a huge soiree to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. She finally gets to put her dance lessons from 2002 to good use.
“First, the dancing is so much fun. We had a great time. That dance at the end, we kind of thought of ourselves as pairs ice skaters,” says Kaczmarek.
In the original show, Hal was often the one planning special surprises for Lois. But not this time. “So I am going to now show you, Hal, how much I love and appreciate you by giving you this anniversary party,” Kaczmarek says of her character. “And of course, he can’t help but still be doing wonderful, wonderful things for Lois.”
“He’s obsessed,” Cranston sweetly adds.
Dewey is excused from his parents’ anniversary party, given his success as a pianist, but Lois demands that everyone else be present, including Malcolm. Francis and Piama are in town for the celebration, with news of their own, and Reese has met his match in his youngest sibling, Kelly. (Hal once said of teenage Reese, “He has no more sense of right and wrong than a tree frog,” and this isn’t far off in the character’s adulthood.)
Strait of Hormuz: Iran’s foreign minister said on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz was “completely open” for all commercial ships, but uncertainty remained after President Trump declared the U.S. blockade of Iran’s ports would remain in place.
Iranian pushback: Iran’s top negotiator said the strait would close if the United States continued its blockade, adding to the uncertainty.
Negotiations: President Trump’s public comments raised hopes that negotiations with Iran were going well enough to sustain the cease-fire as they worked on a long-term peace deal.
Trump extends sanctions exemption on some Russian oil as high gas prices persist.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Wednesday that the U.S. government would not renew the sanctions exemption on Russian oil already at sea. Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times
Just two days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the United States would not extend a sanctions exemption on the sale of some Russian oil, the Treasury Department did just that on Friday, issuing one for about a month.
The renewed license will be in effect until May 16 and supersede the sanctions waiver on Russia that expired on April 11.
Trump has made numerous exaggerated and unverified claims over the course of the war since it began on Feb. 28. He has long called for zero uranium enrichment in Iran, and asserted at a Turning Point USA event on Friday that Iran would “never have a nuclear weapon.” Iran has previously offered to temporarily suspend uranium enrichment, but has said it could never accept Trump’s zero-enrichment position. Experts have also said that retrieving Iran’s 970 pounds of enriched uranium would be a complex, lengthy process that would likely take longer than the reported 60-day window for American and Iranian negotiators to strike a deal.
Ghalibaf also said in his social media post that President Trump made seven false claims in a single hour. It was not clear which of the president’s claims he was refuting. Trump has been on a media tear all day, including saying that Iran had agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again and that the country would coordinate with the United States to send its enriched nuclear stockpile abroad. Both of those claims were denied in statements from Iranian officials. Ghalibaf said that Iranians would not be affected by what he referred to as media warfare and attempts to engineer public opinion.
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An anchored tanker off Muscat, Oman, last month, as the Strait of Hormuz was functionally closed by Iran. Credit…Benoit Tessier/Reuters
Doctors have been drilled for decades on the four big risks for heart disease, which kills more Americans every year than any other illness. The fearsome foursome: hypertension, smoking, high levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol, and type 2 diabetes. Yet for just as long, cardiologists have seen patients who have none of these problems die from heart ailments. And the heart specialists haven’t had the slightest idea why.
Up to a quarter of the people admitted to hospitals for heart attacks don’t have any of these four risk factors. Mysteriously, these “low-risk” heart disease patients actually have the worst outcomes. A 2023 analysis found that hospitalized acute coronary patients without any of the four hazards were 57 percent more likely to die compared with those who had at least one.
If the big known risk factors miss one in four patients, they still predict trouble as expected for the remaining three. That’s a good record. But it also means that of the roughly 920,000 Americans who die of cardiovascular disease every year, about 230,000 of them will have done so for no understandable reason.
This deadly puzzle has haunted cardiologist Paul Ridker for years. “I remember saying to myself that there must be some other fundamental determinant of heart disease,” says Ridker, who is director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Dozens of studies and clinical trials later, Ridker thinks he has found the missing piece. His work, along with that of other researchers, now suggests that chronic inflammation—a prolonged and body-damaging state of immune system activation—may be the hidden factor that accelerates cardiovascular problems to a dangerous and deadly state. When cholesterol builds up in the arteries, it shape-shifts into a sharp and jagged form the body no longer recognizes, provoking the immune system to wage war against it and blood vessels. It is a battle with no winners, and the wreckage it leaves behind ends in heart attacks and strokes.
Initially treated with skepticism, this idea now is becoming widely accepted by other scientists. Heart disease is “a disease of inflammation,” says Kathryn Moore, director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. And in the fall of 2025, the American College of Cardiology recommended that health-care providers routinely screen patients for inflammatory proteins.
If inflammation drives cardiovascular disease, then calming it might protect the organ beating in our chests.
The concept brings with it renewed hope for heart therapy. If inflammation drives cardiovascular disease, then calming it might protect the organ beating in our chests. In June 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a new use of an inexpensive, inflammation-reducing drug for an old disease—gout—to treat patients with heart disease. In a 2020 clinical trial, researchers showed this drug, colchicine, could reduce the risk of heart attacks, strokes, and other complications by a dramatic 31 percent. And this big decrease was mostly among patients already taking the standard cholesterol-lowering medications: statins.
But this treatment is not without controversy. Some recent studies of colchicine have not found protective effects, and many cardiologists are reluctant to use it. Ridker and other researchers are now testing different anti-inflammatory therapies with more precise modes of action. Although questions remain, many researchers believe this shift—seeing the vascular system not as a series of clogged pipes but as battlefields of inflammation—could transform public health and save millions of lives.
For many decades, the dogma among doctors and scientists was that atherosclerosis—the buildup of fatty substances, including cholesterol, in the arteries—was a passive, almost mechanical process, an inevitable by-product of aging. “We were taught that the plaque buildup in arteries was sort of like rust in a pipe,” says Jean-Claude Tardif, a cardiologist who directs the Research Center at the Montreal Heart Institute.
Yet there had been hints over the centuries that inflammation might play an active role in the process. In the mid-1850s, German pathologist Rudolf Virchow peered through his microscope at diseased blood vessels and saw angry, inflamed tissue within the plaques. In 1913, Russian pathologist Nikolai Anichkov wrote that he fed rabbits a high-cholesterol diet and found their arteries teeming with white blood cells, now known to be key markers of inflammation. For the most part, researchers interpreted these findings as evidence that inflammation might develop in response to atherosclerosis.
But it was also possible that things worked the other way around. Inflammation is a complicated process. It’s the body’s built-in alarm system, activated when the immune system senses that something untoward is happening. The body recruits immune cell soldiers to the scene, which launch an attack against any unwelcome intruders and cells they’ve infected. That’s why your throat gets red and swollen when you have the flu. Sometimes this alarm system becomes overzealous—fighting too hard or too long—and ends up harming the body’s healthy tissues in the process.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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A humanoid robot sprints to victory in Beijing, beating the human half-marathon world record
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Maria Corte
James' World 2 