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Horses can smell human fear—and it changes their behavior.

That’s the takeaway of a rather unusual experiment that involved making horses smell material soaked in human sweat and observing what they did next. The findings were published today in PLOS One.

Horses exposed to samples of sweat from people who had had a scary experience appeared more afraid themselves: the animals were easily startled, hesitated to come up to the researchers, and became less likely to interact with unknown objects.

“Our emotions are central when interacting with horses,” says Plotine Jardat, lead author of the study and a horse behavior and welfare researcher at France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment. “If your horse does not cooperate on an exercise you are proposing, maybe trying it another day when you feel differently can be a game changer.”

Researchers already knew that horses can respond to humans’ emotional cues, including facial expressions and tones of voice. But the new study went further by investigating whether horses could smell different emotions emanating from humans without those visual or oral cues.

In the experiment, a group of people with cotton pads under their armpits watched movie clips geared to produce a sense of joy; these included the dance scene in the film Singin’ in the Rain and the song “We Go Together” from the movie Grease. The researchers then asked the participants—armed with new cotton pads—to watch 20 minutes from the horror film Sinister to stimulate fear.

The sweat samples were then stapled into a custom muzzle for the horses to wear. To limit the stress on each test horse, an “audience horse” served as a witness to the behavior tests.

The researchers first measured how often a test horse would interact with the experimenter, depending on what it was smelling, both while it was being groomed and while the experimenter stood slightly apart from the animal. Horses that smelled the fear samples touched the experimenter less than those in a control group or those that smelled joyful sweat samples.

The team then tested the horses’ reactivity by opening an umbrella near a bucket of food. Once again, horses that smelled the fear sweat showed a different reaction than those that smelled anything else. Their physical reactions to being startled were stronger, and their heart rates were higher.

The last test involved presenting the horses with a novel object—a sculpture of sorts, made of linoleum, plastic and string. The researchers recorded how often a horse gazed at the object and how often the animal touched it. The horses in the fear group touched the novel object less often and stared at it from a distance more than their peers did.

Taken together, the horses’ reactions indicate they can sense fear from odor alone, the researchers conclude. What the study doesn’t answer is why horses can apparently do this: the ability could be a result of domestication, or it could stem from some underlying mammalian characteristic. But regardless, perhaps don’t go up to a horse immediately after watching a horror film.

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Camille Loiseau/500px via Getty Images

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Nasa is preparing to roll out its most powerful rocket yet before a mission to send astronauts around the moon and back again for the first time in more than 50 years.

The Artemis II mission is scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida as early as 6 February, taking its crew on a 685,000-mile round trip that will end about 10 days later with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

The flight will mark only the second test of Nasa’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the first with a crew onboard. The four astronauts will live and work in the Orion capsule, testing life support and communications systems and practising docking manoeuvres.

Jared Isaacman, the billionaire private astronaut sworn in as Nasa’s administrator in December, said on Thursday the mission was “probably one of the most important human spaceflight missions in the last half-century”.

It will be the second time in space for three Nasa astronauts, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and the first for Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian astronaut. Koch will become the first woman, and Glover the first person of colour, to travel beyond low Earth orbit.

The astronauts will not land on the moon or enter lunar orbit, but will be the first to travel around the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. The mission follows an uncrewed test flight in 2022 and paves the way for Artemis III, which aims to land astronauts near the lunar south pole as early as next year.

“These are the kinds of days that we live for,” John Honeycutt, the chair of the Artemis II mission management team, told a press briefing on Friday. “It really doesn’t get much better than this: we are making history.”

“It’s a big deal,” said David Parker, the former head of the UK Space Agency and a visiting professor at the University of Southampton. “It is a step towards what we in the space world always dreamed of: the sustained human and robotic exploration of the moon and, one day, on to Mars.”

Some paint the return to the moon as a second space race, with the US competing against China, which hopes to put its own boots on the moon by 2030. “I’ll be damned if the Chinese beat Nasa or beat America back to the moon,” Sean Duffy, Nasa’s former acting administrator, said in September. “We’re going to win.”

The SLS rocket and Orion capsule stand nearly 100 metres tall, with the rocket carrying more than enough liquid propellant to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. When burned through the rocket’s engines, it produces sufficient thrust to fly to the moon at speeds of up to 24,500mph.

But first, the rollout. As early as Saturday morning, Nasa’s crawler-transporter 2, an enormous tracked vehicle, will start lugging the 5,000-tonne rocket and spacecraft from the vehicle assembly building to the launchpad. The four-mile journey can take up to 12 hours.

Nasa will then work through a preflight checklist. If all goes to plan, engineers will move on to a wet dress rehearsal, loading the rocket with more than 700,000 gallons of propellant, conducting a trial countdown and demonstrating that they can remove the propellant safely.

Any substantial problems would require the rocket to be rolled back to the vehicle assembly building for repairs. In recent days, technicians have been working on a bent cable in the rocket’s flight termination system, a faulty valve used to pressurise the Orion capsule, and leaks in equipment that pumps oxygen into the spacecraft.

The entire process must go smoothly for the mission to launch on 6 February. If technical problems or bad weather intervene, Nasa has identified 14 other dates to launch before mid-April. “We’re going to fly when we are ready,” said Honeycutt. “From launch through the mission days to follow, the crew’s safety is going to be our number one priority.”

After liftoff, the crew will loop twice around the Earth. Before heading to the moon, the Orion capsule will separate from the rocket’s upper stage. The astronauts will then fly the spacecraft manually, using cameras and the view outside the window, to approach and retreat from the jettisoned stage. This will give Nasa a sense of how Orion handles for future Artemis missions where crews will dock and undock in lunar orbit.

For all Nasa’s preparations and the astronauts’ extensive training, the mission could still throw up some surprises. “This is a test flight, and there are things that are going to be unexpected,” said Jeff Radigan, Artemis II’s lead flight director.

A final push from Orion’s European service module will send the crew to the moon. The astronauts will travel more than 230,000 miles from Earth, passing around the far side of the moon, before looping back in a giant figure-of-eight trajectory. During the voyage, the crew will practise emergency procedures and test Orion’s radiation shelter, designed to protect them from harmful solar flares.

More than 50 years after humans went to the moon, it is time to get excited again – and perhaps a little nervous. “Every rocket launch is a nail-biter,” Parker said. “We’re putting astronauts on a rocket, and it’s flown only once before, so of course it’s a nail-biter. But I’m confident Nasa will only launch when they are ready.”

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The Artemis II crew members, from left, Jeremy Hansen, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Koch, stand in front of the Orion capsule. Photograph: Kim Shiflett/AP

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Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement responding to the injunction that “D.H.S. is taking appropriate and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers and the public from dangerous rioters.”

She said agents had faced assaults, had fireworks launched at them, and had the tires of their vehicles slashed. She added that despite “grave threats,” agents had “followed their training and used the minimum amount of force necessary to protect themselves, the public and federal property.”

Ms. McLaughlin did not say whether the department planned to appeal the ruling.

Minnesota residents have clashed with federal agents since late 2025, when the federal government began an immigration enforcement campaign that it named Operation Metro Surge. Judge Menendez’s order applies only to federal agents in Minnesota who are participating in that campaign.

Judge Menendez, who was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., clarified in her order that “the court’s injunction does nothing to prevent defendants from continuing to enforce immigration laws.” The injunction did not include explicit protections for recording of agents or other provisions sought by the plaintiffs.

The case is the latest in a series of legal challenges across the country, including in California, Illinois, and Washington, D.C., where civil and immigrant rights organizations have sought to curb the tactics of federal agents.

In Illinois, where immigration agents amassed for several weeks last year, a federal judge issued a sweeping injunction that placed several limits on how agents could use force and interact with protesters. An appellate court later blocked that ruling, calling it too broad and too prescriptive.

Tensions have been especially high in Minnesota since the killing of Ms. Good last week and the shooting of another man, who was injured, by an agent this week. Federal officials have accused Ms. Good of trying to ram the agent who shot her with her car. Minnesota officials have disputed that notion, and a New York Times video analysis suggests that Ms. Good, a U.S. citizen, was steering away from the agent when he opened fire. In the most recent shooting, officials said that the man, whom they described as being in the country illegally, was resisting arrest and had assaulted an agent with a shovel or a broom.

In recent weeks, protesters have been gathering in small groups and in large crowds, yelling at agents to leave Minnesota. In the lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota and law firms on behalf of activists, the plaintiffs claimed that federal agents had violated their constitutional rights by using excessive force. They said agents had intimidated, harassed, or arrested protesters who had not interfered with agents.

Lawyers for the Trump administration pushed back against those claims in court and have repeatedly described protesters in Minnesota as violent and unruly. They also argued against the injunction, saying that it “would place this court in the business of micromanaging D.H.S. officers’ conduct throughout Minnesota.” Federal officials have said their surge of immigration agents in Minnesota, a state led by Democrats, is necessary to crack down on illegal immigration and root out fraud in social service programs.

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Minnesota residents have clashed with federal agents since late 2025, when the federal government began an immigration enforcement campaign that it named Operation Metro Surge. Credit…David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

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One of the most notable chapters in the history of NASA is coming to something like a close: after calling for an unprecedented medical evacuation of four astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS), these space farers are safely home. The episode has left myriad unanswered questions about what exactly happened to prompt the stunning decision to end their mission early—a first in the history of the ISS.

When asked at a Thursday press conference if NASA planned to release further information about the medical situation that prompted the evacuation, agency chief Jared Isaacman said it is “very committed to being transparent.”

“There are some medical privacy considerations here. That said, to the extent that we are in a position to share more information publicly and have the necessary consent, we would do so,” he said.

“Obviously, we took this action because it was a serious medical condition,” Isaacman said. “The astronaut in question is fine right now, in good spirits and going through the proper medical checkouts.”

Crew-11 splashed down in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule off the coast of California at approximately 3:41 A.M. EST. The evacuating Crew-11 includes NASA astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Kimiya Yui, and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov. NASA has not identified which of these astronauts experienced the medical issue. “The crew member of concern is doing fine. We will share updates on their health as soon as it’s appropriate to do so,” Isaacman said on Thursday.

The crew is undergoing medical evaluation on a receiver ship and is headed to a hospital in San Diego, Calif., for further investigation and care, said Joel Montalbano, deputy associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Missions Directorate, at the same conference.

Whatever happened to Crew-11 could influence how the agency prepares for future human spaceflight missions, including the upcoming Artemis II moon flyby. NASA will conduct a full debrief and review of the Crew-11 mission, Isaacman said.

“When we go through the debrief on this, we’re going to learn a lot about the things we got right and did it very well and make sure we apply that in other applications going forward,” Isaacman said.

The ISS is equipped with an array of medical equipment, drugs, and diagnostic tools—all of which the station’s crew know how to use. That means most minor ailments can be dealt with onboard: wounds can be sutured, blood can be taken and ultrasounds can be done. But NASA evidently decided that whatever occurred was serious enough that the ISS was not the place to keep the ailing astronaut. The agency plans for these contingencies on every mission, Isaacman said.

“There are early return options on Artemis II. There are options to bring astronauts back from the space station in hours, not days. So I think that the fact that we did take some extra time here does speak to the stability of the situation,” he said.

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NASA/Bill Ingalls

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Hmmmm … You have what you voted for, be happy!

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In the week and a half since Renee Good’s killing, the Trump administration has committed itself to a sinister new philosophy in Minneapolis.

In the wake of the killing of Renee Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross on Jan. 7, the Trump administration, Republican lawmakers, and ICE officers have adopted the position that the American people must either accept Trump’s rule by force or face death. Their unofficial motto: Live unfree or die.

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The pardons, most of which have not been previously reported,

were supported by people with close ties to Mr. Trump’s orbit, including lawyers who had worked for him.

They continue a trend in which Mr. Trump has used the unfettered presidential clemency power to reward allies and those who have paid his associates or donated to his political operation. The approach stands in contrast to Justice Department guidelines that prioritize the clemency applications of people who have completed their prison sentences or demonstrated remorse and a lower likelihood of recidivism.

The pardons, several of which forgave white-collar crimes and frauds by affluent perpetrators, strike a discordant note with the Trump administration’s announcement that it was suspending federal funding for programs intended to serve poor people in Minnesota in order to root out fraud.

A White House official justified the clemency grants in a statement as rectifying excessive sentences or prosecutions that were politically motivated to target Trump supporters. The official, who was not authorized to discuss the clemency grants on the record, suggested that Mr. Trump made the clemency decisions based on the merits, not whether the recipients had political connections or had made donations to groups he supports.

Three of the recipients were scheduled to be sentenced this month in a political corruption case related to accusations that former Gov. Wanda Vázquez of Puerto Rico had accepted bribes from Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan-Italian banker, in 2020.

In late 2024, while Mr. Herrera was facing felony bribery and other charges in the case, his daughter, Isabela Herrera, donated $2.5 million to MAGA Inc., a super PAC devoted to Mr. Trump and run by his allies.

In May, her father’s lawyer, Christopher M. Kise, who had served on Mr. Trump’s legal defense team, negotiated an unusually lenient deal with the Justice Department. Under the deal, which was authorized by a top Trump appointee, Mr. Herrera agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor campaign finance charge, disappointing career prosecutors who had pushed for a harsher sentence.

In July, Ms. Herrera donated another $1 million to MAGA Inc. She did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump this week pardoned Mr. Herrera, Ms. Vázquez, and Mark Rossini, a former F.B.I. agent who had worked as a consultant for Mr. Herrera. All three had pleaded guilty in August to misdemeanor campaign finance charges.

The White House official denied that Ms. Herrera’s donations had played any role in her father’s pardon. Instead, the official suggested that pardon and the others related to the Puerto Rico case were motivated by a belief that the investigation into the matter was retribution for Ms. Vázquez’s endorsement of Mr. Trump in 2020.

Mr. Herrera “is profoundly grateful” to Mr. Trump, Mr. Kise said in a statement.

Lawyers for Ms. Vázquez and Mr. Rossini did not respond to requests for comment.

As for Ms. Camberos, she was among a number of people granted clemency by Mr. Trump who have been charged with new crimes after receiving a second chance.

Ms. Camberos began serving a 26-month prison sentence in December 2019 for her role in a scheme to sell millions of counterfeit bottles of the caffeinated drink 5-Hour Energy. Mr. Trump commuted her sentence in the final days of his first term after she enlisted two lawyers with connections in his orbit. One of them, Stefan C. Passantino, had been a deputy White House counsel in the first Trump administration. Another, Adam Katz, represented Rudolph W. Giuliani in a defamation case related to his effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.

But soon after her release from prison, she and her brother Andres embarked on a new fraud, federal prosecutors in California said. The siblings were charged in 2023 in a complicated scheme: They bought consumer goods from manufacturers at a steep discount, purportedly to sell them in Mexico — a legal practice. Instead, prosecutors said, the siblings sold the goods in the United States at higher prices and then committed bank and mail fraud to cover their tracks.

They were convicted in 2024. In April, Ms. Camberos was sentenced to more than one year in prison — 12 months for the new conviction and additional months for violating her probation on her earlier conviction — and Andres Camberos was given one year of home confinement. Ms. Camberos had begun serving her sentence.

They were ordered to pay millions of dollars in restitution to the companies they defrauded.

The White House official did not respond to a question about whether the pardon would wipe away the Camberos siblings’ restitution payments, but pardons typically erase financial penalties.

The siblings’ supporters had argued privately that they were targeted by prosecutors because Mr. Trump had wiped away Ms. Camberos’s sentence from her earlier conviction — a claim echoed by the White House official.

Mr. Passantino and Mr. Katz had worked to secure pardons for the siblings, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

The two lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. Marcus Bourassa, another lawyer for Ms. Camberos, said in a statement that his client was wrongfully convicted and is grateful to the President and others for their support.

Mr. Katz also had supported clemency for Terren S. Peizer, a former business executive who had been convicted in 2024 of insider trading and sentenced last year to 42 months in prison. Mr. Peizer was also ordered to pay a fine of $5.25 million and forfeit more than $12.7 million. He was pardoned this week by Mr. Trump.

David Willingham, a lawyer for Mr. Peizer, said in a statement that the case was a “massive overreach” by the government.

Another statement issued on behalf of Mr. Peizer himself said that “there aren’t enough words to express the gratitude and appreciation I have for the compassion and recognition of this unfair process by the most accomplished president of my lifetime, and perhaps beyond.”

The White House official said that Mr. Peizer’s case was an example of excessive prosecution and that he had properly disclosed the trades.

Mr. Trump also commuted the sentence of Jacob Deutsch, who had been sentenced to 62 months in prison in 2024 for his role in a mortgage fraud scheme.

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The pardons from President Trump continue a trend in which he has used the unfettered presidential clemency power to reward allies and those who have paid his associates or donated to his political operation. Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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When the 47th solar panel exploded, Henrik Eskilsson began to fear he’d signed on with a madman.

In his SUV, he and Anders Olsson were accelerating across Sweden’s Lunda Airfield, towing a trailer fitted with a steel mast that suspended the panel. As they gained speed, the panel did something unusual: it floated, catching the wind like a hang glider while staying anchored to the mast. The speedometer crept toward 100 kilometers per hour. Behind them, the device began vibrating. Suddenly, it snapped free, tumbled through the air, and shattered on the runway.

Eskilsson, who’d previously founded a company that makes eye-tracking software, stopped the car and contemplated why he’d committed to this quixotic project: to revolutionize solar power for more than half of the people living on Earth. Many areas in the Northern Hemisphere and some in the Southern lie in zones where traditional solar fields are inefficient, especially in winter—but also in the morning and evening. When the sun sits low, its rays hit horizontal panels at a shallow, grazing angle, delivering little energy. Vertical solar panels that track the sun even as it barely clears the tree line have proved too expensive, requiring multiple motors to rotate them, too much concrete to anchor them, and too much steel to keep the wind from tearing them apart.

The shattered prototype was part of Olsson and Eskilsson’s effort to solve this: Vaja, the vertical-tracking start-up they had co-founded in 2023. For years, Olsson had envisioned building solar systems that moved with the wind like leaves in a storm. He and Eskilsson had consulted with mechanical engineers, who said this design would be impossible. Olsson disagreed. Eskilsson trusted him, although he wondered how many more panels would first have to be destroyed.

They got out of the SUV, took brooms from the back and, in the brisk winter afternoon, began sweeping the runway.

Solar is the fastest-growing source of global electricity, accounting for 7 percent of the world’s generation in 2024, up from roughly 1 percent a decade earlier. In the 2010s, utility companies invested heavily in solar farms with fixed-tilt panels—stationary solar arrays oriented toward the equator to catch the sun’s light. Such systems produce the most electricity in the middle of the day. In markets with many solar farms, this is when electricity prices are lowest, making the panels less profitable. Then, as the sun goes down and electricity demand spikes, the panels cease to be productive.

Horizontal trackers address such limitations by following the sun. Mounted on a north-south spine, the panels tilt like a seesaw, turning east at dawn, lying flat at midday, and facing west at sunset. They can deliver up to 35 percent more energy than fixed-tilt systems for a modest bump in cost. Horizontal tracking has “basically exploded over the past 10 to 15 years,” Eskilsson says.

But horizontal trackers suffer from the same latitudinal shortcomings as fixed-tilt: travel north or south from the equator, and the benefits diminish. Between the 30th and 40th parallels north—roughly aligned with Houston and Philadelphia, respectively—the equation shifts to favor vertical trackers: systems designed to intercept the light of a low-hanging sun that would otherwise skim over a horizontal array.

A handful of companies offer static vertical panels. In Europe, Norway’s Over Easy Solar and Germany’s Next2Sun and SOLYCO Solar provide a variety of vertical solar panels that harvest morning, evening, and winter light. Making vertical trackers, which pivot around an upright axis like a revolving door, is far more challenging. All vertical panels catch the wind like sails. Stationary setups can be made to resist powerful gusts, but vertical trackers are more fragile because they are mobile and mounted on a single post. Imagine a heavy roadside sign perched on a pole: the wind doesn’t just push against the sign; it tries to twist the pole, too. Torsion around a vertical post is nastier than around a horizontal tracker’s low-slung backbone, leading more easily to broken panels and motors. Efforts at beefing them up priced them out of existence. “These kinds of vertical trackers, even today, cost like four times as much as horizontal trackers,” Eskilsson says. Developers in the north stuck with static systems, using more panels to make up for lost productivity.

Olsson, now 51 years old, became interested in solar in 2017, before it was common in his country. On a ski trip, he told a friend that Sweden didn’t receive enough sunlight for the technology to work. The friend disagreed and showed him the math. “I realized when I saw the numbers that solar does make sense,” Olsson says. The moment sparked his love for a challenge, and he spent the train ride home writing a business plan.

Soldags, Olsson’s first solar panel company, took off installing panels for consumers, usually on roofs. But two years in, he landed a contract to install panels on the ground, which required anchoring them with concrete blocks. “These things weighed 10 times more than the solar panels,” Olsson says. An engineering physicist by training and a recreational sailor, he knew how much torque wind could exert. Yet nature thrived in it—trees flexed, leaves feathered. Why did he have to burn money to hold panels still?

He shared his thoughts with his friend and fellow sailor Fredrik Lundell, a fluid dynamics professor and aerodynamics expert. As they spoke, they made sketches of a pivoting mount that might allow panels to feather in the wind.

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How to Combat Perfectionism

Since perfectionism is associated with negative outcomes, what can someone with perfectionist tendencies do to change their behavior? Although people are sometimes hesitant to give up their perfectionist tendencies, psychologists point out that giving up on perfection doesn’t mean being less successful. In fact, because mistakes are an important part of learning and growing, embracing imperfection can actually help us in the long run.

One possible alternative to perfectionism involves developing what psychologists call a growth mindset. Researchers at Stanford University have found that cultivating a growth mindset is a crucial way to help us learn from our failures. Unlike those with fixed mindsets (who see their skill levels as innate and unchangeable), those with growth mindsets believe they can improve their abilities by learning from their mistakes. Psychologists point out that parents can play a crucial role in helping their children develop healthier attitudes towards failure: they can praise their children for making an effort (even if their results were imperfect) and help children learn to persevere when they make mistakes.

Another potential alternative to perfectionism is to cultivate self-compassion. To understand self-compassion, think about how you would respond to a close friend if they made a mistake. Odds are, you’d probably respond with kindness and understanding, knowing that your friend meant well. The idea behind self-compassion is that we should treat ourselves kindly when we make mistakes, remind ourselves that mistakes are part of being human, and avoid being consumed by negative emotions. As Ruggeri points out for BBC Future, self-compassion can be beneficial for mental health, but perfectionists tend not to treat themselves in compassionate ways. If you’re interested in trying to foster more self-compassion, the researcher who developed the concept of self-compassion has a short exercise you can try.

Psychologists have also suggested that cognitive behavioral therapy can be a way to help people change their beliefs about perfectionism. Although perfectionism is linked to lower mental health, the good news is that perfectionism is something you can change. By working to see mistakes as learning opportunities, and replacing self-criticism with self-compassion, it’s possible to overcome perfectionism and develop a healthier way of setting goals for yourself.

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The instructions to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents explain in clear terms how to defuse dangerous encounters: Use “minimal force” when trying to remove people from cars. Issue commands in “professional,” “firm,” “courteous” voices.

“First step in arresting an occupant of a vehicle is NOT to reach in and grab him, unless there are specific circumstances requiring that action,” reads one internal ICE document providing legal guidance for uses of force during vehicle stops. It was reviewed by The New York Times, along with other training materials. ICE officials will thoroughly investigate any encounter, but “deadly force” is allowed only when agents believe lives are in danger.

The fatal shooting of Renee Good last week by an ICE agent in Minneapolis — and the quick reaction by Trump administration officials to declare the agent a hero and Ms. Good a villain — has put a new focus on whether federal agents enforcing President Trump’s deportation drive have been properly prepared for confrontations on city streets. The response of Mr. Trump and his top lieutenants to the killing has also underscored how they have embraced what is supposed to be a last resort under the written standards: using lethal force in self-defense.

Rather than encourage agents to de-escalate combustible encounters, as the agency guidelines emphasize, Mr. Trump and his lieutenants have provided tacit approval for more aggressive tactics.

Several weeks before the shooting, a top ICE official told officers to take “decisive action” if threatened. Immediately after, Mr. Trump and other administration officials said Ms. Good had tried to run the agent over, although a Times video analysis found that she appeared to have turned her vehicle away from him.

“That guy is protected by absolute immunity,” Vice President JD Vance said last week of the ICE agent who killed Ms. Good, 37. “He was doing his job.”

On Tuesday, the Homeland Security Department reiterated that sentiment to its agents, posting a clip on social media of Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, saying, “You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one — no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist — can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.”

Tensions in Minneapolis have boiled over in the days since Ms. Good’s death. On Wednesday night, a federal agent in the city shot and wounded a man who was attacking him, officials said. The episode led to hours of clashes between protesters and law enforcement officers.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said ICE agents were using appropriate tactics.

“The entire Trump administration stands behind our heroic ICE officers who are conducting themselves with the utmost professionalism and integrity, while making American communities safer,” Ms. Jackson said in a statement. “It is not an ‘aggressive tactic’ to defend yourself from an individual using their car as a deadly weapon — ICE officers have a right to self-defense.”

Tricia McLaughlin, a homeland security spokeswoman, said that “ICE law enforcement officers are trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations to prioritize the safety of the public and our officers” and are “highly trained in de-escalation tactics.”

The Minneapolis shooting has also revealed the risks of Mr. Trump’s decision to send ICE on large-scale sweeps through cities, a move that has thrust agents into confrontations with hostile crowds. Most ICE agents are not trained to handle crowd control, according to a 2021 report by the Government Accountability Office. That is in part because ICE has historically focused on targeted arrests that attract less attention and rarely put its officers in conflict with the public.

Moreover, the agency is rapidly expanding its ranks, already more than doubling its number of law enforcement personnel, after an infusion of $75 billion in new funding over four years. It has expedited its training programs to accommodate the new recruits, including reducing training on how to handle vehicle stops, according to a former official at the federal government’s law enforcement academy who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal homeland security policies.

Ms. McLaughlin said there had been no reduction in training on vehicle stops.

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Newly recruited Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at a training center last year. President Trump and administration officials have given tacit approval for more aggressive tactics by the agency.Credit…Audra Melton for The New York Times

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Of all the nonstop talk about artificial intelligence at CES this year, the most useful thing I heard came from Stevie Wonder.

I spotted him moving through the expo floor—handlers tight by his side, fans threading in and out—and sidled up long enough to ask a few questions. Wonder isn’t new to this world. He’s always treated technology as part of his craft—as something to be shaped, tested, and tuned. Long before AI became an unavoidable buzzword, he worked with synth pioneers on the sounds that defined songs like “Superstition” and “Living for the City.” He’s been attending CES for more than a decade.

Wonder is working on his first album in more than 20 years, so I asked what he made of AI in the creative process. He did not equivocate. “I will not let my music be programmed,” he told me. “I’m not going to use it to do me and do the music I’ve done.” He wasn’t rejecting technology. He was protecting what he considers human territory. “We can go on and on talking about technology,” he said. But he was concerned with a different question. “Let’s see how you make things better for people in their lives—not to emulate life but to make life better for the living.”

Among the health-tech exhibitors, a common theme emerged: the always-on AI companion, one that can help make care decisions, locate services, and navigate daily life. Dominic King, vice president of health at Microsoft AI, told me people already use Copilot and Bing to ask roughly 50 million health-related questions every day.

Yet the promise felt realest only in smaller tools with clearer stakes—especially the ones built for people who are blind or have limited vision. With accessibility tech, both the problem and the upside felt obvious.

After a few hours on the floor, a pattern emerged. Some of the most compelling accessibility tech didn’t try to fix vision so much as translate the visual world into something usable. EchoVision, a pair of smart glasses from California-based AGIGA—developed with input from Wonder—let a wearer point their head toward a sign, a doorway or another object and hear a description about it. In a hall full of gadgets that felt like solutions in search of problems, narration that eases a person’s day made good sense.

But description doesn’t always solve the full problem.

“I’m not so sure it does you much good to know that in this direction is where the restrooms are,” a representative from Seattle-based Glidance told me, “if you don’t already have the navigation skills to dodge all the people in the way.” The world isn’t just a picture frozen in time. It’s movement. It’s crowds. It’s columns, curbs, chaos.

Glidance’s answer was Glide, a two-wheeled device that would roll along in front of you with a grip attached, sort of like a handlebar on wheels. Stereo cameras spotted obstacles and hazards. The device then steered and braked to help keep you moving in the direction you wanted to go.

Glidance kept the guide in your hand; .lumen put it on your forehead. The Romanian start-up’s founder, Cornel Amariei, described his glasses as “a self-driving car that sits on your head.” At CES, the company won an accessibility award in a pitch competition for assistive-tech start-ups that came with an oversize $10,000 check. (“Now we have money for the return tickets,” Amariei said.)

Many CES demos relied on bulky sensor rigs. But .lumen kept the hardware of its glasses simple and tried to do the rest with software. Six cameras create stereoscopic vision—depth perception built from slightly different angles, the way two eyes triangulate a curb. And the team made a key design choice: the glasses don’t require an Internet connection. All the compute is in the device itself.

Amariei explained that geometry alone isn’t enough. A lake is perfectly flat. A system that only understands “flat” will steer you right into it. The harder part is recognizing safe surfaces from dangerous ones—then translating that into something your body can use. When .lumen’s glasses find a clear route, they don’t announce directions one step at a time. They guide you there with haptics, nudging your head toward the open path.

All the sensor talk and the demos were fascinating, but the human payoff is what has stayed with me. These tools aim to let someone move through a lobby, down a sidewalk, through a crowded hall, without having to stop and reassess every few feet.

The best accessibility tech I saw at CES pushed back against the show’s most annoying habit: making sweeping promises when what people need are reliable, specific tools. Some of these devices will cost a lot. Some will take longer to mature than their demos suggested. Some will stumble in the real world. But they point in a direction that Stevie Wonder would recognize: tools that make life better for the living.

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