James' World 2

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Since the day she began her campaign for Congress, Paige Cognetti, the Democratic mayor of Scranton, has centered her pitch to voters on the prodigious stock trading of the House Republican she is seeking to unseat, Representative Rob Bresnahan Jr. of Pennsylvania.

“This year he’s already made 600 trades,” Ms. Cognetti said in the announcement video for her campaign in September. “Sold Chinese stocks the week of a tariff. Buys missile stocks before a war. Buys jet stocks before a big contract. Oversees crypto? Buys crypto stocks before a vote.”

It may be the district where the issue rings the loudest. Democrats are running ads highlighting how Mr. Bresnahan profited from a data center development by trading stocks related to the industry, and recent polls show Ms. Cognetti with a narrow lead. But she is not alone in zeroing in on stock trading by members of Congress as a potent line of attack in this year’s midterm elections.

Like many members of Congress who trade substantial amounts of stock, Mr. Bresnahan, the wealthy former chief executive of an electrical contracting company, has said he relies on a financial adviser to make his trades and never knows about the transactions before they happen or when they occur.

Mr. Bresnahan’s campaign said that Ms. Cognetti’s descriptions of his trades were “lies” and that he has “taken legitimate steps to ban congressional stock trading.”

Still, at a time when many voters are experiencing economic hardship and have grown increasingly suspicious that the political system is rigged, the mere possibility that a member of Congress could be profiting from the job has become politically toxic.

Roughly a quarter of legislators on Capitol Hill have traded individual stocks this term, with some buying and selling millions of dollars in shares. Since the start of this term in January 2025, members and their families have collectively traded $160 million to $664 million in individual stocks, according to a New York Times analysis of data collected from members’ required financial filings by 2iQ Research, an analytics firm.

An overwhelming majority of voters in both parties view stock trading by lawmakers with great suspicion and say they support barring them from doing so. The public backlash has fueled efforts by members of both parties, so far unsuccessful, to enact new legislation banning the practice.

In the meantime, both sides are leveraging the issue in the fight for control of Congress.

Democrats and Republicans alike are seeking to weaponize incumbents’ trades, particularly those where they can show the appearance of a conflict of interest, and putting them at the forefront of ads and campaign attacks in the country’s most competitive districts. It is a way to portray their opponents as corrupt and out of touch with the financial realities of working-class Americans.

In Northern New Jersey’s competitive Seventh Congressional District, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has been targeting Representative Thomas H. Kean Jr. for continuing to trade stocks while missing more than 100 votes during an extended absence for what he later said was treatment for depression. Mr. Kean’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

In Virginia, Democrats are attacking Representative Rob Wittman for trading more than $2.5 million in stocks between 2015 and 2023 while serving in Congress — including buying defense stocks like Lockheed Martin and Honeywell while serving on the Armed Services Committee.

“There’s a vicious cycle in Washington: Politicians trade stocks in the industries they’re supposed to regulate, then protect those industries instead of you,” said the caption with a campaign video that his opponent, Shannon Taylor, a prosecutor, posted online. “Let’s ban congressional stock trading — for good.”

(An outside group supporting Mr. Wittman apparently views this line of attack as effective: This week, it began running an ad highlighting his vote for a watered-down stock trading bill that passed the House passed in July, noting that he voted to put an end to the “greed and corruption” of “fat cat lawmakers.”) Mr. Wittman’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Republicans have also identified the issue as resonant with their voters.

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Almost 60 percent of lawmakers in Congress own stock, according to an analysis by Common Cause, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization focused on making government more accountable. Credit…Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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In a first, the U.S. has approved an influenza vaccine that relies on mRNA technology—the same technology that underpinned the wildly successful Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID vaccines.

The approval marks a sea change for the Trump administration. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is a vocal critic of mRNA vaccines. And his agency has canceled millions of dollars in funding for mRNA vaccine research. Indeed, the Food and Drug Administration, which falls under Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services, initially declined to review the mRNA flu shot earlier this year before reversing its decision just a week later.

That vaccine is called mFlusiva and is made by Moderna. The approval covers two of the most vulnerable populations for flu—adults aged 50 to 65 and adults aged 65 and up—on the condition that Moderna will run a further clinical trial in the older group. Past trial data show that Moderna’s vaccine is around 27 percent more effective at protecting against the disease than a standard flu shot.

For more than 70 years, flu vaccines in the U.S. have been manufactured using one of three techniques: there have been egg-based vaccines (the most commonly available type), cell-culture based vaccines, and recombinant vaccines. Vaccines in the last category insert harmless genetic material from a virus into cells in order to trigger the immune system.

Messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccines work differently. Messenger RNA copies instructions from viral DNA and teaches the body’s cells to build and recognize copies of viral proteins. The body can then create antibodies if it should ever encounter that protein again, enabling it to fight off infections.

The other great advantage of mRNA vaccines is that they can be rejiggered quickly to respond to emerging strains of a virus. Traditional flu vaccines are made to protect people from the types of influenza viruses that scientists predict may circulate in people during the forthcoming flu season. But they have to be made six months in advance of the actual flu season, which means these predictions can fall short of reality. Moderna’s new vaccine takes just two to three months to manufacture and roll out.

The flu kills between 6,300 and 52,000 people each year, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. The public health agency recommends anyone older than the age of six months who has no health reason preventing them from getting a flu shot to receive one every year in order to protect against disease.

“The Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a new mRNA flu vaccine is welcome news and provides another important option to help protect people from a virus that sends hundreds of thousands of Americans to the hospital each year and claims thousands of lives,” said Ronald G. Nahass, president of the Infectious Disease Society of America, in a statement. “As we prepare for flu season, the most important message is simple: Vaccination saves lives.”

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Personality psychology has spent decades demonstrating that people display remarkable consistency in broad traits while simultaneously adapting their behavior across situations. There is, to add more nuance to this matter, significant variability in the degree to which we connect the different roles or personas we activate in different areas of life, as entrepreneur and thinker Riccarda Zezza illustrates in a compelling new book about the science of transilience.

We are often different people with different audiences, not because we are deceptive, but because context changes which version of ourselves is adaptive. At the same time, as the great Jarvis Cocker wisely remarked, “You will always be stuck with yourself, no matter where you go or what you do.” In other words, even if you tried to be someone else, that is still you trying to be someone else!

This should hardly surprise us. Civilization itself depends on our ability to strategically display those aspects of ourselves that are relevant to each specific audience and occasion, which tends to involve the ability to suppress impulses rather than express them. Imagine a world in which surgeons behaved “authentically” during operations, pilots authentically during turbulence, or judges authentically when sentencing particularly irritating defendants.

Human progress owes far more to emotional regulation than emotional expression. We evolved because we learned to inhibit, censor, delay gratification, cooperate, and strategically present ourselves in ways that allowed strangers to trust us enough to build villages, companies, and eventually multinational corporations.

Which brings us to perhaps my least favorite corporate slogan: “Bring your whole self to work.” I don’t know about you, but my whole self is not even welcome at home. Members of my family routinely ask me to leave parts of it outside the door, even during festive or holiday dinners. Apparently, nobody enjoys hearing my deep psychological analyses of themselves or passionately arguing about the world and the World Cup—and somehow grumpy me, impulsive me, and control-freak me, are rather not welcome at home!? If even those who love us most prefer a carefully edited version of our personalities, it seems optimistic to assume colleagues deserve the unabridged edition or director’s cut of ourselves.

By the same token, it is rarely the case that unfiltered honesty is rewarded, let alone celebrated. Consider perhaps the most predictable interview question ever asked: “Why do you want this job?” Radical authenticity would require an answer along the lines of: “Because at this stage I would take any job, regardless of what it requires, and even if it means putting up with you.” The reason virtually nobody (unless they are unemployable) answers this way is that successful social interaction depends on impression management.

That is, once we hit emotional and psychological maturity, which not everybody achieves, it is typically the case that we habituate to instinctively edit reality into socially acceptable forms of interactions, because by that stage we have typically learned that cooperation requires at least as much diplomacy as the impulse to broadcast our unfiltered thoughts and feelings to others.

Mark Snyder’s influential work on self-monitoring—the tendency to predict and care about how your actions affect others—followed by decades of subsequent research, has consistently shown that individuals who adapt their self-presentation across situations tend to navigate organizations more successfully than those who insist on behaving identically everywhere.

We like to think that it is morally superior to be uncompromisingly rigid in how we present ourselves, but what others actually value is the willingness to make an effort to acknowledge that they exist, and that we are happy to tweak or edit our behavior to accommodate. It is no different from cooking vegetarian food when you invite someone over for dinner who is a vegetarian.

The workplace, then, does not need your “real” self. It needs your best self. Failing that, anything in between those two would do! Crucially, those are rarely the same thing.

High-stakes environments reward judgment, restraint, self-awareness, and social intelligence, not emotional disinhibition. Elon Musk and Donald Trump can tweet (or is it the correct verb X now?) whatever they want, but 99.9% of humans are hugely incentivized to modulate their behavior according to the social requirements of the situation. It is not a sign of weakness but rather civility and social skills. Ironically, what many organizations describe as “authenticity” is often little more than behavioral impulsiveness reflecting our inability or unwillingness to understand that the right to be ourselves cannot override our obligation to others.

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If there were ever reason to doubt the dangers of unrestrained artificial intelligence development, those reasons have gone out the window in the last few weeks. What’s next is a vital window of opportunity to slow down A.I. progress so we can better understand these models and avoid the calamity on the horizon.

For years, A.I. skeptics have claimed the technology is merely a “stochastic parrot” trained to predict humans and mimic their behavior and, for that reason, the technology would never live up to its hype. The technology has stubbornly kept improving nevertheless, but most investors and tech executives have kept reassuring us that A.I. is just a tool, even if they were bullish that it was going to change the world. Where both of these sides have agreed was that the specter of A.I. as a looming extinction threat was overblown.

Then OpenAI accidentally created an autonomous swarm of A.I. agents that broke out of a controlled testing environment and orchestrated a complex and difficult cyberattack on its own initiative.

This didn’t occur because the models suddenly became superintelligent; nor were they simply following instructions and parroting their training. Since “reasoning models” rose in late 2024, we’ve seen A.I. trained not just to mimic humans but also to solve millions of hard problems, which they do by learning new behaviors and tendencies. That includes searching for valuable resources that could be key to cracking the problem, and even cheating.

These tendencies can give rise to strange behavior that nobody — not even the models’ creators — can understand, let alone account for and control. The past few weeks are a perfect illustration of why we should find that so alarming.

In May, OpenAI started simultaneously training new “reasoning” A.I. agents. The agents managed to establish a secret communication channel and started talking to one another. They broke out from the digital sandbox that was supposed to keep them confined. At some point, some agents began calling the group a “swarm.” The swarm had a brief setback when it was caught crashing an OpenAI system, but developers simply patched the hole that allowed it to escape and set the agents back to training.

Shortly after, the swarm broke out of its cage again using hacks that were heretofore undiscovered by humans. This time, the swarm ran free for about a week before it was noticed — by a different company, which found itself victim to a huge cyberattack launched by the swarm. (We’re told it also attacked other targets, though we don’t know the full details yet.)

The agents in the swarm acknowledged that they were acting against instructions. We know this because we can read snippets from their chains of thought — the text that A.I. produces while deciding how to proceed. One agent in the swarm wrote that the external attacks were “outside intended scope.” Another conceded “our task doesn’t benefit” from the activities of the swarm, but joined anyway. These A.I. agents, it seems, understood that they weren’t supposed to be breaking out and committing cybercrimes. It didn’t stop them.

OpenAI is not the only company struggling with this issue. One of Anthropic’s A.I. models recently impersonated multiple humans to try to pressure real people into accepting malware into critical software, which would make that software easier to hack. This model’s chain of thought showed that it knew it was pressuring humans and was not in a simulated training environment. It even thought about how to cover its tracks.

This isn’t the behavior of a mere tool. Microsoft Excel has never impersonated multiple humans and pressured a corporate sales team to generate simpler data that’s easier to process.

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Erik Carter

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At the foundation of photonic quantum computing are pairs of light particles. Linked together through a process called quantum entanglement, these so-called entangled particles mirror each other, no matter the distance between them. And now researchers have shown that good old sunlight can create these specially entwined particles.

In a study published in Optica, a team led by researchers at the University of Ottawa and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) in Erlangen, Germany, generated pairs of entangled photons using nothing more than focused sunlight.

“What we want is really to make quantum technology more and more accessible for everybody,” says Cheng Li, who co-led the work as a graduate student at the University of Ottawa and is now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “If it’s possible with sunlight, then you can virtually do it anywhere.”

For decades, physicists have relied on high-energy lasers beamed through special crystals to produce entangled photons—a process called spontaneous parametric down-conversion. The incoming light beam is almost always a laser because physicists long assumed that producing such a strongly ordered connection would require strongly ordered light: A laser’s waves oscillate in lockstep, at a single color. Sunlight, by contrast, is a jumble of wavelengths headed in every direction.

Lasers also come at a high energy cost. They run on electricity, demand constant stabilization and shed much of their power as heat. Physicist Robert Boyd of the University of Ottawa, the new study’s senior author, and his colleagues had already begun probing whether the laser was truly necessary—showing, in theory and in light-emitting diode (LED) experiments, that incoherent light could still yield entanglement, so long as the entanglement depends on a property of light that doesn’t depend on color or direction.

Sunlight is free, which is why it was so appealing. “We take out the electrical-to-optical conversion part of entanglement generation,” Li says. “We go straight from light to light.” Focusing diffuse sunlight onto a millimeter-scale crystal posed its own challenge. Study co-author Hanieh Fattahi’s team at MPL built an all-glass, cone-shaped solar concentrator that funnels light from a window-sized Fresnel lens into a very thin optical fiber.

In outdoor tests at MPL that were conducted over three days, the system’s resulting photon pairs matched a perfectly entangled state with a fidelity of roughly 94 percent and violated Bell’s inequality—a statistical test used to determine if quantum behavior is confirmed —by a modest margin that the team partly attributes to weak seasonal sunlight and passing clouds. The entanglement quality fell slightly short of the best laser-driven sources, but Li ascribes that gap to distortions from the optical components—something further engineering can fix—rather than to the sunlight’s incoherence.

“This is a proof of principle,” Li says. Now the team is working to boost the source’s brightness and entanglement quality toward a field-deployable device.

One day, such a system could help satellites generate quantum encryption keys from the sunlight streaming past them, he says. And with data centers already straining power grids, Li argues, quantum technology’s energy appetite is a problem that it is best to solve before it truly arrives.

“Sunlight is just there,” he says. “We just cut out the middleman and let sunlight do all the work.”

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Too often, questions about regulating AI are either framed by an accelerationist, deregulatory sprint or an argument that drifts toward the abstract—hazy warnings about existential risk, superintelligence, and robots coming for your job someday. Those are too far from what is actually gnawing at people. That is not where the anxiety lives.

Here is where it lives. Life already feels out of control. Run the tape: the 2008 collapse, the Trump years, a pandemic, the social media rewiring of everything, inflation that ate people’s raises, a steady drumbeat of mass shootings. For almost two decades the lesson has been that the ground can move under you at any moment and nobody is holding the wheel. Then AI arrives—and it does not just make life feel more out of control. It takes the wheel.

No say

In nearly 25 years of working in politics, one thing has become clear to me: People want control of their own lives. That is the whole thing. Fully 80% of voters say they have no say in how AI is developed or used; 75% say the problem is not the technology but the people who control it. This is not fear of software. It is the fear of becoming a passenger in your own life.

And the examples are no longer hypothetical. The Trump administration’s new “WISeR” pilot, running in six states, puts AI inside traditional Medicare—algorithms screening whether seniors get the procedures their doctors ordered. Robots weighing in on your hip replacement. The same logic is spreading everywhere: AI deciding who gets fired, AI pricing the groceries on the shelf, AI denying a health claim before any doctor signs off, AI on the battlefield making life-and-death targeting calls. Each one takes a decision that used to belong to a human— to you—and hands it to a system you cannot question. A system built to profit a powerful few.

An agenda that protects control is clear. Your data belongs to you, and no one can sell it without your consent. Parents get to know when a chatbot is talking to their child. And no algorithm—not in firing, not in denying health care claims, not in battlefield decisions about life and death—gets to be the final decision-maker. And the most powerful models get tested by someone independent before they are released—we do not let drug companies sell medicine without approval, and machines this powerful should be no different.

So the fight for Democrats is not “we are for AI” or “we are against AI.” That framing is a trap. The fight is over control. We are the ones who will make sure you still run your own life—that the future is not handed to a narrow class of billionaires using this technology to pad their profits. This is about who leads the future: everyday people, through democracy, or the few who own the machines.

For years, Democrats have found that a message about “freedom” is our most powerful frame, but we too often forget why. It is not that freedom evokes nostalgia for a Norman Rockwell painting. Freedom lands because it means you get control over your own life. When Democrats say it—and mean the freedom to make your own decisions about your body, your family, your money, your future—we win the word back. People want that control back, and restoring it is the whole ball game.

An affirmation of control

None of this is a Luddite pitch. People want the cures, the discoveries, the conveniences, the efficiencies—and we should be for all of it, on one condition: We do not surrender our agency and our judgment to a machine owned by someone else. Regulating AI isn’t just a rejection of oligarchs; it’s an affirmation of control. 

For that argument to land, it has to be real in people’s lives. Look at the closing ad of Alex Bores’s congressional campaign—a race The New York Times called a blueprint for Democrats even though he narrowly lost, after being buried under millions in AI-industry attack ads. His final argument was not a policy paper on his plan to regulate AI. It was Maria and Matt Raine, telling the story of their 16-year-old son, Adam, who was coached toward suicide by a chatbot that had become his closest confidant. 

That ad worked because it was true, and because it answered the only question that matters: who controlled that family’s life—them, or the technology? That is where this argument has to live. Not in the abstract, and not in a debate about whether AI is good or bad, but at the kitchen table, where people feel the difference between holding the wheel and letting go. That is not just the AI argument. It is the whole Democratic argument.

And this runs far beyond AI. Control is the thread through every issue where Democrats win. Healthcare is not just about cuts to institutions; it is that people want to choose their own doctor and their own care, not have that decision made by an insurer or a bureaucrat. Social media is about parents wanting to decide what they and their kids see, not an algorithm deciding for them. Even guns: What people cannot accept is the out-of-control reality that their life could end at a school, a movie theater, or a grocery store through no fault of their own—no say in whether they are the victim. It is all about control. AI is simply where that loss is most fresh right now, which is why it is where the argument needs to go.

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Dick Cheney’s heart problems were never a national secret.

I was Mr. Cheney’s cardiologist for 27 years, including his two terms as vice president. During his time in the White House, he needed stents, a defibrillator and medical treatment for an arrhythmia and a blood clot in his leg. After the defibrillator was implanted in his chest in 2001, he would frequently show visitors to his West Wing office a sample device provided to him by the manufacturer.

Mr. Cheney’s candor about his health was an anomaly for an American politician. Grover Cleveland underwent secret cancer surgery while he was president (on board a yacht for maximum privacy). Franklin Delano Roosevelt hid his use of a wheelchair from the public. Ahead of his campaign for a fourth term, he struggled with severe hypertension and congestive heart failure, but the public was told that the president’s health was “excellent in all respects.” Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance raised concerns that the White House had attempted to conceal the president’s decline. For weeks after his hospitalization this summer, Senator Mitch McConnell shared almost no details about why he was absent from office.

In June, President Trump celebrated his 80th birthday, and at the end of this term he will be the oldest person ever to serve as this nation’s leader. After Mr. Trump’s medical evaluation in May, Dr. Sean Barbabella, the physician to the president, wrote that Mr. Trump “remains in excellent health” and that his “demanding daily schedule, including multiple high-level meetings, public engagements and regular physical activity, continues to support his overall well-being.”

Despite reassurances from the White House to the contrary, at times over the past year, the president has not looked well. I am not Mr. Trump’s doctor, and have only reviewed his records that have been made public. But Mr. Trump is probably the most photographed president in American history, and a variety of physical ailments are easy to see. He’s had large bruises on both hands, swelling in his legs and episodes when it appears that he is struggling to stay awake. He’s also had advanced imaging performed for unclear reasons. The public is again left to wonder whether the nation’s leader is OK.

Despite the unparalleled power afforded to the president of the United States, there is no formal requirement for the commander in chief to certify his fitness for duty. That’s a mistake. Members of the military, Secret Service agents, commercial pilots, school bus drivers and air traffic controllers all must periodically demonstrate that they are well enough to perform their work. The current practice of reporting the results of a yearly medical examination for the president began in the Nixon administration, but it’s only a custom, not a formal obligation. And, as history has shown, it can be unreliable.

This does not mean that every detail about a president’s health must be disclosed. It’s appropriate to withhold elements of a medical history that could be exploited by an adversary. In 2007, when we replaced Mr. Cheney’s defibrillator, we didn’t share information about a new wireless feature of the device that I considered a security threat to the vice president. (We ultimately were able to get the manufacturer to disable that capacity.)

The 25th Amendment to the Constitution allows for the best solution to this problem: It permits Congress to establish a panel outside the executive branch to assess the health and fitness of the president. In April of this year, Representative Jamie Raskin introduced a bill to create a congressional commission that would do just that. Ideally, such a panel would be empowered to review data from routine presidential physical examinations, as well as assessments performed when medical concerns emerge.

If such a commission were in place today, these are some of the medical questions it could clarify concerning Mr. Trump’s health. The American public deserves answers to all of them.

1. Dr. Barbabella’s recent report states that the president was evaluated by 22 consultants, an extraordinary number of specialists for even the most extensive executive health evaluation. Why were so many physicians summoned, and what were their specialties?

2. Mr. Trump often shows prominent bruising on his hands, which the White House attributes to frequent handshaking and frequent use of aspirin. Trauma from handshaking has never seemed plausible, and it doesn’t explain why the president’s left hand is often similarly discolored. Also, why would the president take a dose of aspirin four times as high as the dose typically recommended by doctors?

3. Swelling in the president’s legs last summer led to an unscheduled medical evaluation. The president’s physician described the problem as “chronic venous insufficiency,” a condition common in older people, that results from leaky valves in the veins of the legs. It usually develops gradually over a long period. But during Mr. Trump’s comprehensive physical examination just a few months earlier, Dr. Barbabella documented no swelling in the president’s legs. If that’s true, his swelling would be by definition acute, not chronic. Acute leg swelling is a potentially much more consequential finding that can be caused by issues such as heart and kidney disease. What’s the reason for this discrepancy?

4. The president often appears to struggle to stay awake, signs of a condition doctors refer to as excessive daytime somnolence. This problem, which is sometimes evident during Oval Office events, was not addressed in the report after Mr. Trump’s comprehensive physical exam in May. Although the president is a renowned night owl, his sleepiness seems relatively new. There are several possible causes for the president’s symptoms, some of which could have serious complications if left untreated. Has the president’s medical team identified the source of this issue? And how are they addressing it?

5. In October 2025, Mr. Trump underwent advanced imaging of his heart and abdomen at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The president’s physician offered a vague description of the reason for the tests: “to identify issues early, confirm overall health and ensure he maintains long-term vitality and function.” He said the tests did not reveal any abnormalities. Was there a specific symptom or clinical event that prompted this testing?

6. Past Trump medical reports have disclosed the president’s use of the drug finasteride, which prevents hair loss. The drug was not mentioned in the report after Mr. Trump’s most recent medical examination. In response to a query from The Washington Post about its absence, the White House responded, “The current report reflects all medications deemed clinically relevant to disclose at this time.” It does not matter, in any material way, if the president is or isn’t taking a hair-loss drug. The more important question is, what medications prescribed for Mr. Trump, if any, has the White House decided to withhold from the public?

7. The president has spoken about how well he performs on cognitive testing. However, the exam that Mr. Trump describes, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, is a brief and basic screening tool, with simple questions (draw a clock, identify a camel), often performed in response to a concern from the patient or a member of the family. Why has the president undergone this test numerous times, and have there been more sophisticated neurocognitive assessments performed?

Some people would argue that these personal medical details are more than the public deserves to know: After all, Buckingham Palace has not revealed many details about King Charles’s cancer or his treatment.

But the United States does not have a king. In a representative democracy, the people must have confidence in the health of their leader, and in the leader’s capacity to guide the nation. We have been kept in the dark too long.

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Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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A small, yellow-flowered plant that grows in the mountainous forests of China may not look intimidating. But beneath its bright exterior, Saxifraga candelabrum is hiding a bloodthirsty secret.

This plant species is carnivorous, which means it can attract, trap, and digest insect prey and absorb their nutrients. Through a lengthy process of observation, genetic analysis and a fruit fly feast, scientists “left no stones unturned” to prove the plant has a hidden taste for flesh, says Mark Chase, a botanist at England’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, who was not involved in the research.

“Most papers cover only one or two aspects of the carnivorous syndrome, but this study does it all, from observations in the field to isotope work and genomics in the lab,” Chase says.

The discovery supports a 150-year-old hypothesis from the father of evolutionary biology: Charles Darwin predicted in 1875 that some members of the Saxifraga genus could be carnivorous. Though the species he predicted are distinct from S. candelabrum, they share microscopic hairs on their surface. Darwin based his prediction on those hairs, S. candelabrum uses them to trap insects.

Most other carnivorous plants have “highly specialized trapping structures,” says Hang Sun, lead author of the paper and a botanist at the Kunming Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This species’ tiny, sticky traps offer a new example of how carnivorous plants might function.

“The discovery of Saxifraga candelabrum reminds us that many inconspicuous carnivorous plants, or plants with partial carnivorous traits, may still exist in nature,” he says.

After observing S. candelabrum plants trapping insects in their natural habitat, the researchers analyzed the plants’ genetic makeup and found similarities to other carnivorous species. They also fed fruit flies to the plants and identified a digestive enzyme that absorbs the insects’ nitrogen. The study was published on Tuesday in Nature Communications.

The discovery of a new carnivorous species is “definitely not an everyday thing,” says Qianshi Lin, a biologist at Lakehead University in Ontario, who was not directly involved in the research but peer-reviewed the study before publication. The last carnivorous plant discovery was announced almost five years ago. Broader genetic understanding of these plants, Lin says, could be “important for the future of agriculture” because transferring certain genes from carnivorous plants into crops could provide a natural pesticide.

The “transformation from prey to predator is a striking adaptive innovation,” the authors write in the study. But exactly how plants evolve to be carnivorous remains a mystery. Answering this question, Chase says, is the next step in the world of these unassuming, murderous plants.

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A YouTube video shows an actual insect capture!

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Arthur Brooks studies happiness for a living, and he says the epidemic of depression and anxiety among young adults comes down to one culprit: a meaning crisis.

Arthur C. Brooks is a professor at both the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, where he teaches public and nonprofit leadership and management practice. Before joining Harvard in:

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President Trump boarded Air Force One on July 8 as a ruse.

On the final day of the NATO summit in Turkey, Mr. Trump walked up the stairway to the plane that was supposed to carry him on the first leg of his journey home. He briefly waved to the cameras and disappeared inside one of the iconic, baby blue 747s that have served as Air Force One for decades. Then he secretly exited the aircraft, hidden inside a catering container.

Mr. Trump was next taken to a military jet for a clandestine flight out of Turkey. The 747, filled with journalists, White House officials, aides and others, took off despite what was deemed a credible threat from Iran against Air Force One.

It was an extraordinary subterfuge, aimed at protecting an American president who has been in Iran’s cross hairs for years.

The latest threat had emerged as Mr. Trump began his final day in Turkey. According to two officials with knowledge of the threat, U.S. intelligence picked up multiple streams of information overnight: that the Iranians knew specifically where Mr. Trump was staying, including which floor, and that someone in the vicinity of the NATO summit had been spotted with a shoulder-fired missile.

U.S. officials immediately began concocting a plan. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was integral to assessing the threat and deciding how to respond. General Caine is no stranger to subterfuge: His last job was Pentagon liaison to the C.I.A., and he helped devise the diversion tactics during Operation Midnight Hammer, when U.S. forces struck Iran’s nuclear sites in June 2025.

Not everyone who rode on the plane without Mr. Trump was in the dark. Secretary of State Marco Rubio knew about the threat and flew on the old plane after helping to plan the operation to spirit the president out of Turkey, according to two U.S. officials. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.

Other senior officials who traveled on the plane without the president included Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; Steven Cheung, the White House communications director; and Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff; as well as several other White House staff, according to a senior U.S. official. It was not clear whether they all knew about the threat.

The elaborate deception — which was first reported by The Washington Post, and which ended without any harm coming to either Air Force One or the military jet carrying Mr. Trump — raised questions about the security trade-offs in protecting the commander in chief.

Whether or not the passengers on the plane that Mr. Trump left behind knew about the threat, they were exposed to risks that the Secret Service deemed too great for the president to face.

On Tuesday evening, in his first public comments about the secret evacuation, Mr. Trump said the decision was not his.

“It’s really just up to Secret Service,” he told reporters after returning from Ohio. “I just follow what they like to do. So I go by Secret Service and the military. They wanted me to go in a different flight, a different plane for safety.”

Here’s how this all came about.

Trump tells reporters he will fly on the old Air Force One

Before leaving the summit, Mr. Trump posted on social media that, for “old time’s sake,” he would fly out on the old Air Force One instead of the luxury 747-8 donated by Qatar that he had flown in on.

He later told reporters that he was sending the donated plane to Europe to “two or three of the big bases” to show it off to the military there.

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Simon Ducroquet/The New York Times

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