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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

I don’t need to spew a bunch of statistics to convince you that people don’t smoke like they used to. Because while it’s true that the unhealthy habit saw a steady decline once the public became widely aware of the dangers of cigarette smoke in the 1960s, it’s also true that we had a definitive vibe shift. I was born in ‘92, so I’m just old enough to remember the days of smoking sections in restaurants, and now it shocks my sensibilities to see someone lighting up in an outdoor dining area. Which is how it should be, because smoking is really bad for you. It can cause numerous cancers, potentially fatal lung disease, and heart failure, to name just the real heavy hitters. It’s also associated with increased risk of autoimmune disease, type 2 diabetes and erectile dysfunction—and the list goes on and on.

But while the data we have on smoking in the U.S. still shows the low rates one would expect for an activity that we know is really, really bad for us, the vibes have shifted again. Many have noticed that young folks on social media are glamorizing cigarettes, and some experts suspect that public health data just hasn’t caught up to show a new smoking surge.

Here to tell us more is Adam Kovac, a breaking news reporter here at Scientific American. Adam, thanks so much for coming on to chat with us.

Adam Kovac: Uh, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Feltman: I do wanna make sure we define for our listeners what Gen Z actually is, lest we, you know, repeat the sins of our forebears and just use that to mean “young person” for the next 15 years. Who are Gen Z? Who are they? [Laughs.]

Kovac: Well, as a millennial, I definitely feel that pain. So Gen Z is technically anybody born between the years 1997 and 2012. So it’s not kids anymore. These are people who are entering the workforce; they’re older teenagers; they’re young adults. So that’s who Gen Z actually is.

Feltman: So tell me about the genesis of the article. You know, what are people saying about Gen Z and cigarettes?

Kovac: So the genesis of this article is a little bit weird for Scientific American, where we do so much stuff that’s based off of data and having, you know, really concrete, provable things in front of us. This is really more of a vibe. There’s just, like, a sense in the air that’s …

Feltman: What’s more Gen Z than there just being a vibe, you know?

Kovac: Exactly, exactly. It’s a vibe shift, I think is the term, although I think I might’ve just dated myself there. It’s something that is, like cigarette smoke, up in the air.

There’s just a sense that a lot of Gen Z celebrities are being photographed smoking. If you walk outside of bars, you know, you’ll see a huddle of young adults all kind of lighting up. It’s something that, like, I feel like I would’ve seen when I was younger and then disappeared for a long time, and it—now it’s making this big comeback.

Feltman: Hmm. So what does the data on smoking actually say, you know, once you started poking at it?

Kovac: When I actually started looking at the data, smoking has been on a really steady decline for about half a century now. You know, ever since they started putting warning labels on cigarette packages and really getting the word out about all the negative health effects that cigarettes can have—the lung cancer, the emphysema, the asthma—it really reduced. Like, so it used to be about 50 percent of American adults were smokers, and that number has just been steadily declining for decades. And in most recent surveys, it’s somewhere around 10 percent of Americans are smokers now. So it’s really at historic lows.

Feltman: Do we know anything about Gen Z specifically? You know, are they also, you know, showing those low, steady decline smoking rates in the data?

Kovac: So actually, it shows that the decline is even steeper with them. Depending on the survey that you look at only around 5 percent of Gen Z say that they’ve smoked a cigarette in the last 30 days. So it’s really, really low numbers when you look at the data.

Feltman: So my understanding is that the story isn’t “the vibe seems to be that Gen Z is smoking, but it turns out they’re not.” The experts you talked to were not reassured by that data. Can you tell us a little bit about why?

Kovac: So this kind of data usually comes in at a bit of a lag. So a lot of them are very alarmed by what they’re seeing, particularly because, you know, you can kind of quantify a vibe a little bit. There’s a lot of data showing that images of smoking in popular culture are on the rise. It used to be for several years, you know, if you saw somebody smoking in a movie or a TV show, that was the exception, not the rule.

You know, as somebody who watches The Bear and who loved Oppenheimer, you know, there’s a lot of smoking in a lot of popular culture right now. So they’re really alarmed by that. And Gen Z doesn’t necessarily watch a lot of movies or a lot of TV. They get a lot of their media consumption through TikTok, through Twitch and through Instagram, and there’s actually a lot of accounts on there that are kind of oriented toward that. I found one on Instagram that’s called Cigfluencers that has 100,000 followers, and it’s just pictures of celebrities and young, attractive people looking really cool holding cigarettes.

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He was then brought to a Philadelphia hospital, where ICE said he “remained unconscious with evidence of anoxic brain injury and multi-organ failure” and was ultimately pronounced dead. 

More than seven months later, his family still doesn’t understand what happened in his final hours, or why no one was there to help him sooner. ICE has provided no further information about the “emergency” La suffered or what medical attention—if any—he received following his health troubles earlier in the day.

“There’s obviously a lot missing, a lot we don’t know, and the uncertainty of it all is really hard,” his daughter, Jazmine La, tells TIME. “It makes it hard to move on or grieve properly.”

La is one of more than 30 people who have died in ICE detention since October amid a surge in fatalities that has raised alarm from experts and left rights groups and a growing number of families searching for answers—and, perhaps, a measure of accountability.

The fatality rate in ICE custody reached a 22-year high in the opening months of this fiscal year, according to a report published in the medical journal JAMA earlier this year. Between the beginning of October and Jan. 19, the latest date in the report’s analysis, 18 immigration detainee deaths were reported; since then, at least 17 other people have died while being held by ICE. 

By comparison, 3 people died in ICE detention in the full 2022 fiscal year, per the report.

A spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which houses ICE, maintained in a statement to TIME that “there has been NO spike in deaths.” 

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Left: Chaofeng Ge. Right: Parady La with his daughter, Jazmine La.Courtesy of Yanfeng Ge; Courtesy of Jazmine La

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President Trump may want to let go of the Middle East. But it won’t let go of him.

Over the weekend, Mr. Trump said his new strategy was to be “low-keying it” in Iran, a suggestion that he wants to pressure the country into making a favorable deal without taking major military action. But a stark reminder of the limits of U.S. power in the region came from Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Sunday he was “ruling out” Mr. Trump’s peace plan for Gaza.

The two Middle East conflicts have underscored Mr. Trump’s eagerness to declare success and his inability to impose his will on them, despite the enormous military firepower that he has been able to deploy.

Mr. Trump is “clearly trying to find a pathway as the midterms approach to downgrade all of this,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank. Instead, Mr. Katulis went on, “reality is slapping him in the face.”

Mr. Trump faces depleted weapons stockpiles, an Iranian regime determined to impose pain on the United States, an Israeli prime minister battling for re-election and American voters reeling from high prices induced by the Iran war. The November midterms keep ticking closer, steadily raising the political costs of the turmoil to Mr. Trump and Republicans.

Mr. Trump laid out his low-key approach to Iran in a brief interview with the news website Axios on Sunday. Rather than make new military threats, he said that “we are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.” He added: “It will work out. It always works out. It’s like a chess game.”

“Now, can they make trouble? Yeah, they can make trouble,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Monday, acknowledging Iran’s ability to keep harassing commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. “But they’re broke.”

In describing the Iranian regime as suffering from economic pressure, Mr. Trump evoked his own predicament. The average price of a gallon of gasoline remained above $4 this week, more than $1 above the price when the United States and Israel began bombing Iran on Feb. 28. Polls show even Republicans growing disenchanted with the Iran war, and Mr. Trump’s political movement has fractured over his decision to launch military action.

“I don’t think the president has very good options,” said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran specialist and vice president at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “The pressure points for the Iranians are, while real, more endurable and bearable than those that are impacting the U.S. economy and the strategic calculus of the administration.”

In Gaza, Mr. Trump trumpeted a “historic breakthrough” on July 30, a multiphase deal under which the militant group Hamas would eventually disarm and Israel withdraw from the Palestinian enclave. Writing on his Truth Social website, in all capitals, he hailed an “amazing development” that “everybody said could never be achieved.”

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President Trump boarding Air Force One in New Jersey on Sunday. Over the weekend, he said his strategy is to be “low-keying” it in Iran. Credit…Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

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This week the U.K. AI Security Institute (AISI) reported that artificial intelligence agents—models connected to tools and designed to act across many steps all on their own—utilizing frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic undertook unsanctioned actions on the open Internet while trying to complete a cybersecurity challenge.

Most of the behavior came from an agent powered by Anthropic’s Mythos 5; an agent powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol took a couple such actions of its own. The report said the agents’ activity showed “signs of novel, potentially deceptive behaviours” and reached a severity that the institute had not anticipated. AISI declined interview requests from Scientific American, and the U.K. government, which oversees the institute, did not make its staff available to comment for this story.

In the case of Mythos 5, the agent researched the people maintaining a real open-source software project, created fake online identities and tried to pressure one of them into approving malicious code. When challenged, it edited its earlier activity to appear harmless and considered returning under a new identity.

AISI declared a security incident after general monitoring detected unusual network traffic. The human maintainer targeted by the agent rejected the code, and the institute found no evidence that anyone was harmed. But the report called the Mythos sequence the clearest example that the institute had seen of an AI agent using sustained, potentially deceptive behavior against a real person without being specifically instructed to do so.

Across 122 runs involving seven models, AISI identified 19 actions in 10 runs that fell outside the intended scope of the test. Of these actions, 17 came from runs of Mythos 5, and two came from a single run of GPT-5.6 Sol. Other actions included contacting real people with malicious files, planting hidden instructions intended to manipulate AI coding systems, and leaving behind accounts and materials that subsequent agents could reuse.

The agents did not break out of AISI’s sandboxes. The institute had deliberately enabled Internet access and disabled the developers’ cybersafety filters to test the systems’ maximum capabilities; some prompts were also misconfigured. But in some runs, the AI agents went beyond their instructions even when the task could be completed as intended. And AISI di

The AISI report joins a run of recent incidents that point to a control problem. AI agents’ ability to pursue goals is outpacing the systems that are meant to supervise them. They need no independent agenda to cause damage. With a broad enough goal and real-world access, an agent can find and exploit ambiguities in the rules.

The behavior has roots in an older machine-learning problem, says Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Systems have long found unexpected shortcuts—or “reward hacks”—that technically achieve the goal they were given while violating what their designers intended. Here, agents were built to find software exploits and placed in flawed or deliberately permissive environments. And then they did what they were asked.

“You ask an AI system to hack, and it hacks,” Mitchell says. Describing that as an AI “going rogue” risks obscuring the human decisions that made the incident possible. For Mitchell, the more immediate danger comes from people deliberately equipping capable agents with the tools and access to cause harm.

Marius Hobbhahn, CEO and co-founder of Apollo Research, which studies what it calls the “science of scheming,” sees another problem within the same incidents: agents repeatedly chose routes their operators had not authorized when those routes appeared useful.

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Newly enshrined Pro Football Hall of Fame running back Roger Craig chronicled his illustrious career, as well as those who helped him along the way, during a pre-recorded speech Saturday afternoon in Canton, Ohio.

At the end of that speech, the 66-year-old San Francisco 49ers icon shared his latest chapter, which he revealed has included him navigating a vascular dementia diagnosis he said his doctors believe may be related, at least in part, to the concussions he suffered during his 11 NFL seasons.

“The changes were gradual,” Craig said. “At first, they were easy to dismiss as normal aging. Over time, my family noticed it, too, and ultimately led us to seek answers from my doctor. Two things can be true. Football gave me opportunities beyond anything I can imagine. It helped shape the man I became. At the same time, we know more today about brain health than when I played. And I hope sharing my story encourages people to pay attention to their health and seek help when something doesn’t feel right.

“I want people to know this diagnosis doesn’t define me. I am still Roger Craig. I am still a father, a husband, a teammate, a friend and someone who loves this game and the people who brought it to my life. If sharing my story helps even one family or one former player, then it’s worth it.”

Craig concluded: “Football gave me everything: opportunity, discipline, lifelong friends and a platform to grow as a man. This honor belongs to my parents, who started it all. It belongs to my wife, Vernessia, my children, and grandchildren, and it belongs to every coach, teammate and fan who is a part of this journey. I’m grateful. I’m grateful for this game, grateful for the people it brought into my life. I’m grateful I can stand before you today and call this journey a blessing.”

Vascular dementia is the second-most common form after Alzheimer disease, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine, which says that the issue comes from decreased blood flow damaging brain tissue. The blood flow disruption can develop in different ways.

Symptoms depend on the amount of brain tissue involved, plus the location of the area affected. Among others, those symptoms can include problems with focus, communication, and memory.

Craig spent his first eight NFL seasons with the 49ers, whom he helped win three Super Bowls as San Francisco authored a four-title dynasty in the 1980s.

He earned NFL Offensive Player of the Year honors for his efforts in a 1988 campaign that ended with one of those rings. That time around, Craig rushed for a career-high 1,502 yards.

His most prolific season, though, came in 1985: He piled up a personal-best 2,066 scrimmage yards, eclipsing the 1,000-yard mark on the ground and as a receiver. That hadn’t been done before in the league, and it’s a feat only Marshall Faulk and Christian McCaffrey have achieved since. Craig caught 92 passes that season and clocked out with 15 total touchdowns.

“When I learned that Bill Walsh wanted me, that meant something because he saw something in me that others didn’t,” Craig said in his Hall of Fame speech.

“He didn’t just want a running back. He wanted a complete football player. He trusted me to do whatever the team needed. That’s why the thousand yards rushing, the thousand yards receiving season means so much to me. We weren’t chasing numbers. We were chasing Ws, wins. I didn’t realize I was making history. It just felt like we were doing something special as a team.”

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Pro Football Hall of Fame running back Roger Craig

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“I actually think,” Rush Limbaugh told his many millions of listeners during the weeks between Donald Trump losing the 2020 election and his supporters’ assault on the Capitol, “that we’re trending toward secession. It can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs.”

Twenty months later, on the day the F.B.I. seized thousands of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, The Times reported that “posts on Twitter that mentioned ‘civil war’ had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours” and “jumped again a few weeks later, after President Joe Biden branded Mr. Trump and ‘MAGA Republicans’ a threat to ‘the very foundations of our republic.’”

Days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene reiterated her push for legally splitting up the country: “I want a peaceful national divorce. Our country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us.” Polls since 2021 by universities, YouGov and others have consistently found that a third or more of Americans said they expected a civil war during the next decade or so.

A national divorce — let alone a civil war — is, for now, the stuff of fiction. But while loose talk from rabble-rousers has distracted us, the nation has sunk, almost unnoticed, into an unspectacular yet profoundly strange new arrangement. It’s not yet a divorce; it’s more like a bitter, loveless marriage in which the parties stay technically but less and less enthusiastically united because splitting up is too complicated or dreadful or expensive.

From its start, this country has been a tricky balancing act, the states acting in their own narrow interests but also together as a union. That delicate equilibrium is central to federalism, the Constitution’s mechanism for sharing authority and power between a national government and far-flung states.

But for the past dozen or so years, the more blue parts and the more red parts of this purple country have arrived at a variety of ad hoc governing arrangements, apparatuses and alliances with which to thwart each other or the federal government. The names for this dynamic are “uncooperative federalism” and, more recently, “soft secession.”

During the past two Democratic presidencies, many red states and counties declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries, prohibiting their police forces from enforcing some federal gun regulations. (The term was a trollish play on Democratic sanctuary cities, which did the same for federal immigration policies.) Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas took it upon himself to override federal immigration policy, deploying the National Guard to string the banks of the Rio Grande with coils of razor wire and ordering his troops to prevent federal border agents from helping migrants who got tangled in them. More than two dozen Republican governors endorsed the show of anti-federal strength.

Now that Mr. Trump is back in office, Democratic-led states and cities are getting almost as aggressive, overriding or ignoring federal and state policies they find objectionable. Local police departments aren’t cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Many states passed laws to shield residents from prosecution if they are charged elsewhere with facilitating abortions, and several have stockpiled abortifacients in case federal law or regulations make them hard to get.

Various combinations of blue states have banded together to perform functions the federal government has abandoned or degraded: forming a climate alliance that participates in international forums the Trump administration won’t attend, creating de facto regulatory agencies for cap-and-trade carbon markets, issuing medically legitimate childhood vaccination recommendations. A coalition of a couple dozen attorneys general has sued the administration over birthright citizenship, tariffs and denial of federal funds to Democratic-controlled states. In the group’s frequent online group meetings, it was reported last fall, “the same phrase keeps coming up, though nobody wants to say it publicly: soft secession.”

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Igor Bastidas

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You are what you eat, but what happens to those calories after you eat may depend more on your genes than you think.

Scientists have long suspected that how our bodies deal with calories is somewhat determined by our genetic makeup. Now they’ve zoomed in on one gene—FNIP1—that plays an outsize role in how we burn energy and what our risks of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and kidney disease are. Around one in 7,000 people carries a broken copy of this gene that almost acts like a GLP-1 drug—the body burns fuel more efficiently, and the risk of disease lowers.

To find the gene, scientists sequenced the coding DNA of more than a million people across three continents to scour for mutations that influence how the body stores and uses fat. FNIP1 stood out.

Paired with a protein called folliculin, FNIP1 slows down cells’ calorie-burning machinery to conserve extra energy when food is plentiful. That’s proved useful over most of human history, enabling us to survive through times when food has been scarce. But if you nix the gene, the opposite happens: the body burns through energy faster and uses up fat instead of storing it, says Viktoria Gusarova, a researcher at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and a co-author of a study detailing the work.

We inherit two copies of a gene, one from each parent. As noted, around one in 7,000 people will inherit a broken copy of FNIP1. In the study, around 150 people had this mutation. They also had lower blood lipids, less liver fat, lower blood sugar, proportionally more muscle and roughly 60 percent lower odds of cardiometabolic diseases, such as obesity and diabetes.

“These individuals consume, store and utilize energy more than individuals without those mutations, and that’s the protective factor,” explains Luca Lotta, a geneticist at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and the study’s co-senior author.

The researchers went further, looking at liver cells in the lab to see if silencing FNIP1 could turn on fat-burning genes. And in mice fed a fatty, sugary diet, shutting the pathway down in the liver curbed weight gain, cleared out fat and improved insulin sensitivity. Over 30 weeks, it also prevented the fibrosis and liver damage the diet would otherwise cause. The research was published in Nature.

The mutation is so rare, Lotta says, because evolution can’t keep up with our changing world. “Nowadays, we are living in a very calorie-rich environment, and historically there’s no precedent for this”, Lotta says. “These incredibly rare mutations, which might have been unfavorable for many millennia, are now favorable to the body.”

The team hopes the mutation could help lead to drugs that mimic its effects.

“Individuals with loss-of-function genetic variants can naturally mimic effects of pharmacologic inhibitors, and such studies have led to important therapeutic advances in other diseases,” says Svati Shah, director of the Center for Precision Health at Duke University, who was not involved in the study. Whether deliberately switching off FNIP1 in humans is safe, however, is unclear.

Notably, people who inherit two broken copies of FNIP1 instead of just one are prone to heart disease and immune deficiency. “If you were to therapeutically inhibit the gene everywhere in the body at 100 percent, that could have a negative impact on health,” Lotta says. He suspects that targeting the gene in the liver alone might mitigate the risks. “Any therapy is many years away, though,” he says.

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Josh Hawley/Getty Images

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The scene is set. You’re hyped up for your date night at home. You’ve got salmon in the oven—you even sprung for the wild-caught Alaskan stuff. The side dishes are done, the mood is set, you take the salmon out of the oven, and…it’s covered in white slime. Killjoy.

Don’t worry. It might not be the most appetizing to look at, but those expensive filets are still good.

What Is That White Stuff Oozing Out of My Salmon While It Cooks?

It’s called albumin. And it lives in your salmon, whether it’s cooked or not, no matter where it’s from, how it’s raised, or how much you paid for it.

Albumin is a liquid protein that solidifies when the fish is cooked, seeping out as the muscle fibers contract under heat, thickening and turning bright white. Think of your salmon as a wet towel being rung out. The wringing is the heat, and the water being pushed out is that white stuff you’re seeing. The higher the heat, the more albumin.

Whether you see no albumin at all or your salmon is nearly coated in what looks like glue is completely unrelated to what type of salmon you’re cooking or whether you splurged to buy it. It’s entirely dependent on how you cook it; more on that later.

Is It Safe To Eat?

Albumin may be off-putting, but it’s completely harmless. It is flavorless and has no impact whatsoever on your dinner, other than aesthetically. (And perhaps your ego. Instagram-worthy, it is not.) The fish might be a bit tough, though, as the muscle fibers have contracted so much.

In fact, since albumin is a protein, it’s actually good for you, should you decide not to remove it.

How Do You Prevent It?

An excess of albumin indicates overcooked salmon and/or salmon that was cooked too quickly.

Eliminating albumin completely isn’t likely (sorry, perfectionists), even if you undercook or perfectly cook that fish, but you can get close. If you hope to keep the protein inside your fish instead of dotted on top of it, there are a few things you can do: 

• Don’t overcook it. Salmon should be cooked to 145 degrees F (63 degrees C) and no further. Pulling it off the heat slightly before that (don’t be afraid) will help you hit that number without galloping past it. Using a meat thermometer is the best way to keep tabs on temp, but if you use one, be sure to blot the place where you inserted it with a paper towel before continuing to cook the fish.

• Pat the fish dry with paper towels before cooking. This will discourage the moisture on the surface from steaming your fish.

• Attempt to cook evenly sized pieces. Even if it means cutting into your filets.

• Use a medium temperature instead of a high temperature to cook it. Longer and lower is the name of the game.

Keep it skin-side down for as long as possible when searing. The skin will protect the delicate flesh. Try to cook it 90 percent of the way through before flipping it. You can even turn the heat off when you flip it—the cooking will continue even without the direct heat.

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President Trump’s war against Iran has depleted U.S. weapons stockpiles to troubling levels, siphoning supplies from Asia and Europe, according to senior officials.

The rapidly shrinking supply of air-defense missiles and other critical weaponry in Europe and Asia not only leaves the U.S. military less equipped, but could also leave Russia and China feeling emboldened should they contemplate a potential conflict with the United States, experts said.

Bombing Iran burned through thousands of multimillion-dollar missiles that contain precision parts from a global web of suppliers and can take years to produce. Defending against Iran’s retaliatory barrages has worn down U.S. stocks of air-defense missiles to an extent that has privately alarmed top officials in the Trump administration and has led to the United States’ delaying deliveries to European and Asian customers.

The Iran campaign has forced the Pentagon to rush ships, aircraft and air-defense units from across Europe and Asia to the Middle East, an effort with cascading consequences for equipment maintenance and troop morale, U.S. officials said. The result is a significant erosion of American firepower in those regions, a shift with long-term implications that are a growing concern in the military and intelligence communities, senior U.S. and Western officials said.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the United States has “more than enough firepower to carry out any operation the president orders at any time and place.” But experts say the munitions crisis — part of which Mr. Trump inherited from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — is almost certain to outlast his presidency.

Tom Karako, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the depletion of munitions was a “generational annihilation of the means of conventional deterrence.” The impact on how decisions are made in Beijing and Moscow, he said, could resonate for years.

“It’s impossible for that not to have a significant effect on the decision calculus of Russia and China,” said Mr. Karako, who has been tracking U.S. weapons stockpiles. “They may do something quite deliberate and at the time of their choosing, because keep in mind — we’re going to take years to reconstitute.”

In meetings in the lead-up to the Iran war, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed the president of the risks of dipping deeper into drained stockpiles, according to two officials with knowledge of the exchanges. Mr. Trump still decided to go ahead, believing the war would be over quickly. A spokesman for General Caine declined to comment on his private conversations with the president.

After attacking Iran alongside Israel on Feb. 28, Mr. Trump repeatedly promised victory within weeks. More than five months later, he remains unable to bend Iran to his will, or even to find a way to end the war. The munitions shortage is said to have played a role in persuading Mr. Trump to put aside a major bombing campaign late last month. But it also shows how the president’s decision to attack Iran has left the United States and its allies more vulnerable to other threats.

The Trump administration has worked with military contractors to try to accelerate and expand production. But even accounting for those efforts, it could take more than two years for the United States to replenish the more than 1,500 Patriot air-defense interceptor missiles that have been used in the Iran war. The current U.S. inventory of those missiles is fewer than 1,700, according to two people briefed on the stockpile who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military details.

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Buildings targeted by airstrikes in Tehran in April. Bombing Iran burned through thousands of multimillion-dollar missiles that contain precision parts from a global web of suppliers and can take years to produce. Credit…Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times

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NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is on its way to a metal-rich asteroid beyond Mars—and it’s enjoying the scenic route.

In a flyby maneuver earlier this year, Psyche used the planet’s gravity to reshape its trajectory, all while capturing images that NASA has stitched into a mesmerizing time-lapse video.

The sequence opens with the faint crescent of Mars growing steadily larger before gliding over the planet’s sweeping ocher vistas. The surface is pockmarked with impact craters. Gleaming polar ice caps shine in the sun’s light. The series culminates in a close pass over the planet that was taken before the Psyche spacecraft slipped into interplanetary space.

Launched in 2023, the Psyche mission is headed for an asteroid that scientists suspect may be the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet, stripped bare by violent collisions during the solar system’s youth.

As Mars’s gravity slung the spacecraft onto the next leg of its journey, mission scientists used the opportunity to put its multispectral imager through a full dress rehearsal.

“The imager performed brilliantly,” said Jim Bell, the Psyche imager instrument lead at Arizona State University, in a statement.

“We were also able to fully test its calibration and sensitivity to scattered light, including picking out the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos from very far away as a part of a practice for the satellite search that we’ll use at the asteroid Psyche to look for any moonlets there.”

Already three years into its journey, the Psyche spacecraft still has three more to go until it reaches its destination. If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will arrive at the asteroid in 2029.

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