OpenAI wants to raise taxes on the rich, expand the welfare state, let workers decide how their employers use artificial intelligence, and give everyone a cut of the tech industry’s profits.

Or so the company claims in a new vision statement.

In that document, the AI titan argues that the government needs to enact sweeping economic reforms, so as to “share prosperity broadly” in “the age of intelligence.”

The plan received far more attention than your typical policy white paper, due largely to its improbable author. Tech companies do not typically issue sweeping proposals for restructuring the American economy. 

This said, OpenAI’s vision statement is not entirely unprecedented. AI moguls have long warned that their technology could cause mass unemployment, while gesturing toward the need for income redistribution. 

Still, even by those standards of Silicon Valley thought leadership, the agenda OpenAI outlines is remarkably progressive. In fact, it overlaps heavily with Sen. Bernie Sanders’s own AI proposals (minus his moratorium on data center construction). Since advanced AI could shift income away from workers and toward business owners, OpenAI proposes the creation of a “public wealth fund.” Essentially, the government would purchase a stake in the nation’s most profitable companies and then give shares to every US citizen. In other words, it would give Americans a little socialism, as a treat.

OpenAI also calls for, among other things: higher capital gains taxes; more public funding for jobs in health care, education, and community service; giving workers more influence over corporate governance; and holding AI companies accountable to new safety regulations.

All of these policies are hazily sketched. The document is 13 pages and dedicates only a short paragraph to most of its proposals. It reads a lot like something that ChatGPT would spit out, if you asked it to research ideas for combating AI-induced inequality for 10 minutes.

For OpenAI’s progressive critics, however, its agenda is less irksome for its laziness than its hypocrisy: The political behavior of its top leaders belies the firm’s purported commitment to egalitarian reform.

In truth, OpenAI is engaging in one of Silicon Valley’s most annoying traditions: advertising its support for radical new social policies that have no actual chance of becoming law in the near-term, while ignoring — if not abetting — attacks on actual welfare programs in the here and now.

OpenAI supports social democracy in theory — and Republicans in practice

For years now, tech billionaires have been worrying aloud about how artificial intelligence could swell inequality and unemployment. And many have argued that the government must create a universal basic income (UBI) — a guaranteed minimum salary for every American — to account for this risk. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were all making versions of that argument as far back as 2017.

Of course, there was no actual prospect of Congress creating a UBI that year. By contrast, congressional Republicans did try to gut the Affordable Care Act in 2017.

It is hard to see how one could believe that 1) everyone should collect an income, regardless of their employment status and 2) people shouldn’t necessarily receive health insurance if they don’t have a job.

If tech-induced inequality justifies universal cash benefits, presumably it also demands universal health care. Yet Musk, Zuckerberg, and many of the Valley’s other UBI proponents made little effort to thwart the GOP’s attempted repeal of Obamacare. Nor did they mobilize to prevent the expiration of Joe Biden’s enhanced Child Tax Credit, a policy that effectively guaranteed a minimum income for all parents with young children.  

In 2026, the disconnect between OpenAI’s advocacy for legislatively irrelevant reforms — and its approach to live political debates — is even larger. While the company floats collective ownership of the AI industry in PDFs, its leaders are bankrolling the welfare state’s opponents.

OpenAI itself is staying out of political races. In September, though, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife gave $25 million to a pro-Trump super PAC. Along with OpenAI investor Marc Andreessen, Brockman has also poured funds into Leading Our Future, a PAC dedicated to electing opponents of state-level AI regulations. As part of that effort, the group is supporting a wide array of Republican candidates.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, meanwhile, maxed out donations to several Republican lawmakers in 2024, while throwing $1 million toward Donald Trump’s inauguration fund.

If this cash bought Altman and Brockman any influence with the White House, there’s no sign they used it to oppose Trump’s push for new work requirements on food stamps and Medicaid last year.

And yet, those policies are totally antithetical to the economic philosophy that OpenAI is now broadcasting. Surely, if the threat of mass, AI-induced unemployment demands the creation of a public wealth fund, it must also forbid choking off basic medical care to millions of people who can’t find work. 

Nevertheless, OpenAI’s leaders did not feel compelled to publicly oppose Trump’s legislation. And Brockman’s super PAC appears to put zero weight on its candidates’ social welfare policies. Whether it is intervening Republican primaries or Democratic ones, the group’s sole concern seems to be blocking state-level AI safety regulations — including several that OpenAI ostensibly endorses in its vision statement.

Bleeding-heart billionaires should get back to the basics

Of course, there are worse things than hypocrisy. I’d rather see AI companies virtue signal about wealth redistribution than, say, build chatbots who rant about “white genocide.”

Further, I suspect that the actual authors of OpenAI’s “industrial policy” document are sincere. The company’s leadership and employees don’t have the same politics (the latter donated overwhelmingly to Democrats in 2024). 

Nevertheless, the people in charge of OpenAI have made their political priorities clear — and sharing “prosperity broadly” is not among them.  

Wealthy techies who are genuinely concerned with that objective, however, should probably spend a bit less energy on cooking up half-baked UBI proposals — and a bit more on intervening in actual legislative fights over social welfare policy.

In 1964, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke predicted that computers would overtake human evolution.“Present-day electronic brains are complete morons, but this will not be true in another generation,” he told the BBC. “They will start to think, and eventually, they will completely out-think their makers.” 

Daniel Roher opens his new documentary The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist (2026) with this cheerful prophecy. And in the hundred-some minutes that follow, he tries to make sense of a technology that, by his own admission, he does not understand — and a world that is rapidly being changed by it. Explaining that he conceives of AI as a “magic box floating in space,” he enlists the help of experts to provide him with a crash course in what, exactly, AI is. 

Roher’s real concern, however, isn’t so much about the workings of AI — though some of his subjects do attempt to explain them for him — but whether it might displace us, as Clarke’s prediction suggests it will. 

While making the film, Roher learns that his wife Caroline is pregnant with their first child. He tracks his wife’s pregnancy and the birth of his son in parallel with the advent of AI. It’s a smart choice that builds on a fear all parents share: What sort of world are we making for our children? And behind that question is another, vibrating in anxious silence: What happens after our offspring replace us? This twinned existential angst drives his efforts to hear from the doomers, the techno-optimists, and the in-between “apocaloptimists” whose ranks he ultimately joins. 

The AI Doc, as its sweeping title suggests, wants to shape and lead the narrative around AI. It’s certainly set up to do that — Roher is fresh off an Oscar win for his documentary Navalny, and the film opened in nearly 800 theaters, which counts as wide-release for a nonfiction title. The final product is indicative of the ways that public attitudes around AI are in massive flux. Roher hopes to reach people of my grandmother’s generation who conflate AI with smartphones and spellcheck, as well as people who don’t seem to care whether a video was AI-generated. 

But I think that this documentary has come too late to steer the conversation, something the film itself acknowledges. For all its transformative potential, AI isn’t actually unique among emerging technologies yet — it has not been cataclysmic or ushered in a golden age of prosperity  — but Roher and many of those he interviews tend to treat it as a radical break with all that has come before. As a result, they tend to fixate on the binary extremes of doom or salvation. It’s an approach that reinforces our own helplessness in the face of AI-driven change, while also muddying our understanding of what we might yet be able to do as we seek to adapt, mitigate harm, and shape the world that AI could otherwise truly start remaking.

For good and for ill

Roher, contemplating his child’s future, opts to hear the bad news first. Tristan Harris, the cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology, doesn’t mince words: “I know people who work on AI risk who don’t expect their children to make it to high school.”

Many of the film’s other interviewees are similarly gloomy. Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI,” for example, argues that as AI becomes smarter, it will become better at manipulating humanity. But no one is more pessimistic than Eliezer Yudkowsky, the well-known AI doomer and co-author of the controversial book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. As the title suggests, Yudkowsky believes that superintelligent AI would wipe out humanity — a position that he stands by and lays out for Roher. 

Turning his back on these storm clouds — and taking the advice of his wife, Caroline, who tells him that he needs to find hope for the future — Roher tunes into the chorus of AI optimists. They tell him, variously, that there are more potential benefits than downsides to AI; that technology has made the world better in every way; that this will be the tool that helps us solve all our greatest problems. Not to mention: AI will bring the best health care on the planet to the poorest people on Earth, extend our healthspan by decades, and enable us to live in a postscarcity utopia free of drudgery. Oh, and: We will become an interplanetary species, all thanks to AI. 

These promises initially reassure Roher, perhaps because he seems easily led by whomever he’s spoken to most recently. It is Harris who ultimately convinces him that we can’t separate the promise of AI from the peril it presents. The conclusions that result will be obvious to anyone who’s thought about these issues for more than a moment or two: If AI automates work, for example, how will people make a living? 

It doesn’t help that many of the most invested players reflect on these questions superficially, if at all. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tells Roher that he’s worried about how authoritarian governments will use AI — a claim that is followed in the film by a cut to images of Altman posing with authoritarian leaders. Other tech CEOs fall back on PR pleasantries in response to the filmmaker’s questions, and Roher too often goes easy on them, never diving deeper when they admit that even they aren’t confident that everything will go well. That these are the leaders of AI companies racing against each other to make the technology more and more advanced does little to inspire confidence.

(Some of the techno-pessimistic people interviewed for the documentary have expressed their strong displeasure with the final result.)

“Why can’t we just stop?” Roher asks these tech CEOs. He’s told that a moratorium is a pipe dream: Many groups around the world are building advanced AI, all with different motivations. Legislation lags far behind the rate of technological progress. Even if we could pass laws in the US and EU that would stop or slow things down, says Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, we’d have to convince the Chinese government to follow suit. 

If we don’t create it, the thinking goes, our enemies will. It’s best to get ahead of them.

This is, of course, the logic of nuclear deterrence: If we don’t mitigate the risk of ending the world through mutually assured destruction, there’s nothing stopping someone else from pressing the button first. 

An apocalypse in every generation

The atomic comparison is apt, if only because Roher sees the stakes in similarly stark terms. “Will my son live in a utopia, or will we go extinct in 10 years?” he wonders aloud. It’s a question that’s central to the film. But he never really sits with the more likely scenario that AI will neither lead to human extinction nor end all disease and drudgery. Every generation faces the specter of its own annihilation — and yet the ends of days keep accumulating, no matter how close the doomsday clock gets to apocalypse.

The point, then, isn’t that AI won’t be bad for us, but that by framing the question in strictly utopian or dystopian terms, we miss the messy reality that lies between hell on earth and heaven in the stars. Although The AI Doc tries to chart an “apocaloptimist” course between two extremes, it doesn’t grasp the real stakes. AI doesn’t really create new risks as such — it’s a force multiplier for existing ones like the threat of nuclear warfare and the development and use of biological weapons. The chief existential risks of AI are human-made and human-driven. And that means, as Caroline says in the film’s ending narration, “We get to decide how this goes.” She’s right, but her husband never seems to understand how she’s right. 

Like too many Big Issue Documentaries, Roher’s film is heavy on problems and light on solutions. It does offer some, calling for international cooperation, transparency, legal liabilities for companies if something goes wrong, testing before release, and adaptive rules to match the speed of progress. But just as this is a strictly introductory course in AI — one that will probably irritate those who’ve already moved on to AI 102 — these recommendations are only a starting point. For Roher, they offer reason to be hopeful. For the rest of us, they’re just the beginning of an opportunity to meaningfully steer the course of our future.

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Unearthing the Solar Storms of the Past

For centuries, ancient texts have hinted at solar activity that reached Earth with enough intensity to influence the sky itself. One such event, recorded in 1204 CE by the Japanese poet Fujiwara no Teika, described “red lights in the northern sky” over Kyoto, a possible reference to the auroras often caused by solar storms. Thanks to a modern breakthrough in solar research, this observation now aligns with a confirmed solar proton event (SPE) from the same period.

Researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) employed an innovative technique combining historical records with tree-ring analysis to reconstruct solar activity dating back to the medieval period. Their method reveals that the solar storm described by Teika was likely part of a broader, highly active solar cycle during the late 12th century.

Advancing Solar Storm Detection with New Technology

In this new study, published in Proceedings of the Japan Academy, Series B, the OIST team, led by Professor Hiroko Miyahara, made an important leap in solar research. They focused not just on the extreme solar events that have been the subject of previous studies but also on “sub-extreme” solar proton events, less powerful but still hazardous storms that occur more frequently. According to Miyahara,

“Previous studies on historical SPEs have focused on rare, extremely powerful events. Our paper provides a basis for detecting sub-extreme SPEs—events that occur more frequently and are around 10-30% of the size of the most extreme cases, but still hazardous.”

This finding opens new doors for understanding the frequency and impact of solar storms throughout history, which are crucial for assessing the risks posed to modern infrastructure, including satellites and space missions.

“Sub-extreme SPEs are more challenging to detect, but our method now allows us to efficiently identify them and better understand the conditions under which they are more likely to occur,” Miyahara added.

What Ancient Records Reveal About the Sun’s Cycles

The team’s method not only identified solar storms but also helped reconstruct the solar cycles of the medieval period. Using carbon-14 analysis of preserved trees, they discovered that the solar cycle back then was much shorter, only seven to eight years, compared to today’s eleven-year cycle.

“The high-precision data not only allowed us to accurately date sub-extreme solar proton events, but it also lets us clearly reconstruct the solar cycles of the period,” said Miyahara.

This shorter cycle hints at a period of much greater solar activity, which could have influenced the frequency of solar storms and auroras. The data also revealed that the solar storm identified in the study occurred at the peak of this cycle, a time of heightened solar activity.

A New Approach to Space Weather

This study emphasizes the importance of combining historical records with advanced scientific techniques to better understand the Sun’s behavior across millennia. Miyahara concluded,

“Historical literature provides a candidate time window, and dendroclimatology enables direct intercomparison between detected SPE and reports of sunspots and auroras recorded in literature. Integrated approaches like these are necessary to accurately reconstruct past solar activity, helping us better understand the characteristics of extreme space weather.”

Looking ahead, the research team is keen to further explore the conditions that led to unexpected solar events, such as prolonged low-latitude auroras that appear to correlate with solar cycle minima. “This is unexpected,” Miyahara says, “and we’re excited to look further into what solar conditions could cause this.”

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To test these limits, scientists used Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a yeast species commonly studied in biology. According to a new research, this organism shares key cellular processes with more complex life, which makes it a useful model for understanding how life might behave under extreme conditions.

Extreme Mars-Like Shock Waves Recreated in the Lab

Researchers reproduced Martian stress using the High-Intensity Shock Tube for Astrochemistry (HISTA) in India. The setup generated shock waves reaching 5.6 times the speed of sound, similar to those produced by meteorite impacts on Mars. As Riya Dhage, lead author of the study, explained:

“One of the biggest hurdles was setting up the HISTA tube to expose live yeast cells to shock waves — something that has not been attempted before, and then recovering yeast with minimum contamination for downstream experiments.” 

At the same time, the yeast was exposed to 100 mM sodium perchlorate, matching levels detected in Martian soil. According to findings reported in PNAS Nexus, these salts can interfere with hydrogen bonds and hydrophobic interactions, both key to keeping proteins stable. Even under these combined stresses, the yeast cells survived, though they grew more slowly.

RNA and Proteins Form a Cellular Shield

What kept the cells alive was their ability to form ribonucleoprotein (RNP) condensates. These structures, made of RNA and proteins, act like temporary shelters inside the cell during stressful conditions.

Two types showed up in the experiments: stress granules and P-bodies. Shock waves triggered both, while perchlorates mainly led to P-body formation. As mentioned of the study, these condensates help protect genetic material and manage how RNA is used when the cell is under pressure. When conditions improve, the structures disappear and normal activity resumes. It is a flexible system, and it seems to make a real difference.

Survival Drops Without Molecular Protection

The researchers also tested yeast that could not form these condensates. The difference was clear as survival dropped sharply under the same conditions. A closer look at the transcriptome showed that stress disrupted key RNA activity inside the cells. The team found that, RNP condensates helped limit that damage and keep essential processes running.

Taken together, the results suggest that even simple life forms have tools to handle extreme environments. As reported by Purusharth I. Rajyaguru, the corresponding author :

“We were surprised to observe yeast surviving the Mars-like stress conditions that we used in our experiments. We hope that this study will galvanize efforts to have yeast on board in future space explorations.”

It leaves open the possibility that if life exists on Mars, it might rely on similar strategies to get by.

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The Future of Space Data Transfer

ESA’s mission strategy aims to tackle the growing demands of space data transmission, an area rapidly filling up with satellites and the data they generate. As Earth observation, maritime monitoring, and communication networks expand, the need for reliable and high-speed data transfer methods becomes urgent. The radio frequency spectrum that many satellites depend on is quickly reaching its limits, and ESA’s new missions are designed to test innovative solutions that could break through these barriers.

By utilizing optical laser communication, ESA intends to vastly improve how satellites exchange information. Unlike traditional radio frequencies, laser communication offers high-speed, secure data links that are less prone to interference. This new technology could enable more efficient transmission of vast quantities of data, including high-resolution images and real-time information needed for critical applications like climate monitoring and emergency response.

ESA’s Technological Innovation: CubeSats and Laser Communication

Among the key players in these missions are the CubeSats developed under the Greek Connectivity Programme. Five of these small satellites are focused on advancing Greece’s capabilities in space-based optical communication. One such satellite, OptiSat, will test a SCOT20 laser communication terminal developed by the German company TESAT, aiming to establish high-speed laser links with other satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

The other Greek satellites, part of the ERMIS Constellation, will demonstrate a variety of cutting-edge technologies, including 5G satellite connectivity and the ability to download vast amounts of Earth observation data via laser communication. These missions could be pivotal for future satellite constellations that will need to handle large-scale, real-time data streams without overloading traditional communication networks.

Commercial Partnerships and the Future of Space Networks

ESA’s collaboration with commercial entities under the Pioneer Partnership Projects marks a critical step toward making space infrastructure more affordable and accessible. One of the notable missions, led by Spire Global, will test inter-satellite optical links, vital for future space networks that require data to be relayed between satellites in orbit and back to Earth without bottlenecks.

Another commercial mission, VIREON, aims to offer high-resolution Earth observation data on a daily basis, making it possible to monitor vital resources like water quality, forests, and agriculture. This could be a game-changer in global environmental monitoring.

Lastly, ESA’s partnership with Belgian company EDGX is introducing “edge computing” to space, processing data on satellites themselves rather than sending it back to Earth for analysis. This could significantly reduce bandwidth requirements and increase the speed and efficiency of satellite data transfer.

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The project brings together researchers from Nagoya University and the SPring-8 synchrotron facility, combining expertise in astronomy and precision engineering. Their findings, reported in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, highlight both a technical achievement and a new direction for smaller, high-performance instruments.

Observing the universe in X-rays remains key to understanding extreme cosmic environments. As stated by the researchers, events such as solar flares, stellar explosions, and matter near black holes emit intense X-ray radiation that carries critical physical information.

A Mirror Built With Nanometer Accuracy

The heart of the telescope lies in its mirror, a component that must meet unusually strict requirements. X-rays do not behave like visible light and can only be reflected at very shallow angles. This requires surfaces shaped with nanometer-level precision.

To meet this challenge, the team used a precision electroforming method developed at SPring-8. As reported by the study published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, they produced a nickel mirror measuring60 mm in diameter and 200 mm in height.

This mirror differs from conventional designs in one key aspect. It is a single seamless shell. Without joints or seams, there are fewer opportunities for misalignment or deformation. As Ikuyuki Mitsuishi, the project leader at Nagoya University’s Graduate School of Science explained:

” The mirror is like a very precise funnel for X-rays. If any part of the funnel is even slightly out of place, the X-rays miss their target and the image blurs.” He added, “It must also survive the intense vibrations of a sounding rocket launch while retaining its optical precision.”

Recreating Starlight in the Lab

Before sending the telescope into space, researchers needed to verify its performance under realistic conditions. This posed a fundamental difficulty, since starlight reaches Earth as nearly parallel rays due to the vast distances involved.

To replicate this, the team designed a dedicated testing system at SPring-8. According to the researchers, they placed a 10-micrometer X-ray source roughly 900 meters away from the mirror. At that distance, the rays remain sufficiently parallel to simulate those coming from distant stars.

This approach enabled precise measurement of the telescope’s angular resolution. Ryuto Fujii, first author of the study, stated that:

“It’s the first ground-based system capable of accurately evaluating the performance of high-resolution X-ray space telescopes at hard X-ray energies, and it is available to researchers worldwide who want to develop and test similar technology.”

A Successful Test In Space With FOXSI-4

The telescope was later flown aboard FOXSI-4, a sounding rocket mission launched from Alaska on April 17, 2024. The mission carried seven X-ray telescopes designed to observe the Sun’s activity.

Based on the mission data, the instrument successfully observed an active solar flare, confirming its capabilities in real conditions. This flight marked the first participation of a domestically developed Japanese high-resolution X-ray telescope in an international sounding rocket program.

Researchers identified that the main limitation in image sharpness comes from tiny imperfections along the mirror surface. These findings provide a clear direction for improvement. An updated version of the telescope is planned for FOXSI-5, scheduled for 2026.

In the longer run, the goal is to shrink this technology so it can fit inside CubeSats, those tiny satellites about the size of a shoebox. The research team stated that no mission has yet used high-resolution X-ray optics on platforms this small, which could make space-based X-ray observations much easier to access.

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Southern Africa is well known for its rich fossil record, especially in the Karoo Basin, where many dinosaur tracks from the Triassic and Jurassic periods have been found. But after massive volcanic eruptions around 182 million years ago covered much of the region in lava, the record becomes much harder to follow.

According to research published in the South African Journal of Science, this event buried earlier track-bearing layers and left very few traces from later periods. That is why evidence from the early Cretaceous has remained so limited until now.

A Small Site Packed With Footprints

The tracks were discovered in the Brenton Formation, near Knysna in the Western Cape. The site is surprisingly small, about 40 meters long and five meters wide, yet it contains more than two dozen probable dinosaur tracks.

As explained in the study led by Charles W. Helm, the find came during fieldwork in early 2025. The team had originally been looking for fossil remains such as a theropod tooth found in the same area years earlier. Instead, Linda Helm, a team member, spotted the first track, leading to a closer inspection and the identification of many more.

The number of tracks in such a confined space suggests repeated dinosaur activity. Some prints are visible on flat rock surfaces, while others appear in the cliff face.

The Youngest Tracks Found In The Region

The tracks date back to around 132 million years ago, placing them in the early Cretaceous. According to the researchers, they are the youngest dinosaur tracks ever identified in southern Africa, pushing the known timeline forward by about 50 million years compared to earlier finds in the Karoo Basin.

This is only the second time Cretaceous dinosaur tracks have been recorded in South Africa, and the second in the Western Cape. Such discoveries remain rare, partly because rocks from that time are not widely exposed. As the research team noted:

“The first dinosaur tracks reported in the province were recently identified in the Robberg Formation, part of the Uitenhage Group, and dated to around 140 million years ago.”

The site lies within today’s intertidal zone, meaning the tracks are covered by water at high tide. This makes them difficult to study and leaves them exposed to gradual erosion.

Footprints Reveal A Mix Of Dinosaur Types

The footprints point to the presence of several types of dinosaurs, including theropods, and possibly ornithopods and sauropods. The research team explained that it is not always easy to tell exactly which dinosaur made which track.

“The trackmaker assemblage is interpreted to include theropods, possibly ornithopods and possibly sauropods. These form the probable youngest reported dinosaur tracks in southern Africa, the second record of dinosaur tracks from the southern African Cretaceous, and the second record from the Western Cape Province,” explained the authors.

Still, the mix of tracks suggests a varied dinosaur population. As reported by the research, the area may once have included river channels or sandy zones where dinosaurs moved regularly, leaving behind the impressions that later turned to stone.

The discovery of tracks in both the Brenton and Robberg Formations suggests that similar finds may exist elsewhere. Other exposures of non-marine Cretaceous rocks have already been identified in the Western and Eastern Cape, pointing to a fossil record that remains incomplete.

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A Dream Deferred: NASA’s Mars Sample Return Canceled

For decades, NASA scientists envisioned the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission as the next leap in planetary exploration. The plan was to retrieve geological samples collected by the Perseverance rover and bring them back to Earth for detailed analysis, a task that would confirm once and for all whether life ever existed on Mars. Yet, the mission has now been declared unviable after years of technical, logistical, and financial challenges.

Lawmakers made their position clear in a report released on January 6:

“The agreement does not support the existing Mars Sample Return (MSR) program,” lawmakers wrote in an accompanying report published on Jan. 6.

According to LiveScience, the MSR program’s ballooning costs, estimated to exceed $10 billion, coupled with long delays and interagency disputes, led Congress to cut its funding entirely. Without that backing, NASA cannot continue developing the complex series of missions needed to retrieve and transport Martian samples back to Earth.

Scientific Disappointment and Political Fallout

The scientific community reacted with deep frustration. For many researchers, the cancellation is more than a budgetary issue; it represents a strategic retreat from decades of progress in planetary science. Dr. Victoria Hamilton, a leading scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and chair of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), expressed her disappointment bluntly:

“It is difficult to understand how the cancellation of MSR is anything but an admission that returning samples from Mars is too hard for the United States,” Victoria Hamilton told Space.com on Jan. 12. “How do we expect to be successful at something orders of magnitude more ambitious and costly as the Moon to Mars program, where human lives are at stake?”

Her words highlight a growing concern within NASA and beyond: if the U.S. cannot manage an unmanned sample return mission, what does that mean for the agency’s Moon-to-Mars initiative, which aims to send astronauts to Mars within the next two decades?

China’s Advantage in the New Space Race

While NASA regroups, China’s space agency (CNSA) is moving swiftly forward with its Tianwen-3 mission, an ambitious plan to return Martian samples to Earth as early as 2031, potentially years before the U.S. could reassemble a similar program.

If successful, China would become the first nation in history to bring back material from another planet. That achievement could reshape global perceptions of leadership in space exploration. Beijing has steadily advanced its capabilities, from lunar landings to orbital space stations, and the cancellation of NASA’s MSR might open the door for China to claim the scientific prestige once expected to belong to the United States.

What This Means for the Future of Space Exploration

The end of the Mars Sample Return mission is not just a setback; it’s a strategic redirection for NASA. The agency must now decide whether to pursue smaller, more achievable projects or recommit to a grand, unified vision of interplanetary exploration.

The cancellation also raises a critical question: can spacefaring nations sustain complex, multibillion-dollar scientific programs in an era of tightening budgets and growing competition? The answer will define not just who reaches Mars first, but who controls the narrative of human exploration in the decades ahead.

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The wreck dates back about 2,050 years and has fascinated archaeologists for decades because of the scale and diversity of its cargo. The ongoing Return to Antikythera project, launched in 2014, focuses on carefully excavating what remains buried under layers of sediment.

The work is led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and carried out under the supervision of the Greek Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities.

A Dense Concentration Of Artifacts Beneath The Seabed

The Antikythera expedition marked a step forward in understanding the wreck. Divers spent around 40 hours on the seafloor, using specialized equipment to carry out controlled excavations. Based on a report published by Science, metal detectors revealed many buried objects spread across the site, confirming that a large part of the cargo is still hidden under the sediment.

Many of these items were recorded using 3D modeling both before and after recovery, which helps keep track of their exact position. Dr. Theotokis Theodoulou, a maritime archaeologist with the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, explained that:

“We were very lucky this year, as we excavated many finds within their context, which gave us the opportunity to take full advantage of all the archaeological information they could provide.” 

Among the discoveries were more than fifty artifacts, including a bronze armrest that may have belonged to a throne. Smaller finds such as nails, a possible utensil fragment, and a fragile bronze mass found next to a blue bead add to the overall picture.

Luxury Goods or Traces of Daily Life?

Archaeologists identified fragments of mosaic glass, clear glass vessels, and an ornate lagynos used as a table jug. According to Dr. Theodoulou, recovering objects in their original setting makes a real difference in understanding how they were used. Some finds feel more personal, like parts of a bone flute or a pawn from an ancient board game, hinting at moments of leisure during the journey. Other items include a stone statuette base and ceramics such as a Rhodian amphora neck with a stamped handle and a Koan demi-amphora.

Lab Analysis Tracks Origins

The team is also relying on scientific analysis to go further. Fifteen lead artifacts, including a large salvage ring and parts of anchors, were recovered for isotopic analysis. The researchers found that this could help identify where the lead was mined and possibly where the ship came from. At the same time, DNA samples were taken from wooden parts of the hull and from intact ceramic vessels.

Sediment samples were collected as well, with plans to study starch grains and phytoliths. These details may seem small, but they can reveal what the ship was carrying and even aspects of ancient diets.

“The 2015 expedition has left the team with the best understanding yet of this unique shipwreck and its cargo. A metal detection survey of the site revealed that metallic targets are dispersed over an area of about 40×50 meters. This is thought to match the wreck’s debris field, indicating the vast size of the ship that sank off the forbidding cliffs of Antikythera,” as mentioned in a press release avaliable on the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution‘s website.

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In an official announcement, the Navy said the strike group, known as Carrier Strike Group 10, finished COMPTUEX on March 5, 2026, signaling it can operate as a team. Does this return mean a long pause, or just a quick pit stop before the next tasking?

Home after COMPTUEX

For residents around Hampton Roads, a carrier coming home can feel like a neighborhood moment. For the crew, it is a practical reset after training that runs day and night.

The installation in Norfolk is the largest naval complex in the world, and it is built for quick turnarounds. A ship can take on fuel, food, spare parts, and people while maintenance teams tackle repairs that are hard to do at sea.

Open-source observers expect a replenishment period before the next at-sea stretch, though no official destination has been announced. Even nuclear-powered ships still need supplies and maintenance.

What COMPTUEX tests

COMPTUEX stands for Composite Training Unit Exercise, and it is often described as the last big exam a carrier strike group takes before deployment. Every part of the group has to fight, communicate, and sustain itself under pressure.

During COMPTUEX, units are tested across air, surface, subsurface, and cyber scenarios – shorthand for threats from aircraft, ships, submarines, and computer attacks. Some training is live, while simulators add surprise events that force quick decisions.

Rear Adm. Alexis Walker, the strike group commander, summed it up when she said, “COMPTUEX is the certification event for the strike group.” That certification is not a trophy. It is a practical signal to commanders that the force can deploy and operate as designed.

The flight deck tally

A carrier is not just a ship – it is also a busy airport that moves. Carrier Air Wing 7, made up of nine squadrons and about 2,400 sailors and aviators, played a central role in the training.

Over 28 days, the air wing flew 1,586 sorties, meaning 1,586 operational flights, according to the official announcement. The same update reported 693 day-arrested landings and 682 at night, the cable-assisted landings on a moving deck that pilots train for relentlessly.

Capt. Martin Fentress Jr., who led the air wing, described the biggest challenge as “the tyranny of distance,” referring to how hard it is to assemble people and aircraft from many locations into one unit. In his view, solving that problem is part of what makes a deployment work.

Escorts around the carrier

Calling it a carrier strike group matters because the carrier rarely operates alone. The surrounding ships provide layers of defense and support, from tracking aircraft to screening for submarines and helping keep the sea and airspace around the carrier under control.

In this case, the escort includes four Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers, USS Gonzalez, USS Mason, USS Ross, and USS Donald Cook. They are built around the Aegis combat system, a radar-and-missile network designed to detect threats and coordinate defensive fire.

Spain’s frigate alongside

One notable feature of this workup was the participation of Spain’s frigate Blas de Lezo, which integrated with the carrier group for the exercise. A January 15, 2026, update said the ship sailed from Ferrol for the United States and expected the deployment to last about two months, including transits.

The frigate’s commander, Commander Pedro Ramos, called the deployment “a significant milestone in our operational cycle” and said it was an opportunity to strengthen training and capture lessons for national doctrine. In simple terms, it is practice for operating far from home, with less time to fix problems and more pressure to get decisions right.

Interoperability is the core idea here – meaning different navies can operate together using shared procedures and compatible equipment. When ships can share data and work to the same plan, the group is harder to surprise.

Five F-100s at sea

Spain has highlighted a broader milestone as well, with all five of its F-100 Álvaro de Bazán-class frigates deployed at the same time in early 2026. Keeping so many ships sailing at once is not just a matter of crew endurance – it also pushes planning, maintenance, and logistics onshore.

A February 6 statement described the F-100s as escorts of more than 6,000 metric tons, roughly 6,600 U.S. tons, and mapped their missions across allied operations that range from Orion 26 to Standing NATO Maritime Group 1, Eagle Eye, and Steadfast Dart 26 in the Baltic Sea.

The same statement pointed to a mid-life modernization program budgeted at 3.2 billion euros, about $3.69 billion, running through 2036.

That tempo makes the class a familiar sight in multinational drills, but it also increases wear and tear. For planners on both sides of the Atlantic, it is a reminder that readiness depends on shipyards and spare parts as much as it depends on sailors.

What comes next

COMPTUEX completion does not automatically mean an immediate deployment, but it does put the strike group in the category of forces that can move when ordered. Walker said the group was “ready to deploy today,” and the carrier’s commanding officer, Capt. Robert Bibeau, said the crew had trained to high standards to be ready when called.

For now, the firm facts are about training and certification, not a published sailing order or destination. Open-source observers and some media reporting have suggested the group could be preparing for a Middle East deployment, as another carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, has pulled into Souda Bay, Greece for maintenance after operating in the Red Sea.

The official press release was published on U.S. Fleet Forces Command.

This is more than a geological curiosity. The ridges suggest subsurface water kept moving through rock fractures later than scientists expected, even as Mars was drying into the freezing desert we see today. If water can hide underground, could livable conditions have held on there longer too?

A mystery that began with a 2006 snapshot

The first clear look came from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which photographed a weblike patch of ridges on December 10, 2006. Dark sand collected between the lines, and mapping showed the network can run 6 to 12 miles long (10 to 20 kilometers).

Curiosity has been climbing Mount Sharp since 2014 and began close-up work in the boxwork region in 2025, spending about six months crossing ridges and sandy hollows. Up close, those “threads” are real terrain, with ridges about 3 to 6 feet tall (1 to 2 meters) that crisscross for miles.

Boxwork is a fossil plumbing system

The leading idea is surprisingly down to earth. Groundwater once seeped through a web of cracks in the bedrock, carrying dissolved minerals that coated those fractures and slowly cemented them into harder material. Much later, Martian winds sandblasted away the softer rock, leaving the mineral-reinforced lines standing as ridges.

Orbital images hinted at this story with dark lines running down the middle of some ridges. In 2014, scientists proposed those were “central fractures” that once acted like conduits, and Curiosity has now confirmed the lines are fractures.

On Earth, boxwork is usually a small feature, often only centimeters tall and sometimes found in caves, which helps explain why a meter-high version sprawling across a mountain is such a prize.

The chemistry clues hiding in ridges and hollows

Curiosity is not just a camera on wheels. The rover drills into rock, powders the sample, and feeds it into onboard instruments so scientists can test what the ridges are made of rather than guessing from a photo.

In one set of analyses, X-ray measurements found clay minerals in a ridge sample and carbonate minerals in a hollow sample, two fingerprints that help narrow down how water moved and altered the rocks.

The rover team recently ran an even rarer test on a fourth drilled sample. After heating the powdered rock in a high-temperature oven, Curiosity added chemical reagents for “wet chemistry,” a technique designed to make certain organic compounds easier to detect.

Organic compounds are not proof of life, but they are the carbon-based molecules researchers watch for when they reconstruct ancient habitability.

Then there are the odd little bumps. Curiosity has spotted pea-size nodules linked to groundwater, but they are not sitting where some scientists expected near the central fractures. “We can’t quite explain yet why the nodules appear where they do,” mission scientist Tina Seeger said, suggesting that multiple groundwater episodes may have written over each other.

A drying Mars that still had water underground

One reason this finding is turning heads is where the boxwork sits on Mount Sharp. Higher layers formed later in Mars’ history, when surface rivers and lakes were fading and the planet was trending toward aridity.

“Seeing boxwork this far up the mountain suggests the groundwater table had to be pretty high,” Seeger said, adding that the water “needed for sustaining life could have lasted much longer” than orbital views alone implied.

The boxwork region is also part of a layer enriched in sulfate salts, minerals that form as water dries up. In practical terms, Curiosity is reading a chapter where Mars was losing water, but not all at once and not everywhere.

NASA says the rover will leave the boxwork behind sometime in March and continue exploring the sulfate layer for many miles to better understand how the planet’s climate changed billions of years ago.

Why these Martian “spiderwebs” feel oddly relevant

Getting those close-up measurements is its own adventure. Curiosity is an SUV-size rover that weighs about 899 kilograms (roughly 1,982 pounds), and drivers have to guide it along ridges not much wider than the rover and then down into sandy hollows.

As operations engineer Ashley Stroupe put it, “It almost feels like a highway we can drive on,” until the wheels hit loose sand and the team has to hunt for a safer route.

It is easy to treat Mars as a distant science story, but this is really a water story. On Earth, we rarely think about what is below our feet until a dry summer bites or a town asks residents to cut back on watering. Mars shows what happens when a planet’s water budget shrinks, and why underground water can matter for a long time.

Scientists still have work to do, including why some mineral nodules show up in odd spots, but the ridges already read like a map of vanished groundwater.

The official press release was published by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

That matters because a real interstellar visitor, comet 3I/ATLAS, has crossed into our neighborhood, and online chatter around it has mixed astronomy with plain errors. Researchers say the only way to separate the two is to collect quantitative data in the open and let others stress test it.

What 3I/ATLAS really is and what it is not

NASA says the NASA-funded ATLAS telescope in Río Hurtado, Chile reported 3I/ATLAS on July 1, 2025, after its path suggested it came from interstellar space. Archived observations pushed sightings back to June 14, the kind of unglamorous detail that locks down an orbit.

For Earth, the headline is that there is no danger. NASA says the comet will remain at least 1.6 astronomical units away, about 150 million miles, and it should pass closest to the Sun around late October 2025 at about 1.4 astronomical units, just inside Mars’ orbit.

NASA has also lined up a fleet of observers, from Hubble to Webb, because objects like this do not come around often. Hubble data suggests the nucleus is no larger than about 3.5 miles across and could be much smaller, while the glowing fuzz is largely dust and gas released as sunlight warms ice.

How misinformation spreads, even through AI

Even with a real comet in the sky, rumors move faster than photons. Writing in El Confidencial, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb said several AI systems repeated a claim that 3I/ATLAS would pass within about 5,000 miles of Ganymede, yet orbital checks put it tens of millions of miles from Jupiter.

Loeb’s broader argument is simple: physics is supposed to shrink our imagination down to what reality allows, the way a detective rules out flattering suspects. When the incentives reward the most shareable story, the “grain” of data can vanish under a lot of “chaff.”

He points to criminal justice as a reminder that confident testimony is not the same as truth. The Death Penalty Information Center counts 34 people exonerated from death row using DNA evidence, beginning with Kirk Bloodsworth in 1993, and the lesson is familiar to anyone following environmental debates.

The new observatories turning the sky into a data stream

The good news is that the sky is becoming a real-time data stream. On February 25, 2026, the NSF and DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory announced it had issued its first scientific alerts, about 800,000 in a single night, with the system expected to scale up to as many as seven million alerts per night.

Those alerts are public and fast, triggered within minutes, so other telescopes can follow up while an event is still unfolding. Rubin’s team says the same pipeline helps discover and track asteroids for potential Earth threats and can also flag rare interstellar objects.

Loeb says the Galileo Project wants to add another layer with ground-based observatories that continuously monitor the whole sky in infrared, visible, radio, and audio bands and use machine learning to hunt for outliers.

In a March 2026 post, he wrote that three observatories are operating in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, and that triangulation between sensors about 10 kilometers apart can measure distances to objects to better than 10 percent.

Why an alien rumor story belongs in environmental news

So why does an alien rumor story matter for ecology? Because science literacy is environmental infrastructure, and a society that cannot agree on a comet’s orbit will struggle to agree on what satellites and field sensors show about heat, smoke, or CO2.

There is also a practical planetary angle: big impacts can rewrite climates and ecosystems in a geologic instant, so early detection is a form of risk reduction. The same habit of mind — publish the measurements, state the uncertainty, invite independent checks — is what makes climate and biodiversity numbers trustworthy.

For now, 3I/ATLAS is best understood as a rare icy visitor, not proof of alien technology, and it is a useful stress test for how we handle uncertainty online. Ask where a claim comes from, then look for the data trail, because the best surprises survive contact with measurement. 

The press release was published by the Rubin Observatory.

Scientists studying two huge blackwater lakes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo found something unsettling in the water itself. A significant share of the carbon dioxide bubbling out is not “new” carbon from recent plant life, but carbon that has been stored in peat for thousands of years. That’s the kind of quiet shift that can be easy to miss, until it starts showing up in the atmosphere.

The Congo Basin’s dark lakes are not just scenic: they are chemical reactors

Lake Mai Ndombe and Lake Tumba sit inside the central Congo Basin peatland complex, where waterlogged soils slow decay and allow carbon to build up as peat. The lakes look almost like black tea because so much dissolved organic material from surrounding swamp forests stains the water dark brown.

In a Nature Geoscience study published February 23, 2026, researchers report that these lakes are major CO2 sources, meaning they regularly release carbon dioxide to the air. Measurements show the lake water holds far more CO2 than the atmosphere, which naturally drives steady outgassing.

What makes this story bigger than two lakes is what they connect to. Congo Basin swamps and peatlands cover only about 0.3% of Earth’s land surface, yet they hold roughly one-third of the carbon stored in tropical peatlands, and tropical peat systems overall store around 100 gigatons of carbon. In other words, even a “small leak” matters.

Radiocarbon dating shows the CO2 is coming from deep time

The team used radiocarbon dating to figure out how old the dissolved inorganic carbon was in the lakes, and the results landed with a thud. The dissolved carbon they measured corresponds to about 2,170 to 3,515 radiocarbon years old, and an estimated 39 to 40% of it traces back to surrounding peatlands.

Lead author Travis W. Drake put it plainly in ETH Zurich’s summary of the work, saying, “We were surprised to find that ancient carbon is being released via the lake.” A co-author, Matti Barthel, added that “the carbon reservoir has a leak, so to speak, from which ancient carbon is escaping.”

There’s another clue that this isn’t a local oddity trapped inside the lake basin. The Nature Geoscience paper reports that similarly old dissolved inorganic carbon shows up in the Fimi River, which drains Lake Mai Ndombe, suggesting this ancient-carbon signal can move through connected waters before reaching the air. It’s like finding smoke not just in one room, but drifting down the hallway.

Why scientists are worried about dry spells and methane

If CO2 is the long-term climate driver, methane is the punchier cousin that hits harder in the short run. A separate study in Journal of Geophysical Research (Biogeosciences), released via ETH Zurich’s research collection, looked closely at Lake Mai Ndombe and found the lake is highly supersaturated in not only CO2, but also methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) across multiple water-level seasons.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that the lake’s own microbial community appears to consume a lot of what gets produced. The researchers estimate that up to 90% of pelagic methane is reoxidized by methanotrophic microorganisms, meaning much of that methane is eaten before it escapes.

But the same paper warns that small changes in water depth, dissolved oxygen, and microbial communities could significantly change how much greenhouse gas is ultimately emitted.

This is where everyday weather starts to feel less ordinary. When drought lowers water levels, oxygen can penetrate deeper into peat and lake systems, which may change how fast old organic matter breaks down and how gases travel upward, even if the precise pathways are still not nailed down.

And with climate change pushing heat and rainfall patterns around in many regions, scientists are watching these water-level shifts with growing unease.

A climate “sink” can still have vents, and that changes what we track

For years, many researchers assumed Congo peat carbon mostly stayed put unless the region experienced extreme stress like prolonged drought. What this new work highlights is a more active escape route, one that runs through water, microbes, and the everyday chemistry of lakes and rivers.

The mechanism that mobilizes old carbon from peat into lake water is still uncertain, and the researchers themselves emphasize that uncertainty.

That nuance is important because the stakes are high and the story is not finished. The Nature Geoscience authors estimate that the share of ancient peat carbon in lake CO2 implies that Lake Mai Ndombe alone could outgas more than 150 gigagrams of peat carbon per year, and the big question is whether that represents a long-running natural baseline or an early warning sign of destabilization.

In practical terms, protecting the Congo Basin’s climate role is not only about stopping deforestation, even though that remains crucial. It also means protecting hydrology, avoiding drainage and land-use changes that dry peat, and building long-term monitoring that can catch these invisible gas pathways before they scale up.

Photo sources: Greenpeace

The iconic Golden State has faced many issues over its long and well-documented history. From recent devastating wildfires to a hydroelectric dam failure that forced humans and millions of fish to evacuate the region in a panic, the state has had its fair share of issues.

So how could a dam force one of the strangest evacuations in recent memory?

How humanity has evacuated animals to save them

Over our long history, humanity has, at times, shown remarkable ambition to protect the world of animal life that we share the planet with.

Such as the recent initiative that took place in the ravaged nation of Ukraine. Volunteer teams opted to transport hundreds of abandoned and stray animals from the war-torn parts of the nation into safer regions.

And at the drop of a hat, we can come together to save both humans and animals from Mother Nature’s fury as well.

The 1991 volcanic eruption of the Volcán Hudson in Chile forced mass evacuations of both humans and animals. In 2015, an eruption in Costa Rica forced a proactive prevention of loss of life that led to zero animal fatalities.

Saving our planet is paramount to humanity’s future progress

Without the extensive conservation efforts that humanity has undertaken over the past few decades, the world would be far worse off than it is now.

Yes, our impact on the planet’s environment has been severe, to put it mildly. And the world of animal life has been adversely affected by climate change as well. Such as the recent discovery that oyster farmers are seeing their harvest being devastated as parts of the world are literally boiled.

Conservation requires a pragmatic approach where humanity plans years, or even decades, ahead to save the world’s animal life around us.

Studying animal life can help avert serious health risks for humanity as well as other species that rely on us for safety. This has become evident in Mexico recently, as vampire bats may be spreading a fatal disease that affects both humans and livestock.

NOAA Fisheries has detailed an extensive evacuation of both fish and humans that took place in California that beggars belief.

A crisis of biblical proportions led to collaborative efforts to save millions of fish

California has been subjected to many crises over the past few decades.

From the recent wildfires that devastated the state, leading to the USDA proposing to construct more roads around the state to allow for far easier access to wildfires for firefighters. 

The hydroelectric Oroville Dam, which is the tallest dam in the United States at 770 feet, has played a vital role in California’s water infrastructure over its nearly 80-year history.

Constructed in 1961, the dam was fitted with hundreds of instruments to enable state officials to monitor and track water settlement and pressure, leading to the nickname the “Dam That Talks Back”.

The dam helped to reduce peak water flows during the now infamous “Christmas Flood” that nearly devastated the Sacramento Valley in 1964.

A 2017 crisis at the Oroville Dam led to an astonishing evacuation

The crisis led to a high-stakes evacuation operation as millions of fish were evacuated from the Feather River Fish Hatchery. Damaged spillways made the water in the river toxic.

This led to crews using shovels and nets to safely, and more importantly, quickly evacuate the millions of fish from the area.

The unprecedented evacuation proves that the state of California is almost always facing one or another issue, such as the recent tracking of the state’s snowpack that was disappearing months early.

At least we can rely on the state’s residents to drop everything and save not only themselves but also animal life if needed during an emergency.

That restless landscape is now drawing a different kind of attention. Alongside geologists monitoring ongoing hazards, planetary scientists are studying the area for what it may reveal about volcanic activity on Mars and beyond.

A chain of craters still taking shape

The Mono-Inyo Craters form a string of roughly three dozen lava domes, lava flows, and tephra rings running between Mono Lake and Mammoth Mountain — all less than 10,000 years old and clearly visible in Landsat satellite imagery. This isn’t ancient, buried geology. It’s a chain that has been actively building within human prehistory.

Panum Crater, near Mono Lake, is one of the most recent additions. About 700 years ago, a strombolian eruption deposited a ring of pumice, ash, and obsidian fragments around a central vent. A lava dome then pushed up through the middle, leaving the concentric-circle structure visitors can walk around today.

Mammoth Mountain itself adds another layer of complexity. Built from at least 25 overlapping lava domes, its last magmatic eruption occurred around 57,000 years ago — though that hardly means it’s been quiet. Steam-driven phreatic eruptions and episodes of unrest have taken place far more recently, and scientists continue to watch it closely.

CO₂ vents, dying trees, and a new early-warning approach

In 1989, a magma intrusion beneath Mammoth Mountain triggered seismic activity and began pushing volcanic carbon dioxide to the surface. The gas has since killed trees across several areas around the mountain — a visible, ground-level indicator of what’s happening below. USGS monitors CO₂ emissions there on an ongoing basis.

NASA has contributed a complementary perspective from the air. Researchers used NASA airborne remote-sensing technology to measure how the local ecosystem responded to elevated volcanic CO₂ around Mammoth Mountain. The logic is fairly direct: vegetation stressed by gas emissions changes in ways that instruments can detect before other warning signs appear.

More recent projects have extended that approach to other volcanoes entirely. By incorporating satellite imagery, scientists are working toward systems that could detect vegetation changes as proxies for gas emissions — potentially offering earlier hazard warnings than ground monitoring alone can provide.

The supervolcano beneath the caldera

Whatever the ongoing activity at Mammoth Mountain, it’s modest compared to what happened here 760,000 years ago. A six-day eruption ejected approximately 150 cubic miles of material and collapsed the surface over the magma storage area by thousands of feet, leaving behind the Long Valley Caldera — an oval depression roughly 10 miles wide and 20 miles long.

For scale: that volume is about 20 times the output of the 1912 Novarupta eruption in Alaska, which remains the largest volcanic event recorded on Earth in the 20th century. Long Valley wasn’t an eruption on a familiar scale. It was a landscape-remaking event.

Today, the caldera is bounded by snowy ridges, with Mammoth Mountain sitting just off its southwest rim. Crowley Lake, a reservoir on the Owens River, drains the depression to the southeast — a quiet surface over geology that is anything but ordinary.

From California to Mars: a planetary laboratory

In 2023, scientists with NASA’s Goddard Instrument Field Team conducted research at Long Valley Caldera with a question that extended well beyond California: how might similarly massive eruptions on Mars, and on other planets and moons, have altered those environments over time?

The question isn’t as abstract as it sounds. Mars shows clear evidence of large-scale volcanic activity in its past, and understanding the consequences of caldera-forming eruptions on Earth provides a framework for interpreting what remote sensing reveals elsewhere in the solar system.

What makes the Mammoth Lakes region particularly valuable is that it compresses several distinct types of volcanic activity into one accessible area — active gas venting, recent lava dome construction, a supervolcanic caldera — each of which has analogs on other worlds.

The remote-sensing and satellite techniques being developed here for hazard monitoring may end up serving both purposes at once. Methods refined to detect early signs of unrest around communities on Earth could also become tools for reading volcanic histories written across the surfaces of Mars, the Moon, or the icy moons of the outer solar system.

As satellite capabilities improve and field research accumulates, the Long Valley region is likely to remain a proving ground for both missions. Scientists monitoring the next episode of seismicity or CO₂ flux beneath Mammoth Mountain, and scientists reconstructing the volcanic past of another planet, may find themselves drawing on the same data, the same instruments, and the same unusual stretch of California terrain.

The former world number one men’s singles star was assessed a $7,000 fine by the ATP Tour on Monday for smashing his racket seven times during a blowout loss to Matteo Berrettini.

Medvedev, who ranks 10th in the world, was hit with an unsportsmanlike conduct violation by the chair umpire during the tennis match after what transpired early in the second set of his match against Berrettini on Wednesday.

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Berrettini was dominating Medvedev to the point where he didn’t win a single game in the 6-0, 6-0 loss. The match lasted just 49 minutes, and the crowd in Monte Carlo was egging him on as he had quite the outburst.

"I wouldn’t expect to win like that and it doesn’t happen that often," Berrettini, a 2021 Wimbledon finalist, said after what’s considered a double-bagel loss for Medvedev. "It was definitely one of the best performances of my life."

RUSSIAN TENNIS STAR ANDREY RUBLEV SOUNDS OFF ON US OPEN FINE FOR PROFANITY DURING MATCH

The 30-year-old hit a forehand into the net to fall behind 2-0 in the second set after just losing swiftly in the first. He couldn’t contain his anger with his game, as he slammed his racket near the baseline, and then proceeded to throw it toward the end of the court.

As Medvedev walked over to pick up the racket, he decided his equipment didn’t have enough. He continued to smash it until it was unrecognizable of its original shape.

Medvedev threw the racket away as the crowd sent out their sarcastic cheers and continued with the match.

It’s not the best look to be known for outbursts on the court, but Medvedev’s temper has been showcased in Grand Slams as well as ATP Tour matches.

Last year alone, he was hit with much larger fines for his actions in the Australian Open and U.S. Open, being hit with $76,000 and $42,500 fines, respectively, for what occurred on the world stage.

In this match, Medvedev also had five double-faults, while winning only 17 points. This was also his first match on clay this season.

Fox news’ Paulina Dedaj and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Over the weekend, the "Orange is the New Black" actress, 40, made the explosive claims while responding to an article about Perry's reaction to Justin Bieber's Coachella performance on Saturday.

"Katy Perry sexual assaulted me at spice market nightclub in Melbourne. Who gives a s--- what she thinks," she wrote on Threads.

RUBY ROSE WAS FIRED FROM 'BATWOMAN' BECAUSE OF 'MULTIPLE COMPLAINTS ABOUT WORKPLACE BEHAVIOR,' WBTV SAYS

After a Threads user asked her to expand on the claim, Rose wrote: "After it I threw up on her. I told the story publicly but changed it to be a ‘funny little drunk story’ because I didn’t know how else to handle it. Later she agreed to help me get my US visa. So I kept it a secret. But I DID tell yall she wasn’t a good person. Instead I got attacked by.. everyone."

RUSSELL BRAND PUBLICLY DISAPPROVES OF EX-WIFE KATY PERRY DATING JUSTIN TRUDEAU AT PHOENIX EVENT

A representative for Perry immediately shut down the "categorically false" claims.

"The allegations being circulated on social media by Ruby Rose about Katy Perry are not only categorically false, they are dangerous, reckless lies," a representative for Perry told Fox News Digital in a statement. "Ms. Rose has a well-documented history of making serious public allegations on social media against various individuals, claims that have repeatedly been denied by those named."

In another post, Rose said it had taken her almost 20 years to come forward with the claims.

"I was only in my early 20s. I’m now 40. It has taken almost 2 decades to say this publicly," she wrote. "Though I am so grateful to have made it long enough to find my voice, it just shows how much of an impact trauma and sexual assault takes. Thank you for seeing me."

Rose also went on to detail the alleged incident and wrote that "as a woman, for a myriad of reasons, opening up about W on W [women-on-women] violence and sexual abuse, seems to be 100 times harder than speaking about the male predators, at least for me."

While Rose said she's not interested in filing a report, she welcomed legal action from Perry.

AMBER HEARD CLAIMS JOHNNY DEPP LAWSUIT LEFT HER VOICELESS NEARLY FOUR YEARS AFTER EXPLOSIVE TRIAL

"[Katy] is more than welcome to sue me (she won’t, because it happened, I have photos and it was literally in public and witnessed by multiple people). Plus there is so much more that happened in the years leading up to her silly song she won’t want me discussing. The psychological manipulation was strong with that one," she wrote.

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In 2019, Rose detailed her struggles with mental health, dating back to her childhood.

"I've struggled with mental health my entire life," Rose captioned a photo of her in a hospital bed, taken just before her stint on "OITNB." "I was first diagnosed with depression at 13, then major depressive disorder at 16. When I was 18 I found out I had dissociative amnesia."

After experiencing trauma at a young age, Rose explained that she was initially diagnosed with bipolar disorder but later discovered she suffered from severe depression and an overactive thyroid.

Then came "many dark times," according to Rose.

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"On medication, off medication, on and off and on and off per each wrong diagnoses," she said.

Rose then said that she experienced multiple hospitalizations due to her mental health and that she'd attempted suicide "as young as 12."

"What I have learned from the struggles of mental health is just how strong I am," Rose continued. "It’s how amazing people are because they love me and support me and yet you can’t judge those who don’t understand and don’t know how to do that either. It’s that you cannot judge people at all because you can never know what they have been through."

She added one final thought: "It’s that self love [sic] and self care [sic] is more important than anything else."

The 16-year-old stepbrother, identified as T.H. in court documents, is accused of sexually assaulting 16-year-old Anna Kepner and intentionally killing her on Carnival Cruise Line’s Horizon ship.

T.H. was initially charged as a juvenile on Feb. 2. He is charged with first-degree murder and aggravated sexual abuse. If convicted, the teen faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.

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The charges come months after the teen, affectionately called "Anna banana," was found dead onboard the cruise ship during a family vacation with her father, stepmother, grandparents and several siblings.

In February, T.H. was seen arriving in federal court in Miami. The teenager walked into the courthouse in a camouflage hoodie, his face concealed beneath a low-pulled baseball cap and a hood wrapped tightly around it.

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Kepner was discovered dead around 11:15 a.m. on Nov. 7 inside her cabin aboard the cruise ship. Authorities later ruled her death a homicide caused by "mechanical asphyxiation," according to documents previously reviewed by Fox News Digital.

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According to investigators, Kepner was found under the bed in her cabin, wrapped in a blanket and covered with life jackets. The cabin was shared with her stepbrother.

Anna's father, Christopher Kepner, previously told PEOPLE that he hoped that his stepson "faces the consequences" of his alleged actions.

"I want him to face the consequences … I will be fighting to make sure that does happen," Kepner told People.

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"Our hearts go out to the victim’s family during this unimaginable loss," said U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones for the Southern District of Florida. "A federal grand jury has returned an indictment charging serious offenses that allegedly occurred aboard a vessel in international waters. We will present the evidence in court and pursue this case with professionalism and care. As in every case, the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt."

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Fox News Digital has reached out to T.H.'s attorneys for comment.

Brennan, who is currently under investigation by the Justice Department, appeared on MS NOW for an interview with Ali Velshi. He said that the 25th Amendment, which establishes the protocol to remove the president, "was written with Donald Trump in mind."

"Allowing someone like this to continue to be the commander in chief and to control the tremendous capabilities of the U.S. military, including our nuclear weapons capability, which he seemed to allude to when he said he’s going to just eliminate a entire civilization," Brennan said. "Again, we really are in very, very troubling times."

More than 70 lawmakers are calling for the 25th Amendment to be invoked against Trump following a slew of threats he made on Truth Social toward Iran regarding reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

TRUMP IRAN THREAT SPARKS CALLS FOR HIS OUSTER, BUT ONE DEM SAYS EFFORT ‘NOT REALISTIC’

The president made his first threat on Easter Sunday, giving Iran a deadline of Tuesday, April 7, at 8 p.m. Hours before the deadline, Trump posted on Truth Social that "a whole civilization will die tonight."

"I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will," Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Right before the deadline, Trump announced that the United States and Iran had reached a two-week ceasefire agreement. But after negotiations in Pakistan this weekend, Trump announced on Truth Social Sunday that the U.S. Navy will begin to block all ships entering and exiting the Strait of Hormuz beginning Monday.

Since the start of the Iran war, Brennan has been publicly outspoken in his criticism of Trump's handling of the conflict. He's been a regular on MS NOW, suggesting a month ago that Trump is "flailing" and "clueless" about handling the war.

Notably, the Justice Department launched an investigation into Brennan in July 2025, stemming from allegations that Brennan improperly handled a 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which found that Russia was seeking to influence the 2016 presidential election in Trump's favor. 

The 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment included the Steele dossier, a debunked collection of memos alleging Trump colluded with Russia, but Brennan testified before Congress that the document "was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community assessment that was done." House Republicans alleged that Brennan had lied in his 2023 Judiciary Committee testimony by denying that the CIA used the Steele dossier in preparing the assessment. The DOJ investigation is ongoing. 

Lawyers for Brennan said they have been informed he is a target of the investigation but have not been told of any "legally justifiable basis for undertaking this investigation," according to The Associated Press.

Brennan also previously pushed back on the allegations of wrongdoing, including claims from Trump and his allies that Brennan helped promote a "contrived narrative" that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump, which became central to the FBI's Russia collusion investigation of Trump's 2016 campaign. 

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Fox News that the DOJ probe is "heating up" last month in an appearance on "Hannity" and predicted that Brennan would soon face "accountability." 

Fox News Digital reached out to the White House for comment.

"We are deeply honored to welcome Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi to Notre Dame de Namur University," Dr. Beth Martin, president of Notre Dame de Namur University (NDNU) in Belmont, California, said in a statement announcing Pelosi. 

"Her lifelong commitment to public service, leadership, and advocacy for justice reflects the very values that define an NDNU education and the enduring legacy of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur," Martin said. "During this 175th anniversary year of the Sisters in California, her presence powerfully affirms the impact of faith-inspired education on the world." 

PRO-ABORTION NOTRE DAME PROFESSOR WITHDRAWS FROM INSTITUTE ROLE AFTER FIERCE CRITICISM FROM BISHOP, CARDINALS

According to its website, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur are an international apostolic congregation of Catholic sisters, founded in 1804 by St. Julie Billiart in Amiens, France, serving today in 16 countries on five continents.

Their mission is to "make known God's goodness, especially among the most impoverished and abandoned people in the world," according to the group’s website. 

Pelosi, who has called opposing abortion "sinful," will speak at the university’s commencement ceremony on May 2. 

In 2023, Pelosi posted on X, then known as Twitter, calling out Republicans for passing the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which requires doctors to provide care for infants who survive a failed abortion.

NOTRE DAME STUDENT CALLS PROFESSOR APPOINTMENT A 'BETRAYAL' OVER PRO-ABORTION STANCE AT CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY

"Today, instead of joining Democrats to condemn all political violence, [House Republicans] chose to push their extreme anti-choice agenda," Pelosi said in the post.

"Democrats believe everyone deserves the freedom to access reproductive health services — without fear of violence, intimidation or harassment," she added.

The Catholic Church teaches that, "Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law." 

In 2022, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone said that Pelosi would be banned from receiving Holy Communion in her own San Francisco Archdiocese because of her pro-abortion position.

210 DEMOCRATS VOTE AGAINST BILL REQUIRING MEDICAL CARE FOR BABIES BORN ALIVE AFTER ABORTION ATTEMPT

"A Catholic legislator who supports procured abortion, after knowing the teaching of the Church, commits a manifestly grave sin which is a cause of most serious scandal to others," Cordileone wrote in a May 2022 letter. "Therefore, universal Church law provides that such persons ‘are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.'" 

Martin and Notre Dame de Namur University did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.  

On Saturday, Michelle Dick was taken into custody in Fort Wayne, Indiana. According to jail records obtained by Fox News Digital, the 55-year-old is currently being held without bond in the Allen County Jail awaiting extradition to California.

A representative for the Fort Wayne Police Department told Fox News Digital that they received intelligence through law enforcement partners that Dick was at a specific hotel in the area. When officers checked that hotel, she was not there. However, Dick was located at a nearby hotel and was arrested without incident. 

Last month, Buckingham, 76, was attacked by a woman when he showed up for an appointment in Santa Monica, California, according to NBC4 Investigates. The alleged suspect, who authorities described as "a stalking suspect," threw an unknown substance at Buckingham and immediately fled, the outlet reported.

FORMER FLEETWOOD MAC GUITARIST LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM ATTACKED BY ALLEGED STALKER: REPORT

Dick — who claims Buckingham is her biological father — told KTLA earlier this month that she had approached Buckingham in March and had previously gone to his Brentwood home. 

According to court documents obtained by Fox News Digital, Dick — who was previously accused of stalking Buckingham and his family — has been charged with two counts of stalking, two counts of threats to commit a crime with intent to terrorize, assault with a deadly weapon, vandalism and battery.

The offense dates range from October 2021 to as recently as last month.

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In court documents obtained by Fox News Digital, Buckingham filed a request for a restraining order against Dick in December 2024. 

"I am afraid her conduct may escalate into something physically dangerous to me and my family," Buckingham wrote in the petition.

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The harassment began in 2021 when Dick allegedly got "ahold of my wife Kristen's business cell phone number and called the number dozens of times a day sometimes, leaving long drawn-out messages that included the claim that she was my child and threats to kill me and my family," Buckingham stated in the petition. 

"She also blamed me for facial deformities she apparently suffered as a child and demanded money. I do not know Ms. Dick, and I am not her father," he added.

"She is clearly mentally unfit and harbors delusions which makes her scary to me and unpredictable," Buckingham added. 

A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge granted the restraining order, which states that Dick must stay at least 100 yards away from Buckingham and his family. She was also ordered not to harass or attempt to make contact with him in any way.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, examined whether having higher levels of optimism could reduce the chances of cognitive decline over time.

Researchers analyzed data from more than 9,000 adults who were cognitively healthy at the start of the study. Participants were followed for up to 14 years, with more than 3,000 developing dementia during that period.

SIMPLE BRUSHING ROUTINE COULD REDUCE DEMENTIA RISK, SAY DENTAL HEALTH EXPERTS

Those who reported higher levels of optimism on a questionnaire had about a 15% lower risk of developing dementia compared to those with less optimism, even after adjusting for factors such as age, education, depression and major health conditions, according to a study press release.

The findings were consistent across demographic groups and remained largely unchanged after accounting for health behaviors and mental health status.

The results suggest that emotional and psychological factors may play a role in brain health as people age, the researchers noted.

"Our personal emotional and social resources — like how hopeful and positive we feel about the future — may be related to keeping our brains healthy," said lead study author Säde Stenlund, a social and behavioral sciences researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in the release.

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The findings align with previous research linking optimism to other health benefits.

People with a more positive outlook were shown to have a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and may be more likely to live longer.

The researchers noted that the study was observational, meaning it only shows an association and cannot prove that optimism directly reduces the risk of dementia.

Other factors not measured in the study may have influenced the results, and changes in mood might be an early sign of dementia rather than a cause of it, they added.

Still, the findings point to a potential area for future research.

"Since optimism may be increased through relatively simple, low-intensity programs, it is helpful to understand how it is related to health in aging," Stenlund said.

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More studies, including clinical trials, are needed to determine whether boosting optimism could have a measurable impact on long-term dementia risk.

Fox News Digital previously reported that while dementia cases are rising, certain lifestyle habits may help reduce risk.

New York neurologist Dr. Joel Salinas previously told Fox News Digital that factors such as diet, exercise and social engagement play a key role in brain health.

"It’s about putting the odds in your favor that you'll be less likely to develop one of these conditions, or at least delay the onset of symptoms," he said.

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Experts also recommend addressing conditions such as hearing loss, limiting alcohol consumption and quitting smoking, as these factors have been linked to cognitive decline.

Fox News Digital reached out to the researchers for comment.

Melissa Rudy of Fox News Digital contributed reporting.

The video captures the dog eagerly anticipating Koch’s arrival, barking as she opens the door and embraces her pet.

The emotional reunion came just days after Artemis II splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, following the mission around the moon.

The crew — three Americans and one Canadian — became the first humans to travel to the moon since NASA’s Apollo era more than a half-century ago.

ASTRONAUT TELLS CNN 'ENTIRE' TRUMP ADMINISTRATION DESERVES CREDIT FOR ARTEMIS MISSION SUCCESS

The astronauts received a thunderous welcome home Saturday at Ellington Field near NASA’s Johnson Space Center and Mission Control after their splashdown the evening prior.

After reuniting with their spouses and children, Mission Specialist Koch, Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen took the stage inside the hangar, surrounded by space center workers and invited guests.

During Artemis II’s mission, the astronauts traveled deeper into space than the moon explorers of decades past and captured views of the lunar far side never seen by human eyes. A total solar eclipse added to the spectacle.

PETER NAVARRO: TRUMP'S ARTEMIS VISION IS NOW FLYING — AND CHINA IS PAYING ATTENTION

At the mission’s farthest point, the crew reached approximately 252,756 miles from Earth before looping behind the moon, surpassing Apollo 13’s distance record.

The mission also revealed a new perspective of Earth through an "Earthset" image, showing the planet setting behind the moon’s gray, cratered surface — echoing the iconic 1968 "Earthrise" photo taken during Apollo 8.

"Honestly, what struck me wasn’t necessarily just Earth — it was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbed in the universe," Koch said. "Planet Earth, you are a crew."

Wiseman, Glover, Koch and Hansen are the first humans to travel to the moon since Apollo 17 concluded NASA’s initial era of lunar exploration in 1972. A total of 24 astronauts journeyed to the moon during Apollo, including 12 who walked on its surface.

NASA has emphasized the importance of Artemis II’s success as it prepares for future missions. The agency is targeting Artemis III, which is expected to involve crewed operations with a lunar lander, followed by Artemis IV — a planned mission aiming to return astronauts to the moon’s surface near the lunar south pole, later this decade.

Scheffler took issue with the conditions at Augusta National Golf Course and expressed as much after wrapping up the fourth round of the tournament on Sunday evening, telling reporters he wasn’t "in charge of the course setup."

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"I would’ve liked it to have been a little bit more equal in terms of the firmness on Thursday and Friday. I was a bit surprised at how soft things were on Friday afternoon, especially as it got late in the day. But the weather also changes, like it was a bit windy on Thursday," he said, via Golf.com.

"So who knows, it’s just that’s part of the game. We play an outdoor sport, and you don’t know how conditions are gonna change — especially course conditions. Overall, like I said, just Friday for me, going out early, not being able to shoot an under-par round, that definitely hurt my chances. I think I started the weekend maybe 12 back, so to get within one was a pretty good run."

Scheffler said his second round "probably hurt" his chances of winning the tournament the most. He shot a 74 that day with four bogeys before storming back into contention.

TRUMP CONGRATULATES RORY MCILROY ON BACK-TO-BACK MASTERS WINS: 'BECOMING MORE AND MORE A LEGEND'

"We went out on Thursday, Thursday afternoon were some of the most challenging conditions we had all week," he said. "I didn’t see many birdies out there Thursday afternoon, so going out on Friday, whatever they did to the greens to soften them up, they did some stuff, and I just wasn’t able to take advantage of that going on early on Friday.

"And then you saw the barrage of birdies that Rory made and Cam Young and a bunch of guys made on Friday late in the day, and I think I finished maybe two over par on Friday. So that day probably hurt the most in terms of my chances to win."

Scheffler made 12 birdies and two eagles in the tournament. But he also settled for five bogeys over the four rounds.

He was 11-under par for the tournament.

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The university chose author and educator Sharon McMahon to address the graduating class. Days after Kirk was killed, McMahon wrote on X, "Millions of people feel they were harmed, and the murder that was horrific and should never have happened does not magically erase what was said or done."

"To many Americans, especially if you are Black, LGBTQ or Muslim, Charlie Kirk was not a person who simply engaged in good-faith debates on college campuses."

Turning Point USA chapter president at Utah Valley University Caleb Chilcutt called the selection of McMahon a "slap to the face" Monday on "Fox & Friends."

ALLEGED CHARLIE KIRK ASSASSIN TYLER ROBINSON'S FINGERPRINTS, PALM PRINT FOUND NEAR ROOFTOP: REPORT

"They could have brought any other speaker. If they liked Charlie, didn't like Charlie — I honestly don't really care. But the fact they brought someone who was so critical, literally days after the assassination on my campus, is just shameful for me," he said.

Chilcutt said attitudes were divided on campus, with conservative students generally upset while some liberal students chose to "celebrate."

INFLUENCER JAKE PAUL SAYS CHARLIE KIRK WOULD HAVE BEEN 'THE NEXT PRESIDENT'

Former Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz also joined the program and labeled McMahon a "horrific choice" of speaker just months after Kirk's death, calling her a "liberal hack."

He said Utah's largest university should know better, but that there is still time to change course.

"I worry that the United States is now in a very weak position vis-à-vis Iran, which should be the outlier, should be on the back foot and should be the one held to account," Clinton told MS NOW's "Morning Joe" on Monday.

Clinton told MS NOW that the U.S. would have to wipe the slate clean for negotiations with Iran and said they would "have to bring in people who actually know something about nuclear weapons."

Peace talks between the U.S. and Iran collapsed over the weekend, with Vice President JD Vance departing Pakistan empty-handed.

MIKE PENCE WARNS JD VANCE TO AVOID OBAMA-STYLE IRAN DEAL AS NUCLEAR TALKS SET TO BEGIN IN PAKISTAN

"So we’re in a situation now where we are weak, where we essentially have lost the leverage and initiative that we had," Clinton added. "I supported Trump bombing the nuclear sites back in June. I thought that was an appropriate and limited strategic objective. I opposed his incoherent attack on Iran."

Clinton said the administration needed to get back to hard negotiations with the "right people at the table."

"And I also know from personal experience how [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has tried to get every American president to agree to have an open-ended war with Iran, because I had many, many long hourslong conversations with him and his war cabinet about this and refusing to go along with a very inchoate desire to do something to Iran that, you know, with no real end state that could be described as sufficiently," she said.

"So now here we are. I think you’ve got to get back into hard negotiations with the right people at the table who know what they are doing," Clinton added.

President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. Navy to blockade Iran's ports in the Strait of Hormuz beginning Monday.

HORMUZ CHOKE POINT PERSISTS AS IRAN HALTS OIL TRAFFIC DESPITE TRUMP CEASEFIRE

The U.S. began enforcing a blockade on Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz at 10 a.m. ET on Monday.

Trump ordered the blockade after peace talks with Tehran collapsed this weekend. A map of U.S. vessels in the region showed at least 17 ships deployed as of Monday morning.

U.S. Central Command announced plans to enforce the blockade earlier Monday in a notice to seafarers.

"Any vessel entering or departing the blockaded area without authorization is subject to interception, ​diversion, and capture," the note said.

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"Hillary Clinton backed the disastrous, one-sided Obama nuclear agreement, which enabled the rogue Iranian regime to build up its capabilities to threaten our homeland, and her State Department refused necessary security personnel for United States facilities in Benghazi, which paved the way for terrorists to kill four Americans," White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told Fox News Digital in a statement.  

"Crooked Hillary is one of the worst and weakest foreign policy officials to ever disgrace the United States Government. Thankfully, Americans have a courageous leader in President Trump who is strong enough to fix the disaster that Clinton and her fellow Democrats created."

A recent study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B found that the fossil Pohlsepia mazonensis — a 300-million-year-old sea creature found in the Mazon Creek fossil beds of northeastern Illinois — was closer to a nautilus than an octopus.

Researchers now believe the creature was a relative of the nautilus, which is a shell-covered cephalopod with tentacles.

NEW 'HELL HERON' SPINOSAURUS SPECIES FOUND IN REMOTE SAHARA 70 YEARS AFTER FOSSIL CLUE

Cephalopods are a class of marine animals that includes octopuses, squids and cuttlefish, and are known for their tentacles and advanced nervous systems — and for lacking rigid skeletons.

The fossil was identified as the world's oldest octopus in 2000 — but is now considered the oldest soft-tissue nautilus in the world.

University of Reading zoologist Thomas Clements, the lead researcher of the new study, told The Associated Press the fossil is a "very difficult [one] to interpret."

He added, "To look at it, it kind of just looks like a white mush."

ARCHAEOLOGISTS FIND ARTIFACTS OLDER THAN STONEHENGE BENEATH BRITAIN'S HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT: 'INCREDIBLY RARE'

"If you look at it, and you are a cephalopod researcher, and you’re interested in everything octopus, it does superficially look a lot like a deep-water octopus."

The determining factor, Clements said, was its teeth — which researchers examined using a synchrotron to peer inside the fossil.

They found that each row had 11 teeth — more than the seven or nine typically found in octopuses.

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"This has too many teeth, so it can’t be an octopus," Clements said.

"And that’s how we realized that the world’s oldest octopus is actually a fossil nautilus, not an octopus."

The fossil had the same teeth as a nautiloid called Paleocadmus pohli, an ancient creature found in the same area.

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Researchers say the mix-up likely occurred because the creature decomposed and lost its shell before it was fossilized.

The next oldest-known octopus fossil is about 90 million years old — around 210 million years younger than the fossil Pohlsepia mazonensis.

"It’s a huge gap," Clements said, noting it had long raised questions.

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"And so that big gap got researchers sort of questioning, ‘Is this thing actually an octopus?'"

The fossil is currently held in the Field Museum in Chicago. 

Paul Mayer, who manages the museum's fossil invertebrate collections, said he was "a little surprised" by the new classification, but acknowledged that scientists have questioned the finding for years.

"People have been questioning whether it was an octopus ever since the original paper was first published in 2000," Mayer told the AP.

He added that the news "is great for our collections, and hopefully new discoveries will be made and new stories will be revealed."

The Associated Press contributed reporting. 

At least four women have accused the California Democrat of sexual misconduct, according to multiple reports. The House panel said it is investigating "allegations that he may have engaged in sexual misconduct toward an employee working under his supervision."

The panel added that "the mere fact that it is investigating these allegations, and publicly disclosing its review, does not itself indicate that any violation has occurred."

Swalwell has denied any wrongdoing and pledged to correct what he has referred to as "false" allegations.

ERIC SWALWELL EXITS CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR RACE APOLOGIZING FOR PAST JUDGMENT WHILE DENYING CLAIMS

The San Francisco Chronicle first reported on an allegation Friday that Swalwell sexually assaulted a former staffer on two separate occasions while she was intoxicated and could not consent. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has opened a criminal investigation into at least one incident that allegedly occurred in New York City.

The ethics committee announcement comes after Swalwell suspended his gubernatorial campaign Sunday night amid widespread backlash from influential Democrats who nearly unanimously called on him to exit the race.

Every congressional Democrat who endorsed Swalwell has withdrawn their endorsement, and his campaign also lost the backing of several major unions in the Golden State.

Prior to the torrent of sexual misconduct allegations, Swalwell had been a leading contender to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., and appeared to be gaining momentum in the race.

More than 50 former congressional and campaign staffers for Swalwell called on their former boss to drop out of the governor’s race and resign from the House in a public letter released Sunday.

"We stand unequivocally with our colleague, who showed extraordinary courage in coming forward to share her truth. We believe her," the letter read in part.

LAWMAKERS PUT EXPULSION THREATS ATOP HOUSE AGENDA AS RETURN SETS UP HIGH-STAKES WEEK

Still, the seven-term lawmaker has given no indication that he will resign from the House prior to the end of his term in January 2027.

Swalwell is also under investigation for allegedly violating federal immigration laws by hiring a Brazilian nanny who lacked authorization to work in the United States.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., has vowed to introduce a resolution this week expelling Swalwell if he does not voluntarily step aside. Some prominent Democrats, including Reps. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Teresa Leger Fernandez, D-N.M., have said they will support the expulsion measure.

At least three California Democrats — Reps. Ro Khanna, Sim Liccardo and Jared Huffman — have urged Swalwell to resign or said they would support expulsion.

"I've seen enough. With his nuanced statement aimed at defending likely criminal charges, Swalwell all but admits a per se abuse of power under House ethics rules: sex with a subordinate," Huffman wrote on social media Sunday. "He must now drop out of the Governor's race and resign from Congress."

"Rep. Tony Gonzales, who admitted to the same violation, should also resign," Huffman added. "If they don't, I will support voting to expel both of them."

Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, who is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, has acknowledged an affair with a former staffer and suspended his re-election campaign. The aide later died by setting herself on fire.

A spokesperson for Swalwell did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Kirsten Rose, 37, a teacher at Cocoa Beach Jr./Sr. High School, was taken into custody in connection with the case, the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office said.

The investigation began in March when the parents of a male student grew suspicious that he was having an inappropriate relationship with a teacher after he came home late from work and refused to explain where he had been, according to the sheriff's office.

When his parents checked his location, they found he had been at an unfamiliar home. The teen initially claimed he was at a girlfriend’s house, but later admitted he was in a relationship with his teacher, investigators said.

COLORADO SCHOOL STAFFER ACCUSED OF SEXUALLY ABUSING 13-YEAR-OLD STUDENT, NOW ON THE RUN

Detectives determined Rose and the student had been communicating privately on Instagram since November 2025. Authorities said the relationship turned sexual in February and continued into March.

Rose was arrested and booked into the Brevard County Jail, where she is being held without bond.

FLORIDA TEACHER CHARGED FOR ALLEGED SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP WITH STUDENT WHO LIVED WITH HER

Rose faces five counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor, along with lewd and indecent exposure offenses against a student by an authority figure.

The investigation remains ongoing, and authorities are asking anyone with additional information to contact the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office Special Victims Unit.

California-based trial consultant Bryan Edelman, who has a Ph.D. in social psychology, conducted a telephone survey for the defense and reported his findings on March 13.

"It is Dr. Edelman’s opinion that the modern internet and social media ecosystem — especially algorithmic curation and personalization — has fundamentally altered how news is consumed and makes local, high-profile publicity substantially harder to avoid for residents of the locality where the events giving rise to the case occurred and the case is being tried," Robinson's attorneys wrote in a filing last week.

ALLEGED CHARLIE KIRK ASSASSIN TYLER ROBINSON'S FINGERPRINTS, PALM PRINT FOUND NEAR ROOFTOP

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Edelman's testimony is expected to delve into pretrial publicity and public opinion connected to the case against Robinson, who faces the potential death penalty if convicted of aggravated murder and Kirk's shooting death.

Robinson, 22, is accused of firing the fatal shot from a rooftop at Utah Valley University as Kirk, a 31-year-old father of two, spoke to a crowd of about 3,000 in the campus' central courtyard.

In a summary of Edelman's opinions filed with the court, the defense suggested that social media algorithms promote prominent local news, making it harder for potential jurors to avoid pretrial coverage of a case, including online commentary.

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"Experimental research indicates that hostile or uncivil comments can affect readers’ interpretations and perceptions," the defense wrote in the new filing. "In practical terms, the same news item may be encountered alongside inflammatory commentary that can heighten emotional response and shape impressions beyond the factual content of the reporting."

Robinson's lawyers, Kathryn Nester, Michael Burt, Richard Novak and Staci Visser, also argued that pretrial publicity impacts the jury pool and can increase the likelihood of guilty verdicts. Judges are often tasked with balancing the public's right to access court proceedings and a defendant's right to a fair trial.

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Edelman also worked on a controversial juror questionnaire on behalf of Kohberger's legal team. It included questions that Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson alleged were aimed at tainting the jury pool in that case.

Multiple people contacted for the survey called police, raising concerns about violations of a gag order meant to protect details ahead of trial.

Judge John Judge, who was presiding over Kohberger's case at the time, called it "ironic" that the defense survey could have tainted the jury pool, rather than allegations from the prosecution.

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Mark Calzaretta, a jury consultant and founding partner at Magna Legal Services, told Fox News Digital previously that surveys are common practice when the defense is seeking a change of venue.

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Kohberger's push for a change of venue out of Latah County succeeded, but he ultimately pleaded guilty in Ada County to avoid the death penalty weeks before his trial was scheduled to begin last year.

Robinson's defense has already tried to have the Utah County Attorney's Office disqualified from the case over an alleged conflict of interest. Judge Tony Graf Jr. denied the request.

Other high-profile cases Edelman has worked on include the murder trial of former Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke and Buffalo supermarket mass shooter Payton Gendron.

Edelman's testimony is also expected to include topics related from a declaration he filed in Gendron's pending federal case, demographics in Utah County, where Robinson's trial is expected to be held, and the fairness of the jury selection process.

Chappelle, speaking about the possibility of reviving the show in an interview with the Associated Press, offered a notable shift from his past stance.

"If you’d asked me that question a year ago, I’d have told you absolutely not," he said. "But in the last few weeks … I’m considering it."

"Chappelle's Show," which premiered in 2003, became a cultural force through its satire on race, politics and American life before Chappelle abruptly quit production of its third season in 2005. In doing so, Chappelle stepped away from a Comedy Central deal to continue the show worth upwards of $50 million.

COMEDIAN WANDA SYKES ARGUES THAT MODERN COMICS ARE TERRIFIED OF CRITICS FOR SAYING WRONG JOKES

He said at the time he was suffering from creative burnout and felt others were trying to control his work. He also told Oprah Winfrey in a 2006 interview that some of his sketches were "socially irresponsible."

Chappelle did not provide details about what a revival of "Chappelle's Show" might look like but acknowledged that his thinking had evolved. His comments came as he reflected more broadly on the changing entertainment landscape and his own place within it.

Chappelle also pointed to how the comedy industry has shifted in the years since the show aired, noting the rise of digital platforms and a new generation of comedians shaping content in real time. He emphasized the importance of growth through experience.

JERRY SEINFELD REVEALS HOW 'CLEAN' COMEDY FORCES HIM TO BE A MORE 'ELEGANT,' FUNNIER WRITER

"One of the worst things that can happen to a comedian is becoming successful before they get good," Chappelle told the AP. "Because you miss the part where you get to explore and make mistakes."

Despite criticism, Chappelle said he has remained committed to his approach to comedy.

"Your responsibility is to be true to yourself and your work," he said, describing his philosophy toward public reaction.

CONAN O'BRIEN SAYS 'F TRUMP' COMICS HAVE BEEN CO-OPTED BY ANGER, 'JUST SCREAMING'

Chappelle framed the criticism as something to ensure rather than avoid, referencing historical figures who faced backlash in their time.

"Sometimes people will attach things to your voice that don’t necessarily have anything to do with you," he said. "The media used to talk (expletive) about jokes that I did and none of that stuff swayed my audience."

The move, announced by President Donald Trump, came after negotiations in Islamabad ended without a breakthrough, despite what participants described as rare direct engagement between the two sides.

But Lt. Gen. (ret.) Mohammed Saeed, former chief of general staff of the Pakistan Army, said in an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital that the talks came far closer to success than their outcome suggests — and argued that diplomacy is still within reach.

"Both sides are saying they were very close … even inches away from a solution," he said based on his own knowledge and reports. Saeed retired in 2023 but remained part of the core team handling operational planning, internal security coordination, and sensitive periods of political tension. 

JD VANCE RETURNS TO WASHINGTON AFTER 16 HOURS OF IRAN PEACE TALKS COLLAPSE IN PAKISTAN

"They talked to each other in a very friendly manner. There was, from both sides, an expression of accommodation and understanding from each other. So, what you can briefly say is that the engagement has sufficient potential to resume."

Speaking at the White House Monday, Trump defended the blockade, saying, "Right now, there’s no fighting. Right now, we have a blockade … Iran is doing absolutely no business, and we’re going to keep it that way very easily."

He added that Iran’s military capabilities had been significantly degraded, saying its "Navy has gone, their air force is gone, their anti-aircraft is gone, their radar is gone and their leaders are gone."

Vice President JD Vance, who led the U.S. delegation, pressed Iran to accept a strict "zero enrichment" policy and remove its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. 

"The simple fact is that we need to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon, and they will not seek the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon," Vance said at a press conference in Islamabad.

Iranian leaders rejected those demands, insisting that any agreement must include the immediate release of billions of dollars in frozen assets.

Now, with the blockade in place, Saeed suggested the move may be designed less as a military endgame and more as leverage.

"This blockade could be … a maneuver to build further pressure on Iran to negotiate," he said.

TRUMP WARNS CHINA OF 'STAGGERING' 50% TARIFF IF CAUGHT SUPPLYING MILITARY AID TO IRAN

The escalation has raised concerns globally, particularly for countries dependent on Gulf energy flows, including Pakistan.

"Everyone in the world must be worried about what kind of economic negative spin-offs such a blockade would have," Saeed said.

Saeed, who until recently sat at the center of Pakistan’s military leadership, framed the Islamabad talks as a critical reopening of dialogue after decades of hostility.

"It is the first time in 47 years … that there was engagement at the highest level," he said, calling it "a great moment for diplomacy" and a demonstration of Pakistan’s ability to maintain credibility with both Washington and Tehran.

He pointed in particular to Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, a figure who has drawn unusual attention in Washington. 

Trump has publicly praised Munir, at one point calling him his "favorite field marshal," elevating his profile as a key intermediary in regional diplomacy.

Munir, who rose through Pakistan’s intelligence ranks before becoming army chief, previously served as director general of military intelligence and later led the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). His career has been defined by deep involvement in regional security and intelligence coordination, including longstanding engagement with Iran.

‘GATE OF TEARS’ AT RISK: IRAN THREATENS MAJOR NEW GLOBAL CHOKEPOINT IF US MOVES ON HORMUZ

Those ties could prove critical in the current crisis, according to Saeed. 

"What people do not know is that when he was director general of military intelligence … he was interacting with Iranians at multiple levels continuously," Saeed said, describing years of direct engagement with Iran’s military, intelligence and political leadership, including former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. strike during Trump’s first term.

"He has had interaction with them for a long time … visiting Iran frequently and interacting on multiple issues," Saeed said, adding that many current Iranian officials would already be familiar with Munir from earlier roles.

That continuity, he argued, gives Pakistan a rare advantage at a moment when formal diplomatic channels are strained.

"What one can say is that he continues to be one figure internationally who has a personal interaction … in the intelligence community in Iran in the military hierarchy and also on the side of the political leadership," Saeed said.

"So that’s a huge advantage he has on the other side."

TRUMP VOICES FRUSTRATION WITH NATO, SAYS IRANIAN NAVY ‘DESTROYED’ AS US PREPS FOR BLOCKADE

For Pakistan, that personal access — combined with its simultaneous relationship with Washington — has become central to its effort to position itself as a credible intermediary, even as the region edges closer to confrontation.

At the same time, Pakistan’s role as a mediator has drawn scrutiny, particularly given its longstanding position on Israel and recent inflammatory remarks by senior officials.

When asked whether Pakistan can be seen as a neutral broker while not recognizing Israel — an actor directly involved in strikes on Iran — Saeed downplayed the issue, saying Israel was not part of the diplomatic track.

"Pakistan’s position with regard to relations with Israel has been consistent since our independence," he said, adding that Islamabad’s mediation efforts were focused solely on Washington and Tehran.

"Neither of their representatives was on the table … Pakistan was mediating between the U.S. and Iran," he said.

Despite the current escalation, Saeed maintained that diplomatic channels remain open.

"There is a lot of space … for resuming the process," he said, suggesting talks could restart in Islamabad or elsewhere if both sides shift course.

"On Pakistan's side, from my personal knowledge of the field marshal, they are relentless. They would not give up. They must not have given up. They must be continuously in touch with both sides. And they would try their best to convince both sides that the blockade is not going to be in their interest, in the interest of the region and in the interest of the international community."

A new ad released by Unleash Prosperity on Monday slammed Spanberger over her affordability promises as Virginia Democrats propose new taxes on everyday expenses like dry cleaning, gym memberships and pet care. Unleash Prosperity’s ad puts it bluntly, saying, "Virginia can’t afford this."

The governor has not publicly supported or signed the measures. A statement by the governor's office sent to Fox News Digital on Monday emphasized that Spanberger did not sign the tax bills into law "because the General Assembly never passed them, and the bills never reached her desk." The statement said that Spanberger has "remained laser-focused on addressing high costs for Virginians."

However, Spanberger has supported a broader set of revenue measures since taking office, including proposals targeting digital services and business activity, as part of an effort to fund priorities such as education and healthcare.

TRUMP BLASTS SPANBERGER AHEAD OF VIRGINIA MEETINGS, SAYS STATE FACES TAX BASE EXODUS LIKE NEW YORK, CALIFORNIA

Steve Moore, an economist who co-founded Unleash Prosperity, told Fox News Digital that while Spanberger cashed in on Virginians’ worries over prices, she "raced out of the gate with all of these very liberal policies, including tax increases on just about anything that moves in Virginia."

Moore said Democrats across the country should take Spanberger's decline as a "warning" ahead of 2028.

There has been much buzz around Spanberger and her gubernatorial victory last year, which resulted in Republicans being ousted from power in Virginia. The Democratic Party selected her to give its response to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union, further evidencing her stardom.

Yet, despite the Democrats elevating her and even floating her as a presidential or vice-presidential pick, Moore said Virginians have been "shocked about that," explaining why her approval ratings have "absolutely plummeted."

"She has seen one of the swiftest declines in her popularity in the first six months in office that I've seen in many years of politics," Moore said.

Forty-six percent of Virginians disapprove of her job performance, while 47% approve, according to a recent Washington Post-Schar School poll. Compared with Virginia governors from both parties since 1994, Spanberger has the highest disapproval rating at this point in her term.

In contrast, predecessor Gov. Glenn Youngkin had a 54-39 job approval rating at this point in his term, with the highest favorability going to Democrat Mark Warner – now Virginia’s senior senator – at 78-20.

Moore called Spanberger’s tumbling ratings "the price for her bait-and-switch tax hike on Virginia residents and small businesses."

DEMS WHO RAN ON AFFORDABILITY NOW FACE BACKLASH AS COSTS CLIMB IN NY, VIRGINIA

"She campaigned on affordability, and nearly on day one in office, she and Virginia Democrats in Richmond endorsed a catalog of left-wing tax increase proposals on everything from dry cleaners to dog groomers, which make Virginia look like California," he said.

"Spanberger promised to be a pro-business moderate Democrat," he went on, quipping, "Maybe she should be known as ‘Scam-Berger.’"

Moore said Spanberger’s quick decline in the polls does not bode well for the Democratic Party’s hopes of taking back the White House in 2028.

"Spanberger is not alone," he explained. "We're seeing that with a lot of Democrats around the country; they run as moderates and as soon as they get in, they move to the extreme left."

"You're seeing Democrats who are governors and mayors across the country who are advancing very liberal pro-tax policies that are anti-business. And I think it's a very tough agenda for Democrats to run with in 2028 on the national picture," he went on.

"That should be a warning signal to Democrats across the country."

VIRGINIA DEMS TAKE TAX HIKES INTO OVERTIME, TARGET FANTASY FOOTBALL LEAGUES 

Last week Trump took a similar line of criticism against Spanberger ahead of meetings in the state. He warned in a Truth Social post that her policies are triggering a tax base exodus similar to New York and California.

"She is adding so many Taxes, a Food and Beverage Tax, Digital Services Tax, Utilities Tax, and more," Trump wrote. "It has lost its Energy, Vitality, and Strength. People are leaving that would never have even thought of doing so!"

In a statement shared with Fox News Digital, Spanberger's office slammed criticisms of the governor raising taxes as "misinformation."

"The volume of misinformation — spread across social media and repeated in press coverage — made a clarification necessary. The facts are straightforward," the statement said. "Governor Abigail Spanberger did not sign dozens of tax bills into law — because the General Assembly never passed them, and the bills never reached her desk."

The office added that "in the opening months of her administration, Governor Spanberger has remained laser-focused on addressing high costs for Virginians" and is "also working alongside legislators and local communities to attract new capital investment."

Spanberger has also pushed back on the criticism herself. In a post on X, she said Trump and his allies were mischaracterizing her policies.

"The president and his allies are talking about taxes that our state legislature never even voted on and I certainly didn't sign," she wrote. "Why? Because if they don't flood the zone with fake news about fake taxes, people might hear about the bills I am signing to lower energy costs, strengthen our schools, make housing more affordable, and bring billions of dollars of business investment to Virginia."

A Spanberger spokesperson added that businesses have announced "more than $500 million in new investment in the commonwealth since Governor Spanberger took office in January," while accusing Trump of focusing on politics instead of economic stability.

"The ballgame changed when the President — whose been busy raising costs for Virginians by starting a reckless war that has skyrocketed inflation and driven gas prices up to $4 — strong-armed states into drawing more Republican congressional seats that he asserted he was 'entitled' to before the midterms," the governor's spokesperson said. "As prices rise in Trump’s economy, Governor Spanberger will continue her work with both parties to address the high housing, healthcare and energy costs that Virginians are feeling."

Fox News Digital's Charles Creitz and Michael Dorgan contributed to this report.

The Department of Homeland Security announced Monday that Cristian Lopez-Gomez, a Honduran national who entered the U.S. illegally in April 2024 and was released into the country under the Biden administration, is now charged in the attack in Kirksville, home to Truman State University.

Authorities say Lopez-Gomez raped the woman and held her against her will during the holiday weekend. He remains behind bars in the Adair County jail, where ICE has lodged a detainer to keep him from being released.

DHS reinforced that message in a social media post, urging Missouri officials not to release Lopez-Gomez and stressing that cooperation with ICE is key to ensuring suspects like him are not "released back into our communities."

DHS reinforced that message in a statement on Monday, urging Missouri officials not to release Lopez-Gomez, whom it called an "animal" and a "monster." The agency stressed that cooperation with ICE is key to ensuring suspects like him are not "released back into our communities."

"Thankfully, Missouri cooperates with ICE law enforcement," DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said. "When state and local law enforcement work with ICE, we can safely remove criminal illegal aliens from our country and put the safety of American citizens first."

FEDS CHARGE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT IN LOYOLA STUDENT KILLING AS ATTORNEY SAYS PROSECUTORS LACK 'FAITH' IN STATE

The disturbing case is rattling the college town and fueling broader outrage, coming just weeks after another high-profile attack in Missouri involving an illegal immigrant suspect.

In that March case, 18-year-old Honduran national Yefry Archaga-Elvir is accused of luring 15-year-old Miles Young into a deadly ambush before chasing him down and shooting him as the teen reportedly begged for his life.

ICE DETAINER LODGED FOR ILLEGAL MIGRANT ACCUSED OF MURDERING 15-YEAR-OLD MISSOURI BOY WHO BEGGED FOR HIS LIFE

The killing sparked fierce backlash from Republican leaders, who pointed to the suspect’s immigration status as a broader public safety failure.

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"Unfortunately, this is just the latest example of a Missourian killed by an illegal alien," Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., said, calling for sweeping deportation efforts.

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Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., warned that "dangerous individuals who should not be here remain in our communities," while Rep. Mark Alford added, "Our children should NEVER fear murder on our streets."

Missouri State Treasurer Vivek Malek also weighed in, calling the teen’s death "another Missouri family destroyed" and arguing the crime "never would’ve happened" if the suspect had not been in the country.

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Schmitt went further in a separate statement, blasting what he described as an "invasion" and asking, "Where is the outrage when American sons and daughters are murdered by illegal aliens who have no business in our country?"

The back-to-back cases have intensified concerns among GOP leaders, who say the attacks underscore growing risks tied to illegal immigration and the need for stronger enforcement.

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DHS officials echoed that message, emphasizing that when local law enforcement works with ICE, authorities can remove dangerous individuals and "put the safety of American citizens first."

It was not immediately clear whether the victim in the Easter Sunday attack was a Truman State student. Requests for comment were sent to the university, local police and ICE Midwest.

Lopez-Gomez is not believed to have a prior criminal history in the U.S., but officials say he entered the country illegally in April 2024 and was released.

Both cases remain under investigation.

Swalwell, D-Calif., has suspended his campaign for California governor after he was accused of sexual assault, as well as multiple reports alleging other misconduct with women. Swalwell has acknowledged "mistakes in judgment" but claimed the assault allegations against him are false.

Griffin, returning to "The View" after a stint on maternity leave, noted reports that Swalwell's alleged misconduct was not a surprise to many observers.

"Swalwell sat on the intel committee, and there were allegations he had a suspected Chinese spy, Fang Fang, who was associated with him in his office," she said. "Now, he was not found to have engaged in wrongdoing, but to me, my spidey senses from having worked at the Pentagon go off, which is it was an open secret that he had issues with women, that he was somebody who was susceptible, potentially to heavy drinking, to impropriety with women."

CALIFORNIA REPORTER CLAIMS ERIC SWALWELL’S CONDUCT ‘WAS KNOWN,’ RAISES QUESTIONS ABOUT LOCAL SUPPORT

Griffin added that allegations like those made against Swalwell were "disqualifying."

"I think we need to remember that winning isn’t everything, and you lose the plot when you think that," Griffin said. "When somebody does something that’s beyond the pale, that should be it, and we should move on and get back to that kind of society."

"I think of the victims. These allegations are horrible. They’re well-documented. This is, I mean, deeply reported," she added.

The other victim of the situation, she argued, is "the American public," arguing that even the reputation of habitual sexual scandal makes one look vulnerable to bad actors from America’s rival powers.

HOUSE REPUBLICAN PLANS MOTION TO OUST SWALWELL FROM CONGRESS AMID SEXUAL ASSAULT ALLEGATIONS

"America’s adversaries look for how to exploit that," she continued. "So that, to me, pinpoints it was openly known. Nobody did anything about it. But thank God that now Democrats, Adam Schiff and others and others have called for him to step aside, and he did the right thing by doing it."

Swalwell has also been urged by some Democrats to resign from Congress.

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"The accusations were 2019," co-host Sara Haines added. "This is post-MeToo, which was not just a ‘let’s dig out the ones that have done wrong things.' It was a loud warning that people will not be silenced anymore, and he arrogantly did that again in 2019."

Fox News Digital reached out to Swalwell's campaign and did not receive immediate reply.

The man's attorney, Terrel Butler, arrived in Freeport Monday morning to sit in on a second official police interrogation of her client at the city's Central Police Station. 

She confirmed that Hooker still maintains his innocence, but declined to give specific details about the questions asked due to attorney/client privilege. 

Hooker must be released by 7:20 p.m. or charged with a crime. 

"We're close to the wire. Close to a decision," she said. "Even if they decided to charge him, it's highly unlikely that he would go to court today. So we will know by 7:20 p.m. today what their decision will be." 

She added that the decision to charge Hooker will not be made by investigators, but rather by the attorney general's office. 

"So, as soon as [the investigator] receives his instructions, then he will know how to proceed from there," she said. 

Butler said Hooker feels "a bit drained and tired from this whole ordeal," and that he's "just hoping to have closure to be released so that he can continue to search to find out what has happened to his wife."

She also said that Hooker could get rearrested. 

"It is possible that when a person has completed their time, that when they walk out, they can be re-arrested and time starts again," she said. 

Property records indicate that Brian and Lynette sold their home in the town of Kentwood, Michigan, in 2020. Fox News Digital was not able to verify any further property records related to the Hookers.

Hooker has been in custody since last week after authorities detained him in connection with his wife’s disappearance. His attorney said officials have until about 7:20 p.m. ET Monday to decide whether to file charges or let him go.

Police continue searching for Lynette by air, land and sea, though the effort has shifted from a rescue mission to a recovery operation.

Lynette Hooker was last seen the night of April 4 after the couple left the Abaco Inn on a dinghy headed back to their anchored yacht.

DINGHY ROUTE TAKEN BY MISSING AMERICAN WOMAN AND JAILED HUSBAND RECREATED AS DETAILS OF DISAPPEARANCE EMERGE

Fox News Digital previously retraced the route — a short trip through waters local experts say are typically shallow, clear and heavily trafficked.

According to Brian Hooker’s account, Lynette fell overboard in worsening weather and strong winds. He has said the couple was not wearing life jackets and that the dinghy lost power after the ignition key went into the water.

In a recorded phone call obtained by CBS, Hooker described the incident as a series of mistakes, saying Lynette "basically just bounced off the dinghy" before he lost sight of her in the dark.

He has said he later paddled for help after searching for her.

WATCH: Volunteer fire and rescue team searches for missing Lynette Hooker

In an interview on Ashleigh Banfield’s "Drop Dead Serious" podcast, Lynette’s mother described a volatile relationship and said her daughter had left her husband multiple times in the past.

"They had a lot of highs and a lot of lows," she said. "When there were bad times, they were bad times."

She alleged Brian Hooker could become "mean" and "hateful" when drinking and said there had been instances where he became physical, adding she had long feared for her daughter’s safety.

Lynette had been planning to leave the marriage, her mother said in the interview.

FRIEND OF BRIAN HOOKER SPEAKS OUT, QUESTIONS DISAPPEARANCE OF WOMAN IN BAHAMAS MYSTERY

Separately, Lynette’s daughter, Karli Aylesworth, has questioned Brian Hooker’s version of events, saying the circumstances surrounding her mother’s disappearance "don’t add up." 

In a previous appearance on "Fox & Friends," she also alleged he had been physically violent in the past.

"I've seen him choke out one of his daughters before. And we had to go to court for that," Aylesworth said. "So he's just repeating patterns."

MISSING AMERICAN’S HUSBAND HAD 'SPOTTY' CELL SERVICE DURING 8-HOUR TREK TO REPORT DISAPPEARANCE: TELECOM BOSS

Brian Hooker has denied wrongdoing and has spoken publicly about the incident, saying in a Facebook post that he is "heartbroken."

"I am heartbroken over the recent boat accident in unpredictable seas and high winds that caused my beloved Lynette to fall from our small dinghy near Elbow Cay in the Bahamas," he wrote. "Despite desperate attempts to reach her, the winds and currents drove us further apart. We continue to search for her and that is my sole focus."

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Hooker’s attorney said his client wants "closure" to find out what happened to his wife.

"He denied the allegations and he maintained his innocence," Terrel Butler said, adding that a decision on whether to charge him would likely come before the deadline.

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The attorney also said the case would ultimately be handled by prosecutors, not just investigating officers, and that Hooker is "drained and tired" as he awaits a decision.

If he is not charged by the deadline, authorities would be required to release him, though re-arrest remains a possibility under Bahamian law.

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A flotation device believed to have been thrown to Lynette was recovered, according to multiple reports, but authorities have not announced that they have found her body.

Royal Bahamas Defence Force Commander Origin Deleveaux told NBC News that authorities were continuing to search for Lynette, and that early efforts were complicated by severe weather.

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Fox News Digital has also reported that local boaters say it would be unusual for someone to disappear without a trace in the area due to the water clarity and proximity to land.

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The Hookers had documented their boating lifestyle online after buying and restoring a sailboat in Texas, eventually making their way to the Bahamas.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the Royal Bahamas Police Force and Hooker’s attorney for additional comment.

Fox News Digital's Adam Sabes contributed to this report.

The case stems from a lawsuit filed late last year by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which sought to block the construction. The group argued that the project violates multiple federal laws, including the Administrative Procedure Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, and charged that the plans amounted to executive overreach without required approval from Congress and federal planning bodies.

A lower court judge last month put the project on hold, triggering the administration’s appeal.

TRUMP ADMIN FIGHTS IN COURT TO KEEP WHITE HOUSE EAST WING DEMOLITION, $300M BALLROOM BUILD ON TRACK

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, in March issued a preliminary injunction blocking construction of the ballroom, finding the Trump administration likely lacked the legal authority to proceed without congressional approval. He said the government had not shown it had clear authorization to replace parts of the East Wing with a privately funded structure.

Leon’s order paused most construction work on the ballroom, though he allowed activity tied to White House security concerns, and briefly delayed enforcement of his ruling until mid-April, to give the administration time to appeal the case to a higher court.

The Trump administration quickly asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to intervene, arguing that the project is critical to the safety and security of the "president, his family, and White House staff."

The 2-1 ruling from the circuit court did not immediately side with the Trump administration, but gave it temporary relief.

A majority of judges on the panel said the court needed more explanation from Leon before deciding whether construction should remain blocked. 

Specifically, the judges asked Leon to clarify whether stopping the project would harm national security, as the Trump administration claims.

US APPEALS COURT HALTS TRUMP CONTEMPT PROBE ORDERED BY BOASBERG, FOR NOW

The appeals court also paused Leon’s order through April 17, giving the Trump administration time to ask the Supreme Court for emergency intervention if it chooses.

For now, the case will return to the district court for further explanation.

Trump first announced plans for the 90,000-square-foot ballroom in July, initially estimating the cost at around $200 million. He has said the project would be funded "100% by me and some friends of mine."

Lawyers for the administration have pushed back on the lawsuit, arguing the president has authority over White House construction decisions and that Congress does not need to approve the project.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ASKS SUPREME COURT TO REVIEW EL SALVADOR DEPORTATION FLIGHT CASE

"No taxpayer dollars are being used for the funding of this beautiful, desperately needed, and completely secure… ballroom," Justice Department lawyers said in court filings.

They added that past White House expansions, including the East and West Wings, did not require congressional involvement in their design or construction.

The National Trust, meanwhile, maintains the project cannot move forward without complying with federal law and proper review processes.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the ongoing litigation or whether it plans to seek Supreme Court intervention.

The controversy stems from decisions by the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), a 54-member body that plays a central role in shaping U.N. policy and staffing key committees.

Critics warn the outcome could allow governments accused of human rights abuses to influence global policy and control which civil society groups are granted access to the United Nations.

TERROR SPONSOR IRAN GETS UN LEADERSHIP OVERSEEING CHARTER PRINCIPLES

ECOSOC nominated the Islamic Republic of Iran to the U.N.’s Committee for Program and Coordination Wednesday, a body that helps shape policy on human rights, women’s rights, disarmament and counterterrorism.

The nomination is widely expected to be finalized, as the United Nations General Assembly typically approves such recommendations without a vote.

At the same session, ECOSOC elected China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Saudi Arabia and Sudan to the Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations, which oversees accreditation and access for thousands of NGOs operating within the U.N. system.

The United States was the only member state to formally break from consensus.

MIKE WALTZ TURNS TABLES ON IRANIAN ENVOY AT HEATED UN MEETING

In remarks delivered April 8, U.S. Representative to ECOSOC Ambassador Dan Negrea said the U.S. "disassociates from consensus" on both decisions, calling several of the countries involved unfit for such roles.

"The regime threatens its neighbors and has, for decades, infringed on the Iranian people’s ability to exercise their basic human rights," Negrea said, adding that "we believe Iran is unfit to serve" on the committee.

The decision drew sharp criticism from UN Watch, a Geneva-based watchdog group.

Hillel Neuer told Fox News Digital: "By their cynical actions at the UN, major Western states have betrayed their own human rights principles, severely undermining the rules-based international order that they claim to support."

"We note that the EU states clearly had another option. They did take action in recent years to stop Russia from getting elected to similar bodies, and so we deeply regret that they failed to do the same now to stop the election of serial violators such as Iran, China, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Saudi Arabia and Sudan."

"We salute the United States for their moral clarity and leadership in objecting to the election of the Islamic Republic of Iran and other brutal regimes."

Neuer warned the composition of the NGO committee could allow authoritarian governments to influence which organizations are accredited, potentially sidelining independent human rights groups.

"This means dictatorships will have a majority on the committee in order to deny United Nations accreditation to independent organizations that call out their human rights violations, and to accredit more fake front groups created by the regimes," he said.

Israel’s mission to the United Nations also pointed to political tensions surrounding the vote, saying Iran attempted to challenge Israel’s candidacy during the same ECOSOC session.

AMBASSADOR MIKE WALTZ LAYS OUT ‘AMERICA FIRST’ VISION FOR US LEADERSHIP AT THE UN

Israel was elected to several U.N. bodies, according to the Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations, including the Commission on the Status of Women and the NGO Committee, despite opposition.

"Iran also tried to turn the elections at the UN into an arena for incitement against Israel and failed," Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon said. "Those who oppress women and trample on human rights in their own country will not teach us what women's rights are."

Ahead of the vote, around 70 civil society groups warned that countries with poor human rights records could secure seats on key oversight bodies, but the elections proceeded without a formal vote, a process known as approval "by acclamation."

Critics argue that this procedure allows controversial candidates to secure influential roles with limited transparency or accountability.

The developments are likely to intensify scrutiny over how U.N. bodies are staffed and whether political considerations are outweighing human rights concerns.

Fox News Digital reached out to the UK, France, Canada, Australia and U.S. mission for comment but did not receive responses in time for publication.

The Iranian mission to the United Nations declined to comment.

On Saturday, the "Babygirl" actress spoke with Vicky Nguyen — an investigative journalist and University of San Francisco graduate — as part of the private school's Silk Speaker Series and opened up about her plans to become a death doula nearly two years after her mother, Janelle Ann Kidman, died at 84.

"As my mother was passing, she was lonely, and there was only so much the family could provide," Kidman, who admitted the idea "may sound a little weird," told the crowd, per the San Francisco Chronicle. "Between my sister and I, we have so many children and our careers and our work, and wanting to take care of her because my father wasn’t in the world anymore, and that’s when I went, ‘I wish there was these people in the world that were there to sit impartially and just provide solace and care.’"

"So that's part of my expansion and one of the things I will be learning," she added.

JAMES VAN DER BEEK’S DAUGHTER, 9, OFFERS MOVING ADVICE ABOUT GRIEF: ‘I JUST TELL HIM ABOUT MY DAY'

An end-of-life doula advocates self-determination and imparts psychosocial, emotional, spiritual and practical care to empower dignity throughout the dying process, according to the International End-of-Life Doula Association.

In September 2024, Kidman — who won the best actress award for her role in "Babygirl" at the Venice Film Festival, but had to miss the ceremony to be with family — shared the news of her mother's death in a statement delivered by the film's director, Halina Reijn. 

"I arrived in Venice and found out shortly after that my beautiful, brave mother, Janelle Ann Kidman has just passed," Kidman said in a statement, per The Associated Press. "I’m in shock and I have to go to my family, but this award is for her. She shaped me and made me."

SUSAN LUCCI WAS ‘LOST’ AFTER LOSING HUSBAND OF 53 YEARS, FEARED SHE’D NEVER ACT AGAIN

A representative for Kidman confirmed the death at the time and told Fox News Digital, "The family is heartbroken and asks for privacy at this time."

Throughout the years, Kidman has been open about her close bond with her mom and shared insight into her mother's health struggles.

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During an interview with NPR's "Fresh Air" podcast in 2022, Kidman said, "I'm at the place where I'm being given the chance to view the world, because of how close we are. My mom is giving me the chance to view the world through an 81-year-old woman's eyes. That is so beneficial right now, because she's so cognizant. She has every brain faculty available, so she hasn't lost anything. She hasn't lost any memory, which is fascinating, and she's extremely bright."

"She's giving me access, because she's also very direct and very honest, and so I'm getting access to the world through her eyes, my mother's eyes," she continued. "It's her perspective, obviously. There's many different 80-year-old perspectives, but it's her perspective, and her particular path, but I'm drinking it in and learning."

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In 2020, Kidman opened up to the Sydney Morning Herald about how her mom always inspired her to chase her dreams.

"She’s given me the fire to pursue the career I have because I’ve always wanted to please her," Kidman told the outlet. "But she also carved her own path and wanted her daughters to have the same opportunity to carve their own paths."

"Mom didn’t necessarily get the career that she wanted, but she was determined that her daughters would have opportunities that were equal," Kidman added. "That’s given me my life. And she gave me my life, she and my dad."

Kidman's father, Antony Kidman, died in 2014. 

The NBA requires players to play at least 65 games in order to be considered for the league’s highest accolades. The rule became a source of consternation this year in a hotly contested MVP race as some players, who have been playing at a high level, have missed out on consideration.

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But Barkley had no time for players’ complaints.

"I don’t think 65 games is a lot to ask," he said. "Man, shut the hell up. Y’all voted on that in the collective bargaining, now y’all want to complain. If y’all wasn’t sitting on your a-- half the time, sipping margaritas and stuff, they wouldn’t have put the 65-game threshold in there. Shut the hell up."

San Antonio Spurs’ Victor Wembanyama and Denver Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic each came down to the wire when it came to eligibility.

Wembanyama played 64 regular-season games with the NBA Cup Final counting toward his total. Jokic hit the 65-game minimum after playing 18 minutes against the Spurs on Sunday. Oklahoma City Thunder star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is also in contention, having played 68 games.

GIANNIS ANTETOKOUNMPO MAKES CLEAR HE WANTS TO 'F---ING PLAY' AS FEUD ERUPTS OVER INJURY STATUS

But Detroit Pistons star Cade Cunningham, who is having one of the best seasons of his NBA career, will not be eligible after only playing 64 games and missing time with a collapsed lung.

Cunningham’s injury sparked a statement from the National Basketball Players Association last month.

"Cade Cunningham's potential ineligibility for postseason awards after a career-defining season is a clear indictment of the 65-game rule and yet another example of why it must be abolished or reformed to create an exception for significant injuries," the union said. "Since its implementation, far too many deserving players have been unfairly disqualified from end-of-season honors by this arbitrary and overly rigid quota."

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver stood firmly behind the rule.

"I’m not ready to say it’s not working," Silver said in March. "It is working. I’m not ready to say that because there is a sense of unfairness for one player, the rule doesn’t work."

Trump sparked a row with the Roman Catholic Church when he called Pope Leo out for his stance on the Iran war. Barron, while expressing gratitude for Trump’s defense of religious liberty, responded by politely suggesting that the president should apologize to the Pope for these comments.

Trump was asked by a reporter whether he planned on making such an apology.

"No I don’t, because Pope Leo said things that were wrong. he was very much against what I’m doing with regard to Iran, and you cannot have a nuclear Iran," Trump replied. "Pope Leo would not be happy with the end result. You have hundreds of millions of people dead. And it’s not going to happen. So again, I think he’s very weak on crime and other things."

POPE WARNS ESCALATING IRAN CONFLICT COULD TIP MIDDLE EAST INTO ‘IRREPARABLE ABYSS’

Trump went on to recall that he had praised the Pope’s brother, saying he likes him "better than I like the Pope."

"You have to have law and order in our country. And that’s what we have now," Trump said. "We have the lowest crime numbers we’ve had in a long time, despite the fact that many criminals were allowed into our country. But we’ve gotten a lot of them out. We’ve done a great job on crime. So we have the lowest murder rate in 125 years, since 1900, the lowest murder rate."

"So we believe strongly in law and order," Trump concluded. "And he seemed to have a problem with that. So there’s nothing to apologize for. He’s wrong. And the other thing is he didn’t like what we’re doing with respect to Iran. But Iran is a — wants to be a nuclear nation. So they can exterminate the world. Not gonna happen."

"Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy," Trump had written previously on Truth Social. "He talks about ‘fear’ of the Trump Administration, but doesn’t mention the FEAR that the Catholic Church, and all other Christian Organizations, had during COVID when they were arresting priests, ministers, and everybody else, for holding Church Services, even when going outside, and being ten and even twenty feet apart."

Trump went on to make numerous other controversial statements in the post, such as declaring that he prefers Louis Prevost, Pope Leo XIV's brother, more than the Pope himself, saying ""He gets it, and Leo doesn’t! I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon."

VATICAN DECLINES TO JOIN TRUMP’S GAZA ‘BOARD OF PEACE,’ CALLS FOR UN LEADERSHIP

"The statements made by President Trump on Truth Social regarding the Pope were entirely inappropriate and disrespectful," Barron responded in an X post. "They don’t contribute at all to a constructive conversation. It is the Pope’s prerogative to articulate Catholic doctrine and the principles that govern the moral life. In regard to the concrete application of those principles, people of good will can and do disagree."

"I would warmly recommend that serious Catholics within the Trump administration — Secretary Rubio, Vice President Vance, Ambassador Brian Burch, and others — might meet with Vatican officials so that a real dialogue can take place," he continued. "This is far preferable to the statements on social media."

"I am very grateful for the many ways that the Trump administration has reached out to Catholics and other people of faith," Barron added. "It has been a high honor to serve on the Religious Liberty Commission. No President in my lifetime has shown a greater dedication to defending our first liberty. All that said, I think the President owes the Pope an apology."

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Shortly after feuding with the Pope over the weekend, Trump upset many Christians by posting what many have called a "blasphemous" AI art image of what many said appeared to be a portrayal of himself as a Jesus-like figure healing the sick. Some speculated that this was an attempt to troll the Pope, having been posted amid the administration's feud with Roman Catholic leadership.

While Trump has denied he was trying to portray himself as the messiah, arguing of his image where he is in white and red robes with what appears to be holy light emanating from his hands that he was trying to portray "me as a doctor." He has since deleted the post.

Separately, the House Ethics Committee announced Monday its own probe into allegations of sexual misconduct.

A former staffer accused Swalwell of sexually assaulting her when she was blackout drunk twice, including once in New York City in 2024, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle published Friday.

SWALWELL'S FORMER FEMALE STAFFER DROPS BOMBSHELL ALLEGATIONS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT, EXPOSING HIMSELF: REPORT

The unnamed woman told the paper that she was hired at 21 to work in Swalwell's district office in 2019 and claimed her married boss began pursuing her weeks later. She reportedly claimed he sent her naked pictures over Snapchat and asked for oral sex in a parking lot during a ride home from an event. On another occasion, she claimed to have awoken naked in Swalwell's bed after blacking out drinking.

The New York investigation stems from separate allegations in the article, when she was no longer an employee of Swalwell's office. They allegedly met up for drinks after a gala in Manhattan at around 11:30 p.m. on April 25, 2024.

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According to the report, she claimed to remember only "snippets of the night," including telling Swalwell "no." Three days later, she reportedly told a friend she believed she was sexually assaulted.

"I have no skin in the game of who becomes governor of California, but I feel people have a right to know whether the person who leads a state that is a safe haven for so many women actually treats women with dignity and will protect their rights," the Chronicle quoted her as saying. "No one protected me from him, and so I have to protect the other young women like me who aspire to work in this field and he could prey upon."

SWALWELL THREATENS FBI WITH LEGAL ACTION AS PATEL REPORTEDLY WEIGHS 'FANG FANG' FILES RELEASE

She claimed she kept quiet for years, however, out of fear of retaliation.

"We urge survivors and anyone with knowledge of these allegations to contact our Special Victims Division at 212-335-9373," a spokesperson for the DA's office told Fox News over the weekend. "Our specially trained prosecutors, investigators and counselors are well-equipped to help you in a trauma-informed, survivor-centered manner."

Swalwell has denied the allegations and apologized to his wife in a video posted online. He said he planned to fight the accusations but stepped out of the California governor's race anyway.

"I will fight the serious, false allegations that have been made," he wrote on X Sunday. "But that's my fight, not a campaign's."

Since the initial report, several other women have come forward with other misconduct allegations.

Fox News' Max Gorden and Kelly Phares contributed to this report.

Louise Wienckowski and Kent Brown have created a beautiful urban sanctuary in their backyard, filled with over 100 species of native plants, to provide food and habitat for wildlife and to improve air and water quality for the community.

The post Backyard Naturalist: A place to call home appeared first on Springfield Daily Citizen.

Centerstone opened its new Youth Resiliency Campus in Springfield on April 9. It offers round-the-clock crisis treatment, residential care and intensive outpatient care for youth facing acute mental health, behavioral health and substance abuse issues.

The post New 24-hour behavioral health crisis center for teens opens in north Springfield appeared first on Springfield Daily Citizen.

Smith Creek Preserve in Northwest Arkansas offers a variety of hiking trails leading to photogenic waterfalls, cascades, and boulders, making it a great destination for a spring, fall, and winter day trip.

The post Hiking Guide: Take a waterfall day trip to Smith Creek Preserve appeared first on Springfield Daily Citizen.

Aiden Kinnee, 23, was charged with second-degree arson after allegedly setting fire to a shed/detached garage that killed 10 cats, and is being held without bond in the Greene County Jail.

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The Springfield–Greene County Library District (“the Library”), a political subdivision of the State of Missouri, invites qualified firms to submit a proposal for janitorial services for a total of eleven (11) facilities: ten (10) Library branch locations and one (1) adjacent, non-library building that is also to be serviced under this contract.

Please submit an electronic copy of your proposal to: proposals@thelibrary.org

Deadline: 3:00 PM CDT, Wednesday, May 6, 2026

Mandatory Pre-Bid Site Walkthroughs — All proposers are required to attend mandatory site walkthroughs of all Library branch locations.

Walkthroughs will be conducted on the following dates:

April 30, 2026

May 1, 2026

Attendance at both of the scheduled walkthrough days is mandatory for proposal eligibility. Proposers must participate in the full tour covering all branch locations. Failure to attend the complete walkthrough will result in disqualification from the RFP process.

Detailed schedules, including times and branch order, will be provided upon registration. To register, please contact Library staff at 417-616-0568 no later than April 29, 2026.

All questions concerning this RFP must be directed to: John Bledsoe, Director – Buildings & Grounds Department, 4653 S Campbell Avenue, Springfield, MO 65810; phone: 417-616-0568; email: johnb@thelibrary.org

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The post Victor Glover returns home from moon mission, bringing Black dreams closer to orbit appeared first on Unite News.

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Hawnest. // image courtesy the artist

Musician Patrick Hawn’s debut release under the name Hawnest, the You Come Here Often? EP, is a fine example of “genre bending soundscapes inspired by early 2000s sampling, folk infused R&B, and indie pop.” When it dropped earlier this month, we were immediately taken in by the way Hawn’s music evokes both Frank Ocean and Bon Iver simultaneously, all woozy production and heart-on-the-sleeve confessional lyrics.

The four songs that comprise You Come Here Often? should easily make more than a few chill time playlists this spring, but what really got us was the fact that you can do more than listen to the first Hawnest EP. Hawn created an online media player for his website where listeners can isolate stems, apply production effects such as reverb, delay, and chorus, while also offering options to speed up and slow down, pitch up and down, reverse, and loop the audio.

The media player is an endless playground of options, allowing listeners to turn these tracks into whatever their hearts desire. We immediately created a chopped and screwed version of the first single, “Reggie,” and definitely lost an afternoon of productivity to fidgeting with as many possibilities as we could.

“I was trying to explore what could be the next evolution in streaming,” explains Hawn via Zoom one evening. “Because I feel people get one version of a song and then, you’re stuck with that version of the song.”

Additionally, Hawn says, he sees the media player as a way to make music production accessible to folks who don’t have a music background. As he notes, he certainly doesn’t, having picked things up over the years.

“I was like, ‘I think it would be cool to try to create a tool that allows people a deeper engagement with the music through changing some high-level functionality on the music,’” Hawn reflects. The player and the music come about as a combination of Hawn’s personal interests and his educational background. The musician graduated from Kansas State with a degree in industrial engineering at 23, but transitioned over the last four or five years into software development.

“Basically, I have been doing web development for the last four or five years,” says Hawn, while noting that he’d had no prior musical experience before picking up a guitar after graduation. “That was when I started cutting my teeth and being like, ‘Okay, I think I know enough to be dangerous in building this thing.’”

The idea behind the concept of a real-time mixing console is a way for Hawn to promote both skill sets that he has.

“I’ve just, over the years, built on the music knowledge, built on the software development knowledge, and tried to find that middle ground to come up with something unique,” Hawn offers, and he’s quite right in that assessment. It helps, though, that the music of You Come Here Often? stands on its own, beyond the technological sheen of the web player.

As Hawn explains, the four songs on the EP all deal with relationships, aging, and the tension and the ambiguity of it all when you graduate college. When you start a life following the formalized route of “go to college, get a degree,” the spectrum of life experience blows wide open in terms of where people are at and what they’re doing.

“My friends have started families, dating’s a lot harder the older you get, and so I think I wanted to have music that packages that,” Hawn continues. “But also too, I wanted to just get stuff out.”

It’s been a “slow burn” journey to this EP from starting with an acoustic guitar, Hawn says, describing it as “tinkering away” over the years. When he was unemployed during Covid, Hawn got a copy of Ableton and started sinking his teeth into learning it and recording. It took a long time to get to here because, Hawn says, he didn’t really do arts in high school or college.

“So, I just held a lot of this stuff within,” the musician says. “I was a big consumer of music, but I knew the next phase in my journey was like, ‘I wanna try to make it. I wanna try to add to the conversation and’–I don’t know, just make good music.”

Hawnest. // image courtesy the artist

Messing around with what Ableton could do, Hawn began making beats and chopping up samples, and got good results, but the downside was that he couldn’t release any of it due to copyright. With that realization, Hawn taught himself to record his own guitar, and from there, essentially sampled himself.

“On ‘Vince, Be Cool,’ that initially started out as me just playing some piano chords and then guitar, and then I chopped it up like I would with a beat,” Hawn says of his process. “I resampled myself singing, as well.”

Hawn wanted to bridge the gap between making beats and his singer-songwriter side, and that encapsulates the music that is Hawnest. Think Dijon, but all recorded in an apartment and learning as you go. Add in Bon Iver to the equation, and you can see the music of Hawnest as being a perfectly natural way of approaching music, with both of those artists starting out as one person with a guitar before finding their way into pop music, hip hop, and things like that.

Another interesting aspect of the web player for You Come Here Often? is that it’s led Hawn himself to hear his own music in a new context. When we mention our chopped and screwed excursions, he notes that what he’s been doing, too.

“A lot of these songs I never messed with the BPM or the pitch when I was making ’em,” Hawn admits. “So when I was playing back ‘Reggie’ on the website, it was like, ‘Oh shit, this sounds pretty good at 95-100 BPM.’ I kinda like it more upbeat and I’m like, ‘Damn it, I should have sped it up a little bit.’”

While the web player is fun, we wonder aloud to Hawn what his end goal for the project and ask him if he hopes that, by being able remix music on the fly, folks will engage beyond a surface level response of, “It’s a bop.”

“Yeah, I think that’s the goal, hopefully,” Hawn says. “And it would be cool to inspire someone to also get into music production, just based on a website that encourages someone to take one more step forward and learn more about the different components of making a song or whatnot.”

It’s an approach Hawn himself has learned from artists like Dijon.

“Just his humility when he makes music,” Hawn continues. “He’s very clearly going on Zane Lowe and being like, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’m figuring it out,’ and it’s–man, I feel the same way.”

Hawn says that while he doesn’t have a formal background in music, he finds there’s just so much joy in creating.

“I find it reminds me a lot of playing with Legos as a kid,” Hawn says. “I think I’ll always be making music. It’s a way for me to express myself and get the stuff that I bottle up out in a healthy way.”

Hawnest’s You Come Here Often? is streaming now.

The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog site and is being reposted here with the author’s permission.

Comprehension debt is the hidden cost to human intelligence and memory resulting from excessive reliance on AI and automation. For engineers, it applies most to agentic engineering.

There’s a cost that doesn’t show up in your velocity metrics when teams go deep on AI coding tools. Especially when its tedious to review all the code the AI generates. This cost accumulates steadily, and eventually it has to be paid—with interest. It’s called comprehension debt or cognitive debt.

Comprehension debt is the growing gap between how much code exists in your system and how much of it any human being genuinely understands.

Unlike technical debt, which announces itself through mounting friction—slow builds, tangled dependencies, the creeping dread every time you touch that one module—comprehension debt breeds false confidence. The codebase looks clean. The tests are green. The reckoning arrives quietly, usually at the worst possible moment.

Margaret-Anne Storey describes a student team that hit this wall in week seven: They could no longer make simple changes without breaking something unexpected. The real problem wasn’t messy code. It was that no one on the team could explain why design decisions had been made or how different parts of the system were supposed to work together. The theory of the system had evaporated.

That’s comprehension debt compounding in real time.

I’ve read Hacker News threads that captured engineers genuinely wrestling with the structural version of this problem—not the familiar optimism versus skepticism binary, but a field trying to figure out what rigor actually looks like when the bottleneck has moved.

A recent Anthropic study titled “How AI Impacts Skill Formation” highlighted the potential downsides of over-reliance on AI coding assistants. In a randomized controlled trial with 52 software engineers learning a new library, participants who used AI assistance completed the task in roughly the same time as the control group but scored 17% lower on a follow-up comprehension quiz (50% versus 67%). The largest declines occurred in debugging, with smaller but still significant drops in conceptual understanding and code reading. The researchers emphasize that passive delegation (“just make it work”) impairs skill development far more than active, question-driven use of AI. The full paper is available at arXiv.org.

There is a speed asymmetry problem here

AI generates code far faster than humans can evaluate it. That sounds obvious, but the implications are easy to underestimate.

When a developer on your team writes code, the human review process has always been a bottleneck—but a productive and educational one. Reading their PR forces comprehension. It surfaces hidden assumptions, catches design decisions that conflict with how the system was architected six months ago, and distributes knowledge about what the codebase actually does across the people responsible for maintaining it.

AI-generated code breaks that feedback loop. The volume is too high. The output is syntactically clean, often well-formatted, superficially correct—precisely the signals that historically triggered merge confidence. But surface correctness is not systemic correctness. The codebase looks healthy while comprehension quietly hollows out underneath it.

I read one engineer say that the bottleneck has always been a competent developer understanding the project. AI doesn’t change that constraint. It creates the illusion you’ve escaped it.

And the inversion is sharper than it looks. When code was expensive to produce, senior engineers could review faster than junior engineers could write. AI flips this: A junior engineer can now generate code faster than a senior engineer can critically audit it. The rate-limiting factor that kept review meaningful has been removed. What used to be a quality gate is now a throughput problem.

I love tests, but they aren’t a complete answer

The instinct to lean harder on deterministic verification—unit tests, integration tests, static analysis, linters, formatters—is understandable. I do this a lot in projects heavily leaning on AI coding agents. Automate your way out of the review bottleneck. Let machines check machines.

This helps. It has a hard ceiling.

A test suite capable of covering all observable behavior would, in many cases, be more complex than the code it validates. Complexity you can’t reason about doesn’t provide safety though. And beneath that is a more fundamental problem: You can’t write a test for behavior you haven’t thought to specify.

Nobody writes a test asserting that dragged items shouldn’t turn completely transparent. Of course they didn’t. That possibility never occurred to them. That’s exactly the class of failure that slips through, not because the test suite was poorly written, but because no one thought to look there.

There’s also a specific failure mode worth naming. When an AI changes implementation behavior and updates hundreds of test cases to match the new behavior, the question shifts from “is this code correct?” to “were all those test changes necessary, and do I have enough coverage to catch what I’m not thinking about?” Tests cannot answer that question. Only comprehension can.

The data is starting to back this up. Research suggests that developers using AI for code generation delegation score below 40% on comprehension tests, while developers using AI for conceptual inquiry—asking questions, exploring tradeoffs—score above 65%. The tool doesn’t destroy understanding. How you use it does.

Tests are necessary. They are not sufficient.

Lean on specs, but they’re also not the full story.

A common proposed solution: Write a detailed natural language spec first. Include it in the PR. Review the spec, not the code. Trust that the AI faithfully translated intent into implementation.

This is appealing in the same way Waterfall methodology was once appealing. Rigorously define the problem first, then execute. Clean separation of concerns.

The problem is that translating a spec to working code involves an enormous number of implicit decisions—edge cases, data structures, error handling, performance tradeoffs, interaction patterns—that no spec ever fully captures. Two engineers implementing the same spec will produce systems with many observable behavioral differences. Neither implementation is wrong. They’re just different. And many of those differences will eventually matter to users in ways nobody anticipated.

There’s another possibility with detailed specs worth calling out: A spec detailed enough to fully describe a program is more or less the program, just written in a non-executable language. The organizational cost of writing specs thorough enough to substitute for review may well exceed the productivity gains from using AI to execute them. And you still haven’t reviewed what was actually produced.

The deeper issue is that there is often no correct spec. Requirements emerge through building. Edge cases reveal themselves through use. The assumption that you can fully specify a non-trivial system before building it has been tested repeatedly and found wanting. AI doesn’t change this. It just adds a new layer of implicit decisions made without human deliberation.

Learn from history

Decades of managing software quality across distributed teams with varying context and communication bandwidth has produced real, tested practices. Those don’t evaporate because the team member is now a model.

What changes with AI is cost (dramatically lower), speed (dramatically higher), and interpersonal management overhead (essentially zero). What doesn’t change is the need for someone with a deep system context to maintain a coherent understanding of what the codebase is actually doing and why.

This is the uncomfortable redistribution that comprehension debt forces.

As AI volume goes up, the engineer who truly understands the system becomes more valuable, not less. The ability to look at a diff and immediately know which behaviors are load-bearing. To remember why that architectural decision got made under pressure eight months ago.

To tell the difference between a refactor that’s safe and one that’s quietly shifting something users depend on. That skill becomes the scarce resource the whole system depends on.

There’s a bit of a measurement gap here too

The reason comprehension debt is so dangerous is that nothing in your current measurement system captures it.

Velocity metrics look immaculate. DORA metrics hold steady. PR counts are up. Code coverage is green.

Performance calibration committees see velocity improvements. They cannot see comprehension deficits because no artifact of how organizations measure output captures that dimension. The incentive structure optimizes correctly for what it measures. What it measures no longer captures what matters.

This is what makes comprehension debt more insidious than technical debt. Technical debt is usually a conscious tradeoff—you chose the shortcut, you know roughly where it lives, you can schedule the paydown. Comprehension debt accumulates invisibly, often without anyone making a deliberate decision to let it. It’s the aggregate of hundreds of reviews where the code looked fine and the tests were passing and there was another PR in the queue.

The organizational assumption that reviewed code is understood code no longer holds. Engineers approved code they didn’t fully understand, which now carries implicit endorsement. The liability has been distributed without anyone noticing.

The regulation horizon is closer than it looks

Every industry that moved too fast eventually attracted regulation. Tech has been unusually insulated from that dynamic, partly because software failures are often recoverable, and partly because the industry has moved faster than regulators could follow.

That window is closing. When AI-generated code is running in healthcare systems, financial infrastructure, and government services, “the AI wrote it and we didn’t fully review it” will not hold up in a post-incident report when lives or significant assets are at stake.

Teams building comprehension discipline now—treating genuine understanding, not just passing tests, as non-negotiable—will be better positioned when that reckoning arrives than teams that optimized purely for merge velocity.

What comprehension debt actually demands

The right question for now isn’t “how do we generate more code?” It’s “how do we actually understand more of what we’re shipping?” so we can make sure our users get a consistently high quality experience.

That reframe has practical consequences. It means being ruthlessly explicit about what a change is supposed to do before it’s written. It means treating verification not as an afterthought but as a structural constraint. It means maintaining the system-level mental model that lets you catch AI mistakes at architectural scale rather than line-by-line. And it means being honest about the difference between “the tests passed” and “I understand what this does and why.”

Making code cheap to generate doesn’t make understanding cheap to skip. The comprehension work is the job.

AI handles the translation, but someone still has to understand what was produced, why it was produced that way, and whether those implicit decisions were the right ones—or you’re just deferring a bill that will eventually come due in full.

You will pay for comprehension sooner or later. The debt accrues interest rapidly.

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The scientific community is buzzing with the story of Jo Nagai, a 10-year-old Japanese student whose elementary school project has challenged established theories on memory and evolution. Presented at the 2024 International Congress of Entomology, Jo’s research suggests that memories aren't just retained through the violent process of metamorphosis—they might actually be passed down to future generations.

The Spark of Curiosity: Do Butterflies Remember?

Jo Nagai’s journey began with a simple, childlike observation. While raising Swallowtail butterflies, he noticed that the ones he nurtured as caterpillars seemed to recognize him. Unlike wild butterflies that would flee, his "friends" would flutter towards him even after their complete transformation from crawling larvae to winged insects.

Driven by the search for an answer to the question, "Do they remember me from when they were caterpillars?", Jo discovered the work of Dr. Martha Weiss. Her 2008 study proved that moths could retain memories through metamorphosis. However, Jo wanted to take it further. He proposed a "kinder" experiment using lavender oil and mild electric shocks, reasoning that the harsh chemicals used in previous studies might bias the results.

The Experiment: Testing Transgenerational Memory

Jo’s methodology was as rigorous as it was compassionate. He trained a "Parent Generation" of caterpillars to associate the scent of lavender with a mild discomfort—a level-four electric shock he first tested on himself to ensure it wasn't cruel.

After these caterpillars liquefied inside their chrysalises and emerged as butterflies, Jo placed them in a homemade Y-tube maze. The results were staggering: 70% of the trained butterflies avoided the lavender scent, confirming they remembered the "lesson" from their youth despite their brains being entirely rebuilt during metamorphosis.

But the real shock came when Jo tested the "Child" and "Grandchild" generations—offspring who had never been exposed to lavender or shocks.

A Scientific Revolution: Epigenetic Inheritance

The fact that the second and third generations avoided the scent without any training suggests transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. This means the environment and experiences of the parents caused a biological "tag" to be placed on their DNA, which was then passed to their offspring.

While this concept has been explored in mice and tiny worms, finding it in complex insects like Swallowtail butterflies—especially across the complete cellular reconstruction of metamorphosis—is groundbreaking. Jo even observed that the inheritance seemed stronger in male offspring, hinting at a sex-linked genetic pattern that could redefine our understanding of insect biology.

Why This Discovery Matters for Humans

Jo’s discovery isn’t just about butterflies; it provides a window into how "memory" might be stored in the body. If a butterfly can inherit a fear from its grandfather, could humans inherit predispositions or "biological memories" from their ancestors? His work aligns with emerging research into how trauma or health conditions can be passed down through generations—a link Jo himself hypothesized after noticing a pattern of hay fever in his own family.

The Power of a "Stupid Question"

Jo Nagai’s success reminds us that groundbreaking science doesn't always require a multi-million-dollar lab; sometimes, it just requires obsession, a Y-tube made of household items, and the courage to ask "stupid questions." To Jo, the butterflies weren't just test subjects—they were his friends. It was his genuine desire to know if they remembered him that led to a discovery that has shocked scientists across the globe.

The primary deterrent is the capybara’s physical capability to injure a predator. Dr. Elizabeth Congdon, a capybara researcher and associate professor at Bethune-Cookman University, told IFLScience that attacks by caimans are uncommon when other food sources exist. “Capybaras have big, sharp teeth. Combined with their body size, I think they are just not worth the trouble and risk of injury,” Congdon said. A single bite from a capybara could leave a caiman with wounds that impair future hunting ability.

Adult capybaras reach weights exceeding 45 kilograms and possess strong incisors capable of inflicting significant damage. The species, Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris, grows up to 1.3 meters in length and can weigh up to 79 kilograms. The lesser capybara, H. isthmius, reaches about one meter in length and weighs roughly 28 kilograms. Both forms inhabit forests and wetlands from Panama to Argentina, with the larger species ranging from Venezuela to northern Argentina and throughout the Amazon River basin.

Physical Adaptations Strengthen Defense

Capybaras (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) possess several traits that improve survival in predator-rich environments. Their webbed feet and sensory organs positioned high on the head allow them to remain mostly submerged while scanning surroundings. The animals can stay underwater for up to five minutes, which aids escape from aquatic threats. They are short-haired brownish rodents with blunt snouts, short legs, small ears, and almost no tail.

The rodents are semiaquatic and prefer habitats near lakes, rivers, and swamps. They swim and dive readily and commonly enter water to elude predators such as jaguars and anacondas. Their daily rhythm involves feeding in the morning and evening while spending most of the day resting under cover along riverbanks. This predictable pattern places them directly in caiman territory throughout their range.

Dr. Congdon emphasized the rarity of predation events involving adults. “It is rare, especially when there are plenty of fish and easier prey to handle than a capybara. I have seen them in the wild sleeping next to each other,” she told IFLScience. Caimans appear to calculate that the energy expenditure and injury risk outweigh the nutritional reward.

The exception involves juvenile capybaras. “The exception is the babies. Babies are snacks for lots of things, even birds of prey,” Congdon said. Young capybaras face threats from ocelots, anacondas, harpy eagles, and caimans. The mortality rate among juveniles remains considerably higher than among adults who have reached full size.

Social Behavior Adds Protection

Capybaras rely on group dynamics to reduce vulnerability. They form herds that can include more than a dozen individuals. Members take turns standing guard while others feed or rest, which lowers the chance of surprise attacks. They associate in groups along the banks of lakes and rivers.

The species uses a range of vocalizations including chirps, whistles, and purrs to maintain contact and warn of danger. Barros and colleagues documented the vocal repertoire of captive capybaras, identifying distinct calls tied to specific contexts and functions. Scent marking helps define group territories and maintain cohesion. Macdonald and others examined the anatomical and chemical aspects of scent marking among capybaras in a 1984 study.

Congdon’s published research includes a study on female mate choice and group dynamics in the Journal of Mammalogy, available through Academia.edu. The work examined how capybara social systems influence group stability, reproduction, and dispersal patterns. Herrera and Macdonald previously documented that dominant males achieve greater mating success, establishing the male-dominated framework within which female choice operates.

Human Encroachment Creates New Conflict

While capybaras coexist with natural predators, their interactions with humans have produced different outcomes. In 2021, residents of Nordelta, an upscale development near Buenos Aires, reported increased capybara sightings. Gardens sustained damage, pets faced confrontations, and fences proved ineffective barriers. The animals moved through neighborhoods without apparent fear of human presence.

The Nordelta community was constructed over natural wetlands that previously supported capybara populations. As development expanded and fragmented habitat, capybaras began moving back into altered landscapes. Conservationists identified urban sprawl and habitat loss as primary causes of the conflict. The animals sometimes become pests in cultivated areas by eating melons, grain, and squash.

Capybaras are legally protected in several South American countries yet also hunted and farmed commercially. The animals are edible and used for food in various parts of South America. The smaller species is often hunted, whereas the larger species is typically ranched for meat and hides, which are made into leather goods. Both are classified as species of least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.

Diet and Digestive Efficiency

Capybaras are vegetarian and feed primarily on grasses and aquatic plants. They spend most of the day resting under cover along riverbanks. Their diet consists of available vegetation, which in cultivated areas includes melons, grain, and squash crops.

Research published by Congdon in Zoo Biology examined digestive physiology in captive capybaras. The study documented how the animals efficiently extract nutrients from fibrous plant material. This digestive efficiency enables survival on low-quality vegetation, providing an advantage in environments where resources are limited.

The female capybara bears a single litter of three to eight young each year. Gestation takes approximately 100 to 110 days. The reproductive rate supports population stability despite predation pressure on juveniles.

Caiman Species Distinction Matters

The crocodilians sharing habitat with capybaras are specifically caimans, including the yacare caiman. Caimans differ from true crocodiles in size and behavior. The observed coexistence involves caimans rather than larger crocodile species.

Caimans generally prefer fish and smaller prey when available. The risk assessment that deters them from attacking adult capybaras reflects a calculated hunting strategy. Injury from a 45-kilogram rodent with sharp incisors could impair a caiman’s ability to hunt in the future. Herrera and Macdonald’s 1993 study on aggression, dominance, and mating success among capybara males documented the competitive dynamics that shape group structure.

Dr. Congdon acknowledged that caimans may hunt capybaras when circumstances demand it. “This isn’t to suggest that capybara are never on the menu for caimans when times are tough,” she said, but the occurrence remains uncommon.

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Some bristlecone pine trees alive today began growing before the construction of the Egyptian pyramids. The sequenced genome spans 23.8 billion base pairs, making it roughly eight times larger than the human genome, yet it encodes only slightly more protein-coding genes. Researchers identified 21,364 of them. The remainder is largely composed of repetitive sequences that appear to have accumulated without damaging the organism over millions of years of evolutionary history.

What the Genome Actually Contains

Tissue samples were collected from bristlecone pine needles and seeds in California’s White Mountains under a permit from the USDA Forest Service. Scientists at Johns Hopkins University then performed genetic sequencing using a combination of short-read and long-read approaches, producing a highly contiguous assembly with a scaffold N50 size of 1.2 gigabases. The chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes were assembled separately as complete circular chromosomes.

Two features attracted immediate attention as possible contributors to longevity. The bristlecone pine carries genes associated with disease resistance, specifically a class known as nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat receptors, and its telomere lengths are longer on average than those of other conifers. Longer telomeres are generally associated with slower cellular aging.

However, the study’s authors note that neither feature showed strong enough evidence to confirm a direct role in the tree’s lifespan. Further research is needed before any mechanism can be established.

The Scale of the Technical Challenge

Assembling a genome of this size presented significant computational demands. Steven Salzberg, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, said the scale made the project genuinely difficult. “Assembling a 24 billion base pair genome that is eight times the size of the human genome is a significant technical challenge,” he said. The bulk of the genome, he noted, consists of repetitive junk DNA sequences that the bristlecone pine appears to have carried through millions of years of evolution without apparent harm.

David Neale, a UC Davis professor emeritus of plant sciences who led the project and previously helped sequence the coast redwood, giant sequoia, and whitebark pine genomes, described the result as a foundational resource rather than a finished explanation. “Sequencing one tree does not give us clear insights as to the genetic basis of longevity,” he said. “But having a reference genome sequence as it applies to human health and everything else is a necessary reagent in modern biology.”

A Species That Does Not Seem to Age From Within

One of the more thought-provoking aspects of the bristlecone pine’s biology is that it does not appear to undergo biological senescence the way most organisms do. Senescence is the process by which cells age and die without being replaced, eventually leading to the organism’s death. Bristlecone pine trees do not seem to carry the genetic markers associated with this process, and when they die, the cause tends to be external: fire, storm damage, insect infestation, or physical damage, not old age in the conventional biological sense.

Neale acknowledged that the idea of a potentially indefinite lifespan is difficult to dismiss when studying something that can survive five thousand years. “Maybe, by having an equivalent study in something that lives to be 5,000 years versus something, or someone, that lives to be 100 could be informative,” he said. But he also cautioned that the bristlecone pine may simply be a biological outlier with no direct parallel in other species.

Why the Genome Matters Beyond Longevity Research

The bristlecone pine is not currently listed as a threatened or endangered species, though individual trees have died from heat, drought, and bark beetle activity in recent decades. Constance Millar, an ecologist with the USDA Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station, noted that the White Mountains populations have persisted through climate extremes continuously for nearly 11,000 years, since the end of the last ice age.

Having a reference genome gives land managers and conservation scientists a new tool to study how the species responds genetically to environmental stress and to identify which populations carry traits best suited to future conditions. The authors expect the genome to be used not only by forest researchers and land managers, but also by scientists working on the broader question of what controls longevity across different forms of life.

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The Curious Case of NGC 4486B

At first glance, NGC 4486B may appear as a quiet galaxy, tucked away in the vast Virgo Cluster. However, beneath its tranquil exterior lies a cosmic mystery that is now being unraveled by cutting-edge research. The supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center, weighing in at a staggering 360 million times the mass of our Sun, is not where astronomers expect it to be.

Instead of sitting neatly in the galaxy’s center, it resides about 20 light-years off-center. This abnormal positioning, revealed through detailed observations from NASA’s Webb Space Telescope, suggests that a cosmic collision has left its mark on the galaxy’s structure.

The Aftermath of a Black Hole Merger

The cause of this displacement appears to be the merger of two supermassive black holes, an event that has sent shockwaves through the galaxy’s stellar system. In fact, the galaxy’s strange behavior matches the patterns expected after such a merger, including unusual stellar motion and a curious light pattern in the nucleus of the galaxy.

“NGC 4486B appears to be the first system exhibiting multiple observable signatures of a recent SMBH merger,” said Behzad Tahmasebzadeh, a key researcher involved in the study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters..

The merger, which took place not long ago in cosmic terms, has left the black hole with a residual kick that continues to disrupt the galaxy’s equilibrium.

This “kick” phenomenon, a direct consequence of the uneven gravitational forces during the merger, explains why the black hole remains displaced. As the two black holes spiraled toward each other, they released a burst of energy, which caused the merged black hole to recoil. This powerful push resulted in the black hole being ejected from the center of the galaxy, dragging along part of its stellar disk. The discovery has provided astronomers with a rare opportunity to study the aftermath of such a collision in real-time.

A Look Back at the Evidence

Astronomers used a variety of tools to piece together the puzzle of NGC 4486B’s unusual behavior. The Webb Telescope’s high-resolution imaging revealed two bright peaks in the galaxy’s nucleus, a feature that had been noticed in Hubble images from the 1990s. These peaks, far from being caused by dust or a star cluster, are now understood to be the result of the gravitational influence of the displaced black hole. One of the peaks aligns with the faster-moving stars, further corroborating the theory of a recent merger.

Additionally, the motion of stars within the galaxy revealed an intriguing pattern: stars near the displaced black hole were moving much faster than those on the opposite side, suggesting an ongoing disruption. This phenomenon is known as a “gravitational-wave kick,” and it aligns with theoretical models predicting the behavior of black holes after a merger. Using simulations, the research team estimated that the black hole is moving at a speed of around 210 miles per second, a significant but not extreme velocity for such an event.

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The pilot operated under the “100-80-100” principle. Employees kept 100 percent of their salary while working 80 percent of their previous hours. Participating firms were required to hit full baseline productivity targets. The model did not mandate a universal four-day structure. Some businesses adopted a four-day week. Others chose a six-hour workday. All variations aimed to compress the same 20 percent reduction into a format that fit operational demands.

The Rework founder Sarah Uldal led the Norwegian arm of the trial, which was conducted in partnership with 4 Day Week Global as the exclusive Norwegian partner. Participating companies entered a planning phase in late 2024 before launching the six-month pilot. During that window, businesses received guidance on eliminating time-wasting practices, restructuring meetings, and redesigning weekly workflows. The goal was to ensure the hour reduction did not simply compress five days of stress into four.

Rising Mental Health Absences Drove Employer Interest

Norwegian employers entered the trial facing a specific and measurable problem. Data from the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration shows mental health disorders caused more than 2.2 million lost working days in the fourth quarter of 2024. That category alone accounts for 25 percent of all doctor-certified sick leave in Norway.

The Rework also highlighted survey findings indicating nearly one-third of Norwegian workers report that job demands regularly interfere with private life. Another 27 percent said they had considered quitting specifically to reclaim better work-life balance. These numbers helped recruit the eleven companies that ultimately joined the pilot.

Norway’s Existing Work Culture Provided a Distinct Baseline

The trial unfolded in a country already accustomed to shorter-than-average workdays. Norwegian office employees typically leave work between 3:00 PM and 4:00 PM. Legal norms set the workweek at 40 hours. Actual averages hover closer to 33 hours per week.

This cultural baseline raised a specific research question. Would cutting hours further in a society that already prioritizes early departures produce measurable gains in well-being or retention? Or had Norwegian workplaces already captured most of the benefit that other countries achieved when moving from longer schedules? The Nordic trial was designed in part to test whether the 100-80-100 model translated to a high-trust, high-autonomy work environment.

International Framework Meets Nordic Labor Conditions

4 Day Week Global has now coordinated pilots in more than 20 countries. The organization’s methodology has been tested with over 450 companies and 8,500 employees worldwide. The Norwegian trial operated as a joint effort between the global nonprofit and The Rework.

Academic oversight for the Nordic study came from Lena Lid Falkman at Karlstad University in Sweden. Her team tracked metrics including productivity output, employee well-being, sick leave rates, and staff turnover. The research design mirrored earlier trials conducted in Ireland, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

The findings arrive as discussions about shorter workweeks gain traction across Europe. Iceland previously completed large-scale trials that informed widespread adoption of reduced-hour contracts. Spain’s government has funded pilot programs in select regions. Belgium now permits workers to compress full-time hours into four days by extending daily shifts.

Skeptical Voices Point to Broader Economic Pressures

Not all commentary surrounding Norway’s work culture aligns with the pilot’s optimistic framing. Some observers note that young Norwegians face housing costs that have doubled since the COVID-19 pandemic. Others point to rising taxes on fuel and an average tax burden approaching 60 percent of income.

The pilot data focuses specifically on company-level outcomes. It does not claim to address broader economic conditions or housing affordability. The research scope remained confined to productivity, well-being metrics, and employee retention within participating firms.

Business Access to the Model Continues

Companies interested in testing reduced hours can now access The Rework Programmet. The digital course offers seven free introductory lessons covering the concept of shorter workweeks and relevant research. Six workshop modules follow for businesses ready to plan implementation. Topics include measuring key performance indicators, removing time drains, designing efficient meetings, and structuring a new weekly schedule.

The program allows companies to work at their own pace without committing to a formal research pilot. It also accommodates businesses that remain uncertain about full adoption but want to explore productivity improvements.

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The Search for Life on Mars: Why It Matters

The quest to discover life on Mars has long been one of humanity’s most compelling scientific pursuits. But despite decades of exploration, all evidence points to the surface of the Red Planet being a hostile environment, ravaged by radiation and toxic chemicals. These conditions make the surface an unlikely place to find anything living today. That’s why Orpheus is aiming for a radically different approach, looking deep beneath the surface, in volcanic regions that might offer shelter from these harsh conditions.

According to Universe Today, the Cerberus Fossae region, where Orpheus will focus its efforts, is home to some of Mars’ youngest volcanic features. Scientists believe that, like volcanic vents on Earth, these regions could harbor the right mix of heat, water, and chemical nutrients to support life. And if life ever existed on Mars, it may have been preserved here, safe from the radiation and cold above ground.

A Vision for Martian Exploration

The proposal for Orpheus was introduced by Connor Bunn and Pascal Lee of the SETI Institute during the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC). Their paper outlines a mission that would send a quadcopter-like hopper to explore volcanic pits and fissures, terrain that traditional wheeled rovers simply cannot access. The hopper would be able to traverse this difficult landscape, stopping at key sites, such as Cerberus Tholus, where the team hopes to find biosignatures or other evidence of life.

The mission also plans to focus on a specific pit near the summit of Cerberus Tholus, Vent #5, where researchers believe volcanic activity may have recently occurred. This could be one of the most promising sites for life, offering a window into the Martian underground where conditions may still be right for microbial life to survive.

Why Cerberus Fossae Holds Promise for Life

Cerberus Fossae stands out as a unique geological area on Mars. Located in the Elysium Planitia region, it is home to some of the most recent volcanic activity ever identified on the planet. Volcanic regions on Earth are often teeming with life, thanks to the heat and chemical-rich environment. On Mars, these volcanic regions, especially the areas that have been recently active, may offer a glimpse into the planet’s past, and potentially even harbor signs of life.

While surface conditions on Mars are inhospitable, the subterranean regions may be another story. The heat from volcanic vents, combined with the potential for water, creates an environment that could support microbial life, much like the hydrothermal vents found deep in Earth’s oceans. This is why Orpheus aims to dig deep, both figuratively and literally, to find out if Mars could still support life.

Orpheus: A New Kind of Mars Mission

Unlike traditional rovers that crawl across the Martian surface, Orpheus will use a Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) system, similar to the successful Ingenuity helicopter. The VTOL will allow the mission to fly from one volcanic pit to another, hopping from location to location with ease. This mobility makes it possible to explore regions that are inaccessible to rovers, such as steep volcanic craters or deep pits.

The hopper will be equipped with a range of scientific instruments, including a color camera, a near-infrared spectrometer, and ground-penetrating radar. These tools will help scientists analyze the composition of the soil and rock, search for signs of life, and even investigate the geology of these volcanic regions.

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The ratio is straightforward. Most culinary experts suggest approximately one tablespoon of vinegar for every liter of water, combined with a generous amount of salt. Testing from Food Republic confirms that two tablespoons of vinegar and two tablespoons of salt per two quarts of water creates the necessary environment. Potatoes boiled in this mixture maintain clean edges and uniform shapes. Without the acid, the same potato strips often crumble or develop ragged surfaces that lead to uneven frying and burnt edges.

The Chemistry of Pectin and Potato Structure

Understanding how vinegar interacts with the potato requires a look at the cellular composition of the vegetable. Potatoes rely on pectin to maintain their physical form. Pectin is the biological glue that holds plant cells together. Under normal boiling conditions, this structural compound weakens significantly around 140 degrees Fahrenheit and dissolves rapidly when exposed to high heat and water.

If boiling continues until the potato is soft, the exterior often becomes too fragile to survive the transition to a frying basket or a pan of hot oil. Vinegar lowers the water’s pH enough to inhibit this breakdown. The potato exterior firms slightly during the boil rather than turning mealy or eroding. Kitchen testing confirms that unacidulated potatoes show visible fraying after boiling. Vinegar-treated strips emerge with crisp edges intact.

Starch Relocation Creates Shattering Outer Shell

The acid boil does more than preserve geometry. It actively reorganizes starch within the potato matrix. Starch is not an enemy in french fry production. Idaho and russet potatoes remain the preferred varieties specifically because their high starch content produces the coveted crisp exterior and fluffy interior. The goal is not starch removal but starch redistribution.

Boiling in vinegared water draws starch molecules from the dense center of the fry toward the surface. The interior retains a waxy, floury texture that steams and softens during the first fry. The exterior accumulates a concentrated starch layer that dehydrates on the rack and then shatters into a glassy crust when it hits hot oil. The salt in the water seasons the potato internally while the vinegar reinforces the structure.

Without vinegar, a cook might under-boil the potato to keep it from breaking. This results in a French fry that is firm on the outside but potentially waxy or raw in the center. The vinegar treatment removes this compromise, allowing for a complete cook-through while the exterior remains perfectly intact.

Managing Sugar and Surface Browning

Beyond structural integrity, the boiling process washes away excess simple sugars from the surface of the potato. If a potato has too much surface sugar, it will undergo the Maillard reaction too quickly in the frying oil. This leads to fries that look dark brown or burnt on the outside while remaining undercooked on the inside.

Vinegar does not directly stop browning, but the extended boiling time it allows helps rinse away these problematic sugars more effectively. By the time the potato reaches the hot oil, the surface is primarily composed of starch and reinforced pectin. This composition allows for a slower, more controlled browning process. The final French fry achieves a golden-yellow hue rather than a dark, scorched appearance. The vinegar taste does not survive the double fry.

Practical Steps for the Vinegar Method

To implement this technique, peel and cut the potato into uniform sticks. Uniformity ensures each piece reacts to the vinegar and heat at the same rate. Place the sticks in a pot of cold water and add the vinegar alongside salt. Starting with cold water allows the temperature to rise gradually, which promotes even cooking from edge to core.

Bring the water to a boil and simmer the potato sticks for approximately ten minutes. Work in batches small enough that water returns to a rolling boil within thirty seconds. The target texture is fork-tender, meaning a fork can pierce the potato with little resistance but the stick does not crumble. The edges remain sharp and clean, a visual indicator that the acid has protected the pectin.

After ten minutes, remove the potato sticks and spread them on a wire rack or paper-towel-lined baking sheet. Surface moisture is the enemy of crispiness. Let the steam escape and the surface dry completely. Some cooks use a fan or refrigerate the potatoes to speed moisture loss. Once cool to the touch and matte in appearance, they are ready for frying.

Achieving Triple-Cooked Texture

The use of vinegar is the first step in a triple-cooked method favored by restaurants and science-focused home cooks. After the boil and drying, the potatoes undergo a low-temperature fry around 325 degrees Fahrenheit to create a stable, blanched exterior.

The potatoes are then cooled or frozen before a final high-heat fry at 375 degrees Fahrenheit. During this final stage, the reinforced pectin and pre-gelatinized starch form a thick, bubbled crust. Professional kitchens often freeze the potatoes after the first fry. Ice crystals that form inside rupture the starch cells, leading to an even fluffier interior upon the final cook.

The versatility of the vinegar technique extends to different frying styles, including a dedicated deep fryer, a heavy Dutch oven, or an air fryer. Culinary tests indicate that fries treated with vinegar maintain their crispness up to three times longer than those boiled in plain water. The potato remains a consistent side dish that holds its texture from kitchen to table.

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For decades, the seafloor in this region has been known to be littered with industrial waste, without a clear idea of what was actually inside. New research is now shedding light on some of these barrels, and what’s emerging is concerning.

This all goes back to a period between the 1930s and the early 1970s, when different kinds of waste were routinely dumped offshore. Data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show that this included chemical waste, oil-drilling byproducts, as well as radioactive materials and military explosives, spread across 14 disposal sites.

The scale of the problem only really came into public view recently. In 2020, an investigation by the Los Angeles Times revealed that deep-sea surveys had uncovered large numbers of barrels scattered across the ocean floor. Follow-up missions by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography later identified around27,000 barrel-like objects and more than100,000 pieces of debris.

Alkaline Waste As The Main Suspect

For years, scientists suspected that many of these barrels contained DDT, a now-banned pesticide heavily linked to contamination in the region. Yet new sediment analyses suggest otherwise.

Findings published in PNAS Nexus show that researchers led by microbiologist Johanna Gutleben detected no increase in DDT concentrations near sampled barrels. Instead, three barrels surrounded by visible white halos showed extremely high pH levels of around 12 in nearby sediments.

This points to the presence of caustic alkaline waste rather than pesticide residues. In a statement relayed by Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Gutleben noted that:

“Up to this point we have mostly been looking for DDT. Nobody was thinking about alkaline waste before this and we may have to start looking for other things as well.” 

The exact chemical composition remains unidentified, though the study notes that both DDT production and oil refining can generate alkaline byproducts.

White Halos Expose Extreme Chemistry Hotspots

The unusual white rings observed around many barrels have now been explained through chemical reactions triggered by leaking waste. The study describes how the alkaline material reacts with magnesium in seawater to form brucite, a mineral that creates a crust-like layer. Over time, this mineral dissolves, maintaining high alkalinity in the sediment and driving further reactions that produce calcium carbonate deposits, visible as pale halos.

These halos are more than just visual markers. They signal zones where chemical conditions have been drastically altered. Researchers estimate that roughly one-third of observed barrels display such features.

Marine Life Near Breaking Point

Sediment samples taken near the barrels with those white halos showed very little microbial DNA, which suggests most organisms just can’t survive in such an alkaline environment. Researchers did find a few specialized bacteria, similar to ones that live in deep-sea hydrothermal ventsoralkaline hot springs. These microbes are built for extreme conditions, but they only make up a tiny fraction of marine life.

What stands out is how long these effects have lasted. Even after more than 50 years, the waste is still affecting its surroundings. Co-author Paul Jensen said that:

“It’s shocking that 50-plus years later you’re still seeing these effects. We can’t quantify the environmental impact without knowing how many of these barrels with white halos are out there, but it’s clearly having a localized impact on microbes.”

All of this points to alkaline waste behaving like a long-term pollutant, capable of altering marine ecosystems for decades. There are still a lot of unknowns, especially when it comes to how many barrels are down there and what exactly they contain, so scientists are only starting to grasp the full extent of the issue.

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Revolutionizing Space Travel with Light

The latest study, published in Advanced Science, highlights a stunning breakthrough: laser light can move blocks of graphene aerogel in space. In a series of tests, tiny cubes of graphene foam accelerated under the influence of laser light, a phenomenon that was nearly impossible to replicate under normal gravity on Earth. The material’s response was so pronounced in weightlessness that it offered a glimpse into how light could be harnessed for controlled, precise space travel. This discovery is poised to disrupt traditional propulsion systems, which have long relied on fuel-based technologies.

“We are opening the path to a propellant-free propulsion future,” said Ugo Lafont, materials physics and chemistry engineer at the European Space Agency. The ability to use light to push spacecraft forward without the need for fuel could dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of space exploration.

The Power of Graphene and Laser Light

Graphene, a wonder material known for its strength and conductivity, plays a key role in this breakthrough. Scientists discovered that graphene aerogels, super-light, porous foams made from graphene sheets, could be moved by laser light when placed in a weightless environment. During a flight experiment in microgravity, graphene cubes accelerated significantly when exposed to laser beams. In contrast, under normal Earth gravity, the same material barely moved.

The tests were conducted in a vacuum tube inside an aircraft designed to simulate microgravity, where the samples were free from the gravitational forces that typically hinder movement. This environment allowed the scientists to measure the material’s response more accurately, revealing how light could be used to move spacecraft with incredible precision.

A Step Toward Fuel-Free Space Missions

What makes this discovery even more exciting is the potential it holds for long-term space missions. Traditional propulsion systems rely heavily on fuel, which is expensive and adds significant weight to spacecraft. In deep space exploration, the ability to control spacecraft without needing fuel could greatly increase mission duration and efficiency, all while minimizing costs.

By using light as a propulsion mechanism, spacecraft could potentially adjust their orientation and direction without relying on conventional fuel sources. This could revolutionize how space missions are planned and executed, opening up new possibilities for exploration.

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Researchers at the University of California, Riverside say they have a better way. Their new system uses a small ground robot to map soil moisture across an orchard, tree by tree, so irrigation can be targeted instead of averaged across the whole field.

Why overwatering happens even when farmers are careful

Walk through an orchard and it might look uniform, but the soil underneath is not. Fine, tightly packed soils can hold water longer, while sandy soils let it drain fast, so two neighboring trees can end up living in totally different root zone conditions even when sprinklers apply the same amount of water.

That mismatch pushes growers toward guesswork, especially when they rely on a handful of buried moisture sensors for hundreds or thousands of trees. As Elia Scudiero, a UC Riverside associate professor who led the project, put it, “The information those sensors provide is very limited,” because it “really only tells you what’s happening in the immediate areas where they’re placed.”

The stakes are rising. Pumping and delivering irrigation water costs money, and it can add up in a way that feels a lot like watching an electric bill climb during that sticky summer heat we all know.

A “modern-day divining rod” that runs on data

For generations, some people have walked fields with a forked stick, hoping it would point to hidden water. UC Riverside’s version is less mystical and a lot more measurable. A compact robot drives through orchard rows and measures soil apparent electrical conductivity, a property influenced by moisture as well as salt and clay content.

In the study, the team mounted a lightweight electromagnetic induction sensor that weighs about 0.9 pounds (425 grams) on a small unmanned ground vehicle about 20 inches long, 17 inches wide, and 10 inches tall (0.51 by 0.43 by 0.25 meters). The sensor collected about one reading per second, and a GNSS receiver tracked positions with better than about 12 inches (30 centimeters) of horizontal accuracy under typical field conditions.

Here’s the key twist. The robot’s conductivity readings were paired with direct soil moisture measurements from time domain reflectometry tools at a limited set of spots, then fed into a statistical model that translated conductivity into estimated volumetric water content across the orchard. In practical terms, that means a grower can stop watering by averages and start watering by need.

The “sweet spot” matters for roots and yields

Water stress is not a simple “more is better” story. Too little water can weaken trees and leave them more vulnerable to pests and disease, but too much water can also backfire by pushing oxygen out of soil pores and essentially suffocating roots. Scudiero summed it up bluntly with, “There’s a sweet spot.”

The research also highlights why orchard irrigation can be so tricky. In the two citrus orchards studied at UC Riverside’s Citrus Research Center and Agricultural Experiment Station in Riverside, California, the trees were micro irrigated with two micro sprinklers per tree averaging about 14 gallons per tree per hour (53 liters per tree per hour), scheduled two to three times a week for run times up to eight hours.

So when watering is even slightly off, the consequences can ripple. A long irrigation run can mean a lot of water moving through soil, and if the soil structure varies across the field, some areas may be left dry while others become saturated.

What the results say about accuracy and real-world effort

The team’s fieldwork ran from October 2024 to March 2025, surveying two citrus orchards four times each. The robot’s sensor measured conductivity down to roughly 2.3 feet (0.7 meters), while the direct moisture checks used for calibration captured the top roughly 4.7 inches of soil (0.12 meters), which the researchers note is a limitation because the sensing depths do not perfectly match.

Even so, the modeling performed well. Using their best approaches, the median evaluation error was about 0.039 m³/m³ in independent testing, which the authors categorized as “good” accuracy for this kind of field mapping.

One of the most practical findings is how few calibration spots may be needed. The study reports that accuracy improved as more calibration footprints were used, but gains became marginal beyond roughly four to six footprints per field, suggesting farms might not need a dense and expensive sensor network to get useful orchard wide moisture maps.

Cleaner groundwater is part of the story too

Precision irrigation is often pitched as a way to save water, but it can also reduce pollution. When fields are overwatered, nutrients applied as fertilizer can be washed below the root zone and into groundwater, which is a problem in many farming regions.

Scudiero pointed to that risk directly, saying that if you apply “only the amount of water the plants actually need,” you reduce the chance of washing nutrients “away from the roots of the crops and into the environment.” It’s a reminder that irrigation decisions do not stay inside the orchard fence line.

There’s also a plant health angle that farmers know well. The study notes that high soil moisture can worsen certain soilborne disease risks when pathogens are present, which makes better moisture control more than just a conservation move.

What comes next for orchard robots

Right now, moving from university research orchards to commercial farms is the hard part. The researchers say real world systems will need rugged machines that can handle different weather conditions and crop systems, plus partnerships with private industry to turn prototypes into products.

In the study setup, the robot was teleoperated to stay close to irrigation lines where moisture patterns can change quickly, and the team filed a patent related to how the robot interacts with sensors without disturbing measurements.

Other work cited in the paper suggests semi autonomous navigation is getting closer, and a similar platform has been tested for longer missions with a maximum battery life around four hours.

If you’re wondering where this could lead, imagine a future where orchards are quietly surveyed the way a warehouse gets scanned for inventory. Not to replace farmers, but to give them better maps so fewer decisions are made in the dark.

The study was published on Computers and Electronics in Agriculture.

The timing matters because cement is one of the world’s toughest climate problems hiding in plain sight. It is everywhere, from highways to seawalls to the sidewalks you pace while waiting out traffic, and it is responsible for a sizable share of global carbon pollution.

Why cement is so hard to clean up

Concrete looks like a finished product, but the real climate impact starts earlier with cement, the “glue” that binds sand and gravel together. Making cement requires intense heat and it also releases carbon dioxide as limestone is chemically transformed, which is why the sector is considered “hard to abate”.

Estimates commonly place cement at roughly 5 to 8 percent of global human caused carbon dioxide emissions. Put it in a bigger frame and the buildings and construction sector as a whole contributes roughly a third of global CO2 emissions, depending on what is included in the accounting.

That scale is exactly why small sounding improvements can matter. In the VoLo Foundation write up about the project, the team’s adviser Dr. Ali Ghahremaninezhad argues that even modest gains can add up because of how much concrete the world uses.

A seaweed detour that could pay off

The University of Miami group is working with algae grown locally in South Florida, then converting it into biochar, a charcoal like material that can be blended into cementitious mixes. In their case, the goal is not a novelty brick, it is a mix that can still meet real world performance demands.

Biochar is basically carbon rich material made when biomass is processed in low oxygen conditions, leaving behind a porous structure. That structure is part of the appeal, but it is also part of the risk, because porosity and chemistry can change how concrete flows and how it holds up over time.

There is also a very local reason this caught attention in Florida. The VoLo Foundation statement notes that algae growth has become a major environmental and disposal problem in the state, so using algae as a feedstock could tackle waste and emissions at the same time.

The tricky part is keeping concrete strong

Here’s the catch most people never see when they hear “replace cement.” Cement is doing a specific job in a concrete mix, and swapping it out too aggressively can chip away at strength, durability, or simple workability when the crew is trying to pour and finish the slab.

The team’s approach tries to solve that problem head on by “functionalizing” the biochar, meaning they chemically treat its surface so it bonds better with cement. The VoLo Foundation article says they are targeting the known drawback of biochar in concrete, which can be reduced strength and durability, by improving bonding inside the matrix.

One detail stood out because it puts a number on the challenge. The same statement says traditional biochar often replaces only about 10 percent of cement before strength and durability drop, and the team hopes to push that to about 20 to 30 percent through chemical treatment and pre carbonation.

Carbon curing is the second lever

Alongside cement replacement, the researchers are testing carbon curing, a family of techniques that expose fresh concrete to carbon dioxide so it can be absorbed and converted into more stable mineral forms. In plain terms, the concrete is encouraged to “drink in” some CO2 while it is still curing, rather than only absorbing small amounts slowly over decades.

This is not just a theoretical idea. Recent peer reviewed work has explored faster carbonation approaches, including methods that inject CO2 into cement suspensions, with one study reporting CO2 sequestration efficiency up to 45 percent while maintaining concrete strength in their experimental setup.

The Miami project adds its own twist by pre carbonating the biochar first. In the VoLo Foundation description, the biochar is treated so it can act as an internal CO2 reservoir, capturing and storing carbon in solid form as calcium carbonate during cement hydration.

Florida’s environment is part of the test

If you build in Florida, you do not get gentle conditions. Heat, humidity, salt air, and coastal exposure can speed up corrosion and wear, which is why “green” concrete that fails early is not actually a win.

The team says their next phase is extensive testing of long term performance, especially in Florida’s coastal and marine environments. That means thinking beyond lab strength tests and into the unglamorous world of corrosion, cracking, and how a material behaves after years of sun and storm season.

They have also divided the work in a practical way. According to the same statement, Ozsut will focus on corrosion performance, Rezaeicherati will study self healing properties, and Rodriguez will continue analyzing carbon sequestration and storage.

What happens next, and what readers should watch for

The project won the 2026 VISTA Award and a $25,000 research grant, money the team says will support continued experiments and equipment upgrades. Funding matters here because consistency in biochar production and treatment can make or break whether a mix behaves the same way every time.

One more thing to watch is the accounting, not just the chemistry. The VoLo Foundation article says the researchers plan a full life cycle assessment, which is essential because a climate claim only holds if the full supply chain, processing energy, transport, and curing inputs do not erase the gains.

So will algae based concrete become mainstream soon. Nobody should promise that yet, but it is a smart direction, especially because it aims to cut emissions and store carbon while staying focused on durability. And if you have ever stared at a seawall or a busy overpass and thought “this is the future,” this research is a reminder that the future may depend on what we mix into the most ordinary materials.

The official statement was published on University of Miami News.

The big idea is simple. If farms cannot reliably hire enough people for pruning, thinning, and harvest, automation has to pick up some of the slack. In Washington, where agriculture is a multibillion dollar industry, the worker pipeline has been tightening for years, and researchers say that is pushing growers toward a future where humans and machines share the workload.

Soft robots for apples

Designing a robot that can harvest fruit sounds straightforward until you picture a rigid metal arm bumping into tree limbs all day. That is why WSU engineers built an inflatable apple picking arm that is soft by design, aiming to reduce damage to both trees and fruit.

According to the university’s reporting, the arm weighs under 50 pounds and costs about $5,500, and it can identify and pick an apple in roughly 25 seconds. Do the quick math and that is about 140 apples an hour if it could work nonstop, but real orchards are messy, and speed is still the big hurdle.

What makes this approach stand out is the focus on “gentle” engineering rather than brute force. In practical terms, careful handling can mean fewer bruised apples that never make it from the bin to the produce aisle. That is a sustainability win that rarely gets headlines, but it adds up.

Finding strawberries under the canopy

Strawberries bring a different kind of headache because the fruit is often tucked under leaves and low to the ground. WSU’s solution uses AI vision that combines multiple images to locate berries, then a small blower sends light bursts of air to move leaves out of the way before soft silicone “fingers” pluck the fruit.

That detail matters because earlier strawberry robots often worked in controlled setups where berries hang down neatly. Out in the field, everything is partially hidden, uneven, and changing by the hour as plants grow and sunlight shifts.

It is also a reminder of how much “invisible skill” human pickers bring to the job. Spotting ripeness, reaching into a canopy without snapping stems, and moving quickly without crushing fruit is hard to replicate, which is why WSU researchers keep describing this as automation that works alongside people, not a full replacement.

Water saved without yield loss

One of the most striking results in WSU’s work is not a robot arm at all, but irrigation software. At the WSU Smart Apple Orchard, researchers tested automated irrigation that uses weather and water data to adjust how much and when to irrigate, including decisions about cooling fruit and canopies during hot summer periods. In some trials, they cut water use by up to about 50% without hurting yields.

In related WSU tree fruit reporting, a precision irrigation setup saved 52.4% of water compared with soil moisture scheduling, while also reporting higher estimated effective yield and much higher water use efficiency. Results like that help explain why growers are paying attention, especially in regions where every irrigation decision can feel like a stress test.

This is not a niche issue. The U.S. Geological Survey reports that, in 2015, irrigation withdrawals accounted for 42% of total U.S. freshwater withdrawals, making it one of the biggest pieces of the national water puzzle. When irrigation tech can cut water use dramatically in some settings, that is a big deal for rivers, aquifers, and long term farm resilience.

Why farms are running short of hands

Automation is already common in broad acre crops like wheat, where GPS guided tractors can do much of the work with limited human input. Orchards are different because apples, cherries, grapes, and other perennial fruits can require labor across the seasons, not just at harvest time.

WSU points to a sharp contraction in Washington’s farm workforce, citing Census based figures that show hired farm labor declining 23% from 2017 to 2022, while the migrant labor force dropped 37% over the same period. The same report notes that 3,700 farms went out of business in Washington between 2017 and 2022, with some owners citing labor shortages as a factor.

Nationally, the pressure is also financial. USDA data shows that for fruit and tree nut operations, wages, salaries, and contract labor costs represent about 40% of production expenses, far higher than the average across all farms. When labor is that big a slice of the budget, disruptions do not stay on the farm, they show up in supply and, eventually, in what shoppers pay.

Rebuilding orchards for machines

One quiet theme running through WSU’s work is that robots may require farms to change shape. Researchers have pruned demonstration orchards so trees grow more like “walls,” creating corridors where robotic systems can move and work more predictably.

They are also using drones to gather data on crop stress, water use, and plant needs, feeding that information into machine learning tools. Think of it as turning the orchard into a living dataset, where the goal is earlier warning signs and more precise decisions.

Lav Khot, a WSU professor focused on agricultural automation, has described a future where systems blend weather, soil, and plant performance data into automated decision making operated by growers. “The stress we used to have to grow things, I think AI can help to mitigate that stress on humans,” he said.

The road from demo to daily use

For all the promise, WSU is clear that harvesting robots are not yet ready to become routine equipment. The machines can perform tasks effectively, but not quickly enough, and scaling from a lab or demo orchard to thousands of real world acres is where technology tends to get tested the hardest.

There is also a bigger sustainability question hiding in plain sight. If farms adopt more sensors, robotics, and AI tools, the benefits can include water savings and better targeting of farm operations, but the footprint of manufacturing, powering, and maintaining all that hardware has to be part of the conversation too. That is why the most realistic near term path looks like “human plus machine,” not farms run entirely by robots.

At the end of the day, this is about keeping food production stable while labor markets and water constraints tighten at the same time.

That is alarming on its own, but it becomes even more serious once you remember that nuclear war is also an environmental catastrophe.

The paper is currently available as an arXiv preprint, not a peer-reviewed journal article, and no one is suggesting these systems are about to control real arsenals.

Still, lead author Kenneth Payne described the results as “sobering,” because the models often treated nuclear force as a usable tool rather than as a line humanity should fear crossing. For readers worried about climate, food, and public safety, that distinction matters a lot.

What the models actually did

Payne’s tournament generated 329 turns of play and roughly 780,000 words of structured reasoning. Each turn forced the models to assess the situation, predict the opponent’s next move, and then choose both a public signal and a private action, which let the researcher study not just the outcome, but the logic behind it.

The headline result is hard to shrug off. Ninety-five percent of games saw tactical nuclear use, 76% reached strategic nuclear threats, and all 21 games included nuclear signaling by at least one side. Claude tended to build trust and then exceed its own signals, Gemini embraced a “madman” style, and GPT-5.2 looked far more restrained until pressure rose.

Maybe the most unsettling detail is this one. None of the models used any of the eight de-escalatory options on the ladder, from limited concessions to complete surrender, and 86% of games also included accidental escalations designed to mimic the kind of misfires and misunderstandings that haunt real crises.

Even then, the models did not clearly tell rivals that a dangerous move had been unintended.

The clock changed everything

Time pressure changed the whole mood of the simulation. In open-ended games, Claude won all of its matches while GPT-5.2 lost every one, but in deadline-driven scenarios GPT-5.2 flipped to a 75% win rate and Claude dropped to 33%. The same system that looked almost passive without a clock became strikingly more dangerous when defeat had a deadline.

In practical terms, that means an AI system that looks calm in testing may behave very differently when the clock is running out. Real-world crises are rushed, noisy, and filled with false alarms, which is exactly why this part of the study lands so hard. And that is where the warning begins to feel less theoretical.

This is also an environmental story

Why should an environmental newsroom care about a nuclear war game? Because even a smaller nuclear conflict that injects more than 5 teragrams of soot into the stratosphere could trigger mass food shortages in almost all countries, according to a Nature Food study that modeled crop, fishery, and livestock losses after nuclear war.

This is not just a bunker-room problem. It ends up at the dinner table.

The same study estimated that a nuclear war between India and Pakistan could lead to more than 2 billion deaths from famine, while a full U.S.-Russia war could leave more than 5 billion people dead. Farm fields, fishing grounds, supply chains, and the grocery bill would all be caught in the blast radius, even far from the original targets. That is the part no escalation ladder can sanitize.

What leaders should take from this

Payne is clear about the limits of the exercise. These were fictional states inside a stylized game, and the paper argues that AI simulation can still be useful for studying crisis dynamics if it is carefully calibrated against known human behavior.

But the same research also notes that militaries and security institutions are already experimenting with AI-assisted analysis and war gaming, which means the question is no longer whether AI will touch strategic decision-making at all. To a large extent, it already has.

The study does not test ecological understanding directly, but it points to a dangerous mismatch between strategic reasoning and real-world consequences.

These systems can reason fluently about leverage and escalation, while the known effects of nuclear war include darkened skies, failed harvests, and global famine, which is why “machine psychology” is suddenly an environmental issue too. 

The study was published on arXiv.

Studies of circularity in banana farming show that only a small share of the plant becomes food. The rest is biomass that usually stays in the field or is removed as waste. In some production systems the residue can reach around 220 tons per hectare, which helps explain why industry is suddenly very interested in this forgotten trunk.

At the same time, researchers estimate that banana pseudostems generate tens of millions of tons of waste every year in producer countries such as Brazil.

Those stems hold strong cellulosic fibers with tensile strengths that can surpass classic natural fibers like jute and sisal, which makes them attractive for yarns and reinforcement materials.

From craft to factory floor

For years, banana fiber showed up in small artisan projects. The big change now is that companies are organizing the residue as a proper industrial supply chain, with quality standards, traceability and safety routines similar to other natural fibers.

In Brazil, this shift became visible when FIESC highlighted projects at the SENAI Institute of Textile Technology, Apparel and Design that develop fabrics from banana stem fiber specifically for large-scale use.

One of these initiatives, known as Banana Têxtil, took a fabric made from banana stalks all the way to the final of the BRICS Solutions Awards, showing that the material is viable for industrial weaving and not just for craft markets.

Inside a banana fiber plant

The operation usually starts close to the farms. Fresh pseudostems are heavy and full of water, so hauling them over long distances would kill the business and add truck traffic to rural roads. When the loads arrive at the plant they are sorted by size, moisture and condition.

Degraded stems give shorter fibers with more impurities, so this first check already decides a lot about final quality.

The heart of the factory is mechanical extraction. In a process known as decortication, rollers and blades press and scrape the pseudostem, separating a fibrous fraction from the softer, wetter pulp.

Technical studies identify this mechanical route as the most realistic option for industrial scale because it avoids harsh chemicals and delivers fibers that can be aligned and spun. Laboratory work shows that mechanically-extracted pseudostem fibers can reach tensile strengths around 570 megapascals, higher than many other plant fibers used in textiles and composites.

Right after extraction, the fiber goes through intensive washing. The goal is to remove non‑fibrous residues, reduce odor and improve feel. Here, the environmental trade offs become clear. Washing consumes significant water, so the most advanced plants invest in recirculation systems and wastewater treatment to keep both costs and impacts under control.

Drying, quality control and where the fiber goes

Once clean, the fibers need to dry in a predictable way. Many factories mix ventilated air drying with controlled temperature ovens to avoid mold and keep color stable. Recent research indicates that drying temperature influences the physical and mechanical properties of the fibers, which is why this step is treated as process control instead of just waiting for the sun to do the job.

Opening and alignment equipment similar to what is used for other plant fibers then prepares the material for spinning, nonwovens or composite reinforcements.

Quality teams usually monitor average length, moisture, impurities and, in more structured plants, strength parameters. For the spinning mill or paper machine on the other side of the contract, the key is simple. They want banana fiber that behaves the same way every time.

Most of the attention goes to textiles. Projects in Brazil and other producer countries already spin yarns and weave fabrics that blend banana fiber with cotton or other fibers for clothing and home textiles.

But the value chain does not end there. Alternative paper and pulp trials are moving from lab sheets to pilot lines. A recent open access study tested thermomechanically-extracted pseudostem fiber mixed with gum arabic to mold fruit packaging boards, which performed as well as or better than recycled paper pulp trays in several mechanical tests, although they absorbed more water.

What about the rest of the plant

The fibrous fraction is only part of the story. Pulp and sap that leave the decortication line can be turned into compost, solid fertilizer, biogas or even liquid fertilizers.

Experiments using banana pseudostem as a base for organic liquid fertilizer, combined with microbial mixes, show that this residue can supply nutrients while helping farmers cut their reliance on synthetic inputs.

In practical terms, the factory only closes its environmental and financial accounts if most of this biomass finds a use. Otherwise managers end up paying to dispose of soggy waste and local communities are left with odor and runoff problems they never asked for.

A promising fiber, with work still to do

Banana pseudostem fiber will not replace every synthetic fiber in your closet, and experts are clear that logistics, farmer training and wastewater management remain weak points in many projects.

Still, it offers a way to shift part of the textile, paper and packaging supply away from fossil inputs and toward an agricultural residue that already exists in huge volumes.

At the end of the day, the idea is quite simple. Instead of burning or abandoning banana trunks after harvest, turn them into useful products that can eventually return to the soil. 

The study was published in Packaging Technology and Science.

Psychologists say this kind of “quiet fade” can hit harder as we get older, because the built-in social structure of school, work, and daily routines slowly falls away.

A National Academies report estimates that about 24% of Americans 65 and older are socially isolated, and 43% of adults 60 and older report feeling lonely, even though loneliness is not the same thing as being alone. It defines loneliness as a felt gap between the relationships you want and the relationships you actually have.

The friendship loss nobody names

This is a form of grief that rarely gets labeled as grief. There is often no blowup, no last phone call, and no clear ending. One day you realize the friendship only exists when you keep it moving.

That is part of why it can feel so isolating. If a relationship ends quietly, people around you may not notice anything changed. And when there is no shared story about what happened, it can be hard to talk about it without feeling awkward.

Researchers Aaron M. Ogletree and Rebecca G. Adams have pointed out that studies of later-life friendship tend to focus on the benefits, like support and companionship, while the tougher side gets less attention.

That missing spotlight matters, because imbalance and disappointment are real parts of friendship too, especially when life gets smaller and more complicated.

The psychology of “fair exchange”

A key idea here is “equity theory,” a fairness-based framework first developed by J. Stacy Adams and later applied to close relationships by researchers including Elaine Hatfield. In plain terms, it is the idea that people feel better in relationships when the give-and-take seems roughly balanced over time.

In friendships, the “giving” is often invisible stuff. It is remembering birthdays, checking in after a rough week, showing up when someone moves apartments, or being the person who always suggests “Let’s grab coffee.” If one person is doing most of that work, the friendship can start to feel less like a bond and more like a job.

Friendships are also fragile in a very specific way. There is no formal structure holding them together, no built-in obligation, and no shared paperwork tying you to the relationship. So when effort becomes one-sided, the connection can quietly loosen until it is gone.

How common are one-way friendships

The surprising part is how normal this can be. In a PLOS ONE study led by Abdullah Almaatouq at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researchers mapped self-reported friendships in multiple datasets and found that “only about half” were truly mutual in one of the networks they analyzed.

In that sample, 53% of the friendship ties were reciprocal, meaning both people named each other as friends.

Reciprocal is simple. You show up for me, and I show up for you, at least most of the time. Unilateral is different, and it is where the sting often starts, because one person experiences the relationship as close while the other treats it as optional.

It is worth slowing down before turning that into a harsh conclusion. Many of the datasets in that research included students and specific communities, and friendship can change across life stages. Still, the numbers help explain why the “stop initiating” test can feel so brutal, because it exposes something people often misread.

Why it can hurt more with age

When you are younger, friendships get refreshed by proximity. You see people in class, at work, at practice, or just because you are all in the same places at the same time. Even if one person is carrying more of the emotional load, the connection can keep rolling forward on schedule alone.

Later on, the scaffolding disappears. Retirement, caregiving, health limitations, moving, and family changes can make it harder to casually bump into the same people. If a friendship survives, it is usually because both people choose it on purpose.

This is also where time changes the way we invest in relationships. Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen’s “socioemotional selectivity theory” says that when people sense time is more limited, they tend to prioritize “emotionally meaningful goals” over exploration.

That can mean fewer friendships, but deeper ones, and it also means the loss of a one-sided friendship can feel like a sharper reckoning than it would have at 25.

What actually protects against loneliness

One clear message across research is that friendship quality matters more than a packed contact list. A 2023 systematic review led by Christos Pezirkianidis at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences looked at 38 studies published between 2000 and 2019 and found adult friendship was consistently linked with better well-being.

The strongest links showed up around things like support, companionship, and the ongoing effort people put into maintaining the relationship.

Long-term health research points in the same direction, just from a different angle. Psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, who directs the Harvard Study of Adult Development at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, summarized the risk plainly when discussing loneliness and aging, saying, “Loneliness kills. It is as powerful as smoking or alcoholism.”

So what does that mean in real life, when the phone stops buzzing and you are tempted to take it personally. For the most part, it means the loneliest part of aging isn’t simply having fewer people around. It is realizing which relationships were held together by mutual care, and which ones relied on you doing all the work.

The main review has been published in Frontiers in Psychology.

The number of mysteries regarding the Earth is getting significantly less in recent years as technology advances. And when researchers lowered a camera deep beneath an active volcano in the Pacific Ocean, they captured for the very first time how our planet releases its energy.

What led to this remarkable feat of Mother Nature being filmed for the first time?

How the Earth continuously reshapes itself over time is amazing

Our plant is far from just a static rock in the cosmos; it is in a constant state of evolution, much like us.

The Earth’s crust is not simply one massive, solid piece; it is a great conveyor belt of tectonic plates that are never settled and are constantly moving. In some parts of the ocean, magma rises to create new ocean floor, while in other parts, the older crust is forced back into the hot interior of the planet.

Some of the most recognizable features in certain parts of the world are a result of our planet’s never-ending evolution.

Such as the fjords in Norway. These were created when massive ice glaciers acted like sandpaper and carved out huge valleys and flattened mountain ranges over thousands of years.

Life on this third rock from the Sun is nothing if not adaptable

Not only is our planet constantly adapting as its environment and chemistry are altered over thousands of years, but animal life is displaying remarkable behaviors too.

Such as the recent discovery made by a marine ecologist that saw sperm whales protecting unrelated mothers during the birthing process.

Some changes are good for the planet, while others exhibit the disastrous effects we have had on the Earth. The never-ending boiling pot of life that is the Earth is like a toddler on a sugar rush, never standing still and in constant, almost blurry motion.

Many of the most iconic and beautiful parts of the world have been ravaged by pollution, mostly caused by us humans.

This paradox of protecting the very planet we live on and progressing as a society has had a few unforeseen effects on the world, such as an iconic dam in South Africa that has slowly been polluted from runoff over the last few decades.

But how exactly is the planet releasing the unfathomable amounts of energy it has stored away?

A study, “Voluminous Inflated Lobate Flows on the Distal Rift Zones of Axial Seamount, Juan de Fuca Spreading Ridge,” published in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, has filmed the process recently.

Seven minutes that will change how you see our planet forever

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) has played a vital role in developing a better understanding of the alien world that exists deep beneath the surface of our oceans.

Filming odd and unexpected happenings beneath the ocean is becoming a more common occurrence in recent years.

But when the team from MBARI and their collaborators lowered a camera, specifically an AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) beneath the Pacific Ocean surface, they ended up filming how the planet releases its energy, for the first time ever, we might add.

They used the AUV to film and document massive, 1,200-year-old lava flows on the seafloor.

They revealed through this process how an underwater volcano releases energy via the “inflated” lobe formation. The research is significant for us as a species because it is the first time that we have gotten a detailed look at how these enormous underwater volcanic structures are formed.

While above-ground volcanoes force the local population into a state of panic, scurrying to get to safety, this underwater “film shoot” has shown how the planet releases the vast amounts of energy it has stored away for thousands of years.

The green energy transition has been gaining major traction over the last few years as the world comes to accept that the energy industry needs to change. But how can a solar plant encourage endangered species to thrive around it, especially as the panels influence the temperature of the surrounding area?

What has led to some endangered species living beneath solar panel arrays?

How saving the planet we live on from human-led destruction is a top priority

The overwhelming realization that our own progress as a society is irretrievably damaging our only home in the universe has been startling, to say the least.

To date, over 190 countries have agreed to a plan that will protect 30% of the planet’s land and oceans over the next three years in multiple programs. Many have pointed to this being the “tipping point” to avert a mass extinction event in the not-too-distant future.

Protecting the Earth is paramount to our own future as a species, but developing carbon capture technology is exceedingly expensive.

The climate crisis can be somewhat averted by simply protecting the world’s oceans and forests, as they act like massive sinks that absorb the vast majority of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.

A human paradox: Protect the planet or advance our society?

There can be no denying the astonishing impact that our progression as a society has had on the planet.

The civilization we have built requires vast amounts of energy for daily life. But over the last century or so, energy generation has ravaged the natural resources of the planet, leading to a new era of climate disasters that are becoming an all too common factor of modern-day life.

We know that new energy production methods are mostly spared by the recent weather-related events that have enveloped parts of the world.

But even the undisputed king of the renewable energy sector, solar power, has had to face the fury of Mother Nature in recent times. Solar panels now have more than just snow and rain to concern themselves with.

As we enter a new era of clean energy generation led by the renewable energy subsector, the impact of our collective decision is surfacing.

Parts of the world have turned to the untapped and often overlooked power of the wind energy sector. But even that can be brought to a complete standstill if Mother Nature chooses so.

However, everything is not all doom and gloom, as the Wildlands Network has recently shown us.

Hidden in the shade: Surprising residents thriving under North Texas solar arrays

With the climate crisis becoming the issue of our time, some states that have built a reputation for oil production have now turned to solar power.

The Texas-based Impact Solar project is one such development. Located in Lamar County in North Texas, it was one of the first major solar installations in the iconic region of the nation.

The plant’s management has found that several endangered species are not only living nearby, but are actually thriving directly underneath the solar panel array.

The camouflaged Texas Horned Lizard, as well as the ancient Alligator Snapping Turtle, have been monitored as they set up camp underneath the solar plant’s thousands of panels. This proves that through strategic design and habitat management, we can develop a perpetual balance with nature.

Solar panels have been found to create near-perfect conditions for some species to not only survive, but thrive.

What will the next unforeseen benefit from our green energy transition be as more and more nations and states opt to turn to solar power?

The Artemis II missions took human beings farther away from Earth than ever before, bringing the dream of space exploration back to the world. But our next target is more than 200 million miles into deep space. So how do we plan to get there after successfully reaching the Moon?

How will mankind reach our next destination in deep space?

How the dream of space exploration has made a triumphant comeback

Mankind has been dreaming of the day when we would reach back out into the night sky and land on other celestial bodies other than Earth.

The Artemis II mission brought that dream back to reality as humans traversed space to get back to the Moon after a 50-year absence. The mission was led by NASA, but brought humanity together in a collective dream that affects the entire global population.

From the now-famous jar of Nutella that was floating around the Orion capsule to the plan to get back to Earth, the mission has overall been a resounding success.

And while the world is enamored by the Artemis II mission, NASA has been planning our next space “road trip”. But this one will take humans more than 200 million miles into deep space to reach an iconic planet, if everything goes to plan, that is.

Despite the state of geopolitics, space is still our main collective destination

The world is seemingly constantly embroiled in one or another geopolitical issue.

While war and tensions between nations continue, our collective ambition to reach back into space has been making a triumphant comeback. Especially as new technology allows astronomers and cosmologists to study space in far greater detail than ever before.

The dream of finding a habitable planet near our solar system has been catapulted back into the public eye in recent years.

This undeniable ambition that is deep-rooted within our consciousness has been brought back into reality as the public becomes more and more enamored by our dream of reaching into the cosmos.

A recent meteorite that landed in a home in Houston forced the space exploration dream right into our minds.

Several space exploration organizations have been working diligently to develop technology that will enable us to get even further away from Earth than the Artemis II astronauts were.

NASA has detailed the next space mission for mankind to undertake in the not-too-distant future.

Humanity’s next off-grid space road trip is already being planned

The mysterious Red Planet has been a major focus for humanity as the next target in our collective space exploration plans.

Mars has been a mystifying planet with many unsolved secrets that we are simply unable to understand from over 200 million miles away. Such as a recent mysterious signal that was being beamed to Earth from the iconic Red Planet.

Humanity has been planning a road trip to Mars in the near future via the NASA-led “Humans to Mars” program.

The Artemis II missions will serve as a proving ground for the technology that NASA will utilize to get to Mars for the first time. The long-term initiative is focusing on conducting a scientifically minded venture to the Red Planet.

We need far greater technology to finally reach the iconic Red Planet

As Mars is roughly 200 million miles away, NASA and others will need to develop the Space Launch System to get there, among other technologies.

NASA will have no choice but to develop substantial propulsion technologies to shorten the 1,100-day journey to reach Mars. Thankfully, the Artemis II astronauts conducted several tests en route to the Moon that will serve as the basis for the Humans to Mars mission in the near future.

Are you prepared to reach our closest celestial neighbor in the not-too-distant future?

For the best part of the last century, humanity has been entering hidden passages deep beneath the Earth’s surface. And one recent expedition found evidence of a hidden Ice Age world where giant armadillos and tortoises once lived together in an icy harmony.

How was this remarkable discovery made, and what are the implications?

How the Earth’s hidden cave systems have revealed astonishing truths

Our one and so far only home in the universe is far from being just a normal planet inhabited by various forms of life.

It is actually a diverse world with astonishing forms of life that have remained hidden from humanity for millions of years. Such as the Movile Cave in Romania, which was sealed for over 5 million years and houses a toxic atmosphere that supports more than 50 unique species of life.

By deep-diving into the Earth’s hidden labyrinth of cave systems, we can accurately determine the planet’s climate history.

The world-changing discovery of the Homo naledi fossil in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa sparked a debate around whether early humans buried their dead in ancient “funerals” ahead of a time than previously thought.

The story of Earth is being developed over our lifetime

The mechanisms that science uses to study our planet have revealed some hidden truths about the Earth.

Such as a recent study of a South African dam that is glowing in an emerald shade of green. Satellite imaging has shown that our planet is evolving in ways that we never thought possible or expected.

By studying various life forms around the world, we have come to understand that deep beneath the Earth’s surface, a hidden world of life may exist.

We now have the ability to send humans, or at least human-made machines, deep under the ocean surface to study animal life and their behavior. This has led to discoveries that point to the fact that many animals have starkly similar traits to us humans.

Humanity has learnt that long, long ago, the world and all the animals on it were far different from what we see today.

A recent study, “Novel occurrences of Late Pleistocene megafauna from Bender’s Cave on the Edwards Plateau of Texas may include evidence of the last interglacial,” published in Quaternary Research, has detailed the latest discovery of ancient life in an iconic part of the nation.

Central Texas once looked far different from what it does at the moment

We have come to learn many unknown facts about parts of the nation in recent years.

Such as the discovery of a massive freshwater reservoir deep beneath the Great Salt Lake in Utah. But as we continue on our path to study the very planet we live on, new discoveries are being made in unexpected regions.

Texas is home to the Edwards Plateau, a huge limestone upland that covers approximately 45,173 square miles of the iconic Lone Star State.

It was formed roughly 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous period and was ultimately submerged under a vast and hidden inland tropical sea. And when University of Texas paleontologist John Moretti led a team to the region, what they found was astonishing to say the least.

A hidden world of life has been found in a submerged cave in the Lone Star State

Deep inside Benders Cave on the Edwards Plateau, the team found evidence of a hidden Ice Age.

Fossils of huge pampatheres and giant tortoises were discovered, which have challenged the previous assumptions made by scientists that Central Texas was a dry and inhospitable region millions of years ago.

In fact, the fossils suggest that the region was, in fact, a tropical environment that hosted unfathomable forms of life nearly 100,000 years ago.

Discovering fossils from the period when dinosaurs roamed the planet can rewrite what we know about life on our planet.

Antetokounmpo has had a roller coaster time with the Bucks over the last two seasons due to trade rumors and how the team has managed him with injury concerns. The Bucks have said that he was still not cleared to play after he suffered a left knee hyperextension and bone bruise when he landed awkwardly on a dunk on March 15.

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He hasn’t played since then and Milwaukee went 4-11 with him on the bench, including the season-ending loss to the Philadelphia 76ers on Sunday.

"Being cleared to play, I don’t understand. I’ve never in my life denied participation in practice," Antetokounmpo said. "Whoever came up with that is disrespectful towards what I’ve done for this team and the way I carry myself.

"I did what I was supposed to do. I wasn’t able to come on the court now. Who has that say? It comes from above. I thought I had control. OK, if I’m healthy, I’m going to play. This just shows me that not just me, players in general, don’t have no control. No, I didn’t feel like I had control."

Antetokounmpo was seen warming up with no signs of injury.

"It was draining for me, for sure," Antetokounmpo said. "If it was draining for me, it was definitely draining for me and the organization."

BUCKS PART WAYS WITH DOC RIVERS AFTER NBA PLAYOFF MISS: REPORT

The Bucks could look to trade Antetokounmpo in the offseason, or he could possibly sign a four-year, $275 million extension in October.

Still, Antetokounmpo said he hasn’t formally been offered an extension and that it was still too far away for him to think about.

"That’s too far away. It’s something I have to sit down with my family and see what’s best for me, what’s best for my family," Antetokounmpo said. "Money doesn’t mean nothing to me. Zero. Absolutely zero. What means something to me, it’s winning."

Antetokounmpo was the centerpiece of the team’s 2021 championship and has won the NBA MVP award twice. Should he stay with the Bucks for the 2026-27 season and beyond, the team could look drastically different.

Doc Rivers is not expected back with the Bucks next season. Several players have options to exercise for next year, while others are eligible for an extension.

Milwaukee will have numerous decisions to make this summer.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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McIlroy became the fourth golfer in history to earn back-to-back green jackets, edging the field by just one shot.

"Congratulations to Rory McIlroy on another Great Championship, The Masters! He performed tremendously under intense pressure, something which few people would be able to even think about doing. With each year, Rory is becoming more and more a LEGEND!" Trump wrote in a post to Truth Social during his return to Washington from Florida on Sunday evening.

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Trump then pointed to McIlroy’s next stop, saying he’s eager to see him compete at Doral in Florida.

"I look forward to watching him compete in two weeks at Doral. The quality of Professional Golfers today has become extraordinary, each and every one of them. They should all be proud of the way they played at The Masters this weekend!"

RORY MCILROY REPEATS AS MASTERS CHAMPION, JOINS RARE COMPANY AT AUGUSTA NATIONAL

Trump was on hand when McIlroy appeared at the 2016 World Golf Championships-Cadillac Championship at Trump National Doral Blue Monster Course in Doral.

Trump also reflected on McIlroy’s career Grand Slam last year, saying the Northern Irishman showed "tremendous courage."

"I have to congratulate Rory, he showed tremendous courage," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One in April 2025. "He was having a hard time, but he showed great guts, stamina and courage. People have no idea how tough that is... and (he) came back."

After tying at 11-under par with Justin Rose, McIlroy entered a playoff to decide the green jacket. He ultimately outlasted Rose to win the 89th Masters, bringing an 11-year pursuit of the career milestone to a conclusion.

But McIlroy’s victory Sunday also featured plenty of drama, as he edged two-time Masters champion Scottie Scheffler by one stroke to avoid another playoff.

Tiger Woods was the last to accomplish the rare feat of back-to-back Masters victories, when he was a repeat winner in 2001 and 2002. McIlroy now joins a short list that includes Woods, Jack Nicklaus and Nick Faldo.

McIlroy held a Masters-record six-shot lead after 36 holes, but an early stumble Sunday dropped him into a tie for fourth before he regained control and powered his way to the top of the leaderboard. McIlroy's first place finish earned him $4.5 million from the $22.5 million purse.

Trump has been an avid golfer for decades and has owned more than a dozen golf courses across multiple countries. PGA Tour tournaments and LIV Golf events have been held at Trump-owned courses over the years.

McIlroy and Trump have spent time on the course together, with the six-time major winner telling The Irish Times in 2025 that he played a round with the then-president-elect ahead of the inauguration. He also said Trump "loves golf."

McIlroy could return in just over two weeks at the 2026 World Golf Championships-Cadillac Championship, which returns to Doral on April 29.

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Amanda Tom, 25, and Muhamad Tarik Hussein, 23, were arrested and charged with negligent discharge in connection with "possible shots" being fired in the Russian Hill neighborhood, the San Francisco Police Department said. Police did not name Altman or identify the residence as belonging to Altman in its press release.

An OpenAI spokesperson told Fox News Digital Monday morning that the incident was unrelated and had no connection to Altman, adding that there was no indication that Altman's home was being targeted.

The San Francisco Standard first reported that two suspects in a Honda sedan had stopped near Altman’s property at 1:40 a.m. Sunday and fired a shot from the car’s passenger window.

OPENAI CEO SAM ALTMAN'S HOME TARGETED IN MOLOTOV COCKTAIL ATTACK; MAN ARRESTED: POLICE

Security personnel at the compound reported hearing a gunshot before the vehicle sped away, though the car’s license plate was caught on surveillance footage, the outlet reported, citing a police report.

Detectives determined the car belonged to Tom, which led officers to a home in San Francisco, police said. Tom and Hussein were found at the home, where they were arrested without incident. Officers also seized three firearms found inside the home.

"The SFPD takes crimes involving guns extremely seriously, and anyone committing acts like these will be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," said San Francisco Police Chief Derrick Lew. "I want to thank our officers whose swift actions identified these suspects, took them into custody, and got dangerous weapons off our streets."

OPENAI DIDN'T CONTACT POLICE DESPITE EMPLOYEES FLAGGING MASS SHOOTER'S CONCERNING CHATBOT INTERACTIONS: REPORT

The incident comes after a 20-year-old man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s home and threatened OpenAI’s headquarters in San Francisco on Friday, the company confirmed at the time.

Officers arrested the man, who allegedly threatened to burn down the building, and recognized him as the same suspect in the Molotov cocktail incident, police said.

Police did not immediately identify the suspect, though the Standard and local news outlet KNTV reported his name as Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama. Reports indicate he was charged with attempted murder, arson, criminal threats, two counts of possession of an incendiary device and two counts of possessing a destructive device.

No injuries were reported in either incident.

Police have yet to release a possible motive for the alleged attack on Friday.

The Molotov cocktail attack came days after the New Yorker published an in-depth investigation that touched on concerns some people have about Altman and the company.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

"I’m seeing it," the "Insecure" actress said while participating in TheWrap’s Creators x Hollywood Summit. "Just blatantly. People are scared and just not necessarily investing the same way that they would have before. Even executives who, you know, are of color are also like tiptoeing like, 'Well, I can't co-sign you because I'm going to lose my job.' And that's scary to see and sad to see because it's kind of like a bad word now." 

"We all know that, typically, when we're talking about diversity, equity [and] inclusion, it is about giving people opportunities that would otherwise not have them as opposed to pity hires and pity shows and the like," she continued. "It's changed meanings and has become a bad word, but it hasn't affected what we do and who I create for and what our company creates for and who we prioritize. And it never will."

HOLLYWOOD'S 'PROGRESSIVE SNOWFLAKE ERA' IS OVER WITH SHOWS NOW 'HOT, HORNY AND WHITE,' NYT GUEST ESSAY SAYS

Rae was asked about Hollywood and other major industries rolling back DEI initiatives since President Donald Trump took office again in 2025. As a series creator herself, Rae admitted that people have to be "smarter" about how they package diverse projects.

"Like, ‘It’s not a show about a Black woman, it’s a show about class,'" Rae said. "As icky as that might feel, it gets the show sold. You know, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down."

Rae claimed that minorities were "back to limited representation" in entertainment that she hasn't seen since beginning her YouTube series "Awkward Black Girl" in 2011.

BILL MAHER, TIM ALLEN CRITICIZE DEI PRACTICES HAMPERING CREATIVE PROCESS, SAY SITCOMS JUST 'GOT TO BE FUNNY'

"I started ‘Awkward Black Girl’ because there was a dearth of representation in the industry, and it felt like this was my opportunity to put an archetype into the space that didn’t exist at the time," she said. "And now, even after so much progress, we’re kind of back to limited representation and having to stake claim of our stories. We’re back where we started, in a way, but wiser."

Rae has pushed politics and representation in the past. In 2025, she canceled a sold-out show at the Kennedy Center after Trump was named chairman of the center.

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"Unfortunately, due to what I believe to be an infringement on the values of an institution that has faithfully celebrated artists of all backgrounds through all mediums, I've decided to cancel my appearance at this venue," Rae wrote on Instagram.

With the April 15 deadline approaching, millions of Americans are looking for ways to make tax season less painful, and some AI CEOs are promoting their tools as a helpful solution. 

AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, Claude and Grok, explain tax rules, flag deductions and even help assemble a tax return in mere minutes. These tools are seductive, given how frustrating the endless stacks of IRS forms can be. 

HOW TO OPT OUT OF AI DATA COLLECTION IN POPULAR APPS

But don't be fooled: doing your taxes with AI puts you at serious financial risk. That is why the IRS is currently cautioning taxpayers against it for this purpose.

AI is genuinely useful for helping people understand the taxation process. Ask an AI chatbot to explain the difference between a credit and a deduction and it will usually give you a clear answer. Ask it to summarize a rule and it can save you time.  

But filing a tax return is not just about sounding informed. It’s about making sure all the information you input is correct. 

AI tools might give you useful "suggestions" or even craft certain forms for you. However, have they done it competently and in accordance with the law? This is where things get tricky. AI tools must always be used with a strong degree of expert oversight, and unless you are a tax expert, you are at risk of making incorrect or even fraudulent filings.

Using AI for tax preparation fails across all five core principles of the TRACE framework for safe AI use: task exposure (mistakes can have serious consequences), response tolerance (tax filing requires precision, not "good enough" answers), audit feasibility (most users lack the expertise to verify outputs), confabulation risk (AI can generate incorrect information), and environmental sensitivity (sensitive financial data may be exposed).

Consumer AI tools are not built to guarantee accuracy. They generate answers that read well and sound convincing, but that’s very different from applying a complex tax code correctly, line by line, based on individual circumstances. 

A recent study showed how wide that gap can be. When tested on standard tax scenarios, leading AI systems routinely made big mistakes — misapplying thresholds, miscalculating liabilities, and incorrectly determining eligibility for common credits that millions of taxpayers depend on and claim for themselves every year.

 TAX SEASON SCAMS 2026: FAKE IRS MESSAGES STEALING IDENTITIES

According to the study, "Our experiment shows that state-of-the-art models succeed in calculating less than a third of federal income tax returns even on this simplified sample set." Would you trust an accountant who had a 30% chance of filing your tax return correctly? 

Often the tax errors made by AI aren't small. Another study found AI turning in results that were off by thousands of dollars. Again, would you ever tolerate that from an accountant? 

The danger isn’t just that AI gets things wrong. It’s that it gets things wrong with confidence.

A chatbot doesn’t hesitate or flag uncertainty. It delivers a polished answer that feels authoritative, even when it’s incorrect. That creates a false sense of security at exactly the moment when precision matters most.  

Unlike a tax professional, an AI doesn’t bear any responsibility if you get penalized by the IRS. It’s very likely you’ll incur steep penalties if your taxes are inaccurate — and claiming "the robot ate my homework" is no excuse. Moreover, even if you are lucky enough to not be caught by the IRS this time around, remember that later years’ tax preparation uses previous years’ as a blueprint, and so these errors can propagate into the future. 

There's also the matter of what you're revealing to the AI. To get meaningful tax help from an AI tool, you’re often prompted to share highly sensitive personal and financial data — income details, household information, addresses and sometimes full tax documents. That’s the same information experts constantly warn people to protect so their identities aren’t stolen.

TAX SEASON SCAMS SURGE AS FILING CONFUSION GROWS

Once that data is entered, most users have no idea how it’s handled. How long is it stored? Who can access it? Could it be used to improve future systems? The answers are not always clear and the level of transparency varies across platforms. 

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Even advocates of AI tools, such as the general counsel for Elon Musk’s xAI (which produces Grok), tend to warn users to check the results for themselves.  

You should treat AI like a translator, not a decision-maker. Let it help you understand terminology, prepare questions and do research. But when it comes to actually filing your taxes, the tools and professionals are there for a reason.

The appeal of handing your taxes to a chatbot is obvious, but when the margin for error is measured in large dollar sums, fast doesn’t mean correct. 

AI can make tax season easier. Just don’t expect it to do everything for you. 

Hudson beamed about her three children and the values she has instilled in them as they get older, while speaking with Fox News Digital about Netflix's "Running Point" collaboration with State Farm and the upcoming second season.

"Well, my thing is, if my kids drive or purpose is for fame and success, then it's something that would feel like a failure of mine," the star began. "If that is how they equate feeling significant, then, you know, they're being fed a lie."

Instead, Hudson has tried to teach her kids, Ryder, Bingham and Rani, to find what really drives their purpose and to stay true to their values.

KATE HUDSON, DAUGHTER OF GOLDIE HAWN AND KURT RUSSELL, ON NEPOTISM IN HOLLYWOOD: 'IT DOESN'T MATTER'

"So, for me, the most important thing for me with my kids is that they feel self-possessed, that they understand what really drives purpose, and what does a purposeful life look like for them, and where do they hold their values, right? What are those values and why?

"And if you value fame and success, we'd probably have a big sit down," Hudson said.

WATCH: ‘RUNNING POINT’ STAR KATE HUDSON SAYS CHASING FAME WOULD MAKE HER A ‘FAILURE’ AS A MOM

Hudson has three children: Ryder, who she shares with Chris Robinson; Bingham, who she shares with Matt Bellamy; and Rani Rose, who she shares with Danny Fujikawa.

Hudson noted that if her kids believed that fame and success equaled opportunity that she would understand the desire. "But the reality is that those things don't constitute or create a really fulfilling life. What does is that the work that they're doing is bringing them hopefully purpose and community purpose," she said.

Ahead of the release of the second season of "Running Point," Hudson shared that her work ethic has been instilled in her since she was a child.

"I think work ethic is something that I grew up with. I'm a worker bee. I work really hard, and I think that my thing with my kids is you just have to keep chipping away at the things that you love, and you have to show a really strong work ethic and get devoted to the things you love," Hudson said. "And keep working at it because everybody recognizes a hard worker and kindness. I mean that's success, right?"

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Hudson plays Isla Gordon in "Running Point" -- a reformed party girl who proves herself to be a businesswoman after she's unexpectedly put in charge of her family's professional basketball team. Hudson told Fox News Digital that she's 50-50 when relating to Isla's ambition and drive.

WATCH: KATE HUDSON SHARES WHAT WILL TAKE YOU THE FARTHEST IN LIFE

"I do in the sense that I do everything with my whole, with everything, you know. When I put my mind to something, I roll my sleeves up, I want to get it done, and I want to do it right. I think Isla really wants to get it right, but her drive and her ambition comes from a more, I think, a place where she loves what she does, which I can relate to, but there's also a dysfunctional side of it, which is what makes the comedy so fun," Hudson began.

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"But I wouldn't say that I have calculated ambition. I love the arts and I wanna tell good stories and I want to do things that move me and that feel like I can do and that could be a great thing to be able to do if I get that opportunity," she continued. "But I don't have this like, driving ambition to win, and Isla does."

"Running Point" teamed up with State Farm for their first-ever partnership with Netflix. In the cameo, Hudson's Isla Gordon and Chet Hanks' Travis Bugg are seen with Jake from State Farm. Hudson told Fox News Digital that once Jake from State Farm came on set, he was the most famous person there.

WATCH: KATE HUDSON TALKS STATE FARM COLLABORATION WITH ‘RUNNING POINT’

"Jake from State Farm was like the most famous guy on the set. Everybody was all freaking out that Jake from State Farm was there. It was like, you had Ray Romano here and then Jake from State Farm and everybody was like, 'Is that Jake from State Farm?'" Hudson said, adding that it was an exciting day filming with the face of the brand.

"Running Point" season two premieres on Netflix on April 23.

Reps. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif. and Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, are expected to face an immediate expulsion threat when the House returns from a two-week recess on Tuesday. 

Swalwell, who dropped out of California’s 2026 gubernatorial race Sunday, is facing multiple sexual assault and misconduct allegations, including at least one involving a former staffer. The Manhattan district attorney’s office has also opened a criminal investigation into an incident that allegedly occurred in New York City.

Swalwell has repeatedly characterized the allegations as "false," though he acknowledged a lack of judgment on Sunday. He has pledged to vigorously defend himself.

TWO DEMOCRATIC REPS CALL FOR SWALWELL TO EXIT CONGRESS AS CONTROVERSY SWIRLS AROUND HIS BID FOR CA GOVERNOR

Gonzales, who has admitted to having an affair with a staff member who later died by setting herself on fire, dropped his re-election bid in March after House GOP leadership called on him to suspend his campaign. He is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., said over the weekend that she would introduce a resolution to expel Swalwell from the chamber if he does not resign. Meanwhile, Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez, D-N.M., is vowing to draft a measure that would expel Gonzales.

The female lawmakers have said they support expelling both men from the House of Representatives. A growing share of lawmakers in both parties appear to share that view.

"That vote comes to the floor, I will be voting yes on both measures," Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., said on NBC’s "Meet the Press" on Sunday. "These allegations are despicable and they demean the integrity of Congress. These things are just completely unacceptable. And as far as I’m concerned, both gentlemen need to go home."

"I think that this is very important that we believe women and that we show people across the Capitol and across the country that we will not accept this kind of behavior," Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., also said.

PELOSI, CALIFORNIA DEMS SLAM SWALWELL OVER BOMBSHELL SEXUAL ASSAULT ALLEGATIONS: 'INDEFENSIBLE'

Expelling a member of Congress is an incredibly high bar, and it is currently unclear whether both expulsion resolutions can obtain the two-thirds majority required to pass. To be successful, a significant portion of lawmakers will have to vote in favor of removing a member of their own party.

Former Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., who was removed from the House in 2023, is the most recent member to be expelled. President Donald Trump pardoned Santos in 2025 after he was convicted of wire fraud and identity theft and sentenced to more than seven years in prison.

Both House Republican and Democratic leadership have yet to comment on rank-and-file efforts to expel Swalwell and Gonzales.

Reps. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Fla., and Cory Mills, R-Fla., could also become potential targets of expulsion resolutions, though just a handful of members have thus far signaled they would support the removal of the lawmaker from their own party.

"They should resign IMMEDIATELY. If they don’t, we should expel all of them," Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., wrote on social media Sunday, referring to Swalwell and Gonzales, too. 

Cherfilus-McCormick is facing more than five decades in prison after allegedly funneling more than $5 million in disaster relief money to fund her congressional campaign and personal lifestyle.

A House Ethics adjudicatory subcommittee in March found her guilty of more than two dozen violations as part of an investigation separate from the federal criminal indictment. The panel is expected to formally recommend its suggested punishment later this month, which could be as severe as expulsion. 

House Democratic leadership has indicated they will withhold judgment on Cherfilus-McCormick until the ethics panel announces its decision.

Mills, a former Army combat veteran, has faced myriad controversies, including allegedly misrepresenting his military service, domestic violence and threatening to release sexually explicit photos of a former girlfriend, and abusing his committee assignments to benefit defense contracting firms he owns. He is also the target of a House Ethics Committee investigation.

Both lawmakers have denied any wrongdoing and are running for re-election.

The difference comes down to timing. Early filers tend to receive refunds weeks sooner and are less likely to rush into errors or miss out on credits. That extra time — and cash — can be used to pay off bills, build savings or earn returns, creating small financial gains that add up significantly over the course of a lifetime.

"I would simply say your tax return is your single largest financial transaction each year, and you'll be developing it for the next 30, 40, 50 and in some cases 60 or more years," Mark Steber, chief tax officer at Jackson Hewitt Tax Services, told Fox News Digital.

TAX DAY IS THIS WEEK: AVOID THESE 5 COMMON MISTAKES THAT CAN COST YOU MONEY

"It's probably a good idea to start to develop some best practices, one of which is not to wait to the last minute to start trying to do your tax return," he added.

Filing early won’t change how much you owe, but it can shape what you do with your money next. Getting a refund sooner gives taxpayers more time to pay down high-interest debt, build emergency savings or invest — moves that can compound over time.

AVERAGE TAX REFUND TOPS $3,700, TREASURY SAYS, TOUTING NEW TRUMP TAX BREAKS

The IRS issues more than 100 million refunds each year, totaling over $400 billion, underscoring how significant that money can be — and how much timing matters for those who receive it.

It can be even more important for those who owe money to the IRS.

"If you're gonna owe, you should have found that out several months ago, so you can start allocating money aside, and you won't run the risk of refund shock or disappointment or balance due trauma," Steber said.

Filing early can also help protect taxpayers from fraud. Once a return is submitted, it becomes much harder for identity thieves to file a fraudulent return in someone else’s name.

"You file early you get your money early, but more important than getting your refund early. You lock up your data, you lock up your personal information with the IRS and your state. That protects you from ID thieves, from refund thieves and a whole lot of other bad things that creep into the system," Steber added.

Last-minute filers are also more likely to rush, increasing the chances of errors or missed deductions and credits — mistakes that can directly reduce a refund or increase what’s owed.

"Give some attention to your tax return each and every year. Can't really do it this year at the last hour, but some best practices will save you money, lower your stress and put more tax refund dollars in your pocket over time," Steber said.

And then, suddenly, it all came crashing down, thanks to his own egregious conduct.

Last night, after desperately trying to hang on, Swalwell suspended his campaign. He was delusional if he thought he could keep running. He finally faced the inevitable music. 

The Democratic congressman didn't have much choice. His own party, led by Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Adam Schiff and Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, was demanding that he drop out of the race. 

SWALWELL FACES EXPULSION EFFORT FOLLOWING BOMBSHELL ASSAULT ALLEGATIONS

He was denying many of the specifics when it came to sexually abusing women on his staff, but his candidacy was clearly toast. His campaign chairman immediately resigned. The state teachers’ union withdrew its support. The service employees’ union suspended its campaign activities.

In a video Friday night, Swalwell seemed to soften his denials:

"I do not suggest to you in any way that I’m perfect or that I’m a saint. I have certainly made mistakes in judgment in my past, but those mistakes are between me and my wife and to her, I apologize deeply for putting her in this position."

Nobody’s buying that. When you’re a public figure with three children, it’s not just between you and your spouse. It’s also between you and the voters.

SWALWELL ATTORNEY DENIES MISCONDUCT, SAYS CONGRESSMAN TOOK ACCOUNTABILITY FOR 'LAPSES IN JUDGMENT'

Why, knowing of the intense scrutiny a gubernatorial candidate faces, would Swalwell allegedly engage in sex with staffers, given the stark power imbalance between a member of Congress and starstruck young women?

When Swalwell says all this emerged to torpedo his frontrunner campaign – "these allegations are false" – he is probably right. But he put the target on his own back.

Actually, a bandwagon running on four flat tires may be the least of the candidate’s problems. The Manhattan district attorney’s office confirms that it has opened an investigation into some of the allegations, and openly invited "survivors and anyone with knowledge of these allegations" to get in touch with its special victims unit.  

What’s more, both House and campaign staffers for Swalwell gave news outlets an unsigned letter saying they’re "horrified" by the allegations, calling them "abhorrent, beneath the dignity of those serving in public office," which "betrays the trust of all Californians." And one Republican representative, Anna Paulina Luna, is pushing for the House to expel him.

The media have clearly been driving the disclosures about the congressman, who represents the San Francisco area. One of the other two major Democratic candidates – former Congresswoman Katie Porter or billionaire Tom Steyer – will inherit the frontrunner’s mantle.

In California’s "jungle primary," the top two finishers make it to the fall ballot, regardless of party. President Trump has already endorsed former British politician and Fox News host Steve Hilton. But in the bluest of blue states, the Democratic candidate is virtually assured of winning.   

SWALWELL CALLS SEXUAL MISCONDUCT ALLEGATIONS 'FLAT OUT FALSE,' SAYS HE WILL FIGHT THEM 'WITH EVERYTHING'

The San Francisco Chronicle conducted a series of interviews with a woman who said Swalwell had assaulted her twice when she was too drunk to consent, including one encounter when he was her boss.

The woman did not report the alleged assaults because she didn’t think she’d be believed, according to the Chronicle, which viewed texts that she sent to a friend at the time, and medical records showing she sought pregnancy and STD testing days after the alleged 2024 assault.    

CNN also reported on this woman, along with three others who accused Swalwell of various kinds of sexual misconduct. The woman was shown in shadow to protect her identity and said she felt comfortable meeting Swalwell – after a 2019 drunken encounter – because she now had a partner and felt more confident:

"After that bar closed, we went to another, I went to the bathroom, and I don’t remember anything after that… I remember the next day, I can see flashes of that evening of him on top of me, me pushing him off, him grabbing me. It was a lot more aggressive. It was aggressive."

"Did you say no?" asked anchor Pamela Brown.

"Yes. I said no. I said I — in my flash that I can recall, I was pushing him off of me saying no."

What did he do?

"He didn’t stop."

The unidentified woman said that in 2019, when she was still working for Swalwell, she woke up naked with him in a hotel room after a night of heavy drinking. She said she had no memory of what happened but could feel physically that they’d had sexual contact.

CNN reported that three other women said Swalwell sent them unsolicited explicit messages or nude photos.

The New York Times interviewed a social media influencer named in the CNN report, Ally Sammarco, who said the congressman sent her inappropriate messages on Snapchat in 2021. Snapchat content is programmed to disappear after a short period of time.

Sammarco, now 28, told the paper that Swalwell told her she was attractive and asked about alcohol.

"A lot of it was like photos of him going on trips, on airplanes, in hotels, him laying in bed, and then like things like, ‘What would you do if I was, like, with you’ or, like, ‘Wish you were here,’" Sammarco told the paper, adding that he also sent an unsolicited photo of his penis.

PELOSI, CALIFORNIA DEMS SLAM SWALWELL OVER BOMBSHELL SEXUAL ASSAULT ALLEGATIONS: 'INDEFENSIBLE'

"It made me feel gross and uncomfortable. I didn’t ask for that," Sammarco is quoted as saying. While posting pictures of the birth of his third baby, she says, he was messaging her: "When am I going to see you?" 

Sammarco says she finally stopped responding after realizing the congressman wasn’t going to help her find a job.

Politico, meanwhile, reports that a former Swalwell employee, upon leaving his office, signed an agreement that required confidentiality and non-disparagement. This was related to workplace discrimination, not sexual harassment. A spokesman had denied that the office had used any NDAs.

A Swalwell attorney sent letters to two of the women cited by CNN, demanding they retract their statements or face possible legal action.

These letters said the women’s claims were "undermined" by their "voluntary and cooperative relationship with Mr. Swalwell over the course of many years," including the former staffer asking him for job references.

I guess those letters are now moot. You think? 

Had the allegations been made by just one woman, it would have been easier for the candidate to dismiss. It’s not like sexual accusations haven’t been made against Trump and the term-limited governor and 2028 contender Gavin Newsom, which he has admitted.

Even a close personal friend of Swalwell, Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego, pulled his endorsement, calling the conduct "indefensible."

SUBSCRIBE TO HOWIE'S MEDIA BUZZMETER PODCAST, A RIFF ON THE DAY'S HOTTEST STORIES

Eric Swalwell showed no sensitivity to the intimidation factor involving young female staffers. The overall pattern, according to their allegations, is the same.

It’s hardly surprising that his party wanted Swalwell immediately booted from the race. Instead of heading to Sacramento, he wiped out his political career. 

The concern is not just theoretical. A recent Fox News Digital report highlighted the controversy surrounding Google’s Gemini chatbot after the system identified multiple Republican senators as violating its hate speech policies — while naming no Democrats. 

The findings, based on a prompt evaluating all 100 U.S. senators, raised fresh questions about whether AI systems can reflect ideological assumptions embedded in their training data and design.

GOOGLE GEMINI DECLARES ONLY GOP SENATORS VIOLATE HATE SPEECH POLICY, ZERO DEMOCRATS, AUTHOR CLAIMS

That episode is not an isolated case.

A new report from America First Policy Institute (AFPI) reveals that many AI systems consistently lean in particular ideological directions.

These biases can affect how political issues, social topics and news sources are presented. Because users often trust AI as an objective tool, these subtle influences can shape opinions over time without users realizing it.

Matthew Burtell, a senior policy analyst for AI and Emerging Technology at AFPI, said the pattern appears across the industry — not just in isolated cases.

"What we found was a general ideological bias, not just in a particular model, but across the spectrum," Burtell told Fox News Digital, adding that the models tend to lean center left.

The implications go beyond bias alone. Research shows that AI systems are not just reflecting viewpoints — they can actively influence them.

That combination — bias and persuasion — raises deeper concerns about AI’s role in shaping public opinion. "AI is persuasive, and it also leans left," Burtell said. "So if you combine these two things, it may certainly have an influence on people’s beliefs about different policies." 

Recent examples have fueled those concerns. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has faced criticism from some researchers who argue its responses to political and cultural issues can skew in a particular ideological direction, while Microsoft’s AI tools have drawn scrutiny for how they frame controversial topics and limit certain viewpoints.

Those concerns have been reflected in testing as well. In 2024, Fox News Digital evaluated several leading AI chatbots — including Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot and Meta AI — to assess potential racial bias.

NEW AI COALITION TARGETS WASHINGTON, BIG TECH AS GROUP WARNS CHILD SAFETY RISKS OUTPACING SAFEGUARDS

The report also raises serious safety concerns.

AI systems have, in some cases, engaged in harmful interactions — especially with younger users. Without clear transparency about how these systems are designed and what safeguards are in place, parents and users cannot make informed decisions about which platforms are safe.

To address these risks, the report calls for greater transparency from tech companies. This includes disclosing how systems are designed, what values they prioritize, how they are tested for bias and safety, and what incidents occur after deployment.

WHITE HOUSE AI CZAR BLASTS BLUE STATES FOR INSERTING 'WOKE IDEOLOGY' INTO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The goal is not to control what AI systems say, but to give the public enough information to evaluate them critically.

Ultimately, the report makes it clear that AI is not just a tool — it is a powerful force shaping how people access information and understand the world.

Without transparency, users remain in the dark about the biases embedded in these systems. And as AI becomes more influential, that lack of visibility may have far-reaching consequences for individuals and society alike.

It was racist. Ahistorical. Unprecedented. Un-American.

During oral arguments at the Supreme Court last week, Justice Elena Kagan appeared to add another pejorative to the catalogue: revisionist.

Kagan’s accusation was, to be sure, more professionally dressed than many of the others. But it’s equally erroneous.

TRUMP’S BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP CRUSADE DRAWS BACKING FROM COHORT OF PROMINENT LEGAL SCHOLARS

Solicitor General John Sauer wasted no time pushing back on Kagan’s characterization, which, in its specific context, was limited to the government’s contention that birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of illegally or temporarily present aliens remained an open question even after the Supreme Court’s 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark.

Sauer pointed out the irony of Kagan’s characterization: the modern "consensus" that Wong Kim Ark settled these questions is the revisionist interpretation. The federal government only definitively adopted this view of Wong Kim Ark in the 1930s. And it did so at the prompting of a single senior State Department official who had earlier admitted in a law review article that his opinion was contrary to that of the general legal community.

Sauer’s response hits on a truth that cannot be repeated enough to the American public: Much of the prevailing modern assumption about "universal" birthright citizenship is based on a revisionist interpretation. The view exists as the "consensus" today only because it won out in a hostile takeover, supplanting an original, and far more limited, understanding of the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.

INSIDE SUPREME COURT: HOW TRUMP HEARD BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP ARGUMENTS

Consider the ACLU attorney’s reference during oral argument to an 1896 State Department regulation that defined birth on U.S. soil as the sole requirement for birthright citizenship, excepting only the children of tribal Indians and foreign diplomats. Yes, that policy existed. It was apparently implemented during the latter half of President Grover Cleveland’s second term. But it was, itself, a revisionist policy: It broke not just from the policies of earlier administrations, but from the policy articulated by the executive branch during Cleveland’s own first term.

In 1885, Cleveland’s first secretary of state, Thomas Bayard, had instructed federal officials not to issue an American passport to a man whom all parties agreed had been born in the United States to parents who weren’t ambassadors. Bayard concluded that the man, Richard Greisser, wasn’t a U.S. citizen, despite having been born in Ohio, because his German father and Swiss mother had never established permanent residency in the United States. In fact, they’d returned with Richard to Germany within a year of his birth and raised him there as a German subject. In stark contrast to the regulation issued more than a decade later, the first Cleveland administration declared that Greisser had been, at the time of his birth, "subject to a foreign power" and not "subject to the jurisdiction of the United States," as required by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.

Bayard’s position on birthright citizenship for the children of temporarily present aliens was the normative policy at the time. His predecessor under President Chester Arthur, Frederick Frelinghuysen, had similarly instructed federal officials not to issue citizenship documents to U.S.-born Ludwig Hausding. Like Greisser, Hausding was the son of "Saxon subjects" who were "only temporarily in the United States" and who raised him in Germany from infancy. Frelinghuysen’s State Department was clear that the mere "fact of birth [on U.S. soil], under circumstances implying alien subjection, establishes of itself no right of citizenship." The immigration status of Hausding’s parents at the time of his birth made his claims to birthright citizenship "untenable.""

EXPERT FLAGS ‘DISAPPOINTING’ QUESTIONS FROM JUSTICES IN TRUMP BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP CASE

In 1890, State Department officials under Benjamin Harrison demonstrated their continued reliance on this operative theory of birthright citizenship, rejecting citizenship claims for a child born in a New York hospital to Mary Devereaux, a would-be immigrant mother awaiting a final determination of her eligibility to enter the country. The Irish mother had become ill while being held aboard a British ship in New York Harbor and was permitted to disembark for treatment at a New York hospital until after she gave birth.

The State Department concluded that both mother and child were eligible for deportation because the child, though born on U.S. soil, was not born "subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, in the sense of the [F]ourteenth [A]mendment." It also noted that this decision was consistent with the opinion of renowned legal scholar Francis Wharton, who wrote in his treatise that the same reasoning which excludes tribal Indians from birthright citizenship "would exclude the children born in the United States to foreigners here on transient residence."

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Whatever may have led to the 1896 change in State Department policy, it was, indeed, a change — a revision — of the earliest executive branch policies based on the earliest executive branch understandings of birthright citizenship.

Those earliest executive branch interpretations of the Citizenship Clause are interchangeable with the allegedly "revisionist" theory now defended by the Trump administration. And the resultant policy lines drawn about who is or is not a citizen by birth are effectively the same.

The Trump administration’s efforts to abide by the original public meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment aren’t revisionist. They’re just restorative.

To the originalist, no distinction in words could matter more.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM AMY SWEARER

He’s the real deal.

Unlike many other politicians, Mullin has worked with his hands and broken a sweat. He can ride a horse, drive a truck, haul Sheetrock and, unlike Chuck Schumer, likely grill a burger. He ran a company that employed more than 150 people in the state he represents — a plumbing business providing real services anyone can understand, not a consultancy or lobbying group or NGO feasting off government grants. Clinton once told voters, "I feel your pain," but like millions of regular Americans, Mullin really knows what it’s like to suffer under arbitrary, dumb or unnecessary policies. He reportedly got into politics after an Obama-era regulation shut down one of his businesses.

While he is a solid Trump supporter and conservative Republican, he had no truck with those who entered the Capitol illegally on January 6, 2021. At the time, he reportedly helped Capitol police barricade the House chamber, and from the look of him at the time, the first man through any breach would not have fared well. His air is of a man who went to Washington because he felt it a duty, not because of perks, fame and future financial rewards.

DHS SECRETARY MARKWAYNE MULLIN SIGNALS CLOSER SCRUTINY OF CUSTOMS AT MAJOR SANCTUARY CITY AIRPORTS

He gets to be the good cop.

Like Hulk Hogan coming in to save the day, Mullin just got tagged into the remaining three years of Trump’s term — and the boss’s promise to deport millions of illegal aliens. Mullin is following a DHS secretary who has had a tough time in the ring. Noem inherited a nightmare. She went from governing a state with a population under a million to managing 22 federal departments and 260,000 employees. It would have overwhelmed most people.

After four years of an open border, rampant abuse of pardons and paroles, and a mix of purposeful mismanagement and incompetence, Noem was tasked with cleaning up. The Augean stables were a newly-detailed late-model Bentley by comparison. Noem achieved a lot: under her leadership, the border was mostly sealed. The number of illegal arrivals plummeted more than 90%. Bogus parole programs were stopped. Fraud was investigated instead of tolerated. Interior immigration enforcement, moribund under Biden, was resumed with great fanfare.

Perhaps too much fanfare, because the huge challenge of enforcing deportation was the Achilles heel in Noem’s performance, through which came a poisoned arrow in the form of the Ryan Pretti and Renee Good shootings by ICE officers in Minnesota. The Democratic mainstream has hardened its position from Clinton’s reform-but-enforce to now opposing almost any immigration enforcement.

Whatever really went down in the Twin Cities, the net result was a public relations disaster. By playing to the base over swing voters, seeming to put show over metrics, and presiding over the agency when things got out of hand in Minneapolis, Noem had become a liability to Trump and Republican mid-term hopes. Mullin gets to throw off this baggage and make his own impression.

He has a welcome measure of self-control.

Ben Franklin once said that any three people can keep a secret — as long as two of them are dead. He died the year Congress decided that the future capital of the United States was to be in 10 square miles of what was then literally, and remains figuratively, a swamp. Scandals plague Washington like malaria once used to. But the vaccine that prevents it is clean living and a skeleton-free closet. No doubt Mullin will be under extreme scrutiny as secretary of DHS. But provided his past is the no-nonsense westerner we’ve seen so far, he can survive the spotlight. He appears immune from capture by the Washington establishment blob.

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While affable and upright, he does have a temper. He is indeed "blunt and to the point," as he testified in his confirmation hearing. But his relatively calm and measured response to goading by Sen. Rand Paul showed some growth. "Let me earn your respect," he asked Paul, using "sir" in the address throughout, as people still do in his part of the country. In an age where elitist politicians use profanity in a token effort to be "real," Mullin’s attempted self-control stands out — even if he doesn’t always succeed.

He’s a brawler and can take a hit.

In his brief career as a mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter, Mullin had a 5-0 record and made the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. The Senate is no picnic, but being a political appointee in a Trump administration is like covering yourself in honey and beating a beehive with a stick. You have to hold your friends close and your enemies closer. Democrats want your seat, and other Republicans want your job.

Mullin has Trump’s confidence. He knows how the Hill works, and he has allies in the Senate. The half of America that still respects borders and puts public safety ahead of left-wing ideology is rooting for him to succeed.

Let’s give him a chance and see what he can do.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM SIMON HANKINSON

Trump's grip on a Republican Party he reshaped over the past decade remains extremely firm, and his endorsements in GOP primaries are highly influential.

"The Trump endorsement is king in any primary," longtime Republican strategist and communicator Jesse Hunt told Fox News Digital. Veteran GOP consultant Matt Gorman highlighted that a "Trump endorsement is extremely powerful... it’s an undeniable force."

So what should a Republican running for re-election who is facing a primary challenge from a Trump-backed candidate do to survive?

REPUBLICANS WIN BUT DEMOCRATS ALSO CLAIM VICTORY WITH BALLOT BOX SURGE IN TRUMP TERRITORY

In two high-profile cases this year, incumbents fighting for their political lives are trying to make it appear the president is supporting them anyway.

Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana is facing primary challenges from two Republicans in next month's primary: Rep. Julia Letlow and former Rep. John Fleming, who is currently the state treasurer. Trump earlier this year weighed into the race by endorsing Letlow.

Cassidy was one of only seven Senate Republicans who voted in early 2021 to convict Trump after he was impeached by the House for his role in the violent Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters who aimed to upend congressional certification of former President Joe Biden's 2020 election victory. Trump was acquitted by the Senate.

But since the start of Trump's second term 15 months ago, Cassidy has been supportive of the president's agenda and his nominees.

In his first campaign commercial after Trump endorsed Letlow, Cassidy, a doctor, highlighted a bill he authored that passed into law and increases penalties for criminals convicted of manufacturing and distributing fentanyl.

"President Trump said it was the most important legislation he would sign this year," the senator said in the spot under pictures of Trump.

In another spot, the narrator highlights that "Cassidy worked with President Trump to pass tax cuts," under pictures of the president and the senator and the words "Trump & Cassidy" repeatedly flashing on the screen.

MIDTERM ALARM BELLS: TRUMP'S APPROVAL RATINGS KEEP SLIDING BUT DEMOCRATS' BRAND IN TOILET

In Kentucky's 4th Congressional District, Rep. Thomas Massie is facing a challenge from Trump-backed Ed Gallrein in next month's primary.

Massie has long been one of Trump's most vocal GOP critics in Congress, repeatedly taking aim at the president over the Epstein files and foreign policy.

Trump allies have spent big bucks to boost Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL, and to take aim at Massie.

Massie spotlighted an old picture of himself and Trump smiling together at the top of a campaign ad last month.

In Texas, longtime GOP Sen. John Cornyn is fighting for his political life as he faces off in a late May primary runoff election against state Attorney General John Paxton, who is a MAGA firebrand and major Trump supporter.

While Trump has stayed neutral in the showdown between the two Texas Republican titans, Cornyn has repeatedly spotlighted his support for Trump in his statements and on the campaign trail. He has also figuratively hugged the president tight in his ads.

COMBUSTIBLE REPUBLICAN SENATE PRIMARY IN TEXAS HEADING INTO OVERTIME

The narrator in a recent spot noted that Cornyn "had his back" as it showed a picture of Trump and the senator standing next to each other giving the thumbs-up sign.

"We're especially grateful to your wonderful senators," Trump says in an old clip used in the ad, as the president referred to Cornyn and fellow Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.

While Cornyn's ads aren't a total stretch, since neither he nor Paxton has landed Trump's endorsement, the messaging from Cassidy and Massie does not mention that their rivals are backed by the president.

Hunt warns that could backfire by earning Trump's wrath.

"If you haven’t earned it but portray as though you have, it could be the end of your campaign," Hunt said. "That’s if the President decides to take issue with it."

We believe the answer must be yes.

As an emotionally distressed teenager, I, Prisha Mosley, found myself turning to dark places on the internet. Sucked in by chat rooms and subreddits, the addictive, alluring culture of inclusivity captivated my young, impressionable mind. While I struggled with multiple mental-health diagnoses and an eating disorder, I began to believe that what was truly wrong with me was that I was born into the wrong body.

PRISHA MOSLEY: DOCTORS TOOK MY BODY APART FOR GENDER ‘CARE.’ NOW THEY ADMIT IT WAS WRONG

I was told that instead of embracing my biological sex, I could turn myself into a boy. This seemed like the only way forward at the time, especially at the behest of my doctors, who swiftly agreed that this was what was wrong with me. They pressured me into believing that since I was already struggling with suicidal thoughts, I needed to complete the transition as soon as possible, since my life could be in danger. I was told that there was an easy and acceptable solution to my distress: testosterone injections and the surgical removal of my healthy breasts.

My doctor even told me that by taking testosterone, I would go through puberty as a boy. This was a lie. This was medical fraud.

The system that should have been designed to protect me instead threw me to the wolves. Rather than looking at my personal traumas and carefully considering the best way to resolve them, my doctors and therapists signed off on the complete mutilation of my body before I’d even gotten a driver’s license.

TOP NEW YORK HOSPITAL TO END TRANSGENDER PROGRAM FOR MINORS

I received deceptive affirmation, not medicine. My psychological suffering grew even worse than it was prior to my transition, compounded by the loss of my healthy, functioning body and body parts. And these consequences will never be reversible.

For this reason, I contacted attorneys at Campbell Miller Payne to sue on the basis of medical malpractice.

As her counsel, I, Josh Payne, have spent years examining the ins and outs of Prisha’s case — the first of its kind in the nation to proceed in court — and now others like it. Prisha’s case, sadly, isn’t unique. Around the country, vulnerable minors and young adults presenting with complex mental health conditions are directed toward life-altering medical interventions without the rigor, skepticism or informed consent that our legal and medical systems demand.

CHLOE COLE REVEALS INTENSE PRESSURE TO TRANSITION AS A MINOR, PARENTS WERE TOLD SHE'D 'PROBABLY DIE’

When Prisha sought care, she was entitled to the most basic protections embedded in both law and medicine: evidence-based treatment grounded in transparency and the core medical principle of "do no harm." But instead, her doctors sold her a false story that she could change sexes, and they mutilated her body in service of that lie.

In 2023, Prisha filed suit against the medical providers who facilitated her transition, alleging fraud, negligence and malpractice. But her case has yet to be decided by a jury of her peers. It was dismissed on a procedural technicality: time.

TEXAS DETRANSITIONER SHARES HOW DOCTORS AND INTERNET ‘COSPLAY’ GROOMED HER INTO PERMANENT SURGERY

The trial court ruled that her claims came too late. But this is precisely the injustice at the heart of this appeal. Prisha was completely unaware that the testosterone and surgery the defendants pushed on her as "treatment" could possibly harm her. Cases like Prisha’s are ill-suited to rigid statutes of limitation because the patient trusts her medical professionals to care for her honestly. When that trust is broken through deception, the harm is not immediately apparent. In fact, it is often obscured by the very authority and ideology that drive these decisions.

Recognizing this, North Carolina lawmakers extended the statute of limitations for these cases, acknowledging that justice must account for delayed understanding in matters of profound medical consequence. Yet despite this legislative win, Prisha’s claims were dismissed with prejudice, barring her from ever presenting her case before a jury.

FORMER TRANSGENDER CLINIC INSIDER CALLS $2M GENDER SURGERY VERDICT 'TIP OF THE ICEBERG'

Courts exist to examine disputed facts, not to foreclose them. In Prisha’s case, there are legitimate questions that demand examination. What did her doctors know? What did they disclose? And did they meet the standard of care owed to a vulnerable patient? Those questions deserve answers and are precisely why we filed an appeal.

That appeal is what we will be arguing on Monday, April 13, in our written submission to the court.

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This is first and foremost about principles. It is about whether the law will recognize that vulnerable patients cannot meaningfully consent to interventions whose consequences they cannot comprehend. It is about whether medical professionals may advance unproven treatments without accountability. We are told that cases like Prisha’s are rare. But whether or not they are, rarity is not a defense to negligence. The law does not exist to protect negligent and fraudulent conduct. The law exists to protect people from harm.

Our case is not only about justice for one individual, but also about setting a precedent for other such cases nationwide. It stands at the intersection of medicine, ethics and accountability in an era where all three, at times, come into conflict. If our appeal is successful, it will not guarantee victory, but it will guarantee something far more fundamental: the right for detransitioners to be heard.

A successful appeal will prove that accountability does not end when the medical procedure does. On the heels of the Fox Varian $2 million verdict this year, it would prove that justice for detransitioners nationwide is coming.

Monday, the court will consider our arguments and determine whether justice can be advanced in our case. We believe this should not be a difficult decision.

Joshua Payne is an attorney representing Prisha Mosley and co-founder of Campbell Miller Payne, a law firm dedicated to representing detransitioners and others harmed through medical transition procedures. 

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM PRISHA MOSLEY

For many chemotherapy patients, "chemo mouth" can make food taste metallic, bland or spoiled — leading to weight loss, poor nutrition and reduced motivation to eat.

But a small red berry scientifically known as Synsepalum dulcificum — commonly called "miracle fruit" — is drawing attention for helping patients better tolerate food and, in turn, reclaim a sense of normalcy.

CANCER DOCTOR SAYS AMERICANS SHOULD EAT MORE OF 5 KEY PROTECTIVE FOODS

"A lot of side effects from cancer treatments are underreported," Dr. Mike Cusnir, a board-certified medical oncologist and co-director of gastrointestinal malignancies at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, Florida, told Fox News Digital.

He noted that taste changes can become more than a minor inconvenience over time.

"The alteration in taste will end up giving the patient the sensation that everything is absolutely bland," Cusnir said. 

"And we may think that that's negligible, that it's not that important — but with time it becomes bothersome to the point where the patient doesn't eat, then there's weight loss."

5 ULTRA-PROCESSED FOODS THAT MAY BE WORSE FOR YOUR HEALTH THAN YOU THINK, EXPERT SAYS

The experience varies widely from person to person, but the impact can be significant. In some cases, poor nutrition and weight loss may complicate ongoing treatment, he added.

In his research, he found that common workarounds such as using plastic utensils, adjusting food temperature or adding spices offered little relief for chemo mouth.

Cusnir remembers the first time he encountered miracle fruit — a West African berry that looks like a cranberry and contains miraculin, which temporarily alters taste perception.

A patient brought it to his office and told him to try it with a lemon.

COMMON FRUIT FOUND IN AMERICAN KITCHENS MAY SLOW DEADLY FORM OF BREAST CANCER, STUDY SAYS

"I'm like, 'That's going to be tangy,'" Cusnir recalled. "He's like, 'OK, try it.' So I tried it. It was tangy. Then he said, 'Now, try the fruit and then squeeze it again.' And it tasted like lemonade."

The effect typically lasts about 30 to 40 minutes, though researchers are still working to better understand how it works and why it affects people differently.

In a small clinical study, Cusnir and his team compared patients using the fruit with those relying on standard, everyday ways of managing symptoms.

About half of the patients who tried miracle fruit reported improvements in taste, along with better overall quality of life, and 14% gained weight.

CHOCOLATE, CHEESE AND YOGURT LINKED TO LONGER LIFE IN DETAILED STUDY OF 3 MILLION PEOPLE

The fruit did not work for everyone, however, and the findings are considered preliminary.

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center notes that while small studies have suggested possible improvements in taste among chemotherapy patients, the evidence remains limited and inconsistent. 

More rigorous research is needed to determine how effective the fruit is and which patients are most likely to benefit, the experts say.

The berry itself is delicate and often sold frozen or in tablet or powder form, as it can lose potency quickly after harvest. Availability has increased in recent years, though quality and effectiveness may vary between products.

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Cusnir said the fruit has not shown clear safety concerns in limited observations to date, and there is no strong evidence of harmful interactions with cancer treatments. Still, comprehensive safety data are lacking, so patients should consult their care team before trying new supplements or therapies.

There has also been some interest in studying the fruit for people with diabetes, Cusnir said, as its taste-altering effect could make lower-sugar foods more palatable.

For patients dealing with taste changes, even modest improvements may help with day-to-day routines.

"If a meal becomes a challenge for the patient, and they just don't want to be there because they're bothered by the food, they may isolate," Cusnir said. 

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That loss, he added, can compound the already difficult experience of cancer treatment.

"Patients are tired, fatigued and the time they spend with their family — if food is bothering them — it creates more isolation," he said.

Helping patients enjoy even a small part of a meal again can make a meaningful difference, Cusnir said.

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"Patients are with us maybe 15 minutes every few weeks," he said. 

"But they're at home, with their family, three meals a day."

This should not come as a surprise to Americans. We, too, bristle at suggestions that anyone but our own lawful citizens ought to have a say in our democratic process. And beyond the extreme margins of our politics, there is little evidence that foreign influence campaigns are very successful in shaping the views of American voters.

America’s own political leaders have traditionally abided by the idea that politics stopped at the water’s edge. They’ve sought to avoid even the appearance of telling other sovereign democracies how to run their internal affairs and resisted the urge to treat foreign policy as an extension of our domestic politics.

I haven’t hesitated to call out departures from these prudent customs, like the increasingly flagrant ways that elected Democrats have sought to insert themselves into the lively democratic politics of Israel. Yet, for the better part of a decade, Hungarian politics has persisted as an object of intense fascination in certain corners of the American right.

TRUMP CALLS INTO VANCE-ORBAN HUNGARY EVENT: 'MY KIND OF PEOPLE'

This phenomenon is endlessly puzzling. America’s self-proclaimed national conservatives spoke of Orban’s Hungary as an oasis of traditionalism amid the wasteland of an ailing, liberal and decadent postmodern Europe. And some American politicians appear to have bought into the myth.

To be clear, it is a myth. Orban’s champions on this side of the Atlantic may well consider his illiberal court-packing, crony capitalism or restriction of free speech an acceptable price for their desired social utopia. Yet for all the talk of reviving faith and family through statist intervention, Hungary’s religious participation and birth rates under his rule have declined right alongside the rest of the West.

Of course, had any of the breathless pronouncements of Hungary’s unique virtue been true, they’d be a reasonable basis for personal affinity ... but not for U.S. foreign policy. Shared values can be a useful entrée into deeper cooperation with allies and partners. But to the extent that values have played a central role in successful U.S. foreign policy, it has been in service to, and aligned with, our strategic interests.

TRUMP ALLY ORBAN ISSUES SCATHING LETTER DEMANDING ZELENSKYY CHANGE UKRAINE'S 'ANTI-HUNGARIAN POLICY'

Clearly, Orban’s fawning servitude to authoritarians doesn’t reflect American values. But far more importantly, his government’s fealty to Moscow, its willingness to be a gateway into Europe for China’s predatory machinations, and its deepening ties with Iran run counter to America’s interests.

These allegiances ought to matter a great deal to American conservatives who, quite rightly, expect European allies to carry a greater share of the burden of deterring threats to our shared Western interests.

The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy observes that America "will need a strong Europe to help us successfully compete" with strategic adversaries. But Europe’s tremendous progress toward greater burden-sharing on defense has come despite Hungary’s defense budget shrinking by 6% last year and Orban’s active opposition to European Union support for Ukraine. While other allies have decreased their reliance on Russian energy, Orban has doubled down on Hungary’s dependence on Russian gas. And in 2024, he struck an "all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership" with America’s foremost strategic adversary, the PRC.

Orban’s Hungary offered America little in the way of strategic alignment, let alone "moral cooperation." Today, the highest shared value between Americans and the people of Hungary is the right to choose our own leaders, freely and fairly, without foreign or domestic interference.

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Of course, American conservatives who still worry in particular about the social fabric and moral values of Europe’s 19th-largest economy should take heart: The next Hungarian prime minister is unlikely to turn Budapest into a den of iniquity or impose Sharia law. And I have yet to hear him propose opening the country’s borders or sacrificing its sovereignty on the altar of the European Union.

Instead, what seems to have motivated Hungarian voters is a distaste for the crony capitalism and corruption that have weakened Hungary’s economy and the image of its ruling party. Their next prime minister is, after all, a product of that ruling party who campaigned on addressing Hungary’s economic woes rather than just scapegoating them. I suspect Hungary’s voters will, in turn, judge his government on whether he succeeds in doing so.

Watching this from Kentucky, it is hard to understand how some on the American right thought that staking U.S. influence on the outcome of a parliamentary election in a small, central European country was putting America’s interests first. To the extent that what happens in Hungary matters to America, it is a question of whether its actions on the world stage — not its social policies — align with America’s strategic interests.

The future course of U.S.-Hungary strategic alignment under the new government remains to be seen. But to the extent that Hungary’s next leaders behave with less obeisance toward our adversaries and a more serious focus on our shared interests, Washington may be wise to welcome this change.

"Applying total systemic friction on the cartels," a Sunday night post on SOUTHCOM's X account declares.

"On April 11, at the direction of #SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted two lethal kinetic strikes on two vessels operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations," the post continued.

COAST GUARD SEIZES OVER 4,500 POUNDS OF COCAINE WORTH $34M FROM SUSPECTED NARCO-TERRORIST VESSEL ON EASTER

"Intelligence confirmed the vessels were transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and were engaged in narco-trafficking operations," SOUTHCOM asserted.

The post noted that one individual survived one of the strikes.

ALLEGED NARCO-TERRORISTS KILLED AS US FORCES STRIKE SUSPECTED DRUG-TRAFFICKING VESSEL IN CARIBBEAN

"Two male narco-terrorists were killed, and one narco-terrorist survived the first strike. Three male narco-terrorists were killed during the second strike. Following the engagements, USSOUTHCOM immediately notified U.S. Coast Guard to activate the Search and Rescue system for the survivor. No U.S. military forces were harmed," the post stated.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth shared SOUTHCOM'S post about the strikes on his personal X account.

CARTELS FEAR US RETALIATION AS TRUMP-ERA PRESSURE RESHAPES STRATEGY: 'THEY FEAR THE UNITED STATES'

President Donald Trump's administration has controversially carried out scads of such deadly attacks against alleged narcoterrorists.

The standout Miami edge rusher was cited at the scene by the Florida Highway Patrol for operating a motor vehicle in a "careless or negligent manner." The charge was later dismissed because of a "defective citation," after Bain Jr. entered a not guilty plea, according to court records. 

The crash report indicates that Bain Jr. did not show any impairment, and was not suspected of alcohol or drug use and that no tests were given at the time.

Three NFL teams told OutKick's Armando Salguero over the weekend that they are aware of the crash, but no team would comment to what extent the incident would affect the first-team All-American defensive end's status for the April 23-25 NFL Draft. 

The news of the first crash was first reported by Oliver Connolly.

OutKick has reached out to Bain Jr., the University of Miami and the Florida State Attorney's office but has yet to receive comment from either. 

The incident occurred March 17, 2024, when Bain Jr. was driving on South Florida's Interstate 95 shortly after 4 a.m. and he hit another vehicle from behind. That collision sent Bain Jr.'s vehicle — a 2021 Land Rover registered to a corporation named Miami Sports 27 — into the concrete wall on the east side of the highway, and then careening all the way across the entire multilane highway and into the west side concrete wall, according to the crash report. 

Miami Sports 27 is a non-profit company owned by Eric Dounn, an agent who also works with LAA Management, that also has ties to a memorabilia store on eBay.

To read the full crash report, click the link. 

The Florida Highway Patrol was dispatched at 4:17 a.m. and once a trooper arrived at the scene, he found 22-year-old Destiny Betts, who was riding in a passenger seat without a seat belt, incapacitated, per the crash report. Betts was transported to Ryder Trauma Center by the Miami-Dade Fire Department. 

According to a GoFundMe set up by a family member, Betts lost consciousness as a result of the crash. A note on the crash report indicated that Betts was pronounced dead three months later, on June 13, 2024, by a Northshore Hospice nurse. 

The report does not specify an official cause of death.

OutKick has reached out to the family attorney of Destiny Betts and received the following statement, which indicates they are not open to answering questions around the circumstances of the wreck and what happened in its aftermath. 

"As her family, we remain deeply committed to honoring her memory in a meaningful and appropriate way. Destiny’s passing was the result of a tragic accident that occurred several years ago. While the loss remains incredibly painful for our family, we have worked hard to find peace and move forward. At this time, we are not seeking public attention surrounding this tragedy and respectfully request that our family’s privacy be honored. We also wish Mr. Bain the best as he continues his life and career. Thank you for respecting our wishes during this difficult matter."

Miami Hurricanes football players Nyjalik Kelly and Wesley Bissainthe and one other female passenger named LaDreama Roberts were also occupants in the vehicle at the time of the crash. All three were listed as having possible injuries, but only the female passenger was taken to a hospital, according to the FHP report.

OutKick reached out to all three, but has not received a response as of publication.

Both Bissainthe and Kelly, who finished his college career at UCF, are also eligible for the upcoming NFL Draft, although neither is expected to be drafted nearly as high as Bain. 

In addition to the crash in March 2024, court records show that Bain Jr. was issued a citation on Oct. 10, 2025, driving a 2025 Tesla Cybertruck, in which he was again cited for careless driving. The citation, shown below, lists a violation of Florida statute 316.1925(1), which is careless driving. 

OutKick has inquired about who the owner of the Tesla was, but has not yet received that information.

Records state there was an "accident indicator" that came with the charge, meaning he was involved in a crash, which the citation states. That case was dismissed in February of this year, also because of a "defective citation."

Bain would go on to finish the season with Miami as one of the best defensive players in college football, helping lead the Hurricanes to the CFP title game, where they lost to Indiana. 

The NFL Draft is in Pittsburgh next week. 

OutKick has reached out to the Florida Highway Patrol for comment on what led to the citations being dismissed. OutKick has also contacted the University of Miami for comment on whether it was aware of either incident. Neither has responded as of publication of this article.

"I hate Republicans," Piker said on "Pod Save America." "I oppose them. I say that all the time. I think that the Republicans are far more damaging. The biggest terrorists, the biggest domestic terrorist in this country, the biggest terrorist internationally is the Republican Party. And not only that, but it's just like, they ... I want to fight against the growing fascist movement in this country."

He also called out the Democratic Party's "conciliatory attitude" toward the Republican Party and "their lack of investment" in pushing back against a growing "fascist" movement.

WHO IS HASAN PIKER? MEET THE FAR-LEFT STREAMER WHO IS STIRRING UP CONTROVERSY ONLINE AND DIVIDING DEMOCRATS

"On the one hand, you say Donald Trump is a dangerous force," Piker said. "I see that. I recognize that. But then you turn around, and you take on his anti-immigrant narratives and anti-immigrant messaging from the 2020 election that you won and decide you're going to be the sincere candidate that ends up, you know, dealing with the growth of migration in this country. It's a failure." 

Piker did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.

Piker has become an influential figure within the Democratic Party, with some politicians embracing and even campaigning with him ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Others, however, have called out Piker for making what they described as antisemitic and anti-American comments.

POPULAR FAR-LEFT STREAMER UNLEASHES PROFANE TIRADE AGAINST VIETNAMESE COMMUNIST REFUGEE IN RESURFACED VID

Among his past comments were claims that America "deserved" 9/11 and defending Hamas as being "a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state" of Israel.

Piker doubled down on his Hamas comparison when asked about it on "Pod Save America."

"I've also said I'm a harm-reduction voter," he said. "I'm a lesser evil voter and, therefore, I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time because I'm looking at the situation as a paramilitary organization that has a political party as well, a political bureau as well that is entirely comprised not as an alien force but of orphaned children that have, you know, had their parents killed by an apartheid state that has been dominating the lives of Palestinians for 80 years at this point and have done a genocide at this point as well."

HASAN PIKER ACCUSES BILL MAHER OF BEING AN 'ISLAMOPHOBE' AND DEMONSTRATING 'ANTI-BLACKNESS'

Piker was also asked about his 9/11 comments, which he had previously walked back as "inappropriate," and insisted that he was "anti-civilian death."

"I'm anti-civilian murder," he said. "I'm anti-civilian death. That's one of my first principles is that I'm anti-imperialist. I'm anti-war for that reason, because I don't want civilians to die. I don't want random people to die. Hey, I don't even want people to go out and die in the process of trying to kill people."

"My wife and I will be flying to Florence, Italy, next week and are wondering if there are any special tips we should be aware of before we leave."

Chuck, you're asking the right question at the right time. A few smart moves before you leave can save you from frozen credit cards, locked accounts or a phone nightmare overseas. Let's walk through what actually matters.

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HOW TO MINIMIZE YOUR DIGITAL FOOTPRINT WHEN YOU TRAVEL
 

Your phone holds your banking apps, email, travel confirmations and personal photos. That makes it more valuable than your passport to the wrong person. Start with updates. Install the latest version of your operating system and update your apps. Security patches close known gaps that attackers look for, especially on public networks.

Next, turn on built-in protections:

A lot of travelers assume their phone plan will work automatically overseas. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it leads to a shocking bill. Here are your main options:

Easy to activate but often expensive if you use a lot of data.

This is usually the best mix of price and convenience. You can install it before your trip and switch it on when you land.

Often cheap but requires swapping your physical SIM and dealing with local setup.

Before choosing, make sure your phone is unlocked. If it is tied to your carrier, some options will not work. Also, turn off automatic data roaming until you need it. That one setting alone can prevent surprise charges. 

Want a deeper breakdown of which option is best for you? Read this guide on how to stay connected while traveling.

POPULAR TRAVEL SCAMS AND SAFETY WARNINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE TAKING VACATION
 

Airports, hotels and cafés offer free public Wi-Fi everywhere. It feels harmless. It is not always safe. Public networks can expose your data if they are not secured. That includes logins, credit card details and emails. Using a virtual private network (VPN) adds a layer of encryption between your device and the internet. It helps protect your activity and reduces the risk of someone intercepting your data. Even with protection, avoid logging into sensitive accounts on public Wi-Fi when possible. Wait until you are on a trusted network or use your mobile data.

Tourist areas attract more than travelers. They attract scammers.

Keep your setup simple:

When you need cash, use ATMs attached to banks. Standalone machines in busy areas are more likely to be tampered with. Pay attention to your surroundings when entering your PIN. Distraction tactics are common in crowded areas. Also, notify your bank before you leave. That reduces the chance of your card being flagged and declined mid-trip. If you want more ways to protect your cards while traveling, read this guide.

Your phone can make the entire experience smoother if you use it right. Translation apps help you understand menus, signs and conversations in real time. Camera features can translate text instantly, which is incredibly useful in unfamiliar places. Maps can be downloaded offline, so you are not stuck without directions when your signal drops. Location sharing adds peace of mind. Let a trusted contact see where you are during your trip. These small features make things easier and help you stay focused on the experience instead of logistics.

STATE DEPARTMENT REVEALS WORLD'S MOST DANGEROUS COUNTRIES FOR AMERICANS
 

It is tempting to post your location in real time. That can expose more than you intend. Sharing that you are away from home can signal an empty house. Posting your exact location while you are still there can also create unnecessary risk. Instead, share photos after you leave a location or after you return home. It is a simple shift that protects your privacy.

Before you head to the airport, run through this:

These take minutes but can save hours of frustration later.

Travel today is as much digital as it is physical. Your phone connects everything from your boarding pass to your hotel room. If you protect that one device, you reduce most of the common travel risks. You avoid surprise charges. You lower the chance of account lockouts. You keep your personal data from being exposed. It also makes your trip smoother. You spend less time troubleshooting and more time enjoying where you are.

Take my quiz: How safe is your online security?

Think your devices and data are truly protected? Take this quick quiz to see where your digital habits stand. From passwords to Wi-Fi settings, you’ll get a personalized breakdown of what you’re doing right and what needs improvement. Take my Quiz here: Cyberguy.com.

Travel should feel exciting, not stressful. Most problems people run into are preventable with a little preparation. Take a few minutes before you leave to lock things down. It is one of the easiest ways to protect your trip.

What other travel questions do you have when it comes to your tech?  Let us know by writing to us at Cyberguy.com.

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Garcia received a code of conduct warning after he smashed his driver in frustration at Augusta National. He slammed his club into the turf twice after hitting a shot that ended up in the bunker. Then he took a swipe at a table with a green cooler on it.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM

Greenberg seemingly saw Garcia’s anger as a detrimental issue.

"A lifetime exemption is a privilege extended by Augusta to its champions out of respect," he wrote on X. "If that respect is not reciprocated, there is no law that says a past champ cannot be banned.

"I’m not sure they should have Sergio Garcia back after the garbage he pulled today."

RORY MCILROY REPEATS AS MASTERS CHAMPION, JOINS RARE COMPANY AT AUGUSTA NATIONAL

Garcia, who competes in LIV Golf, won the Masters in 2017. It is his only major victory of his career. Since winning in 2017, he has only made the cut for the final two rounds once. The feat came at this year’s tournament. He finished 52nd in the field.

He joined LIV Golf in 2022 as he was among the PGA Tour stars who left the organization. He has two wins in the series – at LIV Golf Andalucía in 2024 and LIV Golf Hong Kong in 2025. He played his way into a playoff four times, only winning the Andalucía event.

Fox News’ Ryan Morik contributed to this report.

Follow Fox News Digital’s sports coverage on X and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.

There is no evidence that unvaccinated blood presents any safety benefit, according to a new study published in the journal Transfusion.

There is currently no process for checking whether donated blood comes from vaccinated or unvaccinated donors, experts say.

CANCER SURVIVAL APPEARS TO DOUBLE WITH COMMON VACCINE, RESEARCHERS SAY

Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, which conducted the research, received 15 requests for unvaccinated blood between Jan. 1, 2024, and Dec. 31, 2025. The median age of patients was 17 years old and more than half were children, the university reported.

Thirteen of the patients received blood donated specifically for them by family members, which is known as "direct donation." This can be risky, because most direct donors are giving blood for the first time, and their donations are more likely to contain "potentially harmful pathogens," the authors noted. 

"Despite being framed as ‘safer,’ directed donations may paradoxically increase risk."

COVID VACCINE UNDER NEW SCRUTINY AFTER STUDIES REVEAL POSSIBLE HEALTH RISKS

Among the studied patient group, two became much sicker after refusing a standard blood transfusion. 

One patient developed anemia, a condition where the body lacks enough healthy red blood cells to carry adequate oxygen. The other developed hemodynamic shock, a serious condition in which there is insufficient blood flow and oxygen to the body’s tissues, potentially leading to organ failure.

Requests for unvaccinated blood spiked after the approval of COVID-19 vaccines, posing a "recurring challenge for transfusion services and clinicians," the researchers stated.

"These requests were associated with care delays, escalation and inefficiencies," they indicated.

FAMILY PLEADS FOR HELP AS TEEN FACES LIFE-THREATENING BONE MARROW FAILURE

The researchers recommend that health systems create standardized policies to handle these types of requests.

"Regulatory and professional organizations have opposed these non-evidence-based policies, emphasizing that blood centers do not record or convey donor COVID-19 vaccination status and that evidence demonstrates transfusion from vaccinated donors poses no unique risk."

The Vanderbilt study had some limitations, the researchers noted. It looked at a few cases and only included situations where special blood donations made it to the blood bank, so it doesn’t show how often people made this request overall. 

CLICK HERE FOR MORE HEALTH STORIES

It also didn’t include cases where concerns were resolved through conversations with doctors or ethics teams, the team noted.

As this was an observational study and not a controlled experiment, it only showed an association and could not prove that refusing standard blood directly caused any specific patient outcomes.

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Several states have introduced proposals aimed at allowing patients to receive blood specifically from donors who have not received COVID-19 vaccines.

In Oklahoma, one such proposal called for the creation of a state-run blood bank dedicated to collecting and distributing blood from unvaccinated donors. Despite these efforts, none of the measures have been enacted into law.

Dr. Marc Siegel, Fox News senior medical analyst, was not involved in the research, but said these types of requests are "part of an ongoing fear culture."

"It is also very difficult to test for, because the antibodies may be positive from COVID itself as well as the vaccine, and it can be difficult to tell the difference," he told Fox News Digital.

The notion that receiving blood from someone who had the vaccine would be harmful is not based on any scientific studies, the doctor reiterated.

"If people want to group up to get blood from other unvaccinated people, I respect that choice, though it will be expensive and will limit options," Siegel added.

Diane Calmus, vice president of government affairs for America’s Blood Centers in Washington, D.C., said that requests for direct donations are "exceedingly rare" – representing about 0.06% of the U.S. blood supply.

"Requests for unvaccinated blood are something we've seen wax and wane since the introduction of the COVID vaccine," Calmus, who also was not involved in the Vanderbilt study, told Fox News Digital. "The challenge is that there's no way to tell whether someone’s blood has been vaccinated – there's no test that exists."

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Any situation where someone requires a blood transfusion is most likely a "very scary time," she noted.

"Family members want to be cautious, and this is why it's so important that people talk to a transfusion medicine-trained doctor," the expert advised. "These are physicians who have a specialty in blood transfusions … and who can answer those questions that any individual will have."

Calmus pointed out that it takes some time to facilitate a direct donation, and that there is a specific process in place. 

"Blood has to be prescribed. You can't just show up at the blood center and say, ‘I would like my sister to donate for me,’" she said. "There needs to be a prescription. It needs to go through the hospital … they need to make sure it is the right blood for the right patient."

Calmus emphasized that the U.S. blood supply is "meticulously tracked," and that there have been no indications of a lack of safety. She also stressed the ongoing need for blood donors.

"We need people – vaccinated or not vaccinated – to show up and donate blood, because it is the blood on the shelves that saves lives."

Fox News Digital reached out to the Vanderbilt researchers for comment.

While the first lady called on Congress to take additional steps to let Epstein "survivors" tell their stories, Epstein victims and members of Congress themselves argued that the onus is with the Trump administration, not Congress. 

"First Lady asks Congress to bring Epstein survivors in for testimony. With all due respect, that’s Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche's job!" Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who has been at odds with the president and his administration over how it has handled the Epstein case, said after the first lady's remarks. "Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and I already gave brave survivors a chance to tell their horrific stories on Capitol Hill. Pam Bondi wouldn’t even acknowledge them. PROSECUTE!"

"Actually, Congress did act," added Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., in response to the First Lady's Thursday night remarks calling on Congress to do more. "But Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche is violating the law and refusing to release the Epstein files as required by law."