Custom-designed polymers open new path to electrochemical separations for sustainable drug manufacturing

Enantiomers, or molecule pairs that are mirror images of each other, make up more than half of FDA-approved drugs in use today, including those used in treatments for cancer, neurologic diseases and arthritis. Separating enantiomers is critical for drug manufacturing because the effect of each molecule in the pair can be very different—for example, one enantiomer might cure a headache while its mirror-image could cause a headache.

source https://phys.org/news/2025-05-custom-polymers-path-electrochemical-sustainable.html

Revisiting Elon Musk’s Most Controversial Moments in the White House

Elon Musk has announced that his time as the leader of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is reaching its end.

“As my scheduled time as a special government employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President [Trump] for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” Musk said on X. “The DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.”

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Tesla CEO Musk has implemented a slew of far-reaching changes in his bid to eliminate waste within the government. His cuts at federal agencies and the termination of billions of dollars of government contracts—many of which have reportedly since been revived—prompted much criticism.

And Musk has personally taken a hit, too. His Tesla showrooms have been the subject of arson attacks and people have boycotted both him and his businesses in protest.

Read More: Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington 

Here’s a look back at Musk’s most controversial moments during his time as a “special government employee.”

“Cruel” email to federal employees sparks mass criticism

In February, Musk’s leadership was questioned over an email sent to various government departments, requesting that employees respond within a certain time frame and summarize their work for the week.

The email—which boasted the subject line “What did you do last week?”—was sent from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to workers in several government departments. Musk added via social media that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” However, there was no mention of resignation in the email sent to employees.

The email—and Musk’s accompanying social media warning—garnered ire from several unions and prominent voices.

Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), referred to the directive as “cruel and disrespectful,” and called Musk an “out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire.”

Some department heads initially instructed their employees to focus on their own internal performance review process, as opposed to responding to the email. FBI Director Kash Patel told employees in an email that they should “pause any responses.”

Earlier this week, it was reported that the Pentagon had ended the initiative with its civilian employees, who will no longer be required to send an email specifying what they did the previous week.

Overhauling multiple agencies through DOGE

Musk has garnered much controversy during his time leading DOGE, specifically for his massive cuts at the federal level which, alongside actions from the Trump Administration, contributed to mass layoffs, the termination of government contracts, and efforts to close entire agencies. DOGE claims to have saved an estimated $175 billion for the federal government, a number which has been brought into question during various verification attempts.

Musk’s goal to cut $2 trillion dollars has resulted in a multi-state lawsuit against Musk and DOGE, amid allegations that they violated the Constitution by accessing government data systems, canceling contracts of federal agencies, and terminating federal employees.

Musk’s straight-arm salute at a Trump rally

At a celebratory rally after Trump’s inauguration, Musk’s White House career got off to a contentious start when he seemingly offered a straight-arm salute at the Capitol One Arena in Washington, D.C., as he excitedly told the crowd: “My heart goes out to you.”

The motion immediately garnered controversy, with some people, including history professors who study fascism and U.S. Representatives, expressing concern that the action was similar to a Nazi salute.

Some, including the Anti-Defamation League, came to Musk’s defense, arguing that he was seemingly making an “awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm.”

Musk addressed the controversy himself, saying: “The radical leftists are really upset that they had to take time out of their busy day praising Hamas to call me a Nazi.”

DOGE employees resigning

Several civil service employees resigned from DOGE, citing their refusal to use their expertise to “dismantle critical public services,” according to a joint resignation letter sent to the White House chief of staff Susie Wiles on Feb. 25, that was obtained by the Associated Press.

The employees had worked for the United States Digital Service, but said their duties had been integrated into DOGE.

Musk directly responded to the AP article, calling it “fake news from Associated Propaganda.”

“These were Dem political holdovers who refused to return to the office,” Musk said of the employees. “They would have been fired had they not resigned.”

There have also been mass resignations from top-ranking government officials since Trump returned to the White House and set up DOGE.

David Lebryk, the highest-ranking Treasury Department career official, retired on Jan. 31 after clashing with Musk’s team over access to government payment systems, the Washington Post reported.

Musk criticizes Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”

Shortly before announcing that his DOGE role was coming to its scheduled end, Musk criticized Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” in a public forum. During an interview with CBS, he agreed that the spending bill—which is now heading to the Senate—undermines the spending cuts brought about by DOGE.

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit,” Musk said. “I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both, [that’s] my personal opinion.”

It isn’t the first time that Musk has openly critiqued movements or people from the White House. He previously called out Peter Navarro—the senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, and the architect of Trump’s tariffs—calling him “dumber than a sack of bricks.”

source https://time.com/7289468/elon-musk-controversial-white-house-moments-doge-departure/

The frosted elfin butterfly returns home to North Florida

The spring sun glinted off the cars rolling through Ichetucknee Springs State Park, but the caravan wasn't headed to the park's famous recreation spots. It was there for conservation, and the scientists in the lead were towing the precious cargo: tiny green caterpillars. Entering a trail road typically closed to visitors, the cars bounced along in deep, sandy grooves and snagged branches on their undercarriages.

source https://phys.org/news/2025-05-frosted-elfin-butterfly-home-north.html

New study suggests how wide-orbit planets form, supporting existence of Planet Nine

In the cold, dark outskirts of planetary systems far beyond the reach of the known planets, mysterious gas giants and planetary masses silently orbit their stars—sometimes thousands of astronomical units (AU) away. For years, scientists have puzzled over how these "wide-orbit" planets, including the elusive Planet Nine theorized in our own solar system, could have formed. Now, a team of astronomers may have finally found the answer.

source https://phys.org/news/2025-05-wide-orbit-planets-planet.html

What Germany’s Green Light for Ukraine to Strike Inside Russia Means for the War

Germany has given Ukraine the green light to strike targets inside Russia using long-range weapons supplied by Berlin, in a decision that signals a notable hardening of Western resolve as the war grinds on.

The shift, announced by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, lifts longstanding restrictions on the range of German-delivered missiles and aligns Berlin with some of Kyiv’s other allies, including the UK and France.

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“We will do everything in our power to continue supporting Ukraine,” Merz said in a statement on social media platform X on Monday.

Read more: Ukraine’s Plan to Survive Trump

While it remains unclear whether Germany will be providing Ukraine specifically with Taurus missiles, as Kyiv previously requested, Merz confirmed that Ukrainian forces are no longer bound by geographic limits when using German systems. “Ukraine can now also defend itself by attacking military positions in Russia,” the Chancellor said.

The Kremlin condemned the move. Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told state media it was “a rather dangerous decision” and warned it would undermine ongoing efforts to reach a political settlement.

“If such decisions are made, they will absolutely go against our aspirations to reach a political settlement and the efforts being made within the framework of the settlement,” he said.

Read more: The Meaning of Germany’s Dramatic Rearmament

The shift marks a departure from Merz’s predecessor, Olaf Scholz, who had resisted sending long-range weaponry to Ukraine, citing fears of Russian escalation. In a visit to Kyiv in December last year, Scholz reiterated his refusal, even as Germany unveiled a military aid package worth €650 million.

By contrast, Merz sought to emphasize unity among Ukraine’s Western allies. “There are no longer any range restrictions on weapons delivered to Ukraine, neither by the British nor by the French nor by us nor by the Americans,” the Chancellor highlighted at a press conference on Monday.

A government official later told Reuters that the announcement was not a change in policy, since Merz’s administration, in office since May 6, had never imposed such limits.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to visit Berlin for a meeting with Merz on Wednesday, May 28.

While Berlin’s position has now shifted, the U.S. is yet to confirm whether it has lifted all restrictions on long-range missile supplies to Ukraine. According to the Kyiv Post, two senior officials said that whilst some restrictions were still in place, President Donald Trump was “seriously considering” lifting these. The report said that these were under review by Trump, and that he “believes that the current status quo does not serve our common interests of bringing Russia to the [negotiation] table.”

Read more: Trump Discovers the War in Ukraine May Be Too Complicated to Fix

Former President Joe Biden had lifted some restrictions on long-range missiles. In November 2024, less than two weeks after he lost the presidential race to Trump, Biden authorized the use of ATACMS missiles in strikes on Russian territory. Ukraine has since used these weapons to hit targets in the Bryansk region and other parts of western Russia.

Chancellor Merz’s decision to lift similar restrictions could bolster Ukraine’s ability to strike deep inside Russian territory. In November, the Ukrainian military used British long-range Storm Shadow missiles. Military sources told Sky News that strikes using the missiles were “very successful,” hitting targets in the Kursk region.

The announcement from Merz comes at a moment of heightened uncertainty over a possible ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. Last week, President Trump held what he called “excellent” calls with both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky in which he said that negotiations between the two countries will begin immediately.

But within days, Russia launched its largest attack on its neighbor since the start of the war, killing 12 people, including three children in a barrage of 367 drones and missiles. 

Trump, posting on TruthSocial, condemned the attack as “needlessly killing a lot of people” and called Putin “absolutely crazy.” The President also criticized Zelensky, saying that the Ukrainian President “is doing his country no favors by talking the way he does. Everything out of his mouth causes problems, I don’t like it, and it better stop.”

source https://time.com/7288843/germany-ukraine-russia-strikes-explained/

Permafrost thaw: Gradual change or climate tipping point?

The Arctic is warming almost four times faster than the rest of the planet. High temperatures are already causing the permanently frozen ground, known as permafrost, to thaw. The carbon contained in this soil is then released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide or methane, further exacerbating global warming.

source https://phys.org/news/2025-05-permafrost-gradual-climate.html

Did Brigitte Macron Push the French President in the Face? What to Know About Their Moment on the Plane

The office of French President Emmanuel Macron has dismissed suggestions of discord after footage emerged appearing to show his wife, Brigitte Macron, pushing him in the face before the couple disembarked from a plane in Vietnam.

The video, filmed on Sunday as the Macrons arrived in Vietnam to mark the start of his Southeast Asia tour, shows the President standing in the doorway of the aircraft when a pair of hands—belonging to a person wearing a red blazer, later identified as Brigitte—reach out and appear to shove him away.

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Macron briefly recoils, turns his head, and then smiles and waves at the press.

Bizarre moment Emmanuel Macron is slapped by his wife Brigitte pic.twitter.com/kYsE5MCDV1

— The Sun (@TheSun) May 26, 2025

Brigitte did not take her husband’s arm as the couple walked down the plane’s steps together.

Read more: In Gently Correcting Trump, Macron Sends a Message on Ukraine Peace Deal

The moment was widely circulated in French media and sparked commentary about the nature of the interaction, with the headline of the daily newspaper Le Parisien asking: ‘Slap or Squabble?’ 

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Macron said he had been “joking” with his wife, adding that “everyone needs to calm down.”

His office issued a similar response, saying “it was a moment of closeness” between the pair.

“It was a moment where the president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip by horsing around. It’s a moment of complicity. It was all that was needed to give ammunition to the conspiracy theorists,” his office said, according to AP.

The French president used the episode to caution against misinterpretations online, pointing to false claims circulated earlier this month that a crumpled up tissue he picked up during a train trip to Ukraine was a bag of cocaine.  

Here’s what we know about the couple.

How did Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron meet?

The Macrons’ relationship has long attracted scrutiny in France.

The couple first met when Macron was a 15-year-old student at La Providence, a French private school in Amiens, where Brigitte worked as a teacher. The pair reportedly grew close while co-writing a play together, when Brigitte oversaw a theatre workshop. 

The president’s parents initially thought that their son had feelings for Brigitte’s daughter, a classmate. But once they discovered the nature of the relationship between Emmanuel and Brigitte, who was married to André-Louis Auzière at the time and had three children, they sent their son to finish his final school year at Lycée Henri-IV in Paris.

“When Emmanuel met Brigitte, we certainly did not say, ‘How wonderful!,’” said Jean-Michel Macron, father of Emmanuel Macron, according to a biography of the President.

The then-schoolboy reportedly told Brigitte, before leaving: “Whatever you do, I will marry you.”

The couple eventually married in 2007, when he was 29 and she was 54, one year after her divorce.

What role has Brigitte Macron played as First Lady?

Following his presidential election in 2017, Macron released a “charter” to clarify his partner’s role within government.

Under the new direction, the President stated that Brigitte would work to represent France at international summits and meetings, support Macron’s endeavors as head of state, and work with charities and other cultural organizations in the “fields of disability, education, health, culture, child protection and gender equality,” according to the Elysee Palace.

The First Lady regularly holds Le Gala des Pièces Jaunes, a charity event in Paris to raise funds for sick and hospitalized children.

France’s First Lady has also been outspoken against cyberbullying. During a 2019 meeting, she read letters sent to her from parents and students explaining the dire effects online bullying can have.

“It’s relentless. Before, we went home at 4:00 pm and that was it, we could relax,” she said. “Now, it’s day and night.”

source https://time.com/7288678/macron-wife-brigitte-plane-shove/

Karnataka Assembly Speaker Revokes Suspension Of 18 BJP Legislators

More than two months after 18 BJP MLAs were suspended from the Karnataka Legislative Assembly for six months, Speaker U T Khader on Sunday said their suspension has been revoked.

source https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/karnataka-assembly-speaker-revokes-suspension-of-18-bjp-legislators-8506154

The surprising climate power of penguin poo

Antarctica's icy wilderness is warming rapidly under the weight of human-driven climate change, yet a new study points to an unlikely ally in the fight to keep the continent cool: penguin poo.

source https://phys.org/news/2025-05-climate-power-penguin-poo.html

Red Alert For Rain, Storm Issued For Delhi And Nearby Areas

A red alert for rain and storm has been issued for Delhi and the National Capital Region by the weather office, warning of squally winds of 60-100 kmph between 10.30 pm and 12.30 am.

source https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/red-alert-for-rain-storm-issued-for-delhi-and-nearby-areas-8499173

Contact Lenses That Provide Supervision Developed By Scientists

Though the creation may appear like a gadget straight out of a sci-fi movie, the researchers said it had real-world uses.

source https://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/contact-lenses-that-provide-supervision-developed-by-scientists-8499048

Unique chemistry discovered in critical lithium deposits

Much of the world's lithium occurs in salty waters with fundamentally different chemistry than other naturally saline waters like the ocean, according to a study published on May 23 in Science Advances. The finding has implications for lithium mining technologies and wastewater assessment and management.

source https://phys.org/news/2025-05-unique-chemistry-critical-lithium-deposits.html

Binary star system with millisecond pulsar and a helium star companion discovered

A large team of astronomers and astrophysicists affiliated with several institutions in China has discovered a binary star system, where one of the stars is a millisecond pulsar and the other is made mostly of helium. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes how they discovered that a pulsar under study since 2020 had a companion star—one that was gravitationally bound to it.

source https://phys.org/news/2025-05-binary-star-millisecond-pulsar-helium.html

Ancient DNA used to map evolution of fever-causing bacteria

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute and UCL have analyzed ancient DNA from Borrelia recurrentis, a type of bacteria that causes relapsing fever, pinpointing when it evolved to spread through lice rather than ticks, and how it gained and lost genes in the process.

source https://phys.org/news/2025-05-ancient-dna-evolution-fever-bacteria.html

Exclusive: New Claude Model Triggers Stricter Safeguards at Anthropic

Today’s newest AI models might be capable of helping would-be terrorists create bioweapons or engineer a pandemic, according to the chief scientist of the AI company Anthropic.

Anthropic has long been warning about these risks—so much so that in 2023, the company pledged to not release certain models until it had developed safety measures capable of constraining them.

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Now this system, called the Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP), faces its first real test.

On Thursday, Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4, a new model that, in internal testing, performed more effectively than prior models at advising novices on how to produce biological weapons, says Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief scientist. “You could try to synthesize something like COVID or a more dangerous version of the flu—and basically, our modeling suggests that this might be possible,” Kaplan says.

Accordingly, Claude Opus 4 is being released under stricter safety measures than any prior Anthropic model. Those measures—known internally as AI Safety Level 3 or “ASL-3”—are appropriate to constrain an AI system that could “substantially increase” the ability of individuals with a basic STEM background in obtaining, producing or deploying chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, according to the company. They include beefed-up cybersecurity measures, jailbreak preventions, and supplementary systems to detect and refuse specific types of harmful behavior.

To be sure, Anthropic is not entirely certain that the new version of Claude poses severe bioweapon risks, Kaplan tells TIME. But Anthropic hasn’t ruled that possibility out either. 

“If we feel like it’s unclear, and we’re not sure if we can rule out the risk—the specific risk being uplifting a novice terrorist, someone like Timothy McVeigh, to be able to make a weapon much more destructive than would otherwise be possible—then we want to bias towards caution, and work under the ASL-3 standard,” Kaplan says. “We’re not claiming affirmatively we know for sure this model is risky … but we at least feel it’s close enough that we can’t rule it out.” 

If further testing shows the model does not require such strict safety standards, Anthropic could lower its protections to the more permissive ASL-2, under which previous versions of Claude were released, he says.

This moment is a crucial test for Anthropic, a company that claims it can mitigate AI’s dangers while still competing in the market. Claude is a direct competitor to ChatGPT, and brings in over $2 billion in annualized revenue. Anthropic argues that its RSP thus creates an economic incentive for itself to build safety measures in time, lest it lose customers as a result of being prevented from releasing new models. “We really don’t want to impact customers,” Kaplan told TIME earlier in May while Anthropic was finalizing its safety measures. “We’re trying to be proactively prepared.”

But Anthropic’s RSP—and similar commitments adopted by other AI companies—are all voluntary policies that could be changed or cast aside at will. The company itself, not regulators or lawmakers, is the judge of whether it is fully complying with the RSP. Breaking it carries no external penalty, besides possible reputational damage. Anthropic argues that the policy has created a “race to the top” between AI companies, causing them to compete to build the best safety systems. But as the multi-billion dollar race for AI supremacy heats up, critics worry the RSP and its ilk may be left by the wayside when they matter most. 

Still, in the absence of any frontier AI regulation from Congress, Anthropic’s RSP is one of the few existing constraints on the behavior of any AI company. And so far, Anthropic has kept to it. If Anthropic shows it can constrain itself without taking an economic hit, Kaplan says, it could have a positive effect on safety practices in the wider industry.

---

Anthropic’s new safeguards

Anthropic’s ASL-3 safety measures employ what the company calls a “defense in depth” strategy—meaning there are several different overlapping safeguards that may be individually imperfect, but in unison combine to prevent most threats.

One of those measures is called “constitutional classifiers:” additional AI systems that scan a user’s prompts and the model’s answers for dangerous material. Earlier versions of Claude already had similar systems under the lower ASL-2 level of security, but Anthropic says it has improved them so that they are able to detect people who might be trying to use Claude to, for example, build a bioweapon. These classifiers are specifically targeted to detect the long chains of specific questions that somebody building a bioweapon might try to ask. 

Anthropic has tried not to let these measures hinder Claude’s overall usefulness for legitimate users—since doing so would make the model less helpful compared to its rivals. “There are bioweapons that might be capable of causing fatalities, but that we don’t think would cause, say, a pandemic,” Kaplan says. “We’re not trying to block every single one of those misuses. We’re trying to really narrowly target the most pernicious.”

Another element of the defense-in-depth strategy is the prevention of jailbreaks—or prompts that can cause a model to essentially forget its safety training and provide answers to queries that it might otherwise refuse. The company monitors usage of Claude, and “offboards” users who consistently try to jailbreak the model, Kaplan says. And it has launched a bounty program to reward users for flagging so-called “universal” jailbreaks, or prompts that can make a system drop all its safeguards at once. So far, the program has surfaced one universal jailbreak which Anthropic subsequently patched, a spokesperson says. The researcher who found it was awarded $25,000.

Anthropic has also beefed up its cybersecurity, so that Claude’s underlying neural network is protected against theft attempts by non-state actors. The company still judges itself to be vulnerable to nation-state level attackers—but aims to have cyberdefenses sufficient for deterring them by the time it deems it needs to upgrade to ASL-4: the next safety level, expected to coincide with the arrival of models that can pose major national security risks, or which can autonomously carry out AI research without human input.

Lastly the company has conducted what it calls “uplift” trials, designed to quantify how significantly an AI model without the above constraints can improve the abilities of a novice attempting to create a bioweapon, when compared to other tools like Google or less advanced models. In those trials, which were graded by biosecurity experts, Anthropic found Claude Opus 4 presented a “significantly greater” level of performance than both Google search and prior models, Kaplan says.

Anthropic’s hope is that the several safety systems layered over the top of the model—which has already undergone separate training to be “helpful, honest and harmless”—will prevent almost all bad use cases. “I don’t want to claim that it’s perfect in any way. It would be a very simple story if you could say our systems could never be jailbroken,” Kaplan says. “But we have made it very, very difficult.”

Still, by Kaplan’s own admission, only one bad actor would need to slip through to cause untold chaos. “Most other kinds of dangerous things a terrorist could do—maybe they could kill 10 people or 100 people,” he says. “We just saw COVID kill millions of people.”

source https://time.com/7287806/anthropic-claude-4-opus-safety-bio-risk/

Trump’s Pause on Infrastructure Funding Impacts More than Just Highways

The Trump administration is shamelessly (and successfully) attacking civil rights protections under the guise of “DEI.” In response, universities, organizations, and companies are changing their policies to protect themselves from the president. Though seldom talked about, this crusade against DEI will also impact our very neighborhoods, in particular America’s infrastructure.

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Passed in 2021, the bipartisan Infrastructure Law represented the largest investment in infrastructure in U.S. history. The law sought to repair our nation’s highways and byways, and to do so in a way that began to address the racial inequality they reinforced.

President Trump paused funding for the law on Day One of his administration for this reason. As his Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy characterized later, the law “pushed a radical social and environmental agenda on the American people.” Yet President Trump has also called for a massive expansion of highway construction, raising the real danger that, without protections in place, a new wave of infrastructure will repeat old patterns of destruction.

The so-called “agenda” Secretary Duffy spoke of was one that rightly recognized two truths about our nation’s infrastructure: that it was built both to connect us—to family, community, and opportunity—and divide us. This history remains with us today, and we risk repeating it.

Read More: How Trump Is Trying to Undo the Inflation Reduction Act

An instance in South Carolina serves as a prime example. In 2019, nine-year-old Amira Johnson sat at her kitchen table in Sandridge, S.C., and wrote a letter to her state’s transportation department. She was trying to protect something most fourth graders don’t have to worry about: her great-grandmother’s home. It had been in her family for generations, part of a historically Black community founded by formerly enslaved people.

But South Carolina’s plan to build a four-lane roadway, cutting through Sandridge, threatened to erase all of it: Homes, businesses, churches, and histories. “My great-grandma is 79 years old and has no business moving,” Johnson wrote. “If you were me, you would be mad because they are taking away your homes. Be fair for once in your life.”

Despite pleas from Johnson and others in Sandridge, the four-lane roadway is moving forward. And Sandridge is the latest Black community poised to be devastated by America’s approach to transportation.

Virtually every state has its version of this story.

For too long, we have treated transportation as if it exists outside of politics and justice. Highways, roads, and transit routes are more than lines on a map—they are tools of opportunity and weapons of exclusion. They reflect our values, and for decades, they’ve sent a painful message to Black communities: You are disposable.

This story is as old as the interstate system itself. The 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, passed just two years after Brown v. Board of Education outlawed segregation in public schools, laid the groundwork for the physical reshaping of American cities. Instead of fulfilling Brown’s promise of racial inclusion and integration, highways became a tool of resistance to civil rights—concrete weapons used to demolish Black neighborhoods and re-segregate cities under the guise of progress. In the mid-1950s, Alfred Johnson, the executive director of the American Association of State Highway Officials, held the view that “the urban Interstates would give them a good opportunity to get rid of the local ‘n—rtown.’”⁠

In Birmingham, Ala., city officials used Interstates 59 and 65 to recreate the racial boundaries first imposed by Jim Crow zoning laws. After courts struck down those zoning ordinances, local leaders—led by notorious segregationist “Bull” Connor—turned to infrastructure to enforce the color line.

In Indianapolis, the creation of the I-65/I-70 Inner Loop displaced 17,000 people—most of them Black—and obliterated 8,000 homes and businesses. Ironically, city officials justified the destruction by pointing to the economic decline that years of redlining had caused. First, they starved Black neighborhoods of investment; then they bulldozed them in the name of “revitalization.”

The damage doesn’t stop with highways. Public transportation, too, has been used to marginalize Black communities. Systems once segregated by local law remain so by brick-and-mortar barriers justified with dog whistles like “public safety.” Bus routes were rerouted or eliminated altogether. Investments favored trains serving white suburbs over buses used by Black and low-income riders. The result: sprawling transportation deserts in Black neighborhoods, where residents are cut off from jobs, healthcare, and education.

Even today, some predominantly white communities lobby against extending public transportation—not because they don’t need it, but because they don’t want certain people to enter their neighborhoods. These choices—past and present—compound racial inequality. They leave people like Johnson’s great-grandmother, who has done everything right—raised her family, cared for her home, contributed to her community—facing displacement with nowhere to go.

The effects of poor transportation policy are not theoretical. They show up in jobless rates, health disparities, educational gaps, and shortened life expectancies.

Now, we’re at a crossroads again. America’s infrastructure is crumbling beneath our feet. From disintegrating highways to crater-filled roads, the need to rebuild is seen everywhere. The collapse of the Key Bridge in Maryland is just one stark and tragic example. Not to mention, funding for a law meant to repair it has been put on pause, along with provisions that require state transportation agencies to consider racial equity in their planning decisions.

As we rebuild our infrastructure, we must reorient our thinking. We can choose to continue down a road that sacrifices Black communities and other communities of color in the name of efficiency. Or we can use this opportunity to do something better. That means repairing the harm done to communities like Sandridge by stopping destructive projects from happening in the first place and reinvesting in what was taken—affordable housing, public transit, walkable streets, and meaningful access to jobs, schools, and services.

It means realizing that racial justice and transportation planning are not separate issues.

Amira Johnson understood this, even at nine years old, and wanted to solve the problem. The Trump Administration understands this too, but they don’t want to solve the problem. They could not care less if a new highway flattens another Black neighborhood. The rest of us must care enough to stop them.

source https://time.com/7287364/trump-infrastructure-funding-pause-essay/

Microplastics eaten by UK invertebrates are contaminating food chains

Plastic pollution is harming invertebrates at the bottom of the food chain, including beetles, slugs, snails and earthworms, according to a new study by the University of Sussex and the University of Exeter. More than 1 in 10 samples had fragments of plastic in their stomach, and harmful chemicals are being passed onto larger animals who feed on them.

source https://phys.org/news/2025-05-microplastics-eaten-uk-invertebrates-contaminating.html

When friendship is treated as essential, what happens to young adults who don't have any?

All participant names in this story are pseudonyms.

source https://phys.org/news/2025-05-friendship-essential-young-adults-dont.html

The Phoenician Scheme Is Wes Anderson at His Most Muted

Wes Anderson, who specializes in designing fancifully invented societies, probably doesn’t strike anyone as an angry person. But his espionage comedy The Phoenician Scheme, playing in competition here at the Cannes Film Festival, shows glimmers of something that might be called anger, or at least frustration, over the greed and immorality of people who have too much—and yet only want more. The picture is flat and schematic—even flatter and more schematic than usual for Anderson, who favors static camera work and sets that resemble meticulously decorated dollhouses; he also has a penchant for dividing his movies into discrete chapters with the use of descriptively deadpan title cards. All those features figure in The Phoenician Scheme. But the movie is more muted than usual for Anderson, both in terms of its color tones and its story. There’s something somber about it; it hints at a fringe of exhaustion on Anderson’s part, though it doesn’t seem that he’s tired of movies—more that he’s a little tired of the world.

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Benicio Del Toro plays Anatole “Zsa Zsa” Korda, the richest man in Europe, a ruthless 1950s business tycoon who has a knack for surviving plane crashes. The suggestion is that his immorality is the key to his immortality; he’s just too distastefully wily to die. After surviving one such smash landing in his private plane, he returns to his palazzo to consider his legacy, having decided that his eldest child and only daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), will be his only heir. (He also has a passel of young sons who figure in the story as virtual orphans; shunted off to the far sidelines, they’re generally depicted as an assembly of tiny, nervous faces.)

Read more: The 37 Most Anticipated Movies of Summer 2025

But Liesl has other plans. For one thing, she’s a nun in training, ready to renounce all earthly belongings. And she has little affection for her father, trusting him not a whit; she even believes he might have killed her mother. Still, Zsa Zsa talks her into accompanying him on a multi-country jaunt, during which he’ll wheedle, cajole, and hoodwink his associates into supplying the money he needs for a big, wealth-generating infrastructure scheme, the details of which are so boring they’ll make your eyes glaze over. A meek and geeky insect specialist named Bjorn (Michael Cera) will accompany them, serving as both a tutor and a sort of guy Friday. Predictably, he nurtures a crush on Liesl, whose moonfaced radiance paradoxically gives her a kind of hot-cha-cha beauty, set off especially well by her demure white veil and habit. With her movie-star crimson lips and nail polish, she’s quite the dish, though she insists to her father and her prospective suitors (there’s more than one) that she truly wants to dedicate her life to God.

That fixation on a desire to believe in a higher power, especially within a religious framework, is one quirk we haven’t really seen from Anderson before. Still, he offsets it jauntily. The movie’s massive revolving door of actors in bit parts, customary for any Anderson affair these days, includes Tom Hanks, Riz Ahmed, Bryan Cranston, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Mathieu Amalric. Hope Davis plays a shrewd, strict Reverend Mother who shows up to inform Liesl that owing to her love of luxury goods (her father has given her a rosary made of glittering crystal and a gemstone-studded pipe, both of which she can’t resist toting around), she’s ill-suited for the convent. But before this exceedingly superior mother superior takes her leave, she makes sure Zsa Zsa is still going to fork over the dough he’s promised her for a new refectory. He’s not the only one adept at the art of the deal.

You might need to be a Wes Anderson purist to love The Phoenician Scheme. There’s nothing wrong with the performances: Cera, with his tootling phony Swedish accent, has an amusing savoir faire. Threapleton, with her take-no-prisoners stare, is charmingly enigmatic. But although there are a few good costumes—Zsa Zsa at one point sports a dashing pair of Russian Constructivist-influenced red, white, and black zigzag pattern pajamas—the film’s design overall feels curiously restrained. There’s lots of 1950s industrial gray-green; even a Marseilles art deco nightclub feels a little decoratively restrained, and the plot jumps around so much that we don’t get to spend much time there anyway. Zsa Zsa suffers from troubling dreams—apparently, he does have a conscience—which are rendered in understated black-and-white and have the sobering vibe of old Rockwell Kent illustrations—they may be the movie’s best feature. The Phoenician Scheme has none of the lavish, kooky excess of, say, The Grand Budapest Hotel. And the plot, with its fixation on intricate, not-quite-cricket business deals, is—let’s just come out and say it—boring. But Anderson seems to be expressing an indistinct dissatisfaction with the current world order in the best way he can: in a parade of color that’s somehow less colorful than usual.

source https://time.com/7286400/the-phoenician-scheme-review/

Lashkar Terrorist Abu Saifullah, Masterminded Of Key Attacks In India, Killed

A key terrorist of Lashkar E Taiba -- -- Rajullah Nizamani alias Abu Saifullah - has been shot dead in Pakistan's Sindh. Saifullah -- said to be involved in the attack on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak...

source https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/lashkar-terrorist-abu-saifullah-masterminded-of-key-attacks-in-india-dead-8447285

"If I Have To Choose Between Hell And Pakistan...": Javed Akhtar

In strong comments after the recent hostilities between India and Pakistan, lyricist and scriptwriter Javed Akhtar has said that if his only two choices are between going to hell and the neighbouring...

source https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/india-pakistan-operation-sindoor-if-i-have-to-choose-between-hell-and-pakistan-javed-akhtar-8440623

Tornadoes kill more than 20 in south-central US

Severe storms swept through the US states of Missouri and Kentucky, leaving at least 21 people dead, laying waste to local communities and cutting off electricity to nearly 200,000 people, authorities said Saturday.

source https://phys.org/news/2025-05-tornadoes-south-central.html

Subtle ligand modifications in aluminum complexes unlock enhanced solid-state light emission

Artificial light, once a luxury, has become central to modern life, with its evolution spanning from fire to LEDs. Now, researchers have developed a new class of efficient light-emitting materials as promising candidates to be applied to lighten the darkness. They demonstrated easily accessible aluminum-based organometallic complexes that have the potential to be applied in optoelectronic devices.

source https://phys.org/news/2025-05-subtle-ligand-modifications-aluminum-complexes.html

Diverse pollen sources boost honeybee survival rates during winter months

Especially in temperate climates, winter poses a major challenge for honeybee colonies. To ensure their survival, the animals must maintain the right temperature in the hive and raise the next generation of workers. The availability of pollen from flowers plays a vital role as well.

source https://phys.org/news/2025-05-diverse-pollen-sources-boost-honeybee.html

Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning Won’t Save the Movies—But It’s Still Fun to Watch Tom Cruise Try

Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, the eighth film in the franchise and ostensibly its finale, looks, feels, and sounds like the sort of movie you need to see on the big screen. The powers that be at the Cannes Film Festival clearly thought so too: the picture premiered here on May 14. And even if, some 20 or even 10 years ago, adding a pop franchise entry like this one to the festival lineup might have seemed like a cheap, attention-grabbing stunt, it means something wholly different now. Aside from the fact that Cannes isn’t necessarily above the occasional cheap, attention-grabbing stunt, as an institution it is and always has been all about the big-screen experience, which is now so endangered that it needs all the attention it can get. In 2025, Final Reckoning is exactly the kind of splashy crowd-pleaser that the festival seeks out to both offset and complement its otherwise fairly serious-minded slate of films from all over the world. No one would begrudge Tom Cruise his turn on the Cannes red carpet, and at the Final Reckoning premiere, the crowd seemed happy to welcome him. You don’t have to love Cruise to acknowledge that he’s probably the most widely recognizable movie star in the world. Sometimes recognition counts as a kind of love.

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To his credit, Cruise believes with all his heart in the big-screen experience. Just as his Mission: Impossible character Ethan Hunt gamely takes on the burden, ad nauseam, of saving the world, Cruise genuinely thinks he can save cinema. His optimism is touching, if unrealistic. But as hard as he, and we, might wish it could be so, Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning—directed by franchise veteran Christopher McQuarrie, who also cowrote the script—isn’t the kind of movie that will save movies. It’s big, extravagant, and at times very beautiful to look at. The story is the problem: packed with expository dialogue, it feels as if it were written to be digested in 10- or 15-minute bites. Characters robotically repeat significant McGuffiny phrases. The Rabbit’s Foot! The Anti-God! The Doomsday Vault! Final Reckoning doesn’t flow; it lurches forward in a series of information-delivery packets. If you’ve seen the first half of this double whammy, 2023’s conveniently titled Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, but forgotten what the hell it was all about, you needn’t worry. You could queue up Final Reckoning at home, go out to walk the dog, and get caught up in a snap when you return. And how cinematic is that?

The plot, picking up where Dead Reckoning Part One left off, goes something like this: Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is in hot water for—quelle surprise—failing to follow orders. (He got thrown off track by trying to avenge the death of his wife—we’re supposed to believe Ethan is a true romantic only because we’re reminded over and over again.) Now he must complete the mission with which he’s been entrusted: to vanquish the scary all-seeing, all-knowing AI being known as the Entity. To do so, he must dive deep into Arctic waters to procure a doodad known as the Podkova—a disappointing-looking little thing that looks like an eight-track cassette—which contains the Entity’s source code. Not so fast, though: the Podkova is nothing without a little plug-in known as the Poison Pill. Once Ethan has that, the Entity will be kaputsky.

Unfortunately, the Poison Pill is in the possession of wily villain Gabriel (Esai Morales), who’s fond of slinking around and bragging about how much power he’ll have once the Entity is in his grasp. He’s already got the Poison Pill, having seized it from one of Ethan’s dearest colleagues in the Impossible Mission Force, Ving Rhames’ Luther. Many of Ethan’s other helpers (the ones who haven’t been killed off—RIP Rebecca Ferguson’s magnificent Ilsa Faust) have returned, including tech-support smarty Benji (Simon Pegg), foe-turned-friend Paris (Pom Klementieff), and ace pickpocket Grace (Haley Atwell), who also slips handily into the role of Ethan’s love interest. Sadly, Grace doesn’t get to do much pickpocketing: her chief job is to gaze admiringly at her hero beau and issue solemn declarations like “The whole world’s in trouble, Ethan. You’re the only one I trust to save it.” At one point, Ethan nearly dies—it wouldn’t be a Mission: Impossible movie without at least one or two or three close calls—and in a sequence shot with the tender, dreamy vagueness of a feminine-hygiene commercial from the ‘70s, she brings him back to robust health with her womanly caresses. No one in the Cannes audience laughed; perhaps the end times really are nigh.

But no matter: cinema is still bigger than all of us, with the capacity to be many things. Mission: Impossible—Final Reckoning is just one kind of thing, a big-screen entertainment that should be better than it is. It does offer some moments of joy: the climactic stunt sequence—involving not one but two biplanes, soaring over countryside greenery—is fun precisely because it’s a pleasure, finally, to gaze at something tangible and mechanical, instead of just contemplating the threat posed by the Entity. (Represented as a talking ganglion of light, it’s a disappointingly abstract villain.)

And no matter how you feel about Cruise, you’ve got to admit he looks pretty good. As usual, his Ethan Hunt is muscular, hardy, game for anything. If any of the cartilage in his joints is wearing away, you’d never know it. A sequence in which he’s told he must train in advance for a treacherous underwater mission has him zipping away on a treadmill in manly-man fashion, electrodes stuck to his bare, gleaming chest. He’s still got that boys-adventure-book grin, though he can also be suitably solemn when he remembers, as one character after another reminds him, that the fate of the world is in his hands. As Ethan Hunt, Cruise may just be going through the motions of being Tom Cruise. But would an audience want to see him any other way? When he appeared onscreen, the audience at the massive Cannes press screening I attended—not to be confused with the glitzy premiere—cheered just a little, as if embarrassed by their spontaneous enthusiasm. This was a crowd of critics and journalists from around the world. We’re supposed to be cool, circumspect, not-too-easy to please—but also, we love our stardust. The movies aren’t just one thing, and they can’t be saved by one man. Still, we’ll believe the world can be snatched from AI doom if Tom Cruise can just plug the Poison Pill into the Podkova. For now, it’s almost enough.

source https://time.com/7285421/mission-impossible-the-final-reckoning-review-tom-cruise/

What to Know About the Apple Class Action Lawsuit Settlement—and How You Can File a Claim

Apple users—specifically those who use Siri through products such as Macbooks, iPhones, and Apple TVs—may be entitled to make a claim after Apple’s class action lawsuit settlement, worth $95 million dollars, regarding the voice-activated assistant.

The settlement comes from a lawsuit filed in 2021 by Californian Fumiko Lopez, who claimed that Apple, via Siri, conducted “unlawful and intentional interception and recording of individuals’ confidential communications without their consent and subsequent unauthorized disclosure of those communications.”

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“Apple intentionally, willfully, and knowingly violated consumers’ privacy rights, including within the sanctity of consumers’ own homes where they have the greatest expectation of privacy,” the lawsuit stated. “Plaintiffs and Class Members would not have bought their Siri Devices, or would have paid less for them, if they had known Apple was intercepting, recording, disclosing, and otherwise misusing their conversations without consent or authorization.”

In 2019, Apple published a statement titled “Improving Siri’s privacy protections,” in which they said they hadn’t “been fully living up” to their “high ideals” and vowed to issue improvements.

Apple agreed to the settlement on Dec. 31, 2024. According to the settlement website: “Apple denies all of the allegations made in the lawsuit and denies that [they] did anything improper or unlawful.”

The website also provides information about who is eligible to file a claim and the deadlines they need to adhere to.

Here’s what you need to know about how you can file a claim:

Who is eligible to file a claim?

People eligible to make a claim include those who owned or purchased a Siri device—which includes the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, MacBook, iMac, HomePod, iPod touch, Apple TV—between Sept. 17, 2024 and Dec. 31, 2024. They must have “purchased or owned a Siri Device in the United States or its territories and enabled Siri on that device.”

According to the settlement agreement, eligible parties also should have “experienced an unintended Siri activation during a confidential or private communication.”

Those not eligible include Apple employees, legal representatives, and judicial officers assigned to the case.

How can you make a claim and when is the deadline?

Claimants can submit a claim form via the settlement website, and can submit claims for up to five Siri devices.

The deadline to make a claim is July 2, 2025. This is also the deadline to opt out of the payment, which would allow the customer to keep their right to bring any other claim against Apple arising out of, or related to, the claims in the case.

Some of those eligible to make a claim may have received a postcard or an email—with the subject line “Lopez Voice Assistant Class Action Settlement”—notifying them about the settlement. This correspondence would likely include a Claim Identification Code and a Confirmation Code. Per the settlement website, people can use these codes when making a claim, but eligible Apple customers who haven’t received any correspondence can still file a claim.

When can you expect to receive payment?

On August 1, 2025, the courts are due to host a final approval hearing, but there could still be appeals. Payments will only be issued after any appeals are resolved. The settlement website is set to keep customers updated on timings and payment schedules, as and when that information is available.

source https://time.com/7285387/apple-class-action-lawsuit-how-to-file-a-claim/

The Unexpected Grief of Discarding Your Frozen Eggs

In 2014, freezing my eggs felt like a groundbreaking act of empowerment. Technology seemed to provide an insurance policy that preserved the possibility of future motherhood. Yet I did not anticipate the emotional landscape that I would face a decade later, as a scientific intervention became a personal meditation on time, money, and unfulfilled dreams.

I always assumed I would have children. I adored my young cousins, babysat from a young age, and earned money in college by working in a church nursery. Yet giving birth was never an all-consuming need. Unlike some high school friends, I never shoved a pillow under my shirt to see how I would look pregnant. Nor did I feel compelled by a ticking biological clock.

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By my mid-30s, I had achieved professional success and felt ready to start a family. An older colleague’s warnings about diminishing fertility prompted me to check my hormone levels. Despite looking young, the tests revealed that my body was indeed aging—my egg count already below average. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine had recently deemed egg freezing no longer experimental, leading a range of news outlets to extol its virtues and some companies to cover the costs. Apart from the steep price tag, freezing my eggs felt like an obvious choice.

My then-boyfriend was uncertain about marriage and fatherhood. If our relationship ended, I did not want to resent him for wasting my waning years of fertility. If it lasted, I figured the eggs could be used for a second child—or our first, if needed. By the time I started injecting hormones into my belly, we had broken up.The doctor retrieved a disappointing three eggs, far short of the eight to 15 range recommended for a future pregnancy attempt.  

When I did a second cycle, I was newly dating a man who was enthusiastic about marriage and kids. He even flew from Chicago to Washington DC to pick me up after the retrieval, though he wryly observed that he may be helping another man father my children someday. The result of my second cycle was a marginally better five eggs. 

In my early 40s, I remained hopeful about finding a life partner and thawing my aspirant offspring for an in vitro fertilization attempt. I ruled out having a baby alone with donor sperm, although I admire those who have chosen that path to motherhood. I filled my life with meaningful work, good friends, and travel adventures. I became the quintessential “cool aunt,” showering my niece and nephew with gifts from around the world, and enjoyed time with my friends’ kids. 

Now 49, I feel my window for having children has closed. It was not a deliberate decision; it just never happened and I have accepted that reality. When I recently met a friend’s newborn son, I relished baby snuggles and his intoxicating scent. But her kitchen filled with bottles and stories of sleepless nights affirmed my contentment with an independent lifestyle. 

And yet every spring, anxiety grips me when the annual letter arrives from the fertility clinic asking if I want to renew my egg storage. In recent years, a demanding job left no time for reflection, so I simply mailed a check to postpone the decision. When the letter arrived last year, I had just left my position and was embarking on a year of international travel. A friend encouraged me to pay the fee and use the time to contemplate my future. Now, as I begin a new job overseas, I am still agonizing over my eggs. Despite having accepted—even embraced—my child-free life, I resist telling the clinic to dispose of them. 

Last year, I cleaned out a storage unit containing childhood treasures that my parents had saved when they downsized over a decade ago. Being sentimental, I kept more cards, books, and photos than is probably warranted. Yet in a burst of pre-travel productivity, I purged significantly—including my fourth-grade Trapper Keeper. If my parents had thrown it away years ago, I never would have thought about it. And it serves no practical purpose in my current life. But I belatedly realized that I liked knowing it existed and now wish that I had kept it. 

It is a seemingly trivial comparison, but the experience gives me pause. Having saved my eggs for so long, will I regret letting them go? And is there a scenario, like meeting a new partner, in which I would still use them? I thought I had accepted years ago that I would not have a child. Yet the prospect of destroying my eggs has unexpectedly forced me to grieve or perhaps, finally accept, a future that looks different from what I imagined. My eggs represent both what could have been and what could still be. Rather than passively accept that I never got pregnant, as I have to date, I must now actively eliminate the last chance that I could.

Of course, I have not been paying for the certainty of a pregnancy but the possibility of one. There is no guarantee that my paltry egg collection would even thaw, form an embryo, implant, or result in a baby. Sometimes this makes me question the sizable financial investment as well as whether I should continue throwing good money after bad. Despite the initial hype, recent studies have found that only six to 11% of women use frozen eggs, often getting pregnant naturally or using fresh eggs for in vitro fertilization. And at a certain stage, biology still makes the final decision—even with frozen younger eggs, pregnancy in older women can carry additional risks.

Although the prospect of discarding these eggs feels unexpectedly profound, there is no ceremony for this moment—just a simple authorization form allowing lab technicians to “ethically discard” what once held my most intimate hope. Friends have suggested donating my eggs, but this does not resolve my dilemma. I froze my eggs with the expectation that I would raise my own child so I do not feel comfortable giving them to a stranger, assuming they were even viable. If I already had a baby, I would have realized that future and consequently feel less attached to these unused eggs. 

Here is the truth I wish someone had told me a decade ago: in addition to the financial cost, there is an emotional toll—in the form of lingering hope and unfulfilled potential—to maintaining frozen eggs. If I could go back to 2014, would I make the same choice? Probably. I appreciated the peace of mind and sense of control. However, I now realize that was based on the assumption that I would eventually have a baby. I wish I had also known the psychological weight of my unused eggs would become a source of grief. 

I will write another check this spring, not because I truly believe I will use my eggs but because the act of letting go feels more final than I am prepared to accept. Maybe when I turn 50, I will finally be ready. Maybe.

source https://time.com/7285337/grief-discarding-frozen-eggs/

Growth in informal lead mining is contributing to widespread poisoning, study finds

Artisanal lead mining in Nigeria is responsible for airborne lead exposures that are 10 times the U.S. Permissible Exposure Limit according to a study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene.

source https://phys.org/news/2025-05-growth-contributing-widespread-poisoning.html

Overcoming perception: Can an online retailer successfully break into the high fashion market?

A new partnership between online retail giant Amazon and luxury department store Saks Fifth Avenue may prove pivotal for Amazon as it looks to penetrate the high-end fashion segment. Yet, despite a flashy promotional video featuring handbags suspended from umbrellas on the Saks Amazon storefront, and the fact that traditional department stores have been struggling for years to stay competitive with e-commerce platforms, the partnership does not necessarily guarantee smooth sailing.

source https://phys.org/news/2025-05-perception-online-retailer-successfully-high.html

US Teacher Gets 30 Years In Jail For Sexual Abuse Of 2 Minor Students

Prosecutors say Ma groomed the 12-year-old boy over 10 months, sending him love letters and suggestive texts, which prompted the boy's mother to alert authorities.

source https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/us-teacher-gets-30-years-in-jail-for-sexual-abuse-of-minor-students-8388948

Antibiotics from human use are contaminating rivers worldwide, study shows

Millions of kilometers of rivers around the world are carrying antibiotic pollution at levels high enough to promote drug resistance and harm aquatic life, a McGill University-led study warns.

source https://phys.org/news/2025-05-antibiotics-human-contaminating-rivers-worldwide.html

Big Concern For England, 2027 WC Qualification Could Be In Doubt. Here's Why

England's decline in ODI cricket could affect their path to the 2027 World Cup.

source https://sports.ndtv.com/cricket/huge-concern-for-england-cricket-qualification-for-2027-world-cup-could-be-in-doubt-heres-why-8381953

Massive job cuts continue across tech sector in 2025, with 22,000 roles lost

In 2025, tech layoffs persist with over 22,000 jobs lost so far, following 150,000 cuts in 2024. Major companies like Match and CrowdStrike are restructuring, impacting thousands of employees. 

source https://www.livemint.com/technology/tech-news/massive-job-cuts-continue-across-tech-sector-in-2025-with-22-000-roles-lost-11746812716144.html

Pope Leo Vows to Look at ‘Challenges’ Facing the Church in the United States in Unearthed Interview

Robert Prevost was elected as Pope Francis’ successor on Thursday, May 8, concluding a two-day papal conclave. Hailing from Chicago, Prevost—who has chosen the name Pope Leo XIV—is the first American Pope. But his service in the Catholic Church stretches beyond the U.S., as Leo holds both U.S. and Peruvian citizenship, and has dedicated many years of his life to missionary work in South America.

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Leo was appointed a cardinal in September 2023 by Pope Francis, and also served as the Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops from January 2023 until Pope Francis’ death on April 21.

In an unearthed interview from 2023, Leo spoke to the BBC about his appointment to Prefect, during which he mentioned his American roots and how that might aid him in helping with the challenges faced by the Catholic Church in the United States.

”It’s not coincidental that Pope Francis chose me. I’ve been a missionary my whole life and I was working in Peru, but I am American and I think I do have some insights into the [Catholic] Church in the United States,” he said.

“The need to be able to advise, work with Pope Francis, and to look at the challenges the Church in the United States is facing. I hope to be able to respond to them with a healthy dialogue. And to continue to look for ways to be a Church in this day and age that we’re living in.”

What are the challenges facing the Catholic Church in the United States?

As of March 2025, there are an estimated 53 million adult Catholics across the U.S. Whilst the number of Catholics remains steady, demographic changes are taking place. The share of American Catholics that are white has fallen by 10%, whilst Hispanic Catholics have increased by 7%, according to the Pew Research Center.

Despite making up a significant share of the national Catholic population, the religion amongst Hispanics in the U.S. has dropped from 67% to 46% between 2010 and 2023.

Reports of historic sexual abuse are another major issue for the Catholic Church around the globe, including parishes that lie within the U.S. It’s a matter that still requires significant attention. Cases of abuse continue to be uncovered, and some campaigners say that Pope Francis still did not do enough to address the issue, despite showing a more progressive approach than his predecessors. The responsibility to address such matters will now fall on Leo.

“The next Pope must institute a zero tolerance law for sexual abuse that immediately removes abusive clergy and leaders who have covered up abuse from ministry,” the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) sad in a statement before the papal election.

SNAP went on to publish another statement after the appointment of Pope Leo, highlighting their “grave concern about his record managing abuse cases.“

Pope Leo’s appointment during Trump’s second term

Leo takes on the highest position in the Vatican at what is arguably a precarious time for his homeland, so far as foreign relations are concerned. It may be the Leo’s wish to help bridge divisions between the U.S. and other nations amid tariff uncertainty and various global conflicts.

It seems the Pope has always kept an eye on political affairs in the U.S. Earlier this year, Leo appeared to criticize J.D. Vance’s interpretation of the Catholic doctrine in a post on X.

Vance had used Christianity to defend American policy on deportation, and an account appearing to be that of Robert Prevost said this interpretation was wrong.

The same account also shared an article in 2015, which described Trump’s views on immigration as “problematic,” further criticising his separation of parents and children at detention centers in 2018.

Pope Leo’s Chicago origins and Peruvian service

Born and raised in Chicago, Pope Leo XIV moved to Peru in 1985 to serve in the Augustinian mission in the area of Chulucanas. He stayed there for 13 years, later returning to the U.S. to become the Provincial of the Augustinian Province in Chicago, where he continued his community work.

But Leo returned to Peru again, and took on an elevated position when Pope Francis appointed him as Bishop of Chiclayo in 2015.

Leo demonstrated his image as a global leader of the Church, not just as an American, in his first address to the public as Pontiff, where he spoke entirely in Italian and Spanish.

Brett C. Hoover, a theology professor at Loyola Marymount University in California, told TIME: “He [Pope Leo] was saying, ‘I’m an American, but I’m a different kind of American. I’m not a nationalist; I’m a person that cares about the entire world.’”

Despite service abroad in Peru and the Vatican, the new head of the Catholic Church has maintained strong ties to the Catholic community in Chicago, where much of his family, including his brother, still resides. In 2024, Leo visited a local church for an “evening of reflection.”

He would also regularly return to Chicago during his years of missionary in Peru, visiting family and churches in the area of his birthplace.

Political division in the U.S. Catholic Church in the Trump era

Within the Catholic Church in the U.S., division has reared amongst bishops and their opinions on President Trump.

Some American bishops have been vocal in their disagreement of Trump, in particular over his immigration policies and deportation practices.

On April 7, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) announced that they would be ending partnerships with the government that serve refugees and children, saying the “heartbreaking” decision followed the Trump Administration’s halt of funding for refugee resettlement.

President of the USCCB, Timothy Broglio, said: “We simply cannot sustain the work on our own at current levels or in current form.”

On April 17, Bishop Evelio Menjivar of Washington voiced deep concern over the Trump Administration’s treatment of immigrants. “These disturbing actions in violation of fundamental human rights and dignity are not only being taken against undocumented persons, gang members, and those who have committed violent crimes, but against peaceful and productive migrants and refugees across the board,” he said.

Regarding LGBTQ+ issues, American bishops also appear to be divided. In November 2024, some bishops declared their support of the 2024 Vatican Dignitas Infinita which said “​​gender theory and sex change procedures are contrary to human dignity.”

These are issues that, as the first American Pope, Leo may well have to address in order to steady the disagreements amongst U.S. bishops. The new Pope’s support of synodality could be a promising sign of tackling these divisions, an approach which aims to make the structure of the Church more inclusive and participatory.

Leo previously said that it could be a method to heal divisions that have been polarizing the Church.

source https://time.com/7284442/pope-leo-united-states-catholic-church-challenges/

Slow-growing bacteria respond more sensitively to their environment

Researchers led by Professor Erik van Nimwegen at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, have discovered a new mechanism in bacteria that controls their response to prevailing environmental conditions. They derived their theory from a simple yet interesting observation: The growth rate of bacteria and their sensitivity to signaling molecules seem to be related.

source https://phys.org/news/2025-05-bacteria-sensitively-environment.html

As the Conclave Continues, Catholicism Is at a Crossroads

As the cardinals gather in Rome to choose the new leader for 1.4 billion Catholics, the Catholic Church once again stands at a crossroads. The animating question facing the conclave is whether the cardinals want the Church to continue in the direction of a broader, more capacious understanding of the faith as articulated by Francis, or will they revert to the conservative, more traditionalist ways of his predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

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The Church has stood at similar crossroads several times in the modern era.

From 1545 to 1560, the Council of Trent met to determine the Church’s response to the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar prior to his excommunication in 1520, had pointed out the corruptions of medieval Catholicism and emphasized the doctrine of justification by faith (not works) and what he called the priesthood of believers.

The question before the prelates at the Council of Trent was whether to acknowledge the excesses and reform the Church in the direction of the more stripped-down Protestantism that Luther and other Reformers advocated. Trent, however, moved in the opposite direction, becoming “more Catholic” in its affirmation of the importance of the sacraments and good works. This hyper-Catholicism can be traced most graphicly in the Baroque and Rococo architecture that followed, which John Updike described as “the incredible visual patisserie of baroque church interiors, mock-marble pillars of paint-veined gesso melting upward into trompe-l’oeil ceilings bubbling with cherubs, everything gilded and tipped and twisted and skewed to titillate the eye, huge wedding-cake interiors meant to stun Hussite peasants back into the bosom of Catholicism.”

Another crossroads for modern Catholicism occurred following the death of Pope Pius XII in October 1958. The cardinals opted for what they thought was a “caretaker” pope, 76-year-old Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who took the name John XXIII. He turned out to be anything but a caretaker. Declaring that it was “time to throw open the windows of the Church and let the fresh air of the spirit blow through,” he convened the Second Vatican Council, which reformed Church theology and liturgy (including mass in the vernacular) and, its supporters say, brought the Church into the modern world.

John XXIII’s successor, Pope Paul VI faced another crossroads shortly after the conclusion of Vatican II. John XXIII had formed a study group, the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control, to review the Church’s teaching on the matter. The commission, which Paul VI expanded, included laywomen, married couples, theologians and bishops. The overwhelming recommendation was that the Church should revise its teaching to allow artificial means of birth control.

Paul VI, however, rejected that recommendation and issued the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae on July 25, 1968. The only acceptable means of birth control, the Church decreed, was the rhythm method, which critics promptly dubbed “Vatican Roulette.”

Humanae Vitae persuaded many Catholics, especially in the United States, that the Pope was hopelessly out of touch. Second-wave feminism, the drive for upward mobility, career opportunities and the desire for smaller families prompted many Catholic households to ignore the papal directive on birth control. As many studies have shown, Catholic attendance declined after 1968; many Catholics felt for the first time that it was all right to disobey the pope and still consider themselves good Catholics.

Now, following the death of Pope Francis, the Church once again stands at a crossroads. Conservatives, those Mark Massa, a historian and a Jesuit, calls “Catholic Fundamentalists,” are pressing for a pope who will reverse course. They criticize Francis for making overtures to the LGBTQ community and for permitting priests to bless same-sex unions. They claim he has “feminized” the Church by calling out what others describe as “toxic masculinity.” They dislike the fact that he restricted use of the traditional Latin mass and entertained the possibility of ordaining married men to the priesthood.

The other faction of the Church points out that Francis graciously sought to welcome marginal people—gays, lesbians, divorced people—into the Church and evinced concern for immigrants and for the poor, positions that have demonstrable appeal to a younger generation of Catholics. They also appreciate his attention to the ravages of climate change.

The term liberal in the context of the Roman Catholic Church may be an oxymoron, but this second camp seeks to perpetuate the work and the legacy of Francis. The conclave stands at a crossroads, and the person the cardinals choose will likely determine the direction of the Church for years to come.

As an Episcopal priest, not a Catholic, I have only a rooting interest in the conclave, and I’m loath to make predictions. But I recall the lyrics of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” by the Charlie Daniels Band, a fiddler’s faceoff between Satan and a young man named Johnny. The devil bets a fiddle of gold against Johnny’s soul and leads off with the bow across the strings, making “an evil hiss.” The rendition may be technically perfect, but it lacks soul.

When Johnny takes his turn, the fiddle vibrates with verve and passion—and he prevails. Whoever prevails in the cardinals’ deliberations will inherit a church with plenty of gilding but still in need of some of the verve and passion that Francis brought to the task.

source https://time.com/7283873/conclave-catholicism-at-a-crossroads/