“A new analysis of samples from the asteroid Bennu, NASA’s first asteroid sample captured in space and delivered to Earth, reveals that evaporated water left a briny broth where salts and minerals allowed the elemental ingredients of life to intermingle and create more complex structures. The discovery suggests that extraterrestrial brines provided a crucial setting for the development of organic compounds. In a paper published today, Jan. 29, in the journal Nature, scientists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History describe a sequence of evaporated minerals that date back to the early formation of the solar system. The assortment of minerals includes compounds that have never been observed in other extraterrestrial samples. ‘We now know from Bennu that the raw ingredients of life were combining in really interesting and complex ways on Bennu’s parent body,’ said Tim McCoy, the museum’s curator of meteorites and the co-lead author on the new paper. ‘We have discovered that next step on a pathway to life.’ Bennu’s parent asteroid, which formed around 4.5 billion years ago, seems to have been home to pockets of liquid water. The new findings indicate that water evaporated and left behind brines that resemble the salty crusts of dry lakebeds on Earth. Bennu has long intrigued researchers due to its near-Earth orbit and carbon-rich composition. Scientists posited that the asteroid contained traces of water and organic molecules and theorized that similar asteroids could have brought these materials to a primordial Earth.” (Smithsonian)
“This is overwhelming. You are meant to be overwhelmed. When we are overwhelmed we miss a lot. When we are overwhelmed we struggle to distinguish between what’s important and what’s a distraction, or what’s important and what can wait, or what’s doable and what’s out of our control. When we are overwhelmed we not only feel powerless, we begin to behave as if we are powerless. This is the point, or at least part of it. The Trump administration has taken all of these actions all at once is to flood the field. Even most close politics-watchers — even most elected officials — can’t keep track of every proposal and order and change and action Trump has put into motion, and have to pick what they believe are the most dangerous or salient to most vociferously oppose. News outlets have to pick and choose which ones to cover; those that aren’t covered, or aren’t highlighted, or have potential consequences that are complex and don’t fit into a pithy headline, go largely unseen by the public. Activist groups with limited budgets and staff have to pick which ones to fight. This strategy virtually guarantees that many of these orders will remain in place, either because they go unchallenged or because the challenges are weak. It also guarantees that some significant swath of the public will simply turn away — will feel overwhelmed, may feel disgusted, but will conclude that things are new levels of bad and only getting worse and there’s nothing they can do. Authoritarianism thrives on despair. And I get it; I feel it.” (Jill Filipovic)
“In 1460, Francesco Sforza, the duke of Milan, decided he required a royal residence. He seized upon the ruins of a medieval fortress in northern Italy and over the next few years, oversaw its reconstruction into a vast, stately home. By the turn of the century, Sforza Castle boasted among its features four towers at its corners, three interior courtyards, frescoed halls, a library, and a lake. But rumors had it that the structure also housed numerous secret walkways, unknown to and unseen by most visitors. As it happens, the legend holds up. A recent investigation, undertaken by the Polytechnic University of Milan, Codevintec, and Sforza Castle, used ground penetrating radars and laser scanners to map the castle’s subsurface at a depth of a few decimeters. The researchers found that the citadel does in fact hold a network of underground passages. The findings confirm the myths surrounding the castle—but also the work of one Leonardo da Vinci. In 1494, the artist was recruited by Ludovico Sforza, Francesco’s successor, to decorate the building. Leonardo, working with Bernardino Zenale and Bernardino Butinone, created frescoes for the castle’s rooms, notably the Sala delle Asse. (He also designed for Sforza an equestrian monument as a tribute to Francesco.) While in Sforza’s employ, Leonardo made drawings that documented the castle’s unseen passageways as well, contained in Codex Forster I. The underground spaces that Leonardo described were likely of a military nature, though they also include a passage Ludovico built to reach the tomb of his wife Beatrice d’Este, who was buried in the Basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie. The church, constructed by Francesco, served as the family’s burial site and of course, houses Leonardo’s The Last Supper.” (Min Chen/ArtNet)
“DeepSeek’s models are a stark illustration of why U.S. export controls on advanced computing chips, instead of impeding China’s AI progress, may actually be accelerating it. In the past several years, the Biden administration issued a series of increasingly strict export control rules on advanced computing chips, including a particularly onerous new rule published in the final week before the Trump administration took office. A central goal of these rules is to impede China’s progress on AI. If DeepSeek’s claims regarding training costs prove to be accurate, the company’s achievements underscore how U.S. chip export control rules can in some respects have the opposite of their intended effect. Forced to operate under a far more constrained computing environment than their U.S. counterparts, AI engineers in China are innovating in ways that their computing-rich American counterparts are not. And in doing so, they are upending the view that has underpinned both the U.S. technology industry’s approach to AI as well as the thinking of U.S. policymakers. The animating assumption in much of the U.S. AI industry has been that creating highly advanced AI models requires access to truly massive amounts of computing power. This is reflected in the investments by companies including Amazon and Meta in multibillion dollar AI computing facilities. Under this paradigm, more computing power is always better. Spending lavishly on computing is viewed as just as important as hiring good engineers. But having access to extraordinary amounts of computing power has a key downside: It means less pressure to use those resources efficiently. By contrast, faced with relative computing scarcity, engineers at DeepSeek and other Chinese companies know that they won’t be able to simply brute-force their way to top-level AI performance by filling more and more buildings with the most advanced computing chips. With easy access to unlimited computing power off the table, engineers at DeepSeek directed their energies to new ways to train AI models efficiently, a process they describe in a technical paper posted to arXiv in late December 2024. While DeepSeek is the most visible exponent of this approach, there are sure to be other Chinese AI companies, operating under the same restrictions on access to advanced computing chips, that are also developing novel methods to train high-performance models.” (John Villasenor/Brookings)
“On the one hand, policymakers will be wary of tariffs and other upside risks to inflation, which may push them to keep interest rates high. Balancing that will be the potential drag on growth caused by the levies and other policies like a crackdown on immigration, which might suggest rates should go lower — even if above-trend growth over the last few years means it would likely take a material slowdown to prompt a rate cut. Fed economists in 2019 calculated that the new import taxes Trump started to impose on aluminum, steel, and select goods from China the year before — and retaliation by other countries — resulted in a net loss of US factory jobs and higher producer prices. In a later study, economists at the New York Fed and Columbia University found that tariffs caused an $8.2 billion reduction in real income in 2018, and led American consumers and importers to pay $14 billion to the government. ‘Our estimates are likely to be a conservative measure of the losses,’ they wrote. What happened in 2019 matters because it was the first time policymakers dealt with the economic impact of a broad swath of higher import taxes since the 1930s. It was a rare real-world experiment in the effects of protectionism.” (Bloomberg)
“Three days before his presidential inauguration, Donald Trump launched a meme coin, a type of cryptocurrency whose value is buoyed by social media and internet culture, rather than any sort of functionality or intrinsic value. The coin – officially called $Trump – briefly ascended into the top 15 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization and attracted over a half-million buyers. Referencing the coin in a news conference on Jan. 21, 2025, a reporter asked Trump if he intended to continue selling products that benefited him personally while being president. ‘You made a lot of money [on $Trump], sir,’ he told Trump, who seemed oblivious to its meteoric rise in value. ‘How much?’ Trump asked. ‘Several billion dollars, it seems like, in the last couple days’ … Meme coins became popular in 2013 with the launch of Dogecoin, which its creators intended as a joke, spoofing the many other seemingly useless cryptocurrencies that were popping up at the time. It was never supposed to be a popular investment. The creators even attempted to make it as undesirable as possible to ensure it wouldn’t. Twelve years later, it remains in the top 10 cryptocurrencies and has inspired thousands of other meme coins to launch … There are countless other scam coins that fly under the radar using the same dynamic: generate hype, pump the price and dump on investors.” (Maximillian Brichter/The Conversation)
“When President Trump sued CBS News on Halloween, legal experts called the suit ‘frivolous;’ ‘ridiculous junk;’ and laughable on its face. From the wild amount of alleged damages ($10 billion!) to the fact that the complaint was filed in Texas (an apparent attempt at ‘judge shopping’) to the decision to give Fox News the scoop about it, the suit had all the hallmarks of a political PR stunt. Trump's team alleged ‘deceptive doctoring’ of a ‘60 Minutes’ interview with Kamala Harris. There was some editing – a preview clip of the Harris interview used one part of an answer about Israel, and the ‘60’ broadcast used a different part – but that's a debatable matter of editorial discretion, not ‘doctoring.’ CBS quickly moved to throw out the suit, stating ‘the First Amendment prevents holding CBS liable for editorial judgments the President may not like.’ And yet... The news outlet's parent company, Paramount Global, is now trying to settle the lawsuit, the NYT's Lauren Hirsch, James B. Stewart and Michael M. Grynbaum reported last night. ‘A settlement would be an extraordinary concession by a major U.S. media company to a sitting president, especially in a case in which there is no evidence that the network got facts wrong or damaged the plaintiff's reputation.’ Bluntly: It would look like a payoff. It would look like a big check to Trump (or his presidential library, following in ABC and Meta's footsteps) in exchange for federal approval of Paramount's deal with Skydance. Is this the cost of doing business in the Trump era? Some business leaders clearly believe it is.” (Brian Stelter/Reliable Sources)
"Trump’s first term was, indeed, an exercise in unpredictability. He threatened North Korean leader Kim Jong Un with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” But he then became the first American president to meet a North Korean leader and declared that the two ‘fell in love.’ He dropped the U.S. military’s largest conventional bomb on militants in Afghanistan yet also started peace talks with the Taliban. He ordered a strike on Iran and then canceled it. He imposed tariffs on some American allies, such as Canada, while sparing others, such as Australia, often for no rhyme or reason. According to Axios, during trade negotiations with South Korea, Trump ordered his negotiating team to say, in reference to him, 'This guy’s so crazy he could pull out any minute.' Trump is hardly the first leader to explicitly embrace an erratic foreign policy. For decades, heads of state around the world have deployed what is known as madman theory: the idea that by acting in a highly volatile way, they can frighten opponents into conceding. During the Cold War, for instance, some strategists suggested that by appearing unstable, a U.S. leader might prompt communist states to take U.S. nuclear threats more seriously." (Roseanne McManus/Foreign Affairs)
“Democrats are essentially leaderless — President Biden and Vice President Harris have exited the stage. There is no DNC chair. Almost no one in the upper echelons of the party has the profile or skill to get sufficient attention in a media environment dominated so thoroughly by Trump and Musk. There is no Democratic entity with money or willingness to spend money carrying our message with TV or digital ads. It’s frustrating, but we cannot expect Democrats to have a battle plan to take on Trump right now. Having said all of that, why are so many Democrats voting for Trump’s nominees? This mind-boggling decision speaks to strategic incoherence and a misunderstanding of how politics works in the Trump era. In their defense, the Democrats voted en masse against confirming a weekend cable host with a reported drinking problem and accusations of sexual assault and domestic abuse as Secretary of Defense. I also suspect that every Democrat will vote against Tulsi Gabbard to be Director of National Intelligence and Kash Patel to be Director of the FBI. Most — if not all — Democrats will oppose Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination. However, these are exceptions, not the rule. Every Democrat voted to confirm Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. Nine Democrats voted to confirm Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security. Huge swaths of Democrats voted to advance the nomination of Scott Bessent as Treasury Secretary. Twenty-one Democrats voted to confirm John Ratcliffe as CIA Director. The Ratcliffe nomination is a case in point for the incoherence of the Democratic approach. As Semafor’s Burgess Everett pointed out, no Democrat voted to confirm Ratcliffe as Director of National Intelligence when Trump nominated him in 2020. Even Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema voted against him!” (Dan Pfeiffer/The Message Box)
“Sheep have been intertwined with human livelihoods for over 11,000 years, according to new research. As well as meat, their domestication led to humans being nourished by their protein-rich milk and clothed by warm, water-resistant fabrics made from their wool. An international team of researchers led by geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and zooarchaeologists from LMU Munich and the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History (SNSB) has deciphered the prehistoric cultural trajectory of the species. The project analysed 118 genomes recovered from archaeological bones dating across 12 millennia and stretching from Mongolia to Ireland. The earliest sheep-herding village in the sample in central Turkey has genomes that seem ancestral to later populations in the wider region, confirming an origin in captures of wild mouflon sheep over 11,000 years ago. By 8,000 years ago, in the earliest European sheep populations, the team found evidence that farmers were deliberately selecting their flocks – in particular for the genes coding for coat colour.” (Brian ODonovan/RTE)
“Meanwhile, in the national capital, Kinshasa, protesters gathered and fires were lit outside a number of Western and African embassies, including that of Rwanda. The French embassy was ‘attacked and firebombed,’ the French foreign ministry told CNN, but protesters were unable to enter the site’s perimeter. Later on Tuesday, the US Embassy in Kinshasa advised US citizens to leave the city. ‘Due to an increase in violence throughout the city of Kinshasa, the US Embassy in Kinshasa advises US citizens to shelter-in-place and then safely depart while commercial options are available,’ a statement from the embassy said. Reports emerged Monday of Congolese troops exchanging fire with Rwandan soldiers along their shared border as fear of a blown-out war grows. Earlier that day, gunfire rang out from Goma’s airport after it was shut by the rebels; a French intelligence source told CNN M23 had gained full control of the facility on Tuesday. At the same time, more than 4,000 prisoners broke free from a correctional facility, the UN-funded Radio Okapi reported, compounding chaotic scenes witnessed in the city. In a statement Monday, the Uruguayan army, whose troops are part of the UN peacekeeping mission in Goma, said ‘hundreds’ of Congolese soldiers had laid down their weapons following a 48-hour ultimatum by M23. Rwandan national broadcaster also shared footage of Congolese soldiers surrendering their arms to Rwandan forces at a Rwandan border post after fleeing Goma. DR Congo has experienced decades of militia violence, including armed rebellion by M23, which claims to defend the interest of the minority Rwandophone communities, including the Tutsi. Since 2022, M23 has waged a renewed rebellion against the Congolese government, occupying a large expanse in North Kivu, which borders Rwanda and Uganda. For several months, the rebels have also controlled Rubaya, a mining town in North Kivu that harbors one of the world’s largest coltan deposits. This valuable mineral is used in the production of mobile phones.” (Nimi Princewell/CNN)
"The Harris-Walz campaign, despite the initial burst of excitement—and joy—wound up being perceived, like recent campaigns from Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, as too risk-averse when it came to engaging with the news media or using social media. That’s not to say that Clinton didn’t do interviews, but NPR’s question of whether she was “dodging the press,” posed in the final months of the 2016 race, showed there was a perception, at least, that the candidate was closed off. (The NPR review of the campaign’s claims about accessibility found them to be ‘at once true and somewhat misleading.’) Biden, of course, won the 2020 election. But during the 2024 election (which he ended up exiting), an Axios headline blared, ‘Biden’s media evasion’; the same site, months later, described Harris’s approach to the press as resembling ‘Biden’s strategy of ducking tough interviews.’ Sure, you can quibble with some of these headlines, and their framing, but they contributed to the perception that Democratic candidates are more closed off. To me, the Democrats’ biggest failure is not at the candidate level, but at the people-telling-the-candidates-what-to-do level—a consultant class that seems to insulate the people running for president from getting more personal. There may be well-meaning advisers urging candidates not to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast or write that spicy tweet." (Molly Jong Fast/VF)