On Wednesday evening, the American Jewish Committee held a reception at DC’s Capital Jewish Museum. The gathering, aimed at Jewish foreign policy professionals between the ages of 22 and 45, featured speakers from humanitarian groups. One such groups, IsraAID, said in a statement that the event “focused on bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza through Israeli-Palestinian and regional collaboration.”At around 9 pm, a gunman killed two attendees leaving the event. Their names were Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim: They were young people working at the Israeli Embassy and a couple planning to get married.Their murders were undoubtedly political. In video of the perpetrator’s arrest, he yells “free Palestine” — a slogan that eyewitnesses also heard him repeat after the killing. A manifesto, published on Twitter/X under the shooter’s name, lays out a clear motivation: punishing those he saw as complicit in Israel’s mass killing of the Palestinians.Reflecting on this sequence of events, it’s hard not to spiral into ever-greater depths of anger and despair. This is partly for personal reasons: I grew up Jewish in Washington, DC, and am the kind of young professional this event would be marketed to. But more fundamentally, it’s for political ones: these murders underscore how dangerous the current political moment is, and may materially make it worse.Wednesday was not the first time that a pro-Palestine activist in America attempted political murder. Last month, a man attempted to burn down the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania in retaliation for, in the suspect’s words, “what [Governor Josh Shapiro] wants to do to the Palestinian people.”These events were not only predictable but predicted. Since October 7, 2023, prominent elements of the pro-Palestinian movement have glorified political violence. Though repeatedly warned that this was harmful, including by fellow critics of Israel’s war, this kind of talk became normalized — including in the sort of online left-wing social media spaces where the DC suspect apparently spent time. The vast majority of the pro-Palestine movement is peaceful, but the most radical subfaction created a climate where real-world violence might become more thinkable.“Fears of anti-Israel political violence on the left are real, and last night that threat became deadly,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, the leader of the pro-peace J Street activist group, said in an emailed statement. “We urge all those in the pro-Palestine movement to take stock of this moment and recognize the danger of extreme rhetoric as it hits the ears of unhinged individuals.”Moreover, the killing in DC actually endangers the chances for peace in Gaza — changing the domestic politics on Israel-Palestine in a way that decreases the chances of the US government reining in Israel even as it begins a nightmarishly violent offensive.“Every single act & word that can associate the Palestinian cause with terrorism, hatred & antisemitism is an act or word that hurts Palestinians in Washington, DC. [This] act of terrorism did all three,” writes Monica Marks, a professor of Middle East politics at NYU Abu Dhabi.There is no good here, no silver lining. Two young people were murdered in cold blood by an ideologue who convinced himself that murder, not democratic activism, is the right way to advocate for the downtrodden. He is not the first to do so — and the track record of those like him is bloody.How pro-Palestine extremists made violence more likelySince the October 7 attacks, a number of leading American pro-Palestine voices have publicly and loudly embraced violence.Students for Justice in Palestine, the national convening group for campus protests, described Hamas’s killings on October 7 as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” Within Our Lifetime, a New York-based activist group that embraces violence as a Palestinian tactic, uses similar language. University of Pennsylvania students chanted in support of Hamas’s military wing (“al-Qassam, make us proud, take another soldier down”). Prominent left-wing media figures compared October 7 to John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and valorized anti-Israel terrorist groups. Perhaps the most relevant case for current purposes is Khymani James, a Columbia student who served as a spokesperson for the campus protest group CUAD. James fantasized about going out and murdering “Zionists” — a loose label that could include, say, attendees at a Jewish networking group in DC. While CUAD initially condemned James, the group later reversed its stance and issued a statement calling for more violence.“We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance,” the group said. “In the face of violence from the oppressor equipped with the most lethal military force on the planet, where you’ve exhausted all peaceful means of resolution, violence is the only path forward.”I want to be clear: these extremists do not speak for the vast majority of pro-Palestinian activists and demonstrators. There have only been a handful of incidents of violence at pro-Palestine rallies in the United States since October 7; these examples of extreme rhetoric are not a justification for painting an entire movement with a broad brush. And yet, the fact that there are influential organizations and individuals talking like this matters. It creates a social and political climate where violence targeting American Jews becomes more likely, even if we cannot (and should not) draw a straight line between any one instance of extreme rhetoric and the violence on Wednesday.In trying to understand the role of violent ideology in inciting terrorism, scholars Donald Holbrook and John Horgan suggest thinking of ideas as fundamentally “social” things. Most people who come across radical ideologies online, even explicitly pro-violence ones, do not become terrorists. But when there are communities either online or in person that are seen as validating violence, individuals become more likely to escalate to real-world killing.This is part of why we saw a deadly wave of white nationalist violence in 2019. Even though each killer acted independently, the existence of online spaces valorizing their acts of violence creates incentives for more people to turn violent.“The sharing of ideas that convey an understanding of collective grievance, aspiration and a sense of community is relevant to terrorism in a variety of often interweaving ways. Perhaps the most obvious concerns ways in which ideological output legitimizes certain targets or methods employed through terrorist violence,” they write.The DC shooter says something similar in his alleged manifesto. He writes that violence would have been justified as far back as 11 years ago, during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war. However, he writes, there were not enough Americans who would have agreed with his actions to make it politically effective. In 2014, he wrote, people would think it simply insane; today, he thinks “there are many Americans” who will see the killings as “highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.”His expectations were not wrong. Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan, one of the most prominent pro-Palestine journalists in America, published a post condemning the DC shooting — only to face a wall of replies justifying the violence. (“The only good zionist is a dead Zionist” is but one of many examples.)The likely political consequences for Palestinians are disastrousMore broadly, there is good reason to believe that the evil in Washington is likely to abet Israel’s ongoing evil in Gaza.Israel has launched a new offensive in Gaza with a horrifying endgame: essentially, the full and complete ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. Yet the offensive is in its early days, and there is still time to prevent the worst-case outcome from coming true.A lot will depend on the political climate in the United States. As Israel’s chief weapons provider and patron, Washington has immense leverage to push Jerusalem to back down. The question is whether Trump cares enough to pick a fight with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Prior to the attack in DC, the two men were seemingly growing apart. Barak Ravid, Axios’s well-sourced Israel-Palestine correspondent, reports that Trump is increasingly “frustrated” with the ongoing Gaza war but still has not applied significant pressure on Netanyahu to back down.Now, however, the spotlight has been turned away from Gaza and back on the domestic American pro-Palestine movement — with much of the MAGA base seeing the Washington shooting as proof that the pro-Palestine left is indeed an internal enemy that deserves to be crushed. Andy McCarthy, a right-wing legal analyst at National Review, predicted a renewed crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech:I believe the consequences of these terrorist murders will include a stepping up of civil rights investigations of antisemitic violence and intimidation by the Justice Department, as well as a reaffirmation of the administration’s commitment to deport from the United States aliens — even legal aliens — who have participated in pro-Hamas agitation on American campuses and elsewhere.The political winds have shifted in a direction that makes the Trump administration less likely, not more likely, to confront Netanyahu.“Less than one full day ago the global news cycle, including Israeli newspapers, were focused on Israel terrorising foreign diplomats. Now a self-proclaimed ally’s act of terrorism shoots diplomats dead, shifts our focus & snatches that moral high ground away,” writes Marks, the NYU professor.It’s hard to say exactly how much the attack damages prospects for stopping Israel’s nightmare plan for Gaza. But we can be certain that it does not help.Much like the October 7 attacks themselves, the attack in DC is thus a double crime. It is an indefensible murder of innocents that also harmed the very people it claimed to be defending.See More: Politics

The orbits of a potential dwarf planet called 2017 OF201 and the dwarf planet SednaTony Dunn A potential dwarf planet has been discovered in the outer reaches of our solar system, orbiting beyond Neptune. Its presence there challenges the existence of a hypothetical body known as Planet 9 or Planet X. Sihao Cheng at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and his colleagues first detected the object, known as 2017 OF201, as a bright spot in an astronomical image database from the Victor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile. Advertisement 2017 OF201 is about 700 kilometres across – big enough to qualify as a dwarf planet like Pluto, which has a diameter about three times as big. The object is currently about 90.5 astronomical units (AU) away from us, or roughly 90 times as far from Earth as the sun is. Because 2017 OF201’s average orbit around the sun is greater than that of Neptune, it is what’s known as a trans-Neptunian object (TNO). It passes through the Kuiper belt, a disc of icy objects in the outer solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune. The researchers looked back over 19 observations, taken over seven years by the Canada France Hawaii Telescope, to determine that the closest 2017 OF201 gets to the sun – its perihelion – is 44.5 AU, which is similar to Pluto’s orbit. The furthest it gets from the sun is 1600 AU, way outside the solar system. Voyage across the galaxy and beyond with our space newsletter every month. Sign up to newsletter This far-flung orbit may be the result of an encounter with a giant planet, which ejected the candidate dwarf planet out of the solar system, say the researchers. “It’s a really cool discovery,” says Kevin Napier at the University of Michigan. The object would go so far outside the solar system that it could be interacting with other stars in the galaxy just as strongly as it interacts with some of the planets in our solar system, he says. The orbits of many extreme TNOs seem to cluster in a specific orientation. This has been interpreted as evidence that the solar system contains a ninth planet hidden in the Oort cloud, a vast cloud of icy rocks encircling the solar system. The idea is that Planet 9’s gravity pushes the TNOs into their specific orbits. But the orbit of 2017 OF201 doesn’t fit this pattern. “This object is definitely an outlier to the observed clustering,” says team member Eritas Yang at Princeton University. Cheng and his colleagues also modelled simulations of the object’s orbit, and how it might interact with Planet 9. “In the one with Planet X, the object gets ejected after a couple of hundred million years, and without Planet X, it stays,” says Napier. “Certainly, this is not evidence in favour of Planet 9.” But until there is more data, the case isn’t closed, says Cheng. “I hope Planet 9 still exists, because that’ll be more interesting.” The candidate dwarf planet takes roughly 25,000 years to complete an orbit, which means it spends only about 1 per cent of its time close enough to Earth for us to detect it. “These things are really hard to find because they’re faint, and their orbits are so long and skinny that you can only see them when they’re really close to the sun, and then they immediately head right back out and they’re invisible to us again,” says Napier. That means there might be hundreds of such objects out there. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, due to go online later this year, will look deeper into space and will potentially detect many more objects like this, which should tell us more about them – and whether Planet 9 actually exists. Reference:arXiv DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2505.15806 Topics:planets

May 21, 202510 min readWhy Some Experts Call Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ Missile Shield a Dangerous FantasyThe White House’s $175-billion plan to protect the U.S. from nuclear annihilation will probably cost much more—and deliver far less—than has been claimed, says nuclear arms expert Jeffrey LewisBy Lee Billings U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House on May 20, 2025, during a briefing announcing his administration’s plan for the “Golden Dome” missile defense shield. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty ImagesDuring a briefing from the Oval Office this week, President Donald Trump revealed his administration’s plan for “Golden Dome”—an ambitious high-tech system meant to shield the U.S. from ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missile attacks launched by foreign adversaries. Flanked by senior officials, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the project’s newly selected leader, Gen. Michael Guetlein of the U.S. Space Force, Trump announced that Golden Dome will be completed within three years at a cost of $175 billion.The program, which was among Trump’s campaign promises, derives its name from the Iron Dome missile defense system of Israel—a nation that’s geographically 400 times smaller than the U.S. Protecting the vastness of the U.S. demands very different capabilities than those of Iron Dome, which has successfully shot down rockets and missiles using ground-based interceptors. Most notably, Trump’s Golden Dome would need to expand into space—making it a successor to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) pursued by the Reagan administration in the 1980s. Better known by the mocking nickname “Star Wars,” SDI sought to neutralize the threat from the Soviet Union’s nuclear-warhead-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles by using space-based interceptors that could shoot them down midflight. But fearsome technical challenges kept SDI from getting anywhere close to that goal, despite tens of billions of dollars of federal expenditures.“We will truly be completing the job that President Reagan started 40 years ago, forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland,” Trump said during the briefing. Although the announcement was short on technical details, Trump also said Golden Dome “will deploy next-generation technologies across the land, sea and space, including space-based sensors and interceptors.” The program, which Guetlein has compared to the scale of the Manhattan Project in past remarks, has been allotted $25 billion in a Republican spending bill that has yet to pass in Congress. But Golden Dome may ultimately cost much more than Trump’s staggering $175-billion sum. An independent assessment by the Congressional Budget Office estimates its price tag could be as high as $542 billion, and the program has drawn domestic and international outcries that it risks sparking a new, globe-destabilizing arms race and weaponizing Earth’s fragile orbital environment.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.To get a better sense of what’s at stake—and whether Golden Dome has a better chance of success than its failed forebears—Scientific American spoke with Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on the geopolitics of nuclear weaponry at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]It’s been a while, but when last I checked, most experts considered this sort of plan a nonstarter because the U.S. is simply too big of a target. Has something changed?Well, yes and no. The killer argument against space-based interceptors in the 1980s was that it would take thousands of them, and there was just no way to put up that many satellites. Today that’s no longer true. SpaceX alone has put up more than 7,000 Starlink satellites. Launch costs are much cheaper now, and there are more launch vehicles available. So, for the first time, you can say, “Oh, well, I could have a 7,000-satellite constellation. Do I want to do that?” Whereas, when the Reagan administration was talking about this, it was just la-la land.But let’s be clear: this does not solve all the other problems with the general idea—or the Golden Dome version in particular.What are some of those other problems?Just talking about space-based interceptors, there are a couple [of issues that] my colleagues and I have pointed out. We ran some numbers using the old SDI-era calculation from [SDI physicists] Ed Teller and Greg Canavan—so we couldn’t be accused of using some hippie version of the calculation, right? And what this and other independent assessments show is that the number of interceptors you need is super-duper sensitive to lots of things. For instance, it’s not like this is a “one satellite to one missile” situation—because the physics demands that these satellites ... have to be in low-Earth orbit, and that means they’re going to be constantly moving over different parts of the planet.So if you want to defend against just one missile, you still need a whole constellation. And if you want to defend against two missiles, then you basically need twice as many interceptors, and so on.You probably have to shoot down missiles during the boost phase, when the warheads are still attached. For SDI, the U.S. was dealing with Soviet liquid-fueled missiles that would boost, or burn, for about four minutes. Well, modern ones burn for less than three—that’s a whole minute that you no longer have. This is actually much worse than it sounds because you’re probably unable to shoot for the first minute or so. Even with modern detectors [that are] much better than [those] we had in the 1980s, you may not see the missile until it rises above the clouds. And once it does, your sensors, your computers, still have to say, “Aha! That is a missile!” And then you have to ensure that you’re not shooting down some ordinary space launch—so the system says, “I see a missile. May I shoot at it, please?” And someone or something has to give the go-ahead. So let’s just say you’ll have a good minute to shoot it down; this means your space-based interceptor has to be right there, ready to go, right? But by the time you’re getting permission to shoot, the satellite that was overhead to do that is now too far away, and so the next satellite has to be coming there. This scales up really, really fast.Presumably artificial intelligence and other technologies could be leveraged to make that sort of command and control more agile and responsive. But clearly there are still limits here—AI can’t be some sort of panacea.Sure, that’s right. But technological progress overall hasn’t made the threat environment better. Instead it’s gotten much worse.Let’s get back to the sheer physics-induced numbers for a moment, which AI can’t really do much about. That daunting scaling I mentioned also depends on the quality of your interceptors, your kill vehicles—which, by the way, are still going to be grotesquely expensive even if launch costs are low. If your interceptors can rapidly accelerate to eight or 10 kilometers per second (km/s), your constellation can be smaller. If they only reach 4 km/s, your constellation has to be huge.The point is: any claim that you can do this with relatively low numbers—let’s say 2,000 interceptors—assumes a series of improbable miracles occurring in quick succession to deliver the very best outcome that could possibly happen. So it’s not going to happen that way, even if, in principle, it could.So you’re telling me there’s a chance! No, seriously, I see what you mean. The arguments in favor of this working seem rather contrived. No system is perfect, and just one missile getting through can still have catastrophic results. And we haven’t even talked about adversarial countermeasures yet.There’s a joke that’s sometimes made about this: “We play chess, and they don’t move their pieces.” That seems to be the operative assumption here: that other nations will sit idly by as we build a complex, vulnerable system to nullify any strategic nuclear capability they have. And of course, it’s not valid at all. Why do you think the Chinese are building massive fields of missile silos? It’s to counteract or overwhelm this sort of thing. Why do you think the Russians are making moves to put a nuclear weapon in orbit? It’s to mass kill any satellite constellation that would shoot down their missiles.Golden Dome proponents may say, “Oh, we’ll shoot that down, too, before it goes off.” Well, good luck. You put a high-yield nuclear weapon on a booster, and the split second it gets above the clouds, sure, you might see it—but now it sees you, too, before you can shoot. All it has to do at that point is detonate to blow a giant hole in your defenses, and that’s game over. And by the way, this rosy scenario assumes your adversaries don’t interfere with all your satellites passing over their territory in peacetime. We know that won’t be the case—they’ll light them up with sensor-dazzling lasers, at minimum!You’ve compared any feasible space-based system to Starlink and noted that, similar to Starlink, these interceptors will need to be in low-Earth orbit. That means their orbits will rapidly decay from atmospheric drag, so just like Starlink’s satellites, they’d need to be constantly replaced, too, right?Ha, yes, that’s right. With Starlink, you’re looking at a three-to-five-year life cycle, which means annually replacing one third to one fifth of a constellation.So let’s say Golden Dome is 10,000 satellites; this would mean the best-case scenario is that you’re replacing 2,000 per year. Now, let’s just go along with what the Trump administration is saying, that they can get these things really cheap. I’m going to guess a “really cheap” mass-produced kill vehicle would still run you $20 million a pop, easily. Just multiply $20 million by 2,000, and your answer is $40 billion. So under these assumptions, we’d be spending $40 billion per year just to maintain the constellation. That’s not even factoring in operations.And that’s not to mention associated indirect costs from potentially nasty effects on the upper atmosphere and the orbital environment from all the launches and reentries.That, yes—among many other costly things.I have to ask: If fundamental physics makes this extremely expensive idea blatantly incapable of delivering on its promises, what’s really going on when the U.S. president and the secretary of defense announce their intention to pump $175 billion into it for a three-year crash program? Some critics claim this kind of thing is really about transferring taxpayer dollars to a few big aerospace companies and other defense contractors.Well, I wouldn’t say it’s quite that simple.Ballistic missile defense is incredibly appealing to some people for reasons besides money. In technical terms, it’s an elegant solution to the problem of nuclear annihilation—even though it’s not really feasible. For some people, it’s just cool, right? And at a deeper level, many people just don’t like the concept of deterrence—mutual assured destruction and all that—because, remember, the status quo is this: If Russia launches 1,000 nuclear weapons at us—or 100 or 10 or even just one—then we are going to murder every single person in Russia with an immediate nuclear counterattack. That’s how deterrence works. We’re not going to wait for those missiles to land so we can count up our dead to calibrate a more nuanced response. That’s official U.S. policy, and I don’t think anyone wants it to be this way forever. But it’s arguably what’s prevented any nuclear exchange from occurring to date.But not everyone believes in the power of deterrence, and so they’re looking for some kind of technological escape. I don’t think this fantasy is that different from Elon Musk thinking he’s going to go live on Mars when climate change ruins Earth: In both cases, instead of doing the really hard things that seem necessary to actually make this planet better, we’re talking about people who think they can just buy their way out of the problem. A lot of people—a lot of men, especially—really hate vulnerability, and this idea that you can just tech your way out of it is very appealing to them. You know, “Oh, what vulnerability? Yeah, there’s an app for that.”You’re saying this isn’t about money?Well, I imagine this is going to be good for at least a couple of SpaceX Falcon Heavy or Starship launches per year for Elon Musk. And you don’t have to do too many of those launches for the value proposition to work out: You build and run Starlink, you put up another constellation of space-based missile defense interceptors, and suddenly you’ve got a viable business model for these fancy huge rockets that can also take you to Mars, right?Given your knowledge of science history—of how dispassionate physics keeps showing space-based ballistic missile defense is essentially unworkable, yet the idea just keeps coming back—how does this latest resurgence make you feel?When I was younger, I would have been frustrated, but now I just accept human beings don’t learn. We make the same mistakes over and over again. You have to laugh at human folly because I do think most of these people are sincere, you know. They’re trying to get rich, sure, but they’re also trying to protect the country, and they’re doing it through ways they think about the world—which admittedly are stupid. But, hey, they’re trying. It’s very disappointing, but if you just laugh at them, they’re quite amusing.I think most people would have trouble laughing about something as devastating as nuclear war—or about an ultraexpensive plan to protect against it that’s doomed to failure and could spark a new arms race.I guess if you’re looking for a hopeful thought, it’s that we’ve tried this before, and it didn’t really work, and that’s likely to happen again.So how do you think it will actually play out this time around?I think this will be a gigantic waste of money that collapses under its own weight.They’ll put up a couple of interceptors, and they’ll test those against a boosting ballistic missile, and they’ll eventually get a hit. And they’ll use that to justify putting up more, and they’ll probably even manage to make a thin constellation—with the downside, of course, being that the Russians and the Chinese and the North Koreans and everybody else will make corresponding investments in ways to kill this system.And then it will start to really feel expensive, in part because it will be complicating and compromising things like Starlink and other commercial satellite constellations—which, I’d like to point out, are almost certainly uninsured in orbit because you can’t insure against acts of war. So think about that: if the Russians or anyone else detonate a nuclear weapon in orbit because of something like Golden Dome, Elon Musk’s entire constellation is dead, and he’s probably just out the cash.The fact is: these days we rely on space-based assets much more than most people realize, yet Earth orbit is such a fragile environment that we could muck it up in many different ways that carry really nasty long-term consequences. I worry about that a lot. Space used to be a benign environment, even throughout the entire cold war, but having an arms race there will make it malign. So Golden Dome is probably going to make everyone’s life a little bit more dangerous—at least until we, hopefully, come to our senses and decide to try something different.

This article contains Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning spoilers. Before Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning earned its latest title, it was previously called Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 2. Considering Part 1’s muted box office reception in 2023 (back when it had the unenviable task of opening sans IMAX screens a week before Barbenheimer), Paramount was probably wise to change it. And yet, as late as November of last year, the still untitled Mission: Impossible 8 was apparently at the center of competing marketing visions between the studio and its star/producer/living manifestation of destiny: Tom Cruise. According to a THRFinal Reckoning moniker that came to pass, plus all the callbacks and cameos that were spoiled in the film before release (I for one wish I hadn’t known that Rolfe Saxon’s delightful reprisal of the CIA analyst who had the worst day of his life in the original 1996 Mission: Impossible was returning). Yet while the film put “final” in the title, and the word was dropped heavily throughout the script—including by Shea Wingham when he promised Ethan Hunt that they were going to have “a reckoning”—the creative loggerheads over whether this really was the end seems to have bedeviled M:I8 all the way to the closing sequence. For deep in London’s busy Trafalgar Square, a retinue of familiar faces gather in the crowds beneath Nelson’s Column. Cruise’s Ethan is there, of course, as is Hayley Atwell’s Grace and Simon Pegg’s Benji. Even Pom Klementieff seems locked in as a permanent IMF fixture, which is impressive since canonically she was trying to kill all these folks only a month earlier. In many ways it gives closure to the adventure we just watched… but only to a point. In fact, like so much else of The Final Reckoning, the ending feels like a variation of scenes we’ve already seen in this series, such as the surviving members of the team gathering for a victory drink in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, or having a celebratory stroll through the London evening streets (which is the original deleted ending to Mission: Impossible – Fallout). Ultimately much of Final Reckoning feels like a retread of something the series has done relatively recently, and often better, including an ending that refuses to say goodbye to anyone—except maybe Ving Rhames’ fan favorite Luther, who like Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa in the last movie discovered that the only way for their actor to retire from the series was by being killed off by a pretty underwhelming villain named Gabriel (Esai Morales). Otherwise though, this is the conclusion of almost any other Mission flick, and one that feels faintly tinkered with. It is easy to speculate, for instance, whether that scene was a reshoot since none of the stars are seen in the same shot together. Even the setting beneath Nelson’s Column looks like an untied thread after we previously spied the statue of Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson at the beginning of the film right before our first shot of Ethan in London. The historical Nelson died ostensibly saving the world (at least from the British perspective) at the Battle of Trafalgar where he led the Royal Navy in a rout of Napoleon Bonaparte’s ships, cementing British supremacy of the seas for the next hundred years. The subtext of beginning the movie with Nelson, therefore, would seem to be that we were about to see another great man give his life to save the world from a megalomaniac. Instead Ethan not only survived The Final Reckoning, but pretty much went through the exact same ending he experienced in Mission: Impossible – Fallout where Cruise’s hero was forced to commandeer one flying contraption (a biplane now instead of a helicopter) in order to hijack another with his enemy, all so he can snap some MacGuffin into place at a great height while the rest of the team disarms the proverbial ticking bomb that is about to destroy the world. This in no way is meant to undercut the pure spectacle thrill of The Final Reckoning’s climax. Seeing Tom Cruise cling from a biplane that is doing barrel rolls in IMAX is worth the price of admission alone. However, the repetitive nature of it suspiciously resembles a compromise. The Mission films during Christopher McQuarrie’s superb tenure as writer-director—beginning with Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation 10 years ago—are famous for their playing the story by ear on the set. Yet despite Dead Reckoning and even the first act of Final Reckoning inserting some pretty major setups meant to confront Ethan’s past (including with the man who apparently killed a great love of his life 35 years ago and sent him into the IMF) nothing significantly is resolved. We never learn exactly who Ethan was before the IMF, what Gabriel meant to him, or how much this film is about him living with the losses of Ilsa and Luther. Furthermore, even Shea Wigham’s threat that they would have “a reckoning” when this is all over—which comes after the limp reveal that Agent Briggs is actually Jim Phelps Jr.—culminates in nothing more than a handshake and hug. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! The ending of “the Final Reckoning” is treated like an afterthought. In one sense, this is no dealbreaker. Even the best Mission films, which I count Cruise and McQ’s partnership on Fallout and Rogue Nation as the pinnacle of, have never been “plot movies.” With the exception of maybe the first film’s techno thriller elements, every M:I flick is about the spectacle and/or the fun of the team dynamics. They are affirmations of Cruise’s movie stardom achieving an almost religious apotheosis. Yet by marketing the eighth film as the last one, Final Reckoning set expectations its star clearly had no intention of meeting. In retrospect, we should have believed Cruise back in 2023 when he said “I hope to keep making Mission: Impossible movies until I’m [Harrison Ford’s] age.” So the end of Final Reckoning is no ending at all for the franchise, which which becomes a problem when it fitfully attempts to emulate the gravity of franchise closers like The Dark Knight Rises, No Time to Die, and Avengers: Endgame (at least in terms of Iron Man and Black Widow). There are no real goodbyes in Final Reckoning, but the movie is still almost certainly a farewell of sorts—to this iteration of the franchise which began a decade ago. McQuarrie is, again, the greatest collaborator Cruise has ever found on this series. They created the platonic ideal of what a Mission film should be in Rogue Nation and then elevated it to rarified, god tier levels within the action genre in Fallout. But it would seem McQuarrie has pushed his messianic interpretation of Ethan to a breaking point. That becomes more pronounced, too, when considering the latest entry began production during COVID and ended it on the other side of the labor strikes of 2023, causing its budget to reach a reported $400 million zenith. That is a record no studio Still, I suspect if anyone can convince a studio to invest in a franchise even after that kind of budget explosion, it’s Cruise. And until relatively recently he has kept the Mission films healthy and exciting by bringing in new directors who radically reinvent it in terms of tone, aesthetics, and even interpretations of the central character. Cruise’s all-American farmboy turned spy in Brian De Palma’s original film is not the Kung fu-kicking rebel in John Woo’s M:I2, and neither are convincingly J.J. Abrams’ familiar schtick of a suburban everyman (or woman) who has an espionage secret in the closet. McQuarrie’s version of Ethan is my favorite: the reckless gambler with a heart so big that it will redeem all mankind of its sins one insane stunt at a time. But between the 63-year-old movie star getting older and Final Reckoning arguably missing the highs of Fallout in spite its bigger budget, it is likely time to soft reboot the series again. Which might explain the non-ending of Ethan Hunt drifting into the crowd, heading toward his next reinvention.

As Trump axes the Digital Equity Act, other digital divide initiatives remain at risk. Credit: Kathleen Flynn / The Washington Post via Getty Images The Trump administration continues with its cost-slashing, anti-DEI agenda, and its coming for nationwide efforts to close the digital divide next.On May 8, President Donald Trump posted to Truth Social that he was directing the end of the Biden-Harris era Digital Equity Act. Trump called the program — which allocated $2.75 billion to digital inclusion programs — "racist" and "illegal." Last week, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) abruptly terminated grants for 20 different state projects under the act, including digital access in K-12 schools, veteran and senior programs, and rural connectivity efforts. The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) called the decision a "significant setback" to universal access goals. "SETDA stands with our state members and partner organizations who have been diligently building inclusive broadband and digital access plans rooted in community need, engagement, and systemic transformation. Equitable access to technology is not a partisan issue–it is a public good." You May Also Like The decision points to an uncertain future for existing broadband and digital connectivity efforts managed or funded by the federal government. Since most serve specific communities and demographics which are at the highest risk of being technologically disconnected or left behind, they have entered the crosshairs of the administration's "anti-woke" crusade. Indigenous connectivity advocates, for example, warned that a Trump presidency would have an immediate impact on rural broadband projects that were in the process of breaking ground, as the president simultaneously promised to shake up the FCC and whittle down the federal government's spending. Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up! “Ongoing efforts to bridge the digital divide in the U.S. face significant challenges with the recent termination of the Digital Equity Act, and potential drastic changes coming to the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program," said Sharayah Lane, senior advisor of community connectivity for the global nonprofit the Internet Society and member of the Lummi Nation. "This will critically impact the future of affordable, reliable, high-speed Internet access in underserved areas, further limiting essential education, healthcare, and economic opportunities."The Biden administration, which pledged billions of federal dollars to building out the nation's high speed broadband and fiber optic network, had made closing the digital divide a central component to its massive federal spending package, including launching the Affordable Connectivity Program, the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program, and the BEAD initiative. BEAD funds, in particular, were split up between state broadband infrastructure projects, including 19 grants over $1 billion. But now the funds are being pulled out from under them. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has had the $42 billion BEAD budget under review since Trump took office, and has falsely claimed that the program "has not connected a single person to the internet," but is rather a "woke mandate" under the previous presidency. Related Stories Meanwhile, Trump has pushed to open up an auction of highly sought after spectrum bands to serve WiFi, 5G, and 6G projects under his "One Big Beautiful Bill" — a move that may sideline rural connectivity projects focused on building reliable, physical connections to high speed internet. Advocates have long fought for federal investment in "missing middle miles" of fiber optic cables and broadband, rather than unstable satellite connections, such as those promised by Elon Musk's Starlink. "We need to prioritize investments in sustainable infrastructure through programs like BEAD and the Digital Equity Act to ensure long-term, affordable Internet access for all Americans, strengthen the economy, and bolster the nation’s overall digital resilience," said Lane. Chase DiBenedetto Social Good Reporter Chase joined Mashable's Social Good team in 2020, covering online stories about digital activism, climate justice, accessibility, and media representation. Her work also captures how these conversations manifest in politics, popular culture, and fandom. Sometimes she's very funny.

Trace amounts of precious metals found in volcanic rock appear to come from the Earth's inner core. Credit: Deposit Photos Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Contrary to conspiracy theories, the Earth’s core isn’t hollow. The dense, hot ball instead contains a stew of precious metals including platinum, ruthenium, and pretty much all of the planet’s gold. As lucrative as that sounds, there’s essentially no way humanity will ever access this natural treasure chest buried beneath more than 1,850  feet of solid rock. But according to recent discoveries made at volcanoes in Hawai’i, trace amounts of some of those coveted metals are seeping up from the planet’s deepest reaches. “When the first results came in, we realized that we had literally struck gold,” Nils Messling, a geochemist at Göttingen University, said in a statement. “Our data confirmed that material from the core, including gold and other precious metals, is leaking into Earth’s mantle above.” Messling and collaborators explained their findings in a study published on May 21 in the journal Nature. The team recently detected trace amounts of the precious metal ruthenium while analyzing volcanic rock samples collected across the islands of Hawai’i. More specifically, they noted the unexpected presence of the ruthenium isotope, ¹⁰⁰Ru. “Unexpected” is the key word there. While ¹⁰⁰Ru does exist in Earth’s mantle, it’s slightly more abundant inside of the core—alongside 99.999 percent of the planet’s gold and other precious metals. That’s because during the planet’s formation about 4.5 billion years ago, some of the ruthenium that is locked inside Earth’s core originated from a different source than the small amount found in the mantle today. The discrepancies between these two forms of ruthenium is so slight that the equipment used by geologists to study these isotopes hasn’t been able to tell the two apart. However, researchers at Göttingen University in The Netherlands recently developed new isotopic analysis methods that allowed them to do just that. In differentiating between these two types of the same isotope, the team discovered that some of Hawai’i’s volcanic basalts contain an unusually high ¹⁰⁰Ru signal meaning it must have originated from near the core-mantle-boundary.   The ramifications are significant: Earth’s core, once thought inaccessible, is ejected at least small amounts up towards the surface during volcanic eruptions. “We can now also prove that huge volumes of super-heated mantle material—several hundreds of quadrillion metric tons of rock—originate at the core-mantle boundary and rise to Earth’s surface to form ocean islands like Hawaii,” added study co-author Matthias Wilbold. The question now isn’t if this unexpected process happens—it’s a question of if and when it’s happened in the past. “Our findings open up an entirely new perspective on the evolution of the inner dynamics of our home planet,” added Messling.

Adelie penguins on sea ice off the Antarctic PeninsulaAshley Cooper pics/Alamy Fumes of ammonia rising from piles of droppings in Antarctica’s crowded penguin colonies help boost the formation of clouds, which have a cooling effect by reflecting sunlight away from the surface. “This demonstrates a deep connection between the ecosystem and atmospheric processes,” says Matthew Boyer at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Advertisement The link comes down to the way ammonia affects the number of particles in the atmosphere. In order to form a cloud, water vapour must condense around a sizeable particle of some kind. But those are hard to come by in Antarctica’s cold, clean air. Without much dust, vegetation or air pollution around, most of the particles available for a would-be cloud are clusters of sulphuric acid molecules generated as a result of natural emissions from phytoplankton in waters around the continent. High concentrations of ammonia were already known to accelerate the formation of these clusters a thousand-fold. But where would ammonia come from in Antarctica? Penguin droppings should be a rich source. To check this, Boyer and his colleagues measured concentrations of ammonia, sulphuric acid and larger particles in the air several kilometres downwind of a 60,000-strong colony of Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) on the Antarctic Peninsula. “They smell terrible,” says Boyer. “They’re dirty birds.” Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month. Sign up to newsletter When wind was blowing from the direction of the colony, they found ammonia concentrations rose far above the levels found in air arriving from other directions. This rise in ammonia also boosted the formation of particles of sulphuric acid large enough for water to condense around them, and presumably to form clouds. This effect persisted for weeks after the penguins had moved on from the colony. More clouds, especially over the ocean, would have a cooling effect by reflecting sunlight away from Earth’s surface. Boyer says this also implies that a decline in penguin populations – for instance, due to sea ice loss driven by climate change – could have a warming effect across Antarctica by reducing cloud cover. However, the measurements taken in the current work aren’t enough to estimate the size of the effect. Other research suggests it could be significant. For instance, Jeffrey Pierce at Colorado State University and his colleagues found ammonia from puffin excretions in the Arctic similarly boosted cloud cover during summer. They estimated this resulted in a cooling effect that cancelled as much as a third of the warming due to carbon dioxide in the air across the region. “I’m sure it makes some impact,” says Pierce. Journal reference:Communications Earth and Environment DOI: 10.1038/s43247-025-02312-2 Topics:

In Denver, Studio Gang is designing a new pedestrian walkway that will improve accessibility between the Colorado State Capitol and Lincoln Veterans Memorial Park, together with Colorado Governor Jared Polis and the America 150-250 Commission. The landscape project is part of a larger masterplan for downtown Denver first shared in 2022, titled Civic Center Next 100. Studio Gang was tapped to lead Phase 1 of the project in 2023, as reported by AN. Mundus Architects, OLIN, Studiotrope, and Thornton Tomasetti are also on the design team. Lincoln Veterans Memorial Park sits just across from the Colorado State Capitol, but connection between the park and capitol is severed by Lincoln Street, a four-lane road. Renderings show the planned elevated footpath anchored at the eastern end of Civic Center. It gradually rises up and has curves that emulate Colorado’s shifting rivers, and also the park’s existing historic crescent-shaped paths. The meandering pathway is meant to emulate Colorado’s rivers. (Courtesy Studio Gang) The Colorado 150 Pedestrian Walkway will total 11,000 square feet. Its goal is to enhance connectivity and accessibility. Studio Gang founder Jeanne Gang said Colorado 150 Pedestrian Walkway will be a “new public space that will also serve as a civic and cultural monument.” Gang added: “We designed the walkway to make this part of Civic Center more welcoming to pedestrians and to celebrate Colorado’s rich history and exciting next 150 years.” A site plan shows the paths connection (Courtesy Studio Gang) The walkway is divided between four zones. The western entrance is called Park Landing, and will have new meadow plantings and a play area. Canopy Walk will be the most elevated portion of the walkway. Toward the eastern end, Capitol Landing will have a newly accessible plaza in front of the State Capitol. Regional materials such as sandstone, marble, and granite will make up the design, as tribute to Colorado’s geological formation. Viewing platforms, sculptural monuments, newly commissioned artworks by local artists, play elements, and public exhibits will abound. The design incorporates regional materials. (Courtesy Studio Gang) The pathway is slated for completion in July 2026 to commemorate Colorado’s 150th anniversary, hence its name. Its news comes not long after another important project by Studio Gang opened in Denver, Populous Hotel.

May 22, 20255 min readHow One Astronomer Helped to Discover Nearly 200 Moons of SaturnScientific American spoke with the astronomer who has contributed to the discovery of two thirds of Saturn’s known moonsBy Meghan Bartels edited by Lee Billings NASA, ESA, John T. Clarke (Boston University), Zolt G. Levay (STScI)A mere decade ago, astronomers knew of just 62 moons around Saturn. Today the ringed planet boasts a staggering 274 official satellites. That’s more than any other world in the solar system—and far too many for most people to keep track of. Astronomer Edward Ashton is no exception, even though he has helped to discover 192 of them—he thinks that’s the total, anyway, after pausing to do some mental math.Ashton is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan. He fell into hunting for Saturn’s moons in 2018, when his then academic adviser suggested the project for his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia. It has been a fruitful search. Most recently, in March, Ashton and his colleagues announced a batch of 128 newfound Saturnian satellites.Scientific American spoke with Ashton about the science of discovering so many relatively tiny moons—most of them just a few kilometers wide—using vast amounts of data gathered by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), located in Hawaii.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]How have you found these moons?To detect the moons, we use a technique known as shifting and stacking. We take 44 sequential images of the same patch of sky over a three-hour period because, in that time frame, the moons move relative to the stars at a rate similar to Saturn. If we just stack the images normally, then the moon appears as a streak across the images, and that dilutes the signal of the moon.So what we do is: we shift the images relative to one another at multiple different rates near that of Saturn, and then we basically blink between the different shift rates. If the shift rate is not quite at the rate of the moon, then it’s going to be slightly elongated. As you get closer to the rate of the moon, then it slowly combines into a dot. And then, as you get faster than the moon’s rate, it expands again. So basically, we look at the images and then quickly blink through the different rates, and you can see the moon coalescing.That’s for a single night. But just seeing an object moving at a Saturn-like rate near Saturn doesn’t guarantee that it is a moon. It’s highly likely that the object is a moon, but that hasn’t been confirmed. So what we need to do is track the objects to show that they are in orbit around the planet. To do that, we repeat the [shift and stack] process multiple times over many months and years.Why did this happen now? Did you need new techniques and observatories to do this work?The technique and the technology have been there for a while—the same technique has been used to find moons of Neptune and Uranus. But the sky area around those planets where moons can exist is a lot smaller, so it takes less time to search through the data. One of the reasons why this hadn’t been done for Saturn is because it’s very time-consuming.Why do those other planets have less space where moons could be than Saturn does?Those planets are less massive, so the stable orbits that moons can have are smaller.I had been wondering if this technique works for other planets, and clearly the answer is yes. But do you think there are other moons that have yet to be found around Saturn or other planets with the method?We did find moon candidates around Saturn that we weren’t able to track long enough to be able to confirm them. So if you redo this technique again, you will be able to find more moons around Saturn, but this is a case of diminishing returns. If you use a larger telescope [than the CFHT], then you’d be able to see fainter moons, so you’d be able to find more.At the moment, if you use the same technique for Jupiter, you will be able to find fainter moons. The problem is: the amount of sky that moons of Jupiter can occupy is significantly larger than [the amount of sky that can be occupied by moons of] Saturn, so the method is even more time-consuming for Jupiter. And Jupiter is much brighter than Saturn and the other planets, so there’s a lot of scattered light that makes it harder to see the moons.So it’s even harder to find satellites around Jupiter, and as you mentioned, other groups have already done this work for Uranus and Neptune. Does that mean we’re sort of “maxed out” on moons until we have better observations?Yeah, you probably have to wait until better technology comes along.Is there something being built or planned right now that could be that “better technology”?There currently are telescopes that can see deeper [than the CFHT], such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The problem is: JWST’s field of view is very small, so you have to do quite a few observations to be able to cover the required area. But there is a telescope that’s set to launch pretty soon, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, that has quite a large field of view. So that’ll be a good telescope to use for hunting more moons.What do we know about these new moons?You basically can only get the moons’ orbits and approximate sizes. But if you look at the distribution of the orbits, you can understand a bit more about the history of the system. Moons that are sort of clumped together in orbital space are most likely the result of a collision, so you can see what moons come from the same parent object.Is seeing so many moons around Saturn unusual?What’s unusual is how many there are. It appears that the planets have more or less equal numbers of the larger moons. But when you get down to the smaller ones that we’re discovering, Saturn seems to shoot up in terms of the numbers. So that’s quite interesting. This could just be because there was a recent collision within the Saturnian system that produced a large number of fragments.Do you get to name them all? Do you have to name them all?I guess I don’t have to. Some of these new moons, they’ve been linked back to observations by a different group from more than 10 years ago. That’s maybe 20 to 30 of them. For the rest, we get full discovery credit, which, I think, means we get the right to name them. But they can’t be named just yet; first, they’re just given a number when they have a high-precision orbit, and I’m not sure how long that’s going to take.Do you have more moon-hunting observations to analyze?No, I’m taking a little break from moons! I’ve got other projects to work on, relating to trans-Neptunian objects. They’re quite far away. They’re hard to see. There are some mysteries about them at the moment. It’s interesting to understand their structure and how it relates to planet formation.