Former President Donald Trump vowed to create a new position for billionaire Elon Musk if he is reelected.
During a Sunday interview on Fox News, host Maria Bartiromo wondered how Trump would "pay for all of this no tax on stuff."
Trump answered by pointing to economic growth and cutting government costs. The former president suggested that he would allow Musk to shut down government agencies.
"So, what agencies would you want to shut down?" Bartiromo asked.
"Well, let me have you ask another person that because I'm going to have Elon Musk," Trump replied. "He is dying to do this. You know, he's a great business guy, actually."
"You think of him for science and rockets, and every time a thing he's telling me about a new screw was developed, he's developed a new screw, screws are difficult, and it's made out of titanium, and it's so exciting," he continued.
"So he will be in the cabinet?" Bartiromo pressed.
"He doesn't want to be in the cabinet," Trump explained. "He just wants to be in charge of cost-cutting, who have a new position, secretary of cost-cutting."
The former president argued that Musk could not take a cabinet-level position because he was too busy.
"And besides that, I want him to send the rocket up to Mars," he noted. "He said, he's made me a promise he'll get to Mars before the end of my administration, which will be long before, hopefully, China or Russia. I created Space Force."
The human mind may find it difficult to conceptualize: a cosmic cloud so colossal it surrounds the Sun and eight planets as it extends trillions of miles into deep space.
The spherical shell known as the Oort Cloud is, for all practical purposes, invisible. Its constituent particles are spread so thinly, and so far from the light of any star, including the Sun, that astronomers simply cannot see the cloud, even though it envelops us like a blanket.
It is also theoretical. Astronomers infer the Oort Cloud is there because it’s the only logical explanation for the arrival of a certain class of comets that sporadically visit our solar system. The cloud, it turns out, is basically a gigantic reservoir that may hold billions of icy celestial bodies.
Two of those bodies will pass by Earth in the days leading up to Halloween. Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, also known as Comet C/2023 A3, will be at its brightest, and likely visible to the naked eye, for a week or two after Oct. 12, the day it’s closest to Earth – just look to the western sky shortly after sunset. As the days pass, the comet will get fainter and move to a higher part of the sky.
A view of comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS from the International Space Station.
The second comet, C/2024 S1 (ATLAS), just discovered on Sept. 27, should be visible around the end of October. The comet will pass closest to Earth on Oct. 24 – look low in the eastern sky just before sunrise. Then, after swinging around the Sun, the comet may reappear in the western night sky right around Halloween. It’s possible, however, that it could disintegrate, in part or in whole, as sometimes happens when comets pass by the Sun – and this one will come within 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) of our star.
As a planetary astronomer, I’m particularly curious about the Oort Cloud and the icy bodies inhabiting it. The Cloud’s residents may be a reason why life ignited on Earth; crashing on our planet eons ago, these ice bodies may have supplied at least some of the water that all life requires. At the same time, these same objects pose an ever-present threat to Earth’s continuation – and our survival.
Billions of comets
If an Oort Cloud object finds its way to the inner solar system, its ices vaporize. That process produces a tail of debris that becomes visible as a comet.
Some of these bodies, known as long-period comets, have orbits of hundreds, thousands or even millions of years, like Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. This is unlike the so-called short-period comets, which do not visit the Oort Cloud and have comparatively quick orbits. Halley’s comet, which cuts a path through the solar system and orbits the Sun every 76 years or so, is one of them.
The 20th-century Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, intrigued by the long-period comets, wrote a paper on them in 1950. He noted about 20 of the comets had an average distance from the Sun that was more than 10,000 astronomical units. This was astounding; just one AU is the distance of the Earth from the Sun, which is about 93 million miles. Multiply 93 million by 10,000, and you’ll find these comets come from over a trillion miles away. What’s more, Oort suggested, they were not necessarily the cloud’s outermost objects.
Nearly 75 years after Oort’s paper, astronomers still can’t directly image this part of space. But they do estimate the Oort Cloud spans up to 10 trillion miles from the Sun, which is almost halfway to Proxima Centauri, the next closest star.
The long-period comets spend most of their time at those vast distances, making only brief and rapid visits close to the Sun as they come in from all directions. Oort speculated the cloud contained 100 billion of these icy objects. That may be as numerous as the number of stars in our galaxy.
How did they get there? Oort suggested, and modern simulations have confirmed, that these icy bodies could have initially formed near Jupiter, the solar system’s largest planet. Perhaps these objects had their orbits around the Sun disturbed by Jupiter – similar to how NASA spacecraft bound for destinations from Saturn to Pluto have typically swung by the giant planet to accelerate their journeys outward.
Some of these objects would have escaped the solar system permanently, becoming interstellar objects. But others would have ended up with orbits like those of the long-period comets.
An illustration of the solar system and the Oort Cloud. The numbers on the graph depict AUs, or astronomical units. Note the location of Voyager 2, which will take another 30,000 years to fly out of the Cloud. NASA
Threats to Earth
Long-period comets present a particular potential danger to Earth. Because they are so far from our Sun, their orbits are readily altered by the gravity of other stars. That means scientists have no idea when or where one will appear, until it does, suddenly. By then, it’s typically closer than Jupiter and moving rapidly, at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Indeed, the fictional comet that doomed Earth in the film “Don’t Look Up” came from the Oort Cloud.
New Oort Cloud comets are discovered all the time, a dozen or so per year in recent years. The odds of any of them colliding with Earth are extremely low. But it is possible. The recent success of NASA’s DART mission, which altered the orbit of a small asteroid, demonstrates one plausible approach to fending off these small bodies. But that mission was developed after years of studying its target. A comet from the Oort Cloud may not offer that much time – maybe just months, weeks or even days.
Or no time at all. ’Oumuamua, the odd little object that visited our solar system in 2017, was discovered not before but after its closest approach to Earth. Although ’Oumuamua is an interstellar object, and not from the Oort Cloud, the proposition still applies; one of these objects could sneak up on us, and the Earth would be defenseless.
One way to prepare for these objects is to better understand their basic properties, including their size and composition. Toward this end, my colleagues and I work to characterize new long-period comets. The largest known one, Bernardinelli–Bernstein, discovered just three years ago, is roughly 75 miles (120 kilometers) across. Most known comets are much smaller, from one to a few miles, and some smaller ones are too faint for us to see. But newer telescopes are helping. In particular, the Rubin Observatory’s decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time, starting up in 2025, may double the list of known Oort Cloud comets, which now stands at about 4,500.
The unpredictability of these objects makes them a challenging target for spacecraft, but the European Space Agency is preparing a mission to do just that: Comet Interceptor. With a launch planned for 2029, the probe will park in space until a suitable target from the Oort Cloud appears. Studying one of these ancient and pristine objects could offer scientists clues about the origins of the solar system.
As for the comets now in Earth’s vicinity, it’s OK to look up. Unlike the comet in the DiCaprio movie, these two will not crash into the Earth. The nearest Tsuchinshan-ATLAS will get to us is about 44 million miles (70 million kilometers); C/2024 S1 (ATLAS), about 80 million miles (130 million kilometers). Sounds like a long way, but in space, that’s a near miss.
But some risks of AI are still poorly understood. These include the very particular risks to Indigenous knowledges and communities.
There’s a simple reason for this: the AI industry and governments have largely ignored Indigenous people in the development and regulation of AI technologies. Put differently, the world of AI is too white.
AI developers and governments need to urgently fix this if they are serious about ensuring everybody shares the benefits of AI. As Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people like to say, “nothing about us, without us”.
Indigenous concerns
Indigenous peoples around the world are not ignoring AI. They are having conversations, conducting research and sharing their concerns about the current trajectory of it and related technologies.
A well-documented problem is the theft of cultural intellectual property. For example, users of AI image generation programs such as DeepAI can artificially generate artworks in mere seconds which mimic Indigenous styles and stories of art.
This demonstrates how easy it is for someone using AI to misappropriate cultural knowledges. These generations are taken from large data sets of publicly available imagery to create something new. But they miss the storying and cultural knowledge present in our art practices.
AI technologies also fuel the spread of misinformation about Indigenous people.
The internet is already riddled with misinformation about Indigenous people. The long-running Creative Spirits website, which is maintained by a non-Indigenous person, is a prominent example.
Generative AI systems are likely to make this problem worse. They often conflate us with other global Indigenous peoples around the world. They also draw on inappropriate sources, including Creative Spirits.
During last year’s Voice to Parliament referendum in Australia, “no” campaigners also used AI-generated images depicting Indigenous people. This demonstrates the role of AI in political contexts and the harm it can cause to us.
Another problem is the lack of understanding of AI among Indigenous people. Some 40% of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population in Australia don’t know what generative AI is. This reflects an urgent need to provide relevant information and training to Indigenous communities on the use of the technology.
We must think more expansively about AI and all the other computational systems in which we find ourselves increasingly enmeshed. We need to expand the operational definition of intelligence used when building these systems to include the full spectrum of behaviour we humans use to make sense of the world.
Key to achieving this is the idea of “Indigenous data sovereignty”. This would mean Indigenous people retain sovereignty over their own data, in the sense that they own and control access to it.
The National Agreement on Closing the Gap also affirms the importance of Indigenous data control and access.
This is reaffirmed at a global level as well. In 2020, a group of Indigenous scholars from around the world published a position paper laying out how Indigenous protocols can inform ethically created AI. This kind of AI would centralise the knowledges of Indigenous peoples.
For example, the guardrails include the need to ensure additional transparency and make extra considerations when it comes to using data about or owned by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, to “mitigate the perpetuation of existing social inequalities”.
Indigenous Futurisms
Grace Dillon, a scholar from a group of North American Indigenous people known as the Anishinaabe, first coined the term “Indigenous Futurisms”.
Ambelin Kwaymullina, an academic and futurist practitioner from the Palyku nation in Western Australia, defines it as:
visions of what-could-be that are informed by ancient Aboriginal cultures and by our deep understandings of oppressive systems.
These visions, Kwaymullina writes, are “as diverse as Indigenous peoples ourselves”. They are also unified by “an understanding of reality as living, interconnected whole in which human beings are but one strand of life amongst many, and a non-linear view of time”.
So how can AI technologies be informed by Indigenous ways of knowing?
A first step is for industry to involve Indigenous people in creating, maintaining and evaluating the technologies – rather than asking them retrospectively to approve work already done.
Governments need to also do more than highlight the importance of Indigenous data sovereignty in policy documents. They need to meaningfully consult with Indigenous peoples to regulate the use of these technologies. This consultation must aim to ensure ethical AI behaviour among organisations and everyday users that honours Indigenous worldviews and realities.
AI developers and governments like to claim they are serious about ensuring AI technology benefits all of humanity. But unless they start involving Indigenous people more in developing and regulating the technology, their claims ring hollow.
Scientist Jim Wild has travelled to the Arctic Circle numerous times to study the northern lights, but on Thursday night he only needed to look out of his bedroom window in the English city of Lancaster.
For at least the second time this year, skygazers in many parts of the world were treated to colourful auroras at latitudes beyond the polar extremes where they normally light up the skies.
The dazzling celestial shows were caused by a gigantic ball of plasma -- and an accompanying magnetic field -- which erupted from the Sun earlier this week.
When this eruption, called a coronal mass ejection (CME), arrived at Earth at around 1600 GMT on Thursday, it triggered a strong geomagnetic storm.
This storm in turn sparked northern and southern lights -- aurora borealis and aurora australis -- in swathes of Europe, the United States, Australia and elsewhere.
While Wild could see the shimmering reds and greens from his back garden, he jumped in the car with his family to get a better look away from the bright lights of Lancaster.
"All the little back roads and parking spots were full of people with flasks of coffee and deck chairs looking at the northern lights," he told AFP.
"It was a party atmosphere," he said, comparing the scenes to UFO spotters looking up at the sky in the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind".
While Wild was explaining the phenomenon to his 11- and 13-year-old children, another nearby skygazer approached and asked how come he knew so much about it.
"Well, actually, this is what I study for a living," responded the professor in space physics at Lancaster University, who specialises in how solar weather disrupts power grids and transport here on Earth.
- 'Perfect hit' -
Auroras were also visible across northern Europe, including near London and Berlin, and as far south in the US as the state of Virginia. In the Southern Hemisphere, areas of Australia and New Zealand were also treated to a show, AFP photos showed.
The CME that triggered Thursday's auroras erupted from a spot on the Sun pointed directly at Earth, said Juha-Pekka Luntama, the head of the European Space Agency's Space Weather Office.
"It was a perfect hit," he told AFP.
The CME caused a "severe" geomagnetic storm given a rating of G4. This fell narrowly short of the highest level of G5, which was seen in May, when auroras delighted many skygazers across swathes of the world.
Storms on the Sun have been intensifying as solar activity approaches -- or may have already reached -- the peak of its 11-year cycle.
While such storms offer pretty light shows for skygazers, they can pose a serious threat to satellites, GPS services, power grids and even astronauts in space.
The US Space Weather Prediction Center warned on Thursday that the geomagnetic storm could disrupt emergencies services already stretched thin by deadly hurricanes Helene and Milton.
Luntama said the European Space Agency had not received any information about disruptions caused by the latest storm, but sometimes this can take days.
The storm is "gradually dissipating", he added, which means that any auroras on Friday night or over the weekend will likely be farther north in Europe, such as central Sweden.
- 'Delighted' -
But for those still hoping to see an aurora, there could be some more chances in the next couple of years.
Luntama explained that during past solar cycles, the biggest eruptions have come in the two years after the Sun passed its peak.
Wild also did not expect a repeat of Thursday's "magical" display.
But space weather -- like Earth's weather -- is not an "exact art," he emphasized.
And if there is an aurora lighting up the sky nearby, it is worth seeking out.
Wild said his neighbors had travelled to Norway twice to see the northern lights -- but had been foiled by clouds both times.
Then on Thursday night, they saw an aurora from their garden.
"They were really delighted to finally have seen it," Wild said.
It might sound far-fetched, but recent research suggests that dogs’ and humans’ brains synchronise when they look at each other.
This research, conducted by researchers in China, is the first time that “neural coupling” between different species has been witnessed.
Neural coupling is when the brain activity of two or more individuals aligns during an interaction. For humans, this is often in response to a conversation or story.
Neural coupling has been observed when members of the same species interact, including mice, bats, humans and other primates. This linking of brains is probably important in shaping responses during social encounters and might result in complex behaviour that would not be seen in isolation, such as enhancing teamwork or learning.
When social species interact, their brains “connect”. But this case of it happening between different species raises interesting considerations about the subtleties of the human-dog relationship and might help us understand each other a little better.
In the recent study, the researchers studied neural coupling using brain-activity recording equipment called non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG). This uses headgear containing electrodes that detect neural signals – in this case, from the beagles and humans involved in the study.
Researchers examined what happened to these neural signals when dogs and people were isolated from each other, and in the presence of each other, but without looking at each other. Dogs and humans were then allowed to interact with each other.
Look into my eyes
When dogs and humans gazed at each other and the dogs were stroked, their brain signals synchronised. The brain patterns in key areas of the brain associated with attention, matched in both dog and person.
Dogs and people who became more familiar with each other over the five days of the study had increased synchronisation of neural signals. Previous studies of human-human interactions have found increased familiarity between people also resulted in more closely matching brain patterns. So the depth of relationship between people and dogs may make neural coupling stronger.
The ability of dogs to form strong attachments with people is well known. A 2022 study found the presence of familiar humans could reduce stress responses in young wolves, the dog’s close relative. Forming neural connections with people might be one of the ways by which the dog-human relationship develops.
The researchers also studied the potential effect of differences in the brain on neural coupling. They did this by including dogs with a mutation in a gene called Shank3, which can lead to impaired neural connectivity in brain areas linked with attention. This gene is responsible for making a protein that helps promote communication between cells, and is especially abundant in the brain. Mutations in Shank3 have also been associated with autism spectrum disorder in humans.
Study dogs with the Shank3 mutation did not show the same level of matching brain signals with people, as those without the mutation. This was potentially because of impaired neural signalling and processing.
However, when researchers gave the study dogs with the Shank3 mutation, a single dose of LSD (a hallucinogenic drug), they showed increased levels of attention and restored neural coupling with humans.
The researchers were clear that there remains much to be learned about neural coupling between dogs and humans.
It might well be the case that looking into your dog’s eyes means that your respective brain signals will synchronise and enhance your connection. The more familiar you are with each other, the stronger it becomes, it seems.
On October 10, NASA is launching a hotly anticipated new mission to Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, Europa.
Called Europa Clipper, the spacecraft will conduct a detailed study of the moon, looking for potential places where Europa might host alien life.
It’s the largest planetary exploration spacecraft NASA has ever made: as wide as a basketball court when its solar sails are unfolded. It has a mass of about 6,000 kilograms – the weight of a large African elephant.
But why are we sending a hulking spacecraft all the way to Europa?
Looking for life away from Earth
The search for life in places other than Earth usually focuses on our neighbour Mars, a planet that’s technically in the “habitable zone” of our Solar System. But Mars is not an attractive place to live, due to its lack of atmosphere and high levels of radiation. However, it’s close to Earth, making it relatively easy to send missions to explore it.
But there are other places in the Solar System that could support life – some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Why? They have liquid water.
Here on Earth, water is the solvent of life: water dissolves salts and sugars, and facilitates the chemical reactions needed for life on Earth to proceed. It’s possible life forms exist elsewhere that rely on liquid methane or carbon dioxide or something else, but life as we know it uses water.
Saturn’s moons, Titan and Enceladus, are stretched and compressed by gravity as they go around their host planet. This movement results in vast underground oceans with a surface of solid ice, with plumes of water vapour exploding 9,600 kilometres from the surface.
It is strongly suspected that Europa is the same. While we know a lot about Europa from more than four centuries of observation, we have not confirmed it has an under-ice liquid ocean like Titan and Enceladus.
But all clues point to yes. Europa has a smooth surface despite being hit by many meteors, suggesting the surface is young, recently replaced. Ice volcanoes raining down water over the surface would make sense.
It also has a magnetic field, suggesting that like Earth, Europa has a liquid layer inside (on Earth, this liquid is molten rock).
This artist’s concept (not to scale) shows what Europa’s insides might look like: an outer shell of ice, perhaps with plumes venting out; a deep layer of liquid water; and a rocky interior, potentially with hydrothermal vents on the seafloor. NASA/JPL-Caltech
What will Europa Clipper do?
At the surface, Europa is bombarded by high levels of space radiation, concentrated by Jupiter. But deeper down, the thick ice sheet could be protecting life in the liquid subsurface ocean.
This means it would be difficult for us to find concrete evidence for life without drilling down deep. But where to look? Through flybys of the icy moon, Europa Clipper will be looking at areas where life could be dwelling under the icy shell.
To achieve this, Europa Clipper has nine scientific instruments. These include a wide-angle camera to study geologic activity and a thermal imaging system to measure surface texture and detect warmer regions on the surface.
There’s also a spectrometer for looking at the chemical composition of the gases and surface of Europa, and for any explosive plumes of water from the surface. The mission also has tools for mapping the moon’s surface.
Other instruments will measure the depth and salt levels of the moon’s ocean and the thickness of its ice shell, and also how Europa flexes within the strong gravitational pull of Jupiter.
Excitingly, a mass spectrometer will analyse the gases of the moon’s faint atmosphere and potential plumes of water. By examining the material ejected from the plumes, we can understand what is hidden within the under-ice oceans of Europa.
A dust analyser will also look at matter that has been ejected from Europa’s surface by tiny meteorites or released from the plumes.
Unfortunately, we will have to wait a while for any discoveries. Europa Clipper will take more than five years to reach Jupiter. And the mission is only equipped to look for the potential of life, not life itself. If we see evidence that might point towards life, we will need future missions to return and explore Europa in depth.
So we must be patient. But this is an exciting opportunity for humanity to get one step closer to find life beyond our own home planet.
It’s tempting to assume that a person’s moral values are stable across time and circumstances, and to some extent they are — but not entirely. Moral values are malleable and can sometimes change depending on the specific thoughts, feelings and motivations that arise in different situations.
Seasons are characterized not just by changes in the weather, but also by many additional changes in our surroundings and the rhythms of our lives. These may include spring cleaning, spending more time with family in summer, back-to-school shopping in the autumn or preparing for winter holidays.
We examined five core principles that previous research has identified as fundamental moral values. Two of these principles — don’t hurt other people and treat all people fairly — pertain to individual rights and are referred to as “individualizing” values.
Three other principles — be loyal to one’s group, respect authority and maintain group traditions — promote group cohesion and are referred to as “binding” values.
Most people endorse all these values, but people differ in the extent to which they prioritize them, and these priorities have important implications. People who prioritize individualizing values are more politically liberal, whereas people who prioritize binding values are more conservative, more punitive and express stronger prejudices against out-groups.
Seasonal cycles
Do the seasons affect the extent to which people endorse these core moral values? To find out, we obtained data from YourMorals, a research website that uses online survey methods to assess people’s self-reported endorsement of all five of these core moral values.
Our analyses focused on the values reported by 232,975 respondents in the United States across a decade (2011-20) of data. The results revealed no apparent seasonal cycle in Americans’ endorsement of individualizing values, but there was clear and consistent seasonal cycle in Americans’ endorsement of all three binding moral values.
This seasonal cycle was bimodal, with two peaks and two valleys each year: Americans endorsed binding moral values (valuing loyalty, authority and group traditions) most strongly in the spring and autumn, and least strongly in midsummer and midwinter. This bimodal seasonal cycle in binding moral values showed up again and again in the data, year after year.
A graph depicting Americans’ endorsement of binding and individualizing moral values. (I. Hohm and M. Schaller), CC BY
This seasonal cycle in binding moral values wasn’t unique to the U.S. either. Additional analyses on data from Canada and Australia revealed similar patterns: Canadians and Australians also endorsed binding moral values most strongly in the spring and autumn, and least strongly in midsummer and midwinter.
Anxiety patterns
What might explain this seasonal cycle in people’s endorsement of binding moral values? One possibility is that it has something to do with the perception of threat, which encourages people to close ranks within a group. Previous research has linked this to increased endorsement of binding moral values.
To test this idea, we analyzed data on an emotion associated with threat perception: anxiety. Results revealed that Americans’ self-reported anxiety showed the same bimodal seasonal cycle, and so did 10 years of data on Americans’ Google searches for anxiety-related words. This seasonal cycle in anxiety helps to explain the seasonal cycle in binding values.
Anxiety tends to change with the seasons, decreasing in summer and midwinter. (Shutterstock)
This explanation raises a new question: what might explain the seasonal cycle in anxiety? Although we can only speculate, our analyses on moral values revealed an intriguing clue. The summertime dip in Americans’ endorsement of binding moral values was bigger in places with more extreme seasonal changes in the temperature. There was no such effect on the size of the midwinter dip.
Perhaps something similar might be going on with anxiety: maybe that summertime decrease is the result of pleasant weather, whereas the midwinter decrease is more of a holiday effect.
Double-edged sword
Regardless of the cause, seasonal cycles in binding moral values could have consequences that affect people’s lives, for better or worse. Binding moral values promote cohesion, conformity and co-operation within groups, which can be beneficial, especially when coping with crises.
The implication is that groups might cope better with crises that emerge in the spring and autumn, compared to those that occur in the summer and winter.
But binding moral values also promote distrust of people who fail to adhere to group norms and traditions. The implication is that there may also be seasonal cycles in prejudices against immigrants, racial minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals and anybody else who is perceived to be different.
People who more strongly endorse binding moral values are also more punitive, so there could be seasonal effects on judicial decision-making in the millions of legal cases that occur every year.
And given the link between binding moral values and conservative attitudes, there are potential implications for politics. One intriguing possibility: the timing of political elections (whether they are scheduled for summer or autumn, for instance) might have some subtle effect on some votes — which, for an election that is especially tight, might even influence its outcome.
Back-to-back devastation from two massive hurricanes has caused a rift between Republicans in affected states over whether or not to back Donald Trump's lies about aid and property seizure, according to a report.
The Washington Post stated Thursday that "Republicans in storm-battered states appear torn between the need to curb conspiracy theories and fear of drawing a rebuke from Trump just weeks before the election."
It said two clear camps had formed — one populated by Republicans dismissing the claims, and the other with party members parroting them.
Trump has spent the past week falsely telling his followers that President Joe Biden ignored phone calls from Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA). He's claimed Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are getting "universally" negative reviews for their efforts to help Americans, and that Harris has spent all of the FEMA disaster assistance money on services for undocumented immigrants.
He's also falsely claimed that the federal government is giving out only $750 to people who lost their homes and that no helicopters were available to rescue people. All the claims have been widely debunked.
Trump allies like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) are alleging Democrats in the government are controlling the weather, while Alex Jones also said that Hurricane Helene was controlled by the government.
The Post said that lawmakers and officials are now in an awkward position in which they might need to counter the rumors — but without wanting to directly criticize their party's presidential candidate.
North Carolina state Sen. Kevin Corbin, a Republican, lambasted the "disinformation," and calling it conspiracy theory junk” in a Facebook post.
An unnamed Republican "scoffed" when speaking to Axios about Greene.
"She thinks we have no impact on the climate but somehow control the weather," the Republican said.
But House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was among those backing Trump, who he said, “Is expressing his frustration about the lack of resources being provided here."
The Good Liars' Jason Selvig spoke to the Trump supporter at a rally in Pennsylvania on Wednesday.
"What do you think happened with the hurricanes?" Selvig asked.
"I think there was an upcoming storm, and then I think government set in with whatever it is that they do," the Trump supporter replied. "I'm not an expert in cloud seeding or whatever it is that they used to magnify the storm to a higher degree, to disturb a land that may be wanted for lithium that [Kamala] Harris' husband is partaking in."
"You think that Milton, they're making it stronger?" Selvig pressed. "You're implying that the government made a hurricane stronger to hurt its own country, the United States of America?"
The woman suggested that Alexa was the source of her information.
"If you ask it about [Hurricane Helene], it'll tell you the government actively used seed clouding," she insisted. "If you're looking at where the hurricane's going, it's a lot of red states."
A massive ball of plasma and accompanying magnetic field ejected from the Sun is expected to strike Earth on Thursday morning, potentially triggering auroras as far south as Alabama, according to US forecasters.
It comes as the Sun approaches -- or is possibly at -- the peak of its 11-year cycle, when activity is heightened.
In May, the planet experienced its most powerful geomagnetic storms in two decades, producing colorful displays across night skies far from the poles.
"The current anticipation is that it is going to arrive tomorrow morning to midday, Eastern time, and perhaps continue on into the following day," Shawn Dahl of the Space Weather Prediction Center told reporters at a briefing on Wednesday.
As the coronal mass ejection (CME) travels through space at 2.5 million miles (four million kilometers) an hour, the agency has put in place a level 4 geomagnetic storm watch (G4).
That is one level below the highest possible G5, seen in May -- but the final outcome could be either below or above G4.
Better predictions aren't possible until around 15-30 minutes before impact, when it crosses tracking satellites, a million miles from Earth.
Dahl said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), already under pressure as it deals with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and the approaching Hurricane Milton, had been informed, as have companies operating the North American power grid, so they can take mitigation steps if necessary.
When CMEs slam into Earth's magnetosphere, they can create geomagnetic storms.
The storms can disrupt satellites orbiting Earth and affect things like radio signals and GPS positioning systems.
They can also knock out electricity grids -- the "Halloween Storms" of October 2003 sparked blackouts in Sweden and damaged power infrastructure in South Africa.
May's storms disrupted precision GPS systems used by US farmers across the Midwest and caused some high-voltage transformers to trip, without large-scale disruption to the grid, said Dahl.
He added that around 5,000 satellites had to have their orbital level corrected, because the storm inflates the ionosphere and causes them to slow down and de-orbit.
For those living in the right latitudes -- potentially as far south as northern California or Alabama in the United States -- auroras would be most visible away from city lights, in the darkest skies possible, experts say.
People should use their cameras or phones to look, because today's digital imagery can often pick them up even when the naked eye cannot.
Wild populations of monitored animal species have plummeted over 70 percent in the last half-century, according to the latest edition of a landmark assessment by WWF published on Thursday.
Featuring data from 35,000 populations of more than 5,000 species of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish, the WWF Living Planet Index shows accelerating declines across the globe.
In biodiversity-rich regions such as Latin America and the Caribbean, the figure for animal population loss is as high as 95 percent.
The report tracks trends in the abundance of a large number of species, not individual animal numbers.
It found that populations under review had fallen 73 percent since 1970, mostly due to human pressures.
The index has become an international reference and arrives just ahead of the next UN summit on biodiversity, which will spotlight the issue when it opens in Colombia later this month.
"The picture we are painting is incredibly concerning," said Kirsten Schuijt, Director General of WWF International, at a press briefing.
- Tipping points -
"This is not just about wildlife, it's about the essential ecosystems that sustain human life," said Daudi Sumba, chief conservation officer at WWF.
The report reiterates the need to simultaneously confront the "interconnected" crises of climate change and nature destruction, and warned of major "tipping points" approaching certain ecosystems.
"The changes could be irreversible, with devastating consequences for humanity," he said, using the example of deforestation in the Amazon, which could "shift this critical ecosystem from a carbon sink to a carbon source."
"Habitat degradation and loss, driven primarily by our food system, is the most reported threat in each region, followed by overexploitation, invasive species and disease," the report said.
Other threats include climate change, in particular in Latin America and the Caribbean, and pollution, notably in North America, Asia and the Pacific.
- 'Incredibly concerning' -
The biggest decline is found in populations of freshwater species, followed by terrestrial and marine vertebrates.
"We have emptied the oceans of 40 percent of their biomass," said Yann Laurans of WWF France.
Continent by continent, the average decline reached 95 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, followed by Africa, down 76 percent, and then Asia and the Pacific, which declined 60 percent.
The reduction in populations is "less spectacular" in Europe, Central Asia and North America.
Some populations have stabilized or even expanded thanks to conservation efforts and the reintroduction of species, the report said.
The European bison, for example, disappeared in the wild in 1927 but in 2020 numbered 6,800 thanks to large-scale breeding and successful reintroduction, mainly in protected areas.
While calling the overall picture "incredibly concerning," Schuijt added: "The good news is that we're not yet past the point of no return."
She pointed to global efforts including a breakthrough pact landed at the last UN meeting on biodiversity in 2022 to protect 30 percent of the planet by 2030 from pollution, degradation and climate change.
But she warned, "all of these agreements have checkpoints in 2030 that are in danger of being missed."
Several scientific studies published by the journal Nature have accused WWF of methodological biases in its index that lead to an exaggerated extent of the decline of animals.
"We remain really confident of its robustness," said Andrew Terry of the Zoological Society of London at a press briefing, highlighting the use of a "range of indicators, looking at extinction risk, biodiversity and ecosystem health to really broaden that picture".
Americans David Baker and John Jumper, together with Briton Demis Hassabis, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for work revealing the secrets of proteins through computing and artificial intelligence.
The three were honored for cracking the code of the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life, with the jury hailing their work as holding "enormous potential" in a range of fields.
Biochemist Baker, 62, was given half the award "for computational protein design", while Hassabis and Jumper shared the other half "for protein structure prediction," the Nobel committee said.
"David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins," it said in a statement.
The committee added that his work has led to the creation of proteins that "can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors."
Hassabis and Jumper developed an AI model "to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins' complex structures," the jury said of the duo who head up AI research lab Google DeepMind.
'Monumental achievement'
Hassabis, 48, and Jumper, who was born in 1985, were among those speculated to be contenders for this year's Nobel for their work on the AI-model Alphafold.
They received the prestigious Lasker Award in 2023.
The AI tool is used to predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins based on their amino acid sequence, and the Alphafold database now contains the predicted structure of over 200 million proteins.
In a post to X, Google DeepMind congratulated the duo.
"This is a monumental achievement for AI, for computational biology, and science itself," the research lab said.
Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, told a press conference that "proteins are the molecules that enable life. Proteins are building blocks that form bones, skin, hair and tissue."
The shape of proteins is key as it determines their function.
"To understand how life works, we first need to understand the shape of proteins," Linke said and added that being able to predict their structure from their amino acid building blocks had "long been a dream."
Baker meanwhile told reporters Wednesday was turning out to be "quite a unique, special day" for him.
"I was sleeping when the phone rang, and I answered the phone and I heard the announcement," Baker said via phone link after the prize was announced in Stockholm.
'More powerful'
The researcher said he was really excited about "all the ways in which protein design can now make the world a better place," while listing areas such as health, medicine as well as technology and sustainability.
"Our new AI methods are much more powerful than our previous traditional scientific model methods," he said.
Tuesday's physics prize honored key breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI), going to American John Hopfield and British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton, known as the Godfather of AI.
Last year, the chemistry prize went to French-born Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus of the United States and Russian-born Alexei Ekimov for developing tiny "quantum dots" used to illuminate TVs and lamps.
Awarded since 1901, the Nobel Prizes honour those who have, in the words of prize creator and scientist Alfred Nobel, "conferred the greatest benefit on humankind".
On Monday, the Medicine Prize was awarded to American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNA and its role in how genes are regulated.
Wednesday's chemistry prize will be followed by the highly watched literature and peace prizes to be announced on Thursday and Friday respectively.
The economics prize wraps up the 2024 Nobel season on October 14.
The winners will receive their prize, consisting of a diploma, a gold medal and a $1 million cheque, from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist Alfred Nobel who created the prizes in his will.
A U.S. scientist who won the 2024 Nobel physics prize for his pioneering work on artificial intelligence said Tuesday he found recent advances in the technology "very unnerving" and warned of possible catastrophe if not kept in check.
John Hopfield, a professor emeritus at Princeton, joined co-winner Geoffrey Hinton in calling for a deeper understanding of the inner workings of deep-learning systems to prevent them from spiraling out of control.
Addressing a gathering at the New Jersey university via video link from Britain, the 91-year-old said that over the course of his life he had watched the rise of two powerful but potentially hazardous technologies — biological engineering and nuclear physics.
"One is accustomed to having technologies which are not singularly only good or only bad, but have capabilities in both directions," he said.
"And as a physicist, I'm very unnerved by something which has no control, something which I don't understand well enough so that I can understand what are the limits which one could drive that technology."
"That's the question AI is pushing," he continued, adding that despite modern AI systems appearing to be "absolute marvels," there is a lack of understanding about how they function, which he described as "very, very unnerving."
"That's why I myself, and I think Geoffrey Hinton also, would strongly advocate understanding as an essential need of the field, which is going to develop some abilities that are beyond the abilities you can imagine at present."
Hopfield was honored for devising the "Hopfield network" — a theoretical model demonstrating how an artificial neural network can mimic the way biological brains store and retrieve memories.
His model was improved upon by British-Canadian Hinton, often dubbed the "Godfather of AI," whose "Boltzmann machine" introduced the element of randomness, paving the way for modern AI applications such as image generators.
Hinton himself emerged last year as a poster child for AI doomsayers, a theme he returned to during a news conference held by the University of Toronto where he serves as a professor emeritus.
"If you look around, there are very few examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things, which makes you wonder whether when AI gets smarter than us, it's going to take over control," the 76-year-old told reporters.
- Civilizational downfall -
With the meteoric rise of AI capabilities — and the fierce race it has sparked among companies — the technology has faced criticism for evolving faster than scientists can fully comprehend.
"You don't know that the collective properties you began with are actually the collective properties with all the interactions present, and you don't therefore know whether some spontaneous but unwanted thing is lying hidden in the works," stressed Hopefield.
He evoked the example of "ice-nine" — a fictional, artificially engineered crystal in Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel "Cat's Cradle" developed to help soldiers deal with muddy conditions but which inadvertently freezes the world's oceans solid, causing the downfall of civilization.
"I'm worried about anything that says... 'I'm faster than you are, I'm bigger than you are... can you peacefully inhabit with me?' I don't know, I worry."
Hinton said it was impossible to know how to escape catastrophic scenarios at present, "that's why we urgently need more research."
"I'm advocating that our best young researchers, or many of them, should work on AI safety, and governments should force the large companies to provide the computational facilities that they need to do that," he added.
