Imagine this A dead star the size of a city suddenly enters our Solar System. Not a planet. Not a comet. A pulsar Its gravity could throw planets off course, and its radiation could strip away Earth's protection. This wouldn't be an astronomical event. It would be a cosmic disaster.

🚨 James Webb confirms there's something seriously wrong with our understanding of the universe: In a striking discovery, James Webb and Hubble space telescopes have confirmed that the universe is expanding at varying rates depending on the observation point, which challenges our current understanding of the cosmos. This discrepancy is known as the Hubble Tension. It was first observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2019 and further confirmed by the James Webb Space Telescope in 2023, with recent combined efforts by both telescopes now eliminating any doubts about measurement errors. The Hubble Tension arises from a conflict between two ways of measuring the universe's expansion rate. One method looks at the early universe, relying on the cosmic microwave background—the ancient afterglow of the Big Bang—to calculate the expected expansion. The other method focuses on the more recent universe, utilizing telescopes to observe stars and galaxies. The problem is, these two methods are yielding vastly different results. It's as if the universe has subtly changed its rules between its infancy and the present day. By observing over a thousand Cepheid stars in galaxies up to 130 million light-years away, the researchers have confirmed the reliability of Hubble's measurements across the cosmic distance ladder, thus ruling out measurement error as a cause for the Hubble Tension and suggesting a profound mystery at the core of our understanding of the universe's expansion. The study was published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

🚨 THREAD: What do Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and Elaine Chao have in common? They were all paid by a Marxist-Islamist Iran group that was designated as terrorist until 2012. No, this is not a joke. Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) was founded by leftist Islamists to oppose the western-backed Pahlavi, and participated in his 1979 overthrow. Khomeini barred MEK afterwards. MEK was implicated in multiple bombings, including that of Americans, and remained an openly armed group until 2003. Since they got de-listed as a terrorist organization in 2012 on procedural grounds, MEK and their fronts have been actively recruiting US politicians selling themselves as a moderate alternative to Khomeini. But RAND Corporation says MEK meets the qualifications for a cult, citing criteria such as forcing their members to work 16 hour days and forced divorces. Polls of the Iranian-American community shows that they do NOT accept Rajavi, MeK's leader, as legitimate, with a 46-point net disapproval - numbers nearly as bad as the existing regime. As Pence's former Chief of Staff, Marc Short, has already weighed against Trump deal, it's helpful to recall this. Receipts below. As always, patience as I pull the thread together.👇

Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus has long been treated as one of the central events in the Milky Way’s formation history: the debris of a major ancient merger that helped build the Galaxy’s inner stellar halo and left many stars on highly elongated, radial orbits. A new work suggests that this picture may be too simple. Using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and a new unsupervised clustering method called GS³ Hunter, the researchers analyzed nearly 87,000 halo stars and identified 17 stellar streams or substructures, including several previously unrecognized ones. Most importantly, they found four distinct components inside the region usually associated with Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus. These four groups share some broad similarities, which is why they can still be connected to the same general GSE region, but they are not identical. Their chemical fingerprints differ, especially in elements and abundance ratios such as aluminum and carbon-to-nitrogen, which trace different star-formation histories. Some populations look as if they formed rapidly and intensely, while others suggest slower, more extended chemical enrichment. Their orbital properties also differ slightly, meaning they do not all occupy exactly the same dynamical space. Most strikingly, their inferred ages range from about 12 billion to 7 billion years, a spread of roughly five billion years. That is difficult to reconcile with one short, clean merger event. The implication is that Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus may not be the remnant of a single ancient galaxy swallowed by the Milky Way, but a composite structure built from multiple accretion events, possibly involving different progenitor systems or material stripped at different stages over a long period. If this interpretation holds, one of the standard reference points in Galactic archaeology would need revision. The Milky Way’s “last major merger” may have been less like one dramatic collision and more like a prolonged, messy sequence of mergers whose debris became blended into what astronomers later classified as one structure. 👉 share.google/RTf6kP1W2NMmbCx…

If gravity is the curvature of spacetime, is electromagnetism the curvature of some other dimension? That question, asked seriously, is basically the origin story of string theory.

The Schwarzschild Metric is the exact solution to Einstein's field equations that describes the geometry of spacetime surrounding a spherical, non rotating mass. It provides the foundation for understanding gravitational time dilation, the bending of light, planetary motion, and black holes within General Relativity. Rather than treating gravity as a force, the Schwarzschild Metric shows how mass curves spacetime and determines the paths that objects and light follow.

Specifically: I’d first look at what promising approaches to post-Einsteinian science were we induced to abandon by Quantum Gravity/StringTheorists. I’d spend the first 1/2 million dollars simply destringifying the last 42 lost years. Then I would look at all the major ideas without ANY refereeing input from string theory/m-theory: Chern Simons Asymptotic safety GU Einstein Cartan McDowell Mansouri Spin connections Strings Gravitational Amplitudes Etc. Then based on that assessment, I would allocate grants to push for the spacetime successor. But the first allocation is to destringification. We need to stop being brainwashed by 5 people and their misinterpretation of Ken Wilson. We need to realize that the real physics that we would need to travel the cosmos got nerfed. By string theory. The first task is undoing the murderous anti-scientific lie and culture of TOGIT as spread by Witten, Susskind, Greene, Kaku, Gross and company. Just undoing that and making it viable to do theoretical physics without their fingers around our throats would bring us far closer to post Einsteinian engineering. Gravitational physics has become a lie under quantum gravity.

Musk is worth more than South Africa’s GDP. @BernieSanders and I proposed a 5% tax on people like him. In one year, it could fund: - free public college & trade school -$10/day childcare - Special-needs education nationwide Wealth inequality is the moral failure of our time.

Today, I’m releasing never before seen intelligence revealing new evidence of past US government funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries, including Ukraine. In support of President Trump‘s Executive Order to end federal funding of dangerous gain of function research around the world, and increase transparency and accountability, ODNI will continue working with partners across the Administration to identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain, and what “research” is being conducted. odni.gov/index.php/newsroom/…

This is your reminder that every vote to pass a bill in the Senate is at 51 after the end of the debate. There are two ways to end debate: 1. 60 vote cloture (zombie filibuster) 2. Force the opponents to actually talk on the floor until everyone gets tired. (The Talking Filibuster.)