Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith told lawmakers in a closed-door interview Wednesday that his team of investigators “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that President Donald Trumphad criminally conspired to over the results of the 2020 election...

...Several Democrats who emerged from Smith’s interview said they could understand why Republicans did not want an open hearing based on the damaging testimony about Trump they said Smith offered.

The committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, said the Republican majority “made an excellent decision” in not allowing Jack Smith to testify publicly “because had he done so, it would have been absolutely devastating to the president and all the president’s men involved in the insurrectionary activities” of the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021...

...the conflict in Ukraine is unfolding similarly to others in Russia’s long history of failed or inconclusive imperial wars. Several times in the past few centuries, Russian leaders launched wars of conquest against foes they misunderstood and underestimated, and with little appreciation of the larger international context...

...The Crimean War (1853-56), the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), World War I (1914-18), and the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-88) offer the most relevant analogies. All were wars of choice for territorial aggrandizement or other imperial interventions, which ended in military defeat followed by political upheaval.

Russia’s failure in these wars stemmed from common mistakes and shortcomings that also afflict Putin’s war in Ukraine. One common failing was to underestimate their foes’ military capabilities and societal resilience. Emperor Nicholas I expected the Ottoman Empire to quickly give way on his demand for a protectorate over Orthodox Christians in what is now Moldova and part of Romania, while Emperor Nicholas II and his commanders believed that the Japanese military could never stand up to a European great power. Similar hubris colored their assessment of the Ottomans in 1914-15, when they settled on seizing Constantinople and the Black Sea Straits as a war aim. Nor did Soviet commanders have much respect for the ragtag mujahedeen in Afghanistan.

Second, Russian leaders frequently downplayed the risks and impacts of foreign (i.e., Western) involvement that ended up prolonging the war and increasing the costs Russia was forced to bear. The landing of French and British troops in Crimea in 1854 forced Russia to fight on multiple fronts against better-equipped armies. British intelligence support enabled Tokyo to remain a step ahead of Russian plans throughout the Russo-Japanese War. While Russia declared war against Austria-Hungary in August 1914, it soon found itself at war with Germany, the Ottomans, and Bulgaria as well. A German-Ottoman blockade of the Black Sea Straits choked off Allied support, exacerbating the tsarist government’s inability to mobilize defense production. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prompted the United States, in uneasy alliance with Saudia Arabia and Pakistan, to arm the mujahedeen forces that ground down the Soviet army until General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev ordered their withdrawal nearly a decade later.

With an economy far less dynamic that those of its Western rivals, Russia in each case found itself at an increasing disadvantage the longer these wars went on. As economic burdens and personnel losses mounted, so too did opposition not just to the war, but to the regime prosecuting it...

...Officially named PSR J2322-2650b, this Jupiter-mass object appears to have an exotic helium-and-carbon-dominated atmosphere unlike any ever seen before...

“The planet orbits a star that's completely bizarre — the mass of the Sun, but the size of a city,” said the University of Chicago’s Michael Zhang, the principal investigator on this study. “This is a new type of planet atmosphere that nobody has ever seen before. Instead of finding the normal molecules we expect to see on an exoplanet — like water, methane, and carbon dioxide — we saw molecular carbon, specifically C3 and C2.”

Molecular carbon is very unusual because at these temperatures, if there are any other types of atoms in the atmosphere, carbon will bind to them. (Temperatures on the planet range from 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit at the coldest points of the night side to 3,700 degrees Fahrenheit at the hottest points of the day side.) Molecular carbon is only dominant if there's almost no oxygen or nitrogen. Out of the approximately 150 planets that astronomers have studied inside and outside the solar system, no others have any detectable molecular carbon.

MIT researchers found a way to predict how efficiently materials can transport protons in clean energy devices and other advanced technologies.

...

The researchers believe their findings can guide scientists and engineers as they develop materials for more efficient energy technologies enabled by protons, which are lighter, smaller, and more abundant than more common charge carriers like lithium ions.

...Many of the passages are longer than 600 yards (550 meters) and tall enough for an adult to walk through without bending.

The leading idea is that giant, extinct ground sloths dug these colossal shelters, turning parts of South America into a maze of underground homes...

...the tunnel walls are packed with claw marks, sometimes in three parallel grooves, right where a digging limb would bite into rock...

...The universality of the UV-to-X-ray relation underpins certain methods that use quasars as “standard candles” to measure the geometry of the universe and ultimately probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy. This new result highlights the necessity for caution, demonstrating that the assumption of unchanging black hole structure across cosmic time must be rigorously re-examined...

A wood bank is exactly what it sounds like. People in rural and Indigenous areas still heavily rely on wood heat as the primary fuel source for their homes. Volunteers cut and split firewood, stack it somewhere public, and give it away for free to those who can’t afford it. No paperwork. No means tests. No government forms. Just a pile of hardwood that shows up because someone else’s house would be cold without it.

Most articles about wood banks wrap them in the same tired language. Community spirit. Rural generosity. Neighbors helping neighbors. It’s the kind of coverage you get when journalists focus on the people stacking the wood instead of the conditions that made it necessary. They never mention the underlying reality. Wood banks exist because without them, people would freeze. It’s the same everywhere: Local news crews film volunteers splitting logs while pretending it’s heartwarming, reporting on senior citizens splitting 150 cords a year for neighbors in need as if the story is about kindness instead of the failure that created the need in the first place.

...The volunteers running wood banks aren’t performing resilience. They’re plugging holes in a sinking ship and doing the work the state stopped doing. They are the thin line between a cold snap and another obituary...

...“So far there is no hint telling us that we should throw quantum field theory away; actually, it’s the opposite,” said Luca Buoninfante, a theoretical physicist at Radboud University in the Netherlands whose calculations have helped shore up the old theory. When you apply the standard quantum field theory to gravity, you don’t just get a unique theory called quadratic gravity, he said. “You also get new predictions.”...

...Perhaps effects occasionally sneak ahead of their causes at the microscopic level, for instance. And perhaps negative-energy “ghost” particles that arise in quadratic gravity can exist safely in the equations without creating paradoxes in experiments...

...The surprising successes of quadratic gravity hint that gravity may yet turn out to have a blurry picture that works well enough after all. Below a certain spatial scale, it may be that any complicated details — whether those are strings, loops or nothing at all — can be ignored, and you’ll still get a fully consistent theory. If that’s the case, physicists can accurately predict how gravitons collide and how the universe inflated without worrying about what’s truly going on at the smallest scales. “It may or may not be the ultimate theory,” Donoghue said. But maybe “it becomes a closed, self-consistent layer of reality.”...

China's energy administration said on Wednesday that it will push renewable energy use beyond the power sector over the next five years, aiming to better absorb the country's booming wind and solar output.

Provinces and power producers should help local governments to build up their industrial bases for green hydrogen, green ammonia, green methanol, and sustainable aviation fuel during the next five-year plan from 2026-2030, the National Energy Administration (NEA) said in its opinion document on integrating new energy...

...Finding new outlets for renewable power is becoming more urgent as China's fleet, the world's largest, sometimes generates more electricity than the grid can accept...

...“Solar power is the fastest-growing source of new electric generating capacity in the United States, driven by large-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) projects built by electric utilities and independent power producers,”...

...“At a time when electricity demand is skyrocketing to meet the needs of AI, data centers, and manufacturing, the Administration is using every tool at its disposal to slow down solar and storage projects,” SEIA emphasizes.

“This blockade is undermining American energy security, driving up costs for families and businesses, and exacerbating the ‘energy emergency’ that the Trump administration itself declared earlier this year,”...

So it turns out that President Donald Trump posting a video of himself dumping poop on Americans was not a winning electoral strategy for the Republican Party.

Dispatching roving gangs of masked federal agents to cities across America and giving them carte blanche to grab whoever they want while tossing teargas at anyone who doesn’t like it? Also not a real vote-winner, apparently...

None of this is popular. None of this has made any regular American’s life better. None of this has brought down grocery bills, made housing more affordable, or provided better health insurance...

...Kimberly-Clark is buying Kenvue in a nearly $50 billion cash and stock deal...