From World War II until 2024, the USA stood unchallenged as the scientific leader of the free world. Across practically every discipline ' physics, materials science, astronomy, chemistry, biology, medicine, geology, etc. ' American scientific missions and initiatives, often in collaboration with European, Canadian, Asian, and many other global partners, brought us new advances and breakthroughs, paving the way for generations of scientists to thrive. In a society that values facts, scientific truths, education, and the public good, this recipe led to multiple generations of continued breakthroughs and advances. Since late January of this year, however, all of that has rapidly changed. Many of the most valuable scientific organizations in the world, including NOAA, NASA, the NSF, the CDC, the EPA, and the FDA among them, have experienced a set of internal attacks that are truly unprecedented....

Speaking at SXSW 2025, Graber appeared with her hair discreetly pulled back, dressed in black and wearing an oversized T-shirt, in what at first might have been interpreted as the typical strategy that, unfortunately, many female Silicon Valley executives employ: downplaying their feminine appearance. Don't worry, I have not become a fashion columnist, nor was the Bluesky CEO dressing down for no reason: her black T-shirt bore the Latin phrase, 'Mundus sine caesaribus', which translates as 'A world without Caesars'. A direct response to a similar T-shirt worn by Mark Zuckerberg in September 2024 that read 'Aut Zuck aut nihil', a play on Julius Caesar's phrase 'Or Caesar, or nothing'. Faced with a disgusting phony who runs his company like a dictator, running the world's largest social networks without any kind of supervision, Graber offers another vision: open-source, decentralized, and user-governed. Bluesky has been built to resist a takeover of the kind that has happened at Twitter. It is now clear that Elon Musk was not interested in turning the company around or protecting freedom of expression, and instead the move was about the transition into politics of a guy who'...

As soon as he gained power, Hitler set Germany upon a course of aggressive expansionism. But what lay behind his drive to conquer vast swathes of Europe' Gavin Mortimer investigates...