All posts tagged: reshaped

Lindsey Graham’s Death Has Reshaped Annie Andrews’ Campaign. Does the Democrat Stand a Chance?

Lindsey Graham’s Death Has Reshaped Annie Andrews’ Campaign. Does the Democrat Stand a Chance?

Published by Sam Flores

Even Democrats concede that the path is narrow. “It is undoubtedly a real uphill climb,” says Democratic strategist James Carville. “I’m not going to blow smoke up your ass and tell you that it’s easy, but there is a path,” says Parmley. That path, according to Carville, runs through Black turnout. He pointed to a surge in Black voter turnout in South Carolina’s primary elections earlier this year. “I’ve never seen numbers like this. Southern Black folk, they got the memo.” Democrats have been down this road before: a compelling candidate in a ruby red state raises an eye-popping sum, attracts national attention, and still gets clobbered. In 2020 Jaime Harrison raised nearly $133 million—more than any Senate campaign in history at the time—only to lose to Graham by more than 10 points. That same year, Kentucky fighter pilot Amy McGrath spent more than $92 million to lose to Mitch McConnell by nearly 20 points. Before Graham’s death, Andrews had reason for optimism. A campaign-commissioned poll showed Graham leading Andrews 48% to 45%. She says …

Suing Biden more than 100 times fueled Ken Paxton’s rise and reshaped Texans’ lives

Suing Biden more than 100 times fueled Ken Paxton’s rise and reshaped Texans’ lives

Published by Sam Flores

In April 2024, the Biden administration cleared the way for more than 4 million low-wage workers to collect overtime pay. People earning less than $58,656 were to be paid time and a half if they worked over 40 hours a week, a shift that would put $1.5 billion into workers’ pockets, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Until Ken Paxton sued to stop it. A Trump-appointed judge, who previously worked at the Texas attorney general’s office, agreed that it was an unconstitutional overreach and struck down the policy nationwide. Today, the threshold for mandatory overtime pay remains at $35,568, where the first Trump administration set it in 2019. Over four years, Paxton’s office ran this same play more than 100 times, filing quick-turn lawsuits asking friendly judges to block President Joe Biden’s signature policies for the whole country. Texas was the tip of the spear, leading almost four times as many lawsuits as the next-highest state and marshaling unprecedented agency resources toward the cause. This litigation machine had a profound effect on everyday life for …

Space Lasers Show How Venezuela’s Earthquakes Reshaped the Earth’s Crust

Space Lasers Show How Venezuela’s Earthquakes Reshaped the Earth’s Crust

Published by skeptic

The European Space Agency released a satellite image that shows the upheaval left behind by the pair of earthquakes that rocked Venezuela last week. The image was created using observations from the Sentinel-1 satellites, which are part of the European Copernicus program. These satellites do not take conventional photographs; instead, they use their radars to “illuminate” the Earth’s surface and record the time it takes for the signal to return to the sensor. By comparing two measurements of the same location taken on different dates, scientists can determine whether the ground has shifted, even when that shift is too small to be seen with the naked eye. To create the map, scientists compared an observation taken on June 18—one week before the earthquakes—with another taken on June 25, the day after the pair of earthquakes that were mangitude 7.2 and 7.5 respectively. This comparison allowed them to construct what’s known as an interferogram revealing how much the ground deformed following the event. This satellite image shows the area around Caracas, Venezuela, which was struck by …

New Moms Are Returning to Coding Jobs Radically Reshaped by AI

New Moms Are Returning to Coding Jobs Radically Reshaped by AI

Published by skeptic

As Danielle settled into the rhythms of new motherhood, her profession underwent a drastic reinvention. Danielle, who asked to use her first name to avoid damaging her job prospects, worked as a software developer at a car company in Portland, Oregon. Before she left the workforce in mid-2024, barely anybody used AI to write code; by the time she was ready to return, a year later, it had become the expectation. Once upon a time, she had been drawn to coding for the job security it offered, but AI was threatening to upend that. “The skills that I had learned—rote development skills—we are now expected to outsource to AI,” Danielle says. The world’s largest AI companies anticipate a future where pretty much everything is “vibe-coded.” In April, Mark Zuckerberg predicted that AI will write most of Meta’s code within the next 18 months. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently told WIRED he expects AI coding to become “one of these rare multitrillion-dollar markets.” The dizzying pace of change has touched software engineers across the industry. But …

The lost inland sea that dwarfed the Great Lakes and reshaped North America

The lost inland sea that dwarfed the Great Lakes and reshaped North America

Published by Jenni Sidey

Long before Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario became the defining waters of North America, a far larger lake spread across the center of the continent. Lake Agassiz no longer appears on any map. It drained away after the last ice age. Still, its scale remains hard to ignore. More than 10,000 years ago, this prehistoric inland sea covered about 170,000 square miles, an area so vast it exceeded the combined size of the Great Lakes. That kind of size changes more than a shoreline. It helped carve valleys, fill basins, redirect rivers, and reshape the weather across a huge swath of land. Even now, the marks it left behind remain visible in the Red River Valley and in the many lakes and wetlands scattered across the region. Lake Agassiz is gone today, but during the last ice age it was a giant—sprawling across roughly 170,000 square miles and ranking among the largest lakes ever to cover North America. (CREDIT: CC BY-SA 4.0) The Great Lakes are hardly small. Lake …

Solar installs surged 205% before the tax credit cut – and reshaped the market

Solar installs surged 205% before the tax credit cut – and reshaped the market

Published by skeptic

Photo by Gustavo Fring on Pexels.com The US residential clean energy market just went through one of its wildest six‑month stretches ever, according to EnergySage’s latest Home Electrification Marketplace Report. For the first time, EnergySage’s flagship analysis report looks at whole‑home electrification, including EV chargers and heat pumps, using millions of homeowner shopping data points collected between July and December 2025. The timing wasn’t random. After the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed in July 2025 and eliminated the 30% federal tax credit for purchased residential solar systems installed after December 31, homeowners raced to lock in installations before the deadline. EnergySage reports a 205% year‑over‑year surge in homeowners actively working with installers, plus a record spike in inquiries. Many installers say they reached their annual capacity by October, forcing contractors and customers alike to make unusual decisions to finish projects on time. Prices stayed steady despite massive demand Even with the rush, prices stayed surprisingly stable. Solar costs rose just 0.4% to $2.49 per watt in the second half of 2025, while battery prices …

The “Swipe Era” Has Forever Reshaped How Couples Meet

The “Swipe Era” Has Forever Reshaped How Couples Meet

Published by Jenni Sidey

Tinder forever changed the landscape of online dating when it introduced the swipe function in 2012: left to pass, right to like. The result was a gamified experience that felt frictionless and addictive. Other dating apps copied it, and then the “swipe era” ignited. Before that, online dating was mostly on boring websites, like Christian Mingle and Farmers Only, that felt closer to digital classifieds. Matches were more local and delivered in slower batches, and users worked through profiles and messages to decide whom to meet. The process is now largely automated by an algorithm and resembles a game, with matches presented in rapid succession. Tinder and other dating apps have forever changed how heterosexual couples in the U.S. meet, overtaking introductions through friends around 2013, according to a recent survey. The chart below shows how online dating was fundamentally transformed by two waves of technology: first, the online web’s takeoff in the mid-1990s, and then the smartphone era after 2007. The rise of the iPhone and Tinder in 2012 helped propel the second wave, …

Fifteen years after Egypt’s uprising, how faith and politics reshaped a generation

Fifteen years after Egypt’s uprising, how faith and politics reshaped a generation

Published by Sam Flores

(The Conversation) — Fifteen years ago, Egyptians from all walks of life took to the street to demand “bread, freedom, social justice.” They were protesting the oppressive 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak. Egypt had been under martial law for 31 years. This meant that political opposition was silenced, and opponents were often imprisoned and tortured. Police brutality was the norm. Egypt’s economy was also weak and relied heavily on foreign aid and loans from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Even though the country’s per capita gross domestic product was growing, almost 25% of the population was living in poverty by 2011. Neighboring Tunisia had toppled its dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, on Jan. 14, 2011, after 28 days of protest. The Tunisian revolution’s success led to a wave of uprisings against corruption, injustice and economic inequality across the region, including the January 2011 revolution in Egypt. For many who joined the movement in Egypt, there was a newfound sense of unity, equality and nationalism. Egyptians young and old, Muslim and Christian, rich …

Two blazing stars once raced past the Sun and reshaped our solar system

Two blazing stars once raced past the Sun and reshaped our solar system

Published by Jenni Sidey

Long before humans walked the Earth, your solar system had a brush with two blazing blue stars that passed surprisingly close by. Nearly 4.4 million years ago, they swept past at a distance of only about 30 to 35 light-years, close in cosmic terms, and quietly stamped their signatures into the gas and dust that surround the Sun today. That is the picture emerging from new work led by Michael Shull, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder. The study pieces together how those wandering stars helped shape the “neighborhood” your planet lives in now. A Cloudy Shell Around the Solar System Your solar system does not drift through empty space. It sits inside a set of wispy structures known as the local interstellar clouds. These clouds are mostly hydrogen and helium gas with tiny traces of dust. Together, they stretch roughly 30 light-years from end to end, or about 175 trillion miles. The location of β CMa on the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram is shown for our derived parameters. (CREDIT: The Astrophysical Journal) Beyond those …