Ukrainian forces reported that they recently conducted Operation Cheburechna in northern Sumy Oblast and cleared 642 hectares of forested area, leveraging rigorous operational planning and deception. Ukraine’s Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported on November 5 that Operation Cheburechna lasted seven weeks. Ukrainian forces first targeted Russian logistical routes, advanced deep into the forests, set up ambushes, pushed back Russian forces in the area, and transferred cleared positions to other Ukrainian units.[28] GUR noted that Ukrainian month-long operational planning and the use of radio deception prevented the Russian military command from identifying Ukrainian positions and recognizing the scale of Ukrainian assault. GUR reported that Operation Cheburechna completely halted Russian offensive operations in northern Sumy Oblast, while preserving Ukrainian forces’ logistical routes and positions in the area.

Last week's failure by the UN Security Council to renew the mandate of its Western Sahara mission after 35 years has deepened concerns that the conflict could escalate militarily while slipping further from international attention.

The United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (Minurso) was established in 1991 to monitor a ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario Front, the armed group fighting for Sahrawi independence in the territory, and pave the way for a referendum.

That ceasefire collapsed in 2020 and the referendum never happened.

Skydio on Thursday that will lift its fully diluted stake in the drone maker from about 15% to about 37% once every tranche closes, at a $5.2 billion pre-money valuation. The same agreement makes Axon the exclusive distributor of Skydio drones to public safety agencies in the United States and Canada. Axon calls it the largest single investment in its history.

The idea that El-Sayed is an enemy of jews has always been absurd.

Yet quantum mechanics, a thoroughly validated theory of how the world works, seems to suggest otherwise. The theory’s math assigns redness to the billiard ball at the moment you measure it. Before then, the theory gives you only a set of probabilities telling you what color the ball might be. Key founders of quantum mechanics suggested that this math reflects the nature of reality — that in some sense, a single, objective reality doesn’t really exist.

In 1935, Einstein rebelled against this surreal reading of quantum theory, proposing one of the 20th century’s most famous thought experiments. But his rebellion was doomed. In 1964, the physicist John Stewart Bell showed with a thought experiment of his own that reality had to be stranger than Einstein assumed. Subsequent work would put Bell’s thought experiment to the test — and prove him right.

Then, 50 years after Bell, Matthew Pusey (opens a new tab), at the time a graduate student at Imperial College London, took on what remained of Einstein’s notion of reality and — without originally intending to — delivered the killing blow.

The paradigm-shifting theorem became known as PBR, for Pusey and his academic accomplices, Jonathan Barrett and Terry Rudolph. Since the publication of PBR in 2012, many theorists have come to accept that it rules out our most commonsense understanding of reality.

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As with Bell, PBR has been experimentally confirmed multiple times. Last fall, for instance, researchers in the U.K. played an expanded version of the PBR game, dealing out five cards instead of just two, using a quantum computer built by IBM. Indeed, the quantum machine always won, although no one had doubted that it would. In fact, the researchers had been using the PBR theorem mainly to check whether the quantum computer was functioning properly. The validity of quantum mechanics — and PBR — was taken as a given.

“That was really the motivation,” said Crispin Barnes (opens a new tab), a physicist at the University of Cambridge who led the experiment, “to see whether a theorem from quantum foundations could also be turned into [an] experimental probe of genuinely quantum behavior.”

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But to conclude that the quantum state is definitely real is to misunderstand the PBR theorem, because PBR also leaves open the other extreme path: It could be, as the Copenhagenists have steadfastly maintained since the days of Bohr, that in some sense nothing is real, including the quantum state. It’s perfectly possible that the quantum state lives in our minds and has no direct connection to an objective reality. In this case, the redness of the billiard ball would be inextricably linked with the act of observing it — precisely the state of affairs that so deeply offended Einstein. “Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?” Einstein once famously pressed his colleague Abraham Pais.

PBR doesn’t give us the answer. What it does do is end a century of bargaining with quantum mechanics. By ruling out the possibility that reality is real while the wave function is not, PBR requires that physicists either fully embrace the notion of an objective but entirely surreal reality, or fully reject objective reality altogether. “Do you bite the bullet, or do you try and dodge the bullet?” Pusey said.

A salt-loving microorganism from Earth did more than endure a months-long experiment designed around possible conditions beneath Mars. It grew in concentrated brine under low pressure, using nitrate or perchlorate in place of oxygen during respiration. The result extends research on the resilience of Earth microbes. It also raises a question for Mars exploration: Which combinations of harsh conditions can still permit biological activity?

link to open access paper https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/aem.01749-26

Conclusion: We have shown that H. volcanii can actively grow under environmental and chemical conditions relevant to the present-day shallow Martian subsurface. However, this study was not designed to replicate the full thermal variability of the Martian surface or shallow subsurface, including diurnal and seasonal freeze–thaw cycles, or the complete suite of chemical conditions presently understood to exist on Mars. Rather, the objective was to determine whether active metabolism is physically possible under Mars-relevant combinations of low atmospheric pressure, high salinity, and oxidizing chemistry, provided that liquid water is available in the form of brines. Moreover, the media used in many previous low-pressure Mars simulation studies, including those employed herein, are supplemented with carbon sources and nutrients that are not representative of the current understanding of biologically available organic compounds on Mars (83).

Our future studies will investigate the capacity of halophilic and psychrophilic microorganisms to grow under conditions that more closely approximate the Amazonian/present-day Martian environment by incorporating freeze–thaw cycles, defined Mars media (94) containing Mars-relevant organic compounds (e.g., acetate) (95), and Mars regolith simulants. Moreover, future experiments would benefit from incorporating additional analytical approaches, including direct cell counts and quantitative biomass measurements, to better characterize population growth and cell-division dynamics under low-pressure conditions. Integrating transcriptomic and proteomic analyses would further enable identification of the molecular pathways involved in hypobaric tolerance, anaerobic metabolism, and adaptation to combined Mars-relevant environmental stressors.

As experimental systems increasingly approximate present-day conditions on Mars, the combined effects of low pressure, low temperature, high salinity, anoxia, radiation, and oxidizing compounds will likely reduce growth yields and metabolic rates. Sensitive, complementary, and agnostic approaches will therefore become increasingly important for detecting and distinguishing subtle biological responses under these more harmful conditions.

The results presented here do not imply that microbial life exists on Mars today. However, they add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that the shallow subsurface of Mars may retain environmental conditions capable of supporting active metabolism and extant life (83, 96–98).

Note: this is not an article about Mitch McConnell having a health checkup with a doctor.