When people think about the Strait of Hormuz, they think about oil tankers, LNG carriers, naval escorts, insurance premiums, and the price of gasoline. They generally do not think about yellow piles of sulfur beside gas plants, phosphate fertilizer complexes, or the acid circuits that keep copper and nickel processing running. They should. The current sulfur price spike is not just another commodity-market twitch. It is a preview of a future in which the cheap sulfur system created by oil and gas cleanup is much smaller, while much of the demand for sulfur remains...

For roughly fifty years, sulfur has been cheap for a strange reason. Oil refineries and sour gas plants had to remove it anyway. Sulfur in fuels is a pollution problem. Regulations forced the oil and gas industry to take sulfur out of refined products and gas streams, and the industry recovered it as elemental sulfur. The sulfur was not the main product. It was the cleaned-up contaminant. That is a very different cost structure from opening a mine, building a roaster, managing residues, and producing sulfur deliberately...

The old low-price regime put sulfur in the $50 to $150 per ton range for long stretches. That world was built on fossil byproduct abundance. A managed transition world might put sulfur in the $250 to $350 per ton range. A structurally tighter oil and gas-light world could easily live in the $400 to $600 per ton range. Regional crises, shipping disruptions, export restrictions, or sudden HPAL nickel demand can push sulfur into the $800 to $1,200 per ton range. The point is not that every future year looks like a crisis. The point is that the old fossil byproduct floor is unlikely to be the future floor...

The logistics problem is the part that deserves more attention. Today’s model works because elemental sulfur moves better than sulfuric acid. A fertilizer producer can import sulfur, burn it on site, integrate the acid plant . . . and ship finished fertilizer...

That means the future sulfur constraint is geographical as much as chemical. The winners are likely to be integrated hubs with two or three of the required pieces in the same place. Phosphate rock plus sulfur access plus port logistics is powerful. Smelter acid plus local mining demand is powerful. Pyrite waste plus acid demand plus permits can be powerful. A lonely inland fertilizer plant that depends on imported acid is not powerful. It is exposed...

Policy makers should be paying attention because sulfur sits in the awkward space between agriculture, mining, trade, and decarbonization. Countries should map sulfur and sulfuric acid dependency. They should identify where smelter acid, pyrite, tailings recovery, phosphate fertilizer, and mineral processing can be linked in real industrial hubs. They should stress-test fertilizer and critical-mineral projects against sulfur prices far above the old fossil byproduct norm...

...Modern agriculture and mining were built in part on cheap sulfur from oil and gas. As the world moves away from oil and gas, sulfur does not disappear, but the cheap arrangement does. The future price of sulfur is unlikely to be the old $50 to $150 per ton world. It is more likely to sit structurally closer to today’s stressed market than most fertilizer, mining, and policy models assumed a few years ago. The sooner that is treated as a supply-chain design problem instead of a temporary commodity spike, the less painful the adjustment will be.

...Trump also suggested during the high-level meeting with Xi Jinping that the US, China and Russia should join forces to challenge the International Criminal Court, noting that their interests align.

The question of why the U.S. government began a war with Iran is unsettled. The ostensible reasons, blocking Iran from developing nuclear weapons and protecting Iranians’ human rights, are not enough. Iran’s agreement not to build a nuclear arms program was in force...

...a U.S. government that so easily tolerates human rights abuses within the United States and in certain allied nations would seemingly have little zeal to fight Iran on that account, unless there were other inducements.

Strategic considerations as to U.S. economic sustainability and U.S. economic and political power in the world very likely impelled nervous U.S. decision-makers to start a war...

...The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz might not be a strategic “mistake,” but rather a deliberate feature of the conflict...

...The argument is that the blockade of the straits is a deliberate move by Washington to choke off China’s energy “lifeline” and, in doing so, halt its geopolitical rise...

...“Because oil was and is so fundamental to nearly every industry, the ‘petrodollar’ became ubiquitous, and the dollar became the cornerstone of the global economy.” To preserve the petrodollar arrangement and predictability of the dollar’s value becomes a principal objective of this war...

...Star Catcher says its customer base spans commercial space operators and U.S. Government stakeholders...

...If Star Catcher can prove the system works in orbit, satellite operators may no longer have to treat the power budget they launched with as the ceiling on what a spacecraft can do...

...its first space-based optical power-beaming demonstration is planned for later this year...

...In its announcement, Star Catcher said its Series A would fund deeper engagement with U.S. national security customers...

...“Persistent surveillance, resilient communications, and unhindered maneuverability are all constrained today by power,”...

...Beam pointing has to be precise across long distances. Beam intensity must be controlled so the system does not damage the solar arrays it is meant to help...

...Ford Energy is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ford Motor Company. We will provide United States-assembled battery energy storage systems (BESS) for utilities, data centers and large industrial and commercial customers in the United States...

Our flagship product – the Ford Energy DC block – is a standardized 20-foot containerized battery energy storage system designed around 512 Ah LFP prismatic cells. We offer two configurations: the FE-250 (two-hour system) and the FE-450 (a four-hour system). Both integrate advanced LFP prismatic battery technology, liquid-cooled thermal management and battery management system.

...We are repurposing existing U. S. battery manufacturing capacity in Glendale, Kentucky...

...The bill takes aim at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, which allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in elections. Lawmakers, drawing from a legal theory developed by the Center for American Progress, argued that because states create corporations and grant them their powers, Hawaii could simply decline to grant corporations the power to spend in elections...

...Democratic Senator Jarrett Keohokalole drew a sharp distinction between the rights of citizens and the powers of corporations, a distinction he said Citizens United had blurred.

“Our rights as individual people don’t come from the government or the Constitution,” Keohokalole said. “As Thomas Jefferson said, all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. They pre-exist the government. The government doesn’t grant us rights. They recognize and protect them.”

Corporate powers, Keohokalole argued, are an entirely different matter.

“They are created by state law,” he said, paraphrasing Chief Justice John Marshall’s 1819 opinion in* Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward*: “A corporation is an artificial being. It possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.”...

...Ammonia is a tempting fuel for the world's hottest jobs. It can be made from air, water and renewable electricity, stored as a liquid and shipped using know-how industry already has.

However, the snag is that it is stubborn to ignite, burns sluggishly and tends to spew nitrogen oxides (NOx) when pushed to high temperatures. That mix has kept heavy industry—where high-grade heat is non-negotiable—tethered to fossil fuels...

...In work published in Joule, a team led by Professor Yan Ning from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Assistant Professor He Qian from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering designed a catalyst that gets ammonia burning just above 200°C and sustains clean combustion at 1,100°C. Importantly, it converts the fuel completely into nitrogen and water, with only trace amounts of NOx...

...Research published in the journal Nature Astronomy shows how WOH G64, a giant binary star system in the Large Magellanic Cloud, has recently undergone a striking transformation...

...researchers say they've examined more than 30 years of brightness measurements and found that the star, long classified as a cold, red supergiant, has become markedly hotter – by over 1,000°C – and now appears yellow rather than red...

...Instead of the traditional steel porcupine, Ukraine has developed an inverted form—it shoots quills not at its enemies but at its allies, injecting them with a protective layer of technology. Not many have noticed, however, that this ensures Ukraine receives not just protection from the allies to whom it now becomes more valuable, but also offers Ukraine a level of control unlike that of many other countries. Due to the nature of the arms business, Ukraine will have a say on who will or will not be allowed to use its technology...

...Ukraine is, in effect, building its own version of ITAR. The same architecture that keeps its technology out of Russian hands also gives Kyiv a say in who gets to defend themselves with it. Every cooperation agreement embeds Ukrainian technology into another country’s defence architecture, and every embedded system requires a Ukrainian licence to transfer further. The United States spent decades getting to that position. Ukraine is acquiring significant leverage over international arms markets in a few short years...

...While an obvious take-away from the arms deals Kyiv is currently signing is that it has emerged as a global security provider, the real outcome is the permission architecture Ukraine is embedding into the global arms industry as we speak, and the power that architecture affords on the global scene. Ukraine is increasingly holding the strings to a global defence network that will operate without Washington’s permission.

Quantum technologies, including quantum computers, rely on materials that display unusual quantum effects under specific conditions. Researchers have found that these properties can also be engineered by adjusting a material’s structure. For example, stacking and slightly twisting layers of graphene creates a moiré pattern that can transform the material into a superconductor.

As scientists build increasingly intricate layered systems, they reach structures such as quasicrystals and super-moiré materials. The challenge is predicting which designs will be useful. Modeling these materials requires calculating vast amounts of data. In the case of quasicrystals, this can involve more than a quadrillion numbers, far exceeding the limits of even the most powerful supercomputers.

Researchers at Aalto University’s Department of Applied Physics have introduced a quantum-inspired algorithm that can handle these massive, non-periodic systems with remarkable speed. According to Assistant Professor Jose Lado, this work also highlights a growing feedback loop in quantum technology...

The US Department of the Interior (DOI) has reached agreements with Bluepoint Wind and Golden State Wind developers to voluntarily terminate their offshore wind leases in exchange for a total of USD 885 million (around EUR 756 million) that they paid in lease fees, which the US will return to the developers to invest in fossil energy projects.

Last May, NATO invited 10 Ukrainians to act as an opposing force during Hedgehog 2025, one of NATO’s largest exercises in the Baltics. The Ukrainians successfully simulated the destruction of 17 armored vehicles and conducted 30 strikes in half a day, effectively neutralizing two NATO battalions before dinner...

...As soldiers rotate off position, they provide feedback to engineers who immediately modify designs. This cycle cannot be replicated by NATO’s centralized procurement...

...Nearly a decade after Delta won a NATO hackathon, America’s equivalent — Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control — struggles to make meaningful progress because of top-down data integration strategies. Delta’s bottom-up origins enabled continuous battlefield refinement, extending decision windows and enabling software updates for commanders’ evolving needs.

These differences reveal tensions between peacetime and wartime innovation structures. NATO’s procurement system prevents waste, increases interoperability, and maintains civilian oversight, which are reasonable in peacetime but cause friction when rapid adaptation is existential. Ukraine bypasses traditional acquisition through compressed decision cycles and flattened hierarchies. Soldiers became drone engineers because there was no time for defense contracts. Procurement timelines measured in years are irrelevant when innovation timelines are measured in weeks...

...Whether through NATO membership, bilateral security guarantees, or another framework, it is strategically indefensible to treat Ukraine as peripheral rather than integral given Ukraine’s capabilities...

...Ukraine is the most combat-experienced, doctrinally up-to-date, and innovative partner in the Western world...