At Argonne National Laboratory, scientists have leveraged the Frontier supercomputer to create an unprecedented simulation of the universe, encompassing a span of 10 billion light years and incorporating complex physics models.

This monumental achievement allows for new insights into galaxy formation and cosmic evolution, showcasing the profound capabilities of exascale computing.

Breakthrough in Universe Simulation

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have achieved a groundbreaking milestone by creating the largest astrophysical simulation of the Universe to date. This simulation was made possible by the Frontier supercomputer, which was recently the most powerful in the world. Its scale mirrors the vast surveys conducted by advanced telescopes and observatories, offering unprecedented insights into the cosmos.

Frontier, located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, is currently the second-fastest supercomputer globally, surpassed only by El Capitan, which pulled ahead in November 2024. Notably, Frontier is the world’s first exascale supercomputer, a distinction it now shares with El Capitan, both of which represent the cutting edge of computational power.

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The outgoing president was right, in his farewell address, to warn of the dangers posed by the billionaires around the table

Aristocrats are “the most difficult Animals to manage, of anything in the whole Theory and practice of Government. They will not suffer themselves to be governed,” John Adams warned, writing after his presidency. Banning titles was insufficient; a few would still be distinguished by birth or, especially, wealth. The problem was not just their ability to buy political favours but the grip that their money had on people’s minds.

Economic and political power entwine everywhere. Fear of the rich’s outsized influence has existed throughout US history. Yet at times the relationship becomes especially stark and threatening. On Wednesday, Joe Biden evoked the 19th-century Gilded Age and the robber barons – who crushed competitors, exploited workers, bought judges and politicians, and flaunted wealth – in his warning against oligarchs.

In his parting words from the Oval Office, the president talked up his achievements: “The seeds are planted, and they’ll grow, and they’ll bloom for decades to come.” It is true that he received insufficient credit for the strengthened economy, green investment, massive healthcare expansion and his management of the Covid disaster that he inherited from Donald Trump, alongside his support for Ukraine. But his carelessness towards Palestinian lives in Gaza and his refusal to stand aside sooner – extraordinarily, he still maintains that he could have beaten Mr Trump – contributed to the Democrats’ defeat.

What resonated, however, was his alarm call as he warned of the “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people”, adding: “An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

In an effort to broaden its appeal, the Washington Post has changed its slogan from “Democracy Dies in Darkness” to

“Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”

The following are six runner-up slogans that were in strong contention:

The Kid Rock of Newspapers

Every Subscription Comes With Free Trump Bible

All the News by Writers Who Haven’t Quit

News? Fuck Yeah!

Ten Millionth Subscriber Gets to Ride in Bezos’s Rocket

Release the Kraken

Editor’s note: We want your slogans, too! Please share at info@contrariannews.org. Our favorite will get a shoutout.

Preston Martin figured the retro blue Volkswagen van he slept in for a year during college was a goner, given that he had parked it in a Malibu neighborhood just before the Palisades fire ripped through, reducing homes and cars to rubble and charred metal.

So the surfboard maker was stunned to find that the vehicle had survived. Not only that, a photo of the vibrant bus taken by an Associated Press photographer was circulating widely on television and online, giving viewers a measure of joy.

“There is magic in that van,” Martin, 24, said Tuesday in an interview with AP. “It makes no sense why this happened. It should have been toasted, but here we are.”

Martin purchased the 1977 Volkswagen Type 2 somewhat on a whim sometime around his junior year studying mechanical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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What-iffing Trump troops in the streets

D.C. National Guard Military Police, Lafayette Park, Washington, D.C. on June 2, 2020. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Revé Van Croft, 715th PAD)

Donald Trump talks tough about deploying troops in the streets. Why? For the same reason he muses about “acquiring” Greenland and the Panama Canal.

Trump, Alex Shepard believes, “is driven almost entirely by his desire to appear strong—or, more to the point, his fear of looking weak. This is why he picks senseless fights with smaller allies while avoiding brawls with the strongmen he so greatly admires.”

Yes, Greenland may have significant resources, but as we pointed out last week, that’s not really why Trump wants it. That’s about Trump’s obsession with size (The New Republic):

As is almost always the case with Trump, though, the cleanest and perhaps most persuasive explanation is the simplest and dumbest: The territory, like Canada, looks really, really big on the commonly used (and widely distorted) Mercator projection. Adding it would be a huge ego boost for a man who, hours after planes hit the Twin Towers, boasted that he now owned the tallest building in New York City. (He didn’t, but that’s beside the point.)

Twenty years of war has created tens of thousands of broken men and women.

Recent headline-making events in two of America’s most famous party-hardy cities sent us back to our well-thumbed copy of Touching the Dragon, a 2018 memoir by James Hatch.

Never heard of Hatch? Well, maybe that’s because he spent much of his military career as a Navy SEAL “warfighter” always “close to the enemy” in Bosnia, Africa, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but never seeking headlines. A survivor of 150 combat missions, Hatch returned home in bad mental and physical shape; in fact, his crippling wounds of war ended his career. Then, adding insult to injury, he was “forced to … reintegrate into a society that I had spent two decades defending, but in which I didn’t feel I had a place.”

In his insightful and prophetic book, Hatch warned that his generational cohort of “special operators,” who experienced a similar “volume of fighting,” were now facing “a serious volume of aftermath. Marriages falling apart. Alcoholism. Guys getting kicked out of their houses. Guys drowning in opioids. The real recoil hasn’t even hit yet.”

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The final missions of two previously unknown Army sergeants—37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger and 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar—left millions of other Americans scratching their heads. Why would two much-saluted young men—who served their country so honorably at home and abroad, for a combined total of 33 years—both rent trucks in two different locations, within the same week? And then turn them into instruments of mass and/or self-destruction?

Michael Tomasky wrote an excellent piece today about the unaccountable president, laying out the process by which he gets away with everything. No one expects anything of him and no matter what he says, the right wing media, the Congress and his allies in the judiciary will back him up.

As an example he suggests that even if Trump were to be found to have given nuclear secrets to North Korea he would either claim it was fake news and the entire wingnuts apparatus would launch into gear calling it another hoax or he would admit it, saying it was a perfect move of a very stable genius and they’d all back his decision as necessary for national security despite its madness. That is not an exaggeration. I believe there is nothing that can make them abandon their support at this point.

We’ve Never Been Here Before: The Zero-Accountability Presidency
The only institutions that will try to hold Trump accountable are powerless, while the only ones with the power to punish him will never do it.

So here we are, at another one of those Trump moments that by now can only be called boringly surreal: The president-elect was sentenced Friday in New York in the hush-money trial, 10 days before taking the oath of office. He was given an “unconditional discharge.” At least he had to appear. Amazingly, the Supreme Court, this once, did not bail him out, although four justices were ready to.

Nothing is shocking anymore. Trump refused to rule out invading Denmark (to take Greenland). Well, of course he did. What else should we expect? That he also wouldn’t rule out invading Panama (to take the canal) took me by surprise, I admit. But only for about three seconds. By the fourth second, it made perfect sense: Jimmy Carter’s decision to give the canal to Panama has been a festering boil on the right ever since it happened.

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Chinese cyber-spies who broke into the US Treasury Department also stole documents from officials investigating real-estate sales near American military bases, it's reported.

Citing three folks familiar with the matter, CNN said the Chinese government-backed snoops compromised the computer security of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS), which reviews foreign money funneled into American businesses and real estate to assess national security risks.

Late last year, the Treasury expanded the committee's authority to review the purchase or lease of real estate close to US military bases. American lawmakers have expressed concern that Chinese government agents could buy up land near these bases and use the locations to spy on military activities.

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US officials are analyzing the national security impact of the stolen CFIUS files, anonymous sources told CNN. While none of the pilfered data appears to be classified, the concern is that the unclassified documents stolen in the raid could still provide useful intelligence to the Chinese government.

The next casualty of the epic Los Angeles fires, appropriately, will be the casualty industry. What has gotten immediate press attention is the impact of the fires on local homeowners and on the California state insurer of last resort, the FAIR Plan, which only has about $700 million in cash. The Pacific Palisades alone has nearly $6 billion in insurance exposure, and the total L.A. losses are projected at $20 billion to over $50 billion counting spillover losses to economic activity.

In addition, insurance companies have been raising rates, canceling or non-renewing policies, or pulling out of the state entirely. There will be massive pressure on the state to make up for these gaps one way or another, both for homeowners who have suffered uninsured losses and for others whose insurance is becoming unavailable or unaffordable.

But that is only the beginning of the story. Basically, there is a massive disconnect between what is financially prudent and what is politically possible. Paradoxically, insurers haven’t been raising rates enough to cover risks.

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A more insidious trend is the rise of insurers that are not regulated at all. As regulated insurers have been quitting high-risk areas, a new kind of sketchy enterprise is filling the gap. According to former Federal Reserve governor Sarah Bloom Raskin, now at Duke University, where her research specialty is the impact of climate on finance, these are thinly capitalized companies that don’t meet normal regulatory standards.

Why we’re publishing a previously undisclosed list of all 448 members of the Democratic National Committee

Three weeks from now, the Democratic National Committee will convene in National Harbor, Maryland, to elect a new party chair and other national officers. For Democrats reeling from the defeat of Kamala Harris, this will be their first opportunity to anoint a fresh face for the national party to replace Jaime Harrison, who is stepping down.

A new chair, particularly one elected via an open vote and not merely picked by an incumbent president, as is the party’s tradition, could also change how Democrats operate at both the national and state level. So, while some joke that the race for DNC chair is the ultimate high school class president election, whoever holds the office will have a significant role in how Democrats respond to Trump, how they rebuild, what changes they make to their media, technology, and fundraising practices, and how the 2028 presidential selection process plays out.

But who will make this decision? Officially, it’s a secret. According to the DNC, there are 448 active members of the national committee, including 200 elected members from 57 states, territories, and Democrats Abroad; members representing 16 affiliate groups; and 73 “at-large” members who were elected as a slate appointed in 2021 by the party chairman, Jaime Harrison. For a party that claims the word “democratic” and insists that it is a champion of transparency and accountability in government, the official roster of these 448 voters is not public.

Michael Kapp, a DNC member from California who was first elected to that position by his state party’s executive committee in 2016, told me the list isn’t public “because it’s the DNC—it’s a black box.” He told me that leadership holds tightly to the list to prevent any organizing beyond their control.

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