“NASA has lost contact with a spacecraft that has orbited Mars for more than a decade. Maven abruptly stopped communicating to ground stations over the weekend. NASA said this week that it was working fine before it went behind the red planet. When it reappeared, there was only silence. Launched in 2013, Maven began studying the upper Martian atmosphere and its interaction with the solar wind once reaching the red planet the following year. Scientists ended up blaming the sun for Mars losing most of its atmosphere to space over the eons, turning it from wet and warm to the dry and cold world it is today.
Maven also has served as a communication relay for NASA’s two Mars rovers, Curiosity and Perseverance.” (12/10/25)
“President Trump recently posted a declaration that confused me a bit. He wrote that he has approved ‘TINY CARS to be built in America,’ proclaiming that they will be inexpensive, safe, fuel-efficient, and amazing. He thanked the Department of Justice and the Departments of Transportation and Environment and demanded that manufacturers start building them now. It sounded like the leader of a centrally planned economy who personally decides which products are permitted. The tone was almost [sic] authoritarian, as if the market had been waiting for permission from the state to innovate. There is a saying: perception is reality. Trump wants us to believe that he is in charge of everything in the country and the world, from diverting hurricanes to stopping wars, regulating trade, and producing automobiles.” (12/10/25)
“There is a long list of really dumb taxes in Missouri. The St. Louis and Kansas City earnings taxes are actively harmful to growth and opportunity. The personal property taxes on livestock are absurd. The pool table tax has long been an anachronism. But I have always thought that the single worst tax is Missouri is the local economic development sales tax. Why is it the worst? Because while the other taxes are harmful, they at least fund, in part, necessary functions of government. The economic development sales tax is a tax that entirely funds actions that cities should not be engaged in. It’s a tax that collects more money from people to make our communities worse off.” (12/10/25)
“At least 30 people, including patients, have been killed, and about 70 wounded after an air strike by the country’s military government hit a major hospital in western Myanmar, according to a rebel group, aid workers and a witness. Myanmar has been gripped by attritional fighting in a raging civil war. The hospital in western Rakhine state’s Mrauk U township was struck late on Wednesday by bombs dropped by a military aircraft, said Khine Thu Kha, a spokesman for the Arakan Army, which is battling the ruling government along parts of the coastal state.” (12/11/25)
“The U.S. suicide rate dropped slightly last year from some of the highest levels ever reported, preliminary data suggests. Experts say it’s hard to know exactly why, or whether the decline will continue. A little over 48,800 suicide deaths were reported in 2024, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 500 fewer than the year before. The overall suicide rate fell to 13.7 per 100,000 people. Suicides rose for nearly two decades aside from a two-year drop around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then they shot up again, to more than 14 per 100,000 from 2021 to 2023.” (12/10/25)
