Humanity is upping the stakes on its deadly game of nuclear poker once again. The world spent a combined total of $91,393,404,739 on nuclear weapons in 2023 – that’s around $250 million each year, $173,884 per minute, or $2,898 a second.Nine countries possess nukes – the US, Russia, France, China, the UK, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea – and all of them increased the amount of money they put into their atomic arsenals last year. 2023's spending is $10.7 billion higher than in 2022, a trend that was primarily driven by the US, which accounted for 80 percent of the surge. Last year, the North American superpower spent more than all the other nuclear-armed countries put together with a total expenditure of $51.5 billion. The next biggest spender was China, which forked out over $11.8 billion on their nuclear weapons arsenal, followed by Russia with an expenditure of $8.3 billion. The UK and France were not far behind, spending $8.1 billion and $6.1 billion, respectively.All of this data comes from a new report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), who described the lavish spending as an “unacceptable misallocation of public funds.”“The acceleration of spending on these inhumane and destructive weapons over the past five years is not improving global security but posing a global threat,” Alicia Sanders-Zakre, Policy and Research Coordinator at ICAN who co-authored the report, said in a statement.The billions upon billions of dollars were spent modernizing and maintaining current nuclear arsenals or, in some cases, even expanding them.Governments and militaries are just half of the story, though. The new report shines a light on 20 corporations that amassed over $30 billion for work on developing, manufacturing, sustaining, and producing nuclear weapons.The nuclear weapons industry received at least $7.9 billion in new contracts in 2023, as per the ICAN report. The top earner was Honeywell International, which raked in around $6.2 billion through nuclear weapons work, followed by Northrop Grumman ($5.9 billion), BAE Systems ($3.3 billion), Lockheed Martin ($2.89 billion) and General Dynamics ($2.7 billion).All of this was facilitated through lobbyist groups, which spent more than $118 million courting governments in 2023.This is without mentioning the nuclear weapons work of certain state-controlled organizations – such as Bharat Dynamics Limited (India), China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), or Rostec (Russia) – which are known to contribute significantly to their country’s nuclear arsenals, but do not publicly disclose much of their data. Don’t expect any changes in the years ahead, either. At least five companies – BAE Systems, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Peraton – have contracts that continue through 2039. Let's hope twitchy fingers stay off the buttons and we make it that far!

Carbon on the planet Mercury could have been compressed to form a layer of diamond beneath the crust kilometers thick, modeling suggests. When the nursery rhyme compares a star to a “diamond in the sky”, it might be accurate for one planet frequently confused with a star.Mercury can shine quite brightly, but that’s because it is so close to the Sun a great deal of light hits it. The proportion reflected off is low, just 9 percent. The MESSENGER spacecraft revealed this is because much of the surface has plenty of graphite. Even though carbon makes up only 1-4 percent by weight, that’s about a hundred times greater than Earth, and enough to darken most of the planet. The distribution of the graphite has led planetary scientists to conclude the carbon was there at Mercury’s formation, rather than having arrived on comets or asteroids. Yongjiang Xu of China’s Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research has been investigating what is likely to have happened to all that carbon during the period where Mercury differentiated into core and crust from the original hot mess.Mercury probably started off with even more carbon than it has now. However, back when its surface was a magma ocean, gases like carbon dioxide and methane would have degassed and escaped from the planet’s low gravity.Nevertheless, Xu and co-authors write; “The abundance of graphite in the Mercurian crust indicates that the planet remained saturated in a carbon phase during metal-silicate differentiation, core formation, and the entirety of magma ocean crystallization.”It’s not just carbon that makes diamonds, however – you need pressure as well. Mercury is a smaller planet with less gravity than Earth, and the pressure in its ancient magma ocean and mantle was thought insufficient to make the gems. Instead, carbon that was not bonded to anything else was thought to have all been in the form of graphite, which floated to the surface. New models of Mercury’s gravity field call this into question. This inspired the authors of this paper to expose samples of the elements that might have been present in Mercury at the time to 7 gigapascals of pressure at almost 2,000° C (3,600° F).There are two scenarios where diamonds could have been formed. Either they were produced from the magma ocean, a stage thought to have been common to all the inner planets, or they were squeezed out of the core as it crystallized.The first scenario is only possible if Mercury had quite a lot of sulfur in its magma ocean, the authors found, as this would have changed the chemistry to the point where diamond production was possible. Even if sulfur was abundant, the authors consider large-scale diamond production improbable, although not impossible.However, they consider the core scenario much more likely. As the solid inner core formed, carbon would have been forced out, leading to a diamond layer kilometers thick. High temperatures could have burned the outer parts of this layer back to graphite. How much would have been lost this way is unclear,  but much of it could survive, sitting between Mercury’s core and its silicate mantle. The conductivity of this diamond layer might contribute to Mercury’s magnetic field.The layer is probably not a single shell kilometers thick, but senior author Dr Bernard Charlier of the University of Liege told New Scientist. “Let’s be honest,” he says, “We have no idea about the potential size of those diamonds.”The study is published open access in the journal Nature Communications. 

At around 7:14 am on June 30, 1908, a giant explosion occurred above the Podkamennaya Tunguska river in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia.The explosion flattened 2,150 square kilometers (830 square miles) with the force of an estimated 10-20 megatons, making it possibly thousands of times more powerful than the atomic bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II. Eyewitnesses described shockwaves from hundreds of kilometers away, and hearing several explosions like cannons."Suddenly, over the mountain where the forest had already fallen, it became very light, and, how can I tell you, as if a second sun had appeared," one witness to the event later described. "My eyes hurt, and I even closed them. It looked like what the Russians call lightning. And immediately there was [...] strong thunder. This was the second blow. The morning was sunny, there were no clouds, our sun was shining brightly, as always, and then a second sun appeared!""With difficulty, Chekaren and I crawled out from under [shelter]. After that, we saw that above, but in a different place, it flashed again and there was strong thunder. This was the third blow. The wind came at us, knocked us off our feet, and hit us against fallen wood."Others described seeing a "tube" in the sky, with reports describing it as blue. What was puzzling about the event was a lack of an impact crater, which hasn't been found to this day (despite claims to the contrary). Over the years, a number of explanations have been proposed for the event, from asteroids skimming the atmosphere to, briefly, primordial black holes passing directly through the Earth.          In the current age of the universe, black holes form when gigantic stars run out of fuel and collapse under their own gravity. This places a limit on how small a stellar black hole can be in the current universe; they have to form from large amounts of mass condensed into one small region, and only occur in stars around 20 times the mass of the Sun. Primordial black holes, on the other hand, are hypothetical black holes that are proposed to have formed in the first few seconds of the universe, when all the stuff that would go on to create the stars and galaxies was more tightly packed together."In that moment, pockets of hot material may have been dense enough to form black holes, potentially with masses ranging from 100,000 times less than a paperclip to 100,000 times more than the Sun’s," NASA explains. "Then as the universe quickly expanded and cooled, the conditions for forming black holes this way ended."If they did form – and we have never detected one – it is possible that they could still be out there. There have even been suggestions primordial black holes smaller than an atom could pass through Earth every day without harm to the planet, or maybe a larger one every thousand years or so.Looking at the Tunguska event, one team of physicists suggested in a 1973 Nature paper that it could have been caused by a primordial black hole passing through the planet. The team claimed that a black hole with the mass of a large asteroid would explain the lack of impactor seen at Tunguska, as well as blue light seen by witnesses."Most of the radiation from the shock front would be in the vacuum ultraviolet and would be absorbed and reradiated at longer wavelengths," the team explained. "There would be little hard X radiation and the accompanying plasma column would appear deep blue." While a very "out there" suggestion, the team suggested a way that the idea could be tested – essentially, looking for signs of an exit wound on the other side of the planet."[The black hole] would enter the Earth, and the rigidity of rock would allow no underground shock wave," the team wrote in their paper. "Because of its high velocity and because it loses only a small fraction of its energy in passing through the Earth, the black hole should very nearly follow a straight line through the Earth, entering at 30° to the horizon and leaving through the North Atlantic in the region 40°-50° N 30°-40° W. This exit provides a check for the whole hypothesis. "The team proposed looking for shockwaves and disturbances of the ocean on the opposite side of the world. While a fun idea, no such evidence has been found, and we still don't know that primordial black holes exist at all. The Tunguska event can be explained without resorting to black holes from the dawn of time that happen to be the mass of a large asteroid. The other explanation is: a large asteroid, around the mass of a large asteroid. The generally accepted explanation is that an asteroid around 50 to 80 meters (160–262 feet) across exploded in an airburst 10 to 14 kilometers (6 to 9 miles) above the ground.

Only weeks before a major UK election, Google Ads reportedly censored an anti-globalist political party. The Reform UK Party found itself suddenly targeted without explanation by Google Ads some two weeks before the July 4 election. While Google did apparently make tacit acknowledgment of a mistake, quickly reversing the censorship, it provides another sobering illustration of Google’s constant election meddling and interference not just in England, but around the world. Reform UK Party leader and political candidate Nigel Farage tweeted June 22, “ELECTION INTERFERENCE ALERT ? Big Tech giant @Google has BLOCKED our Ad Accounts. They are trying to stop the Reform message.” He added, “I hope [Google Europe President] @MattBrittin can look into this issue as a matter of urgency. We want action.” He added a screenshot from Google ads saying, “Your account is suspended.” Google did, surprisingly, look urgently into the issue, as Farage triumphantly posted later the same day, “BREAKING Google have just reinstated our ad account. My thanks to @MattBrittin. A big victory!” Farage did not add if Google provided an explanation or what that explanation was. “Google's reach is truly global, including how it meddles in elections,” said MRC Vice President for Free Speech Dan Schneider. “Blocking Nigel Farage's ads is despicable, but predictable. I suspect this also foreshadows what we will soon see in our own elections. Google has been interfering in our elections for years. It shows no signs of stopping.” Tech giant Google doesn’t just interfere in European elections, but also in American elections. MRC Free Speech America found that Google interfered 41 times in elections since 2008. This interference included Google disabling then-presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard’s Google Ads account in 2020 as she became the most searched candidate after the first Democrat primary debate. More recently, in 2024, Google was caught censoring former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign ad a number of times. Conservatives are under attack. Contact Google at 650-253-0000 and demand it be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

A 20-year-old man from New Jersey was arrested after reportedly taking a flight to Florida to attack a gamer with a hammer after an online dispute took place in the virtual fantasy world of ArcheAge, according to Fox News Digital.As a consequence, Edward Kang is facing a second-degree murder charge after the assault played out early Sunday in Fernandina Beach. The victim was left with severe head injuries, but none of them were life-threatening, according to Nassau County Sheriff Bill Leeper.'I don’t know what transpired between the victim and the suspect, but something made the suspect want to come down to Florida and injure that other individual.'"I just want to let you know that this is a weird one," Leeper said during a press conference following the incident. "Some things make you say ‘hmm.’ Some things you just can’t make up. There are some things that make you say ‘what in the world was he thinking’? And there are some things that make you say ‘you’re not going to believe this.’ Well, this case makes you say all four of those." Leeper went on to say that Kang and the victim had never met in person before the altercation. All of their communication had taken place through a video game known as ArcheAge, a multiplayer role-playing game similar to World of Warcraft."This video game is something where you can name characters, you can fight other characters and kill them — I don’t know what transpired between the victim and the suspect, but something made the suspect want to come down to Florida and injure that other individual," Leeper continued.Leeper said his deputies were dispatched to a home in Fernandina Beach early Sunday morning to respond to a physical altercation that had broken out. He said that upon arrival, deputies "discovered a significant amount of blood in the entryway of the home and in the victim’s bedroom."The victim's stepfather was reportedly awoken in the middle of the night by calls for help. When he got up to investigate the situation, he discovered his stepson and Kang in a physical struggle on the ground, according to the report.Kang, dressed in all black, entered the victim's unlocked house and waited in the hallway until the victim took a bathroom break during a late-night gaming session. The authorities revealed that just days earlier, Kang boarded a Delta flight from Newark, New Jersey, to Jacksonville, Florida. He later purchased a hammer and flashlight at a hardware store. Kang initially told his family that he was going down to Florida to visit a friend he had met years before through an online video game.Kang was booked into the Nassau County Jail on Sunday. Information about whether Kang has an attorney was not immediately apparent.The investigation is still ongoing, but the charges could be upgraded in the future, according to Leeper. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Writer David Hayter reacted to the remarks of actor Alan Cumming, who said that the second X-Men movie was the "gayest film" he'd ever worked on.Hayter cowrote "X2: X-Men United" and was the sole screenwriter for the original "X-Men" movie. He is also known as an iconic video game voice actor, playing the role of Snake in the Metal Gear Solid series.Cumming, who played the mutant named Nightcrawler in the second X-Men film, told Entertainment Weekly that he thought "X2" was the gayest film he had ever worked on due to the themes and the crew members."Oh, I think the X-Men film I'm in is the gayest film that I've ever done, and that's me saying that. It's got a queer director, lots of queer actors in it. I love the fact that something so mainstream and so in the comic book world is so queer," Cumming told the outlet.'Those sorts of films really help people understand queerness.'Hayter told TMZ Cumming's comments thrilled him."I was thrilled Alan Cumming called ‘X2’ the gayest film he'd ever worked on. It made me really happy," Hayter explained. "I'm so glad we did right by him. He's such an icon for gay rights. Ian McKellen also really recognized the allegory of it from a gay perspective."Hayter continued and said the X-Men movies were about appealing to "anyone who faced hatred or exclusion or judgement and still felt compelled to do the right thing."While the beginning of "X-Men" clearly alluded to a Holocaust-like scenario of mutants, Hayter now claims that there was a gay "element" on the filmmakers' minds."We had the Holocaust in the opening of [‘X-Men’] and Magneto paraphrases Malcolm X at the end. It's really for anyone who feels exclusion. ... But we had a number of key creatives behind the camera and on camera who were gay, so obviously that element was on our minds. The fact that came through and felt fulfilling for Alan meant a lot to me personally."Hayter's retcon of the X-Men allegories mirrors that of "The Matrix" creators Andy and Larry Wachowski. The two brothers both came out as transgender and then said the Matrix movies were metaphors for transgenderism.Cumming did not reprise the role of Nightcrawler but is rumored for possible future appearances."I think, in a way, those sorts of films really help people understand queerness, because you can address it in an artistic way, and everyone is less scared of the concept," Cumming added. "It's an allegory about queerness, about people having these great gifts and really great, powerful things that they have to hide to exist. Queer people understand what that's all about."Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

CNN talking heads Dana Bash and Jake Tapper are the co-moderators for this week's presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Some Trump allies expect that Bash, like her colleague, will be unable to contain her long-standing partisan bias long enough Thursday to permit a fair exchange for the benefit of prospective voters. At the height of the pro-Hamas rallies earlier this year and amidst pronounced anti-Israel rhetoric from progressive Democratic lawmakers, Bash accused Trump of dangerous anti-Semitism for pointing out that the "Democrats have been very, very opposed to Jewish people ... and to Israel." Bash, an exponent of the Russia collusion hoax who is evidently content to give Biden boosters plenty of air time, bemoaned the Supreme Court's March decision requiring Colorado to keep Trump on the 2024 ballot, noting that "unfortunately for America, the court isn't necessarily wrong that this is the way the Framers wanted it to be." Years before expressing grief over the prospect that Biden's wouldn't effectively run unopposed in at least one state, Bash diminished the cost of real war in an effort to score political points against Trump. In January 2021, Trump highlighted that unlike his predecessors, he had not committed America to any bloody conflicts abroad costing thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars. Bash said in response, "Maybe he didn't start any new wars abroad, but he completely incited battle after battle and even, I would say, war domestically." Should Bash act on her deep-seated antipathy or take a page out of the playbook of one of her former husbands, then she might end up influencing the election in a questionable fashion. Jeremy Bash, former chief of staff at the CIA under Obama and senior adviser to then-Director Leon Panetta, was part of the cabal of former U.S. intelligence officials who signed an open letter on Oct. 19, 2020, regarding the New York Post's Oct. 14 report about the discovery and damning contents of Hunter Biden's laptop, which the FBI had "verified" one year earlier. The CNN co-moderator's ex-husband helped downplay the possibility that the potentially election-changing discovery of a laptop brimming with possible evidence implicating the Bidens in various improprieties had "all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation." A CNN spokesman stressed to the New York Post that Bash and Tapper were well suited to the task at hand. "Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are well-respected veteran journalists who have covered politics for more than five decades combined," said the spokesman. "They have extensive experience moderating major political debates, including CNN's Republican Presidential Primary Debate this cycle. There are no two people better equipped to co-moderate a substantial and fact-based discussion, and we look forward to the debate on June 27 in Atlanta." Steve Bannon and other Trump allies aware of the co-moderators' past criticism of the former president have suggested the Republican might be ambushed on Thursday — especially after how they treated Trump's national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, on Monday. For daring to mention the co-moderators' unmistakable antipathy toward Trump, CNN abruptly ended an interview Monday with Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Leavitt noted on X, "This proved our point that President Trump will not be treated fairly on Thursday. Yet he is still willing to go into this 3-1 fight to bring his winning message to the American people, and he will win." Leavitt later acknowledged on Bannon's "War Room" podcast that "CNN is a propaganda network for the Democrat Party and for Joe Biden. They have pushed endless lies about President Trump ... from [the] Russia hoax to the Charlottesville lie to the Hunter Biden laptop. They've covered for Joe Biden over the past several years." Bannon said, "This Thursday debate is totally 100 percent rigged," reported Newsweek. "The organizing principle of CNN is a hatred of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement to the core of their being. ... They hate Donald J. Trump and they hate the MAGA movement." Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told Newsweek, "The true benchmark for Thursday's debate should be whether or not Joe Biden can defend his disastrous record on inflation and the out-of-control border invasion versus President Trump's unquestioned first-term record of success, and if Biden can speak for himself without the overt participation and interference of two CNN moderators." Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

What are the newest Five Nights TD codes? The latest list of working Nights TD codes we've put together in this guide has been fully tested and is ready to grant you helpful rewards like in-game currency and other essentials. Inspired by the original Five Nights at Freddy's games, this Roblox take on the iconic horror franchise has been immensely popular with thousands of active players. If it's other horror games you're after, be sure to try out the current Descent codes or Murder Mystery 2 codes. To make it through the night in Five Nights TD though, you'll need the rewards from the codes listed below for the best chance of survival. Continue reading Five Nights TD codes June 2024 MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best Roblox games, Roblox promo codes, Roblox music codes

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The AMD Ryzen 7 7700 has just dropped to its lowest ever price on Amazon, making this eight-core gaming CPU an excellent option for those seeking an AMD CPU deal. It's not the absolute fastest CPU AMD makes for gaming, but it's still a great all-rounder, and it's nearly $100 cheaper than the current king of the hill the 7800X3D. With eight of AMD's latest Zen 4 cores housed inside it, the Ryzen 7 7700 is a powerful CPU, and if had this price at launch it would have found itself a place on our best gaming CPU guide. However, this is a limited-time deal, so you'll have to act fast to get this great CPU for this price. Continue reading Grab the AMD Ryzen 7 7700 at its lowest ever price, if you’re quick MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Ryzen 7 7800X3D review, Best gaming CPU, Radeon RX 7800 XT review