2001: “Brookhaven Labs has produced for the first time collisions of gold nuclei at a center of mass energy of 200GeV/nucleon.”

2002: “There may be a new type of matter according to researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory.”

2010: The hottest man-made temperatures ever achived were a record 4 trillion degree plasma experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York… anointed the Guinness record holder.”

2023: “Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have uncovered an entirely new kind of quantum entanglement.”

2026: On Friday, February 6, “a control room full of scientists, administrators and members of the press gathered” at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, New York to witness its final collisions, reports Scientific American:

The vibe had been wistful, but the crowd broke into applause as Darío Gil, the Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy, pressed a red button to end the collider’s quarter-century saga… “I’m really sad” [said Angelika Drees, a BNL accelerator physicist]. “It was such a beautiful experiment and my research home for 27 years. But we’re going to put something even better there.”

That “something” will be a far more powerful electron-ion collider to further push the frontiers of physics, extend RHIC’s legacy and maintain the lab’s position as a center of discovery. This successor will be built in part from RHIC’s bones, especially from one of its two giant, subterranean storage rings that once held the retiring collider’s supply of circulating, near-light speed nuclei…slated for construction over the next decade. [That Electron-Ion Collider, or EIC] will utilize much of RHIC’s infrastructure, replacing one of its ion rings with a new ring for cycling electrons. The EIC will use those tiny, fast-flying electrons as tiny knives for slicing open the much larger gold ions. Physicists will get an unrivaled look into the workings of quarks and gluons and yet another chance to grapple with nature’s strongest force. “We knew for the EIC to happen, RHIC needed to end,” says Wolfram Fischer, who chairs BNL’s collider-accelerator department. “It’s bittersweet.”

EIC will be the first new collider built in the US since RHIC. To some, it signifies the country’s reentry into a particle physics landscape it has largely ceded to Europe and Asia over the past two decades. “For at least 10 or 15 years,” says Abhay Deshpande, BNL’s associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics, “this will be the number one place in the world for [young physicists] to come.”

The RHIC was able “to separately send two protons colliding with precisely aligned spins — something that, even today, no other experiment has yet matched,” the article points out:

During its record-breaking 25-year run, RHIC illuminated nature’s thorniest force and its most fundamental constituents. It created the heaviest, most elaborate assemblages of antimatter ever seen. It nearly put to rest a decades-long crisis over the proton’s spin. And, of course, it brought physicists closer to the big bang than ever before…

When RHIC at last began full operations in 2000, its initial heavy-ion collisions almost immediately pumped out quark-gluon plasma. But demonstrating this beyond a shadow of a doubt proved in some respects more challenging than actually creating the elusive plasma itself, with the case for success strengthening as RHIC’s numbers of collisions soared. By 2010 RHIC’s scientists were confident enough to declare that the hot soup they’d been studying for a decade was hot and soupy enough to convincingly constitute a quark-gluon plasma. And it was even weirder than they thought. Instead of the gas of quarks and gluons theorists expected, the plasma acted like a swirling liquid unprecedented in nature. It was nearly “perfect,” with zero friction, and set a new record for twistiness, or “vorticity.” For Paul Mantica, a division director for the Facilities and Project Management Division in the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Physics, this was the highlight of RHIC’s storied existence. “It was paradigm-changing,” he says…

Data from the final run (which began nearly a year ago) has already produced yet another discovery: the first-ever direct evidence of “virtual particles” in RHIC’s subatomic puffs of quark-gluon plasma, constituting an unprecedented probe of the quantum vacuum.

RHIC’s last run generated hundreds of petabytes of data, the article points out, meaning its final smash “isn’t really the end; even when its collisions stop, its science will live on.”

But Science News notes RHIC’s closure “marks the end for the only particle collider operating in the United States, and the only collider of its kind in the world. Most particle accelerators are unable to steer two particle beams to crash head-on into one another.”

Even though we’re months away from its anticipated launch, a new leak about Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro Max raises serious concerns about Samsung’s purported Galaxy S26 Ultra.

According to renowned tipster Digital Chat Station, the iPhone 18 Pro Max will feature a larger battery compared to the iPhone 17 Pro Max. While the Chinese version of the handset could feature a 5,000 mAh battery, international variants could offer an even bigger upgrade.

Early iPhone 18 Pro Max put battery life back in the spotlight

The iPhone 18 Pro Max version sold outside China could have a battery capacity between 5,100 and 5,200 mAh. The exact battery size could depend on whether the version has a physical SIM or supports eSIM only. Why do I say that?

The iPhone 17 Pro Max features a 4,823 mAh battery on variants with a physical SIM slot, and a slightly larger 5,088 mAh battery on units without one. So, there’s a chance that the iPhone 18 Pro Max with and without a SIM slot could come with different batteries in the range.

These numbers might not impress you on paper, especially when compared to the 6,000 or 7,000 mAh battery cells on modern Android flagships (like the OnePlus 15), but when it comes to real-world use, the iPhone 17 Pro Max is among the longest-lasting phones on a single charge.

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra suddenly looks vulnerable

Given that Samsung’s purported Galaxy S26 Ultra is rumored to ship with a 5,000 mAh battery (the same as the Galaxy S20 Ultra, which debuted six years ago) and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset based on 3nm fabrication technology, the iPhone 18 Pro Max should easily outlast it.

With a battery that can hold more charge, a chipset that consumes less power (likely the 2nm A20 Pro chip), and the highly-optimized iOS operating system, the iPhone 18 Pro Max might offer more screen-on time between charges than the Galaxy S26 Ultra.

If the leak holds true, the iPhone 18 Pro Max could hold well not just against the Galaxy S26 Ultra, but the Android flagships of 2026 that feature gargantuan batteries, proving that efficiency, not just raw capacity, is what truly matters.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a new binding operational directive requiring federal agencies to identify and remove network edge devices that no longer receive security updates from manufacturers.

It also warned that end-of-life edge devices (including routers, firewalls, and network switches) leave federal systems vulnerable to newly discovered exploits and expose them to “disproportionate and unacceptable risks.”

“The imminent threat of exploitation to agency information systems running EOS edge devices is substantial and constant, resulting in a significant threat to federal property. CISA is aware of widespread exploitation campaigns by advanced threat actors targeting EOS edge devices,” the cybersecurity agency said on Thursday.

“These devices are especially vulnerable to cyber exploits targeting newly discovered, unpatched vulnerabilities. Additionally, they no longer receive supported updates from the original equipment manufacturer, exposing federal systems to disproportionate and unacceptable risks.”

Binding Operational Directive 26-02 (BOD 26-02) mandates U.S. government agencies to decommission end-of-support (EOS) hardware and software on federal networks to prevent exploitation by advanced threat actors.

The directive requires immediate action on vendor-supported devices running end-of-support software for which updates are available, and an inventory of all devices on CISA’s end-of-support list within three months.

Federal agencies also have 12 months to decommission devices that reached end-of-support before the directive’s issuance date. Within 18 months, all identified end-of-support edge devices must be replaced with vendor-supported equipment receiving current security updates.

BOD 26-02 also requires them to establish continuous discovery processes within 24 months to identify edge devices and maintain inventories of equipment and software approaching end-of-support status.

While these requirements apply only to U.S. Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies, CISA encourages all network defenders to follow the guidance in this fact sheet to secure systems, data, and operations against threat groups targeting network edge devices in ongoing attacks.

Three years ago, in June 2023, CISA also issued Binding Operational Directive 23-02, which requires federal civilian agencies to secure misconfigured or Internet-exposed management interfaces (e.g., routers, firewalls, proxies, and load balancers).

Months earlier, it announced that it would warn critical infrastructure organizations if they have network devices vulnerable to ransomware attacks as part of a new Ransomware Vulnerability Warning Pilot (RVWP) program.

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Krystalyn Musselman holds a worn cardboard box up to the screen on our Zoom call. It’s the anonymous question box she relies on to field queries from high schoolers at Tecumseh Public Schools in southeast Michigan, where she teaches sex ed. The box, covered in pink and black patterned craft tape, is topped with a pink handlebar mustache, serving as a key visual set up for the “I mustache you a question” pun, which was popular about 15 years ago. Musselman acknowledges that this particular question box has been around for a while, and laughs. Clearly, the pun is still having its intended effect, as she’s fielding as many serious questions about sexual health as ever.

The question box remains a necessary tool for sex education instruction. It assures students’ anonymity while giving teachers like Musselman a direct line to the topics students are most curious about. She credits her students with asking great questions, but knows she must be careful in how she words her responses. This has always been the case; a 20-year veteran of sexual health in public schools, Musselman is well aware of her duty to adhere to state law and local district policies. She recently underwent the multistep process Michigan requires of the district to make lessons more current. The initial proposal included lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity, but she didn’t get approval for both.

“We do not actually teach or address gender identity or gender expression — that was something the curriculum review committee didn’t want,” Musselman said. “That was the give-and-take. We got a sexual-orientation lesson, but we didn’t get a gender one.”

While always used to some controversy, sexual health educators are in an especially tough spot right now. Amid a push to update comprehensive curriculums to include lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity, state legislators are also considering laws targeting the people these changes help the most. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has threatened to pull funding from districts that don’t remove lessons on gender from their sex education curriculums. District responses have been mixed, with some states quick to issue statements indicating compliance, while some districts have resisted anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, at the risk of losing federal funding. Meanwhile some states have sued the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The pressure to comply — and the resulting resistance — are illustrated by a recent fight in Michigan, which can be seen as a microcosm for what’s happening elsewhere. In November, Michigan’s Department of Education approved revisions to its health education standards. The revised standards covered a broad range of health education topics, from nutrition to mental health. And it included a recommendation that Michigan students be taught about sexual orientation and gender identity.

Taryn Gal, executive director of Michigan Organization on Adolescent Sexual Health, said the decision ultimately gives topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity more credibility.

“There’s now an opportunity for teachers to go to their school board or advisory board and be like, ‘This is the state guidance’,” Gal said. “It provides legitimacy that this is evidence-based, age-appropriate content that’s recommended by the state.”

How educators like Musselman will proceed remains to be seen. Though it ultimately passed, the new framework in Michigan was met with challenges from an opposition grassroots campaign similar to those that have been mounted against school boards in other states. The central, misleading claim of the campaign was that the proposed curriculum updates would strip parents of their right to opt their children out of sex education based on religious or moral objections. Gal found herself caught off-guard by the group’s unwavering commitment to the disinformation, lamenting that it hindered opportunities to have real conversations about the group’s primary concerns.

The purpose of teaching gender identity and gender expression, says Musselman, is purely informational — to provide context and clarity, and promote understanding.

“I think people are very scared and misinformed,” Musselman said.

More Opt-Outs

As philosophical and political arguments continue over the proper way to articulate concepts like gender identity and biological sex within the transgender rights discussion, sexual health educators are focused on the practical aim to educate students on basic human attributes.

The federal government has taken an aggressive stance against comprehensive sex education in schools. Trump officials threatened to revoke the Sexual Risk Avoidance Education (SRAE) program and Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) funding from states that mention gender identity in their curricula. This move politicized and created a false sense of urgency about what’s being taught by sex educators nationwide, and has had direct consequences, even in blue states like Maryland.

Laura is a sexual health educator in Maryland. EdSurge agreed to publish only her first name, because she feared retaliation from her school district for speaking with the media. She says she’s experienced an increase in discriminatory rhetoric reflecting homophobic and transphobic views from parents and students. Laura describes a significant increase in the number of parents requesting exemptions, which she began noticing in 2023. Before that, she estimates about 1 percent of parents opted their children out of her classes; now the rate is about 2 percent.

“So it’s not a huge percentage, but it’s definitely a 100 percent increase,” Laura said.

While Laura’s observation of a doubled opt-out rate may not be a “huge percentage,” some experts worry that challenges like those Laura has seen mean parents are really questioning the value of any sex education in schools. This is a problem, considering one in five adolescents say they received no sexual education from their parents, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Rachel Lotus is founder and director of The Talk NYC, an organization that partners with public schools in New York City to provide customized comprehensive sex education workshops and classes for youth, parents and schools. She says she’s noticed more emboldened rhetoric from the parents pursuing opt-out options for sex education.

“I had a parent in a high school who reached out — not to me, but to the school — to protest against broadening this framework of what sex is,” Lotus said. “The idea that I was talking about queer sex specifically was the objection.”

Lotus hasn’t received any gag orders from districts she works with; if she did, she said those districts wouldn’t be worth partnering with to begin with. She notes that in a city like New York, it’s hard to conceive of a world in which students can unlearn inclusion.

“I have fourth graders who absolutely understand the difference between biological sex and gender identity,” she said. “I am not introducing those ideas [to them] for the first time.”

Historical Precedent

Major public health organizations, such as the World Health Organization, follow peer-reviewed research suggesting that sexual health education curricula is most effective when it covers a range of topics, and remains adaptive and sequential. Sex educators agree.

Despite these findings, incorporating comprehensive sexual health education in public schools has remained inconsistent because there is no federal mandate for sex education in schools. Instead, curriculum is determined at the state level. And districts within a state can differ widely in what they do and don’t teach. The closest the U.S. ever came to endorsing sex education in public schools was through the Personal Responsibility Education Program. Established in 2010 as part of the Affordable Care Act, PREP mandated the abstinence-plus approach, which meant including information on both abstinence and contraception in curriculum. PREP ended the abstinence-only-until-marriage model that preceded it.

Historically, teaching sex ed in public schools has been fraught from the beginning. Margaret Grace Myers, author of “The Fight For Sex Ed: The Century-Long Battle Between Truth and Doctrine,” published in August, said the framework for sex education in public schools was limited to discussion of gender identified at birth and sex between men and women only.

“When we first had ideas about sex ed — variously called social hygiene or personal purity or sex hygiene — of course historians know that LGBTQIA+ people have always existed and will always exist, but it was not even a thought that crossed the minds of anybody who was thinking about instructing young people in sex,” Myers told EdSurge. “The lesson was basically stay abstinent, do not have sex, get married, and the person you would marry would be of the opposite gender, and then only have sex with that person. That was the framework that worked as a disease-prevention angle, which is why doctors were able to get behind it.”

The 2015 documentary “Sex(ed): The Movie” uses archival film clips to show how sex education films shown in schools and in public tended to model relationship dynamics that may have been aspirational at best. The footage presents an image of the world that’s missing a lot of context and is unreflective of reality. This is because the old films weren’t designed to teach but to uphold societal norms, Myers says.

In areas of the U.S. where comprehensive sex education is taught, conversations about gender identity and sexual orientation didn’t become part of the curriculum until the mid- to late 2010s.

“Even for people who are getting the best curriculum available, it might not be relevant to them almost at all, which is wild,” Myers added.

Only nine states require gender identity and sexual orientation be covered in comprehensive sex-education classes, according to the Sexuality Information and Education Council, known as SIECUS, a 60-year advocacy group for sex ed in schools. Its series of heat maps show how nearly half of states received a “D” or “F” in how LGBTQ+ sex ed topics are handled. Similarly, a 2025 Guttmacher policy report highlights that only 26 states require sex and HIV education be medically accurate, while 10 states have broad laws prohibiting classroom instructions on these topics and seven still have laws explicitly requiring same-sex discussions be depicted negatively, if at all.

Sex education in Mississippi, a state that is legally bound to a strict abstinence-only or abstinence-plus requirement, does not cover sexual orientation or gender identity. Yet, according to Josh McCawley, deputy director of Teen Health Mississippi, those topics are what students have the most questions about. The organization is responsible for providing professional development to sex-education teachers in the state.

“In all of the curricula, there’s no actual written information on LGBTQ-related issues,” McCawley said. “However, in our training that we do with teachers, we have learned that this is pretty much the most popular topic for student questions.”

Miranda Estes, state policy action manager for SIECUS, says when it comes to the state of sex ed in American public schools, regional considerations matter.

“I think about Mississippi and it breaks my heart,” Estes said. “But [Mississippi] is 50 years behind in policy from places like Massachusetts, and so trying to jump the gun and say these organizations need to be providing comprehensive sex education in public schools when they’re not even legally allowed to, could it go wrong?”

It is well-documented that LGBTQ+ youth, particularly trans students, are more likely to experience bullying and to attempt suicide. Zach Eisenstein, director of communications with the Trevor Project, said the majority of LGBTQ+ youth report the political environment taking a measurable toll on their health and well-being.

“At The Trevor Project, our crisis counselors regularly hear from young people, especially transgender and nonbinary youth, who share how the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ policies and rhetoric are negatively impacting them,” Eisenstein told EdSurge in a statement, noting that welcoming school environments can serve as a lifeline for at-risk youth. “LGBTQ+ students who said they learned about LGBTQ+ people or issues in the classroom reported 23 percent lower odds of attempting suicide in the past year, compared to those who did not.”

Addressing Discrimination

It’s standard practice for a sex-ed teacher to screen questions submitted anonymously by students in the question box. Musselman in Michigan’s Tecumseh Schools finds that students generally ask insightful questions. But Laura in Maryland has been fielding more discriminatory questions and comments within her classes.

“They’re questions that kind of mirror what we’re hearing from adults, honestly,” she said.

She tries to transform these queries into teachable moments. Her approach involves two key strategies: Using first-person language that students can then mirror, and advising students not to submit the first question that comes to mind, but the second. Her theory is that the second question is the one her students are actually curious about; that it’s far more interesting and less likely to be informed by prejudices picked up from outside sources.

These strategies are crucial for Laura, seeing as the ultimate goal is to prevent students from being pulled out of the entire sex-education curriculum. In Maryland, where Laura teaches, opting a student out means they miss instruction on not only gender identity and expression, but also on vital topics such as consent, contraception, disease prevention, health relationships, and sexual decision-making. Basically everything else that sexual health encompasses.

“Sometimes we’ll have parents who say, ‘I just don’t want them to learn about gender’ or ‘I just don’t want them to be exposed to the transgender ideology’,” Laura said. “But when I talk to them about why they want their child excluded, it’s because they want them to sit out that one lesson and not from the broader unit.”

Maryland doesn’t mandate one uniform opt-out policy for Family Life and Human Sexuality units. Those details are left up to local decision-makers, although most of the districts in Maryland have adopted an all-or-nothing approach toward sex ed. Because Laura works for one of those districts, she finds herself on the phone with parents who have knee-jerk reactions to certain topics based on preconceived notions that may or may not be accurate. In these cases, it’s her job to explain what the lesson entails, what resources she’s using to teach it, and the education their children will lose if they’re opted out of sex ed entirely.

“I have about a 50-percent success rate of parents being like, ‘You know what? Actually, that’s fine. Go ahead and include them. I think it’ll be OK’,” Laura said.

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