A shut strait, a wary Fed, and quantum weirdness you can hold
Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz after a third round of US strikes, the Fed's first report under Warsh calls inflation “stepped up,” and labs deliver a crack-proof battery clue, tabletop entanglement, and DNA written on a chip.
America strikes Iran a third time; Tehran shuts the Strait of Hormuz1
Early on Sunday, July 12, US aircraft, drones and warships hit roughly 140 targets across southern Iran — missile and drone sites, ammunition dumps, coastal surveillance — after an Iranian strike set a Cyprus-flagged container ship ablaze in the Strait of Hormuz and left one crew member missing. Iran declared the strait closed “until further notice” and fired on Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, where Qatar reported intercepting incoming rounds; two earlier rounds of strikes killed at least 17 people, per Iran's health ministry.
Why it matters: about a fifth of the world's seaborne oil and gas passes through Hormuz, so a closure Tehran can enforce even briefly is a lever on every economy that imports energy. That the waterway is a target rather than a bystander is what turns a regional war into a global price shock.
The Fed's first report under Warsh calls inflation “stepped up”2
In the semiannual Monetary Policy Report delivered to Congress on July 10, its first under Chair Kevin Warsh, the Fed said inflation “stepped up further this spring,” with the PCE price index running about double its 2% target, and named tariffs, energy costs from the Middle East conflict and demand from the AI infrastructure build-out as the drivers. The central bank has held its target range at 3.50–3.75% since December; the ten-year Treasury yield sat at 4.54% on July 9.3
Why it matters: Warsh had cast AI as disinflationary through productivity, so conceding that its near-term hunger for power and materials is pushing prices up is a real hedge. Investors now anticipate rate rises later this year, not the cuts a slowing economy would usually invite.
States move to block Paramount's takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery4
A coalition of state attorneys general led by California's Rob Bonta and Oregon's Dan Rayfield is finalizing an antitrust suit against Paramount's acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery — the owner of CNN — with a filing expected within days, weeks after the Justice Department cleared the deal in June. Oregon has already won assurances that Paramount will not close the merger before July 22.
Why it matters: with federal antitrust enforcers standing aside, the states are testing whether they can police media consolidation on their own. The venue shift, more than this single merger, is the precedent to watch.
How lithium cracks a solid-state battery, finally shown5
A Max Planck team, imaging cells under vacuum at cryogenic temperatures, reported in Nature on July 10 that soft lithium dendrites split a battery's hard ceramic electrolyte not by leaking electrons ahead of the tip, as long assumed, but by building hydrostatic stress until the ceramic fractures — the authors liken it to a waterjet cutting rock.
Why it matters: the internal short those dendrites cause is the chief obstacle to solid-state batteries, so naming the mechanism points engineers at concrete fixes — tougher electrolytes, stress-relieving voids, protective coatings — for cells that promise multi-day phones and far longer electric-vehicle range.
Quantum entanglement, in a crystal you can hold6
Physicists at TU Wien found that a hand-sized crystal of cerium, palladium and silicon hosts groups of at least nine entangled particles acting collectively, detected with a technique called quantum Fisher information that gauges how sharply a system reacts to a nudge. The work appeared in Nature Physics on July 7.
Why it matters: entanglement was assumed to wash out at everyday scales, so finding it intact in a macroscopic “strange metal” reframes where the line between quantum and classical actually sits — and hands quantum-materials designers a way to measure it.
A silicon chip that writes DNA with electricity and water7
A Harvard team led by Donhee Ham reported in Nature Electronics a semiconductor chip that synthesizes 64 DNA strands at once, each up to 39 bases, using water-based enzymes rather than the solvent-heavy chemistry of today's DNA foundries; concentric electrodes at each site tune the local pH with tiny currents to run each reaction and keep it from bleeding into its neighbors.
Why it matters: writing DNA on a chip points toward portable synthesizers and, further off, DNA as an archival data store. The remaining bottleneck is chemistry, not electronics — a rare case where the silicon is ahead.
TESS finds a planet by the way it bends starlight8
NASA's TESS telescope, built to catch planets as they dim their host stars, instead detected one through gravitational microlensing for the first time: Gaia23bra b, a super-Jupiter about 1.6 times Jupiter's mass and some 40,000 light-years away, far outside the survey's usual 150-light-year reach. Flagged first by Europe's Gaia mission in 2023 and confirmed in TESS's archive, it ran in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 1.
Why it matters: a survey instrument pulling off a detection method it was never designed for extends its useful range a hundredfold and turns years of archived data into fresh discoveries, for free.
Sources
- NPR · US attacks Iran over ship being hit in Strait of Hormuz; Tehran lashes out again at Gulf Arab states
- The Globe and Mail · First US monetary policy report under Fed's Warsh cites “stepped-up” inflation
- Federal Reserve · H.15 Selected Interest Rates (Daily), release of July 10, 2026
- CNN Business (via KESQ) · State AGs finalizing antitrust lawsuit over Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger
- ScienceDaily · The biggest problem with solid-state batteries may finally be solved (Max Planck Institute; Nature)
- ScienceDaily · Quantum entanglement found in a crystal large enough to hold (TU Wien; Nature Physics)
- Harvard SEAS · Making DNA on a semiconductor chip (Nature Electronics)
- NASA Science · NASA's TESS mission finds planetary system in a new way (The Astrophysical Journal Letters)