NBC News: Trump might be remaking both parties' memberships

Republicans have long been the male party, and their identification advantage among men is unchanged, at 8 percentage points. But the numbers among women have moved sharply in the Democrats' favor. In Pew's latest data, a merge from 2018 and 2019, Democrats held an 18-point ID edge among women, up from a 12-point advantage in 2015. [...]

The partisan divide over race, meanwhile, seems to be changing in some groups. For years, non-Hispanic whites have leaned Republican, while other racial and ethnic groups have leaned Democratic. Since 2015, Republicans have seen their edge among white, non-Hispanic people slip, while, at the same time, the Democrats have grown their advantage among other groups.

The GOP lead in party ID among whites has fallen to about 11 points in Pew's 2018-19 data. It was 14 points in 2015. Among African Americans, Democrats have maintained their advantage in the new data, up very slightly to 73 points from a 71-point edge in 2015. The Democratic ID edge among Hispanics has climbed a bit, about 5 points, to 34 points from 29 points in 2015. And the Democratic advantage among Asian Americans has skyrocketed in the last few years to a 55-point edge, up from a 26-point lead in party ID in 2015.

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NBC News: Scientists are searching for a mirror universe. It could be sitting right in front of you

She calls it an “oscillation” that would lead her to “mirror matter,” but the idea is fundamentally the same. In a series of experiments she plans to run at Oak Ridge this summer, Broussard will send a beam of subatomic particles down a 50-foot tunnel, past a ring of powerful magnets and into an impenetrable wall. If the setup is just right — and if the universe cooperates — some of those particles will transform into mirror-image versions of themselves, allowing them to tunnel right through the wall. And if that happens, Broussard will have uncovered the first evidence of a mirror world right alongside our own. [...]

The mirror world, assuming it exists, would have its own laws of mirror-physics and its own mirror-history. You wouldn’t find a mirror version of yourself there (and no evil Mister Spock with a goatee — sorry "Star Trek" fans). But current theory allows that you might find mirror atoms and mirror rocks, maybe even mirror planets and stars. Collectively, they could form an entire shadow world, just as real as our own but almost completely cut off from us. [...]

A decade ago, Anatoli Serebrov of Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in Russia introduced the idea that ordinary neutrons sometimes cross over into the mirror world and transform into mirror neutrons. At that point, we could no longer detect them — it would be as if some of the neutrons simply vanished. “That would make the neutron lifetime look wrong,” Broussard explains, because some of the neutrons would have been disappearing from the test equipment while the researchers were studying them. [...]

Zurab Berezhiani, a physicist at the University of L’Aquila in Italy who has conducted his own mirror neutron searches, offers an intriguing explanation: Dark matter has been hard to find because it is hidden away in the mirror world. In this view, dark matter and mirror matter are one and the same. If so, the mirror world is not just ubiquitous, it is far more massive than our own. At a recent physics conference, Berezhiani expanded on the idea, outlining a possible parallel reality full of mirror stars, mirror galaxies and mirror black holes. Maybe even dark life?

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NBC News: Saudi Arabia's explosion at a Canadian tweet shows how rules have changed

“The difference with him is that he is presenting absolute power as the eternal end of everything," said Abdullah Alaoudh, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. "This clashes with liberal democracy, with the idea of sharing power at all, even if it is half-democracy or quarter-democracy.” [...]

He added: “The message the crown prince is sending is, ‘We don't have to be a liberal democracy to be allies. And at the same time we are not going to be a liberal democracy at any point in the future so forget it. So let's talk about strategic interests and oil and things like that.’” [...]

The question now is whether Europe and the U.S. will support Canada's call for improvement in the kingdom's human rights record, or will remain silent in the face of the country's economic muscle. So far, the official response from the European Union and the U.S. has been muted. [...]

There are signals, however, of the Trump administration's preferences. President Donald Trump has publicly bashed Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, while Saudi Arabia was the site of the president’s first overseas trip. [...]

“To borrow the Chinese phrase, this is killing a chicken to scare the monkeys,” Freeman said. “The idea is that nobody else is going to mess with Saudi Arabia.”

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NBC News: Did another advanced species exist on Earth before humans?

Finding fossilized bones is a slightly better bet, but if another advanced species walked the Earth millions of years ago — if they walked — it would be easy to overlook their fossilized skeletons — if they had skeletons. Modern humans have been around for just 100,000 years, a thin sliver of time within the vast and spotty fossil record. [...]

Using human technology as their guide, Schmidt and Frank suggest zeroing in on plastics and other long-lived synthetic molecules as well as radioactive fallout (in case factions of ancient lizard people waged atomic warfare). In our case, technological development has been accompanied by widespread extinctions and rapid environmental changes, so those are red flags as well.

After reviewing several suspiciously abrupt geologic events of the past 380 million years, the researchers conclude that none of them clearly fit a technological profile. Frank calls for more research, such as studying how modern industrial chemicals persist in ocean sediments and then seeing if we can find traces of similar chemicals in the geologic record.

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NBC News: Germany's Populist Right-Wing AfD Party Draws Comparison to Nazis

While the AfD has been celebrating election gains — it is on the verge of becoming Germany's third-strongest political force, according to recent polls — it has been battling the label of an extremist party over its anti-Islam stance and a number of controversies surrounding some of its members.

Last week, it came under renewed criticism for providing a home to politicians who support far-right ideologies.

Kay Nerstheimer, an AfD candidate for Berlin's state parliament, reportedly called Syrian refugees "disgusting worms" on his Facebook page and was once a member of the far-right German Defense League. Meanwhile, magazine Stern reported that local AfD politician Rudolf Mueller had been selling banned Nazi paraphernalia at his antique shop in the state of Saarland. [...]

Under its slogan "courage for the truth," the AfD has been able to mobilize disaffected non-voters, swing voters and people who "no longer feel represented by the long-established parties in Germany," Patzelt explained.

Merkel's Christian Democrats have neglected to integrate right-wing conservatives into their party, leaving many voters "politically homeless," Patzelt said. [...]

The historic city of Dresden has already experienced an economic set-back, blamed partly on massive anti-Islam and anti-foreigner PEGIDA demonstrations that have shaken the baroque tourist destination. According to CNBC, domestic visitor numbers were down 3.7 percent year on year in the period of January to July 2016, based on overnight stays in the city.

"The xenophobic remarks and incidents damaged the good reputation of the city and especially impacted domestic travel behavior," Bettina Bunge, head of Dresden Marketing, DMG, said in a statement.

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NBC News: What will happen to the GOP after Trump: Beyond Trump

The GOP for years was a diverse but sturdy three-legged stool of security hawks, tax cutters and religious conservatives. Within that coalition, stakeholders might jostle for prominence but generally got along, united by the common goal of winning elections.

Divisions within the party existed before Trump won the 2016 nomination, but were exacerbated in recent years as establishment Republicans battled with conservative populists over a variety of hot-button issues, including immigration. Tactical fights erupted over whether to threaten government shutdowns and how much to compromise with Democrats. Smaller factions within the party, like libertarians, battled to push their policies to the top of the agenda. [...]

Trump violated party orthodoxy on trade, entitlement reform, money in politics and national security. He exposed a huge portion of the Republican base that either disagreed with party leaders on key issues or didn’t care what they had to say. To some degree, the celebrity candidate challenged the idea that policy proposals even mattered: His own positions were far from consistent; he shifted regularly, even on signature issues; and he scoffed at the need for depth or nuance. The thrice-married candidate’s checkered personal history and crude rhetoric flew in the face of the party’s religious, conservative image. And his appeals to bigotry forced some Republicans to consider whether the left’s portrayal of the GOP as the party of white resentment was more accurate than they had once thought. [...]

Trump has said his vision for the GOP is a “worker’s party.” In a break from the party’s smaller-government past, he has suggested a massive federal investment in infrastructure to provide jobs directly to struggling areas, not unlike the federal stimulus package President Obama pushed through early in his first term over nearly unanimous GOP opposition. [...]

Proponents of this theory, who include prominent “reform conservative” writers like New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and National Review editor Reihan Salam, mostly loathe Trump, especially his appeals to racial prejudice. But they’ve also spent years warning Republicans of a rude awakening if they don’t find ways to address his voters’ concerns about stagnant wages and competition from immigrants and foreign rivals. Douthat has described Trumpism as “reform conservatism’s evil twin” — an unworkable agenda GOP leaders brought upon themselves by ignoring the conservative intellectuals’ think tank-friendly alternative.

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NBC News: Dream Team of Historians Proposed to Advise U.S. President

Professors Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson are calling on the next U.S. president to create a Council of Historical Advisers that would tackle present problems by looking to the past.

Trying to take down a terrorist group? The council would scour historical records to find similar groups, and then analyze which strategies worked against them.

Facing a financial crisis? The council would glean lessons from past meltdowns and report their findings to the president.

"I think there would be more than enough work for a council of applied historians," said Allison, a professor of government and director of Harvard's Belfer Center, a university think tank.

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NBC News: Democrats Advance Most Progressive Platform in Party History

The draft platform, which still needs to be ratified at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia later this month, showed Sanders' clear influence, even though he lost a battle on his top priority, opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. [...]

The document goes further left than Clinton's position on a number of issues, with Sanders policy director Warren Gunnells saying his campaign achieved "at least 80 percent" of what they came for. "I think if you read the platform right now, you will understand that the political revolution is alive and kicking," he said. [...]

Clinton won the nomination and now effectively controls the party, but it was Sanders who drove the process in Orlando. While many questioned his decision to stay in the primary race long after losing the nomination, none of the progress of his ideas on the platform would have happened if he had dropped out.

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