Domestic
On Wednesday, April 1, the Artemis II space mission launched, with astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen on board the Orion spacecraft. It was the first mission to launch humans around the moon since 1972. The astronauts plan to spend 24 hours orbiting the Earth, where they will be able to test Orion’s communication, navigation, propulsion and life support equipment. Then, the crew will spend four days traveling towards the moon, looping around it and four days traveling back.
Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers have started to receive paychecks. In February, the Department of Homeland Security’s funding lapsed, causing the department to shut down. Sunday marked 44 days since the start of the shut down, surpassing the longest shut down in government history (43 days, in the fall of 2025). Last Friday, President Trump signed an order redirecting funds already earmarked for the Department of Homeland Security to go to the TSA.
International
For the first time, antimatter has been successfully transported on the road. Antimatter is the opposite of matter, with an opposite electric charge. This means that if it comes into contact with matter, it is destroyed, releasing energy. While just one gram of antimatter is enough to unleash enough energy to be comparable to a nuclear bomb, such a quantity would cost well over $1 trillion to make. In this test, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland (known as CERN) were able to make a portable container that confined 92 antiprotons in a vacuum, suspended using a combination of electric and magnetic fields. The transportation of these particles will allow scientists at other research laboratories to study them away from the magnetic fields that are produced by the machines that create antimatter.
Recently, a shipment of KitKat bars was stolen en-route to a distribution facility in Poland. The 800 mile route started in central Italy and would have ended in Poland, with the chocolate being distributed in countries along the way. 413,793 Formula 1 shaped KitKat bars weighing approximately 12 tons are missing. KitKat’s global distributor, Nestlé, said in a statement that the company has “always encouraged people to have a break with KitKat”, but that thieves “have taken the message too literally and made a break with more than 12 tons of our chocolate.” The company said that if the stolen products make their way into the market through unofficial means, the chocolate can be traced through batch codes.
