What happened
President Donald Trump late Friday said his administration had reached the “BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY” with Venezuela. The agreement, later confirmed by acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez, gives the U.S. rights to 65 billion barrels of the country’s oil reserves. Trump yesterday described the oil as a “Gift from Venezuela,” and said it would start refilling the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve “very shortly.” But “no text of any agreement has been released,” The Associated Press said, and “many questions” remain unanswered. 

Who said what
Trump has been withdrawing oil “for months to keep prices from rising even higher” during the Iran war, and the strategic reserve “now sits at its lowest level since 1982,” The New York Times said. But refilling it with this Venezuelan oil is “something of a pipe dream.” Experts have “repeatedly warned that Venezuela’s dilapidated oil infrastructure will take years and billions of dollars to repair,” the AP said, and it’s unclear “who would pay for infrastructure investments.” 

The details we know “aren’t cause for enthusiasm,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. The Trump administration, through the Pentagon, is “essentially getting in bed with a foreign dictator and her favored capitalist,” Alejandro Betancourt.

What next?
Oil companies “will remain cautious even if the terms of the deal, once released, pass legal muster,” Bob McNally, a former energy adviser to President George W. Bush, told the AP. “A future president could withdraw, and Caracas has twice thrown foreign investors out.” 

What happened
NASA yesterday launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a $4.3 billion repurposed spy satellite designed to capture panoramic views of the cosmos, cataloguing Earth-like exoplanets and helping solve some of the biggest mysteries of astrophysics: dark matter and dark energy. The bus-sized telescope, named after NASA’s first chief astronomer, blasted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral aboard a Space X Falcon Heavy rocket en route to an observation point a million miles away.

Who said what
Roman is “NASA’s latest and greatest cosmic cartographer,” The New York Times said. Set to send back a “whopping one terabyte of data each day,” the telescope “promises a panorama so wide and so crisp that it would take more than half a million high-definition TVs to display in full.” The Webb Space Telescope, like a zoom lens, is designed to “probe very deeply and with exquisite sensitivity ​into the universe,” senior project scientist Julie McEnery said Saturday. “Roman’s vast reach will allow us to find the weird, the rare and the unusual.” 

The new telescope’s real “superpower is speed,” The Associated Press said. The Hubble Space Telescope, “still churning out celestial glamour shots after 36 years,” could scan the entire Milky Way in a century; Roman can do it in a month.

What next?
Roman is scheduled to arrive at its L2 orbit point in about 100 days. “Its mission is planned for five years,” Reuters said, “though NASA said the telescope may have enough fuel for five additional years.”

Old radioactive waste from discarded barrels may be slowly seeping into the Atlantic Ocean and affecting the marine ecosystem. Between 1950 and 1990, “more than 200,000 barrels filled with radioactive waste were dumped in the depths of the North-East Atlantic,” said France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in a news release. Scientists first mapped the area on a mission in summer 2025, and they recently completed a second observation mission where they carried out dives using a manned submersible.

The barrels, which sit “between 10,000 and 16,000 feet down,” contain “low- and intermediate-level radioactive material” including “process sludge, contaminated metal and laboratory equipment,” said Futura. Researchers were able to “document the advanced state of deterioration of several barrels” and “observe that some of them had leaked their contents,” CNRS said.

Images “alone cannot determine if radionuclides have entered the marine food web,” said Futura. So the researchers collected “precise water, fauna and sediment samples,” allowing them to “measure exactly how far any escaping radioactive materials have migrated into the deep sea ecosystem.”

There were “significant signals of radionuclides specifically linked to this waste,” said researchers Javier Escartin and Patrick Chardon at The Conversation. The difficulty now is in “separating any potential leakage from historical background radiation,” said Futura. 

It also remains unclear “whether deep-sea life is absorbing” the radioactive material and “whether it’s moving through sediment and water in meaningful amounts,” said The Cool Down. Studying the collected samples will provide more information on the effect underwater communities have on the transfer of radionuclides.