What happened
Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday told Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian at a summit in Kyrgyzstan that Moscow will continue supplying “the assistance you need” and “the necessary goods” during “this difficult period.” Since President Donald Trump “launched his war against Iran” in February, The New York Times said, “Russia has backed the Iranians with intelligence, including on U.S. assets in the Persian Gulf,” and “drone components.” Moscow has also been secretly helping Iran develop advanced supersonic cruise missiles, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The U.S. and Iran traded airstrikes last night, in their “first serious combat since July,” Reuters said. 

Who said what
Russia’s transfer of the “strategically important military technology” to build supersonic missiles “would require political approval from Russia’s top leadership,” Conflict Armament Research analyst Fabian Hinz, told the Financial Times. Such missiles would be a “qualitatively new strategic weapons system capable of threatening U.S. Navy ships,” said former CIA military analyst Jim Lamson.

Iran has already done considerable damage to U.S. military bases in the Middle East with a new ballistic missile it calls “the Kheibar Shekan, or ’Castle Breaker,’” USA Today said. The missile, “likely” developed “with the help of Chinese and Russian technology,” can “evade American air defenses and strike with far greater precision.”

What next?
Tehran vowed to respond to last night’s airstrikes with more “crushing and devastating blows” and claimed its own counterstrikes killed several U.S. personnel in Jordan and Kurdish Iraq.

What happened
The House yesterday passed a Senate-approved stopgap funding bill that will avert a government shutdown at the end of the month. The “lopsided” 370-48 vote punts the expected fiscal 2027 “spending fight until after the midterm elections,” The New York Times said, and allows lawmakers to “quickly return to the campaign trail for the critical final weeks before the elections.”

Who said what
The stopgap measure is “simple by design,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), chair of the House Appropriations Committee, in a statement. “No poison pills, no divisive wish lists and no political gimmicks.” At a closed-door meeting yesterday, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.) (pictured above), the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, “said the bill was much improved from the product that passed the House earlier this summer on a mostly party-line basis,” according to The Associated Press. In its bipartisan rewrite, the Senate “made some changes, some that we don’t support,” GOP Whip Steve Scalise (La.) told The Washington Post. But “it’s much more important for the country to avoid a government shutdown.”

What next?
Once President Donald Trump signs the bill, the government will be funded at current levels through Dec. 11. That gives lawmakers time to “find compromise on a full-year measure,” said the AP, which will “likely be quite difficult.”

The sweet treat of the future could be plastic. Scientists have found a way to transform plastic waste, along with food additives and other ingredients, into edible cookies called µBites. The method could be used to manage refuse and provide sustenance in remote or disaster locations, or even in space someday. However, many people are understandably wary about eating plastic. 

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) from plastic bottles and “discarded sweet corn plant stalks and leaves” were put through a process called “oxidative hydrothermal dissolution,” which “uses heat to break down the materials into components that microbes can digest,” said New Scientist. The components are “fed to yeast that has been genetically altered,” allowing it to “convert the components into a variety of useful ingredients.” Then “fiber, starch and sweetener are added, and the paste is extruded through a 3D printer into any desired shape.”

This may nibble around the edges of the problem, but “we produce 400 million tons a year of plastic waste,” Jason Hallett, a professor and researcher at Imperial College London, told New Scientist. It’s “not a solution to the plastic-waste crisis.”

But becoming a mainstream treat isn’t the primary goal. The “µBites system is a tunable and portable device that integrates all necessary components” to be “deployed in submarines or disaster relief vehicles to produce on-demand, on-site food,” said Lahiru Jayakody, a Southern Illinois University Carbondale microbiologist who worked on the product, to ScienceAlert. The process is “particularly suited for using carbon waste in extreme environments such as deserts, the Arctic or the Antarctic,” and potentially even “Mars or the lunar surface.”