Neural Newscast

From Neural Newscast, I'm Daniel Brooks. And I'm Elise Morrow. President less than Trump threatened a 100% tariff on all Canadian imports if the nation moves forward with a new trade agreement with China. This social media ultimatum follows a week of rising tensions between the White House and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. Trump claims that Canada is attempting to become a drop-off port for Chinese products entering the American market. The president specifically criticized a strategic partnership Carney recently signed in Beijing to lower levies on Chinese electric vehicles. This development marks a sharp reversal from last week when Trump initially called the Canadian deal a good thing. The relationship between these two leaders appears to have fractured during the World Economic Forum in Davos. Carney used his time on the international stage to warn against the coercion of middle powers by global giants. He argued that Canada thrives because of its own character and not simply because of its proximity to the United States. In response, Mr. Trump revoked an invitation for Carney to join his proposed board of peace. The aesthetic of this conflict is becoming increasingly personal. Mr. Trump has taken to calling the Prime Minister Governor Carney on social media. This language suggests a challenge to Canadian sovereignty that matches recent rhetoric about absorbing the nation as a 51st state. Policy analysts are watching the numbers closely because Canada is the top export destination for 36 U.S. states. Nearly $2.7 billion worth of goods and services cross the border daily. American infrastructure relies heavily on these northern connections. About 60% of U.S. crude oil imports come from Canada, along with 85% of electricity imports. The Pentagon also identifies Canada as a critical supplier of uranium and 34 other essential minerals. A total tariff would disrupt the entire North American supply chain, just as the Canada-US Mexico Agreement faces its scheduled review this year. Carney seems prepared for this friction by diversifying his trade partners. Under the new agreement with President less than phoneme Xi Jinping, Xi Jinping, China will lower taxes on Canadian canola oil while Canada reduces duties on Chinese electric vehicles. This shift signals a departure from the aligned foreign policy of previous decades. Carney described the change as a response to a world order that has been fundamentally ruptured. He told the audience in Davos that middle powers must act together to avoid being pushed off the global menu. The design of Canadian trade policy is now clearly focused on resilience through independence. In other news, American officials are monitoring a new provincial advertising campaign from Ontario that uses the words of Ronald Reagan to criticize U.S. protectionism. Still, the White House has not yet provided a specific timeline for when these new 100% tariffs might take effect. We We will continue to follow the developments at the border. Turning now to a new study suggesting that Thomas Edison accidentally created graphene while developing his first incandescent light bulbs in 1879. Researchers at Rice University published a paper in the journal ACS Nano revealing that Edison's early filaments likely contained layers of this thin carbon material. Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice and is prized today for its incredible strength and conductivity. Edison was searching for a material that could withstand high heat without burning out quickly. He experimented with everything from carbonized cardboard to grasses and bamboo to find the form. This discovery highlights how early industrial infrastructure was often ahead of the scientific tools needed to measure it. The physicists less than Fezabuo, who officially synthesized graphene, did not win the Nobel Prize until 2010. If Edison was indeed producing it in his New Jersey laboratory, he was using nanotechnology a century before the term existed. Chemists at Rice University are now reproducing Edison's methods with modern equipment to see how much graphene these historical processes actually generated. They found that carbonizing natural fibers creates the kind of structures required for high-performance batteries and filters today. The beauty of this research lies in revisiting the Gilded Age through a modern lens. Edison was an observer of form and function less than WHO, less than prioritized commercial viability over atomic theory. His choice of bamboo as a filament was an elegant solution to the problem of durability. Now we see that his practical experiments resulted in a material that holds the key to future solar cells and touchscreens. It changes the way we look at the history of design when we realize that a miracle material was glowing in living rooms over a hundred years ago. I'm Daniel Brooks. And I'm Elise Moell. Thank you for listening. Neural Newscast is AI-assisted, human-reviewed. View our AI transparency policy at neuralnewscast.com.