Today’s Big Story

New Clothes Feel “Cheap”

They really don't make them like they used to

If you’ve been shopping lately, you’ve probably noticed it. Really well-made clothing is harder and harder to come by. Fast fashion has always been something of a trade off—less quality for cheaper prices. But now, even more standard and mainstream brands aren’t offering comfort and durability that we’ve come to expect from investing in clothing. And apparently, the U.S. fashion industry is having a hard time maintaining standards amid stiff competition from overseas rivals and supply-chain shakeups.

Twenty-seven percent of textile and apparel professionals reported that ensuring consistent quality was “difficult” or “very difficult” over the past year, up from 23% in 2024, according to a recent survey by product auditing firm QIMA provided to NBC News. “There has been a significant reduction in the quality of the fabric for a number of the major brands and retailers,” said Margaret Bishop, a textile development and marketing professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. She said the decline intensified during the recovery from the pandemic, when apparel makers scrambled to untangle disrupted supply chains and contended with weak sales during global lockdowns.

The corner-cutting is partly a tradeoff on price—a bet that the fashion industry has placed on inflation-weary shoppers’ willingness to accept lower-quality garments that don’t break the bank. Since 2019, consumer prices overall have risen 26%, food is up 30% and cars are up 25%, but apparel prices have inched just 6% higher.

When it comes to garments and footwear, Americans often find the best prices among sellers overseas, including the China-linked e-commerce giants Shein and Temu. The ultra cheap foreign retailers have given domestic rivals such a run for their money that they drew a crackdown from the Biden administration, and the Trump administration’s new China tariffs could crimp them further.

Experts now say the fashion landscape has spurred “a race to the bottom,” and we’re left with more choices and yet fewer options of really well-made clothing. Case in point: Hellman’s pulled out all the stops for its multi-million dollar Super Bowl ad, recreating the iconic deli scene from When Harry Met Sally. What they couldn’t do was find a modern interpretation of Harry’s legendary sweater. As InsideHook’s Alex Lauer points out, “It just shows how far sweaters have fallen.”

A Constitutional Crisis?

Law professors have long debated what the term means. But now many have concluded that the nation faces a reckoning.

There is no universally accepted definition of a “constitutional crisis”, but legal scholars agree about some of its characteristics. It is generally the product of presidential defiance of laws and judicial rulings. “It’s not binary: It is a slope, not a switch,” writes the New York Times’ Adam Liptak. “It can be cumulative, and once one starts, it can get much worse.”

Now, White House officials are bristling over a string of court orders stymieing President Trump’s agenda, sparking fears that they may ignore judicial decisions. Just yesterday, a federal judge in Rhode Island ruled that the administration failed to comply with his previous directive temporarily halting a sweeping funding freeze, reminding Trump and his top officials in stark terms that “those who make private determinations of the law and refuse to obey an order generally risk criminal contempt.”

Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk and others in the Trump administration are openly challenging the centuries-old power of the nation’s judiciary, foreshadowing a possible constitutional breakdown of American government. In a separate case Monday, in Washington, DC, federal employees told a judge that the administration had failed to reinstate U.S.A.I.D. workers who were put on leave. In fighting both cases, the Justice Department says the president should have the authority to decide how to run the government and that the judges are overreaching. But a commitment to the rule of law and judicial authority is engrained in the American way of life, tracing to the 1789 creation of the three-tiered federal bench. Historically, the executive branch, even after vigorously fighting a case, has abided by a Supreme Court resolution. Will that remain?

Earth’s Core Is Shape-Shifting

Scientists discover yet another change happening on our planet

Scientists who just months ago confirmed that Earth’s inner core recently reversed its spin have a new revelation about our planet’s deepest secrets—they identified changes to the inner core’s shape. The solid moon-sized sphere of iron and nickel at the center of Earth changes as it rotates. It deforms at its border, potentially accumulating more material in some areas and less in others—almost like creating hills and valleys.

The inner core helps generate Earth’s protective magnetic field and is even linked to the length of our days, but scientists are doubtful these shape changes alone will have noticeable effects on our planet. Still, the finding adds to a long-debated mystery of how the inner core behaves and is changing with time. Because the core can’t be visited or viewed, scientists use earthquake signals to learn about its movement. Seismic signals can travel from one side of Earth to the other, passing through the core on their journey. The key is to look at similar earthquakes that have struck the same spots. If the wave signals are different across the years, they can offer indirect information about the core.

This new study, published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, analyzed seismic data, including 121 repeating earthquakes at 42 locations near Antarctica’s South Sandwich Islands, from 1991 to 2024. Researchers then looked at waveforms from receiver stations in Alaska and Canada. Researchers at the University of Southern California said the data showed “uncharacteristic properties” the team had never seen before, indicating that Earth’s inner core was changing shape and moving, first faster and then slower, than the rest of the planet.

Growing Live “Replacement” Teeth

Scientists successfully grew human-like teeth in pigs

Lose an adult tooth, and you’re left with limited options that typically involve titanium implants topped with a ceramic crown or old school dentures. But scientists are working on an alternative: genuine living human teeth that could one day replace damaged ones.

According to Futurism, medical researchers have managed to grow human-like teeth in a lab setting, and then implant them inside a miniature pig's mouth, “in a harbinger of weird new frontiers for dentistry.” As the MIT Technology Review explains, researchers at Tufts bioengineered this fascinating monstrosity using a mix of bovine and human tooth cells that were grown inside bits of pig teeth. This is the dental equivalent of learning how the sausage is made.

But, as one bioengineering expert told Tech Review, “It’s very difficult to replace an implant, because first you have to rebuild all the bone that has been absorbed over time that's gone away—we’re working on trying to create functional replacement teeth.” NPR points out that the science is not ready to be used in humans just yet. But the doctors are hopeful that with advancements the fields of regenerative medicine and dentistry will accelerate the ability to create new, living teeth and other organs in the near future.

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