January 2026 marks a civilizational pivot in our understanding of the cosmos. By inverting 40 years of 'Cold Dark Matter' orthodoxy, researchers have revealed a universe born in an ultra-relativistic, red-hot state that cooled just in time to seed the first galaxies. Simultaneously, the discovery of 'Cloud-9'—a starless dark matter halo—and the experimental validation of the 87-year-old Migdal effect theory provide the first tangible bridges between invisible scaffolding and