February 21, 20255 min readTexas Measles Outbreak Nears 100 Cases, Raising Concerns About Undetected SpreadLow vaccination rates and undetected infections are driving the measles outbreak in West TexasBy Amy Maxmen & KFF Health News Most unvaccinated people will contract measles if theyre exposed to the airborne virus, which can linger for up to two hours indoors. Those infected can spread the disease before they have symptoms. Anchalee Phanmaha/Getty ImagesSome private schools have shut down because of a rapidly escalating measles outbreak in West Texas. Local health departments are overstretched, pausing other important work as they race to limit the spread of this highly contagious virus.Since the outbreak emerged three weeks ago, the Texas health department has confirmed 90 cases with 16 hospitalizations, as of Feb. 21. Most of those infected are under age 18. Officials suspect that nine additional measles cases reported in New Mexico, across the border from the epicenter of the Texas outbreak in Gaines, are linked to the Texas outbreak. Ongoing investigations seek to confirm that connection.Health officials worry theyre missing cases. Undetected infections bode poorly for communities because doctors and health officials cant contain transmission if they cant identify who is infected.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.This is the tip of the iceberg, said Rekha Lakshmanan, chief strategy officer for The Immunization Partnership in Houston, a nonprofit that advocates for vaccine access. I think this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.An unknown number of parents may not be taking sick children to clinics where they could be tested, said Katherine Wells, the public health director in Lubbock, Texas. If your kids are responding to fever reducers and youre keeping hydrated, some people may keep them at home, she said.Most unvaccinated people will contract measles if theyre exposed to the airborne virus, which can linger for up to two hours indoors. Those infected can spread the disease before they have symptoms. Around 1 in 5 people with measles end up hospitalized, 1 in 10 children develop ear infections that can lead to permanent hearing loss, and about 1 in 1,000 children die from respiratory and neurological conditions.Gaines has a large Mennonite population, which often shuns vaccinations. We respect everyones right to vaccinate or not get vaccinated, said Albert Pilkington, CEO of the Seminole Hospital District, in the heart of the county, in an interview with Texas Standard. Thats just what it means to be an American, right?Local health officials have been trying to persuade the parents of unvaccinated children to protect their kids by bringing them to pop-up clinics offering measles vaccines.Some people who were on the fence, who thought measles wasnt something their kids would see, are recalculating and coming forward for vaccination, Wells said.Local health departments are also operating mobile testing units outside schools in an attempt to detect infections before they spread. Theyre staffing clinics that can provide treatment prophylactically for infants exposed to the virus, who are too young for vaccination. Local health officials are advising day care centers on how to protect young children and babies, and educating school nurses on how to spot signs of the disease.I am putting 75% of my staff on this outbreak, Wells said. Although Lubbock isnt at the center of the outbreak, people infected have sought treatment there. If someone infected was in the [emergency room], we need to identify everyone who was in that ER within two hours of that visit, notify them, and find out if they were vaccinated.Local health departments in rural areas are notoriously underfunded. Wells said the workload has meant pressing pause on other programs, such as one providing substance abuse education.Zach Holbrooks, executive director of the South Plains Public Health District, which includes Gaines, said health officials were following CDC guidelines, as of last year, by advising schools to keep unvaccinated children home for 21 days if they shared a classroom or the cafeteria with someone infected. This means that many parents may need to stay home from work to care for their kids.A lot of private schools have closed down because of a high number of sick children, Holbrooks said.The burden of measles outbreaks multiplies as the disease spreads. Curbing a 2018 outbreak in Washington state with 72 cases cost about $2.3 million, in addition to $76,000 in medical costs, and an estimated $1 million in economic losses due to illness, quarantines, and caregiving.Public health researchers expect such outbreaks to become larger and more common because of scores of laws around the U.S. pending and recently passed that ultimately lower vaccine rates by allowing parents to exempt their children from vaccine requirements at public schools and some private schools.Such policies are coupled with misinformation about childhood vaccination now platformed at the highest levels of government. The new director of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has erroneously blamed vaccines for autism, pointing to discredited theories shown to be untrue by more than a dozen scientific studies.In Kennedys first week on the job, HHS postponed an important meeting of the CDCs Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, without saying when it would resume. In addition, the CDCs letter template to school principals, advising unvaccinated children to remain home from school for 21 days if theyve been exposed to the measles virus, is no longer on the agencys website. An old version remains posted on its archive.As a rule, at least 95% of people need to be vaccinated against measles for a community to be well protected. That threshold is high enough to protect infants too young for the vaccine, people who cant take the vaccine for medical reasons, and anyone who doesnt mount a strong, lasting immune response to it. Last school year, the number of kindergartners exempted from a vaccine requirement was higher than ever reported before, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.In Gaines, exemptions were far higher than the national average, approaching 20% in 2023-24. Gaines has one of the lowest rates of childhood vaccination in Texas. At a local public school district in the community of Loop, only 46% of kindergarten students have gotten vaccines that protect against measles.Amid an outbreak that displays the toll of measles in under-vaccinated pockets of America, Texas lawmakers have filed about 25 bills in this years legislative session that could limit vaccination further. Lakshaman said the public the majority of whom believe in the benefits of measles vaccination should contact their representatives about the danger of such decisions. Her group and others offer resources to get involved.Weve got children winding up in the hospital, and yet lawmakers whove got their blinders on, she said, referring to pending policies that will erode vaccination rates. Its just mind-blowing.KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

February 21, 20253 min readHealth and Safety Agency Purged "Diversity" Documents, But They Weren't about DEIOSHA webpages removed for containing the word "diversity" had no relation to gender or racial diversityBy Ariel Wittenberg & E&E News Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), an arm of the Labor Department, Washington D.C. Xinhua/Alamy Stock PhotoCLIMATEWIRE | A number of safety documents containing the word "diversity" were removed from the Department of Labor website. But they weren't the kind of racial and gender diversity programs that the Department of Government Efficiency has been targeting.Instead, they dealt with the diverse size and shape of firefighters a detail that helps them properly fit into safety equipment like ventilator masks. Another document that was taken down pointed to the diverse set of situations that first responders might be working in.Their removal was prompted by President Donald Trumps executive order to end federal diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives, as well as White House missives to stop promoting "gender ideology."On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The Trump administration has been searching for those terms in programs, grants and documents to trigger funding freezes and to shutter initiatives aimed at counteracting discrimination based on people's race, gender and disabilities.Larges swaths of government webpages have been taken offline in the past month as a result. That includes a 2015 guide from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, an arm of the Labor Department, about restroom access for transgender workers. The removed document cited OSHAs sanitation standard requiring employers to provide workers with toilet facilities.Accessed via the Internet Archive, the 2015 guide notes that OSHA has long interpreted that standard to mean that employers may not impose unreasonable restrictions on employee use of toilet facilities. It also explains that bathroom restrictions can result in employees avoiding using restrooms entirely while at work, which can lead to potentially serious physical injury or illness.Other documents that were removed include guidance for first responders when they treat and transport victims of chemical releases and guidance for small businesses about what personal protective equipment, such as respirators, they should use in diverse scenarios.OSHA did not respond to requests for comment. But emails obtained by the website Popular Information show OSHA public affairs officials announcing to agency staff that the publications were removed from the website and will not be distributed from OSHAs warehouse. The Feb. 7 email said, if you have wallet cards that include language, or can be interpreted, on DEIA or gender ideology, please dispose of them as well.The purge has caught the attention of lawmakers. House Democrats on the Education and Workforce Committee wrote a letter to Vince Micone, acting secretary of Labor, to raise their concerns last week.If erasing these documents relates to President Trumps executive orders on so-called gender ideology and diversity, equity and inclusion, DOL appears to be implementing the orders as though there is a list of banned words, without any regard for the context in which the words are used, they wrote.The removed guidance about treating victims of chemical exposures describes first responders as a diverse group, referencing not race and ethnicity but the diverse conditions under which EMS responders could work, such as full time, part time or as volunteers. Their risks vary with their primary and secondary roles, said the guidance, which is accessible only via the Internet Archive.Other removed documents provided guidance for properly fitting respirators for health care professionals. It mentions gender only to note that protocol for testing the masks has a built-in capability to [adapt for] unique work rate, mask and gender situations that might apply in a specific workplace.That document is among a few that have been reposted to OSHAs website this week after House Democrats raised concerns.But other documents including those about first responders and workplace violence in health care settings remained offline as of Thursday afternoon.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

OpinionFebruary 21, 20255 min readWhy Is the Trump Administration Villainizing Mental Health Meds for Kids?A federal commission to examine U.S. chronic disease could undercut real treatment for kids with depression, ADHD and other mental health challengesBy Megha Satyanarayana edited by Dan Vergano Annadokaz/Getty ImagesOur teenagers are in trouble.Headlines have been ringing loud alarms around adolescent mental health, and the data are sobering. In 2023, 40 percent of high school students surveyed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they persistently felt hopeless or sad in the past year. Nine percent had attempted suicide.Some of it is because of COVID. Some of it is related to social media. Then there is bullying, the pressure to succeed academically, the pressure to fit in. Being a teenager in the U.S. is hard.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.So its perhaps heartening to see President Donald Trump address mental health in a recent executive order (EO) targeting chronic health issues in children, one released as soon as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was confirmed as the director of the Department of Health and Human Services.But nestled in this directive, which creates an RFK, Jr.chaired commission to Make America Healthy Again, are words that speak to the doubt that he and Trump have tried to sow around established science. This includes suggestions that the research funded by the National Institutes of Health and other agencies isnt gold standard and assertions that doctors are overprescribing medicines for conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and depression and that medical treatments might be part of the pediatric chronic disease problem. Perhaps most troubling is the language the administration uses to describe prescription medications for mood and behavior disordersthey are a threat.That language stigmatizes families who choose prescription medication to treat their struggling children. It undermines the expertise of medical professionals. And it opens the door for unproven, improperly studied treatments to gain legitimacy.The next era of snake oil dawns. Wont anyone think of the children?According to the CDC, in 2021 and 2022, more than half of U.S. teens talked to a health care provider about their mental health. About 14 percent of teens reported taking medication to manage their emotional state or for concentration and behavior. Yet 20 percent said they have unmet mental health needs.The Affordable Care Act, and before it, the federal parity law, introduced a lot of Americans, including perhaps these teens parents, to parity in mental health coveragein theory, insurance plans cant deny mental health coverage, charge ridiculous rates for coverage that included mental health or put limits on the amount of mental health coverage a plan allows.But even if you have insurance, depending on where you live, finding mental health care for children can be incredibly difficult. Many providers, whether therapists or psychiatrists, dont take insurance, or dont take certain plans. This includes Medicaid but also large commercial plans. Many primary care doctors, including pediatricians, have limits on what aspects of mental health care they are comfortable managing, including medication. In rural parts of the U.S., there are hundreds of counties that do not have a single child psychiatrist.Then there is the public education system, bound to provide a suitable education for all children, thrust in the role of mental health adviser. For many children in the U.S., appropriate services first become available when a teacher, an aide, a counselor or another professional says, Hey, I think this kid needs help, or when a kid demonstrates concerning behavior. This is admirable and necessaryone estimate says about 70 percent of mental health services that kids get happen at school.But now some states are suing the federal government to render Section 504 educational accommodations for those children, and others with disabilities, unconstitutional because it was modified by the Biden administration to recognize youth who are LGBTQ.This is the cruelty and the inconsistency of this executive order. Children who are LGBTQ have some of the largest rates of depression and anxiety in this country. Some 41 percent considered suicide in 20222023. And now we have a government trying to erase their very being from health care data, or at least to tell people who visit certain federal health care websites that the administration doesnt believe the science and evidence around gender. (Those stats from the CDC come from reports that were temporarily pulled down at the beginning of the Trump administration as part of a push to remove references to gender and sexuality that do not align with the male-female binary that drives conservative ideology.)So what might come of the Trump administrations decision to examine our childrens mental health? Federal funding for conversion therapy to cure LGBTQ teen depression? RFK, Jr., steering taxpayer dollars to the addiction-treating labor camps that he calls wellness farms? Pushing clinical trials for hydroxychloroquine to treat mood disorders (remember this from COVID?) or promoting something like juicing as a treatment for depression? This is speculation, of course, but the broader question of whether Kennedy will, with the administrations blessing, use tax dollars to promote untested, ineffective or harmful treatments remains.Kennedy is a litigator who is now running our nations most comprehensive health care agency. He is not a doctor, not a health care specialist, but a litigatorand one who kept saying during his confirmation hearings that he wanted to see the data that support the health care he has been desperately trying to undermine for the past decade. He is a litigator who once called people on certain antidepression drugs addicts and who has (falsely) claimed that it is harder to quit selective serotonin reuptake inhibitorsdrugs like Prozacthan heroin.And now he wants a chance at your childrens mental health care.Meanwhile the second Trump administration guts health care agencies when it could be doing what the first Trump administration did during COVID and facilitating telemedicine so that more children can access therapy and psychiatry. The administration pulls data and questions, just for the sake of it, the validity of what data we have. The EO says the administration will work with insurers to increase access, but what does that mean? Our medical schools are not graduating enough child psychiatrists. And its not clear if Trump will again go after foreign medical graduates, many of whom fill rural medicine shortages, including psychiatry.Antidepressants do not work for everyone, and some are associated with suicidal thinking in children. Stimulants do not help all children with ADHD. But this is the case for nearly every class of medication in this countrywhat works for some will not work for others. In the meantime, only 14 percent of adolescents are getting medication, and one in five is telling us they need more help. How is this overprescribing?Going after antidepressants and claimingpreposterouslythat they are harder to wean off of than heroin isnt how we care for children. This commission need not waste any time trying to reinvent the wheel. If its members want to solve mental health disorders as a chronic health condition in children, they need to make evidence-based treatment easier to get, increase incentives for insurance and workforce development and stop stigmatizing the families and children who needand benefit fromthis form of health care.IF YOU NEED HELPIf you or someone you know is struggling or having thoughts of suicide, help is available. Call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or use the online Lifeline Chat.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

February 21, 20258 min readWhy the News Feels OverwhelmingAnd How to CopeAn explanation of the science behind news fatigue, plus expert advice to take control and protect your well-being while staying engagedBy Meghan Bartels edited by Andrea Thompson Malte Mueller/Getty ImagesIts February 2025. The world feels like complete chaos, and its hard to step away from the news. Maybe your body feels tight, and perhaps your mind is racing.Take a deep breath, then keep reading.It isnt just you: lots of people have expressed that they have felt overwhelmed and burned out from the events of recent months. Disasters, including Hurricane Helene and the Los Angelesarea wildfires, served as the backdrop to a frighteningly tense presidential election. And the new administration has acted loud and fast, often in ways that judges are already declaring unconstitutional.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.To a degree, the result feels familiar. News overload is nothing new; major crises such as September 11 and the early months of the COVID pandemic delivered a similar onslaught of rapid-fire headlines that were laden with fear and uncertainty. But experts say the developments during these first weeks of President Donald Trumps second administration are posing a very real mental health threat that people may need new skills to manage. Scientific American spoke with experts in psychology and beyond about whats happening and how to stay calm and grounded through it.What Is the Flood the Zone Strategy?Political strategist Steve Bannon, who advised Trump during his first term, has openly discussed overwhelming the media as a key priority to advance right-wing objectives. All we have to do is flood the zone, Bannon told Frontline in 2019. Every day we hit them with three things. Theyll bite on one, and well get all of our stuff done: bang, bang, bang.This approach is reminiscent of the Gish gallop tactic that Trump has used during debates to barrage opponents and fact-checkers with so many lies and half-truths that it becomes impossible to adequately address them all. Away from the podium and inside the Oval Office, its a strategy that harkens back to a predigital Soviet practice of producing huge amounts of disinformation meant to make people question reality, as many experts have noted. The Trump administrations version of this tactic uses volume to create paralysis among the opposition, says Dannagal Young, a professor of communication at the University of Delaware. Its the sense that you are being overwhelmed by a tidal wave, she says. How do you push back against a tidal wave? You cant.In addition to the sheer number of actions coming from the administration, many are also entirely unprecedented. Without historical U.S. parallels to work from, our brain is less able to calculate what these developments might lead to, and that can make processing the news even more difficult. The chaos that ensues is really hard to make sense of because we dont know the consequences, says Kristen Lee, a psychotherapist and a teaching professor of behavioral science at Northeastern University.But its not just the volume of headlines and the intellectual difficulty of understanding whats happening that make current news overwhelming. The key, psychologists say, is the emotional weight of those headlines contentespecially for people who find whats happening in the U.S. today to be genuinely frightening.Fear in the Brain, Fear in SocietiesFor someone worried about the administrations policies creating tangible harm, each new headline can create a spark of fearand fear is a remarkably powerful emotion. Threat and fear take the priority in our brains, says Arash Javanbakht, a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist at Wayne State University. When youre afraid, all youre thinking about is what youre afraid of.Think of the effects of fear on the brain in two categories: cognitive and emotional. Cognitively, fear hijacks our ability to think welland this makes us more likely to rely on other peoples reasoning than to think through our own opinions and values, Javanbakht says. Lee notes that fear can also interfere with attention, leaving people vulnerable to what psychologists call cognitive distortions. This term is often used in discussing conditions such as depression and anxiety, in which our brain can fixate on predicting the worst or ignoring small positives. Ultimately, cognitive distortions are convenient mental shortcuts that our brain can slip into. Such habits include jumping to conclusions and engaging in black-and-white thinking, and they bypass our critical thinking skills.As an emotion, unaddressed fear can morph and grow. Fear often becomes anger, Javanbakht says. And as fear and anger build up, they turn into a state of feeling overwhelmed, as well as exhaustion and sadness. If someone doesnt feel like they have any control over a situation, this emotional cocktail can create a sense of helplessness that can become paralyzinglike a caged lab animal that shuts down amid shocks it doesnt believe it can stop, even if an avenue of escape finally does become available.On top of this, feeling anxious about the news can drive people to follow current events even more closely. Anxiety stimulates our need to search for information, Young says. But in chaotic times, the next news story wont actually resolve the anxietyand neither will the second or third or 10th.And if fear is difficult for someone to cognitively and emotionally manage, the effects are even more profound when that individual is surrounded by other people who are also afraid. Thats because humans are fundamentally social beings who are attuned to one anothers emotions; our connections within our local communities are how we have managed to survive as a species.In todays digitally connected world, however, our exposure goes far beyond perceived threats to us and our daily companions. We now have intimate access to the emotions of hundreds or thousands of people were connected to online. We feel scared and angry, we go online, we encounter other people being scared and angry, and that rubs off on us. When people who we think of as on our team are outraged and upset and anxious, the natural and adaptive response is for us to have the contagion of their experience, Young says.And because our fear has already reduced our cognitive abilities, were also more likely to instantly take on someone elses view of the world without examining it for ourselvesespecially if we consider them a leaderJavanbakht says.Moving ForwardWe can better understand how people have been feeling over recent weeks by thinking about the experience of a car accident, says Fathali Moghaddam, a Georgetown University psychologist who has studied the psychology of democracy and dictatorship. Youre in a state of shock, and you are just trying to adjust to what happened, he says. The car is damaged; you are hurt; everything is bewildering.In the moment, the shock can feel so intense that its difficult to imagine life ever feeling normal again. But psychologists know that humans adjust to their circumstancesand surprisingly quickly. What feels unbearable in the short term can become more manageable with time. We have to adjust, Moghaddam says.It can be difficult advice to heed in the throes of fear and the feeling of being overwhelmed, but experts also encourage us to remember that people of many generations have encountered crises before. We are not the first cohort in humanity to face existential threats, Lee says.Although some people in the U.S. are certainly in immediate risk, many, realistically, are not. And as unpleasant as 2025 may seem for people living today, the modern era is still an improvement over much of the past, Javanbakht notes. At the end of the day, we are living in one of the safest, most prosperous times of humanity, he says. But we have lost sight of that.So know that, on both an individual and societal level, as difficult as you might find this time, things will become more manageable. All the experts interviewed for this article also shared recommendations on ways for emotionally struggling people to manage the current situation and stay healthy.Coping Strategies to Stay Informed without Feeling DrainedJ.A. Bracchi/Getty ImagesTake a deep breath. Do so literally and figuratively. Breathing deeply will help your body recognize that, right now, you are safe, allowing your cognitive brain some room to come back online. And you may need a broader pausean hour, a day, even a weekend away from the newsto evaluate where you are and what you need. When our system is so taxed, we have to be mindful and step back, Lee says.See the bigger picture. To make the task of processing the Trump administrations relentless flood of actions a little less daunting, Young recommends considering them within the larger narrative of the presidents goals and priorities. For example, staffing and funding cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are all aspects of Trumps well-known lack of trust in science and scientists. This thought process can make individual news events feel less overwhelming, Young says. Actually, that tidal wave is all coming from one place, she says. I think that that reframe is essential.Limit news consumption. Experts encourage people who are struggling with the news to manage their exposurewhile still staying reasonably informed. There are plenty of options: People who usually watch news programs can consider reading articles instead. Those accustomed to checking the news all day long can establish one or two set times each day to catch up. And people who find themselves doomscrolling on social media can reduce their exposure.Lee encourages people to use common behavioral-change tactics to make this process easier. For example, you can make doomscrolling more difficult by setting time limits for specific apps on your phone or by unplugging your router at a certain time, and you can make healthier habits easier by keeping a book or walking shoes close at hand. You can also manufacture a fresh start and recruit a friend to help you monitor your progress.Stay with science. Moghaddam argues that, given Trumps authoritarian leanings, standing up for science has become particularly important. Science is the most democratic procedure that humans have invented, he saysand he expects attacks on science to ramp up as the administration continues.Even as the chaos surrounding scientific funding persists, Young encourages active researchers to resist the temptation to get distracted. Not only do you still have work to do, but you have an obligation to get to work, she says. And do it without feeling guilt about what youre doing. Because if you are in the scientific community, your work is the production of knowledge.Reach for something good. Javanbakht points out that its valuable to balance ones political news intake with stories about science, the arts, sports, and more. These articles give your brain a break from fear and keep it cognitively active. Similarly, he and others encourage people to look for good things in life more generally as a way to stay even-keeled.Connect with ourselves and other people. If current events are affecting your perception of yourself and your impact on the world, Young recommends picking up a pencil. Writing about whats happening can help your brain look at your role in a new way. Theres a lot of amazing work from the mental health literature on people writing their own narrative and how it can shape how we view ourselves and our own agency, Young says. Writing can help people construct an image of themselves anew. Writing about your values or the ways youre showing up for the people in your life might be steadying when things are difficult.And connecting with other peopleoffline and not about politicsis also grounding. Good conversations not only help fortify our brain against a fear-induced shutdown; they also strengthen our community ties and remind us of the world beyond politics. Rediscover the art of the dinner party, of the game night, Young says.Take action. Most of all, researchers recommended simply doing somethinganything, really. Javanbakht recommends exercise, given that plentiful research shows its deep mental health benefits. Young emphasizes that reaching out to elected officials, building community and volunteering can all counteract the paralyzing effects of fear-inducing news. Your local school board is still holding meetings, she says. Your town hall is still trying to figure out Are you going to get the money to fill the potholes or not?And for her, taking these actions are the real point of reading the news anyway. News consumption is not an end in itself, she says. From a democratic theory standpoint, news consumption is a means to become informed to act.

OpinionFebruary 21, 20254 min readWhyOw! Needs Absolutely No TranslationThe sounds we make during emotional moments or when experiencing pain may not be arbitraryBy Katarzyna Pisanski, Aitana Garca Arasco & Maa Ponsonnet edited by Daisy Yuhas Alashi/Getty ImagesImagine youve just slammed a door on your finger. More often than not, this sudden jolt of pain elicits a vocal response. Maybe you exclaim ouch! or let out a cry or loud groan. But do the sounds we make in such moments differ across cultures?Humans are remarkably vocally expressive. We not only speak but also giggle, moan, sob or screamsounds that scientists call nonlinguistic vocalizations. Further, our species uses interjections to express emotions. These are standalone words, such as ouch or wow, that dont combine grammatically with other words.Emotional vocalizations and interjections have been observed in every human culture studied to date. Yet scientists still know extremely little about how these sounds might vary across the globe or why they might do so. In our recent research, we tackled this question by focusing on the vowel sounds in vocal expressions of pain, disgust and joy across more than 130 of the worlds languages. We wanted to test whether the interjections and vocalizations that express these emotions consistently contain the same kinds of vowels across disparate cultures and languages. What we found could offer clues into the evolutionary history of language and vocal communication.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The central idea guiding our work was that the sounds people make are not arbitrary. Instead we suspect these sounds have evolved to support their communicative functions. For example, pain cries are often loud, high-pitched and harsh to grab the attention of listeners and elicit aid. They are also often produced with a wide-open mouth, which basically forces the vocalizer to produce an [a]-like vowel sound (as in cat). Give it a try. See if you can say ski or knee with a wide-open mouth. Youll find its nearly impossible to produce these kinds of [i]-like vowels with your jaws so far apart! Instead [i]-like vowels will more readily arise when we adjust our lips, tongue and jaws into a smile.In line with the idea that certain sounds may coincide with particular emotions, researchers have found that words may likewise link particular vowel sounds with certain experiences or perceptual associations. For example, people across several languages have a tendency to link smiley [i] vowels with positive, bright things.To build on these ideas, we decided to explore the possibility that vocalizations and interjections linked to emotional experiences contain specific vowels for pain, joy and disgust. In addition to predicting that pain interjections would contain a high number of [a] vowels, we predicted that joy would have an overrepresentation of smiley [i] vowels. For disgust, we expected a higher proportion of what are called schwa-like vowels, such as in uh, that a person might produce when grimacing or gagging.To test our predictions, we first collected more than 600 pain, disgust and joy interjections from dictionaries spanning 131 languages across Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and Latin America. We also used large language databases to collect thousands of words from those same languages. Then we statistically compared the proportions of different vowels in emotional interjections to those in the general lexicon of each language.As a second step, we asked English, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish and Turkish speakers to produce sounds without using words to express pain, disgust and joy. With acoustic analysis, we determined the vowels in each of these 375 recorded vocalizations by measuring the resonances of the vocal tract, or the part of the airway that is used to produce speech, in each vocalization. (Because these resonances differ in predictable ways from vowel to vowel, measuring them can tell us which vowel is being produced when a person vocalizes.)Our results revealed that across the globeas predictedpain interjections have a much higher than expected proportion of [a]-like single vowels and diphthongs (when two vowels glide together, such as in ay or ow). Joy and disgust interjections did not show robust vowel patterns that were consistent across cultures, however.But when we put aside the interjections and looked more broadly at nonlinguistic vocalizations, we found specific vowel signatures for every emotion. As predicted, pain cries had more open [a]-like vowels, expressions of joy had more [i]-like vowels, and expressions of disgust had more schwa-like central vowels, such as in uh.Our work hints that most humans may turn to certain sounds to communicate specific emotional experiencesbut pain, in our study, stands apart for inducing the same vowel patterns across cultures, whether people produce noises or interjections. This suggests that pain interjections may have originated from nonlinguistic vocalizations. These findings also support the idea that some words may not have originated in totally arbitrary or random ways. Rather, to some extent, they may have acoustic forms that reflect their meaning or communicative function.Research on nonlinguistic vocalizations and interjections is still remarkably limited, especially work that explores comparisons across cultures and languages. These results are just a first step in what we hope is a long line of inquiry into form-function relationships in human vocal behavior, with the aim to shed new light on the origins of vocal communication and ultimately language. In the meantime, rest assured that if you hurt your finger and shout in response, most peopleregardless of culture or languagewill understand.Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about for Mind Matters? Please send suggestions to Scientific Americans Mind Matters editor Daisy Yuhas at dyuhas@sciam.com.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

February 20, 2025Where Did Curly Hair Come From? Biological Anthropology May Provide InsightsHumans have a surprising lack of hair for mammals. Biological anthropology may provide insights into why the hair we have sometimes comes out curly.By Rachel Feltman & Jeffery DelViscio Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific AmericanSUBSCRIBE TO Science QuicklyRachel Feltman: Have you ever really thought about the hair that grows out of your head? I mean, Im sure youve thought about your hairin terms of which way to get it cut and how to get that one really wonky piece to behave itselfbut have you ever considered why it is the way it is?For Scientific Americans Science Quickly, Im Rachel Feltman. My guest today is biological anthropologist Tina Lasisi, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. She leads a lab that studies the evolution and genetic basis of human phenotypic variation, with a focus on pigmentation and hair. In other words shes figuring out why human skin and hair comes in so many gorgeous varieties.Thanks so much for joining us to chat today.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Tina Lasisi: Great to be here.Feltman: So Ive been a fan of your research for a few years now cause, among other things, youre really asking and answering questions about hair that I dont think anyone else is tackling. How did you get interested in your field of study, and would you tell our listeners a little bit about it?Lasisi: Absolutely. So I got interested in this when I was an undergrad. I did my undergrad at the University of Cambridge, where I was studying archaeology and anthropology, which there consists of studying archaeology, biological anthropology and social anthropology.And I was always someone who really liked culture and traveling, so I thought I was gonna be a cultural anthropologist, but I got this lecture in the evolution of human skin color that really had me intrigued, and it was a lecture where they showed, you know, those really famous map pairings where you see the distribution of skin color around the world and the distribution of UV radiation, and it was just like this [makes explosion noise], you know, brain-exploding moment of like, Wow, like I never thought about that, and learning more about evolution and how theres all these processes that can shape the way that humans arethe way that a lot of different species are, rightthat really got me intrigued, and I felt like, Okay, now I understand why my skin is the color that it is, but my immediate next question was: Well, why is my hair curly?Feltman: Hmm.Lasisi: And there wasnt a great answer at the time, and I was lucky enough to be in a really supportive environment, and I had a mentor who said, You know, why dont you just go into the science side of anthropology and study this? And so, what year are we in2025? Okay, 14 years later, here I am [laughs] still working on that.Feltman: Yeah, well, and, you know, it sounds like the nature of your work is pretty interdisciplinary. You know, how would you summarize everything youre looking at to someone whos not familiar with your work?Lasisi: Thats such a great question. Im actually teaching an introduction to anthropology class right now, and Im trying to explain to the students, like, Anything can be anthropology, and everything can be anthropology. You can use so many different methods. So right now, I would say I am definitely an evolutionary biologist. I work on human biology. I also work onthermoregulation is work that Ive worked on. Ive worked with thermal engineers. I also have worked on genetics; thats a big part of what I do. Im also in a Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. So all of those little bits and pieces, they give a different insight into the question that you can ask, and so everything that I do involves sitting [laughs] behind a computer, mostly, but also collecting samples from people and measuring things with various instruments and a lot of computer imaging, basically [basically].Feltman: Very cool. And so, broadly speaking, why is it that people have so much variation in their hair and skin?Lasisi: Mm-hmm. So the reason is simultaneously because of natural selection and because of the absence of natural selection. So the story that weve been able to piece together for skin color is that very long agosomewhere between, you know, two to one million years agoas the genus Homo was emerging, we were completely bipedal and at some point would have started losing our body hair, so really reducing those hair follicles so that we have like, this, tiny peach fuzz all over our body. And by doing that we have lost a really important barrier, right? So a lot of people can associate hair with keeping you warm, but it can also protect you from UV radiation. And so those ancestors probably would have been under selective pressure to evolve darker skin because by having more melanin in your skin, thats another way that you can protect yourself from that UV radiation.The story afterwards is one of adaptation to different environments. So it turns out that having all of that wonderful melanin to protect you is great when theres a lot of solar radiation, but if youre in an environment with not a lot of radiation, you end up running into issues with being able to produce enough vitamin D ...Feltman: Hmm.Lasisi: Which is something you can only do in your body with the power of solar radiation that helps you convert it into an active form. Now, there are, of course, exceptions to that because there are places in the world where people have diets that are rich in naturally occurring vitamin D, like in the Arctic.And since all those times weve moved to so many different places, and you have all of this variation thats evolved because of that. And in the last, lets call it 200 years whats really nice is that we have developed all of these cultural ways of adapting to different places. So instead of being someone who maybe doesnt have a lot of melanin and going to a place that is very, very sunny and being like, Well, geez, Im gonna have to wait a couple of generations for evolution to fix it for my ancestors, we now have sunscreen and all of these other things that we can do. We have vitamin D supplementation.Now the story with hair, its much more complicated to tell because we really dont know. The thing about hair and skin is that in both cases, they dont fossilize, and so were having to infer a lot from the past. And we do that by putting together hypotheses and saying, Well, if this is the reason that natural selection would have selected for this kind of hair or that kind of skin, whats the distribution that we expect to see? And with hair we dont have a lot of thoroughly tested hypotheses, but some of the work that I did in my Ph.D. that got published a few years ago was asking the question: Well, does tightly curled hair reduce how much heat we might gain from solar radiation? And I found in my experiments that, yes, it really does have this role. And so now the question is: Can we also use genetics to ask, Well, how did this happen? Whats the history of this? And whats the story for every group of people around the world?Feltman: Yeah, thats so cool. I loved that study. Its not apparent cause its pulled back and bleached within an inch of its life, but I have very curly hair [laughs]. And I was like, Ive always wondered why when I get a blowout, I feel [laughs], I feel like my head is gonna sweat right off. Meanwhile, when people are like,I dont know how you live through the summer with that long hair, and Im like, I dont know what youre talking about [laughs]. Its fine. So I love when the science answers questions I didnt even know I had.So a lot of the ways that weve historically categorized different variations in hair and skin are, of course, really lacking and sometimes quite racist. What factors are actually at play that lead to differences in the makeup of our skin and hair, and how has your work changed the way you think about how we might describe or categorize those variations?Lasisi: Mm-hmm, thats really an interesting question. So theres a number of factors that we can tease apart there, right? We can ask the question of: What are the mechanisms and the biological processes that contribute to this variation? When it comes to skin color, weve known for a long time that its melanin, but measuring how much melanin is in someones skin is actually [laughs] really invasive. Its really invasivelike youd have to have a skin punch, youd have to do various chemical analyses to measure exactly how much melanin and what kind of melanin is in there. So thats really difficult, and people need a shorthand, especially if youre doing population-wide studies. So people have tried to come up with really good descriptions, but descriptions can only go so far, and measuring something is so much better.So with the rise of reflectance spectrophotometers, we finally had a tool that could really easily and noninvasively measure the color of skin. So this can be done at various levels of detail.You can have one that is specifically trying to estimate the visible range of melanin, and it can give you something called melanin index, which is something thats been developed to say, Okay, well, how much melanin is in someones skin? And so that really helped us collect a lot of accurate data, and in 2017, 2018 there were a lot of papers that came out saying, Oh, wow, look at all of this variation in skin color that we didnt realize existed in Africa.And so thats where you have this really interesting insight of, Oh, sometimes the words that we use and the variation that we think were seeing doesnt align with what it is that were measuring, which is why its so important to have tools that measure things. With hair we suffer from a similar problem, where, okay, well, we have all these descriptions of straight, wavy, curly, but is that really what the range of the variation is?However, there isnt a single thing that you can measure to define hair shape. Theres a lot of things that you can measureif you are narrowing down to the level of a single hair fiber, in a single hair fiber you can get a cross section. You can slice that in half, look at that cross section and say, Well, how thick is that hair fiber? What shape is it? And thats something that weve been doing for over 100 years, and weve noticed that theres a variation there. But when it comes to thecurl its really difficult because hair curves in three dimensions.So that is the thing that I actually worked on the longestit took me 10 years to develop a method that Im, you know, remotely happy with. And it involves getting a little strand of hair, chopping it up into little pieces so that it only curves in two dimensions and then measuring the curvature by trying to, basically, fit a circle to it. So you can imagine: you have different types of curls, different sizes of curls, and the smaller the circle is that fits to that curl, the more curly that hair is, you could say. And so that is one method that you can have of really precisely, accurately measuring hair curvature.To answer the question of, Why does hair curl?: well, we dont really know yet, and thats really interesting because when it comes to sheeps wool, so that doesnt curl, but it crimps; it has this wave. We know that it has to do with two different types of cells that are deposited in different ways. But when it comes to human hair curl we dont know what the mechanism is that makes hair curl, and it might be that there are many mechanisms that contribute to the shape. Some people have said that its the shape of the hair follicle, but we still have a lot of work to do to be sure about that.Feltman: Yeah, well, and, you know, for folks who dont think about hair texture or curl at all, why is it important to answer these questions?Lasisi: Mm-hmm, so its important on a number of levels. First, from the perspective of someone who is really interested in human evolution, human origins, my desire to answer this comes from, you know, being, I dont want to say a natural historian, but thats really what you are when youre studying evolution and asking, like, Wow, what is the story of our people as a whole? I would love to know: What is it that makes our hair the way that it is, and why are we the only mammals that have naked bodies and hair on their heads? Thats weird. Not trying to judge here, but its a little odd compared to all the other mammals. But theres a lot of other reasons that it might be useful to understand.So something that Im incredibly fascinated with is the potential to understand the variation within your ownbody through the hair follicle, right? You have hair follicles all over your body. Your eyebrows are hair, you know, your eyelashes are hair, and they are very different than the hair on your head. You might have body hair in various places. And yet you have the same DNA across your body; its just how that DNA is used. And because you have this incredible structure, this hair follicle, which is the same thing all over your body, we have this unique opportunity to ask, Okay, well, how can we use the same DNA and a similar structure around the body and create different things?And thats the kind of knowledge that you can apply to a lot of different ends. You could be asking questions about, Well, why do things go wrong when they go wrong? And what are various processes that affect how our DNAs able to express itself? Something thats incredibly interesting is a lot of people have reported to me, for themselves or someone they know, when they went through chemotherapy their hair texture changed.Feltman: Mm.Lasisi: Your DNA didnt change, right? But something about how your DNA is being used in those hair follicles has changed, and if were able to make those associations, see what those links are, we can break down what the biological processes are that are going on, and that might lead towho knows what; you never know what youre gonna find in the type of science that Im doing [laughs], and thats what I love about it.Feltman: [Laughs] Yeah, awesome. What are some other big questions that youre still hoping to answer?Lasisi: So there are a number of adventures that I still want to go on when it comes to hair science, and one of them is, you know, understanding how various physiological processes can affect our hair. So thinking of even our own trajectories [laughs] through to adulthood, there was a time when we were probably marginally less hairy, and then puberty happened, and all of a sudden there was hair in places where it wasnt before, and maybe our hair was a little bit different [laughs] in places where we already had hair. And thats really interesting because we know that theres something going on endocrinologically that is, is changing our body and we have this external marker that is telling us, Okay, well, here are some changes, and so its really interesting to ask that question.And then on the other end of that, once were talking about aging, we have people who maybe start losing hair in certain places. It gets thinner or maybe it gets coarser, is something Ive heard people say. And so we can ask questions, again, about whats going on in your body and can we learn something from this external marker that is very noninvasive to say, Okay, this is giving me a window into your body about what could be going on?And then the second part of hair science that Im really interested in right now is what we can learn from the hair fibers that are coming out of your body in terms of biomarkers.Feltman: Mm.Lasisi: So theres a lot you can measure from hair. For example, right now in my lab one of my students is working on extracting cortisol from hair, and the way that your hair works it ends up being, like, this ice core of your bodys physiology; its constantly capturing bits of whats going on in your bloodstream. And so theres this incredible potential to get this slice-of-time view, if we can get our methods to be precise enough, of: This is what was going on in your body a month ago, two months ago, three months ago. And it would be an incredible, noninvasive way to be able to keep track of cortisol, other hormones, and theres also a lot of toxicology that you can do with hair.Feltman: Very cool. Thank you so much for coming on to talk about this. I hope we can have you back soon to talk about more of your research.Lasisi: Absolutely, this was so much fun.Feltman: Thats all for todays episode. Tune in on Monday for our usual science news roundup.Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend!

February 20, 20255 min readWhats on the Milky Ways Far Side?With radio and infrared telescopes, astronomers can pierce the dusty veil of our galaxy and map its farthest reachesBy Phil Plait edited by Lee BillingsThis infrared image from NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope shows the nebula nicknamed the Dragonfish. This turbulent region lies beyond the galactic centereffectively on the dust-obscured far side of our galaxyand is home to some of the most luminous massive stars in the Milky Way. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of TorontoYoud think, given that we live inside the Milky Way, we would have a pretty good map of it by now, together with an understanding of its overall structure and components.Being embedded in the Milky Way is actually a major obstacle to our galactic cartography, however. We see every other galaxy from the outside, allowing us to observe most of them sprawled out before us. That makes mapping their structure relatively easy.But for our own Milky Way, were stuck inside with a murky view. Imagine youre in a giant, fog-filled warehouse where you can always see the floor and ceiling, but the gloom blocks any deep view to the buildings perimeter. You can see the boxes and other goods stacked up on nearby shelving, yet your spatial awareness fades past a dozen meters or so. You cant tell whats out there; you dont even know how far away the walls are or if youre near the warehouses periphery or its center.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Astronomers face this very issue. If our galaxy were just made up of stars, wed be able to see clear across it. But its also filled with dust: tiny grains of rocky or sooty material created when massive stars die, blown out in a vast wind that expels the grains into space. Billions of these stars over billions of years have choked the Milky Way with dust, filling it with opaque clouds, blocking our sight line and limiting our view. Essentially all the stars we can see are on our near side of the Milky Way.Still, we can say with utmost confidence that our galaxy is a flat disk with a roughly spherical central bulge of stars; on a dark, moonless night we see this as a broad river of light across the sky that blossoms outward into a circle near the constellation Sagittarius. Were inside that flat disk, so the all the visible stars combined light produces that misty stream (called the Milky Wayconfusingly, our galaxy as a whole is also named after it).But whats beyond the stars we can see? What is our galaxys overall structure, and what lies in the middle and on the other side?I have good news: I lied to you earlier. Well, I didnt lie so much as withhold some information. Although the disks ubiquitous dust blocks visible (also called optical) light, other, longer wavelengths of light such as radio waves and infrared can slip through that dust relatively unimpeded. So by using telescopes sensitive to those wavelengths, we can see much farther and learn what lies beyond our own eyesight.For example, the center of our galaxy is obscured by so much dust that optical light telescopes are nearly useless, but with infrared telescopes, we can see the light emitted by objects there. Using such instruments, astronomers have been able to track stars so accurately that their stellar motions have revealed and even weighed a monstrously huge object at our galaxys center that emits no visible or infrared light: a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* with a mass of more than four million suns.Radio waves have a longer wavelength than infrared and can pass through dust even more easily. In 2010 astronomers detected a gigantic gas cloud 31,000 light-years from Earth, on the other side of our galaxy. Follow-up observations in infrared revealed it to be an immense cloud of gas and dust in which stars are actively forming; the astronomers named it the Dragonfish Nebula because of its resemblance to the tropical fish. Its two degrees across in the skyfour times as wide as the apparent size of a full moonwhich, given the nebulas astronomical distance, makes it a staggering 1,000 light-years wide; compare that with the Orion Nebula, a relatively nearby stellar nursery that is only a couple of dozen light-years across.The Dragonfish is likely the largest such nebula in the Milky Way, making it easily visible even from other galaxies, yet its entirely invisible to our optical telescopes.Still, we can do even better. Some of these gas clouds are powerful emitters of microwave light, which has a wavelength in between infrared and radio waves. The physics behind these emissions is essentially the same as that of lasers, so we call them masers (the m is for microwave), and they can be seen clear across the galaxy. By combining the observations of telescopes around the world, we can get ultraprecise measurements of their motions and distances.These clouds lie along the galaxys winding, star-studded streams: its spiral arms. In fact, observations of these masers have proved that our Milky Way is a magnificent example of a spiral galaxy. Astronomers have observed that our galaxy has four large-scale arms. But theres also a fifth arm, not as large or obvious, that tracks less than a quarter of the way around the galaxy; this local arm holds our solar system. Other radio astronomy measurements have pinpointed our galactic coordinates with considerable precision: the sun is about 26,000 light-years from the centera bit less than halfway out across the 120,000-light-year-wide diskand located very close to the exact midplane of the Milky Way.G1.9+0.3 is another galactic far-side object found in observations by the Very Large Array, a series of radio telescopes located in the New Mexico desert. Its a supernova remnant, the expanding gaseous debris from a star that exploded. The light from this explosion reached Earth only a little over a century ago, making it the most recent known supernova in our galaxy, but the intervening dust dimmed it so much it wasnt seen in visible light at all. Its location is estimated to be over 27,000 light-years from Earth, putting it just barely on the galaxys far side.X-rays can penetrate our galaxys dust as well. In 2004 a huge wave of this kind of high-energy light swept over Earth, blasted out by a magnetar: an extremely energetic and magnetically charged neutron star called SGR 1806-20. The explosion was so powerful that it swamped satellites designed to measure the x-ray sky and physically affected Earths atmosphere. And it did this from a distance of 40,000 to 50,000 light-years, clear on the other side of the Milky Way. Magnetars are relatively rareonly a handful are known in our galaxy, and all of those except SGR 1806-20 are on our side of the galactic center. Its likely there are more located on the other side that are (hopefully) less powerful than that one.Clearly the hidden half of our galaxy is worth exploring! Our local volume of space is filled with amazing objects, such as powerful Wolf-Rayet stars blasting out waves of dust, stars that are just on the edge of exploding and exoplanets galore, just to name a handful. What other treasures lie in wait to be discovered on the other side? Until we can further explore the Milky Ways more distant reaches, our galactic census is, at best, only half-complete.

February 20, 20258 min readScience under Siege during Trumps First 30 DaysThe Trump administration has acted fast to attack science with a range of funding and policy tacticsU.S. President Donald Trump looks at an executive order on halting federal funds for schools and universities that impose coronavirus vaccine mandates before signing in the Oval Office of the White House on February 14, 2025. Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesIn the wake of the Second World War, US leaders adopted the view that scientific progress is an essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to a higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress. And for the next eight decades, government officials on both sides of the political aisle agreed to invest in US science. Just one month into the second administration of Republican President Donald Trump, scientists fear that that long-time consensus is disintegrating.Acting with unprecedented speed, the administration has laid off thousands of employees at US science agencies and announced reforms to research-grant standards that could drastically reduce federal financial support for science. The cuts form part of a larger effort to radically reduce the governments spending and downsize its workforce.Although US courts have intervened in some cases, Republicans in both chambers of the US Congress which largely blocked Trumps efforts to cut science funding during his first term as president from 2017 to 2021 have mostly fallen in line with the agenda for Trump 2.0. For many researchers, this first month signals a realignment of priorities that could affect science and society for decades to come.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.These actions are all unprecedented, says Harold Varmus, a former director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) who is now a cancer researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. No one has ever seen a [presidential] transition in which one of the most valuable parts of our government enterprise is being taken apart.The Trump White House did not respond to Natures request for comment.Here, Nature unpacks the Trump teams blazing-fast actions on science so far (scroll to bottom to see timeline Science impacts: one month of Trump 2.0) and talks to policy watchers about whats next.Fast and furiousThe overhaul of US science kicked off within hours of Trumps inauguration on 20 January, when he signed dozens of executive orders, which are presidential directives on how the government should operate inside existing laws.Some of those orders had been anticipated, including pulling the United States out of the 2015 Paris agreement to rein in global climate emissions and terminating the nations membership in the World Health Organization. Others had surprising and immediate ripple effects through the scientific community.One order erroneously attempted to define only two biological sexes, male and female, and banned federal actions that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology. Biomedical-research agencies such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scrambled to respond by, among other things, taking down data sets from their websites and pulling back manuscript submissions from scientific journals to purge terms including gender and transgender.Another executive order banned what Trump called illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Any federal employee who did not report colleagues defying the DEI orders would face adverse consequences, according to an e-mail sent to government workers. To many scientists dismay, agencies began terminating DEI programmes, including environmental-justice efforts, which are programmes aimed at protecting low-income communities vulnerable to pollution and climate change. Even some scientific societies and private research organizations scrubbed DEI mentions from their websites. In one of Trumps orders, he called for the investigation of foundations, non-profit organizations and other private entities not in compliance.On 27 January, just one week into the new administration, Trumps budget office froze all federal grants and loans, saying that it needed to review government spending to ensure that it aligned with the executive orders. Chaos erupted as agencies, including the NIH and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) both major funders of basic science halted grant payments, cancelled review panels for research-grant funding and paused communications. A federal judge temporarily blocked the order, but disruptions and confusion continue.Principal investigators who lead research teams are suffering in this environment, says a university scientist who requested anonymity because their research is funded by multiple US agencies. Everything is on you to manage your grants and your team, they say, adding that theres a lot of fear of people not wanting to say or do the wrong thing and therefore lose financial support for their work. Its completely chaotic; Im losing sleep.Slash and burnTrumps unprecedented directives landed as his partnership with billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has flourished. The pair are working together to slash federal spending and dismantle agencies such as the US Agency for International Development, which funds global disease research, prevention and care.To accomplish this goal, the Trump administration working through the US Department of Government Efficiency, which Musk reportedly advises has moved quickly to demoralize and gut the federal workforce, including about 280,000 scientists and engineers. Initially, a 30 January e-mail offer to all federal employees asked them to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector; around 75,000 employees subsequently resigned, on the promise that they would retain their salary through September. And last week, layoffs began for probationary employees across the US government those usually hired into their positions within the past two years, meaning that early-career researchers were particularly affected.I cant even convey how haphazard and cruel the layoffs are, says an NIH researcher who lost members of their laboratory to the job cuts and requested anonymity because they werent authorized to speak with the press. E-mails notifying workers that they were being let go reportedly gave a blanket reason of poor performance for the termination even to those whose performance was rated exceptional by their supervisors. They took some of the best and brightest people who just joined the government and laid them off, the researcher says.Many predict legal challenges will arise. An officer at the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3403 union, which represents scientists at the NSF among others, says that it is assessing all legal options to address the reckless firing of federal workers.Demonstrators attend a protest against U.S. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's DOGE cuts to medical research and higher education during a "Fund Don't Freeze" rally outside the Health and Human Services headquarters in Washington, D.C., on February 19, 2025.Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty ImagesMeanwhile, Trumps team upended biomedical research when it announced on 7 February an NIH policy that would slash billions of dollars of funding annually for US universities, hospitals and other research institutions. The policy would cut research-overhead costs from an average of about 40% to a flat 15% rate for research grants. The costs cover electricity, waste removal and other facility fees, as well as administrative expenses, and are added on top of grant money dedicated to lab equipment, reagents and researcher salaries. The policy is currently on hold, pending the outcome of lawsuits contending that it is illegal.Trumps actions have even sparked worry among some conventional US conservatives. Rather than using fear and intimidation, the administration should be engaging in discussion to, say, reform the NIH and encourage scientists at the agency to take more risks, says Anthony Mills, who heads the Center for Technology, Science, and Energy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Washington DC. I worry that the opportunity for constructive reform will get lost in all of this chaos, Mills says.Month two and beyondPolicy specialists who spoke to Nature say that there is more to come. Many of the policies rolled out during the first month of Trump 2.0 track with proposals put forth in Project 2025, a blueprint organized by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think-tank in Washington DC. Trump officially disavowed that document during his presidential campaign, but many of its authors have now joined his administration.The document also calls for slashing climate research at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and privatizing many meteorological services offered by the US National Weather Service. Project 2025 also says that the US Department of Energy should halt investments in clean-energy technologies and focus instead on basic science. The document cites quantum information sciences and artificial intelligence as examples of this type of science.More cuts to the federal workforce are also probably coming. Project 2025 calls for an overhaul of the rules governing the civil service, which is composed of government workers including scientists who were hired on the basis of expertise rather than being politically appointed. The Trump administration is reportedly crafting a regulation that could make it easier to fire many of those workers.Massive budget cuts for science agencies are likely on the horizon, too. Final negotiations over this years budget are under way in the Republican-dominated US Congress, and a new budgetary process will soon kick off for 2026. The question is, how much of the budget will be cut? According to Jennifer Zeitzer, who leads the public-affairs office at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Rockville, Maryland, Anything is possible.Science impacts: one month of Trump 2.0January 20: Trumps Day 1 executive ordersKey orders announced that the United States would pull out of the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization. Others targeted the federal workforce for deep cuts, froze foreign aid and sought to eliminate diversity programmes, funding and efforts across the US government.January 21: NIH activities suspendedAn extensive pause on external communications by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)s parent organization, the US Department of Health and Human Services, led the NIH to suspend research-grant review panels, travel and training.January 27: Freeze on all federal grantsA memo from the US Office of Management and Budget froze all federal funds, which amounted to trillions in US dollars. A judge temporarily halted the freeze the next day, but some US agencies, including the US National Science Foundation (NSF), continued to hold funds.January 31: CDC databases disappear and papers are censoredComplying with Trumps executive orders on diversity and on replacing gender terminology, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) took down webpages, including those about HIV statistics and teenage health. And it ordered its scientists to withdraw all manuscripts under review at scientific journals to scrub gender-related terms. Following a court order on 11 February, the websites were temporarily restored.February 2: NSF unfreezes funds, scrutinizes grantsThe NSF unfroze funding in response to a 28 January court order but, Nature learnt, continued to scour grants for potential violations of Trumps executive orders, flagging grants that contained words such as women.February 6: Global health efforts imperiledFollowing the freeze on foreign aid, officials at the US Agency for International Development were notified that the Trump administration planned to reduce its workforce from more than 10,000 employees to about 290, threatening efforts to combat diseases such as AIDS and malaria. On 13 February, a US judge temporarily ordered that the aid funding be unfrozen.February 7: Cuts to NIH research overhead funding announcedThe NIH issued a notice that it would slash funding for indirect costs, which pay for electricity, waste-removal, administrative fees and other necessities at US research institutions. It proposed cutting the rate from an average of around 40% to 15%, which would have cut billions from the agencys budget. Before the policy took effect on 10 February, a judge temporarily halted the policy change.February 14: Layoffs at US science agencies beginThousands of employees at agencies such as the NIH, the CDC, the NSF and the US Environmental Protection Agency started to receive notice of termination as part of the Trump administrations effort to reshape and reduce the federal workforce. The employees were probationary, typically meaning that they had been in their jobs for less than two years, although some had just been promoted or switched departmentsThis article is reproduced with permission and was first published on February 20, 2025.

February 20, 20254 min readNational Science Foundation Mass Firings Go Beyond Trump's Orders, Sparking OutrageAt an emotional meeting, NSF officials announced layoffs for about 10 percent of their workforce and warned of more firings to comeBy Corbin Hiar & E&E News National Science Foundation headquarters shown outside Washington. JHVEPhoto/Alamy Stock PhotoCLIMATEWIRE | The National Science Foundation went beyond the staff cuts demanded by the Trump administration in a move that set off a frenzied backlash at the science funding agency.NSF fired about 10 percent of its staff at the end of Tuesday, removing 168 people who included most of the agency's probationary employees and all of its experts, a class of contract workers who are specialists in niche scientific fields.The agency didn't have to fire its experts but decided to in the interest of fairness, a top NSF official told staffers in an emotionally charged hybrid meeting Tuesday morning at its Alexandria, Virginia, headquarters.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today."The removal of experts was completely at the agency's discretion. Because if we're asked to remove probationers, then we also need to remove at-will employees," Micah Cheatham, NSF's chief management officer, said at the tense and tearful hour-long meeting, according to a transcript obtained by POLITICO's E&E News."This is the first of many forthcoming workforce reductions," he added.NSF was created by Congress in 1950 to ensure U.S. leadership in science and engineering. The agency now provides roughly a quarter of federal support to America's colleges and universities for basic research.E&E News previously reported that NSF expects to cut up to half of its 1,500-person workforce. Scientists and Democratic lawmakers fear that staff losses of that scale could effectively break the nation's research and innovation pipeline, with disastrous consequences for the U.S. economy and American citizens.The mass firing at one of the nation's leading funders of scientific research comes as Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency established by President Donald Trump, races to slash federal spending with the help of the Office of Personnel Management. Musk's group has initially targeted foreign aid and racial diversity efforts, but nearly all agencies have been impacted by cuts, or expect them to come soon.A few probationary employees whose work NSF leaders determined was essential were spared from the firings."We asked who was mission critical and more than half of people were identified," Cheatham said. "That was too many."Fired NSF staffers were instructed to stop working by 1 p.m. Tuesday, at which point they would be locked out of the agency's computer network. They had until the end of the day to clean out their desks.To avoid having the stain of a firing on their resumes, staffers were told they could resign. But then they would not be eligible for unemployment payments.The announcement prompted outrage, confusion and concern from people at the meeting, resulting in a string of scathing all-staff emails from impacted workers."You are presenting us as trophies in front of OPM," one angry employee said in the meeting, referring to the Office of Personnel Management, according to the transcript. "I don't want to hear anything about how you are sad, how you feel bad for everyone who's losing their job today.""You screwed people, hardworking people, who trusted the word of this agency, left their careers, wherever they came from," they added. "That's on all of you. Take some accountability."An NSF official apologized to the fired workers, noting that they were "following orders" from the Trump administration.The White House and OPM didn't respond to requests for comment.NSF spokesperson Mike England said its actions were taken to ensure their compliance with the presidents DOGE executive order and thanked the dismissed employees for their service to NSF and their contributions to advance the agency mission.Another fired worker warned that they were responsible for "literally tens of millions of dollars" and an 80-person grant review panel set to meet in the coming weeks. "My email is going to go dead at one o'clock and they're going to say, where's that guy?"After the meeting, staffers began sending agencywide emails reviewed by E&E News that sharply criticized NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan and other top officials."If NSF's top leadership has any dignity, they should resign immediately!" a business operations manager wrote. "At this point, witnessing the cowardliness at the top, NSF is serving no one!""The Director couldnt even show up to the 10 AM firing call held for all of us," an impacted program director said.In a statement accusing Musk and Trump of damaging the nation's competitiveness, Democrats on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee added to the pile-on."We are extremely disappointed in NSF leadership," said Reps. Haley Stevens of Michigan and Zoe Lofgren of California, the committees ranking member. "They have failed American science by not standing up to [the Department of Government Efficiency] and protecting their employees. Dr. Panchanathan must reverse these firings."Reporter Chelsea Harvey contributed.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

February 20, 20253 min readMicrosoft Claims Quantum-Computing Breakthroughbut Some Physicists Are SkepticalWith its topological quantum computers, Microsoft aims to reach useful scales faster than competing technologiesBy Davide Castelvecchi & Nature magazine Microsoft has unveiled its Majorana 1 quantum chip. John Brecher for MicrosoftMicrosoft has announced that it has created the first topological qubits a way of storing quantum information that the firm hopes will underpin a new generation of quantum computers. Machines based on topology are expected to be easier to build at scale than competing technologies, because they should better protect the information from noise. But some researchers are sceptical of the companys claims.The announcement came in a 19 February press release containing few technical details but Microsoft says it has disclosed some of its data to selected specialists in a meeting at its research centre in Santa Barbara, California. Would I bet my life that theyre seeing what they think theyre seeing? No, but it looks pretty good, says Steven Simon, a theoretical physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, who was briefed on the results.At the same time, the company published intermediate results but not the proof of the existence of topological qubits on 19 February in Nature.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Superconducting wireTopological states are collective states of the electrons in a material that are resistant to noise, much like how two links in a chain can be shifted or rotated around each other while remaining connected.The Nature paper describes experiments on a superconducting nanowire device made of indium arsenide. The ultimate goal is to host two topological states called Majorana quasiparticles, one at each end of the device. Because electrons in a superconductor are paired, an extra, unpaired electron will be introduced, forming an excited state. This electron exists in a delocalized state, which is shared between the two Majorana quasiparticles.The paper reports measurements suggesting that the nanowire does indeed harbour an extra electron. These tests do not, by themselves guarantee that the nanowire hosts two Majorana quasiparticles, the authors warn.According to the press release, the team has carried out follow-up experiments in which they paired two nanowires and put them in a superposition of two states one with the extra electron in the first nanowire, and the other with the electron in the second nanowire. Weve built a qubit and shown that you can not only measure parity in two parallel wires, but a measurement that bridges the two wires, says Microsoft researcher Chetan Nayak.Theres no slam dunk to know immediately from the experiment that the qubits are made of topological states, says Simon. (A claim of having created Majorana states, made by a Microsoft-funded team based in Delft, the Netherlands, was retracted in 2021.) The ultimate proof will come if the devices perform as expected once they are scaled up, he adds.Early announcementSome researchers are critical of the companys choice to publicly announce the creation of a qubit without releasing detailed evidence. If you have some new results not connected to this paper, why dont you wait until you have enough material for a separate publication?" says Daniel Loss, a physicist at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Without seeing the extra data from the qubit operation, there is not much one can comment, says Georgios Katsaros, a physicist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria in Klosterneuburg.We are committed to open publication of our research results in a timely manner while also protecting the companys IP [intellectual property], says Nayak.Microsoft has also shared a roadmap for scaling up its topological machines and demonstrating that they can perform quantum calculations2. Vincent Mourik, a physicist at the Helmholtz Research Centre in Jlich, Germany, whose concerns helped to lead to the earlier retraction, is sceptical of the whole concept. At a fundamental level, the approach of building a quantum computer based on topological Majorana qubits as it is pursed by Microsoft is not going to work.As we perform more types of measurements, it will become harder to explain our results with non-topological models, says Nayak. There may not be one single moment when everyone will be convinced. But non-topological explanations will require more and more fine-tuning.This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on February 19, 2025.

February 20, 20255 min readSurprising Chimpanzee Signal Reveals Secrets of Ape CommunicationA rare and deliberate signal between a mother chimpanzee and her daughter raises new questions about ape communication, culture and the meaning of sharing a languageBy Avery Schuyler Nunn edited by Sarah Lewin FrasierA mother chimpanzee, Beryl, sits by her infant, Lindsay, in a remote forest in Uganda. Kevin C. LeeAn hours drive down a ragged dirt road, deep in the heart of Ugandas Kibale National Park, a small research camp sits in the middle of chimpanzee territory. Tangled vines drape ancient trees in the semi deciduous forest, and equatorial sunsets ignite the sky, savannas, lakes and misty mountain peaks in molten gold and ember red. For the primatologists stationed here, mornings begin with a map of yesterdays chimp movements, a tally of fruiting treesand an ear tuned to the forest. The apes calls start early with low, rolling pant-hoots that ripple through the canopy. On some days the chimps are close by. On others the researchers search for them for hours, winding through the Ngogo chimpanzee communitys home range of 35 square kilometers (an area about half the size of Manhattan), on a grid of well-worn trails.On one such morning in 2019, a few researchers spotted something curious: Lindsay, a chimpanzee around two years old, reached forward from her mother Beryls back to cover the older chimps only eye. At first, it seemed like a fleeting moment of play. But the scientists would later learn that Beryl, who moved attentively through the undergrowth with occasional pauses, responded the same way each timeby stepping forward. Within a few years, the gesture had clearly become an intentional lets get moving! signal. Again and again, she would lay her fingers over Beryls eye; each time, her mother would move forward.Chimpanzee Beryl and her infant, Lindsay, perform their hand-on-eye gesture.Kevin C. LeeOn supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.What may have started as Lindsays simple, spontaneous attempt to get her mothers attentionby blocking Beryls already limited visionbecame a ritualized and regularly used signal, a form of shared meaning akin to a secret handshake or inside joke. Among the Ngogo chimpanzees, researchers are coming to realize that such behaviors arent random quirks but part of a growing picture of how apes develop and transmit culture.This is fascinating from a [scientific] literature perspective because there had been no prior record of this gesture, says Bas van Boekholt, a primatologist now at the University of Zurich, who led a recent study in Animal Cognition to decipher the actions meaning. During his second field season at Ngogo in 2022, van Boekholt was reviewing video footage from his field assistant when he first noticed Lindsays hand-on-eye behavior. Among nonhuman primates, previous examples of gestures that were unique to particular individuals had only been documented in captive environments, he says. We havent had convincing evidence that they occur in the wild, van Boekholt adds.Lindsay covers Beryls eye.Bas van BoekholtCurious whether others had observed Lindsay making the same gesture, van Boekholt reached out to fellow researchers and field assistants. Isabelle Clark, a biological anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, recalled being among those who spotted the behavior as early as 2019. This is a big deal because this gesture isnt part of the common chimp repertoire. Its not in our chimp gesture dictionary, so to speak, she explains. Its a rare and compelling example of how gestures might be learned rather than hardwired. Im sure there are subtle, unrecorded ones between closely bonded individuals, but this one stood out; it was so striking and even a little funny.To investigate further, researchers from various field seasons conducted a collaborative quantitative analysis of 179 videos of Lindsay and Beryl that included 21 instances in which Lindsay used the gesture. Young chimps are known to be playful while riding on their mothers back, so the scientists scrutinized Lindsays behavior for markers of intentionality. Was she simply brushing her mothers eye by accident? The data suggested otherwise.Van Boekholts team also reviewed more than 1,020 video clips of 12 other mother-child pairs within the Ngogo community and found no evidence of the gesture occurring among themexcept for three isolated instances in which other chimps performed it just once, without the same intentionality markers present in Lindsay and Beryls interactions.Infants do play around on their mothers backs and sometimes touch their mothers eyes, but its different; theres no clear intent or consistent outcome, van Boekholt says. Maybe if we analyzed another 1,200 clips, wed find more cases, but at this point, we feel confident in saying this is an idiosyncratic gesture.Chimpanzees Lindsay and her mother, Beryl, in 2019.Kevin C. LeeClark, who specializes in social behavior development in juvenile and adolescent chimpanzees, says that chimps exhibit foundational elements of symbolic communicationhumans ability to create limitless symbols for different meaningsand that gestures like Lindsays could be the building blocks of eventual humanlike communication.There are multiple theories on how gestures develop in primates, particularly great apes, van Boekholt says. Tracking their development over a lifetime offers clues about the evolution of language and communication.The researchers note that if the hand-on-eye gesture exists in other chimpanzee communities, it likely carries a different meaning there. Cat Hobaiter, a primatologist and a field scientist, who was not involved in the study, cautions against drawing broad conclusions from a single chimpanzee group. Its like trying to describe human civilization after only visiting Paris, Shanghai, and Auckland, she says. Just as customs and traditions differ across human cultures, gestures among chimpanzees can vary widely; a signal of reassurance in one group might mean something entirely different, or nothing at all, in another.For instance, the long-recognized and well-documented gesture of leaf clippingin which a chimpanzee tears a leaf with its teethvaries in meaning across chimp communities. In some groups, leaf clippings distinctive sound serves as a mating call, while in others, it signals frustration or an alpha males display of dominance.Ape communication researchers have long debated whether gestures and signals such as these are innate or learned through social context and experience. Many scientists now recognize that while gestures may have biological roots, their meanings are shaped by social and environmental dynamics.Beryl and Lindsay on the move.Kevin C. LeeThe development of Lindsays gesture, Hobaiter explains, suggests that apeslike humanshave the capacity to form particular shared uses of a signal. It doesnt necessarily mean that it was created by them from scratch, she says. For instance, a baby chimp could see a gesture in another context and adapt it to have a new meaning.Hobaiter cautions against overemphasizing uniqueness at the expense of a broader insight: the more we observe, the more depth we see in ape cultures. Chimpanzees and bonobos share nearly 99 percent of their DNA with humans. And their traditions, social learning and communication reveal a continuum rather than a sharp divide between us and other great apes.Van Boekholt has returned to Uganda, where he is once again studying the mother-daughter duo. Lindsay, who is old enough to walk independently, still clings to her motherand continues to use the gesture. Van Boekholt suspects Beryl may be pregnant, and he is eager to see whether Lindsays potential future sibling will adopt the gesture and thus turn it into a family tradition. If social learning plays a role, he notes, the gesture is likely to persist. Any parent of a newborn understands the private language they share with their childmeanings that others would never recognize. Now were seeing a similar phenomenon unfold in the wild, he explains. For Lindsay, logically, blocking her mothers vision seems counterintuitive, the last thing shed want to do. Yet, for some reason, [Lindsay and Beryl have] created this shared meaning between them, and I think thats just really wonderful.Lindsay covers Beryl's eye.Kevin C. Lee

February 18, 20254 min readCity Killer Asteroids Earth Impact Risk Rises to Highest Ever RecordedAsteroid 2024 YR4 has a 3.1 percent chance of hitting Earth, astronomers saybut theres no need to panic yetBy Lee Billings edited by Dean VisserThe asteroid 2024 YR4 probably wont come nearly as close to Earth anytime soon as the space rock in this artists illustration. But astronomers cant yet rule out a potentially catastrophic encounter projected for December 2032. Alejandro Miranda/Alamy Stock PhotoA city killersized asteroid called 2024 YR4, which had been discovered swooping uncomfortably near Earth last December, now has an estimated 3.1 percent chance of striking our planet during another close encounter in late 2032, space scientists announced on Tuesday. The escalation makes this sizable space rock the most threatening ever forecasted to impact Earth, although the prospect for catastrophe remains relatively slim: the chance for a direct hit is now one in 32.This is the highest impact probability we have seen for an asteroid of this size or larger, says Davide Farnocchia, an impact hazard expert at the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). But Farnocchia notes that 2024 YR4s superlative status is unlikely to last. The impact probability might change by the time you write this up, he says.First spotted by a specialized asteroid-alert telescope in Chile on December 27 last year, 2024 YR4 didnt enter the limelight until a month later, when preliminary assessments of its orbit showed the 40- to 100-meter-wide object had a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with our world on December 22, 2032. The risk corridor stretches from the eastern Pacific Ocean to South Asia, cutting across vast, people-free stretches of sea and desertbut also massive population centers, including Bogot, Colombia, Lagos, Nigeria, and Mumbai, India. Theres even a vanishingly small chance that the incoming space rock could strike the moon.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.If there is a collision with Earth, whether the asteroid breaks apart in our planets skies or punches a crater into the surface, the immediate effects could resemble a detonating hydrogen bomb, unleashing enough localized devastation to destroy any unlucky metropolis in the way.Its no wonder, then, that the subsequent intermittent upticks to 2024 YR4s impact odds have concerned astronomersas well as the increasingly befuddled public. How could scientists be so uncertain about this space rocks set course around the sun? Why dont they seem very worried about the rising odds that it will hit us? And whats taking them so long to discern the true danger (if there is any)?The simple answer is that pinning down an objects orbit gets easier the longer you look at it, and astronomers havent yet had enough time and opportunity to do that for 2024 YR4. The asteroid is now zooming away from us and has already become too faint in Earths skies for most telescopes to see. But it is still being regularly monitored by multiple large observatories. A team of astronomers will use the keen infrared eyes of NASAs James Webb Space Telescope to further constrain estimates of the asteroids size and trajectory in early Marchand again in early May, just before it dwindles from view (until its orbit brings it close to Earth again in 2028).The relative scarcity of data points lies behind the fluctuating risk assessment, which, until yesterday, had pegged the asteroids probability of impact at 2.6 percent. This boost came from two effects, Farnocchia says: Februarys full moon prevented precise observations for about a week, followed by an influx of fresh data from two facilities (the Magdalena Ridge Observatory in New Mexico and the Nordic Optical Telescope on La Palma, part of Spains Canary Islands, both of which renewed their tracking on February 15). Independent number crunching on all those data occurs at three separate facilities worldwide: NASAs Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at JPL, which is in California, plus the European Space Agencys (ESAs) Near-Earth Objects Coordination Center and the Near Earth Objects Dynamics Site (run by the private company SpaceDyS), which are both in Italy. So far, all three centers have reached the same general conclusions, showing a low but steadily increasing chance of impact.Still, for now I would not be worried, says Detlef Koschny, a planetary scientist at the Technical University of Munich, who, on behalf of ESA, chairs the United Nationsaffiliated Space Mission Planning Advisory Group (SMPAG)an organization tasked with coordinating global responses to asteroid threats. As the uncertainty reduces, the probability for it to cross our planet actually increasesuntil the uncertainty area doesnt cross our planet at all. Imagine 2024 YR4 as a bullet fired down a shooting range and Earth as the bulls-eye on a paper target. An initial projection might forecast the bullet hitting anywhere on the paper, but as the projectile flies downrange, a better estimate predicts that it will hit somewhere in the targets center. The bulls-eye (Earth) will occupy a larger area of this smaller region, and its calculated chance of being struck will rise, even if the bullet (asteroid) is actually off target.This is what happened with Apophis, the previous record-setting potentially hazardous asteroid. After its discovery in 2004, forecasters projected a possible collision with Earth in 2029. Over a few months the probability peaked at 2.7 percent, only to plummet to 0 percent after sufficient further observations. In all likelihood, within months 2024 YR4s rising impact probability will prove to be a similar false alarm (which is perhaps why astronomers so far have stubbornly refused to bestow it with a catchier name). In the meantime, you can call it what you likeand safely ignore ebbs and flows of its odds for catastrophe.The orbit of 2024 YR4 is already certain enough that nobody really reacts to the day-to-day changes, says Timothy Spahr, an astronomer who manages the International Asteroid Warning Network. Yes, the probability [of impact] can change, but in order to really drill down beyond a few percent, well need to increase the observational arc another 30-plus days. The process can seem a little tedious, he admits. But by the time the asteroid fades to black later this year, astronomers should know much more about how worried everyone should be.If 2024 YR4s forecast is still ominous by then, let alone by its next approach in 2028, preventive measures for 2032 may be in order. These could range from evacuating areas in the risk corridor to launching high-stakes space missions to nudge the asteroid off its collision courseor even to blast it to bits. But given that continued observations are likely to rule out the possible impact, Farnocchia concludes, its still premature to talk seriously about deflecting 2024 YR4for now anyway.Additional reporting by Meghan Bartels.

February 19, 20254 min readFEMA Firings Hit Agency Already Suffering Staffing ShortagesAfter firing 200 first-year employees this weekend, FEMA was directed "to make a list" of anyone who worked on climate or equityBy Thomas Frank & E&E News Members of the FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Task Force search a flood-damaged area with a search canine in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene along the Swannanoa River on Oct. 4, 2024, in Asheville, North Carolina. Mario Tama/Getty ImagesCLIMATEWIRE | The Trump administration has fired hundreds of Federal Emergency Management Agency employees and is now targeting staff involved with climate change, equity or diversity, according to interviews and emails obtained by POLITICOs E&E News.After firing probationary employees over Presidents Day weekend, FEMA is being directed to come up with employee reductions far beyond the probationary list, a top FEMA official wrote in an internal email sent recently to senior agency staff.Direction is to make a list of anyone who worked on or works on climate, environmental justice, equity, DEIA, the email reads, referring to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility. The email obtained by E&E News was cropped to not include the name of the sender.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The firings could impair an agency that has faced chronic staffing shortages amid intensifying disasters and heightened scrutiny. FEMA employees were so overwhelmed in October responding to severe hurricane damage in six states that the agency was forced to seek help from other federal agencies.The next time theres a major catastrophic event that requires extensive manpower, FEMAs going to be at a disadvantage, said Michael Coen, the agencys chief of staff in the Biden administration.FEMA confirmed to E&E News that it had fired more than 200 employees and that other agencies in the Department of Homeland Security had fired another 200.Under President Trumps leadership, we are making sweeping cuts and reform across the federal government to eliminate egregious waste and incompetence that has been happening for decades at the expense of the American taxpayer, a DHS spokesperson said in a statement. They said the firings will cut roughly $50 million in personnel costs.The department said it fired non-mission critical personnel in probationary status and is actively identifying other wasteful positions and offices that do not fulfill DHS mission.President Donald Trump has assailed FEMA since taking office, suggesting he might shut down the agency, targeting its response to Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and creating a review council led by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.The upcoming firings could have a broad reach because under then-President Joe Biden, FEMA emphasized climate change and equity.This will impact the majority of our staff, the FEMA email says, noting that climate and equity were prioritized in the latest agency strategic plan, released in 2022 and recently removed from FEMAs website.FEMA leadership will "compile the names of ALL employees that worked on these topics," according to the email, written by a member of FEMA's senior executive service. The official wrote that the agency will make a distinction between employees with "significant involvement" in the targeted programs and those with "insignificant involvement.""I know this feels like a shock to many of you and is an exceedingly difficult task," the official wrote in the email.The firings put a lot of really important programs on life support, a former senior FEMA official said. If you care about government efficiency, you dont indiscriminately fire. You focus on honing your capabilities to be more efficient.The upcoming firings appear likely to target FEMAs resilience directorate, which includes the agencys grant programs and flood insurance program. FEMA has three other directorates including the Office of Response and Recovery, which deals with immediate disaster response.'Collateral damage'On Monday, FEMA sent emails with the subject line Termination Notice to more than 200 probationary employees in agency offices around the country.Your position with the Federal Emergency Management Agency will end on Tuesday, February 18, 2025, an email obtained by E&E News says.The email notes that after the Office of Personnel Management received a list on Jan. 24 of FEMA probationary employees, a decision was reached that it is not in the best interest of the government to retain you in your current role.Thank you for your contributions furthering the FEMA mission of helping people before, during, and after disasters, the email concludes.The fired employees worked full-time jobs in FEMA headquarters and its 10 regional offices. The FEMA employees who respond on the ground to disasters reservists who are called up as needed were not targeted.The targeting of probationary employees resulted in the dismissal of senior FEMA employees with significant roles.Christopher Page, who had worked at FEMA since 2011, mostly as a lawyer, was fired Monday because he had changed positions recently inside the agency and was on probationary status in his new job.Its weird to spend nearly 15 years dedicated to public service, a decade of which I spent working specifically in the flood insurance space, and then get terminated for being a new employee, Page wrote Monday on his LinkedIn page. Page led a team that worked to improve public access to FEMAs flood insurance program, which covers 4.7 million properties.David Maurstad, a FEMA veteran who ran the insurance program before retiring in July, called Pages firing a travesty.Chris was among the finest I worked with, Maurstad, a former Republican lieutenant governor of Nebraska, wrote on LinkedIn. I hope everyone truly understands what collateral damage looks like.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

February 18, 2025The Air around Us Is Full of LifeJournalist Carl Zimmer chats about aerobiology and his new book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific AmericanSUBSCRIBE TO Science Quickly[CLIP: Theme music]Rachel Feltman: For Scientific Americans Science Quickly, Im Rachel Feltman.You probably dont spend too much time thinking about the air you breatheat least relative to the amount of time you spend actually breathing it, which, unless you do a lot of free diving, should be pretty much always.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.But theres a whole lot going on in every inhalation and exhalation. Here to tell us more is science journalist Carl Zimmer. Hes the author of a new book called Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe.Thanks so much for coming on to chat today, Carl.Carl Zimmer: Thanks for having me.Feltman: Lets start with an overview of the book. Would you tell us a little bit about it?Zimmer: When I was reporting on the COVID pandemic at the New York Times, like a lot of my colleagues, one of the most puzzling things about it was that there was this long, drawn-out argument about how COVID spread ...Feltman: Hmm.Zimmer: And the consensus now is that COVIDs airborne, but at the time there was a lot of back and forth about that. And it seemed to me, like to other reporters, this shouldnt be that hard to figure out.Wondering about that and talking to scientists about just why this was such a fraught subject took me down a long history in a field thats known as aerobiologyin other words, the life of the air. And I realized that the answer to this question is actually one that goes back centuries and involves all sorts of remarkable scientists that, in a lot of cases, people have forgotten about and may have never heard of. But I think, really, to understand the COVID pandemic and future pandemics, we really need to understand this world of floating life that surrounds us.Feltman: And how has our understanding of the relationship between air and disease changed through history?Zimmer: If you go back to, say, Hippocrates, an ancient Greek doctor, he would have talked about many diseases in terms of the air, except that he would refer to miasmas.  And that carried this sense that there was something tainted in the airthere was some sort of corruption. It was almost like a religious sense to the word originally.And so, really, for centuries many doctors would claim that somehow the air would get corrupted and if you breathed in this corrupt air, you would get sick, and they would try to explain all sorts of diseases this way. And so, you know, malaria, which we know is caused by a parasite that lives in mosquitoes and they pass on to us in their bites, the very word refers to bad air.Feltman: Hmm.Zimmer: And there was a movement among some naturalists to say, Theres actually all these invisible things, these microorganisms around us. They could see them in the 1600s in their microscopes, and they started arguing that maybe these were the cause of disease. But this was very, very much a minority opinion for a very long time. Even in the late 1800s, when we think of the germ theory of disease really rising up, miasma was going strong, and lots of people would believe that, you know, a disease like cholera or, or typhoid, it was just because of the air.Feltman: Mm.Zimmer: And that thing switched very quickly around 1900. We started to recognize that, well, actually, you know, germs are causing a lot of these diseases. And a lot of public health experts were like, Well, we dont have to worry about the air. Lets keep the water clean. Lets keep food clean. Lets be careful about direct contact and people coughing at each other. But why would we worry about the air?It took a long time for people to start to recognize that, no, actually, the germs can travel remarkably long distances through the air as well. In fact, the air is remarkably full of living things, which we breathe in with every breath.Feltman: Thats so interesting. I love how much we sort of accidentally got almost right before germ theory, but I hadnt realized before checking out your book that we sort of backtracked a little bit [laughs] when it came to airborne diseases.Zimmer: We have an image of science as a march of progress forward and ...Feltman: Mm.Zimmer: Ignorance is continually being trumped by knowledgethats not really how the history of science works ...Feltman: Sure.Zimmer: In fact, people are coming up with ideas all the time, theyre fighting with each other, and you can go back in history and you can find certain people who are doing experiments and making claims that today look spot-on, but their colleagues at the time had a lot of reasons to think like, No, this doesnt seem right.Louis Pasteur, for example, he did this extraordinary thing where he took these flasks full of sterile broth and he would wander around outside to prove that there were germs floating in the air. At the time no one thought that. He would go in a courtyard in Paris, and boom, there are germs there. He would go to a, a farm; he would collect some germs there. He even went to the top of a glacier, which is a pretty amazing thing to think about: Pasteur as glacier climber. He never even liked to, really, leave his lab.When he brought all this data back to Paris and started saying, like, Folks, the air is full of invisible, floating germs, you know, there was a journalist who said, This world, you want to lead us into is just too fantastic to believe.Thats actually one of the fascinating things to me is, is, just how twisty the course of science can be and a lot of chance history can steer things off in strange directions. Even biological warfare basically stole a lot of these ideas of aerobiology and diverted the whole science in a major way for decades. I think theres a lot that we dont know because aerobiologists were too busy for years and years and years trying to build anthrax bombs.Feltman: Right, could you tell us some more about that? I thought that was such an interesting part of the book.Zimmer: It was really fascinating to see just how intimately connected biological warfare is with the science of aerobiology. You literally have some of the architects of aerobiology, the people who would take planes in the 1930s into the air and catch fungal spores, they were then asked in World War II by the U.S. government to help them think about how they could actually create weapons from those same airborne organisms. So you could imagine: Lets take these fungal spores that can wipe out a wheat field, lets pack them all into a bomb, and lets go drop them on our enemy. There were projects being developed at Camp Detrick in Maryland for destroying lots of other crops.In addition, a lot of the pioneering work on human diseases that could be spread through the air, potentially, got used as the basis to develop weapons such as anthrax bombs, weapons that would be based on very obscure diseases ...Feltman: Mm.Zimmer: Things like parrot fever, which we havent heard about, but they were testing it out at Camp Detrick. And then after World War II, in secret, a lot of this research kept carrying on on an even bigger scale. And its not like the United States was alone in this; the Soviet Union had a gigantic program, which actually got even bigger after they signed a treaty with the United States in the 1970s, supposedly to ban these things.So in a way some of the best evidence that airborne diseases are a danger come from this research into, actually, building biological weapons.Feltman: Wow. What are some other surprising things you learned when working on the book?Zimmer: At first I thought I would be learning a lot about the dangers of indoor air because that was really the issue during the pandemic. Its like, if you are in a poorly ventilated space and ...Feltman: Sure.Zimmer: People are breathing, if somebodys got COVID, that could really increase your risk of getting sick as well cause youd inhale these tiny droplets. But then, you know, I was really surprised at just how widely the aerobiome, if you will, affects our lives. We sort of take it for granted that pollen, for example, floats in the air. If you really think about it, thats a pretty extraordinary adaptation that these plants that are stuck in the ground have made. They can figure out basically how to have sex through the air. Their pollen grains are beautifully evolved, adapted, to being able to soar along and, eventually find another member of their species.When you start to think about the air this wayas this avenue for all sorts of different life to do its thingsome of them make us sick, but a lot of that life is, is just life [laughs]. And, you know, even when you look at the, the clouds, you need to understand that the clouds have bacteria in them, huge numbers of bacteria. Theyre not as dense as they are in the soil, but its still a remarkable thing that bacteria are able to survive and maybe even grow in the clouds. Its possible that they may be able to withstand the really stressful conditions inside a cloud and feed and maybe even grow very slowly. And then they get rained down on us. Sometimes they have antibiotic-resistance genes in them. So we can literally have antibiotic-resistance genes raining down out of the sky on us.Feltman: Wow.Zimmer: Its a different way of thinking about the world.Feltman: Given everything youve learned, what do you think are the most pressing questions in the field of aerobiology right now?Zimmer: Its gonna be really fascinating to see scientists really try to create a global picture of the aerobiome cause they really dont have that yet. We have these little glimpses here and there: plane goes up here; you send up a balloon over here; you, you try to catch things on the top of a building over here. Its possible that there are a number of human diseases that are being caused by, perhaps, fungal spores or other organisms that are traveling literally across oceans ...Feltman: Mm.Zimmer: Theres some tantalizing evidence of that. But until we get a global picture of the aerobiome, those are gonna stay mysterious.And Id say the other main thing that we have to do is really, actually, not just scientists, but, you know, the community at large has to really recognize what weve been through with COVID.Feltman: Mm.Zimmer: In other words, we have dealt with a pathogen that does very well spreading through the air. And there are a lot of lessons to be learned from that, and we need to learn them because we might very well encounter another pathogen that is also good at that.A number of the scientists who have been really arguing strenuously that we have to recognize airborne infection have been making a lot of proposals. Buildings, they argue, have to be mandated to be well-ventilated, to bring in fresh air, because thats one of the most important ways to reduce your risk of getting sick, not just with pandemics but with other airborne things that we deal with every day. Maybe in some places we need ultraviolet light; maybe in other places air purifiers will do the job. Basically, this has to be our priorityin the same way that we keep our water free of pathogens, we need to do the same for the air.Feltman: I wanna circle back to COVID. You mentioned earlier how fraught the discussion around COVIDs airborne transmission was. Why is it that that was such a complicated, drawn-out discussion? And it feels like even once it was very clear that COVID was airborne there was a lot of talking around it in the public health world. Why is that?Zimmer: I think that a part of it was tradition ...Feltman: Mm.Zimmer: In other words there was a long tradition in the public health world [of] considering close contact as being your kind of default explanation for how diseases spread. There were just a handful of diseases that the public health community acknowledged, Yeah, this is probably airborne. Tuberculosis, for example. But in my book, I write about how, just to get that one disease really sorted out as truly being airborne took a small group of scientists a huge amount of work.In fact, one of the heroes of my book, William Firth Wells, he tried for 15 years to try to run this experiment, and people just shrugged, like, Eh, why do we need to do this? And he actually died in the middle of the experiment. So its really quite tragic that it took all that work for just one disease ...Feltman: Mm.Zimmer: And then there were measles and so on. But really I would say the default was, for most diseases, even a respiratory disease: Keep your distance, dont let people cough on you, and youll be fine.It was just a different way of thinking about diseaselike, Well, maybe, actually, these are spreading like smoke. They can drift around invisibly, and you just dont see em, and youre inhaling them. It was going to be a big shift to acknowledge this because in order to prevent disease spreading through the air, you cant just keep your distance or wear a, a flimsy mask ...Feltman: Mm-hmm.Zimmer: You have to take some serious alternative measures.I think that clash between, you know, public health workers who had this century-long tradition of really not seeing the air as being that important meeting up with a lot of outsidersphysicists, atmospheric scientistswho looked at these public health measures and said, These dont make sense. This doesnt work with the physics. That was, you know, a real clash of cultures.Feltman: And what lessons do you think we really need to take away from COVID-19 when it comes to air?Zimmer: We have to be aware that when we are breathing we are taking a little sample of this huge living atmosphere that surrounds us. And sometimes that means that we might be at risk of an infection, maybe an infection with a pathogen weve never dealt with before, and we have to recognize that risk because weve had over 20 million people die of COVID and a lot of them probably inhaled the virus.At the same time we have to start asking some deeper questions, too. A lot of the living things that we breathe are not harmful to us. Could they even be beneficial to us? Could we have a relationship with the aerobiome? Maybe, according to some studies, this might be part of how our immune system learns to tolerate living things that arent gonna make us sick. Maybe that means that we dont simply just try to eradicate everything. How do we find that balance? Theres so much science left to be done to answer that question.[CLIP: Theme music]Feltman: Thank you so much for, for joining us to chat about the book. Im sure a lot of our listeners will enjoy it.Zimmer: I hope they do. Thanks so much for having me.Feltman: Thats all for todays episode. Dont forget to check out Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, which comes out on February 25.Well be back on Friday to learn why human hair comes in so many different shapes and colors.Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. See you next time!

February 19, 20254 min readTrumps DEI Purge Is Hitting NASA HardSpace scientists within NASA and outside it feel betrayed by the Trump administrations changes at the agency, which was known for promoting inclusion in scienceBy Alexandra Witze & Nature magazine NASAs diverse astronaut corps was an example of the agencys support for diversity and inclusion. NASA/James BlairIn the corridors of NASA buildings across the United States, Pride flags and pictures celebrating women in science are being taken down. Scientists are adding space-mission stickers to their laptops to cover ones that displayed rainbows and other symbols of LGBT+ support. Employees are stripping pronouns from their e-mail signatures and holding darkly humorous conversations in which they try to avoid saying any pronouns at all.These and other changes are rippling through NASA, which is purging programmes involving diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) throughout the agency. The directive to do so came from US President Donald Trump, who on 20 January issued an order to eliminate DEI initiatives across the federal government.I get a sinking feeling in my stomach when I have to check my [work] e-mail, says an early-career NASA scientist, who asked to remain anonymous because of concerns about their career prospects. Every time I reload it, its like, oh god, will there be some new heinous missive in there?On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Nature spoke to scientists inside and outside NASA about the impacts of its DEI changes and heard anger, fear and confusion. Although the orders affect all federal agencies, they are keenly felt at NASA, which has a long history of working towards inclusivity. In 2020, Trump appointee Jim Bridenstine, then head of NASA, added inclusion to the agencys list of core values, joining safety, integrity, teamwork and excellence. That fifth value has now been removed from many NASA websites.How do you go from something being so important that its a pillar [of the agency], to being so reviled that its off of everything? asks Julie Rathbun, a planetary scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.It feels like a betrayal by NASA, says Kas Knicely, a planetary geophysicist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. Its inefficient, its wasteful, and its also just messed up.In a statement, NASA said the agency is committed to engaging the best talent to drive innovation and achieve our mission for the benefit of all. As new guidance comes in, were working to adhere to new requirements in a timely manner.A changed agencyNASAs push towards inclusivity is one of the most visible in the US government. In the 1950s and 1960s, all of the agencys astronauts were white men. By 1978, it had bowed to internal and external pressure and had chosen several women and people of colour to fly to space. Today, NASAs astronauts, as well as its world-renowned scientific and engineering teams, are measurably diverse.But signs of NASAs efforts to make space for everyone are disappearing. These removals have been triggered both by official edicts such as the requirement to remove pronouns from employees e-mail signatures and by unofficial notices, such as verbal suggestions to remove flags or other displays from workspaces.Trumps changes have also halted projects by employee affinity organizations ― groups ranging from military veterans, to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, to Black employees. Before 20 January, NASA celebrated these groups efforts with many glowing, now-deleted web articles.The work these groups did was wholesome and good for the agency things like, discussing how do we publish data in a way that works with screen readers, so people with visual disabilities can get at our content, says a senior NASA scientist, who requested anonymity to avoid possible reprisals. Or bringing Star Trek legends in to inspire the workforce. Pausing the work of these groups promotes fear, the scientist says, because employees worry that they might be targeted for participating.Other cancellations include a programme that paired undergraduates from underrepresented groups with active planetary missions, giving the students a chance to observe scientists at work.Many NASA employees are angry about the changes to DEI, but are buckling down to work nevertheless. We believe in the mission, and we know that our work is important, says the senior scientist. We know that it matters for the nation.Grassroots protestAs federal workers, NASA employees cant push back against the changes, no matter how much they personally support DEI efforts, says Knicely, who co-chairs a community working group on best practices for DEI at NASA. But space scientists outside NASA are voicing their frustration with the agencys rejection of years of progress towards a more diverse community. Several of them wrote an open letter to NASA leadership on 6 February protesting the changes, which has garnered more than 1,000 signatures.Many of those scientists have been working with NASA for years on DEI issues. For example, researchers have been studying the DEI practices that improve science, and have been working with NASA to integrate those approaches into its funding programmes. These include a system for anonymous review of proposals to use facilities such as the Hubble Space Telescope a change that reduces gender and other biases and requiring inclusion plans in agency-funded research grants, which raises awareness of barriers to participation.For NASA to ignore what many scientists have shown for years confuses the hell out of me, says Rathbun.Alienation and determinationViewed broadly, the cuts basically say that Indigenous peoples, underrepresented peoples, even women dont really belong there at NASA, says Hilding Neilson, an astronomer at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in St Johns, Canada and a Mi'kmaw person. Thats a horrible and shameful thing that is going to set NASA back decades, if not longer.Some researchers inside and outside the agency are doubling down on their scientific and technical projects while living according to their values as best they can.You can take down the websites and you can tell people not to put their pronouns in their emails, but that doesnt mean theyre not going to use the right pronouns for their colleagues, says Sarah Hrst, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.Others are feeling alienated by the agencys actions. For the early-career scientist, the uproar is a huge distraction from their work: Can I be allowed to focus on my science, please?This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on February 14, 2025.

February 19, 20253 min readThe Latest on Bird Flu in Humans, Chickens, and MoreBird flu headlines include three new human cases, millions of dead birds in poultry flocks and new personnel moves from the Trump administrationBy Meghan Bartels edited by Lauren J. Young Edwin Remsberg/Getty ImagesWere regularly rounding up the latest news on avian influenza. Heres what happened recently.Human CasesWithin the past 10 days, three different states in the U.S. have reported new known and likely bird flu infections in humans: The first two are a confirmed case in a dairy worker in Nevada and a probable one in a farm worker in Ohio who had handled dead poultry. The third is a confirmed infection in an older woman from Wyoming who has been hospitalized in Colorado. The Wyoming Department of Health department has reported this person has underlying medical conditions and likely caught the virus from backyard chickens. The new reports from Nevada and Ohio bring the tally of human infections in the U.S. since 2024 to 68 confirmed cases and eight probable ones. The new case from Wyoming is not reflected in these statistics, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spokesperson confirmed.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.While infections continue, so does scientific research aimed at understanding the virus and its spread. A study published in the CDCs Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on February 13 analyzed blood samples of 150 dairy veterinarians to determine exposure. The researchers looked for antibodies to influenza viruses within a large group scientists call H5, which includes the H5N1 avian influenza virus currently dominating cases in wildlife, poultry and dairy cows. Three of the veterinarians had these antibodies. Of these three individuals, two had no known exposure to bird flu, and one has been working in a state without known dairy infections. Experts say the findings mean that existing systems for tracking avian influenza arent up to the task.Poultry UpdatesDecember 2024 and January 2025 were brutal months for bird flu infections in poultry, and Februarys rates still look grim. So far this month more than nine million domesticated birds have been infected by the virus or culled in attempt to stop its spread. Last December saw more than 18 million dead birds in such flocks, and the number this past January was more than 23 million. Ohio has been particularly hard-hit, with 51 commercial flocks affected in the past 30 days.The poultry infections are hitting egg-laying facilities particularly hard, and the loss of birds is causing egg prices to continue to rise. Last week the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reported that urban egg prices in January reached an average of $4.95 a dozen, the highest since at least 1980. (Experts say that the risk of getting bird flu from commercial eggs is very low, if not nonexistent; you should nonetheless fully cook your eggs.)Agency MovesTwo of President Donald Trumps cabinet secretary nominees who will be important in tackling bird flu outbreaks in people and humans were confirmed last week: the Senate approved Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and Brooke Rollins to lead the U.S. Department of Agriculture.Public health experts have expressed concerns about how Kennedy may shape the response to bird flu should the situation in humans worsen. He has publicly promoted drinking raw milk, which can carry live virus, even though pasteurization has been proven to inactivate it. And he has suggested that candidate vaccines to protect against bird flu may not be safe or effective because of the natural limitations of data for any vaccine that has not yet faced down its target virus in the general population.Rollins has drawn much less public scrutiny than Kennedy. And while she has acknowledged that bird flu is a pressing concern, its even less clear how she might respond to the crisis. She has said that shell help the administration address the high price of eggs, however.In the meantime, Trumps recent government-wide firing of workers is also hitting relevant federal response teams, including the CDCs Epidemic Intelligence Service, a two-year epidemiology training program in which participants monitor potential outbreaks worldwide, and the HHS Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, which stockpiles personal protective equipment, antiviral drugs and vaccine components, including for avian influenza. In addition, multiple USDA employees tasked with work related to bird flu were accidentally fired over the weekend, NBC News reported, with the administration now trying to rescind their termination letters.The degree to which these personnel cuts may affect bird flu response remains unclear, but experts have expressed alarm. During his first term, Trump disbanded a global health group that might have put U.S. response to COVID on stronger footing. During his campaign for the last presidential election, he also said he would disband a pandemic preparedness office created by then president Joe Biden.

OpinionFebruary 19, 20255 min readTrumps Iron Dome Space Weapons Plan Ignores Physics and Fiscal RealityProposed U.S. space defenses against hypersonic nuclear missiles are unnecessary, impractical and would trigger a dangerous new arms raceBy Dan Vergano edited by Megha Satyanarayana Alexey Koza/Getty ImagesThere is always a well-known solution to every human problemneat, plausible, and wrong, according to H. L. Mencken. Today we might ponder his words to diagnose the revival of another neat, plausible and boneheaded idea: ringing the planet with orbiting missiles to somehow make the U.S. safer.In January President Donald Trump called for a next-generation missile defense shield for the U.S. in an executive order. Named an Iron Dome for America after Israels short-range missile defense systemwhich it has nothing to do withthe plan would pour hundreds of billions of additional dollars into the long-underperforming rathole of U.S. missile defense efforts while weaponizing space. In the order, Trump referenced then president Ronald Reagans 1983 initiative, known as Star Wars, to build a missile defense shield with ground- and space-based weapons, saying it was canceled before its goal could be realized.A similar fate awaits Trumps planfor the same reasons that Reagans missile-defense fantasia, including a late-1980s orbital version known as Brilliant Pebbles, never panned out: it will cost too much, wont work and will endanger us all.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Right now the U.S. has 44 ground-based interceptor missiles stationed on the U.S. West Coast and aimed against ballistic missile attacks from the unstable nation of North Korea. They have worked 12 times out of 21 tests, a paltry success rate achieved only after $250 billion spent since their 1985 beginning. This illustrates the intrinsic, expensive difficulty of intercepting even dummy intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Its just hard to hit them.Whats driving Trumps Iron Dome? Fear of nuclear-tipped hypersonic missiles developed by Russia and China, which reach speeds of Mach 5, about one mile per second. Unlike ballistic missiles, which arc into space before returning to Earth, hypersonic ones maneuver and fly on a flat trajectory, which would be challenging for U.S. ground interceptors. Most terrestrial-based radars cannot detect hypersonic weapons until late in the weapons flight due to line-of-sight limitations of radar detection, the Congressional Research Service noted in a recent report.Ben GillilandIn pursuit of peace through strength, the executive order argued, the United States will guarantee its secure second-strike capability. That means the ability to launch nuclear missiles as payback after a hypersonic nuclear attack on the U.S.one that would mean World War III had startedsupposedly to be assured via hypersonic-missile-detecting satellites, plus satellites to link these sensors to interceptors and the deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors.The idea is that space-based interceptors would presumably get a jump on blocking missiles over the current ground-based ones. (Natch, there are also space lasers planned. Although, with apologies to Dr. Evil, weve yet to hear if equally impractical sharks with frickin laser beams attached to their heads will also make a debut.)The fundamental problem with all this, of course, is that the U.S. already has a guaranteed second-strike capability, with some 900 nuclear missiles riding around on its submarines right now. This is more than China has in its entire stockpile. The whole rationale for Trumps Iron Dome is a solution in search of a problem, the very definition of wasteful government spending. The leaders of China and Russia know launching any missiles, hypersonic or not, at the U.S. would lead to a catastrophic nuclear war that would kill five billion people, very likely including you, me and themthe last group courtesy of the U.S. Navys subs.Even leaving aside this basic flaw, Trumps Iron Dome has plenty of other problems. For one thing, many of the claims about the special threat from hypersonic weapons may be just Department of Defense hype, where their initial launch and detection wouldnt be much different than current intercontinental ballistic missiles, as scientists reported four years ago in Scientific American.Then there is the cost: an Iron Dome actually modeled on Israels short-range missile defense system, scaled up to cover the 3.7 million square miles of the continental U.S. (the contiguous 48 states plus Alaska), at $100 million per battery, would cost around $2.5 trillion, estimated nuclear policy analyst Joseph Cirincione in July. That system offers a defense only against dumb, ballistic missilesnot even addressing maneuverable, hypersonic ones. Another estimate published in 2024 by Defense and Peace Economics found such a system would cost from $430 billion to $5.3 trillion. That estimate noted the fundamental economic challenge facing missile defenses: they cost more, anywhere from eight to 70 times more, than the ICBMs they are meant to defend against. They are machines for bankruptcy.Now, consider the difficulty: leaving aside the poor U.S. test record for its current interceptors, detecting hypersonic missiles from space might be easier than spotting ICBMs. Traveling at high speeds through the atmosphere, hypersonic missiles should generate tremendous heat, giving off a strong infrared signal to track from space. The trouble is that so would any cheap decoys released alongside them, posing insurmountable problems for a reliable system of defense, the New York Times observed in an analysis of Trumps proposal.Finally, even if somehow enacted, this whole idea makes us all less safe. Since the end of the cold war, the U.S. has proclaimed its missile defenses were not meant to block an incoming attack from China or Russia, just loose North Korean ones. This was to forestall a new arms race with China or Russia if they grew spooked that a protected U.S. would launch an unannounced first nuclear strike. Moscow has already threatened to blow through agreed limits to its nuclear stockpile following Trumps proposal, and China was already building up its stockpile over such first-strike fears. Orbiting U.S. missiles and lasers a few hundred miles overhead of Moscow and Beijing would do little to calm nerves there, while false alarms have always been a feared potential start to World War III.Even if missile defenses worked, any attacker could instead just threaten the U.S. with something as simple as a truck bomb, as the Congressional Budget Office noted in a 2021 report, or a nuclear drone. Nevertheless, the CBO projected a 40 percent increase in U.S. missile defense spending, an increase to $176 billion in this decade, even before the Iron Dome proposal. Two senators have already pitched a bill to steer $19.5 billion in taxpayer money to their states under its cover.The most ludicrous thing is that even Trump knows this. You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and theyre building nuclear weapons, he told reporters in February, calling for denuclearization and cutting Pentagon spending. Were all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually, hopefully, much more productive.Thats right. If Trump wants to save taxpayer dollars, instead of firing nuclear weapons safety experts, he should put a lid on his Iron Dome.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

February 18, 20258 min readTrump Takes a Giant Wrecking Ball to U.S. ResearchAmerica's status as a global science leader is in doubt as the administration freezes funding and targets research that references climate or diversityBy Chelsea Harvey & E&E News Thousands of New Yorkers gather at the 'Stop the Coup' rally against the Trump Administration in Union Square and march to Washington Square Park on Presidents' Day in New York City, United States on February 17, 2025. Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty ImagesCLIMATEWIRE | Scientists across the country are in turmoil as President Donald Trump wages an assault on U.S. research.Theyre worried about their funding and job security. Theyre censoring their language around topics like climate change and diversity. And theyre wondering what kinds of science theyll be allowed to conduct in a rapidly shifting U.S. research landscape.The Trump administration has frozen billions of dollars in funding, paused grant reviews, cut critical support for institutional science and released sweeping executive orders to reshape the federal government. Much of the uncertainty in the research world stems from Trumps executive order on DEI, which calls for the federal government to eliminate programs and grants related to diversity, equity and inclusion.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The order's language is so broad that universities and research institutions still dont understand its full scope, leaving researchers worried that projects involving any mention of gender, race or equity even in the name of science might be on the chopping block. At least one university is advising researchers to not use words like biodiversity to avoid being flagged by AI-based grant review systems.Its clear that you cant be a researcher or scientist in the U.S. anymore, especially if focused on science equity, climate, etc., said one university researcher in a message to POLITICO's E&E News.Researchers who spoke with E&E News expressed fears that the U.S. is losing its status as a global science leader. Most declined to be named, citing concerns about loss of funding and professional retaliation.These aren't just scientists who work for the federal government, where billionaire Elon Musk's efforts to gut agencies from NOAA to EPA have thrown federal research into limbo. The turmoil extends to the countrys vast network of universities and other research institutes, where the threats to federal funding awards which provide much of their research support are raising existential questions about the future of U.S. science.There is no question that the financial implications are significant, said University of Hawaii President Wendy Hensel in a special address to the institutions campuses on Feb. 6. Notably, however, the executive orders do not define what DEIA or environmental justice means, and this fact has been noted in several lawsuits that have been filed.One of the biggest blows to research universities came in the form of a Feb. 7 announcement from the National Institutes of Health indicating that the agency would cut billions of dollars in funding for research-related administrative costs, which experts have described as critical support for institutional science including medical research.Twenty-two state attorneys general have since sued the Trump administration, followed by a second lawsuit brought by a group of universities. A district judge in Boston has issued a temporary restraining order blocking the cuts.Contrary to the hysteria, redirecting billions of allocated NIH spending away from opaque administrative expenses means there will be more money and resources available for legitimate scientific research, not less, said Kush Desai, White House deputy press secretary, in an email to E&E News.But if the cuts are upheld in court, they will blow a huge hole in the financial ecosystem for research universities, John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an email.Its likely that other science-supporting agencies, like the National Science Foundation or the Department of Energy, would then follow suit with major funding cuts of their own, he added.If those shoes drop, the future of U.S. science would take a big hit, he said.'Higher ed is not safe'Federal courts have tried to stymie some of Trump's efforts. After the Office of Management and Budget announced a sweeping freeze on federal aid, federal courts ordered the administration to lift the freeze.But states, nonprofits and other organizations have accused the administration of continuing to freeze some grants in defiance of the court orders.Trump has also issued an executive order that calls for the termination of the Green New Deal" and aims to boost fossil fuels. It directs agencies to pause funding from the 2022 climate law, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, and the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, as well as review other grants and loans to ensure they comply with the order.Last month, science agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, temporarily paused the review panels they use to evaluate grant proposals from researchers, citing the need to ensure compliance with the new administrations orders.Reviews have since resumed at both agencies, but NSF employees have reported new instructions to flag and review grants containing language related to diversity, equity and inclusion.Most recently, scientists across the country were alarmed to find their research projects listed in a database released last week by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) identifying more than 3,400 NSF-funded grants he described as questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.The spreadsheet broadly groups the grants into five categories based on their subject matter, comprising gender; race; environmental justice; social justice; and status, which refers to grants focusing on underrepresented or disadvantaged populations.The same database underpinned an October report released by Cruz suggesting that the NSF has increasingly funded research and programs that color scientific investigation and engagement projects through the lens of political ideology.The list has raised new worries among scientists that NSF and other agencies may curtail or reject projects en masse based on broad subject-matter categories, like gender and race.Meanwhile, the combination of proposed funding cuts and grant reviews has caused widespread confusion and alarm among university researchers and leadership alike.Scientists who spoke with E&E News described fears that their funding agencies may order them to halt ongoing projects, as well as concerns about whether theyll be eligible for future grants. Some indicated that their own institutions had provided vague or inconsistent guidance on how to proceed, leaving researchers unsure of their next steps.Universities response has been pathetic, said one researcher whose work focuses on broadening access and participation opportunities for underrepresented students in STEM. The researcher has become politically active in a local Democratic Party in response to the recent events and is considering transitioning to a career in primary or secondary education.I had other aspirations for myself when I got my doctorate, the researcher said. But higher ed is not safe.Self-censorship growsSome large research universities across the country have issued general recommendations to their faculty in response to Trumps executive orders, with many advising researchers to continue with their projects unless their funding agencies order them to stop.Yet some have also urged caution when interpreting the scope of the orders.Until we have a formal definition of the meaning of DEI and DEIA as referenced in the presidential executive order(s), it is recommended that DEI and DEIA be interpreted broadly, the University of Colorado, Boulder, suggested in an early recommendation to faculty posted on its website.The university has since updated its guidance to note that courts have blocked the federal spending freeze and to advise that all researchers, faculty, and staff continue working on their grants as normal.At the same time, some universities have confirmed that researchers have received stop work orders, even after federal courts ordered the Trump administration to resume its disbursement of grant funds.As of today, many agencies have resumed funding pending the outcome of litigation, Hensel, the president of the University of Hawaii, said in her Feb. 6 address. Other agencies, however, continue to issue stop work orders to some researchers at UH requiring them to assert compliance with the executive orders in order to receive additional funding.A spokesperson at Arizona State University confirmed in an email to E&E News that several federal agencies have sent notices indicating that they plan to discontinue funding certain projects at the university, adding that some faculty could face furloughs as a result.Faced with threats to ongoing projects, some university supervisors have begun quietly advising faculty to censor their research proposals, publications and public-facing documents to comply with Trumps orders.Earth science researchers at one large U.S. university were recently advised to use synonyms for diversity, equity and inclusion to avoid being flagged by AI-based grant review systems, according to a document obtained by E&E News. Faculty were advised that even terms like biodiversity, which refers to the natural variety of all life on Earth, might be flagged.A professor at a different U.S. university, who was granted anonymity out of fears of reprisal, was recently advised by supervisors to remove terms including climate change and greenhouse gas emissions from research papers and other public documents.The censorship makes it difficult to even report basic research findings in clear terms, said the professor, whose work funded by the Department of Transportation involves the intersection of urban planning and climate change.This is really like a giant wrecking ball on the entire higher education system in the U.S., the researcher said. Universities, the central administration, are at a loss they dont know what to do.Brain drain?The wide-ranging scope of Trumps orders has the potential to limit entire fields of independent science in the U.S., the researcher added.I dont know how our institutions are going to function if the federal government is banning research on one of the existential threats to our civilization, the researcher said. Many disciplines cannot do their work without referencing climate change.Other higher education experts have echoed those concerns.Like so much of the Trump agenda, there is little thought about the ramifications of quickly formulated draconian cuts, said Douglass, the UC Berkeley research fellow.The future science and tech capabilities of the U.S. are not even an afterthought in the Trump administrations recent activities, he added.New administrations typically come in with their own new priorities for research, said Matt Owens, president of the Council on Government Relations, an association of academic research institutions. Previous administrations have championed everything from nanotechnology to cancer research to advanced manufacturing.But these priorities are typically additive, not aimed at restricting research in other areas, he said. The Trump administration is taking a different approach one that will have long-term harmful consequences, Owens said.One of our strengths as a nation is the federal government has invested across the board in curiosity-driven research, because over time this pays dividends, he said. So an erosion of broad federal support for all areas of research will damage our ability to remain the global science and innovation leader.The U.S. has long enjoyed a reputation as one of the worlds most research-friendly countries, scientists say flush with funding and rich with both private- and public-sector science jobs. Many are now concerned that the worlds brightest minds will start seeking their opportunities elsewhere.The U.S. is the best place in the world to be a scientist right now, one U.S. researcher said in a message to E&E News, and these actions taken on DEI and funding will change that.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. 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February 18, 202512 min readWhere Are the Universes Missing Planets?Planet demographics reveal a puzzling lack of worlds in a certain size range throughout the galaxyBy Dakotah Tyler edited by Clara Moskowitz Ron MillerFor centuries our solar system was the only planetary system known to humans. We had no proof other worlds existed beyond those in our own cosmic backyard, and we imagined that if other planetary systems were out there, they would mirror ours: small, rocky worlds orbiting close to their stars, with giant planets similar to Jupiter and Saturn farther out. Scientists studied the history of our sun and its satellites with all the tools they had, and they used the knowledge they gained to shape our understanding of how planets form and evolve. But about three decades ago astronomers discovered exoplanets circling stars that were not our own. In the years since, we have found thousands of them, shattering what we thought we knew about planets.It turns out that planetary systems in our galaxy exhibit remarkable diversitysome have tightly packed planets in exotic configurations; others are dominated by gas giants skimming their stars. Now a new era of planetary science has emerged: exoplanet demographics. By analyzing patterns in the sizes, orbits and compositions of the planets they detect, scientists are uncovering the real processes that shape planetary systems. What we are finding is not a simple narrative but a puzzle: striking trends in planet populations that challenge our understanding of how planets are born and grow.These trends offer new clues about the answers to fundamental questions: Why are there very few planets in particular size rangesmost notably a swath of missing planets somewhat larger than Earth? Why does our solar system lack the most common types of planets in the galaxythose larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune? And perhaps most important, how do these findings affect our search for habitable worlds?On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Unraveling these mysteries isnt just about studying individual planetsits about seeing the big picture. By investigating the patterns in exoplanet demographics, were learning not only what makes planetary systems tick but also where our solar system fits into this galactic context. Ultimately, we want to know whether our planet is rareor whether the conditions that allowed life to arise here might be plentiful out there.The first confirmed exoplanets were discovered in 1992 orbiting a pulsara radio-wave-emitting, rapidly rotating neutron star formed from the aftermath of a massive star turned supernova. Its still unclear whether these pulsar planets survived the supernova explosion or formed from its debris. In either case, they are outliers in the known exoplanet dataset.The real breakthrough came in 1995 with the discovery of 51 Pegasi b, the first exoplanet found orbiting a sun-like star. This world defied all expectations. Rather than a distant gas giant like Jupiter, 51 Pegasi b was a behemoth half the mass of Jupiter but orbiting astonishingly close to its star, whipping around it once every 4.2 days. At such proximity the planet would broil at around 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to vaporize some metals. Although 51 Pegasi b has only about half Jupiters mass, this extreme temperature causes the gas to inflate, giving the planet a radius twice as big as Jupiters. Astronomers dubbed this strange new class of planets hot Jupiters.The existence of hot Jupiters threw a wrench into the leading planet-formation models. Theories had been based on the structure of our solar system, where rocky worlds orbit close to the sun, and gas giants stay much farther out in colder regions where they can accumulate hydrogen and helium gas. But here was a Jupiter-mass world that somehow occupied the searing-hot inner reaches of its planetary system. If massive planets could form so close to their starsor form farther out and move there laterwhat other unexpected arrangements might exist?We want to know whether our planet is rareor whether the conditions that allowed life to arise here might be plentiful.Astronomers discovered 51 Pegasi b by detecting a wobble in its stars motion caused by the gravitational tug of the orbiting planeta technique called the Doppler (or radial velocity) method. As a planet orbits, it pulls its star slightly toward it. From our perspective on Earth, that star moves closer toward and then away from us (if the orbit is at the right angle from our line of sight), causing the stars light to alternately redshift and blueshift, similar to the way the pitch of an ambulance siren rises as it approaches and falls as it passes by. The more massive the planet and the closer its orbit, the greater the stellar wobble and the easier it is to detect.Thats why the first exoplanets found with this method were hot Jupitersand why this strategy has a strong detection bias for large planets in close orbits. As more planets were discovered with the radial velocity method, patterns began to emerge. By 2008, after surveying hundreds of stars, researchers found that about 10 percent of sun-like stars host giant planets within a few times the Earth-sun distance (called an astronomical unit). Yet these early demographic patterns were clouded by our observation biases.A major step forward in planetary demographics came when NASA launched its Kepler Space Telescope. By staring continuously at more than 150,000 stars for four years, Kepler detected thousands of planets, using whats called the transit method. It searched for the slight dimming of a stars light that occurs when a planet passes in front of it from our point of view. The results were startling: Erik A. Petigura, my Ph.D. adviser at the University of California, Los Angeles, analyzed the Kepler data and showed that approximately half of all sun-like stars host at least one planet between Earth and Neptune in size. These planets, which dont exist in our solar system at all, seem to make complete orbits around their stars in weeks or months rather than years. In retrospect, it had been shortsighted to think our solar system was the galactic template. As a rule of thumb in astronomy, however, its usually safe to assume our perspective is average and not special, so I think we can be forgiven.As the Kepler sample grew, a mystery became more and more apparent. Astronomers saw a striking dearth of planets with sizes around 1.6 to 1.9 Earth radii, which they called the radius gap. This finding was no detection-bias flukeafter researchers had accounted for all the selection effects and biases in the observations, the gap remained. Something about planet formation or evolution must actively prevent planets from maintaining this intermediate size, most likely a process that strips atmospheres from planets in this range.Adding further intrigue to this puzzle is a phenomenon known as the hot Neptune desert. Planets the size of Neptune are conspicuously absent on orbits shorter than about three days. The reasons for this scarcity are still under investigation, but extreme radiation from stars at this distance and tidal forces probably contribute to this trend. Just as we see with smaller planets that have masses near the radius gap, short-period Neptunes are especially vulnerable to atmospheric loss. Over time their thick gaseous envelopes may be completely stripped away, leaving behind bare, rocky cores that we might classify as super Earthsscaled-up versions of our rocky world. Scientists think the hot Neptune desert is therefore a more extreme case of the same processes shaping the radius gap. (As we gathered more observations, some theories even predicted these features as a consequence of the radiation streaming from stars.)Nadieh Bremer; Source: The California-Kepler Survey. X. The Radius Gap as a Function of Stellar Mass, Metallicity, and Age, by Erik A. Petigura et al. in Astronomical Journal, Vol. 163; March 2022 (data)Follow-up radial velocity observations with ground-based telescopes added another crucial piece to the puzzle. By measuring the masses of known exoplanets, astronomers found that the radius gap corresponds to a transition in composition. Planets with masses below the gap are dense and rocky like Earth, whereas those above it have lower densities, indicating substantial atmospheres. The smaller planets appear to be super Earths. The larger ones are mini Neptunes with rocky cores enshrouded by thick layers of hydrogen and helium.This demographic pattern poses fundamental questions. Do all small planets start with substantial atmospheres, and do some lose them over time? Or do they form with different compositions from the beginning? Recent observations of planets actively losing their atmospheres suggest gas loss plays a significant role.Astronomers think there are several processes that can rip atmospheres off planets or limit their formation in the first place. The two leading contenders are photoevaporation and core-powered mass loss. Together they may explain the radius gap and the hot Neptune desert.Photoevaporation is one of the best explanations for the radius gap. When young stars ignite, they unleash extreme ultraviolet and x-ray radiation, along with powerful winds of charged particles. Planets that orbit too close to their host stars find themselves bathed in this radiation, which heats their atmospheres to the point where particles can escape into space.Imagine two newly formed planets orbiting at the same distance from their respective stars, each starting with a rocky core and a substantial hydrogen-helium gas envelope. Planet A has a lower mass and weaker gravity, so it cant hold on to its atmosphere as the star pumps energy into it. It quickly loses all its gas to space and becomes a dense, rocky super Earth. When we observe this system, the atmosphereless planet appears smaller in size. Planet B, however, has a higher mass and stronger gravity, which allows it to retain most of its atmospheric envelope. When we observe this system, the planet appears large because of its light and puffy primordial cocoon.The photoevaporation theory makes several predictions that match observed patterns. For example, the radius gap should slope downward with orbital period because planets closer to stars experience more intense radiation and need to be more massive to survive with their atmospheres intact. Similarly, we see a lack of Neptune-size planets with orbits shorter than three days, the so-called hot Neptune desert. This region is where atmospheric escape is so efficient that only rocky cores can survive.The second mechanism for the disappearance of planet atmospheres is core-powered mass loss, which is caused by the heat generated within a planet. After planets form, they hold on to significant amounts of heat from the process of pulling mass into themselves. This residual internal energy can warm the base of the atmosphere as the planet cools, lifting up the primordial envelope from below and helping gas to escape, along with the pull from stellar radiation.Our solar system, once thought to be the blueprint for all planetary systems, now stands as just one of countless possibilities.Core-powered mass loss suggests that smaller and less massive planets, with weaker gravity and less insulating gas, lose their atmospheres from below as they cool over hundreds of millions of years. Larger planets, in contrast, have enough gravitational strength to retain their envelopes despite the internal heating. This mechanism also aligns with the radius gap, given that intermediate-size planets are most susceptible to atmospheric loss through this process.Ultimately, hot planets cool off, and stellar irradiation heats up atmospheres. Astronomers think both mechanisms are at work, but the jury is still out on which theory has its thumb pressed more heavily on the planetary-evolution scale. Its likely the outcome depends on the specific conditions of the planet in question.Other processes may also contribute. The rapid boil-off theory, for instance, posits that during a planets early years, shortly after its star has formed, the debris disk circling the starwhich contains the raw ingredients that were used to build the planetsgets cleared out. The resulting rapid drop in pressure around the planet may drive a sudden boil-off phase for its atmosphere.In other cases, planets may form in gas-poor environments. These worlds would naturally lack thick atmospheres from the start, leading to a rocky composition. Finally, massive impacts between young planets could strip away their atmospheres, leaving behind bare, rocky cores in whats called collisional stripping. Although this process is probably rare, it may explain some planetary populations.Recent observations have begun to catch some of these situations in action, providing direct evidence of atmospheric escape. Because planets are most likely to let go of mass when theyre young, most small planets we can observe arent undergoing significant loss. There is, however, a favorable scenario for observing an atmosphere escaping in real time: a gas giant on a close-in orbit, also known as a hot Jupiter.A compelling example is the planet WASP-69b, which my group observed using the telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. WASP-69b is a Jupiter-size, Saturn-mass gas giant orbiting so close to its star that a full trip around it takes the planet only 3.8 days. In a paper we published in 2024, we reported outflows of material around the planet that indicate it is actively losing helium. In this case, the mass-loss mechanism must be photoevaporation. The planet is too massive to lose mass to internal heating; instead its getting blasted with high-energy radiation from its host star. Our observations revealed that WASP-69b is losing about 200,000 tons per second, or one Earth mass per billion years. Furthermore, there have been dramatic variations in the shape of the outflow of escaping gas: sometimes it has a cometlike tail stretching over 350,000 miles, and at other times it appears far less prominent.This variability in outflow probably stems from changes in the host stars activity. Much as our sun cycles through periods of heightened and decreased activity during its magnetic cycle, stars can experience periods of more or less intense radiation and flaring. Stretches of heightened stellar activity might boost atmospheric escape rates and change the shape of any material rushing off the planet. This dynamic interplay between star and planet illustrates that atmospheric loss may not be a steady, uniform process even in more mature planets. Rather its an ongoing battle shaped by both the properties of the planet and the mood of its star.Our findings and others show how photoevaporation can help explain both the radius gap and the hot Neptune desert by demonstrating this mass-loss process in real time. For a given orbital distance, planets require a minimum mass to hold on to their atmospheres amid the onslaught of high-energy stellar radiation. The radius gap separates the planets that are massive enough from those that are not. The hot Neptune desert demonstrates how this concept is amplified as a planet gets nearer to the star and the stellar irradiation increases exponentially. At sufficient proximity to a star, only hot Jupiters have the mass required to retain an atmosphereall other planets get stripped to their bare, rocky core.The next decade should be an exciting stage for refining our understanding of planetary demographics. Although most astronomers agree that atmospheric mass loss is the primary reason we dont see slightly bigger Earths or hot Neptunes on close orbits, the finer details remain unresolved. Is photoevaporation, driven by stellar radiation, the dominant factor? Or does core-powered mass loss, fueled by a planets internal heat, play a larger role? Untangling the contributions of these mechanisms requires a new generation of telescopes and instruments capable of precisely measuring planetary masses, compositions and atmospheres.We hope to better understand how the radius gap depends on stellar type. For low-mass stars, such as M dwarfs, the radius gap appears to shiftsmaller planets around these stars are able to retain atmospheres more often because they are exposed to less radiation than larger stars put out. The radius gap is usually less defined because low-mass stars put out different kinds of radiation than larger stars. The planets around these stars also tend to have greater core-composition diversity, and these systems may have an increased rate of major collisions.Planets around M dwarfs also tend to orbit much closer, where stellar activity such as flares and winds can have a big effect on atmospheric retention. Close inspection of these worlds has revealed hints that some of them might harbor significant amounts of water, potentially in the form of deep global oceans underneath hydrogen-rich atmospheres. These water worlds would occupy a unique position in planetary demographics, challenging simple models of rocky super Earths and gas-rich mini Neptunes.New ground-based instruments such as the Keck Planet Finder, which recently went online at the Keck observatory, and other high-precision radial velocity tools will be indispensable in testing our theories. By enabling us to measure planetary masses across a wide range of star types, these advances will help us determine whether the masses of super Earths and sub Neptunes align with predictions from our various models. In multiplanet systems, these kinds of data can help disentangle the effects of stellar irradiation history, allowing researchers to compare planets that formed under similar conditions.NASAs Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission is conducting extended monitoring over long timescales that could reveal planets with slightly wider orbits around their stars than most known worlds have. By filling out this sparsely populated region of small exoplanets with longer orbital periods, these discoveries will provide crucial data for understanding how atmospheric loss and composition vary across a broader range of planetary environments.The big leap forward should come when some big-ticket telescopes come online in the next decades. Ground-based super telescopes, such as the European Southern Observatorys Extremely Large Telescope, are expected to see first light in the late 2020s. These instruments will excel at observing young, luminous planets still glowing with the heat of their formation. Such gigantic telescopes will offer critical insights into the chaotic early stages of planetary evolution, when atmospheres are most vulnerable to loss.The Habitable Worlds Observatory, a NASA flagship space telescope, is planned to launch in the 2040s. It is being designed to detect and study Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of sun-like stars. The aim is to use the observatory to directly image these worlds and analyze their atmospheres to search for signs of oxygen, methane and water vaporkey indicators of habitability.What we learn from all these new tools will reach far beyond planetary demographics. By studying how planets lose or retain their atmospheres, we are unlocking the secrets of habitability, diversity and the forces that sculpt worlds across the galaxy.Our solar system, once thought to be the blueprint for all planetary systems, now stands as just one of countless possibilitiesa unique configuration in a cosmos teeming with variety. Most stars host planets unlike anything in our cosmic neighborhood, reminding us that the universe is richer and more surprising than we have imagined. By untangling the forces that shape these distant worlds, we inch closer to answering some of humanitys oldest questions: How common are planets like Earth? Is there other life among the stars? And what does our place in this vast and intricate universe truly mean?

February 18, 202514 min readThis Backyard Bird Has a Lot to Teach Us about Sex VariabilityWhite-throated Sparrows demonstrate that traits we usually associate with sex can be influenced by genes that are not on sex chromosomesBy Donna L. Maney Joel Sartore/Photo ArkIts springtime in your backyard. You watch a pair of little brown songbirds flit about, their white throats flashing in the sun. One of the birds has striking black and white stripes on its crown and occasionally belts out its song, Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody. Its partner is more drab, with tan and gray stripes on its head and brown streaks through its white throat. Knowing the conventional wisdom about songbirdsthat the males are flashy show-offs and the females more camouflaged and quietyou decide to name the singer with bright plumage Romeo and the subtler one Juliet.But later that day you notice Juliet teed up on the fence, belting out a song. Juliets song is even louder and showier than Romeos. You wonder, Do female birds sing? Then you see Romeo bringing a twig to the pairs nest, hidden under a shrub. Your field guide says that in this species the female builds the nest by herself. What is going on?Turns out, when you named Romeo and Juliet, you made the same mistake 19th-century artist and naturalist John Audubon did when, in his watercolor of this species, he labeled the bright member of the pair male and the drab one female. Romeo might look male, even to a bird expert such as Audubon, but will build a nest and lay eggs in it. Juliet, who might look female, has testes and will defend the pairs territory by singing both alone and alongside Romeo, who also sings.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Juliet and Romeo are White-throated Sparrows (Zonotrichia albicollis). At first glance, members of this species of songbird might look rather ordinary. For example, like many other songbirds, one member of each breeding pair of these sparrows has more striking plumagethat is, its appearance is what we would traditionally consider malelike for songbirds. The other bird in the pair is more femalelike, with drabber plumage.On closer inspection, White-throated Sparrows are quite remarkable. If we were to assume that the brighter bird in each breeding pair is the male, wed be right only half the time. In about 50 percent of breeding pairs of White-throated Sparrows, the brighter bird has the testes and the drabber bird has the ovaries, in keeping with the typical songbird pattern. In the rest of the breeding pairs, however, the bird with the more striking plumage is the one with the ovaries, and the duller bird has the testes.White-striped birds with ovaries behave in a way that is more masculine than we expect for female songbirds.Researchers have known since the 1960s that White-throated Sparrows occur in two color forms: a brighter white-striped morph and a plainer tan-striped morph. Even though morph has nothing to do with sexbirds of each morph are equally likely to have ovaries or testesthe birds still pay attention to morph when choosing mates. Whether male or female, tan-striped birds almost always choose white-striped mates, and vice versa. Each bird, therefore, chooses a mate from only 25 percent of the population; if you are a tan-striped female looking to make some babies, a male of the same morph just wont do. You want a male with white stripes on his head.This interesting and complex situation has earned this species the nickname the bird with four sexes. But to be clear, White-throated Sparrows do not have four different types of gonads. As in other birds, each individual typically has either two testes that produce sperm or a single ovary that produces eggs. Nevertheless, as recent research has shown, this species has much to teach us about the nature of sex variabilitythe way in which sex-related behaviors are influenced by genes, the complex structure of sex-associated chromosomes and the evolution of sexual reproduction itself. Importantly, this species challenges the practice of flattening natures wondrous diversity into two categories, male and female.I have spent the past 25 years studying this fascinating species, trying to understand how social behavior and the structure of genomes can influence each others evolution. White-throated Sparrows are a particularly good model for this line of research because the categories of sex and morph are each associated with special chromosomes. The sex chromosomes, which in birds are known as Z and W, influence whether primordial gonads develop as ovaries or testes. Birds with both the Z and the W typically develop an ovary, whereas birds with two copies of the Z develop testes. Color morph is associated with a different chromosome, chromosome number 2. Like sex chromosomes, chromosome 2 in White-throated Sparrows occurs in two versions. The first, which well call the standard version, was the first to be sequenced by scientists. The other is a rearranged version that contains a supergene, which is technically a collection of genes bound together. Whether male or female, birds with a copy of the supergene develop as white-striped; birds with only the standard chromosome develop as tan-striped.Rebecca Gelernter; Source: Multivariate Models of Animal Sex: Breaking Binaries Leads to a Better Understanding of Ecology and Evolution, by J. F. McLaughlin et al., in Integrative and Comparative Biology, Vol. 63; October 2023 (reference)Although color morphs in White-throated Sparrows are not technically sexes, the standard and supergene-bearing versions of chromosome 2 share features with the human sex chromosomes X and Y, respectively. In a typical breeding pair, one bird has two copies of the standard version, analogous to the XX genotype in humans. The other bird has one copy of the standard and one copy of the supergene, analogous to the XY genotype. Just as humans with two Y chromosomes are rare, the number of White-throated Sparrows with two copies of the supergene is vanishingly small. Almost all birds of the white-striped morph have one standard version of chromosome 2 to pass down and one version with the supergene. As a result, half the offspring of each breeding pair will inherit the supergene, and half will not.The supergene-bearing version of chromosome 2 resembles the mammalian Y chromosome in other ways. To understand the similarities, lets consider how it came to exist. Geneticist James W. Thomas, who was then at Emory University, and his laboratory demonstrated that the supergene itself is made up of several inversionslarge sections of DNA sequence that long ago flipped 180 degrees relative to the standard sequence. The rearranged region on chromosome 2 in White-throated Sparrows is so large that the two different versions cannot line up precisely beside each other and swap genes, a process known as recombination. Generally speaking, mismatched sequences arent a big problem, so long as there is another copy of the same version of the chromosome nearby to line up and swap genes with. But for the supergene version of chromosome 2, there usually isnt one. As is the case for the mammalian Y chromosome, individuals with the supergene chromosome typically have only one copy of it. So, whereas in the tan-striped birds the two copies of the standard version of chromosome 2 can recombine freely with each other, in white-striped birds the supergene version of the chromosome stands alone, unable to recombine with a partner.This isolation has caused the gene sequences inside the supergene to slowly diverge from the corresponding sequence on the standard version, becoming less and less similar to it over time. Escaping recombination also causes the genes inside the supergene to become locked together, meaning that each white-striped bird inherits a large block of increasingly differentiated genes. For these sparrows, those differentiated genes translate to differences in plumage and behavior.The evolutionary changes taking place in chromosome 2 in White-throated Sparrows loosely recapitulate a classical theory of the evolution of sex chromosomes. In the case of the X and Y chromosomes in mammals, suppression of recombination has been hypothesized to cause progressive loss of gene function and even the loss of entire genes. Over time the Y chromosome has degenerated such that it shares only a handful of genes with the X. The same scenario has played out for sex chromosomes in a wide variety of species, including other mammals, birds and many insects: a chromosome associated with either testicular or ovarian development has stopped recombining with its former partner and has differentiated substantially. The supergene-bearing chromosome 2 in White-throated Sparrows seems to be in the same situation. To investigate these parallels more closely, we worked with researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, led by Soojin V. Yi. Our study revealed that the supergene shows only minimal signs of degeneration. Thus, although the chromosome with the supergene may be recapitulating the evolution of a sex-chromosome-like system in many ways, we dont see obvious evidence that it will end up small, like the Y, anytime soon.In White-throated Sparrows, both white-striped birds (bottom) and the drab tan-striped birds (top) sing.Glenn Bartley/Minden Pictures (top); Scott Leslie/Minden Pictures (bottom)The White-throated Sparrows chromosome 2 also resembles the mammalian XY chromosome system with respect to its consequences for behavior. Birds with the supergene versionthat is, the white-striped birdsdefend their breeding territories more vigorously on average than do their tan-striped counterparts, who spend more of their time bringing food to offspring in the nest. In other words, behaviors we expect to be associated with the Y chromosome in mammalsnamely, prioritizing territorial aggression over parentalThis dissociation makes this species especially valuable for understanding the evolution of sex-related traits and the extent to which any individual can be said to be one sex versus another. In White-throated Sparrows, we see masculine and feminine traits distributing themselves in a manner clearly orthogonal to gonadal sex. White-striped birds with ovaries behave in a way that is more masculine than we expect for female songbirds, and tan-striped birds with testes look and behave in a relatively feminine way. Because the behavioral differences between the morphs can be attributed to a genetic sequence not associated with sex or sex chromosomes, the supergene provides an important tool with which to identify gene variants that nudge a sparrow in one behavioral direction or another no matter what gonads it has.Twentieth-century geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, who once said, Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution, speculated that inversions are adaptive because they capture and bind together gene variants that confer a collective benefit when inherited together. The inversions that make up the White-throated Sparrow supergene have captured about 1,000 genes that are slowly differentiating from the standard versionscertainly a rich source of possibilities for co-adaptation.In my laboratory at Emory, we went on the hunt for gene variants inside the supergene that shift the behavior of the white- and tan-striped sparrows in masculine and feminine directions, respectively. We knew that circulating levels of steroid hormonesnamely, testosterone in males and estradiol in femalesare higher in white-striped than tan-striped birds. This morph difference in hormone levels does not, however, explain the differences in their behavior. When we experimentally equalized levels of steroid hormones between the morphs, the white-striped birds were still more aggressive, despite having levels of steroid hormones identical to those of the tan-striped birds. Perhaps the white-striped birds are simply more sensitive to their own circulating steroids. If so, we wondered, what is the biology underlying that sensitivity?To answer that question, Brent M. Horton and I led a team to take a neuroscience approach. We reasoned that increased sensitivity to steroid hormones in white-striped birds might come from higher levels of the receptors for those hormones in their brains. Sure enough, in a part of the brain associated with reproductive behaviors, white-striped birds have extraordinarily high activity of a gene encoding a steroid-hormone receptor important for territorial aggression. This gene, called ESR1, is located inside the region of chromosome 2 that corresponds to the location of the inversions. Over evolutionary time the variant of ESR1 inside the supergene has diverged genetically from its counterpart on the standard chromosome. This genetic divergence has revved up the activity of the supergene variant such that white-striped birds have higher levels in this brain region than do tan-striped birds. Moreover, the more active the supergene variant of ESR1 relative to the standard version, the more aggressive the bird. We had our smoking gun.To show definitively that this receptor plays a causal role in white-striped aggression, Jennifer R. Merritt, then a graduate fellow at Emory,ESR1 gene. We hypothesized that if white-striped birds were more aggressive because of higher levels of the hormone receptor, then the morph difference in aggression should disappear if we experimentally reduced production of the receptor in those birds down to the tan-striped level in the brain region in question. Just as we predicted, white-striped birds with reduced receptor levels showed no more aggression than tan-striped birds. In other words, we were able to change their behavior from white-striped to tan-striped by altering the activity of a single gene.As exciting as that finding was, we were under no illusion that the aggressive behavior of the white-striped morph can be explained by just one gene. We believe, as Dobzhansky would have, that the behavior is influenced by multiple, co-adapted genes inside the supergene. Our analysis of all the genes inside the supergene, spearheaded by Emory researcher Wendy M. Zinzow-Kramer, showed that ESR1 is part of a large network of genes inside the supergene that predict territorial aggression. Perhaps these genes act together somehow to alter both plumage and behavior.White-throated Sparrows help us see past the sex binary by forcing us to acknowledge sources of variability other than sex.Armed with the knowledge that the neighbors of influential genes can have related functions, we directed our attention to a gene that is practically adjacent to ESR1 inside the supergene. This gene, known as VIP, is active widely in the brain and influences a variety of social behaviors across vertebrates. In songbirds, it promotes aggression when activated in one part of the brain and parental behavior in another. Because these behaviors are the ones that differ between the morphs in White-throated Sparrows, this gene was a prime candidate for further investigation.Horton and his team showed that in the brain region where VIP is associated with aggression, activity of the VIP gene is higher in the white-striped morph. In the brain region associated with parenting, its activity is higher in the tan-striped morph. Because white-striped birds are more aggressive and tan-striped more parental, this finding strongly suggested a role for VIP in the behavioral differences. But how can the same gene variant be revved up in one brain region and ramped down in another?A group led by Mackenzie R. Prichard, then a graduate fellow at Emory, provided an important clue. The VIP variant inside the supergene differs from the standard version not only genetically but also in another important way. DNA can be tagged with chemical markers that are not part of the gene sequencethey attach to it epigenetically, which can silence the gene. In the brain region where VIP promotes aggression, these tags are significantly reduced on the supergene variant of VIP. Although we do not totally understand the mechanisms that regulate the tags, their removal from the supergene probably allows the peptide that VIP encodes to be produced at higher levels in this brain region in the white-striped birds. The situation looks different in the brain region associated with parenting, where the relative activity of the supergene variant of VIP is significantly lower.The 19th-century artist and naturalist John Audubon mistakenly assumed that the whitestriped variants of the White-throated Sparrow were all males and the tan-striped birds were all females.Fine art images/Heritage Images via Getty ImagesThese findings are exciting because they show that production of the VIP peptide is regulated differently in each of these two brain regions in ways that are adaptive for each morph. In the brain region where VIP promotes aggression, the brakes have come off the supergene version of the gene. The resulting higher activity may allow the white-striped birds to produce more VIP peptide where it is needed for aggression. In the region where VIP promotes parental behavior, the brakes are applied a bit more to the supergene, which may reduce VIP production in this region in white-striped birds and make them less parental.Is it significant that the two supergene variants of ESR1 and VIP are so close to each other inside the supergene? Are they co-adapted at the molecular level? We dont yet know. Even if the gene products dont interact directly, both contribute toward the same aggressive, white-striped phenotype. Dobzhansky might argue that this shared function alone makes their linkage adaptive. Over evolutionary time the supergene is likely to accumulate even more gene variants and epigenetic tags that complement an aggressive phenotype, in keeping with the theory behind the evolution of chromosomes associated with sexes.White-throated Sparrows demonstrate that traits we usually associate with sex can be influenced by genes that are not on sex chromosomes. In this species, some of those genes are linked to one another and to an obvious, sex-adjacent phenotype, making these associations easy to study. But the dissociation of sex-related genes from sex chromosomes isnt at all exceptional. In all sexually reproducing species, including humans, most genes that contribute to sex-related variation are not known to be linked to any particular genomic architecture. Even genes involved in gonadal development and hormone synthesis can be found on most any chromosome, mapping to locations throughout the genome that freely recombine. Each individual inherits a new combination of genetic and epigenetic material, resulting in diversity that defies binary categories.In most sexually reproducing species, making an embryo requires two gametes: one egg and one sperm. That binary is clear. But the egg-sperm binary does not apply to the eventual development of that embryo into a sexed body with sex-related behaviors. That development is conceptually separate and decidedly nonbinary in many ways. To understand why, lets consider the theoretical evolutionary function of sexual reproduction.Biologists have long argued that the genetic function of sexnamely, the mixing of genomes in the generation of offspringis to create combinations of genes that could confer advantages in an unpredictable future environment. Sexual reproduction hurries the new combinations along, meaning the advantageous combinations become established much faster than if we simply cloned ourselves and waited for genes to randomly mutate into more beneficial forms. In other words, the entire point of having sexes is to generate diversity. Each new organism possesses a genome never seen before, unlike either parents.For reasons that so far remain mysterious to scientists, the most diverseUntil recently, species such as sex-changing fish, all-female lizards and White-throated Sparrows with their four sexes were regarded as curiositiesoddball organisms that seemed to break the rules. But that view is rapidly changing. New tools for studying the processes underlying sexual development call the rules themselves into question. We are learning that the molecular pathways that guide a body to develop ovaries, testes, or other sex-related features are evolutionarily unstable and precarious. The genes and proteins that contribute to making a gonad are not the same across species, even closely related ones. These pathways are not well conserved, suggesting they remain flexible for good reason.The development of sex-related traits is astonishingly diverse not only across species but within them. Every individual, sparrow or human, has masculine and feminine characteristics. That diversity is obscured when we lump individuals into two categories and consider each as a homogeneous group. When we compare the categories female and male, we often report a sex differencea binary outcome made inevitable by a binary approach. This approach fails to acknowledge the profound overlap between sexes on almost any measure.White-throated Sparrows help us see past the sex binary by forcing us to acknowledge sources of variability other than sex, which is, in reality, only a small contributor to variability for many species. Diversity and plasticity of phenotypic expression is the norm, particularly for traits that correlate with sex. Sex-related traits are simply not hardwired. Evolutionary biologists believe that this plasticitylike the dazzling diversity of sex-determining molecular pathwaysmay be adaptive in changing environments. Individuals retaining maximal flexibility in the expression of sex-related traits are better able to adapt quickly to changing environments or, in some cases, may even be able to change their sex.Sexual reproduction, by its very nature, generates diversity. The different pathways by which bodies develop as male, female, both or neither are perhaps as numerous as species themselves. Genomes are fluid, constantly changing and evolving. Gene sequences link together and separate in a never-ending dance. The environment also changes constantly, guiding development in unpredictable and sometimes disruptive ways. Every newly evolved avenue to develop into a sexed body begins a new, generative process that gives rise to still newer routes. Viewed this way, it is clear that sexual diversity within species is an evolutionary adaptationa feature, not a bug. Like our backyard sparrows Romeo and Juliet, each of us is expressing our own unique phenotype just as nature intended.

OpinionFebruary 18, 20254 min readBroken Legs and Ankles Heal Better If You Walk on Them within WeeksUsing crutches for months is largely a thing of the past. Early weight-bearing has real benefitsBy Lydia Denworth edited by Josh Fischman Jay BendtTwenty years ago my husband, Mark, broke his left ankle and was in a cast and on crutches for nearly two months. Last year he broke the other ankle. But this time, after surgery, his doctor surprised us by instructing Mark to walk on it two weeks later.It turns out the standard advice to stay off a broken leg bone for at least six weeks is based less on scientific evidence and more on cultural cautionphysicians like to play it safe. But now studies show that complications are no more likely with early weight-bearing than with a long delay. Except in a few complex cases, walking around earlier helps broken bones heal, and it improves quality of life: for example, people can return to work and other activities faster.If you are fully immobilized, you come out of the cast with a sort of hairy, withered leg that takes forever to overcome, says orthopedic trauma surgeon Alex Trompeter of St. Georges University of London. The science tells us that the rate at which you lose muscle mass is far faster than the rate at which you gain it. Youre slow to build bone, too. Consider astronauts. After six months in zero gravity at the International Space Station, they lose 10 percent of their bone density, and to ward off that loss they do exercises in space that are equivalent to bearing weight.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.In the 19th century German surgeon and anatomist Julius Wolff recognized that healthy bones adapt and change in response to the load placed on them. That is why everyonebut especially women, who are more susceptible than men to osteoporosisshould lift weights as they age. It increases bone density.Those who walked early on femurs that had broken just above the knee had no higher rate of complications than those who stayed off the leg for six weeks.When you fracture a bone anywhere in the body, physicians first worry about stability. How much will the bone fragments move if you put weight on them? If the answer is too much, surgery is usually indicatedfirst a reduction to realign the pieces of bone and then fixation to hold them in place with screws, plates or rods.That procedure sets up a bone, which is living tissue, to heal naturally by making new bone and resorbing damaged cells. In the gap caused by a fracture, a healing tissue called callus forms first, which then turns into bone. The right amount of load or movement (heres where Wolffs discovery applies) is critical to this process. Too little results in no callus; too much prevents the bone from knitting back together. Its all about the strain environment, says orthopedic surgeon Chris Bretherton of Queen Marys Hospital in London.Surgical implants hold the alignment until that process is complete. Its a little bit of a race postoperatively between the bone healing and the fixation breaking, says orthopedic trauma surgeon Marilyn Heng of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. In that contest, she roots for the new bone. Once the body heals and forms bone across the fracture site, the hardware we put in becomes extraneous. The crux of our decisions for weight-bearing status is we want to win that race.And putting some load on the bones aids that goal. Although the process of bone healing is the same all over the body, bones in the lower limbs such as hips, femurs and ankles bring extra complications because they affect the ability to walk. In patients with hip fracturespredominantly frail, older peoplethat immobility can lead to dire consequences.Some patients do not have the dexterity and strength to manage partial weight-bearing while using crutches, so they stay in bed. The lack of movement leads to serious problems such as blood clots and weakening of the lungs. One 2005 study found that nine percent of hip fracture patients died within 30 days of breaking a hip and that 30 percent died within the first year. But more recent studies of healing hips suggest that early weight-bearing decreases mortality rates, and doctors have altered their practices. The normal standard of care is [now] to fix it and let people walk, Trompeter says.Breaks in long bones, like the femur in your thigh, can be relatively straightforward to repair with a rod. In a study that looked back at outcomes for a series of patients, Heng and her colleagues showed that those who walked early on femurs that had broken just above the knee had no higher rate of complications than those who stayed off the leg for six weeks.For ankles, the largest randomized controlled trial to date (480 fracture cases across 23 centers in the U.K.) was published in 2024 in the Lancet. Half of the patients were instructed to walk after two weeks, and the other half were told to wait until after six weeks. Any complications, such as infections or broken plates, were equally common in both groups, so early walking didnt pose a greater risk. And the early weight-bearing group reported better function in the ankle at six weeks and at four months postsurgery. Surgeons just needed a push, says Bretherton, who led the study. He hopes this evidence gives them that confidence.As for my husband, he jumped at the chance to get moving sooner. In less than two months, the point at which he was just coming out of a cast last time, his scar was fully healed, he was walking normally and, with a few limitationsno running, no quick pivotshe was exercising again. It seems that he won this race.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

February 18, 20255 min readReaders Respond to the November 2024 IssueLetters to the editors for the November 2024 issue of Scientific AmericanBy Aaron Shattuck Scientific American, November 2024VACCINES AND IMMUNITYNo More Needles, by Stephani Sutherland, describes new nasal spray vaccines. It was very helpful to learn about mucosal immunity, an aspect of the immune system about which there has been very little press. But the article did not discuss the effect of nasal vaccines on immunocompromised or immunosuppressed individuals.My wife is a heart-transplant recipient and is on a lifelong regimen of immunosuppressants. Recently we received an alert from her transplant team that transplant patients should not take FluMist, a spray vaccine against influenza that received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval last September. It also said such patients shouldnt be in the same room as another person receiving an inhaled dose of FluMist or have any contact with a person who has taken the vaccine for seven days. Why is this?On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.ANDREW WRIGHT BASKING RIDGE, N.J.THE EDITORS REPLY: FluMist is made with a weakened (attenuated) flu virus to stimulate immunity. A normally functioning immune system can keep that virus in check. A suppressed immune system, however, may not be able to stop the weakened virus from creating a real infection. People who have received an organ transplant usually have a suppressed immune system, so live, attenuated vaccines are not recommended for such individuals.We shouldnt abandon the leap second out of a misguided quest for simplicity! Agatha Mallett, Via E-mailSECOND OPINIONShould We Abandon the Leap Second?, by Mark Fischetti and Matthew Twombly, questions whether the leap seconds we add or subtract to time kept by our atomic clocks are worth the effort.We should maintain the leap second. It is the basic link between UT1 (essentially mean solar time) and atomic clock time, also called international atomic time (TAI). Their combination, coordinated universal time (UTC), gives the advantages of both: accurately ticking seconds, as defined by the International System of Units, but still respecting the day-night cycle that is foundational to everyday human life.Jumps in UTC turn out to be the only reasonable way to make this elegant and useful correspondence. Every alternative involves sacrifice: reduced accuracy, reduced human relevance or long-term failure. Moreover, removing the leap second would actually make computerized timekeeping much harder, not easier, so there is simply no reason to do it.UTC is the sole time standard that is ideal for the needs of both humans and machines, and leap seconds are crucial to implement it. We shouldnt abandon the leap second out of a misguided quest for simplicity!AGATHA MALLETT VIA E-MAILBABY TALKThe Evolution of Music, by Allison Parshall, Duncan Geere and Miriam Quick [Graphic Science], notes three worldwide trends in song: they tend to be slower than speech and to have a higher and more stable pitch. It occurs to me that this pattern is the same one we see when adults speak to infants (at least in the Western world). If this is correct, is there a connection between song and the most basic infantile communication? And further, is this link the basis for the evolution of adult speech?DENNIS MONASEBIAN ARMONK, N.Y.PARSHALL REPLIES: Recent research does support the idea of infant-directed speech, or baby talk, sharing characteristics such as higher pitch and slower tempo across cultures. One could hypothesize that the same features that make baby talk attention-grabbing and appealing to infants also make adult song attention grabbing and appealing to adults, although its also possible that they evolved separately for different reasons.FINDING HELP FOR ADDICTIONAs someone who has struggled with addiction, I was very interested in Maia Szalavitzs article on The Traumatic Roots of Addiction [October]. But I was dismayed by her portrayal of 12-step programs, particularly Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). To classify them as social support groups is not correct. AAs meetings may provide social support, but that is not the basis of the program.Further, Szalavitz comments on the rigidity of 12-step programs and people telling newcomers to shut up and listen, but this is not the case in AA. It is simply a suggested program of recovery. Some groups did decide to veer away from the established program and basically create their own. As noted in the article, AA has no opinion on outside matters, including therapy. Therapy in conjunction with AA has helped many peopleand has made a difference in my life. One without the other would mean incomplete treatment. Whenever a given group tells me what I must do in a rigid way, I simply find another meeting. The program can work for anyone who wants it to.MIKE H. VIA E-MAILSZALAVITZ REPLIES: It is not possible to write about 12-step programs without encountering pushback from members who claim misinterpretation. Research shows that participation in 12-step groups is most likely to be beneficial for people who attend them voluntarily and find them helpful. But because both the social support aspect and the steps themselves can be harmful to some (as I discuss), they should not be mandated. Still, 12-step participation is the foundation of most American addiction treatments. To help the majority of people with addiction who have suffered from childhood trauma get evidence-based care, this must change.MOTIVATED DELAYI have some responses to Javier Granados Samayoa and Russell Fazios fine article on procrastination [How to Beat Procrastination; Mind Matters], but I just havent been able to find time to jot them down. Perhaps Ill do so next month.TIM JOHNSON SARASOTA, FLA.ULTRASOUND LESSONS FOR ADHDI was intrigued by Lucy Tus Advances article on a study that enhanced mindfulness with ultrasound stimulation of the brains default mode network (DMN) [Ultrasound Meditation; October]. I recall a video by YouTube personality Jessica McCabe in which she talked to psychiatrist Edward Hallowell about how the DMN can act up and lead to rumination in people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). They also discussed strategies for how to get the DMN to relax. I wonder if ultrasound stimulation would be a viable treatment for those of us whose brain wants to go full speed all the time or if lessons from studying ADHD could become useful in determining how ultrasound stimulation could be helpful.VIVIANA H. VIA E-MAILERRATABetter Measures, by Cassandra Willyard [Innovations in Solutions for Health Equity], should have described creatinine as a molecule, not a protein.Defogging Data, by Jyoti Madhusoodanan [Innovations in Solutions for Health Equity], should have said that the Office of Management and Budget defined the single Asian or Pacific Islander category in 1977 and that a 1997 revision to the standard required that group to be split into two categories. In addition, the article should have given Joseph Keaweaimoku Kaholokulas full name and described him as a health disparities researcher.

February 18, 20252 min readWhich Knot Is Stronger? Humans Arent Great JudgesPeople are surprisingly bad at guessing knot strength, a study found Jen ChristiansenHumans are pretty good at guessing whether a towering stack of dishes in the sink will topple over or where a pool ball will go when a cue hits it. We evolved this kind of physical reasoning to navigate our changing and sometimes dangerous environments. But a new study highlights one area of intuitive physics thats deceptively difficult: judging how strong a knot is.Take a look at these four knots, which may look similar but are all distinct. Which knot would be hardest to undo if you pulled on the two long ends of its ropes? Rank them in order from weakest to strongest.Jen Christiansen; Source: Tangled Physics: Knots Strain Intuitive Physical Reasoning, by Sholei Croom and Chaz Firestone, in Open Mind, Vol. 8; September 2024 (reference)On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.These four knots can be grouped into two pairs of similar configurations: the thief (A) and reef (B) knots, and the granny (C) and grief (D) knots. In both pairs, one knot is vastly stronger than the other. The correct weak-to-strong ranking is grief, thief, granny and reef (D, A, C, B).If youre surprised, youre in good company. Researchers recently asked volunteers to look at photographs of these knots and decide which would take more force to undo. The participants consistently misjudged the strength of the ties by wide margins, Johns Hopkins University brain science researchers Chaz Firestone and Sholei Croom report in the journal Open Mind.Reef and thief knots were rated as similarly strong because theyre visually similar, but the position of the bitter endsthe shorter, cut-off ends in each knotis really significant, Croom says. A knot with two bitter ends on opposite sides is a lot weaker than if the two sides are the same. The grief knot, aptly named, is so weak you could sneeze on it and it would fall apart.KNOT BASICSThe fact that people are bad at evaluating knot strength is surprising because we encounter them in many situationsfrom tangled electronic cords to hair braids, knitting stitches to medical suture ties, rock climbing to sailing. Tying a knot properly can spell the difference between safety and peril, Croom says. The four shown here are among the simplest knots that can be tied with two lengths of string, and they are prevalent in daily life.PHYSICAL REASONINGStudying areas where our physical intuition fails helps scientists better understand how our brains perceive the world around us. Knots might be an interesting case study on constraints around our physical reasoning, Croom says. Is it something to do with elasticity? Is it the fact that its a soft-body object rather than a rigid-body object? Figuring out why tangles are so tricky could help scientists predict when peoples snap judgments about a physical situation are likely to be wrong, leading to unsafe reactions.

February 17, 20252 min readWhy Do Wild Cats Have So Many Different Eye Colors?The Internets vast cat resources help researchers chart cat eye evolutionBy Zane Wolf edited by Sarah Lewin FrasierSnow leopard's colorful eye. Picture by Tambako the Jaguar/Getty ImagesWild cats showcase a stunning diversity of eye colors, proving a mystery for researchers because most wild species are known to have narrow eye color schemes (usually black, brown or yellow). Eye colors evolution is notoriously hard to track: fossils dont preserve it, taxidermy specimens have fabricated eyes, and most books illustrate only one example per species. Now scientists have harnessed the Internets abundant wild cat photographs to chart the transition from brown eyes to colors such as green and blueand found something of a gray area.Any animals eye color is determined by its levels of two melanin pigments: eumelanin, which makes brown-black, and pheomelanin, which makes red-yellow. Eye colors vary according to the amounts of each, with different combinations leading to colors such as blue, green and gray.For a paper in iScience, Harvard University biology graduate student Julius Tabin and his co-author, Katherine Chiasson, used a process called ancestral state reconstruction to determine the eye colors of extinct wild cat species based on those of their living descendants. The authors analyzed the clearest images submitted to the database iNaturalist.org, then classified each cats eye color and mapped the data to the cat family tree, using an algorithm to find each common ancestors possible eye colors. The algorithm accounted for the likelihood of certain changes and figured in the time since species diverged in order to generate the likeliest colors at every split.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Its a way we can actually look into the eyes of the felid ancestor, Tabin says. The ancestor develops gray eyes, and then the eye color diversity just explodes. Once an eye with moderate amounts of both eumelanin and pheomelanin appeared (producing gray eyes), blue and green were not far behind.The scientists next tried to connect the discovered eye colors with numerous factors, including habitat, fur color and hunting behavior, to help explain why those shades had evolved. But they found little correlation. Huskies have those bright blue eyes because we wanted them to and bred them accordingly, Tabin says, but in wild cats, I have no idea whats going on here. Sexual selection is plausibleperhaps cats prefer particular eye colors in matesbut it would be challenging to test.Eye color is a very overlooked trait, and its a pity because its probably important ecologically and evolutionarily, says University of Glasgow evolutionary biologist Arianna Passarotto, who is not affiliated with the new study. She is skeptical of using photos taken in uncontrolled conditions, but she describes the study as ambitious and absolutely very novel.As Juan Jos Negro, an ecologist at the Spanish National Research Council also not affiliated with the study, puts it, the eye is the last frontier for [studying] coloration.

February 16, 20254 min readQuantum Simulation Shows How Universe-Destroying Bubbles Could GrowPhysicists are finding new ways to model false vacuum decay, a terrifying, albeit remote, cosmic endgameBy Dan Garisto edited by Lee Billings Nico Korbel/Getty ImagesThe good news is that you, and everyone you love, will die long before it might happen.Now for the bad news. Someday, in the far-distant future, eons beyond its 13.8-billion-year adolescence, the universe could suffer a false vacuum decay. This would involve a bubble of incomprehensibly destructive power that would spontaneously materialize and ripple through spacetime at the speed of light. Such an event would rewrite the fundamental laws of physics and obliterate our reality in the equivalent of a cosmic cut-and-paste command.Whatever [was] in the false vacuumso this would be uswould disappear immediately right when this bubble spread through us, says Jaka Vodeb, a physicist at the Jlich Center in Germany.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.For decades, theoretical physicists have wondered whether the universe is stable or metastable. In the latter scenario, it is in afalse vacuum that will eventually decay to a state of lower energy, a true vacuum. Vacuum, in this case, refers neither to an appliance nor to outer space but to a state of truly empty space, which can still have energy even when it is devoid of particles. In recent years theorists experimental colleagues have begun tinkering with quantum systems to whip up analogous systems in the lab (given that working with bona fide universe-annihilating bubbles would be a bit dicey).Earlier this month Vodeb and his colleagues published the findings of their cosmic bubble simulation in Nature Physics. Using a 5,564-qubit quantum annealer from the company D-Wave to essentially create a one-dimensional chain of highly sensitive magnets that could point up or down, they simulated the growth and interactions of cosmic bubbles.The researchers first arranged the qubits to point up and then tuned a magnetic field so that pointing down was energetically favorable. Over time, some qubits flipped to point down, and the flips cascaded to nearby qubits, forming clusters, or bubbles. The analogue bubbles then grew and merged, matching predictions about their cosmic counterparts. The results, first shared on the preprint server arXiv.org in June 2024, represent the first time cosmic bubble interactions have been simulated.This is one of the simplest demonstrations of how a vacuum can decay in a real, physical system with a proper analytical theory behind it, says Roopayan Ghosh, a theorist at University College London, who was a peer reviewer for the paper. Thats why I think people should find it interesting.Contrary to their apocalyptic subject matter, the physicists who study false vacuum decay are rather zen about the whole thing. I dont really, you know, live in existential fear, Vodeb says.So Long, and Thanks for All the Flash-Frozen FishTo understand the metastability of the false vacuum, start by filling a bottle with distilled water and putting it in your freezer for a couple of hours. The bottles water, free of dust or chemicals to trigger crystallization into ice, can remain liquid below the normal freezing point. This is a metastable state. Jostling the bottle will cause the supercooled water to immediately freeze to ice, shifting to its stable state.Another example of metastability, more morbidly apropos of universe-ending bubbles, involves fish.The Greenland cod (Gadus ogac) is a tan-colored fish thats uninterestingsave for the fact that its blood freezes at about 0.7 degree Celsius. During the winter, seawater in their geographic range is colder than that, reaching a frigid temperature of 1.9 degrees C. The cod are no warmer, but they swim along fineunless they are brought into contact with ice. Researchers studying the phenomenon in the fjords of northern Canada in the 1950s placed the fish on ice and watched: ice crystals surged across the cods skin, rapidly killing the fish and creating a frozen monument to metastable precarity.Whereas flash frozen cod are a classical phenomenon, false vacuum decay requires quantum tunneling, in which a highly improbable fluctuation takes the universe to a different state. How improbable is that fluctuation? If the universe is in fact metastable, recent calculations of vacuum decay have put its lifetime at about 10790 years, a number so large that you could wait another 13.8 billion years for the arrival of a better analogy, and cosmic annihilation would still be 10790 years away.Supposing you are fortunate enough to be around for a false vacuum decay, physicists have deduced that there is additional encouraging news. As a consequence of this rapid expansion, if a bubble were expanding toward us at this moment, we would have essentially no warning of its approach until its arrival, wrote Sidney Coleman, a theorist then at Harvard University, in a 1977 paper.Lacking a universe in a bottle to observe, physicists have learned to blow bubbles in a variety of media. A quantum annealer is slow and not very useful for computing, Vodeb says, but its thousands of qubits are ideal for such a simulation because theyre very controllable, allowing bubble formation to be easily initiated and observed.Last year Alessandro Zenesini and his colleagues at the University of Trento in Italy reported their observations of a bubble in a collection of about a million sodium atoms that were the size of a poppy seed and cooled to nearly absolute zero. In that case, the bubble consisted of clumps of thousands of atoms that flipped their orientation to emulate the shift from a false vacuum to a true one.Although such atomic clumps are closer to the conventional image of a bubble than the annealers qubits in the new study, they are still only a crude toy model of the universenotably, they lack any meaningful inclusion of gravity. We cannot say anything about the real universe based on the 2024 experiment in Italy, says Alessio Recati, a theorist at the University of Trento and a member of the group that conducted that earlier study.That, of course, raises a broader and somewhat important, albeit nonurgent, question: Is the cosmos actually metastable, distantly destined for extinction by cosmic bubbles? Could be, Zenesini says breezily. Who knows?

OpinionFebruary 17, 20256 min readUnderstanding Your Introverted Kids Needs Will Help Them SucceedThere is nothing wrong with quieter, introverted kids. Recognizing what makes them tick can help them confidently navigate an extroverted worldBy Megha Satyanarayana edited by Dan Vergano Malte Mueller/Getty ImagesMy kids live on different planets.My daughter is bold and loud, talkative and active. She is happiest climbing and swinging, and if she had six playdates in a weekend, it still wouldnt be enough. My son, on the other hand, is more thoughtful and quiet. He spends a lot of time understanding a problem before trying to solve it. He is content to play with the same two kids every day at school. But hes just as happy to play alone, or play next to me while I do dishes or hammer away on my computer.These kids are far too young for popular personality tests, but already, I see that my daughter is more extroverted and my son, more introverted. Last summer, we took my daughter to overnight camp and stayed in a vacation rental nearby. Almost every morning, my son and I got up early and went to the beach, just us, to watch birds and look for shells. As he rooted around in the sand, as we meandered the early morning coastline, I could see how happy he was, how these low-key, contemplative outings completely filled his bucket in a way they never would his sister. I started to wonder: Am I meeting his need for slow moments? Am I meeting his need for quiet?On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.I am more extroverted, a social butterfly with many groups of friends and a penchant for throwing a good party. But opposites attract, and my life is full of people who are more introverted, including my partner and one of my best friends. I get that these personality traits are a spectrum, and that most of us are ambiverts, but the structure of societyand often childhoodis geared toward rewarding those of us who are louder, flashier, chattier, social, even as some estimates place 57 percent of people as introverts. Years ago, in an effort to be a better friend, co-worker and human, I decided to learn more. I picked up Susan Cains book Quiet, an eye-opening treatise into the power and wisdom of the more introspective people around us. Her work clearly lays out why the professional world needs to pay attention to, and create workplace environments that also benefit, quieter people. Quiet gives people like me a playbook for how to make space for, support and champion introverts.But the book is mostly about adults. With my son in mind, I reached out to Susan. I wanted to know: Are the rules different for kids? How do I best serve my little introvert?[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]I think the big overarching question is what does an introverted kid need thats different from an extroverted one. How do we, as parents, give them what they need to be successful? There are so many questions in there! Number one, for children who are quieter and shy, theres a difference between those two things. An introverted child is one who just kind of prefers less overwhelmingly stimulating environments, and often wants to socialize, but in quieter ways, like with one other kid at a time. A shy child might actually be very extroverted and enjoy the company of lots of kids in a kind of big, boisterous environment. But with shyness, its more about social anxiety and the fear of being judged, so the first thing is really to identify where the childs quiet behavior comes from.Okay. I think with my kid, its definitely that he likes less stimulating environments. He takes a long time to warm up to new places just as much as new people. Yes, these kids have a longer runway. Ill give you the example of a child learning to swim. Very often these kids will be tentative around the water for the first time. You dont just want to throw them in the pool, which is sort of one school of parenting. But neither do you want to overprotect them. So maybe you go to the pool on a day where you know its going to be empty, and maybe the drill for that day is you encourage your child to dip one toe in the water, and then you celebrate and go for ice cream. And then you go back a few days later, and this time theyre in up to their knees, and you do it little by little from there. Eventually the child learns to swim, and you cannot tell the difference between that child and the one who leapt in right away.Youre letting them know that what they are feeling is normal, and that they can learn to manage these feelings and work through them.That makes sense. A big transition is the first day of school, or a new school. How do we help? One of my kids schools hosts playdates at the school playground to get the kids accustomed to the school itself. Yeah, so thats getting together at a playground with a big noisy group of kids. If your kid wants to play, thats fine, but if not, I would say identify other parents and kids that you think your child might get along with and arrange a solo playdate over the summer, there or somewhere else.Often for quieter kids the route to social life is through these bridge friends. Its getting to know one person at a time. Kenneth Rubin and Andrea Thompson wrote a book called The Friendship Factor, and it looks at this concern that kids who arent as social might have problems in their future lives. Based on their research, as long as that child has one or two friends, thats their social connection, and thats all they need to live a happy, successful rewarding life.So maybe on the first day of school try to get there earlier, so that they are one of the first kids in the classroom, and its still quiet and not overwhelming. Basically, the rule of thumb is: try to introduce the child to a new situation on their own terms.Do you think then that we should advocate for our introverted kid at school? Talk to their teacher about ways to involve them that honor their skills? Im always worried about being a helicopter parent.Definitely reach out to the teacher. Just let them know, Hey, I wanted to let you know something about my child and get your advice or My child is slower to warm up, so how would you feel about pairing him with Johnny to do something one-on-one? Or, for an older kid, maybe you say, I know she does really well if she knows in advance you are going to call on her but shes really nervous about being called on just cold. Most teachers are pretty receptive if you approach them as partners. And theres a way teachers can frame their feedback to show they understand a quieter child. Instead of Sophie must learn to speak up in class, which, I will tell you, from all the years of hearing from Sophies, makes them feel terrible and stays with them for years, try Sophie is a deep thinker, and we always love to hear what she comes up with.Weve been talking about younger kids, but what about older kids and teenagers? How do we best meet their needs? One of the most important routes for an older child to flourish, a quieter one, is developing mastery in areas they are passionate about. It might be tennis, or chess, it could be anything, but I would lean into cultivating that mastery because the research shows that self-esteem comes from mastery rather than the other way around. And those passion areas are a great road to friendship for introverted kids because often they arent interested in just socializing for its own sake, but they might love talking to their friend on the fencing team. Theres a common bond in that activity.Thank you. Is there anything else you think is important here? Anything my extroverted brain isnt thinking of? This sounds hokey, but it really isnt. A child needs to understand that their parents love and honor them for who they are. Ive gotten thousands of letters over the years from parents, but also children who feel they didnt get that signal, who felt that it was inadvertently communicated to them that there was something wrong with this way of being. That creates a shame that that child then carries around with them. So parents need to do the inner work on that, because when introverts have parents who truly get them, that goes a very long way.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

February 17, 20255 min readA Vaccine for the Dreaded Norovirus Is Closer Than EverNorovirus infection rates are extremely high this year, raising the question: Why cant a vaccine protect us from the stomach bug?By Meghan Bartels edited by Lauren J. Young Hailshadow/Getty ImagesNorovirus conjures a nightmarish series of gastrointestinal symptoms, and the hated infection has been rampant this winter. The so-called stomach flualthough its unrelated to influenzastrikes suddenly and curses its victims with one to three days of diarrhea and vomiting.Yet unlike other commonplace infections such as seasonal flu and COVID, no vaccine exists to help people avoid being sidelined by norovirus, a notoriously transmissible and resilient virus that is difficult to kill with common alcohol-based disinfectants. Vaccine developers have long worked to create a vaccinesome seven different candidates are currently in various stages of clinical trials. But none has proved effective enough to earn approval in the U.S. There are several scientific barriers, but researchers hope that soon one approach will meet the challenge and provide an effective tool to those who want to boost their immune system against the nasty infection.What Is Norovirus?On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Norovirus is responsible for more than half of foodborne illness cases in the U.S. The virus can survive for up to two weeks on surfaces, flourishes in the face of common hand sanitizers and rips through settings such as cruise ships and cafeterias. Typical symptoms of infection include diarrhea, vomiting, nausea and stomach pain; people can also experience fever, headache and body aches. Cases with severe vomiting and diarrhea increase the risk of serious dehydration.The Centers for Disease Control and Preventions data regarding norovirus outbreaks are quite limited: the agencys surveillance network for the infection includes only 14 states. Still, the picture these statistics paint is grim. The reporting states have seen 1,078 suspected or confirmed norovirus outbreaks from August 1, 2024, through January 15, 2025, which is nearly twice as many as the same period during the 20232024 season and higher than in all years since at least 2012, when the reporting network was established.Young children and people aged 65 and older are particularly vulnerable to severe illness. Each year the virus causes more than two million outpatient clinic visits, predominantly in young children, and kills about 900 people a year, mostly those aged 65 and older. The infection is highly contagious, causes large outbreaks often and hits these vulnerable groups hardbut for most people, symptoms only last a few days. That variability in disease severity presents a tricky situation for would-be vaccine manufacturers, says Ming Tan, a scientific researcher at the Cincinnati Childrens Hospital Medical Center.Some people do not view it as a very important disease, and other people say that its terrible because it can make a lot of people sick in certain close settings, Tan says.Challenges for Vaccine MakersThe virus boasts several characteristics that make it a challenging target for vaccine developers. First, as with influenza, norovirus is actually a group of viruses that consists of some 48 so-called genotypes divided into 10 larger classes. As with the flu, an immune system trained to recognize one variety of norovirus cant necessarily protect against the others. And dominant strains come and go as frequently as every two to four years, making it difficult for the immune system to keep up. (Cases this year and last year have been caused predominantly by a strain called GII.17, whereas previous seasons had been led by a strain nicknamed Sydney.)There are dozens of genotypes of norovirus that can cause disease in humans, and each one of those genotypes has a slightly different-looking protein shell that we think requires a slightly different immune response, says Doran Fink, a physician and vaccine scientist at the biotech company Moderna, who leads its norovirus vaccine development.Another challenge is that norovirus causes what scientists call a mucous membrane, or mucosal, infectionin this case, a local infection in the intestinal surface tissue. (Flu is a localized mucosal infection in respiratory tissue.)These local viruses are trickier for the body to remember and fight off compared with systemic infections, such as measles and chickenpox, that affect the whole body and usually cause robust, long-lasting immune responses. Mucosal immunity is short-lived, not like systemic immunity, says Lijuan Yuan, a viral immunologist at Virginia Tech. An injected vaccine triggers a systemic immune response, she notes, not a mucosal one, so it is less able to access the virus. This disconnect makes it more likely that injected vaccines for mucosal infections will only protect against severe disease, not prevent sickness entirely.Norovirus is also tricky to work with in the lab. Preliminary vaccine experiments typically require animal models, but researchers dont have a good such model for norovirus. Thats because human noroviruses dont easily infect animals, and animal-specific noroviruses cause very different symptoms. Norovirus cant be grown well in cells either, Yuan notes.In the PipelineDespite the host of obstacles, scientists are working on clinical trials testing half a dozen different vaccine candidates. All target the primary surface proteinor capsid proteinthat encases a norovirus molecule, but they use several different approaches, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.In one approach, scientists produce many of these so-called capsid proteins. The proteins then spontaneously form empty structures in the same shape as the virus. When these empty shells, called viruslike particles, are injected into a person, the body reacts as it would to the real thing, training the immune system. But making the viruslike particles is time-consuming, Tan says. And although the vaccine produced decent results in trials in adults, it did little to protect children, suggesting that this vulnerable population may require a different vaccine.A second approach recruits a common, typically mild respiratory virus called an adenovirus, makes it unable to replicate and gives it the ability to produce the target norovirus protein. The adenovirus is packaged into an oral vaccine, which is much easier to administer than an injection, and it can train the mucosal immune system directly. The protection rate is still rather low, however, Tan says.The third approach uses the same mRNA technology that was used to create some of the COVID vaccines. Genetic information for the norovirus protein is injected into the vaccine recipient to trigger the immune response. This method is simpler to execute and can be more easily updated as different strains of norovirus become dominant, Fink says. His team at Moderna designed an mRNA norovirus vaccine, and the company is now recruiting people to test how protective it is. That will enable scientists to compare the mRNA technique with the viruslike particle and adenovirus approaches that have disappointed researchers to date. Whether or not it will have a better efficacy, we still need to wait [and see], says Tan, who is not involved with any of these candidates.Whichever vaccine makes it through trials first may not earn the annual ritual status of the flu shot. A norovirus vaccine would likely be offered first to people aged 65 years and older as well as immunocompromised people, given that norovirus infections tend to be much worse for these groups, Fink says. It would probably be offered as a yearly dose timed with the peak period for norovirus, which is between November and April in the Northern Hemisphere. Perhaps people planning to embark on a cruise or those who otherwise expect to be exposed to the virus could opt for a dose as well, he notes. But Tan isnt convinced that healthy adults would be very interested in a norovirus vaccine.Fink says that theres still value in having a vaccine as a prevention option, even if it wont be fully protective. If we can shift the burden of disease such that even if you do get norovirus, its very mild, I think that would be a big success, he says.

February 15, 20256 min readUrgent CDC Data on Influenza and Bird Flu Go Missing as Outbreaks EscalateDelays in CDC analyses of infectious disease threats and agency silence will harm Americans, doctors and publichealthexperts warnBy Amy Maxmen & KFF Health News Kachura Oleg/Getty ImagesSonya Stokes, an emergency room physician in the San Francisco Bay Area, braces herself for a daily deluge of patients sick with coughs, soreness, fevers, vomiting, and other flu-like symptoms.Shes desperate for information, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a critical source of urgent analyses of the flu and other public health threats, has gone quiet in the weeks since President Donald Trump took office.Without more information, we are blind, she said.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Flu has been brutal this season. The CDC estimates at least 24 million illnesses, 310,000 hospitalizations, and 13,000 deaths from the flu since the start of October. At the same time, the bird flu outbreak continues to infect cattle and farmworkers. But CDC analyses that would inform people about these situations are delayed, and the CDC has cut off communication with doctors, researchers, and the World Health Organization, say doctors and public health experts.CDC right now is not reporting influenza data through the WHO global platforms, FluNet [and] FluID, that theyve been providing information [on] for many, many years, Maria Van Kerkhove, interim director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness at the WHO, said at a Feb. 12 press briefing.We are communicating with them, she added, but we havent heard anything back.On his first day in office, President Donald Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the WHO.A critical analysis of the seasonal flu selected for distribution through the CDCs Health Alert Network has stalled, according to people close to the CDC. They asked not to be identified because of fears of retaliation. The network, abbreviated as HAN, is the CDCs main method of sharing urgent public health information with health officials, doctors, and, sometimes, the public.A chart from that analysis, reviewed by KFF Health News, suggests that flu may be at a record high. About 7.7% of patients who visited clinics and hospitals without being admitted had flu-like symptoms in early February, a ratio higher than in four other flu seasons depicted in the graph. That includes 2003-04, when an atypical strain of flu fueled a particularly treacherous season that killed at least 153 children.Without a complete analysis, however, its unclear whether this tidal wave of sickness foreshadows a spike in hospitalizations and deaths that hospitals, pharmacies, and schools must prepare for. Specifically, other data could relay how many of the flu-like illnesses are caused by flu viruses or which flu strain is infecting people. A deeper report might also reveal whether the flu is more severe or contagious than usual.I need to know if we are dealing with a more virulent strain or a coinfection with another virus that is making my patients sicker, and what to look for so that I know if my patients are in danger, Stokes said. Delays in data create dangerous situations on the front line.Although the CDCs flu dashboard shows a surge of influenza, it doesnt include all data needed to interpret the situation. Nor does it offer the tailored advice found in HAN alerts that tells health care workers how to protect patients and the public. In 2023, for example, a report urged clinics to test patients with respiratory symptoms rather than assume cases are the flu, since other viruses were causing similar issues that year.This is incredibly disturbing, said Rachel Hardeman, a member of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the CDC. On Feb. 10, Hardeman and other committee members wrote to acting CDC Director Susan Monarez asking the agency to explain missing data, delayed studies, and potentially severe staff cuts. The CDC is vital to our nations security, the letter said.Several studies have also been delayed or remain missing from the CDCs preeminent scientific publication, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Anne Schuchat, a former principal deputy director at the CDC, said she would be concerned if there was political oversight of scientific material: Suppressing information is potentially confusing, possibly dangerous, and it can backfire.CDC spokesperson Melissa Dibble declined to comment on delayed or missing analyses. It is not unexpected to see flu activity elevated and increasing at this time of the year, she said.A draft of one unpublished study, reviewed by KFF Health News, that has been withheld from the MMWR for three weeks describes how a milk hauler and a dairy worker in Michigan may have spread bird flu to their pet cats. The indoor cats became severely sick and died. Although the workers werent tested, the study says that one of them had irritated eyes before the cat fell ill a common bird flu symptom. That person told researchers that the pet would roll in their work clothes.After one cat became sick, the investigation reports, an adolescent in the household developed a cough. But the report says this young person tested negative for the flu, and positive for a cold-causing virus.Corresponding CDC documents summarizing the cat study and another as-yet unpublished bird flu analysis said the reports were scheduled to be published Jan. 23. These were reviewed by KFF Health News. The briefing on cats advises dairy farmworkers to remove clothing and footwear, and rinse off any animal biproduct residue before entering the household to protect others in the household, including potentially indoor-only cats.The second summary refers to the most comprehensive analysis of bird flu virus detected in wastewater in the United States.Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University, said delays of bird flu reports are upsetting because theyre needed to inform the public about a worsening situation with many unknown elements. Citing insufficient data and high uncertainty, the United Kingdom raised its assessment of the risk posed by the U.S. outbreak on dairies.Missing and delayed data causes uncertainty, Nuzzo said. It also potentially makes us react in ways that are counterproductive.Another bird flu study slated for January publication showed up in the MMWR on Feb. 13, three weeks after it was expected. It revealed that three cattle veterinarians had been unknowingly infected last year, based on the discovery of antibodies against the bird flu virus in their blood. One of the veterinarians worked in Georgia and South Carolina, states that havent reported outbreaks on dairy farms.The study provides further evidence that the United States is not adequately detecting cases in cows and people. Nuzzo said it also highlights how data can supply reassuring news. Only three of 150 cattle veterinarians had signs of prior infections, suggesting that the virus doesnt easily spread from the animals into people. More than 40 dairy workers have been infected, but they generally have had more sustained contact with sick cattle and their virus-laden milk than veterinarians.Instead, recently released reports have been about wildfires in California and Hawaii.Interesting but not urgent, Nuzzo said, considering the acute fire emergencies have ended. The bird flu outbreak, she said, is an ongoing urgent health threat for which we need up-to-the-minute information to know how to protect people.The American public is at greater risk when we dont have information on a timely basis, Schuchat said.This week, a federal judge ordered the CDC and other health agencies to restore datasets and websites that the organization Doctors for America had identified in a lawsuit as having been altered. Further, the judge ordered the agencies to identify any other resources that DFA members rely on to provide medical care and restore them by Feb. 14.In their letter, CDC advisory committee members requested an investigation into missing data and delayed reports. Hardeman, an adviser who is a health policy expert at the University of Minnesota, said the group didnt know why data and scientific findings were being withheld or removed. Still, she added, I hold accountable the acting director of the CDC, the head of HHS, and the White House.Hardeman said the Trump administration has the power to disband the advisory committee. She said the group expects that to happen but proceeded with its demands regardless.We want to safeguard the rigor of the work at the CDC because we care deeply about public health, she said. We arent here to be silent.KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

February 14, 20253 min readThe Psychology of Shared Silence in CouplesThe right kind of silence can be golden, revitalizing and strengthening a relationshipBy Francine Russo & Knowable Magazine Partners enjoy a companionable moment of separate activities. lucky-sky/Getty ImagesA couple sits together on a sunny park bench. He appears to be studying the passing clouds; shes absorbed in a novel. Some passersby might think, How sweet. Others might see them as bleak.They could be either. Until now, scientists have mostly ignored shared silences between romantic partners, concentrating on verbal exchanges: how to discuss feelings, negotiate needs and deal with conflict. But according to new research, silence can be a powerful communicator for couples.In a series of four studies described in Motivation and Emotion in 2024, psychologist Netta Weinstein of the United Kingdoms University of Reading and her colleagues asked partnered college students and adults to write about experiences of silence with their significant others.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Weinstein and her colleagues hypothesized that silences would differ in meaning and in the emotion they generated based on what motivated them. The research team sorted shared silences into three types. Intrinsic, or intimate, silences arise naturally and comfortably between mates, while introjected, or anxious, silences occur when one person feels uncomfortable speaking, and external, or hostile, silences can come from one partners wish to shut out or punish the other. Silences can also be spontaneous, or random.We dont always need to fill up the space with conversation: Silent moments can be powerful ways to connect. Netta Weinstein, psychologistIn Weinsteins investigations, different groups of subjects reflected on a recent silent episode in their current relationship, or on daily silent episodes over 14 days. Some participants were randomly assigned to write about a particular kind of silence, based on what motivated it, and one group wrote about a wordless episode from a bad relationship in their past. Participants reported how frequently such silences occurred, their emotions during them peaceful, depressed, bored or sad, for example and how they felt about their relationship.To indicate why they were not speaking, they could choose among such statements as: Because I feared he/she would be mad at me if I said something, Because I cherish moments when I am able to be next to him/her even if we arent speaking, Because he/she wanted me to be silent, Because I wanted him/her to feel bad and Because I didnt need to speak for my partner to get me.Three significant findings emerged from the studies. First unsurprisingly the reason for a silence was a major factor in the episodes impact on the partners emotions and relationship. Couples who saw their silence as anxious or hostile reported less positive and more negative emotion, for example. Second, intrinsic silences that felt comfortable were associated with many positive emotions and high ratings of how well the relationship fulfilled their needs.The third finding was that during these intrinsic silences, positive feelings were low-arousal they were relaxed and peaceful rather than happy or excited.Weinstein says she finds this last result intriguing. Until now, she says, researchers had reported that this kind of peacefulness could be achieved only in solitude, but it appears that couples who feel safe thinking their own thoughts while enjoying the pleasure of togetherness seem to experience it too. The findings show couples that they dont have to separate to enjoy alone time.Another overall finding, she adds, is that we dont always need to fill up the space with conversation: Silent moments can be powerful ways to connect.Weinstein and colleagues are really looking at a topic that has received not nearly as much attention as it deserves, says Northwestern University psychological scientist Claudia Haase, who wrote a 2023 article in the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology on how couples become better at managing their emotions as they grow older. In her current work, she studies couples interacting in a lab. Although she has not specifically studied mutual silences, she believes these are filled with meaning, from the refusal to speak during stonewalling to the wordlessness that indicates, she says, a sense that we are safe with each other.Weinstein notes that partners pay a lot of attention to how what they say can hurt or help their mate, but rarely think about the ramifications of silences. Partners might learn something important, for example, if they check out what their quietness means for their mate, Haase adds: One persons comfortable silence may leave their mate feeling ignored or shut out.Couples can also plan together to enable intimate silent experiences perhaps doing something together that they both enjoy, such as reading, hiking up a trail to a breathtaking vista or stretching out and listening to a Chopin sonata. Those moments, Weinstein says, are rich with love and closeness and connection.This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

February 14, 20259 min readTumors Hijack the Nervous System to Fuel Their Own GrowthInterrupting signals exchanged between tumors and the nervous system could become a critical pillar of cancer careBy Ingrid Wickelgren edited by Gary StixBrain tumor. Kateryna Kon/Science Photo Library/Getty ImagesCancer arises as an enemy from within. One of the bodys own cells becomes damaged or corrupted and then multiplies to create copies of its aberrant self. The ballooning army of deviant cells may invade nearby tissues, damaging them and causing symptoms.Deepening the betrayal, the body itself becomes complicit. Blood vessels grow toward the tumor, supplying oxygen and nutrients. Immune cells may forego an attack on the cancer and protect it instead. By communicating with these body systems, the cancer bends them to its own ends.Until recently, the nervous system was not thought to be part of these duplicities, even when cancer had set up its primary residence in the brain. Neurons were simply the cancers victims. But in recent years, investigators have uncovered chemical and electrical cross talk between neurons and cancer cells that powerfully fuel a tumors growth. The tumor may even remodel neural networks so that they are better positioned to provide it critical life support.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The discoveries unveiling this alliance underpin a new field called cancer neurosciencethe study of interactions between cancer and the nervous system that promote cancer growth and cancer-related disability.Michelle Monje, a neuroscientist and neuro-oncologist at Stanford University, helped pioneer the field more than a decade ago while studying a group of deadly brain cancers that include glioblastoma and certain fatal childhood tumors. The strongest evidence for the devastating actions of the nervous system in cancer is in brain cancermuch of it a result of Monjes work. But researchers have replicated at least part of the story in other cancers, including those of the breast, prostate, pancreas, colon and skin.The findings offer a new set of targets for halting cancer growth. Monje believes that interrupting the communication between cancer and the nervous system may be key to successfully treating the deadliest of tumors.Scientific American spoke to Monje about the strategies neurons and cancer cells use to collaborate and the ways that drugs might be crafted or repurposed to disrupt that relationship.[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]How did cancer neuroscience get its start?Its only been about 10 years, and it really came all at once. My intellectual journey started during my clinical training, between 2000 and 2010. I was treating patients with primary brain cancers called high-grade gliomas, for which we have extremely limited therapies. Youve probably heard of glioblastoma [a type of high-grade glioma]. I also focus on a childhood cancer called diffuse midline glioma. It struck me that these cancers happen in particular parts of the nervous system at particular ages. You can predict the location of a glioma if you know the age of the patient. That speaks to some process in neural development that has gone awry.I also knew that for almost 100 years, neuropathologists looking at tumor tissue have noticed cancer cells clustering around neurons in the brain. The cells are not randomly distributed. They have this tight microanatomical association with mature neurons that we call perineuronal satellitosis.What did you make of those clues?I thought the cancer might be hijacking neurodevelopment. As a neuroscientist, I knew that much of neurodevelopment depends on the activity in the nervous system. So I thought the activity of the nervous system might matter a lot in brain cancer. There might be critically important interactions between the neurons and the cancer cells.Was that a new idea?Yes. At that time, neurons had been entirely ignored [as participants in cancer]. They were viewed solely as the victims of the cancer.How did you test this idea?We put tumors that had been removed from my patients into mouse brains. Then we used a technique called optogenetics, which allows us to control the activity of specific neurons, to stimulate mouse neurons. We found that the tumors grew more and that they grew faster. It was the first demonstration that brain activity influences brain cancer growth.In that same study, which was published in 2015, we also identified some growth factors that the active neurons secrete that influence the growth of the glioma.You said this happened all at once. What other evidence had come out?Around that time, a very exciting paper from the sadly now deceased Paul Frenette, who was working at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, showed that peripheral nerves were important for prostate cancer growth. Then a third group led by Tim Wang at Columbia [University] showed that if you remove nerves in the stomach in a mouse model of gastric cancer, the tumors stop growing.A program officer at the National Cancer Institute [NCI] took notice of our work and suggested we have a think-tank meeting. In 2015 she brought us all together at the NCI for what was really the very first meeting in cancer neuroscience.So nervous system activity causes the release of chemical factors that spur cancer growth. Is that the whole story?Not all of what we were seeing in my lab could be explained by these growth factors. As a postdoc, I had discovered that these terrible childhood high-grade gliomas originated from immature cells that give rise to oligodendrocytes, brain cells that belong to a broad class called glia. In my lab, we showed that neural activity causes normal immature glia to mature and proliferate and that it does so through growth factors. We found that one of these factors, a surprising one called neuroligin 3, strongly regulates the growth of malignant glioma. In fact, it was required for glioma growth: if you deleted the gene for it in a mouse, gliomas from patients did not grow in the mouses brain.We delved into why the cancer was dependent on this factor, and we found that when glioma cells were exposed to it, they expressed genes that are needed for building synapses [the connection points between neurons]. So I wondered whether synapses might be forming between neurons and the cancerwhich seemed like a really wild idea. But we looked, and there were.So the cancer cells are electrically connected to neurons in a circuit?We not only found neuron-to-cancer synapses but also electrical currents in the cancer cell. This cancer is an electrically active tissue. We can see it. We have a biochemical tool that shows us the electrical activity. The electrical potential difference across the cell membrane changes, something called membrane depolarization [that lets positively charged ions stream into the cell]. Thats a super metabolically expensive thing for a cell to do, so it must be advantageous to the cancer cell.I wondered whether this membrane depolarization was the key thing. The synapses were important because they induce membrane depolarization. We tested that by using optogenetics to depolarize cancer cells in a mouse brain, and that did promote the cancers growth. So just membrane depolarization is sufficient to promote the growth of the cancer.We showed that in a paper published in 2019. Then, in 2023, we reported that the larger the inward current, the more it promotes the growth of the cancer. And if we interrupt this current, that is pretty profoundly therapeutic in animal models.Were you the first to find these synapses between the cancer and the nervous system?Back in December 2015, when we were still working on proving this, I was invited to speak at [Heidelberg University in Germany] by Frank Winkler, who had just discovered that glioma cells connect to each other through something called gap junctions. We were talking in this office, and although I had just met this guy, I decided to share our really big finding.... His face lit up. He said, We found synapses, too!It was so incredibly reassuring. It wasnt some artifact. This independent group across the Atlantic found the exact same thing. In a lot of contexts, people would be competitive about this co-discovery. But I wasnt going to try to scoop him, and he didnt try to scoop me. Instead we co-submitted our papers to Nature. They were published back-to-back in the same 2019 issue. Its a nice story of scientific professionalism.When the cancer cells form these synapses, does the brains normal activity promote their growth?Yes, and the cancer cells even remodel the brain. A neurosurgeon colleague of mine, Shawn Hervey-Jumper of the University of California, San Francisco, made some chilling discoveries in adults who had been newly diagnosed with gliomas that affected the left language cortex. Prior to removing the tumors, he recorded from the region around the tumor while patients did expressive language tasks, such as naming objects in photographs. In people without tumors, the expressive language centers become active during these kinds of tasks. But in these patients, a much larger area spanning the entirety of the tumor-infiltrated cortex became active. So by the time of diagnosis, the tumor had functionally remodeled language circuitry such that every time a patient spoke, the tumor was stimulated.How did the tumor do this?Cancer cells secrete factors that lead to more neuron-to-neuron synapses and increase excitability and probably promote this functional remodeling, which we only partly understand.Does that mean that, using these factors, the cancer recruits and mobilizes the nervous system to further promote its own growth?Yes, the remodeling creates more connections to the tumor such that normal activities, such as speaking, trigger more extensive electrical inputs to the tumor than they would otherwise. The tumor also increases the activity of neurons so there are more instances of communication between the neuron and the cancer.Its a vicious cycle. [This remodeling of circuitry not only perpetuates the cancers growth but also] probably accounts for a lot of the symptoms patients have. Hervey-Jumper found that language function in patients inversely correlated with the degree to which the cancer had remodeled the language circuitry. Survival was also inversely correlated with the degree to which the tumor was connected to the rest of the brain.Is this a new idea?Yes. Most people thought these neurological deficits resulted from a destructive process, and thats not true. Theres a dysfunction process induced by the cancer and hijacking of the neural circuits, but the cancer needs the neural circuits to function, so destruction is much more minimal and much later in the course of the disease.Does the nervous system play a role in all cancers?In every solid tumor Im aware of that has been studied from this perspective, there is a key neural mechanism that is regulating cancer initiation, growth and/or invasion. But there are a lot of cancers that have not been studied from this perspective.Are these mechanisms the same as they are for brain cancer?Peripheral nerves are important for peripheral cancers. So the concept is the same, but the details differ from tumor to tumor. For instance, cholinergic nerves [which release a chemical signal called acetylcholine] powerfully drive colon cancer, but those same nerves slow down pancreatic cancer, which is driven by adrenergic nerves [which release adrenaline].People have found neurotransmitters and growth factors driving the growth of these cancers, but we dont know as much about synaptic and electrical mechanisms in cancers outside of the brain because those experiments are just beginning to be done.What are the implications for cancer treatment?There are key opportunities to develop new and repurpose old medicines to target these neuron-cancer interactions. We are starting in this field with a leg up because so many wonderful medicinesfor seizures, migraines, blood pressure and arrhythmias, for examplehave already been developed that target neurotransmitter receptors and ion channels to regulate excitable tissues. In our 2019 paper, we tested an antiseizure medicine called perampanel that targets a receptor on glioma cells. It really nicely slowed glioma growth in mice. We can take FDA-approved medicines off the shelf and test them in this new way.There are also lessons to be learned from data we already have. A lot of cancer patients take antiseizure medicines, blood pressure medicines and pain medicines. We can study patient datasets to see if people did better if they were on one of these other medications.Are there clinical trials?The trials are just beginning. I led an early-phase trial of a compound that blocks the release of neuroligin 3 in pediatric brain tumors. Frank Winkler has started a glioblastoma trial targeting neurotransmitter receptors and gap junctions that are involved in signaling between neurons and cancer cells. There are trials of beta-blockers in breast cancer.Do you think that disrupting nerve-cancer interactions will be enough to control cancer?Probably not. But I suspect it will be necessary for difficult-to-treat cancers. As somebody who administers CAR T cell therapy [genetic modification of a patients immune cells] for brain tumors, I can tell you that one of the reasons that this immunotherapy doesnt work sufficiently is that these are rapidly growing tumors, and the treatment cant keep up. It is hard to get ahead of the cancer. But if you can disconnect the tumor from the nervous system that is robustly promoting its growth, maybe you can slow it down enough to allow the immunotherapy to outpace the cancer.Treatments based on this idea will not replace current cancer treatment strategies, such as chemotherapy, surgery and radiation. They will augment them to increase their efficacy and hopefully achieve better outcomes. Targeting nervous system interactions with cancer is going to be a major aspect of cancer care in the future.What does the future look like for cancer neuroscience?The field has been exploding. We just had a cancer neuroscience meeting in January with 125 attendees, a 10-fold increase from that first meeting a decade ago. And there are so many papers that every time I write a review article, it feels out of date by the time it is published.We are developing courses in cancer biology for the neuroscientist and in neuroscience for the cancer biologist. We need to teach each other the techniques because there are very few of us trained in both disciplines. We are also training the next generation of scientists to learn neuroscience and cancer biology techniques at the same time. Its so exciting that people are thinking about this now. Its really this missing pillar of oncology.