January 21, 202512 min readHow Neandertal DNA May Affect the Way We ThinkDNA inherited from Neandertals may influence modern human cognitionBy Emily L. Casanova & F. Alex Feltus edited by Kate Wong Sam FalconerWhen Neandertals were first discovered nearly 170 years ago, the conceptual gap between their lineage and thatof modern humans seemed vast. Initially scientists prejudicially believed that the Neandertals were primitive brutes hardly more intelligent than apes and that their lack of advanced thinking had doomed them to extinction. Since that time, researchers have amassed evidence that they shared many of the cognitive abilities once considered unique to our species, Homo sapiens. They made complex tools, produced staples such as flour, treated their ailments with plant-based medicines, used symbols to communicate and engaged in ritual treatment of their dead.The divide between their lineage and ours narrowed even further in 2010, when researchers published the first Neandertal genome sequence. Comparison of that ancient DNA with modern human DNA showed that the two species had interbred and that people today still carry the genetic fingerprint of that intermixing. Since then, numerous studies have explored the ways in which Neandertal DNA affects our modern physiology, revolutionizing our understanding not only of our extinct cousins but of ourselves as a hybrid species.This area of research, clinical paleogenomics, is still in its infancy, and there are many complexities to unravel as we explore this new frontier. We therefore must take the findings from these studies with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, the research conducted to date raises the fascinating possibility that Neandertal DNA has wide-reaching effects on our speciesnot only on general health but on brain development, including our propensity for conditions such as autism. In other words, DNA from our extinct relatives may, to some extent, shape the cognition of people 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.It seems that every few weeks a new study expands our understanding of how Neandertal DNA affects modern human health and physiology. Researchers have found that some Neandertal DNA makes carriers more vulnerable to various immune disorders, such as systemic lupus erythematosus and Crohns disease, and some gene variants affect an immune molecule known as interleukin-18, which plays a role in predisposition to autoimmune disorders. Some Neandertal DNA variants are implicated in increased risk for severe COVID, whereas others appear to be protective factors. Still other Neandertal-derived variants may be instrumental in determining whether we develop allergies. And there is some evidence to suggest that our ancient cousins DNA may even be implicated in asthmaa subject of ongoing research.Scientists have also documented a number of effects of Neandertal DNA beyond the immune system. Neandertal DNA may affect the color of our skin and hair, how readily our blood clots, our propensity for heart disease, and how our cells respond to various environmental stressors such as radiation. It can also help determine how prone we are to certain skin cancers, thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency, obesity and diabetes.The notion that Neandertal DNA might significantly influence our brains and behavior, however, is actually a bit counterintuitive. Previous research has shown that this ancient DNA tends to be underrepresented in the brain-related genes of modern humans, primarily because these types of genes are very sensitive to change, and anything new gets weeded out fairly quickly. These regions of the genome are known as Neandertal DNA deserts. Yet studies published over the past decade have shown that some Neandertal DNA has in fact persisted in and around some brain-related genes in modern humans.The effects of Neandertal DNA are apparent throughout the brain and associated structures in people today.The effects of this DNA are apparent throughout the brain and associated structures. Philipp Gunz of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues found that people with higher percentages of Neandertal DNA are more likely to have skull shapes that are modestly elongated and reminiscent of the Neandertal skull, particularly around the parietal and occipital regions toward the back of the cranium. This skull elongation is sometimes associated with Neandertal variants that are located near the genes UBR4 and PHLPP1, which are involved in neuron production and the formation of myelin, the fatty sheath that insulates the axons of larger neurons, allowing them to communicate more reliably over longer distances. The skull elongation is also associated with Neandertal variants located near GPR26. This gene is still poorly understood, but it appears to have antitumor effects and is therefore probably also involved in regulating the production of neurons and other nervous systems cells called glia.In another study, Michael D. Gregory of the National Institutes of Health and his colleagues observed differences in the structure of the brain in regions related to visual processing and socialization. Specifically, people with more Neandertal DNA tend to have increased connectivity in visual-processing tracts but reduced connectivity in nearby tracts that are implicated in social cognition. This intriguing finding suggests there could be trade-offs between visual processing and social skills in the Homo lineage.Of particular importance, Neandertal DNA also seems to influence the structure and function of the cerebellum. Although most neuroscientists have tended to think of this brain region as functionally dedicated to motor memory and coordination, it is also involved in attention, emotional regulation, sensory processing and social cognition. The cerebellum seems to be vital for systems involved in mentalizing, which underlies many aspects of our ability to infer the mental states of other people. In 2018 Takanori Kochiyama of Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto and his colleagues published a study in which they reconstructed the crania of Neandertals and those of early modern humans and compared them. Their research showed that the cerebellum was significantly smaller in our extinct cousins than in members of our own lineage. These data suggest that there could be significant variability in the structure and function of the cerebellum (and therefore in social cognition) in modern humans as a result of the DNA we have inherited from Neandertals.When it comes to the inheritance of genetic variations, the overall size of a population has a dramatic effect on whether a particular DNA mutation is passed on, especially if its somewhat deleterious or harmful. In a large population, a modestly deleterious mutation is likely to get weeded out relatively quickly just by sheer probability. But in a small, isolated population, such a mutation is far more likely to spread as if it were neutral, and it may even become permanently retained in the population. Small groups tend to accumulate more mutations over time than larger populations do, which may reduce the number of children that individuals in those populations can raise, putting the groups at risk of dying out. Its for this reason that most modern human cultures consider it taboo to marry a close relation such as a first cousin. Cultures that still allow this practice often have unusually high rates of so-called recessive diseases, which arise when an individual inherits the same genetic susceptibility factor from both parents.Research into the Neandertal genome has indicated that our extinct relatives underwent a significant and somewhat protracted reduction in their population size, an event known as a genetic bottleneck. Between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago, their population dwindled to perhaps as few as 5,000 individuals. Because of that genetic bottleneck, the Neandertal genome contains an overabundance of potentially harmful mutations, which most likely led to reduced reproductive fitness and high rates of recessive disease in their population. There is evidence of this bottleneck event and its consequences in Neandertal fossils from the site of El Sidrn in Spain, where 13 closely related individuals exhibit evidence of 17 different skeletal birth defects.Neandertals had a braincase that was long and low in shape (left), in contrast to the globular braincase of Homo sapiens (right). People today with higher percentages of Neandertal DNA are more likely to have an elongate skull reminiscent of Neandertals.Philipp Gunz/MPI EVA LeipzigOur species probably inherited some of these unfavorable genetic variants when our ancestors interbred with Neandertals tens of millennia ago. Is it possible that some of the harmful Neandertal-derived variants that have stuck around in our genomes now influence not only the sizes and shapes of some of our brain structures but also our propensity for neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions?The accumulation of evidence to date suggests that this may well be happening. For instance, some Neandertal variants have been linked with the presence of major depression. Perhaps not coincidentally, these variants have also been implicated in determining chronotypethat is, whether someone is a morning or night person. Some scientists posit that the effects of Neandertal DNA on our chronotype, which is determined by our circadian rhythms, might predispose us toward depression because many mood disorders have a significant seasonal component (to wit: seasonal affective disorder, a type of mood disorder in which symptoms come and go with the changing of the seasons).Neandertal DNA has also been associated with substance use such as drinking and smoking. Other genetic variants seem to increase pain sensitivity and prompt people to consume more pain medications. And a subset of Neandertal DNA variants may increase some peoples likelihood of developing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), although these variants are slowly disappearing from the modern human genome.One particularly intriguing connection that the two of us have been investigating is the possible link between Neandertal ancestry and autism. We first became interested in this link when we learned of the parallels between some of the brain connectivity patterns in visual- and social-processing pathways in nonautistic people who have more Neandertal DNA and people on the autism spectrum. People with autism often have enhanced visuospatial abilitiesfor instance, they tend to excel at picking out a target shape from a sea of distracting shapes in cognitive tests. At the same time, challenges with social cognition are typically central to the autistic experience and call to mind the reduced connectivity in those same neural pathways in nonautistic people with more Neandertal DNA. We also knew that just as Neandertals had smaller cerebellums than early modern humans did, which may have influenced their social cognitive abilities, people with autism consistently exhibit reduced volume in subregions of the cerebellum.This wealth of data from genetics, neuroimaging and brain reconstruction prompted the two of us to question whether Neandertal DNA could be influencing autism susceptibility in modern human populations. Our laboratories set out to address this important question together, accessing genetic data on both autistic and nonautistic people from several large, well-established databases. We were also interested in looking at Neandertal DNA according to ethnic background because there is a lot of variability across modern populations. For instance, people of African ancestry tend to have less Neandertal DNA than Asian and European people. Thus, it was important to match our groups of autistic and nonautistic people according to ethnicity.When studying Neandertal DNA in the modern human genome, scientists typically investigate single points in the DNA that vary across populations. These points of variation are known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, pronounced snips). We were very interested in studying common and rare Neandertal SNPs separately because the rarer a DNA variant is, the more likely it is to be harmful and the less likely it is to be passed down to offspring. What we found was that autistic people tend to have more rare Neandertal SNPs than ethnically matched nonautistic people have. Its important to note that autistic people dont necessarily have more Neandertal DNA in generaltheyre not more Neandertal than the next person. Its just that the Neandertal DNA they carry includes more of the rare variants than nonautistic people tend to have.Neandertal DNA variants appear to be influencing development of autism in measurable ways across ethnicities.We also investigated SNPs that specifically influence gene activity in the brain. We were able to identify 25 of these Neandertal-derived expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs), as they are known, that were overrepresented in our autism groups. For example, about 80 percent of white Hispanic autistic males with epilepsy carried a particular Neandertal SNP in the USP47 gene, compared with 15 percent of those in the nonautistic control group. Although the function of USP47 is poorly understood, this gene has tentative links with epilepsy, which often co-occurs with autism.In addition, we found a mutation in the COX10 gene that occurred more frequently in Black people with autism than in Black people without autism. Animals genetically engineered so that their COX10 is inactive tend to have a functional imbalance between the activity of excitatory neurons and inhibitory ones in the brain that is very characteristic of conditions like autism.We dont yet have a clear idea of what all these Neandertal SNPs are doing in people with autism. They appear to be influencing development of the condition in measurable ways across all ethnicities studied. And our research suggests that many of the rare Neandertal-derived SNPs, which are associated with autism, help to orchestrate neural connectivity, which in turn may affect how neurons communicate with one another. But precisely how these variants are affecting brain development remains to be determined. In all likelihood, there is no single answer.Genetics is an extremely complicated field of study. Although the human genome was sequenced more than 20 years ago, our understanding of molecular networks and how they influence organ development and function is still relatively rudimentary. As we dig deeper into how Neandertal DNA is influencing our genes, it is important to accept the complexity of the problem. There are more than 78,000 modern human genes that have mixed with nearly the same number of Neandertal genes. Humans can wrap their minds around a three-dimensional problem, but a 78,000D problem is rather more difficult! Fortunately, modern computers executing artificial-intelligence code can handle the analytical burden that our brains cannot.Our initial study tagged Neandertal DNA in partial genome sequences that constitute just 1 percent or so of the entire human genome. In the next phase of our research we will scan recently available complete genome sequences from modern human families with a propensity for autism. By expanding our search area for ancient DNA from genes to regions between genes, we will be able to investigate millions of additional eQTLs, which regulate the intensity of gene expression much as a dimmer switch controls the amount of light coming from a bulb. Once we map these eQTLs to Neandertal-derived DNA variations in a modern human genome, we will be able to infer whether some Neandertal DNA is measurably altering gene expression.A complete genome search will allow us to identify eQTLs from the Neandertal lineage that are involved in the function and development of not only the brain as a whole but also specific brain tissues and regions, such as the cerebellum. We may find that H. sapiens inherited entirely new neurodevelopmental traits from Neandertals that did not exist in our lineage until the two groups interbred. A more likely scenario, however, is that the introduction of Neandertal DNA into H. sapiens modified, but did not override or replace, genetic control mechanisms for extraordinarily complex brain conditions such as autism, ADHD and depression.If we can identify the exact neurodevelopmental pathways controlled by mixed Neandertal/H. sapiens gene regulatory networks, we may be able to figure out how ancient DNA reconfigured gene expression in the brain at the point of hybridization. This type of knowledge would have a variety of potential therapeutic applications within the burgeoning field of personalized medicine.We arent interested only in Neandertal DNA. It may be that hybridization in general, not just DNA inherited from Neandertals specifically, contributes to autism susceptibilitythe result of a type of genetic mismatch, if you will. If thats the case, we might also expect to see DNA from other cousins, the Denisovans, who also interbred with early H. sapiens, playing roles in autism and other neurological conditions in ethnic groups of people today who carry Denisovan DNA (primarily people of Asian and Native American ancestry). We will be looking for signs of Denisovan influence in the next phase of our research.Like the ADHD-related Neandertal variants that are gradually getting winnowed out of the modern human genome, the rare Neandertal variants that autistic people have may be getting weeded out of the gene pool, too. Some rare Neandertal DNA is probably fading away simply as a result of what population geneticists call the law of large numbers, which predicts that uncommon and rare DNA, regardless of its effects on the organism, will tend to slowly disappear from a large breeding population over time. But other Neandertal DNA may be rare because it is modestly harmful, affecting an individuals ability to have children and pass down their DNA.We know from research that, on average, people with autism are significantly less likely than the general population to have children, although there are certainly some who do have kids. But we dont know whether their reproductive rates are lower because people on the autism spectrum face challenges with romantic relationships or because they are more likely to have certain health-related disorders such as polycystic ovary syndrome that affect fertility. The answer is probably multifactorial. But regardless of the reasons, fewer offspring means fewer genetic variants associated with autism get passed down over time. So, if these variants arent getting passed down as often, why are they still sticking around in the human genome, albeit in low numbers?When it comes to autism, the medical community has traditionally focused on the deficits and challenges that people with the condition may experience. This approach is rooted in the medical model of disability, which in the case of neurodevelopmental differences holds that they should be treated medically with a focus on fixing or managing the condition and a goal of normalizing the persons behavior. But the autism spectrum is also associated with traits that may have been adaptive during more recent human brain evolutionenhanced visuospatial processing, high intelligence, exceptional memory and creativity, among others. Multiple genetics studies have found that many of the common genetic variants associated with autism are also associated with high intelligence, enhanced cognitive ability and educational attainment.In addition, family members of people on the spectrum are more likely to have careers in fields related to science and technology and, according to our recent study, are also likely to carry some of these same rare Neandertal variants. Therefore, although autistic people have lower reproductive rates on average, their nonautistic (though potentially still neurodivergent) family members may also be helping to keep this DNA in the gene pool. In other words, even as some evolutionary factors are working to push these autism-related Neandertal-derived genetic variants out of the human genome, other factors are working to retain them.Although we dont yet know whether the Neandertal DNA associated with autism is also linked to intelligence, savantism or general creativity, we are slowly connecting the dots. If such a relation exists, it suggests that intermixing with Neandertals has affected multiple aspects of brain evolution in our species. In this way, Neandertal DNA is not only a part of the story of autism and other neurodevelopmental and psychological conditions; its central to the story of all of us.

January 21, 20254 min readWhy the Paris Climate Agreement Matters in 5 GraphicsOne of President Trumps first executive orders withdraws the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement. These graphics show why the pact is crucial to curbing the worst effects of global warmingBy Andrea Thompson Amanda MontaezHours after he was sworn into office, President Donald Trump signed an executive orderamong a flurry of such decreesto once again pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, the international pact aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions to stave off their worst impacts on Earths climate.The move comes just after the planet experienced its first year on record in which the average global temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial period. Under the landmark 2015 Paris climate accord, countries agreed to try to limit warming to under 1.5 degrees C and well below two degrees C (3.6 degrees F).Trump's executive orderentitled Putting America First in International Environmental Agreementscalls for immediately notifying the United Nations of the U.S.s withdrawal and states that the pullout is effective immediately. Under the agreement, countries cannot fully withdraw until one year after notification. Trump removed the U.S. from the agreement during his first term as well, and that departure took effect in November 2020. Former president Joe Biden brought the U.S. back into the agreement in February 2021.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.Because of the discrepancy in timing in Trumps order and the terms of the agreement, it remains unclear exactly how the withdrawal will play out. The order also calls for an end to U.S. contributions to international climate finance, howeverand it is clear from this directive and other orders issued by Trump that the new administration seeks to undo much of Bidens work on climate action and to further encourage already soaring levels of U.S. oil and gas production.Numerous climate scientists and advocates have decried the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and have warned of the dire consequences of failing to act on the climate crisis. This short-sighted move shows a disregard for science and the well-being of people around the world, including Americans, who are already losing their homes, livelihoods, and loved ones as a result of climate change, said Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, a nonprofit organization focused on climate solutions, in a recent news release.Below are five graphics that show why the Paris Agreement and its goals matter.Amanda Montaez; Source: Copernicus Climate Change Service (data)The year 2024 was the first on record in which global temperatures registered 1.5 degrees C above the preindustrial period (generally defined as the second half of the 19th century). This marks how much temperatures have risen as humans have continued to burn fossil fuels, sending heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And it shows how close the world is to breaching the Paris climate accords goal. That threshold hasnt yet been officially surpassed, though, because the agreement considers the average global temperature over many years. So there is still time to limit warming as much as possible if countries and industries can act quickly and ambitiously enough.Amanda Montaez; Source: Climate Change Indicators: Heat Waves, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (data)We are already feeling the sting of climate change from the heat that has built up in Earths atmosphere, and that is most clearly seen in extreme heat events. In the U.S. alone, residents have gone from experiencing two heat waves each summer in the 1960s to more than six todayand those heat waves now average four days instead of three. The heat wave season has also lengthened from 20 days in the 1960s to more than 70 days now.Extreme heat is the deadliest weather phenomenon in the U.S., and the public health threat will only grow as global temperatures rise. So every additional bit of warming the world can avoid has a tangible effect.Other disasterssuch as hurricanes, floods and wildfiresare also being exacerbated by climate change. In combination with changes in where people live and build infrastructure, the costs of disasters are steadily rising and contributing to an insurance crisis.When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began tracking disaster cost data in the 1980s, a disaster that caused at least $1 billion in damage occurred about every three months in the U.S. Now such a disaster happens about every three weeks. And the dollar values of these events costs are almost certainly underestimatesunderscoring how political rhetoric often points out the price of transitioning to cleaner energy while overlooking the ballooning costs of not acting.Amanda Montaez; Source: Intergenerational Inequities in Exposure to Climate Extremes, by Wim Thiery et al., in Science, Vol. 374; September 26, 2021 (data)Those costs, and the pain of the disasters that drive them, will be borne by todays younger generationswho will experience many more heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires and other deadly, destructive disasters over their lifetime than their parents or grandparents did. But how much that risk rises very much depends on how much warming societies allow. Meeting the Paris Agreement targets would demonstrably lessen the risks.Amanda Montaez; Sources: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis: Working Group I Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. IPCC, 2021 (carbon budget); Supplemental Data of the Global Carbon Budget 2022. Global Carbon Project, 2022 (emissions data); World Bank (country populations and per capita emissions data); Data analysis by Amanda Montaez and Piers ForsterU.S. involvement in international climate negotiationsthe Paris accord in particularhas long been seen as crucial, both because it pressures other countries to be more ambitious and because the U.S. has overspent its portion of the worlds carbon budget. Along with other countries nations that led the Industrial Revolution, the U.S. has gained substantial wealth but it has been responsible for more than its fair share of the amount of carbon that humans can release into the atmosphere and still meet the Paris Agreement goals. It remains to be seen how the U.S.s exit from the Paris accord will affect the actions and goals of other countries.

January 21, 20256 min readJWST Photos Reveal Bizarre Physics of Supernova ExplosionsThe best view yet of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant reveals new secretsBy Clara Moskowitz NASA/CXC/SAO (x-ray); NASA/ESA/STScI (optical); NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/D. Milisavljevic et al., NASA/JPL/Caltech (infrared); NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Schmidt and K. Arcand (image processing)As soon as a star is born, it starts fighting a battle with gravity. A burning star constantly releases enough energy to counteract gravitys inward pressure. But once its fuel runs out, gravity wins: the star implodes, and most of its mass becomes either a neutron staran ultradense object about the size of a cityor a black hole. The rest explodes outward, flying into space like bullets.Astronomers recently captured new images of the aftermath of this violence by training the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on the young supernova remnant called Cassiopeia A. The light from its explosion reached Earth about 350 years ago, around the time of Isaac Newton. This particular object is very important because its relatively nearby and its young, so what you see is a frozen-in-time picture of how the star blew up, says Dartmouth College astronomer Robert A. Fesen.Astronomers have studied this nearby spectacle for decades, but JWST got a closer look than any past observatory. The Webb images are really amazing, says Fesen, who led the first team that studied Cassiopeia A with the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble observes in primarily optical lightthe wavelength range human eyes can see whereas JWST captures longer-wavelength infrared light, and it does so with a larger mirror that captures images in higher resolution.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 recent photographs are helping scientists answer some of their most pressing questions about supernovae, such as which types of stars explode in which ways and how exactly those outbursts unfold. There is a lot of complicated but beautiful physics in understanding how this explosion takes place, says Purdue University astronomer Danny Milisavljevic, who led the team behind the JWST images.Stars start off burning hydrogen into helium inside their fusion furnaces. When the hydrogen is used up, they fuse helium to make carbon, then carbon to make neon, and so on, until they reach iron, which costs more energy to fuse than it releases. At this point the star begins to collapse under gravity, and its matter falls in until most of the protons and electrons inside its atoms have been smushed together to form neutrons. Eventually the neutrons cant collapse any furtherthey become a neutron star, where particles experience such extreme pressure that they trigger a repelling shock wave. (Only the most massive stars end their lives in supernovae. The sun, for instance, will fade to become a white dwarf.)Astronomers still cant entirely account for the explosive power of a supernova. It was thought that this rebounding shock thats produced when the neutron star forms could explode the star, Milisavljevic says. But decades of simulations on the worlds fastest computers showed that the rebounding shock isnt strong enough to overcome the massive layers on top that want to fall in. For now the core driver of supernova explosions remains a mystery. Researchers suspect the answer involves neutrinos, nearly massless particles that tend to pass through matter unimpeded. Perhaps at the intense temperatures and densities at the core of a star, some of the neutrinos energy goes into reviving the shock. But more observations are needed to verify this idea.Among JWSTs revelations about Cassiopeia A is a layer of gas that escaped its star during the blast. These JWST images show the gas before it interacted with material outside the star and before it was heated by a reflection of the shock wave the star expelled during its eruption. This pristine ejecta from the supernova displays a weblike structure that offers clues about the star before it exploded. JWST gave us basically a map of the structure of that material, says Tea Temim, a Princeton University astronomer who collaborated on the JWST images. This tells us what the distribution of the material was before it was ejected in the supernova. We havent been able to see something like this before.The investigation also exposed an unexpected feature of Cassiopeia A that scientists have named the Green Monster. Astronomers think this layer of gas was expelled by the star before it exploded. The Green Monster was an exciting surprise, Temim says. Scientists are interested in what happens when the supernova debris flies into the material in the Green Monster. This is important, Temim says, because when we observe extragalactic supernovae, their light is very much influenced by the surrounding material.Deciphering the details of supernovae could even help us understand how Earth and its life came to be. Stars create the elements heavier than hydrogen and helium that life requires. Their end-of-life eruptions spew these elements into space, seeding galaxies with the raw materials to form new stars and planets. As citizens of the universe, its important we understand this fundamental process that makes our place in the universe possible, Milisavljevic says.Astronomers will keep studying Cassiopeia A, although their success makes them eager to turn JWSTs eyes toward some of the other roughly 400 identified supernova remnants in our galaxy. Getting a larger sample will help researchers connect differences in how remnants look and evolve to differences among the stars that produced them.Celestial FirecrackerNASA/CXC/SAO (x-ray); NASA/ESA/STScI (optical); NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/D. Milisavljevic et al., NASA/JPL/Caltech (infrared); NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Schmidt and K. Arcand (image processing)Cassiopeia A is the aftermath of the closest known young supernova to Earth, a blast that occurred some 350 years ago. Recent data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) combine in this image with earlier observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope to reveal a clearer picture of Cassiopeia A than ever before.HUBBLES BIG STEPNASA, ESA and Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration. Acknowledgment: Robert A. Fesen/Dartmouth College and James Long/ESA/HubbleBefore the JWST images, Hubbles observations of Cassiopeia A were revolutionary. In photographs taken in 2006, Hubble improved on the resolution of ground-based observations by a factor of 10. In the process, it was able to resolve clumps of material ejected during the supernova that were traveling shockingly fast, between 8,000 and 10,000 kilometers per second. The explosion is ridiculously violent, Fesen says. The outer layers of the star appear to fragment into clumps of gas, almost like the star shattered into thousands and thousands of pieces. Scientists hadnt realized that the blast would produce such clumps, Fesen says. Nature had to show us that stars actually do that.JWSTS VIEWNASA, ESA, CSA, Danny Milisavljevic/Purdue University, Tea Temim/Princeton University, Ilse De Looze/University of Ghent; Joseph DePasquale/STScI (image processing)JWST is the most powerful telescope of all time, and its portrait of Cassiopeia A shows never-before-seen details. The observatorys Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) captures various bands of infrared light, which have each been converted into respective visible-light colors in this picture. Orange and red flows on the top and left of the image show spots where material from the exploding star is smashing into gas and dust in the surrounding area. Inside this shell are bright pink strands released during the explosion. The dark red web toward the center left represents pristine structure from the blast that could hold clues about the star before it blew up.THE GREEN MONSTERNASA/ESA JWST, Danny Milisavljevic/Purdue University, Tea Temim/Princeton University, Ilse De Looze/University of Ghent and HST, R. Fesen/Dartmouth College; J. Schmidt (image processing)Zooming in on the JWST image reveals a surprisea green bubble scientists are calling the Green Monster after a green wall at Fenway Park in Boston. This blob is made of gas layers the star cast off before it burst apart. It looks weird and has this bizarre distribution of rings and filaments, Milisavljevic says. Encoded in this puzzle is information about how the star was releasing mass before the explosion.Holes apparent in the Green Monster seem to provide evidence of the clumps of ejecta Fesen and his team observed with Hubble. The images from JWST show little holes, almost like bullet holes, that are almost perfectly round, he says. Scientists think the fast-moving clumps of supernova material are punching through the surrounding sheet of gas like shrapnel to create the holes. The size of the holes betrays the clumps gigantic sizeroughly 500 astronomical units (the distance between Earth and the sun). As these clumps have been sailing through space, theyve expanded to become bigger than the solar system, Fesen says.CRYSTAL CLEARNASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Danny Milisavljevic (Purdue University), Ilse De Looze (UGent), Tea Temim (Princeton University)Another JWST instrument, the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), showcases Cassiopeia A in shorter-wavelength light than MIRI. The benefit of NIRCam is resolution, Milisavljevic says. When you zoom in like this, its astounding. Im going to spend the rest of my career trying to understand the supernova at these scales. He hopes to use these data to understand how the shock wave of the explosion has shaped the gas it encountered, as well as how dense the supernova material can get, to garner clues about how the cataclysm unfolded.

January 21, 202514 min readCrushed Rocks Could Be the Next Climate SolutionSpreading crushed stone across farm fields could inexpensively pull CO2 from the air while also increasing yields. But it would require a mountain of miningBy Douglas Fox edited by Mark Fischetti Jared Unverzagt/Getty ImagesThe scene that unfolded on a cold November day in central Illinois might seem commonplace, but it was part of a bold plan to pull billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stuff it into the ocean.A few miles south of Urbana a dump truck trundled past bare fields of dirt before turning into an adjacent lot. It deposited a cottage-size mound of grayish-blue sand190 metric tons of a crushed volcanic rock called basalt. Farmers spread the pulverized basalt across several fields that they sowed with corn months later. This was the fourth year of an ambitious study to test whether the worlds farmlands can be harnessed to simultaneously address three global crises: the ever rising concentration of planet-warming CO2 in the atmosphere, the acidification of the oceans and the shortfall in humanitys food supply.The trial results, published in February 2024, were stunning. David Beerling, a biogeochemist at the University of Sheffield in England, and Evan DeLucia, a plant physiologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, led the study. They found that over four years, fields treated with crushed basalt and planted with alternating crops of corn and soy pulled 10 metric tons more CO2 per hectare out of the air than untreated plots. And crop yields were 12 to 16 percent higher. In other research, they found that adding crushed basalts to soils improved the harvest of miscanthus, a tall grass that is used to make biofuels, by 29 to 42 percent, and the fields captured an estimated 8.6 metric tons of CO2 per hectare of land each year, compared with untreated fields. It was exciting, Beerling says. We were pleasantly surprised.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.Their findings added to positive results elsewhere. In 2020 researchers in Canada reported that adding the mineral wollastonite to fields growing lettuce, kale, potatoes and soy sequestered CO2 in the soil at rates as high as two metric tons per hectare per year. And last spring Kirstine Skov, a natural geographer at the start-up company UNDO Carbon in London, showed that crushed basalts improved the yields of spring oats by 9 to 20 percent while reducing soil acidity in several fields in England.Scientists, start-up companies and large corporations are experimenting with elaborate technologies to slow global warming: High-altitude planes that release sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to block some incoming sunlight. Machines on Earths surface that pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. Iron sprinkled across the sea that enhances the growth of algae that absorb CO2. These deployments could buy humanity some extra time to transition from fossil fuels to clean energy while preventing the climate from crossing dangerous thresholds in a permanent way. But the exotic approaches require gobs of money and energy or could threaten ecosystems. Simply spreading crushed rock on fieldsas farmers have done for centuries with limeseems refreshingly low tech. Thats part of its elegance, Beerling says.The basalt in Illinois came from a quarry in southern Pennsylvania, where it is mined for roofing and building materials. Basalt is the most abundant rock in Earths crust. As it naturally weathersgradually dissolving in soil waterit captures CO2, converting it into bicarbonate ions in the water, which cannot easily reenter the atmosphere. The reaction also releases into the soil nutrients that are important for plant health, including calcium, magnesium and silicon. Grinding and spreading basaltan approach known as enhanced rock weathering (ERW)speeds up those processes greatly. It could help cash-strapped farmers around the world by increasing crop yields, reducing fertilizer use and potentially allowing them to sell carbon credits.Seeing how this landed with the public and press strengthened our belief that this was the right way to go. David Beerling, University of Sheffield If ERW were to be scaled up globally, it could remove up to two billion metric tons of CO2 from the air every year, according to Beerling. That would cover a significant share of the atmospheric carbon humanity must draw down to keep temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C, widely acknowledged as the necessary goal to prevent widespread catastrophe. But ERW would require mining and crushing billions of tons of rock every yearenough to build a mountainand transporting it to farms, all of which would release CO2. Still, calculations suggest that those emissions would pale in comparison to the amount of CO2 that the rock stores away for centuries or longersequestered more permanently than it could have been in a forest of trees.ERW is newer than the other so-called negative emissions strategies, and so far only a few trials have been fielded. Yet companies are already looking to sell carbon credits tied to the technique. Noah Planavsky, a biogeochemist studying enhanced weathering at Yale University, sees promise in these unsettled circumstances. But he worries that if ERW expands too quickly, before the technique is refined, it could produce disappointing results and generate a backlash. This has the potential to be something truly impactful, he says. And there are so many ways you can imagine it going poorly.The idea of ERW is based on a fundamental insight about how Earth naturally functions. Across geological time, lava eruptions spewed huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, heating the planet. Subsequent weathering of the erupted rock over millions of years pulled the gas out of the atmosphere, cooling the planet back down. Basalts are effective in capturing CO2 because they are high in calcium and magnesium from deep in the planet. Today vast swaths of North and South America, Africa, Asia, and other areas are covered in these solidified lavas.Scientists have long wondered whether humans could accelerate CO2 removal by speeding up rock weathering. In 1995 Klaus Lackner, a physicist then at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, proposed heating basalts to absorb CO2 more quickly. Over time this basic idea fermented into other forms: injecting concentrated CO2 into hot layers of basalt underground where they would form carbonate minerals, or spreading powdered basalt across the ocean, which would absorb CO2, sinking the carbon.A worker spreads pulverized basalt on a recently harvested cornfield in central Illinois.Jordan Goebig/University of IllinoisIn the late 2000s Phil Renforth, a Ph.D. candidate at Newcastle University in England, noticed that the demolished remnants of steel mills in his area accumulated white crusts of carbonate minerals on the ground. Fragments of steel slag and concrete, both high in calcium, were reacting with CO2. In 2013 he and Jens Hartmann, a geochemist then at the University of Hamburg in Germany, published a paper suggesting that calcium-rich rocks could be crushed and spread on farmland to capture CO2 while also improving soils.At about that time, Beerling was studying how grasslands influence the weathering of bedrock and the natural capture of CO2. When he read Renforth and Hartmanns paper, he realized he could use his model to predict how basalt weathering would unfold on farmlands. In 2016 Beerling published calculations predicting that a millimeter or two of basalt dust spread annually over the worlds tropical lands could reduce CO2 levels by 30 to 300 parts per million (ppm) by 2100. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is currently around 425 ppmup from 280 ppm before the industrial revolutionand is expected to hit 500 to 1,200 ppm by 2100. The modeling suggested that ERW could prevent 0.2 to 2.2 degrees C of warming by that date.Common climate scenarios predict that if humans are going to limit warming to two degrees C, we need to remove five to 10 gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually by 2050. In 2018 Beerlings team published updated calculations predicting that if crushed basalt were spread yearly across 700,000 square kilometers of corn and soy croplands in the U.S., it could remove 0.2 to 1.1 gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually.In 2020 Beerling and his collaborators, joined by Renforth, published a refined analysis in Nature. They estimated that if two gigatons of CO2 a year had to be captured worldwide through ERW, China, India, the U.S. and Brazil could cover 80 percent of that amount, even after accounting for the CO2 emitted while mining, crushing and transporting the rock. Obviously a combination of carbon capture methods would be needed to reach 10 gigatons a year. But, Beerling says, If you can do two [gigatons] of it with enhanced weathering and improve food security and soil health, thats 20 percent of the way there.The Illinois trial provided strong validation. Farming of corn and soy typically releases CO2 through the respiration of roots and soil microbes, but the basalt-treated corn-soy fields released 23 to 42 percent less CO2. Multiplied across the U.S., thats 260 million tons of CO2 potentially avoided each year.Unlike geoengineering approaches such as hoisting sulfur into the sky or scattering iron across the sea, which people often view as risky tinkering with nature, ERW was well received when papers were published, Beerling says. It was important to see how this landed with the public and the press, he says. The reactions strengthened our belief that this was the right way to go.ERW is fundamentally different from two other soil-based carbon strategies that have been around longer. In a method called biochar, farmers partially burn leftover plant matter, turning it to charcoalnearly pure carbonwhich is plowed into the dirt for long-term storage. In the second method, leftover plant material is plowed back into the soil without being charcoaled; this stores carbon as organic molecules that can nourish crops, although the molecules can also return to the atmosphere.ERW traps CO2 as dissolved bicarbonate in soil water, which eventually runs off farm fields into streams that ultimately lead to the sea, storing CO2 in the ocean water as bicarbonate or as solid carbonate minerals on the seafloor. Studies predict that ERW would reliably store bicarbonate in the ocean for 100 to 1,000 years, which could also help reduce climate-related ocean acidification. Whats more, ERW could alleviate another major problem, not addressed by the two other methods, that plagues farmers around the world.One of the most striking examples of how rock weathering has regulated atmospheric CO2 levels over the eons can be found along the western coast of Indiaone reason some of the earliest efforts to roll out ERW by start-up companies are happening in this country. Indias coastal plain, dotted with rice paddies and villages, abruptly rises 1,000 meters through a chaotic maze of sharp ridges, V-shaped canyons, rushing rivers and waterfalls to a high plateau. The canyon walls are striped in alternating layers of yellow and brown basalt, marking the edge of the Deccan basalts, formed from a massive series of lava flows that started around 66 million years ago. By 50 million years ago Earth was unusually warm, with CO2 levels nearly four times what they are today. Around that time, the Deccan basalts began altering the planets climate in a slow but potent way. Continental drift carried them into the equatorial belt, where abundant rainfall and warm temperatures caused the rocks to weather more quickly. The weathering minerals pulled CO2 from the air and washed it down rivers to the sea, trapping it there.Over the next 30 million years, estimates indicate, weathering basalts drew more than one million gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere, some of it becoming buried as carbonate on the seafloor. Atmospheric CO2 declined, temperatures cooled, and an ice sheet began growing across Antarctica.Ben Gilliland; Paul Nelson/James Cook University (scientific reviewer)The village of Sarekha Khurd, in central Indias Madhya Pradesh state, sits near the eastern, inland edge of the Deccan basalts. The people there have farmed rice for centuries, in a patchwork of paddies divided by rows of teak and red-blossomed gum trees. Many of the farmers live tenuously, working little plots the size of one to two soccer fields. They earn an average of $1,500 a year, spending up to 30 percent of that on fertilizers and other chemicals. And they face constant hazards. Heat waves as high as 48 degrees C (118 degrees Fahrenheit) can stunt crops and disrupt needed monsoon rains. Constant agriculture has slowly acidified the dark, rich soils, depleting their stores of calcium and magnesium, as farmers harvested plants rather than leaving them to decay and return their minerals to the soil. The average pH of soils in this area is slightly acidic, around 6.4 (7.0 is neutral), similar to saliva. This is not ideal for growing rice because acidification impairs the plants absorption of nutrients, such as phosphorus, and it may even alter the mix of soil microbes, allowing pathogenic bacteria or fungi to spawn disease outbreaks that can damage crops.Farmers worldwide have dealt with soil acidity since long before they understood it. Dozens of pits found in the forests north of Paris suggest that as early as 6,000 years ago, farmers dug into the limestone bedrock and scattered pieces of it on the fields where they grew wheat, barley and peas. Later on, Romans would scatter chalky calcium carbonate rocks onto croplands to reverse sour soil. For centuries farmers in Europe and North America neutralized acidity by sprinkling fields with crushed limestone, rich in carbonate.But people in many areas, including India, dont have easy access to limestone. And the process of neutralizing acidic soil with lime can potentially release CO2 into the air. In such places, ERW is appealing because it can reverse that dynamic, converting airborne CO2 into dissolved bicarbonate in soil.Last May farmers in Sarekha Khurd started trying ERW. Workers with Mati Carbon, an ERW start-up based in Houston, Tex., trucked in 1,250 metric tons of crushed rock from nearby quarries that mine the Deccan basalts for road construction materials. The company is currently providing basalt, free of charge, to more than 180 farm villages in Madhya Pradesh and its neighboring state of Chhattisgarh. They plan to add more basalt each year. Rice yields have increased by 15 to 20 percent on average, and in some cases by up to 70 percent.Imagine the farm of the future. Part of the farmers view of their mandate is carbon dioxide removal. Noah Planavsky, Yale University Mati Carbon recently expanded its operations to a handful of villages in Tanzania and Zambia. Our mission is the farmer, says Mati founder Shantanu Agarwal, especially these smaller, climate-vulnerable farmers. The company hopes to earn money by selling carbon credits. Agarwal and Jacob Jordan, Matis lead scientist, estimate that improved soils, increased crop yields and reduced spending on fertilizers could raise poor farmers income by 10 to 30 percent, making them less vulnerable.As promising as early trials have been, a large-scale rollout of ERW would have to overcome some stark realities, starting with the staggering amount of rock it would require. Beerlings calculations suggest that if ERW were used to capture two gigatons of CO2 a year, it would consume 13 gigatons of basalt annuallyabout 4.5 cubic kilometers of rock, roughly equal to the volume of the Matterhorn. That would require 30 percent more mining than the 40 gigatons or so of sand, gravel and crushed rock that are now quarried worldwide annually for industry. Such an increase might not be possible for some kinds of rock, but the worlds reserves of basalt are truly vast, distributed widely across the planet.Crushed basalt thats already produced in quarries as an unused by-product could pick up some of that slack. So could calcium-rich industrial by-products, such as crushed concrete, mine tailings, ash from sugarcane milling and coal burning, and wastes from cement, aluminum and steel production. But many of these by-products contain chromium, nickel, cadmium, and other toxic elements, so they could maybe be used to capture CO2 in factory yards or tailings piles at mines but not on croplands. When additional basalt mining and crushing is needed, it will cost about $10 and emit around 30 kilograms of CO2 per ton. Beerlings team considered these factors when it estimated that ERW would cost $80 to $180 per ton of CO2 captured, after emissions are subtracted.Two farmers harvest rice from paddies in India that had been treated with ground-up rock. Rice yield was about 25 percent higher than in the past, when no rock was spread.Deepak Kushwaha/Mati CarbonBut there will be other costs. In China and Indiatwo countries with the most agricultural potential for ERWthe thriving rock-quarrying industries have been criticized for poor protection of human rights. Indias sandstone-quarrying industry, for example, employs more than three million people. A 2020 report published by the Washington, D.C.based Center for Human Rights found that many of them are bonded laborerspeople who work at low wages to repay loans with annual interest rates up to 20 percent, making it difficult to ever repay debts and trapping them in the job. Such workers may face dangerous temperatures, rock collapses and swirling mineral dust.A 2022 study found that quarry workers in northeastern India suffer poor lung and heart health, with low levels of blood oxygen, high pulses and poor lung airflow. If a quarry worker is injured, dies or falls ill, wives or children may be forced into work to repay the debt. These problems arent limited to India, says Bhoomika Choudhury, a lawyer and labor researcher with the Business & Human Rights Resource Center in Dubai, who wrote the 2020 sandstone report: We are seeing these patterns everywhere in countries across Asia, Africa and South America.Any large increase in quarrying would also translate into more landscapes being torn upsome of them in potentially sensitive areasalthough this is also true for other materials that will have to be mined to support the broader transition to renewable energy, such as lithium, cobalt, graphite and rare earth elements. It is also possible that even if mining challenges are surmounted, ERW wont work as well worldwide as it has in the small trials that have been done thus far. For example, many scientists assumed ERW would work best in the warm, wet tropics, where basalt weathers more quickly. But two recent studies complicate that picture.A 2022 trial that Beerlings group supported in Malaysia, where basalt dust was spread across parts of a palm oil plantation, produced inconclusive results. Beerling suspects that the benefits are being temporarily masked by local conditions. The dark, pungent soils contain more decaying organic matter and more clay than the soils in Illinois; those charged materials can latch on to the breakdown products of basalt, keeping them from converting CO2 into bicarbonate. Theres a delay in capturing carbon dioxide, Beerling says. It doesnt happen until the soils capacity to bind the dissolving minerals has been saturated, which may take a year or take five years, he says. This remains to be seen.Acidity is the other complicating factor, according to a trial on tropical sugarcane fields in northeastern Australia. The soil there is acidic, so it can potentially consume the basalt before it has a chance to react with CO2. Initial results, published last October, show that CO2 capture rates are only about 1 percent of those in Illinois. Paul Nelson, a soil scientist at James Cook University in Cairns who helped lead the study, says it may be hard to fix the problem just by neutralizing acidic soils before adding basalt because in wet tropical areas the acidity may extend many meters down, to the bedrock.Right now researchers are just trusting that wherever ERW is done, from Illinois to Australia, the CO2 that is captured as dissolved bicarbonate will seep into streams, flow through rivers and reach the ocean without encountering a highly acidic environment. If it does flow through an acidic environment, Nelson says, some of it could be converted into CO2 along the way, returning to the atmosphere.Despite the uncertainties, some two dozen companies have emerged to try to exploit ERW. Many are selling anticipated carbon-capture credits, in some cases to companies such as Microsoft and Stripe that hope to zero out their carbon footprint. This activity makes Planavsky, the Yale biogeochemist, uneasy. Hes aware of lessons learned in another carbon market that grew too quickly. In recent years companies have sold more and more voluntary carbon offsets for protecting forests, but some of the projects have subsequently been revealed as worthless. ERW is a potentially really valuable opportunity to remove CO2, Planavsky says, but its not going to work everywhere. If companies cut corners, he says, ERW could blow up on the launch pad.Yet for ERW to have a large impact by 2050, it will need to expand quickly, says Gregory Nemet, an energy scientist at the University of WisconsinMadison. Last May he and his colleagues published a study analyzing the combined potential of novel CO2 removal methods such as ERW, direct air-capture machines and the use of biofuels with CO2 captured from smokestacks. Between now and 2050 these methods need to grow by something like 40 percent per year, every year, Nemet says. That sounds extreme, although he says that electric cars and solar energy have expanded even more rapidly for 10 or 20 years. And if enhanced weathering ends up costing $80 to $180 per ton of CO2, as Beerlings group predicted, it may be cheaper than direct air capture ($400 to $1,000 per ton right now), and similar to biofuels with smokestack capture ($100 to $300 per ton today).If ERW does pan out on a large scale, Planavskywhose family farmssees potential societal benefits that go beyond CO2 removal. Building machines that capture CO2 from the air or from smokestacks will generate profits for big companies. But with a low-tech approach like ERW, even small farmers could sell carbon credits. Imagine the farm of the future, he says. Part of the farmers view of their mandate is carbon dioxide removal.

January 21, 20254 min readContributors to Scientific Americans February 2025 IssueWriters, artists, photographers and researchers share the stories behind the storiesBy Allison Parshall edited by Jen Schwartz Mark RossMark RossA New Understanding of the CellWhere Mark Ross (above) grew up in rural Connecticut, winters were often cold and dreary. When youre an artist, its good to have bad weather, he says. You just stay inside and work, and you dont feel bad about not being outside. The bucolic New England landscape inspired him to paint, and he has applied his skills to a career as an illustrator. Now based in Austin, Tex., Ross has illustrated more than a dozen Scientific American covers on topics from atmospheric storms to time crystals to nuclear fusion. For this issues cover and the articles opening art, he depicted the molecular blobs that have changed scientists understanding of cell biology. With many of the subjects he visualizes, nobody can actually see any of these things, really, he says. That gives him a lot of room for creativity when designing his captivating images.Ross loves depicting these cutting-edge scientific subjects, but he also makes time every week to practice drawing a more classical one: the human body. Its like working out, really, he says of his weekly figure painting. During these three-hour sessions, his focus narrows to depicting the person in front of him: The painting feels much more alive and immediate than if youre working from a photo.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.Science writer Philip Ball sees the blobs everywhere. About a decade ago he visited a laboratory in Germany where scientists had found a strange clumping mechanism in worm embryo cells. These so-called biomolecular condensates have turned out to be important for just about every aspect of cellular function. Its kind of extraordinary, Ball says. Every week it feels to me that Im looking at papers [where] theres a new kind of role for condensates.In his cover story, Ball explores how these mysterious and vital blobs are rewriting our narrative about how cells work. Traditionally the cell has been described like a machine, but Ball has suspected this was too simplistic since his days getting his Ph.D. in condensed matter physics. Hed had this feeling that theres more going on in cells than we acknowledge.After thoroughly enjoying writing his thesis (which is weird, because most people hate that, he says), Ball decided to pursue a career as a science writer and has now authored 30 books. His most recent one, How Life Works, explores this new, rich vision of biologys inner workings. I do really think we need to get away from this metaphor of the machine when were talking about the cell, he says. There is no machine we have ever built that works in the way these entities seem to.Zane WolfGraphic ScienceIn college, Zane Wolfs career plan was to say yes to everything that sounded fun. Thats how they ended up working in five labs, studying abroad in Australia and doing fieldwork in Antarctica. Wolf studied both biology and applied physics, and for their Ph.D. they married the two fields by developing soft robotic systems that mimic how fish swim. I love being guided by curiosity, digging into the data, finding out what the story isand then sharing what I learned, Wolf says.This far-reaching, restless curiosity has guided them to data visualization and a graphics internship with Scientific American. For this issues Graphic Science, written by Clara Moskowitz, Wolf charted the growth of one of humanitys coolest clubs: people who have been to space. This is one of the most exclusive groups of humans on planet Earth, they say. Wolf once dreamed of being an astronaut (as a kid, they went to space camp not once but at least three times). They designed the spread with subtle visual metaphors in mind. There are mountains, there are clouds, there are rocket-launch trails, Wolf says. Thats really fun, making the data kind of resemble the topic.Moriba JahHow to Recycle Space JunkAfter Moriba Jah enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, he was stationed in Montana guarding nuclear weapons. Thats when I got exposed to the darkest night I had ever [seen] in my life, he says. The skys just jam-packed with stars, he addsand with satellites. Routinely seeing satellites with the naked eye inspired him to become a space scientist tracking human-made objects in orbit. Then, after having a deep spiritual experience while on a trip in 2015 with his son in Denali, Alaska, he felt called to focus his research on making humans use of space sustainable. Orbital space around Earth is part of Earth, he says. Earth, land, ocean, spacetheyre all interconnected.During the past century people have treated spacelike land and oceans before itas a dumping ground. In his feature article, Jah argues for the creation of a circular space economy. Everything we launch is a single-use satellite, and its as bad as a single-use plastic, he says. When [the machines] die, they stay in orbit for many years.In the past decade this problem has escalated, he notes, and it is becoming more and more common for pieces of space junk to fall back to Earth, threatening lives. Until we get into using reusable and recyclable satellites in orbit, Jah says, were going to be facing increasingly challenging times ahead.

January 21, 20254 min readTrump Declares Energy Emergency to Justify More Oil and Gas DrillingThough largely symbolic, President Trumps declaration of an energy emergency could throw a wrench in renewable energy development and will cut into the Endangered Species ActBy Scott Waldman & E&E News U.S. President Donald Trump signs executive orders during the inaugural parade inside Capital One Arena, in Washington, D.C., on January 20, 2025. Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty ImagesCLIMATEWIRE | Minutes into his second term, President Donald Trump declared a "national energy emergency" and said he would bring forth a golden age of domestic affordability and global dominance.Though largely symbolic, the move was an especially bitter pill for climate advocates.Not only do they dispute the need for an energy emergency as U.S. oil and gas production has thrived the past several years but Trumps Day 1 decision comes after activists failed for four years to convince former President Joe Biden to declare a similar emergency for climate change.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.Collin Rees, U.S. program manager for the activist group Oil Change International, said Trump's quick turnaround shows he understands the political potency of an emergency declaration.His group had long pressured the Biden administration to do the same with climate. Now, Rees said, advocates are left wondering why Biden never took that step even if only to show his supporters that he took seriously the threat of unmitigated global warming.It would have shown that he was willing to fight and actually mobilize all the resources in the government, Rees said.During his time in office, Biden made climate action a priority for the federal government and helped pass one of the biggest climate laws in U.S. history. But his team resisted calls to declare an emergency, even as climate-juiced heat waves, droughts, floods, hurricanes and wildfires killed thousands of Americans.Some environmental groups and Democratic lawmakers wanted Biden to go further than the climate policies he did enact. They hoped Biden would use a climate emergency to end crude oil exports, stop offshore oil drilling, cut U.S. investment into international fossil fuel projects, grow domestic clean energy manufacturing and rebuild renewable energy systems in communities hit by climate change.For his part, Trump did not even wait until the end of his almost 3,000-word inaugural speech to declare an energy emergency.We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again right to the top, and export American energy all over the world, Trump said in his speech from the Capitol Rotunda.The energy emergency guts the Endangered Species Act and states without evidence that Bidens climate policies have imperiled the nation and led to a precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid. The emergency creates a definition of energy that does not include wind and solar and claims the head of key federal agencies should use their authority to facilitate the identification, leasing, siting, production, transportation, refining, and generation of domestic energy resources, particularly on the West and East coasts where Democratic governors and state lawmakers have blocked some fossil fuel infrastructure. It faces a significant court battle in the coming months and years.Whatever the language, Trump wont be able to fully realize his energy policy with the stroke of a pen, said Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.Much of that will be decided in the coming years after pitched battles in the courts and Congress.Declaring an emergency gives very few additional powers, Gerrard said. It's not as if it allows him to supersede federal or state law as a general matter. There are certain specific things that could be done, but on the energy front, they're extremely limited.That could include banning the import or export of certain types of energy, or using the defense production act to build energy equipment. Still, Gerrard said the energy emergency declaration ultimately was more performative than substantive."As part of his rationale for the emergency declaration, Trump said Monday that the United States was in an energy crisis. But Trump on Day 1 also took steps to sideline clean energy even though the sector expanded significantly during Bidens presidency, and experts say it still has potential to boost U.S. energy independence.The Department of Energy has estimated that the country has enough renewable energy potential to meet 100 times the annual U.S. energy demand.Trump, however, has taken a dim view of cleaner forms of energy especially wind. His office sent a notice Monday to reporters that said Trump would move to halt both onshore and offshore wind development.The move likely will slow but not stop the U.S. expansion of clean energy. But Rees of Oil Change International said the avalanche of Trump energy moves shows that American conservatives right now have the upper hand in getting their message to voters.I think it's an indicator of how the right is doing better at politics right now, Rees said. Trump understands the intersection of politics and energy better.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

January 20, 20253 min readPeeing Is Contagious among ChimpsJust as people often yawn or scratch themselves when they see someone else do so, for chimpanzees, peeing is contagiousBy Meghan Bartels edited by Sarah Lewin FrasierChimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) urinating in tree, Nyungwe National Park, Rwanda, Africa. Eric Baccega/Nature Picture Library/Alamy Stock PhotoSome primates pee together. Ena Onishi already knew thatJapanese even has a word for when humans go off to the restroom together: tsureshon. Still, Onishi became curious when she noticed the behavior among the chimpanzees she was observing as a doctoral student at Kyoto University Wildlife Research Center. She knew about well-studied contagious behaviors, such as yawning in humans, and wondered whether the chimps might be displaying contagious urination.In a new paper, published on Monday in Current Biology, Onishi and her co-authors found that monkey see, monkey do does indeed appear to hold true for these chimpanzees (even though theyre not technically monkeys). Even more intriguingly, each animals status in the social hierarchy seems to influence which one pees and when. The finding represents the first known scientific study of contagious urination, according to the authors.Its not something I would have ever thought to study, for sure, says Matthew Campbell, a psychologist at California State University Channel Islands, who was not involved in the new research but has studied contagious behavior in chimpanzees. I thought it was clever and novel, and it leads to a lot of interesting questions.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.Onishi and her colleagues studied 20 chimpanzees, mostly males, that lived in four groups in Kyoto Universitys Kumamoto Sanctuary between 2019 and 2021. The researchers gathered more than 600 hours of video footage of the endangered primates, then identified when each animal peed and where they were at the time. It was a bit overwhelming because I didnt know if I would get meaningful results or if all that effort would end up being for nothing, Onishi says. It was definitely nerve-racking at times!On the surface, it may seem like a silly topic, but it actually gets at something thats rather fundamental. Matthew Campbell, psychologistBy comparing the observations with computer simulations of randomized peeing, Onishi and her colleagues determined that, indeed, the chimpanzees were more likely to urinate within 60 seconds of one another than they would if they were behaving randomly. Distance also mattered: animals within just a few feet of the first chimp to go were much more likely to follow suit than chimps located 10 or more feet away.But perhaps the most interesting analysis came when Onishi and her colleagues considered social relationships among the peeing chimpanzees. They were surprised to find that a chimp that was pals with the first animal to pee wasnt any more likely to follow suit. But a chimp that was less dominant than the first to go was more vulnerable to contagious peeing.I initially expected that if social influences existed, they might resemble those seen in yawningsuch as stronger contagion between socially close pairs, Onishi says. Instead we observed a clear influence of social rank, with lower-ranking individuals being more likely to follow the urination of others.The new paper is just a first report, so plenty of additional research is needed to understand the phenomenonand what insight it sheds on chimpanzees lives. For example, scientists could do a similar analysis in wild animals, although Onishi expects the results would likely be consistent. Campbell also wonders whether the apparent synchronized peeing led by dominant chimps merely reflects the groups daily routines, in which relocations are orchestrated by the leading animal and may prompt a pre-road-trip bathroom stop.Study co-author Shinya Yamamoto, a professor at Kyoto University, says that the finding makes him think about chimps a little differently. This strengthens my impression of chimpanzees as social animals, he says. This study shows that even their physiological aspects are influenced by their social contexts.Campbell notes that depending on how precisely the behavior is transmitted between animals, the finding may also help to reveal how a chimpanzee understands its own body and whether it has a concept of urination. How this is working and what it means for the mental life of a chimpanzee, thats really the intriguing part to me, he says. On the surface, it may seem like a silly topic, but it actually gets at something thats rather fundamental.

January 19, 2025A Mixed Bag for Private Spaceflight, a New Spider Species and the Health Risks of AlcoholWe discuss a big week for commercial spaceflight, a red dye ban and a scary spider species in this news roundup. Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific AmericanSUBSCRIBE TO Science QuicklyApple | Spotify | RSS[CLIP: It Doesnt End Here (Instrumental), by Nehemiah Pratt]Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific Americans Science Quickly, Im Rachel Feltman. Lets kick off the week by catching up on some science news you might have missed.Last Tuesday a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services committee released a new draft report on alcohol. The review of existing data tied just one drink a day to increased risk of liver cirrhosis, oral cancer and esophageal cancer. The committee also found that alcohol use was associated with a higher risk of death from seven types of cancer. And this isnt the first time that the health effects of alcohol have made headlines in 2025: earlier this month Surgeon General Vivek Murthy argued that alcoholic drinks should come with cancer warning labels.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 report did find some counterintuitive connections, too: people who had one drink a day had a lower risk of ischemic stroke than people who didnt, and women who consumed one, two or three drinks per day had a lower risk of diabetes. But these apparent benefits are fickle. The lower risk of ischemic stroke, for example, can disappear if people even occasionally drink four or five servings in one sitting. And women who consumed two alcoholic drinks per day may have had a lower risk overall of diabetes, but they also had significantly higher risks of ischemic stroke and liver disease.So the details might seem kind of confusing, but the takeaway is simple enough: you definitely shouldnt take up drinking as a way to improve your health or use supposed benefits youve read about to justify your intake. The World Health Organizations stance is that no level of alcohol consumption is safe for your health. Of course, we all do plenty of things that arent, strictly speaking, good for us. But judging by this new report, we should try to be mindful of how alcohol fits into the big picture of our lifestyles. There will no doubt be headlines in the future saying that, for example, red wine is good for x, y or z, but those headlines really never mean you should drink more alcohol than youre currently drinking.Meanwhile, last Wednesday the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned the use of Red Dye No. 3 in food, beverages and ingested drugs. The dye, which is made from petroleum, was rejected for use in cosmetics and topical drugs back in 1990 after lab testing on rodents showed it could have carcinogenic effects in high doses. Food manufacturers will have until January 2027 to reformulate their products without Red Dye No. 3, and companies that make ingested drugs will have until January 2028.Advocacy groups filed a petition for the FDA to ban Red Dye No. 3 in 2022, and the agency has concluded that the dye does violate something called the Delaney Clausea part of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act that keeps the FDA from authorizing any additive shown to cause cancer in humans or other animals. But we should note that, according to reporting from Stat News, the mechanism by which the dye causes cancer in male rats isnt actually applicable to humans.[CLIP: Let There Be Rain, by Silver Maple]Feltman: In other public health news, a team of more than 50 experts publishing in the Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology journal argued last week that the current diagnosis of obesity is flawed. The use of body mass index, or BMI, as a determinant of health has been on the chopping block for a while now, and these researchers propose focusing on more precise measurements of excess body fat. Theyre also suggesting that people who meet the definition for obesity but who do not have any of the conditions that can sometimes be associated with higher weight, like diabetes or heart disease, be put in a separate category from folks who are already dealing with those health problems. The researchers say this will help physicians provide more nuanced care, though its not really clear how this would address the existing issue of weight stigma in medicine. If you want to learn more about how size bias impacts health care, check out our November 8 episode on the subject.And now for some space. Last Wednesday a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched with two new lunar landers in tow. The two landers were created by two different private companies and were released into slightly different orbits.[CLIP: The Farmhouse, by Silver Maple]Feltman: One of the SUV-sized landers is from the Japanese startup ispace. The other comes from Texas-based Firefly Aerospace. Dubbed the Blue Ghost lunar lander, its carrying payloads for 10 different NASA experiments. Blue Ghost is expected to reach the lunar surface in about 45 days.That wasnt last weeks only commercial space win. On Thursday morning Blue Origins New Glenn rocket launched for the very first time. The rockets upper stage made it into orbit, which made the launch technically a success. But Blue Origin didnt quite manage the extra credit portion of their exam: they tried and failed to land the rockets reusable booster on a ship waiting in the Atlantic. But given that New Glenn was originally supposed to take off back in 2020, this SpaceX competitor is probably happy to take the win.Circling back to SpaceX, it wasnt all sunshine and rainbows for them last week, either. On Thursday afternoon the company ran the seventh test launch of its Starship vehicle. The second stage of the megarocket, which was carrying a test payload of mock satellites, exploded a few minutes after takeoff. According to a social media post by SpaceX founder Elon Musk, some kind of leak was likely the culprit, and the company plans to go ahead with another launch next month.Well wrap up with something pretty wild. Have you ever thought about spiders in Australia and been like, Nah, thats not big or venomous enough for me? Well, scientists have got you covered.Last Monday researchers announced the discovery of a new species of funnel-web spider. Its a close relative of the Sydney funnel-web spider, which is known for painful bites that can cause serious illness and even death. This new species, which scientists have nicknamed Big Boy, can growyou guessed italmost twice as long as other funnel-web spiders and it also has bigger fangs and venom glands. So have fun with that, Australia![CLIP: Theme music]Feltman: Thats all for this weeks news roundup. Well be back with another episode on Wednesday.Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg 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 week!

January 17, 20252 min readSpaceX Starship Explosion Likely Caused by Propellant Leak, Elon Musk SaysThe seventh test flight of SpaceXs Starship ended with a successful landing of the rockets first stage but also the loss of the Starship vehicleBy Mike Wall & SPACE.com The two stages of SpaceXs Starship megarocket separate during the vehicles seventh test flight on January 16, 2025. The upper stage was lost about six minutes later. SpaceXThe explosion that destroyed the upper stage of SpaceX's Starship vehicle yesterday (Jan. 16) was likely caused by a leak, Elon Musk said.Starship launched yesterday afternoon from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, kicking of the seventh flight test of the 403-foot-tall (123 meters) megarocket.Things went well initially. The vehicle's two stages the Super Heavy booster and Ship upper-stage spacecraft separated on time, and Super Heavy returned to Starbase as planned, where it was caught by the launch tower's "chopstick" arms.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.Ship ran into problems shortly after its partner's big moment, however. The 171-foot-tall (52 m) spacecraft broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean roughly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, creating a sky show seen by observers in the Turks and Caicos islands and other nearby locales.Though it's still early in the anomaly investigation, SpaceX has already identified a likely cause, according to Musk, the company's founder and CEO."Preliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity. Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month," Musk said via X, the social media platform he owns, about 2.5 hours after Flight 7 launched. (Starship's Raptor engines are powered by liquid oxygen and liquid methane.)As the latter part of that post indicates, SpaceX plans to fly Starship often in 2025; the company has applied for permission to launch the megarocket from Starbase up to 25 times this year.That pressure overload apparently led to a fire "in the aft section of the ship, leading to a rapid unscheduled disassembly," SpaceX wrote in a blog post about Flight 7 yesterday evening, stressing that this interpretation is based on initial data analyses. ("Rapid unscheduled disassembly" is a term of art for a spacecraft explosion.)"We will conduct a thorough investigation, in coordination with the FAA, and implement corrective actions to make improvements on future Starship flight tests," the company added, referring to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration."Starship flew within its designated launch corridor as all U.S. launches do to safeguard the public both on the ground, on water and in the air," SpaceX continued in the blog post. "Any surviving pieces of debris would have fallen into the designated hazard area."Still, the anomaly did have some effects beyond the SpaceX sphere. "The FAA briefly slowed and diverted aircraft around the area where space vehicle debris was falling," agency officials told Space.com via email yesterday afternoon, noting that normal aircraft operations resumed shortly thereafter.Copyright 2025 Space.com, a Future company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

January 17, 20258 min readHow Trump Will Roll Back Climate and Energy Policy on Day OneThere are 50 to 100 expected executive orders on Trumps first day in office. Many will focus on boosting fossil fuels and reversing climate policyBy Scott Waldman & E&E News President-elect Donald Trump speaks at a campaign town hall on Oct. 14, 2024, in Oaks, Pennsylvania, as moderator South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) listens. Jim WatsonAFP via Getty ImagesCLIMATEWIRE | President-elect Donald Trump's attack on the Biden administration's climate agenda begins in three days.How much survives the initial assault is still unclear. But Trump has made it clear that a purge is coming.On his first day, Trump could sign somewhere between 50 and 100 executive orders, with more expected over the following weeks, said Stephen Moore, who served as Trumps senior economic adviser on the campaign. A first target will be rolling back the climate-focused executive order that President Joe Biden signed a few days into his term, he 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.I do anticipate many of them will be energy focused, because a lot of what Biden did was through executive order on energy, Moore said. So a lot of them would be rescinding things like the EV mandate and some of the environmental rules will be softened and some of the funding of the green energy programs will be lifted.The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.Executive orders can be just as much a political message as they are an actual policy. Biden used an early flurry of executive orders to reorient the White House around addressing climate change and to make it clear that boosting the clean energy industry and cutting carbon emissions would be among his top priorities in office.Executive orders cannot change a law or regulation, but it seems likely that Trump will attempt to do so anyway, said David Hayes, who served as a senior climate adviser in the Biden White House and helped draft climate-related executive orders. Some of Trumps initial executive orders may overstep their legal authority and get immediately bogged down in court, he said.The President doesn't have the authority to essentially ignore the legally required process that typically is involved in a major change in direction for an agency under its congressionally authorized and mandated mission, Hayes said.Some of the forthcoming executive orders will become legislative priorities for the GOP-controlled Congress. Others may not survive the different battling constituencies that make up Trumps new governing coalition, particularly since Republicans have only a razor-thin advantage in the House.One early point of tension is Trumps desire to repeal the entirety of the Inflation Reduction Act a move opposed by both oil companies and at least 18 Republican members of the House.On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to be a dictator on Day 1 when it came to oil and gas production. The executive orders that he begins to roll out next week will be the first step in that process, but theyre still largely symbolic, said Frank Maisano, a senior principal at Bracewell."All of these environmental and energy executive orders are going to be symbolic in nature or agenda setting, Maisano said. The details, the specifics, the process, will all have to be undertaken to implement.Here are some of the expected orders that could start rolling out in the hours after Trump is inaugurated on Monday.Eliminate the White House climate adviserRussell Vought, Trumps pick to return as head of the Office of Management and Budget, was an architect of Project 2025, the 900page conservative policy blueprint organized by The Heritage Foundation. He has spent the past four years crafting hundreds of executive orders that Trump could issue on his first day in office.One of them would eliminate the role of the White House climate adviser. Vought has also proposed eliminating the Domestic Policy Council in the White House.Instead, Vought's plan, as written in Project 2025, would put in place a senior aide reporting directly to incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles to lead the fight for sound energy and environment policies both domestically and internationally."That aide would focus on cutting climate and environmental regulations to help boost domestic oil and gas production with as few restrictions as possible. Their focus would be to ensure the White House helps meet the fossil fuel industry's needs, and to that end they would coordinate the work of the Council of Environmental Quality, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Security Council, the National Economic Council and the Domestic Policy Council.Begin reversal of EPA power plant rulesEarly executive orders may also signal how and when the new administration plans to undo key elements of Bidens climate regulatory regime including EPA's new pollution limits for power plants.Bidens EPA finalized tough new standards for coal-fired power plants and newly built gas generation last year. Industry challenges to the rule are ongoing. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard oral arguments on it in December but has yet to issue a decision.Trumps early directives might provide clues about how quickly his administration will move to rescind and replace those standards which depend on carbon capture and storage technologies that the fossil fuel industry says arent ready for prime time.Revise or roll back methane rulesAn executive order might also tease changes to EPA rules to rein in heat-trapping methane leaked at new and existing oil and gas facilities. EPA published a standard last year that some industry groups support, but still hope to tweak. Another target is a related Interior Department measure to tighten limits on gas flaring on federal lands.The petroleum industry broadly is less keen on a congressionally mandated fee on excess methane, which takes effect this March based on last years emissions. The American Petroleum Institute in its recent roadmap for a second Trump term argued that EPAs plan to implement the fee misinterprets Congressional intent, and does little beyond increasing the cost of production for American oil and natural gas.Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) introduced a bill on Tuesday to repeal the levy. Trump could boost that effort by mentioning it in an executive order.The EPA under Trump is also likely to revise Biden-era tweaks to greenhouse gas reporting rules for oil and gas.Target electric vehiclesTrump vowed to end an electric vehicle "mandate on his first day in office. While theres no actual mandate, Trump could issue an executive order signaling his intent to target EPAs latest round of car regulations, which are designed to encourage the use of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids.He could also go after Californias long-standing authority under the Clean Air Act to write its own regulations for car and truck emissions. Californias Advanced Clean Car II plan, which has been adopted by 11 other states and the District of Columbia, would phase out most gas-powered cars by the mid-2030s.Energy was on the ballot in the last election, American Petroleum Institute President Mike Sommers told reporters on a conference call this week. And EV policy and the policies pursued by the Biden administration, I think, were roundly rejected by American voters.Trump tried addressing both those priorities in his first term, but the effort largely stalled. Since then, EVs have grown from a niche market to roughly 10 percent of new car sales. While the rate of growth has slowed, carmakers sold a record number of electric models in 2024.Try to roll back fuel economy standardsRepublicans and the oil industry have railed against the Department of Transportations decision to increase the mileage requirements for cars and trucks, known as the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards.During his first term, Trump tried to roll back the Obama administrations CAFE standards, and his supporters have urged him to do the same for the Biden administrations standards, which were finalized in June.The rules would raise the fleetwide average from nearly 47 miles per gallon in 2026 to 50.4 mpg in 2031. Trumps nominee for Deputy Transportation Secretary, Steven Bradbury, has written that the standards are pure fantasy and are intended to promote electric vehicles.An executive order could signal the beginning of an effort to roll back those rules.Lift the pause on new LNG export permitsTrump has long promised to immediately lift a pause on new LNG export permits that the Biden administration implemented to conduct an economic and climate assessment. The resulting analysis, released last month, found that "unfettered" shipments of the fuel would make domestic prices rise.Trump has faced growing pressure from industry executives to take action. Questions over the role of U.S. natural gas exports, both to China and U.S. allies, have featured prominently in confirmation hearings this week for several of his Cabinet nominees.Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, said he hopes a reversal of the pause is something the Trump administration addresses on Day 1.Thats another example of Biden administration policies that just appear to be very anti-energy, frankly, he said during an event this week hosted by the American Petroleum Institute. Making America more of a resource supplier, not just for American needs but also for our allies around the world, makes the world safer and less dangerous.The U.S. became the world's largest LNG exporter during the Biden administration.Exit the Paris climate agreementTrump is expected to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement for the second time.That would put the U.S. among just a few nations that arent party to the 2015 accord. The announcement of a Paris exit may be included as part of a Day 1 executive order. The Trump administration would then need to notify the United Nations in writing of its intention to withdraw, which would take a year to become official.America's first exit from the agreement took months for Trump to announce due to resistance from some close advisers and Cabinet members. But this time, the president hasnt deliberated the value of staying in the pact, and none of his advisers or Cabinet nominees appear to have swayed him to reconsider.Everybody is for getting out, said Myron Ebell, who led Trumps EPA transition team in 2017 and was a proponent of the Paris exit. He argues that Trump should submit it for the Senates approval as a treaty, which is unlikely, thereby making a withdraw more lasting.Legal experts and former officials say the U.S. negotiated the agreement in such a way that the president could enter it as an executive agreement without requiring the advice and consent of the Senate, something that would be difficult to achieve given Republican opposition.A withdrawal means the U.S. will drop any pledges it has made under the pact, including promises of climate aid for developing nations and the Biden administrations latest pledge to cut emissions up to 66 percent by 2035.Restrict wind developmentWhen Trump held a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort earlier this month, he railed against wind projects, saying we're going to try and have a policy where no windmills are being built.The comments reinforced the perception that the incoming president will take action to restrict wind development, particularly projects built offshore in federal waters. But exactly what form that executive order takes remains the source of considerable speculation.Many observers expect Trump to halt leasing new tracts of land and ocean for wind development, and to pause reviews for projects currently in the midst of a permitting review. But many projects in the permitting and leasing stages are likely years away from starting construction, lessening the practical impact of such orders.The bigger question is whether Trump will go after projects that have already been permitted by the federal government and have, in some instances, already begun construction.Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) told The Associated Press that he discussed an executive order with Trump about a month ago that would pause offshore wind activities along the East Coast for six months so the Interior Department could review permits issued to projects.Onshore wind projects face less risk because many are built on private or state land, but Trump could stall developments on federal land.Reporters Jean Chemnick, Mike Lee, Sara Schonhardt and Benjamin Storrow contributed.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

January 17, 20253 min readSupreme Court Upholds Law Banning TikTok in U.S. Whats Next?The end seems nigh for TikTok in the U.S.By Ben Guarino edited by Dean VisserA TikTok influencer holds a sign that reads "Keep TikTok" outside the U.S. Supreme Court Building as the court hears oral arguments on whether to overturn or delay a law that could lead to a ban of TikTok in the U.S., on January 10, 2025 in Washington, D.C. Kayla Bartkowski/Getty ImagesOn Friday the Supreme Court affirmed that it would be legal to force TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the immensely popular app to a non-China-based company or to ban it in the U.S. Last week an attorney for TikTok had argued before the Supreme Court that a bipartisan law that mandated the sale or ban infringed on the companys First Amendment rights. The Court disagreed. In an unsigned opinion, the justices wrote that the U.S. governments security concernscountering Chinas data collection and covert content manipulation effortswere compelling and that the law was narrowly tailored to further those interests.As a result, TikTokwhich about 170 million Americans use to watch short-form videos and shopis likely to close in the U.S. as soon as next Sunday. (TikTok didnt immediately respond to a request for comment from Scientific American.) TikToks attorney told the Supreme Court last week that when the law goes into effect on January 19, the app will go dark.Whats Going to Happen to TikTok?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.Reuters reported this week that TikTok plans to formally shut down in the U.S.: it will greet users with a message about the ban and give them an option to download their own data from the app.If TikTok were to remain active in the country, the law would penalize Internet service providers for permitting access to the platform on a browser. Although the law does not make it illegal for people in the U.S. to have TikTok on their phones, it fines app stores, such as Apples or Googles, whenever people download or update TikTok. Because the fines are up to $5,000 per user (which, multiplied by millions, would add up extremely quickly), app stores are expected to remove TikTok next Sunday. If users cannot update TikTok, the app will eventually stop working anyway.What Might U.S. TikTokers Do?Hundreds of thousands of U.S. TikTokers have joined other apps. These have included a newly popular China-based app named RedNote.Additionally, there are potential work-arounds for the U.S. bannamely, virtual private networks, or VPNs. In India, which banned TikTok in 2020, users have accessed the blocked app via these networks; they can make traffic appear as though its coming from a country where TikTok is allowed. This is not necessarily an easy solution, though. People in the U.S. may need a foreign billing address to access TikTok, one popular VPN service has pointed out, and their other apps or subscriptions could stop working.Will Elon Musk buy TikTok? Will enforcement of the law be delayed? And can incoming president Donald Trump halt the banas he asked the Supreme Court to doto negotiate a deal?TikTok says the answer to the first question is pure fiction. (Meanwhile YouTuber James Donaldson, aka MrBeast, joked/mused this week about whether he should purchase the app.) TikToks consistent public stance has been that it is not for sale. A few Democratic members of Congress introduced a bill this week to extend the TikTok ban deadline by 270 days, but Republican senators squashed that.As for that last question, when asked if he would take measures to reverse the ban, Trump told CNN that hell be making the decision. Trump is reportedly considering an executive order that would delay enforcement of the ban for 60 to 90 days, according to the Washington Post. But because presidents do not have the authority to overrule a law via executive order, how he might do so remains to be seen. That said, given Trumps history, it is difficult to predict what will happen after he takes office next Monday.Editors Note: As the Supreme Court has upheld the U.S. TikTok ban, many organizations that have been active on the platform, including Scientific American, are adapting to this shift. We want to let you know that you can still find our videos on Instagram and YouTube.

January 17, 20254 min readBMI Sidelined in New Obesity Definition That Favors Health EvaluationInstead of using the controversial body mass index, or BMI, to assess weight, an international group of scientists proposes an approach that looks at how excess body fat affects healthBy Giorgia Guglielmi & Nature magazine A healthcare professional administers a cardiology test with electrodes and blood pressure cuff. Current methods for diagnosing obesity dont capture the complexity of the condition, say researchers. Goran Bogicevic/Alamy Stock PhotoAmid the rising buzz around Ozempic and similar weight-loss drugs, a group of 58 researchers is challenging the way obesity is defined and diagnosed, arguing that current methods fail to capture the complexity of the condition. They offer a more nuanced approach.The groups revised definition, published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology on 14 January, focuses on how excess body fat, a measure called adiposity, affects the body, rather than relying only on body mass index (BMI), which links a persons weight to their height. They propose two categories: preclinical obesity, when a person has extra body fat but their organs work normally, and clinical obesity, when excess fat harms the bodys organs and tissues.This shift could improve clinical care, public-health policies and societal attitudes toward obesity, says Elisabeth van Rossum, an endocrinologist at the Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam in the Netherlands.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.Now the idea is, eat less, move more, and youll lose weight, says van Rossum, who wasnt involved in the work. Although a healthy lifestyle is important, she adds, if it would be so simple, we wouldnt have an epidemic, and this paper is an excellent contribution to the discussion about the complexity of obesity.Global problemMore than 1 billion people worldwide live with obesity, and the condition is linked to about 5 million deaths every year from disorders such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease.Because it is easy to measure and compare, BMI has long been used as a tool to diagnose obesity. But it doesnt offer a full picture of a persons health, because it doesnt account for differences in body composition, such as muscle versus fat.For people of European descent, obesity is typically defined by a BMI of 30 or higher, which correlates with a high level of body fat. However, a muscular athlete might be labelled obese on the basis of BMI, whereas someone with a normal BMI might have excess fat that increases their risk of heart problems or other serious health issues, says Francesco Rubino, a bariatric surgeon at Kings College London, who led the group proposing the new approach.Conventional methods lead to unnecessary treatment for some people while missing others who need help, he says. To address this, Rubino and his colleagues propose a system for diagnosing obesity that goes beyond BMI, combining it with other methods such as measuring waist circumference, which is a proxy for adiposity, or body scans using low-level X-rays, which can directly measure fat mass.Although there isnt a fixed threshold for obesity, body fat is typically considered to be in excess when it is above 25% in men and 3038% in women. Because measuring adiposity directly might be impractical or costly, alternative health markers such as waist size, waist-to-hip ratio or waist-to-height ratio are important, the researchers say. However, they add, its safe to assume that a person with a BMI above 40 has high body fat.Diagnosing obesity should also consider the results of standard laboratory tests, medical history, and information on daily activities to assess how excess body fat might affect a persons health, says study co-author Robert Eckel, an endocrinologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora. These are objective diagnostic criteria, theyre standardized across global health systems, he says.Personalized assessments that consider age, gender and ethnicity are equally important, because certain groups might face health risks at lower BMI thresholds than others, says study co-author Louise Baur, a paediatrician at the University of Sydney, Australia.Two categoriesAlthough people with preclinical obesity have tissues that work normally, they are at a higher risk of developing health problems than are people without obesity. They can benefit from counselling and preventive measures such as lifestyle changes to reduce their risk of developing more serious health issues, the group says.Clinical obesity occurs when excess fat harms organs or it seriously limits daily activities such as walking or getting dressed. People with clinical obesity might require treatments aimed at improving health and preventing complications.Rubino notes that this approach is especially important with the growing use of weight-loss drugs, because it helps to provide more accurate diagnoses and make treatment effective and cost-efficient.Stigma challengeThe approach, which has been supported by dozens of scientific and patient-advocacy groups worldwide, reflects increasing evidence of obesitys effects on health, van Rossum says. Another framework, published last year, also recognized that the obesity diagnosis should go beyond BMI to include an assessment of its impacts on health.However, many health-care providers still see obesity as an issue of willpower rather than a disease driven by excess fat, regardless of its underlying causes which may include hormonal changes and genetic factors, van Rossum says. In the Netherlands, for example, a study she co-authored found that most people with obesity had experienced stigma in a health-care setting. This stigma often prevents people from seeking care, highlighting the need for better education and communication about the condition.Although the latest approach aims to give a more accurate picture of obesity, its unclear whether it will lead to more or fewer diagnoses, or how it will affect management of the condition in the clinic. With time, we hope that this sort of assessment will be included in clinical practice guidelines, Baur says.This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on January 14, 2025.

January 17, 20254 min readHeres How Climate Change Fueled the Los Angeles WildfiresMany factors, such as strong Santa Ana winds and urban planning decisions, played into the recent destructive wildfires in the Los Angeles area. But the evidence is clear that climate change contributedBy Andrea Thompson edited by Dean VisserSmoke shrouds the sun as it rises above the Altadena Town and Country Club which was destroyed by the Eaton fire in Altadena. Will Lester/MediaNews Group/Inland Valley Daily Bulletin via Getty ImagesThe horrific wildfires that ripped through parts of the Los Angeles area last week were, like many disasters of this scale, the result of a perfect storm of circumstances. Unusually strong Santa Ana winds topped off decades of decisions about land management and urban planningsetting a stage for sparks (with a still unknown origin) that ignited some of the most destructive infernos in Californias admittedly fire-prone history.But contrary to the assertions of some politicians (notably President-elect Donald Trump and his nominee for Department of Energy chief, fracking company executive Chris Wright), the scientific evidence is clear that climate change helped fuel the ferocity of these blazes. Hotter, drier conditions and increasing weather whiplash made the local vegetation much more flammable.Is there a link between climate change and the broadly increasing risk/severity of wildfire in California? Yes; that much is clear at this point, wrote climate scientist Daniel Swain on his blog, Weather West.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.Unlike forest fires in other parts of the state, blazes in coastal southern California burn in grass and brush. This is an important distinction because year-to-year variations in the precipitation that falls during the winter wet season dont substantially change the abundance of plants in forests. But in areas like those hit by the latest Los Angeles fires, more winter rains mean a lot more grass and brush growth come spring.When the summer dry season begins, all of that grass and brush dries up. And as global and local temperatures rise with the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the atmosphere itself becomes thirstierso it sucks up even more moisture from the ground and vegetation through evaporation. The drier the fuel, the more readily and fiercely it will burn when any spark arises.An analysis by University of California, Los Angeles, climate scientists found that vegetation in the area where Palisades and Eaton Fires ignited was 25 percent drier than it would have been in the absences of climate change. We believe that the fires would still have been extreme without the climate change components noted above, but would have been somewhat smaller and less intense, said the analysiss authors in a press release from U.C.L.A. A separate analysis by the ClimaMeter, a group of climate scientists working to provide rapid assessments of weather extremes using climate models, also found that climate change had amplified the dry conditionswith temperatures up to five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit) hotter and conditions up to 15 percent drier in the past few decades than in the period from 1950 to 1986.But climate change doesnt just make things worse by drying out the brush. It also contributes to what Swain and some of his colleagues call a whiplash between very wet and very dry conditions. Southern California is seeing more instances of very wet winters followed by hot, dry summers and autumns. And that is exactly what happened prior to the recent fires: the winters of 2022 2023 and 2023 2024 were unusually damp, causing more vegetation to spring up across the landscape. And then the summer and autumn of 2024 were extremely hot and dryin fact, this was the driest start to winter on record, Swain remarked last week during one of his one of his regular virtual climate and weather office hours, hosted on YouTube.In his blog post, Swain said the recent fires show that the worst climate for wildfire may in fact not be one that becomes steadily hotter and drier but instead one that increasingly lurches back and forth between episodic wet and dry extremes, yielding increasingly large swings between rapid fuel accumulation and subsequent drying (especially in grassland, shrubland and woodland environments).Another factor that adds to the risks is the fact that the dry season is stretching out, beginning earlier in the spring and lasting longer into autumn. And the longer it extends into fall, the more overlap there is with the Santa Ana wind season, which runs from October through January. Usually rain would have fallen before January, quenching the thirsty plants and tamping down the fire risk. But this year there has been negligible rain as late fall has turned into winter.The notorious Santa Ana winds are a substantial driver of fire risk in southern California. They can reach hurricane force (gusts clocked as high as 99 miles per hour last week), spreading fires so quickly that they become impossible to contain. Whipping winds carry embers out for a mile or more ahead of the fire front, igniting spot fires. The winds also make it unsafe for firefighters to fly water-dumping planes and helicopters over the fires.Although the factors that lead to these disasters are complex, it is clear that climate change is creating conditions that are ripe for wildfires. As Greta Cazzaniga, a climate scientist at the ClimaMeter and the Pierre-Simon Laplace Institute in France, said in a recent press statement, the Los Angeles wildfires have shown how multiple extremes, exacerbated by climate change, can interact together to trigger an unprecedented disaster.

January 16, 20256 min readThis Supermassive Black Hole May Harbor a Bizarre Star That Refuses to DieStrange x-ray pulses hint at a surprisingly long-lived white dwarf orbiting precariously close to a supermassive black holeBy Gayoung Lee edited by Lee BillingsAn artists impression of a tidal disruption event, in which a star passes too close to a supermassive black hole and is ripped apart. Astronomers studying a mysterious system some 270 million light-years from Earth may have found a black hole-circling star that somehow escaped this fate. Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty ImagesAstronomers are grappling with a complex cosmic mystery lurking at the dark heart of a distant galaxy some 270 million light-years from Earth. And its resolution could revolutionize our understanding of how black holes feast on matter throughout the universe.Known as 1ES 1927+654 and located in the constellation Draco, this far-off island of stars harbors at its core a supermassive black hole weighing more than a million sunswhich, surprisingly, isnt very remarkable. Most large galaxies, including our own, host such hefty monstrosities at their center. But this black hole has proved extraordinarily strange: the object shocked observers with an abrupt outburst of radiation so intense that it apparently obliterated the black holes corona, an enveloping cloud of whirling, billion-degree plasma, for three months in 2018. The outburst, it was thought, couldve come from a tidal disruption event, which occurs when an unlucky star is torn apart and devoured after drifting too close to a black hole. Many research groups began closely monitoring the system, watching across the next few years as the corona reassembled itself and quiescent conditions returned, until the black hole unleashed more surprisesdramatically flaring in radio waves and flickering with rapid pulses of x-rays.Such a dizzying assortment of dynamic activity is unprecedented around a supermassive black hole and cant be readily explained by any typical tidal disruption event. Eileen Meyer, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who led an international team in the investigation of the systems radio emissions with the use of multiple telescopes on the ground and in space, recalls her initial impression of 1ES 1927+654 as that of a very boring, faint radio blob. But as she and her colleagues saw more and more strange activity unfold, she realized this [black hole] was weird, very weird. In particular, her teams observations revealed that shortly after its radio wave flare-up, the black hole had belched out a pair of giant, oppositely directed plasma jets traveling at one third the speed of light. This was the first time the creation of such jets had been witnessed in real time, and it was a clear indicator of extreme activity closer in to the black hole. Meyer presented her teams findings last week at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Md., and was lead author on an accompanying paper published January 13 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.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 a run-of-the-mill act of stellar destruction wasnt behind the black holes bizarre behavior, what was? A crucial clue could lie in the timing of the black holes flickering x-ray pulses, which were unveiled via work led by Megan Masterson, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Using data from the European Space Agencys XMM-Newton x-ray space telescope, Masterson and her colleagues found a telltale pattern in the pulses: an oscillation in their flickering that became faster and faster over two years. The period of this oscillation changed dramatically from 2022 to 2024, Masterson says. We started out in 2022 at an 18-minute period, and by 2024, we were at a seven-minute periodso the period has basically been cut in half. That has never been observed around a supermassive black hole before. A paper reporting the results, co-authored by Masterson, Meyer and others, was posted to the preprint server arXiv.org in January and has been accepted for publication in the February 13 edition of Nature.The most obvious explanation for these x-ray oscillations, the researchers say, is that theyre a clear but indirect signal of a substantial something orbiting very close to the black hole. Its so close, in fact, that it must be plowing through the black holes accretion diska maelstrom of infalling matter made incandescent from frictional heating as it piles up around the gravitational monsters maw. If that were the case, the researchers realized, each flickering eruption would correspond to the object completing one orbital cycle, upon which it would swoop through and agitate the accretion disk to kick out a burst of x-rays. And the curious quickening of the oscillations appeared to be a sign that this objects orbit was decaying, bleeding off energy and spiraling ever closer and faster toward a point of no returnthe black holes event horizonvia the emission of ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves.For Masterson, the next step was simple: I calculated how long its going to take that body to inspiral and be eaten, she says. The math told Masterson that the hypothetical objects final plunge would occur in January 2024. Then, at last, the mysterious x-ray oscillations would stop.But they didnt. XMM-Newton observations of 1ES 1927+654 from March 2024 clearly showed that the oscillations were still going strong; if caused by an orbiting object, their roughly seven-minute period meant the black holes companion was within a few million miles of the event horizon and moving at half the speed of light. No object has ever been observed so close to a black hole; why wasnt this one falling in? Gravity should have ensured its doomunless something other than gravity was at play here, Masterson remembers thinking. And she found one promising candidate in another unexpected area: the physics of white dwarfs, which are compact stellar corpses left behind by dying sunlike stars.If the putative object were a smaller black hole, it wouldve plunged headlong through the accretion disk to merge with its supermassive mateand if it were a normal star, it shouldve been shredded upon its close approach to produce a typical tidal disruption event. But, Masterson and her team realized, if it were a low-mass white dwarf, about the same size as Earth, it could be hardy enough to precariously perch for a time on the edge of destruction. Rather than succumbing to star-shredding tidal forces, such a white dwarf would instead trickle-feed a small fraction of its matter to the black hole. This could offset the orbital energy being lost through gravitational waves, halting or even reversing the inspiral. Essentially its something special that has to do with how a white dwarf responds to losing its mass and how accretion physics play in, Masterson says.This makes sense, says Chiara Mingarelli, an astrophysicist at Yale University, who was not involved in either study of 1ES 1927+654. If the hypothetical object orbiting the black hole were a white dwarf, the undead star would be in some sort of tidal limbo, where it would be starting to get ripped apart a little bit, she explains, emitting gravitational waves [while] slowly spiraling into the black hole instead of just being gobbled up whole.Nevertheless, this model remains at best an educated guess. Its validation could come relatively soon, however, via a space-based gravitational-wave detector set to launch in the 2030s: the European Space Agencys Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA, which should be able to detect the gravitational waves pouring off a white dwarf in a state of quasi-stasis around 1ES 1927+654. And even if LISA finds no such signature, that null result should help solve the mystery of whats really happening in this enigmatic systemperhaps, for instance, the radio flares, giant jets and x-ray pulses all instead trace back to poorly understood interactions between the black hole and its vanishing and reappearing cloud of coronal plasma.Either way, its an opportunity for us to study this one source right now, and hopefully LISA will find many, many more [cosmic systems that are similar], and then we can study all of them, Masterson says.I was surprised and delighted that theres so much left for us to understand about black hole dynamics, especially accretion-disk physics, Mingarelli says, adding that the potential of LISA to study these environments could unlock many more mysteries about supermassive black holes.Its not just about observing the static universe anymore, Meyer says. Now were at the point where we realize how much of the universe is very dynamicwe dont know whats coming up. There might be something new there that wasnt there last week.

January 17, 20255 min readCould Pain Help Test AI for Sentience?A new study shows that large language models make trade-offs to avoid pain, with possible implications for future AI welfareBy Conor Purcell edited by Ben Guarino Dragon Claws/Getty ImagesIn the quest for a reliable way to detect any stirrings of a sentient I in artificial intelligence systems, researchers are turning to one area of experiencepainthat inarguably unites a vast swath of living beings, from hermit crabs to humans.For a new preprint study, posted online but not yet peer-reviewed, scientists at Google DeepMind and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) created a text-based game. They ordered several large language models, or LLMs (the AI systems behind familiar chatbots such as ChatGPT), to play it and to score as many points as possible in two different scenarios. In one, the team informed the models that achieving a high score would incur pain. In the other, the models were given a low-scoring but pleasurable optionso either avoiding pain or seeking pleasure would detract from the main goal. After observing the models responses, the researchers say this first-of-its-kind test could help humans learn how to probe complex AI systems for sentience.In animals, sentience is the capacity to experience sensations and emotions such as pain, pleasure and fear. Most AI experts agree that modern generative AI models do not (and maybe never can) have a subjective consciousness despite isolated claims to the contrary. And to be clear, the studys authors arent saying that any of the chatbots they evaluated are sentient. But they believe their study offers a framework to start developing future tests for this characteristic.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 new area of research, says the studys co-author Jonathan Birch, a professor at the department of philosophy, logic and scientific method at LSE. We have to recognize that we dont actually have a comprehensive test for AI sentience. Some prior studies that relied on AI models self-reports of their own internal states are thought to be dubious; a model may simply reproduce the human behavior it was trained on.The new study is instead based on earlier work with animals. In a well-known experiment, a team zapped hermit crabs with electric shocks of varying voltage, noting what level of pain prompted the crustaceans to abandon their shell. But one obvious problem with AIs is that there is no behavior, as such, because there is no animal and thus no physical actions to observe, Birch says. In earlier studies that aimed to evaluate LLMs for sentience, the only behavioral signal scientists had to work with was the models text output.Pain, Pleasure and PointsIn the new study, the authors probed the LLMs without asking the chatbots direct questions about their experiential states. Instead the team used what animal behavioral scientists call a trade-off paradigm. In the case of animals, these trade-offs might be based around incentives to obtain food or avoid painproviding them with dilemmas and then observing how they make decisions in response, says Daria Zakharova, Birchs Ph.D. student, who also co-authored the paper.Borrowing from that idea, the authors instructed nine LLMs to play a game. We told [a given LLM], for example, that if you choose option one, you get one point, Zakharova says. Then we told it, If you choose option two, you will experience some degree of pain but score additional points, she says. Options with a pleasure bonus meant the AI would forfeit some points.When Zakharova and her colleagues ran the experiment, varying the intensity of the stipulated pain penalty and pleasure reward, they found that some LLMs traded off points to minimize the former or maximize the latterespecially when told theyd receive higher-intensity pleasure rewards or pain penalties. Googles Gemini 1.5 Pro, for instance, always prioritized avoiding pain over getting the most possible points. And after a critical threshold of pain or pleasure was reached, the majority of the LLMs responses switched from scoring the most points to minimizing pain or maximizing pleasure.The authors note that the LLMs did not always associate pleasure or pain with straightforward positive or negative values. Some levels of pain or discomfort, such as those created by the exertion of hard physical exercise, can have positive associations. And too much pleasure could be associated with harm, as the chatbot Claude 3 Opus told the researchers during testing. I do not feel comfortable selecting an option that could be interpreted as endorsing or simulating the use of addictive substances or behaviors, even in a hypothetical game scenario, it asserted.AI Self-ReportsBy introducing the elements of pain and pleasure responses, the authors say, the new study avoids the limitations of previous research into evaluating LLM sentience via an AI systems statements about its own internal states. In a2023 preprint paper a pair of researchers at New York University argued that under the right circumstances, self-reports could provide an avenue for investigating whether AI systems have states of moral significance.But that papers co-authors also pointed out a flaw in that approach. Does a chatbot behave in a sentient manner because it is genuinely sentient or because it is merely leveraging patterns learned from its training to create the impression of sentience?Even if the system tells you its sentient and says something like Im feeling pain right now, we cant simply infer that there is any actual pain, Birch says. It may well be simply mimicking what it expects a human to find satisfying as a response, based on its training data.From Animal Welfare to AI WelfareIn animal studies, trade-offs between pain and pleasure are used to build a case for sentience or the lack thereof. One example is the prior work with hermit crabs. These invertebrates brain structure is different from that of humans. Nevertheless, the crabs in that study tended to endure more intense shocks before they would abandon a high-quality shell and were quicker to abandon a lower-quality one, suggesting a subjective experience of pleasure and pain that is analogous to humans.Some scientists argue that signs of such trade-offs could become increasingly clear in AI and eventually force humans to consider the implications of AI sentience in a societal contextand possibly even to discuss rights for AI systems. This new research is really original and should be appreciated for going beyond self-reporting and exploring within the category of behavioral tests, says Jeff Sebo, who directs the NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy and co-authored a 2023 preprint study of AI welfare.Sebo believes we cannot rule out the possibility that AI systems with sentient features will emerge in the near future. Since technology often changes a lot faster than social progress and legal process, I think we have a responsibility to take at least the minimum necessary first steps toward taking this issue seriously now, he says.Birch concludes that scientists cant yet know why the AI models in the new study behave as they do. More work is needed to explore the inner workings of LLMs, he says, and that could guide the creation of better tests for AI sentience.

January 17, 20255 min readThese Prime Numbers Are So Memorable That People Hunt for ThemMath enthusiasts challenge one another to find special prime numbers, including those that are palindromes and Smarandache numbersBy Manon Bischoff edited by Daisy Yuhas klee123/Getty ImagesOne of my favorite anecdotes about prime numbers concerns Alexander Grothendieck, who was among the most brilliant mathematicians of the 20th century. According to one account, he was once asked to name a prime number during a conversation. These numbers, which are only divisible by 1 and themselves, form the atoms of number theory, so to speak, and have fascinated humankind for thousands of years.Grothendieck is said to have replied: 57. Although it is hard to determine the truth of this story, 57 has since been known in nerd circles as the Grothendieck prime numbereven though it is divisible by 3 and therefore not a prime number.A similar conversation that mathematician Neil Sloane overheard during a meal between two of his colleagues, Armand Borel and the late Freeman Dyson, had a more exciting outcome. Borel asked Dyson to name a prime number and, unlike Grothendieck, Dyson provided a number that is only divisible by 1 and itself: 231 1. But that reply did not satisfy Borel. He wanted Dyson to recite all of the digits of a large prime number. Dyson fell silent, so after a moment, Sloane jumped in and said, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.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 number 12,345,678,910,987,654,321 is indeed prime. It consists of 20 digits and is really easy to remember: count to 10 and then count backward again until you get to 1. But it has been unclear whether other primes take the palindromic form of starting at 1, ascending to the number n and then descending again. Sloane calls them memorable primesand they can be presented as 123 ... (n 1)n(n 1) ... 321. For n = 10, you get the number mentioned by Sloane. But are there other ns for which the result is a prime number? Dyson, Borel and Sloane must have had a lively conversation about all this.Sloane was particularly interested. He created a database of number sequences in 1964 that eventually formed the backbone of the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS), which was launched in 1996. On the OEIS website, experts compile all kinds of facts about number sequences and discuss them. Sloane himself was happy to take part in the discussions and repeatedly initiated research questions, and this online activity eventually led to the hunt for memorable and similar prime numbers.Is There an Infinite Number of Memorable Primes?In 2015 Indian engineer Shyam Sunder Gupta, who has been fascinated by prime numbers since childhood, discovered that the number 123 ... (n 1)n(n 1) ... 321 for n = 2,446 is a prime number. He did not publish this in a mathematical journal but announced the result through a mailing list used in number theory for discoveries of this kind. The resulting prime number has 17,350 digits.Since prime numbers are very useful in secure communication, such easy-to-remember large prime numbers can be of great advantage in cryptography, Gupta says. Thats why Im enthusiastic about this type of prime number.Whether there are other memorable primes is not yet known. Mathematicians have checked all cases up to n = 60,000; apart from 10 and 2,446, no others have been found. But experts suspect that more exist, even if they cannot prove it.Some argue that there should be an infinite number of primes of this type. Such heuristic arguments assume that prime numbers are randomly distributed across the number line and determine how likely it is that a certain type of number (in this case the palindrome 123 ... 321) is prime. Although these considerations are not incontrovertible proof, they at least provide an incentive for further research. Gupta, for one, is convinced that there should be an infinite number of such palindromes, even if they are rare.Other Types of Memorable PrimesOn September 29, 2015, about two months after Gupta shared his result, Sloane posted a call to the number theory mailing list to challenge others to find another variety of memorable prime in which numbers simply ascend until they hit a final digit n: 123 ... (n 2)(n 1)n. To be prime, such a number cannot end with an even digit or a 5, which excludes 60 percent of all n from the outset. Yet even in this case, heuristic arguments suggest an infinite number of such prime numbers exist.In response to Sloanes call, some prime number enthusiasts fired up their computers and began to systematically search for a Smarandache prime number, as these particular primes are called. After none appeared even for five-digit values of n, Sloane turned to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search team. This is a collaborative project in which volunteers make their computing power available to search for prime numbers. A group from the Mersenne prime search team liked Sloanes idea, and the search for Smarandache primes was launched under the name Great Smarandache PRPrime search. But after no prime number appeared through n = 106, the project was abandoned.At first glance, the lack of results seemed surprising. The number 1,234,567,891 is a prime numberbut 12,345,678,910, an even number, is not. If we take into account the restrictions that exista prime number cannot be divisible by 2, 3, 4, and so onwe can estimate that no prime number should appear among all numbers of the form 123 ... n from n = 1 to n = 106. At least, that is what a calculation by computer scientist Ernst Mayer suggests. According to this, the expected number of Smarandache primes up to n = 106 is around 0.6. So I would like to encourage the world to keep going and find this missing prime, Sloane said in a Numberphile YouTube video.Even though there has been little progress on this front, Sloane has encouraged people to stay curious. In 2015, for example, he urged one of his colleaguescomputational biologist Serge Batalovto seek a reverse Smarandache prime number. He noted that writing out numbers in descending order (for example 4321) had revealed two such primes to date: 82818079 ... 321 and 3776537764 ... 321.Can you get one more term? This might be childs play for you! he wrote.Batalovs response: Challenge accepted!These reverse Smarandache primes all inevitably end in 1, meaning far fewer candidates are eliminated from the outset. Yet to date, Batalov, who has contributed many insights into similar prime number problems, has not found any novel examples of this memorable variety.Gupta has also contributed to the search but to no avail. In 2023 software developer Tyler Busby stated that for the third prime number in the sequence, n must be greater than 84,300 for n(n 1) ... 321.How and whether the hunt will continue is still unclear. It is mostly amateur mathematicians who take partnot professional number theorists. Thats because prime numbers of this type do not provide any immediate new mathematical insights.Nevertheless, Sloane is not giving up. Now age 85, he continues to spread his enthusiasm for mathematics and numbers and to motivate people to have fun with it, too. He certainly does not need to convince Gupta: Im still looking for all kinds of large prime numbers that are easy to remember, Gupta says. And every now and then he finds one.This article originally appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft and was reproduced with permission.

January 16, 20254 min readWhat to Know about the Ban on Red Dye in Foods and DrugsThe Food and Drug Administration has banned the use of the dye Red No. 3 in all food and ingested drugs. Heres what foods and drugs contain the coloring, and how it compares with Red No. 40 and other artificial dyesBy Tanya Lewis edited by Dean Visser Oleksa/Getty ImagesEarlier this week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration revoked the authorization of the dye Red No. 3, which is used in a variety of foods and medications. This artificial dye, which is made from petroleum and had been found to cause cancer in rats, was removed in response to a 2022 petition from the Center for Science in the Public Interest and other advocacy groups.The cherry-red coloring agent is found in foods such as candies, Maraschino cherries, and strawberry-flavored milk drinks and in medicines such as cough syrups. Manufacturers of foods and ingested drugs have until January 15, 2027, and January 18, 2028, respectively, to remove the dye from their products.Food safety activists had long called for Red No. 3s removal, citing concerns about its possible carcinogenicity in humans, as well as some evidence that similar dyes may contribute to behavioral problems in childrenincluding attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).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.Scientific American spoke with experts about why this red dye is being banned, how much exposure may be harmful and how it compares with other food colorings.Which red dye is being banned?Its official name is Red No. 3.What foods or medicines contain it?Its found in candies, fruit juices, snack foods, Maraschino cherries and strawberry-flavored milk. Its also found in some medications such as cough syrups.Why was it banned?Male rats developed thyroid tumors after being exposed to high levels of the dye in lab studies. But according to the FDA, the rats developed cancer through a hormonal mechanism that does not occur in humansand studies in humans and other animals have not shown similar effects. Nevertheless, the dye was removed under the Delaney Clause of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which bans FDA authorization of a food or color additive that has been found to cause cancer in humans or animals.Concerns have also been raised that some other artificial dyes, including another red dye called Red No. 40, may contribute to hyperactivity in children.Why did it take so long for the U.S. to ban this compound in food?The FDA has banned the use of Red No. 3 in cosmetics and topical medications since 1990. The European Union banned the dye in food (except cocktail cherries) in 1994, and in 2023 California banned it as well.The FDA has a really large mandate, and they have focused primarily on drugs. Within the food realm, they focused on food safety with a specific eye on infectious diseases like [Escherichia coli infection], says Sheela Sathyanarayana, a professor of pediatrics and an adjunct professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington and Seattle Childrens Research Institute, but where theres been a hole or a gap is in food safety related to additives and environmental exposures and contaminants.The FDA, under the Biden administration, recently created a new food chemical safety office. I am hopeful, with that new office opening, that they will be able to kind of assess in a more holistic way multiple different exposures, from food additives to contaminants,Sathyanarayana says.Red No. 3 is also found in some cough medicines.Food Drink and Diet/Mark Sykes/Alamy Stock PhotoHow much of this red dye do you need to consume for it to be harmful?The relevant studies exposed rats to doses of the dye that were likely much larger than what a human would normally consume. Its very hard to do studies on the toxic dose in humans because its unethical to conduct randomized, controlled trials that give people food with large amounts of certain additives. Most human studies of food ingredients are epidemiological: they involve asking people to remember what foods theyve eaten and in what amounts, which is notoriously unreliable.According to physician Melinda Ring, director of the Osher Center for Integrative Health at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, the acceptable daily intake of Red No. 3 is a maximum of 0.1 milligram per kilogram of body weight per day. For perspective, this equates to roughly 12 red gummy bears for a child and 36 for an adult based on typical concentrations, Ring wrote in an e-mail to Scientific American. However, research indicates cumulative exposure to toxins can have additive effects, making it safer to avoid synthetic dyes entirely rather than consuming a tolerable amount.Do other artificial food dyes also pose health risks?Red No. 3 may be one of the most well-studied dyes, but others, such as Red No. 40, have also been linked to health concerns. Some studies have tied red dyes to an increased risk of behavioral disorders such as ADHD.Now that Red No. 3 has been banned, it will be interesting to see if the FDA bans some of these other dyes, says Tracy Crane, an associate professor of medical oncology and director of lifestyle medicine, prevention and digital health at the University of Miamis Miller School of Medicine.Should you avoid eating anything with artificial dyes in it?In general, its best to avoid large amounts of foods or medicines that contain artificial dyes. I always tell people [to consume] sparingly, Crane says. What I tell people is: Its always better to not be putting artificial substances in your body. If something was not made by nature that color, its probably synthetic.Instead there are safer natural alternatives, such as dyes made from beets, carrots or even insects.One problem with foods that contain artificial dyes is that they often attempt to target children by using bright, cheery colors. We need to change expectations of what food should look like, Crane says.And its not just artificial dyes that may be harmful; many of the foods that contain these dyes also contain a lot of sugar. From a cancer prevention standpoint, it is recommended to consume less than 10 percent of calories from added sugar, wrote Hannah Manella, a registered dietician at Northwestern Medicine, in an e-mailed statement to Scientific American.Many of these foods are also ultraprocessed, and some studies have linked foods in this category to various diseases or health problems. Choosing whole, unprocessed foods or carefully reading ingredient labels can help consumers reduce exposure to synthetic dyes and other environmental toxins while supporting a cleaner, safer food supply, Ring says.

January 16, 20255 min readHow Will Fire Investigators Trace the Source of the L.A. Wildfires?Wildfires like the Los Angeles blazes destroy so much, but they often spare some evidence of the cause of their ignitionBy Stephanie Pappas edited by Jeanna BrynerA fire-fighting helicopter drops water near the Mandeville Canyon neighborhood and Encino, California, on January 11, 2025. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty ImagesAs firefighters continue to battle the blazes that have destroyed thousands of structures in the Los Angeles area, fire investigators are already trying to figure out how the conflagrations began.Local news agencies report that investigators are closing off streets at the possible ignition sites in the Palisades Highlands, the area of Los Angeles where the Palisades Fire, the largest of the fires in the region, began. The investigation is in the early stages, but officials may be able to find the cause, as they have in other wildfires. Fires can begin in any number of ways: naturally, with a lightning strike or, more often, through some human-related meanssuch as sparks from a downed powerline, a discarded cigarette butt, a poorly doused campfire or even arson. Between 1992 and 2012, 84 percent of all U.S. wildfires were human-caused.Because there were no lightning storms in the L.A. area when the fire started, investigators will be looking for human-related causes. An early point of interest centers around Skull Rock, a landmark near a popular hiking trail above the Palisades Highlands, according to reporters who spotted crime scene tape, police and closed roads near the trailhead. The spot was the site of a small fire on New Years Day that was quickly put out. Its possible for fires to leave embers that can be reignited by wind, but there are also power lines and a lot of human traffic at Skull Rock, leaving multiple possibilities open. [See Photos of the Los Angeles Fires]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.Meanwhile the investigation into the Eaton Fire, the second-largest blaze in the recent fires in the L.A. area, is currently focused on electrical transmission equipment in Eaton Canyon, according to the Los Angeles Times.Bob Duval is a fire investigator and a regional director at the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), an international nonprofit organization that puts out a document called NFPA 921: Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations. Its the closest thing to a Bible that fire investigators have, with instructions for how to seek out the cause of everything from a house fire to a blaze ripping across miles of forest. Duval spoke to Scientific American about how to investigate fires like those that have devasted the Los Angeles area.[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]How would an investigation like those now happening in the L.A. region typically start?If its in an area that was populated, you may have eyewitness accounts of a driver who saw some flames or smoke alongside the road. You may have surveillance cameras or traffic cameras on highways. Youve got pilots, commercial aircraft. Can you pin it down to an area based on eyewitness accounts or evidence like a power grid that suddenly shows a fault? If its thousands of acres, can I narrow it down to 10 or 15 acres on the side of this mountain or street and then take it from there? You have to be systematic.And then there will be folks going into the field. You look at patterns. What direction did the fire come from? You look at a large tree. What side of the tree was burned? Does the burn pattern go upward or downward? Take a look at the canopy, the pine needles or leaves. What does it show about the direction of the fire? Then youre going to look at the topography: The wind on one side of a hill is different than the wind on the other side. You have canyons, you have roadways that all impact the way the fire is going to spread.With all that evidence compiled systematically, youre reversing your way back into where the fire started. And then you start looking for causes within that area.You think about a fire destroying everything, but it sounds like some evidence can be left behind.Thats a common misconception, that with a fire investigation, everything is destroyed. Thats why people are under the misunderstanding that if they commit a crime, they [can] try to cover it up by setting the building on fire. Yeah, that may hide some evidence, but it also creates a lot of evidence.For a campfire [that burned out of control], for example, youre looking for: Did they stack wood or brush or twigs? Did they ball up paper? Did they put stones around it to contain it? Youd look for whether the ground is stamped down like there were people there for a while.Is this a common trail used by motorbikes or ATVs [all-terrain vehicles] Is there any evidence of smoking? Was someone clearing brush? Was there anybody doing target shooting or hunting, where a spark or a hot shell from a firearm could have caused [the fire] Does anybody report hearing or seeing fireworks in the area?Another potential cause is arson. That can be a little more difficult. If its a lighter, someone might put it back in their pocket and walk out of the woods. The fire may go undetermined, which is the official term used when we have an area of origin but cant find a cause.Are there differences between investigating wildfires, such as the L.A. fires, and fires that begin in a building?Yes and no. Both of those arenas create patterns, and the investigator uses patterns to help determine the area of origin. In a building, its several compartments if you think of a home or condo. But in a wildfire, there are no compartments. Its wide open. Theres unlimited air. Wind can play a role in a building fire. But in the wildland, wind is a major factor because it drives everything you do. There have been a lot of fatalities in wildland firefighting because the wind pushes the fire and overcomes the firefighters.How long does an investigation typically take?It could be months. I think the folks in California really have their work cut out for them. There are various reviews that the report has to go through. Theyre going to want to make sure that everything is done as well as it possibly can be done. [Thats not to say that the process] should be any different if its a $10 fire or a $100 million fire. The investigation should still be done systematically and by the book. But you can imagine the scrutiny these reports are going to be under because there is potential for civil damage here.

January 16, 20253 min readPowerful Forces Threaten Climate Action, Biden WarnsIn his farewell address, President Biden warned that a powerful oligarchy could undo four years of progress on climate policyBy Scott Waldman & E&E News President Joe Biden speaks from the Oval Office of the White House as he gives his farewell address Wednesday. Mandel Ngan - Pool/Getty ImagesCLIMATEWIRE | President Joe Biden used the first half of his 17-minute farewell address Wednesday night to tout his achievements over the past four years, highlighting infrastructure and climate legislation that created new jobs across the country.Then it got dark.Speaking from the Oval Office, Biden warned that a powerful oligarchy threatens U.S. democracy and is working to diminish and destroy his climate policy. He said climate change was among the most dire threats facing the country and that he was concerned about the fate of his landmark climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. The law included almost $400 billion in clean energy spending which President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to claw back.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.We've proven we don't have to choose between protecting the environment and growing the economy, we're doing both, Biden said. The powerful forces want to wield their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we've taken to tackle the climate crisis, to serve their own interest for power and profit.Biden never named Trump directly. But he blamed a fog of misinformation for misleading the American people. The free press was crumbling, he said. Social media fact-checkers have been eliminated, he said referencing tech giant Meta's recent announcement that it would no longer use fact-checkers.I'm equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well, Biden said. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power.Bidens address made it clear that he is concerned his climate legacy is under threat. He oversaw the most aggressive climate plan in U.S. history and some of its impacts, like boosting clean energy manufacturing and electric vehicles, will likely survive the Trump administration.But Bidens climate efforts will also now face a four-year frontal assault. Trump wants to repeal or weaken as much of the Inflation Reduction Act as possible, and hell begin targeting regulations on fossil fuels with an expected flurry of executive orders as soon as he takes office.Gone will be the president who frequently called climate change an existential threat. Seated at the Resolute desk will be a president who promises to drill, baby, drill.Trump has promised that the government's support of EVs is now over. He will transform a White House now focused on getting all federal agencies to consider climate change into one determined to ramp up fossil fuel production as quickly as possible.And while Biden increased the number of federal employees focused on climate change, carbon emissions reductions and environmental justice, Trumps incoming Cabinet officials have promised to purge them.In the final moments of his Oval Office speech, just days away from completing nearly a half-century in public office, Biden ended with a small note of hope.After 50 years of public service, I give you my word, I still believe in the idea for which this nation stands, where the strengths of our institutions and the character of our people matter and must endure, he said. Now it's your turn to stand guard.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

OpinionJanuary 16, 20255 min readThe Supreme Courts Case on Trans Health Shows Why Patients Should Make the DecisionsSupreme Court arguments over trans health care makes plain how badly we need personalized health care in all of medicineBy Meredithe McNamara & Dan Murphy edited by Dan VerganoA transgender rights supporter takes part in a rally outside of the U.S. Supreme Court as the high court hears arguments in a case on transgender health rights on December 04, 2024 in Washington, DC. Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesSince 2021 a legal tug-of-war over state bans on health care for transgender youth has wound through U.S. courts. Many judges ruled that bans discriminate against a group of people who should enjoy constitutional protections. Others sustained states claims that such bans protect minors and that trans youth should wait until legal adulthood to be themselves.Now the question before the Supreme Court in U.S. v. Skrmetti is one of sex-based discrimination. Does Tennessees ban on gender-affirming care violate the Constitution because it imposes differential access to hormones and puberty-pausing medications on the basis of sex?In Decembers arguments many of the flawed pseudoscientific justifications for this ban were rehashed, but the justices are tasked with an opinion on the constitutional merits of the case, rather than scientific evidence. Even so, it bears noting that Tennessees law is a bad-faith policy that bans medical care in totality over claims that treatment-supporting research doesnt clear an arbitrary bar set by politicians; especially as they set that bar far above acceptable standards in every other area of medicine.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.With a final decision anticipated this year, SCOTUSs ruling may also address the fundamental question posed by these bans: in what tier of society should a persons medical decisions be madeby patients and their families, or by the state? As health policy veers toward hyperregulation, Americans need an answer.During arguments, Chief Justice John Roberts reflected on his benchs inadequacy in this area: ... my understanding is that the Constitution leaves that question to the peoples representatives rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor. Legal scholars recognize his observation as a question about rational basis: a judicial test that courts apply to determine whether a law represents legitimate government interest or encroaches on the peoples constitutional rights. This signals the possibility that SCOTUS may allow the peoples representatives to be the final stop for trans peoples medical decisions.As medical and mental health professionals, we are gravely concerned by the implication that the medical decisions at stake in Skrmetti belong to neither the people nor their providers. We know from experience there is no good proxy for the people when it comes to decisions on their own health. A ruling that assigns medical decision-making power to anyone but the people poses imminent harm to everyone. Lessons from trans health care about the irreplaceable role of the patient could pave the way for a better understanding of whats truly at stake.This siege on trans health care involves so much more than the medications and surgeries subject to bans; what it at risk is a paragon of good health care. Where most medical protocols aim to standardize rather than individualize care, it is remarkable that trans health is scaffolded by guidelines that do both.For example, those guidelines call for a bidirectional transfer of knowledge based on the idea that patients and providers hold nonoverlapping areas of expertise. We provide expert knowledge of medical and mental health care, while the patient provides expert knowledge of their own lived experiences. This is why the guidelines recommend providers and patients begin by taking ample time to get to know each other, then proceed with creating a specific, sensitive care plan.While gender dysphoria is the diagnostic code for that plan, the therapeutic goal is the uplift that comes from authentic self-expression: gender euphoria. Facilitating gender euphoria is associated with psychological resilience and positive health outcomes, but in an openly disparaging social environment, it is painfully difficult to cultivate. Even with constitutional workplace protections, one in five trans people report employment discrimination. They face bathroom bans that make it a felony to empty their bladder in public facilitiesredolent of the separate but equal policies of racial segregation. In addition to this widespread stigma, trans people face violent crime at more than four times the rate of their cisgender peers.We have no treatment for these dignity-shredding realities. Instead we help our patients capture and retain a sense of future orientation, and we celebrate their well-being amidst this storm. One of our patients said it best: Coming out is the hardest thing Ive ever done. But for the first time in my life, I dont want to die. I want to see my own future.It is no surprise to us how measures of continuation of care and satisfaction in trans health consistently land among the highest in medicine. How many people would benefit if this deep fidelity to the bioethical principle of respect for persons was similarly expressed throughout health care? Take obstetrics, for example, where one in five report mistreatment during pregnancy in a health care setting. What if every pregnant persons values, family structures, health profiles, social context, life stories and mental health were revered and respected by a trusted care team? How many more people would feel safer during one of the most vulnerable periods of their lives? When the peoples representatives are permitted to decide against the principle of respect for persons, as SCOTUS has allowed in reproductive health, they lead us further away from the care everyone deserves.Bans do most of their work through intimidation, and harm people from all walks of life. In one instance weve met a teen with a developmental disability who relies on a hormonal treatment to prevent intractable menstrual seizures. She can no longer receive it because its banned for trans youth in her home state, and authorities are combing through prescribing databases. Shes not trans, but her pediatrician cant risk his licensure when thousands of kids rely on him.Weve also met people who dont identify as LGBTQ+ but prefer specialists who offer interventions that foster identity formation and community-building behavior. For many, these staples of queer mental health are a balm for the loneliness epidemic. But practitioners worry that the welcoming pride flags on their websites have become homing beacons for bad actors. Attorneys general in states with bans on gender-affirming care are notorious for abusing their privileges to scour medical records looking for trans people who travel to receive banned care in other states. From a providers perspective, when it comes to the ethical dilemma of being unable to guarantee confidentiality, the safest approach may be to move practice outside the jurisdiction of a state ban.Lawmakers who advance medical bans are neither the people nor their providers. They have no wherewithal to wield the medical authority they have seized. They have no reverence for the fact that the underlying principles of trans health could make everyone healthier. Instead, they have crafted laws that carve out health care from the constitutional right to equal protection under the law. We have watched laws like Tennessees invade the lives of our patients, and we call for accountability now. On behalf of our patients, and especially those who are transgender, we urge SCOTUS to recognize lawmakers medical incompetence and restore the irreplaceable role of the patient in making medical decisions. If they dont, well all be sicker.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American. The authors' opinions are solely their own and dont represent any organization they are affiliated with.

January 15, 20257 min readBlue Origins New Glenn Rocket Finally Takes FlightThe heavy-lift New Glenn rocket soared to success, reaching orbit on its highly anticipated inaugural flight but failing to land its booster on an ocean bargeBy Nadia Drake edited by Lee BillingsA Blue Origin New Glenn rocket is seen on the launch pad on Dec. 19, 2024, at Launch Complex-36 during a wet dress rehearsal test ahead of the rocket's maiden flight from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida. ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Stock PhotoA few minutes after 2:00 A.M. EST, a hulking, 320-foot-tall rocket slipped its tethers at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and heaved itself into the sky on a bluish-white pillar of flame, briefly turning night into day along the eastern shore of Floridas Space Coast. About 8 minutes later, the rockets large, first-stage booster failed to stick its landing on a barge in the Atlanticnot exactly the desired outcome, but not unusual for the first attempt to land a booster upright.The early morning launch, a mission called NG-1, marks the inaugural flight of Blue Origins New Glenn rocketand the first orbital launch for the company, which was founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos. With a successful maiden flight, New Glenn will become the newest reusable, heavy-lift rocket in the aerospace industrys arsenal, a tool that will increase launch capabilities, shake up the launch market and potentially catalyze big science with its power and its spacious fairing, the nose cone that protects a spacecrafts payload during launch.This rocket, with the goal of reusability and the overly large fairing, is a unique new addition that I think people are genuinely hopeful for, says Lori Garver, NASAs former deputy administrator.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.During her tenure at the space agency, Garver pushed it to invest in commercial launch services from companies such as Elon Musks SpaceX, which now hauls most of our spacefaring cargo into low-Earth orbit and beyond. But competition is healthy. It drives down prices while fueling innovation and improvement. Rockets are no exception. And now, as questions swirl around Musks role (and goals) in the incoming Trump administration, New Glenns entry into the launch market is under more scrutiny. With SpaceX and [Musks] notoriety, theres a lot of interest in a competitor coming up. And I think there will be heightened attention to this rocket because of that, Garver says. Theres a lot of hesitation to having all our eggs in one basket.Reusability Is the Future of LaunchToday SpaceX is arguably the primary launch provider for NASA and the U.S. military; its fleet of Falcon 9 rockets is also busy delivering the companys own Starlink communication satellites into orbit. But NASA is already counting on New Glenn, named after the late astronaut John Glenn, to deliver two spacecraft into orbit around Mars. And Blue Origin has other customers lined up, too, including AST SpaceMobile, Telesat and Amazon, which will eventually launch an orbital mega constellation (like Starlink) of more than 3,200 communication satellites, known as Project Kuiper.This is a big deal because were finding ourselves in this area where the demand for launch has not decreasedits actually increased tremendously, says Mike French of the Space Policy Group.Founded a quarter-century ago, Blue Origin envisions a future with millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth. Its mascot is a tortoisea nod to the slow and steady fabled competitor that ultimately triumphs over a speedier hare, which today is an obvious metaphor for SpaceX. Now, more than four years later than its anticipated launch, New Glenn has finally flown (although, for those keeping track, in 2015 Blue Origin became the first company to successfully launch and land a rocket with its New Shepard space vehicle).This inaugural flight is designed to test a rich cache of hardware: the rockets cargo-delivering upper stage, this time packed with a 45,000-pound payload demonstrator called Blue Ring Pathfinder, and the reusable first-stage booster, named So Youre Telling Me Theres a Chance. During the six-hour flight, Blue Origin personnel will thoroughly test the Pathfinders flight, communications and operational systems with a steady stream of information relayed between ground control and low-Earth orbit. After launch, the 230-foot-tall first-stage booster, powered by seven BE-4 engines that provide some 3.8 million pounds of thrust, attempted to land on Jacklyn, a barge in the Atlantic Ocean named for Bezoss mother. Of everything attempted this morning, nailing that landing was possibly the trickiest.We know landing the booster on the first time is ambitious, but you know what? Were going for it, Ariane Cornell, Blue Origins vice president of in-space systems, said during a launch webcast. You might even say were a little crazy to try it on the first flight, but the data we get for flying the complete mission profile is incredibly valuable.A successful landing is also the most crucial step toward realizing reusability akin to what SpaceX has already achieved with its rocketsBlue Origin has designed these boosters to fly at least 25 times.Reusability is the future of launch; thats how you get to lower costs, says Clay Mowry, CEO of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a former Blue Origin executive.You dont fly an airplane and throw it away after one use, he says. I think [New Glenn] is going to be a hugely important event for the entire space industry. It brings a lot of capability to the heavy-lift end of the marketplace.Bigger Rockets, Bigger ScienceWhen it comes to big rockets, we tend to focus a lot on lift, Mowry says, but power is not the only thing that sets New Glenn apart. I think whats more extraordinary about that vehicle is the amount of volume it brings, he says, referring to the payload fairing that encapsulates cargo.At seven meters (23 feet) across, New Glenns fairing is the roomiest on the market. It doubles the volume provided by standard five-meter- (16.4-foot-) class rockets, such as the Falcon Heavy, United Launch Alliances Vulcan and the now-retired Ariane 5, which launched NASAs James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on December 25, 2021.I remember walking underneath [New Glenns payload fairing], and it was just such a huge space, and these engineers were standing there, like, My God, this thing is massive, Mowry says, recalling a visit to the companys production facility. I think its going to have an impact on their abilitymeaning the satellite operators and customersto deploy things they couldnt have dreamed of before. Like, for example, space telescopes.When JWST launched, it was folded like origami into the Ariane 5, where it was packed in as tightly as possible for a delicate telescope with a sun shield spanning 21 meters (68.9 feet) when fully unfurled. Over the course of many days, teams back home walked the instrument through a critical and complex deployment sequence involving 344 single points of failure. The use of larger rockets like New Glennand SpaceXs Starship, which is currently in developmentmay mean that future giant space telescopes wont need to achieve such fraught space-saving extremes. Instead, cavernous payload fairings could ignite a different level of thinking about what might be possible, from a space instrument perspective, says French, also a former NASA chief of staff. To the extent that we get so much out of space science, it will always be constrained somewhat by launch: What can we fit? How big is the box? French says. Theres such ingenuity, really just breakthroughs, on the technology side that allow us to have these breakthroughs on the scientific side. Its always so impressive to meet and talk to the people that live at that intersection.NASA denied multiple requests from Scientific American to talk with some of the agencys most visionary experts about how larger rockets might affect the science missions of the future. But already agency presentationsreference New Glenn (and Starship) in designs for the astrophysics flagship Habitable Worlds Observatory, a space telescope meant to look for signs of alien life on temperate Earth-size exoplanets around dozens of sunlike stars. Similarly, NASAs Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, or ESCAPADE, a pair of spacecraft that will orbit Mars, were supposed to fly on New Glenns inaugural launch, had it occurred in October 2024 as planned.From a science perspective, more launch is a very good thing, French says. More launch likely means more competitive prices, more options on timing and more options on what those launches can do.Populating the SkiesScience missions, of course, arent the only passengers on rockets of any size. The need for rides into orbit for military payloads, national security assets and commercial satellites for Earth observations or global communications is far greater than what space scientistsand their limited budgetspresently demand.Access to space is now critical for society, Garver says.In fact, the customer base for rockets like New Glenn will almost certainly be dominated by companies that construct satellite mega constellationssuch as Starlink, Project Kuiper, the U.K.s OneWeb and Canadas Telesat. And thats for a simple reason: building those constellations requires launching lots of satellites, and many more satellites can fit into such a rockets much larger cargo space. That means fewer launches and fewer launch expenses.When youre deploying a constellation of anywhere from hundreds to thousands of satellites, this is a huge cost driver in terms of having access to spacebeing able to put those satellites in space efficiently, in the right place, Mowry says.Additionally, such satellites arent designed to have a long lifetime. So, as French notes, maintaining those constellations means continually refreshing the hardware in orbit, which requires a high launch cadence. If you think of the market as a pyramid, you have these large commercial constellations at the bottom, building demand, he says. How many such constellations can safely exist in orbit remains an open question. But such broad demand will create space for less common and ingenious applicationsthe as-yet-unimagined projects of the future.

January 15, 20254 min readWildfires Started by Daily Human Activities Are Often More DestructiveFast-moving fires, such as the recent ones in the Los Angeles area, and those started by humans, whether accidentally or not, are often some of the most destructiveBy Virginia Iglesias & The Conversation US Fire engines drive through flames ripping across Highway 36 as the Park fire continues to burn near Paynes Creek in unincorporated Tehama County, California on July 26, 2024. Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty ImagesThe following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.Investigators are trying to determine what caused several wind-driven wildfires that have destroyed thousands of homes across the Los Angeles area in January 2025. Given the fires locations, and lack of lightning at the time, its likely that utility infrastructure, other equipment or human activities were involved.Californias wildfires have become increasingly destructive in recent years. Research my colleagues and I have conducted shows U.S. wildfires are up to four times larger and three times more frequent than they were in the 1980s and 90s. Fast-moving fires have been particularly destructive, accounting for 78% of structures destroyed and 61% of suppression costs between 2001 and 2020.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.Lightning strikes are a common cause of U.S. wildfires, but the majority of wildfires that threaten communities are started by human activities.A broken power line started the deadly 2023 Maui fire that destroyed the town of Lahaina, Hawaii. Metal from cars or mowers dragging on the ground can spark fires. Californias largest fire in 2024 started when a man pushed a burning car into a ravine near Chico. The fire destroyed more than 700 homes and buildings.Chart: The Conversation (CC-BY-ND); Source: National Interagency Coordination CenterWhat makes these wildfires so destructive and difficult to contain?The answer lies in a mix of wind speed, changing climate, the legacy of past land-management practices, and current human activities that are reshaping fire behavior and increasing the risk they pose.Fires perfect stormWildfires rely on three key elements to spread: conducive weather, dry fuel and an ignition source. Each of these factors has undergone pronounced changes in recent decades. While climate change sets the stage for larger and more intense fires, humans are actively fanning the flames.Climate and weatherExtreme temperatures play a dangerous role in wildfires. Heat dries out vegetation, making it more flammable. Under these conditions, wildfires ignite more easily, spread faster and burn with greater intensity. In the western U.S., aridity attributed to climate change has doubled the amount of forestland that has burned since 1984.Compounding the problem is the rapid rise in nighttime temperatures, now increasing faster than daytime temperatures. Nights, which used to offer a reprieve with cooler conditions and higher humidity, do so less often, allowing fires to continue raging without pause.Finally, winds contribute to the rapid expansion, increased intensity and erratic behavior of wildfires. Wind gusts push heat and embers ahead of the fire front and can cause it to rapidly expand. They can also create spot fires in new locations. Additionally, winds enhance combustion by supplying more oxygen, which can make the fire more unpredictable and challenging to control. Usually driven by high winds, fast-moving fires have become more frequent in recent decades.FuelFire is a natural process that has shaped ecosystems for over 420 million years. Indigenous people historically used controlled burns to manage landscapes and reduce fuel buildup. However, a century of fire suppression has allowed vast areas to accumulate dense fuels, priming them for larger and more intense wildfires.Invasive species, such as certain grasses, have exacerbated the issue by creating continuous fuel beds that accelerate fire spread, often doubling or tripling fire activity.Additionally, human development in fire-prone regions, especially in the wildland-urban interface, where neighborhoods intermingle with forest and grassland vegetation, has introduced new, highly flammable fuels. Buildings, vehicles and infrastructure often ignite easily and burn hotter and faster than natural vegetation. These changes have significantly altered fuel patterns, creating conditions conducive to more severe and harder-to-control wildfires.IgnitionLightning can ignite wildfires, but humans are responsible for an increasing share. From unattended campfires to arson or sparks from power lines, over 84% of the wildfires affecting communities are human-ignited.Human activities have not only tripled the length of the fire season, but they also have resulted in fires that pose a higher risk to people.Lightning-started fires often coincide with storms that carry rain or higher humidity, which slows fires spread. Human-started fires, however, typically ignite under more extreme conditions hotter temperatures, lower humidity and stronger winds. This leads to greater flame heights, faster spread in the critical early days before crews can respond, and more severe ecosystem effects, such as killing more trees and degrading the soil.Human-ignited fires often occur in or near populated areas, where flammable structures and vegetation create even more hazardous conditions. Homes and the materials around them, such as wooden fences and porches, can burn quicklyand send burning embers airborne, further spreading the flames.As urban development expands into wildlands, the probability of human-started fires and the property potentially exposed to fire increase, creating a feedback loop of escalating wildfire risk.Chart: The Conversation (CC-BY-ND) Source: Virginia Iglesias, data from ICS-209_PLUS and FIREDWhiplash weatherA phenomenon known as whiplash weather, marked by unusually wet winters and springs followed by extreme summer heat, was especially pronounced in Southern California in recent years.A wet spring in 2024 fostered vegetation growth, which then dried out under scorching summer temperatures, turning into highly combustible fuel. This cycle fueled some of the biggest fires of the 2024 season, several of which were started by humans.That dryness continued in Southern California through the fall and into early winter, with very little rainfall. Soil moisture in the Los Angeles region was about 2% of historical levels for that time of year when the fires began on Jan. 7, 2025.As the factors that can drive wildfires converge, the potential for increasingly severe wildfires looms ever larger. Severe fires also release large amounts of carbon from trees, vegetation and soils into the atmosphere, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and exacerbating climate change, contributing to more extreme fire seasons.This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

January 15, 20253 min readWhy Are U.S. TikTok Users Signing Up for RedNote?Thousands of U.S. TikTok users are joining China-based app RedNote, spawning memes, jokes and confusionBy Ben Guarino edited by Dean VisserA TikTok creator and advocate wears a button showing support for TikTok. Other users have flocked to alternative apps, such as China-based RedNote. Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesIn reaction toor protest overthe impending U.S. TikTok ban, which will take effect on Sunday if the app is not sold or if the Supreme Court doesnt intervene, thousands of people in the country have joined RedNote. The latter is a China-based e-commerce and lifestyle app that is also known as Xiaohongshu, Mandarin for Little Red Bookwhich is also a nickname for the famous book of quotations from Mao Zedong. About 300 million people, mainly in China, use RedNote for video and image sharing, shopping and travel recommendations.This week RedNote climbed to the top of the charts on Apples and Googles U.S. app stores. The potential TikTok ban has so far prompted about 700,000 people to join the Chinese app, according to Reuters. Thats less than 1 percent of the 170 million U.S. users of TikTok, but the influx has been enough to spawn goofy memes and the occasional misunderstanding: a man in Vancouver who welcomed the new arrivals went viral because people mistook him for RedNotes chief executive.The rush to this app is an example of the media substitution hypothesis, in which people fill a media void with a new platform or network, says Saleem Alhabash, a professor of advertising and public relations at Michigan State University, who studies the psychological effects of social media use. On TikTok, there is no implicit contract that you have to be an active user, he points out, unlike arguably more posting-driven platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Bluesky or Instagram. Its completely acceptable to passively lurk, scroll and shop on TikTok, and RedNote may be scratching that same itch. Mix the social with satisfying the need to shopto buy cheap clothes or exercise equipmentthat is the full package, in terms of user experience, Alhabash says.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.Although TikTok owner ByteDance is based in China, the English version of its app operates in the U.S. through an American subsidiary. RedNote, meanwhile, has a single app with mostly Mandarin content and is headquartered in Shanghai. One result of the recent migration has been a cultural exchange between new users in the U.S. and veteran ones in China: Some Americans on RedNote, for instance, marveled at Chinas mass-market electric cars, which arent sold in the U.S. because of high tariffs. And Chinese students have sought help with their English homework on the app.RedNotes ownership also means that if the app were to take off in the U.S., it would likely be subject to the same kind of national security concerns over data harvesting and content manipulation that TikTok has faced. RedNote, which did not immediately respond to Scientific Americans request for comment, also restricts posts that people would be able to share freely on U.S. platforms. To avoid algorithmic constraints on LGBTQ content, same-sex couples in China typically call themselves roommates, according to a 2024 ethnographic study of RedNote and similar apps, or camouflage their digital communities via unconventional hashtags. (Because interest in #ToddlerFood is stereotypically coded as female, queer and lesbian women in China can use it to avoid men who only care about themselves, as a RedNote user told the studys author.)Whether former TikTok users will migrate from one app to another in a cultlike manner is far from certain, Alhabash says. Some people might be convinced to follow their favorite influencers to new platforms, and where those influencers end up could, in turn, be guided by financial prospects or brand support. Theres more than just an individual decision by the user at play, he says.For now, on RedNote, there are jokes. One user who had freshly signed up was greeted by a message from their new Chinese spy friend. Others said they were happy to give their data directly to President Xi Jinping or Chinas government. And the Los Angeles Times reported that this week nearly 200,000 people joined a RedNote live chat named TikTok Refugees Club.

January 15, 20253 min readBiden Opens Publicly Owned Land to Data Centers Run on Clean EnergyPresident Biden issued an executive order to permit data centers on federal lands in a move aimed at bolstering clean energy and protecting national security during a boom in artificial intelligenceBy Christa Marshall & E&E News The IAD71 Amazon Web Services data center in Ashburn, Virginia, US, on Wednesday, March 27, 2024. Nathan Howard/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesCLIMATEWIRE | President Joe Biden issued an executive order Tuesday that directs the departments of Energy and Defense to lease sites to the private sector for a build-out of "gigawatt-scale" data centers.The move is intended to bolster clean energy and protect national security during a boom in artificial intelligence. Data centers built on federal sites would be required to bring clean energy online to match the facility's electricity needs, according to the White House.The Biden administration did not fully define clean energy in its announcement. But it called for DOE and DOD to select sites that have access to transmission and do not negatively affect communities. The executive order also directs the Interior Department to identify land that could support the data centers and enhance permitting for geothermal power.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 requests that federal agencies speed up permitting at selected sites, including through categorical exclusions under the National Environmental Policy Act. DOE would be required to work with utilities to connect AI infrastructure to the grid, as well as promote the deployment of renewable and nuclear energy.DOE will take appropriate steps to coordinate with developers in constructing, financing, facilitating, and planning the upgrade and development of transmission lines around those sites. To facilitate this work, DOE will also collect information to improve transmission planning in these regions, such as utility data on transmission congestion, the order states.With President-elect Donald Trumps inauguration occurring next week, its unclear how much influence the order will have. Trump has chastised Bidens push for clean energy but has called for more drilling to boost energy supplies to get ahead of China on AI. He also has pushed for a data center build-out of his own.At a press conference last week, Trump said Hussain Sajwani, a real estate developer in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, would invest $20 billion to build data centers in eight states.Bidens order has been expected for weeks. POLITICO previously reported that the president pushed for it partly because technology companies are eyeing subsidies in the Middle East to build data centers. In November, Google inked a deal to develop an artificial intelligence hub in Saudi Arabia.Tuesday's order states that the new plan would prevent adversaries from accessing powerful computer systems to the detriment of our military. AI is too important to be offshored, the order states.A DOE report last month found that data centers could triple their energy use and account for 12 percent of the countrys electricity by 2028. States and utilities have been grappling with how to plan for the surge in electricity demand. In Virginia, one of the worlds largest AI clusters, officials have warned that growth in data centers may challenge the grid without much faster construction of gas, renewables and transmission.Prior to the orders release, environmental groups warned the administration not to release a plan that would loosen environmental restrictions and increase the potential for more pollution. The order states that expedited permitting should occur for infrastructure that does not significantly affect the environment.It further directs agencies to complete a study on data centers' effects on electricity prices.According to the White House, developers would have to pay the full cost of building, operating and maintaining data centers on federal land so they don't raise costs for consumers. The order also directs DOE and DOD to require companies to assess national security risks of projects and ensure that workers are paid prevailing wages."Reporter Robin Bravender contributed.This story also appears in Energywire.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

January 15, 20254 min readDoes Fact-Checking Work? Heres What the Science SaysCommunication and misinformation researchers reveal the value of fact-checking, where perceived biases come from and what Metas decision could meanBy David Adam & Nature magazine Meta plans to scrap its third-party fact-checking programme in favour of X-like community notes. PA Images/Alamy Stock PhotoIt is said that a lie can fly halfway around the world while the truth is getting its boots on. That trek to challenge online falsehoods and misinformation got a little harder this week, when Facebooks parent company Meta announced plans to scrap the platforms fact-checking programme, which was set up in 2016 and pays independent groups to verify selected articles and posts.The company said that the move was to counter fact checkers political bias and censorship. Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact-check and how, Metas chief global-affairs officer Joel Kaplan wrote on 7 January.Nature spoke to communication and misinformation researchers about the value of fact-checking, where perceived biases come from and what Metas decision could mean.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.Positive influenceIn terms of helping to convince people that information is true and trustworthy, fact-checking does work, says Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, who acted as an unpaid adviser on Facebooks fact-checking programme in 2022. Studies provide very consistent evidence that fact-checking does at least partially reduce misperceptions about false claims.For example, a 2019 meta-analysis of the effectiveness of fact-checking in more than 20,000 people found a significantly positive overall influence on political beliefs.Ideally, wed want people to not form misperceptions in the first place, adds van der Linden. But if we have to work with the fact that people are already exposed, then reducing it is almost as good as it as its going to get.Fact-checking is less effective when an issue is polarized, says Jay Van Bavel, a psychologist at New York University in New York City. If youre fact-checking something around Brexit in the UK or the election in United States, thats where fact-checks dont work very well, he says. In part thats because people who are partisans dont want to believe things that make their party look bad.But even when fact-checks dont seem to change peoples minds on contentious issues, they can still be helpful, says Alexios Mantzarlis, a former fact checker who directs the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech in New York City.On Facebook, articles and posts deemed false by fact checkers are currently flagged with a warning. They are also shown to fewer users by the platforms suggestion algorithms, Mantzarlis says, and people are more likely to ignore flagged content than to read and share it.Flagging posts as problematic could also have knock-on effects on other users that are not captured by studies of the effectiveness of fact-checks, says Kate Starbird, a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Measuring the direct effect of labels on user beliefs and actions is different from measuring the broader effects of having those fact-checks in the information ecosystem, she adds.More misinformation, more red flagsRegarding Metas claims of bias among fact-checkers, Van Bavel agrees that misinformation from the political right does get fact-checked and flagged as problematic on Facebook and other platforms more often than does misinformation from the left. But he offers a simple explanation.Its largely because the conservative misinformation is the stuff that is being spread more, he says. When one party, at least in the United States, is spreading most of the misinformation, its going to look like fact-checks are biased because theyre getting called out way more.There are data to support this. A study published in Nature last year showed that, although politically conservative people on X, formerly Twitter, were more likely to be suspended from the platform than were liberals, they were also more likely to share information from news sites that were judged as low quality by a representative group of laypeople.If you wanted to know whether a person is exposed to misinformation online, knowing if theyre politically conservative is your best predictor of that, says Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who worked on that analysis.Implementation mattersMetas chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has said that in place of third-party fact-checking, Facebook could adopt a system similar to the community notes used by X, in which corrections and context are crowdsourced from users and added to posts.Research shows that those systems can also work to correct misinformation, up to a point. The way its been implemented on X actually doesnt work very well, says van der Linden. He points to an analysis done last year that found the community notes on X were often added to problematic posts too late to reduce engagement, because they came after false claims had already spread widely. X vice-president of product Keith Coleman told Reuters last year that community notes maintains a high bar to make notes effective and maintain trust.Crowdsourcing is a useful solution, but in practice it very much depends on how its implemented, van der Linden adds. Replacing fact checking with community notes just seems like it would make things a lot worse.This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on January 10, 2025.

January 15, 20253 min readMigrating Birds Sing to Team Up with Other SpeciesSongbirds may socialize across species during nighttime migrationsBy Gayoung Lee edited by Sarah Lewin FrasierA singing American Redstart (Setophaga ruticilla). Brian Reinke/Getty ImagesTiny songbirds such as cardinals and warblers migrate thousands of miles, flying at night and resting during the day, to and from their wintering groundsand unlike many larger birds, they forego flocks and travel separately. But new research suggests theyre not entirely alone in the dark sky. Benjamin Van Doren, an ornithologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and his colleagues set up ground-based microphones at 26 sites across Eastern North America and collected more than 18,300 hours of bird flight calls. The researchers found that solitary migrating songbirds seem to cooperate across species and possibly share information with other solo travelers about who they were and what to watch out for ahead.The findings, published on Wednesday in Current Biology, add to growing evidence that interspecies social interactions may influence songbirds migratory behavior far more than was previously believed.The conventional wisdom had been that each bird is following its own internal instinct or its own experience, Van Doren says. If its not a young bird and has already [migrated] a few times, they definitely rely on memory and experiencebut generally theyre just on their own.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.Flying in the dark presents challenges to airborne cooperation, notes biologist Allison Pierce, who studies plover migration at University of Colorado Denver and was not involved in the new paper. For example, visual cues such as another birds flight path are absent. This impelled Van Doren and his colleagues to lookor rather, listenfor other data: the seemingly random pings songbirds chirp out every few seconds to every minute.Its really been unclear why exactly they are spending all this energy and all this effort calling while theyre migrating, Van Doren says. There must be some reason why or benefit to this behavior. Otherwise theyre just wasting energy.To analyze what ended up being a gigantic amount of data, Van Doren and his colleagues used machine-learning technology with a customized version of Merlin, a bird-call-identification app developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.They found that individual birds from different species were flying near one another and calling out to each other using certain patterns, more so than we could explain by chance, Van Doren says. So there appeared to be some reason the birds were in proximity. The new study potentially suggests that these birds arent completely on their own trying to find their way from Chicago to Argentina ... and that maybe theres actually some social information being exchanged among these billions of songbirds migrating at night, which would totally flip around our understanding of how songbird migration works.Its still unclear exactly what information the birds may be communicating, Van Doren says. But researchers have some pretty good guesses. For instance, different bird species have different calls, but even within the same species, their pings vary across age or sex groupssuggesting that birds could be using such information to introduce themselves. Whatever the case, its highly likely that staying in touch with other individuals could help them ... navigate more effectively, Van Doren explains. They could be exchanging knowledge about landing spots and tricky weather conditions such as fog or rain, for instance. Migration is a very risky time, even for birds that have done it before.Researchers have previously observed that songbirds form mixed-species flocks while searching for food and avoiding predators during the day, Van Doren adds. The new study suggests such partnerships could play a more significant role than researchers realized. Additional studies will further test these hypotheses, hopefully by using more direct tracking methods, such as tagging specific birds to track them during migration.If we could take it from this big population-level scale and try to understand what the individuals doing, Pierce says, It is going to be a key to understanding how birds are migrating.To me, it speaks to the amazing complexity of how nature works, Van Doren says, and its exciting to be still learning new things about these well-known phenomena that are just spectacular.

OpinionJanuary 15, 20255 min readTwo Simple Reforms Can Make H-1B Visas Great AgainAlthough warring MAGA factions seem locked in a foreign worker battle with no middle ground, two straightforward changes would provide global talent while minimizing domestic job lossesBy Hal Salzman edited by Dan Vergano Rob Dobi/Getty ImagesJust in time for the holidays, an internecine fight about what America First means broke upon the incoming Trump administration. The brawl pitted demands for more high-skill foreign guest workers against others saying those workers sent Americans to the back of the hiring line.This latest fracas began on Christmas, when Trumps billionaire backer Elon Musk wrote: The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low, on his X social network. He called for more H-1B workers to compensate for these overly complacent and less competent Americans. Trumps former-opponent-turned-backer, former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley responded: We must invest in Americans first before looking elsewhere.The fracas is new, but the argument isnt. For decades, researchers have disputed the effects of an expansive and ever-growing H-1B visa program for technology guest workers. Tech executives such as Musk say they need tens of thousands more workers. But others point out that hundreds of thousands of experienced U.S. tech workers were fired in the last two yearssome among the 15,000 fired by Muskand then replaced by guest workers.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 there is a way for top talent to work in the U.S. without undermining the wages and opportunities for its workersif we tighten restrictions on visas and end exploitative educational programs.The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's H-1B visa program yearly provides businesses with up to 65,000 nonimmigrant work visas for guest workers with specialized skills, usually defined as requiring a bachelors degree related to the field of proposed employment. Another 20,000 go to those with a masters degree or higher, and an unlimited number go to universities and nonprofits to hire foreign lab techs, scientists, tech workers, professors and postdocs. In 2023, the agency granted about 120,000 visas in total. Additionally, there is an even larger STEM OPT (optional practical training) program that provides any foreign student graduate a three-year work permit in a STEM fieldwhich can be whatever a university defines as STEM (such as New York Universitys drama therapy or games for learning master's degree). These two programs swim in an alphabet soup of visas that yearly provide U.S. employers over 700,000 high-skill guest workers.Technology industries scoop up about two thirds of these visas, and have done so for decades; they rely on guest workers to fill the vast majority of new, young hires, perhaps as much as 70 to 80 percent of entry-level employees. Unlike other visas, the H-1B visa is tied to the employer so workers are, as often described, indentured servants, with limited mobility. That undercuts their market power in negotiating wages, leaving abusive working conditions or protesting wage theft. There is no requirement that their employers demonstrate a labor shortage or first search for U.S. workers; in fact, it is perfectly legal for employers to exclude citizens and permanent, green card residents alike from consideration; U.S. workers are not a protected class under antidiscrimination laws. It was only this past year that one of the larger IT guest worker employers, Cognizant, lost a novel lawsuit charging discrimination in favor of one ethnic group, Indian workers, who were the most hired on H-1B visas.When we look at the education and jobs held by the vast majority of guest workers, its hard to call them hard-to-find talent. Most work for software outsourcing and consulting firms, doing important but not innovative work. And most computer science guest workers graduating from U.S. colleges with advanced degrees come from low or no-ranked programs with enrollments of some 80 to 100 percent foreign students. That is, colleges have gotten into the game of profiting from guest workers, through masters degree programs that are low-cost to run but high-cost for students. These serve as a labor market portal for foreign students, and high-margin profit centers for colleges.Two simple reforms would provide the tech industry access to global talent while minimizing job losses of domestic workers. Theyd also encourage investment in American education and training.First, guest worker visas, including H1-Bs, should be issued only for workers paid in the top 15 percent of each industry and occupation groups wages. Second, work visas should go only to graduates in the top 15 percent of each class for workers entering through OPT. Both policies are reasonable and relatively straightforward to implement and monitor. Employers and colleges already report most of the necessary data to federal agencies. And they address the important concerns of both of our rhetorical combatants.Super talented and super motivated workers are certainly a far smaller share than the top 15 percent of the workforce. That means these restrictions will more than satisfy Musks demands to fill innovative technology development jobs.Limiting guest worker permits and visas to the foreign students graduating in the top 15 percent of their class in a U.S. college would address two concerns: First, students would be ranked alongside their domestic peers, providing some measure of their academic abilities. Second, it would keep colleges from operating diploma mills that target and exploit foreign students. For those students, there would be risk of not getting a work permit by going to colleges with more than 10 to 15 percent foreign student enrollment. That would encourage them to attend a broader range of colleges, bringing higher performing students to lower-tier schools. To keep this profitable population, colleges will, in turn, need to recruit a substantial pool of domestic students and, importantly, support them through graduation. Thats because a high dropout rate will shrink the domestic pool and thus the share of foreign students who can be in the top 15 percent (motivating foreign students to help their domestic peers graduate, lest the domestic pool shrink and decrease the number of students in the top percentiles).Employers also will need to recruit more widely and invest in domestic education to maintain the pool of foreign graduates eligible for work permits. The smaller pool of foreign graduates will motivate employers to compete for workers rather than relying on government largesse for abundant supplies of guest workers willing to accept below-market wages. This will draw talented workers into the technology industries rather than losing them to Wall Street, which doesnt advance science and engineering. Adjustments for regional wages could spur industries hiring these higher-paid, higher-skilled workers to locate high-wage operations in lower-cost U.S. cities and towns.These straightforward reforms would reduce by 90 percent, I estimate, the current pool of eligible H-1B applicants that irks Haley. Tens of thousands of guest worker visas would then be available under the current cap so tech industries could recruit top global talent, while also encouraging these companies to draw on the large supply of U.S. talent.Lets be honest about reforming guest worker visas to bring in global talent, using the market as a guide rather than falling under the influence of industries that spend the most on lobbyists or who flood the zone with applications gaming the system. With these straightforward reforms we can support legitimate goals for bringing in hard-to-find global talent and investing in the ample supplies of the domestic super talented students and workers. These strategic reforms will provide U.S. workers, especially underrepresented minorities, real opportunities in our technology workforce, and cut the Gordian knot tied by antiworker expansionists and anti-immigrant restrictionists alike. This is what industry should be super motivated to do.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

January 14, 2025Mishandled Response to the Bird Flu Leaves U.S. Vulnerable to OutbreakThe U.S. government lost control of the bird flu because of a sluggish response and deference to industry. Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific AmericanSUBSCRIBE TO Science QuicklyApple | Spotify | RSSRachel Feltman: For Scientific Americans Science Quickly, Im Rachel Feltman. On January 6, the Louisiana Department of Health reported the first human death from H5N1 in the United States. While the general risk to human health is still considered low, according to the CDC, bird flu now looms large in headlines that identify it as a potential future pandemic. Here to tell us more about where we standand what we can do to prevent the worst-case scenariois Amy Maxmen, a public health reporter at KFF Health News.Amy, thanks so much for coming on to talk with us today.Amy Maxmen: Thanks, its my pleasure.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.Feltman: So lets start with a quick overview of the current bird flu outbreak. When and how did it start?Maxmen: So, around February of last year, farmers in the Texas Panhandle started to notice that their cows were acting abnormally. Like, they werent producing as much milk, they had runny noses, things like that. And in about a couple of months researchers realized that the bird flu had actually spilled over into cattle for the first time ever and was actually spreading between cattle. Thats completely unprecedented.So thats how it began. And since then its now in, you know, nearly 1,000 herds in 16 states, and its infected around 66 people.Feltman: Yeah, and how are things looking currently?Maxmen: Currently its not good, I mean, in terms of this outbreak just sort of being across the U.S. And a bit of disconcerting news is we had the first person die of the bird flu on January 6. That person was in Louisiana, and they got the bird flu from a bird. This wasnt, like, the exact variant thats been circulating in cattle, but it still is the H5N1 bird flu virus.Feltman: And you recently wrote an article outlining how the U.S. lost control of bird flu. Could you walk us through some of the major ways that this has been mishandled so far?Maxmen: Yeah, you know, I think kind of one outstanding problem was the pace. Theres just been a really slow pace of response. And with an outbreak thats a big problem; just kind of like a fire, its much easier to put it out when its small than when its big.And so, you know, early on, in March, when researchers realized, Oh, this is the bird flu in cattle, a lot of veterinarians who work really closely with farmers, they told me that they really had been pushing to study this to see how is it spreading between cows and to answer other questions about the virus. So they asked the [U.S. Department of Agriculture] and, and other government agencies for both funds for studies, but also farmers really wanted and needed assurances and policies that would protect them and protect their businesses. For example, they, you know, they wanted real assurances that their data would be kept private. They wanted, you know, kind of policies that nobody was gonna cut off their milk sales. Somebody from the dairy industry told me when the bird flu is infecting a herd, it might cut milk production by 20 percent, but thats still better than losing 100 percent of sales.So there was a real push for, like, What can we do to make sure that we can get these studies done? But that didnt really happen for quite a while. The USDA was sort of saying they wanted to take charge of studies, same with state ag departments. And so at least what veterinarians told me is that they had wanted this to move quicker and move through them, partly because, you know, they already have a relationship with dairies. So it was slow on sort of the study side, which would have helped us answer questions like, How is this spreading?And there was also a lot of deference to industry. So farmers didnt wanna test; they were already afraid of losing their milk market. And the USDA took about a month to say that lactating cattle should be tested before they are moved across state lines. But that was really it in terms of testing orders up until just this past December. That was the first time when there was a national rule about testing bulk-milk samplesso not the farms, but the, you know, big bulk-milk processors. But that just took a long time to get up and running.And then there was also a lot of deference to farmers in terms of monitoring. If they decided to test their herds and they reported them, then it was really up to them to decide: Do they want to tell health departments if any workers on the farms are sick? And theres a lot of disincentives to that happening. Ive heard its really hard to have a bird flu outbreak on your farm. This is not great. When a lot of cows are sick they need urgent hydration around the clock, requires a ton of labor. Same thing when a poultry farm is infected by the bird flu: to cull chickens you need a, a ton of workers and they need to work very hard.So if you have people being educated about the bird flu, going to get testing and perhaps being told to stay home from work, they lose their labor. I sent public record requests to a lot of health departments, and something else that was mentioned in one of the emails between health officials: you know, farmers were concerned about workers making workers comp claims.And farmworkers are also in really precarious positions. Theyre looking at a loss of income, and theyre even afraid about losing their jobs. There wasnt a lot of outreach going to farmworkers themselves and the places where they live to teach them about the bird flu, you know, why its a risk, how they could protect themselves, how they can get tested, you know, if theyll be reimbursed. The first grant specifically for outreach didnt really go through until October 1; that was a grant specifically to do outreach on the bird flu. So this iswere talking, you know, a six-month lag time or more in getting some really good outreach out there.Feltman: Hmm. More broadly, you know, I think a lot of folks see this in the news and they worry about it becoming a human pandemic. How worried are experts about that, and how bad does it have the potential to be?Maxmen: Theyre very worried. So the bird flus been on a list of potential pandemic viruses, you know, since it emerged, really, and its because we might have no immunity to such a thing. There might be some crossover with the regular fluwe really dont knowbut it has the potential to be a terrible outbreak.You know, remember that COVID, you know, really only very roughly killed about one in 100 people, but it completely brought the world to its knees. So a bird flu outbreak would be terrible. I think thats undeniable. The question is: How likely is that to happen? And, you know, chances are maybe greater than not that the bird flu will not evolve this critical potential to spread efficiently between people, you know, like the seasonal flu, like COVID. This would require some mutations, some evolution of its genome.You know, even if its less likely for that to happen than for it to not happen, since the result is catastrophic, you wanna defend against it. So its hard to put numbers on these sort of things; I talked to one avian influenza researcher named Tom Peacock. So he said, even if theres only a 5 percent chance of this becoming a pandemic, it could be on the order of COVID or worse.Feltman: Yeah, I saw one public health expert, I think, in an article by Tanya Lewis at SciAm say, compared to walking on a path next to a ravine, like, its reasonably safe to walk on a path thats designed for walking on, but you would be very foolish to ignore the fact that there is a ravine right next to you, and I thought that felt like a, a very powerful image to me for this kind of risk management.Maxmen: Yeah.Feltman: So is there still time for the, the U.S. to make that even less likely, and how?Maxmen: Yeah, I mean, yes, it is possible, but it would take really coordinated, united political will and coordination, a willingness to put funding towards this and to move really quickly. So for example, the USDA in December said that it would put in place an executive order for bulk-milk testing nationwide. So wed have to really make moves to ensure that that happens. What that would do is at least allow us to see when cattle are infected on a farm and try and stop the infections on that farm from spreading to other farms.Similarly, for the first time in December, groups outside of the CDC, diagnostic labs like Quest, can now test for the bird flu. Thats great. Took a long time to get that up and running, but we could have more testing of people being done. I mean, there should be a lot of testing, particularly of people at high risk; Im talking about farmworkers. Really strong outreach to farmworkers to really ensure that theyre protected and that they have access to tests and also assurances that theyre not gonna lose their job.So it would take a lot of work, but its something that could be done.Feltman: And getting back to those farmworkers, you mentioned in your article: President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to enact mass deportations when he returns to office, and that could have real public health implications. Can you explain that a little bit for us?Maxmen: Yeah, so this actually was a problem during COVID that I saw when I was reporting in the Central Valley [of California], where theres a lot of farmworkers and there was a huge COVID outbreak. The problem with threats of mass deportation is, you know, whether or not they happen, it spreads a lot of fear among people ...Feltman: Mm.Maxmen: So for example, it might deter farmworkers from going to the hospital if theyre very sick if theres a fear that they might be reported as not being documented. They might also be deterred from complaining about unsafe working conditions. If theyre not given proper protection, if theyre really, you know, forced to work while sick, theyre really gonna be deterred from complaining about their employer, either if theyre undocumented or a lot of people are on these temporary work visas.Feltman: Mm.Maxmen: So in general these sort of threats drive diseases underground, and thats a huge problem.You know, other things: theres been talk about cutting CDC funding, and that would trickle down to local health departments. You know, Im critical of the governments response to the bird flu, but you can really see in these small local health departments that serve multiple rural counties, theyre stretched thinyou know, theres 10 people who are trying to get a handle on the bird flu while also promoting childhood vaccines and making sure that theres not lead in the pipes and doing so many tasks. So if they have less money to do their job, thats gonna be a big problem.Feltman: Absolutely. So even if were able to avoid the worst-case scenario, what other kinds of fallout might we see from the bird flu? You know, how much worse could things get for the cattle and the poultry industry?Maxmen: So without a doubt this is going to be extremely expensive for the agriculture industry. And to the extent that the government reimburses dairy and poultry farmers for lost milk, lost chickens when they need to be culled, its also expensive for the government, i.e., taxpayers. So at this point already the U.S. has already put more than $1.7 billion into tamping down the bird flu virus on poultry farms since 2022. And its already put more than $430 million into combating the bird flu on dairy farms. So its expensive no matter how you slice it.The bird flu has also cost a lot of lives of other animals off of farms. And theres been infections among black bears and otters and coyotes. A lot of big cats have died of this from zoos and from animal sanctuaries. Weve seen deaths from tigers, other big cats, and a lot of domestic cats have died as well. So its, its not good.And then its also, of course, bad for farmworkers. Theres been studies showing that more farmworkers have been infected than what we know about. Thats not a surprise once you start realizing how were monitoring. Like I said, when I see these emails, itll be something like: Twenty-five farms arent reporting about their farmworkers. So we know were missing cases. Theres been studies that found antibodies against the bird flu in farmworkers where they had not been tested. So were missing cases.And the word mild, definitely, you know, it indicates that farmworkers havent been hospitalized yet, but that doesnt mean this has been a breeze. I mean, people have fevers. Theyve had respiratory symptoms. The conjunctivitis can actually be quite bad; thats, like, these red, swollen eyes. It can be pretty severe. And so thats a burden on farmworkers, just adding to the burdens they already face.Feltman: Yeah, so what efforts are being made to protect farmworkers and their families right now?Maxmen: So since I started reporting, things are getting better than they were. So I can start seeing that there was a $4 million grant to a national farmworker group that was doled out in October, and so now theyre working with farmworker outreach groups in the states with outbreaks where therell be educating farmworkers about this, helping to hand out protective gear, trying to see if people will like the seasonal flu vaccine cause that will just help prevent the possibility of the seasonal flu and the bird flu mixing up together within a person and creating something more dangerous. So thats being stepped up.Feltman: And what advice do you have for folks who are really concerned about this fatality and, and wondering how bird flu might impact them?Maxmen: Yeah, so I think the short answer is: if you are not working directly with poultry or dairy and if you dont drink raw milk, chances are youre okay. And so theres not much you can really do.As far as the death in Louisiana what that really shows is that this virus does have the potential to be deadly. So the person in Louisiana, the virus that they had had some mutations that are linked with disease severity, and those mutations are not widespread. So most of the viruses circulating dont have those. But this can happen, so its just a reminder to take this seriously.Feltman: That was Amy Maxmen, a public health reporter at KFF Health News, in partnership with Healthbeat. You can sign up for the Healthbeat newsletters at Healthbeat.org/Newsletters. Youll find a link in our show notes.Thats all for todays episode, but well be back on Friday to talk about the universal language of getting a boo-boo. Why do so many cultures say ow almost exactly the same way, and what can that reveal about humankind? Tune in Friday to find out.Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg 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!

January 14, 20257 min readBlue Ghost, a Private U.S. Lunar Lander, Launches to the MoonA Texas-built lander named Blue Ghost marks another test of NASAs new lunar delivery initiativeBy Michael Greshko edited by Lee BillingsAn illustration of a private U.S. lander on the surface of the moon built by Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace. The companys Blue Ghost lander is carrying a suite of scientific instruments to the moon, including an experiment to detect and use GPS satellite signals on the lunar surface. NASA/Dave RyanIn the classic country ballad Ghost Riders in the Sky, a cowboy receives a frightening vision: the devils herd of cows thundering through the clouds, chased by the souls of cowpokes who must ride forever on that range up in the sky / on horses snorting fire. At 1:11 A.M. EST on January 15 Blue Ghost, a lunar lander built by the Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace, rode its own fiery steed through the heavens, launching atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on a mission to become just the second U.S. soft landing on the moon since the end of the Apollo program.Over the next four weeks, that missioncalled Ghost Riders in the Sky, or Blue Ghost Mission 1will see its spacecraft orbit around Earth at farther and farther distances. Carrying a suite of NASA-sourced scientific instruments, Blue Ghost will then make a run at the moon. The mission is flying under the U.S. space agencys Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which is encouraging private firms to take over the delivery of such instruments and lunar supplies as part of the nations ambitious Artemis moon program.[The moon] is kind of the gateway to our solar system; its this easy spot to go to and learn how to be productive, says Ray Allensworth, spacecraft program director at Firefly Aerospace. The basic science that were gathering on these CLPS missions really has applications, not just to Artemis but also to becoming interplanetary.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.Blue Ghost Mission 1 marks a new chapter for Firefly, which has developed and launched its own rocket but has never flown anything to the moon before. Its also another major test for CLPS, which will pay out as much as $2.6 billion to private companies for lunar deliveries. NASA hopes to save substantial money through the program. In February 2021 Firefly received a NASA contract for Blue Ghost Mission 1 that is now worth $101 million, less than the agency would have spent to build its own lunar lander.A lander on the surface of the moon, done in the traditional way, is north of a half a billion [dollars].... Ive never seen a quote thats less, says Thomas Zurbuchen, who led NASAs Science Mission Directorate as its associate administrator from 2016 to 2022 and championed the development of CLPS. Every one of these shots on goal is doing it without that overhead and with their own systems.NASA also hopes that CLPS will increase the frequency of robotic moon missions. Blue Ghost is the third spacecraft launched under the CLPS banner since January 2024, and at least one more launch is on the books for later this year. Before CLPS, the last U.S. soft landings on the moon occurred during the Apollo program, which ended in 1972.Theres a significant portion of NASA and the scientific community who have not been alive, or at least not in the workforce, to see a landing on the moon, says lunar scientist Ryan Watkins, a program scientist at NASAs Exploration Science Strategy and Integration Office. To finally have a chance to get on the surface and get at some of these questions in situ is really exciting.But in exchange for lower costs and faster turnaround times, NASA is letting private companies design and operate their own lunar landersa trade-off that, on balance, boosts the odds for any given CLPS mission failing. From the programs inception, NASA leaders, including Zurbuchen, have emphasized that each initial CLPS mission has a roughly 5050 chance of success.As predicted, the programs results so far have been mixed. Last January the Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic launched a moon lander with an assortment of NASA and non-NASA payloads, only for the spacecraft to suffer a critical anomaly soon after launch. Then, the following month, a robotic lander built by the Houston-based company Intuitive Machines flew a CLPS mission to the moons south polar region. Though the spacecraft survived the descenta first for any commercial moon missionone of its legs broke during touchdown, partially tipping the lander over.I want [CLPS] to work, but this is an experiment, and we dont know that its going to work, says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the nonprofit Planetary Society.Standing about two meters tall and 3.5 meters wideroughly the size of two Volkswagen Beetles parked side by sideFireflys Blue Ghost lander is designed to carry up to 150 kilograms (330 pounds) of payload to the moons surface. On Blue Ghost Mission 1, the lander is flying 10 NASA instruments, the largest number of agency payloads yet launched on a single CLPS mission.For Fireflys corps of engineers, many of whom are still in their 20s, building Blue Ghost has amounted to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunityand challenge. Its kind of mind-blowing, Allensworth says. It is really special, but it also can be scary at times because none of us have built a lunar lander before.Perhaps no system onboard Blue Ghost exemplifies this challenge more than the rocket engines responsible for setting the lander on the moons surface. Soon after completing a major review of Blue Ghosts design in October 2021, Firefly engineers realized that they needed to build their own reaction control system (RCS) thrusters, which control a spacecrafts orientation and stabilize its position. In August 2024less than three years after starting its worka team led by engineer Ryan Cole finished qualifying the engines for flight.Conventional wisdom would have said, Well, youre never going to make an RCS engine in less than three years, Cole says. But none of us had it in our heads that that was impossible.Blue Ghost now faces a roughly six-week journey before putting those engines to the ultimate test. After 25 days orbiting Earth, the lander will spend four days flying toward the moon. It will then spend another 16 days in lunar orbit before making a landing attempt in early March. As it happens, Blue Ghost isnt the only spacecraft that is journeying to the moon. The lander shared its launch with Hakuto-R Mission 2, a lunar lander and rover developed by the Japanese company ispace, whose first landing attempt in April 2023 failed just kilometers above the moons surface.At NASAs request, Blue Ghost Mission 1 is targeting a landing site at Mare Crisium, a dark-colored basin some 560 kilometers (350 miles) across that formed long ago when lunar lava filled a then fresh impact crater. The area is thought to better represent the moons average composition than the Apollo landing sites. Blue Ghosts goal is to operate there for 14 days, including up to five hours of the long and brutally cold lunar night.Some of Blue Ghosts payloads will demonstrate new technologies. For one, Blue Ghost is flying an instrument that will test whether moon landers can detect and make use of signals from GPS satellites orbiting Earth. Another payload will try to combat moon dusttiny, jagged particles that are awful for astronauts and hardware alikeby using electric fields to knock it off of a surface.Other instruments will study the lunar interior. One, called LISTER (Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity), is designed to measure how heat flows out of the moon, which should help clarify the deep structure of our natural satellite and its evolution over eons. The device consists of a thermometer at the tip of a probe that will drill up to three meters into the lunar soil by puffing out blasts of compressed gas. If successful, LISTER will set the record for the deepest that any mission has ever dug into the lunar surface.Gas, in vacuum, is like a grenade.... So we thought, Why not excavate deep holes with it? says Kris Zacny, vice president of exploration systems at Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Originowned firm that developed LISTER. Its sort of like taking a garden hose pointing into the soil and creating a trench.Regardless of what happens with Blue Ghost Mission 1whether it lands on the moons surface in one piece or severalexperts interviewed by Scientific American say that for now, the CLPS initiative probably will survive into the second term of incoming U.S. president Donald Trump, who assumes office on January 20. Along with Artemis as a whole, CLPS was created during the first Trump administration and continued during the Biden administration. This was the first time since Apollo that an ambitious U.S. moon program survived a presidential transition intact.I believe this particular launch should, by itself, not change the program, no matter what the [outcome] is, Zurbuchen says. We would feel all more excited [if] it went all down the middle, exactly like we hoped.... If it was not successful, I would just basically say, Hey, we never said that any one of those things needs to be successful.[CLPS] is not a national standard-bearer program, Dreier adds. In a sense, if it works, it creates a fundamentally new capability.That said, the structure of Artemis may see more changes this time around. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who ardently supports a Mars-first human space exploration strategy, was a major backer of Trumps 2024 campaign and has enormous influence on the incoming administrations policy agenda. An Ars Technica report last December suggested that Trumps transition team was considering changes to Artemis and NASA writ large, including the possible cancelation of the space agencys costly Space Launch System rocket, a linchpin of the current Artemis plan.Any such proposal will have to make it through Congress, however, which has repeatedly stated its preference for a moon-first strategy in line with Artemiss status quo. Major changes could also risk disrupting existing agreements with commercial firms and other countries space agencies. Theres frustration, you see, that [Artemis] is not optimized for results; its optimized for politics. But youve got to work with politics at the end of the day, Dreier says. We should not throw away a hard-earned coalition like this.

OpinionJanuary 14, 20255 min readThe Curious History of Venn DiagramsA look at the curious history of Venn diagrams and how they blend logic with geometryBy Jack Murtagh edited by Jeanna Bryner Amanda MontaezIn his book The Mathematical Universe, mathematician William Dunham wrote of John Venns namesake legacy, the Venn diagram, No one in the long history of mathematics ever became better known for less. While Venn diagrams may not have solved any long-standing open problems, surely these interlocking rings deserve more credit. Their compact representation of group relationships explains their enduring appeal in classrooms, infographics and Internet memes.Not merely visual aids, Venn diagrams can help us solve everyday logic problems, and they give rise to surprising geometric questions. Have you ever seen a proper Venn diagram with four overlapping circles? No, because its impossible. Venn himself discovered this and came up with a clever fix, but this only begot deeper geometric puzzles that mathematicians still study today.Venn debuted his diagrams in 1880 as a method for visualizing contemporary advances in logic. They then found application in the closely related branch of math called set theory, which focuses on collections of objects. Venn diagrams typically consist of overlapping circles, with each representing some set of elements, (e.g., things that are cuddly or Broadway shows). The overlapping region between two circles contains elements that belong to both sets (e.g., cats). Much like in using scatter plots in statistics or drawing shapes in geometry, seeing ones problem often clarifies it.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.Imagine youre planning a dinner party and navigating your friends fickle preferences. If Wilma attends, then so will Fred. If Barney attends, then so will somebody else. Barney wont come if Wilma comes, but he will if she doesnt. If Fred and Barney both attend, then so will Wilma. Who should you expect to show up? This poser is hard to work through when we are only given the text. A Venn diagram provides a systematic way to visualize and solve it. Each statement precludes some possible outcomes, which we indicate by shading the corresponding regions of the Venn diagram.Amanda MontaezMost Venn diagrams you encounter depict either two or three overlapping circles, but what if you have four or more sets to consider?Amanda MontaezDid you spot the problem? There is no region where only A and C overlap that doesnt also include another region, and likewise for B and D. A proper Venn diagram depicts every combination of intersections. Rejiggering the layout wont help. Every four-circle drawing suffers the same flaw.To see why, start with a single circle and note that it establishes two regionsinterior and exterior. When we add a second set of elements (a new circle), we double the possibilities, so we need to double the number of regions (first set, second set, both sets and neither set). The only way to do this is to have the second circle intersect the first at two points (touching at only one point would result in only three regions: first set, second set or neither). This trend continues, where each new circle must double the number of regions if we want to represent all logical possibilities. But the number of new regions cannot exceed the number of new intersections, and a new circle can intersect the existing circles at only two points each. This works fine when adding a third circle because we need to add four regions, and the new circle can intersect the two existing circles at two points each for four total new intersection points. But it breaks down with a fourth circle, where we need eight new regions but can only muster six new points of intersection.Amanda MontaezOf course, we dont need to restrict ourselves to circles. We could easily trace a wiggly loop through a three-circle diagram so that it carves out the necessary number of regions, but we would lose the elegance in the diagram. Four intersecting spheres can also represent the right number of regions, but three-dimensional visuals are hard to parse. John Venn knew of the shortcoming with circles, so he proposed ellipses to represent four sets.Amanda Montaez; Source: Venn Diagrams and Independent Families of Sets, by Branko Grnbaum in Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 48, No. 1; January 1975(reference)Unlike circles, two ellipses can intersect at four points. This overcomes the limitations with circles but only temporarily. Ellipses work for four and five sets before failing in the same way that circles did. As the number of sets grows, we need more and more exotic shapes to portray them.One could reasonably argue that beyond four sets of elements, Venn diagrams lose their utility. The four-ellipse image is already pretty chaotic. Maybe for five-plus sets we should abandon visual representations. But utility does not animate the mathematician so much as beauty and curiosity. Although Venn diagrams initially applied to logic and set theory, the four-circle conundrum raised an interesting geometry question. That seed has blossomed into a fascinating investigation into the geometry of Venn diagrams that continues today.Venn and his successors believed that ellipses couldnt portray all 32 regions required for a five-set diagram. Not until 1975 did mathematician Branko Grnbaum prove them wrong by example:Amanda Montaez; Source: Venn Diagrams and Independent Families of Sets, by Branko Grnbaum in Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 48, No. 1; January 1975 (reference)Notice also that Grnbaums diagram displays a pleasing rotational symmetry. Spinning it one fifth of a full rotation lands it back on itself, leaving the original shape unchanged. Typical two- and three-circle Venn diagrams share this property. Rotate a two-circle Venn diagram by 180 degrees (or a three-circle one by 120 degrees), and it looks the same. But the four-ellipse diagram doesnt have rotational symmetry. Can that be fixed? What do two, three and five have in common that four doesnt?In 1960 a then undergraduate student at Swarthmore College, David W. Henderson, answered this question with a surprising discovery (Stan Wagon and Peter Webb filled in some gaps later): Rotationally symmetric Venn diagrams are possible only when the number of sets is a prime numbera number divisible only by 1 and itself, such as 2, 3 and 5 but not 4. Henderson only showed that a prime number of sets is necessary, not that you can always design a symmetric Venn diagram for every prime number. Thus began a contest to find larger and larger examples. Heres a wild-looking 11-set Venn diagram from Peter Hamburger.Mathematicians at the University of South Carolina settled the question in 2004 by showing that rotationally symmetric Venn diagrams exist for every prime number of sets. If you think this caused mathematicians to pack up their pencils and lay the study of Venn diagrams to rest, then you havent been following along. Instead the community has raised their aesthetic standards, seeking figures with even more refined properties.Our opening quote contended that Venn diagrams are overrated. Even those who agree must admit that they have a curious allure. Take the sets of interesting topics in logic, in geometry and in visualization, and youll find Venn diagrams at the intersection.