March 25, 20254 min readHow Researchers Found a Greener Way to Make Fuel for Nuclear FusionBy AccidentResearchers have found an environmentally safer way to extract the lithium 6 needed to create fuel for nuclear fusion reactors. The new approach doesnt require toxic mercury, as conventional methods doBy Jacek Krywko edited by Andrea Thompson xia yuan/Getty ImagesAll the nuclear power plants in operation right now use nuclear fissionthe process of splitting apart an atomto produce energy. But scientists have spent decades and entire careers in a frustrating quest to achieve nuclear fusion, which combines atoms, because it releases far more energy and produces no dangerous waste. Many hope fusion could one day be a significant source of carbon-free power.In addition to the many technical issues that have kept nuclear fusion perpetually in development, the process also needs fuel that presents its own problems. The fuel requires a rare lithium isotope (a version of an atom of the element with a different number of neutrons) called lithium 6.But the traditional process for sourcing lithium 6 involves using the toxic metal mercury and causes major environmental damage. It has been banned in the U.S. since 1963. The country currently relies on lithium 6 supplies that were stockpiled at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory as part of nuclear weapons development programs during the cold war. Its kept a secret how much lithium 6 is left there, but its surely not enough to supply future fusion reactors, says Sarbajit Banerjee, a professor of chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. Banerjee and his team think they have found a new and environmentally safer way to extract lithium 6 from brineand they came across it completely by accident.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.Nuclear fusion, a reaction that powers stars such as our sun, generates energy by fusing atoms together. In fusion reactors, those atoms are deuterium (a heavy form of hydrogen that is abundant in seawater) and tritium (an even heavier form of hydrogen that is extremely rare but can be bred from lithium 6). Deuterium-tritium fusion unleashes a massive amount of energyits what gives hydrogen bombs their immense explosive power. It also happens at temperatures low enough to be contained in reactors. But it needs a relatively large amount of tritium.The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a 500-megawatt, large-scale experimental fusion reactor that is currently under construction in France, is expected to use much of global reserves of tritium, which are estimated to comprise between 25 and 30 kilograms. To make enough to fuel ITER and other projects, not to mention future fusion reactors, scientists will need much more lithium 6.When a lithium 6 atom is bombarded with a neutron, it undergoes a nuclear reaction that produces helium and tritium. Because roughly two kilograms of lithium 6 is needed to breed one kilogram of tritium, significant amounts of lithium 6 would be needed for ITER alone. If nuclear fusion takes off the ground, the demand for lithium 6 will shoot up to thousands of tons, Banerjee says.The natural lithium that is now mined from rocks in Australia or extracted from brine deposits in Chile is a mixture of two stable isotopes: lithium 7, which is commonly used in batteries, and lithium 6. The only established industrial process that separates these two isotopes is called column exchange (COLEX): large amounts of liquid mercury flow down a vertical column, while lithium mixed with water flows up. When those two liquids pass each other, the lithium 6 sticks to the mercury a bit more than lithium 7, so it ends up at the bottom of the column, while lithium 7 ends up at the top. But in this process, a few hundred tons of mercury got released to the environment, Banerjee says, prompting the U.S. ban.Thus far, the mercury-free methods for lithium isotope separation have been far costlier and less efficient than COLEX. But then Banerjee and his team went to Texas to work on a seemingly unrelated project: developing membranes for cleaning the water thats brought to the surface in oil and gas fracking operations.We had a couple of membranes that could filter out the oil, salt and silt from the water. At the same time, we were working on some battery materials, so we also filtered out lithium, Banerjee explains. His team used membranes made from zeta vanadium oxide, a patented material the team synthetized in a lab. The membranes contain a framework of one-dimensional nanoscale tunnelsand the team found these tunnels were particularly good at capturing lithium ions. They could even separate lithium 6 from lithium 7.To test this process more thoroughly, the researchers built an electrochemical cell: a sort of battery working in reverse. When water was cycled through the powered-up cell, positively charged lithium 6 ions got trapped in the one-dimensional tunnels of the negatively charged zeta vanadium oxide electrode. But heavier lithium 7 ions were more likely to break the bond with the tunnels and mostly avoided getting stuck in them. The results were published on March 20 in Chem.The technique could reach the level of enrichment suitable for nuclear fusion fuel after 25 four-hour cycles, Banerjee and his team say. Another plus was that zeta vanadium oxide gradually changed color from yellow to dark green when more lithium ions got trapped in it, which provided a very clear indicator of when the job was done. To get the lithium out of the cell, Banerjees team simply reversed the polarity to push trapped ions out of the tunnels and back to the circulating water.This method seems to have excellent separation, which is very promising, says Norbert K. Wegrzynowski, a physicist at the University of Bristol in England, who has worked on isotopic separation of lithium 6 and is not affiliated with Banerjees team. However, the next question is scalability. The key problem for such methods is driving the cost down enough to make them cost effective, Wegrzynowski says. He believes, though, that techniques along these lines may be the easiest and fastest to scale up to an industrial level.The efficiency of this process is already comparable to COLEX, and its just an unoptimized proof of concept. Within six months or so, we can probably be doing much better Banarjee says. He believes his lithium isotope separation technique could be implemented at an industrial scale within a couple of years. The materials to make this work are available, and its not the hardest process in the world, Banerjee says. Its not that far from actual realization.

OpinionMarch 25, 20255 min readWhen Scientists Dont Correct Errors, Misinformation and Deadly Consequences Can FollowUncorrected errors in science and the unconscionable reluctance to correct them erodes trust in science, throws away taxpayer money, harms the publics health and can kill innocent people Devrimb/Getty ImagesFew tasks come as thankless as asking a scientific journal editor to correct a bad study. I think that it [is] time to stop this never-ending story, the editor in chief of a diabetes journal told us last year, refusing our request for the data behind a study that we deemed to have fatal statistical errors. As noted by Retraction Watch, in an earlier e-mail to us, the corresponding author of the paper said, "sharing data with a third party would breach the study [participants] consent and European rules on data protection. But such errors would invalidate preliminary positive results for a Web-based clinical decision support tool intended to help diabetes patients. Those are the people we were concerned about.Unfortunately, such irresponsibility is all too common.Science informs our medical care, flies us through the skies, and keeps us safe while driving. And yet, because its done by people, mistakes can be made. After all, to err is human.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 papers are riddled with errors; for example, as many as 30 percent of cluster randomized controlled trials for childhood obesity may have been analyzed incorrectly. In psychology, 20 percent of studies or more may have inconsistencies with their basic descriptive statistics that shed doubt on the reliability of their findings.When mistakes happen, the costs can be high. Researchers say that science is self-correcting, but often it isnt or it is unforgivably slow. For example, in the early 19th century, based on obviously bad sampling, physicians misdiagnosed many healthy infants with enlarged thymuses and mistakenly believed they were responsible for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) by occluding the trachea, leading to a century-long medical misconception. Radiation therapy was then used to shrink thymuses for thousands of children, which ultimately caused increased rates of thyroid and breast cancer, resulting in over 10,000 deaths. The error was finally recognized and corrected in the 1940s. However, a nationwide campaign was only launched in 1977 by the National Cancer Institute to warn the medical community and alert the public.Serious errors occur in social science publications, too. Economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published influential research in 2010 suggesting that when a countrys debt surpasses 90 percent of its gross domestic product, economic growth declines. Broadly cited by political leaders, this finding famously supported austerity policies worldwide. Independent researchers later uncovered significant errors in Reinhart and Rogoffs calculations. The blunder omitted key data from five countries, reversing the findings to show an average growth increase, rather than decline, at high debt levels. Reinhart and Rogoff acknowledged the error but argued against other criticisms of their analysis and maintained that their main findings generally held. This case raises another all-too-common irresponsibility we encountered in our diabetes study correction quest, where authors do not proactively disclose data and editors fail to require its availability. And while Reinhart and Rogoff had initially shared some of their data analysis details publicly, it was insufficient to fully reproduce and check their findings. Had they shared their data completely, the error could have been identified and corrected sooner, potentially prior to publication.We end on an egregious saga of scientific falsification and fabrication that went uncorrected for decades in the fields of Alzheimers and Parkinsons disease research. Eliezer Masliah, former director of the National Institute of Agings neuroscience division and a neurodegenerative disease specialist, was found guilty of scientific misconduct following a government investigation. As a result, two papers were retracted because of what appeared to be doctored images. A news story in the journal Science after an independent investigation reported that as many as 132 papers from 1997 to 2023 are suspect; several of those papers were very influential in the neurodegenerative disease field and in therapeutic drug development. A quarter century of Alzheimers research may have gone down the wrong trail to potential remedies because of this disaster.Many of us have had or will watch a loved one go through the slow, debilitating, and heartbreaking loss of self and others that Alzheimers brings. Tragically, current treatments offer limited relief. Despite countless researchers efforts and millions of dollars, progress has been hindered by chasing false leads while people are lost to the scourge of Alzheimers.The odiousness of knowingly delaying the correction of error-contaminated science came into play in the 2023 case of Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a distinguished scientist in the neurodegenerative field and a former president of Stanford University. Tessier-Lavigne resigned after an expert panel review found several of his groups published papers to contain manipulated images. Although Tessier-Lavigne himself was exonerated of research misconduct, the review concluded that as supervisor of the research group Tessier-Lavigne failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record. This case highlights the dangers when scientists (especially senior scientific leaders) do not fully stand up for the rigor and integrity of science. Just as we experienced, it also highlights the failure of editors and journals to maintain the scientific integrity of the scientific literature. It turned out that Tessier-Lavigne attempted to make corrections for papers in Cell and Science, but Cell initially said it was not necessary, and the correction in Science initially was not published, consequent to an editorial error.Such delays and failures to correct known errors not only harm the public and stall progress but can also erode public trust in scientific research. This is why scientists and the journals in which they publish must unwaveringly commit to correcting errors. Scientists must uncompromisingly commit to rigorous research and accurate and trustworthy reporting; all of our welfare hangs in the balance.Its not all bad. We know of the errors cited here in part because science as an enterprise takes them seriously, even if individuals did not. Science has always been about self-improvement. It is a wellspring of innovations that learn about the world and leverage those insights to help us all.We are still hopeful. When bad science is left unchecked, it harms us all. And we need to do better. How much more progress could we make and how many more lives could we save if we do?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 institution, or any other organization.

March 23, 20252 min readWhat the Worlds First Case of Bird Flu in Sheep Means for the Viruss SpreadThe detection of bird flu in a sheep is another sign that the H5N1 virus is adapting to hop to new hostsBy Josh Fischman edited by Jeanna BrynerSheep grazing in England. In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty ImagesThe H5N1 bird flu virus has been found in a single sheep in England. This is the first time the virus has been detected in sheep, scientists say, expanding the list of animals that it can infect. Agricultural authorities say no other sheep were infected, and the risk to people remains low. But scientists added that the appearance of the virus in another species has underscored the need for caution.What HappenedOn March 24 the U.K.s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs and its Animal and Plant Health Agency announced that bird flu had been detected in a single sheep in Yorkshire, England. The sheep was in an area where the virus had been confirmed in captive birds, so testing was already going on. According to the announcement, the single sheep was culled to prevent further spread and to permit more extensive testing of the animal.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.What This MeansDiscovery of H5N1 in a sheep enlarges the list of nonbird animals now known to be susceptible to the virus. In the U.S. that list includes cows, pigs, domestic and wild cats, coyotes, bears, rodents, raccoons, opossums and marine mammals. Seventy people in the U.S. have also been infected, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and one of them died. Although the risk to humans remains low, and person-to-person transmission is not known to have happened, the viruss ability to infect different kinds of animals highlights that the microbe can evolve and adapt to infect new hosts, scientists say. As it spreads, it warrants careful and continued scrutiny, officials say.What Experts Are SayingCurrent evidence suggests that the avian influenza viruses were seeing circulating around the world do not spread easily to peopleand the risk of avian flu to the general public remains very low, said Meera Chand, emerging infection lead at the U.K. Health Security Agency, in Mondays announcement. Chand also said, however, that globally, we continue to see that mammals can be infected with avian influenza and that health agencies will continue to search for human infections.

March 24, 20253 min readTo Win Trust and Admiration, Fix Your MicrophoneFrom job interviews to dating, we subconsciously judge one another based on sound quality when we interact digitallyBy Rachel Nuwer edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier yasinemir/Getty ImagesLike hundreds of millions of others around the world, Brian Scholl, a psychologist and cognitive scientist at Yale University, spent much of the COVID pandemic on Zoom. But during one digital faculty meeting, he found himself reacting unexpectedly to two colleagues. One was a close collaborator with whom Scholl usually saw eye-to-eye, while the other was someone he tended to have differing opinions from. On that particular day, though, he found himself siding with the latter colleague. Everything he said was so rich and resonant, Scholl recalls.As he reflected afterwards, Scholl realized that there was a key underlying difference between the two mens messaging: the colleague whom Scholl normally agreed with had been using a junky built-in microphone on an old laptop, whereas the one with whom he typically disagreed had called in from a professional-grade home-recording studio. Scholl began to suspect that it was the quality of their sound, rather than the content of their arguments, that had swayed his judgment.New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA suggests his hunch was correct. In a series of experiments, Scholl and his colleagues found that poor audio quality consistently caused listeners to negatively judge speakers in a variety of contextseven if the message itself was exactly the same.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.When chatting on Zoom, everyone is familiar with how they look, but we dont typically take into account how we sound to other people, Scholl says. It turns out this can really drive peoples impressions of how intelligent you are, how credible you are and how datable and hirable you are.Our brain evolved to make intuitive judgments about people not solely on the basis of what they say but also according to how they sound. Ample research has shown that factors such as how confident a person sounds or whether they have an accent influence how others perceive them. Scholl wanted to see if the same pattern would hold when the only difference was technological distortion.Scholl, Robert Walter-Terrill and Joan Danielle Ongchoco, both then graduate students at Yale, created audio recordings in which a human man or woman or a computerized male or female voice read one of three scripts. Each script dealt with a different topic: the readers posed as a job applicant, a potential romantic partner and someone describing a car accident. Some of the recordings were clear, whereas others were artificially manipulated to sound tinny. We tried to use a manipulation thats relevant to daily life, Scholl says. If you spend time on Zoom, you probably know tons of people who sound like this.The researchers recruited more than 5,100 people online and had each participant listen to one script and then answer simple questions about their judgment of the speaker on a continuous scale. The team ensured that the participants actually understood what they had heard by asking some of them to transcribe the recording they heard after they answered the questions.Across all three scripts, and for both human and computerized voices, participants consistently rated the tinny voices as less hirable, datable, credible and intelligent. The findings speak to the deep power of perception, Scholl says, and its ability to make us behave irrationally. Everybody knows that this kind of auditory manipulation does not reflect on the person themselves, he says. But our perception is operating, in some ways, autonomously from higher-level thought.Nadine Lavan, a psychologist at Queen Mary University of London, who was not involved in the research, says the findings are somewhat expected based on what researchers already knew about how we evaluate other people. But a lack of surprise doesnt mean the results are not important or interesting, she says.The study raises questions, she continues, about how much of an effect microphone quality may or may not have in real-world settings. Job applicants, for example dont tend to read out their applications; they tend to give more spontaneous answers, Lavan says. Also, abstract ratings of credibility and of being hirable are informative, but real-life hiring decisions tend to include higher stakes and much more complex trading off of different factors.Assuming the findings do hold in the real world to some extent, Scholl says the takeaway lesson is clear: You should really find out how you sound to other people online. And if you dont sound good, take some remediable action, he says.This was the case for Scholls tinny-sounding colleague, he adds, who eventually upgraded to a better microphone.

March 24, 20255 min readFEMA Disaster Aid Review Could Deter Migrants from Seeking Help in Extreme WeatherA previously undisclosed FEMA review could block disaster assistance to millions of undocumented people and deter legal immigrants from seeking help in extreme weatherBy Thomas Frank & E&E News People are seen outside a wildfire shelter at the Pasadena Convention Center on January 21, 2025, where FEMA disaster assistance is available. Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty ImagesCLIMATEWIRE | The Trump administration is reviewing all disaster relief programs that may indirectly or incidentally aid illegal aliens, according to an internal memo that raises the prospect of shutting off government aid to millions of people during extreme weather events.The two-page memo sent to senior officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its 10 regional offices on Feb. 14 also orders the agency to review nongovernmental organizations that "provide assistance" to undocumented immigrants. That could include groups like the American Red Cross that offer food, shelter and medical care to disaster survivors regardless of their immigration status.The review, which has not been previously reported, has alarmed advocacy groups that work with the roughly 11 million undocumented migrants within the U.S. who could be barred from disaster shelters during deadly hurricanes, wildfires or floods.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.This review shall include identification of those programs and potential policy changes, said the memo by FEMA acting Administrator Cameron Hamilton.Potential aid restrictions could deter millions of people who are in the country legally from going to disaster shelters because they fear being targeted by immigration enforcement officers, some advocates said. Those concerns were raised as President Donald Trump attempts to deport two legal immigrants.This is horrifying, said Madison Sloan, director of disaster recovery at Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit that promotes social, economic and racial justice. Historically, FEMA has provided life-saving and life-sustaining assistance to disaster victims regardless of their immigration status, and thats the way it should be.FEMA did not respond to requests for comment.The memo, which FEMA disclosed in a court filing, appears to be so expansive that it could affect programs that were created to help individuals who have evacuated their homes, along with communities that face huge cleanup and rebuilding costs after disasters.What are we going to do? Tell people that theyre not going to be allowed in the FEMA shelter because theyre not a U.S. citizen? said Michael Coen, the FEMA chief of staff in the Biden administration.That should be the last thing youre thinking about when youre trying to save lives, he added.Hamiltons brief description of the review outlined in two sentences within the memo does not identify the programs that are being scrutinized for helping undocumented migrants.The phrasing is so broad that it could potentially apply to FEMA funding that's used to rebuild roads, schools and parks.If youre repairing infrastructure to a community that has a large population of undocumented immigrants, that would be indirectly assisting them, said Noah Patton, manager of disaster recovery for the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group.Project 2025, the conservative policy manifesto that has guided the Trump administration, said FEMA grants to states, localities and private groups should go only to "recipients who are lawful actors, can demonstrate that they are in compliance with federal law, and can show that their mission and actions support the broader homeland security mission."Immigrants, including those who are in the U.S. legally, have long been reluctant to seek disaster aid from FEMA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, because they worry about immigration enforcement, Sloan and others said.Hamilton ordered the review days after the administration revoked $80 million it had given New York City for sheltering undocumented migrants who had been released from federal custody after entering the U.S. illegally.Although the money came from a special fund created by Congress in 2023 and not from FEMAs disaster fund the Trump administration tried to generate an uproar by questioning the legality of the spending and falsely claiming that New York City officials used it to house migrants in luxury hotels.In fact, the migrants stayed temporarily in a hotel that was converted years ago to a shelter, which Trump officials said was being run by a dangerous Venezuelan street gang.Risks to Red CrossFormer FEMA officials and disaster experts said the review could target billions of dollars the agency gives to households each year for emergency costs related to hotel rooms, minor home repairs and basic supplies. The money is separate from emergency services that FEMA provides to survivors immediately after a disaster including shelters, health care, and food and water.FEMA disaster aid is available only to people who can show they are U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents or certain types of noncitizen residents. Individuals who don't meet those criteria can receive FEMA aid if they are parents of a child who is eligible under longstanding FEMA policy.If a family has a citizen child, the family can get assistance, said Patton, adding that such funding would likely meet the review's standard of indirectly or incidentally helping undocumented migrants.I would definitely be worried about the emergency response programs that are going to be impacted by this, Patton said.Since 2002, FEMA has given a total of $38 billion in disaster aid to nearly 12 million households, according to an analysis of agency records by POLITICO's E&E News.FEMA established citizenship and residency requirements after former President Bill Clinton signed a major law overhauling the nations welfare programs. The Welfare Reform Act generally barred nonqualified aliens from receiving a broad range of benefits.FEMAs review could threaten activities by the Red Cross, a federally chartered aid group that has an agreement with FEMA to provide emergency services such as shelter, food and supplies. The agreement notes that the Red Cross provides services to those in need regardless of citizenship, race, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, veteran status, or political affiliation.The Red Cross and other nonprofits that provide disaster aid have historically resisted any attempt to get that information from them, Patton said, referring to survivors' immigration status.Any move around those programs to institute some sort of citizenship requirement or even an attempt to access information on who doesnt have documented status would have a significant chilling effect for immigration communities, Patton added.Sloan of Texas Appleseed said the Red Cross has decades of experience in responding to disasters and local relationships and a level of trust because they are a nonprofit. You would lose all of that.The Red Cross did not respond to requests for comment.Hamilton, the FEMA leader, initiated the review through a memo explaining an order by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who in late January put a hold on FEMA nonprofit grants that touch in any way on immigration.Hamilton added his own conditions, including the review of all disaster programs that "may indirectly or incidentally" benefit undocumented migrants or nonprofits that help them.Hamilton wrote that his memo is necessary to comply with Noems directive and to ensure FEMA can continue to support the communities and disaster survivors who rely on us for assistance.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

March 23, 2025NASA Astronauts Finally Return, Seals Hold Their Breath, and Penguin Poop Stresses Out KrillIn this weeks news roundup, two NASA astronauts finally return to Earth after nine unexpected months in space, gray seals hold their breath for more than an hour, and penguin poop panics krill. Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific AmericanSUBSCRIBE TO Science QuicklyRachel 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 may have missed.Well start out with a space update that weve all been waiting about nine months for[CLIP: NASAs SpaceX Crew-9 Re-Entry and Splashdown: And splashdown Crew-9 is back on earth [cheering]]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: Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are finally back on Earth. The two NASA astronauts, who were meant to spend about a week on the International Space Station but have been there since June, splashed down in a SpaceX capsule last Tuesday evening. Welcome home, Butch and Suni!If youre wondering why it took so long to bring them back after their arrival vehicles initial technical difficulties, the answer isnt very excitingit basically came down to scheduling issues. First, NASA had to bump two other astronauts off an upcoming mission so that their return vehicle would have room for Butch and Suni. Once that mission made it to the station, it had to stay put until the next mission came up to relieve the prior crew of their duties. Space is hard, as folks so often say, and multiple ISS missions are bound to mean multiple delays.In other space news, last week scientists unveiled images of a planetary system 130 light-years away snapped by the James Webb Space Telescope. In an exciting first, the JWST was able to directly capture images of carbon dioxide gas on an exoplanet. That means JWST lives up to its promise of sussing out the chemistry of planetary atmospheres from a distance. These observations suggest that the four planets of the system, known as HR 8799, were likely formed through a process called core accretion. That process starts with the gradual formation of solid cores, which go on to attract gas from inside a protoplanetary disk. Its the same way Saturn and Jupiter formed. At 30 million years old or so, HR 8799 is a baby compared to our roughly 4.6-billion-year-old solar system, so studying these alien worlds could give us a glimpse into what our own gas giants looked like in their early days. And speaking of early days, when it comes to JWST the best is still yet to come. The space telescope was designed to last for at least five years, but the hope is that it can make it more than 20.Now lets catch up with the Environmental Protection Agency. In last weeks news roundup, I outlined EPA head Lee Zeldins plans to undo heaps of environmental legislation. I also mentioned his purported plan to cut 65 percent of the agencys costs. Last week, thanks to documents reviewed by Democrats on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, we got a clearer picture of those prospective cost-cutting measures.The New York Times reported last Monday that the EPAs plan calls for firing up to 1,155 scientists, as well as getting rid of the Office of Research and Development. This is the EPAs main science arm, which conducts research on environmental issues such as pollutants and their effects on humans. Zeldin said in a Fox Business appearance on Tuesday that the EPA was still working through cost-cutting decisions. Also on Tuesday, Representatives Valerie Foushee, Deborah Ross and Zoe Lofgren, who are all members of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, put out a joint statement condemning the supposed plans. They argued that, considering the EPAs obligation to use the best-available science in making its decisions, eliminating its main science branch would be illegal. If you like having clean air and water, you might consider calling up your own congressional reps to ask them to take a stand too.Meanwhile last week President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, a platform he owns, that he was authorizing his administration to immediately begin producing energy with BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN COAL.Clean coal is a nebulous term referring to technologies that make coal less polluting than it would be without those technologies. But theres no way of handling coal that makes it a clean form of energy. There are a few facilities that now use carbon capture technology to mitigate coals impact on the environment, but this technology is expensive and lemme be very clear about this it doesnt turn coal into a zero-carbon energy option. Coal is the most polluting source of energy. It releases heaps of carbon dioxide, contributes to environmental issues like acid rain and smog, and can cause lung disease.On Truth Social, President Trump claimed that Environmental Extremists and Thugs had allowed other countries, particularly China, to gain economic advantages over the U.S. by opening new coal plants. While its true that China has opened new coal plants in recent years, its worth noting that the countrys percentage of electricity generated from coal is actually on the decline.Its also worth noting that last Wednesday the World Meteorological Organization reported that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are at an 800,000-year high. So yeah, consider calling your reps!For no particular reason, I could use a little bit of a breather. Lets just talk about animals for the rest of the episode.First, have you ever wondered how seals avoid drowning? You totally should wonder that cause gray seals, for instance, can hold their breath for more than an hour at a time. A study published last Thursday in Science could help explain how. It turns out that gray seals can seemingly sense how much oxygen is in their blood at any given moment.Like most mammals, humans dont necessarily react to a lack of oxygen in the air. Were much more sensitive to an uptick in our carbon dioxide levels, which prompts us to breathe more. If a gray seal started to get that panicky air-hunger feeling as soon as the saturation of CO2 in their blood started going up while they were holding their breath, theyd never get anything done. But it seems theyve got a trick for that: just cutting out the middleman and sensing oxygen directly.Scientists tested this by giving seals air with different levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide before the animals went for their dives. The researchers found that seals would dive for longer after inhaling more oxygen-rich air and would cut their dives short after getting less oxygen. When the seals inhaled air with high levels of carbon dioxide, it didnt really change their dive length.While this study looked at gray seals, theyre not even the most accomplished divers in the seal world. The northern elephant seal can dive for up to two hours at a time. Its even possible that this oxygen-sensing trait came from a fairly distant ancestor that is applies to more than just mammals. After all, the emperor penguin can stay underwater for up to 27 minutes.And speaking of penguins it turns out their poop causes a big ruckus among zooplankton world. In a study published last Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, researchers zoomed in on the behavior of Antarctic krill. These tiny, shrimplike creatures are crucial members of the food chain, so they spend a lot of their time trying not to get eaten. Scientists already knew that krill used their sense of smell to react to things like food and pollution, so naturally they thought, Why not try penguin poo? Sure enough, when exposed to seawater containing guano in a tank, the little critters swam faster, pivoted direction more, and ate less algae. You might be asking yourself why scientists are interested in this crap. Like literally specifically this crap. But between krills spot on the food chain and their ability to sequester carbon by eating algae, these little guys can have a big impact on the ocean. Krill are already changing their behaviors due to climate change, sea ice loss and ocean acidification by moving further south.And if you need a pick-me-up this week, just take a moment to be grateful you arent on penguin doody duty: researchers had to collect a couple ounces of the stuff for the study, and apparently it smells like rotten shellfish.Thats all for this weeks news roundup. Well be back on Wednesday to talk about the changing science of invasive plants. And stay tuned for a very special video episode on Friday. Were giving you a tour of the cutting-edge lab where MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] scientists study and fabricate stuff at the nanoscale.Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. 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 Americans Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great week!

March 24, 202510 min readA Prenatal Test of the Fetus Turns Up Cancers in Pregnant MothersA test for abnormal fetal chromosomes can also detect maternal cancersand physicians are struggling to incorporate that knowledge into routine careBy Laura Hercher edited by Gary StixA noninvasive prenatal test Untitled Content SciAm CMS ContentfulIn 2013, Susan Klugman, an obstetrician and geneticist who is currently president of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics, got back test results that were really weird. Her patient was a pregnant woman who had opted for noninvasive prenatal testing, or NIPT, a screen for Down syndrome and a handful of other conditions that had been on the market for only two years. Now Klugman was looking at a lab report that suggested the 13-week-old fetus had a chromosomal condition that should have been lethal. And yet here it was on ultrasound, with a beating heart, developing organs and no sign of a problem. After several rounds of diagnostic testing, Klugman reassured the woman that her baby would most likely be fine. Nine months later, she read by chance in her local newspaper that the new mother had died of renal cancer. Mysterious test results and an unexpected cancersurely, Klugman thought, there must be a connection.For decades, prenatal testing for Down syndrome and other chromosomal conditions had fallen into two categories: invasive biopsies using a needle to collect fetal cells from the amniotic fluid or the placenta, or biomarker testing via a simple blood draw from the pregnant person. The invasive test carries a small but real chance of miscarriage. Biomarker testing is easier, cheaper and safer, but because it looks at proxy measures and not the fetal DNA itself, it casts a wide and leaky net. Some people carrying a fetus with a chromosomal condition are missed, while the majority of those flagged as high risk turn out to be false positives.Thus, the introduction of a more accurate and noninvasive blood test in 2011 was embraced enthusiastically by expectant parents. Today, NIPT is used in more than 60 countries, and sales of the test have attained a market value of more than $4.5 billion. In the U.S. alone, it is used in more than a million pregnancies a year. Multiple labs offer NIPT. And while they have their differences, they have this in common: all of them work by examining something called cell-free fetal DNA.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.In living cells, DNA is contained in discrete structures known as chromosomes. As cells die and are replaced, chromosomes are deconstructed, and tiny snippets of DNA are released into the bloodstream. If sequenced, these blood-borne snippets can be traced back to their chromosome of origin like jigsaw puzzle pieces using our human genome map as if it were the picture on the box. A random sampling of cell-free DNA will consist of DNA from all chromosomes in proportion to their sizethe largest chromosome being represented by the most segments, and so onand therefore we can predict the number of segments we expect to see from each chromosome of origin.In a pregnant person, some of this cell-free DNA is fetal DNA from the placenta. In the epiphany that spawned NIPT, Hong Kongbased researcher Dennis Lo realized that even though fetal DNA is only a small part of the whole, the fetal genome can be accurately assessed if the numbers are precise enough because any underrepresentation or overrepresentation of a given chromosome is clearly coming from the fetus. After all, the pregnant persons chromosomal status is known, so their contribution to the cell-free DNA in the sample is entirely predictable.Thats a safe assumption almost all the time. But from the earliest days of NIPT, there were rare instances of abnormal results that could not be explained by variations in fetal DNA. Sheetal Parmar, senior vice president of medical affairs for womens health at Natera, who has been at the NIPT lab since it began testing in 2013, recalls that it was clinicians who first drew their attention to a possible link between certain oddball results and malignancies in pregnant people. It started with people coming back to us and saying, Hey, this particular patient had this finding and has been diagnosed with cancer, Parmar says.But anecdotes arent evidence, and this left the labs in an awkward spot. Telling a person they have canceran unknown cancer of unknown origin, requiring unspecified follow-up, which insurance will be unlikely to cover is not something to be done lightly, much less when the person involved is pregnant. NIPT tests showing multiple missing or added chromosomes, which labs had begun to suspect might be a potential indication of cancer, were officially labelled nonreportable results. Unofficially, genetic counselors and obstetricians have told stories of off-the-record phone calls from friends at labs whispering suggestions that a certain patient should get checked out.In 2019, convinced that this cancer signal was real, Diana Bianchi, director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, began a study intended to provide clearer guidance to labs and clinicians about how and when to follow up on these atypical results. Called IDENTIFY (Incidental Detection of Maternal Neoplasia through Non-invasive Cell-Free DNA Analysis), the study offered a thorough evaluation to any patient currently pregnant or less than two years postpartum who didnt already have a cancer diagnosis and whose results were discordantthat is, cases in which the fetus seemed fine, yet the pregnant persons NIPT results showed a pattern of extra and missing chromosomes that should have been impossible in a viable pregnancy.Many were skeptical. Our colleagues at the National Cancer Institute thought we were on a fishing expedition, Bianchi recalled. They thought we were out of our minds. But if IDENTIFY was a fishing expedition, it was one that caught a whale. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine published in December 2024 reported on the first 107 IDENTIFY participants. All of them were pregnant or recently postpartum; their mean age was 33. I met and talked with some of them, Bianchi told me. Their physical exams were generally unremarkable. They were pregnant, glowing. Of the 107, some 52almost 50 percenthad cancer. By the time the paper was written, seven of them were dead.Even before their first report, IDENTIFY provided labs with a talking point and a resource they could offer to primary care providers, who, as Bianchi notes, typically have minimal education in contemporary genetics and may not understand the significance of these unusual results. Illumina, another market leader in NIPT, began adding a note in 2019 about the association with maternal neoplasia, both benign and malignant for any patient with nonreportable results. Susan Hancock, a staff genetic counselor at Illumina, says that Illumina has reinforced this with phone calls to practitioners to give them information on IDENTIFY. It was important to let them know about the association, Hancock explains, because, realistically, many providers just were not aware.Nobody goes to a results session for prenatal testing expecting to be told that they might have cancer. On a Friday afternoon late in 2022 when Erica Lucca got a call to say that her NIPT results might indicate a problem, she assumed it was about the baby. Lucca and her husband spent the weekend panicking, freaking out. When the geneticist she saw on Monday suggested that it was most likely a maternal issue, she was inclined to be dismissive. Lucca was 33 years old and in the best shape of her life, just finishing up an uneventful first trimester. I could easily have been, like, No, nothings wrong with me, I feel fine.But Lucca, who lives in Washington, D.C., decided to take the advice she was given and enroll in the IDENTIFY study, conveniently located in nearby Bethesda, Md., a decision she now credits with saving her life. An eight-centimeter mass in her chest, discovered via a full-body magnetic resonance imaging scan, turned out to be a particularly aggressive form of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Less than two weeks later, she started chemotherapy.Pursuing treatment during pregnancy was not an easy decision. When you're pregnant, youre supposed to, like, avoid deli meats and avoid drinking alcohol, she says. But somehow, youre okay to take chemotherapy and sit for an infusion every three weeks for eight hours? Its kind of a difficult concept to accept. Still, multiple doctors told Lucca that her baby would be finebut she might not be if she delayed treatment. Her final infusion was on April 28, 2023. Two weeks later her son was born. Almost two years later, both mother and son are thriving.It was not easy taking care of a newborn while recovering from chemotherapy. The first two months or so, Lucca says, I dont know how I survived that. But her conversation with Scientific American is peppered with expressions of gratitude. Its hard to feel lucky about having cancer at 33 in the middle of your first pregnancy, yet Lucca is aware that, in so many ways, it could have been worse. Without the test, she might not have known until many months later, when the symptoms arose that are associated with advanced disease.Early and nonspecific signs of cancer might have been written off as pregnancy-related complaints, something Bianchi and her team observed frequently in the IDENTIFY cohort. Luccas obstetrician might not have known to send her to genetics; her geneticist might not have been familiar with the IDENTIFY study. If it had not been close at hand, she might not have been so easily persuaded to go get checked out. (IDENTIFY covers travel costs for eligible participants, but patients may still struggle with time off and childcare.)Cancer during pregnancy is rare, though it is on the rise in many countries, along with the average age of childbearing. In the U.S., an alarming trend shows an increasing incidence of colon cancer in younger adults. In the IDENTIFY study, colorectal cancer was the second most common diagnosis after lymphoma.) The majority of people with cancer in the IDENTIFY cohort were entirely asymptomatic and would not have come to medical attention for months or even years, meaning that the test itself has the potential to increase the number of cancer cases diagnosed during pregnancy through earlier detection.. Bianchi estimates that hundreds of pregnant women per year receiving suspicious NIPT results would benefit from appropriate follow-up care.But in the real world, it is easy for these opportunities to intervene to be lost. In the spring of 2023, a woman in Chicago, much like Lucca, was referred to genetics by her obstetrician for routine discussion of atypical NIPT results. Her report included a note that genetic counselor Divya Ramachandra had never seen before: risk of maternal malignancy. Still, it wasnt bolded or marked in red, and the report mentioned other risks as well. It was in this long line of possibilities, Ramachandra explains.Ramachandra and her patient discussed the mention of maternal malignancy and, absent any guidelines, she suggested that they order genetic testing for the pregnant woman herself. Hesitantly, the expectant mother agreed to submit a request for testing to her insurance. That request was subsequently denied. To move ahead, they would have to appeal. The patient told me shed give us a call about whether she wanted to complete testing or not, Ramachandra explained. She didnt give us a call, and I didnt chase her down.Three months later, Ramachandra heard from a medical geneticist who worked in the hospitals lab. The woman, now in her third trimester, had just been diagnosed with lymphoma. Do you remember this patient? she remembers the doctor asking. How did she go so far undiagnosed when she had these results early on?She wasnt trying to accuse me of anything, Ramachandra said, but of course you feel like, Oh my god! This is my fault. Distressed, Ramachandra called the lab that had done the NIPT. And thats when I found out that they had called the obstetricians office multiple times to tell them about their really strong concerns about malignancy. Genetic counselors at the lab had sent over a flyer about the IDENTIFY study to the ordering physician, but it hadnt made it to Ramachandra.Every practitioner has cases that haunt them, and for Ramachandra, this is the one. If she had known, would she have pushed harder? Could they have gotten insurance to cover the testing? Would they have found an oncologist willing to do a workup on a pregnant woman with no sign of cancer except a strange result on a prenatal screening test? People are a little hesitant when it comes to pregnant patients, Ramchandra explains.The professional discomfort is real. I think obstetricians are not used to having patients who have cancer and oncologists are not used to having pregnant patients, Lucca says. Luckily for her, she was able to find a tertiary care center where all her providers worked as a team. Every time I had an infusion, Lucca recalls, someone from maternity would come over and take the fetal heartbeat, just for reassurance that everything was okay.But unfamiliarity and fear can affect the care that pregnant patients receive. One of our challenges in the beginning of the study, Bianchi says, was to find interventional radiologists who were comfortable doing a diagnostic biopsy, wherever it was, if the woman was pregnant. Eventually, the IDENTIFY team was able to establish a referral network for biopsies despite what Bianchi calls a historical culture of dont touch a pregnant woman.A part of the message of IDENTIFY, Bianchi tells me, is that cancer during pregnancy can be treated. As Lucca learned, chemotherapy after the first trimester can be done with minimal risk to the fetus. In Belgium, Bianchi adds, radiologists have even developed a work-around for the use of contrast dye in MRIs, which is contraindicated for pregnant people.. They have women drink an enormous amount of pineapple juice, she explains. Theres something in pineapple juice that acts as a contrast agent.But in some cases, says Reshma Jagsi, a bioethicist and radiation oncologist at the Emory University School of Medicine, the treatment that provides the best odds of survival may necessitate a therapeutic abortionif, for example, a patient with a pelvic malignancy requires radiation treatment. In states with strict antiabortion laws, a mere discussion of abortion could put the provider at risk of civil or even criminal sanctions. Though most states have exceptions for the life of the pregnant person, Jagsi notes that many hospitals legal counsels have taken a very conservative, very restrictive approach to interpreting those exemptions. In some cases, its just having a chilling effect because physicians dont know what it means. And understandably they are afraid of the risks.Even in the absence of legal jeopardy, appropriate follow-up care for individuals with nonreportable results may require some unfamiliar stepping out of silos. Klugman notes that insurance companies are likely to require that oncologists, not obstetricians, order follow-up testing. Are the oncologists ready for this? No way, she adds. What IDENTIFY proves, Bianchi observes, is that frontline obstetric providers need to take these results seriously. As Klugman and others suggest, getting them potentially life-saving care may require that obstetricians, insurance executives and perhaps even politicians take these results seriously as well.Many medical tests have unanticipated findings, but few are quite as startling as this: a screening test for the fetus, a technique now integrated into routine prenatal care, that has unexpectedly manifested the power to identify cancer in a pregnant person long before it would become apparent on any physical exam. It was a happenstance for me, and I hope it is a happenstance for other women, too, Lucca says. It just feels like magic.

OpinionMarch 24, 20255 min readSetting Parental Controls Is Not As Complicated As You ThinkProgramming devices with parental controls may seem daunting, but they can help parents ensure what their kids find on TV and the Internet is age-appropriateBy Jacqueline Nesi fotostorm/Getty ImagesRecently I was settling onto the couch with my three-year-old after a long day, ready for our nightly viewing of Bluey. Clad in his favorite Octonauts pajamas and clutching a stuffed dog, he pulled a blanket up over our legs and fixed his eyes on the TV screen.I grabbed the remote and waited for the screen to blink to life.Oh no. 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 TV was set to the Movie Hub channel, and my son was suddenly watching a couple entering a bedroom, sharing a soft kiss, with romantic music playing, growing louder and faster. My son looked on blankly and asked, Wheres Bluey?I ripped off the blanket, fumbled for the remote and frantically smashed buttons, racing against the clock. Finally, the Bluey theme song mercifully rang out. I vowed then to change our TV settings, making our new default channel something more benign.I am a psychologist studying how digital media affects kids, and the author of a popular newsletter on parenting and technology, and still there are times when my kids screen time goes awry. They see things they shouldnt have. They spend too much time in front of that screen. They stumble on videos Id rather they did not.One solution that has helped me keep things age-appropriate? Parental controls.Some 72 percent of U.S. parents of children ages five to 11 have used parental controls to manage their childrens screen use, yet when I talk to parents about setting up parental controls, the most common sentiment I hear is, Whats the point? Theyre overwhelming to set up, and my kids will just find a way around them. Its a losing battle, so why bother?Heres why you bother. Parental controls are like speed bumps. Yes, kids can get around them, but theyre an important first line of defense. They offer a helpful, though imperfect, barrier between our children and the vast world of TV and the Internet. And they can slow our kids down as they enter that world, reminding them to proceed with caution.Our children are growing up in a world saturated with media: phones, tablets, computers, TVs and more. Children up to age eight spend an average of two hours, 27 minutes per day with screen media. For tweens (ages 8 to 12), its more than five hours per day, and for teens (13 to 17), more than eight hours. By the time theyre four years old, the majority (58 percent) of kids have their own tablet, and by 12, the majority (71 percent) have their own smartphone.As our kids digital lives become more varied and complex, so, too, do the options for parental controls. Parents can set controls on devices, for example, via built-in iPad or smart TV settings or external parental monitoring apps like Bark or Aura. They can set controls within specific apps and games, like YouTube or Roblox. They can even set protections on their home WiFI networks. For each of these options, varied functions are available, too. Parental controls can block or filter content, limit screen time, monitor contacts and communication, and track location.Every child is different, and when it comes to managing technology, what works for one family may not work for another. Appropriate parental controls also depend on a childs age and maturity. Among young kids (up to age five), just 4 percent of parents use software to limit screen time, and 20 percent use it to limit the content their child sees. These numbers may be low because many parents are using devices together with their children at this age, or at least keeping a closer eye. As kids get older and begin spending more time independently using screens, the numbers increase. Among parents of children ages five to eight, 30 percent use software to limit screen time, and 56 percent use software to limit content. And as children move through adolescence, parents tend to loosen the reins. This may stem from parents desire to provide teenagers more age-appropriate independence and privacythough it may also be driven by a feeling that theres little they can do. Among parents of 13- and 14-year-olds, 62 percent limit smartphone time, but only 37 percent of parents of 15- to 17-year-olds do the same.Its easy to feel overwhelmed by parental control options, so here are the basics to get you started:To manage all devices on your home Wi-Fi network: Most Internet service providers, like Netgear and Verizon provide options to block certain websites and limit screen time across all devices on the network. The upside is that you can manage high-level settings all in one place. The downside is that these settings no longer apply when a device leaves the home.To manage an individual device, like a tablet or phone: With an Android device, you can use Family LinkFamily SharingAnother option is a third-party app like Bark or Aura, which offers similar protections, along with the ability to monitor conversations and receive alerts for potential risky activity. Just avoid using these tools to spy on your child; all plans for monitoring should be clearly communicated in advance. For an older child or teen, youll want to explain your rationale (e.g., Its my job as a parent to keep you safe), describe the plan (One way Im going to check in on your safety is by using this app), and clarify that its not a replacement for communication (If you run into anything on your phone that youre confused or worried about, I hope youll come talk to me, and I will do the same if Im concerned about you).To manage specific apps: Many apps, including social media platforms and games, offer parental controls with varied capabilities, including filtering content, monitoring or restricting contacts, limiting time, and turning off certain features. Here are some of the most popular:YouTube offers a separate YouTube Kids app designed for younger children, and supervised YouTube accounts for preteens. For teens, your options are more limited, but one is to turn on Restricted Mode to screen out mature content.Instagram offers supervised accounts through its Family CenterTikTok offers similar options through Family PairingSnapchat also offers parental controls through a Family CenterRoblox offers parental controls on content, spending, time, and communications.Minecraft has similar parental control options.So do parental controls work? A recent review of the research suggests its a mixed bag. Some studies find evidence of beneficial outcomes of parental controls, like childrens reduced online risks, improved time management, and better family communication about digital habits. Other studies find downsides: increased family conflict or distrust, childrens lower feelings of privacy, and restricted access to educational or social opportunities online.Ultimately, the research concludes, the efficacy of parental controls depends on the context. They will never be a standalone, set-it-and-forget-it solution. They are far from perfect. But in combination with other critical media parenting strategieslike having regular, open conversations with our children about their digital lives and setting reasonable, intentional limits on usethey can be helpful for many families.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

March 21, 20253 min readStunning Antarctic Sea Creatures Discovered after Iceberg Breaks AwayA calving iceberg exposed a region that never before had been seen by human eyes, revealing a vibrant, thriving ecosystemBy Ashley Balzer Vigil edited by Andrea ThompsonA large sponge, a cluster of anemones, and other life is seen nearly 230 meters deep at an area of the seabed that was very recently covered by the George VI Ice Shelf in Antarctica. Sponges can grow very slowly, sometimes less than two centimeters a year, so the size of this specimen suggests this community has been active for decades, perhaps even hundreds of years. ROV SuBastian/Schmidt Ocean InstituteIn H. P. Lovecrafts chilling science-fiction novella At the Mountains of Madness, a group of researchers uncovers the ruins of an ancient alien civilization while exploring beneath Antarctica. Now a real team has investigated what lies beneath some of the frozen continents floating ice, and its findings are certainly otherworldly.Scientists onboard the Schmidt Ocean Institutes research vessel Falkor (too) sailed to Antarctica to study the nearby seafloor, the creatures that live there and the way climate change is affecting Antarctic ice and the ecosystems that evolved around it. But their plan was sidetracked after an iceberg the size of Chicago broke away from a nearby ice shelf in Bellingshausen Sea on January 13.The ice front left behind where the iceberg calved off in the Bellingshausen Sea.Alex Ingle/Schmidt Ocean InstituteOn 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.That event presented an opportunity that was too good to pass up: the chance to explore the seafloor below the icebergs original locationlike overturning a rock or log in the woods to see what creatures lie hidden underneath. There was a sense of going into a complete unknown, says the expeditions co-chief scientist Sasha Montelli of University College London. We thought we might see some life there, but it was really surprising to see the degree to which life was thriving in such a hostile environment. And it wasnt just existing there but had apparently been sustained for a very long time.The researchers sent their underwater robot SuBastian into the deep and found an ecosystem filled with anemones that look like Dr. Seusss Truffula Trees, along with sea spiders, icefish, octopuses. Some of the creatures that are new species, and many may only be found near Antarctica. Beyond simply being remote, the continent has been isolated for millions of years by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which surrounds it like a moat around a castle.An octopus rests on the seafloor 1150 meters deep in the Bellingshausen Sea.ROV SuBastian/Schmidt Ocean InstituteThe tentacles of a solitary hydroid drift in currents 360 meters deep at an area of the seabed that was very recently covered by the George VI Ice Shelf. Solitary hydroids are related to corals, jellyfish, and anemones, but do not form colonies.ROV SuBastian/Schmidt Ocean InstituteBecause the Bellingshausen Sea is not much explored in terms of deep-sea biodiversity, we expect many new species from the expedition. And in fact, we have already confirmed some, including snails, polychaete worms, crustaceans and even fish, says the expeditions co-chief scientist Patricia Esquete of the Center for Environmental and Marine Studies and the University of Aveiro in Portugal.The researchers also encountered large vaselike sponges whose size hints at their age. Based on the size of the animals, the communities we observed have been there for decades, maybe even hundreds of years, Esquete said in a recent press release.The observations draw sharp contrast to previous studies of ecology below the ice, which either dropped cameras down through holes drilled in the ice or took place years after an iceberg calved. Those studies indicated that the ecosystems seemed to be quite impoverished, with a limited number of species, Esquete says. Now we know that under ice shelves, at least in the first 15 kilometers from the frontthe newly exposed area the new expeditions researchers were able to explore after the iceberg calvedthere are diverse, well-established ecosystems.A squid eats a fish at a depth of nearly 950 meters in the Bellingshausen Sea.ROV SuBastian/Schmidt Ocean InstitutePatricia Esquete inspects a suspected new species of isopod that was sampled from the bottom of the Bellingshausen Sea. It will take scientists years to describe all of the new species found during this expedition.Alex Ingle/Schmidt Ocean InstituteLess certain is how this vibrant ecosystem will fare now that the iceberg has broken away. Many deep-sea dwellers are adapted to unchanging conditions found in their environment, so they are highly sensitive to even small environmental shifts. For the life-forms uncovered in Bellingshausen Sea, the dramatic loss of their former iceberg ceiling may rock their ecosystem.Montelli says that the floating ice shelf that the iceberg broke away from has retreated inland by about 25 miles (40 km) over the past 50 yearsjust one example of accelerating ice loss on the continent. The ice loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet is a major contributor to sea level rise worldwide, Montelli said in the recent press release. Our work is critical for providing longer-term context of these recent changes, improving our ability to make projections of future change.

March 21, 20253 min readCan Earths Rotation Generate Electricity? Physicists Divided over Controversial IdeaExperiments suggest an unusual magnetic material could help harness energy from Earths rotation. But not everyone is convincedBy Elizabeth Gibney & Nature magazine A device can supposedly create a tiny current by manipulating Earth's magnetic field as the planet rotates. photovideostock/Getty ImagesElectricity can be generated from the energy of Earth rotating through its own magnetic fieldaccording to a provocative claim put forward by physicists this week.The findings are controversial but intriguing, researchers told Nature. The effect was identified only in a carefully crafted device and generated just 17 microvoltsa fraction of the voltage released when a single neuron firesmaking it hard to verify that some other effect isnt causing the observations.If the phenomenon is real and the device could be scaled up, it could generate emission-free power while remaining static, which could be useful in remote locations or for medical applications. The authors published their findings in Physical Review Research and presented them at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Anaheim, California.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 idea is somewhat counter-intuitive and has been argued since Faraday, says Paul Thomas, an emeritus physicist at the University of WisconsinEau Claire. But the experiments, led by Christopher Chyba, a physicist at Princeton University in New Jersey, are very carefully done, he adds. I find it very convincing and remarkable.Others agree that the results are striking, but remain sceptical. Rinke Wijngaarden, a retired physicist previously at the Free University of Amsterdam, has followed the authors assertions since 2016 and failed to find the effect in his own experiments in 2018. He finds the work very interesting, but is still convinced that the theory of Chyba et al. cannot be correct.Planet powerIn theory, the device would work in a similar fashion to an electrical power station, in which passing a conductor through a magnetic field causes electrons to move, creating a current. As Earth rotates and part of its magnetic field remains static (at least according to a 1912 proof), a conductor on its surface would move through some components of the field.Normally, this would not create a current, because in a uniform field such as Earths, electrons feeling this push would rearrange themselves to create an opposing electric force, ultimately leaving charges static (this does not apply in places where the force a conductor feels is constantly changing, as in a generator).But Chyba and his colleagues say that they have found a loophole. Using a complex calculation, they showed that certain materialswith unusual properties and when shaped into cylindrical tubecould channel Earths magnetic field into a strange configuration. This, they argue, would create a magnetic push that the electrostatic force inside the device could not cancel out, generating a current.To demonstrate their theory, the researchers crafted a hollow cylinder made of a soft magnetic material containing manganese, zinc and iron. While controlling for other effects, they looked for any voltage and current running through the device. The result verified their predictions: they observed a tiny 17-V voltage that depended on the set-ups orientation with respect to Earths magnetic field. The voltage was zero when they used a solid chunk of the conductor, rather than a hollow tube.The observed voltages are so small that there are many potential spurious causes available, says Wijngaarden, but he points out that Chybas team has gone to great lengths to try and avoid other effects that could mimic their predicted phenomenon, such as temperature variations.Verification neededMore evidence is needed before anyone can conclude that the voltage truly results from Earths rotation, says Wijngaarden. Physicists could test whether the experiment gives different results at different latitudes, as predictions suggest. These comparisons would not be easy, but are really needed in view of the surprising result, he says.If another group can verify the results, Chyba says that the next step will be to try and scale up the device enough to generate a useful amount of energy. Our equations show how such scaling might be done, but that is very different from a demonstration that it is actually possible, he says.Even if it works, the method will not generate energy from thin air. It would tap Earths kinetic energy and, in doing so, cause the planets spinning to slow over time although only slightly. If the technique provided all of Earths electricity needs, which was around 11 trillion watts in 2022, this would slow the planets spin by 7 milliseconds over the next century, the authors calculate. This is similar to the change in speed caused by natural phenomena such as the Moons pull and changing dynamics inside the planets core.This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on March 19, 2025.

OpinionMarch 21, 20255 min readWalking Shouldnt Be So Dangerous in the U.S.About 20 people die every day in the U.S. after being hit by a car. To make walking safer, we need a big cultural shift in how we view pedestrian safetyBy Megha Satyanarayana Houston Police Department officers investigate the site where a motorist driving a pickup truck struck and killed a pedestrian in 2017. Trucks and SUVs are among the most dangerous cars in the U.S. for pedestrians. Godofredo A. Vasquez/Houston Chronicle via Getty ImagesI like to walk. In my big southern city, its a good way to get some exercise when the weather is nice or to run a nearby errand without having to waste gas or deal with parking. Im not alone; on the big street I typically take, other pedestrians are always around me, either out of necessity or pleasure.But so are the cars, zooming down that same street. Drivers coast through stop signs or flat out ignore flashing, newly installed crosswalk lights at one major intersection. Ive seen more near-misses at that intersection than I care to rememberdrivers who screech to a halt for a pedestrian in the crosswalk while the yellow beacons blink above, or who swerve around walkers rather than simply stopping, or my favorite, the ones who just speed through the crosswalk, forcing pedestrians to stop or jump out of the way.Ive been one of those near misses. It was terrifying. My heart now pounds every time I get to that block. I keep waiting for a neighborhood alert that someone has been struck. Or killed. Its so dumb that I have to worry about this. But I do. According to data analyzed by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers in the latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, about 20 pedestrians are killed each day in the U.S. by someone driving a car. That was 7,522 pedestrians in 2022. Those researchers note that other countries pedestrian fatality rates are going down. Ours is really not.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.This is absurd. We should be able to walk in the U.S. without the fear of getting mowed down. But we cant, largely because the problem has now become an ideological turf war. We cannot tamper with car culture, never mind its role in fueling climate change. People in rural areas do not walk, goes the thinking, so why do they need sidewalks? Never mind that 7.5 percent of rural residents said they do as a form of transportation, and 56 percent said they did for leisure. And as is often the case in this country, if an issue affects people who are poor, or not white, its not a problem worth solving.We need to stop hitting people with our cars. To make this happen, the culture shift we need has to come from everywherepublic officials, drivers, automakers and government agencies. The U.S. Department of Transportation describes this as a Safe System Approacheveryone working together to reduce car-related fatalities. And it makes sense.But, culturally, for this to really work, we must stop falling prey to ridiculous tribal cries that paint these problems in absolutes and keep us from making progress. Liberals drive SUVs. Conservatives want sidewalks. There is no us versus them if everyone remembers that we all want the same thingthe ability to walk when we need to, when we want to, safely. South Korea (through lower speed limits and public awareness campaigns) and Poland (through enforcement and bigger penalties on speeding) saw drastic drops in pedestrian death rates from 2013 to 2022. Why cant we?One of these absolutes is that idea that having walkable cities or towns means no cars, fewer cars, extra taxes or tolls on carsbasically any notion that feels like a punishment to car drivers. For many parts of the U.S., banishing cars simply isnt realistic in the absence of comprehensive public transportation and high-density redesigns that often lack political or taxpayer backing. So can we make these places, both the rich and poor zip codes, more walkable by making those roads saferbetter lighting, bigger sidewalks, more pronounced crosswalks? Yes, of course we can. This doesnt mean those areas should eschew public transit and mixed-use development, but it does mean improving whats there, in addition to developing something new.Another notion that has to go is treating walkability as an enticement solely for yuppies, a box to check off when deciding what urban condo you want to rent. Walkability is a civil rights issue, something that people outside New York, San Francisco and other compact, dense cities deservesafe streets to get to work, to school, to child care, to the store, whether on foot, wheelchair, whatever. Wider sidewalks and good lighting are fundamental. Too often we instead treat walkability as a marketing feature rather than a survival one, a promise broken to the least powerful people in our communities. And so where are the best sidewalks, the brightest lights and the biggest speed bumps in many cities in the U.S.? Not in the places that need them most.Conversely, we treat cars as a necessity. But cars are increasingly expensive, even leaving aside tariff drama. Many Americans cannot afford a used car, let alone a new one. In February a typical car payment in the U.S. was $748. People cant afford insurance. Gas. Repairs. Then, for people who can afford a car, older cars have fewer safety features on them, including the sensors that might warn of a possible collision. And while we drive, we are on our phones. In 2021, 644 pedestrians, cyclists and other people outside cars were killed by distracted drivers in the U.S.During the last months of the Biden administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposed a new rule requiring cars to make design and safety changes to minimize head injuries in pedestrian collisions. The rule would especially apply to pickup trucks and large SUVs, the most popular cars in the U.S., and among the most dangerous. In November 2024, the Department of Transportation, which houses NHTSA, asked for more time for public comment. That comment period would have ended in mid-December. I asked the now-Trump-led NHTSA earlier this week what the status was of the rulewas it still in deliberation? They wouldn't confirm and directed me to a docket page with more than 5,800 submitted comments but not much else. And automakers? Some argue that automatic braking systems are enough. The evidence suggests otherwise, showing that these larger cars are killing more pedestrians.Where does this leave us? Public officials must understand where people need to walk and make those places safer. Drivers, fighting distraction and deadlines, must look out for pedestrians. Automakers must take pedestrian safety into account for once, calling off their lobbyists trying to block sensible regulations that would save lives. Walking is nonpartisan. Anyone who tells you differently needs to curb themselves.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

March 21, 20253 min readHegseth Orders Elimination of Climate Defense Planning, but Still Wants Extreme Weather PreparationThe Defense secretary aims to purge climate work from the Pentagon. But critics say his carve-out for weather resiliency misses the pointBy Scott Waldman & E&E News U.S Air Force airmen drive through flood waters caused by Hurricane Matthew at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in October 2016 in Goldsboro, North Carolina. US Air Force Photo/Alamy Stock PhotoCLIMATEWIRE | A new memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doubles down on his campaign to eliminate the Pentagon's work on climate calling for a review of both mission statements and military planning documents to ensure there are no references to climate change and related subjects.But the missive, issued Monday, identifies several key exceptions.It makes room for efforts to harden U.S. military installations against extreme weather. And it says the climate purge shouldnt stop the Pentagon from assessing weather-related impacts on operations, mitigating weather-related risks (or) conducting environmental assessments, according to the document obtained exclusively by POLITICOs E&E News.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.Those exceptions, critics say, underscore the shortsighted nature of Hegseths attack on what he calls the climate distraction.Global warming is intensifying extreme weather events such as hurricanes, floods and wildfires. And the rapid transformation of Earth is altering the Pentagons mission in ways both big and small.A hotter planet is raising the possibility of conflict in areas that could lose access to resources such as water. And more dangerous extreme weather events can affect military operations and deal massive damage to military bases and equipment.We design military facilities and buildings to last 50 years, said Will Rogers, who served as the senior climate adviser to the secretary of the Army in the Biden administration.The climate is going to be different 50 years from now," he added. "You don't want to base it based on the weather tomorrow.Rogers warned the new memo could have a chilling effect, too, on military officials who plan for high-risk situations, including extreme weather conditions. And he said it could deter career staff from preparing U.S. armed forces for a changed planet Earth.Those concerns, however, haven't deterred Hegseth, who has made it a priority to root out "woke" policies in the military. There is now a Pentagon-wide initiative to ensure the elimination of Climate distraction, according to the memo.In a video released on X on Thursday, Hegseth announced the DOD had cut a total of $800 million in what he deemed wasteful spending. Some of that money possibly up to $100 million worth went to climate-related work, including an effort to decarbonize Naval ships and scientific research into climate conditions fueling unrest in Africa.They are not a good use of taxpayer dollars, he said.His memo closely follows Project 2025, the conservative policy proposal overseen by the Heritage Foundation.The document describes the Defense Department as a deeply troubled institution because it has a pervasive politically driven top-down focus on progressive social policies that emphasize matters like so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion and climate change, often to the detriment of the Armys core warfighting mission.But Hegseths memo goes further, said John Conger, who served as principal deputy undersecretary of Defense in the Obama administration.And that kind of attitude could put future U.S. warfighters at risk, he said. As an example, Conger cited the changing ecosystem of the Arctic, where global warming has opened up new opportunities for travel in areas once covered in ice.Russia and China both have significantly escalated their presence in the region. Refusing to prepare for a new Arctic landscape would put the United States at a disadvantage.Conger added the Hegseth memo is so vague that it can be interpreted by Defense officials to blindly target a lot of useful programs that could be eliminated even though they have nothing to do with cutting emissions or reducing fossil fuel use.They appear to be getting rid of climate by narrowing both the vocabulary and the definition, he said.The Defense Department did not respond to questions about the memo. But Hegseths assault on climate stands out, even when compared to President Donald Trump's first term.During the first Trump administration, senior Defense officials treated climate change as a threat multiplier. James Mattis, who served for a time as Trump's Defense secretary, called climate change a challenge that requires a broader, whole-of-government response.And the Pentagon has long incorporated climate science into its planning, operations and military readiness.Climate science and modeling can save billions of taxpayer dollars by ensuring that military installations are prepared for rising sea levels, increased flooding, droughts, extreme heat conditions and other consequences of global warming.Hegseths memo, however, sees it differently.Climate change related considerations are unrelated to the Department's mission, the memo states.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

March 21, 20255 min readThe Science behind Tariffs and How They WorkPresident Donald Trump is threatening steep tariffs on virtually all imports. Heres what that means and what economics research suggests would be the impactBy Meghan Bartels edited by Jeanna BrynerContainer port, Shenzhen, China. Yinwei Liu/Getty ImagesConfusion over tariffs has largely shaped the first months of President Donald Trumps second term. He has repeatedly announced 25 percent tariffs on imports from U.S. neighbors and allies Canada and Mexico, then temporarily delayed and reduced them. Trump has also targeted China, and here he has been less lenient: in February he implemented a 10 percent tariff, and this month he doubled that. He also raised the possibility that steep tariffs on most imports globally will be implemented in April. The results have been uncertainty in the stock market and widespread confusion about which tariffs are actually in effect at any given time.But there is also a deeper confusion about the policy: What are tariffs, really, and what do experts know about their impacts? It turns out that the verdict on effects is relatively clear: Economists know that they are very inefficient; we know that they are very bad for consumers, says Luisa Blanco, an economist at Pepperdine University.Many countries, including the U.S., have historically imposed tariffs as high as 20 percent on imports as a tactic to protect local producers, but this has generally fallen out of favor as free trade has become the global norm. The U.S., in line with peer nations such as Japan and European Union members, has maintained some small tariffs on specific goods, such as passenger cars, that nations under free-trade agreements are exempt from.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.And during his first term in the White House from 2017 until 2021, Trump implemented tariffs on solar panels, which are primarily produced in China, and on select Chinese industries, including medical and aerospace production. His successor from 2021 until January 2025, then president Joe Biden, kept most of those policies in place and even added tariffs on other China-made products, including electric vehicles and medical equipment. But Trumps favored approach involves using far higher ratesapparently less of an economic tactic than a foreign policy one.Scientific American spoke with Blanco about the science behind tariffs and the types of ripple effects these taxes can have on peoples daily lives.How do tariffs work?Conceptually, heres how economists think about trade: In an economically ideal world, every nation produces only the goods it can make most efficiently. The nation consumes what it needs of these products, then sells any surplus to other nations that dont produce these items as efficiently. The proceeds from those sales then fund imports of goods that the nation cant produce as efficiently.Its a mutually beneficial scenario that plays to each nations strengths. Both countries actually benefit by having access to more products, more goods, than if they just tried to produce everything themselves, Blanco says. This is the kind of free-trade situation fostered by pacts such as the United StatesMexico-Canada Agreement, which in July 2020 replaced the North America Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.A simple way to think about an economic market is that producers and importers are willing to sell varying amounts of a good for varying prices, and customers are willing to buy that good for a range of prices. In a free market, buyers and sellers continuously perform a sort of indirect negotiation that determines the retail value of a good.Some imported goods can cost more than domestically produced goods, but only if customers value them enough to pay more for them. (Consider a product such as Italian olive oil.) Other imported goods, such as T-shirts imported to the U.S. from China, cost less than domestic goods because the exporting company can produce them for far less than the cost of transporting those goods.A tariff interferes with this free-market scenario. Its basically a tax, but rather than a tax on a particular type of product (such as alcohol or gasoline), its a tax on importseither from one country or across the board.What is the impact of tariffs?Tariffs provide income to the government that applies them, although even after existing tariffs levied by Trump and Biden, the federal government last year collected about 30 times more revenue via individual income taxes than through tariffs.Traditionally, tariffs are meant to keep production at home. They artificially raise the price of imported products, allowing domestic manufacturers to charge higher prices without losing as many customers as they would if they raised prices without tariffs in place. That makes it easier for local producers to compete on goods that the U.S. does have a competitive advantage in producing. Even sellers not subject to a tariff can raise prices. For instance, after then president Barack Obama implemented a three-year tariff on China-made tires in 2009, tires produced domestically and imported from countries other than China became significantly more expensive as well, according to research published in 2022 in Applied Economics.And it is customers who ultimately bear the biggest burden of tariffs becauseto simplifythey can either pay the naturally higher price of the U.S.-made goods or the artificially higher price of the imported alternative; either way, the customer pays more. This result weighs on the economy, Blanco says. Tariffs actually create a deadweight loss in which the consumer loses more than the producer gains, she explains.Of course, the real marketplace is much more complicated and interconnected than what these explanations can encompass. For example, many goods have components that cross multiple borders multiple times. A product may be manufactured in the U.S. but rely on components sourced in a second country and processed in a thirdand these international journeys become even pricier when tariffs are added to the mix. There are definitely going to be huge distortions in the supply chain, Blanco says.The consequences add up. One analysis suggests that a 10 percent tariff on all international products and a 60 percent tariff on Chinese products could cut nearly $600 billion over four years from the U.S. gross domestic product, a common measurement of economic output, falling hardest in the earliest days.In addition, targeted nations, driven to protectionism by a trade partners initial move, often levy their own retaliatory tariffs. Sometimes tariffs escalate repeatedly into a trade war, like the one that has simmered between the U.S. and China since 2018. A retaliatory tariff against the U.S. can magnify the impacts of higher prices on U.S. consumers, but it can also hurt export opportunities for the nation despite being meant to protect its manufacturers.Effects can ripple through an entire economy. For example, one large-scale study that looked at tariffs implemented across 50 years in 151 countries from 1963 to 2014 found that the policies caused small increases in unemployment and inequality.Blanco particularly worries about people with lower incomes, who have the least padding in their household budgets when costs rise. These tariffs are going to be regressive taxes, she says. At the end of the day, we all have to buy groceries.

March 21, 20256 min readMath Reveals the Formula for a Hollywood BlockbusterMost movies follow one of six emotional arcs. Which one sells the most tickets?By Manon Bischoff edited by Daisy Yuhas bernardbodo/Getty ImagesWhat was the last movie you saw in theaters? I rarely go to the movies anymore, partly because I prefer TV seriesparticularly action shows with spies (recommendations welcome!). But I do go to the movies for real blockbusters, such as the Dune films. I have to admit, seeing an epic story on the big screen is still a special experience.In 2020 cinema-going plummeted amid the COVID pandemic. In the years since, attendance has been on the rise in many parts of the world but is still below prepandemic levels. Inflation, the rise of streaming services such as Netflix and a shift towards prestigious TV series may all play a part in these trends. The film industry is therefore under more pressure than ever to attract people to movie theaters. Math might be able to help.In 2020 British data scientist Ganna Pogrebna and her colleagues published a paper that analyzed the revenue, expenditure and popularity ratings of more than 6,000 different films. The findings mapped out story lines across movies and linked those narrative types with audience approval and money made.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.Storytelling: From Aristotle to HollywoodThe researchers study was based on an earlier analysis of literary works by researchers from the University of Vermont and University of Adelaide in Australia. Both studies built on the premise that the vast majority of stories can be mapped onto just a handful of narrative arcs.This idea has been around for some time. Some 2,300 years ago, the polymath Aristotle was already thinking about the construction of stories and how they can move audiences. And in the 20th century, Kurt Vonnegut examined the emotional progression of well-known tales by charting out the sadness or joy each story conveyed from beginning to end.Inspired by Vonneguts story shapes, the University of Vermont and University of Adelaide team fed 1,327 stories from Project Gutenbergs fiction collection to an algorithm and identified six dominant emotional arcs across narratives (spoilers for classic movies and books ahead):Rags to RichesManon Bischoff/Spektrum der Wissenschaft, restyled by Amanda MontaezThese stories start with a negative situation and a protagonist who must work their way out of it over time. A classic film example is Groundhog Day, in which the main character finds himself in the strange predicament of reliving the same day over and over, and his circumstances improve as he learns more and more from his situation.Tragedy (or Riches to Rags)Manon Bischoff/Spektrum der Wissenschaft, restyled by Amanda MontaezThis is the reverse arc. In tragedies, things starts positively and end negatively. Think of Romeo and Juliet: the couple are happy in their love at the beginning, but by the end, both protagonists are dead.Man in a HoleManon Bischoff/Spektrum der Wissenschaft, restyled by Amanda MontaezIn these stories, the protagonist is doing well, and then things take a negative turn, but by the end they are often in a more favorable situation than at the beginning. A classic example is The Godfather. The Corleone crime family is at the pinnacle of power at the start of the movie, but then the head of the family is seriously injured and his eldest son is murdered. The youngest son, the protagonist, then gains an unparalleled amount of power when he takes over the role of leader and is made the new godfather.IcarusManon Bischoff/Spektrum der Wissenschaft, restyled by Amanda MontaezThis arc inverts the Man in a Hole storyline. Think of Leonardo DiCaprios character in Titanic: a poor man falls in love on a glamorous adventure but perishes of hypothermia at the end. The eponymous character of The Great Gatsby also follows what starts like a Rags to Riches success story and concludes with his murder.CinderellaManon Bischoff/Spektrum der Wissenschaft, restyled by Amanda MontaezCinderella stories begin with a bad situation that initially improves for the protagonist, then hits an emotional descent but concludes with a happily ever after. Think of Babe, the little piglet from the eponymous movie who struggles to find his place on the farm but turns things around when he begins learning to herd sheep. Unfortunately, he then gets put in a dangerous situation while defending the flock. Happily, by the storys end, everything works out, and Babe wins a herding competition.OedipusManon Bischoff/Spektrum der Wissenschaft, restyled by Amanda MontaezThe emotional arc of Oedipus is the reverse of Cinderella. Things start well, but then theres a stroke of bad luck. The protagonist picks themselves up again only to ultimately end up in a bad situation. Examples of characters with these arcs include the doomed protagonists of Frankenstein, Moby Dick or Hamlet.Pogrebnas team wanted to find out whether feature films also follow these six emotional progressions and, if so, which structure pays off the most. The researchers downloaded the English subtitles of 6,174 films and then analyzed themsentence by sentencefor their emotional content. They assigned each word a score based on sentiment: 1 for a negative, 0 for neutral and +1 for positive. Then the researchers assigned each sentence an emotional value based on the words and scaled the sentence values to fall between 1 and +1. In order to compare films of different lengths, they processed the data such that each story boiled down to 100 individual data points.To group the narratives, the researchers needed a way to measure the distance between the emotional arcs of any two movies. According to the researchers, the difference between two arcs of tension with the respective sets of data points X and Y can be calculated as follows:With that equation, the researchers were able to compare the difference between the emotional trajectories of two films at any time point (t) in the narrative. Because the absolute value in the square root is squared, the sign does not play a role in the comparison; it is therefore irrelevant whether one curve runs above or below the otheronly their distance from each other matters.Using this measure, the experts were able to group the films with similar arcs. In that way, they confirmed that all of the movies they studied fell into one of the six emotional arcs that the earlier study had identified.Interestingly, movie genre often correlates with a storys emotional progression, they found. For example, horror films usually have a tragedy structure, whereas comedies follow Man in a Hole or Cinderella narratives. Biographies are often Rags to Riches, and thrillers tend to have a Man in a Hole structure.Which Films Are Most Successful?Pogrebnas team then collected estimated production and income data from a film industry data website called The Numbers, along with film ratings from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).First, the experts examined the domestic revenue generated by each filmthis was the only information available for all works studied. The Man in a Hole category performed best, grossing an average of $37.48 million, compared with $33.63 million in the second most successful category, Cinderella.Amanda MontaezPeople seem to go to the movies more for films in which the heroes suffer but ultimately receive happy endings. Intriguingly, the much simpler Rags to Riches arc generated the least revenue on average.But maybe the big winners were simply the most expensive films? The answer to that question is nuanced. The team found no correlation between budget and success for Man in a Hole stories. These films apparently play big regardless of dollars spent or genre.Tragedies, however, generate less money unless they have particularly high production costs (in the region of $100 million or more). This may explain the financial success of large historical dramas such as The Last Samurai or survival epics like Life of Pi, Pogrebnas team wrote in the paper.Which Films Are the Most Popular?When the experts looked at user ratings on IMDb, a different picture emerged:Amanda MontaezOn a scale of 1 to 10, with one being least favorable and 10 being most favorable, films with a Man in a Hole plot performed 0.19 points worse than Rags to Riches stories. In fact, ranking the film categories by rating forms a list that is almost the opposite of the result obtained when ranking by revenues.One reason the data are at odds could be that Man in a Hole tales draw more viewers and generally receive more ratings overalland IMDb users are more likely to leave a negative review than a positive one. But the Metascore on IMDba score from review aggregator Metacritic that is based on a weighted average of critics reviews of a filmechoes the user reviews for this story category. The Man in a Hole emotional trajectory does not produce the most liked movies, but generates the most talked about movies, the researchers wrote.Meanwhile tragedies fare best in reviews from critics, who seem to favor serious films rather than happy endings.With this information, the film industry can make data-driven decisions. To attract as many people as possible to the movie theater, filmmakers can produce more movies with a Man in a Hole setup. For critical acclaim, heart-tugging tragedies remain the best. But they should keep in mind that the audience still loves the simple upward promise of a rags-to-riches journey.

March 20, 2025The Neurosurgeon Who Advised Severance Breaks Down Its ScienceA neurosurgeon who has acted as a consultant for Severance explains the science behind the shows brain-altering procedureand whether it could ever become reality. Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific AmericanSUBSCRIBE TO Science QuicklyRachel Feltman: For Scientific Americans Science Quickly, Im Rachel Feltman. Today were talking about the science of Severance.What if instead of struggling to find work-life balance, you could completely separate your professional identity from your personal one? That question kicks off the Apple TV+ show Severance, which just wrapped up its second season.In the world of the show, a company called Lumon Industries requires certain employees to undergo its severance procedure, which its spokespeople say means youll never have to take work home with you again. It also means you have to get a microchip implanted into your brain.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.To help make the procedure and its effects as realistic as possible, the folks behind Severance brought on a real-life neurosurgeon to consult on the show. Vijay Agarwal is chief of the Skull-Base Tumor Center at Montefiore Einstein [at the Einstein College of Medicine]. We sat down with him to get the inside scoop on the science of severance.Before we get into that chat, just a brief spoiler warning: we did our best to avoid any super-specific spoilers for recent episodes, but wed recommend waiting until youve watched at least episode seven of season two before listening.Thanks so much for coming on to chat with us today.Vijay Agarwal: Yeah, my pleasure.Feltman: So tell me how you got involved with the show Severance and what thats entailed.Agarwal: You know, its sort of hard for people to believe, but it really was just a call out of the blue. Just one day at work I got a call that they were looking for someone for a concept for a show that hadnt come out yet. That was pre-COVID, in a very different world ...Feltman: Right.Agarwal: Than we live in now. And it was just as simple as that. It was just a thought at that stageyou know, We wanna develop a procedure that implants a chip that separates your work life from your social life, from your everyday life. And we were off to the races.Feltman: Yeah. What were your initial thoughts and reactions when you first heard that premise?Agarwal: I thought it was a very cool concept, and I think I just directly went into how that could be a reality. You know, one of the things that Ben Stiller was really strict on was that he wanted this to be as believable as possible ...Feltman: Mm.Agarwal: As real as possible. There are some sort of creative allowances that happen as part of this process, but he really wanted the science to be real and to be believable, and I think thats part of the reason that people have really bonded with the show and in particular the science.Feltman: Yeah, well, thats a great segue to my next question, which is: What are some of the, the real science concepts and, you know, factual medical procedures that youve baked into the concept of the severance procedure?Agarwal: I made a statement a while ago that I dont think were far off from things like this happening, and I really firmly believe that. And were actually much closer than when I made that statement.Feltman: Mm.Agarwal: So if we had told somebody a few years ago that we would be implanting electrodes in the brain to stimulate the brain to treat people who are paralyzed and allow them to be able to walk again or treat their obsessive-compulsive disorder, their addiction, their severe suicidal depression, obesity, things like that, we would think people are crazy, but those things are actually happening currently in science. And almost every major academic center around the world is doing these sorts of procedures every day, in particular to help people with diseases like Parkinsons disease. And so it seems like a very science fiction-type concept, but its part of our everyday life as neurosurgeons and neuroscientists.Feltman: Well, and can you walk me through, you know, in creating the concept for the severance procedure, where did you sort of pepper in factual details, you know, for example, the placement of the chip?Agarwal: I actually think that that scene is very, very realistic.Feltman: Mm.Agarwal: And so weI borrowed from the science and the surgeries that we do today, even. So some of the navigation equipment that we use, I had that equipment shipped in. And so when I started, it really was just a concept: How do we develop the severance procedure? How do we sever people? Then we sort of developed the science, and I remember veryin the early days of the show sitting at a, you know, a big conference table with Ben and Dan [Erickson] and a lot of the producers, and we just had a whiteboard in it, and we would just spitball concepts ...Feltman: Mm.Agarwal: Until we found one that was, you know, really believable and the one that people liked and the one that Ben thought would fit with his vision.And so we really implant in an area that is able to process memories but, interestingly, associates those memories with emotion. Its the amygdala and hippocampus, so those sort of middle part of the structures, on the left side of the brain, which is the dominant side of the brain for most people. So what a great area to stimulate to really facilitate this ability to separate our innies from our outies: number one, the ability to process memories, but then, number two, the ability to, to associate those memories with emotion. So that was a perfect place to do it. And then, actually, the procedure was very realistic. So how we put the hole in the skull, the needle with which we use to implant the chip, those are things that we use every day in neurosurgery and neuroscience currently.Feltman: And you actually appear on camera to do the procedure, is that right?Agarwal: Season one, episode twoso when we implant the chip in Helly. So we really designed that set. So, you know, Ben had a very specific vision in mind, and then our goal was really to try to make that vision become a reality. And so everything was important on that set, from the scientific accuracy to the lighting to the cinematography. And so it was all specifically laid out to capture a purpose. And so thats the episode that I appeared in and very proud with the, the way it came out.Feltman: Yeah. So just to really spell out the actual neuroscience here, which I think is so cool, in your mindpardon the punwhat is that chip doing in there, in that part of the brain?Agarwal: As I mentioned before there are semultiple companies trying to do something on a different scale, which is trying to stimulate the brain to alter the way that it functions: so Elon Musks Neuralink; a lot of my friends are working on this technology at different centers around the country; Synchron is another company based out of New York thats trying to do something similar in terms of being able to modify the function of the brain by inputting electrical stimulation.And Elon, he gave a talk at one of our recent neurosurgery meetings, and hes compared the brain to a big circuit board. And then he likened the work that theyre doing with Neuralink is really adjusting the electricity thats going into the circuit board to modify the way that it fires, to change the way that it fires and really dictate how that circuit board functions to make your computer run a certain way, your TV run a certain way. And I think thats really the best way to look at what were doing in the severance procedure.If you look at the brain as, as one big computer, if you change the way that you, instruct the computer to function by really changing the way youre putting electricity in, by firing all of these neurons across the brain, you can really affect the way that your brain processes or pulls memories from its memory bankand then also to potentially modify what emotions are associated with those memories as well.And thats what the amygdala and hippocampus does: so the amygdala is very famous for fear responses and things like that, very profound emotion. And if you followed season two, I think this concept of fear and these really dark emotions are really prevalent in this season. And so whenone of the recent episodes, where we follow Cobel going to where she grew up, its a very kind of dark, fearful episode. And so thats exactly the type of brain and the emotions that were trying to conjure, is the stimulation of this amygdala and hippocampus.Feltman: Yeah, speaking of season twoI mean, back in season one, we were introduced to this concept of reintegration, where the severed consciousnesses kind of come back together, and weve seen a lot more of the messiness of that process in season two. Did you weigh in at all on what that might look like from a neuroscience perspective?Agarwal: Yeah, so I was actually on set for a lot of that work in terms of the reintegration, just to make sure that work was being done well. I worked with Adam Scott, who plays Mark, on some of the things, such as, in one of the recent episodes ...Feltman: Hmm.Agarwal: He had a seizure, and I thought he did an absolutely brilliant job portraying that, and, you know, it really shows sort of the academic stint a lot of the actors and Ben take in the show; I think Adam Scott and Ben Stiller in particular really look at this as almost homework, to try to really understand it. And so I helped Adam, and I was, you know, sendtexting with him after that episode because I was just so proud with how that seizure came out. It was, you know, it was very realistic, and thats a hard thing to capture.So we worked on that, and then the reintegration procedure, I had a lot of input with how that would workyou know, what sort of science would go into something like a reintegration procedureso I remember sending and reviewing ...Feltman: Mm.Agarwal: Articles from the literature about being able to do things that would be likened to reintegration or to really enhance things like electrical stimulation. We were able to use almost like a transmagnetic stimulation-type device. We were able to really use very realistic scientific methods to incorporate into this reintegration.Feltman: Yeah, and for listeners who dont know, could you talk a little bit about what TMS is and how it relates to what we saw in that reintegration episode?Agarwal: Yeah, transmagnetic stimulation, its an amazing technology, and its basically putting these magnetic fields into the brain to alter the way that your brain fires. And theres very good data to show that people who have become paralyzed can regain some functionalityso some ability to movein areas that are either weak or paralyzed.And so theres a lot of different uses for transmagnetic stimulation, and its delivered very similarly to the way that we saw in one of the earlier episodes, where Reghabi is reintegrating Mark in his basement. And so theres actually, today in society, transmagnetic stimulation medical spas ...Feltman: Mm.Agarwal: That you could go to to receive this very intense therapy. And so theres a lot of people who feel that this is really gonna be a major advance for us to use against things like paralysis and depression and things like that.Feltman: Yeah, thats super interesting.Speaking of reintegration weve seen some random acts of basement neurosurgery [laughs] in this season. From a neurological standpoint what kind of risks would someone like Mark be facing in that situation?Agarwal: I think there was a bit of a red herringso in one of the earlier episodes this season, where Reghabi was reintegrating Mark, you could see, as she was delivering this transmagnetic-type stimulation on the left side of the brain, his right hand start to shake ...Feltman: Mm.Agarwal: Really the left side of the brain controlling the right side of the body. And so the same risks that we saw, namely seizure, which we saw him have a very sort of total body seizure, those sorts of things would be a big risk. So bleeding in the brain: the brain didntdoesnt like anything sort of entering into the brain or disturbing the brain; its about a 1 percent risk of what we say is hemorrhage. Infection: so there being a big infection in that area, thats also a possibility. But I think irritating the brain is one of the most common side effects of a procedure like that. And when the brain is irritated, oftentimes itll manifest by seizing ...Feltman: Mm.Agarwal: Which means really firing electrons abnormally in the brain, which is what we saw.Feltman: So weve talked about season two a little bit and about fear and, and emotion in memory. Obviously, in one of the kind of biggest and most impactful episodes of season two, we saw a character who seemed to be severed many times over and have this, like, very compartmentalized consciousness and was experiencing a lot of emotions that were then cut off when they emerged from, you know, that area of the floor they were on. How much more complicated do you think that would be than sort of a standard severance floor chip behavior weve seen so far?Agarwal: You mean in real life?Feltman: Yeah.Agarwal: I think it would actually be less complicated ...Feltman: Oh, yeah?Agarwal: So currently, right now, theres these amazing videospeople who wanna go to YouTube and see this, they canthese very amazing videos of people with Parkinsons disease, which is a neurodegenerative disease, and oftentimes one of the biggest symptoms they have is uncontrollable shaking. So we actually, as part of the standard of care of treating these patients, well put electrodes into very specific parts of the brain and deliver electricity, and when you turn it on theyll almost completely stop shaking. And when you turn it off, which is a flip of a switch externally, they start shaking uncontrollably, to the point that they cant care for themselves, they cant shower, they cant eat, they cant function in societyjust from a flip of a switch externally.So imagine youre able to do that from, like, your phone, anywhere in the world. But then it allyou know, it begs the question: Who is the one flipping that switch? And ethically who should have the right to flip that switch?Feltman: Yeah. Last question: you know, Severance is one of those shows that inspires so many fan theories, more and more with every episode. Im just curious, when friends and patients talk to you, how often do you get people trying to, you know, pull some secret Severance info out of you or get you to weigh in on their theories?Agarwal: Yeah, you know, itsI think people have strayed away from doing that. What Ive noticed is that I actually rarely get asked, and thats good because my response is always, Well, I guess youll just have to see the rest of the season, so Ive been trained well.But I actually have more people, even in the general community, just wanna talk about ...Feltman: Mm.Agarwal: The show, not specifically trying to figure out what happens in the later episodes; theyre just so fascinated with the show and the concept and the way that its written and the work that, you know, Ben, Dan and Mark have doneand the rest of the team as well. And its really amazing to see the response to the show cause people just wanna talk about it.Its like when people read a good book and they wanna talk to other people who have read the book and they just really delve into, you know, What did this mean? What do you think this means? And people just wanna talk about the show. And I absolutely love it cause I think its brilliant, I love the show, I love watching the show, and I, you know, love talking about it. And so I actually dont get people really poking about what happens later on in the show. I get people who really genuinely enjoy it and actually just wanna talk about it, just wanna talk shop, and I enjoy that as well, and I think that really speaks to the response the show has had.Feltman: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for joining us to chat. As a Severance fan I have really loved this, so we really appreciate it.Agarwal: Yeah, my pleasure, and Im excited for you guys to see the rest of the season.Feltman: Thats all for todays episode. If youre listening to this in our podcast feed, you can check out a version with video over on our YouTube channel. Well be back on Monday with our usual science news roundup.Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend!

March 20, 20255 min readWhat Makes a Moon?Defining the word moon is harder than you might thinkBy Phil Plait edited by Lee BillingsA quintet of Saturns moons come together in this image from NASAs Cassini spacecraft. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science InstituteHeres a simple question: Whats a moon?As with so many questions in science, it may seem straightforward but truly isnt. Why, a moon is a celestial body that orbits a planet, youre probably thinking. Well, sureif you squint your eyes and dont look too closely, thats a pretty decent description.But rigidly defining the term moon isnt so easy.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 canonical example is of course our own moon, a decently big chunk of rock that orbits Earth. But centuries ago the first telescopic observations of other planets revealed that many have moons as well; Jupiter has four giant, easily seen satellites, and Saturn has several that are visible by modest means as well. So at that point in time, our definition of moon seemed safe enough.Then, of course, things got complicatedbecause they always do. As telescopes got bigger and better, more moons were found. Mars has two, and poor Mercury and Venus have none, but in contrast, moons seemingly kept sprouting on Jupiter like mushrooms after a rainstorm. For the first half of the 20th century, Jupiter was known to have an even dozen. A handful more were found telescopically in the 1970s, and the numbers jumped a bit when we started sending spacecraft to the outer planets. Then, in the 2000s, the numbers leaped upward as more exacting techniques were used to scrutinize Jupiters environs.As of this writing Jupiter has 95 confirmed moons. They range in size from mighty Ganymede, the largest in the solar system at more than 5,200 kilometers acrosswider than the planet Mercury!to the tiniest that were able to see from Earth, at roughly 1 km in diameter. Saturn is more distant from us than Jupiter, so its moons are harder to see, yet we now know it boasts at least 274 moons, a staggering number! Of these, 128 were just announced this month by scientists who had used an advanced searching technique that allows extremely faint satellites to be spotted in telescopic observations. Most of these new additions are only a few kilometers across.Its clear that with ever more powerful equipment, well find that many planets have orbital companions of arbitrarily small dimensions. Is something the size of a football stadium a moon? Sure! But what about something the size of a car, a basketball or a grape? What about a grain of dust?Saturns rings are composed of trillions of small icy particles. Is each of these a moon?At some lower limit, that term just doesnt seem to fit.The problem is further complicated by the fact that many asteroids have moons. More than 430 asteroids are known or suspected to be orbited by smaller asteroids. Its possible that those satellites were formed from low-speed collisions that either ejected material that subsequently coalesced as moons or slowed two asteroids enough to put them in orbit around each other. In some cases an asteroid and its moons may have even formed together.Out past Neptune are countless small icy and rocky bodies called Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), and many of these have moons as well. While some TNOs could be called dwarf planets because of their size, many more are tiny and dont even come close to falling into that category.And, although I hate to complicate things even more, I should note that if we broaden our moon definition to any object that orbits something bigger, then planets are moons. Even small stars that orbit big stars would be moons!Clearly were running into trouble trying to hang the word moon on these objects.Theres also the problem that the arguments for what makes a moon can change when viewed differently. For example, the suns gravity tugs harder on the moon than Earths does! So does the moon orbit the sun or our planet? Well, the trick here is that both Earth and the moon orbit the sun together. The suns effect on both is equal, so in a sense it cancels out, and therefore the moon orbits our own planet more than it orbits the sun.Theres actually mathematical support for this. Its possible to balance out the equations of gravity for a planet and star, including the centrifugal force created by the orbiting body, to see how far a planets sphere of influence stretches. This area, where the planets gravity locally dominates over the star, is also called the Hill sphere, after American astronomer George Hill, who first derived it. The Hill sphere for Earth, given its distance from the sun, is about 1.5 million km. The moon is only about 385,000 km from Earth, so its well inside our Hill sphere and therefore more under Earths influence than the suns.This region of space grows larger the farther a planet is from its star. Jupiter is more massive than Saturn, but Saturn is farther from the sun, so its Hill sphere is nearly twice the volume of Jupiters. That may be why weve found so many more moons orbiting Saturn even though its more distant from Earth and thus harder to search for companions.Neptune is so far from the sun that its Hill sphere is the largest of all the planets. Its possible that Neptune has far more moons than Jupiter or Saturn, and we just havent found them yet because theyre too faint to easily see from Earth.This still leaves us with some interesting edge cases. Pluto has five known moons. The largest, Charon, was discovered in 1978. Its roughly half the diameter of Pluto and has about one eighth its mass. Because of this, Charon doesnt so much orbit Pluto as they both orbit their barycenter, a mutual center of mass. This is like two people on a seesaw; the balance point is closer the person who weighs more. The Pluto-Charon barycenter is actually outside the body of Pluto itself! So is Charon a moon? Or is it more that they both comprise a binary planet?Even trickier, its possible for moons to have moons! Similar to the Hill sphere argument for planets, some moons can have a large enough sphere of influence to potentially possess moons of their own. What do we call these? Some people argue for the term moonmoon, which is delightful but somewhat imprecise. I prefer submoon.Dont even get me started on quasi-moons.In the end, the problem lies in our preference for straightforward simplicity rather than complex nuance; rigidly defining the term moon is hopeless because its not definable. Its a concept more than a definition, much like the term planet. Perhaps thats why the International Astronomical Union, the official keeper of celestial names and definitions, doesnt have a definition for what makes a moon.Humans like to put things in distinctive bins, but nature is not so prejudiced. Whenever objects fall into a range, a spectrum of characteristics, the transition along that spectrum tends to be smooth, and trying to wedge them into defined borders winds up generating more exceptions than rule-followers.Sometimes its best to accept something for what it is and not how it falls into our narrow classifications. You can understand it better that way, and isnt that the point?

March 20, 20253 min readKanzi the Bonobo, Who Learned Language and Made Stone Tools, Dies at Age 44What we learned about ape and human cognition from Kanzi the bonobo, who died this weekBy Kate Wong edited by Jeanna BrynerKanzi the bonobo died on March 18, 2025, at the age of 44. Ape InitiativeKanzi the bonobo, who learned how to communicate with humans using symbols, has died at the age of 44. Raised and kept in captivity, Kanzi was the subject of many studies aimed at illuminating ape cognition and the origins of human language and tool use.Why It MattersKanzi was not the first great ape to learn how to communicate with humans using symbols. Koko the gorilla and Washoe the chimpanzee learned signs that were adapted from American Sign Language. But unlike his predecessors, who acquired their skills through direct training from researchers, Kanzi developed an interest in such symbols on his own when his adoptive mother, Matata, was receiving lessons on how to use keyboard lexigrams to communicate. Kanzi went on to learn hundreds of symbols that represented various objects and activities, as well as some more abstract concepts. Sometimes he combined these symbols to create new meaning.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.Kanzi was also something of a technologist. Archaeologists Nicholas Toth and Kathy Schick, both at Indiana University, began working with Kanzi in 1990 to teach him and his sister Panbanisha how to make stone tools by using one rock as a hammerstone to remove sharp flakes from another rock called a core. Kanzi slowly got more adept at flaking stone through time, Toth recalls. Early in Kanzis training, he invented his own technique for making stone tools, throwing a flint cobble against a hard tile floor to remove larger flakes. He would then use the flakes to cut a cord to open a box with a food treat inside. After developing this technique, Toth says, Kanzi seemed to realize that the force of impact was important in getting larger usable flakes and applied this newfound knowledge when he resumed using the hammerstone-and-core technique to make tools.Kanzi the bonobo learned hundreds of symbols to represent objects, activities and abstract concepts over his lifetime.Ape InitiativeKanzis toolmaking skills fell short of those of modern-day humans and our ancestors, however. When Toth and Schick compared Kanzi and Panbanishas handiwork with their own and that of human ancestors who lived 2.6 million years ago, they found that the bonobos had many more failed attempts at removing flakes from the coresand that the flakes the bonobos did produce were smaller than the ones made by humans. We feel that their limitations in flaking were both biomechanical and cognitive, Toth says. You have to recognize acute angles on core edges and strike in the right place and at the right angle with your stone hammer to successfully remove flakes.What the Experts SayPrimatologist Jill Pruetz of Texas State University, who studies wild chimpanzees in Senegal, shared her memories of Kanzi on Facebook: I was lucky enough to meet Kanzi a few times & even got to hold a conversation with him via his symbol board and got to play chase with him too, she wrote. He had a hard time understanding my spoken words only if it was a word that had a soft a sound in it, which I blame on my Texas accent.One of Pruetzs favorite pieces of Kanzi lore, she added, was a story about him using two of his symbols to describe a frightening beaver he discovered in his new outdoor habitat in Iowa. He combined the symbols for water and gorilla, the latter referred to something scary in his world, and I always think of beavers ... as water gorillas now, she wrote.More about KanziKanzi was born in 1980 at what is now the Emory National Primate Research Center Field Station. He and Panbanisha were moved to the Language Research Center at Georgia State University in 1985. From there the siblings were sent to the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa. That research facility eventually closed amid accusations of animal neglect, among other troubles, shortly after Panbanisha died there in 2012. The Ape Conservation and Cognition Initiative (ACCI) took over the facility in 2013. On March 19, 2025, the ACCI announced that Kanzi had died on March 18. According to the ACCI, Kanzi hadnt shown any signs of illness that day and had spent the morning foraging for breakfast, chasing his nephew Teco and enjoying enrichment surprises before settling in for a grooming session and becoming unresponsive. Kanzis cause of death is unknown; necropsy results are pending. He was being treated for heart disease.

March 20, 20254 min readRFK, Jr., Wants to Make Baby Formula Safer, but Trump Budget Cuts Imperil That EffortA new Trump administration healthinitiative called Operation Stork Speed aims to improve the safety of infant formula and reduce contamination risk, but budget and staffing cuts may hinder thatBy Tanya Lewis edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier Magone/Getty ImagesEarlier this week the Trump administrations Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Food and Drug Administration announced a new initiative aimed at improving the safety and quality of infant formula. Dubbed Operation Stork Speedlikely a reference to the first Trump administrations COVID vaccine program Operation Warp Speedthe program aims to increase testing for heavy metals and other contaminants.In addition, the announcement said the FDA will launch a comprehensive update and review of infant formula nutrients, the first such effort by the agency since 1998, according to the announcement. It also said that the FDA will expand formula importation policies and work to achieve greater transparency in the formula market. And the agency plans to work with the National Institutes of Health and other research organizations to study the short- and long-term effects of formula feeding on infant and child health.The FDA will use all resources and authorities at its disposal to make sure infant formula products are safe and wholesome for the families and children who rely on them, said Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in the announcement. Helping each family and child get off to the right start from birth is critical to our pursuit to Make America Healthy Again.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 the Trump administrations cuts to the FDA and other government agencies could make it hard to ensure the safety of food in general, let alone that of infant formulas.What Prompted ItThere have been a couple of high-profile incidents of bacterial contamination in infant formulas in recent years. In 2022 Abbott detected contamination at one of its formula manufacturing plants, which led to a recall and national shortage of the vital source of newborn nutrition. And in 2023 Reckitt/Mead Johnson Nutrition recalled one of its formulas. These companies are two of the largest formula producers.Earlier this week, Consumer Reports published an analysis of 41 formula products that found that many of them contained concerning levels of heavy metals, such as arsenic and lead, as well as so-called forever chemicals (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS). The analysis also determined one product contained two chemicals found in plastic, including bisphenol A (BPA). It's obviously a product for a very vulnerable population at an age where their brains and their bodies are still developing. And there is plenty of data to show that some of these chemicals can interfere with that process at a young age, says Brian Ronholm, director of food policy at Consumer Reports. Some of these chemicals are found naturally in the environment, but in the analysis, certain brands contained more of them than others. The good news is, though, that there are a number of brands and options that are available to parents that have low readings of these chemicals, Ronholm says.Ronholm notes that the timing of the HHS and FDAs announcement suggests it was likely made in response to these data because we had shared the results with them on Monday, he says. Ronholm adds that the agencys intended actions are encouraging but only if they are implemented. There is a risk of this becoming a false promise, especially if the current trend of additional budget cuts, additional staffing cuts across government agencies continues. That really puts this plan into jeopardy, he says.Beyond contamination, Kennedy has also taken aim at formulas nutritional content. In a meeting earlier this week with the countrys biggest formula producers, first reported by Bloomberg, he specifically called out the use of seed oils, which he has claimed are unhealthy despite little clear evidence of harm. Others studies have documented the high added sugar content in formulassugar is often one of the first listed ingredients.More about RFK, Jr.s PoliciesKennedy has made nutrition and food additives a central part of his mission to Make America Healthy Again. Studies have shown that ultraprocessed foods pose health risks for chronic disease, and California has proposed legislation to restrict their use in school lunches. The FDA recently banned the artificial dye Red No. 3 because studies showed it caused cancer in animals. (This has not been shown in humans, however.)But experts say many of Kennedys policy positions, including his long-standing opposition to vaccines, are dangerousespecially as the country battles a growing measles outbreak that has killed two people, including a child. Kennedy has also made troubling statements about letting H5N1 avian influenza rip through poultry farms to identify birds that are immune, which scientists say would be devastating to flocks and also ineffective. Bird flu has swept through U.S. dairy cattle and poultry farms since last year, causing egg prices to spike and raising fears of a potential pandemic.

March 19, 202517 min readEvangelina Rodrguez Traveled to Paris to Revolutionize Health Care in the Dominican RepublicAndrea Nathaly LermaIn the early 1900s, devastated by the death of her mentor, who passed away following childbirth, Andrea Evangelina Rodrguez Perozo decided to devote her life to womens health. It took a decade to raise the money to go to Paris, which was then the mecca of medical training, but she never gave up. At the age of 42, she boarded a steamship to France. Amid the postwar scene of the countrys Rroaring Ttwenties, she studied obstetrics and gynecology with leading specialists and started to absorb modern ideas about public health. Her goal: was to return home and revolutionize health care in the Dominican Republic.LISTEN TO THE PODCASTOn 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.TRANSCRIPTLaura Gmez: San Pedro de Macors, 1921. The marina at the southern Dominican port city is bustling with activity. Fishermen head home for the day after selling their morning catch, while dockworkers load heavy sacks of cane sugar onto cargo ships under the hot sun. Hustling past them, wealthy travelers trailed by their porters line up to board the gangway of a passenger ship bound for New York City. In the midst of it all, a 42-year-old, Afro-Dominican woman quietly waits her turn to board.Few people notice her. Fewer still would guess that she is Dr. Evangelina Rodrguez Perozo, the first Dominican woman to graduate from medical school.Mercedes Fernndez Asenjo (Voiceover): What she did was really memorable for the time the fact that she was a woman, from a poor background, who was able to study medicine and practice as a doctor.Laura Gmez: Now, carrying nothing but a small, battered suitcase with a few changes of clothes, shes setting sail on a weeks-long journey that will take her north to New York and then across the Atlantic to Paris, France.This is Lost Women of Science. I'm Laura Gmez. This is the second episode of our five-part series on the life of Dr. Evangelina Rodrguez Perozo, the first female doctor from the Dominican Republic.To find out how Evangelina, a poor girl born out of wedlock, went from selling sweets on the streets of San Pedro de Macors to graduating from medical school. Go back and listen to Episode One.Today, our story crosses continents as Evangelina enters a whole new world.Episode Two: A Dominican in Paris.Evangelina's dream of going to Paris was born over a decade before she set foot on the steamship in San Pedro. And it was born from tragedy.In 1907, mid-way through her medical studies, her beloved teacher and mentor, Anacaona Moscoso, died following the birth of her third child. It was a pregnancy her doctor had warned might kill her. But she didnt have the power to keep from getting pregnant again. And her death left Evangelina devastated.Mercedes Fernndez Asenjo (Voiceover): Shes more like a mom. The mom Evangelina never had. And seeing that person die, the person who had really helped her keep going, the person who always told her, You can do it, you can do it, you can do it... that had to be really hard for her, right?Laura Gmez: This is Mercedes Fernndez, who we heard from in Episode One. She wrote her Ph.D. thesis on Evangelina.Mercedes Fernndez Asenjo (Voiceover): So, I think that's what convinced her to say, we have to help women. There has to be a way for women to have children and not have to die.Laura Gmez: Mercedes believes that the death of Anacaona affected Evangelina so deeply that she made up her mind to do something. It was too late for Anacaona, but her case wasnt an exception. So many women lost their lives giving birth in those days. The problem was, Evangelinas med school hadnt equipped her to do much about it.There were no up-to-date training facilities at her school the one med school in Santo Domingo. No dissecting room, no chemical laboratory, no pathology department, and no courses in bacteriology. And so, even after shed beat all the odds to get to that school and become a doctor, Evangelina decided she had to keep training.And at that time, the number one place doctors went to specialize and study advanced medical techniques was Paris.But getting to Paris, let alone living and studying there, was incredibly expensive. Evangelina knew that raising money for the trip would take time.So after her graduation, in the early nineteen-teens, she kept the two side jobs shed had throughout her studies. By day, she served as director of the school Anacaona founded, and in the evenings, she taught classes at a school for domestic workers.On top of this, she wanted to begin practicing in her hometown of San Pedro. She figured she could at least treat some patients, while she pulled together the money for her transatlantic voyage.Claudia Scharf (Voiceover): She began to practice timidly, because she was so serious about what she was doing. She had so much respect for the profession that she felt she wasn't quite ready to practice medicine yet.Laura Gmez: This is Claudia Scharf, a pediatrician and medical professor in the Dominican Republic. She says that, unfortunately, when Evangelina tried to begin practicing, she found that many people in San Pedro werent willing to see her.Claudia Scharf (Voiceover): People who were in the middle or upper class rejected her because they thought, how was it possible that she was a doctor being that she was a woman?Laura Gmez: So Evangelina left her job at the night school and moved to a place where she knew people needed her, a rural village outside San Pedro called Ramn Santana. Heres Mercedes Fernndez.Mercedes Fernndez Asenjo (Voiceover): In her letters, when she talks about Ramn Santana, she explains that they have almost no roads, that it's very inaccessible, that many things are lacking. So, my understanding is that it is a place where there are no resources.Laura Gmez: The village was surrounded by sugar cane fields, and most people living there survived on the growth and sale of sugar cane. According to Claudia Scharf, the people in these communities couldn't be too picky about what kind of doctor they saw.Claudia Scharf (Voiceover): The people who worked in the sugar fields, cut the sugar cane, those laborers did not have many resources to go visit prestigious doctors. So it was with these people that Evangelina first began to practice.Laura Gmez: Evangelina set up her practice in a small house next to the stump of a large oak tree. Since the area had no pharmacy, she opened one next door and stocked it with basic medicines. But it seems that Evangelina had too big a heart to be a savvy businesswoman.Mercedes Fernndez Asenjo (Voiceover): With this idea, she always has of wanting to help, this medicine dispensary never works because she gives everything away.Laura Gmez: Mercedes Fernndez again.Mercedes Fernndez Asenjo (Voiceover): She has no notion of basic economics. If you give something away, how are you going to pay for what you bought? I mean, you can't, you know?Elizabeth Manley: I think because she was developing this commitment to public health and to addressing the concerns of those that couldn't pay that it's a combination of kind of her principles and the fact that there wasn't a ton of resources there to pay her in the first place.Laura Gmez: Thats Elizabeth Manley. Shes a professor of Caribbean history at Xavier University in Louisiana. She explains that Evangelinas efforts were making a difference in peoples lives, if only in her little pocket of the world.And those efforts went beyond treating patients. She organized sanitation services in the village and encouraged residents to sweep in front of their homes. She did what she could to make up for the absence of government services.At the time, the Dominican Republic was suffering from both political and economic instability. There had been a series of coups since the turn of the century, and the country was steep in debt. The U.S. had tried to mediate to protect its commercial interests in sugar production, but the unrest continued. The successive regimes had little capacity to invest in rural public health.For the time being, Evangelina settled into her quiet new life, away from most of this turmoil. But out in the broader world, more trouble was brewing and her country was about to get sucked in.In 1914, the first World War broke out in Europe, pitting Germany against France, the United Kingdom, Russia, and their allies. Of course, it wasnt the world war yet, and at first, the dangers seemed a world away. But a couple of years later, when the U.S. began planning to enter the war on the side of France and Britain, the political instability inside the Dominican Republic became a real concern. The U.S. was worried that Germany might try to use the Dominican Republic as a military base. So, in 1916, they took the drastic step of invading the island, citing national security interests but they had some other motives too.Robin Derby: One of the most important measures that the U.S. Marines instigated during the occupation was privatizing land.Laura Gmez: This is Robin Derby. She's a professor of Caribbean and modern Latin American history at UCLA.Robin Derby: This is a time, you know, when there were important agribusiness interests, which wanted to expand in, in sugar, and that area becomes a place where a lot of sugar corporations wanted to establish plantations.Laura Gmez: That area was the Eastern Provinces, specifically the area around Ramn Santana, where Evangelina lived. And the ambitions of American agribusiness companies had massive ramifications for the people in Evangelina's community.Robin Derby: There was no private property and land in the Dominican Republic before the U.S. Marines sought to privatize land. So, people had what they called Terrenos Comuneros, which were basically, land was held by shares, collectively among large extended clans, people who, over the course of generations, had seen themselves as having usufruct, as having squatters rights. And I'm sure it was a violent process to evict them.Laura Gmez: And the man spearheading this violent process was named Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. The same Rafael Trujillo who would later seize control of the Dominican Republic and rule as a dictator for over three decades. But in the nineteen-teens, he was a rising young officer in the newly formed Dominican National Guard, stationed in the Eastern Provinces, and under the control of the United States.April Mayes: Rafael Trujillo really comes of age and comes to his moment, being trained by U.S. Marines and the Dominican National Police Force, in the Dominican National Guard, so to speak, and that transforms his life.Laura Gmez: Thats April Mayes, a professor of Afro-Latin American history, who we heard from in Episode One. Heres Robin Derby.Robin Derby: One of his, his moves was ingratiating himself to the United States. He rose up through the Marines, who rather liked him, in part because he learned to cut this profile as a very effective man of action.Laura Gmez: April Mayes.April Mayes: He proved himself to be very willing to, you know, implement cruel and unusual punishments and also go after peasants and revolt against U.S. military occupation.Laura Gmez: There's little by way of actual records documenting Trujillo's actions in Ramn Santana at this time... there's not even a clear understanding of how the people occupying land bought by U.S. sugar corporations were removed. But an oral history gathered by one of Evangelinas biographers describes Trujillo and his men as, quote, "simply killing people, whole families, in order to take their land." To Elizabeth Manley, this comes as no surprise.Elizabeth Manley: There is no doubt in my mind that that man was ruthless from the jump. As soon as he had decided what his aspirations were and what the needs of the U.S. sugar interests were, I have no doubt that he would have been someone's man Friday in terms of protecting those interests.Laura Gmez: According to her biographer Antonio Zaglul, Evangelina witnessed some of these atrocities, and she was horrified. Its not surprising that from this time on, she harbored a deep-felt animosity towards her future ruler ... an animosity that would later cost her dearly.But for the time being, as conflict raged around her, Evangelina kept working at her longtime goal: to save money to go study medicine in Paris.In the end, it took Evangelina a full decade to pull together the funds. Since her medical practice didnt pull in much, she tried branching out. First, she wrote a book titled Granos de Polen, or Pollen Seeds.Part sociological treatise, part advice pamphlet for women, it was published in 1915 and endorsed by many of Evangelina's intellectual friends.But what she perhaps failed to consider was that the majority of Dominicans were illiterate at the time. And it didnt help that Granos de Polen wasnt the easiest read. So, unsurprisingly, despite all the praise it receivedMercedes Fernndez Asenjo (Voiceover): The book is not as successful as she thought it would be because it's a bit complicated to read.Laura Gmez: Mercedes Fernndez.Mercedes Fernndez Asenjo (Voiceover): So, this quixotic idea she has of publishing a book and making money... doesn't work out for her.Laura Gmez: When the book failed, Evangelina took up public speaking. An article in 1918 in the newspaper, Listn Diario, gave this account:Now Evangelina is going around cities and villages in the interior of the island, preaching the gospel of love, work, ideals, peace, civility, all in order to raise the funds necessary for her move to the heart of the most advanced centers of science.Meanwhile, she also resorted to asking for donations from friends and benefactors, with her mentor Anacaona's widower giving the biggest one. But Evangelinas travel fund still wasnt enough to get her to Paris.Finally, nearly 10 years after graduating from medical school, Evangelina got her big break. Here's April Mayes.April Mayes: The fact that she was connected to Anacaona and then also the ongoing legacy of her connection with the Deligne brothers, she still remained in kind of this orbit of these intellectual cultural groups in San Pedro. And when she asked, will you send me to Paris to study medicine? The city council said, we'll try our best, but yes, we'll do what is necessary. And that's what happened.Laura Gmez: Endowed with a scholarship from the city council of San Pedro de Macors, Evangelina was finally ready to tackle the next chapter of her life. And that's how, in 1921, at the age of 42, Dr. Evangelina Rodriguez stepped onto the steamship for the first part of her journey to Paris. What happened next, after the break.[Mid-roll]Laura Gmez: When Evangelina first set foot in Paris in 1921, she entered a whirlwind. It was just three years after the Allies victory over Germany in the First World War, and Paris was entering a period known as "Les Annes Folles"... the wild years.The economy was booming and the cultural milieu and glittering nightlife attracted writers and artists from around the worldincluding Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dal, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. Performers like Josephine Baker graced cafs and cabarets, inspiring women to crop their hair short and ditch their corsets and long skirts for knee-length flapper dresses. Freedom was the order of the day, as was a certain debauchery...But according to her biographer Antonio Zaglul, Evangelina wasn't one to be swept up in the never-ending party of the Roaring 20s. She was in Paris to study. Heres Mercedes Fernndez.Mercedes Fernndez Asenjo (Voiceover): She's attending class and training at different hospitals and clinics.Laura Gmez: From what we know, she took courses with a famous French pediatrician named Pierre Nobecourt, whose work focused on infant hygiene and nutrition. She also trained in Obstetrics and Gynecology at two different Parisian hospitals.One of those, the Baudelocque Maternit, had earned an excellent reputation for having the lowest infant mortality rates in the country. Its previous director, a French doctor named Adolphe Pinard, was a pioneer of modern perinatal care. Pinard invented devices such as the fetal stethoscope, which let doctors listen to the babys heartbeat. And he established the practice of routine pre- and post-natal exams to monitor the health of expectant mothers and newborns.The contrast could not have been sharper with the Dominican Republic, where a pregnant woman might never see a doctor until the moment she gave birth. Evangelina eagerly took it all in.And at the same time, even as she focused on her specialization, she was also getting a broad view of the world around her. Mercedes Fernndez.Mercedes Fernndez Asenjo (Voiceover): And she's seeing the difference in infrastructure between one country and the other.Laura Gmez: One thing was impossible not to notice: families in France looked really different from the families Evangelina grew up around.For one, they had fewer children: around two per family on average, compared to 5 or more in the DR. But the kids they did have were better cared for, in part thanks to help from the government. For example, a public health program called La Goutte de Lait, or Drop of Milk, distributed free cows milk to infants and their mothers. Social norms also helped promote better hygiene.Mercedes Fernndez Asenjo (Voiceover): This idea that the sun is therapeutic, that physical exercise is necessary, and also this idea of prophylaxis, of the need to bathe and have good hygiene to avoid getting sick, to maintain health... She is seeing all these things in France.Laura Gmez: But Evangelina didn't just come away from Paris with a new understanding of public health, or sharper medical skills. Heres Elizabeth Manley.Elizabeth Manley: It seems pretty clear that she was also radicalized, in terms of her understanding of the world, of feminism, of the role of public health, of the role of sexual education. Because if you look at what she wrote in Granos de Polen, which was a fairly conservative tract, that she will actually later kind of denounce, her worldview changes while she's there.Laura Gmez: Before Evangelina left for France, the Dominican Republic had seen an uptick in prostitution following the arrival of U.S. Marines. And that had led to the spread of venereal diseases like syphilis. Mercedes Fernndez again.Mercedes Fernndez Asenjo (Voiceover): She's very concerned, because all these women who are prostitutes are not taking care of themselves. And by not taking care of themselves, they're getting sick and they're spreading venereal diseases to different individuals in the society.Laura Gmez: And in her book Granos de Polen, Evangelina blamed the sex workers for that.Mercedes Fernndez Asenjo (Voiceover): She attacks prostitutes and sees them as a danger to society. She sees them as a negative force, something that has to be eradicated. When she comes back from France, she no longer feels that way.Laura Gmez: Paris had changed her.Mercedes Fernndez Asenjo (Voiceover): She sees that prostitutes are human beings who are part of society and as such, they are people who maybe haven't had any other choice in life.Laura Gmez: We don't know exactly what Evangelina saw or experienced in Paris that caused this change of heart. She may have witnessed Frances very different approach to handling prostitution: Brothels were strictly regulated, and sex workers were subjected to mandatory medical exams.Meanwhile, their male clients were educated on the benefits of using condoms to limit the spread of disease... The French army even supplied soldiers with condoms during World War I.Whatever the reason, Evangelinas mind was swimming with new ideas.She was no longer just thinking of healthcare as something that happened behind a doctors door. She was seeing it as something that was woven into society. Into homes and schools, into infrastructure, and yes even into brothels.And she didnt have to wait until she was back home to start spreading these ideas there.Because in 1922, a radical new publication was launched in the Dominican Republic, called Fmina. Mercedes Fernndez.Mercedes Fernndez Asenjo (Voiceover): Fmina was a very, very important magazine because it became a forum for discussing many issues related to Dominican women of the time, and it received correspondence from all over Latin America.Laura Gmez: Fminas founder and editor-in-chief was a woman called Petronila Gmez, a former Normalista teacher, like Evangelina. The two had taught night classes at the same evening school for domestic workers years earlier. And it turns out, Petronila and Evangelina had a lot in common. Heres Elizabeth Manley.Elizabeth Manley: They both came from families of lower economic status, not expected to do much with their lives, and they were both, you know, Afro-Dominican as well, both being kind of distinguished in that way of being educated. So I think they would have found kinship in each other.Laura Gmez: Petronila invited Evangelina to write dispatches from Paris for Fmina. Just a handful of these have survived, and to be honest, Evangelina still wasnt the best writer. Mercedes Fernndez.Mercedes Fernndez Asenjo (Voiceover): I have to say that, when it came to Evangelina Rodriguez's writing... style was never her thing. I think she was a woman of science.Laura Gmez: But in her dispatches, Evangelina enthusiastically described the citys advanced approach to public health. She singled out programs like Drop of Milk, as well as another French public health program that sent poor city kids to visit the countryside for fresh air and sunshine.As far as we can tell from these dispatches, Evangelina was taking in a lot during her time in Paris. But its hard to imagine the daily life of this middle-aged Afro-Dominican woman walking the same streets of Paris as Picasso, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. We just dont have that many details. We do know that despite all she was learning, it wasnt the easiest time for her.Reading between the lines of her enthusiastic descriptions of Paris, Mercedes also sensed a sadness and a loneliness coming through in Evangelina's writing.Mercedes Fernndez Asenjo (Voiceover): She describes an image where she sees a little bird in the sun, and then she has a moment where she admits, Yes, I miss the sun. Yes, I feel lonely. So maybe what shes trying to say in this unveiled confession is that that time in France was a time of learning, yes, but at the same time, it must have been a very lonely time.Laura Gmez: Still, she stayed there for almost four years. Then in 1925, she decided to return home to bring her newfound knowledge back to her home country.U.S. occupation of the island had ended just a year earlier, and the Dominican Republic had a new president, Horacio Vsquez, who promised to usher in a new era of peace and democracy.Back in the DR, many people seemed eager for Evangelina to bring her new knowledge back home: The San Pedro City Council even helped fund her return journey. And none celebrated the news of her return more than her friend, Petronila Gomez.Mercedes Fernndez Asenjo (Voiceover): Immediately, the first one to announce it, the first one to spell it out in capital letters, is Petronila Anglica Gmez, and she hails her as the "woman of science" who is going to return. She really shows a remarkable admiration for Evangelina.Laura Gmez: In 1925, Evangelina once again stepped onto a steamship for the reverse transatlantic journey home, to her sorely missed Caribbean sun. She carried the same battered suitcase with her clothes... but this time, she also brought three trunks full of books.And based on Petronila's celebratory op-ed in Fmina, she had every reason to expect a warm welcome at her return. Here was a highly trained doctor, determined to bring her new skills to improve health and well-being in her home country, and especially to help women.In fact, she was in for a rude awakening That's next week.This episode of Lost Women of Science was produced by Lorena Galliot, with help from associate producer Natalia Snchez Loayza. Samia Bouzid is our senior producer, and our senior managing producer is Deborah Unger.David De Luca was our sound designer and engineer. Lizzie Younan composed all of our music. We had fact-checking help from Desire Ypez.Our co-executive producers are Amy Scharf and Katie Hafner. Thanks to Eowyn Burtner, our program manager, and Jeff DelViscio at our publishing partner, Scientific American. Our intern is Kimberly Mendez.Lost Women of Science is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We're distributed by PRX.For show notes and an episode transcript, head to lostwomenofscience.org where you can also support our work by hitting the donate button.Im your host, Laura Gmez. Thanks for listening, and until next week!Host: Laura GmezProducer: Lorena GalliotSenior Producer: Samia BouzidGuestsApril MayesApril Mayes is Associate Dean and Professor of Afro-Latin American history, Pomona College.Mercedes Fernndez AsenjoMercedes Fernndez Asenjo, PhD, is a foreign language educator at The Catholic University of America.Claudia ScharfClaudia Scharf is Director of the School of Medicine, Universidad Nacional Pedro Henrquez Urea.Elizabeth ManleyElizabeth Manley is Chair of the Department of History and a professor of Caribbean history, Xavier University of Louisiana.Lauren (Robin) DerbyLauren (Robin) Derby is Professor and Dr. E. Bradford Burns Chair in Latin American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.Further ReadingDespreciada en la vida y olvidada en la muerte: Biografa de Evangelina Rodrguez, la primera mdica dominicana. Antonio Zaglul. Editora Taller, 1980Motherhood by Choice: Pioneers in Womens Health and Family Planning. Perdita Huston. The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1992Granos de polen. Evangelina Rodrguez. 1915The Mulatto Republic: Class, Race, and Dominican National Identity. April J. Mayes. University Press of Florida, 2014

March 20, 20256 min readCharts Show How Measles Outbreaks Flourish Where Vaccination Rates FallMeasles continues to spread in Texas and other states and has caused the first reported U.S. death from the virus in a decade. Vaccination data over time reveal vulnerabilities in protectionBy Ripley Cleghorn edited by Lauren J. Young Ripley Cleghorn; Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (data)A recent resurgence of measles is hitting multiple U.S. states, sending a concerning number of children to hospitals. In the past two months, public health officials have reported a total of 301 confirmed cases, with more than 170 infections concentrated in Gaines County in West Texas, where a school-aged child died last monthmarking the first measles death in a child in the U.S. in 22 years. And recently an adult in New Mexico died after testing positive for the disease. Both people were unvaccinated. The severityand seemingly continuous spreadof cases in recent outbreaks has experts calling for a closer examination of the nations rates of childhood measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccinations.The MMR vaccines two dose-regimen is 97 percent effective against measles infection. But because the disease is highly contagious, 95 percent of a population needs to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunityprotection that stops disease spread. The state of Texas has an MMR vaccination rate among kindergarteners that is slightly below that threshold, at 94.3 percent, and measles has spread rampantly. Cases have now spanned more than nine Texas counties. How can even a slight decrease in the proportion of vaccinated people lead to such a large outbreak?Measles on a Local LevelOn 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.One factor is that a slight dip below the recommended vaccination coverage for herd immunity leaves room for outbreaks. Another factor, though, is that state-level data can make it more difficult to trace more local, community-level dynamics that are crucial to understanding how quickly and far outbreaks spread. What really matters for transmission are the people you see every day, says Emily Smith, an epidemiologist and infectious disease researcher at George Washington University.Ripley Cleghorn; Source: Annual Reports of Immunization Status (data)Drilling down further into county-level data can offer more clarity than state-level data, but even that can overshadow whats happening within smaller populations, Smith explains. In Gaines County, most initial cases appear to have occurred within a close-knit, under-vaccinated Mennonite community, according to a state health department spokesperson. Whats more, Gaines County has a large homeschooled population that isnt included in school district dataso the number of unvaccinated children is likely higher than official reports.Texas is one of 45 states that allows for nonmedical exemptionspersonal, religious or bothto childhood immunizations mandated by public and some private schools. In Gaines County, nearly one in five kindergarten students opted out of at least one vaccine last yearfive times the national rate.Why Measles Is a Sentinel for Low Vaccination RatesMeasles is an order of magnitude more contagious than seasonal influenza. Measles virus particles emitted through coughing and sneezing can stay airborne for hours after an infected person leaves an area, making it easy to become infected by a person with whom you havent interacted directly. The reproduction number for measlesthe average number of people who get sick from one infectious personis around 15.Ripley Cleghorn; Source: University of Michigan School of Public Health (data)Most people infected with measles experience a high fever, cough and an unmistakable splotchy red rash. As with polio and hepatitis B, there is no specific treatment for measles. Complications from the disease arent uncommon. One in five unvaccinated people who get infected will end up in the hospital, most commonly because of pneumonia. In Texas, many people who were hospitalizedincluding at least one child younger than six months oldneeded intubation. About one in 1,000 children infected with measles will die, and another one in 1,000 will develop acute brain swelling, or encephalitis, which can occur up to months after infection and can lead to permanent brain damage.A rare type of brain swelling, subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), can lead to a chronic measles infection of the brain, says Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia. In people with SSPE, the virus lies dormant for five or even 10 years after complete recovery from the acute illness. Once it resurfaces, people develop a progressive series of neurologic symptomsusually a deterioration of certain personality traits and loss of motor skills, followed by a decline into a vegetative state and invariably death. There is no treatment for this. Children who suffer from this will always die, says Offit, who had measles himself in the 1950s. He has seen five or 10 cases of SSPE in his career.Since the MMR vaccine was introduced in 1971, it has been exhaustively studied and has been shown to be incredibly safe. Side effects, such as fever and soreness from the injection, are mild. It does have a risk of serious effects, but they are much rarer than the risk of measles complicationsand vaccination also lowers the risk of developing severe disease.Zooming out to State and National Trends When national rates for all childhood vaccinations began to fall, pediatricians grew worriedthough the issue was sidelined during the COVID pandemic, when many children got behind on vaccinations because of missed routine appointments. During the 20192020 school year, 95 percent of kindergarteners received all state-mandated vaccines for school attendance. This number dropped to 93 percent in 20222023. For MMR vaccinations, only a few states have bounced back since the peak of the pandemic, and rates have been slowly decreasing, on average, for the past six years.Ripley Cleghorn; Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (data)Ripley Cleghorn; Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (data)Ripley Cleghorn; Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (data)One reason vaccine rates have continued to decline has to do with a distrust in public health, which may worsen under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.s leadership of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Offit says. Kennedy, a longtime promoter of antivaccine rhetoric, recently wrote an op-ed in Fox News that mentioned the need to make MMR vaccines more accessible after claiming in earlier public comments that the current number of measles outbreaks was not unusual, a statement experts disagree with.This outbreak is atypical in the sense of having sustained local transmission and a child death in west Texas, Smith says. Additionally, outbreaks usually consist of dozens of people, not hundreds, as is happening in Texas. The national case count from the current outbreaks, which began in January, recently surpassed last years total. In previous outbreaks, weve seen an important, hopeful public health response encouraging families to get vaccinated, and were seeing a lot less of that in this particular case, Smith says.Measles was considered eliminated from the U.S. in 2000, following implementation of a recommended second MMR dose for children in 1989. But if low vaccination rates and higher spread of disease continues, experts worry measles could become commonplace again.The MMR vaccine is also just one of more than a dozen vaccines recommended for children. While its still too early to say if declining rates of other childhood vaccines might result in future outbreaks, the current situation with measles paints a foreboding picture. In an interview about cases in 2024 with the podcast Pediatrics Now, JB Cantey, a University of Texas associate professor of pediatrics, warned that measles is the canary in the coal mine for other vaccine-preventable diseases that are going to start to rear their ugly heads in the next few months, next few years, if our vaccine rates continue to drop, Cantey said.The current measles outbreaks demonstrate the importance of herd immunitya vaccinated person is highly affected by the vaccination status of those around them. An example of this played out during a measles outbreak in the Netherlands in 1999 to 2000 with 3,292 reported cases. Unvaccinated individuals were 224 times more likely to get measles than individuals who were vaccinated. Paradoxically, though, a higher number of infections were not among unvaccinated people who lived among vaccinated people but among vaccinated people who lived in clusters of largely unvaccinated individuals.In such a scenario, even if a person is 97 percent protected by the vaccine, [they are] constantly running into people who have measles or am spending a lot of time with them, Smith says. Every time is a chance at the bug breaking down [their] defenses.When populations achieve strong vaccine coverage, cases that appearusually from people traveling in and out of the countrywont spread from one child to another. This prevents the disease from hopping to other communities, Offit explains. He adds that herd immunity also helps protect individuals who are not eligible to receive the MMR vaccine because of their age or health status, including babies and those whose immune systems are suppressed because of treatments for cancers or autoimmune diseases. There are millions of people who... depend on the herd to protect them, Offit says.

March 20, 20253 min readHow Will Climate Scientists Know When the World Gets to the 1.5 C Mark?As the world gets closer to the mark 1.5 degrees Celsius in Paris climate agreement, scientists are racing to establish a single way to monitor current warmingBy Sara Schonhardt & E&E News Climate activists gather with signs for a demonstration calling upon the G20 conference to adhere to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, at the Sharm el-Sheikh International Convention Centre, in Egypt's Red Sea resort city of the same name, during the COP27 climate conference, on November 15, 2022. Fayez Nureldine/AFP via Getty ImagesCLIMATEWIRE | The world can't seem to agree on when the planet will exceed a key temperature threshold in the Paris climate agreement.Nearly 200 nations committed back in 2015 to pursuing efforts to keep global temperatures from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. But there is no official metric for determining when the world has crossed that line into increasingly catastrophic impacts.Enter an international team of scientific experts.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 World Meteorological Organization first convened the team of around 10 experts last summer to look at the different methodologies and devise a more accurate way to measure current warming. Some of their preliminary findings are detailed in the WMO's latest State of Climate report, which estimates that current global warming is somewhere between 1.34 degrees and 1.41 degrees compared with the 1850-1900 average.The expert group is still working to come up with a single way to monitor current warming, said Chris Hewitt, director of the climate services branch of the WMO. Then they'll work on an estimate for when the world will likely exceed the 1.5-degree threshold.While it's generally accepted that 1.5 degrees refers to a long-term average, the Paris agreement doesn't go into more scientific detail on how to measure that, Hewitt said.The latest assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the worlds top authority on global warming, defines future warming in terms of 20-year averages relative to the average from 1850-1900, the WMO says. But that doesnt provide an up-to-date assessment of current warming and could lead to delays in recognizing when 1.5 has been exceeded which in turn could delay the responses needed not just to keep warming from rising but to reverse it.If we look just back in the past, we won't know we've reached 1.5 until five or 10 years after it's happened, and for policymakers thats probably not very helpful to be told, Oh, so sorry, this happened five or 10 years ago, said Hewitt.Experts began discussing the need for a better metric for long-term warming ahead of global climate talks in 2023, when different analyses began showing that the world was getting exceedingly close to the 1.5-degree mark, with reports of monthly averages exceeding that threshold. The world needs to agree on the current level of warming and how to define 1.5 degrees of warming before it actually exceeds the threshold, experts say.Reaching 1.5 degrees of global warming may well be a trigger for policy responses, or at least public responses, said Richard Betts, head of climate impacts research at the U.K.s Met Office Hadley Centre and University of Exeter. And we want to avoid confusion, and some people saying that we're at 1.5 and some people say we're not.The expert team assembled by WMO which includes Betts used several new approaches referred to in Wednesday's report to come up with a more accurate metric for current warming. For example, one combines the average temperatures over the past 10 years with projections for the next decade. Theyre looking at a wider range of methods with the aim of narrowing down uncertainties.The report also found that the global mean temperature in 2024 was 1.55 degrees Celsius (plus or minus 0.13 degrees) above the planets preindustrial levels. Thats up from the 1.45 degree mean temperature in 2023.A breach of a single year doesnt mean that the Paris goal is dead, experts say.But it is a wake-up call that we are increasing the risks to our lives, economies and to the planet, WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo wrote in the forward to the report.

March 20, 20254 min readMouse-to-Mouse Resuscitation: Rodents Try to Revive Unconscious BuddiesThree studies show that a mouse will try to rouse an unconscious companionBy Gennaro Tomma edited by Gary StixA mouse tries to pull out the tongue of an unconscious social partner, perhaps to clear its airway in an attempt to revive it. Wenjian Sun, Guangwei Zhang, et al.Mice in animated movies and shorts do the weirdest things, from cooking starred dishes to piloting steamboats. But sometimes real life exceeds the most feverish Disney-esque imaginings. Consider recent research highlighting a mouse version of CPR. This study found that when mice see an unconscious peer, they seem to perform first aid, apparently aimed at rescuing their companion, although not all experts are convinced.It all started from an accidental observation, says Li Zhang, a systems neuroscientist at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC). While conducting laboratory experiments, Zhang and his colleagues noticed that when a mouse encountered an unconscious partner, it suddenly started to interact intensively with it.This caught our attention because this hasnt been reported before, how animals in general respond to unconscious conspecifics, Zhang says. While there are anecdotes of wild animals such as elephants, chimpanzees and dolphins trying to help others of their species in need, such rescuing behavior has never been carefully studied.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.To probe further, Zhang and his colleagues designed different experiments to analyze how a mouse behaved when it encountered another mouse that had been knocked out with anesthesia.Videos filmed with high-resolution cameras revealed that the first mouse performed a set of behaviors toward its unresponsive partner. First, it sniffed the unconscious mouses body and then started grooming the animal. Then it took more vigorous action: biting the mouth of its immobile partner and pulling its tongue out, clearing the airway opening. These actions resembled what humans do during first aid procedures, the team reports in a study published on February 21 in Science. When the researchers put an object in the mouth of the unresponsive mouse, the rescuer removed it most of the time.The team then designed additional experiments to rule out whether this behavior was motivated by a desire for social interaction with the unconscious mouse or curiosity about something new. The results were really a shock to us, Zhang says. We realized, Wow, this is a revival.The mice were more likely to administer this rescuelike behavior to familiar partners than to strangers, suggesting their actions were not motivated by aggressive impulses. For their part, the female rescuers sometimes went through this routine with strangers, suggesting they might have a higher level of empathy compared with males, the researchers say. The mice rescuers had no previous experience of interacting with an unconscious peer, suggesting the behavior is innate.While the recipients of the first aid behaviors revived more quickly from their unconscious states, the researchers remain cautious about whether such resuscitation attempts are intentional. It is possible that such rescuers actions arise from innate impulses that may have evolved because they enhance the chances of an animals survival, says study co-author Huizhong Tao, a professor of physiology and neuroscience at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.A closer look at the brains of these mice showed that neurons in the hypothalamus that release the hormone oxytocin play a key role in the expression of this first-aid-like behavior, Tao says.Another study investigating mouse first aid published in the same issue of Science produced similar results. The researchers found that a brain structure called the medial amygdala plays a part in the recognition of the unconscious animal and in regulating the rescuing behavior. These two different findings can complement each other, suggesting that both of the structures may be required for helpinglike behaviors toward unresponsive companions, Tao says.Yet another study, published on January 22 in Science Advances, reached similar conclusions while highlighting a different brain region that might be involved in this behavior.The behavior seems to be super surprising, says Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University, who studies helping behavior in rats and was not involved in the new research. For a long time, we were trying to explain whether behaviors for others are something that is automatic or ... something that is more acquired. For example, in humans, Bartal says, so-called prosocial behaviors are thought by many to be culturally based, skills that are learned from others.But this result, Bartal says, points toward a different view proposed by some scientiststhat we also have an innate automatic circuit that is intended to act prosocially for others.I think its definitely relevant to humans, Bartal adds. I think it helps us to realize that there is something automatic about prosociality in us that is very evolutionarily ancient.But not all scientists are convinced. I completely disagree with the interpretation, says Peggy Mason, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Chicago, who also wasnt involved in the new research. While she agrees that the rescue behavior indicates that the mice are disturbed by their unresponsive peers, Mason believes they are not actually attempting to rescue the animals but are just curious about them and engaged in investigation. I think the behavior is fine, she says. I just think you got to name it differently.Overall, the findings raise new questions, and further studies could lead to a better understanding of the brain circuitry that controls these rescuelike behaviorsand the empathy toward other animals that underlies them. Once the brain pathways that control these behaviors become clear, the authors say, it could reveal the underlying causes of deficits for certain neurological disorders ranging from Alzheimers to autism.

March 20, 20258 min readPsychology Explains Why Some People Buy So Much StuffFrom China to Brazil to Germany, huge numbers of people are addicted to shopping, driven in part by companies that use gaming strategiesBy Emma Marris & Nature magazine Fabio BuonocoreSadie has spent years hiding her problem from her family. In her day job, she works as a purchasing agent for a scientific firm, which requires placing large orders for everything from chemical reagents to US$8-million worth of glass vials. But in her personal time, Sadie goes on buying sprees for herself. She has ordered cameras, camera accessories, scrapbooking supplies, metal-detecting equipment, lasers, board games, planners, fountain pens, tech gadgets, nail polish, computer keyboard parts and yarn. She bought everything online.Before she knew it, she was $20,000 in debt. I couldnt believe it, she says. I never told my husband how bad it was. She has been paying the debt off, but she cant say exactly where the total stands today. Im so ashamed I wont even check the balance, she says. Sadie asked to remain anonymous so her family would not find out that shes a compulsive shopper.Sadies struggle is not a new phenomenon. German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin described krankhafte Kauflust the pathological desire to buy as early as 1899. But many specialists worry that the problem is getting much worse now in part because of the rise of e-commerce companies such as Amazon, Chinese fast-fashion firm Shein and online marketplace Temu, some of which use game-like strategies to sell items. Last year, the European Commission announced it was investigating several aspects of Temus business, including the risks linked to the addictive design of the service.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.As more and more shopping has moved online, retailers are increasingly using powerful psychological techniques to keep shoppers spending money. The Internet has, in effect, turned mundane behaviours such as shopping into something that resembles a drug, in the view of Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist at Stanford University in California, and the author of popular books about addiction. As a result, she says, it suddenly becomes a problem for the masses.And that problem extends across the globe. Researchers have studied compulsive shopping in many countries, including the United States, Turkey, Poland, Germany, India, Brazil, South Korea and Pakistan where almost one-third of university students were classified as compulsive buyers in both physical stores and online.There is particular concern about the problem in China, which might have the highest prevalence of the condition ever recorded. Heping He, a marketing researcher at Shenzhen University in China, conducted a survey that found around 29.1% of the general population of China shopped compulsively.He is one of many researchers around the globe who are investigating the prevalence of the problem as well as the brain pathways involved and how compulsive shopping relates to similar types of condition. But researchers studying these issues face a problem: there is no official diagnosis of shopping addiction or compulsive shopping, which could help to stimulate further research and aid with demands for regulation.Consumer cultureAlthough compulsive shopping has probably existed for as long as money and markets have, the Internet has made it much easier for people to make purchases. Before the rise of online shopping in China, few people paid attention to compulsive-buying behaviour, says He. Today, China is one of the most developed regions globally in terms of Internet commerce, he says. Add that to what he describes as a materialistic consumer culture and youve got an epidemic of shopping addiction.Compulsive shopping was once seen as problem that affected mostly women. But not all studies have found differences between genders, especially among younger shoppers. In China, He says the gender gap in compulsive buying appears to be narrowing, as men increasingly embrace online shopping amid the boom in Internet retailing.Although data suggest that the problem is surging, theres no official entry for shopping addiction or compulsive shopping in the two main references that are used to help make diagnoses: the International Classification of Diseases which is maintained by the World Health Organization and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Many clinicians and researchers say that the time has come to make the condition official. This is necessary, they say, to help people who are facing the problem to gain access to care.Brain scans indicate that shopping can activate the dopamine reward system.Westend61/Getty ImagesOne reason compulsive shopping is not yet a recognized disorder is a lack of consensus on its cause. Researchers debate whether it is brought about by a pathological level of impulsivity, a compulsion resembling obsessivecompulsive disorder or a behavioural addiction, activating reward pathways similar to those linked to drugs and alcohol. Although many researchers who have looked into the issue would like to see more studies completed, the addiction model for compulsive shopping seems to be ascendant among specialists, as the broader category of behavioural addictions is increasingly accepted. Gambling disorder, which is in many ways similar to compulsive shopping, was added to the fifth edition of the DSM in 2013 and was grouped with addictions to substances.According to Lembke, the phenomenology of shopping addiction also follows the classic addiction pattern: People do it at the beginning either to have fun or to solve a problem, from managing anxiety or depression to loneliness to boredom. If the behaviour works for them, they keep repeating it until it changes their brains and they cant stop, even as they descend into debt and, in some cases, destroy relationships with close family, she says.There are some brain-imaging studies that support the addiction theory for shopping. Patrick Trotzke, a psychologist at Charlotte Fresenius University in Cologne, Germany, scanned the brains of 18 people who were seeking treatment for buyingshopping disorder and 18 control participants while showing them pictures of shopping centres and shopping bags, as well as desirable objects, such as handbags and consumer electronics. In individuals with a shopping problem, these images activated the dopamine reward system in the striatum the same system implicated in drug addiction. They get thrilled when you show them these pictures, Trotzke says. The dopaminergic reward system is on fire. This tends to weaken the control system in the prefrontal cortex, Trotzke adds, until affected individuals no longer have control over their purchasing behaviour.Further evidence that compulsive shopping is connected to this dopamine reward system comes from people who are taking excessive amounts of medicine that alters this system and who then develop uncontrolled shopping behaviours. In one case report of a person with Parkinsons disease who took more dopaminergic medication than prescribed, the individual presented dressed in colourful clothes and was wearing three gold necklaces. It emerged that they had purchased over 5,000 pocket watches and 42 old and unusable cars.In 2021, 138 specialists from 35 countries were asked to weigh in on diagnostic criteria for buyingshopping disorder. The group used the Delphi method, which is an iterative and anonymous way of collecting opinions from a group that prevents leading researchers from exerting undue influence. The group agreed that the condition was a distinct entity that was due to addictive behaviours and settled on the name compulsive buying disorder. The studys authors derived a proposed list of criteria for the disorder, which includes intrusive urges to buy; lack of control over buying; buying items without using them; chasing the high of buying and using buying to feel better about bad feelings; and experiencing negative consequences because of buying.However, the idea that people either have or do not have compulsive buying disorder might be simplistic. Its a spectrum disorder, just like drugs and alcohol, Lembke says. Some people have a bit of a shopping problem and other people end up with very severe addictions where they go into huge financial debt and they lose their primary relationship.A 2020 study of more than 1,000 people in Switzerland grouped participants into categories of shoppers, including risky and addicted. The researchers estimated that around 3% of the people in their sample were truly addicted to online shopping, with a further 11% at risk, because they agreed with the statements I think about shopping/buying things all the time and I shop/buy things in order to change my mood.Brain-imaging studies such as Trotzkes cant be used to neatly diagnose compulsive buying disorder, because shopping is at least somewhat rewarding for most people. I like shopping, and when you show me shopping-related things, my brain reward system is also turning on, he explains.Limited treatment optionsThe only empirically supported treatment for compulsive shopping is cognitive behavioural therapy, according to Trotzke. But few studies explored other therapeutic or pharmacological approaches. Similarly, little work has been conducted on how the retail environment might induce or worsen problematic shopping.Mava Flayelle and Jol Billieux, both behavioural addiction researchers at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, say their work attempts to expand the focus from the psychology of the individual to the design features of websites and apps that, in Flayelles words, are challenging user self-control abilities. She says many of these features such as integration of shopping with social media, reward points for purchases, roulette wheels of deals and discounts, countdown timers that create time pressures to buy and apps that allow shoppers to pay in instalments can erode self-control in susceptible individuals.Another development in online shopping is loot boxes integrated into some video games. These cost money to open and contain an unknown but possibly valuable digital item that can then be sold to other players. These boxes combine gaming, shopping and gambling into a single package that proves to be irresistible for some people. Loot boxes have so far escaped the kinds of regulation that are placed on slot machines.A 2024 Council of Europe policy paper argued that the video-game industry needs to take responsibility for the harms its products cause and recommended effective regulatory measures. But, Flayelle says, we are really at the beginning. And the technological innovation of online businesses is moving much more quickly than research and regulation.Lembke has taken part in some academic discussions of banning advertising on sites designed for teenagers, but this could face resistance in the United States, where President Trumps administration has said it will reduce regulation. In China, He says that retailers are more inclined to implement measures that stimulate consumer purchases rather than take steps to prevent shopping addiction.Although countries might not adopt regulations that could help, trade restrictions could put a dent in the global e-commerce industry. Along with the investigation into Temus addictive design, the European Commission announced in early February that it is also looking into whether low-value imports are harmful or counterfeit. Some 12 million parcels per day enter the EU market, the commission says, three times as many as in 2022.In the meantime, self-described shopping addicts are left to tackle their problems individually, either with the help of a professional or on their own. Communities of people with shopping problems congregate on social-networking platforms, such as Reddit, where they share stories and encourage one another to change their habits. As a moderator on one of these forums, Sadie has recently cut back on shopping, saying that her world view and priorities have shifted.Taking a break from endlessly scrolling through products has been revelatory for Sadie. We are bombarded with feel-good mini jolts every time our phone pings, she says. Were all running on a hamster wheel trying to hit that dopamine button in our brain again and again.This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on March 4, 2025.

OpinionMarch 20, 20255 min readWere Not Going to Mars Anytime SoonDespite What Musk SaysElon Musk and Donald Trump have announced ambitious plans to send a mission to Mars in 2026 and 2028. Its not going to happenBy Paul M. Sutter edited by Dan VerganoElon Musk gives a tour to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and lawmakers of the control room before the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket on November 19, 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. Brandon Bell/Getty ImagesIn his January inaugural address, President Donald Trump declared that we will pursue our Manifest Density into the stars and plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars. He reiterated the Mars promise in his March 4 speech to a joint session of Congress. As for a timeline, SpaceXs founder and CEO Elon Musk, stated in November that he is highly confident that we will send several of his companys Starships to Mars in two years, and if those go well, with crewed missions to follow in four.Meanwhile, on March 6, SpaceXs latest Starship exploded mid-flight for the second time in a row, sending debris raining over Florida and the Caribbean, closing airports in the process.Somethings not adding up.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 stated goals of Mars landings in 2026 and 2028 do not correspond to a comprehensive, articulated plan. Its simply the next open launch window, when Earth and Mars are in conjunction on the same side of the solar system, and transfers to that planet require the least amount of energy. Its like announcing a camping trip on your next available weekend, without having purchased any camping supplies. And your car is in the shop. And has exploded.So far, the only details of a Mars mission that Musk has shared consist of a brief comment on X, when someone asked him what cargo of the first Starship to the red planet would carry. His response: Cybertrucks and Optimus robots.While such statements may play well to sycophants on social media, its nowhere near an actual plan to go to Mars, especially considering the calls to cut NASAs science budget by up to 50 percent.A mission to Mars is not outright impossiblethere are no laws of physics that forbid itand indeed SpaceX has made enormous strides in developing reusable rocket boosters. And Im confident that Starship, with its impressive launch cadence, will achieve orbit and land safely back to Earth in short order. Even so, theres still a long road to go to get to Mars.In the 1960s the Apollo program went from blueprints to lunar landing in less than a decade. But Mars is another beast. At its closest approach, that planet is 56 million kilometers awayroughly 150 times the distance to the moon. Starship cannot launch directly from the Earth and reach Mars in one go. It must refuel in orbit, a technology only in its earliest development. While estimates vary, a full refill of Starship is likely to take an additional 10 to 20 tanker launches of fuel.Next, Starship has to plunge through the thin Martian atmosphere and land on its cratered surface in a controlled, powered descentsomething that no lander has ever achieved before. SpaceX was already contracted to provide the lunar lander for the Artemis mission, but last year a Government Accountability Office report found significant issues with SpaceXs supporting evidence that its mission can be achieved within schedule and acceptable risk.A crewed mission to Mars isnt a one-way trip. A return journey would entail another launch from Mars, another transfer across interplanetary space, another plunge through an atmosphere, and another controlled landingagain, all never before done from interplanetary distances. The return trip fuel would either have to be transferred there ahead of time (meaning even more launches) or we must the develop the machinery to create methane from ice water and the thin carbon dioxide atmosphere on Marstechnologies that have yet to be demonstrated, let alone deployed.And all this is just for the uncrewed, robotic proof-of-concept that Musk envisions for 2026. A crewed mission brings its own headaches. For starters, we have no working human-rated deep-space vehicleat all. Starship will have to undergo rigorous installation and testing of life-support systems, and demonstrate a much higher degree of safety, to be certified to carry a human crew to Mars.A typical Mars round trip takes around two years, including transfer time and waiting on the Martian surface for our planets to come back into conjunction. The record-holders for the longest duration stay at the International Space Station are cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub, at only 374 days. For the duration of a Mars mission, Starship would have to remain fully independent, unlike the ISS, which gets regular supplies and materials, not to mention constant guidance from the ground to fix the myriad issues that crop up.Starship also has to protect the crew against cosmic radiation for those two years, and maintain their health against the ravages of microgravity. Research into this is one of the primary motivations for the ISS, which Musk called for deorbiting after insulting one of its former commanders.Plus, Starship cant just be a transit vehicle. It also has to be (or at least provide for) the operating base on the Martian surface. Whatever Starship is at this point, its definitely not that. No Starship has even successfully landed on Earth yet.We are very, very far away from these ideas becoming prototypes, let alone robust mission components.Indeed, the U.S. was developing exactly those mission components when, in 2016, the Obama administration announced a pivot from the moon-focused initiative of the Bush years with a focus on getting to Mars in the 2030s. Then Trump reversed that by disregarding Mars and aiming again for the moon with the Artemis project.Now with Musk calling the moon a distraction, rumors are swirling that the second Trump administration may cancel Artemiscalls that seem to come from Musks insistence that we colonize Mars.The only way were going to Mars is by spending a lot of money. Likely, up to trillions of dollars. Perhaps thats Musks real aimto funnel enormous sums of money away from researchers at NASA and its partners and into his privately-held company without having to answer to shareholders or deliver on promised schedules. A bold enough claim could substantially increase his already vast fortune.Followers of Musk are used to his audacious, and sometimes incredible, assertions. For example, Tesla drivers are still waiting for their vehicles Full Self Driving system to achieve Level 5 autonomy, which was supposed to occur in 2021; meanwhile, the systems under scrutiny for fatal accidents. But while statements of grand ambition may excite shareholders and fans, they dont make for sound space progress. If we keep whipsawing between priorities, and allow outlandish, self-interested claims to direct policy, the only place well be going is nowhere.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

March 19, 20254 min readRFK, Jr. Wants to Let Bird Flu Spread on Poultry Farms. Why Experts Are ConcernedHealth secretary RFK, Jr. has repeatedly suggested that farmers should let bird flu spread through flocks. Experts explain why thats a dangerous ideaBy Stephanie Pappas edited by Jeanna BrynerChickens stand in a henhouse in Petaluma, Calif., on February 18, 2025. Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesWith H5N1 avian influenza spreading in poultry flocks, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is pushing a new plan: let the virus rip.Kennedy recently told Fox News that by letting the highly pathogenic bird flu spread through flocks, farmers could identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it.But poultry experts say that, in addition to causing an unimaginable poultry death toll, this plan wouldnt work.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.No, not for this disease, says Rocio Crespo, a poultry veterinarian at the North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine. This is crazy.How Bird Flu Impacts FarmsFarmers must currently cull infected flocks to contain the disease before it spreads. Theyre financially compensated for the culled birds by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The policy is supported by science because highly pathogenic avian influenza is so deadly on its own, killing 90 to 100 percent of chickens in three or four days, says Matt Koci, an immunologist and virologist at North Carolina State Universitys poultry science department.The disease overwhelms birds, Crespo says. Its devastating, she says. Its a disease that attacks every single organ.As a result, the chickens never develop the antibodies that would beat back the flu and give them the ability to survive a second encounter with the virus they die too quickly. That means there is little for scientists to study to develop treatments or uncover some genetic secret to resistance, Koci says. Genetic resistance in chickens and turkeys is not a thing, he says.What the Experts SayEven with avian diseases that are slower-acting than highly pathogenic bird flu, scientists have struggled to find a key to genetic resistance. Huaijun Zhou, a professor of animal science at the University of California, Davis, worked on a project on Newcastle disease, another viral illness that is also nearly always fatal in poultry but that some infected birds can survive for weeks. We didnt find any magic bullet, Zhou says.There were genetic variants in chickens that allowed the birds to survive longer with Newcastle disease. Yet each one had a tiny effect, and it took a combination of hundreds of them to make a noticeable difference in survival. Its just the nature of the disease, says Zhou, adding that the bird flus high mortality rate makes success even less likely.Kennedys remarks belie a lack of knowledge about the way poultry breeding works, Koci says. The chickens that provide meat and eggs are not in the breeding population: theyre the product of parent generations that are bred to maximize disease resistance and meat or egg production. Wiping out the working offspring of these breeders wouldnt do anything to alter the next generations of chickens coming down the line.Another problem with the let-it-rip strategy would be the inability of farmers to sell chicken products internationally because the policy might lead importers to ban American products. The resulting mass poultry death would also make todays egg prices look like a great deal.The Chick-fil-As and the Kentucky Fried Chickens and all the chicken dinners you have, forget it, Crespo says, gone.How Scientists Are Tackling the Bird Flu CrisisCulling and containment have been successful at controlling bird flu in the U.S. since the 1980s, Koci says. The currently circulating strain, however, has thrown a wrench in the system by finding new ways onto poultry farms. In the past, bird flu spread to new farms through the droppings of infected migratory birds, meaning the danger was largely limited to summer and fall, when these birds passed through. Now the disease is in nonmigratory wild birds, as well as wild mammals. The risk is year-round, and scientists arent entirely sure how the virus gets onto farms.Were trying to understand: Can we figure out these other point sources, and can we change how we do biosecurity? Koci says.In the longer term, Zhou says, researchers are looking at genetic variations in the way poultry respond to vaccination. Currently, vaccines are not used because, although they can keep chickens alive, they dont prevent infection. That means that infected chickens could spread disease even if they were vaccinated, so farmers wouldnt be able to export products from such inoculated birds. Understanding why the immune systems of some chickens respond better than others could help scientists develop vaccines that better tamp down transmission.Kennedy does not have a say in the U.S.s agricultural policies. But, as the New York Times reported on Tuesday, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has also indicated support for the let-it-rip idea, telling Fox News that some farmers are interested in piloting the strategy.In a statement, Emily Hilliard, the deputy press secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services said, We want to keep people away from the most dangerous version of the current bird flu, which is found in chickens. Culling puts people at the highest risk of exposure, which is why Secretary Kennedy and NIH want to limit culling activities. Culling is not the solution. Strong biosecurity is.But viral spread leads to more viral particles in the environment, begetting more viral spread, Crespo says.And a no-cull policy would expose farmworkers to sick chickens, according to Koci. Youre exposing more humans to more chickens, he says, and just buying more lottery tickets for that pandemic strain.

March 19, 20257 min readShocking Dark Energy Findings Challenge the Standard Model of the UniverseA new map of cosmic expansion suggests that dark energy evolves over time, hinting that the universe doesnt work the way we thought it didBy Zack Savitsky edited by Clara MoskowitzDESI's 3D map of the universe can show how dark energy may have evolved over time. Earth is at the center in this animation, and every dot is a galaxy. DESI collaboration and KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. ProctorAt a beachfront convention center in Cancn, Mexico, last December, Seshadri Nadathur presented a confidential growth chart of the universe. Seated in the audience, hundreds of his fellow scientists silently processed that the cosmic chronicle as they had come to know it may need revising. Its the most exciting thing thats happened in cosmology in 25 years, says Nadathur, a cosmologist at the University of Portsmouth in England.For almost three decades, astronomers have believed that the universe is expanding faster and faster and that the acceleration of this growth is constant over timedriven by a mysterious force they call dark energy. Last April a survey by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) published hints that dark energy may not be as constant as theyd assumed, adding to a pile of concerns that are already threatening the standard model of cosmology. Today Nadathur and his DESI collaborators unveiled their follow-up results publicly at the American Physical Societys Global Physics Summit and in multiple preprint papers, further validating the omen.After nearly tripling the researchers collection of galaxy coordinates, the new DESI analysis provides the strongest evidence yet that the rate of cosmic expansion fluctuatesfinally shedding some light on dark energy, which scientists think constitutes about 70 percent of everything in the universe.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 the evidence still falls short of physicists benchmark for a discovery, experts say the new result leaves the standard model in dire straits. Making sense of an evolving dark energy would almost certainly involve amending the foundations of physics in order to unlock the true history and fate of our universe.Its like hitting a vein of gold, says Adam Riess, who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of dark energy and was not involved in the new work. Assuming the result holds up, it says this investment that weve all been making that there was still more to learn is going to pay off.Cosmic Tug-of-WarAround a century ago scientists began to realize that the universe is expanding outward from what they now call the big bang, the explosion of energy that birthed space and time. In the late 1990s scientists set out to measure how the growth of the universe gradually slows as it spreads outonly to realize that its not slowing at all. Studying the light from burst stars called supernovae, Riesss group and another independent team confirmed in 1998 that the farther objects are from us, the faster theyre receding. In other words, space is accelerating outward.In the years since then, scientists have remained in the dark about whats causing the universes prolonged growth spurt (hence the name dark energy). To construct their standard model of cosmology, theorists tagged onto their equations of gravity a cosmological constanta value Albert Einstein first proposed in 1917 to explain why the universe doesnt gravitationally collapse. Although physicists dont understand the origin of this figure, their best guess has been that the vacuum of space itself is imbued with a constant energy that pushes outward relentlessly.Today the canonical story of cosmic evolution describes this tug-of-war between the unwavering push of dark energy and the gravitational pull of matter (including the vast reservoirs of invisible cold dark matter that supposedly glue galaxies together). This standard model paints a crazy successful picture of how the universe evolved from one second to 14 billion years old, despite the fact that 95 percent of the models contents are utterly unfamiliar, says Kevork Abazajian, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Irvine. But its also broken. A series of conflicting measurements about the expansion rate and the clumpiness of the cosmos have thrown cosmology into a conundrum.As a result, cosmologists have been measuring the rate at which nothingness expands with increasing precision. The acceleration had proven steadfastuntil they started looking at sound.Frozen Ripples in SpaceShortly after the big bang, the universe was a fireball of free-flying particles and light that sloshed around, creating pressure waves like those youd get from tossing a rock into a pond. After around 380,000 years, everything had cooled enough for atoms to form, allowing light to flow freely without constantly bumping into other particles (this light is the cosmic microwave background radiation that we can still see today). Suddenly, the primordial pond froze over, preserving a patchwork of ripples, all about 490 million light-years across. These waves, known as baryonic acoustic oscillations, sowed the seeds for galaxies to comeoffering astronomers today a handy standardized touchstone.The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) maps the universe by collecting spectra from millions of galaxies and quasars.Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley LabPerched on the Quinlan Mountains in southern Arizona, DESI is designed to pick up those sound waves frozen in time. Its 5,000 dancing robotic arms trace out the patterns of galaxies, capturing more than 200,000 in a night. It then spits their light out into a spectrum, revealing the relative age of different clusters of galaxies. For objects more than nine billion light-years away, DESI detects matter by the way it soaks up light from supermassive black holes glowing in the background. At each slice of cosmic history, the team looks for traces of the ripples in the distribution of matter. Finally, by overlaying those measurements with observations of the cosmic microwave background and various supernovae surveys, the researchers can reconstruct a three-dimensional map of the universes expansion over the past 11 billion years.Last April the 900-member DESI collaboration released the analysis of its first year of data, which showed some hints that the cosmic expansion rate didnt line up perfectly with the standard model. But experts were hesitant to trust the signal from a brand-new experiment with limited observations. In this round, DESI has pinpointed nearly 15 million galaxies from more than 24,000 exposuresa few of which, observers suspect, were accidentally triggered by the telescopes resident cat Mimzi stepping on the keyboard.To avoid subconsciously biasing their interpretation, the researchers cleverly shuffled the real locations of galaxies such that their analysis wouldnt reveal the true underlying cosmology to them while they were still working on it. After months of study, hundreds of DESI collaborators met in Cancn to unblind the results.Days before the big reveal, a select few researchers quietly swapped in the true measurements and watched the plots slowly take shape. Uendert Andrade, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan, spent the following days mustering his best poker face and dodging colleagues attempts to pry the answer out of him. Its really kind of magicalyoure one of the few people in the world that know this, he says.As Nadathur clicked through his presentation, the message became clear: The deviation wasnt a fluke. The cracks in the standard model had only widened. Something has to break somewhere, says DESI collaborator Claire Lamman, a graduate student at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.On their own, the new DESI observations show a slight but statistically insignificant preference for an evolving dark energy. But when they are combined with other experiments data from supernovae surveys and the cosmic microwave background, the confidence that dark energy is indeed wavering approaches 99.997 percenta compelling indication thats just shy of the bar usually required to claim a physics discovery. Crucially, no matter which of those datasets are omitted, the results all point in the same direction. You can remove one leg of the stool, and it still stands, Riess says. It passes the sniff test that I have for [taking] a result very seriously.Rewriting PhysicsThe analysis seems to suggest that dark energy transforms over timeappearing a tad weaker today than Einsteins prediction and a tad stronger in the early universe. This progression has implications for the ultimate destiny of the universe: a dark energy that is too strong could eventually rip apart all atoms, and one that is too weak could lure everything to crunch inward.Fate aside, the changeable nature of dark energy would pose deep problems for fundamental physics today. An acceleration greater than that described by the cosmological constant evokes what cosmologists call phantom energy, which has an ever increasing density over timesomething forbidden by our current understanding of gravity.Assuming the results stand, this incongruence could spark an era of chaos cosmology, says Abazajian, who recently posted a preprint paper that showed how even the previous DESI results prefer a fluctuating dark energy. Reconciling this, he suggests, would require either uncovering an entirely new fundamental force or realizing that our universe has more than four dimensions. No matter what, we are discovering new physics here, Abazajian says. Theres nothing in the standard physics that allows for an evolving dark energy.Although the results dont directly help to resolve the existing tensions in cosmology (relating to the universes stretching and smoothing), researchers are hopeful that the new insights could point them toward a sturdier model. Over the next few years, experiments with the Euclid satellite and the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory should chime in with complementary pointers.Researchers are already starting to mine the DESI data for clues. Riess is intrigued by why an evolving dark energy would hover around the value of the cosmological constant that Einstein predicted rather than any other arbitrary value. Its almost like an Easter eggsomething is hidden in there, he says.For many senior members of DESI, the new results bring a feeling of relief. In graduate school, Alexie Leauthaud, now at the University of California, Santa Cruz, watched as fellow cosmologists debated whether their field was destined to die. They feared cosmology experiments would only measure the cosmological constant with greater precision to no avail. It felt to many people that we were chasing these decimal points, she says. At least now we are headed somewhere.The significance rings differently for junior researchers. Lamman notes how ever since shes been able to read, the cosmology textbooks havent changed. This field has always been the same, and Ive kind of taken that for granted, she says. I dont think I ever fully internalized that we could actually find something new.After the unblinding, Lamman and a few dozen of her colleagues ran out to the beach to celebrate. Floating in the ocean, she gazed up at the blanket of stars and cried out at the sky, We know your secret!

March 19, 20254 min readADHD Misinformation Is Common on TikTok. Heres How to Spot ItWith limited access to mental health care, people looking for answers about ADHD are turning to TikTok, where information is frequently misleading or inaccurateBy Allison Parshall edited by Dean Visser mihailomilovanovic/Getty ImagesOn TikTok, videos about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) abound; it is consistently one of the most popular health-related topics on the app. People often share relatable content about their own experiences with the condition, and many adults report learning they had ADHD by watching these videos.But misinformation about ADHD is also common, a group of psychology researchers reported on Wednesday in PLOS ONE. In the 100 most popular TikTok videos about the topic at the time of this study, only half of claims about symptoms reflected the core diagnostic criteria of ADHD, according to evaluations made by two clinical psychologists . The other half of the claims were largely overgeneralized, misleading or inaccurate but were often presented with confidence and without nuance.The findings dont mean these videos are intentionally misleading or even entirely unhelpful, but the researchers emphasize the need for caution in interpreting and internalizing them.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.These videos have an incredible reach and are very popular, says the new studys lead author Vasileia Karasavva, a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at the University of British Columbia. What I think our study tapped into is that people are struggling, and people are trying to understand themselves better in the context of ADHD, she says. But getting support through the mental health care system is onerous and expensive, she notesand this drives people to seek information on social media, where it can be difficult to assess whether what theyre learning is supported by clinical experience and research.Karasavva and her colleagues evaluated the top 100 videos under TikToks #ADHD tag on January 10, 2023. The study co-authors, including two psychologists with at least 20 years of experience in diagnosing and treating ADHD, then evaluated the videos many claims about symptoms and treatment. The researchers found that 55.6 percent of claims about ADHD treatments werent empirically supported and that 51.3 percent of claims about symptoms did not reflect a core diagnostic ADHD symptom as specified by the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).Of those noncore symptom claims, only 5.6 percent referred to issues that are associated with ADHD, such as working memory problems, based on empirical research. Most referred to symptoms that are associated with other conditionsor, in the case of 68.5 percent of these claims, that are more reflective of what the studys clinicians deemed normal human experience. For example, frequently bumping into furniture, listening to the same songs over and over or having a sweet tooth were commonly presented as indications of ADHD in the videos. But they are not, Karasavva points out.You can sometimes find a grain of truth in these associations, says Lorenzo Lorenzo-Luaces, a psychologist at Indiana University Bloomington, who studies online misinformation but was not involved in the new paper. But these often loose connections, which are typically based on peoples personal experiences, can be overgeneralized. Misinformation research shows that people are more likely to believe claims to which they are repeatedly exposedwhether they trust the source at the time or nothe adds.Some of the noncore symptoms presented as ADHD indicators might also reflect active areas of scientific debate, Lorenzo-Luaces says. For example, problems with emotional regulation are increasingly recognized as a common experience among people with ADHD but arent a part of the official diagnostic criteria.The videos often lacked nuance in presenting symptoms, however, the researchers found. Only 4 percent of the videos acknowledged that the symptoms they mentioned dont apply to everyone with ADHD, and even fewer mentioned that people without ADHD might experience those symptoms, too. In videos where people recounted their own personal experience, this lack of nuance was less concerning to the researchers. But in others, information was presented as blanket fact. For example, one video about habit formation began with a creator saying, Just a quick reminder that anything you do with ADHD has a 100 percent relapse rate. Difficulty forming habits isnt necessarily associated with ADHD, the researchers say, and such absolute statements have the potential to mislead or even harm people who are trying to learn about themselves.A very high level of confidence like this can be a red flag that someone is providing exaggerated or inaccurate information about ADHD, Karasavva says. A clear financial incentive can be another warning sign. The team found that 50 percent of the creators of the most popular videos were directly soliciting donations or selling products or services, such as fidget spinners, workbooks or coaching services.We still think that, for a huge chunk of [creators], their intentions were pure, Karasavva says. But online platforms often incentivize creators to post quick and entertaining videosand to do so frequentlywhich might create some barriers to making content that is very well researched and has nuance.If someone wants to know more about what ADHD is and how it might appear in their life, Karasavva recommends talking to an expert mental health provider. But she also highlights that obtaining a diagnosis can be an onerous, time-consuming, expensive and complicated process that can be much harder for people with ADHD to navigate.And this process can be worse for people in historically underdiagnosed groups because many ADHD diagnostic criteria and treatments were developed based on how the condition appeared in white male children. "People of color and women have been missed by this diagnosis. So Im not faulting anyone who is like, I dont trust the system because the system wasnt built for me, Karasavva says. Theyre not wrong about that.People will continue to rely too heavily on social media for key mental health information until care is more accessible and equitable, she adds: Nothing will change if the system doesnt change and become more accessible to people who need support, Karasavva says.

March 19, 20254 min readHow Gutting the EPA's Research Team Could Impact Clean Air and Water RulesA plan by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to fire scientists could disrupt environmental rules focused on clean air and water long after President Donald Trump leaves officeBy Jean Chemnick & E&E News Smog over Los Angeles. Westend61/Getty ImagesCLIMATEWIRE | If EPA amputates its scientific arm, it would have consequences for environmental regulations for years to come, experts said.Administrator Lee Zeldins proposal to eliminate the Office of Research and Development and fire hundreds of scientists threatens to drain the agency of experts who ensure that federal rules accurately target pollution and provide remedies. The move, if approved by the White House, could also lead the agency to depend on outside researchers who risk being selected through a politicized process that jeopardizes EPA's mission of assessing regulations without prejudice, according to experts.Reverberations from gutting the research office, known as ORD, could affect the agency long past the end of President Donald Trumps second term.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.ORD is a crown jewel of EPA, and it provides indispensable scientific information that forms the underpinnings of a lot of regulatory decisions, said Richard Revesz, who headed the White House regulatory office during the Biden administration.Signs of the purge could be delayed, he said, because the Trump administration is unlikely to prioritize regulations.It will make it difficult for an administration that comes in committed to carrying out EPA's actual mission to have the scientific underpinnings necessary to move forward with the kind of regulatory program they might otherwise be able to have, Revesz said.The agency's leaked workforce reduction plan, first reported in The New York Times on Tuesday, calls for EPA to eliminate 1,540 scientists as part of a broader effort to slash 65 percent of the agencys budget. The plan would keep a relatively small number of scientists who it said are directly supporting statutory work. They would be reshuffled into other offices.The reductions would fall heavily on EPA offices in North Carolina and elsewhere around the country, where its labs are concentrated.The sudden loss of so much expertise might make it harder for EPA to fulfill its core mission of regulating air and water pollution based on the best available science as it is required to do under bedrock laws like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, experts said.EPAs mission is to protect human health and the environment, said Laura Kate Bender, assistant vice president of nationwide healthy air at the American Lung Association. They can't do that if they don't have the facts on how air pollution impacts human health and the environment.For example, the Clean Air Act directs EPA to set maximum allowable limits for harmful air pollutants dubbed the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, or NAAQS at levels that are deemed by years of research to be safe for the public. That science is conducted at the office Zeldin has proposed to eliminate.EPA itself points to the importance of conducting that research without bias which could lead to standards that are influenced by environmentalists or industry. The agency's website states that placing the NAAQS process within the science office ensures that the assessments can be developed independent of their use by EPAs program and regional offices to set national standards and make environmental decisions.Chet Wayland, a longtime EPA career official who recently retired as head of air quality monitoring, said the full effect of the layoffs may not be felt until EPA's current models and monitoring tools become obsolete through years of deferred research.Nobody's doing the research for solving the future problems, Wayland said, referring to a scenario under Zeldins plan. We're having to rely on current tools for future problems. And we know that things change over time, and you constantly need to upgrade those tools. And ORD was a major part of providing those updates for us on a regular basis.Revesz said climate science might not be the hardest hit, because most of it was conducted outside of EPA. But agency research is often at the vanguard of finding new public health hazards that may require regulation.Thomas Lorenzen, a former Justice Department attorney who defended EPA regulations in court, said it was unclear whether the loss of so much scientific expertise would lead to more rules being overturned in court. While EPA is supposed to base its rulemakings on the best available science, he said, theres nothing that says that EPA has to rely on their own internal science to justify their decisions.So, what you've got here is basically the outsourcing of science, Lorenzen said. And that could give rise to questions. Is that science unbiased? Who funds it? Where does it come from?Lorenzen said EPA would need to explain why it chose the science and analysis it relied on when undertaking a rulemaking.So, it could make things more challenging, but it doesn't have to, he said. Courts generally defer to agencies in their areas of expertise, he said.But Georges Benjamin, executive director of American Public Health Association, said EPA would need scientists to vet outside research and fill in any gaps.When you're doing [research] for regulatory oversight, you have to be very careful you don't bring bias into that, he said. And this office is essential to doing good regulatory oversight. So, I think it will be a real problem. And maybe that is the administration's intent, is to bring regulatory oversight to a halt.Meredith Hankins, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said losing internal expertise means EPA would have to rely on science that is conducted outside of government transparency laws. But it also means losing a generation of career scientists who would leave government service over the next four years and wont train their eventual replacements.So, it's not just the hiring and firing of individual people, but it's the years and years of knowledge and expertise that really cannot be replaced, she said.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

March 18, 20256 min readSpace Advertising Could Outshine the StarsUnless Its Banned FirstAstronomers are racing to protect the dark skies as private companies seek to place large advertisements in Earth orbitBy Sharmila Kuthunur edited by Lee BillingsIn the not-too-distant future, Earths skies could become cluttered with bright billboardlike advertising displays produced by orbiting constellations of small, maneuverable laser-equipped satellites. Allvision/Getty ImagesImagine stepping outside to stargaze on a clear summer night, only to see no stars but rather the garish glow of advertisements streaming across the sky.This seemingly science-fictional scenario isnt actually implausible: private companies are inching closer to launching swarms of tiny maneuverable satellites to create billboardlike displays big and bright enough to be seen from the ground. Prohibitive launch costs and nascent satellite-positioning technology have historically hindered this sort of celestial drone show, but last April the Russian start-up Avant Space announced it had successfully deployed what it billed to be the first space media satellite into Earth orbit. The prototype was a technology demonstration for a planned fleet of small, low-cost, laser-equipped satellites designed to emblazon Earths sky with corporate logos, QR codes and other consumer-culture ephemera.The suddenly all-too-real prospect of large-scale space advertising prompted Piero Benvenuti, former general secretary of the International Astronomical Union, to raise the issue in February during a subcommittee meeting of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), the United Nations body that governs the use of space for peace, security and development. Benvenuti urged delegates from 104 member nations, including Russia, to ban obtrusive space ads, warning that such displays could otherwise become the ultimate light trespass that would ruinously interfere with ground-based astronomy.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.There is absolutely no reason why you should use space in such a useless way to advertise commercials, Benvenuti says. The U.N. doesnt regulate space launches, he notes, but it can help establish international norms to prevent any space-based advertising initiatives from gaining momentum. Our goal on the diplomatic part is to keep the attention of everybody on the issue, he says.Artificial Stars in the SkyIn 2020 Russia granted Avant Space a patent for a laser-based technology to project messages, logos and other images for advertisers onto the sky. The start-up plans to soon offer its customers brief, app-based control of a satellite, allowing them to light [their] own star, says Vlad Sitnikov of StartRocket, a Russia-based firm partnering with Avant Space. An investor pitch shared with Scientific American shows that the two companies aim to deploy between 200 and 400 laser-fitted small satellites into an orbit roughly 370 miles above Earths surface before the end of this decade. Such a swarm could beam ads down toward our planet for potentially hours each and every day. Their vision, Sitnikov says, is to prove that space is not just for scientists, not just for the militaryit is entertainment, too. And people like entertainment.Anton and I, were dreaming about this technology, he adds, referring to Anton Ossovskiy, founder and CEO of Avant Space. Where there is humanity, there will be advertisementswe want to be the first.This isnt the first time astronomers have sounded alarms about space-based advertising. Light from most any conceivable space ad would need to be sufficiently bright to be visible to the unaided eyeand would thus photobomb any unlucky ground-based telescopes that happened to be in the way. In 2000 such concerns helped to spur the U.S. Congress to pass a federal law that banned the issuance of launch licenses to companies for the purpose of ferrying payloads for obtrusive space advertising. (This law was first introduced as potential legislation in 1993, when it arose on the heels of a proposal by a Georgia-based marketing company to display a space billboard in the then upcoming 1996 Summer Olympic Games.) The recent push for a global ban urges other nations to enactand enforcesimilar laws before its too late. Astronomers fear that as space becomes ever easier to access, more companies will follow Avant Space and StartRocket in becoming drawn to the allure of space-based advertising, with few, if any, regulatory limits on their potentially disruptive plans.If space billboards do indeed make an abrupt splash in our sky, current space law doesnt prohibit the displays from drifting over countries that have banned them, notes astronomer John Barentine, who spearheaded a stance recently put forth by the American Astronomical Society that also calls for a global ban on obtrusive space billboards. Whats more, the COPUOS delegates ostensibly responsible for addressing the problem dont usually meet on an emergency basis.Thats my fearif somebody launches something tomorrow, it could be the better part of a year before there is even an opportunity to react to it, Barentine says. We stand a better chance of keeping the genie from getting out of the bottle by the biggest world power saying, This is something we do not want.The Wild Wild WestIn pushing for a global ban on space billboards, Barentine, Benvenuti and other astronomers are eager to get ahead of issue rather than respond retroactively, as they were forced to do back in 2019 when light pollution from the first batch of SpaceX Starlink satellites stunned them with brighter-than-expected streaks in telescope images. It was just this wake-up call, Barentine says. It got us thinking about going on offense and start anticipating whats coming next.Sitnikov remains undeterred by objections from the scientific community, maintaining that StartRocket and Avant Spaces ads would only be switched on during dawn and dusk and only over major cities, thereby avoiding remote areas where telescopes are typically hosted and the dark hours when most astronomical observations are carried out. It is very strange to blame us, he says.Once deployed in orbit, however, these satellites would reflect sunlight particularly strongly during twilight hours, which would still degrade observations of current and forthcoming ground-based telescopes, leading to a loss of discoveries and increased bogus alerts. Moreover, the radio transmissions required for the satellites to communicate with apps on cell phones must be so strong that even the slightest leakage outside their designated frequency band would be enough to drown out very faint radio signals from celestial objects that astronomers seek. Such a purposeful change of the night sky into a canvas for commercial advertising is a terrifying problem for astronomy research, says astronomer Samantha Lawler of the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. But we have nothing beyond asking nicelyits very frustrating.Beyond impacting telescope observations, flying a swarm of satellites intended for space-based advertising would undoubtedly complicate efforts to manage traffic in low-Earth orbit. This region of space around Earth is home to thousands of defunct rocket stages, dead satellites and discarded hardware that all zip around our planet at dangerously high speeds. On top of this, there are millions of ultrasmall yet lethal pieces of trash that scientists are still learning to detect and track, which makes it particularly tricky to dodge debris while holding the precise satellite formation needed to display ads. If you hit the wrong point, its not just a hole in your advertisementit would create a huge debris cloud, says Jan Siminski, who monitors potential debris collisions for satellites operated by the European Space Agency. All this is further complicated by the fact that satellite operators across nations lack a unified platform to communicate and handle the hundreds of collision alerts they receive daily. Instead they rely on e-mails and phone calls to gather crucial information to manage their assets, such as whether objects on a collision course can even be maneuvered and, if so, which party should swerve, Siminski says. It is really like the Wild Wild West.Companies that hope to profit from conspicuous celestial commercials are exploiting the ambiguity in current space law regarding what constitutes light pollution from outer space, says astronomer Aaron C. Boley of the Outer Space Institute. The U.N.s Outer Space Treaty, the foundational document that governs how nations act in space, states that outer space shall be free for exploration. But purposefully shining bright lasers from space is clearly a loophole right now, Boley says. Until the current space law is amendedwhich could take years, if not decadesthe burden falls on governments to make judgment calls to regulate companies operating in their respective nations.Space brings huge benefits to society, and we dont want to screw that up, Boley says. Fundamentally, we have hard choices to make about what we allow to happen in space and what we dont allow because it is a shared resourceand it is finite.

March 19, 20253 min readBlue Ghost Lander Successfully Completes Historic Lunar MissionFirefly Aerospaces Blue Ghost commercial lander has gone dark on the moon as planned, but not before sending back spectacular views of the lunar sunsetBy Mike Wall & SPACE.com After delivering ten NASA science and technology payloads to the near side of the Moon through NASAs CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative and Artemis campaign, Firefly Aerospaces Blue Ghost Mission 1 lander captured this image of a sunset from the lunar surface. Firefly AerospaceThe historic mission of Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander is over.The solar-powered Blue Ghost went dark on Sunday evening (March 16) after the sun set on its lunar locale, bringing an end to a highly successful two weeks of surface operations on the moon."We battle-tested every system on the lander and simulated every mission scenario we could think of to get to this point," Blue Ghost Chief Engineer Will Coogan said in a Firefly statement today (March 17) that announced the end of the mission.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 what really sets this team apart is the passion and commitment to each other," he added. "Our team may look younger and less experienced than those of many nations and companies that attempted moon landings before us, but the support we have for one another is what fuels the hard work and dedication to finding every solution that made this mission a success."Blue Ghost's mission, which Firefly called "Ghost Riders in the Sky," was the company's first-ever lunar effort. The flight was supported by NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which puts agency science gear on robotic landers to gather a wealth of cost-effective data ahead of the arrival of Artemis astronauts on the moon a few years from now.Blue Ghost carried 10 NASA payloads, which it successfully delivered to a basaltic plain on the lunar near side called Mare Crisium ("Sea of Crises") on March 2. The successful touchdown was just the second ever by a private lunar lander, after that of Intuitive Machines' Odysseus vehicle in February 2024. Odysseus operated for seven Earth days on the lunar surface before going dark.The mission plan called for Blue Ghost, and those science instruments, to operate for a lunar day about two Earth weeks. And that indeed happened, Firefly said today, declaring "Ghost Riders in the Sky" 100% successful."After a flawless moon landing, the Firefly team immediately moved into surface operations to ensure all 10 NASA payloads could capture as much science as possible during the lunar day," Firefly CEO Jason Kim said in the same statement."We're incredibly proud of the demonstrations Blue Ghost enabled, from tracking GPS signals on the moon for the first time to robotically drilling deeper into the lunar surface than ever before," Kim said. "We want to extend a huge thank you to the NASA CLPS initiative and the White House administration for serving as the bedrock for this Firefly mission. It has been an honor to enable science and technology experiments that support future missions to the moon, Mars and beyond."Blue Ghost was even able to observe the "Blood Worm Moon" total lunar eclipse of March 13-14. But, thanks to its unique vantage point, the lander saw this dramatic event as a solar eclipse, snapping a gorgeous "diamond ring" photo that Firefly shared with the world.The lander beamed home a total of 119 gigabytes (GB) of data, including 51 GB of science information, before going dark as expected on Sunday at around 7:15 p.m. EDT (2315 GMT), according to Firefly.Blue Ghost's final hours were productive. It "captured imagery of the lunar sunset on March 16, providing NASA with data on whether lunar dust levitates due to solar influences and creates a lunar horizon glow that was hypothesized and observed by Eugene Cernan on Apollo 17," Firefly wrote in the statement. "Following the sunset, Blue Ghost operated for 5 hours into the lunar night and continued to capture imagery that measures how dust behavior changes after sunset.""Ghost Riders in the Sky" was part of a wave of private moon exploration. For instance, Blue Ghost launched on Jan. 15 along with another private lunar lander, Tokyo-based ispace's Resilience, which is expected to make its own touchdown attempt on June 5.And Intuitive Machines' second lunar lander, called Athena, lifted off on Feb. 26 and landed near the moon's south pole on March 6. However, Athena, which was also flying a CLPS mission, tipped onto its side just after touchdown and was declared dead on March 7.That exploration surge will continue in the coming years, if all goes to plan. Firefly is already looking forward to its second moon mission, a CLPS effort that's expected to launch in 2026. That flight will send Blue Ghost to the lunar far side and also place Firefly's "Elytra Dark" spacecraft in orbit around the moon.Copyright 2025 Space.com, a Future company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.