November 21, 20245 min readNew Bird Flu Cases in Young People Are Raising Concerns about Mutating VirusCanadas first human case of bird flu has left a teenager in critical condition as human infections continue to emerge in the western U.S.By Lauren J. YoungThree influenza A H5N1/bird flu virus particles. Layout incorporates two CDC transmission electron micrographs that have been repositioned and colorized by NIAID. Imago/NIH-NIAID/Image Point FR/BSIP/Alamy Stock PhotoSince a strain of avian influenza was first detected in U.S. dairy cows this past spring, it has caused relatively mild illness in humans, with most cases seen in farmworkers who were directly exposed to sick dairy cows or poultry. But two unusual cases in children who had no known prior contact with infected animals are increasing scientists concerns that the infections foreshadow a larger public health threat. On Tuesday a child in California with a mild infection tested positive for low levels of a bird flu virus that is most likely H5N1. And Canadian health officials announced last week that a teenager in British Columbia who was hospitalized with bird flu was in critical conditionthe countrys first locally acquired infection.Were not containing the outbreak, says Seema Lakdawala, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at the Emory University School of Medicine. Most likely this British Columbian case is not going to be the only time a kid is hospitalized with H5N1.In both cases, family members and close contacts have tested negative for the virus, and officials report no evidence of person-to-person transmission. The Canadian teen, whose age and sex have been withheld, initially had symptoms similar to other cases reported so far: fever, coughing and conjunctivitisan eye infection thats been common with bird flu. The teen later developed acute respiratory distress, however, despite having no underlying health issues. A person in Missouri with a history of chronic respiratory illness tested positive for bird flu while hospitalized for gastrointestinal symptoms in September.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 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has logged 52 bird flu cases in people since April 2024. But experts suspect this is likely an undercount. A recent CDC study of 115 dairy workers exposed to infected cows found 7 percent of them had antibodies for H5N1 even though half of those didnt report any symptoms.Though the study was conducted with a relatively small sample of farmworkers, what it highlights for us is that we are obviously underestimating the number of human infections, Lakdawala says. A lot of infections that are maybe asymptomatic or quite mild dont always produce a strong antibody response, which could mean the studys antibody test may have missed some cases.Scientific American spoke with influenza experts about recent bird flu cases in humans, preliminary genetic information and the risk of exposure and infection.Animal SpilloversThe strain of H5N1 currently circulating in North America was mostly contained to wild migratory birds before it started to spill over around 2022 into other animal populations, such as minks, bears, foxes and marine mammals. Currently in the U.S. the virus has largely been affecting dairy cows and poultry.I think whats really changed since this particular strain emerged is its somewhat unique ability to cross over and infect a lot of different mammals, says Stacey Schultz-Cherry, who studies the ecology of influenza in animals and birds at St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital. There have been reports quite a long time ago of occasional spillover, but nothing quite like were seeing now.H5N1 can be very deadly in poultry, whereas cows usually recover from their symptoms, which include fever, dehydration and abnormal milk production. The variety of animals plagued by H5N1 so far poses a problem in tracing sources of human infection, Lakdawala says.Source Tracing TroublesInvestigations are currently underway to identify the sources of infection for the child in California and the teen in Canada. Neither reported any known recent exposure to sick wild or farm animals or pets. A Canadian health official said in a press conference on November 12 that its a very real possibility investigators will never be able to confirm the source. A sick wild bird may not show any symptoms, for instance, Schultz-Cherry says.Genetic sequencing of emerging strains is offering some clues. Test results of the strain that caused illness in the teen suggests it is similar to the one currently circulating in poultry in Canada. Some scientists flagged a specific mutation in the sequence thats known to be important for altering the viruss receptor preferencepossibly allowing it to bind more readily to human cells. A genetic change associated with viral adaptation to mammals was seen in the analysis of another recent human case in Texas, Lakdawala says. What this means is that the virus is adapting to humans to gain mammalian genetic signatures, she suggests. We need to stop the amount of H5N1 in animal species, particularly in cattle and poultry farms, to reduce the amount of possible exposures and spillovers into humans. This will prevent the virus from taking so many shots on goal to reach an optimal mammalian fitness.Bird flu remains a relatively low risk for most people, but those who work directly with sick dairy cows or poultry are at higher risk. Sustained person-to-person transmission of H5N1 hasnt been observed, but Schultz-Cherry says its important to closely monitor the virus for any genetic changes that would allow it to gain that ability or cause increased disease severity.Understanding Severe InfectionIn previous outbreaks, H5N1 has caused severe disease and occasionally death in people, Schultz-Cherry says. With the exception of the hospitalized teen, weve been very lucky that these events have been [mostly] mild, but it is a bit different than what we had seen historically, and we dont know why. Canadian health officials suggested that the teenagers critical condition may hint that the virus could be more severe in younger age groups. But the ages of the young people with recent casesand most of the human bird flu cases this yearhavent been made public, which further complicates experts ability to understand the risk of severe disease.Lakdawalas team has investigated the role of preexisting immunityprotection developed from past infections such as seasonal fluon H5N1 disease progression. The findings, which are currently under peer review, suggest older people may have more antibody cross-reactivitythe ability of antibodies that are originally primed to seasonal influenza to also respond to H5N1compared with younger individuals. That could be because younger children havent encountered flu infections such as these before, Lakdawala explains. Our immune responses are going to see [a virus] differently based on our prior immunity, she says, but adds, I dont know what this [Canadian] individuals prior immunity was like. Schultz-Cherry and Lakdawala say its too early to draw any conclusions with such limited data and information.There are several tactics people and farmworkers with high risk of exposure in particular can take to lower their risk of infection. Washing hands, disinfecting surfacesincluding milking and farming equipmentand using protective gear can help. People in general should keep themselvesand their petsaway from dead wild birds or animals and avoid consuming raw milk and raw cheeses. Getting a seasonal flu vaccine is also particularly important this year, Schultz-Cherry says. We want to do everything possible to avoid giving [the H5N1 virus] an opportunity to reassort in a person or animal infected with seasonal flu, she says. Could they actually share genetic material and cause a new virus to emerge? I think thats the biggest concern as we move into the human seasonal influenza time.

November 21, 20243 min readChimps Share Knowledge Like Humans Do, Spurring InnovationFemale chimps who migrate to new social groups bring skills and technology with them, helping to drive development of increasingly complex tool setsBy Rachel NuwerWestern chimpazee female "Fana" aged 54 years shows her grandson 'Flanle' aged 3 years how to crack open palm oil nuts in Bossou Forest, Mont Nimba, Guinea. Nature Picture Library/Alamy Stock PhotoChimpanzees live in fiercely hierarchical social communities whose male members remain within the same group over time. To prevent inbreeding, females migrate to new communities when they reach adulthood. They bring with them not only new genes but also new knowledge.As this process repeated itself across thousands of years, female chimpanzees played an integral role in driving cultural innovation, a new study reports. Females spread behaviors between communities, and those behaviors were recombined with existing traditions to create layers of innovation that resulted in increasingly complex and advanced tool sets.The new research shows that humans are not the only species capable of building on innovations over time to make them more efficient, says Cassandra Gunasekaram, a doctoral student in evolutionary biology at the University of Zurich and lead author of the study, which was published in Science. Additionally, she says, the research demonstrates the importance of social links between different populations of chimpanzees for driving the complexity of culture.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 recently as the 1990s, the idea that nonhuman animals could exhibit the distinct, socially learned behaviors that constitute culture was controversial. Numerous examples of animal culture are now known, including a diversity of bird song dialects, whale vocalizations and honeybee waggle dance moves.The new chimpanzee paper shows an example of cumulative culture, however, which is different. Cumulative culture refers to knowledge that is transmitted from generation to generation, enabling the development of increasingly sophisticated new technologies that result from gradual accumulation of new ideas and breakthroughs, contributed by multiple minds. The products of cumulative culture are usually so complex that it would be virtually impossible for a single individual to invent them. Computers are an example: they have gained in complexity and efficiency as researchers have iterated and built on what came before to the point that no person could create one with todays standards completely from scratch.Cumulative culture is still primarily considered to be a feature of human society. Some researchers have begun to question that assumption, however, and this latest research supports that cumulative culture might be found in some other species. Like humans, chimpanzees seem to have the capacity to exchange and combine ideas, says the studys co-senior author Andrea Migliano, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Zurich. She adds, however, that the amount of cultural knowledge that the animals can accumulate is limited by their hierarchical social structures, restricted migration among groups and lack of spoken language.To perform the new study, Migliano, Gunasekaram and their colleagues turned to a preexisting open dataset maintained by the Pan-African Program, a chimpanzee research consortium. They used genetic data from 240 individual chimpanzees from 35 different communities, representing all four subspecies, to trace past encounters among the animals. First, the researchers reconstructed 5,000 years of ancestry by analyzing segments of DNA that indicated common relatives and got broken into smaller pieces across generations. Next, they traced population links back 15,000 years by tracking genetic variants that occurred in individual groups but were rare in others.In addition to the genetic analyses, they also built a map of 15 foraging behaviors across chimpanzee populations. They divided the behaviors into three categories: the simplest behaviors involved no tools; intermediate examples relied on a single tool; and the most complex ones depended on a sophisticated tool set. An example of a complex tool set comprised a multistep approach to accessing beehives inside trees by using different tools for pounding open a hive, breaking into its inner chamber and swabbing up the honey for collection.Finally, the researchers overlaid and compared these networks of acquired datagenetic relatedness and cultural similaritiesto see whether one predicted the other, providing possible confirmation for cumulative culture. When the simplest behaviors were included, they found no corresponding evidence of genetic exchanges between groups. When only the most complex behaviors were analyzed, however, they found a clear correlation with female migrations. This suggests that females moving to a new group play a role in driving innovation and fits the hypothesis that social transmission between groups is necessary for the development of only the most sophisticated tools, not the simpler ones, Migliano says. The big pattern were seeing is: if its complex, its really correlating with migration and is unlikely to be reinvented, she adds.This project provides the best evidence yet that wild chimp traditions really are cultural and that they can, and have, evolved cumulatively, says Thomas Morgan, an evolutionary anthropologist at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the work. The past few decades have seen the emergence of the idea that cumulative cultural change is our species secret incredeint, but recent work, including this project, is really changing that view.

November 20, 20244 min readHealthResearch Could Face Severe Cuts and Changes under TrumpSweeping reorganization and more research scrutiny could be on the way for the U.S. National Institutes of HealthBy Max Kozlov & Nature magazineThe U.S. National Institutes of Health, located in Bethesda, Maryland, is composed of 27 institutes and centers. National Cancer Institute/WikimediaThe worlds largest public funder of biomedical research seems poised for a major overhaul in the next few years.Proposals from both chambers of the US Congress, as well as comments made by the incoming administration of US president-elect Donald Trump show that there is significant appetite to reform the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its US$47-billion research portfolio. Whats less clear is how this transformation will unfold; proposals have included everything from shrinking the number of institutes by half to replacing a subset of the agencys staff members.Reflecting this increased scrutiny by the government, on 12 November, the NIH launched a series of meetings at which an advisory group of agency insiders and external scientists will consider the various proposals and offer its own recommendations for reforms.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.It will be a mad dash to the finish line among these parties in terms of whose vision will win out, says Jennifer Zeitzer, who leads the public-affairs office at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Rockville, Maryland. Theres absolutely movement on Capitol Hill to discuss how to optimize and reform the NIH, she says. We now also have the agency participating in that conversation.Shrinking and cuttingThe NIH advisory meeting comes in the wake of Republicans winning control of both chambers of Congress and the White House for 2025. This year, two separate legislative proposals to reform the agency were put forward by Republican congressional members one led by representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington State and one by senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. These proposals have in part been fuelled by discontent over the agencys response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the perception that its oversight of research on potentially risky pathogens has been lax.McMorris Rodgerss plan would collapse the number of institutes and centres at the NIH from 27 to 15, allow its parent agency to cancel any grant determined to be a threat to national security, impose a 5-year term limit on institute directors that can be renewed only once and enact stricter oversight of research involving risky pathogens. For his part, Cassidy, who is set to become the chair of the US Senates committee charged with overseeing health issues in 2025, said that he would introduce more transparency into processes that the agency uses to review research grant proposals.If these plans which are laid out in white papers come to pass, they would represent the first major reform of the NIH in nearly 20 years. The last time an overhaul happened, in 2006, the US Congress passed the legislation with bipartisan support, establishing a review board and requiring the agency to send updates to lawmakers every two years. The same support from both sides of the political aisle is unlikely to happen with the proposals currently under consideration, however.The NIH has been a frequent target of Trump and his Republican and other allies. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who Trump has chosen to run the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) the NIHs parent agency said in 2023 that he would seek an eight-year pause for infectious-diseases research at the NIH so that the biomedical funder can instead focus on chronic diseases such as diabetes and obesity. He also said on 9 November that he would seek to replace 600 employees at the NIH. (Neither Trump nor his appointees can currently fire career staff members at the agency, whose jobs are protected by law, but that might change if Trump makes good on a promise to reclassify the federal workforce.)Harold Varmus, a cancer researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City and a former head of the NIH, tells Nature that he is alarmed by Kennedys comments. We may need congressional Republicans and even Democrats who are traditional supporters of NIH to speak up for the agency and its importance for public health.Dash to the finish lineAt this weeks meeting of the NIHs advisory committee, called the Scientific Management Review Board (SMRB), panel members met for the first time since 2015 to review the agencys structure and research portfolio and to provide recommendations to the NIH director and the HHS. Congress requested that the agency kick-start this process.NIH officials hope that the group will meet five more times during the next calendar year so that they could draft a report of their findings and recommendations by November 2025. This ambitious timeline suggests that theres a recognition that the SMRB is going to have to move quickly to catch up with Congress, or risk Congress making decisions that they dont like, Zeitzer says.In fact, several committee members noted their trepidation during the 12 November meeting that Congress would act before the group delivers its report. Kate Klimczak, the NIHs director of the office of legislative policy and analysis, tried to reassure the committee: the authors of the different [congressional] proposals clearly wanted this board to be re-established and wanted this board to do their work, she said. We have to take them at their word that theyre looking forward to getting [a report] from you.NIH director Monica Bertagnolli, who will probably resign before Trump takes office, noted her disapproval with the proposals to collapse the number of institutes. She said that the current system offers people with diseases and patient-advocacy groups the ability to coordinate with a dedicated institute for their cause, for instance the National Institute of Mental Health or the National Institute on Aging. If we were to collapse, we would definitely lose something in terms of our engagement with the public, she said.Its unclear what direction the SMRB will go with its recommendations, but there were hints at the meeting. Several panellists were taken aback by the legislative proposals. For example, the McMorris Rodgers white paper says that decades of nonstrategic and uncoordinated growth created a system ripe for stagnant leadership, research duplication, gaps, misconduct and undue influence at the NIH. James Hildreth, president of Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, called this language almost offensive. He added: I know were not supposed to allow politics to creep into what we do, but how could it not?This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on November 15, 2024.

November 20, 20245 min readTrumps Anti-Climate Agenda Could Boost Chinas Global PowerTrumps retreat from climate agreements and tech funding will help China dominate global clean energy marketsBy Alec LuhnElectric vehicles bound for shipment to Europe at the Port of Taicang in Taicang, Jiangsu Province, China, on August 24, 2023. Bloomberg/Getty ImagesThis story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Centers Ocean Reporting Network.BAKU, AzerbaijanA steady stream of international government and business leaders have been trekking to the China Pavilion, one of the largest among dozens of showcase spaces here at this months 29th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP29). Inside, a calligraphy artist inscribes folding fans to hand out, along with plush pandas and books by President Xi Jinping. Guests drink green tea and swap business cards with Chinese representatives amid flags and red paper lanterns.At the pavilions high-level forum on global South-South cooperation, government ministers from Nigeria and Chad spoke alongside U.N. officials. U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell praised China for leading by example with its clean energy investments in the developing world. We will need Chinas continued leadership at COP29, where countries are trying to agree on a new climate finance goal, as well as at COP30 next year in Brazil, Stiell said. Chinas minister of ecology and environment, Huang Runqiu, signed a memorandum of understanding to invest in renewable energy in Nigeria, Africas most populous country.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 19th century was the European century, the 20th century was the American century, and the 21st century will be, to a large extent, the Asian century, said Erik Solheim of Chinas Belt and Road Initiatives International Green Development Coalition.The U.S. delegation has largely been a lame duck here. Incoming president Donald Trump has said hell pull out of the Paris Agreement, under which these COP summits are held, and double down on oil and gas drilling. Hes also planning to raise tariffs on Chinese goods, including clean energy technologies, and, potentially, to break off normal trade relations with the country.U.S. import barriers would be a blow to Chinas economy in the short term. But in other ways, Trump may be giving Beijing a gift: U.S. withdrawal from international climate policy deliberations will allow China even greater influence. And if Trump overturns some of the Biden-era climate manufacturing subsidies Trump calls the Green New Scam, it could eventually mean less competition for China on cutting-edge tech.China is willing to take a more active role in global climate governance, said an official from its resources and environment planning body at a COP29 side event. Indeed, some participants say Beijing has been more visible and assertive in the current negotiations than in previous years.The U.S. has been pushing for Chinanow the worlds second-largest economy and second-largest historical emitter of greenhouse gasesto join the group of developed countries that will provide the most cash under the new climate finance arrangement, which urges richer nations to help fund adaptation measures in poorer ones. But last week China said it has already provided $24 billion for climate projects in developing countries since 2016, suggesting it will continue to resist any outside requirements. About to quit Paris, the U.S. has little grounds to argue. The U.S. and Chinese delegation offices, which were placed next to each other at the last two summits to encourage face time, are set apart this year.Speaking with Scientific American, Li Shuo of the Asia Society Policy Institute likened todays climate politics to a tricycle comprising the U.S., the European Union and Chinaand said the U.S. wheel is now falling off. We can still make progress if you have two wheels, he said. So well see more realignment between [China and the E.U.], and they will set the agenda without the U.S.An isolationist U.S. could also open opportunities for Chinas soft power. Xis Belt and Road Initiative has invested $1 trillion in energy and infrastructure projects in 150 countries over the past decade, garnering trade and resources, as well as political clout. The U.S. is also active in many of these countries, but that could change under Trump.Project 2025, a wish list for a second term created by 100-plus former Trump officials and others, calls for cutting the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) budget to 2019 levels or lower and for eliminating funding to any [country] that engages with Chinese entities directly or indirectly. It also seeks to refocus USAID climate change programs on oil and gas.Chinas lead COP29 negotiator, Zhao Yingmin, told Scientific American that the nations Global South investment policy is fully based on our own capabilities and has nothing to do with other countries. But if the U.S. ends aid to countries such as Nigeria, which hosts several USAID projects, that could create a vacuum to be filled by rivals such as China, according to Michael Ivenso, an energy transition analyst with the Nigerian delegation.Under a memo of understanding signed at COP29, China will build a large solar farm in Nigeria funded by a grant rather than a loan, he told Scientific American. China has signed similar documents on climate cooperation with 42 other developing countries. When a power exits, it creates an opportunity for another to enter, Ivenso said. If the U.S. decides that thats what its going to do, and Chinaperhaps even Russia and some other [countries]now gets into that space that theyve left, then thats their problem to deal with.There is also tension over new technologies. China already controls 80 percent of the worlds solar panel supply chain. Several Biden-era laws, including the Inflation Reduction Act, were intended to help U.S. companies compete in more nascent markets such as batteries, electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel. Trump, however, has said hell repeal such laws. Furthermore, his promised use of wide-reaching tariffs could turn the U.S. cleantech industry into what Li calls a fat bird living on an isolated island, safe from predation at home but unable to compete abroad.Scrapping the Biden laws could drive $80 billion of green energy investment abroad and cost the U.S. $50 billion in lost exports, according to a Johns Hopkins University report released this month. U.S. cleantech needs more collaboration instead of this high-fence, small-yard kind of mindset, said Haimeng Zhang, vice president of the major Chinese solar producer LONGi, which opened a factory in Ohio with a U.S. company this year. That's not very helpful to develop your own industry.Two U.S. congressional delegations to COP29 have embodied these two clashing visions. A delegation of four Republicans and one Democrat from the U.S. House of Representatives promised to unleash American energy with the reliable technologies of natural gas, hydropower, nuclear power and clean coal. Yet a delegation of Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Ed Markey of Massachusetts said a U.S. failure to keep investing in green energy innovation would let China take an insurmountable lead in new technologies. Markey promised a mighty battle over the Inflation Reduction Act in congress, where 18 House Republicans have spoken up in favor of the law.If [China] has a plan, and we do not have a plan, we will lose, he said. We will lose markets around the planet. We will lose the cutting-edge technological breakthroughs that otherwise would have been conceptualized here in the United States."

November 20, 20245 min readSpaceXs Starship Soars in 6th Test Flight but Skips Booster CatchThe sixth test flight of SpaceXs giant rocket ended with a fiery splashdown rather than a clean chopstick catchBy Mike Wall & SPACE.comSpaceXs Starship rockets into the skies near Boca Chica, Texas on November 19, 2024 for the Starship Flight 6 test. Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty ImagesThe biggest and most powerful rocket ever built now has a half-dozen launches under its belt.SpaceX's 400-foot-tall (122 meters) Starship megarocket lifted off for the sixth time ever today (Nov. 19), rising off the orbital launch mount at the company's Starbase site in South Texas at 5:00 p.m. EST (2200 GMT; 4:00 p.m. local Texas time).SpaceX landed Starship's huge first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, back at the launch tower on the vehicle's most recent flight, which occurred on Oct. 13. The company aimed to repeat that feat which the tower achieved with its "chopstick" arms today, but the flight data didn't support an attempt.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today."We tripped a commit criteria," SpaceX's Dan Huot said during the company's Flight 6 webcast. So Super Heavy ended up coming down for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico instead, hitting the waves seven minutes after liftoff.Anticipation for Flight 6 was high, in part because of the planned booster-catch attempt. For example, President-elect Donald Trump made the trip to South Texas to watch Flight 6 in person.Trump's support for Musk and Starship isn't terribly surprising; the two billionaires have apparently grown quite close over the past few months.Musk campaigned hard for Trump's election and put more than $100 million of his own money toward that effort. And Trump has appointed Musk to co-lead the "Department of Government Efficiency." This advisory group, Trump said, will help his administration "dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal Agencies."An action-packed flightToday's mission aimed to do far more than just bring Super Heavy back to Earth in one piece. SpaceX also wanted to put Starship's upper stage a 165-foot-tall (50 m) spacecraft called Starship, or simply "Ship" through its paces.The launch sent Ship on the same semi-orbital trajectory that it took on Flight 5, targeting a splashdown in the Indian Ocean off the northwestern coast of Australia about 65 minutes after liftoff. But Ship also achieved some new milestones along the way this time.For example, Flight 6 carried the first-ever Starship payload a plush banana onboard Ship, which served as a zero-gravity indicator. (It was not deployed into space.) In addition, Ship briefly re-lit one of its six Raptor engines about 38 minutes into the flight. (Super Heavy also employs Raptors a whopping 33 of them.)This burn helped show that Ship can perform the maneuvers needed to come back to Earth safely during orbital missions. Indeed, Ship is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, just like Super Heavy; SpaceX eventually intends to catch it with the chopstick arms as well, and will likely try to do so on a test flight in the near future. (Landing directly on the launch mount, rather than on a ship at sea or a designated touchdown pad, will enable quicker and more efficient inspection, refurbishment and reflight, SpaceX has said.)Flight 6 also tested modifications to Ship's heat shield, which protects the vehicle during reentry to Earth's atmosphere."The flight test will assess new secondary thermal protection materials and will have entire sections of heat shield tiles removed on either side of the ship in locations being studied for catch-enabling hardware on future vehicles," SpaceX wrote in a mission description. "The ship also will intentionally fly at a higher angle of attack in the final phase of descent, purposefully stressing the limits of flap control to gain data on future landing profiles."SpaceX also shifted the launch time for Flight 6, to allow for better observation of Ship's reentry and splashdown. Flight 5 (and all four of its predecessors) lifted off from Texas in the morning, and Ship came down in darkness on the other side of the world.So we all got great views of Ship's return to Earth today, which went swimmingly. The shiny silver vehicle survived its scorching-hot trip through the planet's atmosphere, fired up three of its six Raptors to flip itself into a vertical position as it approached the water, and hit the waves base-first as planned 65.5 minutes after liftoff."Incredible! We really pushed the limits on Ship, and it made it all the way back down to Earth," Jessica Anderson, SpaceX manufacturing engineering manager, said during today's webcast."I am shocked, to be honest," added webcast co-host Kate Tice, a senior quality engineering manager at SpaceX. "I think many folks are. The fact that it survived all the way through while flying a lesser-gen heat shield is just absolutely incredible."SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, and to perform a wide variety of other spaceflight tasks, such as building out its Starlink broadband megaconstellation in low Earth orbit.NASA has a serious stake in the vehicle, selecting Starship to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program of moon exploration. If all goes according to plan, Starship will put NASA astronauts down on the moon for the first time in late 2026, on the Artemis 3 mission.SpaceX is working to get Starship up and running as soon as possible, and test flights are a big part of this effort. The megarocket has now flown six times in April and November of 2023, and March, June, October and November of this year and the cadence is likely to increase greatly in the near future.Musk is apparently targeting 25 Starship launches in 2025 and 100 a few years after that. Those numbers may seem optimistic, but SpaceX has already launched 113 missions of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket so far in 2024. And the regulatory environment which Musk has railed against repeatedly in recent months could soon relax considerably, given Trump's stated goals and his apparently closeness with the SpaceX founder and CEO.These test missions are designed to pave the way for more ambitious jaunts and soon, if all goes according to plan."Every one of these flights is a step closer to a fully operational Starship that will take us beyond Earth orbit, and with our pace of rapid iteration here, the moon and Mars are not nearly as far in the future as you may think," Tice said today. "In fact, we're planning to send Starships to Mars as soon as 2026, which is when the next Mars transfer window opens."Copyright 2024 Space.com, a Future company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

November 20, 20245 min readClimate Change Amplified the Winds in Every Hurricane in 2024Every Atlantic hurricane that formed this year had higher wind speeds because of climate change. Two likely would have remained tropical storms without its influenceBy Chelsea Harvey & E&E NewsSatellite image of Category 4 Hurricane Helene making landfall in Florida, USA, with powerful winds and heavy rainfall causing widespread damage. Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2024CLIMATEWIRE | Climate change increased the maximum wind speeds of every Atlantic hurricane that formed this year, scientists have found. All 11 storms intensified between 9 and 28 miles per hour under the influence of warmer-than-average ocean temperatures.The extra juice pushed seven storms at least one category higher than they would have been without the influence of climate change. And Hurricanes Debby and Oscar likely would have remained tropical storms in a world without global warming.The new analysis was released Wednesday morning by researchers from the climate science and communications nonprofit Climate Central. Its the latest study to warn of the dangers of intensifying hurricanes in a warmer world.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.We know climate change is increasing the temperatures around the planet, said lead study author Daniel Gilford, a climate scientist with Climate Central. We know temperatures in the ocean, and in the Atlantic Ocean in particular, are getting warmer. So now we can estimate what does that mean for hurricane intensities.The full study examines not only the 2024 season, but all Atlantic hurricanes over the last five years. Between 2019 and 2023, elevated ocean temperatures boosted the wind speeds in five out of every six hurricanes, causing them to intensify by an average of 18 miles per hour. Over that time period, 30 hurricanes jumped at least one category higher than they would have been without the influence of climate change.And in 2024, every Atlantic hurricane was strengthened to some degree by warming ocean waters.The analysis also finds that some hurricanes reached a catastrophic Category 5 only because of the influence of climate change. That includes Hurricane Lee in 2019, Ian in 2022 and Lorenzo in 2023, as well as both Milton and Beryl in 2024.Milton was an especially remarkable case, the analysis notes. It gained 120 miles per hour in wind speeds in less than 36 hours after passing over waters more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit above their typical temperatures. A separate Climate Central analysis found that these water temperatures were 400 to 800 times more likely to occur because of climate change.The new study relies on a special kind of analysis known as attribution science, which investigates the links between global warming and extreme weather events.Using a combination of on-the-ground observations, statistical analyses and climate models, the research compares real-world events with a hypothetical scenario in which human-caused climate change doesnt exist. This comparative analysis can help scientists determine the extent to which global warming has influenced an extreme weather event.In this case, the scientists focused on the influence of warming waters. Ocean temperatures are a major factor in the formation and intensification of tropical cyclones, and studies have suggested for decades that hurricanes will grow stronger as sea surface temperatures rise.That doesnt necessarily mean the total number of hurricanes will increase. But the proportion of storms that achieve major hurricane status, at a Category 3 or higher, will rise over time.The new analysis confirms its already happening. And it reinforces the findings of other similar recent studies, according to Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and co-founder of World Weather Attribution, a climate science consortium dedicated to investigating the links between climate change and extreme weather events around the world.World Weather Attribution performed a similar analysis earlier this year, she noted. The study used slightly different methods, based on a mathematical model, to investigate the links between climate change and hurricane wind speeds, focusing specifically on Hurricane Helene.The exact numbers differed slightly from the Climate Central findings, but were very much in the same ballpark, according to Otto.It really shows that these two completely different lines of evidence show us the same thing, she added.Age of unprecedented disastersIts not just wind speeds that are strengthening.Studies have found that climate change can increase the intensity of hurricane rainfall, making floods more likely and more damaging. And research suggests that water, from rainfall or from storm surge, causes more damage during tropical cyclones than winds.But overall hurricane damage, including water-related impacts, scales up exponentially with higher wind speeds, according to NOAA. That means higher category storms tend to be costlier and deadlier across the board.All of which underscores the importance of studies that focus on wind speeds, experts say. And they may be able to help scientists better communicate the dangers to the public, potentially saving lives.Is it relevant that were getting more violent hurricanes? You bet it is, said John Morales, a longtime meteorologist and hurricane specialist with NBC. Because these are the ones that cause the vast majority of the destruction. And were seeing more of those in recent years.One emerging danger of strengthening hurricanes is that theyre intensifying faster than they used to, Morales added sometimes ballooning into major storms in a matter of hours. That gives emergency managers little time to prepare their communities and organize evacuations.Hurricanes also are intensifying in ways that many communities have rarely or never seen, he added.Hurricane Helene, which carved a path of destruction from Florida through Southern Appalachia in September, is a prime example.An unusually large, powerful and fast-moving storm, Helene was able to maintain its strength long enough to dump historic levels of rainfall on communities unaccustomed to severe impacts from tropical cyclones. The storm left swaths of western North Carolina submerged in floodwaters and cut off from aid, killing hundreds of people.There are huge death tolls when extreme events happen that people have not experienced before, said Otto, the World Weather Attribution co-founder.Thats not just a problem with hurricanes. Scientists have warned that extreme weather events of all kinds, from wildfires to floods, are worsening as global temperatures rise. And the odds of record-breaking or unprecedented events is climbing, meaning communities around the world are at more frequent risk of disasters they've never experienced before.We see now again and again that records are broken, that wind speeds are higher than ever before, rainfall is higher than ever before, Otto said. We really need to use that to make sure that people dont die.Scientists and emergency managers are still considering the best ways to communicate the dangers of intensifying disasters to vulnerable communities. Some experts have floated the idea of adding a Category 6 to the hurricane scale, as tropical cyclones strengthen into record-breaking territory.While the exact strategies are still under debate, increased communication is key, Otto said.Just so people are aware that something is going to hit them that is different from everything else they have experienced before, she said. And therefore more dangerous.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

OpinionNovember 19, 20245 min readBury Me on the MoonPreferably on the Far SideThe far side of the moon offers grounds for compromise between advocates and opponents of lunar developmentBy Rick N. Tumlinson Ana J Crdenas/Getty ImagesI want to be buried on the moon.Why? I am one of Apollos Children, part of the generation that grew up watching as NASAs Apollo astronauts made the giant leap for all humankind with their epochal lunar footfalls. Ive spent most of my life working on this new incredible phase of human history, our breakout into space, always with the moon in mind as a destination. I led return-to-the-moon petition drives in the 1980s, helped start the first mission to look for lunar water in the 1990s and have assisted in laying the groundwork for multiple civil and commercial lunar exploration initiatives.Some of my reasons are admittedly selfish. I think of my daughter and any of my descendants, who, from anywhere on Earth, could always look up at that island in the sky and know Im there.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.But I also want to do this for all the countless others who share my dream of opening space.Death rituals are some of humanitys most important traditions. Choosing a final resting place is often one of the last acts of personal agency in your life. And we usually honor these choices as such. For example, so long as it doesnt impact public safety, having some or all of ones ashes scattered in the ocean or some other place of great personal meaning is a respected practice. Recently, the space firm Celestis has expanded to include placing small symbolic amounts of human ashes on the moon as a beautiful way of honoring ones deceased ancestors.Yet there are those with other equally valid traditions who feel the moon should be off-limits to dreamers like me. Some Native Americans, such as those of the Navajo Nation, hold the Earth-facing side of the moon, as well as the other planets and even the stars, as not just lights in the night sky but as sacred objects of spiritual significance essential to their cosmology and ceremonies. The night sky spoke to their ancestors, and the moons movements and phases were an important source of wisdom and guidance.Such deeply spiritual traditions typically consider proposals for lunar burial as pollution of this important object by crass commercial interests. Then again, anyone honoring the dearly departed with some form of extraterrestrial intermentvia commercial services or otherwisesee such acts as deeply spiritual, too.We should weigh history while pondering these two contrasting perspectives. It must be noted that while calling out a private company for placing tiny capsules of human ashes aboard exploration vehicles already flying to the moon, those protesting the idea largely ignore 65 years of lunar littering via government spacecraft from the U.S., Russia and the former U.S.S.R., as well as from India, Japan and China.The current challenges being made against the placement of small amounts of ashes on the moon raise the question: Is it what people do on the moon that critics find so upsetting, or who is doing it? Is this perhaps less about time-honored traditions and more about the current stereotype of American space entrepreneurs plundering and pillaging space? To this I would add a follow-up question: Why is it considered normal for private firms like funeral homes to manage funeral services on Earth, but not in space? Might it be that the opposition is motivated by fear of what is to come, and the perceived need to take a stand against citizen-led lunar development?This all being said, I get it. In the past, confronted with new frontiers, be it empty lands, or places already home to others, those with the power to do so have simply charged forward, taking whatever they wanted and shattering the ecosystems and societies they were invading.Now, as we open what my mentor Gerard K. ONeill called the High Frontier of space, we have the chance to do things differently, showing consideration for the traditions of those we represent as human pioneers and respect for the new places we will go. Perhaps we can evolve this disagreement about a few ashes into a more unifying conversation that transforms how we take our next small steps into the great beyond.Whether my final resting place is or is not on the moon is of minor importance given what else is at stake, a macro-issue we must deal with right now, lest we make mistakes we will never be able to correct. Fortunately, the nature of the moon itself offers a solution. It twirls on its axis once for each orbit it makes of our world, meaning it always turns the same faceits near sidetoward Earth. Its other hemisphere is invisible from our planet, creating an opportunity for both sides in this argument to get their way.Thus I suggest a compromise for the ages that allows us to develop and build communities and preserve the essential nature of the moon as it will be seen by all Earths people for all time to come. The provisional name Ive given this initiative is the Luna Bella Protocols. Its final form will be determined in years to come, but as the nickname suggests, the goal is to keep our moon as beautiful as it is todayforever.I propose that we all agree to ban all permanent lunar development that is visible with the naked eye from Earth. Be it a strip mine gashing the eye of the man in the moon, a scar on an ear of the lunar rabbit, or a hole in the gown of the goddess of the moon, it is not our generations place to condemn all future generations to bear witness to our lack of compassion and frankly, good taste. We dont need to change the moons familiar faceso why not agree to leave it unmarred by any obvious act of humanity, forevermore? Meanwhile, we can let our lunar dreams come into full bloom on the far side, never to be directly seen by wandering eyes here on Earth. Theres plenty to go around, so to speak.Let the forces of cultural and natural preservation join with those expanding civilization to forge a pact encompassing all we do out there, for the visible benefit of everyone down here.As to my burial plans? They can wait for now. Weve got too much to do.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Play this crossword inspired by the December 2024 issue of Scientific American

OpinionNovember 19, 20246 min readRFK, Jr., Is a Bad Prescription for U.S. Public HealthProminent vaccine skeptic RFK, Jr., is a proven menace to public health. But with a bird flu outbreak looming, he is poised to take a perch atop the federal public health enterpriseBy Maggie FoxFormer Republican presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks ahead of a live interview with US commentator Tucker Carlson and former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, during the finale of the Tucker Carlson Live Tour at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona, on October 31, 2024. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty ImagesRemember ivermectin, the antiparasitic drug that right-wing media figures wrongly touted as a cure for COVID? How about hydroxychloroquine, the malaria treatment taken by thousands who then suffered side-effects after Donald Trump recommended it as a COVID treatment? And recall when the Trump White House pondered poisonous oleandrin as a COVID treatment on the advice of a pillow-maker campaign donor?Now Trump says he will elevate to his Cabinet someone with a notable record of promoting pseudoscience and downright quackery: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. A prominent vaccine skeptic, Kennedy promises to be a disaster for U.S. public health.For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health, wrote Trump in a November 14 post on X (formerly Twitter) in which he announced that he will nominate Kennedy to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.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.Mr. Kennedy will restore these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again! Trump added.That, according to Kennedy, will include pushing for the removal of fluoride from drinking water, relitigating the already meticulous approval of vaccines and revisiting disproven treatments, such as chelation therapy, sometimes touted as a treatment for autism.An environmental lawyer, Kennedy is a master at seeding doubt around public health. He employs the same distrust-sowing technique that worked for the tobacco industry for decades, just asking questions dissembling that threatens support for science and an already stumbling public health infrastructure.Kennedy largely owes his prominence and income to his last name, not demonstrated scientific competence. As a senior writer on the NBC News medical unit in the 2010s, I fought more than once with senior producers who wanted to give airtime to Kennedy and his bogus health claims. These claims run the gamut from vaccine skepticism to advocating for raw milk and fears Wi-Fi might cause cancer. Now hell have the implied legitimacy of the White House. News outlets will have little choice but to report whatever nonsense he decides to spew.This is not his area of expertise. I am not quite sure why they would let him do any of this stuff, says Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.The Senate will have to confirm Kennedy to head HHS, an enormous department with a nearly $2-trillion annual budget that oversees the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.But even if the Republican-led Senate balks at approving Kennedy, Trump could give him an unofficial czar position with extensive influence over fresh political appointees eager to please the fickle Trump.They take calls from the White House, says Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University. Being able to whisper in the ear of the president, that brings enormous power and influence.HHS leads the agencies tasked with discovering new drugs, approving new treatments and vaccines, advising on public health and preparing against threats such as pandemics and biological attacks. COVID has killed more than 42,000 people in the U.S. so far this year alone. And with H5N1 avian influenza spreading among poultry, cattle and people, this is a perilous time to give free rein to an amateur.Kennedy comes to the Trump administration with a track record of trying to thwart public health campaigns. His nonprofit Childrens Health Defense has produced films, such as Vaxxed III: Authorized to Kill, that feature testimonials by people claiming standard medical treatments or vaccines hurt them or killed loved ones. We leave you to decide where the truth lies, reads Vaxxed IIIs introduction. A Facebook misinformation campaign funded in no small part by Kennedys organization helped fuel fear of measles vaccines in American Samoa. The resulting outbreak there in 2019 killed 83 people, mostly children, and sickened more than 5,700. This year alone, undervaccination has led to at least 277 measles cases in 32 cities and states, according to the CDC.Its unlikely Kennedy could directly limit state-decided approval of vaccines, Gostin said. But he can scare more people away from vaccines and help turn an already dubious public away from mainstream medicine. On spreading mis- and disinformation, there are no guardrails. There are no restraints, Gostin says.In my mind, he is the most influential and most well financed anti-vaxxer in the world. But he will now have the imprimatur of the White House and the organs of public health like the CDC to really amplify that deep distrust in vaccines and also deep distrust in public health agencies and science itself, Gostin adds.Already the CDC has struggled to gain the cooperation of state officials and dairy farms in collecting data on an outbreak of H5N1 in farm animals that has caused infections in humans. In the U.S., human cases have been confirmed in 53 people in seven states. So far all but one of them have been confirmed animal-to-human infections. (The source of the additional U.S. case is unknown.)Having spread from poultry to dairy cattle, the virus also infects a range of other mammals, including pigs, the best-known mixing vessel for flu viruses. If the virus does start to spread from human to human, the federal government is already behind in preparing vaccines. If we have an H5N1 outbreak, assuming we have a vaccine that works, how do we get people to take it? Benjamin asks.An HHS chief telling people to drink raw milk from possibly infected cows wont help. While pasteurization kills the virus, raw milk offers no such protection, and it sickens several hundred people every year who catch Listeria, Campylobacter and other bacterial infections from it. The FDA has long been battling the raw milk movement. Howard Lutnick, Trumps transition co-chair, told CNN in October that Kennedys plans include dismantling faith in vaccines. He wants the data so that he can say that these things are unsafe, Lutnick said, despite prodigious amounts of clinical trial data showing that vaccines are overwhelmingly safe.FDAs war on public health is about to end, Kennedy recently wrote on X. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and cant be patented by Pharma.While few would argue against the benefits of exercise, psychedelic treatments have yet to make it through clinical trials, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin dont treat or prevent COVID, hyperbaric therapies are proven only to treat rare conditions such a decompression sickness, and the FDA is restricted by law from regulating the multibillion-dollar nutraceutical and supplement market. Many legitimate stem cell treatments exist, but thousands of clinics offer sham treatments at extortionate prices, exploiting desperate patients hope.Its ironic that Kennedy happily casts doubt on vaccines, which are meticulously tested and monitored and which have saved 154 million lives over the past 50 years, while promoting unproven or disproven products alongside treatments that only empty pockets with empty promises.Benjamin says he despairs. We already know [the FDA] is overburdened, underfunded and under stress to do things quickly, he notes.Strong leaders at HHS, the FDA and the CDC will have a hard time withstanding what the COVID experience has already promised: an onslaught of confusing, contradictory and chaotic health direction coming from a Trump White House. Weaker leaders may not even bother to try.Oh, God. Wouldnt it be terrible for us to have another epidemic on [Trumps] watch? Benjamin asks. I am not sure how much they learned from the first one.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

November 19, 20243 min readTrees Alone Cant Stop Climate ChangeForests absorb planet-warming pollution, but world leaders shouldnt include them in plans to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, a new study recommendsBy Chelsea Harvey & E&E NewsBeech Tree Forest in early spring. AVTG/Getty ImagesCLIMATEWIRE | Countries around the world have turned to natural carbon sinks such as forests and wetlands to help them achieve their climate targets. The thinking is that these landscapes naturally soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and so can cancel out ongoing emissions from fossil fuels.But that kind of approach is a mistake, say some of the worlds leading scientists in a new study. And it could jeopardize the Paris Agreements vulnerable climate goals.Because carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for decades, forests and other natural carbon sinks are still absorbing emissions released by humans years ago. And that carbon doesnt stay in the ground forever, either. It becomes part of the Earths natural carbon cycle, eventually escaping back into the atmosphere when the trees die before eventually being reabsorbed again by some other natural landscape.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Its all part of a giant natural equilibrium. But the system only stays in balance as long as emissions from human sources wind down to zero. If humans depend on natural carbon sinks to balance out ongoing future emissions, the world will just keep on warming.Thats the stark conclusion of the study published Monday in the scientific journal Nature. We are already counting on forests and oceans to mop up our past emissions, most of which came from burning stuff we dug out of the ground, said lead study author Myles Allen, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford, in a statement. We cant expect them to compensate for future emissions as well.Countries around the world have submitted carbon-cutting pledges to the United Nations in an effort to meet the Paris Agreements two key climate targets: keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius and if possible less than a more ambitious 1.5 C.Scientists warn that global emissions must reach net zero by midcentury for the world to even keep close to the 1.5 C target meaning that any carbon going into the atmosphere must be balanced by the same amount of carbon coming back out.But those offsets need to be permanent, the scientists say and they shouldnt come from sources that are already part of the natural carbon cycle. To actually halt global warming, world leaders must offset any residual fossil fuel emissions by capturing that carbon and sequestering it in geological reservoirs underground where it cant escape.Its a concept the authors refer to as geological net zero and its becoming more urgent, they say.The problem hinges on the rules of the Paris Agreement, which doesnt require countries to separate passive carbon sinks, such as forests, from their net-zero targets. Many nations already have begun using these natural landscapes in their net-zero accounting systems, suggesting that the forests inside their national boundaries are offsetting some of their fossil fuel emissions.The study notes that more than 6.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from passive carbon sinks every year are classified as carbon removals in the national emissions inventories that countries submit to the United Nations. That means world leaders are using them to count against their fossil fuel emissions, helping them reach net zero faster.The system doesnt have to work this way.Take the Kyoto Protocol, a U.N. climate treaty adopted in 1997. The agreement failed to meet its climate targets but had some useful provisions, the study authors note. The agreement discouraged nations from using passive carbon sinks, such as forests, in their emissions accounting systems.The new study suggests the problem with the Paris accounting system needs broader awareness.Achieving and maintaining net zero emissions under accounting rules that allow passive CO2 uptake to count as CO2 removal will only slow down global warming, the authors said.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

November 19, 20242 min readBomb Cyclone and Atmospheric River Will Pummel U.S. West CoastA major windstorm and an atmospheric river are set to unleash a firehose of precipitation from California to British ColumbiaBy Andrea ThompsonA "bomb cyclone" and atmospheric river are set to bring damaging winds, heavy snow and torrential rain to the West Coast. NOAA/NESDIS/STAR GOES-WestA bomb cyclone is bringing damaging winds to parts of the U.S. Northwest and northern California today, and the storm is helping to set up powerful atmospheric river that one weather experts says will open a firehose of rain and snow onto parts of the West Coast. Northern California will be particularly hard-hit by extreme rainfall rates.The term bomb cyclone refers to an area of low atmospheric pressure that suddenly deepens, or drops even further in pressure. This process, called bombogenesis, happens when a storm systems pressure falls by a certain amount within 24 hours, based on the systems current latitude. At a latitude of around 45 degrees North, bombogenesis occurs when pressure drops by at least 18 to 20 millibars. This storm will easily clear that hurdle, dropping between 60 and 70 millibars in 24 to 36 hours, wrote climate scientist Daniel Swain in a recent post on his blog. This will likely be among the fastest if not the singularly fastest-deepening low pressure system on record in this region, he added.The storm will bring winds up to 70 miles per hours to parts of Washington State, Oregon and California, where it could knock out electricity and damage trees, according to the National Weather Service. Blizzard conditions are forecast for Washingtons portion of the Cascade Range.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.A front (essentially the boundary between two air masses with different temperatures and humidities) associated with the bomb cyclone is expected to stall near northern California on Wednesday, and that will set up a stream of water vapor called an atmospheric river. Such streams can be up to 2,000 miles long, 500 miles wide and two miles high, with a flow of moisture 25 times that of the Mississippi River. This atmospheric river will be pulling tropical moisture from around Hawaii and sending it over to the West Coast in in several waves of heavy to extreme precipitation, particularly in mountainous areas. It is a bit uncertain which areas will get the biggest impacts because the river can wiggle up and down along the coast, as Swain put it on his blog.He also noted that this atmospheric river will likely pull in even more water vapor because of unusually high ocean temperatures along its path.Though atmospheric rivers are crucial to supplying the winter precipitation that later provides water to the largely arid West during the dry season, the torrential nature of such rains can also be dangerous. They can cause mudslides and flash floodinghazards that are particularly of concern near the burn scars of wildfires because the scorched soil cannot soak up the onslaught of water, raising the risk of landslides.

November 18, 20248 min readIts Actually Healthier to Enjoy Holiday Foods without the AnxietyFood anxiety can peak during the holidays. Heres how to manage it and enjoy yourselfBy Allison Parshall Martine Severin/Getty ImagesThe year-end holidays are a time to gather and celebrate with loved onesand to enjoy rich, delicious foods. But for many people, these special meals come with anxiety and guilt. In a recent survey by Orlando Health, 39 percent of U.S. respondents reported worrying about how much they eat during the holidays. And a quarter agreed they should skip meals to save calories before a feast such as Thanksgiving dinner.The messaging we absorb about health and the holidaysespecially surrounding diets and weight lossis often misguided, says Sara Riehm, a registered dietitian at Orlando Health. Riehm guides clients through a six-week lifestyle program to further their health goals. She sees firsthand how counterproductive our go-to ways of thinking about health and weight loss can be, particularly during the holidays. This time of year she spends a lot of time helping people build more effective and healthy ways of approaching situations where theyre surrounded by delicious foods that might not be the best for nourishing their bodies.It's not necessarily restricting or cutting out all of those foods, she says. It's creating a balance so that we still get to enjoy our holiday but also keep our health in mind.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Scientific American spoke with Riehm to learn more about how certain dieting misconceptions can harm us, what tips can help us navigate the holidays and what to do when New Years resolution time comes.[An edited transcript of the conversation follows.]Why do many people feel anxious about what they eat during the holidays?I think a lot of people feel very uncertain and nervous because, in the past, holidays have included a lot of overindulging. I have a lot of clients who are trying to learn how to improve their health, but then when a special occasion like this comes along, theyre not really sure how to handle it because its a unique circumstance. And in particular, its a circumstance where youre almost encouraged to be over the top and overindulge. Its a time when a lot of people end up feeling out of control. But I personally love starting with clients around this time of year because I get to help teach them and walk them through this holiday season in real time.Why might this focus on holiday eatingor anxiety about itbe counterproductive?Stress can definitely contribute to weight gain just by itself. When we have higher levels of [the stress response hormone] cortisol in the body for longer periods of time, such as during the holiday season, that can definitely contribute to weight gain. So in the context of weight management, that can be counterproductive to what were trying to achieve.Then theres the toll that focusing so much on food takes on our mental health. There are so many other things that we should be experiencing or thinking about during the holiday season. At their core, the holidays are supposed to be joyous times of celebrationof gathering, gratitude, gift giving and celebrating our loved ones. I try to emphasize with my clients to focus on what they want to prioritize during the holiday season: What are the things that are actually important to you during this time of year?What if health goals are one of those important things?I recommend trying to create a balanced plate by leaning into the vegetables that are on the table. Oftentimes theres some sort of salad or a roasted vegetable or even a green bean casserole; those are some of the more nutrient-dense foods that we can consume. Theyre nourishing our body but also still leaving room for the other delicious foods that we want to have. Believe me, Im still making room on my plate for mashed potatoes and mac and cheese. But Im also considering how I can best nourish my body in this situation.Another way to stay on track with health goals is getting a little bit of movement. Im not necessarily suggesting going to the gym as a family or doing the Turkey Trot. But studies have shown that even doing a two- to five-minute walk immediately after you eat can improve insulin sensitivity, which could be really beneficial for anybody that might be managing insulin resistance.I also recommend thinking about what foods you want to prioritize. For me, I know that I can get mac and cheese and mashed potatoes all year round, but my grandmother only makes derby pie on major holidays. So because I know that Im trying to stay focused on certain health goals, I might cut back from the mac and cheese and mashed potatoes, save a little bit of extra room for the derby pie. And thats how we still create that balance.If its important to me to build healthy eating habits but also not to miss out on enjoying grandmas pie, how do I keep these special occasions from derailing my progress?Its all very individual; it depends on where you are in your health journey. Ideally, you have this baseline that you've created of healthy habits, so having one slice of pie or one cookie is not going to change much. Without that baseline, however, it can be really hard to come back to that. I encourage my clients to engage in a cycle of plan, act, reflect. As much as you can, try to plan for unexpected situations as we come upon this holiday season. Reflect on whats gone well in past years and what hasnt. If, in the past, we overindulgedand that left us not feeling the best in our body or maybe with higher lab values that we werent happy aboutthen we can plan for how we want to handle this upcoming holiday season. What can we do differently this time? Then we can act upon that plan as best as we can for next year.Continuing to engage in this cycle of plan, act, reflect keeps those less-than-ideal situations or decisions from becoming, for lack of a better word, relapses, where we fully revert back to our old habits. I have found in working with clients that thats one of the more powerful strategies so that we can release some of our suboptimal decisions and still move forward in a positive, productive way.Many people believe they should skip meals to save calories before big holiday dinners. Why do you not recommend that?When we restrict food like that, its counterproductive to our health goals because its very, very difficult to make healthy decisions when were hungry. Its going to be difficult to make those balancing decisions that we talked about before. Additionally, when we restrict, we also have a tendency to binge. How many times have we been in a situation where weve gotten a little bit too hungry, and then weve eaten a little bit too much, and then we dont eat for a while, and the cycle perpetuates itself? We get into this cycle of restricting and binging, and for certain people, that can become a very serious issue.So I dont recommend it. Its not healthy. Its not a way to balance your nutrition. What I would recommend is to go ahead and have some small meals or snacks throughout the day leading up to your main meal. Leave room for your favorite foods on Thanksgiving, on Christmas, during the holiday meals. But dont starve yourself, right? Dont create this situation that sets yourself up for failure when youre trying to maintain these health goals.The survey found that one in three respondents believed they needed a detox or cleanse after the holidays. Why dont you recommend this?The best way to move forward, if you feel like you have overindulged or made a suboptimal decision or a decision that you dont like, is to acknowledge it and reflect upon the factors that led to it, come up with a plan for next time and then move on. That is the biggest advice I have. Dont dwell on it. Compensatory behaviors like juice cleanses and overexercisingor even to go so far as purging with vomiting or laxative pillsthat bumps up very closely against disordered eating behavior. If you find yourself engaging in that side of that type of behavior, please be very honest with yourself and maybe seek some support. Evaluate why you feel like you need to do those things because they can be dangerous types of behavior if you continue to engage in them.But you also need recognize that we don't need to do all that. We can enjoy a meal on a special occasion that comes around once a year and then move on with the rest of our journey. I say it so many times: the same way that one healthy meal is not going to change your life, neither will one unhealthy or less than great meal. So release it. That's my biggest piece of advice: acknowledge it, and let it go. The same way that people say, New year, new me, break that down even smaller: new day, new me or even new meal, new me. Put in the work to figure out why you made that decision [youre unhappy with] so that it doesnt continue to happen, but then move on.How do you help people reframe their relationship with food so that it is less adversarial and punitive and more accepting and flexible?I dont think I can succinctly answer that, to be honest, because this is what I spend six-plus weeks counseling people about. Its heavy stuff. Its peoples relationship with food. Its the psychology behind nutrition. [At its core], its diet culture, which places the value of thinness above all else. When we break it down and we think about why we think about foods with morally charged wordsgood, bad, clean, dirty, cheatits because of diet culture. Thats how, as a society, weve been conditioned to think of it. As somebody in my position, Im trying every day to try to dismantle it. Because it is so not true. I desperately try to get my clients to think of food in a neutral way, to give them freedom, to take the power away from foodbecause it is, at the end of the day, just food. Its just a way to nourish your body.One of the concepts I like to teach is a nutrition spectrum. I try to have people think of foods as always foods, sometimes foods and rarely foods. Rarely foods are the ones were having as treats. Maybe theyre high in saturated fat, sodium, sugarthose more inflammatory nutrients that we know are not great for our health and can be connected to some of those cardiometabolic diseases that were trying to avoid. Then in the middle we have sometimes foods. Maybe they dont have those health risks associated with them but arent the best way to nourish our body either. The vast majority of our foods are going to fall in that category. Then always foods are the most nutrient-dense: fruits, vegetables, whole grains, plant-based proteins such as beans, peas and lentils. Things like that that are super nutrient-rich, so we want to have them all the time.If we can lean more toward the sometimes and always side of the spectrum as often as possible, were doing okay. So when we think about Thanksgiving and the holidays, think about where your food is going to fall on your spectrum and try to lean more toward those sometimes and always foods. And you can have a rarely food because its a holiday and those happen rarely!One last, very important question: What is derby pie?Oh, let me tell you about it. Derby pie is a Kentucky delicacy that my grandmother, whos from Louisville, makes. Its basically pecan pie, but it has chocolate and bourbon in it. Theres a lot of corn syrup in there, tooits indulgent. And it is so good, and she only makes it twice a year, on Thanksgiving and Christmas. It is my thing that I always make room for.If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, you can contact the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders helpline by calling (888) 375-7767.

November 18, 20245 min readTrump Selects Fracking Executive to Lead Energy DepartmentChris Wright, CEO of a fracking services company and Trumps nominee to lead the Department of Energy, has said there is no climate crisisBy Brian Dabbs & E&E NewsChris Wright speaking with attendees at the American Conservation Coalition's 2023 Summit at the Salt Lake City Marriott City Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)CLIMATEWIRE | President-elect Donald Trump's pick for Energy secretary signals a boost for U.S. fossil fuels.Trump tapped Chris Wright, the CEO of fracking services company Liberty Energy, for the position this weekend. The oil and gas executive is a passionate proselytizer for fossil fuels, often touting the benefits of energy access while downplaying the threats posed by climate change.Wright is celebrated in the oil and gas sector, where executives anticipate he will clear the way for more American exports of liquefied natural gas. The country's LNG exports have already skyrocketed in recent years, but the Department of Energy paused approvals for new permits earlier this year to assess the climate and economic impacts of the surge.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.We look forward to working with him once confirmed to bolster American geopolitical strength by lifting DOEs pause on LNG export permits and ensuring the open access of American energy for our allies around the world, American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers said Saturday on X.On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly argued that the clean energy transition is increasing inflation (though analysts say that's only partially accurate at best). He vowed to ramp up production of U.S. liquid gold, even as the U.S. produces record volumes of oil and gas.If confirmed as head of the Department of Energy, Wright would exercise a limited regulatory role over fossil fuels. Other agencies wield much more influence: for example, the Interior Department oversees drilling leases and EPA regulates industry emissions.But Wright would be tasked with approving or denying LNG exports, which environmentalists decry as a major threat to global temperature rise. Some controversial LNG projects that could get the go-ahead under Wright include the sprawling CP2 project in Louisiana and Alaska's $43 billion LNG project.Hell be hell-bent on abusing his power to prolong the use of deadly fossil fuels and give his corporate polluter executive friends a rubber stamp for the unfettered buildout of LNG exports, said Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous in a statement. Chris Wright is not merely unqualified, hes a direct threat to our future and the planets.Wright was a donor to the Trump campaign and reportedly met with the president-elect earlier this year, according to The Wall Street Journal. Last week, he gained the backing of fossil fuel magnate and Trump ally Harold Hamm.The Wright nomination comes in the wake of Trumps decision to nominate North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum as Interior secretary. The president-elect also put Burgum in charge of a new informal agency called the National Energy Council, which Trump said in a statement would oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE."We are excited to work with these two gentlemen to grow Americas standing as the pre-eminent global oil and natural gas producer, said Kathleen Sgamma, president of the fossil fuel group Western Energy Alliance. Not only is their agenda good for American jobs, economic growth, and prosperity, but for reducing energy poverty across the globe.Wright was a major driver of technological development in fracking, which is often credited with boosting U.S. fossil fuel production. He has often argued that the benefit of energy access outweighs the impact of planet-warming emissions.Wright has said there is no climate crisis and labeled net-zero emissions goals neither achievable nor humane.Any negative impacts of climate change are clearly overwhelmed by the benefits of increasing energy consumption, he said last year. We have seen no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts or floods despite endless fear mongering of the media, politicians and activists.Scientists overwhelmingly agree that burning fossil fuels drives climate change, which is increasing the frequency of disasters like wildfires, hurricanes and heat waves. The U.S. government's National Climate Assessment also says greenhouse gas emissions are increasing "the frequency and severity of many types of extreme weather events."Methane emissions, which are linked to gas production and LNG exports, are a major short-term driver of climate change. A 2021 National Renewable Energy Laboratory study reviewing existing research found that the total life-cycle emissions of electricity generated from natural gas are 11 times higher than solar and 37 times higher than wind.Jean Su, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's Energy Justice Program, called on other countries to reject American fracked exports and instead embrace the renewable future we desperately need.Picking someone like Chris Wright is a clear sign that Trump wants to turn the U.S. into a pariah petrostate, said Su.All of the above?Trumps energy picks, while controversial, arent expected to generate the level of opposition predicted for selections like former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) as attorney general or Pete Hegseth, a Fox News personality, as defense secretary. Both face sexual assault allegations.Atop DOE, Wright would be tasked with approving billions of dollars of loans and grants for renewable energy, carbon capture, direct air capture and hydrogen grants all of which Congress authorized in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. DOE also regulates efficiency levels for home appliances, directs the national laboratories, maintains the nuclear stockpile, cleans up nuclear weapons plants and broadly oversees energy policy.Meanwhile, Trump has laid out grand goals for the new Burgum-led National Energy Council.This team will drive U.S. Energy Dominance, which will drive down Inflation, win the A.I. arms race with China (and others), and expand American Diplomatic Power to end Wars all across the World, he said.Burgum has supported carbon capture and hydrogen energy as decarbonization solutions for the power and industrial sectors. Both industries have seen billions of dollars of federal support as part of the Biden administration's climate agenda."Clean hydrogen can play a major role in our all-of-the-above energy approach, he said last year.But the inauguration of Trump will mark a dramatic shift in U.S. strategy on climate change and global multilateralism. Hes expected to abandon the Paris climate agreement as he did in his first term.Meanwhile, on Sunday, President Joe Biden toured the Amazon rainforest on route to the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, while U.S. leaders met with global counterparts in Baku, Azerbaijan for a new round of climate talks. Biden pledged U.S. funding for the Amazon Fund, which prevents deforestation.Biden has vowed to put the U.S. on track to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions in the power sector by 2035 and economywide by mid-century.The fight against climate change has been a defining cause of President Bidens leadership and presidency, the White House said Sunday. These past four years, the Administration has created a bold new playbook that has turned tackling the climate crisis into an enormous economic opportunity.Environmentalists are vowing to continue the fight against climate change into the Trump administration.The clean energy economy is here to stay, and we are all in to defend both bedrock environmental laws and the recent climate progress that is creating jobs and lowering energy costs for families across the country, said Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters.Reporter Timothy Cama contributed to this report.This story also appears in Energywire.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

November 18, 2024An Off Day in BrooklynAnd on UranusA serious bird flu infection in Canada, a troubling projection of future plastic waste and dispatches from a global climate convention. Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific AmericanSUBSCRIBE TO Science QuicklyApple | Spotify | RSS[CLIP: Theme music]Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific Americans Science Quickly, Im Rachel Feltman. Lets get the week started by catching up on a few science stories you might have missed.First, you might remember that last week I mentioned that an unprecedented number of U.S. states were experiencing drought. Those dry conditions have helped wildfires take hold, including in surprising spots like Brooklyns Prospect Park. Here to tell us a little bit more about that situation is Andrea Thompson, a Scientific American associate editor who covers the environment, energy and Earth sciences.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.[CLIP: "It Doesn't End Here (Instrumental)," by Nehemiah Pratt]Andrea Thompson: So a lot of us are used to wildfires out West, especially in places like California in recent years, but theres been more than 500 fires since October 1 in New Jersey. Theres been about 200 brushfires in Massachusetts in October, which is a [roughly] 1,200 percent increase over the average. So, you know, its clear that this is really unusual.And the reason its happening is because of the drought conditions there and actually in a large part of the country. In terms of population, its actually about half of the country, about 149 million people.The reason were seeing the drought in the East right now is because weve just had a prolonged period where we havent really gotten much rain. Thats been particularly true in the Northeast. We have recently seen some rain hit in a few places, particularly from Louisiana up into the Ohio River Valley.Parts of the Southeast have gotten a decent drenching and have seen some improvement in the drought, but it takes repeated, you know, rainfalls like that to really fully dig out. And in some areas like New York City or Washington, D.C., recently had a very light rain, which doesnt hurt, but its not really helping. Its sort of just making it so that the drought doesnt keep getting worse.As to when well actually see the drought conditions ease, thats going to be different for different parts of the country. Its very hard to do any kind of detailed forecast out weeks or months in advance. But there are forecasts that can be sort of done to say whether the odds are going to favor warmer or cooler conditions, wetter or drier. So for some parts of the U.S., you know, we are seeing possibly wetter conditions coming whereas in the Northeast right now, were still kind of looking warmer than average, drier for at least the next few weeks. But, you know, how that continues into the winters a little hard to say right now.Feltman: In other troubling planetary news a study out last Thursday in Science warns that global mismanaged plastic waste could almost double from 2020 levels by 2050 if we stay on our current trajectory. Researchers used machine learning to analyze data on plastic production and waste management along with info on socioeconomic trends to estimate how our plastic problem might evolve over the next few decades. While the findings are very troublingand suggest the annual greenhouse gas emissions from the plastic system could grow by more than a third if nothing changesthe authors did also game out some potential solutions. The researchers simulated the results of eight interventions currently being considered in the United Nations plastic pollution treaty draft. The good news is the authors found that four of these policies, if implemented together, could reduce plastic-related greenhouse gas emissions by a third by 2050. Unfortunately those policies are likely to be a pretty tough sell: to start wed have to cap virgin plastic production at 2020 levels. Wed also need to mandate that new products contain at least 40 percent recycled plastic. Plus wed also have to set a high tax on plastic packaging. Then a $50 billion investment into global waste management would be the cherry on top. So wed better get cracking. And by we I mean the U.N.Unfortunately we also have a sobering update on H5N1, which is one of the viruses that causes bird flu. This year the strain of avian influenza has been spreading among cattle and other animals and has infected at least 46 humans in the U.S. So far cases have generally been described as quite mild. But last week health officials in British Columbia, Canada, announced that a previously healthy teen who has H5N1 was in critical condition. Their initial symptoms of conjunctivitis, fever and a cough progressed to acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS, which is a life-threatening condition. Health officials are still working to track down the source of the teens infection and confirm they didnt pass the virus on to anyone else. But this is a reminder that H5N1 does have the potential to cause serious illness and that our efforts to keep it from circulating should reflect that.[CLIP: "Let There Be Rain," by Silver Maple]But weve got some uplifting public health news, too. Last week we saw the release of federal data from 2023 on sexually transmitted infections. STIs have been on the rise in recent years, but the 2023 data shows a roughly 10 percent drop in early stage syphilis, which is when its most contagious. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, thats the first substantial drop weve seen in more than 20 years. Gonorrhea cases also fell for the second year in a row. Theres still a lot of work to be doneespecially on congenital syphilis, which is an STI passed to newborns during delivery. That continued to rise in 2023. Now, we saw a lower rise in cases of congenital syphilis in 2023 than in previous years, which is great. But since this potentially deadly illness is entirely preventablepregnant people just need to be screened for syphilis and receive antibiotics before they give birthweve really got no excuse not to eliminate it entirely. So basically, these numbers should motivate the government to put even more money into sex ed, STI screening and treatment, and public awareness because we're finally moving in the right direction.Now we have a quick update to share on the 29th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, better known as the much more concise COP29. The meeting started in Azerbaijan last Monday. Scientific American has a reporter there on the ground, so here he is with some key takeaways from the meetings as of Friday.Alec Luhn: My name is Alec Luhn. Im a Pulitzer Center reporting fellow covering the COP29 climate summit. The goal of this years summit is to increase international climate finance from $100 billion per year to $1 trillion per year or more. But its been ill-fated from the very start.At first countries couldnt agree which country to hold it in. National leaders didnt show up. France has boycotted the summit. Argentina has left early. And of course, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, promising to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement.Now, Bidens climate envoy, the secretary of energy, a congressional delegationtheyve all come to COP29 promising that the energy transition will continue in the U.S. despite Trump. But the fact remains that the finance goal has to be agreed [to] now without any real guarantees from the U.S., which is traditionally one of the biggest voices here, along with the European Union and China. So that climate tricycle is missing one wheel, and it reflects an uncertain time for climate in general because while the energy transition is underway [and] wind and solar have overtaken other sources of energy, were not moving fast enough.We just found out that emissions continued to rise this year. They havent started to come down yet despite almost 30 years of these climate summits. And a stark reminder of that is another report that came out, which I covered for Scientific American, which found that even if we stopped emitting carbon tomorrow, a certain amount of sea level rise is probably already locked in from the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet.So the climate crisis is more urgent than ever, and yet our international mechanisms for dealing with it are weaker than everto the point that a number of former diplomats, including the former president of the U.N. climate body, wrote a letter saying that COP is no longer fit for purpose and needs to be reformed if its to have any real chance of solving this problem.Feltman: Lets wrap up with a quick pit stop over on Uranuswhich is, as ever, full of surprises. When NASAs Voyager 2 spacecraft zipped by the ice giant back in 1986, it picked up some perplexing data about the planets magnetosphere. Those are the bubbles dominated by a planet's magnetic field that help protect the celestial body from the destructive force of charged particles from the sun and other cosmic sources.[CLIP: "Without Further Ado," by Jon Bjrk]So heres what Voyager 2 saw back in the 1980s: the spacecraft detected belts of electron radiation that, at least in our solar system, were rivaled only by the super intense ones found around Jupiter. But things didnt quite add up. In Uranuss magnetosphere, scientists expected to see a whole bunch of plasmaionized particles that help feed the radiation beltsbut it seemed like the belts themselves were the only action in town, so to speak. Scientists didnt even find any of the water ions theyd hoped to see from Uranuss moons.In a study published last Monday researchers report that a new look at the Voyager 2 data reveals a novel explanation: we just caught Uranus on an off daylike, a really weird one. The researchers think a massive solar wind event happened to hit Uranuss magnetosphere just before Voyager 2 flew by, which they hypothesize knocked all that missing plasma out of the way and temporarily juiced up the radiation belts. The scientists suspect that Uranus experiences these conditions just 4 percent of the time. That means its possible the ice giants moonswhich were written off as geologically inactive after those findings in the 1980smight actually be producing water ions that were temporarily displaced by the bout of nasty space weather. In other words, secret subsurface oceans are back on the table for the moons Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon.[CLIP: Theme music]Thats all for this weeks science news roundup. Well be back on Wednesday.Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great week!

November 18, 20246 min readClimate Change Is Altering Animals' ColorsLizards in France have grown lighter in color and so are many insects and birds across the globe. The effects of a changing climate are plainly visible throughout the animal kingdomBy Marta ZaraskaBrown-lipped snail (Cepaea nemoralis). Blickwinkel/Alamy Stock Photo.Zebras, a childrens tale goes, became striped after standing half in the shade and half out of it. While the author, Rudyard Kipling, wasnt a biologist, his story may hold some truth: research shows that when temperatures rise, animals become lighter in color, resembling the sun-exposed parts of the storybook zebra. In the humid shadows, meanwhile, darker hues prevail.As our planet warms up and rain patterns shift, the feathers and skin of many species are changing colors, often getting lighter. Snails in the Netherlands are going from brown to yellow. In a species of tropical bee in Costa Rica, the proportion of orange to blue individuals is increasing. Lizards in France are turning lighter, and so are many insects and birds across the globe. Under global warming one would expect that the darker species, and darker individuals, might decline, says Stefan Pinkert, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Yale University.There are two main ways in which animal skin, fur and feathers are colored. Some of the hues we perceive are from the interaction of light with the microstructure of feathers or scalesthink of a hummingbird that changes color depending on the angle at which you spot it. Others are caused by pigments, molecules that absorb light, such as carotenoids, which produce yellow, red and orange colors, and melanins, responsible for black, gray, brown and rustlike hues.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.Melanins, the most common pigments in birds and mammals, may be affected by rising temperatures and changing rain patterns. If you have more melanin in your skin or your fur or feathers, then it tends to absorb more heat, says Matthew Shawkey, an evolutionary biologist at Ghent University in Belgium. This may be a disadvantage as the temperature soars, he says, because it can cause animals to overheat. On the flip side, if it rains more, pathogens tend to thrive. In such conditions, dark melanins can be protective because they toughen up tissues, Shawkey says.A rule proposed by Charles Bogert, an American herpetologist, in a 1949 paper, predicts that hotter climates should have a higher presence of ectotherms, or so-called cold-blooded animals, that are lighter in color and therefore less likely to overheat. (These animals, such as reptiles and insects, cant regulate their own body temperature, and they rely on external heat sources.)In recent years, science has not only confirmed Bogerts rule but also extended it to endothermic, or warm-blooded, species. Its not just frogs, toads, snakes and midges that are lighter in warmer regions; birds get lighter as well. A 2024 analysis of more than 10,000 species of birds showed that in hot places, white and yellow feathers win over blue and black ones.With global warming, some animal populations are becoming even lighter. Between 1967 and 2010, as temperatures in the Netherlands rose by 1.5 to two degrees Celsius, brown land snails gave way to yellow ones. Between 1990 and 2020 in the U.K., dragonflies and damselflies got progressively lighter, tooas Pinkert and his colleagues found in a 2023 paper. And if youve looked closely at some dragonflies, you may have noticed that they now have fewer dark ornaments on their wings.In one recent study conducted in North America, male dragonflies from 10 different species had the smallest melanin-based color patches on their wings in the warmest years between 2005 and 2019. In this same time period, pretty spots also seemed to pale on Mediterranean Blue Titstiny birds with yellow chests and azure, hatlike markings on their head. Between 2015 and 2019, the blue head patches of tit populations around Montpellier, France, have gotten lighter by approximately 23 percenta change related to the rise in local temperatures.Experiments confirm the observational data: hot temperatures make animals turn lighter. In some cases, an individual may simply produce more or less pigment depending on temperature. Vivid dancer damselflies, for instance, can change their colors from dark to light and back to dark as mercury fluctuates throughout the day. Male chameleon grasshoppers go from black at 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees C) to turquoise at more than 77 degrees F (25 degrees C). If you raise many different species of insects in cold temperatures, they develop darker, and if you raise them in warmer temperatures, they get lighter, says Kaspar Delhey, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence in Seewiesen, Germany.Such effects are not limited to insects. Field experiments conducted in Spain showed that vultures that hatch in nests exposed to more sunlight have paler feathers than those that grow in more sheltered sites. It wasnt simply that the birds were sun-bleachedthe melanin in their plumage wasnt degraded, as it would be if destroyed by sunshine. There was simply less of it to begin with.Besides individual ability to adjust color based on temperature, animal populations living in warming regions may become lighter simply because paler animals move into new areas. There may be genetic changes at play, too, Pinkert says, but we still have a critical knowledge gap about how such evolution may be playing out.While Bogerts rule appears straightforward in regions that heat up yet remain dry, such as the Mediterranean, if rainfall increases alongside temperatures, species may turn dark instead of light. In 1833 Constantin Gloger, a German ornithologist, suggested that in humid places feathers are more likely to be black than white. One reason may be camouflage. In wet habitats, there is more vegetation; the backgrounds are darker, and so a darker animal might be more camouflaged, Delhey says. Another explanation for Glogers rule may be protection against pathogens, which often flourish in humid climates. A 2020 study of 16 bird species showed that feathers containing more melanin are better at resisting damage by nest bacteria. The goal of this molecule is to protect the organism against various sources of stress. For instance, the feathers which are black are stronger, says Alexandre Roulin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, who was not involved with the study. Research suggests that melanin molecules may not only inhibit parasites but also reinforce cells, creating a barrier against pathogens.When Delhey tested what happens when both temperatures and precipitation increase with climate change, he found that, at least in birds, the effects of humidity are generally much, much stronger, he says. Delhey and his colleagues mapped the plumage colors of all species of passerine birds, of which there are more than 5,000, to climates in which they live. They found that the animals were lighter where warm and dry but darker where warm and humid. Roulin and his colleagues found something similar in a 2024 study of thousands of museum specimens of barn owls collected across the globe between 1901 and 2018. The researchers showed that over time, plumage colors became lighter where the climate got warmer and drier but darker where both temperature and precipitation increased. Where the climate change was stronger, the change in color was stronger, Roulin says.Yet changes in precipitation patterns caused by global warming are less straightforward than a future increase in temperatures. This is why, Delhey says, if he were to predict a general trend across animals, based on the effects of temperature, they should get lighter. Cold-blooded animals, such as insects, may also respond more strongly to heat rather than humidity, he says, yet research on this is still lacking.Overall, shifts in animal coloration are expected to be subtle. We are not going to see such a dramatic change that were not going to recognize species, Delhey says. From a biological perspective, however, that small difference may mean whether a species can survive, he says. Meanwhile the animals that do adapt by changing their colors can serve as a visual reminder of humanitys giant environmental footprint that has unsettled the entire planet. You can track with your eyes what is the impact of climate change, Roulin says.

November 14, 202420 min readThis Human Computer Created a System for Measuring Vast Distances in Our UniverseVisual artist Anna Von Mertens looks to astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt and her vision of the universe for inspiration Lily Whear (composite); MIT Press (image)Attention Is Discovery, visual artist Anna Von Mertenss thoughtful new exploration of astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt, describes and illuminates Leavitts decades-long study of stars, including the groundbreaking system she developed for measuring vast distances within our universe simply by looking at photographic plates. Leavitt studied hundreds of thousands of stars captured on the glass plates at the Harvard College Observatory, where she worked as a human computer from the turn of the 20th century until her death in 1921. Von Mertens explores her life, the women she worked alongside and her discoveries, weaving biography, science and visual imagery into a rich tapestry that deepens our understanding of the universe and the power of focused, methodical attention.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.TRANSCRIPT:Anna Von Mertens: Hubble's discovery was not possible without Leavitt's work. It is Leavitt's work that began this understanding of our three-dimensional universe.Carol Sutton Lewis: I'm Carol Sutton Lewis, and this is Lost Women of Science Conversations, a series where we talk to writers, poets, and artists who focus on forgotten female scientists.In the late 1800s, the scale of the cosmos was unknowable. But this all started to change at the turn of the 20th century with the meticulous calculations and shrewd observations of astronomer, Henrietta Swan Leavitt. Leavitt, a human computer at the Harvard College Observatory, pouring over glass plate photographs of the sky, discovered a system for measuring vast distances within our universe.She turned what were once unreachable regions of the cosmos into a measurable map of stars, using the power of attention.For Anna Von Mertens, a visual artist based in New Hampshire, the power of attention was nothing new. Anna makes work that investigates science and history, and her use of paper and pencil or thread and cloth requires time, patience and intense focus. And so when she came across Henrietta Leavitt's work, she immediately felt a kinship. After spending many hours in the archives looking at the examples of early astrophotography, which Leavitt used to make her astral discoveries, Anna created graphite drawings of glass plates and hand stitched quilts inspired by Leavitt's legacy.And, going even further, she decided to write a book that merges these visual works with lyrical and detailed essays that delve into Leavitt's science. That book, Attention Is Discovery: The Life and Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, came out in September, and it's the topic of our conversation today.So let's get into it. Hi, Anna. Thanks for coming onto the show.Anna Von Mertens: Hi, Carol. Thank you so much for that lovely introduction.Carol Sutton Lewis: Anna, you're an artist known for your use of various textile processes and quilt making techniques. So, how did you decide to write a book about Henrietta Swan Leavitt?Anna Von Mertens: So as a visual artist, my work often uses observable phenomena, patterns in nature that reveal structural revelations and understandings.And so because of this type of work that I do that is so steeped in history and science, I was invited by Jennifer Roberts to the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and Jennifer was the Director of Arts at the time there, and she invited me to develop a research-based exhibition.And the various archives and libraries on campus at Harvard University were generously opened up to me to investigate as a possible subject for this exhibition. And we toured exquisite archives. But when I arrived at the Harvard College Observatory, I knew I had found my subject matter.Because there, housed, are over 550,000 glass plate photographs of the night sky. Now this is the oldest and largest archive of those type of photographs in the world. And Harvard, being Harvard, established an observatory in the 19th century in Peru. So that archive covers both the northern and southern hemispheres, and it's the only complete record of the sky.So viewing some of these glass plate photographs, I first heard Henrietta Leavitt's name. I had never heard her name before. And through these objects, these glass plates, I learned of her name and learned of her discovery and struck by its significancestruck by the profundity of her discoveryI knew that I wanted to develop a project around her life and work.Carol Sutton Lewis: And what a project it is. The book is really a wonderful, unusual combination of art and science.It's a very detailed explanation of Henrietta Swan Leavitt's work and the impact it had on science, but it's also a beautiful, artistic interpretation of the glass plates that you saw. And I could go on and on about this book, but we'll come back to it in a bit. Let's talk a little bit about Leavitt herself. She came to work at the Harvard College Observatory in the 1890s.What was known about our universe then?Anna Von Mertens: Right. Leavitt studied these photographs of the night sky, but almost nothing was known about the stars that shone in that night sky. So at the time of Leavitt's research, there was no sense of the chemical composition of the stars, and no way to know how far away these lights were from us. So for example, if a bright light shone in the sky, did that mean that it was intrinsically larger and brighter? Or did that mean simply that it was of equal brightness to a dim star, but simply closer to us? So there was no sense of depth to the stars. There was no sense of structure to this sea of stars that we were swimming in.Carol Sutton Lewis: And tell me a little bit more about the Harvard College Observatory. How did they come to be on the cutting edge of astronomical research? I mean, what were they doing that the others weren't?Anna Von Mertens: So the glass plate photographs that Leavitt studied were a new kind of technology, dry plate photography, and previously its predecessor, wet collodion photography. An astronomer would need to coat a glass surface with an emulsion, expose it to starlight through a telescope's lens, and then develop that photograph all within a span of 15 minutes, but with dry plate photographya much more stable substructurethat enabled exposures that were multiple hours in length.And so with that accumulation of starlight onto the glass surface, these dim stars could be pulled into view over an exposure that might be up to four hours length in time. And so with this new technology, a survey of the stars was possible previously, right?It would be dependent on a single individual's eye looking through a telescope, studying an individual object and finding observations on that individual celestial object. Here the stars could be studied en masse. So, Edward Pickering, who was the director of the Harvard College Observatory at the time of Leavitt's study, he realized that, that no astronomical research could move forward without building an empirical foundation of knowledge that future discoveries could be made from. So he quickly adopted this new technology, dry plate photography.And with those glass plates, a huge inundation of data. It was the first sort of flood of big data into the field of astronomy. So with that influx of data, of course, a workforce was needed to process that data. And Edward Pickering, despite being at Harvard, did not have an enormous budget. There was no funding from the college. He had to simply operate the observatory, based on interest from the observatory's endowment. So he had to be quite frugal in how he proceeded. And he realized that women as a labor force could be hired more cheaply than men, and they could analyze these glass plates, again, sort of organizing the data on them so that they could be more readily available for study. One of the things I love about thinking about Leavitt and sort of this access point to the science is that Pickering opened the door to it. It reminds me of this idea of a Room of One's Own.So here Leavitt and her female colleagues, they had a building of their own. So literally only women during her time worked in the brick building where the glass plate collection was housed. Now, yes, they were cataloging this data, but given access to this data and really given agency within their work from the director, these women not only organized the data, but within that close proximity to the data, went ahead and made the discoveries in their own right.Carol Sutton Lewis: And so Anna, initially, what was Leavitt asked to do? What was her task within the observatory, within this group, this building of women?Anna Von Mertens: So, nothing was known about the stars at this time, and director Edward Pickering wanted to survey the stars, and the most basic element of the star, the information that could be gleaned, was the brightness of that star. So, Leavitt was tasked with trying to assess the magnitude, the brightness of each individual star.And this seemed simple enough. But if you think about what she had to navigate, it is an incredibly nuancing, complex. So the photograph was made by coating a glass plate with a light sensitive emulsion. That plate was placed in the telescope and gathered starlight on its surface.It was then developed and each star would register as a tiny black speck of emulsion. If you think of pepper sort of scattered across the surface of a glass plate that might sort of give a sense of the minute details that she needed to study. So most of the plates she studied were photographic negatives with each star represented as a tiny speck of emulsion.And so she went about assessing the magnitude of each star by measuring, estimating the sort of diameter of each circle, of each tiny speck. Adding complexity to this task, the photographic medium was nascent and unreliable. And so for example, results would deviate from the center of a glass plate simply to its edges.Also the color of starlight would affect its results on glass. So for example, red stars barely registered with this new medium. And most significantly, Leavitt had to gather information of photographs made by various telescopes, made by different telescopes, made from different exposure times, so comparing a 15-minute exposure taken by one telescope to a three hour exposure taken by another telescope, so she really had to first understand this new translation of starlight onto glass. And then once she had formed that understanding, she could go and further her research.Carol Sutton Lewis: And in the midst of all this meticulous work, what did Leavitt discover? What did she learn about the cosmos?Anna Von Mertens: So in this work of trying to assess their individual brightness and survey the stars, Leavitt noticed that some of these stars changed in their brightness, so called variable stars.So instead of a consistent amount of light, over time that light would shift brighter, and then dimmer, and then brighter again. And at the time Leavitt began this research, only several hundred variable stars were even known. But Leavitt made this a particular avenue of her research, and one of the most inventive techniques of hers that she developed to identify these variable stars, was to take a glass plate negative of a certain patch of sky.And, remember, so each star would register as a black speck of emulsion. And then she would take another photograph of that same patch of sky, but on a different night. And she would translate that negative into a positive. She would then superimpose a positive and negative glass plate of the same patch of sky taken on different nights.And, if it was a traditional star, it would just, right, those specks would fill in the holes on the positive and cancel each other out. But a variable star might announce itself as a tiny white halo of light. And if that indicated that it could be a variable, she would go through time, go through plates and try to track that changing light through time. Now, as I said, only a few hundred variable stars were known at the beginning of Leavitt's research. In her lifetime, Leavitt personally discovered 2,400 variable stars, which is more than half of all known variables at the time. So she was the resident expert in this field of research.Carol Sutton Lewis: That is incredible. So, in your book, you lay out all the many inconsistencies of early astrophotography, the plate defects, the differing exposure times, the blurry edges, emulsions, as you said, with different reaction speeds.She had to take all of those potential inaccuracies into account when she was doing this analysis, which brings me to the title of your book, Attention is Discovery. So why do you think the work of noticing the work of finding patterns was so important to her work? I mean, clearly she could have just been cataloging this, but why do you think that the noticing, helped her make these discoveries?Anna Von Mertens: Well when something is known, when a scientific discovery is announced, it can seem almost self-evident. Like there's such a clarity to its truth, and one can, uh, see and observe that truth. And so it's helpful to sort of go back deeper into Leavitt's methodologies to understand really how there were no guideposts. There were no orientation markers to navigate the sea of data. So within that you have to really have faith in the process of - take an observation, see what you can pull from that, and then repeat that action. And you have to have this, this sort of fluid back and forth where you are open to investigation.You're not closing off certain lines of research, but you have this receptivity to what you are seeing, but then you're allowing that seeing to guide you. And so, Leavitt did exactly that in her groundbreaking discovery is that while she was working, while she was studying variable stars, she decided to turn her attention to the small Magellanic cloud.Now this is a celestial object that we now know as a satellite galaxy separate from our own, but at the time it was just considered a fuzzy patch of sky. And Leavitt, as she turned her attention to the small Magellanic cloud, as she studied variable stars that she found there, she, she made an incredibly important simplifying assumption. She said, I will treat this as an individual celestial object, the small Magellanic cloud, and so therefore any variable stars I find there will be equal distant to us from Earth, right? So, If she finds a bright star there and a dim star, both within the small Magellanic in a cloud, they're traveling an equal amount of distance to each other to us, and therefore, equally dimmed by that distance. So that means she knows that relationship within the cloud is true. That bright star is truly brighter than the dim star next to it and so, as it translated onto glass, she would know that that relationship held true there. That meant she could turn to her glass plates and study variable stars in the small Magellanic cloud and see what she noticed. As she started to track these stars in their brightening and dimming cycles, she noticed that the brighter stars seemed to take longer to complete their pulsation period, as it traveled through that curve of dim to light and back to dim again.And it took her several years to follow up on this line of thinking and confirm that, indeed, it was true that the brighter the star, the longer it took to pulse. And Leavitt in 1912 published a paper that graphed this relationship and the smoothness of the logarithmic curve of that graph was so smooth and so pronounced that it was, indeed, a direct relationship.And in, in fact, it was law. It's now known as the Leavitt Law, the period-luminosity relation, that establishes that the brighter a variable star is, the longer it takes to pulse. And astronomers immediately recognized the significance of this finding. So astronomers could simply observe a variable star pulsing, and based on that observation, determine how bright it should be.And if it was not as bright as it should be, they could calculate the amount of distance causing that light to dim.Carol Sutton Lewis: So, Anna, for those of us listening who are, like me, not quite as well versed in the field of astronomy, in just a sentence or two, can you please summarize for us why Leavitt's Law changed our understanding of the cosmos?Anna Von Mertens: Sure. Leavitt provided an astronomical tool that allowed. astronomers to simply observe the pulsation period of a variable star. And from that, determine how far away it is from us. And so this gift of being able to see something quite clearly, just the changing fluctuation of a star, and being able to calculate astronomical distance, opened up an entire new field of research.Carol Sutton Lewis: More after the break.Carol Sutton Lewis: So Henrietta Swan Leavitt, after all of this painstaking detailed work, determined a system to help us measure the distances to pulsating stars, also known as Cepheid variable stars. How is this groundbreaking discovery then used?Anna Von Mertens: So once this tool was established that astronomers could simply observe the changing brightness of a Cepheid variable star and based on those observations calculate its distance to us. This was most significantly put to use with Edwin Hubble was studying spiral nebulae. And perhaps the most famous astronomical glass plate photograph in the history of astronomy is a plate taken in 1923, where Hubble photographed the Andromeda Nebula, as it was called at the time, and he noticed three new lights. And he identified those as Nova, new star.But the next night he went back and noticed that one of those Nova, one of those new stars, it changed in brightness. And he realized, aha, that is a Cepheid variable star. That's one of Leavitt's Cepheid variables. And so he crossed out N, Nova for new star, and wrote V A R exclamation point.And I like to point out that exclamation points don't show up in scientific data very often, but there was good reason for it. Is that Hubble knew just based on that one single star, he could observe its changing brightness over time. And once he established its pulsation period, he could calculate its distance to us.And so with one single star, he could show that Andromeda was so far away from us, it had to be outside the scope of the Milky Way galaxy, and was a galaxy in its own right. And now, think about that. Think that with one Cepheid variable, he could make this determination. Now, if we go back to the fact that Leavitt discovered 2,400 variable stars in her lifetime, and then within that discovery made this important singular discovery that Cepheid variable star, the brighter it is, the longer it takes to pulse. Hubble's discovery was not possible without Leavitt's work. It is Leavitt's work that began this understanding of our three-dimensional universe.Carol Sutton Lewis: So you've just brought up the 2,400 variable stars that through incredibly meticulous, detailed work Leavitt discovered during her lifetime. And so this brings me back to the attention to detail theme that runs through her work and through your own artistic practice. And I want to turn to your art for a moment.You have a series called the Artifact Series, which was inspired by Leavitt's work. Can you tell me about that, how you put it together?Anna Von Mertens: I wanted to practice, as it were, the way that Leavitt studied these glass plates. So I turned and, looking at these glass plates, tried to apply my own attention to them. And one particular plate caught my interest because at the edges of the plate, there was this very pronounced warping.So as the starlight traveled through the telescope's lens, it warped at the edges of the plate. Now, this was a phenomenon that Leavitt knew well, and she needed to navigate as she tried to pull set data from these surfaces. But I was quite enamored of these artifacts, of the way that the starlight was warped, because it almost seemed to sort of attach wings to these stars, as if they were sort of moths and dragonflies and birds almost taking flight.And the specificity of those objects caught my attention, and reminded me of how Leavitt built her discovery, that she needed to build it star by star by star. And so I decided to appreciate that specificity by magnifying sections of the plate and drawing these particular artifacts across the surface.And what I was surprised is how easily my attention was held by their, their elegance, their transparencies, their depth, their peculiarities. And It reminded me how Leavitt, just how evidently committed and engaged Leavitt was in her own work. And so I've mentioned that part of what drew me to Leavitt's story is that she had this profound discovery that launched modern cosmology, but because she herself did not live to see the impact of that discovery, I wanted to know, well, was she satisfied in her own work?And reading her scientific papers, reading her letters, and looking at these glass plates myself, I could see how transfixed and engaged and delighted she was by this dedicated work.Carol Sutton Lewis: Anna, your enthusiasm and admiration for Leavitt's work is wonderfully clear. But you just mentioned that Leavitt didn't live long enough to see the impact of her work. So, can you tell me about the end of her career? What happened after her groundbreaking discovery?Anna Von Mertens: So, Leavitt spent her life studying variable stars on these glass plates at Harvard and announced her discovery to the world, Leavitt's Law, and astronomers sort of immediately understood its significance and sort of discovery tumbled forth from there. But, Leavitt sadly died in 1921, and, if you think about that famous glass plate photograph that, Hubble took, it was in 1923. So only two years after Leavitt died, Hubble found a Cepheid variable in the Andromeda galaxy and proved it was, indeed, a galaxy. And from there, right, that, that Hubble's work continued, that each time Hubble identified a Cepheid variable star in a spiral nebula, he could calculate the amount of distance to it and prove that. How far away it was and culminating at the end of the 1920s with his 1929 paper showing that not only were there galaxies all around us, but he proved in the redshift of their light, that the farther a galaxy was away from us, the faster it was receding. So, our universe was expanding.So you think within just a decade, there is this profound shift in our awareness of going from, right? In the night sky, unsure of any sense of depth to them to understanding the shape and scope of our Milky Way and galaxies outside our own. So, I wanted to celebrate this woman, who truly founded modern cosmology, but then also celebrate the life that she lived within it.Carol Sutton Lewis: Earlier, you mentioned that Leavitt was one of the many women working at Harvard, and they had their own building to do this work. And yet, even though they had jobs in the field, astronomical work was still very much divided by gender. Women could only catalog and analyze the data while the men collected it. Can you talk a little bit more about the impact that women generally had on astronomy at this time?Anna Von Mertens: You're right in that uh, women were not allowed to make the photographs or observe at night through the eye of the telescope. They worked by day analyzing the glass plates. What's interesting there is there was sort of a hierarchy given thinking that observations directly made through the telescope was where the science was. The science was actually on, on the plates. That is where the data was and that's where the discoveries were latent. And so the women Leavitt and her colleagues, now known as the Harvard Computers, were given access, this first access point to the data. And yes, it was, there was only one job description for the women at the time, they were called computers and there was only one pay rate and no sort of chance of ascending up a ladder on a career, but given access to this world, it is evident how committed and dedicated Leavitt and her colleagues were to this work, and you know, Leavitt spent her entire adult life there working at the Harvard College Observatory until her death.But alongside her were women who you know, I have a list of of certainly, Annie Jim Cannon is well known as her work focused on the studying of stellar spectra, but she worked there for her lifetime. Mabel and Edith Gill were sisters who worked there for decades. Ida Woods, another Harvard computer, worked there for 37 years.So these women were dedicated to the work and around that, an evident warmth developed both for the work and for each other.Carol Sutton Lewis: And it seems that some of the women were given recognition at the time, but why do you think our retelling of history often overlooks the work of these Harvard computers?Anna Von Mertens: that is fascinating component that surfaced in my research for the book, is that I think many of us, assumed that it was the sexism of Leavitt's day that limited her recognition. And looking at that time, the women, the Harvard computers were at the hub, at the very center of international astronomical research. So often in the archive, there's these letters written to the director of the observatory at the time of saying, what are the latest updates? You know, can you tell me more about this finding? Where are we at on this research? So these women and Leavitt in particular with her variable star research, it was well known within the astronomical community, what she was up to and, you know, that their research depended on her work.So what I found it is that actually it is the retelling of history, of that history, that is more problematic. So often the sort of women are sort of dismissed as like, oh yes, it's very tedious meticulous work and it's recognized, but sort of seen as perfunctory, or just sort of, you know, the needed work to get down to the real research. And what I found is that, yes, like all science results need to be repeated. Science has a certain amount of tedium to it, just as Hubble needed to measure circles of emulsion on his glass plates to make his own findings. So the process is the same, but somehow the work of the women is diminished as sort of, being in the background where really they were at the leading edge of research, pushing the field of astronomy forward.Carol Sutton Lewis: That feels like a great place for us to end. But before we do, do you have any final words on how we should all remember Leavitt and this exciting time in astronomical history?Anna Von Mertens: So certainly celebrating her discovery and her legacy is an enormous part of this book of really seeing the science and seeing the impact that her discovery had on all future discoveries. But returning to that sort of elemental unit of measuring a star's brightness and star by star building a finding, that on attention was, was really helpful for me as a reminder that we can apply that skill to whatever endeavor we are undertaking, whether it's an artistic practice or a scientific one. So, the way that I could see Leavitt's engagement with this work, see this dedication, this commitment, even she writes the words pleasure and delight, recognizing how attention builds and provides a richness to the world around us and what is available to see, that that was such a gift, as part of her legacy as well.Carol Sutton Lewis: So beautifully said. Anna, thank you so much for writing this book and for joining us today.Anna Von Mertens: Oh, thank you so much for having me. And yes, thank you for helping tell Leavitt's story.Carol Sutton Lewis: This has been Lost Women of Science. I'm your host, Carol Sutton Lewis. This episode was produced by Sophie McNulty. Our thanks go to Anna Von Mertens for taking the time to talk with us. Hansdale Hsu was our sound engineer, Lexi Atiya was our fact checker, Lizzie Younan composes all of our music, and Lily Whear designed our art.Thanks to Jeff DelViscio at our publishing partner, Scientific American. Thanks also to executive producers Katie Hafner and Amy Scharf, senior managing producer Deborah Unger, and program manager Eowyn Burtner. Lost Women of Science was funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We're distributed by PRX. Thanks for listening, and do subscribe to Lost Women of Science at lostwomenofscience.org so you'll never miss an episode.HostCarol Sutton LewisProducerSophie McNultyGuestAnna Von MertensAnna is a visual artist and researcher who has exhibited widely, including in Boston, San Francisco, and Oslo. She was the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Public Understanding of Science and Technology book grant to support the publication of Attention Is Discovery. She lives and works in Peterborough, New Hampshire.Further ReadingAttention Is Discovery: The Life and Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt. Anna Von Mertens. MIT Press, 2024The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars. Dava Sobel. Viking Penguin, 2016The Rise of the Milky Way. Presented by Joo Alves at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, April 3, 2019Review: How a Group of Women Launched Modern Cosmology, by Lucy Tu, in Scientific American; September 2024

OpinionNovember 15, 20244 min readEnding NASAs Chandra Will Cut Us Out of the High-Resolution X-Ray UniverseThe Chandra X-ray Observatory is facing closure. Shutting it down would be a loss to science as a wholeBy Mara AriasNASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory as it may appear at about 50,000 miles from the Earth, nearly twice as high as Earth-orbiting geosynchronous satellites. Walter Myers/Stocktrek Images Inc. Alamy Stock PhotoThe Chandra X-ray Observatory is the darling of high-energy astrophysics. Famed for providing unequaled x-ray views of voracious supermassive black holes, exploding massive stars and even dark matter-infused collisions between galaxy clusters, the spacecraft probes the biggest mysteries in astrophysics.But 25 years after seeing its first light, Chandras future is up in the air.In March NASA slashed Chandras budget from $68 million in 2024 to $41 million in 2025 and $26 million a year later. According to the Chandra X-ray Center, which operates the telescope, this only allows for mission closeout. In the months since, a series of eventsincluding an intense publicity campaign and a show of congressional supporthas kept Chandra funded through September 2025. But for this years Senior Review, which evaluates NASAs missions, the Chandra X-ray Center has been told to stay within the proposed budget numbersthat is, to plan how the spacecraft will shut down.This is a mistake. Chandra should remain operational until it encounters a critical failure or is replaced by a comparable mission. Chandra is the only high angular resolution x-ray telescope in space, and there is no mission with similar capabilities scheduled to replace it until 2032 at the earliest.One could ask: What new discoveries can Chandra make that it hasnt made over the past 25 years? And thats a good question. But our observational capabilities have changed greatly since Chandra was launched, and therefore so has its potential for making discoveries that require multiple telescopes. We have only recently reached the era of multiwavelength, multimessenger astrophysics, allowing simultaneous views of stars and galaxies in everything from the radio spectrum to gamma rays, neutrinos and gravitational waves. Much of that critical synergy will be lost and squandered if we give up on the high-resolution x-ray coverage.In a sense, Chandra was ahead of its time. Some of the discoveries it will be remembered for, such as the detection of sound waves from supermassive black holes, are Chandra-only science. But its most significant recent results come from the combination of its keen x-ray vision with new instruments such as the James Webb Space Telescope or the Event Horizon Telescope.The Chandra X-Ray Observatory was the heaviest payload to be carried into space by a shuttle. It's been looking at supernovas, black holes and spiral galaxies for two decades.In 2017, when the emitted gravitational waves of two merging neutron stars reached Earth, all the major observatories in the world conducted follow-up observations on this historic, never-before-seen celestial event. The binary neutron star merger resulted in a kilonova explosion, which shone across the electromagnetic spectrum. Its x-ray emission was due to the explosions blast wave accelerating particles and gave us information about the material surrounding the binary. No other facility could have localized the merger as accurately as Chandra did: our understanding of one of the most important astrophysical events of modern times would be incomplete without it.After a quarter-century of operations, Chandra is a well-oiled machine, with a highly experienced team that has adapted to the ageing telescope. Keeping Chandra up and running at the forefront of astronomy is getting more complex, but its not getting costlier. We're just getting better at it every single day, says Daniel Castro, an astrophysicist at Chandra Science Operations.The crux of the matter lies in the presidential budget request from last March, which to communal consternation mischaracterized Chandra as rapidly degrading and increasingly expensive. A further source of frustration within the community is that NASA sidestepped its own peer-review procedure for evaluating the timeliness of mission closeout, the Senior Review (which had given Chandra top marks in 2022), by unexpectedly cutting Chandras funding. The budget cuts end Chandras mission without any discussion or input from the astrophysics community.An interesting choice of NASAs was to award $50 million to the development of the Habitable Worlds Observatory, or HWO, where the same funding would keep Chandra fully operational. HWO is an infrared, optical and ultraviolet NASA flagship telescope that is 20 to 30 years from launch, and which will most likely cost more than its estimated $6 to $10 billion.Webb, whose costs ballooned from an initial $2 billion to $8 billion, looms large in the decision to prioritize funding for HWO. Its commendable that NASA is keeping an eye on future challenges, but a lot of this first allocation of money for HWO will go into preliminary overheads, such as building a project office and establishing industry partnerships. It is worth considering whether awarding $50 million, decades before launch, to a multibillion-dollar mission justifies shutting down a mission as productive as Chandra.Astronomers have thrown around ideas for other sources of funding for Chandra, such as selling its operations to the Japanese or European Space agencies or relying on private donations. Collaboration with other space agencies and companies is standard in astrophysics, but it is a lengthy process, and a lot of the technology in Chandra is walled off by U.S. technology transfer restrictions. And NASAs policy directive, while it allows for donations, does not allow for conditions on their use. Besides, do we want (sometimes erratic) space billionaires to expand into fundamental science? Access to the universe is a public good, and most of us astronomers would like to avoid the possibility that oligarchs become its gatekeepers.Killing Chandra highlights the tension inherent in flagship-style astronomical missions. They make stunning discoveries, but they also have a way of soaking up the budget of medium-size or existing missions. We need more powerful telescopes because they open new parameter space, which is the way truly revolutionary discoveries get made. But there is a delicate balance to be maintained here: What are we giving up by allocating such early funding to HWO? Id say were opening a window, but closing a door. We are choosing to be blind to the high-resolution x-ray universe. And thats a loss to science as a whole.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

November 15, 20243 min readMiaou! Curly Tails Give Cats an AccentA genetic mutation makes some cats tail curl over their back, giving them something akin to an accent when they communicate with other kittiesBy Christa Lest-LasserreBaby the cat has a genetic mutation that makes his tail curl over his back in a spitz-like position. Erica HudsonOwning a cat with a trendy feature, such as a salty licorice coat color or the flat face of a Persian feline, might be the cats meow. But some trendsincluding a curled-back tail thats gaining popularity among ownersmay unintentionally complicate a kittys social life. These cute but unusual tails could give a feline a sort of nonverbal accent to other cats (or humans), researchers say.Cats have a large repertoire of body language signals. They arch their back, raise their fur and flatten their ears to communicate fear or stress. They squint, knead their paws and rub their head against someone when showing affection and trust. And one of their most common contentment cues is a simple straight-up tailheld vertical and sometimes a little curved at the tipwhich translates to other kitties as Hey there, friend!Morgane Van Belle, a feline ethologist at Ghent University in Belgium, was researching cat-to-cat interactions in peoples homes when she came across some surprising tails that bent completely over the cats backs. Participants sent her videos of two cats from unrelated households that could wave, swish, twitch and drop their tail but couldnt hold it straight up. The owners said their respective cats tail had always been this way, suggesting a genetic mutationone that is likely also involved in a new breeding effort to promote curly tails. The proposed name for the breed with this trait is the American ringtail (not to be confused with the small mammal from the raccoon family).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.Curious about how curly tails affect cats ability to communicate, van Belle and her colleagues watched 85 minutes of video footage of the two curly-tailed felines interacting with other cats that lived in their respective homes. Normal-tailed cats happily groomed, played, rubbed heads and slept with the odd-tailed kitties they lived withmeaning the animals had likely found some other way to communicate friendly messages, the researchers report in a new paper published in the Veterinary Journal.The curled tail gives a cat something a bit like an accent that may take some time and effort for others to understand, says Van Belle, who was lead author of the paper. Maybe theyre using other cues, like ear position or odors instead, she adds. Knowing each other very well probably also helps in the communication. It really shows how flexible cats are when communicating with each other.Erica HudsonSandra Nicholson, an animal behavior scientist at University College Dublin, who was not involved in the new paper, concurs. Theyre still signaling through other parts of their body, with their face, their ears and their body position as a whole, she says. So its not just about the tailalthough obviously that [curled tail] is going to reduce some of their signaling ability.Unfamiliar felinesand even humansrisk misinterpreting curly-tailed cues. These cats could be sending confusing messages, Nicholson says. Indeed, tails that curl over the back dont even seem to exist in the kitty language repertoire because most cats cant make this move at all.Whether communication challenges exist among the approximately 70 breeds of curly-tailed spitz dogs, such as Pomeranians and Shiba Inus, remains to be explored, says one of the new studys co-authors, Daniel Mills, a veterinary behaviorist at the University of Lincoln in England. Breeds who only experience their own breed may be more limited in their ability to communicate across all breeds, he says, noting the importance of socializing a dog with a diverse range of breeds.On a broader scale, the cat study highlights the need to consider how fashionable breeding characteristics may affect not only animals physical health but their social health as well, says evolutionary ecologist Brittany Florkiewicz of Lyon College, who was not involved in the new paper. Snub-nosed animals such as pug dogs and Persian cats cant create all the normal facial expressions for their speciesin addition to struggling to breathe correctly.On a more positive note, Nicholson points out that the paper highlights cats ability to adapt to one anothers individual variations. These animals need to be supported and included and not disadvantaged as a result of their differences, she explains. Here we see theyre living their lives normally, and I find that quite inspiring.

November 15, 20247 min readThe Tooth Is Stranger Than FictionAnglerfish have invisible fangs, narwhal tusks are extra-long canines, and more facts from the weird and wonderful study of teeth will astound youBy Zane WolfIn this bridled parrotfish (Scarus frenatus) beak, layers and layers of teeth can be seen compressing into an incredibly stiff conglomerate structure. Nature Picture Library/Alamy Stock PhotoDo you think teeth are boring or gross? From the iron-laden teeth of Komodo dragons to the horns on unicorns of the sea, the animal kingdom is filled with marvelous dental adaptations that will have you thinking again.Sharks are covered in toothlike scales called denticlesColored micrograph of shark skin showing the complex three-dimensional structures of its denticles.Gregory S. Paulson/Getty ImagesOn 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.Cartilaginous fishes such as sharks, rays, skates and chimaeras grow three-dimensional scales on the surface of their skin. Each toothlike scale has a pulp cavity containing blood vessels and nerves and is covered in a mineralized, enamel-like tissue called enameloid. These scalesvery unlike bony fishes flat dinner-plate-like scalesare called denticles and have widely different shapes and features, not just across species but also in an individual fish. Denticles found on a sharks nose might be flat and round, resembling the patched surface of a soccer ball. But elsewhere on the body the denticles might look like overlapping cupped hands with ridges and points.These denticles can serve a variety of functions, such as decreasing drag while swimming and perhaps even increasing thrust directly, explains Purdue University biomechanist Dylan Wainwright. We think theyre also functioning in some way as protection for sharks, Wainwright continues. They may protect from both big things like bites from other sharks [and] from small things like ectoparasites. (Some fish have been observed rubbing against sharks rough skin to scrape off their own parasitic riders.)We still dont know where teeth come fromTwo competing theories about the evolutionary origins of teeth have been battling back and forth for decades, vacillating with the latest supporting discoveries in developmental biology or the fossil record. The outside-in hypothesis suggests that toothlike dermal scales with pulplike centers covered in hardened mineralsimilar to denticles found todaygradually migrated across the bodys exterior surface over successive generations of fish before moving inward to take up residence in our ancestors jawbones. The inside-out hypothesis suggests that teeth originated internally before migrating forward in the oral cavity to become oral teeth.An investigation of a fossilized sawtooth sharks rostral denticles (the teeth on the fishs sawlike bill) showed complex internal structures incredibly similar to those found in shark teeth. This discovery suggests that the developmental gap between dermal scales and teeth is smaller than originally thought, edging the outside-in hypothesis ahead of inside-out once more. Given the inherently spotty nature of the fossil record, however, it is entirely possible that we will never know exactly where our oral teeth come from.Some fish species have not one, not two, but three varieties of teethMost fish have two sets of teeththe oral teeth located near the front of their mouth for grabbing and chomping and the pharyngeal teeth located in their throat for the slicing and dicing. But some fish, comprising a group known as osteoglossomorphs, have also developed a third set of teethbony plates formed by the roof of their mouth and their tongue (osteo means bony; glossi means tongue) that help crush and grind their food. It seems like fish just put teeth wherever they want, says Kory Evans, a fish biologist at Rice University, and fishes can continue making teeth throughout their entire life, which is really impressive.The most numerous vertebrate fossils on the planet are microfossil fish teethAs fish routinely replace their teeth, the shed teeth will fall to the bottom of the water column and become enshrined in the sediment. Unlike more porous bones, these hardened teeth are less susceptible to erosion and degradation. Given that fish have existed for 530 million years or so, it should come as no surprise that sediment from around the globe is chock-full of fish tooth fossils. But good luck spotting them in the wild. Theyre smaller than the human hair, but these little, teeny, tiny fish teeth can tell mighty stories, says Elizabeth Sibert, an oceanographer and paleobiologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.Resembling microscopic ice cream cones, these micro teeth can vary in thickness, length, curvature, presence or absence of barbs, and so on. From the relative abundances of these teeth over time and the geographic distribution of differently shaped ones, Sibert and her collaborators can make inferences about animal diversity, animal abundance and food webs from oceans long past. And just how many of these microfossil teeth might be out there? Certainly billions, Sibert guesstimates, and I think trillions might not be that far off.Parrotfish beaks, built from compressed teeth, have the stiffest biomineral ever foundHeavybeak parrotfish (Chlorurus gibbus) featuring an impressive beak.Ute Niemann/Alamy Stock PhotoMost parrotfish species munch through coral in search of polyps and algae (contributing to white sandy beaches), but biting through coral is no easy feat. Parrotfish beaks are composed of the stiffest biological mineral ever discovered, supplanting limpet (snail) teeth, the previous record holder.Parrotfish beaks form by compressing up to 1,000 teeth arranged in as many as 15 rows into one hard, conglomerate structure covered by a layer of enameloid. Crystals in the enameloid are woven together much like fabric but on the scale of two to five microns (smaller than a red blood cell). This woven structure affords one square inch of a parrotfishs beak the ability to withstand a force equivalent to the weight of 88 elephants.Deep-sea fishes transparent teeth may provide camouflageJagged, transparent fangs can be seen in the mouth of this deep sea Anglerfish (Melanocoetus sp.) female.Nature Picture Library/Alamy Stock PhotoDeep-sea fish will never win beauty pageants, but surviving under hundreds of meters, if not several kilometers, of water is not easyand these fishes are brimming with incredibly bizarre adaptations that should definitely win them some awards. The long, spindly, transparent teeth of anglerfish, dragonfish, and the like are fascinating in more ways than one. First, while the long fangs may look sharp, these teeth are actually not designed to puncture but to trap! Many deep-sea fish species have depressible teeth that bend only inward and function like a one-way valve. Food can come in, but it cant go out. Additionally, research suggests that a dragonfishs smile doesnt exactly light up a room. Any ambient light (like that generated from luminescing prey) passes through the tooth structure instead of bouncing off a dense surface and reflecting outward, like it would from our own pearly whites. This lets the deep-sea nightmares sneak closer to prey without their exposed teeth giving away the game.Snake fangs evolved multiple times yet still all look identicalWhile most reptiles lack fangs and venom, many different snake species have evolved mechanisms to deliver venom through their teeth. Snakes display two main types of venom-delivering fangs: grooved fangs, in which venom runs down a backside channel, and tubular fangs, in which venom flows through an enclosed delivery duct within the fang itself. Tubular fangs have evolved in three separate snake families (vipers, cobras and burrowing asps). In a class of animals where fangs are not all that common, how is it that fangs evolved not just once but multiple times across disparate snake families and converged on roughly the same structures each time?The answer appears to have a root cause. Many reptilian teeth have a pattern of zigzagging indentations called plicidentine around their base, where they attach to the jaw. Scientists hypothesize that one of the zags eventually developed into a long channel running the length of the fang, which could then be fully encapsulated within the fang as a canal. The presence of plicidentine forms an evolutionary shortcut to venom delivery that made repeated evolution of that adaptation more likely.Nature evolved metal teeth long before humans invented the sawFor a few lucky critters, jaws of steel is not too far off from the truth. Some animals have evolved chompers that contain iron to reinforce and protect their teeth from wear and tear. Beavers are a prime mammalian example; their incisor enamel is enriched with iron and capable of withstanding the repetitive gnawing and chomping of fibrous plant tissue. Researchers recently learned that Komodo dragon teeth also contain iron strategically located along their serrated edges. This is particularly surprising given that Komodo dragons, like most reptiles, replace their teeth frequently. The metabolic cost of investing in and growing thousands of iron-laden teeth over their lifetime must be worth it.Narwhal tusks are overgrown canine teethNarwhal (Monodon monoceros) crossing tusks above the water's surface off of Baffin Island, Nanavut, Canada.Nature Picture Library/Alamy Stock PhotoThe defining characteristic of the narwhal, or unicorn of the sea, is a long, spiraling tusk erupting from the animals forehead. But its not a hornits a tooth. Narwhals have two large teeth embedded horizontally in their skull, and one of them (usually the left tooth, though sometimes the right or rarely both) erupts from the skull to continue its growth into what we think of as a horn. And even more strangely, these tusks always spiral in the counterclockwise direction, even in the odd instances where a narwhal has two horns. This might be the mechanism by which the tusks of narwhals grow straight, compared with the curved tusks of elephants and boars and the impressively large, curving canines of walruses and hippos. Additionally, the tusks are not covered in enamel, as most teeth are, but in cementum, a more flexible mineral coating. Given that most narwhal tusks are grown by males, it is no surprise that they have been shown to play a role in sexual selection.Plaque-causing bacteria and fungi can walk across the surface of our teethWe have known for a while that bacteria residing on human teeth can cause surface damage leading to plaque buildup and tooth decay. But scientists made a few startling discoveries more recently that might provide the motivation to brush and floss just a bit more regularly. Not only did they discover fungi in the saliva samples of children with severe tooth decay, but they also saw the bacteria and fungi interacting under a microscope! These conglomerations are capable of spreading or walking across the surface of teeth and combining with other Frankensteinian bacteria-fungi colonies to grow larger and larger.

November 15, 202410 min readThe Arecibo Message, Earths First Interstellar Transmission, Turns 50In 1974 we beamed a radio transmission into space that changed the way we think about our place in the cosmosBy Nadia DrakeThe Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico transmitted the most powerful known interstellar message in 1974. The facility's iconic 1000-foot-wide dish that beamed out the signal collapsed in 2020. American Photo Archive/Alamy Stock PhotoA half-century ago humanity sent its first postcard to the stars, carried by a narrow beam of radio waves.It was November 16, 1974a turbulent time on planet Earth. The cold war was reaching its crescendo, and the world economy was still sputtering from a Middle East oil embargo that was imposed the previous year. The U.S. had retreated from its crewed forays to the moon but was still fighting in Vietnam, and the resignation of scandal-plagued President Richard Nixon was still reverberating. The Beatles had effectively disbanded earlier yet would officially do so before years end. (John Lennons solo singleWhatever Gets You thru the Nighttopped the U.S. charts that very day.)Against that dark background, this first-ever interstellar transmission was both a literal and figurative ray of light. Astronomers had already started eavesdropping on the heavens, hopefully awaiting murmurs from beyond that would break our seeming cosmic solitude. But this was something differentan intentional summons, perhaps an invitation for communion with hypothetical beings among the stars. Sent using a powerful radio transmitter at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, it signaled the start of an age that is still unfolding, in which our rapidly changing technological civilization confronts an uncertain fate beneath a silent sky and grapples with how to present itself.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.Composed in binary codea string of 1s and 0swhats now known as the Arecibo message has become an icon of the 20th-century space age in the 50 years since it left Earth. Youve almost certainly seen it at some point, even if you didnt recognize it for what it was. Arrange its digits in a grid with the right dimensions, and the transmission yields a two-dimensional image that tells of us humans, our home in the solar system and the instrument that relayed the message skyward.I think of the Arecibo message in this grand tradition of attempts at communicating with ET or transmitting things into space that are fundamentally messages, at least in part, to Earth as well, says Rebecca Charbonneau, a science historian at the American Institute of Physics. But, she says, its more than that.Human beings are very visual creatures, and we need something visual and beautiful to help channel feelings of spirituality and wonder, she says. And I think, in some ways, the Arecibo message is an icon in that old traditiona visual representation of something that makes us feel small in an expansive and sublime kind of way.But just as it symbolizes some sort of transcendence, today the Arecibo message is also a poignant reminder of fragility and loss. Since the message left Earth, the telescope that sent it fell into neglect and eventually collapsed. And the Arecibo messages designer, my father Frank Drake, died. A few months ago, while rummaging through some of Dads old papers, I found an early penciled in draft of the messagealong with his musings about the information he wanted to convey and correspondence surrounding its creation. Id of course known of Dads role in sending the message for most of my life, but it was the first time Id seen any of the work that went into making it. And when I shared an image of the draft on social media, the response was more fervent than I had anticipated, with many folks channeling Indiana Jones: That belongs in a museum! (A sentiment with which I agree.)The Arecibo Message as it appears when its 1,679 bits are properly aligned on a grid (left), an annotated illustration explaining its components (center), and a photograph of the message's recently discovered hand-drawn first draft (right).SPL/Science Source (left and middle); Frank Drake (right)Those images are seared in the mind of anybody who thinks about this stuff or is aware of the history, says David Grinspoon, senior scientist for astrobiology strategy at NASA. It was a very hopeful gesture, and the motivation is transcendent in that it was not for national gain or personal gain. It was like, Hey, humans on Earth, we can do this.With a Little Help from My FriendsDespite its fame, the Arecibo message was not the first deliberate, designed transmission from Earth.That honor belongs to what is now known as the Morse message, which in 1962 used Morse code to transmit three words in Russian. Designed by three Soviet scientists and sent using a planetary radar complex at Yevpatoria in Crimea, the Morse message was never meant to be received by aliensunless any of them (improbably) happened to be living on its inhospitable target, the planet Venus. It never even left the solar system. Rather the transmission bounced off Venus and came right back to Earth, where its nationalist sentimentsthe words mir (which can mean peace or world), Lenin and USSRwere received by its intended audience: us.Ive seen people claim this was the first case of messaging extraterrestrials, Charbonneau says. I dont think you can do that because its very clear from the content of the message that it did not have an extraterrestrial audience in mind.But, she notes, the Soviet scientists sent the message to commemorate the integration of a new radar array at their facility. Their gut instinct was to send a message into space, she says. And thats what happened with the Arecibo message as wellto commemorate the Arecibo upgrades.Completed in 1974, those upgrades transformed the Arecibo Observatory into a world-class facility for radio astronomy. They included a powerful radio transmitter, as well as a gleaming aluminum surface for the telescopes 1,000-foot-wide reflector dish. To celebrate those accomplishments, Dadwho was at the time director of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, which ran Areciboinvited more than 200 people to a ceremony at the observatory, scheduled for November 16 of that year. The transmission would conclude the celebration, demonstrating the nations newfound interstellar reach to the gathered VIPs and the world.A few months before the ceremony, Dad had begun designing the message. It wasnt his first; years earlier, hed composed a 551-bit binary message, just for fun, and sent it to the handful of people whod attended a historic 1961 meeting about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Properly arranged into a grid, those 0s and 1s would form an image that included a human, our solar system, and oxygen and carbon atoms. But only one of the recipientsengineer and technology magnate Bernard Oliverfigured out how to decode it. (Oliver notified Dad with a binary reply of his own: a coded image of a martini glass, complete with an olive.)For the Arecibo message, Dad constructed his grid as the product of two prime numbersa rectangle measuring 23 by 73for a total of 1,679 bits. And then, as he got to thinking about what, exactly, to say, he asked for input from his colleaguesmost of whom demurred. Now, somewhat paradoxically, in less than half a century the exact authorship of a message meant to travel for thousands of yearswhich individuals contributed whatseems to have already been lost to the mists of history. But we know with certainty that Dad was its primary architect and that he worked closely with (among others) Richard Isaacman, then a graduate student at Cornell University. Isaacman offered some suggestions that he recalls Dad adopting, such as making modifications to the binary numbers on the messages top row and offsetting the planet Earth to indicate that its our home.I didnt ascribe a lot of importance to it at the time. I just thought it was really cool, says Isaacman, who today is retired from NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center and divides his time between Maryland and Hawaii. But it was a tech demo that crosses a line into a regime with very profound philosophical implications.Here Comes the SunDad targeted a globular cluster of stars called Messier 13 (M13), or the Great Cluster in the constellation of Hercules, because it would conveniently be overhead at the time of the ceremony (nestled in a sinkhole, Arecibos giant dish was not fully steerable). In about 25,000 years, Dads message will reach M13or at least part of it, because the majority of the clusters thousands of stars will have moved out of the telescopes beam by then. But anyone whos around to detect the Arecibo transmission, and who figures out how to decode it, will have a blueprint telling them a lot about us: what we look like, which chemical elements and biomolecules make up our DNA, what our planetary system is and how many of us existed in 1974. Dads transmission concluded with a binary encoded representation of the Arecibo dish itself.In some ways, it was kind of a love letter to the telescope, says Kathryn Denning, an anthropologist at York University in Ontario, who studies the scientific search for life beyond Earth. And thats beautiful. But this text, this object, this performance has meant so many different things to different people.As Dad closed the ceremony on November 16, he told the audience what was about to happenthat they were about to end the proceedings with a very important beginning.Our Earth, at the present time, on our frequency, is an unbelievable sight. It is presently 10 million times brighter than the sun, he said. Anyone who looks in this direction is going to see our star brighter than any other star has ever been, except those others who may have sent intelligent signals.And then Representative John Davis of Georgia gave the go-ahead to personnel in the Arecibo control room by paraphrasing a quote from Daniel Webster that hangs in the House of Representatives. Let us develop the resources of our land and see whether, in our day and time, we might not perform something worthy to be remembered, he said. And I think this day we have.Bernie Jackson, a heliophysicist now at the University of California, San Diego, had programmed the message into the computer and pushed the button that began the transmission. Outside, speakers blasted audio as the message left Eartha simple translation of those 0s and 1s into two audible tones. The speakers warbled for nearly three minutes, and by the time the transmission stopped, its first bits were nearly at the orbit of Mars.What they were hearing was what we might hear from another world, Dad told me when we discussed the message on its 40th anniversary. It had the aura of human beings doing something marvelous that involved the whole cosmos.Across the UniverseDads transmission was, in some ways, from a more innocent time that was less plagued by cosmic paranoia. Few people opposed it for the seemingly remote possibility of summoning malevolent alien invaders to Earth. But even so, not everyone was particularly pleased with the experiment, and over the past 50 years, a lively debate has sprung up regarding the ethics of interstellar messaging. Some opponents consider it a dangerous practice that might attract the attention of civilizations bent on destruction; others are more concerned with who gets to decide what we send, in addition to what we actually say.Now that we know about exoplanets and potentially habitable planets within several light-years, its not as outlandish to think that there could be a consequence of sending something and that we could, in our lifetimesor in the lifetimes of our close descendantsreceive something back, Grinspoon says. But Im still of this optimistic mindset that if we did get the response to something, it would be the most wonderful thing evernot just cool but potentially transformative in a really needed, exciting and hopeful way.Frank Drake, the visionary astronomer who designed the Arecibo message and helped begin the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence.Ramin Rahimian for The Washington Post via Getty ImagesBut such worries havent kept Earth quiet. Every day we release into the cosmos our own technosignatures of all sorts, any number of which could conceivably be discerned with the appropriate toolkit across interstellar distances. And since the Arecibo transmission, at least two dozen additional intentional messages have been loosed upon the sky. These include additional transmissions sent from Yevpatoria, a Beatles song, a Doritos advertisement and a series of signals to the TRAPPIST-1 system of seven tantalizingly Earth-size planets. Today, Denning notes, the ability to send interstellar transmissions is no longer limited to government-operated facilitiesand its likely that we dont even know of all the messages that have been beamed from Earth. And maybe, despite the narrative in Liu Cixins The Three-Body Problem, thats not a bad thing?If everybody in the galaxy keeps quiet, we never figure out if we are alone, says Jonathan Jiang of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who, along with his colleagues, has designed an upgraded version of Dads interstellar memo. Communication is the key to figuring out whether theres anybody out there.Hello, GoodbyeIn the end, if we receive an answer to the Arecibo message telling us that we are not alone, it wont happen in our lifetimeor even in the next millennium. Traveling at the speed of light, it will take that message some 25,000 years to reach the outskirts of M13 and at least another 25,000 years for any potential reply to reach Earth. Will there really be anybody here to reply to? Denning asks. I dont know if thats a question they would have asked, apart from the nuclear war aspect.That Dad and others were even considering a project that might unfold on such an extended timescale reflects a maturity in thinking that was perhaps a bit unusual for the 1970s, Grinspoon says.That forces you to imagine our own longevity in a way that almost nothing else makes us think of, he says. What else do we do that we have to think of the consequences 50,000 years in the future?Searching for life beyond Earth is, in some sense, an exercise in optimism. It requires that you imagine there is something, or someone, to be foundand that we humans are capable of making that discovery and reacting accordingly. As some have said, as long as we are listening for whispered signals from distant civilizations, announcing our own presence is a moral obligation. (And Jiang also told me that making cosmic messages can be an exercise in helping humankinds moral advancement, pushing us to grow out of the conflicts that now so consume and threaten our world.)But the messages we send to the cosmos, even the Arecibo message, are fleeting. From afar, they are Earth revealing itself for mere instants, as some beaming declaration that briefly outshines the sun and most everything else on some snippet of the electromagnetic spectrum. And then the planet goes back to black, just another silent world among billions in the Milky Way.With my father having fallen silent, too, I sometimes find solace knowing theres some small part of him still out there, forever traveling. Frank Drake never left Earth, yet his messageour messageis now 50 light-years away. More than 1,000 star systems reside in that volume of space, a vastness so easily lost in our galaxys billions-strong stellar swirl. In that murk, we know of only a few that are in the transmitters beam, although so far no one has echoed in reply. Chances are, none ever will. But that didnt stop Dad from searching, or from seeking some cosmic connection. Too many secrets remain hidden among the stars. And we still have so much to say.

November 15, 20243 min readClimate and Conservation Ballot Measures Approved Even in Places Trump WonFour counties in Florida that voted for Trump also voted to conserve open space, reduce flood damage and protect habitatBy Avery Ellfeldt & E&E NewsA Cypress Lake Cove in Lake County, Central Florida. Stephen Vincent/Alamy Stock PhotoCLIMATEWIRE | President-elect Donald Trump won nearly 70 percent of the vote in Floridas Clay County last week.Another big winner in the Republican county near Jacksonville was a ballot measure that will increase taxes by $45 million to fund projects that will improve water quality, protect wildlife and reduce damage from floods.Nearly two dozen conservation- and climate-related ballot initiatives were approved on Election Day in states from Florida and Georgia to California and Colorado. The measures aim to expand parks, preserve natural areas and prepare communities for the impacts of climate change.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today."This is not a partisan issue," said Pegeen Hanrahan, associate director of conservation finance at the Trust for Public Land, a non-profit that advocates for conservation- and climate-focused ballot measures. We see wins in red states and in blue states."Many of the initiatives passed in Democratic areas such as Denver, which approved a measure to install and improve air conditioning in public schools. The city saw saw record-breaking temperatures this fall. Several measures won the support of voters in states and counties that backed Trump, who has called climate change a hoax and has promised to scrap pollution regulations and President Joe Biden's climate policies and programs.The success reflects a growing recognition among residents and officials that global warming poses a rising risk to people, property, budgets and tax bases and will get worse absent intervention.Everybody, regardless of their political leanings, understands that and is willing to make these kinds of investments, said Justin Marlowe, who directs the Center for Municipal Finance at the University of Chicago. Its an economic development strategy.Hanrahan said her organization tries to address the impacts of climate change" through ballot measures. "In some places we dont discuss the direct cause of those impacts," Hanrahan said.The Clay County measure was listed on the ballot as the Land Conservation Referendum to Protect Water Quality, Wildlife Habitat, Forests and Farms.Four measures were approved by Florida counties that backed Trump.In Lake County, near Orlando, voters passed a measure to preserve natural areas, improve water quality and protect wildlife habitat. The county will pay for the work by issuing $50 million in bonds that it will pay back through an increase in property taxes that will cost the average homeowner $21 a year for 20 years, according to a Trust for Public Land analysis.The Clay County measure has similar aims and authorizes the county to sell bonds that could cost the average homeowner up to $33 per year, according to the trust. A referendum in Osceola County south of Orlando authorizes $70 million in bonds to renew a land conservation program.Voters in Martin County north of Palm Beach approved a measure with similar objectives. But instead of selling bonds, the county will raise its sales tax by half a cent for the next decade to raise $183 million.None of the Florida measures mentions climate change. And thats intentional.We're not out there talking about climate change a lot, said David Weinstein, western conservation finance director at the land trust. We're talking about the worst effects of climate change, and that's what resonates with voters.Nonetheless, the ballot measures aim to fund projects capable of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, preparing communities for climate impacts or both.The main benefit of doing land protection for climate is that obviously natural lands absorb carbon, absorb flood waters [and] create a habitat that is healthier for movement of wildlife, said Hanrahan of the land trust.Other approved ballot measures aim to reduce wildfire risk in Colorado, preserve forests in Illinois, and fund parks, community centers and more in New Mexico.California voters approved four related ballot measures including one that mentions climate multiple times. Proposition 4 earned 58 percent of the vote and authorizes the state to issue $10 billion in bonds to finance projects aimed at preventing wildfires, providing safe drinking water and protecting California "in the face of significant threats from climate change.As climate impacts intensify, Marlowe of the University of Chicago expects ballot measures that address climate change to become more common and to remain popular with voters."There are estimates that say were going to have to borrow twice as much money as we currently borrow every year to keep up with" climate impacts, Marlowe said. If youre a mayor, or a city council or a city manager or a chief finance officer, you cant wait for action from Washington."Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

November 14, 20247 min readNew Bird Flu Spread Patterns Are Revealed in WastewaterWastewater in several Californian cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, recently tested positive for bird flu. But understanding disease risk and exposure to humans isnt so straightforwardBy Lauren J. YoungRecent wastewater measurements have detected the H5N1 bird flu virus in several cities in California. Amanda Montaez; Source: WastewaterSCANSince the first avian influenza outbreaks hit the U.S. early this year, health and agriculture experts have struggled to track the viruss spotty path as it spreads in dairy cow herds and an unknown number of humans. Infection risk still seems low for most people, but dairy workers and others directly exposed to cows have been getting sick. Canadas first human case was just reported, in a teenager who is in critical condition. To get a better handle on the unsettling situation, scientists are picking up a pathogen-hunting tool thats been powerful in the past: wastewater surveillance.In the past couple of weeks, wastewater samples in several locations mostly scattered around Californiaincluding the cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento and San Josetested positive for genetic material from the bird flu virus, H5N1. The Centers for Disease Control and Preventions National Wastewater Surveillance System reported detections at 14 sites in California during a collection period that ended on November 2. As of November 13, across the U.S., 15 sites monitored by WastewaterSCAN, a project run by Stanford University and Emory University researchers, reported positive samples this month. But finding H5N1 material in wastewater doesnt necessarily mean theres a risk to human health, says WastewaterSCANs co-director Alexandria Boehm, a civil and environmental engineer at Stanford University.Analyzing trace amounts of viral genetic material, often shed by fecal matter in sewers, can alert scientists and public health experts to a possible increase in community infections. Wastewater sampling became instrumental in forecasting COVID cases across the U.S., for instance. But the way H5N1 affects both animal and human populations complicates identifying sources and understanding disease risk. H5N1 can be deadly in poultry. Cattle usually recover from symptomssuch as fever, dehydration and reduced milk productionbut veterinarians and farmers are reporting that cows have been dying at higher rates in California than in other affected states. Cats that drink raw milk from infected cows can develop deadly neurological symptoms. The current cases in humans havent caused any known deaths (most people have flulike symptoms, although some develop eye infections), but past major outbreaks outside of the U.S. have resulted in fatalities.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Scientific American spoke with Boehm about the latest bird flu detections in wastewater and the ways that scientists are using these data to better track and understand disease prevalence and exposureamong animals and humans both.Amanda Montaez; Source: WastewaterSCAN[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]When did WastewaterSCAN start tracking H5N1?We noticed something very unusual in Amarillo, Tex. [In the spring of 2024,] after flu season, we saw really high levels of influenza A [one of the four flu virus types that infect humans] RNA nucleic acids in their wastewater. This was surprising because we know influenza A in wastewater tracks with cases in the communitybut there were not very many cases in the community, and it was after flu season. We also then heard on the news that they had discovered cattle infected with avian influenza in the same area in Texas. So we worked in collaboration with the local wastewater treatment plants and public health officers to test the wastewater. And we found that, indeed, it was H5 [a subtype of avian influenza A virus] in their waste stream. We determined that most of that H5 was coming from legal discharges into the sanitary sewer from milk processing plants.Then when we scaled the H5 assay across the country, we were finding it in locations where, shortly thereafter, cattle were being identified as being infected [with the virus]. In June the CDC actually sent memos to the states asking them to try to measure H5 in wastewater, recognizing that the measurements can help to understand the extent and duration of the outbreak in the U.S.Has wastewater analysis been able to trace cases to any sources?We cant always rule out that its wild birds or poultry or humans, but overall the preponderance of evidence suggests most of the inputs are likely from cow milk. That cow milk is getting into consumer homes, where people are disposing of it down the drain. Im sure you have poured out milk down your sinkI know I have. Its also coming from permitted operations where people are making cheese or yogurt or ice cream, and they might be starting with a milk product that has the avian influenza nucleic acids in it.I want to stress that the milk in peoples homes that might have the avian influenza RNA is not infectious or a threat to human health. Its just a marker that some milk got into the food chain that originally had the virus in it. Its killed because milk products are pasteurizedand thats, by the way, why drinking raw milk or eating raw cheeses right now is not really recommended. The RNA that makes up the genome of these viruses is extremely stable in wastewater. Its even stable after pasteurization. So you pasteurize the raw milk, and the RNA is still present at about the same concentrations.Detecting it in the wastewater does not mean theres a risk to human health. What it does mean is that there are still infected cattle that are around the vicinity, and work still needs to be done to identify those cattle and remove their products from the food chain, which is the goal of the officials that are in charge of that aspect of the outbreak.How might we be able to better determine where the viral genetic material is coming from and assess human infection rates?It is very difficult because genetically the virus is not different [between sources]. Its not like we can say, Oh, the one in humans is going to be like this, and so lets look for that. Were working really closely with public health departments that are really proactive in sequencing positive influenza cases. If we do start seeing it in [more] people, we will likely know it because well see differences in the wastewater.I dont want to be alarmist because right now the risk of getting H5N1 is very minimal, and the symptoms are really mild. But I think one of the concerns is that the virus could mutate during this influenza season coming up. Somebody whos infected with [seasonal influenza] could also get infected with H5N1, and then it could maybe create a new strain that could be more severe. Were hoping that the wastewater data, along with all the other data that people and agencies are collecting, will together help figure out whats going on and protect public health better.What are trends are you seeing in your surveillance right now?Most recently, California is just lighting up. A lot of the wastewater samples in California are coming back as positive, even in locations that are very urbansuch as the Bay Area and in Los Angeles. The question is: Why? In some of these locations, there actually are small operations where people are making dairy products with milk. But another explanation, like I mentioned earlier, is just the wasting of milk products.How do H5N1 levels in wastewater correlate to infections in animals?Were sort of seeing it as an early indicator, or concurrent indicator, of cattle in the vicinity being infected with avian influenza. The first detections were in Texas, and we saw a lot of detections in Michigan for a while, and now the hot spot is California. As scientists, were going to analyze all this in the future. But anecdotally, the H5 detections in wastewater are following along with when herds are identified, and then once its sort of under control, we stop seeing it.Public health officials are using the data to say, Okay, we got a positive in this location. What are the different sources that could account for it? Have we tested all the cattle that are contributing milk products to industries in this sewer shed? Have we gotten rid of all the infected herds in our state, because now were not getting any positives in the wastewater?How else are scientists and officials staying on top of cases and spread?The [U.S. Department of Agriculture] and different entities around the country are pursuing it from an animal health perspective and a food safety perspective. So there is testing of cattle herds and milk products. Theres also testing of poultry, and then theres testing of workers that are in contact with infected herds and infected poultry. On the clinical side, there is a push to get influenza-positive samples sequenced to understand what kind of influenza it is, as sort of a safety net to see if there might be some avian influenza circulating in people. So far, cases have been in people who are actually exposed to infected animals, who are working on farms, and perhaps in some of their family members.How has tracking H5N1 been different from or similar to COVID or other pathogens?All the other pathogens that we track have been conceptually similar to COVID, where humans are the source [of pathogenic material in wastewater]. We know that the occurrence of the viral or fungal material in wastewater match the cases. Bird flu is the first example where were using wastewater to track something that is primarily not, at least right now, from a human source but has potential human health implications for different reasons. Its been a really great case study of how wastewater can be used not only for tracking human illness but also zoonotic pathogenspathogens that affect animals. So now were thinking about what else wastewater could be used for. What other kinds of animal byproducts end up in the waste stream that might contain biomarkers of infectious disease? H5 is our first example, and Im sure there will be more.

November 14, 20247 min readWhat RFK, Jr.s Role in Trumps Administration Could Mean for Public HealthFederal health scientists voice concern over an anticipated takeover by medical skeptics in Trumps second administrationBy Arthur Allen & KFF Health NewsRobert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during a campaign rally for president-elect Donald Trump at Macomb Community College on November 01, 2024 in Warren, Michigan. Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesMany scientists at the federal health agencies await the second Donald Trump administration with dread as well as uncertainty over how the president-elect will reconcile starkly different philosophies among the leaders of his team.Trump has promised he would allow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to go wild on medicines, food, and health. With that, a radical antiestablishment medical movement with roots in past centuries could threaten the achievements of a science-based public health order painstakingly built since World War II, some of these scientists fear.If Kennedy makes good on his vision for transforming public health, childhood vaccine mandates could wither. New vaccines might never win approval, even as the FDA allows dangerous or inefficient therapies onto the market. Agency websites could trumpet unproven or debunked health ideas. And if Trumps plan to weaken civil service rights goes through, anyone who questions these decisions could be summarily fired.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.Never has anybody like RFK Jr. gotten anywhere close to the position he may be in to actually shape policy, said Lewis Grossman, a law professor at American University and the author of Choose Your Medicine, a history of U.S. public health.Kennedy and an adviser Calley Means, a health care entrepreneur, say dramatic changes are needed because of the high levels of chronic disease in the United States. Government agencies have corruptly tolerated or promoted unhealthy diets and dangerous drugs and vaccines, they say.Means and Kennedy did not respond to requests for comment. Four conservative members of the first Trump health bureaucracy spoke on condition of anonymity. They eagerly welcomed the former presidents return but voiced few opinions about specific policies. Days after last weeks election, RFK Jr. announced that the Trump administration would immediately fire and replace 600 National Institutes of Health officials. He set up a website seeking crowdsourced nominees for federal appointments, with a host of vaccination foes and chiropractors among the early favorites.At meetings last week at Mar-a-Lago involving Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., Kennedy, and Means, according to Politico, some candidates for leading health posts included Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University scientist who opposed covid lockdowns; Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who opposes mRNA covid vaccines and rejected well-established disease control practices during a measles outbreak; Johns Hopkins University surgeon Marty Makary; and Means sister, Stanford-trained surgeon and health guru Casey Means.All are mavericks of a sort, though their ideas are not uniform. Yet the notion that they could elbow aside a century of science-based health policy is profoundly troubling to many health professionals. They see Kennedys presence at the heart of the Trump transition as a triumph of the medical freedom movement, which arose in opposition to the Progressive Era idea that experts should guide health care policy and practices.It could represent a turning away from the expectation that mainstream doctors be respected for their specialized knowledge, said Howard Markel, an emeritus professor of pediatrics and history at the University of Michigan, who began his clinical career treating AIDS patients and ended it after suffering a yearlong bout of long covid.Weve gone back to the idea of every man his own doctor, he said, referring to a phrase that gained currency in the 19th century. It was a bad idea then and its even worse now, he said.What does that do to the morale of scientists? Markel asked. The public health agencies, largely a post-WWII legacy, are remarkable institutions, but you can screw up these systems, not just by defunding them but by deflating the true patriots who work in them.FDA Commissioner Robert Califf told a conference on Nov. 12 that he worried about mass firings at the FDA. Im biased, but I feel like the FDA is sort of at peak performance right now, he said. At a conference the next day, CDC Director Mandy Cohen reminded listeners of the horrors of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles and polio. I dont want to have to see us go backward in order to remind ourselves that vaccines work, she said.Exodus From the Agencies?With uncertainty over the direction of their agencies, many older scientists at the NIH, FDA, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are considering retirement, said a senior NIH scientist who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job.Everybody I talk to sort of takes a deep breath and says, It doesnt look good, the official said.I hear of many people getting CVs ready, said Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at New York University. They include two of his former students who now work at the FDA, Caplan said.Others, such as Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, have voiced wait-and-see attitudes. We worked with the Trump administration last time. There were times things worked reasonably well, he said, and times when things were chaotic, particularly during covid. Any wholesale deregulation efforts in public health would be politically risky for Trump, he said, because when administrations screw things up, people get sick and die.At the FDA, at least, its very hard to make seismic changes, former FDA chief counsel Dan Troy said.But the administration could score easy libertarian-tinged wins by, for example, telling its new FDA chief to reverse the agencys refusal to approve the psychedelic drug MDMA from the company Lykos. Access to psychedelics to treat post-traumatic stress disorder has grabbed the interest of many veterans. Vitamins and supplements, already only lightly regulated, will probably get even more of a free pass from the next Trump FDA.Medical Freedom or Nanny StateTrumps health influencers are not monolithic. Analysts see potential clashes among Kennedy, Musk, and more traditional GOP voices. Casey Means, a holistic MD at the center of Kennedys Make America Healthy Again team, calls for the government to cut ties with industry and remove sugar, processed food, and toxic substances from American diets. Republicans lampooned such policies as exemplifying a nanny state when Mike Bloomberg promoted them as mayor of New York City.Both the libertarian and medical freedom wings oppose aspects of regulation, but Silicon Valley biotech supporters of Trump, like Samuel Hammond of the Foundation for American Innovation, have pressed the agency to speed drug and device approvals, while Kennedys team says the FDA and other agencies have been captured by industry, resulting in dangerous and unnecessary drugs, vaccines, and devices on the market.Kennedy and Casey Means want to end industry user fees that pay for drug and device rules and support nearly half the FDAs $7.2 billion budget. Its unclear whether Congress would make up the shortfall at a time when Trump and Musk have vowed to slash government programs. User fees are set by laws Congress passes every five years, most recently in 2022.The industry supports the user-fee system, which bolsters FDA staffing and speeds product approvals. Writing new rules requires an enormous amount of time, effort, energy, and collaboration by FDA staff, Troy said. Policy changes made through informal guidance alone are not binding, he added.Kennedy and the Means siblings have suggested overhauling agricultural policies so that they incentivize the cultivation of organic vegetables instead of industrial corn and soy, but I dont think theyll be very influential in that area, Caplan said. Big Ag is a powerful entrenched industry, and they arent interested in changing.Theres a fine line between the libertarian impulse of the medical freedom types and advocating a reformation of American bodies, which is definitely nanny state territory, said historian Robert Johnston of the University of Illinois-Chicago.Specific federal agencies are likely to face major changes. Republicans want to trim the NIHs 27 research institutes and centers to 15, slashing Anthony Faucis legacy by splitting the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he led for 38 years, into two or three pieces.Numerous past attempts to slim down the NIH have failed in the face of campaigns by patients, researchers, and doctors. GOP lawmakers have advocated substantial cuts to the CDC budget in recent years, including an end to funding gun violence, climate change, and health equity research. If carried out, Project 2025, a policy blueprint from the conservative Heritage Foundation, would divide the agency into data-collecting and health-promoting arms. The CDC has limited clout in Washington, although former CDC directors and public health officials are defending its value.It would be surprising if CDC wasnt on the radar for potential change, said Anne Schuchat, a former principal deputy director of the agency, who retired in 2021.The CDCs workforce is very employable and might start to look for other work if their area of focus is going to be either cut or changed, she said.Kennedys attacks on HHS and its agencies as corrupted tools of the drug industry, and his demands that the FDA allow access to scientifically controversial drugs, are closely reminiscent of the 1970s campaign by conservative champions of Laetrile, a dangerous and ineffective apricot-pit derivative touted as a cancer treatment. Just as Kennedy championed off-patent drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat covid, Laetriles defenders claimed that the FDA and a profit-seeking industry were conspiring to suppress a cheaper alternative.The public and industry have often been skeptical of health regulatory agencies over the decades, Grossman said. The agencies succeed best when they are called in to fix things particularly after bad medicine kills or damages children, he said.The 1902 Biologics Control Act, which created the NIHs forerunner, was enacted in response to smallpox vaccine contamination that killed at least nine children in Camden, New Jersey. Child poisonings linked to the antifreeze solvent for a sulfa drug prompted the modern FDAs creation in 1938. The agency, in 1962, acquired the power to demand evidence of safety and efficacy before the marketing of drugs after the thalidomide disaster, in which children of pregnant women taking the anti-nausea drug were born with terribly malformed limbs.If vaccination rates plummet and measles and whooping cough outbreaks proliferate, babies could die or suffer brain damage. It wont be harmless for the administration to broadly attack public health, said Alfredo Morabia, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University and the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Public Health. It would be like taking away your house insurance.Sam Whitehead, Stephanie Armour, and David Hilzenrath contributed to this report.Healthbeat is a nonprofit newsroom covering public health published by Civic News Company and KFF Health News. Sign up for its newsletters here.KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

OpinionNovember 13, 20244 min readThe U.S. Must Lead the Global Fight against SuperbugsAntimicrobial resistance could claim 39 million lives by 2050, yet the pipeline for new antibiotics is drying up. U.S. policy makers can help fix itBy Howard DeanColored scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of bacteria cultured from a mobile phone. Tests have revealed the average handset carries 18 times more potentially harmful germs than a flush handle in a men's toilet. With frequent use phones remain warm, creating the ideal breeding ground for bacteria. With touch-screen phones, the same part of the phone touched with fingertips is pressed up against the face and mouth, increasing chances of infection. In tests E. coli, Haemophilus influenzae and MRSA were amongst infectious bacteria found on handsets. Common harmless bacteria include Staphylococcus epidermidis, Micrococcus, Streptococcus viridans, Moraxella, and bacillus species. Steve Gschmeissner/ Science SourceMost Americans could probably guess that heart disease, diabetes and cancer are among the worlds fastest-growing causes of death. Yet one rapidly accelerating health threat now lurks under the radar, despite its devastating consequences.The threat comes from antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, the evolved immunity of dangerous microbes to lifesaving drugs. AMR killed 1.27 million people in 2019, more than malaria and HIV combinedaccording to the most recent comprehensive global analysis. Now, a groundbreaking study published in the Lancet estimates that, without action, AMR will kill more than 39 million people in the next quarter century. Average annual deaths are forecast to rise by nearly 70 percent between 2022 and 2050.We dont have to stay on this trajectory. But changing direction will require decisive moves from the U.S. government. As the global leader in pharmaceutical development, the U.S. has a moral obligation to lead the way on solving this global problem. We need to jump-start research and development on new antimicrobial drugs and shore up the patent system that enables us to bring so many new medicines to market.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.AMR occurs when disease-causing microbesmost often bacteriaevolve to evade the drugs created to kill them, turning them into so-called "superbugs." Some better-known ones include methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, and Streptococcus pneumoniae, a bacterium that causes pneumonia and can be resistant to penicillin. In 1993 U.S. hospitals recorded fewer than 2,000 MRSA infections. In 2017 that number had jumped to 323,000according to the latest data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Preliminary data shows that cases of another superbug called C. auris jumped five-fold between 2019 and 2022.A major cause of AMR is overuse and misuse of antibiotics. The more a bacterium is exposed to a particular antibiotic, the more opportunities it has to mutate and become resistant. The danger is that as these essential medicines stop working, even minor infections will become hard to treat. That will make even routine surgeries and common illnesses much more dangerousand make it much harder for those battling cancer whose immune systems are compromised, in particular, to fight off infections. Without action and investment soon to support the development of new antibiotics, we could be thrown back to the pre-penicillin era, when a simple cut could turn deadly.Yet despite the urgent need for new antibiotics, the pipeline for developing them is drying up. As of today only four major pharmaceutical companies still work on antibiotics, down from dozens just a few decades ago. The reason is simple: the economics of modern antibiotic development don't work. Creating a single new drug takes an average of 10 to 15 years and costs more than $2 billion. But since antibiotics are typically used for short periods ranging from seven to 14 days and must be used sparingly to limit AMR, their profitability is necessarily low. This built-in roadblock means companies have a hard time justifying the expense and risk.The new Lancet study recommends several ways to fight back. One of them, unsurprisingly, is to develop new antibioticsan area in which the U.S. has an opportunity to show global leadership, expand its influence and make an enormous difference.America has the worlds best system of intellectual property protection, which has made us the global frontrunner in biopharmaceuticals as well as dozens of other high-tech industries. IP protectionsin particular patentsprovide a window of market exclusivity that allows companies to recoup their enormous investments in research and development. Without reliable patents, few businesses would take the risk of developing new antimicrobial drugs.Unfortunately, over the last several years, some U.S. lawmakers have advocated for reducing patent protections as a way to reduce drug prices. But these efforts, while well-intentioned, would just make the situation worse. Attacking patents isnt the right strategy, since it would only create another disincentive to invest in novel antibiotic development. This would likely make it harder to combat outbreaks of infectious diseases and superbugs, which are evolving and growing deadlier each year.Theres no single panacea for the brewing AMR crisis. It will take action from all stakeholders and segments of society. Everyday Americans, for their part, need to do a better job of letting respiratory viruses like the common cold run their course, rather than asking their provider for antibiotics. Not only are antibiotics ineffective against viruses, attempting to use them to treat viral infections still contributes to resistance. Doctors need to take more responsibility, too. As a physician, I know many of my colleagues could be more judicious in prescribing antibiotics.Finally, Americans need Congress to be more proactive. One solution to the antibiotic conundrum would be a subscription-type model to incentivize new research and development. Under this kind of system, which is already being tested in the U.K., the government would contract with companies to provide antibiotics for a fixed fee, regardless of how many doses are needed. This would give drug developers a more predictable revenue stream, allowing them to invest in high-risk, high-impact antimicrobial research that saves lives when we need it.Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright called the U.S. the indispensable nation, essential to global progress and peace. Some dispute this characterization, and its true that the U.S. can't solve every problem. But drug research and development is one area where we already lead. Smart policies to tackle AMR can help ensure we maintain this leadership while saving potentially millions of lives worldwide.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

OpinionNovember 13, 20245 min readThe Mathematical Mind Offers Neuroscientists a Master Class in ConcentrationExpertise bulks up the brains ability to think deeply, a skill that may generalize across tasksBy Hanna Poikonen Malte Mueller/Getty ImagesThink of the last time you concentrated deeply to solve a challenging problem. To solve a math puzzle or determine a chess move, for example, you might have had to screen through multiple strategies and approaches. But little by little, the conundrum would have come into focus. Numbers and symbols may have fallen into place. It might have even felt, at some point, like your problem effortlessly resolved itself on the blackboard of your mind.In recent research, my colleagues and I set out to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying these experiences. Specifically, we wanted to understand what happens in the brain while a person engages in abstract and demanding thoughtso we designed a study involving math expertise.Mathematics relies on an ancient brain network located in the parietal regions at the top and center of the brains outer folded cortex. That network helps us process space, time and numbers. Past studies on neurocognition in mathematics have focused on brain activity while considering problems that take a few seconds to solve. These studies have helped illuminate brain activity that supports focused attention and a special form of recall called working memory, which helps people keep numbers and other details top of mind in the short 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.But our study used longer, more complex math challenges that involve multiple steps to solve. These problems are more akin to the tricky puzzles that mathematicians must tackle regularly. We found that people with more experience in mathematics enter a special state of deep concentration when thinking about challenging math problems. Understanding that state could help scientists to someday understand the power of concentration more broadly, as well as the possible trade-offs of off-loading our problem-solving to our devices.For our experiment, we recruited 22 university studentsat both the graduate and undergraduate levelwho were in math and math-related programs, such as physics or engineering, along with 22 fellow students in disciplines with minimal to no quantitative emphasis, such as physiotherapy and arts. We determined each students verbal, spatial and numerical intelligence quotient (IQ), as well as their level of math anxiety.We asked the students to watch step-by-step presentations that explained how to solve several challenging math problemssuch as proving a Fibonacci identity. Throughout this demonstration, students wore a cap covered with electrodes so that we could noninvasively track electrical activity in their brain. After each presentation, they had to report whether they thought they had understood the demonstrations and how engaged they felt during this experience. We also encouraged the participants to watch the demos carefully by telling them that they would have to explain the problem afterward.We found that the students with greater math expertise showed markedly different brain activity than those with less. For example, the students whose coursework involved little mathematics showed more signs of complex activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area just behind the forehead that is engaged in all kinds of cognitive efforts. This finding may reflect how hard they were working to understand the various steps of the complex math demonstrations.But things really got interesting when we turned to students who engaged in quantitative thinking regularly. We noted significant activity that appeared to link the frontal and parietal regions of their brain. More specifically, these areas exhibited a pattern of activity that neuroscientists describe as delta waves. These are very slow waves of electrical activity that are typically associated with states such as deep sleep. Of course, these students were wide awake and deeply engagedso what was going on?Some recent research suggests that these sleepy slower delta waves may play a crucial role in the cognitive processing that supports deep internal concentration and information transfer between distant brain regions. For example, recent studies show that large-scale delta oscillation emerges among experienced meditators when they enter meditative states. One reason that meditation, mathematical problem-solving and sleep resemble one another might be that, in each case, the brain needs to suppress irrelevant external information and unneeded thoughts to really focus and concentrate on the task at hand. (Indeed, even sleep can be a busy time for the brain. Sleep research has revealed deep sleeps irreplaceable role in memory consolidation; slow-wave sleep retracts the neural patterns that were previously activated during a learning task.)In fact, we suspect that the long-distance delta oscillation we observed may play a central role whenever people are immersed in contextual and complex problem-solving. For instance, we have found that dancers and musicians show similar delta waves when watching dance or listening to music. This suggests engaging brain networks in this way could be useful for many tasks involving concentration. Its likely that when people who have extensive experience in a task are deeply engaged in that effort, these same slow delta waves are involved, even as the specific brain networks vary. Its also possiblethough well need to investigate further to be surethat this state of deep concentration is generalizable: develop this way of thinking in one domain, whether its tackling trigonometry or playing the violin, and it could help you in others.Though our experiments involved students and not, say, champion mathematicians or Nobel laureates, the differences in brain activity that we observed are still a testament to the power of practice in expertise. Our student participants did not significantly differ in their IQ or level of math anxiety, for example. Rather repetition and deliberate or intentional study helped some of these graduate and undergraduate students become more efficient masters of quantitative thinking.By the same logic, these findings hint at a trade-off that people should keep in mindparticularly as artificial intelligence and other tools offer tantalizing shortcuts for various forms of problem-solving. Each time we off-load a problem to a calculator or ask ChatGPT to summarize an essay, we are losing an opportunity to improve our own skills and practice deep concentration for ourselves. To be clear, technologies can boost our efficiency in important ways, but the seemingly inefficient hard work we do can be powerful, too.When I consider how frenetically we switch between tasks and how eagerly we externalize creativity and complex problem-solving to artificial intelligence in our high-speed society, I personally am left with a question: What happens to our human ability to solve complex problems in the future if we teach ourselves not to use deep concentration? After all, we may need that mode of thought more than ever today to solve increasingly complex technological, environmental and political problems.Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about for Mind Matters? Please send suggestions to Scientific Americans Mind Matters editor Daisy Yuhas at dyuhas@sciam.com.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

OpinionNovember 13, 20245 min readHow I Overcame SolastalgiaDamage to your environment can bring a profound sense of loss; that feeling, called solastalgia, can also provide inspirationBy Queen Essang Overearth/Getty ImagesAs I sit in my backyard in Abuja, Nigeria, looking out at the open landscape around me, I cant help but feel a deep sense of loss. The rolling hills that were once vibrant with a rich carpet of wild ferns, daisies, lupines and goldenrods are now dotted with invasive species that have choked out the native flora. The river that once flowed crystal clear, reflecting the azure sky and teeming with darting fish and dragonflies gliding gracefully by, is now muddied by sediments and pollutants from nearby construction and agriculture.This feeling of loss and dislocation, a combination of nostalgia for what once was and a profound sadness for what has been irretrievably altered, has a name: solastalgia. Coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht, solastalgia describes the emotional distress caused by environmental change, particularly when it affects the place we call home. Essentially, it is the feeling of being homesick while at home.But despite this feeling, there is hope. Solastalgia has inspired me. It serves as a strong motivator to push for the protection and rejuvenation of our environments. It reminds us of the intrinsic value of nature and the importance of stewardship. When we acknowledge our grief and channel it into positive action, we empower ourselves to fight for the landscapes we love and to safeguard biodiversity, transforming our sorrow into tangible steps for change. Our bonds with nature are resilient and worth nurturing for future generations.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.Growing up, I spent countless hours in the woods behind my childhood home surrounded by majestic oaks with their sprawling canopies, towering pines reaching for the heavens and graceful willows swaying gently by the rivers edge. I would often find myself in the embrace of the ancient pines, their earthly scent grounding me as I wandered beneath their branches. The woods were my sanctuary. Each tree had a story, a memory attached to it. I remember the laughter of friends echoing throughout the canopy as we played hide and seek, the sun filtering through the foliage, casting dappled shadows on the forest floor, and the quiet moments spent sitting up against a tree trunk, feeling at one with nature.When I returned home after five years in college, I was struck by how much the ecosystem had changed. As climate change accelerates and development encroaches on familiar spaces, I find myself grappling with an unsettling reality. The vibrant tapestry of my childhood is unraveling. In its place lies a landscape marked by changechange that feels invasive and alien.Today, in my backyard, I find myself thinking about the day years ago that I encountered a friendly female waterbuck while wandering through the lush Stubbs Creeks forests. The forest was alive with playful squirrels, the occasional fox darting through the underbrush. Chirping robins and warblers and buzzing insects created a symphony that felt like home. Now I realize many of those trees had been felled, replaced by sterile housing developments devoid of the life and character.Nestled within this vibrant landscape was Ibeno Lake. I had taken pride in its clear water, where families of ducks and geese often swam gracefully by. The lake was joy: a place for summer swims, lazy afternoons spent floating on rafts, evenings filled with the laughter of friends gathered around bonfires. It was here that I learned the rhythm of nature. Now I watch in dismay as algae blooms choke the water, turning it murky green.The emotional turmoil is not mine alone; it resonates with many people who are witnessing similar transformations in their environments. The deep sense of solastalgia manifests as a grief that is often overlookeda sorrow not for a person but for a place. It is a longing for a connection that feels increasingly out of reach, as the landscapes we once knew and loved are irrevocably altered.Every time I see a familiar landmark disappear or a beloved habitat shrink, I can't help but reflect on how a once-vivid tapestry of biodiversity is transforming into a homogenized landscape. This transformation induces a precarious tipping of natures equilibrium. Climate change is a fundamental cause, but pollution from nearby industrial complexes has contributed significantly to the degradation of the natural environment. Deforestation spurred by the relentless pursuit of urban development continues to erode extensive forestland, and unsustainable resource extraction has stripped the land of its natural resources, leaving scars that are slow to heal.I cannot stand idly by. I began to educate myself about conservation efforts shortly after I returned home, driven by the changes I witnessed in my environment. I have joined local conservation groups, participating in tree-planting initiatives to restore native species and combat the invasion of nonnative flora. I have also engaged in cleanup efforts at Ibeno Lake, rallying friends and family to help remove litter and debris from the shorelines, to help restore its natural beauty. Education is vital, too; I strive to raise awareness in my community about the importance of preserving our natural spaces.In my conversations with family and friends, I find that solastalgia is a common experience. We often reminisce about the landscapes of our youth, remembering the places that influenced our lives. There is a somber tone in these discussions, as we realize that our memories are becoming more associated with what we are losing rather than what is left. The world is changing, and as a result, so are we.As I reflect on my journey with solastalgia, I realize that it is not merely a feeling of loss but also a call to reconnect. It urges us to find new ways to engage with our surroundings, to create memories in the face of change and to honor the beauty that still exists, despite the challenges. Although the landscape may shift, our appreciation for it can remain steadfast, reminding us that our bond with nature is resilient and worth nurturing for future generations.In an era where environmental challenges loom large, solastalgia serves as a poignant reminder of the stakes involved. It is an invitation to cherish our homes, to advocate for their protection and to cultivate a deep-rooted sense of responsibility for the world we inhabit. As we confront the realities of a changing climate, may we find solace not only in our memories but also in our collective capacity to create a thriving future for both people and the planet, in a harmonious balance that nurtures the vibrant tapestry of life.This is an opinion article; the views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

November 13, 20246 min readAlternate Timelines Cant Help You, Quantum Physicists SayThe multiverse offers no escape from our realitywhich might be a very good thingBy George Musser Hiroshi Watanabe/Getty ImagesAs memes go, it wasnt particularly viral. But for a couple of hours on the morning of November 6, the term darkest timeline trended in Google searches, and several physicists posted musings on social media about whether we were actually in it. All the probabilities expressed in opinion polls and prediction markets had collapsed into a single definite outcome, and history went from what might be to that just happened. The two sides in this hyperpolarized U.S. presidential election had agreed on practically nothingsave for their shared belief that its outcome would be a fateful choice between two diverging trajectories for our world.That raises rather obvious (but perhaps pointless) questions: Could a darkest timeline (or any other timeline, for that matter) be real? Somewhere out there in the great beyond, might there be a parallel world in which Kamala Harris electorally triumphed instead?It turns out that, outside of fostering escapist sociopolitical fantasies and putting a scientific gloss on the genre of counterfactual history, the notion of alternate timelines is in fact something physicists take very seriously. The concept most famously appears in quantum mechanics, which predicts a multiplicity of outcomescats that are both alive and dead and all that. If a particle of lighta photonstrikes a mirror that is only partially silvered, the particle can, in a sense, both pass through and reflect off that surfacetwo mutually exclusive outcomes, known in physics parlance as a superposition. Only one of those possibilities will manifest itself when an observation is made, but until then, the particle juggles both possibilities simultaneously. Thats what the mathematics saysand what experiments confirm. For instance, you can create a superposition and then uncreate it by directing the light onto a second partially silvered mirror. That wouldnt be possible unless both possibilities remained in play. Although this feature is usually framed in terms of subatomic particles, it is thought to be ubiquitous across all scales 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.What supports the idea that these timelines are real, and not just imaginative fictions, is that they can interfere with one another, either enhancing or diminishing the probability of their occurrence. That is, something that might have happened but doesnt has a measurable effect on what does, as if the former reaches from the shadowy realm of the possible into the world of the actual.Consider the bomb detector that physicists Avshalom Elitzur and Lev Vaidman proposed in 1993 and that has since been demonstrated (fortunately not with real bombs): Perform the experiment with the partially silvered mirror but place a light-sensitive bomb along one of the two paths the photon can take. This blockage prevents you from uncreating the superposition to restore the traveling photon to its original state. It does so even if the bomb never goes off, indicating that the photon never touched it. The mere possibility that the photon could strike the bomb affects what happens. In theory, you could use this principleknown as counterfactual definitenessto take x-ray images of cells without subjecting them to damaging radiation. In an emerging subject known as counterfactual quantum computing, a computer outputs a value even if you never press the run button.One way to think about counterfactual definiteness is known as the many-worlds interpretation. A photon striking a mirror causes the cosmic timeline to branch, creating one world in which the particle passes through the mirror and one in which it reflects off that surface. Each of us is stuck inside our world and therefore sees only one outcome at a time, but the other is still there, visible to an inhabitant of the alternate world. All such worlds, taken together, constitute a multiverse.Whether they agree with the many-worlds interpretation or not, physicists and philosophers certainly love to argue about it. Some admire its elegance; others grouse about conceptual difficulties such as the slippery matter of what exactly constitutes a world. Quantum theory not only allows multiple worlds but also offers an infinity of ways to define them.In all the debate over many worlds, though, the key insight of the ideas originator, physicist Hugh Everett, is often forgotten. Everett developed his view in reaction to assumptions by other physicists that, because we can see only one of the possibilities of a superposition if a particle enters into that state, something must cause all the other possibilities to be discarded. In other words, some mechanism must collapse the superpositionperhaps the act of observation itself or some sporadic randomness inherent to the fabric of reality. Everett noticed a fallacy in this reasoning: it will always look as though the superposition has collapsed, even if it remains intact. The reason is that, in making our observation, we interact with the particle, and together we and it become a single combined system. Because the particle is in superposition, so are we. But we cant tell. Everetts fundamental point is this: We are part of the reality we seek to observe, yet no part can fully apprehend the whole, and thus our view is limited. Multiple timelines arise in the hidden recesses imposed by our very embedding within the universe.Other branches of physics also conceive of existence as comprising forking timelines. Physicists consider counterfactuals when calculating the path of a particle; according to what they call the principle of least action, even a classical particle that exhibits no distinctively quantum effects susses out all the possibilities. In statistical physics, researchers study particles by the septillion by thinking in terms of ensembles, which are another kind of multiverse, spanning all the possible ways the particles can be arranged and evolve. Over time, the particles explore all possibilities open to them. We sense their machinations indirectly as the flow of heat and establishment of thermodynamic equilibrium. Going outside physics, evolutionary biologists also routinely talk about multiple timelines: If you reran the evolution of species, would things turn out the same?All these scientific issues are rooted in a fundamental puzzle: What does it mean to be possible but not actual? Why is there something rather than something else? The physicist Paul Davies has called this the puzzle of what exists. It touches not just on esoteric ideas about branching timelines but also on aspects of everyday life such as causation. To say that something causes something else, there must be the possibility that the something else would never have happened in the first place. In astrobiologist Sara Imari Walkers recent book on the physics of life, Life As No One Knows It, she noted that the entire observable universe doesnt contain enough material to create every single possible small organic molecule, let alone big ones such as the DNA strands we know and love. For her, living things distinguish themselves by making molecules and other structures that are otherwise vanishingly unlikely to exist. Life blazes a path through the void of possibility space.Perhaps some deep rule selects the actual reality from among the possible realities, but efforts to identify that principle have been serially dashed. It is hard to argue that ours is the best of all possible worlds. Nor, despite what the 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer proclaimed, does it seem to be the worstthings could always get worse, Google searches for the darkest timeline notwithstanding. For many, such as philosopher David Lewis and cosmologist Max Tegmark, the most straightforward conclusion is that all possible realities exist.The real question, then, is not whether there are other timelines; there certainly are. Rather it is why we see only one. Perhaps life or intelligence would not be possible if the branching were too evident to us. Physics is replete with such preconditions for our existence. For instance, if temporal flow did not have a directionalityan arrow of timethere could be no lasting change, no memories, no intelligence, no agency. Keeping other timelines hidden might be of similar importance. Quantum superposition may serve some specialized functions in our bodies, but otherwise italong with any traces of alternate timelinesis dissipated in biologys vigorous exchange of material and energy with the environment. The very nature of intelligence is to be selective; we would be paralyzed if we had to assay boundless infinitudes. Rather than holding open all possibilities, a mind must settleat least tentativelyon one. The effort required to make that choiceand, from there, to act upon itmay be key to giving us at least the subjective feeling of free will.So be careful what you wish for. In dark hours we may imagine alternate timelines and long for escape to another, but we seem to be inseparable from our own. Were it easier to flit between them, we might arrive only at oblivion. Like it or not, were stuck in this oneif we want to change it, well have to do that the old-fashioned way.

November 13, 20246 min readKristi Noem, Set to Oversee Disaster Agency, Has Rejected Climate SciencePresident-elect Donald Trumps pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security and its disaster agency has said people arent driving temperature increases and declined to accept federal climate money for disaster preparedness as governor of South DakotaPresident-elect Donald Trump named South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) to his Cabinet on Tuesday. Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty ImagesCLIMATEWIRE | President-elect Donald Trumps pick to run the department in charge of disaster recovery has been skeptical of climate change, declined to accept federal climate money and been criticized for her own handling of a natural catastrophe.Trump named Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota on Tuesday to run the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency at a time when damage from extreme weather is soaring. FEMA distributes billions in disaster aid yearly and runs the country's biggest insurer against flooding the most damaging disaster in the U.S.But Noem has dismissed the idea that people are causing temperatures to rise.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.Asked by a reporter in March 2022 if she believes the climate is changing, Noem replied, I think the science has been varied on it, and it hasnt been proven to me that what were doing is affecting the climate.Noem, a Republican, is one of five governors who declined to accept EPA planning grants that the Biden administration offered every state to address climate pollution.She is the only governor to opt out of a new $4 billion Energy Department program that gives states money to distribute to their residents for rebates on energy-efficient home appliances and improvements. South Dakotas share was $69 million, one of the largest amounts per capita in the nation.That money would have been available to commercial contractors to install energy-efficient appliances, which would lower heating and cooling costs for the individuals who are renting or buyers of those homes, said South Dakota state Sen. Linda Duba (D) on Tuesday.Were trying to drive down costs for individuals, so there was tremendous opportunity there, Duba added.Ian Fury, a Noem spokesperson, said last year that the governor declined the rebate money because federal spending often comes with strings attached, and more of it is often not a good thing.Noem declined the pollution grant because we focus on solving long-term problems with one-time investments rather than creating new government programs, Fury said.Noem also did not claim most of the money that FEMA has made available to states through a grant program for resilience projects.FEMA offered each state $3.6 million from 2021 to 2023. South Dakota collected just $1.3 million, FEMA records show. Thats one of the lowest collection rates of any state.Noem has also sought minimal funding from a separate FEMA grant program that pays for projects to lower flood damage, FEMA records show.She would be the eighth Homeland Security secretary since the department was created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Two of them had also been governors Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania and Janet Napolitano of Arizona.Noem is expected to focus largely on border and immigration issues if the Senate confirms her. DHS includes Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Noem joined legal attacks on climate programsNoems skepticism about climate change stands in sharp contrast to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, both of whom are currently serving under President Joe Biden. They have both emphasized the enormous damage being caused by intensifying hurricanes, wildfires and floods, which they link to climate change.Trump has not yet named a FEMA administrator, who requires Senate confirmation, and is likely to wait until he has selected his Cabinet and other top officials.Noem, who has been governor since 2019, faced criticism for her response in June to major flooding in southeastern South Dakota due to massive rainfall overflowing streams, including the Big Sioux River. Some local residents criticized Noem for not activating the South Dakota National Guard and for flying to Tennessee during the flooding to attend a Republican fundraiser.When journalists asked Noem why she didnt deploy the National Guard, she pointed to the cost and said no local officials requested it, according to South Dakota Searchlight. Fury, the spokesperson, said at the time that county emergency managers handle local emergencies and are supported by the state on request.Quite frankly she was back and forth out of the state when all of that rain was falling, and her focus should have been right here. She should have canceled all of her press and been here because the flooding was substantial, said Duba, the Democratic state senator.A couple of weeks after the flooding, Noem asked Biden to approve federal disaster aid for South Dakota. Biden approved the request, and FEMA has given $9.1 million to 1,100 residents for emergency expenses and minor home repairs.Noem has experience with the FEMA disaster system. During her time in office, she has made 10 requests to the White House for FEMA aid after natural disasters five to Biden and five to Trump, who denied one request due to insufficient damage. South Dakota has received a total of $142 million in FEMA aid under her leadership, agency records show.In 2023, Noem hired Navigators Global, a Washington lobbying firm, to make sure that South Dakota is getting their fair share of all the taxpayer money they send to the federal government, lobbyist Cesar Conda said at the time.Noem met with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in early 2023. Around the same time, her chief of staff, Mark Miller, met with Mitch Landrieu, who was then at the White House overseeing implementation of the bipartisan infrastructure law.As she sought help from the White House, Noem also attacked some of the Biden administration's actions on climate change. She joined 15 other Republican governors to protest a move by the Securities and Exchange Commission to require publicly traded companies to disclose their risks from climate change.Since climate change models vary dramatically, the notion of evaluating investment risk based on such uncertain variables is inherently subjective and unreliable, the governors wrote to SEC Chair Gary Gensler in 2022. The SEC rule is tied up in a court challenge.Noem also joined a lawsuit to stop the Biden administration from putting a price on the social cost of carbon emissions, which agencies could use to write stronger climate regulations. The lawsuit was dismissed.'You're fired!'A year after becoming governor, Noem gained national attention during the pandemic for insisting that state and local businesses stay open. She was the only governor to reject Trumps offer of additional unemployment benefits.Noem has described the pandemic and the response as a life-changing event.In 2020, dysfunction mutated into dictatorship, Noem wrote in her autobiography "No Going Back," published this year.The COVID-19 pandemic changed our country and changed me. It almost killed us, and Im not talking about a virus. Most of the American population was at high risk for being controlled, Noem wrote.South Dakota, she boasted, was the only state in the nation that never once closed a single business.Before then, as a member of Congress from 2011 to 2019, Noem had few dealings with climate issues or disasters and was focused on agriculture and the military.Noem, who is 52, served in the South Dakota Legislature from 2007 to 2011 and grew up on a farm in the eastern part of the state.In "Not My First Rodeo," Noem's memoir published in 2022, she wrote, If I had to describe my overall political beliefs and the political beliefs of my whole family and most of my neighbors in just one word, it would be: respect.But Noem expressed a sharper edge in her newest book, "No Going Back."Near the end, she lists actions she would take as president on her first day. They include close the border and build that wall and restore the Made in Mexico policy.Noem also said she would hire John Kerry as climate czar just to have the satisfaction of looking him in the eye and saying, Youre fired!'"Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

November 12, 20244 min readMethane Leaks Are Everywhere. The Trump Administration May Repeal Penalty Meant to Reduce ThemA fee created to push oil and gas companies to plug methane leaks could be axed by the incoming Trump administration, hampering efforts to curb the potent greenhouse gasBy Jean Chemnick & E&E NewsA natural gas flare burns near an oil pump jack at the New Harmony Oil Field in Grayville, Illinois, US, on Sunday, June 19, 2022. Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesCLIMATEWIRE | EPA finalized regulations Tuesday for a fee that oil and gas companies could begin paying on excess methane emissions next year if Republicans dont repeal it first.The rule guides implementation of a levy created by the 2022 climate law and is the last important climate standard of the Biden administration. It was unveiled at an event on the sidelines of this years U.N. climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, shortly before a U.S.-China methane summit.EPA Administrator Michael Regan, who did not attend the global meeting, said in a statement that the rule is the latest in a series of actions under President Bidens methane strategy to improve efficiency in the oil and gas sector, support American jobs, protect clean air, and reinforce U.S. leadership on the global stage.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.EPA estimated that the levy would keep 1.2 million metric tons of methane out of the atmosphere through 2035 and deliver up to $2 billion in climate benefits.Companies will begin paying the levy next year for excess emissions released in 2024. Oil and gas operators will pay $900 for each metric ton of methane that's above a threshold enshrined in the Inflation Reduction Act. The fee, called the waste emissions charge, will climb to $1,500 a ton for 2026 and beyond. The levy reinforces EPAs Clean Air Act rules for methane by ensuring that if operators arent covered by those standards or dont comply with them they would pay the fee.But President-elect Donald Trumps victory last week throws doubt on the future of President Joe Bidens methane policies particularly the methane fee. Trump could direct former Rep. Lee Zeldin, a New York Republican whom Trump announced as his future EPA administrator Monday, to pare back elements of those policies or scrap them. Zeldin faces Senate confirmation.The Biden EPA has rolled out important methane rules at each of the last three U.N. climate summits. The administration has also built its climate diplomacy around the need to curb methane a superpollutant that's 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at raising temperatures over a 20-year time horizon.The U.S. joined the European Union in 2021 to launch the Global Methane Pledge, which has resulted in more than 150 countries promising to work together to reduce global methane at least 30 percent by 2030. The U.S. summit with China on Tuesday marks the second time the biggest two polluters are meeting to curb the potent gas.But under Trump, EPA could quickly begin the process of pulling back and replacing Biden-era methane rules with laxer standards including those that drive implementation of the methane fee. Because the rule is being finalized so late in Biden's term, Republican lawmakers could invalidate it through a Congressional Review Act resolution.But experts say those moves wouldnt absolve Trumps EPA from having to implement the fee.The law is still the law, said one industry advocate who was granted anonymity to talk about future policies.A CRA resolution would allow the Trump administration to craft a more industry-friendly methane fee. It could, for instance, make it easier for oil and gas operators to claim fee exemptions offered under the Inflation Reduction Act. Trump could also let operators delay paying the fee until their annual greenhouse gas reports are finalized late in the year. The Trump EPA could also allow corporations to net emissions across all assets, removing restrictions on how cleaner facilities may compensate for dirtier ones to mitigate fees.If Trump and congressional Republicans wish to kill the methane fee, they would have to enact legislation to repeal it. Democrats and Biden moved the IRA through the annual budget process, and the GOP could potentially use the same maneuver to undo parts of it. Trade groups like the American Petroleum Institute and Independent Petroleum Association of America oppose the fee.Rosalie Winn, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund, said legislation to scrap the fee would be directly contrary to the interests of the American people.We know that reducing methane pollution is the single most important and lowest-cost way to lower the warming that we are experiencing today and to protect the communities across America that are already being affected by extreme weather events and rapidly increasing insurance costs, she said, noting that the methane fee is a revenue raiser and its repeal would add to the federal deficit.Although the fee is unpopular with industry, not all of Biden's other methane policies are.EPA is on track to release hundreds of millions of dollars from the IRA in the coming weeks to help operators slash emissions. Many oil and gas industry advocates fear that jettisoning EPA rules for leak prevention and monitoring could leave U.S. companies vulnerable to international and state methane policies. They also note that many operators have their own climate commitments that are roughly in line with EPAs methane rule.This story also appears in Energywire.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

OpinionNovember 12, 20245 min readWe Need to Ensure Legal Cannabis Is SafeTodays cannabis plant is highly cultivated and incredibly potent. Treating it like a commodity, and not a testable, regulated medicine, is hurting peopleBy Yasmin Hurd Aninka Bongers-Sutherland/Getty ImagesFruit-flavored gummies. Tinctures. Creams.Todays cannabis is not simply dried flowers in plastic baggies or the special ingredient in dorm-room brownies. These days, it comes in candy form, suppositories and even vaporizable dab and wax concentrates. This new cannabis is heavily engineered, cultivated and manufactured to reach THC concentrations of up to 90 percent (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol), whereas earlier plants had only 2 to 4 percent. And while the cannabis of yore was something that required more under-the-radar action, todays cannabis, blended into a cornucopia of products, is readily available at a neighborhood store, depending on where you live.The ubiquity of cannabis creates the impression that it is akin to an evening glass of wine or a nice IPA. That is misleading. The reality is that scientists, policy makers and public knowledge have not kept pace with the rapid expansion of the cannabis market; we do not even know if the products on shelves of dispensaries are truly safe or alleviate the specific symptoms retail cannabis sellers claim they will.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.I study both the beneficial and harmful health effects of cannabis, and in a recent report released by the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM), my co-authors and I broke down the public health concerns we saw with the commoditization and high-THC cultivation of cannabis in this country. The bottom line is that our state patchwork of laws leaves many users in legal limbo. Our knowledge of what high-potency cannabis does to the body is evolving. To treat it simply like a food, cosmetic or over-the-counter medication as its now sold is misleading, if not dangerous. We have to do more to make sure what people consume is uniform and safe.The push to legalize cannabis in the U.S. has created an unprecedented situation. The Food and Drug Administration by law mandates thorough safety and efficacy testing to determine whether new plant, medicine or food products can be marketed to the public. For cannabis, voters and ballot measures have decided that cannabis is medicine and safe for public use.Thus cannabis and derived cannabinoid products, which are marketed as treatments for sleep, anxiety and pain, and as ways to augment creativity, have largely bypassed this federal regulation. That legislative leapfrog has resulted in a state-by-state patchwork of laws in the U.S., allowing new cannabis products to enter the market with minimal oversight. While those gummies and tinctures may tell consumers how much THC is in them, or in what form, consumers don't know if the product is safe. Nor do we know if it's effective. We don't even independently know if the "dosage" on the label is actually correct.This includes hemp-derived products, sold on the unsubstantiated assertions that they are THC-light. While these are intoxicating, consumers are told they are safer than traditional cannabis (hemp has less than 0.3 percent THC). Until rigorous research is conducted on the various forms of cannabis, classifying it uniformly as a safe drug is wrong.In my work as director of the Addiction Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai, I know that we still lack sufficient understanding of how these modern, highly potent and concentrated forms of cannabis affect our health. Highly potent and concentrated cannabis and cannabinoid products are associated with significant mental and physical health risks, including the development of schizophrenia or psychosis, respiratory symptoms including chronic bronchitis, and lower birth weight from prenatal exposure. This is not adequately or equitably reflected in our legislation or public understandingWhat this means is that states that fully legalize cannabis use fail to consider the hazards of high potency and concentrated THC. Hemp-derived semi-synthetic products, including delta-8-THC, are far removed from the original plant, and on top of intoxicating users, they can contain harmful chemicals that are a byproduct of processing. Marketing these products as safe is dishonest and not supported by data.If we want the public use of cannabis to be not only safe, but effective and nondiscriminatory, laws on cannabis must be standardized nationally, based on data. In many states, using the products of cannabis plants still arbitrarily carries criminal charges. In others, while hemp products are being sold legally from stylized brick-and-mortar dispensaries, using other forms of cannabis is illegal.The federal government must be proactive; rather than waiting to address further harms, which is how we developed our alcohol and tobacco policy, it can use that established policy to set the groundwork on safe cannabis use.In many ways, cannabis legalization has made it easier to conduct research on its use. What we know now is that cannabis use disorder is a growing concern likely because of the availability of extremely potent products, as well as daily or near-daily use. Cannabis use in people ages 12 and older currently exceeds that of alcohol consumption. My research, along with that of many other investigators, demonstrates that developmental THC exposure has long-term effects on both brains and behavior that are relevant to psychiatric risk into adulthood.Framing cannabis as a general wellness product or a benign recreational drug is an overcorrection from the fear-mongering days of it being a gateway drug. While those fear-based campaigns caused real harm to our communities, the current promotion of cannabis as completely harmless is equally misleading. An evidence-based, public education campaign, especially one targeting people most at risksuch as children, teens, pregnant individuals and those over 65 would significantly improve knowledge and encourage safer health choices regarding its use.Providing accurate information about reducing the risks associated with cannabis can empower individuals to make informed decisions about their health. Health equity must also address the impact of the high density of cannabis retailers now placed in low-income communities and communities of color, which have already suffered from the previous harsh cannabis laws. Moreover, while cannabis arrests did decrease in states that legalized it, the NASEM report indicates that this decline primarily benefited white people. Our current landscape of state laws continues to promote racial inequities in both justice and health.In addition to standardizing legalization policies, I strongly urge policy makers to remove barriers to effective research on the health impacts of cannabis legalization. As noted in our report, enhanced population-level data collection from the CDC, and elimination of the restrictions against studying the legalization of cannabis by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, would enable health researchers to keep better pace with the evolving cannabis landscape. This would ensure that cannabis products are safe and that there are data to inform consumers about their effectiveness.The cannabis plant itself is not inherently good or bad, but its modern iterations are more varied and less understood. This knowledge gap should be a real cause for concern; a historic 42 percent of adults in 2023 ages 19 to 30, and 29 percent of those ages 35 to 50, used cannabis during the prior year. Without more nuanced and updated data on cannabis, policies will unfortunately continue to be driven by public perception rather than public health. We owe it to the public to investigate this complex and evolving cannabis landscape and to develop evidence-based policies that prioritize peoples health.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

November 11, 20243 min readWorker Protections for Extreme Heat in Peril after Trumps ElectionA Biden administration proposal that would require employers toprovide cooling measures under extreme heat conditions may be scuttled by the incoming Trump administrationBy Ariel Wittenberg & E&E NewsA worker adjusts his helmet on a construction site in Los Angeles during a heatwave in July 2024. Etienne Laurent/AFP via Getty ImagesCLIMATEWIRE | The return of former President Donald Trump to the White House puts at risk new heat protections for workers that were proposed over the summer by the Biden administration, say workplace advocates.Trump on the campaign trail never directly addressed the proposal from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which would force employers to provide their workers with water and cool places to rest when temperatures are high.But many of Trumps Republican allies in Congress panned the idea when it was announced, including House Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.). Westerman called it one of the most idiotic things theyve ever done and said the heat protection rules ignored the realities of outdoor 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.During Trumps first term, OSHA stopped work on many health regulations, including one slated to be proposed in October 2017 that would have forced the healthcare industry to prepare for an airborne pandemic such as COVID-19.Outright killing the heat protection proposal, however, would be difficult for the incoming Trump administration because of the laws governing the way OSHA issues public health standards, said Jordan Barab, who was OSHAs deputy assistant secretary of Labor for occupational safety and health during the Obama administration.But Barab said theres nothing that requires the next administration to finalize the rule which could put peoples lives in danger.If the Trump administration does not move forward, people will die, Barab said. I dont think theres any doubt about that.Heat killed at least 815 workers between 1992 and 2017 and seriously injured some 70,000 more, according to federal data. And health advocates say the toll is likely to increase as temperatures rise with global warming.OSHA has been under pressure to protect workers from heat for decades, starting with a 1986 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommending heat standards.More recently, congressional Democrats put pressure on the agency at the end of the Trump administration with a bill co-sponsored by now-Vice President Kamala Harris that would have required the agency to issue a rule.But it was only this past summer that OSHA finally proposed the regulation which, if finalized, could protect some 35 million workers from extreme heat.Groups representing some of those workers now fear it wont be enacted.President Trump would have to actively work to undo that progress intentionally putting workers including many who no doubt voted for him in harms way, said Antonio De Loera-Brust, a spokesperson for the United Farm Workers. Whether these workers are killed by extreme heat on the job should not be a partisan issue.In the absence of federal action, workers and their advocates would have to lobby the 29 states that enforce worker safety rules to enact their own heat protections, Barab said.He added that state action could create a situation similar to the history of the right to know rule, which requires employers to inform workers about the hazardous properties of the chemicals they work with. In 1981, the Reagan administration froze work on such regulations that began under President Jimmy Carter.After labor advocates successfully convinced some 15 states to adopt their own rules over two years, OSHA was forced to publish its own right to know rule to standardize requirements across jurisdictions in 1983.Six states currently have heat protections for workers, but others are resistant to the idea. Texas and Florida recently passed laws blocking municipalities from requiring water and rest breaks for workers.One state that has moved forward with greater protections is Maryland, which enacted its heat standards in September spurred in part by the heat stroke death of a Baltimore sanitation worker.If theres any silver lining, its that there is no doubt that climate change is a problem, and that it is likely to be a record hot spring and summer again. These rising temperatures are not easy to hide, nor are the inevitable workplace deaths, Barab said. So its possible there will be some pressure to do something at the state and federal level.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

OpinionNovember 11, 20246 min readI Destroyed a Car to Explore Some Music MythsTwo years of experimentation taught a Nashville guitarist not every musical myth makes senseBy Jim LillJim Lill playing his guitar made from a car. Jim LillThis is the story of how (and why) I had to turn my car into a guitar and play it.I'm a country musician in Nashville. But right now I'm best known for changing a lot of people's minds about traditionally held and industry-backed opinions regarding what factors affect the sound of an electric guitar. I did it by myself, at home, and I'm not even a scientist.Its been an interesting journey, and I think everyone can learn a little from it about the power of experimenting even for nonscientists like me.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 a guitarist plays a note, it travels electrically through all of the cables and gear until it gets recorded (or put through a PA system) and a listener can listen to it. The final sound of the note is called the guitar tone and its part of what makes different types of music sound different. There are many, many competing ideas about what affects guitar tone. The trouble is, most of the sounds that inspired me to play music in the first place were created by using a lot of prohibitively expensive vintage gear. But I wasnt born rich, have no industry bloodlines, and dont have a grandpa kept this old guitar under his bed since 1952 story to tell, so I was always worried that there was a financial barrier between me and the kinds of sounds I want to be able to make. It would be an enormous bummer if I spent all of this time honing my craft and still couldnt get that sound to come out of my fingertips because I didnt have the right equipment.Initially, the same as most kids, I was a sponge. I knew nothing, so I could absorb everything. I voraciously read anything had that to do with guitar, and collected tidbits like talismans that I superstitiously thought would help ward off bad guitar tone. I figured if I could just collect all of the individual bits of gear knowledge from the magazines and Internet forums, then like puzzle pieces it would all eventually fit together, forming a complete picture, and I could finally make my guitar playing sound like I wanted it to, wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. But that isnt what happened.Instead the next step of this journey was dissonance. I still sounded terrible about half the time and couldnt do anything about it. The temptation was to blame the venue, or the recording engineer, but I had a feeling my beliefs about guitar tone were off the mark. So I kept diving in and learning more, but I wasnt an empty sponge anymore. Some of the new things I was learning conflicted with the old ones I had already accepted. I tried to figure out which sources to trust, and which to take with a grain of salt, but no matter how I tried to sort the facts, it wasn't making sense and I wasn't sounding any better.The last leg of this journey was hard work. Instead of relying on outside information I started from scratch and collected the data myself. I set the goal of figuring out why my favorite guitar player sounded like he did when he recorded my favorite music. His name is J.T. Corenflos, and he was an under-the-radar session musician in Nashville, known by his peers for his exceptional guitar tone and responsible for a lot of the guitar you heard on the radio from the 1990s until his death in 2020. He had a legendary custom-made baby blue guitar that he used on countless hit singles, and the last thing I asked him a couple weeks before he died was Whats that blue body made out of? and he replied Alder.Alder is a medium-density hardwood that Leo Fender started making into guitar bodies around 1956. My main guitar is ash, not alder. I needed to know if this body wood difference could partly explain why I still couldnt get J.T.s sound. The traditional belief is that all of these things make a difference. Alder sounds different from ash, and they both sound different from mahogany (what Gibson guitars are often made from), and maple fretboards sound different than rosewood fretboards, and the way the neck is joined to the body changes the sound, and even the type and thickness of lacquer finish will alter the tone of the guitar. Therefore, if you took a professionally built guitar with an ash body and a maple neck and compared it to a set of guitar strings strung up across the gap between a bench and a shelf, they would have to sound different, even if they had the same electronics. So I did exactly that, and this is what that actually sounds like:But what about guitar amplifiers? I always learned that vacuum tubes, tube biases, rectifiers and component quality were the main reasons an amp sounds like it does (even if I didn't understand what those things were), and that if you took expensive flagship model tube amps of the major legendary brands like Fender and Marshall and compared them to an amplifier made of out an old tackle box, built by an amateur with solid state electronics on breadboards, they would have to sound different, even if some of the points in the circuit were kept the same. So I did exactly that, and this is what that actually sounds like:But what about speaker cabinets? I've read about solid pine resonating differently from birch ply, and different joinery methods producing different tones, and certainly if you had a professionally built heavy duty speaker cabinet and compared it to something made of styrofoam and caulk, they would have to sound different, even if they had mostly the same geometry. So I did exactly that, and this is what that actually sounds like:But what about microphones? My favorite music was recorded at Ocean Way Nashville with expensive vintage mics, and Ive been told that the types of tubes and quality of the components and the iron in the output transformers all contribute to the sound of the mic. So if you compared one of Ocean Ways vintage Telefunken ELA M 251 tube microphones with an amateur microphone built out of a pop can and a cheap circuit found on Craigslist, they would have to sound different, even if the capsules (the part that turns moving air into electricity) had a similar frequency response. So I did exactly that, and this is what that actually sounds like:This journey has gotten traction on the Internet, and some people have told me they're still torn between my tests and years of accepted tradition. Why should they believe me when people with more experience say something different?Heres the thing: I never asked you to believe me. I don't need to. The tests speak for themselves. If you read It sounds like X when you do this, and then someone actually does it and it sounds like Y, then it sounds like Y. Hopefully you get as much out of this as I have.But like I said up top, this journey isnt about convincing anyone else of anything. It's about making music, and answering questions about making music that couldn't be answered any other way.Last time I took my car to the mechanic, he said he wasn't going to fix it for me anymore. It was all rusted underneath, and he told me I shouldn't put another dollar into it. So I knew what I needed to do. I needed to string it up across the windshield and play some music on it. People say that a car shouldnt be able to sound like a guitar. It's not ash, alder or mahogany. But I did that. And this is what that actually sounds like:This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

November 11, 20246 min readThe Lucy Fossils Extraordinary Journey to Becoming an Icon of Human EvolutionThe 3.2-million-year-old human ancestor known as Lucy rose to fame through an incredible combination of circumstancesBy Bernard WoodThe 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis skeleton known as Lucy is the most famous fossil in the world. Dave Einsel/Getty ImagesFifty years ago researchers working in the Afar region of Ethiopia recovered a remarkable fossil of an ancient relative of ours. This specimen of a female hominin, or member of the human family, soon became the most famous fossil in the world. If youve ever had even a passing interest in human origins, you have probably heard of her. She goes by the name Lucy.One of the reasons Lucy is special is that she is a recognizable skeleton, albeit an incomplete one. Another is that the skeleton is enough like our own for researchers to think Lucys ilk could be a close relativeand possibly even an ancestorof modern humans. But Lucy is just one of many hominin fossils that have come to light since Charles Darwin surmised in 1871 that humans originated in Africa. Why does she play such an outsized role in the public imaginationand in the investigation of human origins? The answer lies as much in Lucys value as a symbol of humanitys deep evolutionary history in Africa as in her intrinsic worth as a source of evidence about human evolution.Lets page back to Lucys era. Nearly 3.2 million years ago a diminutive human ancestor with a mix of humanlike and apelike traits was living in the Horn of Africa on a grassy landscape dotted with trees and shrubs. She was part of a richer community of primates and a much more impressive variety of mammals than live in that region today. There is no reason to think that Lucy was special in any way during her relatively short life. What made her special was what happened to her after she died.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 an animal dies on an open landscape, away from a lakeshore or stream channels, the soft tissuesmuscles and ligamentsare consumed by scavengers large and small. The bones of the skeleton soon separate and break up, and in a remarkably short time, only fragments of the skeleton are left. There is nothing recognizable to fossilize. If the animal dies close enough to a lake or stream, there is a very small chance that one or more of its bones and teeth will be covered by a layer of sediment. Not only will the bones be physically protected by the sediment from further damage, but also, under the right circumstances, they will be hardened by chemicals in the sediment. This process, called fossilization, gradually converts bones and teeth into bone- and tooth-shaped rocks.But even if all this occurs, we are still a long way from that individuals remains becoming a famous fossil. For that to happen, the sedimentary rock in which the bones were entombed needs to be exposed by erosion, a team of scientists and trained fossil hunters has to find those fossilized bones before they deteriorate beyond recognition, and the team must have the extensive resources needed to recover the many bits and pieces of the specimen that have been scattered across the landscape by the elements. The exceedingly slim odds of the bones and teeth of a single individual being preserved, fossilized, exposed, discovered and recovered make the Lucy skeleton an exceptional discovery. The number of such skeletons in the early stages of the human fossil record can be counted on the fingers of one hand.Another reason Lucy is exceptional is that among the various regions of her skeleton that are preserved are substantial parts of the bones that reveal the length of the limbs: the humerus and radius in the upper limb and the femur and tibia in the lower limb. One of the biggest differences between modern humans and our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, is the relative length of the limbs. Whereas modern humans have long legs and short arms, chimpanzees and bonobos have long arms and short legs. Chimpanzees and bonobos also have relatively long forearms.All four of Lucys main limb long bones are damaged or missing parts of the shaft, so their maximum length has to be estimated. Even so, enough of each bone is preserved to make it pretty clear that Lucys limb proportionsand thus the limb proportions of Australopithecus afarensis, the species to which she belongsare closer to those of chimpanzees and bonobos than they are to those of modern humans. This is not to say that Lucy moved around like a chimpanzee or a bonobo: other fossils belonging to A. afarensis provide compelling evidence that the species walked upright on two legs. But it was practicing a form of bipedal locomotion that differed in significant ways from the bipedalism used by modern humans and our immediate predecessors. Whereas we Homo sapiens take longish strides when we walk, A. afarensis had a more lumbering gait because its feet were farther apart.Some experts think Lucy belongs on the line leading to modern humans, adding to her cachet. But ancestry is difficult to demonstrate and almost impossible to prove with the patchy fossil record we have for early hominins. I know the difference between my ancestorsmy parents, grandparents and great-grandparentsand my nonancestral close relatives, such as my uncles and aunts, and if I was not sure about anyones status, I could check using their birth certificates. There are no birth certificates in the fossil record, so we have to use shared morphology instead. The principle is that the more physical traits one species shares with another, the more closely related the species are, assuming that the morphology they share only evolved once in a recent common ancestor of the two species. We call this commonality shared derived morphology. But to return to my own family history, although I look more like my parents than a total stranger, once you go several generations into the past, my resemblance to my ancestors is not so obvious.The fly in the ointment when using shared morphology to reconstruct relationships is a phenomenon known as homoplasy, in which different lineages evolve shared morphology independently rather than jointly inheriting it from a common ancestor. In this case, shared morphology is telling us more about shared environmental challenges than it is about shared evolutionary history. Still, even if A. afarensis is not our ancestor, it is very likely to be a close relative.Lucy was found in 1974, almost exactly half a century after anatomist and anthropologist Raymond Dart had recognized the significance of a skull of a juvenile hominin found in Taung, South Africa. For three decades after the discovery of the Taung juvenile, the quest for human origins focused on southern Africa. That focus changed in the 1960s when paleoanthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey began to discover hominin fossils at Olduvai (now Oldupai) Gorge, in Tanzania, some of which looked as if they could even belong to our own genus, Homo. By 1974 that trickle of fossil discoveries in eastern Africa had become a torrent, with most of the finds coming from sites on the eastern shore of what is now known as Lake Turkana.Not only had paleoanthropologists turned their attention from southern to eastern Africa, but the age profile of the most successful fossil hunters was shifting from senior researchers such as Louis and Mary Leakey, Phillip Tobias and Clark Howell to field workers such as Richard Leakey and Donald Johanson, who were even younger than Dart was when he recognized the significance of the Taung skull. Richard Leakey and Johanson were half the age of their predecessorsand telegenic to boot. Every high schooler or college student interested in human origins could imagine themselves in their place.It was brilliant of Lucys discoverer, Johanson, to name the partial skeleton after a character in the popular Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Lucy ODonnell was a childhood friend of John Lennons son, Julian Lennon, who brought a drawing home from school one day and said it was Lucy in the sky with diamonds, inspiring the song. The name Lucy was a user-friendly way of referring to the A. afarensis skeleton that had the official catalog number A.L. 288-1. And the association with ODonnell injected vitality and relatability into a collection of bone-shaped rocks.But many things have changed since Lucy was named in the mid-1970s. For one, scientists are now more aware of the implications of the names given to fossils. Like John Lennon, Lucy ODonnell was from Liverpool, England. Much of the Beatles success was based on its members authenticity as Liverpudlians. By the time of the Beatles, Liverpool was in economic decline, but in its heyday in the 18th century, it was the preeminent port in the U.K. The economic foundation of Liverpools prosperity came from the major role its merchants played in the trade of enslaved African people.Lucy the fossil has another nickname. In Ethiopia she is known as Dinkinesh, which means you are marvelous in one of the countrys official languages, Amharic. As iconic as the name Lucy is, maybe it is time we all started to use Dinkinesh to refer to this extraordinary member of the human family.

November 11, 2024Mud Bath Really Does Make Baseballs Easier to GripDroughts in 48 of 50 U.S. states, evidence of microplastics mucking up wastewater recycling and the science of a baseball mud bath in this weeks news roundup. Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific AmericanSUBSCRIBE TO Science QuicklyApple | Spotify | RSSRachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific Americans Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman.First, I just want to say that I believe radical optimism is going to be an important part of our tool kit in the months to come. So Im going to do my best to bring you stories that show how innovation can help change the world for the better. Were going to keep introducing you to brilliant people who are working to solve problems that seem insurmountable. Were going to keep taking you to places youve never been to learn things that broaden your horizons and offer you new ways of seeing the world. Were also going to try to provide you with joy and levity and that indescribable wow, gee whiz feeling as often as we can because we know thats so important.Okay. So. Lets kick off the week by catching up on some of the latest science 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.The worlds first wooden satellite arrived at the International Space Station last Tuesday. The Japanese spacecraft is just four inches square. As Ive mentioned before on Science Quickly, the rapidly growing number of metal satellites in orbit pose a real threat to our planets ozone layer. Thats because spacecraft made mostly of aluminum produce hazardous aluminum oxide when they burn up in the atmosphere, which is an inevitable part of their life cycle. Ill spare you the inorganic chemistry, but those aluminum oxide particles can kick off reactions between ozone and chlorine in the Earths atmosphere. LignoSat contains electronic sensors, but its body is made of magnolia wood. Researchers hope to deploy the cubesat from the ISS and collect data as it orbits the planet for several months.Speaking of space: last Wednesday, NASAs Parker Solar Probe took a crucial step toward making a record-breaking pass of the sun. On December 24, the probe is expected to pass within 3.86 million miles of the solar surfacebreaking its own 2023 record of 4.51 million miles.Parker has been breaking records since its launch in 2018. That year the probe passed within 26.55 million miles of the sun's surface, surpassing a record set in the 1970s.Last Wednesday the probe flew by Venus to use the planets gravity to propel it into its new orbit. NASA says the December solar pass will bring the spacecraft close enough to pass inside a solar eruption, like a surfer diving under a crashing ocean wave.Back on Earth things are looking pretty dry. The U.S. Drought Monitor reports that nearly every state in the country is experiencing droughtAlaska and Kentucky are the only exceptions. From October 23 through 29 more than 150 million people around the U.S. were in a drought, which marked a roughly 34 percent increase over the week before.Climate change is contributing to drought in more ways than you might think. While some areas are seeing less rain in generalwhich of course creates arid conditionsothers are getting most or all of their rain all at once.Theres a limit to how much water soil can absorb, so an excessive dump doesnt necessarily leave behind extra moisture for us to rely on during not-so-rainy days. Instead that water becomes what we call runoff, which flows across the ground until it enters a stream or another body of water.Climate change seems to be making these big bursts of precipitation more common. So when it rains, it pours, and it floods, and were still liable to end up in a drought down the line. With such wide swaths of the country in drought right now, its not a bad idea to take water-conserving measures no matter how things look where you live. Consider taking shorter showers, and make sure you turn off the faucet while you brush your teeth and scrub dishes.Speaking of water, heres a news story to get you fired up about one of my favorite things to hate: plastics! If youre just joining us (on Science Quickly and also, like, on Earth), most plastics are literally made of fossil fuels, and theyve shown up pretty much everywhere, from Antarctica to the human brain.Last Wednesday a new study found that microplastics could even be mucking up our ability to clean wastewater for reuse. The researchers suspected that tiny plastic particles known as microplastics, which provide a happy home for microbes to create robust colonies called biofilms, might keep potential pathogens alive through the wastewater treatment process. Sure enough, the researchers identified a few nasty types of bacteria and viruses that persisted after the water was treated. This is just one more piece of evidence in a growing pile that shows we need to address our reliance on plastic.Lets end with a couple of fun stories.First: you know how sometimes, when someone is watching you work, it makes you kind of, like, knuckle down and really get the thing done, and sometimes having an audience can make you choke instead? Apparently those instincts are older than our species.In a study published last Friday, researchers reported that chimpanzees are subject to whats called the audience effect, too. The study reviewed years of data on chimps performing number-based tasks on touch screens. It turns out that the chimps performance was impacted by how many humans were watching and whether the animals knew the spectators. When it came to the toughest numerical tasks, the chimps seemed to perform better as an audience of experimenters grew. But they were more likely to fumble the easiest tasks in the presence of a crowd of experimenters and familiar audience members. The researchers are hoping to use these insights to better understand how humans developed similar behavior.Lastly, heres one for you sports fans. As you may already know, every single baseball used in every single major league game gets a special little spa treatment: its scrubbed down with mud that comes from a single secret spot somewhere along a tributary of the Delaware River. The idea is that this mud bath makes the balls easier to grip. No team is willing to mess around with substitutes, but the je ne sais quoi of this particular goop was only recently subjected to scientific study. In a paper published last Monday, researchers confirmed that the mud really does have a certain something going for it.The research team put some of the magic mud in a precision instrument called a rheometer, which applies different kinds of force to figure out the fluid flows, to quantify the spreadability of the substance. The researchers also used an atomic force microscope to measure how much force the mud resisted with as an instrument pulled away from itin other words, its stickiness. They even made a fake human finger out of rubberwhich they coated with whale oil to mimic the natural goop of human skinto approximate the friction of a ball against a pitchers hands.All that data proves what baseball players have been saying for years: the mud works. Its consistency makes it as easy to spread as face cream, which allows for uniform coverage on a ball. But the stickiness of the clay helps all the tiny particles of sand suspended within it adhere to the ball so the muck dries as grippy as sandpaper. Neat!Thats all for this weeks science news roundup. Well be back on Wednesday to learn how insects have helped shape human culture.Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Anaissa Ruiz Tejada. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great week!

OpinionNovember 8, 20244 min readConsciousness Might Hide in Our Brains Electric FieldsA mysterious electromagnetic mechanism may be more important than the firing of neurons in our brains to explain our awarenessBy Tamlyn Hunt Hiroshi Watanabe/Getty ImagesThe neuron, the specialized cell type that makes up much of our brains, is at the center of todays neuroscience. Neuroscientists explain perception, memory, cognition and even consciousness itself as products of billions of these tiny neurons busily firing their tiny spikes of voltage inside our brain.These energetic spikes not only convey things like pain and other sensory information to our conscious mind, but they are also in theory able to explain every detail of our complex consciousness.At least in principle. The details of this neural code have yet to be worked out.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.While neuroscientists have long focused on spikes travelling throughout brain cells, ephaptic field effects may really be the primary mechanism for consciousness and cognition. These effects, resulting from the electric fields produced by neurons rather than their synaptic firings, may play a leading role in our minds workings.In 1943 American scientists first described what is known today as the neural code, or spike code. They fleshed out a detailed map of how logical operations can be completed with the all or none nature of neural firingsimilar to how todays computers work. Since then neuroscientists around the world have engaged in a vast endeavor to crack the neural code in order to understand the specifics of cognition and consciousness.To little avail. The most obvious chasm in our understanding is in all the things we did not meet on our journey from your eye to your hand, confessed neuroscientist Mark Humphries in 2020s The Spike, a deep dive into this journey: All the things of the mind Ive not been able to tell you about, because we know so little of what spikes do to make them.Brain researchers have long acknowledged that there are a number of ways other than firing by which neurons could communicate, including the little-known mechanism known as ephaptic coupling. This coupling results from electromagnetic (EM) fields at the medium and large scales of the brain interacting, alongside much smaller scale fields accompanying synaptic spikes (which themselves result from a type of highly localized EM field activity) operating at nanometer scales.Retinal neurons, for example, operate without any neural firing. These cells employ a type of electrodiffusion, the diffusion of charged particles without synapses, the connection points between neurons. Electrodiffusion passes along a signal to the optic nerve at very fast rates and with high bandwidth. We couldnt see without this.The ephaptic in ephaptic coupling simply means touching. Though not well-known, ephaptic field effects result from the textbook electric and magnetic interactions that power our cells. Intriguing experimental results suggest these same forces play a bigger role in the brain than one suspected and perhaps even in consciousness.Ephaptic field effects first came to my attention in a significant way with a remarkable 2019 paper from the Case Western Reserve laboratory of Dominique Durand. That lab demonstrated that the mouse cortex was affected without synaptic connectionsby definition, ephaptic field interactions. This remarkable effect was found by the Durand team after they cut a slice of mouse hippocampus in half and then measured the voltage potential going up and down the slice. There wasalmost no change in that measured voltage even after the slice was fully severed, demonstrating a strong influence from ephaptic fields.The influence did, they found, wane after a certain distance, as wed expect. Once the cut slices were separated by 400 microns or more, the ephaptic field effect mostly disappeared.These results were considered so remarkable by peer reviewers that they required the Durand lab to replicate the results not once but twice before they approved publication of the paper. One scholar stated at the time of the papers publication that the findings of Chiang and colleagues should probably (and quite literally) electrify the field.Another team compared the speed of ephaptic field effects in various tissues, finding that the speed of propagation of ephaptic fields in gray matter is about 5,000 times faster than neural firing.This means that what would take normal spike pathways one second to span through the brain, could be traversed 5,000 times during that same time interval with ephaptic effects. If we cube this over the volume of the brain we get an information density up to a staggering 125 billion times more from ephaptic fields than from synaptic firing.A key caveat to this statement is to stress that this is potential information density only, and it is not necessarily the case that this potential can actually be reached. More research will need to be done to see how much of this vast ephaptic potential is realized by our brains.Abundant evidence shows that synaptic firing is essential for moving, hearing, touching and much else, but given the vastly greater information density in the ephaptic fields, and the pervasiveness of ephaptic field effects, it would be exceedingly strange if evolution hadnt grasped upon this effect for important brain functions. Indeed, it seems that she has, in sundry ways.Walter Freeman, a legendary now-deceased neuroscientist from the University of California, Berkeley, stated in a 2006 paper that traditional synaptic firing speeds could not explain the speed of cognitive functions he had observed over the years in rabbits and cats.Instead, the recent spate of ephaptic effects findings suggest a solid mechanism to explain these speeds. Our recent theoretical paper, building on these findings, suggested that ephaptic field effects may in fact be the primary mechanism for consciousness and cognition, rather than neural firing.Another recent paper including as authors the University of California, Los Angeless Costas Anastassiou and former Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch, provides strong support for the importance of ephaptic effects. They find that, indeed, ephaptic coupling can explain the fast coordination required for consciousness even in the absence of very fast synapses.This single paper could take the field of ephaptic field science from the fringes of neuroscience to the forefront. Its findings regarding the speed and pervasiveness of ephaptic field effects may presage a fundamentally new understanding of how cognition and consciousness work.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

November 8, 2024The Impact of Weight Stigma on HealthFocusing on size in health care might be doing more harm than good.By Rachel Feltman & Fonda Mwangi Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific AmericanSUBSCRIBE TO Science QuicklyApple | Spotify | RSSThis episode is part of Health Equity Heroes, an editorially independent special project that was produced with financial support from Takeda Pharmaceuticals.Rachel Feltman: According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least one in five U.S. adults in each state are categorized as, quote, unquote, living with obesity. But for many of those people, having physicians focus on their size is far from helpful. In fact, theres research to suggest that our fixation on weight could be preventing us from actually helping people live healthy lives.For Scientific Americans Science Quickly, Im Rachel Feltman. Today were talking about a topic that might sound totally radical to some of you, but I hope youll listen with an open mind. My guest today is Ragen Chastain. Shes a speaker, writer, researcher and board-certified patient advocate. Her Substack newsletter, Weight and Healthcare, meticulous, evidence-based information on, you guessed it, weight and health care. Today shes here to talk to us about how weight stigmain other words, a systemic bias against bigger bodiescould potentially be to blame for many of the negative health outcomes weve been taught to associate with gaining weight.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Feltman: Ragen, thanks so much for coming on to chat today.Ragen Chastain: Oh, thank you for having me. Im so excited.Feltman: Im really excited. Im a big fan of your newsletter. I find it super helpful, soreally looking forward to chatting about it. But for folks who arent already familiar with you, how would you describe what it is you do?Chastain: Yeah, so my area of expertise is at the intersections of weight science, weight stigma and health care practice. And so I teach health care providers about best practices for working with higher-weight people. I help higher-weight people navigate weight stigma in the health care sphere, and I analyze and contribute to the body of research around weight-neutral health and weight science in general.Feltman: Awesome. And I do want to pause before we go further just to talk about, like, words we might end up using and words we might not use that might surprise some listeners. Could you tell me a little bit about the word choices you use in your newsletter and the work that you do?Chastain: In terms of language around higher-weight people, the terms obese and overweight are terms that were literally made up for the express purpose of pathologizing bodies based on shared size rather than shared metabolic profile or cardiometabolic status like we would see in a typical disease diagnosis.And the idea of pathologizing higher-weight bodies is rooted in and inextricable from racism and anti-Blackness. And I absolutely urge people to read Sabrina Stringss Fearing the Black Body and DaShaun Harrisons Belly of the Beast to learn more about how not only are these things rooted in racism and anti-Blackness but theyre continuing to disproportionately impact those communities.Feltman: Absolutely. Yeah, I really appreciate that because I think a lot of really well-meaning people and publications and institutionsI mean, probably also some very not-well-meaning institutions, but some of them are well meaningyou know, say, oh, were going to focus on person-first language.And, you know, as a self-identified fat person, I dont know any higher-weight person who ever was like, Person with overweightthats what makes me feel good.Chastain: As if weight stigma doesn't give me enough problems, lets make me grammatically problematic as well. Yeah, the thing about person-first language is that its being marketed as antistigma language, but it didnt come from weight-neutral health community, health-at-every-size community, fat activism.It came directly from the weight loss industry as part of their campaign to have simply existing in a higher-weight body, again, regardless of actual health status, be seen as a chronic, lifelong condition that requires chronic, lifelong treatment from them. And so its being pushed through, quote, unquote, patient advocacy groups that they fund.This is person-first language for higher-weight people. First of all, they co-opted it from disability community, where theres a lot of conversation and transformation and nuance. And again, urge people to listen to folks from that community to understand those nuances. But absent those nuances, the weight-loss industry sort of took it and plopped it onto higher-weight people.And the, the problem is, to me, its more stigmatizing because we don't talk about other bodies that way. Im not like, Oh, I hope my friend with tallness can come over so I can change that light bulb, or, I think that man affected by thinness on the busI believe I know him. Thats not how we talk about bodies.And so when we suggest that its so stigmatizing to simply accurately describe a higher-weight or fat body that we need a semantic workaround, that actually creates stigma. It doesnt reduce it.Feltman: Yeah, I think thats really well put. Well, and this is a great segue because I think some of our listeners probably assume that its common sense that being in a bigger body brings all sorts of health risks. But of course now many researchers are pushing back on that. So could you walk us through what the data actually says about higher weights and what it doesnt say?Chastain: Sure. So itIve been studying this research for 20 years, and I came to it believing exactly what youre saying, right, believing being higher-weight is a healthy issue and weight loss is the solution to it. And in digging into the research, I found that neither of those things were actually what the research was saying. And so what happens is we get this research that correlates being higher-weight to a health issue and, you know, so your first day of research methods class, they teach you correlation is not causation, right?You cant assume one thing causes the other because they happen together at the same time. And this gets tricky in medical research because we use correlation all the time, but its not responsible to do that without investigating what are called confounding variables, right? Basically, what else happens to higher-weight people that could lead to higher rates of these health issues?And in terms of the research, there are three well-researched confounding variables: weight stigma, weight cycling, or yo-yo dieting, and health care inequalities. And these things independently are correlated to the same health issues that get blamed on body weight. And in these studies, theyre rarely even mentioned and never controlled for.And so when we talk about, you know, quote, unquote, weight-related or, quote, unquote, obesity-related conditions, what we might be actually talking about are weight-stigma-related conditions, weight-cycling-related conditions and health-care-inequality-related conditions. For example, [Linda] Bacon and [Lucy] Aphramor [noted research that] found that weight cycling could account for all of the excess mortality that was attributed to, quote, unquote, obesity in both [the] Framingham [Heart Study] and the NHANES [National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey].And so were talking about serious confounders that are not being explored at all in the research. And, you know, a big part of that, from my perspective, is that the research is often being conducted and funded by the weight-loss industry. And I have sort of developed over time a bit of a subspecialty in the ways that the weight-loss industry has and continues to infiltrate and manipulate the health care industry.And this research is one of those ways.Feltman: Yeah, well, I definitely want to get more into that because I think you do some really incredible work in that space. But for folks who are, like, maybe having their minds blown right now, you know, what do we know about where this conflation comes from? I know that you already mentioned some recommended reading on the origin of weight stigma, but I would love to hear a little bit more about that.Chastain: Yeah. So, and I want to say, too, if youre listening to this and youre having, like, anger, denial, defensiveness, incredulousness, I have had all of those feelings in the last 20 years as Ive been researching this. So I want to name that as valid and say, when you do have those feelings, I just offer that as an invitation to dig deeper and ask more questions.But in terms of weight stigma, so the research on weight stigma shows that the experience of weight stigma and even perceived weight stigma is correlated independently with things like higher rates of type 2 diabetes, higher rates of hypertension, suicidality, substance use, lower health-related quality-of-life scores, almost 60 percent greater risk of overall mortalityso were talking about serious correlations here between experiencing weight stigma and these health risks and issues that end up getting attributed to weight.Feltman: And what do we know about, you know, how this impacts, sort of public health overall?Chastain: So at some point, public health became less about helping the public be healthy and more about making fat peoples bodies the publics business, with the goal of eradicating higher-weight people and making sure no more ever exist, rightthe, quote, unquote, treatment and prevention of, quote, unquote, obesity.And its helpful, I think, to substitute higher-weight people existing for the term obesity to get a clear picture of how this impacts higher-weight people in public health. And I don't think most people were doing this from an ill-intentioned perspective, right, but what we ended up with is public health that is hyperfocused on eradicating higher-weight people and preventing higher-weight people from existing in ways that end up harming higher-weight people and make it almost impossible to support the health of higher-weight people directly.And you get a co-opting and twisting of the concept of anti-weight stigma that ends up like, We dont want to treat fat people badly, but we definitely want to rid the Earth of them and make sure no more ever exist but, you know, like, in a nonstigmatizing way, and thats not actually possible.And so, through public health, this focus on, this hyperfocus on manipulating body size rather than an evidence-based option to support peoples health based on their own priorities and definitions at the size that they are has ended up creating a public health system that is hostile and harmful to higher-weight people.Feltman: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I think again, for our listeners who are, you know, maybe very new to this, lets talk about some of the ways that, you know, sort of, um, health-based interventions can be decoupled from, you know, weight-loss and weight-based interventions and sort of the kinds of health care that people have difficulty accessing or [are] even outright denied because theyre in a higher-weight body.Chastain: Yeah, thats a huge, like, area of concern. So there's a lot of ways that this happens. Theres implicit and explicit bias from health care providers, right, where, either subconsciously or consciously, theyve got these stereotypes and preconceived notions about higher-weight people that lead them to treat, you know, us differentlyeither give us less time, fewer recommendations, make assumptions about our behaviors.There's also structural bias. And this happens when the things that higher-weight people need simply don't exist for us in the spaces we are. And that could be anything from a chair in a waiting room to an MRI machine. And all stigma requires systemic solutions, but structural bias can only be solved systemically.Because you can have a fully fat-affirming provider, a fully fat-affirming patient, but if the MRI is too small, that patient cannot get care. And so, within the health care system, those are all issues that face higher-weight people on a daily basis.Theres also, as you talked about, accessing health care. So as a patient advocate, often what Im working on, and as a researcher and writer, is the idea of BMI-based health care denials. And this is when a person is refused a health care procedure that a thinner person would get unless or until they become a certain BMI or they lose a certain amount of weight.And this is holding health care hostage for a weight-loss ransom that most patients are not able to pay. And it can sort of float into the ridiculous, whereI had a patient who was denied the gender-affirming care that they wanted but then was referred to weight-loss surgery. And thats an actually a pretty common thing, and in this case, I dont expect this to ever work again, but the argument we made was, you know, youre saying that youre denying this surgery because of anesthesia risk, but youre now going to offer this patient weight-loss surgery. Whoevers going to do the anesthesia for the weight loss surgery, could they just, like, come down the hall and do the surgery this patient actually wants and needs?And they ended up agreeing, but Im not sure that will ever work again. But, like, this is where were at in terms of health care for higher-weight peoplethat it can be a fight just to access basic care. And then the other piece of that is what I call provider weight distraction, where the provider becomes so hyperfocused on the patients weight and manipulating the patients size that theyre not listening or responding to the patients actual complaint presentation, why theyre there, what they want in health care.And so this can really lead to patients who disengage from care or patients who simply cant access the care that they want and need.Feltman: And how do you think that drugs like Ozempic are impacting this, you know, weight-centric health paradigm? And then, you know, how is weight stigma impacting the way that we talk about these drugs?Chastain: Sure, I, now, I take a very firm view of bodily autonomy. Right? So I think people can do what they want. But I think people deserve good information, and in terms of health care, they deserve ethical, clear, informed consent.Feltman: Mm.Chastain: I have done breakdowns of the research on these weight-loss drugs since they started, and I am not nearly as excited as the people who are reading the marketing language versus the research.For example, uh, Wegovy, or semaglutide, Novo Nordisks drug, their four-year outcomes have just come out, and they claimed that people were able to maintain 10 percent loss. But if you look, they started with almost 9,000 people, and they ended with only 900 in four years. So thats massive attrition that did not make the headlines, right?So I think these arefirst of all, I want to be clear, these are solid type 2 diabetes drugs.Feltman: Absolutely.Chastain: Right. They work well for people who are contraindicated on other drugs. They work well for people who couldnt get the glycemic management they wanted on other drugs. and they have benefits in terms of only working when blood sugar goes high, so there are fewer hypoglycemic episodes.But so what happened was they realized that these drugs had a small side effect of weight loss. And so what the drug companies asked was, Well, if we gave people megadoses of these type 2 diabetes drugs, would that increase the weight loss? And they found out that yes, it would, and thats how these turn into, quote, unquote, weight-loss drugs. And so theres a big titration difference because with type 2 diabetes, the goal is to give the smallest dose necessary to achieve the glycemic control that somebody wants and reduce or minimize side effects. But with weight loss, theyre just trying to get people to take as much as they can for the express purpose of maximizing side effects.And these drugs have serious, sometimes fatal side effects, and so thats not a small issue.Feltman: Right. And how are you seeing the prevalence of these drugs, you know, with the goal of weight loss, impact the way mainstream physicians talk about and treat higher-weight patients?Chastain: Yeah, so, and sort of to continue from your other question about how weight stigma is involved, its important to understand that the approval of these drugs by the FDA was based on a risk-benefit analysis that suggests that its worth harming or killing some higher-weight people to make others a bit thinner.And thats a view thats based in weight stigma, right, often to cure or prevent health issues that thin people also get but from whom these risks are not asked. So theres that piece of it, and the weight-loss industry, and in particular the pharmaceutical companies who make these drugs, are now falling all over themselves to say, Oh yeah, behavior-based weight loss interventions dont work long-term.Right? And theyre, like, the last 15 people to figure this out. Weve been, people have been screaming this from the rooftops in my community since before I was born, right, that at this point, 100 years of research show that almost everyone will lose weight short-term and gain it back long-term because these behavior-based interventions physiologically change our bodies, making them into sort of weight-regaining, weight-maintaining machines.And so now doctors are sort of being honest with themselves about this, right, because this is what they had, so they would just tell every higher-weight person who came in, like, Eat less and exercise more, without typically asking even what we ate or how much we exercised. And now theyre saying, Oh, well, now theres a drug, so, like, its so much easier, and you just get on the drug.And Im hearing patients who are really being pressured to take the drug and/or who are saying, These side effects are intolerable to me and are being pushed to tolerate them.Feltman: Wow. Yeah.Chastain: Right? And being given an unclear picture of the likelihood of long-term success. The sort of best-case scenario is that at 65 weeks, people will have lost kind of whatever theyre going to lose.And if they go off the drug, all of the research shows theyre going to gain the weight back and lose the cardiometabolic benefits that they got. And so this is, basically theyve invented every weight-loss drug that ever existed. This is how weight-loss drugs work. But their marketing is that, oh, well, again, because of this idea that, quote, obesity is a, quote, chronic condition, you just have to take these drugs for the rest of your life.Now, their research doesnt support that this will work. In tirzepatides study, 10.5 percent of people who stayed on the drug had gained back 20 percent of the weight just in one year. So we dont know that thats even gonna work. Right? But thats the messaging. And so I think doctors are getting a view of this that is vastly overstating the research.And thats because a lot of the communication is coming from the companies themselves, who also have taken incredibly active roles in creating and running the research. Um, and again, in doing the breakdowns for these, they have strayed so far from what would be considered appropriate best-practice research methods and statistics in order to get these results that theyre publicizing. And so I think that its putting doctors at a disadvantage because theyre being misinformed, and then theyre misinforming their patients. And theres just, again, so much focus on the idea of making fat people thin rather than supporting their health directly that doctors and sometimes patients feel like its worth risking my life and quality of life for this. And that also is about not just health but escaping weight stigma, which is another piece of this, right: that were trying to change ourselves to suit our oppressors so that we can be treated better.And while individuals can make that decision, as a society, to say you should change yourself to suit those who, you know, oppress and bully and harm you is a dangerous, dangerous road to go on.Feltman: Yeah, absolutely. You know I think its so interesting how little medicine is expected to innovate to be better at, say, performing surgery on a person at a higher weight, you know, as opposed to having these BMI requirements for sometimes extremely necessary surgery.And as a science journalist, Im also just so struck by, like, the credulity I see in people talking about this class of drugs.Everything I learned in, you know, science journalism grad school tells me to be extremely skeptical of, like, these, quote, unquote, miraculous drugs, you know, in the words of the companies selling them. And it just feels bizarre to see not all but a lot of the media treating these drugs, like, completely differently than they would any other class of medication.Chastain: Yeah, thats such an important perspective, and it has been really frustrating to me. Things like the New York Timesthere was an article by Gina Kolata ... that every single expert quoted had taken money from the drug manufacturers.And there was no disclosure of that.Right? Im seeing a lot of that, and, for example, there was a study that looked at the effect of Wegovy (semaglutide), Novo Nordisks drug, on major adverse cardiac events. And instead of releasing the study, Novo Nordisk released a press release saying that it had been a 20 percent reduction [in relative risk] in adults with, quote, unquote, overweight and, quote, unquote, obesity.And that spread like wildfire through the international media. Novo Nordisks stock went up by 17 percent that day. But when the study came out, what we learned was actually a 1.5 percent reduction [in absolute risk]. The problem is, I dont want to put this all on reporters because weve got a 24-hour news cycle; there are fewer and fewer reporting jobs; people who never intended to be science reporters are being asked to report on science.So theres a lot of issues that put reporters at a disadvantage, but I think it does the public a tremendous disservice when reporting is not more critical in the way that they look at these headlines and these press releases and this research.Feltman: And when you think about a more equitable health landscape, particularly with regards to body size, what does that look like, and what needs to change for us to get there?Chastain: Yeah. So we have a good body of research that shows that behaviors are a better predictor of current and future health than is weight or weight-loss attempts. And obviously, much more impacts our health than simply behaviors, right? But when we're talking about What would a doctor recommend to a patient? theres an interesting study on this.[Traci] Mann, [Britt] Ahlstrom and [A. Janet] Tomiyama looked at this claim that 5 to 10 percent weight loss creates clinically meaningful health benefits and found in correlational analysis that they couldnt correlate the actual weight loss with the health issues, and they posited that it was, in fact, the behavior changes instead.[Eric] Matheson et al. looked at four behaviors. They looked at five or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day, exercising more than 12 times a month, up to two drinks a day for cis men and one drink a day for cis women and not smoking. And they found that people who participated in all four of those habits had the same health hazard ratio, regardless of size.So I think what we need in general is a change in focus that, rather than trying to manipulate the weight of people, that were trying to support their health directly.Feltman: I definitely recommend that folks go check out your newsletter. Well absolutely link to it in the show notes. but if you could give just, like, one major takeaway to folks who arent going to go do that, what would it be?Chastain: I just want to say that even if Im wrong about everything, right, even if all fat people could become thin, even if by becoming thinner, they would become healthier, fat people would still deserve the right to exist without shame, stigma, bullying or oppression and would still deserve the right to complete access to society, including health care.It doesnt matter why theyre fat. It doesnt matter if there are health impacts of being fat. It doesnt matter if they could or want to become thinner. Fat people deserve equal rights and access to the world, again, including health care.Feltman: Ragen, thank you so much for coming on to chat today. This has been super informative, and I really appreciate your time.Chastain: Thank you so much for having me and for talking about this and for all the work that you do. Im honored to be a part of this.Feltman: Thats all for todays episode. Check out Ragens Substack Weight and Healthcare if you want to learn morelike, seriously, so much more, because she cites all her sources. Well be back on Monday with our usual news roundup.By the way, were still looking for some voice memos to help with an upcoming episode. Well be taking a look at the science behind earworms, those songs you just cant get out of your head, and wed love to feature some of your favoriteor maybe most infuriatingexamples. If youd like to share an earworm with us, make a voice memo on your phone or computer and send it over to ScienceQuickly@sciam.com. And, yes, we do want to hear you singing, or at least humming, the earworm in question. Make sure to tell us your name and where youre calling from, too.Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. Emily Makowski, 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!

November 8, 20245 min readHappy New Year! (If Youre a Martian)The Martian new year arrives with the Red Planets vernal equinox. Explaining why requires a deep dive into celestial mechanics and Earths calendrical historyBy Phil Plait Alones Creative/Getty ImagesYou may think its a few weeks early to celebrate the new year, but thats only because youre Earthist: November 12, 2024, marks the new year for Mars, when the calendar turns the page from 37 to 38.And here I am, still putting 37 on all my checks.Why would anyone pick November 12 as New Years Day for Mars? And why does our official reckoning of Martian time set the eons-old Red Planet only in its 38th year? The answer involves a combination of natural cycles and the human need to impose order via somewhat arbitrary timekeepingpretty much like on Earth.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.Here on our home planet, most countries use the Gregorian calendar to keep track of the year. This was first adopted in 1582 (although it took quite some time to spread around the world) and is your standard 12-month calendar365 days every year, with a bonus day added on every fourth year (a leap year). The Gregorian calendar starts on January 1 as a holdover from its predecessor, the Roman Empires Julian calendar; to honor the god Janus, Julius Caesar proclaimed that day to be the years first.As an astronomer, I might wish we marked the first day of the year using a date of some astronomical significance. The problem there is Earth stubbornly refuses to play nice with any sort of organized calendar. For example, our planets path around the sun is an ellipse, or oval shape. That means there is a point in time when it gets closest to the sun, which we call perihelion. That seems like a natural date for the start of a new year.But Earths orbital shape changes subtly every year because of the gravitational influence of the other planets, altering the exact time of perihelion. Another tweak to perihelions timing comes from Earths moon, which tugs on our planet to make it wobble a bit as we co-orbit the sun. These make perihelion an unworkably complicated way to start a calendar, even though perihelion also happens to occur in January. (Aphelionwhen Earth is farthest from the sunoccurs in July.)If you know a little bit more about astronomy, you might try to tag the new year with the equinoxes or solstices. These dates are based on Earths axial tilt, our planets roughly 23-degree pitch relative to the plane of its orbit (which is why you always see classroom globes tilted over on their stand). The June solstice, for example, occurs when the planets north pole is tipped most toward the sun, which happens on or about the 21st of that month every year. (Note that this is in winter for people in the Southern Hemisphere, which is why astronomers tend to shy away from calling it the summer solstice.)Astronomers prefer to measure everything in the sky relative to the March equinox, also called the vernal (relating to spring) equinox as a holdover from Northern Hemispherefocused timekeeping. There are many ways to think about the March equinox, but astronomers think of it as the time when the suns position on the sky crosses the celestial equator, the projection of Earths equator onto the sky. Thats a handy point in time and space to use for measuring things like the positions of the planets and stars.But again, because of the changing shape of Earths orbit, using that to mark the new year would be a hassle. The calendar date changes every year, adding unwieldy layers of chronological complexity.So what does all this have to do with Mars?Early in the 20th century, as humans began scrutinizing Mars with more powerful telescopes, we saw global changes sweep across that planet in sync with its changing position in its orbit. Then, as exquisite in situ observations emerged from our probes sent to the Red Planet, it became clear we needed some sort of Mars calendar.Such a calendar would have to be very different from ours. The most obvious reason is that Mars is farther out from the sun and takes almost two Earth years to complete a single orbit around our star; a Martian year is about 687 Earth days!A Mars daycalled a sol, to distinguish it from an Earth dayis also a little bit longer than our terrestrial one, lasting 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds. There are about 668 sols in a Martian year.But these differences are actually liberating because they free us from our historic legacy of arbitrary sociopolitical machinations. At Mars, we were able to get a fresh start, defining when we wanted the year to begin essentially from scratch.So planetary scientists decided to start the Martian new year at the time of the planets vernal equinox. Like Earth, the spin axis of Mars is tipped over relative to its orbit, and Mars even has a relatively Earth-like axial tilt of about 25 degrees. That means it has seasons similar to ours, creating the global changes earlier astronomers had witnessed. As temperatures rise in the Martian spring, dust storms arise, and some grow so large they can cover much of the planet. The onset of summer in a given hemisphere heats the respective polar ice cap, which shrinks in size as it sublimates (turns from solid to gas).Why not use the equinox as a starting date, then? If we have to choose a date, that one makes as much sense as any.If only things could be so simple. Earths orbit around the sun is very nearly a circle, and the seasons all last about three months. But Marss orbit around the sun is decidedly elliptical. When the planet is closest to the sun (in winter in its northern hemisphere) its orbital speed is faster than when its furthest (in northern summer), and combined with the oval orbital shape, this means the seasons have significantly different lengths. Northern spring is 194 sols long, while summer is 178, autumn is 142 and winter is 154 sols in duration.These odd seasons would make living on Mars weird. I mean, it would of course be hard: the suffocatingly thin atmosphere, high radiation levels, lack of quick and easy access to supplies from Earth, and so on would all make it extremely difficult to eke out a life there. But the wonky calendar would be a constant source of extra irritation.And what of the year numberthe bizarre fact that our Martian calendar has so far only advanced to Year 38? Scientists decided to mark Year 1 as the time a huge dust storm raged across the planets surface in 1956one of the most notable events on another planet during the early space age. The vernal equinox for that Martian year occurred on April 11, 1955, so thats now accepted as the planets first New Years Day. To make things less ambiguous, scientists also defined Year 0 as starting on the previous equinox, May 24, 1953. This prevents any weirdness like that of the Gregorian calendar, which, because it has no Year 0, creates strange situations such as new centuries starting on years ending with 01 instead of 00. (The 21st century, for instance, began on January 1, 2001.)Put this all together, and youll see that Year 38 on Mars begins on November 12, 2024, in the earthly Gregorian calendar, at around 16:00 coordinated universal time, or UTC (11 A.M. EST). Get your party hats and champagne ready!And dont forget: when the clock ticks down to zero, its time to sing Ares Lang Syne.

OpinionNovember 8, 20245 min readLet African Communities Manage Their Climate Adaptation PlansOutside groups often offer their solutions for climate adaptation in Africa. But the best people to manage the climate crisis are the people in those communities themselves. For climate adaptation to succeed in Africa, let communities and local leaders show the wayBy Kennedy OdedeA local resident of Kiamako slum planting a tree near a site of homes destroyed by floods along the bank of Mathare river Boniface Muthoni/SOPA Images/Sipa USA/Alamy Live NewsWhen I was a baby, a long drought drove my family from our rural village in Kenya to Kibera, the largest slum in the country. My single mother wanted to provide us a better life, but with few prospects we ended up in the most vulnerable part of Nairobi.Climate change has shaped my life and taught me much about our environment. Even my name, Odede, means after the drought. Now I run a globally recognized, community-based NGO across Kenya that undertakes projects to help people adapt to such changes. For one, we have built an aerial water system in Kibera that can withstand the kind of extreme flooding that seems to be becoming more common and brings with it intensifying cycles of drought and rain.In Kenyas most recent catastrophic rainy season, these rains displaced more than 300,000 people nationwide, led to a cholera outbreak and further strained access to food and clean water. The destruction from climate-related extreme weather events can last for decades. These disasters turn community leaders into frontline response workers, developing solutions to fight for their futures, but nongovernmental organizations that work in Africa often neglect to tap into local leaders deep understanding of both the people in a community and their needs.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.We must be more than just bystanders, the passive recipients of aid in adaptation. Community leaders and local organizations must lead adaptation efforts. We, not the external groups who work in our communities, are the most knowledgeable about our local environment, and we have the most at stake.We are living in a decisive moment. More than 110 million Africans were directly affected by climate-related hazards in 2022, and up to 700 million people are projected to be displaced by 2030 because of climate change.Global climate priorities historically focused only on efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate global warming, but the IPCC, the United Nations program around climate change, has become increasingly vocal that climate change is already here, and we wont be able to slow it fast enough. This demands people instead adaptto hotter temperatures, more frequent or more intense disasters, and less water, among other things. According to Antnio Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, we are living in an adaptation emergency and must act like it. The 29th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP29), the U.N.s major climate change conference, will take place in Baku, Azerbaijan, this month. And climate adaptation will be a hotly debated topic there. Developed countries will be making funding pledges to the Adaptation Fund, which aims to support locally led adaptation and has previously fallen short of its funding targets. Targets desperately need to be met this year to properly establish climate adaptation efforts at this precarious timeAfrica is home to 17 of the 20 countries most at-risk of disruptions from climate-related hazards, and where slum dwellers, who are vulnerable to extreme weather events, make up over 60 percent of the urban population. Our communities have a disproportionate environmental impact in comparison to more-developed nations such that mitigation has little effect at this point. Africa must adapt to remain livable, by investing in solutions that help us better prepare for the impacts of climate change. Otherwise, far more people will become climate refugees.With its pipes suspended overhead, the water system created by the organization I lead, Shining Hope for Communities (SHOFCO), provides the clean water vital to adaptation, and eliminates the dangers of contaminated water by drawing from an underground borehole. During the most recent floods and the outbreak of waterborne disease, the system continued to provide clean water to residents of Kibera.In Nairobis Mathare slum, young people have organized clean-ups of the Mathare river, planting trees on the barren, hardened clay riverbank to prepare for floods. Trees help flood prevention by slowing the flow of heavy rain from sky to ground, mitigating runoff and preventing erosion. Another group in Mathare has created rooftop gardens and set up rainwater collection systems to make sure they can manage during drought without having to pay for water. They are planting trees like avocado, mango and guava, which provide nutrition and the opportunity to sell surplus produce. Initiatives like this are virtually unheard-of in densely overcrowded slums worldwide, where green space and municipal waste removal is lacking. Youth see climate change for the immediate threat it is, and are using all the resources at their disposal to make their communities more livable, now and into the future.And yet, despite projects like these, international policy makers who set the climate agenda and direct funds toward adaptation projects often overlook community-based leadership. This is, in part, because of funding dynamics; funders are too far removed from the communities they intend to reach, and so are unwilling to give up control of project agendas or to invest in strengthening local leadership.While local leaders may lack scientific expertise to forecast weather patterns, we are uniquely qualified to drive change; top-down approaches led by outside groups typically fail because many community members do not trust outsiders. They are more expensive, and less sustainable long-term. Local organizations can deliver programming that is 32 percent more cost-efficient than international groups, based on savings from salaries and overhead costs. Trusted local leaders with cultural knowledge are best positioned to understand peoples specific needs and to involve community members at every turn.In Zimbabwe a savings collective called the Gungano Urban Poor Fund offers loans for climate projects in poor, urban communities. In Namibia a government-funded small grants program called Empower to Adapt enabeled dozens of communal conservatories and community-managed forests to undertake projects to improve fire management, clean water supply, access to solar energy, and more. Many other climate adaptation projects are happening in rural Kenya, including distribution of drought-resistant seeds and tree nurseries and the transforming of food waste into organic fertilizer through composting. A recent three-year drought killed 80 percent of the regions cattle in northern Kenya, and the local Samburu tribe has begun to farm camels as a drought-resistant alternative, as they are able withstand more extreme conditions.Despite the success of these projects, climate adaptation has yet to receive the level of attention and investment needed, especially in the worlds most vulnerable places. This is, in part, because of the long-standing belief among some scientists and policy makers that moving to adaptation signals to people that the mitigation battle is lost. They fear people and governments will stop trying to promote renewable energy. And so, governments have not moved quickly enough to increase their adaptation targets. Globally, adaptation receives only 5 percent out of all climate-related investments measured, andonly 20 percent of that goes to Africaabout $13 billion annually. A U.N. economist has estimated that Africa, by 2030, will be $2.5 trillion short of the financing it needs to adapt to climate change.Despite the commitments laid out in the Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals, there is a growing divide between international financing flows and the needs on the ground. Adaptation financing from both public and private sector sources has fallen further off-track, and many African countries are struggling to access existing funding, instead relying on emergency response funding to cope with climate impacts. It is nowhere near enough. The longer we wait, the greater and more costly needs will become. International funders need to come to us, and trust us, because the next generation of climate leaders on the continent will be African. Give them what they need to survive, in place, at home.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

November 8, 20245 min readWhat Trump CanAnd Probably CantDo to Reverse U.S. Climate PolicyThe new president-elect can go beyond just pulling out of the Paris Agreement. But it may be more difficult to roll back clean energy policiesBy Gautam Jain & The Conversation USIn 2019, then-President Donald Trump visited a liquid natural gas facility in Hackberry, Louisiana. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty ImagesThe following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.As the U.S. prepares for another Trump administration, one area unambiguously in the incoming presidents crosshairs is climate policy.Although he has not released an official climate agenda, Donald Trumps playbook from his last stint in the Oval Office and his frequent complaints about clean energy offer some clues to whats ahead.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.Exiting the Paris climate agreementLess than six months into his first presidency, Trump in 2017 formally announced that he was withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate accord the 2015 international agreement signed by nearly every country as a pledge to work toward keeping rising temperatures and other impacts of climate change in check.This time, a greater but underappreciated risk is that Trump will not stop at the Paris Agreement.In addition to exiting the Paris Agreement again, Trump could try to withdraw the United States from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The 1992 treaty is the foundation for international climate talks. A withdrawal from that treaty would make it nearly impossible for a future administration to reenter the UNFCCC treaty because doing so would require the consent of two-thirds of the Senate.The reverberation of such a step would be felt around the world. While the Paris Agreement is not legally binding and is based on trust and leadership, the stance taken by the worlds largest economy affects what other countries are willing to do.It would also hand the climate leadership mantle to China.U.S. funding to help other countries scale up clean energy and adapt to climate change rose significantly during the Biden administration. The first U.S. International Climate Finance Plan provided US$11 billion in 2024 to help emerging and developing economies. And commitments from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation surged to almost $14 billion in the first two years of Bidens presidency, versus $12 billion during the four years of Trump. Biden also pledged $3 billion to the United Nations Green Climate Fund.Under President Trump, all these efforts will likely be scaled back again.Targeting clean energy might not be so simpleIn other areas, however, Trump may be less successful.He has been vocal about rolling back clean energy policies. However, it may be harder for him to eliminate the Biden administrations massive investments in clean energy, which are interwoven with much-needed investments in infrastructure and manufacturing in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.Since both are laws that Congress passed, Trump would need majorities in both Houses to repeal them.Even if Republicans end up with a trifecta controlling both houses of Congress and the White House repealing these laws will be challenging. Thats because the laws benefits are flowing heavily to red states. Trumps allies in the oil and gas industry also benefit from the laws tax credits for carbon capture, advanced biofuels and hydrogen.However, while the Inflation Reduction Act may not be repealed, it will almost certainly be tweaked. The tax credit to consumers who buy electric vehicles is likely on the chopping block, as is the EPA regulation tightening tailpipe pollution standards, making battery-powered cars uneconomical for many.Trump may also slow the work of the Department of Energys Loan Program Office, which has helped boost several clean energy industries. Again, this is not a surprise he did it in the first term except that the impact would be greater given that the offices lending capacity has since skyrocketed to over $200 billion, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act. So far, only about a quarter of the total has been doled out, so there is a rush to ramp up the pace before the new administration starts in January.Drill, baby, drill?Trump also talks about increasing fossil fuel production, and he almost certainly will take steps to boost the industry via deregulation and opening up more federal lands for drilling. But prospects of massively ramping up oil and gas production seem dim.The United States is already producing more crude oil than any country ever. Oil and gas companies are buying back stocks and paying dividends to shareholders at a record pace, which they wouldnt do if they saw better investment opportunities.The futures curve indicates lower oil prices ahead, which could be further weighed down by slowing demand from any resulting economic weakness if Trump follows through on his threat to impose tariffs on all imports, leading to the risk of lower profitability.Trump will likely try to roll back climate policies related to fossil fuels and emissions, which are the leading source of climate change, as he did with dozens of policies in his first administration.That includes eliminating a new federal charge for methane emissions from certain facilities the first attempt by the U.S. government to impose a fee or tax on greenhouse gas emissions. Methane is the primary component of natural gas and a potent greenhouse gas.Trump has also promised to support approvals of new liquefied natural gas, or LNG, export terminals, which the Biden administration tried to pause and is still working to slow down.The markets have a say in clean energys futureOne clean energy source that Trump is likely to rally behind is nuclear energy.And despite his criticism of wind and solar power, investments in renewable energy will likely continue rising because of market dynamics, especially with onshore wind and utility-scale solar projects becoming more cost effective than coal or gas.Nevertheless, a U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and the regulatory and policy uncertainty under Trump would likely slow the pace of investments. The expected inflationary impact of his economic policies is likely to negate the benefits of lower cost of capital that were expected to flow through with central banks lowering interest rates this year. Its an outcome that the warming planet can ill afford.This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

OpinionNovember 7, 20245 min readRainwater Could Help Satisfy AIs Water DemandsA few dozen ChatGPT queries cost a bottles worth of water. Tech firms should consider simpler solutions, like harvesting rainwater, to meet AIs needsBy Justin Talbot Zorn & Bettina Warburg Yamada Taro/Getty ImagesIn late September Microsoft announced that it had reached a deal to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power its growing network of data centers. Reviving the plant, home to a partial meltdown in 1979, is one of several extraordinary moves that tech companies are willing to make to meet the increasing energy demands of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and other technologies. Industry analysts at Transforma Insights predict the world will reach nearly 30 billion Internet of Things devices by 2030up from less than 10 billion in 2020.Still, as big tech companies tout nuclear power and other low-carbon energy plans, theyve presented surprisingly few ideas to meet their rapidly growing use of another scarce resource: water.Data centers require massive amounts of water for liquid cooling systems to absorb and dissipate the heat generated by servers. Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, have found that between five and 50 ChatGPT requests can consume up to 500 milliliters of water (close to the amount in a 16-ounce bottle). Those gulps add up. Google used 20 percent more water in 2022 compared to 2021 as it ramped up AI development. Microsoft's water use rose by 34 percent over the same period. By 2027 the amount of water AI uses in one year worldwide is projected to be on par with what a small European nation consumes. Worse, large numbers of data centers are located in water-stressed regions. Recently, a Google-owned data center in The Dalles, Oregon commanded one third of the city's water supply amid drought conditions.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.While some tech companies are making investments in water recycling, others are imagining long-shot innovations such as transporting seawater inland or even moving data centers under the ocean. Many are simply ignoring what their water use could eventually cost, not to mention the specter of drought. To date, only a few tech companies have taken steps to apply what might be the simplest, most proven and most promising strategy to mitigate water risks: catching rainwater from the sky.People have been gathering rainwater since ancient times. Now theres growing interest among water conservation advocates to collect rain from rooftops and send it down gutters into tanks. Then, at data centers, this water would be piped through cooling systems. Recent studies show that harvesting even a small portion of the rain that falls in a given area can eliminate water shortages while simultaneously recharging groundwater and reducing pollution from stormwater runoff. Theres no utility middleman needed when water is collected from a roof, meaning rainwater harvesting can be less expensive than purchasing equivalent amounts from a municipal supplyand avoid the greenhouse emissions associated with pumping water between sites.For years some states and municipalities restricted residential and industrial rainwater harvesting because of concerns about water quality or reductions in the water supply. But more recently state after state has authorized the practice as evidence for conservation benefits mounts. Cities like Tucson and Austin are now encouraging rainwater collection by offering incentives and establishing requirements. Apple, Ford and Toyota have recently integrated rainwater harvesting systems into corporate campuses and manufacturing facilities.But we believe that data centers are the biggest untapped opportunity for water conservation through rainwater harvesting. Its not just that data centers have the pressing need for waterits also that their large, flat roofs are well-suited to harvest water. A 50,000-square-foot roof can collect about 31,000 gallons of water from a single inch of rainabout as much as fills an average residential swimming pool. Many data centers feature roofs larger than 100,000 square feet, and some hyperscale data centers owned by major tech companies feature roofs of up to one million square feet.Why arent more data centers relying on rainwater harvesting? The cost, for one. Setting up a system for a commercial facility like a data center typically costs between $2 to $5 per square foot, depending on the systems complexity, storage and filtration needs. If the cost of municipal water in an area is low, it might not make sense to invest in rainwater capture. Whats more, rainwater systems rarely cover the total amount of water needed to cool a data center. Some massive facilities can consume a million gallons of water daily.But the economics of rainwater harvesting make more and more sense as both the cost and uncertainty of water resources increase, especially as the climate changes. Much like installing solar panels, installing a rainwater harvesting system is a one-time investment that reduces long-term utility costs. In some cases companies can leverage their existing stormwater management budgets toward rainwater harvesting. In places such as the greater Dallas area, home to many of the nations data centers, rainfall averages means that rainwater harvesting systems could cover up to a third of a data centers cooling needsdepending on size and storage systems. While the numbers are lower in arid regions, higher costs of water in those areas typically make the economics of rainwater harvesting more attractive. As public concern grows about the environmental effects of AI and other technologies, companies will likely need to consider both the financial and reputational risks of inaction on water.Some industry leaders are beginning to see the potential. A Google data center in South Carolina is using rainwater retention ponds for harvesting rainwater. A Microsoft data center has implemented rainwater harvesting in Sweden, reducing reliance on local water sources. Amazon Web Services highlights the potential of rainwater harvesting in its water positive strategy.On a policy level, green banksthe clean energy-focused financial institutions that are expanding all over the country following a $27 billion federal investment through the Inflation Reduction Actcould soon start helping to provide financing for rainwater projects. Rainwater has potential to win bipartisan supportand potentially even tax credits along the lines of recent renewables legislation. While the approach can be a popular cause among Democrats on climate resilience grounds, Republicans can support rainwater harvesting without needing to accept the science of climate change or oppose fossil fuel lobbies.At a time when Silicon Valley is turning to energy solutions like long-dormant nuclear plants, it might seem odd to address a pressing global challenge using a technology thats as old as civilization itself. But sometimes the best solutions can fall out of the sky.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.