Science – Page 6

Outbreak turns 30

Entertainment, epidemiology, films, Outbreak film, Science, viruses / Kelly Newman / March 14, 2025

Ars chats with epidemiologist Tara Smith about the film’s scientific accuracy and impact over 3 decades.

Dustin Hoffman and Renee Russo starred in this medical disaster thriller. Credit: Warner Bros.

Back in 2020, when the COVID pandemic was still new, everyone was “sheltering in place” and bingeing films and television. Pandemic-related fare proved especially popular, including the 1995 medical disaster-thriller Outbreak, starring Dustin Hoffman. Chalk it up to morbid curiosity, which some researchers have suggested is an evolved response mechanism for dealing with threats by learning from imagined experiences. Outbreak turned 30 this week, making this the perfect time to revisit the film.

(Spoilers for Outbreak abound below.)

Outbreak deals with the re-emergence of a deadly virus called Motaba, 28 years after it first appeared in an African jungle, infecting US soldiers and many others. The US military secretly destroyed the camp to conceal evidence of the virus, a project overseen by Major General Donald McClintock (Donald Sutherland) and Brigadier General William Ford (Morgan Freeman). When it re-emerges in Zaire decades later, a military doctor, Colonel Sam Daniels (Hoffman), takes a team to the afflicted village to investigate, only to find the entire town has died.

Daniels takes blood samples and realizes the villagers had been infected by a deadly new virus. But Ford shrugs off Daniels’ concerns about a potential global spread, not wanting the truth to come out about the bombing of the village nearly 30 years ago. Daniels alerts his estranged ex-wife, Dr. Roberta “Robby” Keough, who works for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about the virus, and she, too, is initially concerned.

Meanwhile, a local monkey is captured and brought to the US as an exotic pet. A smuggler named Jimbo (Patrick Dempsey)—who works at an animal testing facility—tries to sell the monkey to a pet shop owner named Rudy (Daniel Chodos) in the fictional town of Cedar Creek, California. The monkey bites Rudy. Unable to sell the monkey, Jimbo lets it loose in the woods and flies home to Boston. Both Jimbo and his girlfriend (who greets him at Logan Airport and passionately kisses a feverish Jimbo right before he collapses) die from the virus.

Naturally Keough hears about the Boston cases and realizes Daniels was right—the new virus has found its way to American soil. Initially she thinks there aren’t any other cases, but then Rudy’s demise comes to light, along with the death of a hospital technician who became infected after accidentally breaking a vial of Rudy’s blood during testing. When the virus strikes down a cinema filled with moviegoers, Daniels and Keough realize the virus has mutated and become airborne.

This time Ford and a reluctant McClintock can’t afford not to act as the bodies keep piling up. The military declares martial law in the town as Daniels and his fellow scientists race to develop a cure, even as the nefarious McClintock schemes to bomb Cedar Creek to smithereens to contain the virus. The deaths of the residents strike him as a necessary cost to preserve his hopes of developing Motaba as a biological weapon; he dismisses them as “casualties of war.”

Outbreak ended up grossing nearly $190 million worldwide when it was released in March 1995, but critical reviews were mixed. Some loved the medical thriller aspects and quick pacing, while others dismissed it as shallow and improbable. Some of the biggest criticisms of the film came from scientists.

A mixed bag

“Honestly, the science, if you look at it broadly, is not awful,” Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State University in Ohio, told Ars. “They showed BSL-4 facilities and had a little description of the different levels that you work in. The protagonists respond to an outbreak, they take samples, they bring them back to the lab. They infect some cells, infect some animals, they do some microscopy, although it’s not clear that they’re actually doing electron microscopy, which would be needed to see the virus. But overall, the steps are right.”

Granted, there are plenty of things to nitpick. “There’s a lot of playfulness,” said Smith. “Kevin Spacey [who plays military doctor Lt. Col. Casey Schuler] takes out a fake virus tube and tosses it to Cuba Gooding Jr. [who plays another military doctor, Major Salt]. You don’t play in the BSL-4 laboratories. You just don’t. And a lab tech [who becomes infected] is spinning a centrifuge and doing other things at the same time. Then he opens up the centrifuge and just puts his hand in there and everything breaks. That’s how he gets exposed to the virus. I’ve used a centrifuge hundreds of times. You wait until everything is stopped to open it up. As a trained scientist, those are the things you are told over and over not to do. [The filmmakers] exploit those to drive the plot.”

One of the biggest scientific criticisms is the time compression: the virus multiplies in the body within an hour instead of days; Salt eventually synthesizes a cure in under a minute when this would normally take months; and Keough (who has been infected) recovers almost immediately after being injected with said cure. Smith also noted that scientists identify the two Motaba strains using electron micrographs rather than sequencing them, as would normally be required.

And that whole bit about the Motaba virus liquefying organs just isn’t a thing, according to Smith. “If you read The Hot Zone [Richard Preston’s bestselling 1994 nonfiction thriller], or watch Outbreak and take a shot every time you hear ‘liquefying,’ you would be dead by the end,” she said. “I don’t know how that trope got so established in the media, but you see it every time the Ebola comes up: people are bleeding from their eyes, they’re liquefying. That doesn’t happen. They’re horribly sick. It is an awful virus, but people don’t just melt.”

That said, “I think the biggest [scientific] issue with Outbreak was the whole airborne thing,” said Smith. “Realistically, viruses just don’t change transmission like that.”

Influencing public perceptions

According to Smith, Outbreak may have impacted public perceptions of the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak—the largest yet seen—fueling widespread fear. “There were very serious people in The New York Times talking about Ebola potentially becoming airborne,” she said. “There was one study where scientists had aerosolized the virus on purpose and given it to pigs and the pigs got infected, which was treated as proof that Ebola could be airborne.”

“That idea that Ebola is super contagious and you can spread it by air—that really originates with Outbreak in 1995, because if you look at the science, it’s just not there,” Smith continued. “Ebola is not that easy to get unless you have close, personal, bodily-fluid-exchanging contact. But people certainly thought it was airborne in 2014–2015, and thought that Ebola was going to cause this huge outbreak in the United States. Of course, we just had a few select cases.”

Smith is currently working on a project that reviews various outbreak stories in popular media and their influence on public perception, particularly when it comes to the origins of those outbreaks. “Where does the virus, fungus, or bacteria come from?” said Smith. “So many films and TV series have used a lab leak origin, where something was made in the laboratory, it escapes, and causes a global pandemic. That’s an important narrative when we talk about the COVID pandemic, because so many people jumped on the lab leak bandwagon as an origin for that. In Outbreak it’s a natural virus, not a lab leak. I don’t think you’d see that if it were re-made today.”

Sam and Salt find the information they’re looking for. Warner Bros.

Outbreak is often unfavorably compared to another pandemic movie, 2011’s Contagion, of which Smith is naturally a fan. “Contagion is the gold standard [of pandemic movies],” said Smith. “Contagion was done in very close collaboration with a lot of scientists. One of the scientists in the movie is even named for [Columbia University epidemiologist] Ian Lipkin. Scientific accuracy was more important from the start. And there’s a bigger timeframe. These things happen in months rather than days. Even in Contagion, the vaccine was developed quicker than in the COVID pandemic, but at least it was a little bit more realistically done, scarily so when you think about the Jude Law character who was the blogger peddling fake cures—very similar to Ivermectin during the COVID pandemic.”

One might quibble with the science, but as entertainment, after 30 years, the film holds up remarkably well, despite the obvious tropes of action films of the 1990s. (Sam and Salt defying orders and hijacking a military helicopter, then using it to face-off mid-air against a military aircraft deployed to bomb the town out of existence, is just one credibility-straining example.) The talented cast alone makes it worth a rewatch. And for Smith, it was nice to see a strong female epidemiologist as a leading character in Russo’s Bobby Keough. On the whole, “I honestly think Outbreak was fairly good,” she said.

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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In one dog breed, selection for utility may have selected for obesity

behavior, Biology, Dogs, Genetics, Labrador retriever, Science / 9u50fv / March 14, 2025

High-risk Labradors also tended to pester their owners for food more often. Dogs with low genetic risk scores, on the other hand, stayed slim regardless of whether the owners paid attention to how and whether they were fed or not.

But other findings proved less obvious. “We’ve long known chocolate-colored Labradors are prone to being overweight, and I’ve often heard people say that’s because they’re really popular as pets for young families with toddlers that throw food on the floor all the time and where dogs are just not given that much attention,” Raffan says. Her team’s data showed that chocolate Labradors actually had a much higher genetic obesity risk than yellow or black ones

Some of the Labradors particularly prone to obesity, the study found, were guide dogs, which were included in the initial group. Training a guide dog in the UK usually takes around two years, during which the dogs learn multiple skills, like avoiding obstacles, stopping at curbs, navigating complex environments, and responding to emergency scenarios. Not all dogs are able to successfully finish this training, which is why guide dogs are often selectively bred with other guide dogs in the hope their offspring would have a better chance at making it through the same training.

But it seems that this selective breeding among guide dogs might have had unexpected consequences. “Our results raise the intriguing possibility that we may have inadvertently selected dogs prone to obesity, dogs that really like their food, because that makes them a little bit more trainable. They would do anything for a biscuit,” Raffan says.

The study also found that genes responsible for obesity in dogs are also responsible for obesity in humans. “The impact high genetic risk has on dogs leads to increased appetite. It makes them more interested in food,” Raffan claims. “Exactly the same is true in humans. If you’re at high genetic risk you aren’t inherently lazy or rubbish about overeating—it’s just you are more interested in food and get more reward from it.”

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.ads2145

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No, that’s not a cosmic cone of shame—it’s NASA’s newest space telescope

Science, Space / Beth Washington / March 13, 2025

A filter for the Universe

“SPHEREx is going to produce an enormous three-dimensional map of the entire night sky.”

NASA’s SPHEREx observatory after completion of environmental testing at BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, last year. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/BAE Systems

Satellites come in all shapes and sizes, but there aren’t any that look quite like SPHEREx, an infrared observatory NASA launched Tuesday night in search of answers to simmering questions about how the Universe, and ultimately life, came to be.

The mission launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 8: 10 pm local time (11: 10 pm EDT) Tuesday. Less than 45 minutes later, the Falcon 9’s upper stage released SPHEREx into a polar orbit at an altitude of roughly 420 miles (675 kilometers). Ground controllers received the first signals from the spacecraft, confirming its health after reaching space.

As soon as next month, once engineers verify the observatory is ready, SPHEREx will begin a two-year science mission surveying the sky in 102 colors invisible to the human eye. The observatory’s infrared detectors will collect data on the chemical composition of asteroids, hazy star-forming clouds, and faraway galaxies.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted SPHEREx into orbit. Credit: NASA/Jim Ross

“SPHEREx is going to produce an enormous three-dimensional map of the entire night sky, and with this immense and novel dataset, we’re going to address some of the most fundamental questions in astrophysics,” said Phil Korngut, the mission’s instrument scientist at Caltech.

“Using a technique called linear variable filter spectroscopy, we’re going to produce 102 maps in 102 wavelengths every six months, and our baseline mission is to do this four times over the course of two years,” Korngut said.

Boiling it down

The mission’s full name, for which SPHEREx is the acronym, is a mouthful—it stands for the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer. The $488 million mission seeks answers to three basic questions: How did the Universe begin? How did galaxies begin? What are the conditions for life outside the Solar System?

While it’s possible to sum up these objectives in an elevator pitch, the details touch on esoteric topics like cosmic inflation, quantum physics, and the flatness of spacetime. Philosophically, these questions are existential. SPHEREx will try to punch above its weight.

Built by BAE Systems, SPHEREx is about the size of a subcompact car, and it lacks the power and resolution of a flagship observatory like the James Webb Space Telescope. Webb’s primary mirror spans more than 21 feet (6.5 meters) across, while SPHEREx’s primary mirror has an effective diameter of just 7.9 inches (20 centimeters), comparable to a consumer-grade backyard telescope.

SPHEREx will test the inflationary model, a theory to explain the unimaginably violent moments after the Big Bang. Credit: NASA

But NASA’s newest space telescope has a few advantages. While Webb is designed to peer deep into small slivers of the sky, SPHEREx’s wider field of view will observe the sky in all directions. Like its name might suggest, SPHEREx will capture a spherical view of the cosmos. Color filters overlay the instrument’s detector array to separate light entering the telescope into its component wavelengths, a process known as spectroscopy. NASA says SPHEREx’s unique design allows it to conduct infrared spectroscopy on hundreds of thousands of objects simultaneously, and more than 600 exposures per day.

“SPHEREx is a testament to doing big science with a small telescope,” said Beth Fabinsky, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Because SPHEREx orbits hundreds of miles above the Earth, the telescope flies above the discernible atmosphere, which can absorb faint thermal energy coming from distant astronomical sources. Its detectors must be cold, below minus 360° Fahrenheit, or 55 Kelvin, or the telescope would be blinded by its own light. This is the reason the spacecraft has such an unusual look.

Many past infrared telescopes used cryogenic coolant to chill their detectors, but this is a finite resource that gradually boils off in space, limiting mission lifetimes. Webb uses a complicated tennis court-sized sunshield to block heat and light from the Sun from its infrared instruments. Engineers came up with a simpler solution for SPHEREx.

Three concentric photon shields extend from the top of the spacecraft to insulate the telescope’s optics and detectors from light from the Sun and the Earth. This design requires no moving parts, boosting the mission’s reliability and longevity. The photon shields look like an Elizabethan collar. Pet owners may know it as the “cone of shame” given to animals after surgeries.

Like NASA’s new half-billion-dollar space telescope, this cheery canine wears his collar with pride. Credit: Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

For SPHEREx, this cone is an enabler, allowing astronomers to map hundreds of millions of galaxies to study inflation, a cosmological theory that suggests the Universe underwent a mind-boggling expansion just after the Big Bang nearly 13.8 billion years ago. Through the process of inflation, the Universe grew a “trillion-trillion-fold” in a fraction of a second, Korngut said.

The theory suggests inflation left behind the blueprint for the largest-scale structures of the Universe, called the cosmic web. Inflation “expanded tiny fluctuations, smaller than an atom, to enormous cosmological scales that we see today, traced out by galaxies and clusters of galaxies,” said Jamie Bock, a cosmologist at Caltech who leads the SPHEREx science team.

“Even though inflation (theory) was invented in the 1980s, it’s been tested over the intervening decades and has been consistent with the data,” Bock said. “While we have this general picture, we still don’t know what drove inflation, why it happened. So what SPHEREx will do is test certain models of inflation by tracing out the three dimensions, hundreds of millions of galaxies, over the entire sky. And those galaxies trace out the initial fluctuations set up by inflation.”

SPHEREx’s telescope will also collect the combined light emitted by all galaxies, all the way back to the cosmic dawn, when the first stars and galaxies shined through the foggy aftermath of the Big Bang. Scientists believe star formation peaked in the Universe some 10 billion years ago, but their understanding of cosmic history is based on observations of a relatively small population of galaxies.

“SPHEREx, with its small telescope, is going to address this subject in a novel way,” Bock said. “Instead of really counting, very deeply, individual galaxies, SPHEREx is going to look at the total glow produced by all galaxies. This cosmological glow captures all light emitted over cosmic history from galaxies, as well as anything else that emits light. So it’s a very different way of looking at the Universe, and in particular, that first stage of star and galaxy formation must also be in this cosmic glow.”

Bock and his science team will match the aggregate data from SPHEREx with what they know about the Universe’s early galaxies from missions like Webb and the Hubble Space Telescope. “We can compare to counts that have been built up with large telescopes and see if we’ve missed any sources of light,” Bock said.

Closer to home

In our own galaxy, SPHEREx will use its infrared sensitivity to investigate the origins and abundance of water and ice in molecular clouds, the precursors to alien solar systems where gas and dust collapse to form stars and planets.

“We think that most of the water and ice in the universe is in places like this,” said Rachel Akeson, SPHEREx science data center lead at Caltech. “It’s also likely that the water in Earth’s oceans originated in the molecular cloud. So how will SPHEREx map the ice in our galaxy? While other space telescopes have found reservoirs of water in hundreds of locations, SPHEREx observations of our galaxy will give us more than 9 million targets, a much bigger sample than we have now.”

As the telescope scans across these millions of targets, its detectors will measure of each point in the sky in 102 infrared wavelengths. With the help of spectroscopy, SPHEREx will measure how much water is bound up in these star-forming clouds.

“Knowing the water content around the galaxy is a clue to how many locations could potentially host life,” Akeson said.

The SPHEREx observatory (top) was joined on its ride to space by four small NASA satellites (bottom) setting out to study the solar wind. Credit: Benjamin Fry/BAE Systems

All-sky surveys like SPHEREx’s often turn up surprises because they ingest immense amounts of data. They leave behind enduring legacies by building up catalogs of galaxies and stars. Astronomers use these archives to plan follow-up observations by more powerful telescopes like Webb and Hubble, or with future observatories employing technologies unavailable today.

As it pans across the sky observing distant galaxies, SPHEREx’s telescope will also catch glimpses of targets within our own Solar System. These include planets and thousands of asteroids, comets, icy worlds beyond Pluto, and interstellar objects that occasionally transit through the Solar System. SPHEREx will measure water, iron, carbon dioxide, and multiple types of ices (water, methane, nitrogen, ammonia, and others) on the surface of these worlds closer to home.

Finding savings where possible

A second NASA mission hitched a ride to space with SPHEREx, deploying into a similar orbit a few minutes after the Falcon 9 released its primary payload.

This secondary mission, called PUNCH, consists of four suitcase-size satellites that will study the solar corona, or outer atmosphere, a volatile sheath of super-heated gas extending millions of miles from the Sun’s surface. NASA expects PUNCH’s $150 million mission will reveal information about how the corona generates the solar wind, charged particles that stream continuously from the Sun in all directions.

There are tangible reasons to study the solar wind. These particles travel through space at speeds close to 1 million mph, and upon reaching Earth, interact with our planet’s magnetic field. Bursts of energy erupting from the Sun, like solar flares, can generate shocks in the solar wind current, leading to higher risks for geomagnetic storms. These have a range of effects on the Earth, ranging from colorful but benign auroras to disruptions to satellite operations and navigation and communications systems.

Other NASA spacecraft have zoomed in to observe second-by-second changes in the Sun’s atmosphere, and a fleet of sentinels closer to Earth measure the solar wind after it has traveled through space for three days. PUNCH will combine the imaging capacities of four small satellites to create a single “virtual instrument” with a view broad enough to monitor the solar wind as it leaves the Sun and courses farther into the Solar System.

Hailing a ride to space is not as simple as opening up Uber on your phone, but sharing rides offers a more cost-effective way to launch small satellites like PUNCH. SpaceX regularly launches rideshare flights, called Transporter missions, on its Falcon 9 rocket, sometimes with more than 100 satellites on a single launch going to a standard orbit. Missions like SPHEREx and PUNCH aren’t usually a good fit for SpaceX’s Transporter missions because they have more stringent demands for cleanliness and must launch into bespoke orbits to achieve their science goals.

Matching SPHEREx and PUNCH to the same rocket required both missions to go to the same orbit and be ready for launch at the same time. That’s a luxury not often available to NASA’s mission planners, but where possible, the agency wants to take advantage of rideshare opportunities.

Launching the PUNCH mission on its own dedicated rocket would have likely cost at least $15 million. This is the approximate price of a mission on Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket, the cheapest US launcher with the muscle to lift the PUNCH satellites into orbit.

“This is a real change in how we do business,” said Mark Clampin, the acting deputy administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, or SMD. “It’s a new strategy that SMD is working where we can maximize the efficiency of launches by flying two payloads at once, so we maximize the science return.”

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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Large study shows drinking alcohol is good for your cholesterol levels

alcohol, Cholesterol, health, Science / Kelly Newman / March 13, 2025

The good and the bad

For reference, the optimal LDL level for adults is less than 100 mg/dL, and optimal HDL is 60 mg/dL or higher. Higher LDL levels can increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, peripheral artery disease, and other health problems, while higher HDL has a protective effect against cardiovascular disease. Though some of the changes reported in the study were small, the researchers note that they could be meaningful in some cases. For instance, an increase of 5 mg/dL in LDL is enough to raise the risk of a cardiovascular event by 2 percent to 3 percent.

The researchers ran three different models to adjust for a variety of factors, including basics like age, sex, body mass index, as well as medical conditions, such as hypertension and diabetes, and lifestyle factors, such as exercise, dietary habits, and smoking. All the models showed the same associations. They also broke out the data by what kinds of alcohol people reported drinking—wine, beer, sake, other liquors and spirits. The results were the same across the categories.

The study isn’t the first to find good news for drinkers’ cholesterol levels, though it’s one of the larger studies with longer follow-up time. And it’s long been found that alcohol drinking seems to have some benefits for cardiovascular health. A recent review and meta-analysis by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that moderate drinkers had lower relative risks of heart attacks and strokes. The analysis also found that drinkers had a lower risk of all-cause mortality (death by any cause). The study did, however, find increased risks of breast cancer. Another recent review found increased risk of colorectal, female breast, liver, oral cavity, pharynx, larynx, and esophagus cancers.

In all, the new cholesterol findings aren’t an invitation for nondrinkers to start drinking or for heavy drinkers to keep hitting the bottle hard, the researchers caution. There are a lot of other risks to consider. For drinkers who aren’t interested in quitting, the researchers recommend taking it easy. And those who do want to quit should keep a careful eye on their cholesterol levels.

In their words: “Public health recommendations should continue to emphasize moderation in alcohol consumption, but cholesterol levels should be carefully monitored after alcohol cessation to mitigate potential [cardiovascular disease] risks,” the researchers conclude.

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How whale urine benefits the ocean ecosystem

Biology, Ecology, marine animals, marine ecology, Science, whales / 9u50fv / March 12, 2025

A “great whale conveyor belt”

illustration showing how whale urine spreads throughout the ocean ecosystem — Credit: A. Boersma

Migrating whales typically gorge in summers at higher latitudes to build up energy reserves to make the long migration to lower latitudes. It’s still unclear exactly why the whales migrate, but it’s likely that pregnant females in particular find it more beneficial to give birth and nurse their young in warm, shallow, sheltered areas—perhaps to protect their offspring from predators like killer whales. Warmer waters also keep the whale calves warm as they gradually develop their insulating layers of blubber. Some scientists think that whales might also migrate to molt their skin in those same warm, shallow waters.

Roman et al. examined publicly available spatial data for whale feeding and breeding grounds, augmented with sightings from airplane and ship surveys to fill in gaps in the data, then fed that data into their models for calculating nutrient transport. They focused on six species known to migrate seasonally over long distances from higher latitudes to lower latitudes: blue whales, fin whales, gray whales, humpback whales, and North Atlantic and southern right whales.

They found that whales can transport some 4,000 tons of nitrogen each year during their migrations, along with 45,000 tons of biomass—and those numbers could have been three times larger in earlier eras before industrial whaling depleted populations. “We call it the ‘great whale conveyor belt,’” Roman said. “It can also be thought of as a funnel, because whales feed over large areas, but they need to be in a relatively confined space to find a mate, breed, and give birth. At first, the calves don’t have the energy to travel long distances like the moms can.” The study did not include any effects from whales releasing feces or sloughing their skin, which would also contribute to the overall nutrient flux.

“Because of their size, whales are able to do things that no other animal does. They’re living life on a different scale,” said co-author Andrew Pershing, an oceanographer at the nonprofit organization Climate Central. “Nutrients are coming in from outside—and not from a river, but by these migrating animals. It’s super-cool, and changes how we think about ecosystems in the ocean. We don’t think of animals other than humans having an impact on a planetary scale, but the whales really do.”

Nature Communications, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-56123-2 (About DOIs).

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NCI employees can’t publish information on these topics without special approval

Department of Health and Human Services, health, National Cancer Institute, rfk jr, Science, syndication, trump administration / Shannon Garcia / March 11, 2025

The list is “an unusual mix of words that are tied to activities that this administration has been at war with—like equity, but also words that they purport to be in favor of doing something about, like ultraprocessed food,” Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco, said in an email.

The guidance states that staffers “do not need to share content describing the routine conduct of science if it will not get major media attention, is not controversial or sensitive, and does not touch on an administration priority.”

A longtime senior employee at the institute said that the directive was circulated by the institute’s communications team, and the content was not discussed at the leadership level. It is not clear in which exact office the directive originated. The NCI, NIH and HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions. (The existence of the list was first revealed in social media posts on Friday.)

Health and research experts told ProPublica they feared the chilling effect of the new guidance. Not only might it lead to a lengthier and more complex clearance process, it may also cause researchers to censor their work out of fear or deference to the administration’s priorities.

“This is real interference in the scientific process,” said Linda Birnbaum, a former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences who served as a federal scientist for four decades. The list, she said, “just seems like Big Brother intimidation.”

During the first two months of Donald Trump’s second presidency, his administration has slashed funding for research institutions and stalled the NIH’s grant application process.

Kennedy has suggested that hundreds of NIH staffers should be fired and said that the institute should deprioritize infectious diseases like COVID-19 and shift its focus to chronic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity.

Obesity is on the NCI’s new list, as are infectious diseases including COVID-19, bird flu and measles.

The “focus on bird flu and covid is concerning,” Woodruff wrote, because “not being transparent with the public about infectious diseases will not stop them or make them go away and could make them worse.”

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

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What the EPA’s “endangerment finding” is and why it’s being challenged

climate change, Earth science, EPA, greenhouse gasses, Policy, Science, trump administration / Shannon Garcia / March 11, 2025

Getting rid of the justification for greenhouse gas regulations won’t be easy.

Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images

A document that was first issued in 2009 would seem an unlikely candidate for making news in 2025. Yet the past few weeks have seen a steady stream of articles about an analysis first issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the early years of Obama’s first term: the endangerment finding on greenhouse gases.

The basics of the document are almost mundane: Greenhouse gases are warming the climate, and this will have negative consequences for US citizens. But it took a Supreme Court decision to get written in the first place, and it has played a role in every attempt by the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions across multiple administrations. And, while the first Trump administration left it in place, the press reports we’re seeing suggest that an attempt will be made to eliminate it in the near future.

The only problem: The science in which the endangerment finding is based on is so solid that any ensuing court case will likely leave its opponents worse off in the long run, which is likely why the earlier Trump administration didn’t challenge it.

Get comfortable, because the story dates all the way back to the first Bush administration.

A bit of history

One of the goals of the US’s Clean Air Act, first passed in 1963, is to “address the public health and welfare risks posed by certain widespread air pollutants.” By the end of the last century, it was becoming increasingly clear that greenhouse gases fit that definition. While they weren’t necessarily directly harmful to the people inhaling them—our lungs are constantly being filled with carbon dioxide, after all—the downstream effects of the warming they caused could certainly impact human health and welfare. But, with the federal government taking no actions during George W. Bush’s time in office, a group of states and cities sued to force the EPA’s hand.

That suit eventually reached the Supreme Court in the form of Massachusetts v. EPA, which led to a ruling in 2007 determining that the Clean Air Act required the EPA to perform an analysis of the dangers posed by greenhouse gases. That analysis was done by late 2007, but the Bush administration simply ignored it for the remaining year it had in office. (It was eventually released after Bush left office.)

That left the Obama-era EPA to reach essentially the same conclusions that the Bush administration had: greenhouse gases are warming the planet. And that will have various impacts—sea-level rise, dangerous heat, damage to agriculture and forestry, and more.

That conclusion compelled the EPA to formulate regulations to limit the emission of greenhouse gases from power plants. Obama’s EPA did just that, but came late enough to still be tied up in courts by the time his term ended. The regulations were also formulated before the plunge in the cost of renewable power sources, which have since led to a drop in carbon emissions that have far outpaced what the EPA’s rules intended to accomplish.

The first Trump administration formulated alternative rules that also ended up in court for being an insufficient response to the conclusions of the endangerment finding, which ultimately led the Biden administration to start formulating a new set of rules. And at that point, the Supreme Court decided to step in and rule on the Obama rules, even though everyone knew they would never go into effect.

The court indicated that the EPA needed to regulate each power plant individually, rather than regulating the wider grid, which sent the Biden administration back to the drawing board. Its attempts at crafting regulations were also in court when Trump returned to office.

There were a couple of notable aspects to that last case, West Virginia v. EPA, which hinged on the fact that Congress had never explicitly indicated that it wanted to see greenhouse gases regulated. Congress responded by ensuring that the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy-focused components specifically mentioned that these were intended to limit carbon emissions, eliminating one potential roadblock. The other thing is that, in this and other court cases, the Supreme Court could have simply overturned Massachusetts v. EPA, the case that put greenhouse gases within the regulatory framework of the Clean Air Act. Yet a court that has shown a great enthusiasm for overturning precedent didn’t do so.

Nothing dangerous?

So, in the 15 years since the EPA initially released its endangerment findings, they’ve resulted in no regulations whatsoever. But, as long as they existed, the EPA is required to at least attempt to regulate them. So, getting rid of the endangerment findings would seem like the obvious thing for an administration led by a president who repeatedly calls climate change a hoax. And there were figures within the first Trump administration who argued in favor of that.

So why didn’t it happen?

That was never clear, but I’d suggest at least some members of the first Trump administration were realistic about the likely results. The effort to contest the endangerment finding was pushed by people who largely reject the vast body of scientific evidence that indicates that greenhouse gases are warming the climate. And, if anything, the evidence had gotten more decisive in the years between the initial endangerment finding and Trump’s inauguration. I expect that their effort was blocked by people who knew that it would fail in the courts and likely leave behind precedents that made future regulatory efforts easier.

This interpretation is supported by the fact that the Trump-era EPA received a number of formal petitions to revisit the endangerment finding. Having read a few (something you should not do), they are uniformly awful. References to supposed peer-reviewed “papers” turn out to be little more than PDFs hosted on a WordPress site. Other arguments are based on information contained in the proceedings of a conference organized by an anti-science think tank. The Trump administration rejected them all with minimal comment the day before Biden’s inauguration.

Biden’s EPA went back and made detailed criticisms of each of them if you want to see just how laughable the arguments against mainstream science were at the time. And, since then, we’ve experienced a few years of temperatures that are so high they’ve surprised many climate scientists.

Unrealistic

But the new head of the EPA is apparently anything but a realist, and multiple reports have indicated he’s asking to be given the opportunity to go ahead and redo the endangerment finding. A more recent report suggests two possibilities. One is to recruit scientists from the fringes to produce a misleading report and roll the dice on getting a sympathetic judge who will overlook the obvious flaws. The other would be to argue that any climate change that happens will have net benefits to the US.

That latter approach would run into the problem that we’ve gotten increasingly sophisticated at doing analyses that attribute the impact of climate change on the individual weather disasters that do harm the welfare of citizens of the US. While it might have been possible to make a case for uncertainty here a decade ago, that window has been largely closed by the scientific community.

Even if all of these efforts fail, it will be entirely possible for the EPA to construct greenhouse gas regulations that accomplish nothing and get tied up in court for the remainder of Trump’s term. But a court case could show just how laughably bad the positions staked out by climate contrarians are (and, by extension, the position of the president himself). There’s a small chance that the resulting court cases will result in a legal record that will make it that much harder to accept the sorts of minimalist regulations that Trump proposed in his first term.

Which is probably why this approach was rejected the first time around.

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

What the EPA’s “endangerment finding” is and why it’s being challenged Read More »

Study: Megalodon’s body shape was closer to a lemon shark

aquatic animals, megalogon, paleontology, Science / Beth Washington / March 10, 2025

the mighty, mighty megalodon

Also: Baby megalodons were likely the size of great white sharks and capable of hunting marine mammals

The giant extinct shark species known as the megalodon has captured the interest of scientists and the general public alike, even inspiring the 2018 blockbuster film The Meg. The species lived some 3.6 million years ago and no complete skeleton has yet been found. So there has been considerable debate among paleobiologists about megalodon’s size, body shape and swimming speed, among other characteristics.

While some researchers have compared megalodon to a gigantic version of the stocky great white shark, others believe the species had a more slender body shape. A new paper published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica bolsters the latter viewpoint, also drawing conclusions about the megalodon’s body mass, swimming speed (based on hydrodynamic principles), and growth patterns.

As previously reported, the largest shark alive today, reaching up to 20 meters long, is the whale shark, a sedate filter feeder. As recently as 4 million years ago, however, sharks of that scale likely included the fast-moving predator megalodon (formally Otodus megalodon). Due to incomplete fossil data, we’re not entirely sure how large megalodons were and can only make inferences based on some of their living relatives.

Thanks to research published in 2023 on its fossilized teeth, we’re now fairly confident that megalodon shared something else with these relatives: it wasn’t entirely cold-blooded and kept its body temperature above that of the surrounding ocean. Most sharks, like most fish, are ectothermic, meaning that their body temperatures match those of the surrounding water. But a handful of species, part of a group termed mackerel sharks, are endothermic: They have a specialized pattern of blood circulation that helps retain some of the heat their muscles produce. This enables them to keep some body parts at a higher temperature than their surroundings.

Of particular relevance to this latest paper is a 2022 study by Jack Cooper of Swansea University in the UK and his co-authors. In 2020, the team reconstructed a 2D model of the megalodon, basing the dimensions on similar existing shark species. The researchers followed up in 2022 with a reconstructed 3D model, extrapolating the dimensions from a megalodon specimen (a vertebral column) in Belgium. Cooper concluded that a megalodon would have been a stocky, powerful shark—measuring some 52 feet (16 meters) in length with a body mass of 67.86 tons—able to execute bursts of high speed to attack prey, much like the significantly smaller great white shark.

(H) One of the largest vertebrae of Otodus meg- alodon; (I and J) CT scans showing cross-sectional views. — (H) One of the largest vertebrae of *Otodus megalodon*; (I and J) CT scans showing cross-sectional views. Credit: Shimada et al., 2025

Not everyone agreed, however, Last year, a team of 26 shark experts led by Kesnshu Shimada, a paleobiologist at DePaul University, further challenged the great white shark comparison, arguing that the super-sized creature’s body was more slender and possibly even longer than researchers previously thought. The team concluded that based on the spinal column, the combination of a great white build with the megalodon’s much longer length would have simply proved too cumbersome.

A fresh approach

Now Shimada is back with a fresh analysis, employing a new method that he says provides independent lines of evidence for the megalodon’s slender build. “Our new study does not use the modern great white shark as a model, but rather simply asks, ‘How long were the head and tail based on the trunk [length] represented by the fossil vertebral column?’ using the general body plan seen collectively in living and fossil sharks,” Shimada told Ars.

Shimada and his co-authors measured the proportions of 145 modern and 20 extinct species of shark, particularly the head, trunk, and tail relative to total body length. Megalodon was represented by a Belgian vertebral specimen. The largest vertebra in that specimen measured 15.5 centimeters (6 inches) in diameter, although there are other megalodon vertebrae in Denmark, for example, with diameters as much as 23 centimeters (9 inches).

Based on their analysis, Shimada et al, concluded that, because the trunk section of the Belgian specimen measured 11 meters, the head and tail were probably about 1.8 meters (6 feet) and 3.6 meters (12 feet) long, respectively, with a total body length of 16.4 meters (54 feet) for this particularly specimen. That means the Danish megalodon specimens could have been as long as 24.3 meters (80 feet). As for body shape, taking the new length estimates into account, the lemon shark appears to be closest modern analogue. “However, the exact position and shape of practically all the fins remain uncertain,” Shimada cautioned. “We are only talking about the main part of the body.”

Revised tentative body outline of 24.3 meters (80 feet) extinct megatooth shark, Otodus megalodon. — Credit: DePaul University/Kenshu Shimada

The team also found that a 24.3-meter-long megalodon would have weighed a good 94 tons with an estimated swimming speed of 2.1-3.5 KPM (1.3-2.2 MPH). They also studied growth patterns evident in the Belgian vertebrae, concluding that the megalodon would give live birth and that the newborns would be between 3.6 to 3.9 meters (12-13 feet) long—i.e., roughly the size of a great white shark. The authors see this as a refutation of the hypothesis that megalodons relied on nursery areas to rear their young, since a baby megalodon would be quite capable of hunting and killing marine mammals based on size alone.

In addition, “We unexpectedly unlocked the mystery of why certain aquatic vertebrates can attain gigantic sizes while others cannot,” Shimada said. “Living gigantic sharks, such as the whale shark and basking shark, as well as many other gigantic aquatic vertebrates like whales have slender bodies because large stocky bodies are hydrodynamically inefficient for swimming.”

That’s in sharp contrast to the great white shark, whose stocky body becomes even stockier as it grows. “It can be ‘large’ but cannot [get] past 7 meters (23 feet) to be ‘gigantic’ because of hydrodynamic constraints,” said Shimada. “We also demonstrate that the modern great white shark with a stocky body hypothetically blown up to the size of megalodon would not allow it to be an efficient swimmer due to the hydrodynamic constraints, further supporting the idea that it is more likely than not that megalodon must have had a much slenderer body than the modern great white shark.”

Shimada emphasized that their interpretations remain tentative but they are based on hard data and make for useful reference points for future research.

An “exciting working hypothesis”

For his part, Cooper found a lot to like in Shimada et al.’s latest analysis. “I’d say everything presented here is interesting and presents an exciting working hypothesis but that these should also be taken with a grain of salt until they can either be empirically tested, or a complete skeleton of megalodon is found to confirm one way or the other,” Cooper told Ars. “Generally, I appreciate the paper’s approach to its body size calculation in that it uses a lot of different shark species and doesn’t make any assumptions as to which species are the best analogues to megalodon.”

Shark biologists now say a lemon shark, like this one, is a better model of the extinct megalodon's body than the great white shark. — Shark biologists now say a lemon shark, like this one, is a better model of the extinct megalodon’s body than the great white shark. Credit: Albert Kok

Cooper acknowledged that it makes sense that a megalodon would be slightly slower than a great white given its sheer size, “though it does indicate we’ve got a shark capable of surprisingly fast speeds for its size,” he said. As for Shimada’s new growth model, he pronounced it “really solid” and concurred with the findings on birthing with one caveat. “I think the refutation of nursery sites is a bit of a leap, though I understand the temptation given the remarkably large size of the baby sharks,” he said. “We have geological evidence of multiple nurseries—not just small teeth, but also geological evidence of the right environmental conditions.”

He particularly liked Shinada et al.’s final paragraph. “[They] call out ‘popular questions’ along the lines of, ‘Was megalodon stronger than Livyatan?'” said Cooper. “I agree with the authors that these sorts of questions—ones we all often get asked by ‘fans’ on social media—are really not productive, as these unscientific questions disregard the rather amazing biology we’ve learned about this iconic, real species that existed, and reduce it to what I can only describe as a video game character.”

Regardless of how this friendly ongoing debate plays out, our collective fascination with megalodon is likely to persist. “It’s the imagining of such a magnificently enormous shark swimming around our oceans munching on whales, and considering that geologically speaking this happened in the very recent past,” said Cooper of the creature’s appeal. “It really captures what evolution can achieve, and even the huge size of their teeth alone really put it into perspective.”

DOI: Palaeontologia Electronica, 2025. 10.26879/1502 (About DOIs).

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Huh? The valuable role of interjections

history of language, language, Science, syndication / 9u50fv / March 9, 2025

Utterances like um, wow, and mm-hmm aren’t garbage—they keep conversations flowing.

Interjections—one-word utterances that aren’t part of a larger sentence—used to be dismissed as irrelevant linguistic detritus. But some linguists now think they play an essential role in regulating conversations. Credit: Daniel Garcia/Knowable Magazine

Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you’ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words—mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like—that don’t convey any information about the topic of the conversation itself. For many decades, linguists regarded such utterances as largely irrelevant noise, the flotsam and jetsam that accumulate on the margins of language when speakers aren’t as articulate as they’d like to be.

But these little words may be much more important than that. A few linguists now think that far from being detritus, they may be crucial traffic signals to regulate the flow of conversation as well as tools to negotiate mutual understanding. That puts them at the heart of language itself—and they may be the hardest part of language for artificial intelligence to master.

“Here is this phenomenon that lives right under our nose, that we barely noticed,” says Mark Dingemanse, a linguist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, “that turns out to upend our ideas of what makes complex language even possible in the first place.”

For most of the history of linguistics, scholars have tended to focus on written language, in large part because that’s what they had records of. But once recordings of conversation became available, they could begin to analyze spoken language the same way as writing.

When they did, they observed that interjections—that is, short utterances of just a word or two that are not part of a larger sentence—were ubiquitous in everyday speech. “One in every seven utterances are one of these things,” says Dingemanse, who explores the use of interjections in the 2024 Annual Review of Linguistics. “You’re going to find one of those little guys flying by every 12 seconds. Apparently, we need them.”

Many of these interjections serve to regulate the flow of conversation. “Think of it as a tool kit for conducting interactions,” says Dingemanse. “If you want to have streamlined conversations, these are the tools you need.” An um or uh from the speaker, for example, signals that they’re about to pause, but aren’t finished speaking. A quick huh? or what? from the listener, on the other hand, can signal a failure of communication that the speaker needs to repair.

That need seems to be universal: In a survey of 31 languages around the world, Dingemanse and his colleagues found that all of them used a short, neutral syllable similar to huh? as a repair signal, probably because it’s quick to produce. “In that moment of difficulty, you’re going to need the simplest possible question word, and that’s what huh? is,” says Dingemanse. “We think all societies will stumble on this, for the same reason.”

Other interjections serve as what some linguists call “continuers,” such as mm-hmm — signals from the listener that they’re paying attention and the speaker should keep going. Once again, the form of the word is well suited to its function: Because mm-hmm is made with a closed mouth, it’s clear that the signaler does not intend to speak.

Sign languages often handle continuers differently, but then again, two people signing at the same time can be less disruptive than two people speaking, says Carl Börstell, a linguist at the University of Bergen in Norway. In Swedish Sign Language, for example, listeners often sign yes as a continuer for long stretches, but to keep this continuer unobtrusive, the sender tends to hold their hands lower than usual.

Different interjections can send slightly different signals. Consider, for example, one person describing to another how to build a piece of Ikea furniture, says Allison Nguyen, a psycholinguist at Illinois State University. In such a conversation, mm-hmm might indicate that the speaker should continue explaining the current step, while yeah or OK would imply that the listener is done with that step and it’s time to move on to the next.

Wow! There’s more

Continuers aren’t merely for politeness—they really matter to a conversation, says Dingemanse. In one classic experiment from more than two decades ago, 34 undergraduate students listened as another volunteer told them a story. Some of the listeners gave the usual “I’m listening” signals, while others—who had been instructed to count the number of words beginning with the letter t—were too distracted to do so. The lack of normal signals from the listeners led to stories that were less well crafted, the researchers found. “That shows that these little words are quite consequential,” says Dingemanse.

Nguyen agrees that such words are far from meaningless. “They really do a lot for mutual understanding and mutual conversation,” she says. She’s now working to see if emojis serve similar functions in text conversations.

Storytellers depend on feedback such as mm-hmm and other interjections from their listeners. In this experiment, some listeners were told to count the number of times the storyteller used a word starting with t—a challenging task that prevented them from giving normal feedback. The quality of storytelling declined significantly, with problems like abrupt endings, rambling on, uneven or choppy pacing and overexplaining or justifying the point. Credit: Knowable Magazine

The role of interjections goes even deeper than regulating the flow of conversation. Interjections also help in negotiating the ground rules of a conversation. Every time two people converse, they need to establish an understanding of where each is coming from: what each participant knows to begin with, what they think the other person knows and how much detail they want to hear. Much of this work—what linguists call “grounding”—is carried out by interjections.

“If I’m telling you a story and you say something like ‘Wow!’ I might find that encouraging and add more detail,” says Nguyen. “But if you do something like, ‘Uh-huh,’ I’m going to assume you aren’t interested in more detail.”

A key part of grounding is working out what each participant thinks about the other’s knowledge, says Martina Wiltschko, a theoretical linguist at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona, Spain. Some languages, like Mandarin, explicitly differentiate between “I’m telling you something you didn’t know” and “I’m telling you something that I think you knew already.” In English, that task falls largely on interjections.

One of Wiltschko’s favorite examples is the Canadian eh? “If I tell you you have a new dog, I’m usually not telling you stuff you don’t know, so it’s weird for me to tell you,” she says. But ‘You have a new dog, eh?’ eliminates the weirdness by flagging the statement as news to the speaker, not the listener.

Other interjections can indicate that the speaker knows they’re not giving the other participant what they sought. “If you ask me what’s the weather like in Barcelona, I can say ‘Well, I haven’t been outside yet,’” says Wiltschko. The well is an acknowledgement that she’s not quite answering the question.

Wiltschko and her students have now examined more than 20 languages, and every one of them uses little words for negotiations like these. “I haven’t found a language that doesn’t do these three general things: what I know, what I think you know and turn-taking,” she says. They are key to regulating conversations, she adds: “We are building common ground, and we are taking turns.”

Details like these aren’t just arcana for linguists to obsess over. Using interjections properly is a key part of sounding fluent in speaking a second language, notes Wiltschko, but language teachers often ignore them. “When it comes to language teaching, you get points deducted for using ums and uhs, because you’re ‘not fluent,’” she says. “But native speakers use them, because it helps! They should be taught.” Artificial intelligence, too, can struggle to use interjections well, she notes, making them the best way to distinguish between a computer and a real human.

And interjections also provide a window into interpersonal relationships. “These little markers say so much about what you think,” she says—and they’re harder to control than the actual content. Maybe couples therapists, for example, would find that interjections afford useful insights into how their clients regard one another and how they negotiate power in a conversation. The interjection oh often signals confrontation, she says, as in the difference between “Do you want to go out for dinner?” and “Oh, so now you want to go out for dinner?”

Indeed, these little words go right to the heart of language and what it is for. “Language exists because we need to interact with one another,” says Börstell. “For me, that’s the main reason for language being so successful.”

Dingemanse goes one step further. Interjections, he says, don’t just facilitate our conversations. In negotiating points of view and grounding, they’re also how language talks about talking.

“With huh? you say not just ‘I didn’t understand,’” says Dingemanse. “It’s ‘I understand you’re trying to tell me something, but I didn’t get it.’” That reflexivity enables more sophisticated speech and thought. Indeed, he says, “I don’t think we would have complex language if it were not for these simple words.”

Knowable Magazine explores the real-world significance of scholarly work through a journalistic lens.

Huh? The valuable role of interjections Read More »

White House may seek to slash NASA’s science budget by 50 percent

nasa budget, Science, Space / Beth Washington / March 9, 2025

In many ways, NASA’s science directorate is the crown jewel of the space agency. Nearly all of the most significant achievements over the last 25 years have been delivered by the science programs: Ingenuity flying on Mars, New Horizons swooping by Pluto, images from the James Webb Space Telescope, the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, the return of samples from asteroids and comets, Cassini’s discovery of water plumes on Enceladus, a continuous robotic presence on Mars, and so much more. Even the recent lunar landings by Firefly and Intuitive Machines were funded by NASA’s science directorate.

Of NASA’s roughly $25 billion budget, however, only about 30 percent is allocated to science. For fiscal year 2024, this amounted to $7.4 billion. This spending was broken down into approximately $2.7 billion for planetary science, $2.2 billion for Earth science, $1.5 billion for astrophysics, and $800 million for heliophysics.

NASA science funding since 1980. Credit: Casey Dreier/The Planetary Society

The proposed cuts are being driven by Russell Vought, the recently confirmed director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, which sets budget and policy priorities for a presidential administration. In some sense, the budgetary decisions should not come as a surprise, as they are consistent with what Vought proposed in a “shadow” budget for fiscal-year 2023 as part of his Center for Renewing America.

“The budget also proposes a 50 percent reduction in NASA Science programs and spending, reducing their misguided Carbon Reduction System spending and Global Climate Change programs,” Vought’s organization wrote in its report published in December 2022.

Zeroing out Earth science?

Despite Vought’s desire, however, NASA is expressly charged with studying our planet.

The congressional act that created NASA in 1958 calls for the space agency to expand human knowledge about Earth’s atmosphere and space, and the agency’s Earth observation satellites have substantially increased our understanding of this planet’s weather, changing climate, and land use.

Even if NASA’s Earth science budget were taken to zero, cutting the overall science budget in half would still dramatically reduce funding in planetary science as well as other research areas. Scientists told Ars that NASA would be forced to make difficult decisions, likely including shutting off extended missions such as the Voyager and Curiosity probes on Mars, and possibly even the Hubble Space Telescope. It might be possible to save missions in later stages of development, such as the Dragonfly probe to Saturn’s moon Titan, and the NEO Surveyor mission to search for hazardous asteroids. But it would be impossible to start meaningful new missions to explore the Solar System, potentially setting back planetary exploration a decade.

White House may seek to slash NASA’s science budget by 50 percent Read More »

New research shows bigger animals get more cancer, defying decades-old belief

animal research, cancer, cancer research, Science, syndication / 9u50fv / March 8, 2025

The answer lies in how quickly body size evolves. We found that birds and mammals that reached large sizes more rapidly have reduced cancer prevalence. For example, the common dolphin, Delphinus delphis evolved to reach its large body size—along with most other whales and dolphins (referred to as cetaceans) about three times faster than other mammals. However, cetaceans tend to have less cancer than expected.

Larger species face higher cancer risks but those that reached that size rapidly evolved mechanisms for mitigating it, such as lower mutation rates or enhanced DNA repair mechanisms. So rather than contradicting Cope’s rule, our findings refine it.

Larger bodies often evolve, but not as quickly in groups where the burden of cancer is higher. This means that the threat of cancer may have shaped the pace of evolution.

Humans evolved to our current body size relatively rapidly. Based on this, we would expect humans and bats to have similar cancer prevalence, because we evolved at a much, much faster rate. However, it is important to note that our results can’t explain the actual prevalence of cancer in humans. Nor is that an easy statistic to estimate.

Human cancer is a complicated story to unravel, with a plethora of types and many factors affecting its prevalence. For example, many humans not only have access to modern medicine but also varied lifestyles that affect cancer risk. For this reason, we did not include humans in our analysis.

Fighting cancer

Understanding how species naturally evolve cancer defences has important implications for human medicine. The naked mole rat, for example, is studied for its exceptionally low cancer prevalence in the hopes of uncovering new ways to prevent or treat cancer in humans. Only a few cancer cases have ever been observed in captive mole rats, so the exact mechanisms of their cancer resistance remain mostly a mystery.

At the same time, our findings raise new questions. Although birds and mammals that evolved quickly seem to have stronger anti-cancer mechanisms, amphibians and reptiles didn’t show the same pattern. Larger species had higher cancer prevalence regardless of how quickly they evolved. This could be due to differences in their regenerative abilities. Some amphibians, like salamanders, can regenerate entire limbs—a process that involves lots of cell division, which cancer could exploit.

Putting cancer into an evolutionary context allowed us to reveal that its prevalence does increase with body size. Studying this evolutionary arms race may unlock new insights into how nature fights cancer—and how we might do the same.

Joanna Baker, Postdoctoral Researcher in Evolutionary Biology, University of Reading and George Butler, Career Development Fellow in Cancer Evolution, UCL. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

New research shows bigger animals get more cancer, defying decades-old belief Read More »

The X-37B spaceplane lands after helping pave the way for “maneuver warfare”

Boeing, military space, Science, Space, Vandenberg space force base, x-37b spaceplane / Kelly Newman / March 8, 2025

On this mission, military officials said the X-37B tested “space domain awareness technology experiments” that aim to improve the Space Force’s knowledge of the space environment. Defense officials consider the space domain—like land, sea, and air—a contested environment that could become a battlefield in future conflicts.

Last month, the Space Force released the first image of Earth from an X-37B in space. This image was captured in 2024 as the spacecraft flew in its high-altitude orbit, and shows a portion of the X-37B’s power-generating solar array. Credit: US Space Force

The Space Force hasn’t announced plans for the next X-37B mission. Typically, the next X-37B flight has launched within a year of the prior mission’s landing. So far, all of the X-37B flights have launched from Florida, with landings at Vandenberg and at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where Boeing and the Space Force refurbish the spaceplanes between missions.

The aerobraking maneuvers demonstrated by the X-37B could find applications on future operational military satellites, according to Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of US Space Command.

“The X-37 is a test and experimentation platform, but that aerobraking maneuver allowed it to bridge multiple orbital regimes, and we think this is exactly the kind of maneuverability we’d like to see in future systems, which will unlock a whole new series of operational concepts,” Whiting said in December at the Space Force Association’s Spacepower Conference.

Space Command’s “astrographic” area of responsibility (AOR) starts at the top of Earth’s atmosphere and extends to the Moon and beyond.

“An irony of the space domain is that everything in our AOR is in motion, but rarely do we use maneuver as a way to gain positional advantage,” Whiting said. “We believe at US Space Command it is vital, given the threats we now see in novel orbits that are hard for us to get to, as well as the fact that the Chinese have been testing on-orbit refueling capability, that we need some kind of sustained space maneuver.”

Improvements in maneuverability would have benefits in surveilling an adversary’s satellites, as well as in defensive and offensive combat operations in orbit.

The Space Force could attain the capability for sustained maneuvers—known in some quarters as dynamic space operations—in several ways. One is to utilize in-orbit refueling that allows satellites to “maneuver without regret,” and another is to pursue more fuel-efficient means of changing orbits, such as aerobraking or solar-electric propulsion.

Then, Whiting said Space Command could transform how it operates by employing “maneuver warfare” as the Army, Navy and Air Force do. “We think we need to move toward a joint function of true maneuver advantage in space.”

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