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How a mysterious particle could explain the Universe’s missing antimatter

neutrino, neutrino oscillations, Science, syndication / Shannon Garcia / August 16, 2025

New experiments focused on understanding the enigmatic neutrino may offer insights.

An artist’s composition of the Milky Way seen with a neutrino lens (blue). Credit: IceCube Collaboration/NSF/ESO

Everything we see around us, from the ground beneath our feet to the most remote galaxies, is made of matter. For scientists, that has long posed a problem: According to physicists’ best current theories, matter and its counterpart, antimatter, ought to have been created in equal amounts at the time of the Big Bang. But antimatter is vanishingly rare in the universe. So what happened?

Physicists don’t know the answer to that question yet, but many think the solution must involve some subtle difference in the way that matter and antimatter behave. And right now, the most promising path into that unexplored territory centers on new experiments involving the mysterious subatomic particle known as the neutrino.

“It’s not to say that neutrinos are definitely the explanation of the matter-antimatter asymmetry, but a very large class of models that can explain this asymmetry are connected to neutrinos,” says Jessica Turner, a theoretical physicist at Durham University in the United Kingdom.

Let’s back up for a moment: When physicists talk about matter, that’s just the ordinary stuff that the universe is made of—mainly protons and neutrons (which make up the nuclei of atoms), along with lighter particles like electrons. Although the term “antimatter” has a sci-fi ring to it, antimatter is not all that different from ordinary matter. Typically, the only difference is electric charge: For example, the positron—the first antimatter particle to be discovered—matches an electron in its mass but carries a positive rather than a negative charge. (Things are a bit more complicated with electrically neutral particles. For example, a photon is considered to be its own antiparticle, but an antineutron is distinct from a neutron in that it’s made up of antiquarks rather than ordinary quarks.)

Various antimatter particles can exist in nature; they occur in cosmic rays and in thunderclouds, and are produced by certain kinds of radioactive decay. (Because people—and bananas—contain a small amount of radioactive potassium, they emit minuscule amounts of antimatter in the form of positrons.)

Small amounts of antimatter have also been created by scientists in particle accelerators and other experiments, at great effort and expense—putting a damper on science fiction dreams of rockets propelled by antimatter or planet-destroying weapons energized by it.

When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate, releasing energy in the form of radiation. Such encounters are governed by Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc²—energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light — which says you can convert a little bit of matter into a lot of energy, or vice versa. (The positrons emitted by bananas and bodies have so little mass that we don’t notice the teeny amounts of energy released when they annihilate.) Because matter and antimatter annihilate so readily, it’s hard to make a chunk of antimatter much bigger than an atom, though in theory you could have everything from antimatter molecules to antimatter planets and stars.

But there’s a puzzle: If matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts at the time of the Big Bang, as theory suggests, shouldn’t they have annihilated, leaving a universe made up of pure energy? Why is there any matter left?

Physicists’ best guess is that some process in the early universe favored the production of matter compared to the production of antimatter — but exactly what that process was is a mystery, and the question of why we live in a matter-dominated universe is one of the most vexing problems in all of physics.

Crucially, physicists haven’t been able to think of any such process that would mesh with today’s leading theory of matter and energy, known as the Standard Model of particle physics. That leaves theorists seeking new ideas, some as-yet-unknown physics that goes beyond the Standard Model. This is where neutrinos come in.

A neutral answer

Neutrinos are tiny particles without any electric charge. (The name translates as “little neutral one.”) According to the Standard Model, they ought to be massless, like photons, but experiments beginning in the 1990s showed that they do in fact have a tiny mass. (They’re at least a million times lighter than electrons, the extreme lightweights among normal matter.) Since physicists already know that neutrinos violate the Standard Model by having mass, their hope is that learning more about these diminutive particles might yield insights into whatever lies beyond.

Neutrinos have been slow to yield their secrets, however, because they barely interact with other particles. About 60 billion neutrinos from the Sun pass through every square centimeter of your skin each second. If those neutrinos interacted with the atoms in our bodies, they would probably destroy us. Instead, they pass right through. “You most likely will not interact with a single neutrino in your lifetime,” says Pedro Machado, a physicist at Fermilab near Chicago. “It’s just so unlikely.”

Experiments, however, have shown that neutrinos “oscillate” as they travel, switching among three different identities—physicists call them “flavors”: electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino. Oscillation measurements have also revealed that different-flavored neutrinos have slightly different masses.

Neutrinos are known to oscillate, switching between three varieties or “flavors.” Exactly how they oscillate is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, and the probability of finding that an electron neutrino has transformed into a muon neutrino, for example, varies as a function of the distance traveled. (The third flavor state, the tau neutrino, is very rare.) Credit: Knowable Magazine

Neutrino oscillation is weird, but it may be weird in a useful way, because it might allow physicists to probe certain fundamental symmetries in nature—and these in turn may illuminate the most troubling of asymmetries, namely the universe’s matter-antimatter imbalance.

For neutrino researchers, a key symmetry is called charge-parity or CP symmetry. It’s actually a combination of two distinct symmetries: Changing a particle’s charge flips matter into antimatter (or vice versa), while changing a particle’s parity flips a particle into its mirror image (like turning a right-handed glove into a left-handed glove). So the CP-opposite version of a particle of ordinary matter is a mirror image of the corresponding antiparticle. But does this opposite particle behave exactly the same as the original one? If not, physicists say that CP symmetry is violated—a fancy way of saying that matter and antimatter behave slightly differently from one another. So any examples of CP symmetry violation in nature could help to explain the matter-antimatter imbalance.

In fact, CP violation has already been observed in some mesons, a type of subatomic particle typically made up of one quark and one antiquark, a surprising result first found in the 1960s. But it’s an extremely small effect, and it falls far short of being able to account for the universe’s matter-antimatter asymmetry.

In July 2025, scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva reported clear evidence for a similar violation by one type of particle from a different family of subatomic particles known as baryons—but this newly observed CP violation is similarly believed to be much too small to account for the matter-antimatter imbalance.

Charge-parity or CP symmetry is a combination of two distinct symmetries: Changing a particle’s charge from positive to negative, for example, flips matter into antimatter (or vice versa), while changing a particle’s parity flips a particle into its mirror image (like turning a right-handed glove into a left-handed glove). Consider an electron: Flip its charge and you end up with a positron; flip its “handedness”—in particle physics, this is actually a quantum-mechanical property known as spin—and you get an electron with opposite spin. Flip both properties, and you get a positron that’s like a mirror image of the original electron. Whether this CP-flipped particle behaves the same way as the original electron is a key question: If it doesn’t, physicists say that CP symmetry is “violated.” Any examples of CP symmetry violation in nature could help to explain the matter-antimatter imbalance observed in the universe today. Credit: Knowable Magazine

Experiments on the horizon

So what about neutrinos? Do they violate CP symmetry—and if so, do they do it in a big enough way to explain why we live in a matter-dominated universe? This is precisely the question being addressed by a new generation of particle physics experiments. Most ambitious among them is the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), which is now under construction in the United States; data collection could begin as early as 2029.

DUNE will employ the world’s most intense neutrino beam, which will fire both neutrinos and antineutrinos from Fermilab to the Sanford Underground Research Facility, located 800 miles away in South Dakota. (There’s no tunnel; the neutrinos and antineutrinos simply zip through the earth, for the most part hardly noticing that it’s there.) Detectors at each end of the beam will reveal how the particles oscillate as they traverse the distance between the two labs—and whether the behavior of the neutrinos differs from that of the antineutrinos.

DUNE won’t pin down the precise amount of neutrinos’ CP symmetry violation (if there is any), but it will set an upper limit on it. The larger the possible effect, the greater the discrepancy in the behavior of neutrinos versus antineutrinos, and the greater the likelihood that neutrinos could be responsible for the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the early universe.

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), now under construction, will see both neutrinos and antineutrinos fired from below Fermilab near Chicago to the Sanford Underground Research Facility some 800 miles away in South Dakota. Neutrinos can pass through earth unaltered, with no need of a tunnel. The ambitious experiment may reveal how the behavior of neutrinos differs from that of their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos. Credit: Knowable Magazine

For Shirley Li, a physicist at the University of California, Irvine, the issue of neutrino CP violation is an urgent question, one that could point the way to a major rethink of particle physics. “If I could have one question answered by the end of my lifetime, I would want to know what that’s about,” she says.

Aside from being a major discovery in its own right, CP symmetry violation in neutrinos could challenge the Standard Model by pointing the way to other novel physics. For example, theorists say it would mean there could be two kinds of neutrinos—left-handed ones (the normal lightweight ones observed to date) and much heavier right-handed neutrinos, which are so far just a theoretical possibility. (The particles’ “handedness” refers to their quantum properties.)

These right-handed neutrinos could be as much as 10¹⁵ times heavier than protons, and they’d be unstable, decaying almost instantly after coming into existence. Although they’re not found in today’s universe, physicists suspect that right-handed neutrinos may have existed in the moments after the Big Bang — possibly decaying via a process that mimicked CP violation and favored the creation of matter over antimatter.

It’s even possible that neutrinos can act as their own antiparticles—that is, that neutrinos could turn into antineutrinos and vice versa. This scenario, which the discovery of right-handed neutrinos would support, would make neutrinos fundamentally different from more familiar particles like quarks and electrons. If antineutrinos can turn into neutrinos, that could help explain where the antimatter went during the universe’s earliest moments.

One way to test this idea is to look for an unusual type of radioactive decay — theorized but thus far never observed—known as “neutrinoless double-beta decay.” In regular double-beta decay, two neutrons in a nucleus simultaneously decay into protons, releasing two electrons and two antineutrinos in the process. But if neutrinos can act as their own antiparticles, then the two neutrinos could annihilate each other, leaving only the two electrons and a burst of energy.

A number of experiments are underway or planned to look for this decay process, including the KamLAND-Zen experiment, at the Kamioka neutrino detection facility in Japan; the nEXO experiment at the SNOLAB facility in Ontario, Canada; the NEXT experiment at the Canfranc Underground Laboratory in Spain; and the LEGEND experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy. KamLAND-Zen, NEXT, and LEGEND are already up and running.

While these experiments differ in the details, they all employ the same general strategy: They use a giant vat of dense, radioactive material with arrays of detectors that look for the emission of unusually energetic electrons. (The electrons’ expected neutrino companions would be missing, with the energy they would have had instead carried by the electrons.)

While the neutrino remains one of the most mysterious of the known particles, it is slowly but steadily giving up its secrets. As it does so, it may crack the puzzle of our matter-dominated universe — a universe that happens to allow inquisitive creatures like us to flourish. The neutrinos that zip silently through your body every second are gradually revealing the universe in a new light.

“I think we’re entering a very exciting era,” says Turner.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.

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

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Upcoming DeepSeek AI model failed to train using Huawei’s chips

AI, china, DeepSeek, NVIDIA, syndication / 9u50fv / August 14, 2025

DeepSeek is still working with Huawei to make the model compatible with Ascend for inference, the people said.

Founder Liang Wenfeng has said internally he is dissatisfied with R2’s progress and has been pushing to spend more time to build an advanced model that can sustain the company’s lead in the AI field, they said.

The R2 launch was also delayed because of longer-than-expected data labeling for its updated model, another person added. Chinese media reports have suggested that the model may be released as soon as in the coming weeks.

“Models are commodities that can be easily swapped out,” said Ritwik Gupta, an AI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. “A lot of developers are using Alibaba’s Qwen3, which is powerful and flexible.”

Gupta noted that Qwen3 adopted DeepSeek’s core concepts, such as its training algorithm that makes the model capable of reasoning, but made them more efficient to use.

Gupta, who tracks Huawei’s AI ecosystem, said the company is facing “growing pains” in using Ascend for training, though he expects the Chinese national champion to adapt eventually.

“Just because we’re not seeing leading models trained on Huawei today doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future. It’s a matter of time,” he said.

Nvidia, a chipmaker at the center of a geopolitical battle between Beijing and Washington, recently agreed to give the US government a cut of its revenues in China in order to resume sales of its H20 chips to the country.

“Developers will play a crucial role in building the winning AI ecosystem,” said Nvidia about Chinese companies using its chips. “Surrendering entire markets and developers would only hurt American economic and national security.”

DeepSeek and Huawei did not respond to a request for comment.

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OpenAI, cofounder Sam Altman to take on Neuralink with new startup

AI, bci, brain computer interface, Neuralink, Science, syndication / 9u50fv / August 13, 2025

The company aims to raise $250 million from OpenAI and other investors, although the talks are at an early stage. Altman will not personally invest.

The new venture would be in direct competition with Neuralink, founded by Musk in 2016, which seeks to wire brains directly to computers.

Musk and Altman cofounded OpenAI, but Musk left the board in 2018 after clashing with Altman, and the two have since become fierce rivals in their pursuit of AI.

Musk launched his own AI start-up, xAI, in 2023 and has been attempting to block OpenAI’s conversion from a nonprofit in the courts. Musk donated much of the initial capital to get OpenAI off the ground.

Neuralink is one of a pack of so-called brain-computer interface companies, while a number of start-ups, such as Precision Neuroscience and Synchron, have also emerged on the scene.

Neuralink earlier this year raised $650 million at a $9 billion valuation, and it is backed by investors including Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, and Vy Capital. Altman had previously invested in Neuralink.

Brain implants are a decades-old technology, but recent leaps forward in AI and in the electronic components used to collect brain signals have offered the prospect that they can become more practically useful.

Altman has backed a number of other companies in markets adjacent to ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, which is valued at $300 billion. In addition to cofounding World, he has also invested in the nuclear fission group Oklo and nuclear fusion project Helion.

OpenAI declined to comment.

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China tells Alibaba, ByteDance to justify purchases of Nvidia AI chips

AI, china, NVIDIA, Policy, syndication / 9u50fv / August 12, 2025

Beijing is demanding tech companies including Alibaba and ByteDance justify their orders of Nvidia’s H20 artificial intelligence chips, complicating the US chipmaker’s business in China after striking an export arrangement with the Trump administration.

The tech companies have been asked by regulators such as the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) to explain why they need to order Nvidia’s H20 chips instead of using domestic alternatives, said three people familiar with the situation.

Some tech companies, who were the main buyers of Nvidia’s H20 chips before their sale in China was restricted, were planning to downsize their orders as a result of the questions from regulators, said two of the people.

“It’s not banned but has kind of become a politically incorrect thing to do,” said one Chinese data center operator about purchasing Nvidia’s H20 chips.

Alibaba, ByteDance, and MIIT did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Chinese regulators have expressed growing disapproval of companies using Nvidia’s chips for any government or security related projects. Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that Chinese authorities had sent notices to a range of companies discouraging the use of the H20 chips, particularly for government-related work.

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Experiment will attempt to counter climate change by altering ocean

carbon sequestration, climate change, oceanography, Science, syndication / Kelly Newman / August 11, 2025

Gulf of Maine will be site of safety and effectiveness testing.

Woods Hole researchers, Adam Subhas (left) and Chris Murray, conducted a series of lab experiments earlier this year to test the impact of an alkaline substance, known as sodium hydroxide, on copepods in the Gulf of Maine. Credit: Daniel Hentz/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Later this summer, a fluorescent reddish-pink spiral will bloom across the Wilkinson Basin in the Gulf of Maine, about 40 miles northeast of Cape Cod. Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will release the nontoxic water tracer dye behind their research vessel, where it will unfurl into a half-mile wide temporary plume, bright enough to catch the attention of passing boats and even satellites.

As it spreads, the researchers will track its movement to monitor a tightly controlled, federally approved experiment testing whether the ocean can be engineered to absorb more carbon, and in turn, help combat the climate crisis.

As the world struggles to stay below the 1.5° Celsius global warming threshold—a goal set out in the Paris Agreement to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change—experts agree that reducing greenhouse gas emissions won’t be enough to avoid overshooting this target. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, published in 2023, emphasizes the urgent need to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere, too.

“If we really want to have a shot at mitigating the worst effects of climate change, carbon removal needs to start scaling to the point where it can supplement large-scale emissions reductions,” said Adam Subhas, an associate scientist in marine chemistry and geochemistry at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who will oversee the week-long experiment.

The test is part of the LOC-NESS project—short for Locking away Ocean Carbon in the Northeast Shelf and Slope—which Subhas has been leading since 2023. The ongoing research initiative is evaluating the effectiveness and environmental impact of a marine carbon dioxide removal approach called ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE).

This method of marine carbon dioxide removal involves adding alkaline substances to the ocean to boost its natural ability to neutralize acids produced by greenhouse gases. It’s promising, Subhas said, because it has the potential to lock away carbon permanently.

“Ocean alkalinity enhancement does have the potential to reach sort of gigatons per year of carbon removal, which is the scale at which you would need to supplement emissions reductions,” Subhas said. “Once the alkalinity is dissolved in seawater, it reacts with carbon dioxide and forms bicarbonate—essentially dissolved baking soda. That bicarbonate is one of the most stable forms of carbon in the ocean, and it can stay locked away for tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years.”

But it will be a long time before this could happen at the magnitude needed to mitigate climate change.

According to Wil Burns, co-director of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University, between 6 and 10 gigatons of carbon need to be removed from the atmosphere annually by 2050 in order to meet the Paris Agreement climate target. “It’s a titanic task,” he said.

Most marine carbon dioxide removal initiatives, including those involving OAE, are still in a nascent stage.

“We’re really far from having any of these technologies be mature,” said Lisa Levin, an oceanographer and professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, who spoke on a panel at the United Nations Ocean Conference in June about the potential environmental risks of mining and carbon dioxide removal on deep-sea ecosystems. “We’re looking at a decade until any serious, large-scale marine carbon removal is going to be able to happen—or more.”

“In the meantime, everybody acknowledges that what we have to do is to reduce emissions, right, and not rely on taking carbon out of the atmosphere,” she said.

Marine carbon dioxide removal

So far, most carbon removal efforts have centered on land-based strategies, such as planting trees, restoring soils, and building machines that capture carbon dioxide directly from the air. Increasingly, researchers are exploring whether the oceans might help.

“Looking at the oceans makes a lot of sense when it comes to carbon removal, because the oceans sequester 70 times more CO₂ than terrestrial sources,” Burns said. What if it can hold more?

That question is drawing growing attention, not only from scientists. In recent years, a wave of private companies have started piloting various methods of removing carbon from the oceans.

“It’s really the private sector that’s pushing the scaling of this very quickly,” Subhas said. In the US and Canada, he said, there are at least four companies piloting varied ocean alkalinity enhancement techniques.

Last year, Ebb Carbon, a California-based startup focused on marine carbon dioxide removal, signed a deal with Microsoft to remove up to 350,000 metric tons of CO₂ over the next decade using an ocean alkalinity enhancement process that splits seawater into acidic and alkaline streams. The alkaline stream is then returned to the sea where it reacts with CO₂ and stores it as bicarbonate, enabling the ocean to absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In return, Microsoft will purchase carbon removal credits from the startup.

Another company called Vesta, which has headquarters in San Francisco, is using an approach called Coastal Carbon Capture. This involves adding finely ground olivine—a naturally occurring olive-green colored mineral—to sandy beaches. From there, ocean tides and waves carry it into the sea. Olivine reacts quickly with seawater in a process known as enhanced weathering, increasing ocean alkalinity. The company piloted one of their projects in Duck, North Carolina, last year where it estimated approximately 5,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide would be removed through coastal carbon capture after accounting for project emissions, according to its website.

But these efforts are not without risk, AU’s Burns said. “We have to proceed in an extremely precautionary manner,” he said.

Some scientists are concerned that OAE initiatives that involve olivine, which contains heavy metals like nickel and chromium, may harm marine life, he said. Another concern is that the olivine could cloud certain ocean areas and block light from penetrating to deeper depths. If too much alkalinity is introduced too fast in concentrated areas, he said, some animals might not be able to adjust.

Other marine carbon dioxide removal projects are using other methods besides OAE. Some involve adding iron to the ocean to stimulate growth in microscopic plants called phytoplankton, which absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. Others include the cultivation of large-scale farms of kelp and seaweed, which also absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. The marine plants can then be sunk in the deep ocean to store the carbon they absorbed.

In 2023, researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution conducted their first OAE-related field experiment from the 90-foot research vessel R/V Connecticut south of Massachusetts. As part of this first experiment, nontoxic water tracer dye was released into the ocean. Researchers tracked its movement through the water for 72 hours to model the dispersion of a plume of alkalinity over time. Credit: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

One technique that has not yet been tried, but may be piloted in the future, according to the science-based conservation nonprofit Ocean Visions, would employ new technology to accelerate the ocean’s natural process of transferring surface water and carbon to the deep ocean. That’s called artificial downwelling. In a reverse process—artificial upwelling—cooler, nutrient-rich waters from the deep ocean would be pumped to the surface to spur phytoplankton growth.

So far, UC San Diego’s Levin said she is not convinced that these trials will lead to impactful carbon removal.

“I do not think the ocean is ever going to be a really large part of that solution,” she said. However, she added, “It might be part of the storage solution. Right now, people are looking at injecting carbon dioxide that’s removed from industry activities on land and transporting it to the ocean and injecting it into basalt.”

Levin said she’s also worried that we don’t know enough yet about the consequences of altering natural ocean processes.

“I am concerned about how many field trials would be required to actually understand what would happen, and whether we could truly understand the environmental risk of a fully scaled-up operation,” she said.

The experiment

Most marine carbon dioxide removal projects that have kicked off already are significantly larger in scale than the LOC-NESS experiment, which Subhas estimates will remove around 50 tons of CO₂.

But, he emphasized, the goal of this project is not to compete in size or scale. He said the aim is to provide independent academic research that can help guide and inform the future of this industry and ensure it does not have negative repercussions on the marine environment.

There is some concern, he said, that commercial entities may pursue large-scale OAE initiatives to capitalize on the growing voluntary carbon market without first conducting adequate testing for safety and efficacy. Unlike those initiatives, there is no profit to be made from LOC-NESS. No carbon credits will be sold, Subhas said.

The project is funded by a collection of government and philanthropic sources, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Carbon to Sea Initiative, a nonprofit that brings funders and scientists together to support marine carbon dioxide removal research and technology.

“We really feel like it’s necessary for the scientific community to be delivering transparent, trusted, and rigorous science to evaluate these things as these activities are currently happening and scaling in the ocean by the private sector,” Subhas said.

The LOC-NESS field trial in Wilkinson Basin will be the first “academic only” OAE experiment conducted from a ship in US waters. It is also the first of its kind to receive a permit from the Environmental Protection Agency under the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act.

“There’s no research in the past or planned that gets even close to providing a learning opportunity that this research is providing for OAE in the pelagic environment,” said Carbon to Sea Initiative’s Antonius Gagern, referring to the open sea experiment.

The permit was granted in April after a year of consultations between the EPA and other federal agencies.

During the process’ public comment periods, commenters expressed concerns about the potential impact on marine life, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, small crustaceans that they eat called copepods, and larvae for the commercially important squid and mackerel fisheries. In a written response to some of these comments, the EPA stated that the small-scale project “demonstrates scientific rigor” and is “not expected to significantly affect human health, the marine environment, or other uses of the ocean.”

Subhas and his interdisciplinary team of chemists, biologists, engineers, and physicists from Woods Hole have spent the last few years planning this experiment and conducting a series of trials at their lab on Cape Cod to ensure they can safely execute and effectively monitor the results of the open-water test they will conduct this summer in the Gulf of Maine.

They specifically tested the effects of sodium hydroxide—an alkaline substance also known as lye or caustic soda—on marine microbes, phytoplankton, and copepods, a crucial food source for many marine species in the region in addition to the right whales. “We chose sodium hydroxide because it’s incredibly pure,” Subhas said. It’s widely used in the US to reduce acidity in drinking water.

It also helps counter ocean acidification, according to Subhas. “It’s like Tums for the ocean,” he said.

Ocean acidification occurs when the ocean absorbs excess carbon dioxide, causing its pH to drop. This makes it harder for corals, krill, and shellfish like oysters and clams to develop their hard calcium carbonate shells or skeletons.

This month, the team plans to release 50 tons of sodium hydroxide into a designated area of the Wilkinson Basin from the back of one of two research vessels participating in the LOC-NESS operation.

The basin is an ideal test site, according to Subhas, because there is little presence of phytoplankton, zooplankton, commercial fish larvae, and endangered species, including some whales, during this season. Still, as a precautionary measure, Woods Hole has contracted a protected species observer to keep a look out for marine species and mitigate potential harm if they are spotted. That person will be on board as the vessel travels to and from the field trial site, including while the team releases the sodium hydroxide into the ocean.

The alkaline substance will be dispersed over four to 12 hours off the back of one of the research vessels, along with the nontoxic fluorescent red water tracer dye called rhodamine. The dye will help track the location and spread of the sodium hydroxide once released into the ocean, and the vessel’s wake will help mix the solution in with the ocean water.

After about an hour, Subhas said, it will form into a “pinkish” patch of water that can be picked up on satellites. “We’re going to be taking pictures from space and looking at how this patch sort of evolves, dilutes, and stretches and disperses over time.”

For a week after that, scientists aboard the vessels will take rotating shifts to collect data around the clock. They will deploy drones and analyze over 20 types of samples from the research vessel to monitor how the surrounding waters and marine life respond to the experiment. They’ll track changes in ocean chemistry, nutrient levels, plankton populations and water clarity, while also measuring acidity and dissolved CO₂.

In March, the team did a large-scale dry run of the dispersal at an open air testing facility on a naval base in New Jersey. According to Subhas, the trial demonstrated their ability to safely and effectively deliver alkalinity to surface seawater.

“The next step is being able to measure the carbon uptake from seawater—from the atmosphere into seawater,” he said. That is a slower process. He said he expects to have some preliminary results on carbon uptake, as well as environmental impacts, early next year.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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NASA plans to build a nuclear reactor on the Moon—a space lawyer explains why

nuclear reactor, Policy, Space, space law, syndication, the Moon / Mike M. / August 10, 2025

These sought-after regions are scientifically vital and geopolitically sensitive, as multiple countries want to build bases or conduct research there. Building infrastructure in these areas would cement a country’s ability to access the resources there and potentially exclude others from doing the same.

Critics may worry about radiation risks. Even if designed for peaceful use and contained properly, reactors introduce new environmental and operational hazards, particularly in a dangerous setting such as space. But the UN guidelines do outline rigorous safety protocols, and following them could potentially mitigate these concerns.

Why nuclear? Because solar has limits

The Moon has little atmosphere and experiences 14-day stretches of darkness. In some shadowed craters, where ice is likely to be found, sunlight never reaches the surface at all. These issues make solar energy unreliable, if not impossible, in some of the most critical regions.

A small lunar reactor could operate continuously for a decade or more, powering habitats, rovers, 3D printers, and life-support systems. Nuclear power could be the linchpin for long-term human activity. And it’s not just about the Moon – developing this capability is essential for missions to Mars, where solar power is even more constrained.

The UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space sets guidelines to govern how countries act in outer space. United States Mission to International Organizations in Vienna. Credit: CC BY-NC-ND

A call for governance, not alarm

The United States has an opportunity to lead not just in technology but in governance. If it commits to sharing its plans publicly, following Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty and reaffirming a commitment to peaceful use and international participation, it will encourage other countries to do the same.

The future of the Moon won’t be determined by who plants the most flags. It will be determined by who builds what, and how. Nuclear power may be essential for that future. Building transparently and in line with international guidelines would allow countries to more safely realize that future.

A reactor on the Moon isn’t a territorial claim or a declaration of war. But it is infrastructure. And infrastructure will be how countries display power—of all kinds—in the next era of space exploration.

Michelle L.D. Hanlon, Professor of Air and Space Law, University of Mississippi. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Encryption made for police and military radios may be easily cracked

Biz & IT, e2ee, ETSI, Security, syndication, TETRA / Beth Washington / August 9, 2025

An encryption algorithm can have weaknesses that could allow an attacker to listen in.

Two years ago, researchers in the Netherlands discovered an intentional backdoor in an encryption algorithm baked into radios used by critical infrastructure–as well as police, intelligence agencies, and military forces around the world–that made any communication secured with the algorithm vulnerable to eavesdropping.

When the researchers publicly disclosed the issue in 2023, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), which developed the algorithm, advised anyone using it for sensitive communication to deploy an end-to-end encryption solution on top of the flawed algorithm to bolster the security of their communications.

But now the same researchers have found that at least one implementation of the end-to-end encryption solution endorsed by ETSI has a similar issue that makes it equally vulnerable to eavesdropping. The encryption algorithm used for the device they examined starts with a 128-bit key, but this gets compressed to 56 bits before it encrypts traffic, making it easier to crack. It’s not clear who is using this implementation of the end-to-end encryption algorithm, nor if anyone using devices with the end-to-end encryption is aware of the security vulnerability in them.

The end-to-end encryption the researchers examined, which is expensive to deploy, is most commonly used in radios for law enforcement agencies, special forces, and covert military and intelligence teams that are involved in national security work and therefore need an extra layer of security. But ETSI’s endorsement of the algorithm two years ago to mitigate flaws found in its lower-level encryption algorithm suggests it may be used more widely now than at the time.

In 2023, Carlo Meijer, Wouter Bokslag, and Jos Wetzels of security firm Midnight Blue, based in the Netherlands, discovered vulnerabilities in encryption algorithms that are part of a European radio standard created by ETSI called TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), which has been baked into radio systems made by Motorola, Damm, Sepura, and others since the ’90s. The flaws remained unknown publicly until their disclosure, because ETSI refused for decades to let anyone examine the proprietary algorithms. The end-to-end encryption the researchers examined recently is designed to run on top of TETRA encryption algorithms.

The researchers found the issue with the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) only after extracting and reverse-engineering the E2EE algorithm used in a radio made by Sepura. The researchers plan to present their findings today at the BlackHat security conference in Las Vegas.

ETSI, when contacted about the issue, noted that the end-to-end encryption used with TETRA-based radios is not part of the ETSI standard, nor was it created by the organization. Instead it was produced by The Critical Communications Association’s (TCCA) security and fraud prevention group (SFPG). But ETSI and TCCA work closely with one another, and the two organizations include many of the same people. Brian Murgatroyd, former chair of the technical body at ETSI responsible for the TETRA standard as well as the TCCA group that developed the E2EE solution, wrote in an email on behalf of ETSI and the TCCA that end-to-end encryption was not included in the ETSI standard “because at the time it was considered that E2EE would only be used by government groups where national security concerns were involved, and these groups often have special security needs.

For this reason, Murgatroyd noted that purchasers of TETRA-based radios are free to deploy other solutions for end-to-end encryption on their radios, but he acknowledges that the one produced by the TCCA and endorsed by ETSI “is widely used as far as we can tell.”

Although TETRA-based radio devices are not used by police and military in the US, the majority of police forces around the world do use them. These include police forces in Belgium and Scandinavian countries, as well as Eastern European countries like Serbia, Moldova, Bulgaria, and Macedonia, and in the Middle East in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. The Ministries of Defense in Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, and Syria also use them, as do the Polish military counterintelligence agency, the Finnish defense forces, and Lebanon and Saudi Arabia’s intelligence services. It’s not clear, however, how many of these also deploy end-to-end decryption with their radios.

The TETRA standard includes four encryption algorithms—TEA1, TEA2, TEA3 and TEA4—that can be used by radio manufacturers in different products, depending on the intended customer and usage. The algorithms have different levels of security based on whether the radios will be sold in or outside Europe. TEA2, for example, is restricted for use in radios used by police, emergency services, military, and intelligence agencies in Europe. TEA3 is available for police and emergency services radios used outside Europe but only in countries deemed “friendly” to the EU. Only TEA1 is available for radios used by public safety agencies, police agencies, and militaries in countries deemed not friendly to Europe, such as Iran. But it’s also used in critical infrastructure in the US and other countries for machine-to-machine communication in industrial control settings such as pipelines, railways, and electric grids.

All four TETRA encryption algorithms use 80-bit keys to secure communication. But the Dutch researchers revealed in 2023 that TEA1 has a feature that causes its key to get reduced to just 32 bits, which allowed the researchers to crack it in less than a minute.

In the case of the E2EE, the researchers found that the implementation they examined starts with a key that is more secure than ones used in the TETRA algorithms, but it gets reduced to 56 bits, which would potentially let someone decrypt voice and data communications. They also found a second vulnerability that would let someone send fraudulent messages or replay legitimate ones to spread misinformation or confusion to personnel using the radios.

The ability to inject voice traffic and replay messages affects all users of the TCCA end-to-end encryption scheme, according to the researchers. They say this is the result of flaws in the TCCA E2EE protocol design rather than a particular implementation. They also say that “law enforcement end users” have confirmed to them that this flaw is in radios produced by vendors other than Sepura.

But the researchers say only a subset of end-to-end encryption users are likely affected by the reduced-key vulnerability because it depends on how the encryption was implemented in radios sold to various countries.

ETSI’s Murgatroyd said in 2023 that the TEA1 key was reduced to meet export controls for encryption sold to customers outside Europe. He said when the algorithm was created, a key with 32 bits of entropy was considered secure for most uses. Advances in computing power make it less secure now, so when the Dutch researchers exposed the reduced key two years ago, ETSI recommended that customers using TEA1 deploy TCCA’s end-to-end encryption solution on top of it.

But Murgatroyd said the end-to-end encryption algorithm designed by TCCA is different. It doesn’t specify the key length the radios should use because governments using the end-to-end encryption have their own “specific and often proprietary security rules” for the devices they use. Therefore they are able to customize the TCCA encryption algorithm in their devices by working with their radio supplier to select the “encryption algorithm, key management and so on” that is right for them—but only to a degree.

“The choice of encryption algorithm and key is made between supplier and customer organisation, and ETSI has no input to this selection—nor knowledge of which algorithms and key lengths are in use in any system,” he said. But he added that radio manufacturers and customers “will always have to abide by export control regulations.”

The researchers say they cannot verify that the TCCA E2EE doesn’t specify a key length because the TCCA documentation describing the solution is protected by a nondisclosure agreement and provided only to radio vendors. But they note that the E2EE system calls out an “algorithm identifier” number, which means it calls out the specific algorithm it’s using for the end-to-end encryption. These identifiers are not vendor specific, the researchers say, which suggests the identifiers refer to different key variants produced by TCCA—meaning TCCA provides specifications for algorithms that use a 126 bit key or 56 bit key, and radio vendors can configure their devices to use either of these variants, depending on the export controls in place for the purchasing country.

Whether users know their radios could have this vulnerability is unclear. The researchers found a confidential 2006 Sepura product bulletin that someone leaked online, which mentions that “the length of the traffic key … is subject to export control regulations and hence the [encryption system in the device] will be factory configured to support 128, 64, or 56 bit key lengths.” But it’s not clear what Sepura customers receive or if other manufacturers whose radios use a reduced key disclose to customers if their radios use a reduced-key algorithm.

“Some manufacturers have this in brochures; others only mention this in internal communications, and others don’t mention it at all,” says Wetzels. He says they did extensive open-source research to examine vendor documentation and “ found no clear sign of weakening being communicated to end users. So while … there are ‘some’ mentions of the algorithm being weakened, it is not fully transparent at all.”

Sepura did not respond to an inquiry from WIRED.

But Murgatroyd says that because government customers who have opted to use TCCA’s E2EE solution need to know the security of their devices, they are likely to be aware if their systems are using a reduced key.

“As end-to-end encryption is primarily used for government communications, we would expect that the relevant government National Security agencies are fully aware of the capabilities of their end-to-end encryption systems and can advise their users appropriately,” Murgatroyd wrote in his email.

Wetzels is skeptical of this, however. “We consider it highly unlikely non-Western governments are willing to spend literally millions of dollars if they know they’re only getting 56 bits of security,” he says.

This story originally appeared at WIRED.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

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National Academies to fast-track a new climate assessment

climate change, endangerment finding, EPA, National Academies, Science, syndication / Kelly Newman / August 8, 2025

The nation’s premier group of scientific advisers announced Thursday that it will conduct an independent, fast-track review of the latest climate science. It will do so with an eye to weighing in on the Trump administration’s planned repeal of the government’s 2009 determination that greenhouse gas emissions harm human health and the environment.

The move by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to self-fund the study is a departure from their typical practice of responding to requests by government agencies or Congress for advice. The Academies intend to publicly release it in September, in time to inform the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision on the so-called “endangerment finding,” they said in a prepared statement.

“It is critical that federal policymaking is informed by the best available scientific evidence,” said Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences. “Decades of climate research and data have yielded expanded understanding of how greenhouse gases affect the climate. We are undertaking this fresh examination of the latest climate science in order to provide the most up-to-date assessment to policymakers and the public.”

The Academies are private, nonprofit institutions that operate under an 1863 congressional charter, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, directing them to provide independent, objective analysis and advice to inform public policy decisions.

The Trump administration’s move to rescind the endangerment finding, announced last month, would eliminate the legal underpinning of the most important actions the federal government has taken on climate change—regulation of carbon pollution from motor vehicles and power plants under the Clean Air Act. Since assuming his role, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has made clear he intends to repeal the climate rules that were put in place under the Biden administration, but his job will be far easier with the elimination of the endangerment finding.

The EPA based its proposal mainly on a narrow interpretation of the agency’s legal authority, but the agency also cited uncertainties in the science, pointing to a report published the same day by the Department of Energy that was authored by a hand-picked quintet of well-known skeptics of the mainstream consensus on climate change. The administration has given a short window of opportunity—30 days—for the public to respond to its endangerment finding proposal and to the DOE report on climate science.

The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the announcement by the National Academies. Critics of the Trump administration’s approach applauded the decision by the scientific panel.

“I think the National Academies have identified a very fundamental need that is not being met, which is the need for independent, disinterested expert advice on what the science is telling us,” said Bob Sussman, who served as deputy administrator of the EPA in the Clinton administration and was a senior adviser in the agency during the Obama administration.

Earlier Thursday, before the National Academies announcement, Sussman posted a blog at the Environmental Law Institute website calling for a “blue-ribbon review” of the science around the endangerment finding. Sussman noted the review of the state of climate science that the National Academies conducted in 2001 at the request of President George W. Bush’s administration. Since then, the Academies have conducted numerous studies on aspects of climate change, including the development of a “climate-ready workforce,” how to power AI sustainably, and emerging technologies for removing carbon from the atmosphere, for example.

The National Academies announced in 2023 that they were developing a rapid response capacity to address the many emerging scientific policy issues the nation was facing. The first project they worked on was an assessment of the state of science around diagnostics for avian influenza.

Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A&M University, said the new controversy that the Trump administration had stirred around climate science was a fitting subject for a fast-track effort by the National Academies.

“The National Academies [were] established exactly to do things like this—to answer questions of scientific importance for the government,” he said. “This is what the DOE should have done all along, rather than hire five people who represent a tiny minority of the scientific community and have views that virtually nobody else agrees with.”

Dessler is leading an effort to coordinate a response from the scientific community to the DOE report, which would also be submitted to the EPA. He said that he had heard from about 70 academics eager to participate after putting out a call on the social media network Bluesky. He said that work will continue because it seems to have a slightly different focus than the National Academies’ announced review, which does not mention the DOE report but talks about focusing on the scientific evidence on the harms of greenhouse gas emissions that has emerged since 2009, the year the endangerment finding was adopted by the EPA.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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President Trump says Intel’s new CEO “must resign immediately”

Donald Trump, intel, Lip-Bu Tan, Policy, syndication, Tech / Beth Washington / August 7, 2025

Intel and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s post. Intel shares dropped 3 percent in pre-market trading in New York.

Tan was appointed as Intel CEO in March after the Silicon Valley company’s board ousted his predecessor, Pat Gelsinger, in December.

Intel is the only US-headquartered company capable of producing advanced semiconductors, though it has so far largely missed out on the current boom for artificial intelligence chips. It has been awarded billions of dollars in US government subsidies and loans to support its chip manufacturing business, which has fallen far behind its rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

However, amid a radical cost-cutting program, Tan warned last month that Intel might be forced to abandon development of its next-generation manufacturing technology if it were unable to secure a “significant external customer.” Such a move would hand a virtual monopoly of leading-edge chipmaking to TSMC.

“Intel is required to be a responsible steward of American taxpayer dollars and to comply with applicable security regulations,” Cotton wrote in Tuesday’s letter to Intel’s board chair, Frank Yeary. “Mr Tan’s associations raise questions about Intel’s ability to fulfill these obligations.”

Additional reporting by Demetri Sevastopulo.

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States take the lead in AI regulation as federal government steers clear

AI, ai action plan, AI regulation, facial recognition, generative ai, Policy, syndication / Mike M. / August 6, 2025

AI in health care

In the first half of 2025, 34 states introduced over 250 AI-related health bills. The bills generally fall into four categories: disclosure requirements, consumer protection, insurers’ use of AI, and clinicians’ use of AI.

Bills about transparency define requirements for information that AI system developers and organizations that deploy the systems disclose.

Consumer protection bills aim to keep AI systems from unfairly discriminating against some people and ensure that users of the systems have a way to contest decisions made using the technology.

Bills covering insurers provide oversight of the payers’ use of AI to make decisions about health care approvals and payments. And bills about clinical uses of AI regulate use of the technology in diagnosing and treating patients.

Facial recognition and surveillance

In the US, a long-standing legal doctrine that applies to privacy protection issues, including facial surveillance, is to protect individual autonomy against interference from the government. In this context, facial recognition technologies pose significant privacy challenges as well as risks from potential biases.

Facial recognition software, commonly used in predictive policing and national security, has exhibited biases against people of color and consequently is often considered a threat to civil liberties. A pathbreaking study by computer scientists Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru found that facial recognition software poses significant challenges for Black people and other historically disadvantaged minorities. Facial recognition software was less likely to correctly identify darker faces.

Bias also creeps into the data used to train these algorithms, for example when the composition of teams that guide the development of such facial recognition software lack diversity.

By the end of 2024, 15 states in the US had enacted laws to limit the potential harms from facial recognition. Some elements of state-level regulations are requirements on vendors to publish bias test reports and data management practices, as well as the need for human review in the use of these technologies.

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“Red meat allergy” from tick bites is spreading both in US and globally

Alpha-Gal Syndrome, CDC, health, red meat allergy, syndication, ticks / Mike M. / August 5, 2025

Remember to check for ticks after your next stroll through the woods or long grasses.

Hours after savoring that perfectly grilled steak on a beautiful summer evening, your body turns traitor, declaring war on the very meal you just enjoyed. You begin to feel excruciating itchiness, pain, or even swelling that can escalate to the point of requiring emergency care.

The culprit isn’t food poisoning—it’s the fallout from a tick bite you may have gotten months earlier and didn’t even notice.

This delayed allergic reaction is called alpha-gal syndrome. While it’s commonly called the “red meat allergy,” that nickname is misleading, because alpha-gal syndrome can cause strong reactions to many products, beyond just red meat.

The syndrome is also rapidly spreading in the US and around the globe. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates as many as 450,000 people in the US may have it. And it’s carried by many more tick species than most people realize.

Map showing alpha-gal syndrome prevalence. — Cases of suspected alpha-gal syndrome based on confirmed laboratory evidence. Credit: CDC

What is alpha-gal syndrome?

Alpha-gal syndrome is actually an allergy to a sugar molecule with a tongue-twisting name: galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, shortened to alpha-gal.

The alpha-gal sugar molecule exists in the tissues of most mammals, including cows, pigs, deer, and rabbits. But it’s absent in humans. When a big dose of alpha-gal gets into your bloodstream through a tick bite, it can send your immune system into overdrive to generate antibodies against alpha-gal. In later exposure to foods containing alpha-gal, your immune system might then launch an inappropriate allergic response.

Picture of lone star tick — A lone star tick (Amblyomma americanum). The tick can cause alpha-gal syndrome as well as carry other diseases, including ehrlichiosis, tularemia, and Southern tick-associated rash illness. Credit: wildpixel/Getty

Often this allergy is triggered by eating red meat. But the allergy also can be set off by exposure to a range of other animal-based products, including dairy products, gelatin (think Jell-O or gummy bears), medications, and even some personal care items. The drug heparin, used to prevent blood clotting during surgery, is extracted from pig intestines, and its use has triggered a dangerous reaction in some people with alpha-gal syndrome.

Once you have alpha-gal syndrome, it’s possible to get over the allergy if you can modify your diet enough to avoid triggering another reaction for a few years and also avoid more tick bites. But that takes time and careful attention to the less obvious triggers that you might be exposed to.

Why more people are being diagnosed

As an entomologist who studies bugs and the diseases they transmit, what I find alarming is how rapidly this allergy is spreading around the globe.

Several years ago, experts thought alpha-gal syndrome was primarily limited to the Southeastern US because it was largely associated with the geographical range of the lone star tick.

However, both local and global reports have now identified many different tick species across six continents that are capable of causing alpha-gal syndrome, including the prolific black-legged tick, or deer tick, which also transmits Lyme disease.

These ticks lurk in yards and urban parks, as well as forests where they can stealthily grab onto hikers when they touch tick-infested vegetation. As tick populations boom with growing deer and human populations, the number of people with alpha-gal syndrome is escalating.

Why ticks are blamed for alpha-gal syndrome

There are a few theories on how a tick bite triggers alpha-gal syndrome and why only a small proportion of people bitten develop the allergy. To understand the theories, it helps to understand what happens as a tick starts feeding on you.

When a tick finds you, it typically looks for a warm, dark area to hide and attach itself to your body. Then its serrated teeth chew through your skin with rapid sawing motions.

As it excavates deeper into your skin, the tick deploys a barbed feeding tube, like a miniature drilling rig, and it secretes a biological cement that anchors its head into its new tunnel.

A tick’s mouth is barbed so it can stay embedded in your skin as it draws blood over hours and sometimes days. Credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

Once secure, the tick activates its pumping station, injecting copious amounts of saliva containing anesthetics, blood thinners, and, sometimes, alpha-gal sugars into the wound so it can feed undetected, sometimes for days.

One theory about how a tick bite causes alpha-gal syndrome is linked to the enormous quantity of tick saliva released during feeding, which activates the body’s strong immune response. Another suggests how the skin is damaged as the tick feeds and the possible effect of the tick’s regurgitated stomach contents into the bite site are to blame. Or it may be a combination of these and other triggers. Scientists are still investigating the causes.

What an allergic reaction feels like

The allergy doesn’t begin right away. Typically, one to three months after the sensitizing tick bite, a person with alpha-gal syndrome has their first disturbing reaction.

Alpha-gal syndrome produces symptoms that range from hives or swelling to crushing abdominal pain, violent nausea, or even life-threatening anaphylactic shock. The symptoms usually start two to six hours after a person has ingested a meat product containing alpha-gal.

Due to a general lack of awareness about the allergy, however, doctors can easily miss the diagnosis. A study in 2022 found that 42 percent of US health care practitioners had never heard of alpha-gal syndrome. A decade ago, people with alpha-gal syndrome might go years before the cause of their symptoms was accurately diagnosed. Today, the diagnosis is faster in areas where doctors are familiar with the syndrome, but in many parts of the country it can still take time and multiple doctor visits.

Unfortunately, with every additional tick bite or exposure to food or products containing alpha-gal, the allergy can increase in severity.

Chart showing tick relative sizes — The lone star tick isn’t the only one that can cause alpha-gal syndrome. Black-legged ticks have also been connected to cases. Credit: US Army

If you think you have alpha-gal syndrome

If you suspect you may have alpha-gal syndrome, the first step is to discuss the possibility with your doctor and ask them to order a simple blood test to measure whether your immune system is reacting to alpha-gal.

If you test positive, the main strategy for managing the allergy is to avoid eating any food product from a mammal, including milk and cheese, as well as other potential triggers, such as more tick bites.

Read labels carefully. Some products contain additives such as carrageenan, which is derived from red algae and contains alpha-gal.

In extreme cases, people with alpha-gal syndrome may need to carry an EpiPen to prevent anaphylactic shock. Reputable websites, such as the CDC and alphagalinformation.org, can provide more information and advice.

Mysteries remain as alpha-gal syndrome spreads

Since alpha-gal syndrome was first formally documented in the early 2000s, scientists have made progress in understanding this puzzling condition. Researchers have connected the allergy to specific tick bites and found that people with the allergy can have a higher risk of heart disease, even without allergy symptoms.

But important mysteries remain.

Scientists are still figuring out exactly how the tick bite tricks the human immune system and why tick saliva is a trigger for only some people. With growing public interest in alpha-gal syndrome, the next decade could bring breakthroughs in preventing, diagnosing, and treating this condition.

For now, the next time you are strolling in the woods or in long grasses, remember to check for ticks on your body, wear long sleeves, long pants, and tick repellent to protect yourself from these bloodthirsty hitchhikers. If you do get bitten by a tick, watch out for odd allergic symptoms to appear a few hours after your next steak or handful of gummy bears.

Lee Rafuse Haines is associate research professor of molecular parasitology and medical entomology at University of Notre Dame.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Conversation is an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community. Our team of editors work with these experts to share their knowledge with the wider public. Our aim is to allow for better understanding of current affairs and complex issues, and hopefully improve the quality of public discourse on them.

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Idaho has become the wild frontier of vaccination policy and public health

anti-vaccines, childhood vaccination, health, public health, syndication / 9u50fv / August 4, 2025

Idaho charts a new path as trust in public health craters.

Some 280,000 people live in the five northernmost counties of Idaho. One of the key public officials responsible for their health is Thomas Fletcher, a retired radiologist who lives on a 160-acre farm near Sandpoint.

Fletcher grew up in Texas and moved to Idaho in 2016, looking for a place where he could live a rural life alongside likeminded conservatives. In 2022, he joined the seven-member board of health of the Panhandle Health District, the regional public health authority, and he was appointed chairman last summer.

PHD handles everything from cancer screenings to restaurant hygiene inspections, and the business of the board is often mundane, almost invisible. Then, this February, Fletcher issued a short announcement online. Parents, he wrote, should be informed of the potential harms of common childhood vaccines. It was time for the board to discuss how best to communicate those risks, rather than “withholding information contra the CDC narrative.” Fletcher invited everyone who believes in “full disclosure and transparency when providing informed consent on childhood vaccines” to attend the next monthly meeting of the board, on a Thursday afternoon.

PHD board meetings tend to be sparsely attended. This one was standing-room only—the start of a monthslong debate over vaccine safety and the question of what, exactly, it means to provide informed consent.

Versions of that debate are playing out across the United States in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which many Americans believe was badly mismanaged. The backlash has upended longstanding norms in public health: The nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., publicly questions the value of common vaccines. Prominent vaccine skeptics now sit on a key advisory committee that shapes immunization practices nationwide. Polls suggest that trust in health authorities is politically polarized — and perhaps historically low. Immunization rates are dropping across the country. And many advocates are promoting a vision of public health that’s less dependent on mandates and appeals to authority, and more deferent to individuals’ beliefs.

Much of that energy has been reflected in Kennedy’s Make American Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement. The coalition is diverse — and has sometimes fractured over vaccination issues—but often channels a long-running argument that Americans should have more freedom to choose or reject vaccines and other health measures.

The backlash against traditional health authorities, said Columbia University medical historian James Colgrove, is unprecedented in recent US history. “It’s been a very, very long time since we’ve been in a place like this,” he said.

Perhaps more than anywhere else in the country, Idaho has experienced these shifts—an ongoing experiment that shows what it looks like to put a vision of individual health freedom into practice. And places like the Panhandle Health District have become testing grounds for big questions: What happens when communities move away from widespread and mandated vaccination? And what does it mean to turn MAHA principles into local public health policy?

During a recent visit to Idaho, Kennedy described the state as “the home of medical freedom.” In April, Gov. Brad Little signed the Idaho Medical Freedom Act, which bans schools, businesses, and government agencies from requiring people to participate in medical interventions, such as mask-wearing or vaccination, in order to receive services. It’s the first legislation of its kind in the country. The bill has a carveout that keeps school vaccine requirements in place, but those requirements are already mostly symbolic: The state’s exemption policy is so broad that, as one Idaho pediatrician told Undark, “you can write on a napkin, ‘I don’t want my kids to get shots because of philosophical reasons,’ and they can go to kindergarten.” Overall, reported vaccination rates for kindergarteners in Idaho are now lower than in any other state that reported data to the federal government—especially in the Panhandle Health District, where fewer than two-thirds arrive with records showing that they are up-to-date on common shots.

“It’s really kind of like watching a car accident in slow motion,” said Ted Epperly, a physician and the CEO of Full Circle Health, which operates a network of clinics in the Boise area.

Photo of Idaho countryside — A view of Sandpoint, Idaho, which sits on the shores of Lake Pend Oreille. The city, a part of Bonner County, is served by the Panhandle Health District. Credit: Kirk Fisher/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Public health leaders often ascribe the low vaccination rates to the work of bad-faith actors who profit from falsehoods, to the spread of misinformation, or to failures of communication: If only leaders could better explain the benefits of vaccination, this thinking goes, more people would get shots.

In interviews and public statements, health freedom advocates in Idaho describe a far deeper rift: They do not believe that public health institutions are competent or trustworthy. And restoring that trust, they argue, will require radical changes.

Fletcher, for his part, describes himself as an admirer of RFK Jr. and the Make America Healthy Again movement. With the recent appointment of a new member, he said, MAHA supporters now hold a majority on the board, where they are poised to reimagine public health work in the district.

Local public health

In the US, public health is mostly local. Agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conduct research and issue influential recommendations. But much of the actual power rests with the country’s thousands of state, local, and tribal public health authorities—with institutions, in other words, like the Panhandle Health District, and with leaders like Fletcher and his fellow PHD board of health member Duke Johnson.

Johnson says he grew up in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in the 1960s, the descendant of homesteaders who arrived in the 19th century. He attended medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles and eventually returned to Idaho, where he runs a family medical practice and dietary supplement business in the town of Hayden.

In Idaho, health boards are appointed by elected county commissioners. The commissioners of Kootenai County gave Johnson the nod in July 2023. Johnson took the role, he said, in order to restore trust in a medical system that he characterized as beholden to rigid dogmas and protocols rather than independent thinking.

In interviews and public statements, health freedom advocates in Idaho describe a far deeper rift: They do not believe that public health institutions are competent or trustworthy.

Last winter, Johnson took a tour of one of the PHD clinics. Among other services, it provides routine childhood immunizations, especially for families with limited access to health care. As is standard in pediatrics practices, the clinic hands out flyers from the CDC that review the potential side effects of common vaccines, including “a very remote chance” of severe outcomes. Johnson was unimpressed with the CDC writeup. “I thought: This isn’t completely covering all of the risk-benefit ratio,” Johnson said. He felt families could be better informed about what he sees as the substantial risks of common shots.

Johnson is an outlier among physicians. The overwhelming majority of laboratory scientists, epidemiologists, and pediatricians who have devoted their lives to the study of childhood disease say that routine immunizations are beneficial, and that serious side effects are rare. Large-scale studies have repeatedly failed to find purported links between the measles-mumps-rubella, or MMR, vaccine and autism, or to identify high rates of severe side effects for other routine childhood immunizations. The introduction of mass vaccinations in the US in the 1950s and 1960s was followed by dramatic declines in the rates of childhood diseases like polio and measles that once killed hundreds of American children each year, and sent tens of thousands more to the hospital. Similar declines have been recorded around the world.

Children can suffer side effects from common shots like the MMR vaccine, ranging from mild symptoms like a rash or fever to rare fatal complications. Public health agencies and vaccine manufacturers study and track those side effects. But today, many Americans simply do not trust that those institutions are being transparent about the risks of vaccination.

Johnson shares some of those concerns. The website for his clinic, Heart of Hope Health, describes offering services for “injection-injured” patients, encouraging them to receive a $449 heart scan, and advertises “no forced masks or vaccinations.” (During a PHD board meeting, Johnson said that one of his own children suffered an apparent bad reaction to a vaccine many years ago.) “The lack of trust in established medicine is probably 10 times bigger than the people at Harvard Medical School realize,” Johnson told Undark during an evening phone call, after a long day seeing patients. Top medical institutions have brilliant scientists on staff, he continued. But, he suggested, those experts have lost touch with how they’re seen by much of the public: “I think sometimes you can spend so much time talking to the same people who agree with you that you’re not reaching the people on the street who are the ones who need the care. And I’m in the trenches.”

Many public health experts agree that restoring trust is an urgent priority, and they are convinced that it will come through better communication, a reduction in the circulation of misinformation, and a re-building of relationships. Johnson and others in the health freedom movement frequently adopt the language of restoring trust, too. But for them, the process tends to mean something different: an overhaul of public health institutions and a frank accounting of their perceived failures.

At the board meeting in February, Johnson laid out the proposal for a change in policy: What if the board wrote up its own document for parents, explaining the evidence behind specific vaccines, and laying out the risks and benefits of the shots? The goal, he told Undark, was “to make sure that the people that we’re responsible for in our in our district can make an informed decision.”

Fletcher was also hoping to change the way PHD communicated about vaccines. Why did a push for informed consent appeal to him? “I can summarize the answer to that question with one word,” Fletcher said. “COVID.”

Nobody’s telling me what to do

Idaho is ideologically diverse, with blue pockets in cities like Boise, and texture to its overwhelming Republican majority. (Latter-Day Saint conservatives in East Idaho, for example, may not always be aligned with government-skeptical activists clustered in the north.) Parts of the state have a reputation for libertarian politics—and for resistance to perceived excesses of government authority.

People came West because “they wanted to get out to a place where nobody would tell them what to do,” said Epperly, the Boise-area physician and administrator. That libertarian ethos, he said, can sometimes translate into a skepticism of things like school vaccination requirements, even as plenty of Idahoans, including Epperly, embrace them.

Like all US states, Idaho technically requires vaccination for children to attend school. But it is relatively easy to opt out of the requirement. In 2021, Idaho lawmakers went further, instructing schools to be proactive and notify parents they had the option to claim an exemption.

“Idaho has some of the strongest languages in the US when it comes to parental rights and vaccine exemptions,” the vaccine-skeptical advocacy group Health Freedom Idaho wrote in 2021. In the 2024–2025 school year, more than 15 percent of kindergarten parents in the state claimed a non-medical exemption, the highest percentage, by far, of the states that reported data.

The pandemic, Epperly and other Idaho health care practitioners said, accelerated many of these trends. In his view, much of that backlash was about authority and control. “The pandemic acted as a catalyst to increase this sense of governmental overreach, if you will,” he said. The thinking, he added, was: “‘How dare the federal government mandate that we wear masks, that we socially distance, that we hand-wash?’”

Recently, advocates have pushed to remove medical mandates in the state altogether through the Idaho Medical Freedom Act, which curtails the ability of local governments, businesses, and schools to impose things like mask mandates or vaccine requirements.

The author of the original bill is Leslie Manookian, an Idaho activist who has campaigned against what she describes as the pervasive dangers of some vaccines, and who leads a national nonprofit, the Health Freedom Defense Fund. In testimony to an Idaho state Senate committee this February, she described feeling shocked by mitigation measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Growing up, I could have never, ever imagined that Idaho would become a place that locked its people down, forced citizens to cover their faces, stand on floor markers 6 feet apart, or produce proof of vaccination in order to enter a venue or a business,” Manookian told the senators.

“Idaho has some of the strongest languages in the US when it comes to parental rights and vaccine exemptions.”

Where some public health officials saw vital interventions for the public’s well-being, Manookian saw a form of government overreach, based on scant evidence. Her home state, she argued, could be a leader in building a post-COVID vision of public health. “Idaho wants to be the shining light on the Hill, that leads the way for the rest of the nation in understanding that we and we alone are sovereign over our bodies, and that our God-given rights belong to us and to no one else,” Manookian said during the hearing. A modified version of the bill passed both houses with large majorities, and became law in April.

Epperly, like many physicians and public health workers in the state, has watched these changes with concern. The family medicine specialist grew up in Idaho. During the pandemic, he was a prominent local figure advocating for masking and COVID-19 vaccinations. When the pandemic began, he had been serving on the board of the Boise-area Central District Health department for more than a decade. Then, in 2021, Ada County commissioners declined to renew his appointment, selecting a physician and vocal opponent of COVID-19 vaccines instead.

A transformative experience

For Thomas Fletcher, the Panhandle Health District board of health chair, the experience of the pandemic was transformative. Fletcher has strong political views; he moved away from Texas, in part, over concerns that the culture there was growing too liberal, and out of a desire to live in a place that was, as he put it, “more representative of America circa 1950.” But before the pandemic, he said, although he was a practicing physician, he rarely thought about public health.

Then COVID-19 arrived, and it felt to him that official messaging was disconnected from reality. In early 2020, the World Health Organization said that COVID-19 was not an airborne virus. (There’s a scientific consensus today that it actually is.) Prominent scientists argued that it was a conspiracy theory to say that COVID-19 emerged from a lab. (The issue is still hotly debated, but many scientists now acknowledge that a lab leak is a real possibility.) The World Health Organization appeared to indicate that the fatality rate of COVID-19 was upwards of 3 percent. (It’s far lower.)

Many people today understand these reversals as the results of miscommunications, evolving evidence, or good-faith scientific error. Fletcher came to believe that Anthony Fauci—a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force during the pandemic—and other public health leaders were intentionally, maliciously misleading the public. Fletcher reads widely on the platform Substack, particularly writers who push against the medical establishment, and he concluded that COVID-19 vaccines were dangerous, too—a toxic substance pushed by pharma, and backed knowingly by the medical elite. “They lied to us,” he said.

That shift ultimately led the retired physician to question foundational ideas in his field. “Once you realize they’re lying to us, then you ask the question, ‘Well, where else are they lying?’” Fletcher said during one of several lengthy phone conversations with Undark. “I was a card-carrying allopathic physician,” he said. “I believed in the gospel.” But he soon began to question the evidence behind cholesterol medication, and then antidepressants, and then the childhood vaccination schedule.

In 2022, lawmakers in Bonner County appointed Fletcher to the board of health. Last year, he took the helm of the board, which oversees an approximately 90-person agency with a $12 million budget.

“As Chairman of Panhandle Health, I feel a certain urge to restore the trust—public trust in public health—because that trust has been violated,” he said.

The informed consent measure seemed like one way to get there.

Conversations around informed consent

On a February afternoon, in a conference room at the health district office in Hayden, a few dozen attendees and board members gathered to discuss vaccination policy and informed consent in the district.

During the lengthy public comment periods, members of the public spoke about their experiences with vaccination. One woman described witnessing the harms of diseases that have been suppressed by vaccination, noting that her mother has experienced weakness in her limbs as the result of a childhood polio infection. Several attendees reported firsthand encounters with what they understood to be vaccine side effects; one cited rising autism rates. They wanted parents to hear more about those possibilities before getting shots.

In response, some local pediatrics providers insisted they already facilitated informed consent, through detailed conversations with caregivers. They also stressed the importance of routine shots; one brought up the measles outbreak emerging in Texas, which would go on to be implicated in the deaths of two unvaccinated children.

“Once you realize they’re lying to us, then you ask the question, ‘Well, where else are they lying?’”

Johnson, defending the measure, proposed a document that listed both pros and cons for vaccination. The PHD Board, he argued, “would have a much better chance of providing good information than the average person on the Internet.”

The conversation soon bogged down over what, exactly, the document should look like. “If the vote is yay or nay for informed consent, I’m all in with two hands,” said board member Jessica Jameson, an anesthesiologist who ultimately voted against the measure. “But my concern is that we have to be very careful about the information we present and the way that it’s presented.” The board members, she added, were neither “the subject matter experts nor the stakeholders,” and studies that seemed strong on first-glance could be subject to critique.

Marty Williams, a nurse practitioner in Coeur d’Alene who works in pediatrics, had heard about the meeting that morning, as materials about the measure circulated online.

Williams is a former wildland firefighter, a father of five, and a Christian; he snowboards and bowhunts in his free time, and speaks with the laid-back affect of someone who has spent years coaching anxious parents through childhood scrapes and illnesses. A document associated with the proposal looked to him less like an attempt at informed consent, and more like a bid to talk parents out of giving their children immunizations. “If you read this, you would be like, ‘Well, I would never vaccinate my child,’” he recalled. “It was beyond informed consent. It seemed to be full of bias.”

He and his practice partner, Jeanna Padilla, canceled appointments in order to attend the meeting and speak during a public comment period. “The thought of it coming from our public health department made me sick,” Williams said. “We’re in the business of trying to prevent disease, and I had a strong feeling that this was going to bring more fear onto an already anxiety-provoking subject.” The issue felt high-stakes to him: That winter, he had seen more cases of pertussis, a vaccine-preventable illness, than at any point in his 18-year career.

Williams has always encountered some parents who are hesitant about vaccination. But those numbers began to rise during the COVID-19 pandemic. Trust in public health was dropping, and recommendations to vaccinate children against COVID-19, in particular, worried him. “Is this going to push people over the edge, where they just withdraw completely from vaccines?” he wondered at the time. Something did shift, he said: “We have families that historically have vaccinated their children, and now they have a new baby, and they’re like, ‘Nope, we’re not doing it. Nope, nope, nope.’”

In his practice, Williams described a change in how he’s approached parents. “I don’t say, ‘Well, you know, it’s time for Junior’s two months shots. Here’s what we’re going to do.’ I don’t approach it that way anymore, because greater than 40 or 50 percent of people are going to say, ‘Well, no, I’m not doing vaccines. And they get defensive right away,’” he said. Instead, he now opens up a conversation, asking families whether they’ve thought about vaccination, answering their questions, providing resources, talking about his personal experiences treating illness—even inviting them to consider the vaccine schedules used in Denmark or Sweden, which recommend shots for fewer diseases, if they are adamant about not following CDC guidelines.

The approach can be effective, he said, but also time-consuming and draining. “It’s emotional for me too, because there’s a piece of this that being questioned every single day in regards to the standard of care, as if you’re harming children,” he said.

“If you read this, you would be like, ‘Well, I would never vaccinate my child.’ It was beyond informed consent. It seemed to be full of bias.”

Williams doubts his comments at the February meeting achieved much. “I was shocked by what I was hearing, because it was so one-sided,” he said. What seemed to be missing, he said, was an honest account of the alternatives: “There was no discussion of, OK, then, if we don’t vaccinate children, what is our option? How else are we going to protect them from diseases that our grandparents dealt with that we don’t have to deal with in this country?”

The board punted: They’d discuss the issue again down the road.

This isn’t new

Versions of this debate have played out across Idaho—and across the country — since the end of COVID-19’s emergency phase. In an apparent national first, one Idaho health district banned COVID-19 vaccines altogether. In Louisiana, Surgeon General Ralph Abraham told public health departments to stop recommending specific vaccines. “Government should admit the limitations of its role in people’s lives and pull back its tentacles from the practice of medicine,” Abraham and his deputy wrote in a statement explaining the decision. “The path to regaining public trust lies in acknowledging past missteps, refocusing on unbiased data collection, and providing transparent, balanced information for people to make their own health decisions.”

In several states, Republican lawmakers have moved to make it easier for people to opt out of vaccines. Not all those efforts have been successful: In West Virginia this past March, for example, the Republican-dominated legislature rejected a bill that would have made it easier to obtain exemptions. Keith Marple, a Republican lawmaker who voted against the measure, cited his personal experiences with people who had been left disabled by polio. “West Virginia needs to look after its children,” he said, according to the news site West Virginia Watch.

In an apparent national first, one Idaho health district banned COVID-19 vaccines altogether.

In Idaho, like many states, vaccination rates have dropped. In the 2023-2024 school year, a bit more than 65 percent of kindergarten families in the Panhandle Health District furnished records showing they’ve received the MMR vaccine and five other common immunizations, down from just over 69 percent in the 2019-2020 school year. (State officials note that some children may have received shots, but their parents did not submit the paperwork to prove it.) Such figures, infectious disease modelers say, leave the area vulnerable to outbreaks of measles and other illnesses.

During an interview with Undark earlier this year, Sarah Leeds, who directs the immunization program for the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, noted her colleagues across the country are reporting resistance to their work. “Sometimes it’s hard when you might be feeling like people think we’re the villain,” she said. “But I know our team and our leadership knows we do good work, and it’s based on sound science, and it’s important work for the community. And we just keep that at the front of our minds.”

When the board reconvened in early March, more advocates for the informed consent policy came out to back it. Among them was Rick Kirschner, a retired naturopathic doctor, author, and speaker. (His best-known book is titled “Dealing With People You Can’t Stand.”) Kirschner lived for decades in Ashland, Oregon. Early in 2020, he began to diverge from his neighbors over COVID-19 policies. He and his wife visited north Idaho that summer, and bought a home there weeks later. Compared to pandemic-conscious Oregon, it felt like a different reality. That Thanksgiving, he said during a recent Zoom interview, they attended a celebration “with 10 families and all their kids running around. It just was, ‘Oh, we’re Americans again.’ And it was just terrific.”

At the meeting in March, several people said that it was necessary to restore trust in public health institutions. But what, exactly, did that mean? Kirschner argued that it required more information, including more detailed accountings of all the ways public health interventions like vaccination could cause harm, and more detail on where the scientific literature falls short. “Denying information risks backfiring when risks that were hidden become known and trust in authorities craters,” he said during the hearing.

“I find that people are smarter than these public health people give them credit for,” he said during his call with Undark. There was a tendency in public health, he felt, to treat people like cattle. “The mindset of public health is, ‘They’re dummies, and we need to direct them and to what we think is in their interest,’” he said.

Others at the meeting pushed back against suggestions that public health workers and clinicians were not already providing detailed information to patients. “It’s not like Panhandle Health is against informed consent, or does not have that as part of the process” said Peggy Cuvala, a member of the board. Cuvala has personal experience with the issue: She spent more than three decades as a public health nurse and nurse practitioner with the Panhandle Health District. “I would never force anyone into vaccination,” she said in a phone interview.

Cuvala is well aware that vaccine side effects happen—one of her own children, she said, suffered an adverse reaction to a shot—but she’s also seen transformative benefits. For years, she had to fill out reports on cases of Haemophilus influenzae that had caused meningitis in young children, including one case in which an infant died. Then a vaccine arrived. “Within a year of that vaccine coming out, I didn’t have to do those reports anymore,” she told Undark.

Cuvala describes herself as feeling perplexed by the recent direction of the board. “I think protecting and promoting the health and well being of the residents in North Idaho is critical,” she wrote in an email. “This work should be directed by the board collectively without political bias.”

During the meeting, legal questions came up, too: What were the liability implications of drawing up a custom PHD vaccine safety document?

In a previous meeting, Fletcher had pushed for a document that just gave basic details on the duration and scope of the randomized controlled trials that common vaccines had been subjected to. Such information, he argued, would demonstrate how poorly vetted the shots were—and show how they could be dangerous, even fatal. After that, he said in an interview, it was the parent’s choice. “If some mom wants her kid to get it, fine, give it to him,” Fletcher said. The ultimate arbiter of who was correct would be the brutal process of natural selection: “Let Darwin figure it out.”

In the March meeting, the board voted against creating a subcommittee to explore how to draft the document. “It’s dead,” said Fletcher during a phone call in early May.

A matter of trust

The discussion around the informed consent measure, though, was not entirely gone. On a Saturday morning in early May, the board held a lengthy public planning session at a government building in Coeur d’Alene. During a visioning session, attendees put stickers on pieces of paper next to words describing opportunities for the district. At the bottom of the page, someone wrote, in large, all-caps: “TRUST.”

Kirschner spoke again at the meeting, urging the board to revive the measure. So did a handful of other attendees, including Ron Korn, a county commissioner.

In a short interview at the meeting, PHD spokesperson Katherine Hoyer expressed some uncertainty about what substantive differences, precisely, the measure would offer over what’s already taking place in clinics. “What they’re proposing is that we provide patients with information on medical practices and vaccines,” she said. “That is happening.”

Fletcher sees opportunities ahead. In July, the board unanimously reelected him as chair. And, he said, he has a new ally in the push for an informed consent policy. Jessica Jameson, one of the board members who opposed the measure, recently resigned. Fletcher described her successor, a naturopathic doctor who was appointed to the board last month, as aligned with the MAHA movement. That brings the total MAHA-aligned members, by his count, to four — securing a majority on the seven-member board. “My plan is unfolding just as I wanted,” he said during a call in late July.

During an earlier conversation, Fletcher had reflected on the strange position of RFK Jr., who is perched atop the Department of Health and Human Services, which is staffed by many of the people he spent his career opposing. “He has hundreds of thousands of employees; 99.99 percent of them think he’s full of shit,” Fletcher said. Fletcher, in some ways, has his own miniature version of that problem: An antagonist of institutional public health, overseeing a public health organization.

The precise informed consent measure, he acknowledged, may not come to pass. But the debate itself has merit, he said: “Even if we lose, whatever lose means, even if we don’t make any positive forward motion — you never know. Every time you talk about this, you maybe change someone’s sentiment. You maybe move things forward a little bit. Which is why I do it.”

Fletcher’s role is small. But, he suggested, added together, the cumulative efforts of local politicking could amount to a revolution. “Robert Kennedy needs as many people putting their oar in the water and stroking in the same direction,” Fletcher said. “He can’t do it alone. So if there are 10,000 Thomas Fletchers out there, all going in the same direction, then maybe we can have hope.”

Rajah Bose contributed reporting from Idaho.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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