Trump Administration Cancels Meetings, Freezes Hiring At NIH

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is Science Friday. I’m Flora Lichtman. Later in the hour, we’ll hear from a group of researchers with long COVID who are doing research on themselves to try to find relief from their symptoms. Plus, a new study on bird calls.

But first, it was President Trump’s first week back in office, and along with a number of executive orders, the new administration has imposed a range of restrictions on the Department of Health and Human Services, including the National Institutes of Health. Here to get us up to speed is Casey Crownhart, senior climate reporter at the MIT Technology Review. Welcome back to Science Friday, Casey.

CASEY CROWNHART: Thanks so much. Always great to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Casey, what is happening?

CASEY CROWNHART: All kinds of things are happening. Mass confusion is happening. So like you said, the Trump administration imposed new restrictions on the NIH. That includes a suspension of all travel, a pause on all external communications out of the agency, and it’s also being affected by a governmentwide hiring freeze. And researchers are saying that this sort of disruption can have ripple effects that slow down the pace of research. The NIH is responsible for all public-health and biomed research for the government, so this could have long-ranging effects, depending on how long this all lasts.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I’m reading that it’s also some grant-making operations. Have you heard anything about that?

CASEY CROWNHART: Absolutely. So, I mean, it really ranges from researchers aren’t able to travel to conferences. Groups that would meet to approve grants aren’t meeting. There’s really a range of things that this is affecting at the agency.

One thing that really surprised me was we were expecting reports on the H5N1 bird-flu outbreaks this week, and now it’s not clear when those reports are going to be published.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do you have a sense of how unusual this is? I mean, does this typically happen when a new administration takes over?

CASEY CROWNHART: Some section of this is pretty common. So a short pause on communications has happened in the past when a new administration takes office, but researchers are saying that the scope of this is pretty unusual. So the travel pause, for example, isn’t very common. It’s also not totally clear how long this communications pause will be in effect. So it’s definitely a little bit out of the ordinary for an administration taking over.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How are scientists reacting?

CASEY CROWNHART: There’s a lot of concern. Like I said, part of this depends on how long this will last, but one researcher, for example, called this devastating in a story in Science magazine. All of these young researchers just trying to do science and communicate that science to the public, they’re really nervous about what the future might hold here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What’s the impact or the potential impact on science and scientists?

CASEY CROWNHART: I think that pauses and interruptions like this can have long-ranging effects on science. So the NIH does research on things like biomedicine and public health, and so this could slow down our understanding of important public-health phenomena. We talked about bird flu. It could also slow down advances in getting new drugs onto the market and kind of the research involved in that. So like I said, it kind of depends on how long this lasts, but it definitely could come with ripple effects.

FLORA LICHTMAN: To our scientist listeners, we would like to hear from you on this. If you have been affected by what’s happening at the NIH, please give us a call, 646-767-6532, or you can email us at scifri@sciencefriday.com.

Casey, let’s also briefly touch on some of the executive orders that relate to climate and energy.

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, so Trump signed 26 executive orders on his first day in office, a whole range of topics. One of the ones that I was watching the most closely was one that Trump signed to pull out of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. That’s the international treaty that aims to limit global warming. That wasn’t a big surprise. Trump pulled out in his first term as well.

Another big one in the world of science, Trump also signed an executive order to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization. That’s the UN agency that really works on public health, so that could have ripple effects around the world as well.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We’ll be following this.

Let’s turn to a story you wrote recently about nuclear power and how we’re at a tipping point for it. Tell me what you found.

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, I think 2025 is going to be a really important and exciting time for nuclear energy. Nuclear is a really big chunk of how the world gets electricity, especially electricity that doesn’t come with huge amounts of greenhouse-gas emissions attached. And what we’re seeing this year is that advanced reactor technology could really start to take off and enter this new phase.

Most nuclear reactors that are on the grid today follow a pretty similar blueprint. They’re really big. They use water for a coolant and low-enriched uranium as a fuel, and we’re starting to see efforts to go outside that blueprint– build smaller reactors, for example, that could be quicker and cheaper to build or use different things for the coolant and the fuel. One expert that I spoke to said that this is really the time that we’re starting to see paper reactors turn into real-life reactors. So we could see some projects coming online in the next couple of years.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You wrote that AI is playing a role in nuclear’s future too. Tell me about it.

CASEY CROWNHART: Absolutely. I mean, I think there’s a whole lot of different things that are contributing to rising electricity demand, but AI and big data centers are definitely expected to be a significant part of that. And one effect that we’re seeing is that that is driving efforts to squeeze out as much power as we can out of existing reactors because those advanced projects, it’ll still take years for the first of their kind to be built, not to mention enough to really make a difference on the grid. And so I’m really interested to see reactors that are having their lifetimes extended, for example, or efforts to reopen nuclear plants that have shut down, like at the former Three Mile Island nuclear plant or Palisades in Michigan. So I’m really interested to see how people, like I said, try to squeeze everything they can out of nuclear reactors.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Moving on, it was a dramatic weather week in the Southeast US. I mean, there were record snowfalls in Louisiana and Florida. How did this happen, meteorologically speaking?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yes, a super-weird week for weather in the Southeast. I saw that since the beginning of December, New Orleans has had more than double the snowfall of Anchorage, Alaska, as of earlier this week.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s wild. Wait a second. Say that again.

CASEY CROWNHART: Yes, so since the beginning of meteorological winter, which is December 1, New Orleans has seen about 8 inches of snow. Anchorage, Alaska, has seen a little under 4 inches of snow.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow.

CASEY CROWNHART: Yes, wild. So part of this is basically lake-effect snow, so that kind of phenomenon. That means that the Great Lakes region, the Midwestern US, typically sees a lot of snow. You have moisture coming off of the lakes in the Midwest. A similar thing happened with the Gulf. So we often see low-pressure systems over the Gulf kind of pushing north and going along the coast. Usually that means rain, but this time there was this weird confluence of an Arctic air mass coming from the north, which made it very cold, and so we saw a lot of snow in places that don’t usually get it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow, so not the lake effect, the Gulf effect.

CASEY CROWNHART: Exactly.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Is this a symptom of climate change?

CASEY CROWNHART: Oh, this is a great question with a maybe complicated answer. So we know that, overall, climate change causes rising temperatures, and we’re seeing actually overall, over the last few decades, fewer cold weather events because of climate change.

But climate change isn’t just global warming. Some scientists also call it global weirding. So one way that climate change could be contributing to events like this is that there’s a polar jet stream. There’s a band of these strong winds that blows west to east, typically, which keeps the polar vortex, that mass of cold air, up in the Arctic. Some studies suggest that climate change makes that jet stream kind of wobbly, which can disrupt that vortex and make it possible and maybe likely for that air to escape and come down south like we saw this week. So it definitely kind of potentially a little bit of climate change involved here, but weather and climate are also very complicated, especially in rare events like this.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, let’s head to Los Angeles. Fires are still burning, but residents are now dealing with something else as well, the aftermath. Will you tell me about it?

CASEY CROWNHART: Absolutely. So like you said, some of the biggest fires have been contained, although I will say that there are still dangerous fire conditions in LA, so do continue to keep watching that. But now, as residents start clean-up and recovery efforts, experts are warning that the ash that’s left behind from these fires can be very dangerous. Especially in fires that burn structures, the ash can contain toxic compounds, things like asbestos and lead that are common in older buildings. Even more common materials like plastics that are all over our homes, things like batteries, when they burn, release these compounds that you really don’t want to be breathing in. So if you are involved in recovery, folks should wear N95 masks and gloves and be careful around those efforts.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Does that show up on your air-quality app, on your weather app?

CASEY CROWNHART: I think it’s actually very difficult to measure because even small amounts of this can be dangerous or have long-ranging impacts that are kind of difficult to measure on our health. And a lot of air-quality monitoring, it’s difficult to pick those things up.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Let’s wrap up with a refreshing dip in the sea. Tell me about this new manta-ray finding.

CASEY CROWNHART: Yes, so a big mystery in science up until now has been, what in the world are manta rays’ tails for?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Because stingrays, we know they’re a weapon.

CASEY CROWNHART: Yes, infamously used for defense, and most other kind of sea creatures use their tails to propel through the water. Manta-ray tails do neither of those things, and so researchers wanted to look into what in the world they’re using their tails for. And so what they found is that their tails might be acting as antennae, basically designed to detect approaching danger.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Really? What are they sensing?

CASEY CROWNHART: So, basically, the organs that are in their tails are linked to their lateral line canal. This is a common system of sensory organs in fish and amphibians that can basically detect movements in surrounding water. For most aquatic vertebrates, that is most complex and kind of developed near their head, but in some kinds of rays, that system runs all the way down their tail. And the idea kind of– the hypothesis is that it’s because a lot of rays bury their heads in the sand to eat and leave their backsides and their tails exposed behind them, sticking up in the water. So if, for example, a shark is swimming by moving a lot of water around, that tail could detect that and say, ooh, time to finish up my lunch.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow, like a spidey sense in their tail.

CASEY CROWNHART: Exactly.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s a great image too.

CASEY CROWNHART: I know. So kind of adorable, I think at least.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Thanks for bringing us the news this week, Casey.

CASEY CROWNHART: Thanks so much. Always great to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Casey Crownhart, senior climate reporter at the MIT Technology Review.

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