This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is developing a generative artificial intelligence tool to find patterns across data reported to a national vaccine monitoring database and to generate hypotheses on the negative effects of vaccines, according to an inventory released last week of all use cases the agency had for AI in 2025. The tool has not yet been deployed, according to the HHS document, and an AI inventory report from the previous year shows that it has been in development since late 2023. But experts worry that the predictions it generates could be used by HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to further his anti-vaccine agenda. A long-standing vaccine critic, Kennedy has upended the childhood vaccination schedule in his year in office, removing several shots from a list of recommended immunizations for all children, including those for Covid-19, influenza, hepatitis A and B, meningococcal disease, rotavirus, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Kennedy has also called for overhauling the current safety monitoring system for vaccine injury data collection, known as Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), claiming that it suppresses information about the true rate of vaccine side effects. He has also proposed changes to the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program that could make it easier for people to sue for adverse events that haven’t been proven to be associated with vaccines. Jointly managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration, VAERS was established in 1990 as a way to detect potential safety issues with vaccines after their approval. Anyone, including health care providers and members of the public, can submit an adverse reaction report to the database. Because these claims are not verified, VAERS data alone can’t be used to determine if a vaccine caused an adverse event. > “I would expect, depending on the approaches used, a lot of false alerts and a > need for a lot of skilled human follow-through.” “VAERS, at best, was always a hypothesis-generating mechanism,” says Paul Offit, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who was previously a member of the CDC’s Advisory Council on Immunization Practices. “It’s a noisy system. Anybody can report, and there’s no control group.” Offit says the system only shows adverse events that happened at some point following immunization; it doesn’t prove that a vaccine caused those reactions. CDC’s own website says that a report to VAERS does not mean that a vaccine caused an adverse event. Despite this, anti-vaccine activists have misused VAERS data over the years to argue that vaccines are not safe. Leslie Lenert, previously the founding director of the CDC’s National Center for Public Health Informatics, says government scientists have been using traditional natural language processing AI models to look for patterns in VAERS data for several years, so it’s not surprising that HHS would move toward the adoption of more advanced large language models. One major limitation of VAERS is that it doesn’t include data on how many people received a vaccine, which can make events logged in the database seem more common than they actually are. For that reason, Lenert says it’s important to pair information from VAERS with other data sources to determine the true risk of an event. LLMs are also famously good at producing convincing hallucinations, underscoring the need for humans to follow up on any hypotheses generated by an LLM. “VAERS is supposed to be very exploratory. Some people in the FDA are now treating it as more than exploratory,” says Lenert, who is currently the director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Health Artificial Intelligence at Rutgers University. Vinay Prasad, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, reportedly proposed stricter vaccine regulation in a recent memo sent to staff in which he blamed the deaths of at least 10 children on the Covid-19 vaccine without citing evidence. The deaths were reported to VAERS and had previously been reviewed by FDA staff. More than a dozen former FDA commissioners responded with a letter in The New England Journal of Medicine, expressing concern about Prasad’s proposed guidelines. The changes, they wrote, would “dramatically change vaccine regulation on the basis of a reinterpretation of selective evidence.” Jesse Goodman, an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at Georgetown University, says that the use of LLMs could potentially detect previously unknown safety issues with vaccines. But since VAERS can contain inaccurate and incomplete data, he says it’s important that any leads are thoroughly investigated first. “I would expect, depending on the approaches used, a lot of false alerts and a need for a lot of skilled human follow-through by people who understand vaccines and possible adverse events, as well as statistics, epidemiology, and challenges with LLM output,” he says. With deep staffing cuts at the CDC, Goodman says it would be important to have plans and capacity in place to deal with any emerging data, including screening it and deciding what may need to be studied further and how. In the past, VAERS has flagged legitimate safety issues, including instances of a rare clotting disorder among some people who received the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine and rare cases of myocarditis, particularly among younger males, who got the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. HHS did not respond to a request for comment.

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Polar bears became the poster child for the peril of climate change for obvious reasons: They hunt seals from the ice, and as fossil fuels warm the planet, the ice where these bears live is melting. For more than three decades, scientists have been warning that climate change could drive polar bear populations extinct. That message infiltrated the public psyche, perhaps more than any other about the scourge of global warming. But as scientists are continuing to learn, the reality for these iconic bears is more complicated. In 2022, scientists published a study showing that polar bears in southeastern Greenland were able to use glacial ice instead of sea ice to hunt, sheltering them from some of the impacts of warming. And a study published late last year revealed some changes in polar bear DNA that may help them adapt to hotter weather. > “There’s variability in how bears are responding. This [research] adds to the > variability story.” Now, research in the journal Scientific Reports adds yet another wrinkle of hope for the species. The study, an analysis of hundreds of polar bears in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, found that declining sea ice is not causing polar bears to starve. They actually appeared healthier in the last two decades of the analysis, from 2000 to 2019. The overall population, meanwhile, is either stable or growing, according to Jon Aars, the study’s lead author and a scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute. “I was surprised,” Aars told Vox from Svalbard. “I would have predicted that body condition would decline. We see the opposite.” The new study makes clear that, in other regions, the loss of sea ice from warming is indeed linked to ailing polar bear populations. In Canada’s Western Hudson Bay, for example, researchers have tied melting ice to lower bear survival and a shortage of food, finding that the population has roughly halved since the 1980s. Climate change remains the largest threat to these animals. Yet, there are 20 distinct polar bear populations around the world, and they all behave slightly differently. Warming is not uniformly killing them. Perhaps, then, polar bears aren’t the best mascot for the climate crisis—a point some advocates have been making for a while—especially when there are countless other species imperiled by rising temperatures. Polar bears need fat to survive the harsh Arctic cold; that’s why they eat blubbery seals. Seals, meanwhile, need ice to rest and birth pups. Without that ice, polar bears have a hard time finding and catching them. Since the late 1970s, the Arctic—the northernmost region of the planet, including parts of Alaska, Canada, Europe, and Russia—has lost more than 27,000 square miles of summer ice. That’s an area larger than the state of West Virginia. Some estimates suggest that the region could be ice-free by the middle of the century, even under optimistic emissions scenarios. That melting ice is what’s harming polar bear populations in Canada’s Hudson Bay; the Beaufort Sea, located north of Alaska and the Yukon; and Baffin Bay in Greenland. And it’s why they’re listed as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, a global authority on endangered species. But the story in Svalbard—an icy archipelago in the Barents Sea, north of Scandinavia—is different. Magnus Andersen and Jon Aars, researchers at the Norwegian Polar Institute and co-authors on the new study, measure a polar bear in Svalbard.Jon Aars/Norwegian Polar Institute Between 1992 and 2019, scientists in Svalbard darted hundreds of polar bears from helicopters and measured their bodies. Then they compared those measurements to sea ice conditions, such as the number of ice-free days, and other climate variables. Remarkably, the number of days with no ice in the region increased by roughly 100 during that period. And yet, as the authors found, the body condition of both male and female polar bears—i.e., how fat and healthy they are—increased from 2000 onward. Female bears were actually in worse condition when the sea ice lasted longer. Often, the message about polar bears is “100 percent doom,” said Kristin Laidre, a polar bear researcher at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the study. “But that’s not true,” Laidre told me. “There’s variability in how bears are responding. This [research] adds to the variability story.” If polar bears in Svalbard are healthy, that means they’re finding food. So what are they eating? One possibility, said Aars, the lead author, is that there may be higher densities of ringed seals, their primary food source, in years with less ice, so they’re easier to catch. Even if polar bears have less time to catch the seals—because there are fewer days with ice—they can put on loads of weight quickly and rely on that for months. The bears may also be eating other animals on land that don’t require ice. Reindeer on the archipelago are increasing, for example, and Aars says he’s seen bears eat them. Walrus populations are increasing, too. Although polar bears can’t easily kill a walrus, they can scavenge their tusked, fat-filled carcass when walruses die from other causes. “Bears in Svalbard are potentially changing their diet, and that might account for the increase in body condition,” said John Iacozza, a senior instructor and polar bear expert at the University of Manitoba. That’s a luxury that polar bears elsewhere might not have. “You wouldn’t see the same effect happening in Western Hudson Bay, just because the availability of other species is less,” said Iacozza, who was not involved in the new research. While the Svalbard bears might be fine for now, researchers still worry about the long-term impacts of warming in the region. “We do think there’s a threshold,” Aars told me. “The difficult part is that we don’t know what it is.” No other animal has been so closely tied to climate change as the polar bear. It was on the cover of TIME’s 2006 global warming issue. It was featured in Al Gore’s seminal documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which premiered the same year. It was used in funding campaigns for environmental groups. (One year, I even dressed up as a drowning polar bear for Halloween with a friend who went as a melting ice cap.) The bear’s symbolism is rooted in good science. Those early studies were in places like Canada’s Western Hudson Bay, where these Arctic apex predators were clearly dying from melting sea ice. Media outlets amplified the most sensational conclusions—and they stuck. That’s partly because the message is simple, Laidre said: Polar bears need ice, and warming is making it disappear. “The relationship between [climate and] an animal that needs a platform to eat is easy to wrap your brain around,” she said.

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Already, a bitter burst of cold is gripping much of the country, and in the next few days, it will reach at least 45 states and extend across two-thirds of the country. It is one of the most extreme winter storms in years. The National Weather Service on Thursday warned that “dangerously cold and very dry Arctic air” will spill into the continental United States and lead to “life-threatening risk of hypothermia and frostbite” as temperatures drop well into negative territory, creating some of the coldest weather on Earth. For millions of Americans, this is not merely a forecast anymore. Schools were already announcing closures around the country Thursday morning. Lines were forming at grocery stores. The Texas power grid operator issued a winter warning as it braces for higher electricity demand and disruptions from freezing rain. > “It always ends up colder than the models initially predict, and the models > are always playing catchup.” Wintertime cold is normal. But what is unusual is how this kind of cold tends to arrive: These icy spells sneak up on us, posing a greater challenge to forecasters and leaving little time to prepare compared to slower-moving extremes like heat waves. “Oftentimes, longer duration signals, such as heatwaves, can be more predictable, whereas short bursts of cold are more difficult to predict,” Matthew Rosencrans, meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center, told Vox in an email. Cold snaps are especially jarring when they’re interspersed with milder weather. And even though the planet just came out of one of the hottest years on record and is poised to heat up more, shocks of extreme cold are not going away, nor are their disruptions and dangers. Winter Storm Uri in 2021 cost the US economy more than $200 billion as it triggered deadly blackouts and fuel disruptions in Texas. New forecasting methods are helping meteorologists close the gap on predicting future winter storms. But they are racing against rapid planetary changes, and the US is deliberately hampering its own weather forecasting capabilities with major personnel and budget cuts to science agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That could leave more Americans less prepared for dangerous weather, which can quickly turn deadly. A cold wave is a distinct meteorological event where temperatures plummet below the average for a region for several days. But conventional forecasting tools often struggle to track all the factors at work and can underestimate the full extent of the chill. That makes it more difficult to prepare for the severity of a storm, often until it’s already set in. “It always ends up colder than the models initially predict, and the models are always playing catchup,” said Judah Cohen, a research scientist at MIT studying weather forecasting. Bouts of cold like the one this week have their origins at the North Pole. Icy air tends to remain corralled at the Arctic by a spinning band of strong, cold wind that is normally confined to 10 to 30 miles above the North Pole, known as the polar vortex. It tends to get stronger in the winter. The polar jet, which flows at a lower altitude some three to six miles above the ground, also plays a role. Waves of air can start to form in the atmosphere. Those waves can collide with the polar air currents, with some of their energy bouncing off and some of their energy getting absorbed. The collisions deform the wind rings holding chilly Arctic air in place, breaking the neat circles into oblong lobes that drape over lower latitudes. “If that energy gets absorbed, it kind of energizes or amplifies the wave over North America, and you get these more extreme weather events,” Cohen said. “This [weather this week] is a very nice example of that.” So meteorologists have a pretty good grasp on how the process works. The challenge is figuring out what signs can tell us what’s coming. There are interactions between the Arctic Ocean, the ice above it, and the sky that influence weather patterns around the world. There are also other sources of variability, like the periodic warming and cooling pattern in the central Pacific Ocean known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. It adds up to a knotty problem that scientists have slowly unraveled over decades. To speed up progress and to encourage new approaches, the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts held a contest to see who could build the best new AI-powered model for subseasonal forecasts, looking two to six weeks ahead. This remains one of the toughest windows to hit for weather forecasters because both long-term and short-term variables are at play. But good predictions in this timeframe could be very useful in planning for extreme weather, helping communities issue alerts, shore up power, and stockpile supplies. A good forecast is a lifesaving tool, one that has helped drive disaster-related deaths downward over the years. Cohen’s team won the latest contest for the 2025-’26 winter season. There’s even a certificate. (“I’m excited, of course. I shared it on social media,” Cohen said.) He started raising the alarm as early as November that a blast of extreme cold was heading toward the United States in the coming months. His team trained their model on decades of observations across the Northern Hemisphere. They found that there were really far-flung variables at work, like weather in Eurasia in October and ocean temperatures in parts of the Arctic like the Kara Sea. How does climate change play into all this? That is, as scientists say, an area of active research. In general, the planet is heating up, and winter temperatures are rising faster than in the summer months. But in certain areas and at specific times, there are still periods of intense cold, and some evidence suggests that warming in the Arctic is contributing to these cold weather spillovers. The Arctic is currently warming up to four times faster than the rest of the planet. The extent to which human activity is altering cold snaps isn’t known, and there are other scientists who think that Arctic warming doesn’t play a big role in cold weather in lower latitudes and found that global warming has led to fewer extremely cold temperatures. A complication on top of all this is that while teams around the world are in a heated competition for better forecasts, the US is cutting back on a lot of its scientific research, especially around climate change. In particular, the Trump administration has its crosshairs on the National Center for Atmospheric Research, one of the best places in the world for conducting weather and climate predictions. Job cuts across the government have already led to less collection of raw data that informs weather models. So at a time when the country needs a better sight of the world ahead, the current administration is obscuring the view.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. High-profile studies reporting the presence of microplastics throughout the human body have been thrown into doubt by scientists who say the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives. One chemist called the concerns “a bombshell.” Studies claiming to have revealed micro- and nanoplastics in the brain, testes, placentas, arteries, and elsewhere were reported by media across the world, including the Guardian and Mother Jones. There is no doubt that plastic pollution of the natural world is ubiquitous, and present in the food and drink we consume and the air we breathe. But the health damage potentially caused by microplastics and the chemicals they contain is unclear, and an explosion of research has taken off in this area in recent years. However, micro- and nanoplastic particles are tiny and at the limit of today’s analytical techniques, especially in human tissue. There is no suggestion of malpractice, but researchers told the Guardian of their concern that the race to publish results, in some cases by groups with limited analytical expertise, has led to rushed results and routine scientific checks sometimes being overlooked. > One scientist estimates there are serious doubts over “more than half of the > very high impact papers” on microplastics in biological tissue. The Guardian has identified seven studies that have been challenged by researchers publishing criticism in the respective journals, while a recent analysis listed 18 studies that it said had not considered that some human tissue can produce measurements easily confused with the signal given by common plastics. There is an increasing international focus on the need to control plastic pollution but faulty evidence on the level of microplastics in humans could lead to misguided regulations and policies, which is dangerous, researchers say. It could also help lobbyists for the plastics industry to dismiss real concerns by claiming they are unfounded. While researchers say analytical techniques are improving rapidly, the doubts over recent high-profile studies also raise the questions of what is really known today and how concerned people should be about microplastics in their bodies. “Levels of microplastics in human brains may be rapidly rising” was the shocking headline reporting a widely covered study in February. The analysis, published in a top-tier journal and covered by the Guardian, said there was a rising trend in micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) in brain tissue from dozens of postmortems carried out between 1997 and 2024. However, by November, the study had been challenged by a group of scientists with the publication of a “Matters arising” letter in the journal. In the formal, diplomatic language of scientific publishing, the scientists said: “The study as reported appears to face methodological challenges, such as limited contamination controls and lack of validation steps, which may affect the reliability of the reported concentrations.” One of the team behind the letter was blunt. “The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60 percent fat.” Materić and his colleagues suggested rising obesity levels could be an alternative explanation for the trend reported in the study. Materić said: “That paper is really bad, and it is very explainable why it is wrong.” He thinks there are serious doubts over “more than half of the very high impact papers” reporting microplastics in biological tissue. Matthew Campen, senior author of the brain study in question, told the Guardian: “In general, we simply find ourselves in an early period of trying to understand the potential human health impacts of MNPs and there is no recipe book for how to do this. Most of the criticism aimed at the body of work to date (ie from our lab and others) has been conjectural and not buffeted by actual data. “We have acknowledged the numerous opportunities for improvement and refinement and are trying to spend our finite resources in generating better assays and data, rather than continually engaging in a dialogue.” But the brain study is far from alone in having been challenged. One, which reported that patients with MNPs detected in carotid artery plaques had a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes than patients with no MNPs detected, was subsequently criticized for not testing blank samples taken in the operating room. Blank samples are a way of measuring how much background contamination may be present. Another study reported MNPs in human testes, “highlighting the pervasive presence of microplastics in the male reproductive system.” But other scientists took a different view: “It is our opinion that the analytical approach used is not robust enough to support these claims.” This study was by Campen and colleagues, who responded: “To steal/modify a sentiment from the television show Ted Lasso, ‘[Bioanalytical assays] are never going to be perfect. The best we can do is to keep asking for help and accepting it when you can and if you keep on doing that, you’ll always be moving toward better.’” > “This isn’t a dig…They use these techniques because we haven’t got anything > better available to us.” Further challenged studies include two reporting plastic particles in blood—in both cases the researchers contested the criticisms—and another on their detection in arteries. A study claiming to have detected 10,000 nanoplastic particles per liter of bottled water was called “fundamentally unreliable” by critics, a charge disputed by the scientists. The doubts amount to a “bombshell,” according to Roger Kuhlman, a chemist formerly at the Dow Chemical Company. “This is really forcing us to re-evaluate everything we think we know about microplastics in the body. Which, it turns out, is really not very much. Many researchers are making extraordinary claims, but not providing even ordinary evidence.” While analytical chemistry has long-established guidelines on how to accurately analyze samples, these do not yet exist specifically for MNPs, said Dr. Frederic Béen, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: “But we still see quite a lot of papers where very standard good laboratory practices that should be followed have not necessarily been followed.” These include measures to exclude background contamination, blanks, repeating measurements and testing equipment with samples spiked with a known amount of MNPs. “So you cannot be assured that whatever you have found is not fully or partially derived from some of these issues,” Béen said. A key way of measuring the mass of MNPs in a sample is, perhaps counterintuitively, vaporizing it, then capturing the fumes. But this method, dubbed Py-GC-MS, has come under particular criticism. “[It] is not currently a suitable technique for identifying polyethylene or PVC due to persistent interferences,” concluded a January 2025 study led by Cassandra Rauert, an environmental chemist at the University of Queensland in Australia. “I do think it is a problem in the entire field,” Rauert told the Guardian. “I think a lot of the concentrations [of MNPs] that are being reported are completely unrealistic.” “This isn’t a dig at [other scientists],” she added. “They use these techniques because we haven’t got anything better available to us. But a lot of studies that we’ve seen coming out use the technique without really fully understanding the data that it’s giving you.” She said the failure to employ normal quality control checks was “a bit crazy.” > “It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological > barriers,” but today’s instruments “cannot detect nano-size particles.” Py-GC-MS begins by pyrolyzing the sample—heating it until it vaporizes. The fumes are then passed through the tubes of a gas chromatograph, which separates smaller molecules from large ones. Last, a mass spectrometer uses the weights of different molecules to identify them. The problem is that some small molecules in the fumes derived from polyethylene and PVC can also be produced from fats in human tissue. Human samples are “digested” with chemicals to remove tissue before analysis, but if some remains, the result can be false positives for MNPs. Rauert’s paper lists 18 studies that did not include consideration of the risk of such false positives. Rauert also argues that studies reporting high levels of MNPs in organs are simply hard to believe: “I have not seen evidence that particles between 3 and 30 micrometers can cross into the blood stream,” she said. “From what we know about actual exposure in our everyday lives, it is not biologically plausible that that mass of plastic would actually end up in these organs.” “It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological barriers and that we are expecting inside humans,” she said. “But the current instruments we have cannot detect nano-size particles.” Further criticism came in July, in a review study in the Deutsches Ärzteblatt, the journal of the German Medical Association. “At present, there is hardly any reliable information available on the actual distribution of microplastics in the body,” the scientists wrote. Plastic production has ballooned by 200 times since the 1950s and is set to almost triple again to more than a billion metric tons a year by 2060. As a result, plastic pollution has also soared, with 8 billion metric tons now contaminating the planet, from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trench. Less than 10 percent of plastic is recycled. An expert review published in the Lancet in August called plastics a “grave, growing and underrecognised danger” to human and planetary health. It cited harm from the extraction of the fossil fuels they are made from, to their production, use and disposal, which result in air pollution and exposure to toxic chemicals. > Insufficiently robust studies might help lobbyists for the plastics industry > downplay known risks of plastic pollution. In recent years, the infiltration of the body with MNPs has become a serious concern, and a landmark study in 2022 first reported detection in human blood. That study is one of the 18 listed in Rauert’s paper and was criticized by Kuhlman. But the study’s senior author, Marja Lamoree, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, rejected suggestions of contamination. “The reason we focused on blood in the first place is that you can take blood samples freshly, without the interference of any plastics or exposure to the air,” she said. “I’m convinced we detected microplastics,” she said. “But I’ve always said that [the amount estimated] could be maybe twice lower, or 10 times higher.” In response to Kuhlman’s letter, Lamoree and colleagues said he had “incorrectly interpreted” the data. Lamoree does agree there is a wider issue. “It’s still a super-immature field and there’s not many labs that can do [these analyses well]. When it comes to solid tissue samples, then the difficulty is they are usually taken in an operating theatre that’s full of plastic.” “I think most of the, let’s say, lesser quality analytical papers come from groups that are medical doctors or metabolomics [scientists] and they’re not driven by analytical chemistry knowledge,” she said. Improving the quality of MNP measurements in the human body matters, the scientists said. Poor quality evidence is “irresponsible” and can lead to scaremongering, said Rauert: “We want to be able to get the data right so that we can properly inform our health agencies, our governments, the general population and make sure that the right regulations and policies are put in place. “We get a lot of people contacting us, very worried about how much plastics are in their bodies,” she said. “The responsibility [for scientists] is to report robust science so you are not unnecessarily scaring the general population.” > “We do have plastics in us—I think that is safe to assume.” Rauert called treatments claiming to clean microplastics from your blood “crazy”—some are advertised for £10,000 (about $13,400). “These claims have no scientific evidence,” she said, and could put more plastic into people’s blood, depending on the equipment used. Materić said insufficiently robust studies might also help lobbyists for the plastics industry downplay known risks of plastic pollution. The good news, said Béen, is that analytical work across multiple techniques is improving rapidly: “I think there is less and less doubt about the fact that MNPs are there in tissues. The challenge is still knowing exactly how many or how much. But I think we’re narrowing down this uncertainty more and more.” Prof Lamoree said: “I really think we should collaborate on a much nicer basis—with much more open communication—and don’t try to burn down other people’s results. We should all move forward instead of fighting each other.” In the meantime, should the public be worried about MNPs in their bodies? Given the very limited evidence, Lamoree said she could not say how concerned people should be: “But for sure I take some precautions myself, to be on the safe side. I really try to use less plastic materials, especially when cooking or heating food or drinking from plastic bottles. The other thing I do is ventilate my house.” “We do have plastics in us—I think that is safe to assume,” said Materić. “But real hard proof on how much is yet to come. There are also very easy things that you can do to hugely reduce intake of MNPs. If you are concerned about water, just filtering through charcoal works.” Experts also advise avoiding food or drink that has been heated in plastic containers. Rauert thinks that most of the MNPs that people ingest or breath in probably expelled by their bodies, but said it can’t hurt to reduce your plastics exposure. Furthermore, she said, it remains vital to resolve the uncertainty over what MNPs are doing to our health: “We know we’re being exposed, so we definitely want to know what happens after that and we’ll keep working at it, that’s for sure.”

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. It first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter. Marc Dervaes sat straight-backed in a circle of 10 men at a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico. The glass window behind him looked out on a pool deck and the Pacific Ocean beyond.  Inside, sunglasses masked his eyes, and a beard grew down to his chest. His blank expression invited no sympathy, and Dervaes had none to give.  “I’m sorry if this offends anyone,” he said at the introductory circle, “but I really don’t care about any of you. I’m here for me.” Dervaes knew the men would be curious about his amputation. He mentioned losing his right arm in Afghanistan but had no intention of sharing more.  The pool deck at one of Ambio Life Sciences’ clinics near Tijuana, Mexico. Natanya Friedheim Each man had his own reason to visit the clinic, where patients pay around $8,000 for a psychedelic treatment with little scientific backing. They all hoped suffering through a brain-bending, vomit-inducing, existential jolt would cure their ailments, which ranged from malaise to traumatic brain injury. A veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Dervaes had one foot in the grave before contacting Ambio Life Sciences. Two months earlier, he had spent two days in a hospital back home in Colorado Springs with alcohol poisoning that he hoped would end his life.  “Peace was totally gone in this house,” said Michaela Dervaes, his wife of 26 years. Dervaes called the clinic after leaving the hospital. The earliest it could schedule him was April 2026—a nine-month wait. Dervaes told the man on the phone he would be dead by then.  Michaela and Marc Dervaes at an archery range in April 2021. Photo courtesy of Marc Dervaes Two companies operating clinics in Tijuana, Ambio Life Sciences and The Mission Within Center, say they have treated about 3,000 U.S. veterans in the last decade. Both use the psychedelics ibogaine—derived from the root of a central African shrub—and 5-MeO-DMT—a chemical secreted by the Sonoran desert toad. A common motivation among participants has emerged: The talk therapy and prescriptions offered by the Department of Veterans Affairs proved ineffective.  Every time Breanna Morgan opens the clinic’s oversized wooden door and shows patients into the foyer—where a half-dozen staffers wait to greet them—she assumes it’s the worst day of their lives. “They’re not here because they really want to be here,” Morgan, Ambio’s guest experience manager, said in an interview. “They’re here because it’s their only option.”  > “They’re not here because they really want to be here. They’re here because > it’s their only option.”  This is the story of one of those guests—a broken veteran whose ibogaine experience would put him face-to-face with everyone in his life he had ever wronged. His tears would soak through the eye mask patients wear to limit sensory input.  Back home, confronted by another tragedy, Dervaes would quickly regret his visit to the cliffside mansion and resent the clinic that took thousands of dollars from him.  Then, four months later, he would return. Breanna Morgan, Ambio’s guest experience manager, explains to patients how to mentally prepare for ibogaine.Natanya Friedheim MEDICAL RESEARCH AND COASTAL RETREATS For decades, overseas drug rehab clinics have offered ibogaine to people addicted to cocaine and opioids. The drug’s use among military veterans has surged over the last four years. Despite support from veterans, a push for more research, and efforts by advocates to legalize the psychedelic treatment in the United States, much remains unknown about the drugs’ long-term effectiveness and safety. The federal Drug Enforcement Administration considers both ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT Schedule 1 substances, meaning the agency finds both have a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. A nurse checks Marc Dervaes’ blood pressure before he and nine other patients go to a backyard sweat lodge. Ibogaine can cause heart arrhythmias.Natanya Friedheim Psychedelic medicine advocates fear the expensive, decade-long process of bringing a new drug to market in the U.S. will adulterate both the drugs and the environments in which people take them.   Researchers, meanwhile, fear that the media hype and the proliferation of ceremonies replete with New Age rhetoric and dubious claims will undermine their efforts to gain FDA approval.  As debates play out at state legislatures and research conferences, it is here, in a coastal retreat center down the road from an open-air fruit stand, that veterans come in a desperate attempt to find relief.   Behind the clinic, a steep path, wide enough for trucks full of families, boogie boards, and fishing poles, leads to a beach covered in sand blackened with pollution.Natanya Friedheim ALIVE DAY  Dervaes’ journey to the clinic began more than a decade ago. It was in September 2009 in eastern Afghanistan. Corn grew 8 feet high on either side of the unpaved road outside of Jalalabad.  Dervaes clutched the passenger’s seat grab handle as the mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle rumbled along. A platoon sergeant with 15 years as an Army infantryman under his belt, Dervaes felt invincible.  He had survived a bullet to his helmet during his first deployment to Iraq. On his second, he spent 16 grinding months guarding nighttime construction crews in Baghdad.  His convoy drove in a tight pack. That day, a gap formed between his truck and the three others ahead, Dervaes said. “The enemy took full advantage.” Dervaes bent over a junction box to fiddle with a defective cord, his right arm still clutching the grab handle. When he looked up, he saw a man outside, a rocket-propelled grenade mounted on his shoulder aimed at Dervaes.   A big flash, pressure, and heat. Dervaes collapsed over the junction box. His right arm, wristwatch still attached, landed in the driver’s lap. He came to as the driver, his foot still on the gas, pulled Dervaes up by his helmet.  Another RPG shot through the passenger door and out the roof. The truck caught fire and filled with smoke. Chunks of flesh and bone covered the side of the cab. Dervaes heard screaming. “Someone else is hurt,” he thought. “Someone else in the truck is either dead or hurt.”  Before he was medevaced, Marc Dervaes pulled a camera out of his pocket to chronicle the ambush in which he lost his right arm in Afghanistan. He said the photo shows resilience.Photo courtesy of Marc Dervaes His body tingled. His vision grew blurry. A man with a belt-fed machine gun emerged from the stalks of corn. Somehow, the truck kept moving forward. “Drive. Drive. Don’t stop,” Dervaes said as bullets shattered the windshield.  He spent eight months recovering at an Army hospital in San Antonio, Texas, then returned to Fort Carson, Colorado, just as his unit got back from Afghanistan. He and the driver finally had time to look back. Dervaes longed to fill gaps in his memory.  “Who was screaming?” Dervaes remembers asking.  “It was you,” the driver said.  LIFE AFTER WAR Like so many Americans, Dervaes battled prescription opioid addiction after his surgeries. He faced a personal crisis, described by many veterans, of adapting to a civilian life that lacks the structure, urgency, and adrenaline soldiers grow accustomed to at war. He sought thrills as a U.S. Paralympic snowboarder. He and his wife began cave diving. As a volunteer for the nonprofit Team River Runner, he designed prosthetics for adaptive kayaking. He helped to launch the Colorado Springs chapter of the nonprofit Wounded Warrior Project. He instructs children with disabilities in snowboarding.  Dervaes threw himself into extreme sports after his battlefield injuries.Photo courtesy of Marc Dervaes More than a decade of athleticism landed him seven rib fractures, a concussion, a bruised lung, and three surgeries on his left arm, all between 2021 and 2025. So damaged was his left arm, his only arm, that he could hold neither a Voodoo Ranger beer can nor his basset hound puppy Ruby.  The pain led him to spiral.  Hours before traveling to Tijuana, Dervaes paced around the lobby of the Sheraton San Diego Resort. A hotel staffer asked if he was OK. The night before, his wife blocked the hotel room door to prevent Dervaes from leaving. Sober for three months, a requirement of attending the clinic, Dervaes wanted a drink. He feared the treatment, a last-ditch effort to address his deteriorating mental health and excessive drinking, would fail.   Two SUVs pulled up in front of the hotel’s entryway fountain. It was a Tuesday morning in early August. Dervaes sat alone in the back seat of one as drivers piled luggage into the trunks.  “How’s it going, man?” asked Brad Banks, a medical device salesman trying to quit drinking, as he slid next to Dervaes. Maintaining his forward gaze, Dervaes barely grunted.  The men rode in silence past the border checkpoints where Mexican officers wore rifles slung across their chests. In the beachside community of Playas de Tijuana, the SUVs turned down an unpaved road.  Across from a cluster of shanties, a concrete wall fortifies the clinic, an 11-bedroom compound where foreigners come and go each week. The entrance to one of Ambio Life Sciences’ clinics in MexicoNatanya Friedheim A stay at Ambio starts with an EKG, one of many medical tests the clinic requires to ensure patients are fit for ibogaine. The drug has a narrow therapeutic window, meaning a little more than an effective dose can be toxic. Too much can cause heart arrhythmias.  A 2022 review of literature published on ibogaine found 38 deaths and 20 medical emergencies associated with its use documented in medical literature. In most of those cases, the drug was used to treat opioid addiction. Other emergencies may have gone undocumented given ibogaine’s use in nonmedical settings.  Both ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT can exacerbate existing mania or psychosis, according to Martín Polanco, a doctor who founded The Mission Within Center in Tijuana. Three hours after arrival, the men changed into swim trunks and crowded back into the Suburbans. Dervaes’ tough-guy veneer started melting away on the drive to a backyard sweatlodge. “I think it’s time we discuss sweat lodge etiquette,” he said from the back seat, squished beside two passengers. “No farting in the sweat lodge.”  A nurse checks Marc Dervaes’s heart with an EKG within hours of his arrival at Ambio Life Sciences. Monitoring is required to ensure patients are fit to take ibogaine. Natanya Friedheim ‘DON’T COME HERE TO GET HIGH’ Few people report enjoying their experience on ibogaine. Many have visions. Some see deceased relatives. To some patients’ chagrin, they see and feel nothing.  People who have taken ibogaine refer to the frequent vomiting during the more than 10-hour trip as “purging” and frame it as part of the healing experience.  The men sat around the large wooden dining table on Wednesday, the morning before they took ibogaine. Over French toast and chicken enchiladas, Isaac Pulido told them he could not predict how they would feel that night. “Many years of doing this and we still don’t have the power,” he said.  Pulido estimates he has overseen more than 4,000 treatments over the last 16 years. A nurse with a doctorate specializing in intensive care, he oversees treatments at all Ambio’s clinics in Mexico.  “Remember, we come here to get healed. We don’t come here to get high,” he told the men. “But if you get high, oh my God, embrace it. Enjoy it.” Intensive care nurse Isaac Pulido administers the treatments in Ambio’s Mexico clinics. Natanya Friedheim Doses at Ambio vary based on each patient’s body weight. If the person feels nothing after about two hours, they can take a booster pill.  > “Remember, we come here to get healed. We don’t come here to get high. But if > you get high, oh my God, embrace it. Enjoy it.” It’s possible that lower, nonhallucinogenic doses have benefits without cardiotoxicity, said David Olson, a professor at the University of California, Davis, and director at the UC Davis Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics. But a lot of people who take hallucinogenic drugs want to trip out and end up disappointed if they don’t.  “They expect to see unicorns and all that shit,” Pulido said in an interview. Dervaes did not see unicorns.  The third and final dose of ibogaine is taken with honey. Natanya Friedheim DANTE’S INFERNO Around 10 p.m. that night, the men had swallowed their third pill. They collected pillows and descended stairs to the clinic’s treatment room. Twin mattresses lined the walls, each with a mirror propped in front of it. The men sat cross-legged on the edge of their mattresses like preschoolers getting ready for nap time. They shook rattles and stared in their mirrors. Over the next hour, lo-fi music gave way to a chaotic mix of plucked string instruments, traditional ceremonial Gabonese music.  Six nurses, two paramedics, and two doctors kept watch over the patients, who wore heart monitors throughout the night.  Patients wear heart monitors throughout the night as they experience the effects of ibogaine.Natanya Friedheim As Dervaes shook his rattle, his reflection showed him something evil, as he recalled 36 hours after his ibogaine trip. He tried to smile or change his expression. He slid on an eye mask and lay back to visions he feared would continue all night: wave after wave of people he had wronged. Each time he tried to apologize, a new vision appeared.  The drug exacerbated the severe tinnitus in his left ear. When he lifted his mask, Dervaes saw the room on fire with piles of bodies and people retching.  In the early afternoon the following day, as the drug’s effects waned, Dervaes looked in the mirror. His big brown eyes looked back at him. His downturned and angry brows had vanished.  Ibogaine’s effect on the brain has long puzzled pharmacologists. The drug reduces depression and anxiety and blocks drug withdrawals, said Deborah Mash, a pioneering ibogaine researcher who received FDA approval to study the drug in the mid-1990s.  While ibogaine leaves the blood within 24 hours, its metabolite noribogaine—what the liver creates after processing ibogaine—stays in the body longer. Noribogaine pumps the brain with dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with mood and motivation. Drug abuse and depression are associated with dopamine deficiency. “You’re helping to restore dopamine homeostasis in the brain,” Mash said. “The enduring effect is a question that neuroscience hasn’t completely worked out.”  Ambio nurse Angie Serrano puts smoke from burning sage, a practice known as “smudging,” around Mark Dervaes’ body before he takes ibogaine.Natanya Friedheim THE SECOND TRIP The men ambled back to their rooms around midday Thursday. The sleepover party had ended. Many people experience hangover symptoms after the hallucinogenic effects of ibogaine wear off.  Only a few of the patients made it to breakfast the following morning. After a day of rest, the men would inhale another psychedelic, a synthetic version of 5-MeO-DMT.  The men circled up in the living room around noon on Friday. An Ambio employee’s prelude to the upcoming drug sounded like a warning: “For the people who are going to be here, waiting for their turn,” she said, “if you hear someone screaming for their lives or yelling like they’re about to die or something, don’t worry about it. It’s absolutely normal.” > “If you hear someone screaming for their lives or yelling like they’re about > to die or something, don’t worry about it. It’s absolutely normal.” Controversy exists over whether 5-MeO-DMT should be used in conjunction with ibogaine. “There’s no good medical or scientific reason for that at all,” said Albert Garcia-Romeu, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences who studies psychedelics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dervaes sat in a hallway waiting his turn. He had arrived at the clinic indifferent to others. Now, he couldn’t stop thinking about a fellow patient, a young man whose bad ibogaine trip caused him to cry throughout the night.  Dervaes slipped off his sandals and relaxed in a hammock during down time at the clinic. In a few hours, he would smoke 5-MeO-DMT.Natanya Friedheim The sounds of wailing traveled down the hallway from a room where another patient, a fellow veteran, took 5-MeO-DMT.  “I have a feeling this is going to hurt,” Dervaes said. “It’s OK. I’ve got to let it go. I have to let all this go. I don’t want to carry it anymore.” When his turn came, Dervaes sat on a cluster of mattresses covered in serape blankets. He inhaled vapor from a pipe and lay back. In less than a minute, he began to cry. “Holy shit,” he said, starting to sit up before lying back down to convulsions.  Dervaes came out of the trip ready for a second dose. “How do you feel?” the woman asked after he sat up minutes later. “I feel reborn,” he said, his eyelashes wet with tears.  Five days later, back home in Colorado, Dervaes updated the group on his progress via their Signal chat.  He had gone to Costco.  “I DON’T GO TO COSTCO!” he wrote. “It was amazing, I didn’t feel like I wanted to strangle anyone! There was no anxiety, fear, or anger; I felt safe!!” Ambio nurse Angie Serrano props her head up on her hand as she waits for Dervaes to come out of his 5-MeO-DMT trip. Natanya Friedheim TRAUMA RETURNS  If patients experience stress after taking psychedelics, the drugs “can do more damage than good,” according to Gul Dolen, a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley.  Dolen’s work found psychedelics reopen “critical periods”—windows when the brain is more sensitive to its environment and more capable of learning during early childhood and other critical periods. In the same way a person who just had open-heart surgery shouldn’t climb stairs, people who take psychedelics shouldn’t expose themselves to traumatic events. “Think of this as open-mind surgery,” Dolen said.  For Dervaes, the trauma returned less than a month after returning from Ambio. He lost a friend to suicide. The devastation ripped through his community of friends. In a Zoom call hosted by an Ambio counselor with about 30 former patients, frustration mounted. The healing stopped. Dervaes started drinking. “Regression,” he said.  Marc Dervaes looks out at the Pacific Ocean minutes after taking 5-MeO-DMT. Natanya Friedheim Suddenly, he questioned everything about his ibogaine journey: the healing, the expense, the hope. “I was angry for even going there and wasting my time and money.” Still, his wife, Michaela, noticed subtle changes. He was showing less rage on the road and making progress on letting things that upset him go. Over the next three months, he read more books than he had willingly read in his life, including A Lifetime at War, about a veteran more severely wounded than Dervaes.  “It was like: Wake the fuck up, man,” Dervaes said, “because you’re not the only one that’s out here hurting.” Instead of retreating, he would double down. In early December, as the first snow peppered Colorado Springs, Dervaes packed his bag. Like a growing number of Ambio’s patients, he was returning. Things fell into place quickly. A spot became available at the clinic. A nonprofit agreed to sponsor his trip. On the last day, Breanna Morgan presents Marc Dervaes with his rattle to take home from the clinic. Natanya Friedheim At a fireside ceremony before taking ibogaine for a second time, Dervaes vowed never to touch alcohol again. He has new goals, he said, and the tools to maneuver through life: prayer, meditation, plus treatments like magnetic e-resonance therapy for his post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries. He said he might go back to Ambio again. Michaela Dervaes met her husband at the San Diego airport as he returned from his second trip to Mexico. She looked into his face. The soft eyes and smile were back. The ups and downs have left her exhausted.  “Even though everything seems wonderful right now, there could be just something happening, and it’ll go downhill,” she said. For now, she is hopeful. She sees how hard he is trying. “With this new treatment, I’m thinking we’re at peace.”    This War Horse news story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On a mid-November evening, at precisely 7:12 p.m., a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the Florida coast. It appeared to be a perfect launch. At an altitude of about 40 miles, the rocket’s first stage separated and fell back to Earth, eventually alighting in a gentle, controlled landing on a SpaceX ship idling in the Atlantic Ocean. The mission’s focus then returned to the rocket’s payload: 29 Starlink communication satellites that were to be deployed in low-Earth orbit, about 340 miles above the planet’s surface. With this new fleet of machines, Starlink was expanding its existing mega-constellation so that it numbered over 9,000 satellites, all circling Earth at about 17,000 miles per hour.  Launches like this have become commonplace. As of late November, SpaceX had sent up 152 Falcon 9 missions in 2025—an annual record for the company. And while SpaceX is the undisputed leader in rocket launches, the space economy now ranges beyond American endeavors to involve orbital missions—military, scientific, and corporate—originating from Europe, China, Russia, India, Israel, Japan, and South Korea. This year the global total of orbital launches will near 300 for the first time, and there seems little doubt it will continue to climb.     > “We are now in this regime where we are doing something new to the atmosphere > that hasn’t been done before.” Starlink has sought permission from the Federal Communications Commission to expand its swarm, which at this point comprises the vast majority of Earth’s active satellites, so that it might within a few years have as many as 42,000 units in orbit. Blue Origin, the rocket company led by Jeff Bezos, is in the early stages of helping to deploy a satellite network for Amazon, a constellation of about 3,000 units known as Amazon Leo. European companies, such as France’s Eutelsat, plan to expand space-based networks, too. “We’re now at 12,000 active satellites, and it was 1,200 a decade ago, so it’s just incredible,” Jonathan MacDowell, a scientist at Harvard and the Smithsonian who has been tracking space launches for several decades, told me recently. MacDowell notes that based on applications to communications agencies, as well as on corporate projections, the satellite business will continue to grow at an extraordinary rate. By 2040, it’s conceivable that more than 100,000 active satellites would be circling Earth. But counting the number of launches and satellites has so far proven easier than measuring their impacts. For the past decade, astronomers have been calling attention to whether so much activity high above might compromise their opportunities to study distant objects in the night sky. At the same time, other scientists have concentrated on the physical dangers. Several studies project a growing likelihood of collisions and space debris—debris that could rain down on Earth or, in rare cases, on cruising airplanes. More recently, however, scientists have become alarmed by two other potential problems: the emissions from rocket fuels, and the emissions from satellites and rocket stages that mostly ablate (that is, burn up) on reentry. “Both of these processes are producing pollutants that are being injected into just about every layer of the atmosphere,” explains Eloise Marais, an atmospheric scientist at University College London, who compiles emissions data on launches and reentries.  As Marais told me, it’s crucial to understand that Starlink’s satellites, as well as those of other commercial ventures, don’t stay up indefinitely. With a lifetime usefulness of about five years, they are regularly deorbited and replaced by others. The new satellite business thus has a cyclical quality: launch, deploy, deorbit, destroy. And then repeat.  The cycle suggests we are using Earth’s mesosphere and stratosphere—the layers above the surface-hugging troposphere—as an incinerator dump for space machinery. Or as Jonathan MacDowell puts it: “We are now in this regime where we are doing something new to the atmosphere that hasn’t been done before.” MacDowell and some of his colleagues seem to agree that we don’t yet understand how—or how much—the reentries and launches will alter the air. As a result, we’re unsure what the impacts may be to Earth’s weather, climate, and (ultimately) its inhabitants.  To consider low-Earth orbit within an emerging environmental framework, it helps to see it as an interrelated system of cause and effect. As with any system, trying to address one problematic issue might lead to another. A long-held idea, for instance, has been to “design for demise,” in the argot of aerospace engineers, which means constructing a satellite with the intention it should not survive the heat of reentry. “But there’s an unforeseen consequence of your solution unless you have a grasp of how things are connected,” according to Hugh Lewis, a professor of astronautics at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. In reducing “the population of debris” with incineration, Lewis told me—and thus, with rare exceptions, saving us from encounters with falling chunks of satellites or rocket stages—we seem to have chosen “probably the most harmful solution you could get from a perspective of the atmosphere.”  We don’t understand the material composition of everything that’s burning up. Yet scientists have traced a variety of elements that are vaporizing in the mesosphere during the deorbits of satellites and derelict rocket stages; and they’ve concluded these vaporized materials—as a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences put it—“condense into aerosol particles that descend into the stratosphere.” The PNAS study, done by high altitude air sampling and not by modeling, showed that these tiny particles contained aluminum, silicon, copper, lead, lithium, and more exotic elements like niobium. > “Emission plumes from the first few minutes of a mission, which disperse into > the stratosphere, may…have a significant effect on the ozone layer.” The large presence of aluminum, signaling the formulation of aluminum oxide nanoparticles, may be especially worrisome, since it can harm Earth’s protective ozone layers and may undo our progress in halting damage done by chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. A recent academic study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters concluded that the ablation of a single 550-pound satellite (a new Starlink unit is larger, at about 1,800 pounds) can generate around 70 pounds of aluminum oxide nanoparticles. This floating metallic pollution may stay aloft for decades.  The PNAS study and others, moreover, suggest the human footprint on the upper atmosphere will expand, especially as the total mass of machinery being incinerated ratchets up. Several scientists I spoke with noted that they have revised their previous belief that the effects of ablating satellites would not exceed those of meteorites that naturally burn up in the atmosphere and leave metallic traces in the stratosphere. “You might have more mass from the meteoroids,” Aaron Boley, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia, said, but “these satellites can still have a huge effect because they’re so vastly different [in composition].”  Last year, a group of researchers affiliated with NASA formulated a course of research that could be followed to fill large “knowledge gaps” relating to these atmospheric effects. The team proposed a program of modeling that would be complemented by data gleaned from in situ measurements. While some of this information could be gathered through high-altitude airplane flights, sampling the highest-ranging air might require “sounding” rockets doing tests with suborbital flights. Such work is viewed as challenging and not inexpensive—but also necessary. “Unless you have the data from the field, you cannot trust your simulations too much,” Columbia University’s Kostas Tsigaridis, one of the scientists on the NASA team, told me.  Tsigaridis explains that lingering uncertainty about NASA’s future expenditures on science has slowed US momentum for such research. One bright spot, however, has been overseas, where ESA, the European Space Agency, held an international workshop in September to address some of the knowledge gaps, particularly those relating to satellite ablations. The ESA meeting resulted in a commitment to begin field measurement campaigns over the next 24 months, Adam Mitchell, an engineer with the agency, said. The effort suggests a sense of urgency, in Europe, at least, that the space industry’s growth is outpacing our ability to grasp its implications. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket takes off. SpaceX now has more than 9,000 Starlink satellites orbiting the Earth.SpaceX The atmospheric pollution problem is not only about what’s raining down from above, however; it also relates to what happens as rockets go up. According to the calculations of Marais’ UCL team, the quantity of heat-trapping gases like CO2 produced during liftoffs are still tiny in comparison to, say, those of commercial airliners. On the other hand, it seems increasingly clear that rocket emission plumes from the first few minutes of a mission, which disperse into the stratosphere, may, like reentries, have a significant effect on the ozone layer.  The most common rocket fuel right now is a highly refined kerosene known as RP-1, which is used by vehicles such as SpaceX’s Falcon 9. When RP-1 is burned in conjunction with liquid oxygen, the process releases black carbon particulates into the stratosphere. A recent study led by Christopher Maloney of the University of Colorado used computer models to assess how the black carbon absorbs solar radiation and whether it can warm the upper atmosphere significantly. Based on space industry growth projections a few decades into the future, these researchers concluded that the warming effect of black carbon would raise temperatures in the stratosphere by as much as 1.5 degrees C, leading to significant ozone reductions in the Northern Hemisphere. > When satellite companies talk about sustainability, “what they mean is, we > want to sustain this rate of growth.”  It may be the case that a different propellant could alleviate potential problems. But a fix isn’t as straightforward as it seems. Solid fuels, for instance, which are often used in rocket boosters to provide additional thrust, emit chlorine—another ozone-destroying element. Meanwhile, the propellant of the future looks to be formulations of liquefied natural gas (LNG), often referred to as liquid methane. Liquid methane will be used to power SpaceX’s massive Starship, a new vehicle that’s intended to be used for satellite deployments, moon missions, and, possibly someday, treks to Mars.  The amount of black carbon emissions from burning LNG may be 75 percent less than from RP-1. “But the issue is that the Starship rocket is so much bigger,” UCL’s Marais says. “There’s so much more mass that’s being launched.” Thus, while liquid methane might burn cleaner, using immense quantities of it—and using it for more frequent launches—could undermine its advantages. Recently, executives at SpaceX’s Texas factory have said they would like to build a new Starship every day, readying the company for a near-constant cycle of launches. One worry amongst scientists is that if new research suggests that space pollution is leading to serious impacts, it may eventually resemble an airborne variation of plastics in the ocean. A more optimistic view is that these are the early days of the space business, and there is still time for solutions. Some of the recent work at ESA, for instance, focuses on changing the “design for demise” paradigm for satellites to what some scientists are calling “design to survive.” Already, several firms are testing satellites that can get through an reentry without burning up; a company called Atmos, for instance, is working on an inflatable “atmospheric decelerator” that serves as a heat shield and parachute to bring cargo to Earth. Satellites might be built from safer materials, such as one tested in 2024 by Japan’s space agency, JAXA, made mostly from wood.  More ambitious plans are being discussed: Former NASA engineer Moriba Jah has outlined a design for an orbital “circular economy” that calls for “the development and operation of reusable and recyclable satellites, spacecraft, and space infrastructure.” In Jah’s vision, machines used in the space economy should be built in a modular way, so that parts can be disassembled, conserved, and reused. Anything of negligible worth would be disposed of responsibly. Most scientists I spoke with believe that a deeper recognition of environmental responsibilities could rattle the developing structure of the space business. “Regulations often translate into additional costs,” says UCL’s Marais, “and that’s an issue, especially when you’re privatizing space.” A shift to building satellites that can survive reentry, for instance, could change the economics of an industry that, as astronomer Aaron Boley notes, has been created to resemble the disposable nature of the consumer electronics business. Boley also warns that technical solutions are likely only one aspect of avoiding dangers and will not address all the complexities of overseeing low-Earth orbit as a shared and delicate system. It seems possible to Boley that in addition to new fuels, satellite designs, and reentry schemes, we may need to look toward quotas that require international management agreements. He acknowledges that this may seem “pie in the sky”; while there are treaties for outer space, as well as United Nations guidelines, they don’t address such governance issues. Moreover, the emphasis in most countries is on accelerating the space economy, not limiting it. And yet, Boley argues that without collective-action policy responses we may end up with orbital shells so crowded that they exceed a safe carrying capacity.  That wouldn’t be good for the environment or society—but it wouldn’t be good for the space business, either. Such concerns may be why those in the industry increasingly discuss a set of principles, supported by NASA, that are often grouped around the idea of “space sustainability.” University of Edinburgh astronomer Andrew Lawrence told me that the phrase can be used in a way that makes it unclear what we’re sustaining: “If you look at the mission statements that companies make, what they mean is, we want to sustain this rate of growth.”  But he doesn’t think we can. As one of the more eloquent academics arguing for space environmentalism, Lawrence perceives an element of unreality in the belief that in accelerating space activity we can “magically not screw everything up.” He thinks a goal in space for zero emissions, or zero impact, would be more sensible. And with recent private-sector startups suggesting that we should use space to build big data centers or increase sunlight on surface areas of Earth, he worries we are not entering an era of sustainability but a period of crisis. Lawrence considers debates around orbital satellites a high-altitude variation on climate change and threats to biodiversity—an instance, again, of trying to seek a balance between capitalism and conservation, between growth and restraint. “Of course, it affects me and other professional astronomers and amateur astronomers particularly badly,” he concedes. “But it’s really that it just wakes you up and you think, ‘Oh, God, it’s another thing. I thought, you know—I thought we were safe.’” After a pause, he adds, “But no, we’re not.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Changes in polar bear DNA that could help the animals adapt to warmer climates have been detected by researchers, in a study thought to be the first time a statistically significant link has been found between rising temperatures and changing DNA in a wild mammal species. Climate breakdown is threatening the survival of polar bears. Two-thirds of them are expected to have disappeared by 2050 as their icy habitat melts and the weather becomes hotter. Now scientists at the University of East Anglia have found that some genes related to heat stress, ageing, and metabolism are behaving differently in polar bears living in southeast Greenland, suggesting they may be adjusting to warmer conditions. The researchers analysed blood samples taken from polar bears in two regions of Greenland and compared “jumping genes”: small, mobile pieces of the genome that can influence how other genes work. Scientists looked at the genes in relation to temperatures in the two regions and at the associated changes in gene expression. > “We cannot be complacent, this offers some hope but does not mean that polar > bears are at any less risk of extinction.” “DNA is the instruction book inside every cell, guiding how an organism grows and develops,” said the lead researcher, Dr Alice Godden. “By comparing these bears’ active genes to local climate data, we found that rising temperatures appear to be driving a dramatic increase in the activity of jumping genes within the south-east Greenland bears’ DNA.” As local climates and diets evolve as a result of changes in habitat and prey forced by global heating, the genetics of the bears appear to be adapting, with the group of bears in the warmest part of the country showing more changes than the communities farther north. The authors of the study have said these changes could help us understand how polar bears might survive in a warming world, inform understanding of which populations are most at risk and guide future conservation efforts. This is because the findings, published on Friday in the journal Mobile DNA, suggest the genes that are changing play a crucial role in how different polar bear populations are evolving. Godden said: “This finding is important because it shows, for the first time, that a unique group of polar bears in the warmest part of Greenland are using ‘jumping genes’ to rapidly rewrite their own DNA, which might be a desperate survival mechanism against melting sea ice.” Temperatures in northeast Greenland are colder and less variable, while in the south-east there is a much warmer and less icy environment, with steep temperature fluctuations. DNA sequences in animals change over time, but this process can be accelerated by environmental stress such as a rapidly heating climate. There were some interesting DNA changes, such as in areas linked to fat processing, that could help polar bears survive when food is scarce. Bears in warmer regions had more rough, plant-based diets compared with the fatty, seal-based diets of northern bears, and the DNA of southeastern bears seemed to be adapting to this. Godden said: “We identified several genetic hotspots where these jumping genes were highly active, with some located in the protein-coding regions of the genome, suggesting that the bears are undergoing rapid, fundamental genetic changes as they adapt to their disappearing sea ice habitat.” The next step will be to look at other polar bear populations, of which there are 20 around the world, to see if similar changes are happening to their DNA. This research could help protect the bears from extinction. But the scientists said it was crucial to stop temperature rises accelerating by reducing the burning of fossil fuels. Godden said: “We cannot be complacent, this offers some hope but does not mean that polar bears are at any less risk of extinction. We still need to be doing everything we can to reduce global carbon emissions and slow temperature increases.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Years of underfunding and new delays in federal grantmaking threaten buoys and ocean monitoring assets run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that protect fishermen, cargo ships and endangered species across the country. With key grant deadlines now passed and new awards still pending, regional operators warn that some of those services could go dark at the peak of hurricane season. In the Northeast Channel, where warm, salty Gulf Stream waters collide with frigid meltwater from the Arctic, sensors that hung from a buoy like ornaments on a tree were stationed at the entrance to the Gulf of Maine. The sensors fed scientists and forecasters rare data from one of the Atlantic’s strangest crossroads. But in 2022, the buoy’s operator, the Northeast Regional Association of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems (NERACOOS), was forced to pull it from the water as stagnant federal funding made routine servicing impossible. Faced with hard choices, the group prioritized buoys closer to shore that are more critical for marine safety over the Northeast Channel buoy, which primarily supported research. Unlike many NOAA programs, the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS)—“the eyes of our ocean,” a network of regional associations that collect and track ocean data—enjoys bipartisan support in Congress. But year after year, federal appropriations have fallen short of what the program needs to properly service and maintain its buoys, sensors, gliders, and other equipment.   After the program was authorized by Congress in 2009, an independent study found that the program would need about $715 million to deliver on lawmakers’ vision. Since that study, the most the program has received is $42.5 million—a level it has effectively been stuck at for years. That number was always ambitious and would require slow, steady growth, according to Kristen Yarincik, executive director of the IOOS Association, a nonprofit that represents the 11 regional IOOS associations. But flat funding in recent years, combined with inflation and rising equipment costs, has made routine servicing and upgrades increasingly difficult. > “If one of our buoys goes offline, I hear about it from fishermen [first]. > What that tells me is that even a short outage really affects people.” This year, federal appropriations may offer some relief, matching the IOSS Association’s $56 million request—but only if the money actually moves on time. IOOS regions operate on five-year cooperative agreements with NOAA; the current agreements, covering 2021–2026, end on June 30 for most regions. IOOS sources say the next round of funding may be delayed by new layers of federal review within the Department of Commerce and the Office of Management and Budget. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Congress has not passed a full-year appropriations package, leaving agencies to operate under the president’s budget proposal, which zeroes out IOOS. “It’s so important that Congress finalize a full-year appropriations package for 2026 as soon as possible,” said Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), a member of the House Committee on Appropriations. “Both the House and the Senate have proposed a funding increase for IOOS Regional Observations, and it’s my sincere hope that both chambers will push the administration to adopt these spending levels.” Regional associations say they need to submit proposals by the end of January. Because Notice of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) to federal contractors are legally required to stay open for about 60 days, they need to have been published by the end of November to avoid problems next summer, according to Yarincik. “After that, the timeline, and therefore continuity of data collection, becomes at risk,” she said. As of early December, those NOFOs still have not been released. The question now is how long awards will be delayed, and how long a funding gap may persist come July. Once proposals are submitted, NOAA must still review, negotiate, and approve awards—a process that has been slowing under new rules requiring the secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, to personally sign off on grants over $100,000. “They are a ways behind on this,” said Jake Kritzer, executive director of NERACOOS. According to Kritzer and Yarincik, NOFOs are typically published a year before the start date, making this round more than six months late. If a funding gap arises because of the delay, it would only exacerbate problems IOOS regional associations are already struggling with. > A funding gap next summer could hit just as hurricane season reaches its > height. In the Northeast, buoys lobstermen and cargo ships rely on are starting to show their age, Kritzer said. “Think of it like a car,” he said. “It may last 10 or 20 years, but over time the maintenance becomes more and more expensive.” And replacing an old buoy requires even more money up front. While the Gulf of Maine has lost a number of buoys, those that remain aren’t being serviced frequently enough. Buoys that should be serviced five times a year may see only a single visit, according to Kritzer. As sensors float at different depths, salt and biofouling buildup can degrade data quality, and sometimes the instruments go dark for hours or even days. “If one of our buoys goes offline, I hear about it from fishermen before our data guys or sensor technicians,” Kritzer said. “What that tells me is that even a short outage really affects people.” Fishermen use subsurface temperature data to find the most cost-effective places to fish and rely even more on IOOS data to decide whether it’s safe to leave the dock at all. “Maine lobstermen monitor the buoy readings and NERACOOS data products daily to understand sea conditions, make informed decisions about when it is safe to leave the dock, and be prepared for the conditions they will face at sea,” the Maine Lobstermen’s Association (MLA) said in a statement. “It directly impacts their ability to determine whether or not it is safe to go fishing.” The association also noted that NERACOOS data helps protect lobster populations and other sea life, including endangered whales, from human impacts. Sensors that monitor algal blooms and zooplankton help ensure lobsters have enough prey to feed on. Water-quality monitoring tracks pollution that can harm marine life. And acoustic monitoring systems help keep ships away from migrating whales. Cargo ships depend on that same real-time wave and wind data to plan safe transit in and out of port, avoid dangerous seas, and reduce costly delays. “Congress and NOAA should continue to fund and efficiently administer the IOOS and other navigation programs for the safe and efficient operations of our maritime industry,” said a representative from the American Association of Port Authorities. IOOS data supplements the National Weather Service’s own observation networks, sharpening coastal forecasts for local communities. The National Weather Service can still draw on its radars, satellites and other federal, military and private data, but IOOS-backed tide gauges and wave buoys help monitor flood risk and storm surge—data that allows emergency management to make more informed decisions.  IOOS officials warn that if regional systems go dark, many coastal forecasts would become less precise and less locally tuned. But the work that allows lobstermen to empty their traps, cargo ships to safely reach port, and coastal communities to get accurate flood warnings depends on steady funding. Supplementary funding sources can help keep IOOS regions afloat if a funding gap is realized, but IOOS leaders warn even a one- to two-month lapse in federal support could delay maintenance and force key services to go dark. If that happens, Yarincik said, “the availability of real-time data and accuracy of data products will be reduced, at a minimum, and this will impact navigational safety for commercial shipping, fishermen and recreational boaters; local flood monitoring for coastal communities; and weather forecasting, especially for hurricane intensity forecasts.”  IOOS helps supply the water-temperature data forecasters use to gauge how intense hurricanes may become. A funding gap next summer could hit just as hurricane season reaches its height, leaving lives and entire coastal communities vulnerable.

A landmark study on the safety of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the controversial herbicide Roundup, has been formally retracted by its publisher, raising new concerns about the chemical’s potential dangers.  Federal regulators relied heavily on the study, published in 2000 by the science journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, in their assessment that the herbicide is safe and does not cause cancer. Indeed, the paper, which concluded that “Roundup herbicide does not pose a health risk to humans” was the most cited study in some government reports. But the journal’s editor-in-chief, Martin van den Berg, said he no longer trusted the study, which appears to have been secretly ghostwritten by employees of Monsanto, the company that introduced Roundup in 1974. Officially, the paper’s authors, including a doctor from New York Medical College, were listed as independent scientists. Van den Berg, a professor of toxicology in the Netherlands, concluded that the paper relied entirely on Monsanto’s internal studies and ignored other evidence suggesting that Roundup might be harmful. >  “The MAHA world is losing their minds right now. They keep getting thrown > under the bus.” In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer determined that glyphosate probably causes cancer. Since then, Roundup’s manufacturer, Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, has agreed to pay more than $12 billion in legal settlements to people who claim it gave them cancer.  In 2020, the US Environmental Protection Agency released an updated safety assessment on glyphosate that again determined that it was safe and did not cause cancer. This EPA report is often cited in news reports that contend glyphosate is “fine” and important for modern food production. But those reports failed to mention that the 2020 EPA health assessment was overturned in 2022 by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. The “EPA’s errors in assessing human-health risk are serious,” the judges wrote, and “most studies EPA examined indicated that human exposure to glyphosate is associated with an at least somewhat increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma”—a type of cancer. The court told the EPA it needed to redo its human health assessment, meaning the agency now has no official stance on glyphosate’s risk to people. It is expected to release an updated safety report next year.  During the first Trump administration, Monsanto executives were told they “need not fear any additional regulation from this administration,” according to an internal Monsanto email cited in a Roundup lawsuit in 2019. Monsanto had hired a consultant, according to court documents, who reported back that “a domestic policy adviser at the White House had said, for instance: ‘We have Monsanto’s back on pesticides regulation.’” On Tuesday, the US Solicitor General asked the Supreme Court to consider a case that could help shield Bayer from further lawsuits. The company’s stock soared by as much as 14 percent on news of the Trump administration’s help in the case. Two states—North Dakota and Georgia—have passed laws this year that help shield Bayer from some cancer lawsuits arising from Roundup use. There is a push to enact similar laws in other states and on the federal level.  In July, New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker introduced the Pesticide Injury Accountability Act to push back against these new laws, and ensure that “these chemical companies can be held accountable in federal court for the harm caused by their toxic products.” Zen Honeycutt, a key voice in the Make America Healthy Again coalition, has endorsed the legislation. Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said the glyphosate debate has become a key sticking point between President Trump and his MAHA base. “The MAHA world is losing their minds right now. They keep getting thrown under the bus by this administration,” Donley said. “He’s alienating a crucial voting bloc.”

In the summer of 2019, a group of Dutch scientists conducted an experiment to collect “digital confessions.” At a music festival near Amsterdam, the researchers asked attendees to share a secret anonymously by chatting online with either a priest or a relatively basic chatbot, assigned at random. To their surprise, some of the nearly 300 participants ­offered deeply personal confessions, including of infidelity and experiences with sexual abuse. While what they shared with the priests (in reality, incognito scientists) and the chatbots was “equally intimate,” participants reported feeling more “trust” in the humans, but less fear of judgment with the chatbots. This was a novel finding, explains Emmelyn Croes, an assistant professor of communication science at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and lead author of the study. Chatbots were then primarily used for customer service or online shopping, not personal conversations, let alone confessions. “Many people couldn’t imagine they would ever share anything intimate to a chatbot,” she says. Enter ChatGPT. In 2022, three years after Croes’ experiment, OpenAI launched its artificial intelligence–powered chatbot, now used by 700 million people globally, the company says. Today, people aren’t just sharing their deepest secrets with virtual companions, they’re engaging in regular, extended discussions that can shape beliefs and influence behavior, with some users reportedly cultivating friendships and romantic relationships with AIs. In chatbot research, Croes says, “there are two domains: There’s before and after ChatGPT.” Take r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, a Reddit community where people “ask, share, and post experiences about AI relationships.” As MIT Technology Review reported in September, many of its roughly 30,000 members formed bonds with AI chatbots unintentionally, through organic conversations. Elon Musk’s Grok offers anime “companion” avatars designed to flirt with users. And “Friend,” a new, wearable AI product, advertises constant companionship, claiming that it will “binge the entire [TV] series with you” and “never bail on our dinner plans”—unlike flaky humans. The chatbots are hardly flawless. Research shows they are capable of talking people out of conspiracy theories and may offer an outlet for some psychological support, but virtual companions also have reportedly fueled delusional and harmful thinking, particularly in children. At least three US teenagers have killed themselves after confiding in chatbots, including ChatGPT and Character.AI, according to lawsuits filed by their families. Both companies have since announced new safety features, with Character.AI telling me in an email that it intends to block children from engaging in “open-ended chat with AI” on the platform starting in late November. (The Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones, is suing OpenAI for copyright violations.) As the technology barrels ahead—and lawmakers grapple with how to regulate it—it’s become increasingly clear just how much a humanlike string of words can captivate, entertain, and influence us. While most people don’t initially seek out deep engagement with an AI, argues Vaile Wright, a psychologist and spokesperson for the American Psychological Association, many AIs are designed to keep us engaged for as long as possible to maximize the data we provide to their makers. For instance, OpenAI trains ChatGPT on user conversations (though there is an option to opt out), while Meta intends to run personalized ads based on what people share with Meta AI, its virtual assistant. “Your data is the profit,” Wright says. Some advanced AI chatbots are also “unconditionally validating” or sycophantic, Wright notes. ChatGPT may praise a user’s input as “insightful” or “profound,” and use phrases like, I’m here for you—an approach she argues helps keep us hooked. (This behavior may stem from AI user testing, where a chatbot’s complimentary responses often receive higher marks than neutral ones, leading it to play into our biases.) Worse, the longer someone spends with an AI chatbot, some research shows, the less accurate the bot becomes. People also tend to overtrust AI. Casey Fiesler, a professor who studies technology ethics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, highlights a 2016 Georgia Tech study in which participants consistently followed an error-prone “emergency guide robot” while fleeing a building during a fake fire. “People perceive AI as not having the same kinds of problems that humans do,” she says. At the same time, explains Nat Rabb, a technical associate at MIT’s Human Cooperation Lab who studies trust, the way we develop trust in other humans—perception of honesty, competence, and whether someone shares an in-group—can also dictate our trust in AI, unlike other technologies. “Those are weird categories to apply to a thermostat,” he says, “But they’re not that weird when it comes to generative AI.” For instance, he says, research from his colleagues at MIT indicates that Republicans on X are more likely to use Grok to fact-check information, while Democrats are more likely to go with Perplexity, an alternative chatbot. Not to say AI chatbots can’t be used for good. For example, Wright suggests they could serve as a temporary stand-in for mental health support when human help isn’t readily accessible—say, a midnight panic attack—or to help people practice conversations and build social skills before trying them out in the real world. But, she cautions, “it’s a tool, and it’s how you use the tool that matters most.” Eugene Santos Jr., an engineering professor at Dartmouth College who studies AI and human behavior, would like to see developers better define how their chatbots ought to be used and set guidelines, rather than leaving it open-ended. “We need to be able to lay down, ‘Did I have a particular goal? What is the real use for this?'” Some say rules could help, too. At a congressional hearing in September, Wright implored lawmakers to consider “guardrails,” which she told me could include things like stronger age verification, time limits, and bans on chatbots posing as therapists. The Biden administration introduced dozens of AI regulations in 2024, but President Donald Trump has committed to “removing red tape” he claims is hindering AI innovation. Silicon Valley leaders, meanwhile, are funding a new PAC to advocate for AI industry interests, the Wall Street Journal reports, to the tune of more than $100 million. In short, we’re worlds away from the “digital confessions” experiment. When I asked Croes what a repeat of her study might yield, she noted that the basic parameters aren’t so different: “You are still anonymous. There’s still no fear of judgment,” she says. But today’s AI would likely come across as more “understanding,” and “empathetic”—more human—and evoke even deeper confessions. That aspect has changed. And, you might say, so have we.