On Oct. 7, 1492, Christopher Columbus, aboard his ship the Santa María, had been at a complete standstill for 21 days, trapped in a very strange sea which he would later name the Sargasso Sea—sargazo in Spanish meaning “gulfweed.” Today, the Sargasso Sea—an elliptical expanse in the southwestern Atlantic at the center of which lies Bermuda—is six times the size of France, and is the only sea in the world with no shoreline. There was great anxiety among Columbus’s sailors as their already heavily rationed food supplies dwindled the longer they remained stuck. Not the slightest wind, not the slightest wave, only this tangle of seaweed as far as the eye could see—it felt as though the Santa María was destined to stay bogged down in the golden mass forever. But finally, a light breeze came and helped bush them through towards the shores of the Bahamas.
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As far back as 2,000 years ago, people were warned of the impenetrable Sargasso Sea. What caused such a mass of seaweed likely remained a mystery to Columbus. But today we have a better picture of what’s causing this phenomenon. The incredible accumulation of algae over millions of square miles is linked to a vortex created by the convergence of three great marine currents of the Atlantic—this clockwise circulation, generated as the ocean currents collide with one another, is known as the North Atlantic gyre. That vortex, and an excess of agricultural nutrients and chemicals that leak into the sea, is to blame. The resulting massive blobs of sargassum (a type of brown seaweed, also known as “golden tides”) are a growing challenge—as Florida is right now experiencing—but this seaweed also presents a multitude of untapped opportunities.

The first golden tides noticed in the U.S. were reported off the coasts of Texas and Florida in the 1980s. And since 2011, the proliferation of sargassum in the Caribbean has accelerated exponentially, multiplying its biomass tenfold in the space of a few years. The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt now covers an area from Central America to the coast of West Africa. From Texas to Abidjan, these huge rafts form a strip of nearly 5,600 miles.

Read more: The Ocean Farmers Trying to Save the World With Seaweed

In the open sea, sargassum contributes to biodiversity by providing a refuge for turtles, crabs, and fish. But when their proliferation takes them near the coasts at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, they prevent light from penetrating which causes the corals and seagrasses to die. Once dead, the coral and seagrasses decompose and absorb all the oxygen, creating deserted areas on the shoreline to the detriment of fish, crustaceans, and turtles.

On land, however, they cover the shores for several miles in heaps over three feet thick, releasing a stench similar to rotten eggs as they decompose. The hydrogen sulfide they emit causes eye irritation, nausea, sore throat or ears, or itchy skin. This phenomenon destroys all tourist activities in disadvantaged areas where this income is essential to the population. The seaweed also clogs the propellers of fishing boats, preventing fishermen from working.

These mountains of seaweed are not exclusive to the Sargasso Sea. Today, much of the seaweed originates from a more southerly region, opposite Brazil, at the mouth of the Amazon. The banks of the world’s largest river have been suffering for years from the ravages of intensive agriculture and deforestation, and are spitting out an incalculable amount of nitrogen, phosphorus, and other waste into the ocean. Exhausted and leached soils regurgitate hundreds of thousands of gallons of pollutants and wastewater and act on the seaweed like oil thrown onto a fire: the seaweed proliferates and accumulates by millions of tons.

In 2011, there were 10 million metric tons of sargassum, in 2018, this figure reached 20 million metric tons. The problem with the sargassum is they’re incredibly difficult to eradicate, especially as their routes through the sea are almost impossible to predict. Studies are underway into offshore booms or boats specifically built to harvest them alive offshore, but the difficulty in predicting the location of the seaweed and the dates of its proliferation makes it complicated to implement these innovations. There are also some proposals to develop a means of sinking the seaweed in the open sea in order to sequester the carbon from its biomass in the marine sediments for thousands of years to come.

Read more: How Seaweed Helps Cows Become Better Climate Citizens

Rather than get rid of the seaweed, though, some people hope to transform it into something more useful. The most profitable potential at present seems to be in its alginate, which can be processed into biomaterials. Local investors in places such as Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and France are demonstrating a growing interest in using sargassum in biodegradable packaging. Other entrepreneurs are starting to manufacture building bricks using this sargassum. In 2018, a Mexican company built a house in two weeks from sargassum harvested on the coast of Puerto Morelos. It was dried and mixed with wet raw earth to form bricks which then hardened in the sun. According to studies by scientists from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), a house made from these bricks can withstand earthquakes and strong winds. The bricks obtained by incorporating this brown seaweed provide much more resilience than traditional ones.

These solutions aren’t without their challenges. Industrial processing plants enabling these applications would be a possibility, but working out where to put them is complex given the imprecise location of the algal bloom from year to year. And the stakes are high. If no solution is found, then the very sargassum that struck terror into Columbus’s sailors could destroy the coastal resources—both biological and economic—of Central America and even Africa in the years to come. Unfortunately, there is no indication right now that the countries bordering the Amazon River are committed to taking action to limit deforestation, pollution, and the influx of nutrients and minerals into the ocean. After all, we must remember that sargassum is not the cause of our problems—it is a symptom.

Seaweed is too often perceived as a risk. On the contrary, it represents an opportunity. Its bad reputation is linked to the economic and ecological damage caused throughout the world by tides of seaweed that we’ve been unable to control or fully understand. So we must ask ourselves: What keys to progress might be hidden in seaweed and in our capacity to rediscover the ocean today?

The Seaweed Revolution by Vincent Doumeizel, translated by Charlotte Coombe, published by Hero in Hardback and ebook. Published in the U.K. on April 25, 2023 and in the U.S. on Sept. 5 2023.

If you attend a college-level earth science class in Ohio in the coming years, you might learn about how climate change is causing heat waves, flooding, and record storms, and how humanity has a shrinking window to drastically cut emissions and forestall the worst effects. But your instructor could also be forced to spend a big chunk of time talking about how a few largely discredited researchers and fossil-fuel funded lobbyists don’t think there’s really much of an issue.

That’s because just last week, the state senate began debating the Ohio Higher Education Enhancement Act, which would tie the hands of instructors at colleges and universities from teaching effectively on subjects the state legislature has labeled as “controversial,” including climate change. Those institutions would have to guarantee that they’re “encourag[ing] students to reach their own conclusions,” on such matters, which also include subjects like abortion rights. The schools are also obligated to not “seek to inculcate any social, political, or religious point of view” on students. Higher education institutions would also be barred from implementing sustainability initiatives. Diversity or equity programs would also be banned.
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Classroom politics have been at the center of an intense national discussion for years, with much of that controversy focusing on sexual orientation, gender identity, race, and American history. Climate science is sometimes thrown into the debate as well. Idaho, for instance, went through the legislative equivalent of a knock down drag out fight over a proposal to include climate change in the state’s academic standards back in 2019. Those tensions have recently been inflamed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s increasingly zealous efforts to remake the state’s school systems and universities in opposition to what conservatives have termed “wokeness.” Now, the Ohio education bill may signal that that renewed conservative education push has extended to climate science as well, with politicians seeking to insert proven falsehoods into higher-education science courses.

That conservative crusade comes at a time of increased attention among educators and progressive politicians to get more climate science into classrooms in order to help children understand the accelerating changes in the world around them. New Jersey became the first state to legislate climate change into its learning standards back in 2020, followed by Connecticut last year. New Jersey’s standards went into effect last fall, with educators introducing children to climate change starting in kindergarten, and in both science classes and less obvious subjects, like art and physical education. Supporters of the policy point to studies that show how climate education can inculcate sustainable habits, and even help increase parental engagement on the issue.

Many schools mention climate change in science class, but absent efforts like those in New Jersey the curriculum can fall woefully behind the current science and state of urgency. On a recent visit to several D.C.-area charter schools, for instance, a colleague of mine was surprised by how little climate awareness was part of the curriculum. She asked one class of 11th graders if any of them were worried about how climate change would impact their own lives; only one hand went up, and that student was more focused on what would happen if the polar ice caps melted 100 years from now. A few students in a 9th grade class had heard of Greta Thunberg, but weren’t exactly sure what she stood for. When prompted, a few other 11th graders in another school acknowledged that heat waves had gotten worse in the D.C. area over the past few years, likely because of climate change, but the solution, they said, was more air conditioning. Other classes were more informed, but it appeared to be due to the efforts of individual teachers, not the curriculum.

Ohio’s law proposes to go entirely in the opposite direction, preventing educators from teaching the established facts of climate change as such, and forcing them to add misleading arguments from climate change skeptics. Supporters say the measure is about championing intellectual diversity on an important subject. “What I think is controversial is different views that exist out there about the extent of the climate change and the solutions to try to alter climate change,” said Republican state senator Jerry Cirino, the bill’s primary sponsor, speaking with Energy News Network. That would seem to mean that educators must validate the perspective that climate change is a minimal threat, or that there’s not much we can do about it, both of which are untrue.

Classroom debates in which students are encouraged to argue and draw their own conclusions about big issues are an important part of education. But schools and colleges are also places for instruction, and it’s the job of teachers and educators to determine which topics are places to indulge multiple contrasting views, and which are places for hard facts. Climate science is well-established, but by framing the field’s basic concepts as a topic worthy of spirited debate, those legislators are really promoting false fossil fuel industry talking points—that wrongly say humans aren’t causing the warming, or that the changes won’t necessarily be that bad—and putting them on the same level as actual science in the minds of those students. That might serve the interests of a few hard-line state legislators who haven’t been keeping up with the most recent U.N. climate reports. But it’s a profound disservice to the students who will face the realities of a warming world in the years ahead.

A version of this story also appears in the Climate is Everything newsletter. To sign up, click here.

History does not record who the weeping woman was who joined the giant crowd at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles on Feb. 4, 1962. But she was inconsolable.

“I know it’s silly to carry on this way,” she said with a hitching breath to a reporter from the Griffith Observer magazine. “But I can’t help myself.” The cause of her profound distress: On that day, the Sun, the moon, and all five non-Earthly planets from Mercury to Saturn were arranged in a cosmic conga line within a tiny 17-degree patch of the sky. The alignment foretold terrible things, said many: earthquakes, floods, a devastating rending of the Earth itself from the gravitational pull of so many other bodies at such close range.
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The day, for the record, ended peacefully, as all such things work out when the planets align. That’s worth remembering this week, as five planets—Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Mercury, and Uranus—form a similar alignment near the moon, in an arc that will stretch from close to the horizon, up to the top of the bowl of the night sky.

The alignment is, of course, an illusion. The planets remain separated by tens and hundreds of millions of miles. Mercury and Uranus, which will appear to be keeping close company this week, for instance, are actually 1.75 billion miles apart. But when numerous planets happen to gather on one side of the sun, they take on a pearl necklace appearance that gives them the look of having fallen into close ranks.

One of the rare times multiple planets did align was back in the 1970s and 1980s, when the four gas giants—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—formed tidy and temporary ranks in deep space. That allowed the Voyager 2 spacecraft to barnstorm all four of them in what was called the Grand Tour of the outer solar system.

Modern astronomy notwithstanding, you don’t have to go back to the ancients to find people on whom planetary alignments have had much the same distressing effect they had on the woman at the Griffith Observatory, 61 years ago. As The Scotsman reports, astrologers are predicting that the current alignment could lead to impulsive behavior and “fiery disagreements” with loved ones this week. Much more dire predictions were at large in 1919, when a similar arrangement of the planets led to widespread rumors that the phenomenon would lead to a rash of sunspots which would cause worldwide destruction at a scientifically sounding precise moment: Dec. 17 at 8:31 AM. (The rumors also had it that existing sunspots, along with the somehow pernicious influence of Jupiter, were responsible for the 1918 flu pandemic.)

On May 5, 2000, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn converged in a patch of sky less than 25 degrees across, leading to still more tales that the gravitational muscle of the seemingly clustered bodies would potentially tear the Earth in two. Astrological forecasts also saw the alignment as a sign of the coming of the End Times.

Perhaps the most celebrated recent alignment took place on Dec. 24, 2022, when all eight planets lined up in a horizon-to-horizon arc. This yet again, gave rise to tales of gravitational destruction. But NASA has a ready answer to that. The gravitational pull of the larger planets is indeed considerable. Jupiter’s gravity, for example, is more than 2.5 times that of Earth. But gravity isn’t the only part of the equation. Distance plays a role too. The farther away an object is, the less we feel its gravitational influence (a good thing, considering that a supermassive black hole sits at the center of our galaxy and yet its gravity does us no harm.)

On a scale on which the influence of the Sun’s gravity on Earth—its so-called tidal force—is 1.0, the moon (much smaller but much closer) weighs in at 2.1. Venus is 0.000113; massive Jupiter is 0.0000131; as for giant but distant Neptune: 0.000000002. As NASA says: “If all of the planets were to align perfectly with each other…their gravity would raise the ocean tides by just one twenty-fifth of one millimeter.” As environmental scientists would point out, we should worry a whole lot more about the effect of climate change on our tides and sea level than about the impact of extraterrestrial gravity.

The takeaway: This week’s sky show is just a sky show, one of those little gifts—like solar and lunar eclipses or the passing of a comet—that the heavens occasionally give us. Enjoy the spectacle—and if you miss this one, just be patient. On June 27, there will be another alignment, when Mercury, Uranus, Jupiter, Neptune and Saturn will cluster within a 95-degree arc of sky.

Not every politician is willing to admit they owe their election to rats. But Laura Milkulski, city councilwoman for Ferndale, Michigan isn’t shy about attributing her political career—literally—to skeevy, long-tailed rodents.

Milkulski, who educated herself in all things rat control, is the co-founder of the Ferndale Rat Patrol. She created a citizens’ movement to accurately assess the local scope of its burgeoning rat problem, embrace less environmentally harmful methods of pest control, and even host a month-long census, called Tracktoberfest, in which participants win gold-painted spring trap trophies for bringing in the most dead rats. “Nobody knows Laura Mikulski,” the councilwoman, who won election in 2019, says. “But they all love The Rat Lady.”
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If Mikulski’s political path thus far sounds unlikely, it’s nothing compared to her next move: guide Ferndale as it embarks on its first experiment with rodent fertility. As in, birth control for rats.

In April, Ferndale will begin trialing one of the more innovative weapons in the anti-rat arsenal: a product, called Contrapest, that has the potential to change the way cities around the world address their own rat situations by limiting the rodents’ ability to reproduce. Senestech, the company that makes the plant-based product, claims it prevents the critters from reproducing for 45 days per dose, reducing populations humanely without posing danger to other animals or the environment. And thanks to another innovative discovery by a small Danish biotech startup that will allow a key ingredient to be grown in labs, it will soon be a lot more readily available.

As climate change, population growth and land-use changes increase conflicts between humans and wildlife around the world, contraceptives are proving a promising pest-control alternative to “traditional methods to mitigate these impacts, such as culling, that can can be ineffective, environmentally harmful, and often publicly opposed,” explains Giovanna Massei, director of the Botstiber Institute for Wildlife Fertility Control Europe. Already, contraceptives in different formats are being used to reduce deer populations in U.S. suburbs, monkeys in Thailand, and feral pigeons in Barcelona.

No one has invented tiny rat condoms yet, so ContraPest is an EPA-registered oral contraceptive that rats consume simply by eating it. It works via two active compounds, one of which induces a kind of menopause in females while the other, called triptolide, limits sperm production in males. Delivered cumulatively over time, the product has reduced populations by 95%, according to Senestech’s own research.

Senestech says its compound is non-toxic and poses no danger to other animals or the environment. And although rats must continue to consume it to maintain the contraceptive effects, according to Senestech CEO Joel Fruendt, uptake hasn’t been a problem. “It’s very sweet, so they love it,” he says. “It’s like a milkshake for rats.”

The world is going to need a lot of these milkshakes. Although it’s unclear whether actual populations increased during the pandemic or simply sightings of them, cities from Boston to Portland are reporting record numbers of complaints about the rodents. By December of 2022, the problem had grown so confounding in New York City that mayor Eric Adams posted a job announcement for a “highly motivated and somewhat bloodthirsty” rat czar. And the problem is not limited to the U.S.

In London–which has struggled with the critters since the outbreak of the Bubonic Plague in the 1600s—there is more than one rat for every five inhabitants. In Paris, the numbers are even higher: between 1.5 and 1.75 per resident. In Mumbai, city catchers kill 1,000 rats each night. And an astonishing 100 million rats are estimated to burrow beneath the streets of Mexico City.

Beyond their reviled reputation, rats also pose a serious threat to human health and infrastructure. They spread diseases like leptospirosis (which killed a record number of New Yorkers in 2019 and is spread primarily through contact with rat urine), decimate harvests, and destroy property. And as an invasive species in many parts of the world, they pose a grave threat to biodiversity.

Rat biology bears some of the blame. The average litter for the common Norway rat ranges from five to 12 pups. With females having three to six litters in their year-long lifetime, a single pair of rats breeding in ideal conditions can produce 15,000 descendants in a year.

But the rise of rats can’t all be chocked up to rodent randiness; humans, with their garbage bins that act like buffet lines and their sewer pipes that make such cozy homes, have also helped rats thrive.

“It’s one of the species that has benefitted from the success of humans,” says biologist Naia Morueta-Holme, professor of macroecology at the University of Copenhagen. “Besides being spread by humans from their native range in Asia, they benefit from human constructions—first granaries, then cities have provided food sources and perfect habitat for rats.”

Even the signature human invention of plastic has contributed, by making a lot more food accessible to rats now that trash is generally put out in flimsy bags rather than sturdy metal cans. And global warming brought on by humans has also boosted populations; warmer winters allow rats to breed during months that were previously too cold.

Against this rising army of rodents, most available weapons fall short ethically, environmentally, efficiently, or all of the above. Traps can be cruel—glue traps often leave the animal starving for days before dying, while rats caught in snap traps will chew off their own limbs to free themselves. Chemical poisons cause pain before death and are toxic to other animals who might ingest them, and their residue can contaminate soil and water. Rats learn to avoid bait that makes them sick and can even build up resistance to some rodenticides.

Contraception avoids those problems—though as a novel product targeting an especially unloved creature, Contrapest has a particular obstacle to overcome: blood thirst. Although rats are highly intelligent animals who can be trained to detect both cancer and landmines, they also have a long history of skeeving people out thanks to their associations with trash, sewers, and diseases going back to the Black Death. As the popularity of rat-control YouTubers (yes, there is such a thing) like Twin Home Exterminators and Shawn Webb attests, “people want to see dead rats,” says Senestech CEO Fruendt.

Until now, the labor and expense involved in attaining one of the product’s active ingredients had also been a challenge. Used in traditional Chinese medicine, triptolide is derived from a rare plant called Thunder God Vine that grows in the country’s mountains and is mostly harvested by hand. Each plant produces so little triptolide that, in the region, the substance is worth 15 times its weight in gold.

That’s where Danish biologist Johan Andersen-Ranberg comes in. He has figured out a way to get common yeast, injected with the proper genetic code, to grow triptolide. “It’s a bit like brewing beer,” he says. “You feed sugar to yeast, and you get this precious substance on the other side.”

Yet having discovered a way to produce the triptolide in the lab, Andersen-Ranberg realized he had no idea what to do with it. So, like any highly-trained scientist, he Googled it, and learned that Senestech had recently begun marketing its product based on natural triptolide for rat control. Together with business partner Jon Christensen, Andersen-Ranberg launched a startup called TriptoBio, and entered into a partnership with the American company. Now, while they wait for EPA registration for the lab-grown compound specifically, they’re scouting locations and working on how to scale up their triptolide-producing yeast.

Although he didn’t start his research with rat birth control in mind, the scientist is excited about the application. “I like that it’s a bigger problem that everyone can relate to. Rat pest control is kind of like sewers; sewer systems have probably done more to improve health in modern society than anything else but no one talks about them. This could have a similar impact.”

Senestech expects that the lab-grown version will allow it to guarantee supply as it ramps up production while reducing costs–important steps as it attempts a paradigm shift in pest control. Even so, challenges remain, especially in big cities.

When ContraPest was trialed in Washington, D.C. in 2019, it reduced camera-detected rat sightings by 90%, according to the company’s results. But according to a spokesman for the Department of Health, the district decided not to continue with the product “after the results proved inconclusive.”

Although the DOH declined to go into more detail, Daniel Neves, head biologist for the UK pest control company Inoculand has some ideas on why the substance may be less effective in urban settings than rural ones. As someone with many years of experience (and the horrifying stories of rats streaming up through the toilets of newly built homes to prove it), he knows that the key to controlling rodents is access.

“That product can be very efficient,” Neves says, “But if the rats don’t come to where it is, there will always be a reservoir of them. And the main problem with rats is that they live deep in the sewers where it is hard to get to them.”

Other experts have been thrilled with Contrapest. Wesley Parker, the co-owner of Parker Eco-Pest Control in Seattle, was initially skeptical about the product’s claims, but after partnering with a wildlife population management foundation called FYXX to run a study in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood in spring 2022, her doubts were erased.

“It does require some patience, but the results speak for themselves,” Parker says. “Not only did we see the population go down by 90% in a matter of months, but we heard anecdotally from businesses adjacent to the test site that they’ve never been rodent-free until now.”

She’s convinced that the new technique is at least part of the future. “Birth control plus physically sealing up a structure will soon be the gold standard for eco-friendly rodent control.”

That’s certainly what Laura Makulski is hoping for when Ferndale starts its own ContraPest trial next month. Public support for the initiative is strong, despite the relatively high price tag (the pilot project will cost the city roughly $8,000 for a year’s supply).

“We have that support because we’ve educated people here so they want to do better, and the things that we’ve been doing–using normal rat poisons that kill our owls—that’s not doing better. We have to be smarter.”

Keep an eye to the sky this week for a chance to see a planetary hangout.

Five planets—Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Uranus, and Mars—will line up near the moon.

Where and when can you see the 5 planets?

The best day to catch the whole group is Tuesday. You’ll want to look to the western horizon right after sunset, said NASA astronomer Bill Cooke.

The planets will stretch from the horizon line to around halfway up the night sky. But don’t be late: Mercury and Jupiter will quickly dip below the horizon around half an hour after sunset.
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The five-planet spread can be seen from anywhere on Earth, as long as you have clear skies and a view of the west.

“That’s the beauty of these planetary alignments. It doesn’t take much,” Cooke said.

Do I need binoculars?

Maybe. Jupiter, Venus and Mars will all be pretty easy to see since they shine brightly, Cooke said. Venus will be one of the brightest things in the sky, and Mars will be hanging out near the moon with a reddish glow. Mercury and Uranus could be trickier to spot, since they will be dimmer. You’ll probably need to grab a pair of binoculars.

If you’re a “planet collector,” it’s a rare chance to spot Uranus, which usually isn’t visible, Cooke said. Look out for its green glow just above Venus.

Does this happen often?

Different numbers and groups of planets line up in the sky from time to time. There was a five-planet lineup last summer and there’s another one in June, with a slightly different makeup.

This kind of alignment happens when the planets’ orbits line them up on one side of the sun from Earth’s perspective, Cooke said.

Among many well-intentioned people working on the uneasy border between climate action and consumption-based capitalism, there’s long existed a consensus that consumers of everything from coffee to dry shampoo are basically rational creatures. If you can label which particular brand of toilet paper isn’t destroying the planet, you’ll help that bath tissue win in the marketplace, and put the bad toilet paper brands out of business. That’ll cut pollution, and help save the world. It hinges on toilet paper shoppers making sane decisions—but that seems like a fair assumption, right? They’d be crazy to keep buying the bad toilet paper when a better alternative exists.
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The problem, though, is that people are a bit crazy, according to science. Earlier this week, researchers in Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S. released one of the most comprehensive reviews to-date of our research on what works in making people take action on climate, and what doesn’t. One of the topline findings is striking: expecting people to change their behavior based on simply telling them what is good or bad for the planet doesn’t work very well. Instead, the most powerful influence is what other people around you are doing.

Across hundreds of studies, which assessed situations from whether people chose meat or vegetarian food options to whether people tossed cans in a recycling bin or the trash, the researchers determined that subjects changed their behavior by an average of just 3% when they were educated about the climate consequences of their actions, like energy labels on products. That’s 3% less energy used, for instance, or 3% less meat consumed, or 3% fewer airline miles flown, and 3% less resultant airplane emissions. By contrast, when people were presented with financial incentives, they changed their behavior by 4 times as much, 12%, on average.

Read more: You Can Now Calculate Your Grocery List’s Carbon Footprint

“The problem with educational information is often that it doesn’t include any clear motive for people,” says Magnus Bergquist, a psychology lecturer at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and the lead author on the study. “You know that you should exercise more, but you don’t do it, because just knowing you should do something isn’t sufficient motivation for you to actually do it.”

As it turns out, when it comes to taking action to stop climate change, the best way of changing people’s behavior is what the researchers termed “social comparisons,” which resulted in an average 14% change in people’s behavior. Basically, when people see that other people have taken a specific action, they’re likely to copy it. If you go into a restaurant bathroom, for instance, and find the light switch is off, you’re much more likely to turn it off when you leave. The same goes for people deciding to litter: people are far more likely to litter on a street already full of trash—which is evidence that others have littered before them—than on a clean sidewalk. And while it doesn’t do much to simply know that a certain product is more eco-friendly, if people see others buying that product instead of the dirty one, they’re much more likely to choose it themselves. “After all,” Bergquist says, “we are a highly social animal.”

Read more: What to Eat if You Want to Save the Planet and Your Health

The world faces an incredibly tricky land crunch over the coming decades. On the one hand, we want to protect more wildlife, having realized the critical role nature plays in limiting climate change and sustaining human life. On the other hand, we want to generate more energy than ever before for fast-developing countries in the Global South, and transition the entire world to renewables. That’s going to require a lot of new power plants and mines, which can be devastating for wildlife.

A study published today in the journal Biological Conservation highlights that mammoth clash of interests. Researchers looked at a list of 15,150 areas of land that conservation groups have classed as the world’s most important for protecting biodiversity. They compared those areas with a map of all the mining and energy projects that exist or are planned globally.
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Already, 5% of the key biodiversity sites contain mines, 14% contain oil and gas infrastructure, and 2% contain power plants. If all the planned projects came to pass, that would increase to 20%, 24%, and 11% respectively.

The overlap will be particularly bad in biodiversity hotspots like Brazil, central Africa, and parts of east and south Asia. That creates an enormous challenge for policymakers in those areas as they balance global conservation goals with the economic opportunity of energy generation and resource extraction.

Fossil fuel projects, present and future, have the biggest footprint, and the harm they can do to plants and animals is well understood. Oil and gas infrastructure tends to be built in incredibly remote places, disrupting previously pristine habitats. Construction activity on two pipelines in Nigeria’s Niger Delta in the 2010s, for example, drove the clearing of more than 9 million trees and triggered a “colossal loss” of biodiversity, according to a 2014 study. Even once finished, oil and gas wells and pipelines can leach potent chemicals into nearby ecosystems, or kill thousands of creatures in a few seconds during major spills.

But the researchers noted that a large chunk of the future threat to wildlife will come from efforts to transition to renewables and combat climate change. Clean energy sources like solar, wind, and hydropower require much larger areas of land to produce the same amount of energy as fossil fuels. Clean technologies like electric vehicles, batteries, and wind turbines require vast amounts of metals and minerals, which is driving a new global mining boom.

Clean energy infrastructure doesn’t necessarily need to be as harmful to wildlife as its fossil fuel predecessors. The lithium mining sector, whose huge water consumption has dried up the sources that humans and wildlife depend on in South America, for example, is trying to develop more sustainable methods of extraction. Meanwhile, some wind power companies are trying to reduce their industry’s toll on bird populations by choosing sites less visited by birds, and trialing sensor technologies to prevent collisions with threatened species.

But the study’s authors say authorities need to do more to make sure those kinds of efforts become mandatory. “More effective application and wider adoption of biodiversity policies by both governments and the financial sector is needed to ensure global infrastructure development avoids impacts on biodiversity,” they write.

“We recognise that infrastructure is essential to human development, but it’s about building smartly,” said Ash Simkins, a Zoology PhD student at the University of Cambridge who led the study. “This means ideally avoiding or otherwise minimizing infrastructure in the most important locations for biodiversity. If the infrastructure must be there, then it should be designed to cause as little damage as possible, and the impacts more than compensated for elsewhere.”

A version of this story also appears in the Climate is Everything newsletter. To sign up, click here.

The astronomers operating the Pan-STARRS1 telescope on the island of Maui were not expecting to hit cosmic paydirt on Oct. 19, 2017—but they did. On what was otherwise an ordinary night of skygazing, they suddenly spotted what is easily the oddest comet ever detected. Its high speed—87 km per second (54 mi. per second)—and highly elliptical angle indicated that it originated from deep space, the first known interstellar object ever to enter our solar system. It was cigar shaped and, as comets go, tiny—just 115 m (377 ft.) long and 19 m (62 ft.) wide.

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Most important, the comet—which was dubbed Oumuamua (Hawaiian for “a messenger from afar arriving first”)—actually accelerated during the latter part of its transit, more than the gravitational influence of the sun could explain. That left even sober scientists to speculate that the object might actually be an alien spacecraft, speeding up under its own power during its barnstorming of our solar system.

In the years since Oumuamua’s discovery, most people have put aside the E.T. talk, but no one has yet explained how, in fact, the object defied traditional cometary physics and hit the gas as it was leaving our solar system. Now, at last, a new paper in Nature might have the answer—and it has everything to do with molecular hydrogen.

Every comet that passes through our solar system speeds up on the way out. For one thing, as it swings around the far side of the sun, the solar gravity gives it a sort of whipcrack push. What’s more, dust on the surface of the comet outgasses due to solar heating, providing a natural jet that adds even greater acceleration. But Oumuamua was too small to have any surface dust—denying it the glowing halo, or coma, that circles the body of common comets as well as creating the comet’s characteristic tail.

“When astronomers looked for common signatures of outgassing activity, they couldn’t find them [on Oumuamua],” says Jenny Bergner, professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of the new paper. And while Oumuamua did pick up some energy from the sun’s gravitational push, calculations showed its increase in speed was too great to be explained by that factor alone.

“The most mysterious thing about Oumuamua was this very significant non-gravitational acceleration,” says Darryl Seligman, a post-doc in astronomy at Cornell University and the co-author of the paper

One possible answer, Seligman says, was what’s known as the Yarkovsky effect, a phenomenon by which small bodies like asteroids—or tiny comets like Oumuamua—absorb photons from the sun and re-radiate them in a kind of propulsive plume. But this effect too was too small to account for the degree of Oumuamua’s acceleration.

That left three possible explanations: propulsion provided by nitrogen, carbon monoxide, or molecular hydrogen (H2). All three of these gasses are present in comets and all three are what is known as hypervolatiles. “They really want to be in the gas phase all the time,” says Bergner, “but sometimes they can be frozen.”

When Oumuamua was in deep space, the hypervolatiles were frozen indeed, exposed to temperatures as low as -269ºC (-450ºF). In theory, as the comet approached the sun, those hypervolatiles could have warmed up and outgassed as plumes, giving Oumuamua the push it needed to explain its extra-gravitational acceleration. The same process would take place on other comets, but they are too large to be affected much by such a subtle nudge. A tiny comet like Oumuamua would be a different matter

In the course of their work, Bergner and Seligman ran computer models to determine both the overall composition of the comet and its so-called “budget” of hypervolatiles—how much carbon monoxide, nitrogen, and H2 would be present. They also conducted thermal modeling to estimate how the change in temperature from deep space to the warmer inner solar system would affect those materials. On the whole, they determined that the quantities of carbon monoxide and nitrogen onboard Oumuamua would be too low to explain the outgassing and acceleration. But H2 would be a different matter.

Oumuamua, like most comets, is rich in water. Before the comet entered the solar system, the extreme cold of deep space would cause the water to freeze into ice in what is known as an amorphous state. Rather than the solid, crystalline structure of ordinary ice, amorphous ice is porous, dotted by pockets. Exposure to deep space would have a second effect on the ice too—with cosmic radiation causing some of the H2 in the H2O molecules to break away. That H2 would collect in the pores of the amorphous ice, like fuel in tiny fuel tanks. When Oumuamua entered the inner solar system, it warmed up just enough for the ice to convert to its crystalline state, essentially closing the pockets and forcing the H2 out of the comet, providing the propulsive push that explained the acceleration.

“When the water matrix has enough energy, it rearranges to a more stable and more compact configuration,” says Bergner. “In the process, you lose those pores and the hydrogen can escape through the surface.”

So question answered, problem solved and, alas, no alien spacecraft in the mix. Bergner, Seligman, and other astronomers will be looking for similar small and dark comets when the National Science Foundation’s Vera C. Rubin Observatory goes into operation in Chile’s Atacama desert in 2025, with a specific charge to spend part of its observation time looking for hydrogen outgassing from comets. Before 2017, astronomers did not even know that a species of comet like Oumuamua existed. Now, thanks to the Rubin Observatory and the astronomers who will make use of it, we’ll learn more about their behavior, composition, population, and more.

“The main takeaway is that Oumuamua is consistent with being a standard interstellar comet that experienced heavy processing [in space],” said Bergner in a statement that accompanied the release of the paper. If one Oumuamua exists, many more should be found.

The scariest part of a landmark new report on the science of climate change may be what scientists don’t know.

On Monday, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N.’s climate–science body, released the final volume in a series of reports outlining experts’ latest understanding of the science of climate change. The report declared the science of climate change “unequivocal” and warned that even with urgent action we will continue to face a dramatic uptick in catastrophic events—from droughts to floods—that have become tell-tale signs of a rapidly warming world.

But, for all that scientists are able to lay out clearly and confidently, the part that gives me the greatest pause is the brief section on what you might call “known unknowns”—potential outcomes that scientists know could happen even if they don’t know when or understand exactly how. Near the middle of the 37-page summary for policymakers, which outlines the report’s key themes, scientists explain the “likelihood and risks of unavoidable, irreversible or abrupt changes.”
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It’s striking both how close we may be to crossing a number of points-of-no-return and how little we know about those points.

Take the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). This system of ocean currents may sound wonky, but it is a key regulator of temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean and, in turn, maintaining land temperatures, particularly in North America. In the latest report, the IPCC says that scientists have “medium confidence” that AMOC will not abruptly collapse before 2100. But, if it did, we would quickly face remade weather patterns, extreme stress on ecosystems, and distrupted “human activities.”

Another known unknown addressed by the IPCC is the magnitude of sea level rise. In high-emissions scenarios in which countries abandon climate commitments, global average sea levels are expected to rise up to one meter (about three feet) by 2100. But because the science of rapidly melting ice sheets remains difficult for scientists to understand, that number could also plausibly end up being two meters in the same time frame, a dramatic difference that could mean the difference between destruction and survival for coastal communities around the globe.

The report summarizes these known unknowns in dry, scientific language: “the likelihood of abrupt and/or irreversible changes increases with higher global warming levels. Similarly, the probability of low-likelihood outcomes associated with potentially very large adverse impacts increases with higher global warming levels.” In other words, the more it warms the more likely we are to experience unpredictable catastrophic changes.

Regardless of how its worded, the stakes could be world-changing: the loss of entire ecosystems, the rapid remaking of regional climates, and the destruction of entire regions.

Climate events of this magnitude are typically referred to as tipping points, singular climatic events that within an instant can reshape our understanding of climate systems. These tipping points have received attention because of how inherently scary they are, but they aren’t the only terrifying known unknowns.

It receives just a fleeting mention, but the new report lays out how the future becomes more difficult to predict as climate change proceeds. In short, climate change impacts that scientists might be able to project today will become more difficult to predict when they intersect with other climate effects. The report gives food insecurity as example. Food insecurity could drive changes in agricultural practices, which would in turn affect the climate.

“With further warming, climate change risks will become increasingly complex and more difficult to manage,” says the report. “Multiple climatic and non-climatic risk drivers will interact, resulting in compounding overall risk and risks cascading across sectors and regions.”

Flipping through three decades of IPCC reports, it’s easy to see how the science has evolved, growing more certain and more urgent with every passing report. The IPCC is not expected to publish another report for at least another six years. In that time, the science will evolve, as will the on-the-ground impacts of climate change that humans experience. It’s also likely that global warming will surpass the 1.5°C mark identified by scientists as a danger zone where we might expect some of these tipping points to occur. By then we should know more about these known unknowns, too. We can only hope that the knowledge brings relief, not further fear.

Venus had a lot going for it. Roughly the same diameter and density as Earth, it orbits in the solar system’s habitable zone—just the right distance from the sun for liquid water to exist. But the planet’s biological prospects were long ago wrecked by a runaway greenhouse effect that left it with an atmosphere that is 95% carbon dioxide, and 90 times the pressure of Earth’s—the equivalent of being a mile deep in the ocean. Venus’s surface temperatures hover at about 475º C (900º F), or hot enough to melt lead.

But there is one fiery feature of Earth that Venus has long been thought to lack: volcanoes. Without the plate tectonics that drive eruptions on Earth, Venus has been said to be a volcanically quiescent place, having seen its last blast perhaps a billion years ago. Or so it seemed. Now, however, a new paper in Science reveals modern-day volcanic activity on Venus—a discovery that may cause scientists to reconsider how rocky planets like Earth form and even help us look for habitable worlds surrounding other stars.
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The new findings rely on a fresh look at images captured of Venus by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft, which orbited the planet taking radar soundings of its surface from 1990 to 1994. Overall, Magellan mapped more than 40% of Venus’s face—capturing images that at the time, were stored on DVDs, and shipped to various astronomy labs in cardboard boxes. Now the Magellan images are available to researchers online. Robert Herrick, planetary scientist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and Scott Hensley, senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., took advantage of that fact to give the 30-year-old images a second look.

The area that attracted their attention is a region known as Alta Regio, near the Venusian equator, that is home to the planet’s two largest dormant volcanoes: Ozza Mons and Maat Mons. What the researchers were looking for were any signs that there still might be residual volcanic activity associated with the giant vents. The mere lack of plate tectonics would not necessarily rule that out: Venus is still rich in subsurface radioactive material that could provide the heat needed to produce an eruption.

Hensley and Herrick scrutinized images taken eight months apart—between February 1991 and October 1991—and after about 200 hours of study, they hit paydirt. One small, circular vent associated with Maat Mons that, in the February image, measured 2.2 sq. km (1 sq. mi.), had doubled its size and become kidney shaped in the October image. “The vent is nearly filled to its rim in the [second] image,” the researchers wrote in their paper. “We speculate that a lava lake formed during the 8-month gap between images.”

But “speculate” was a key word. During the two passes Magellan made over the Alta Regio region, it took its radar soundings of the target vent from different angles. It was always thus possible that the seeming change in the size and shape of the vent was just a result of a change in perspective. The researchers thus ran hundreds of computer simulations of the twin images, trying to determine if it was possible to reproduce the change they had seen through mere shifts in angle of sight. But the tests came up empty.

“The simulation cannot reproduce the vent’s kidney shape,” Hensley and Herrick wrote. “We definitely conclude that the vent has changed.”

Where there is one volcano, there should be more—perhaps many more. The researchers studied just 1.5% of Venus’s surface in their 200 hours of image comparisons and they plan to dive back into the three-decade-old pictures for more. “While this is just one data point for an entire planet,” Hensley said in a statement released by NASA, “it confirms there is modern geological activity [on Venus].”

That has implications that go beyond just one planet in our own familiar solar system. More than 5,000 exoplanets have been spotted in our galaxy alone and the true jackpot discoveries are small, rocky worlds with a solid surface where life could take hold. Venus, Earth, and Mars all check that box, and all orbit in the habitable zone. But only Earth caught all of the lucky breaks to become the garden world that it is. The better we grasp how such planets form, the better we will know where else to go looking for life.

“A bunch of big-picture scenarios have been put forth to explain why Earth and Venus are so different now,” wrote Herrick in an email to TIME, “including some that have Venus as habitable with something like plate tectonics for three quarters of its history. In terms of bigger picture ideas, the evolution of Venus and Mars through time will shape our ideas about what controls where the habitable zone is around other stars in other solar systems.”

“Resolving questions like [the evolution of Venus],” Hensley added in an email to TIME, “will provide clues to rocky planets’ evolution more generally and which one may be habitable or not.”

The search for life in the cosmos goes on. The new findings from so close to home advance that effort at least one small step.

If you can think of something, there’s probably a scientist studying it. There are researchers looking into naked mole rat breeding patterns, the aerodynamics of cricket balls, and that people tend to like pizza better than beans. But there are also certain experiments that scientists generally don’t do. They don’t, for instance, genetically modify humans, or clone them. They don’t conduct psychology experiments without subjects’ informed consent. And there’s a whole host of experimental medical procedures that could teach us a lot, but no one would ever be justified to try.
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Many scientists have long thought of experiments to inject chemicals into the earth’s atmosphere in order to cool the climate, known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), as falling within that taboo category—arguing developing the technology could pose serious planetary risks. But some researchers have been working to alter that perception in recent years, splitting the climate science community. In recent months, the field has seen a surge in momentum: last month the U.N. Environment Programme called for more research into geoengineering, while reports emerged last summer that the Biden Administration has begun coordinating a five-year research plan. Rogue researchers and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs meanwhile conducted small scale tests late last year and in February, despite condemnation from much of the scientific community.

All that attention has added fuel to the smoldering disagreements among climate scientists, creating what is likely the most significant rift in the world of atmospheric science and climate studies in years. Academic factions have published a series of dueling petitions as part of an increasingly visible and contentious battle for control of the scientific narrative—and ultimately over how to tackle climate change as emissions continue to rise. One side says that humanity may doom itself by refusing to look into potential chemical means of cooling our atmosphere. The other claims that undertaking such research could lead to disastrous consequences that we can barely imagine.

Read more: Inside a Controversial Startup’s Risky Attempt to Control Our Climate

No one person or organization has a monopoly on decisions over what scientific questions are off limits for ethical reasons—the answers tend to come about from messy consensus among governments, scientific bodies, and individual researchers. And until recently, when it came to geoengineering our atmosphere, the majority agreed the risks outweighed the opportunity. There’s the risk that such geoengineering technology would be used by the wealthy and powerful at the expense of others—that we’ll use it to save coastal property from inundation by rising sea levels, but end up disrupting monsoons and causing famine in Southeast Asia in the process—or that disputes between nations over who gets to set the global thermostat could lead to war, or, in an extreme scenario, to nuclear armageddon. There’s the moral hazard argument: that if governments and industries begin to perceive SAI as a reliable plan B for climate change, they’ll use it as an excuse to hold off on making urgently-needed emissions cuts. And then there’s the Frankenstein’s monster aspect: that is, the deep unease that many people feel in altering what seems to be the natural order of things, and the foreboding sense that something will, almost inevitably, go terribly wrong.

Solar geoengineering remained largely outside the scientific mainstream until the early 2000s, when influential scientists like David Keith, now a professor of applied physics at Harvard University, first started advocating for more study and discussion of using chemicals to cool the planet. A succession of papers, books, and philanthropic donations to support research followed over the course of the next two decades, particularly from tech billionaires like Bill Gates who became interested in the technology’s potential. By 2021, the momentum was shifting, with respected organizations like the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommending scientists “cautiously pursue” solar geoengineering research.

Hansi Singh, a professor of climate dynamics at The University of Victoria in Canada says things have changed markedly. Back in 2016, she was interested in studying geoengineering after graduating from a PhD program, but was warned away from the field because it could taint her reputation. “There’s been enough negative sentiment that people … were afraid to go into that area,” she says. “There’s less of that now.”

Advocates like Singh say that the turnaround is partly due to the worsening climate situation. With emissions still not falling nearly fast enough to avoid dangerous impacts, geoengineering seems more like an option that may one day need to be considered. But those opposed to geoengineering work are skeptical. They see the shift in favor of exploring this solution more as the result of a sustained lobbying effort. “A very small group of individuals with a lot of financing, they’re pushing for this,” says Jennie Stephens, a professor of sustainability science and policy at Northeastern University. “The advocates are very good fundraisers.”

Read more: Why Billionaires are Obsessed With Blocking Out the Sun

That growing support for research into geoengineering technology has led to a serious schism in the normally friendly world of climate science. “You think of polarization only in terms of Trump and Twitter, but it doesn’t come home to roost.” says Aarti Gupta, a professor of global environmental governance at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. “We are friends—we know each other. And then suddenly there’s this issue.”

For opponents of geoengineering research, a 2021 article advocating for more study of the field in influential science journal Nature was an indication that the proponents were making headway, as was a plan that year by Keith’s Harvard research group to test SAI technology in the skies over northern Sweden. That project was later canceled due to opposition from environmentalists and local Indigenous groups. But Frank Biermann, a professor of global sustainability governance at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, says that the fact that Keith’s project got as far as it did sent shockwaves through the broader environmental sciences community. “It was a signal that these folks are serious,” he says.

Biermann helped organize a letter in response to those developments. It was published in January 2022 and signed by dozens of scientists and climate researchers, with the goal of making it clear that the academic community didn’t want governments to develop solar geoengineering technologies. He says it’s a sign that anti-geoengineering scientists are getting more organized. Today, more than 400 academics have signed the letter, including influential climate scientists like Michael Oppenheimer, a professor at Princeton University and one of the original voices who warned about the danger of global climate change. “So many people have ignored this debate for a long time,” Biermann says. “They’re now getting a little bit into the fray because they are concerned.”

Many of those involved in studying geoengineering saw the letter as a direct attack. Daniele Visioni, a researcher at Cornell University, immediately began discussing ways to counter calls to restrict such research. To him and other proponents of studying geoengineering, to avoid working in the field was to lose out on a chance to better understand the risks and potential benefits of a technology that is likely to be on the table in the future. “You cannot say we shouldn’t be studying this because someone somewhere in the future might misuse it,” Visioni says. “You are making the decision for other people, and for people that maybe don’t exist yet.” Eventually, they settled on the idea of producing their own letter that would show support for geoengineering research. “People that do [geoengineering] research are always on the defensive,” he says. “There’s been a realization that we need to be more forceful.”

Visioni’s letter, published late last month, gathered more than 100 signatories, largely from European and international researchers, as well as other prominent scientists like James Hansen, a professor at Columbia University and another of the original scientists who called for action on global warming. It emerged alongside another similar U.S.-focused call for support for geoengineering research, published around the same time.

Researchers who work on geoengineering often emphasize that such climate interventions are no substitute for emissions reductions, and stress the need for global agreement and fair governance in how the technology might be used. Other potential players, like private business, might not be so scrupulous. Singh, who signed on to the second pro-geoengineering research letter, says that reports in December of a controversial series of test flights by geoengineering startup Make Sunsets helped to galvanize their side of the debate—it was a clear sign that if researchers and government bodies didn’t start studying geoengineering seriously, someone else might take matters into their own hands, with unpredictable consequences. “There’s no research body that has come to any sort of general agreement, and so within the vacuum, anybody can come in and claim that they’re going to do some smoke and mirrors and cool the planet,” Singh says.

For those opposed to researching geoengineering, though, those controversial experiments have been a sign of exactly the opposite. The pro-geoengineering research faction may be adamant about the ethics of how the technology should be deployed, but once those scientists lay the scientific groundwork, the decision of how the technology is used might be out of their control. Biermann, of Utrecht University, says the pro-geoengineering researchers don’t understand that—he calls it “Captain Kirk syndrome.”

“The idea is there is this kind of [global] President who behaves like Captain Kirk, and the scientists are like Mr. Spock, the person who has absolute logic,” he says. “[But] Captain Kirk is not real life. There is no Captain Kirk.”

A new dog breed has waddled its way into Americans’ hearts. While Labrador retrievers were the most popular purebred dog for a record 31 years, French bulldogs—or “frenchies” as they’re called by enthusiasts—took the top spot in 2022 for the first time, the American Kennel Club announced on March 15.

But the selection doesn’t come without some controversy. Veterinarians have long warned that the breed’s popularity is contributing to their suffering. Like other dog breeds with scrunched faces, such as pugs and bulldogs, Frenchies are plagued by a range of health problems tied to their distinctive shape. And as their popularity has risen and the price of a puppy has soared into the thousands of dollars, veterinarians have warned that there’s an incentive to breed more dogs at the expense of their health.
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Compared to many other purebred dogs, French bulldogs are unusually susceptible to certain health conditions, including spinal problems, difficulty giving birth and issues with their skin. One of the most serious issues is “Brachycephalic Obstructive Airway Syndrome (BOAS),” which makes it difficult for the dogs to breathe. While some dog owners may dismiss it as normal for French bulldogs to snort and wheeze, veterinarians warn the condition harms the quality of dogs’ lives and is associated with health problems, such as gastroesophageal reflux, sleeping problems and hypertension, and can require lifelong health maintenance, including surgery. According to one study, French Bulldogs are about 31 times more likely to suffer from obstructive airway syndrome than other dog breeds.

Some airlines, including American, have even banned all bulldogs and other snub-nosed dog breeds from their cargo holds as a result of the pups’ respiratory issues.

As French Bulldogs have become more popular, the number of dogs with BOAS has also increased, warned Dr Peter Sandøe, director of the Centre for Companion Animal Welfare at the University of Copenhagen, in a statement through the World Small Animal Veterinary Association (WSAVA) released in February. The WSAVA said that the popularity of short-nosed dogs has led to a “canine welfare crisis.”

“Selective breeding for an exaggerated short nose has created dogs whose health, in many cases, is compromised for the sake of perceived ‘cuteness.’ It is simply unethical to breed dogs which struggle to breathe,” said Sandøe.

Some animal organizations and welfare advocates have pushed for better breeding practices to protect the health of French bulldogs and other pups. In 2021, the United Kingdom’s kennel club updated its standard for French bulldogs to encourage breeders to avoid exaggerated features that could harm their health, and breed for a “well-defined muzzle” with visibly open nostrils.

The WSAVA urged breeders to prioritize producing animals without health issues, including by screening animals to ensure that they can breathe, or to test if they can go for a three-minute walk without laboring to breathe.

Following the 2021 announcement of the new standards, Dr. Laura Hamilton, a veterinary surgeon in the U.K., said in a statement through the kennel club that pet owners should be aware of the dogs’ health problems.

“These days social media can often be influential on the way that dogs are bred to look, so we urge any would-be owners to fully research the breed before making any decisions, speak to experts, and find a responsible breeder who health screens their dogs,” she said.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday proposed limiting the amount of harmful “forever chemicals” in drinking water to the lowest level that tests can detect, a long-awaited protection the agency said will save thousands of lives and prevent serious illnesses, including cancer.

The plan marks the first time the EPA has proposed regulating a toxic group of compounds that are widespread, dangerous and expensive to remove from water. PFAS, or per- and polyfluorinated substances, don’t degrade in the environment and are linked to a broad range of health issues, including low birthweight babies and kidney cancer. The agency says drinking water is a significant source of PFAS exposure for people.
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“The science is clear that long-term exposure to PFAS is linked to significant health risks,” Radhika Fox, assistant EPA administrator for water, said in an interview.

Fox called the federal proposal a “transformational change” for improving the safety of drinking water in the United States. The agency estimates the rule could reduce PFAS exposure for nearly 100 million Americans, decreasing rates of cancer, heart attacks and birth complications.

The chemicals had been used since the 1940s in consumer products and industry, including in nonstick pans, food packaging and firefighting foam. Their use is now mostly phased out in the U.S., but some still remain.

The proposal would set strict limits of 4 parts per trillion, the lowest level that can be reliably measured, for two common types of PFAS compounds called PFOA and PFOS. In addition, the EPA wants to regulate the combined amount of four other types of PFAS. Water providers will have to monitor for PFAS.

The public will have a chance to comment, and the agency can make changes before issuing a final rule, which is expected by the end of the year. Water providers will have time to adjust.

Environmental and public health advocates have called for federal regulation of PFAS chemicals for years. Over the last decade, the EPA has repeatedly strengthened its protective, voluntary health thresholds for the chemicals but has not imposed mandatory limits on water providers.

Public concern has increased in recent years as testing reveals PFAS chemicals in a growing list of communities that are often near manufacturing plants or Air Force bases.

Until now, only a handful of states have issued PFAS regulations, and none has set limits as strict as what the EPA is proposing. By regulating PFOA and PFOS at the minimum amounts that tests can detect, the EPA is proposing the tightest possible standards that are technically feasible, experts said.

“This is a really historic moment,” said Melanie Benesh, vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group. “There are many communities that have had PFAS in their water for decades who have been waiting for a long time for this announcement to come out.”

The agency said its proposal will protect everyone, including vulnerable communities, and reduce illness on a massive scale. The EPA wants water providers to do testing, notify the public when PFAS are found and remove the compounds when levels are too high.

Utilities that have high levels of a contaminant are typically given time to fix problems, but they could face fines or loss of federal grants if problems persist.

The proposal would also regulate other types of PFAS like GenX Chemicals, which manufacturers used as a substitute when PFOA and PFOS were phased out of consumer products. The proposal would regulate the cumulative health threat of those compounds and mandate treatment if that threat is too high.

The EPA recently made $2 billion available to states to get rid of contaminants such as PFAS and will release billions more in coming years. The agency also is providing technical support to smaller communities that will soon be forced to install treatments systems, and there’s funding in the 2021 infrastructure law for water system upgrades.

But still, it will be expensive for utilities to install new equipment, and the burden will be especially tough for small towns with fewer resources.

“This is a problem that has been handed over to utilities through no fault of their own,” said Sri Vedachalam, director of water equity and climate resilience at Environmental Consulting & Technology Inc.

Many communities will need to balance the new PFAS requirements with removing poisonous lead pipes and replacing aged water mains prone to rupturing, Vedachalam said.

Fox said there “isn’t a one-size answer” to how communities will prioritize their needs. She said, however, that there are billions of dollars in federal resources available for water improvements.

Several states have already imposed PFAS drinking water limits. Officials in Michigan, which has the tightest standards of any state, said costs to remove PFAS in communities where it was found were reasonable.

If the rules are finalized and imposed, many communities will learn they have been supplying drinking water with harmful compounds. When people learn of problems, they may stop using tap water altogether, distrusting its safety, and turn instead to bottled water. That’s often a more expensive choice and one that can have negative health effects if people replace tap water with sugary drinks that cause cavities and contribute to obesity and other health problems.

“This,” Fox said, “is such an issue of concern for people.”

______

Phillis reported from St. Louis.

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Many residents of East Palestine, Ohio, are suspicious of the environmental contractor Norfolk Southern has brought in to measure chemical exposures following last month’s massive train derailment, toxic spill, and chemical burn off. Over the last decade, the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health (CTEH) has become the go-to contractor for corporations looking to follow up on environmental disasters to which they’ve been connected. CTEH has done environmental testing after other derailments where toxic chemicals were released, like the 2012 derailment in Kentucky of a CSX train carrying butadiene (a human carcinogen), and other Norfolk Southern derailments in South Carolina and Georgia. CTEH also performed environmental monitoring for BP’s cleanup efforts after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon offshore well blowout.
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The residents of East Palestine have reason to be suspicious. My experience working at government regulatory agencies in both the Clinton and Obama Administrations has led me to conclude that CTEH’s business model often entails providing clients with the ammunition to slow regulation or defeat court claims. I believe consulting firms like CTEH are tangled in irreparable conflicts of interest; if they produce results showing the clients’ products are harmful, it seems likely that their client base would quickly disappear.

When corporations are faced with indications that their products or activities may be causing environmental harm, it has become standard operating procedure to hire scientists not to determine the truth, but rather to manufacture doubt about the scientific evidence and then use that disinformation to try to slow public health protections and defeat lawsuits. That’s where consulting firms, CTEH among them, come in.

The two industries most closely identified with this strategy, of course, are tobacco and fossil fuels. In both cases, these industries have disingenuously demanded proof over precaution in matters of public good. For decades, cigarette manufacturers employed scientists to argue that the links between tobacco and lung cancer, or nicotine and addiction, were unproven. Similarly, fossil fuel producers bankrolled a small cohort of scientists to question the scientific consensus around the expected effects of the rise in the atmospheric accumulation of greenhouse gasses, while their own scientists were accurately predicting today’s climate crises. Debating the science is a tried-and-true way to avoid discussing the necessary policy solutions.

I saw this up-close in two stints running federal agencies. When I was running the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) under President Barack Obama, the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s trade association, opposed our efforts to issue a rule protecting more than 2 million workers from exposure to silica, which increases a worker’s risk of silicosis and lung cancer. The ACC hired mercenary scientists to question virtually all the science underpinning the proposed standard; their chief consultant even stood up in a public hearing and asserted that we had not proven the link between silica and silicosis.

That wasn’t the first time I saw those tactics. During the administration of President Bill Clinton, I served as the Department of Energy (DOE) Assistant Secretary for Environment, Health and Safety—among other things, that meant I was the chief safety officer for the nuclear weapons complex. There were scores of workers across the complex with chronic beryllium disease, a disabling and sometimes fatal lung disease caused by exposure to beryllium, a metal vital to the manufacture of nuclear weapons. When the DOE was moving toward issuing a standard to protect workers employed in the weapons complex from beryllium exposure, Materion (then called Brush Wellman) the nation’s primary manufacturer of the metal, opposed the rule. The firm hired product defense scientists to question the existing studies and called for more research rather than efforts to reduce exposure. I was able to reject this attempt to delay these arguments and we issued the more protective standard in 1999. Materion eventually came around, and jointly with the United Steelworkers (which represented many beryllium-exposed workers not covered by DOE’s rule) requested that OSHA issue a beryllium standard similar to the one the industry had opposed earlier, to cover the remainder of the nation’s beryllium-exposed workers.

Nevertheless, these efforts to stymie public health protections infuriated me. After I left the Obama Administration in 2017 and returned to the George Washington University School of Public Health, I wrote The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception, in which I document case after case of corporations embracing the disinformation playbook. Volkswagen, for example, bankrolled efforts to dispute studies that documented the deleterious impact of diesel pollution on human health—at the same time that it secretly installed “defeat devices” to fool auto emissions testing systems into underestimating its cars’ diesel engine exhaust. Fossil fuel producers use product defense consultants in their efforts to counter studies showing that gas stoves increase household air pollution and the risk of childhood asthma, and to assert that the evidence of the health effects of air pollutants like ozone is too uncertain to use in setting regulatory limits. Even the National Football League, following initial reports of concussion-related brain injury among its players, took the tobacco road. It appointed an “expert” committee stacked with members conflicted by financial ties to the teams, and did its best to discredit the accumulating evidence, enabling the league to delay addressing the problem for a decade.

CTEH has been the source of controversy before. Following their rebuilding efforts after hurricane Katrina, thousands of gulf coast residents sued Knauf, a German-owned firm that manufactures construction materials, claiming that hydrogen sulfide, off gassing from its Chinese-manufactured construction drywall, corroded their pipes and damaged their homes, sickening many of them. Knauf hired CTEH to measure the chemicals emitted from the drywall, and CTEH declared them “not a public health concern.” In response to a barrage of consumer complaints, however, the Consumer Products Safety Commission hired the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to conduct an independent study. CPSC reported that the samples of Knauf’s drywall emitted hydrogen sulfide at a rate 100 times greater than comparison samples. In this case, CTEH’s efforts for the manufacturer did not prove successful; the manufacturer ended up settling the litigation, paying out hundreds of millions of dollars.

I understand the dilemma facing corporate CEOs or their trade associations. They will never say they value profits before the health and safety of their employees or the public, or that they care little about our air or water or food. But decision-makers atop today’s corporate structures are responsible for delivering short-term financial returns to investors, and in the pursuit of these goals a certain dissonance creeps in: profits and growth above all else. Minimizing the costs of cleaning up environmental disasters, opposing costly regulations, and defending against litigation are all part of the corporate calculus.

CTEH is the railroad industry’s consultant of choice in these efforts. When the American Association of Railroads, the industry’s trade association, wanted to weaken the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s policy on classifying chemicals as cancer causing, their comments were written by CTEH and sent under CTEH letterhead.

I am not claiming that CTEH engineers are intentionally fudging numbers or sampling in ways that guarantee finding lower risk from exposure. There’s a famous quote from Upton Sinclair that says, “It is difficult to convince a man of something if his salary depends on him not believing it.” Psychologists label this phenomenon “motivated reasoning.” There is no question that being paid by a polluter changes a scientist’s motivations, and thus the way they reason and work—including how they measure exposure and interpret the results.

We all need the best science to protect our health and environment. The residents of East Palestine need to be confident in the exposure monitoring being done in their community. But why should anyone trust the result of a study done by a product defense consulting firm?

There is a solution. Corporations whose products or activities may be harming people should be required to fund the testing and research, and then get out of the way.

To accomplish this, we will need to develop new mechanisms for surveillance and research funding and administration. There are some models out there, like the Health Effects Institute, a research group originally established in 1980 by the EPA and the automobile industry to study the health effects of motor vehicle emissions, with each party contributing half the budget.

The bottom line is that scientific investigation into the potential harms of products and activities should be paid for by producers of those products and activities. But the research should be planned, conducted, analyzed, and interpreted by independent scientists, not ones with financial conflicts of interest. Only then can we have confidence in the results.

Sixty-six years ago, there was just a single human-built object in Earth orbit. It was Sputnik, the Soviet Union’s—and the world’s—first satellite, launched on Oct. 4, 1957. Now take a moment and try to guess how many objects—including active satellites, defunct satellites, and bits of debris from all of that space traffic—are currently circling the planet. Have you made your guess? Good.

Your answer is wrong. Or let’s put it this way: it’s wrong unless the figure you guessed is 100 trillion. That’s the jaw-dropping number cited by an international team of researchers writing an open letter in last week’s issue of Science, calling for a global treaty to curb the amount of satellites and rubbish that have been forming an ever-growing debris belt in low-Earth orbit for more than three generations now.
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The researchers report that there are currently 9,000 active satellites in orbit—a number expected to grow to over 60,000 by 2030. The 100 trillion figure includes everything from spent boosters and stray bolts, to metal flecks and floating paint chips that went along with launching all of that hardware. And don’t think something as small as a paint chip is harmless. Orbiting the Earth at 28,200 km/hr (17,500 mph), so small a piece of rubbish can strike a spacecraft or other orbiting object like a bullet. Astronauts spacewalking outside the International Space Station report that the skin of the 25-year-old orbiting lab looks in some spots as if it has been hit by buckshot. The astronauts routinely have to shelter in place in one of the attached Soyuz or SpaceX spacecraft to wait out a passing swarm of space debris in case the station gets catastrophically struck and they have to bail out in a hurry. Ultimately, all of this debris will fall back to Earth and incinerate in the atmosphere, but we’re replacing the junk at a faster pace than its orbit can decay.

Each of the seven researchers writing in Science are experts in one of two fields: satellite technology and ocean plastic pollution. Why the latter? Because, as they write, the mess we’ve made of the oceans—witness the great Pacific garbage patch, a mass of floating junk that measures twice the area of Texas—mirrors the mess we’re in the process of making in space. The difference: we’ve had centuries to foul the oceans and only decades to do the same in space, and yet we’re not wasting time.

“As a marine biologist I never imagined writing a paper on space,” said Heather Koldewey, a senior marine technical adviser at the Zoological Society of London and a coauthor of the letter, in a statement that accompanied its release. “But through this collaborative research [we] identified so many parallels with the challenges of tackling environmental issues in the ocean. We just need to get better at the uptake of science into management and policy.”

The researchers see hope for space in the progress that has been made so far in cleaning up the oceans—or at least in nations agreeing to try. In March 2022, world leaders representing 170 nations signed a global plastics treaty at the United Nations Environment Assembly, in an attempt to curb continued dumping of plastics in the oceans and eliminate what is already there. Other negotiations are already underway on a more ambitious Global Plastics Treaty.

Similar initiative should be taken now, the authors write, to implement treaties that hold both government and commercial space launch services liable for minimizing the amount of debris their launches create, deorbiting satellites after they’ve reached the end of their functional life, and developing technologies to clean up at least some of the 100-trillion-strong rubbish swarm.

“Most nation states have neglected to implement the necessary local space regulations that could promote long-term equitable and sustainable use of Earth’s orbit,” the authors of the letter write. “There is no international treaty that seeks to minimize orbital debris.”

That must change—and fast. “To avoid repeating the mistakes that have left the high seas—and all who depend on them—vulnerable, we need collective cooperation, informed by science, to develop a timely, legally binding treaty to protect Earth’s orbit.”

A species that is smart enough to have gotten itself to space—an order of magnitude more difficult than initially learning to sail (and foul) the oceans—should be smart enough not to make a mess of things once it gets there. As Moriba Jah, coauthor and associate professor of aerospace engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, put it in a statement, “Marine debris and space debris are both an anthropogenic detriment that is avoidable.”

Chances are, you haven’t yet made your plans for Valentine’s day 2046. But just in case you’re thinking about it, you may want to make sure you spend the day indoors. That, at least, is the take home message from NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which earlier this week sounded the alarm via Twitter that in just under 23 years, a newly discovered asteroid named 2023 DW—which measures 50 m (165 ft.) wide, or about the size of an Olympic swimming pool—will make a close swing by Earth, with a 1 in 560 chance of colliding with us.
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That doesn’t sound like much, but 23 years is a lot of time for the rock to change its course, and since it was only spotted for the first time on Feb. 27, astronomers have a lot of additional observing to do before they can be certain of its future trajectory.

“Often when new objects are first discovered, it takes several weeks of data to reduce the uncertainties and adequately predict their orbits years into the future,” NASA’s tweet read in part. “Orbit analysts will continue to monitor asteroid 2023 DW and update predictions as more data comes in.”

Warnings about 2023 DW are flooding news sites today—including, well, this one. So how worried should you be?

For starters, there’s the size of 2023 DW to consider—which is not that big, but not that small either. It’s nowhere near the 12 km (7.5 mi.) wide asteroid—more than half the length of Manhattan—that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That’s the good news. The bad news is that a swimming pool sized piece of space rubble can still do a lot of damage. On Feb. 15, 2013, a projectile roughly half the size of 2023 DW exploded in the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia, injuring 1,500 people and damaging more than 7,000 buildings.

NASA calculates the risk a near-Earth object poses of colliding with Earth on something known as the Torino scale, a zero to 10 ranking of the likelihood of impact, with zero representing no danger or, a risk “so low as to be effectively zero.” Five on the scale indicates “A close encounter posing a serious, but still uncertain risk, of regional devastation.” Ten—which the dinosaurs could tell you about if they weren’t all dead—indicates that “a collision is certain, capable of causing global climatic catastrophe that may threaten the future of civilization as we know it.”

So where does 2023 DW rank? For now, NASA puts it at a one, indicating “a routine discovery in which a pass near the Earth is predicted that poses no unusual level of danger.” For now, that pass near the Earth will be no closer than 7.5 million km (4.65 million mi.), according to NASA’s Eyes on Asteroids website. That’s 18 times farther than the moon is from Earth.

But 2023 DW’s distance could change, as NASA itself admits, as further observations of the space rock are conducted and its trajectory is more finely calculated. What’s more, Feb. 14, 2046 will not be the only time 2023 DW swings by our way. The asteroid will make nine more potentially close passes from Feb. 15, 2047 to Feb. 14, 2054.

None of this is cause for serious alarm. Rather, all of it is cause for celebration of the success of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which last September successfully crashed a small spacecraft into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, to see how much it could change the speed of its orbit around its parent asteroid Didymos. The mission—which was a first test of the kind of asteroid deflection defense that could be used to protect the Earth from an incoming space rock—worked spectacularly. To be considered a success, mission planners determined that the orbit of Dimorphos would have to speed up by at least 73 seconds. The actual acceleration? Thirty-two minutes.

“This mission shows that NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson when the results were released. “NASA has proven we are serious as a defender of the planet.”

Nobody believes that a DART-type mission will be necessary to protect Earth from 2023 DW—at least not yet. But other cosmic ordnance lurks—and other defense systems must continue to be in the pipeline. The solar system has always been a shooting gallery—and Earth will always be at risk of winding up in the crosshairs.

It wasn’t long after the pandemic began that people around the world started to notice something weird was going on. As the rhythms of daily life changed, some people’s days seemed to run together; others felt theirs stretched on indefinitely. The sense of what an hour felt like was corroding. News outlets filled with attempts to explain what was happening.

Ruth Ogden, an experimental psychologist who studies time perception at Liverpool John Moores University in the U.K., says she had only ever gotten maybe one interview request before the pandemic, and has since received at least a hundred. And while the study of time is certainly not new, she says the volume and pace of academic publication on the topic seem to have increased, too. Studies published since early 2020 have suggested, in no particular order, that dragonflies process the movement of time very quickly while starfish do so slowly; that virtual reality and ADHD are both linked to difficulty judging how much time has passed; that time flies when you’re making eye contact and seems to drag when you’re guilty of hiding something. (The International Bureau of Weights and Measures is even in the course of redefining the second, though that one’s a coincidence.)
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Another attempt to get to the bottom of things arrives Tuesday. In Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, the artist Jenny Odell follows the threads she plucked in her best-selling 2019 debut, How to Do Nothing—which found an eager audience in people looking for ways to shore up their souls against the drain of productivity culture—and arrives at a sweeping yet personal challenge to assumptions Western society makes about the relationships between individuals and the finite hours in a given day. COVID-19 was not the original impetus for the project; she says her interest was sparked when she kept hearing the odd complaint from readers that they wanted to do nothing, but simply couldn’t find the time. Still, the pandemic not only provided a jolt to her writing process—if you’re trying to blow up assumptions about time use, there’s nothing like a worldwide shift in the way people spend their days to help the project along—but also helped create a world particularly eager to join in her reexamination.

Lockdowns ravaged the routines by which we used to define our hours; what had once seemed as sure as the ticking of a clock was exposed as mere social construct. And then there was the virus itself. “Everyone was faced with deaths, and really had that in their face every day,” Odell theorizes. “So [the] question of ‘How do I spend my time?’ or ‘What is my relationship to time?’ becomes a lot more urgent.”

Today, almost exactly three years after the WHO declared a pandemic, with so many of the lifestyle changes of COVID-19 reverting to the status quo, Odell’s book arrives at what could be a turning point. The pandemic created a window in which almost everything, from office culture to trust in the government, could be up for debate. Time itself was no exception, which for many represented a major shift: the realization that decisions made by mere humans can shape something so fundamental. And once you’ve realized it, you also know that you have some control over your own experience of it.

Now, in the return to “normal,” we’ll find out if what we learned will stick, and perhaps give us new models for a happier relationship with time.

To be sure, time in a physics sense, rather than a psychology sense, is a different story. There, it takes something like a black hole, not a lockdown, to mix things up. Perhaps fittingly, then, Carlo Rovelli, the Italian physicist and author behind 2017’s The Order of Time, says he doesn’t see the last few years as likely to have changed much in this area. And if widespread reflection did have an impact, he doesn’t see that lasting once the crisis passes.

But that reversion, others argue, is not a foregone conclusion.

“I think people don’t quickly forget that there was a one-to-three-year period of their lives where they lived in a very different way than before,” says Oliver Burkeman, author of the popular 2021 book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. “A 5% difference in how you spend your time as a result of an experience like the pandemic is huge.”

Which way does Odell think things will break? “Only time will tell,” she says, then reconsiders. “I do think there are certain things—once you’ve seen them, you can’t unsee them.”

What Odell can’t unsee is the fact that the pre-pandemic mainstream Western way of thinking about time isn’t the only way. Her conclusion, after studying how those norms came about and how they’re put to use today, is that time is not so much money but power.

Read an excerpt from Saving Time: The Beauty of What Happens When Nothing Happens

When people say they don’t have time, what they mean is they don’t have control. That lack of autonomy may come from a demanding boss, an internal voice, or existential-level problems such as climate anxiety. Odell uses the concept of a zeitgeber, German for “time giver,” to discuss the systems that determine how our experiences of time are structured; the examples she gives range from a child’s school schedule to the UX design of a gig-work app.

One way for the powerless to find some control, she posits, is to reject the most basic assumptions of the system that keeps them down. In Indigenous societies, for example, she finds alternatives to the kind of clock-based living that can feel natural but isn’t. (In fact, she believes, rigid ways of thinking about the future are holding us back from productive attitudes toward the fate of the planet.) Her own epiphany during the pandemic was that her time was not so much hers as it was created within relationships. One clear example she cites in the book is the siesta, a time-use norm that only exists as long as a culture decides collectively that it should. She pushed herself—while acknowledging the privilege of being able to do so—to see hours not as a personal resource to expend, but as a material that was molded by the way she and others chose together to use it. “It was almost as if a grid had been lifted off the topography of time,” she recalls.

Of course, Odell wasn’t the only one encountering a new experience of time. Researchers like Ogden, the psychologist, moved their work outside the lab because of COVID-19 and took advantage of the unprecedented moment to conduct studies all over the world asking people how the pandemic affected their impressions of time. The fact that having your life messed with can alter the experience of time’s passage isn’t a new revelation; as Ogden pointed out in one paper that came out of her work during this period, decades of studies, including of families locked in fallout shelters during the 1960s, confirmed that life feels different if you stop being told what time it is. But, she argues, the pandemic was the first significant proof that it doesn’t take a nuclear bunker to see that effect: you can be in your home, with your roommate, the clock on your microwave glowing, your inbox filling with emails, and still feel that the hours have come unglued from expectation. And those studies arrived just at a moment when people were inclined to be interested in the results.

That’s because, Ogden suggests, “you had this period of time in which life stopped, but time continued. And I think that got us all much more aware of the idea that time is finite, and it’s valuable. And when it’s lost, or when you can’t control it, it feels weird, and you want to know why it feels weird.”

That said, this shift might not have happened were it not for a conference held years before the pandemic. When Marc Wittmann, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany, was a doctoral student a few decades back, he says, even a major neuroscience or psychology conference might have just one symposium or presentation related to time. Then, about a decade ago, the E.U. supported a networking drive that brought together time and timing scholars across countries and disciplines. It all culminated in 2014, in Corfu, Greece, at the first International Conference on Timing and Time Perception.

Since then, Wittmann says, there’s been a “snowball effect” of interest: more people are getting professorships related to their focus on time perception, and those professors have students, and those students become professors who study new aspects of time.

Argiro Vatakis, an experimental psychologist at Panteion University in Athens and an organizer of that Corfu conference, says that the biggest change in the last decade is an increase in research that focuses on questions relevant to everyday life. The pandemic only furthered that trend. “Now the fact that we lose track of time or time seems to pass fast or slow,” she says, “became on the forefront of what people were talking about.”

Case in point: Wittmann and Vatakis are among the 32 contributors to the “Blursday database,” which compiles survey results from nearly 3,000 people in nine countries who were asked about their experience of time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those studies confirmed, among other findings, that ”the less isolated individuals felt [during lockdown], the closer in time past and future events seemed to be.” In other words, isolation makes time drag. In the absence of commutes, many of us learned something similar to Odell’s takeaway: that our days can be shaped instead by community—and maybe that’s a better way to live.

Of course, knowing that the brain’s experience of time can be shaped by our relationships doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy to reset our internal clocks; if you don’t feel in control of your time, that’s not necessarily your fault. Where Odell concerns herself with the systemic societal and economic structures that constrain us, Ogden cautions that the way trauma alters one’s experience of time’s passage is a biological process that can’t be self-helped away.

That said, there are certain things that people who spend all day thinking about time do to seize what control they can over it.

Ogden, for one, finds comfort in using her knowledge of the fallibility of time perception to remind herself that negative periods came to an end faster than it perhaps seemed they did. Wittmann says he is more aware of the way that breaking out of one’s emotional routine can keep it from feeling like the fun times are flying by too quickly: looking for additional depth in your feelings, he says, can create the kind of variety that can make a good moment seem to have lasted. Vatakis, for her part, hopes her current research project, meant to figure out how to purposefully modulate our experience of time in order to increase well-being, allows us to use our knowledge of time’s malleability to live better lives, rather than suffering passively the fickleness of the clock. And with the Blursday data available online, there’s hope that this era’s trove of studies will inform time-perception research for years to come.

Read more: How Listening to Silence Changes Our Brains

As for Jenny Odell, she has come out of the project of Saving Time preaching a kind of mindfulness marked by “a loving, curious, fascinated feeling of interest” in time, as she puts it: living in the now without thinking about it so much that it can’t be enjoyed; seeing time as a series of moments, each as rich as the meaning we put into it. She finds that balance in nature, in collective action, in friendship—appropriate for someone who now defines time as both the context for and the output of relationships.

Maintaining that perspective is anything but simple, and is sure to only get harder as the gravity of the pre-pandemic status quo gets stronger. But maybe it’ll be easier if we know we’re not alone in the quest. Together, it turns out, we can make time for ourselves.

It’s no secret that air pollution is a serious problem facing the world today. Just how serious? A new study on global daily levels of air pollution shows that hardly anywhere on Earth is safe from unhealthy air.

About 99.82% of the global land area is exposed to levels of particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) — tiny particles in the air that scientists have linked to lung cancer and heart disease — above the safety limit recommended by the Word Health Organization, according to the peer-reviewed study published Monday in Lancet Planetary Health. And only 0.001% of the world’s population breathes in air that is considered acceptable, the paper says.
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Conducted by scientists in Australia and China, the study found that on the global level, more than 70% of days in 2019 had daily PM2.5 concentrations exceeding 15 micrograms of gaseous pollutant per cubic meter — the WHO recommended daily limit. Air quality is particularly worrisome in regions such as southern Asia and eastern Asia, where more than 90% of days had PM2.5 concentrations above the 15 microgram threshold.

While any amount of PM 2.5 is harmful, scientists and regulators are typically less concerned about daily levels than they are about chronic exposure.

Read more: How Climate Change and Air Pollution Affect Kids’ Health

“I hope our study can change the minds of scientists and policymakers for the daily PM2.5 exposure,” said Yuming Guo, the lead researcher and an environmental health professor at Monash University. “Short-term exposure, particularly sudden increase, to PM2.5 has significant health problems … If we can make every day with clean air, of course the long-term exposure of air pollution would be improved.”

While scientists and public health officials have long been at alert to the dangers — air pollution kills 6.7 million people a year, with nearly two-thirds of the premature deaths caused by fine particulate matter — quantifying the global exposure to PM2.5 was a challenge due to a lack of pollution monitoring stations.

Guo and his coauthors overcame that challenge by marrying ground-based air pollution measurements collected from more than 5,000 monitoring stations worldwide with machine learning simulations, meteorological data and geographical factors to estimate global daily PM2.5 concentrations.

When it came to estimating annual exposure across all regions, the researchers found that the highest concentrations occurred in eastern Asia (50 micrograms per cubic meter), followed by southern Asia (37 micrograms) and northern Africa (30 micrograms). Residents of Australia and New Zealand faced the least threat from fine particulate matter, while other regions in Oceania and southern America were also among the places with the lowest annual PM2.5 concentrations.

They also examined how air pollution changed over the two decades up to 2019. For instance, most areas in Asia, northern and sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, and Latin America and the Caribbean experienced an increase in PM2.5 concentrations over the 20 years, driven in part by intensified wildfires. Annual PM2.5 concentrations and high PM2.5 days in Europe and northern America decreased, thanks to stricter regulations. Fine particulate matter is made up of soot from vehicles, smoke and ash from wildfires and biomass cook-stove pollution, plus sulfate aerosols from power generation and desert dust.

Read more: Why Extreme Heat Plus Pollution Is a Deadly Combination

The article also points out how levels of fine particulate matter vary depending on the season, a reflection of human activities that accelerate air pollution. For instance, northeast China and north India recorded higher PM 2.5 concentrations from December to February, likely linked to an increased use of fossil fuel-burning heat generators during the winter months. South American countries such as Brazil, on the other hand, had increased concentrations between August and September, probably connected to slash-and-burn cultivation in the summer.

Greenhouse gas emissions from the way humans consume food could add nearly 1 degree of warming to the Earth’s climate by 2100, according to a new study.

Continuing the dietary patterns of today will push the planet past the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) limit of warming sought under the Paris climate agreement to avoid the worst effects of climate change, according to the study published Monday in Nature Climate Change, and will approach the agreement’s limit of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

The modeling study found that the majority of greenhouse gas emissions come from three major sources: meat from animals like cows, sheep and goats; dairy; and rice. Those three sources account for at least 19% each of food’s contribution to a warming planet, according to the study, with meat contributing the most, at 33%.
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All emit large amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas with more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide, in the way they are currently farmed. The researchers calculated that methane will account for 75% of food’s share of warming by 2030, with carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide accounting for most of the rest.

Read more: What to Eat if You Want to Save the Planet and Your Health

“I think the biggest takeaway that I would want (policymakers) to have is the fact that methane emissions are really dominating the future warming associated with the food sector,” said Catherine C. Ivanovich, a climate scientist at Columbia University and the study’s lead author.

Ivanovich and colleagues from the University of Florida and Environmental Defense Fund calculated the three major gases produced by each type of food over its lifetime based on current consumption patterns. Then they scaled the annual emissions over time by gas based on five different population projections.

And then they used a climate model frequently used by the United Nations’ panel on climate change to model the effects of those emissions on surface air temperature change.

Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field, who wasn’t involved in the study, said it used well-established methods and datasets “to produce a novel, sobering conclusion.”

“The study highlights that food is absolutely critical to hitting our Paris Agreement climate targets — failure to consider food is failure to meet our climate targets globally,” said Meredith Niles, a food systems scientist at the University of Vermont who was not involved in the study.

The study offered some ways to change global food production and consumption that could limit warming.

Many of these changes are already being called for or adopted. U.S. President Joe Biden touted the climate benefits of planting cover crops that can draw down carbon from the atmosphere in an April 2021 address to Congress. Multiple recent studies and reports have recommended eating less meat in order to reduce greenhouse gas creation by animals raised for consumption. And California started a mandatory food waste recycling program in 2021 to reduce the emissions created by decaying food.

But reducing methane may be the most important goal of all. Although methane is far more potent than carbon, it also is much shorter-lived — meaning cuts in methane emissions can have a quick benefit, Ivanovich siad.

“So that’s going to help us stay under the dangerous warming target,” she said, “as well as give us some time to build up resilience and adaptation to climate change in the meantime.”

A major question that remains is whether food producers and consumers can change their behavior in order to achieve the reductions in greenhouse gases laid out in the study. There’s a roadmap, but will it be followed?

“Changing behavior, especially when we are bombarded with constant media extolling the benefits of everything from Coke to french fries, from pizza to burgers, is pretty damned difficult,” Columbia University plant physiologist Lew Ziska in an email to the AP. “So, overall, while we need to change, whether we can change is …. problematic.”

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

If you haven’t heard the name Alex Murdaugh over the course of the past few months, you may just not have been paying attention. The disgraced South Carolina attorney was convicted yesterday of the murder of his wife and son, following a six-week trial that was must-watch TV for much of the nation. Cable news carried Murdaugh’s testimony live and uninterrupted as it unfolded. In its near obsessional public following, the case was in many ways reminiscent of the O.J. Simpson murder trial, which saw 150 million Americans tune in to learn the verdict on Octal. 3, 1995.

But why? What is it about sensational—and often sensationally gruesome—murder trials that fascinates us so? Are humans as a whole and Americans in particular simply morbid, simply voyeurs? Or is there something more complex going on? There is an answer, and it turns out to be equal parts evolution, self-protection and, in some measure, the media attention that cases like Murdaugh’s regularly draw.
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Like other animals, we humans are acutely aware of and alert to threats in our environment. The world is a dangerous place and, especially for a soft, slow, unfanged, unclawed—and thus easy to kill—species like ours, it pays to be exceedingly alert to dangers.

“Humans, broadly, are built to be intrigued by and alert to potentially dangerous situations,” says psychologist Coltan Scrivner, research scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark. “We’re curious about threats in our environment. So anytime we get a hint that there might be information about danger out there, the attention mechanisms in our minds sort of kick on and guide us toward that information.”

That danger, of course, could be a lion or a tiger or a hurricane or a wildfire. But the danger another human—like a Murdaugh—poses captures a particular part of our focus.

“Humans are very good at being sneaky,” says Scrivner. “We’re very good at being premeditated in our violence and in our approach to hurting others, whereas other animals tend to be reactive. If you make an animal angry, they react right away. If you make a human angry, they can go home and conspire or plot against you. And so if we get a hint of secrecy or planning or anything like that, that also tends to capture our attention.”

Just who does the killing also plays a role in our fascination with cases like Murdaugh’s. There were more than 26,000 homicides in the U.S. in 2021, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But that hardly meant there were 26,000 investigations or trials that drew the kind of attention Murdaugh’s did. What those other cases lacked was celebrity. Murdaugh has been widely described as the wealthy scion of a prestigious South Carolina family. Simpson was a Hall of Fame football player and movie star. That makes a difference.

“There’s an element of status involved in all of that,” says Scrivner. “And we again have attention mechanisms in our minds that are particularly tuned to that. If a high-status individual is doing something we tend to pay attention, because they’re a person who not only has the desire to do something bad or conspiratorial or threatening, but also the ability to carry it out.”

Joni Johnstone, a San Diego-based forensic psychologist, notes that there is also an element of schadenfreude at play in the Murdaugh case: “You have a family that has a long legacy of wealth and power and I think a lot of people are interested in seeing justice done. It ties into the sense that the rich get away with whatever they want, while the poor get charged for things they didn’t do.”

Then there is the gruesomeness of this particular crime. Much was made at trial of the horrific effect Murdaugh’s shotgun had on the bodies of his wife and son—similar to the primacy given to the slashings sustained by the victims in the Simpson trial. It is more than morbidness that causes us to be so fascinated by such gory details. It is, again, evolution and self-protection.

“I wrote a paper on this a few years ago,” reports Scrivner. “What we found was that when people heard of a crime where the perpetrator behaved in a gruesome way, they perceived or envisioned the perpetrator to be particularly big and large and strong.” Big and large and strong is a person you especially want to avoid and it pays survival dividends to attend closely to such a menace. “It’s tapping into a very old system in the mammalian brain for mapping strength,” Scrivner says. “We expect larger, stronger individuals to be more capable and more dangerous.”

Then too, there is the role of the media. Newspapers, websites, magazines and cable news programmers are no fools, and they recognize a target-rich story when they see one. Johnston sees a sort of self-reinforcing cycle in the public’s natural fascination with a case like Murdaugh’s, giving rise to saturation coverage that satisfies that interest, which, in turn, draws still more eyeballs. “The media is both a driver of our attention and reflects our interest,” she says. “We’ve been able to basically be inside the courtroom from day one. If they didn’t think we were going to be interested in that, they wouldn’t be broadcasting. So it becomes a kind of a circle.”

Scrivner thinks this kind of coverage has a lasting impact on our view of crime—and not for the better. “Excessive coverage of true crime cases by the media could signal to the minds of viewers that the frequency of rare crimes is higher than it really is,” he says, “which could make them more likely to seek out information about true crime cases. This probably isn’t an issue in many cases, but does skew the perception of how likely these kinds of crimes are.”

For the media and the public, attention will now be focused elsewhere. Murdaugh himself will be going nowhere—sentenced this morning to life without the possibility of parole. As for his wife and son, the silent centers of this terrible story, we can only offer thoughts of sympathy—and a bit of thanks that justice was at last done.