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Overnight Science News: The US has entered its Fahrenheit 451 era - saving science from Trump [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-26
Scientific findings such as “female solidarity can invert the male-biased power structure ” are one of the reasons that Trump 2.0 is gutting research, booting out foreign scientists, and nuking databases. Fortunately science is bigger than Trump (no matter what the White House webpage purports).
The United States has been the world leader in science for decades, but the Trump administration has made plans to cancel or freeze federal grants that fund scientific institutions and universities and shrink or abolish federal scientific agencies. Such actions would end the country’s decades of preeminence in science, researchers and experts warn. Around 1,900 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine signed a letter warning President Donald Trump of the dangers that funding cuts present. “We all rely on science. Science gave us the smartphones in our pockets, the navigation systems in our cars, and life-saving medical care,” the letter said. “A climate of fear has descended on the research community,” the scientists said, referring to what the future would look like after funding cuts. “What is happening in this administration is that they are engaged in a process of closing down scientific exchange, debate and multiple opinions, which represent important ways to advance knowledge and find solutions to national and global problems to make life better for our nation,” said Ruth Enid Zambrana, a distinguished university professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She a signer of the academies’ letter.
x Harvard scientist Kseniia Petrova has been in ICE custody for about two months. Her colleague and friend Leon Peshkin says her case is causing some scientists to reconsider working in the U.S.
[image or embed] — NPR (@npr.org) April 24, 2025 at 12:45 PM
Major European institutes join race to save US science data — nature
Several research institutes in Germany are joining a worldwide grassroots effort to save science data sets that researchers fear could be deleted or decommissioned on the orders of US President Donald Trump’s administration, Nature has learnt. An official with Pangaea, a massive environmental data repository run by the University of Bremen and the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, says that the organization is formally working with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to back up at-risk databases. Pangaea’s decision to join the cause followed distress calls from members of the science community and from staff members inside NOAA — an agency that monitors Earth’s atmosphere and climate and provides weather-forecasting services. The Trump administration has promised to slash government spending and has proposed gutting NOAA’s climate research programmes , which administration officials have said promote “exaggerated and implausible climate threats”.
NOAA Datasets Will Soon Disappear — eos
NOAA has quietly reported that they will soon decommission 14 datasets, products, and catalogs related to earthquakes and marine, coastal, and estuary science. According to the list, these data sources will be “decommissioned and will no longer be available” by early- to mid-May. [...] The announcement of the removals comes days after environmental and science groups sued the Trump administration for the removal of climate and environmental justice websites and data. [...] “The public has a right to access these taxpayer-funded datasets,” Gretchen Goldman, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement about the lawsuit. “From vital information for communities about their exposure to harmful pollution, to data that help local governments build resilience to extreme weather events, the public deserves access to federal datasets. Removing government datasets is tantamount to theft.”
x In addition to gutting environmental laws and agencies, Trump is attacking nonprofit environmental groups. Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice, a public interest environmental law organization, talks about the challenges: www.propublica.org/article/eart...? #environment #birds #wildlife 🌎
[image or embed] — Lyn Heideman (@heidelyn.bsky.social) April 25, 2025 at 11:26 PM
Inside the desperate rush to save decades of US scientific data from deletion — bbc
No one knows when the next alert or request to save a chunk of US government-held climate data will come in. Such data, long available online, keeps getting taken down by US President Donald Trump's administration . For the last six months or so, Cathy Richards has been entrenched in the response. She works for one of several organisations bent on downloading and archiving public data before it disappears. "You get a message at 11 o'clock at night saying, 'This is going down tomorrow'," she says. "You try to enjoy your day and then everything goes wrong. You just spend the night downloading data." Richards is a data and inclusion specialist, and civic science fellow at the Open Environmental Data Project (OEDP), a non-profit based in Hudson, New York. Her organisation is a founding member of the Public Environmental Data Project (PEDP) , which emerged in 2024 to safeguard data under the Trump administration. Some of the messages are "heart-breaking", says Richards. Scientists sometimes get in touch, desperate to know that data they have spent their professional lives collecting will be rescued. "You hear the urgency," she says. "You understand that this is someone's X amount of years of research and this is their baby. That's probably why we snap into action."
The Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) has enrolled tens of thousands of participants in clinical trials of hormones and other medications and tracked the health of many thousands more over more than 3 decades. Its findings have had a major influence on health care. WHI leaders announced yesterday that contracts supporting its regional centers are being terminated in September and that the study’s clinical coordinating center, based at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, “will continue operations until January 2026, after which time its funding remains uncertain.” They added that the contract terminations for its four main sites “will significantly impact ongoing research and data collection … severely limit[ing] WHI’s ability to generate new insights into the health of older women, one of the fastest-growing segments of our population.” (There are about 55 million postmenopausal women in the United States.)
Female bonobos keep males in check with solidarity — Max Planck gesellschaft
“To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that female solidarity can invert the male-biased power structure that is typical of many mammal societies. It’s exciting to find that females can actively elevate their social status by supporting each other.” Biologically speaking, female and male bonobos have a weird relationship. First, there’s the sex. It’s the females who decide when and with whom they mate. They easily parry unwanted sexual advances—and the males know better than to force the issue. Second, there’s the food. It’s the females who usually control high-value, sharable resources—a fresh kill, say. They feed while sitting on the ground, unthreatened, while males hover in tree branches waiting for their turn. ...Bonobo males are larger and stronger than females, which gives them the physical upper hand to attack, force matings, and monopolize food. Like almost all other social mammals with larger males, bonobo societies should be dominated by males. And yet, bonobo females famously maintain a high social status compared to their larger male counterparts. Until now, though, nobody knew how this paradoxical dynamic was possible at all. Now, a study by Surbeck and Fruth has delivered the first empirical evidence from wild bonobos explaining the rare phenomenon: females maintain power by forming alliances with other females. The study found that females outranked males when they formed gangs, which the authors named “coalitions.” In the vast majority of coalitions—85 percent of those observed—females collectively targeted males, forcing them into submission and shaping the group’s dominance hierarchy.
Slowing human-caused climate change requires decisive action, but the slow upward creep of global temperatures contributes to apathy among people who don't experience regular climate-driven disasters, psychologists say. In a new study from UCLA and Princeton, researchers looked into ways to communicate the true impact of climate change and found a solution. Showing people continuous data, such as temperature increases in a town, left people with a vague impression of gradual change, but showing binary data for the same town, specifically whether a lake froze or not each winter, brought home the striking shift, said incoming UCLA communications professor and cognitive psychologist Rachit Dubey. "People are adjusting to worsening environmental conditions , like multiple fire seasons per year, disturbingly fast," said Dubey, senior author of the study. "When we used the same temperature data for a location but presented it in a starker way, it broke through people's climate apathy. Unfortunately, compared to those who looked at a clearer presentation of the same information, those who only looked at gradual data perceived a 12% smaller climate impact and cared less."
A new study from University of California San Diego suggests that climate trauma -- such as experiencing a devastating wildfire -- can have lasting effects on cognitive function. The research, which focused on survivors of the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California, found that individuals directly exposed to the disaster had difficulty making decisions that prioritize long-term benefits. The findings were recently published in Scientific Reports, part of the Nature portfolio of journals. [...] "It was clear that brains of study participants directly exposed to wildfires -- as opposed to those not exposed -- became significantly hyper-aroused when trying to make proper decision choices but they were still unable to execute the task well," said Jason Nan, a UC San Diego bioengineering graduate student and study first author. "We interpret this to mean that their brain was attempting to focus on making sound decisions, but they were unable to."
Hawaii is a beautiful tropical paradise and also home to formidable creepy crawly predators. There are spiders that impale prey in midair and venomous centipedes that can stretch nearly 15 inches long . And then there are the carnivorous caterpillars, an evolutionary rarity. And now scientists have discovered one very hungry caterpillar that doesn’t just eat other insects — it decorates itself in the macabre mishmash of the body parts of its meals. [...] According to David Wagner, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut who was not involved with the new study, the caterpillar’s reliance on spiders presents one of nature’s most improbable connections. “It is remarkable that a caterpillar would tie its fate to a spider — a clear and present danger for both caterpillar and moth alike,” Dr. Wagner said. He’s aware of only one other moth species that frequents spider webs. But that species is a vegetarian that snacks on plant material caught in the web.
New study shows why simulated reasoning AI models don’t yet live up to their billing — ars technica
There's a curious contradiction at the heart of today's most capable AI models that purport to "reason": They can solve routine math problems with impressive accuracy, yet when faced with formulating deeper mathematical proofs found in competition-level challenges, they often fail. That's the finding of eye-opening preprint research into simulated reasoning (SR) models, initially listed in March and updated in April, that mostly fell under the news radar. The research serves as an instructive case study on the mathematical limitations of SR models, despite sometimes grandiose marketing claims from AI vendors. What sets simulated reasoning models apart from traditional large language models (LLMs) is that they have been trained to output a step-by-step "thinking" process (often called " chain-of-thought ") to solve problems. Note that "simulated" in this case doesn't mean that the models do not reason at all but rather that they do not necessarily reason using the same techniques as humans. That distinction is important because human reasoning itself is difficult to define.
An international team including astronomers from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) has announced the discovery of a planet about twice the size of Earth orbiting its star farther out than Saturn is to the sun … "We found a 'super-Earth'—meaning it's bigger than our home planet but smaller than Neptune—in a place where only planets thousands or hundreds of times more massive than Earth were found before," said Weicheng Zang, a CfA Fellow. He is the lead author of a paper describing these results in the latest issue of the journal Science. The discovery of this new, farther-out super Earth is even more significant because it is part of a larger study. By measuring the masses of many planets relative to the stars that host them, the team has discovered new information about the populations of planets across the Milky Way.
x Really excited to share this new article from the lab. We synthesize the profound importance of movement and connectivity for conservation and provide a vision for future policy and management. Let's work toward a well-connected planet for biodiversity and people: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
[image or embed] — Robert Fletcher (@fletcherecology.bsky.social) April 25, 2025 at 12:47 AM
Populations of animals and plants separated by even thousands of miles can rise and fall together driven by ecological factors, a phenomenon scientists call "spatial synchrony." A new study from the University of Kansas in Ecology Letters reveals the study of spatial synchrony over a long enough timescale leads to better testing of ideas, improved statistical results and new conceptual realms for understanding ecology, conserving species and farming more profitably. [...] "One study from the early 2000s examined two populations of musk ox on opposite sides of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Even though they were separated by 1,000 miles of ice, their populations fluctuated in sync—they had good years and bad years at the same time." Reuman said his study reviews the most important conceptual developments in spatial synchrony over the past 20 years. "One of these is timescale structure," he said. "Populations don't just fluctuate—they do so on multiple timescales simultaneously. They might change on an annual basis, as expected, but they also fluctuate on decadal scales and beyond. The causes of these fluctuations vary, and synchrony can differ depending on the timescale."
A new biosensor can detect bird flu in five minutes — mit tech review
The most common way to detect bird flu involves swabbing potentially contaminated sites and sequencing the DNA that’s been collected, a process that can take up to 48 hours. The new device samples the air in real time, running the samples past a specialized biosensor every five minutes. The sensor has strands of genetic material called aptamers that were used to bind specifically to the virus. When that happens, it creates a detectable electrical change. [...] Though the system is promising, its effectiveness in real-world conditions remains uncertain, says Sungjun Park, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ajou University in South Korea, who was not involved in the study. Dirt and other particles in farm air could hinder its performance. “The study does not extensively discuss the device’s performance in complex real-world air samples,” Park says.
The Real Reason You See Earthworms After Rain — cool green science (The Nature Conservancy)
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