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Trump administration’s blockchain plan for USAID is a real head-scratcher

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Giulio Coppi, a senior humanitarian officer at the nonprofit Access Now who has researched the use of blockchain in humanitarian work, says that blockchain technologies, while sometimes effective, offer no obvious advantages over other tools organizations could use, such as an existing payments system or another database tool. “There’s no proven advantage that it’s cheaper or better,” he says. “The way it’s been presented is this tech solutionist approach that has been proven over and over again to not have any substantial impact in reality.”

There have been, however, some successful instances of using blockchain technology in the humanitarian sector. In 2022, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) ran a small pilot to give cash assistance to Ukrainians displaced by the Russia-Ukraine war in a stablecoin. Other pilots have been tested in Kenya by the Kenya Red Cross Society. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which works with the Kenya team, also helped to develop the Humanitarian Token Solution (HTS).

One representative from an NGO that uses blockchain technology, but wasn’t authorized to speak to the media with regards to issues relating to USAID, says that particularly with regards to money transfers, stablecoins can be faster and easier than other methods of reaching communities impacted by a disaster. However, “introducing new systems means you’re setting up a new burden” for the many organizations that USAID partners with, they say. “The relative cost of new systems is harder for small NGOs,” which would often include the kind of local organizations that would be at the front line of response to disasters.

The proposed adoption of blockchain technology seems related to an emphasis on exerting tight controls over aid. The memo seems, for example, to propose that funding should be contingent on outcomes, reading, “Tying payment to outcomes and results rather than inputs would ensure taxpayer dollars deliver maximum impact.” A USAID employee, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the media, says that many of USAID’s contracts already function this way, with organizations being paid after performing their work. However, that’s not possible in all situations. “Those kinds of agreements are often not flexible enough for the environments we work in,” they say, noting that in conflict or disaster zones, situations can change quickly, meaning that what an organization may be able to do or need to do can fluctuate.

Raftree says this language appears to be misleading, and bolsters claims made by Musk and the administration that USAID was corrupt. “It’s not like USAID was delivering tons of cash to people who hadn’t done things,” she says.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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How the language of job postings can attract rule-bending narcissists

hiring, narcississm, psychology, Science, Social science, syndication / /

Why it matters

Companies write job postings carefully in hopes of attracting the ideal candidate. However, they may unknowingly attract and select narcissistic candidates whose goals and ethics might not align with a company’s values or long-term success. Research shows that narcissistic employees are more likely to behave unethically, potentially leading to legal consequences.

While narcissistic traits can lead to negative outcomes, we aren’t saying that companies should avoid attracting narcissistic applicants altogether. Consider a company hiring a salesperson. A firm can benefit from a salesperson who is persuasive, who “thinks outside the box,” and who is “results-oriented.” In contrast, a company hiring an accountant or compliance officer would likely benefit from someone who “thinks methodically” and “communicates in a straightforward and accurate manner.”

Bending the rules is of particular concern in accounting. A significant amount of research examines how accounting managers sometimes bend rules or massage the numbers to achieve earnings targets. This “earnings management” can misrepresent the company’s true financial position.

In fact, my co-author Nick Seybert is currently working on a paper whose data suggests rule-bender language in accounting job postings predicts rule-bending in financial reporting.

Our current findings shed light on the importance of carefully crafting job posting language. Recruiting professionals may instinctively use rule-bender language to try to attract someone who seems like a good fit. If companies are concerned about hiring narcissists, they may want to clearly communicate their ethical values and needs while crafting a job posting, or avoid rule-bender language entirely.

What still isn’t known

While we find that professional recruiters are using language that attracts narcissists, it is unclear whether this is intentional.

Additionally, we are unsure what really drives rule-bending in a company. Rule-bending could happen due to attracting and hiring more narcissistic candidates, or it could be because of a company’s culture—or a combination of both.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Jonathan Gay is Assistant Professor of Accountancy at the University of Mississippi.

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

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For climate and livelihoods, Africa bets big on solar mini-grids

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Nigeria is pioneering the development of small, off-grid solar panel installations.

A general view of a hybrid minigrids station in Doma Town which is mainly powered by solar energy in Doma, Nassarawa State, Nigeria on October 16, 2023. Credit: Kola Sulaimon/AFP via Getty Images

To the people of Mbiabet Esieyere and Mbiabet Udouba in Nigeria’s deep south, sundown would mean children doing their homework by the glow of kerosene lamps, and the faint thrum of generators emanating from homes that could afford to run them. Like many rural communities, these two villages of fishermen and farmers in the community of Mbiabet, tucked away in clearings within a dense palm forest, had never been connected to the country’s national electricity grid.

Most of the residents had never heard of solar power either. When, in 2021, a renewable-energy company proposed installing a solar “mini-grid” in their community, the villagers scoffed at the idea of the sun powering their homes. “We didn’t imagine that something [like this] can exist,” says Solomon Andrew Obot, a resident in his early 30s.

The small installation of solar panels, batteries and transmission lines proposed by the company Prado Power would service 180 households in Mbiabet Esieyere and Mbiabet Udouba, giving them significantly more reliable electricity for a fraction of the cost of diesel generators. Village leaders agreed to the installation, though many residents remained skeptical. But when the panels were set up in 2022, lights blinked on in the brightly painted two-room homes and tan mud huts dotted sparsely through the community. At a village meeting in September, locals erupted into laughter as they recalled walking from house to house, turning on lights and plugging in phone chargers. “I [was] shocked,” Andrew Obot says.

Like many African nations, Nigeria has lagged behind Global North countries in shifting away from planet-warming fossil fuels and toward renewable energy. Solar power contributes just around 3 percent of the total electricity generated in Africa—though it is the world’s sunniest continent—compared to nearly 12 percent in Germany and 6 percent in the United States.

At the same time, in many African countries, solar power now stands to offer much more than environmental benefits. About 600 million Africans lack reliable access to electricity; in Nigeria specifically, almost half of the 230 million people have no access to electricity grids. Today, solar has become cheap and versatile enough to help bring affordable, reliable power to millions—creating a win-win for lives and livelihoods as well as the climate.

That’s why Nigeria is placing its bets on solar mini-grids—small installations that produce up to 10 megawatts of electricity, enough to power over 1,700 American homes—that can be set up anywhere. Crucially, the country has pioneered mini-grid development through smart policies to attract investment, setting an example for other African nations.

Nearly 120 mini-grids are now installed, powering roughly 50,000 households and reaching about 250,000 people. “Nigeria is actually like a poster child for mini-grid development across Africa,” says energy expert Rolake Akinkugbe-Filani, managing director of EnergyInc Advisors, an energy infrastructure consulting firm.

Though it will take more work—and funding—to expand mini-grids across the continent, Nigeria’s experience demonstrates that they could play a key role in weaning African communities off fossil-fuel-based power. But the people who live there are more concerned with another, immediate benefit: improving livelihoods. Affordable, reliable power from Mbiabet’s mini-grid has already supercharged local businesses, as it has in many places where nonprofits like Clean Technology Hub have supported mini-grid development, says Ifeoma Malo, the organization’s founder. “We’ve seen how that has completely transformed those communities.”

The African energy transition takes shape

Together, Africa’s countries account for less than 5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and many experts, like Malo, take issue with the idea that they need to rapidly phase out fossil fuels; that task should be more urgent for the United States, China, India, the European countries and Russia, which create the bulk of emissions. Nevertheless, many African countries have set ambitious phase-out goals. Some have already turned to locally abundant renewable energy sources, like geothermal power from the Earth’s crust, which supplies nearly half of the electricity produced in Kenya, and hydropower, which creates more than 80 percent of the electricity in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Uganda.

But hydropower and geothermal work only where those resources naturally exist. And development of more geographically versatile power sources, like solar and wind, has progressed more slowly in Africa. Though solar is cheaper than fossil-fuel-derived electricity in the long term, upfront construction costs are often higher than they are for building new fossil-fuel power plants.

Thanks to its sunny, equatorial position, the African continent has an immense potential for solar power, shown here in kilowatt-hours. However, solar power contributes less than 3 percent of the electricity generated in Africa. Credit: Knowable Magazine

Getting loans to finance big-ticket energy projects is especially hard in Africa, too. Compared to Europe or the United States, interest rates for loans can be two to three times higher due to perceived risks—for instance, that cash-strapped utility companies, already struggling to collect bills from customers, won’t be able to pay back the loans. Rapid political shifts and currency fluctuations add to the uncertainty. To boot, some Western African nations such as Nigeria charge high tariffs on importing technologies such as solar panels. “There are challenges that are definitely hindering the pace at which renewable energy development could be scaling in the region,” says renewable energy expert Tim Reber of the Colorado-based US National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Some African countries are beginning to overcome these barriers and spur renewable energy development, notes Bruno Merven, an expert in energy systems modeling at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, coauthor of a look at renewable energy development in the Annual Review of Resource Economics. Super-sunny Morocco, for example, has phased out subsidies for gasoline and industrial fuel. South Africa is agreeing to buy power from new, renewable infrastructure that is replacing many coal plants that are now being retired.

Nigeria, where only about a quarter of the national grid generates electricity and where many turn to generators for power, is leaning on mini-grids—since expanding the national grid to its remote communities, scattered across an area 1.3 times the size of Texas, would cost a prohibitive amount in the tens of billions of dollars. Many other countries are in the same boat. “The only way by which we can help to electrify the entire continent is to invest heavily in renewable energy mini-grids,” says Stephen Kansuk, the United Nations Development Program’s regional technical advisor for Africa on climate change mitigation and energy issues.

Experts praise the steps Nigeria has taken to spur such development. In 2016, the country’s Electricity Regulatory Commission provided legal guidelines on how developers, electricity distribution companies, regulators and communities can work together to develop the small grids. This was accompanied by a program through which organizations like the World Bank, the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, Bezos Earth Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation could contribute funds, making mini-grid investments less financially risky for developers.

Solar power was also made more attractive by a recent decision by Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to remove a long-standing government subsidy on petroleum products. Fossil-fuel costs have been soaring since, for vehicles as well as the generators that many communities rely on. Nigeria has historically been Africa’s largest crude oil producer, but fuel is now largely unaffordable for the average Nigerian, including those living in rural areas, who often live on less than $2 a day. In the crude-oil-rich state of Akwa Ibom, where the Mbiabet villages are located, gasoline was 1,500 naira per liter (around $1) at the time of publishing. “Now that subsidies have come off petrol,” says Akinkugbe-Filani, “we’re seeing a lot more people transition to alternative sources of energy.”

Mini-grids take off

To plan a mini-grid in Nigeria, developers often work with government agencies that have mapped out ideal sites: sunny places where there are no plans to extend the national grid, ensuring that there’s a real power need.

More than 500 million Africans lack access to electricity, and where there is electricity, much of it comes from fossil fuels. Countries are taking different approaches to bring more renewable energy into the mix. Nigeria is focusing on mini-grids, which are especially useful in areas that lack national electricity grids. Morocco and South Africa are building large-scale solar power installations, while Kenya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are making use of local renewable energy sources like geothermal and hydropower, respectively. Credit: Knowable Magazine

The next step is getting communities on board, which can take months. Malo recalls a remote Indigenous village in the hills of Adamawa state in Nigeria’s northeast, where locals have preserved their way of life for hundreds of years and are wary of outsiders. Her team had almost given up trying to liaise with reluctant male community leaders and decided to try reaching out to the women. The women, it turned out, were fascinated by the technology and how it could help them, especially at night — to fetch water from streams, to use the bathroom and to keep their children safe from snakes. “We find that if we convince them, they’re able to go and convince their husbands,” Malo says.

The Mbiabet community took less convincing. Residents were drawn to the promise of cheap, reliable electricity and its potential to boost local businesses.

Like many other mini-grids, the one in Mbiabet benefited from a small grant, this one from the Rocky Mountain Institute, a US-based nonprofit focused on renewable energy adoption. The funds allowed residents to retain 20 percent ownership of the mini-grid and reduced upfront costs for Prado Power, which built the panels with the help of local laborers.

On a day in late September, it’s a sunny afternoon, though downpours from the days before have made their imprint on the ground. There are no paved roads and today, the dirt road leading through the tropical forest into the cluster of villages is unnavigable by car. At one point, we build an impromptu bridge of grass and vegetation across a sludgy impasse; the last stretch of the journey is made on foot. It would be costly and labor-intensive to extend the national grid here.

Palm trees give way to tin roofs propped up by wooden poles, and Andrew Obot is waiting at the meeting point. He was Mbiabet’s vice youth president when Prado Power first contacted the community; now he’s the site manager. He steers his okada—a local motorbike—up the bumpy red dirt road to go see the solar panels.

Along the way, we see transmission lines threading through thick foliage. “That’s the solar power,” shouts Andrew Obot over the drone of the okada engine. All the lines were built by Prado Power to supply households in the two villages.

We enter a grassy clearing where three rows of solar panels sit behind wire gates. Collectively, the 39 panels have a capacity of over 20 kilowatts—enough to power just one large, energy-intensive American household but more than enough for the lightbulbs, cooker plates and fans in the 180 households in Mbiabet Esieyere and Mbiabet Udouba.

Whereas before, electricity was more conservatively used, now it is everywhere. An Afrobeats tune blares from a small barbershop on the main road winding through Mbiabet Esieyere. Inside, surrounded by walls plastered with shiny posters of trending hairstyles — including a headshot of popular musician Davido with the tagline “BBC—Big Boyz Cutz”—two young girls sit on a bench near a humming fan, waiting for their heads to be shaved.

The salon owner, Christian Aniefiok Asuquo, started his business two years ago when he was 16, just before the panels were installed. Back then, his appliances were powered by a diesel generator, which he would fill with 2,000 naira worth (around $1.20) of fuel daily. This would last around an hour. Now, he spends just 2,000 naira a month on electricity. “I feel so good,” he says, and his customers, too, are happy. He used to charge 500 naira ($0.30) per haircut, but now charges 300 naira ($0.18) and still makes a profit. He has more customers these days.

For many Mbiabet residents, “it’s an overall boost in their economic development,” says Suleiman Babamanu, the Rocky Mountain Institute’s program director in Nigeria. Also helping to encourage residents to take full advantage of their newly available power is the installation of an “agro-processing hub,” equipped with crop-processing machines and a community freezer to store products like fish. Provided by the company Farm Warehouse in partnership with Prado Power, the hub is leased out to locals. It includes a grinder and fryer to process cassava—the community’s primary crop—into garri, a local food staple, which many of the village women sell to neighboring communities and at local markets.

The women are charged around 200 naira ($0.12) to process a small basin of garri from beginning to end. Sarah Eyakndue Monday, a 24-year-old cassava farmer, used to spend three to four hours processing cassava each day; it now takes her less than an hour. “It’s very easy,” she says with a laugh. She produces enough garri during that time to earn up to 50,000 naira ($30.25) a week—almost five times what she was earning before.

Prado Power also installed a battery system to save some power for nighttime (there’s a backup diesel generator should batteries become depleted during multiple overcast days). That has proved especially valuable to women in Mbiabet Esieyere and Mbiabet Udouba, who now feel safer. “Everywhere is … brighter than before,” says Eyakndue Monday.

Other African communities have experienced similar benefits, according to Renewvia Energy, a US-based solar company. In a recent company-funded survey, 2,658 Nigerian and Kenyan households and business owners were interviewed before and after they got access to Renewvia’s mini-grids. Remarkably, the median income of Kenyan households had quadrupled. Instead of spending hours each day walking kilometers to collect drinking water, many communities were able to install electricity-powered wells or pumps, along with water purifiers.

“With all of that extra time, women in the community were able to either start their own businesses or just participate in businesses that already exist,” says Renewvia engineer Nicholas Selby, “and, with that, gain some income for themselves.”

Navigating mini-grid challenges

Solar systems require regular maintenance—replacing retired batteries, cleaning, and repairing and addressing technical glitches over the 20- to 25-year lifetime of a panel. Unless plans for care are built into a project, they risk failure. In some parts of India, for example, thousands of mini-grids installed by the government in recent decades have fallen into disrepair, according to a report provided to The Washington Post. Typically, state agencies have little long-term incentive to maintain solar infrastructure, Kansuk says.

Kansuk says this is less likely in situations where private companies that make money off the grids help to fund them, encouraging them to install high-quality devices and maintain them. It also helps to train locals with engineering skills so they can maintain the panels themselves—companies like Renewvia have done this at their sites. Although Prado Power hasn’t been able to provide such training to locals in Mbiabet or their other sites, they recruit locals like Andrew Obot to work as security guards, site managers and construction workers.

Over the longer term, demographic shifts may also leave some mini-grids in isolated areas abandoned—as in northern Nigeria, for instance, where banditry and kidnapping are forcing rural populations toward more urban settings. “That’s become a huge issue,” Malo says. Partly for this reason, some developers are focusing on building mini-grids in regions that are less prone to violence and have higher economic activity—often constructing interconnected mini-grids that supply multiple communities.

Eventually, those close enough to the national grid will likely be connected to the larger system, says Chibuikem Agbaegbu, a Nigeria-based climate and energy expert of the Africa Policy Research Institute. They can send their excess solar-sourced electricity into the main grid, thus making a region’s overall energy system greener and more reliable.

The biggest challenge for mini-grids, however, is cost. Although they tend to offer cheaper, more reliable electricity compared to fossil-fuel-powered generators, it is still quite expensive for many people — and often much more costly than power from national grids, which is frequently subsidized by African governments. Costs can be even higher when communities sprawl across large areas that are expensive to connect.

Mini-grid companies have to charge relatively high rates in order to break even, and many communities may not be buying enough power to make a mini-grid worthwhile for the developers — for instance, Kansuk says, if residents want electricity only for lighting and to run small household appliances.

Kansuk adds that this is why developers like Prado Power still rely on grants or other funding sources to subsidize construction costs so they can charge locals affordable prices for electricity. Another solution, as evidenced in Mbiabet, is to introduce industrial machinery and equipment in tandem with mini-grids to increase local incomes so that people can afford the electricity tariffs.

“For you to be able to really transform lives in rural communities, you need to be able to improve the business viability—both for the mini-grid and for the community,” says Babamanu. The Rocky Mountain Institute is part of an initiative that identifies suitable electrical products, from cold storage to rice mills to electric vehicle chargers, and supports their installation in communities with the mini-grids.

Spreading mini-grids across the continent

Energy experts believe that these kinds of solutions will be key for expanding mini-grids across Africa. Around 60 million people in the continent gained access to electricity through mini-grids between 2009 and 2019, in countries such as Kenya, Tanzania and Senegal, and the United Nations Development Program is working with a total of 21 African countries, Kansuk says, including Mali, Niger and Somalia, to incentivize private companies to develop mini-grids there.

But it takes more than robust policies to help mini-grids thrive. Malo says it would help if Western African countries removed import tariffs for solar panels, as many governments in Eastern Africa have done. And though Agbaegbu estimates that Nigeria has seen over $900 million in solar investments since 2018—and the nation recently announced $750 million more through a multinationally funded program that aims to provide over 17.5 million Nigerians with electricity access—it needs more. “If you look at what is required versus what is available,” says Agbaegbu, “you find that there’s still a significant gap.”

Many in the field argue that such money should come from more industrialized, carbon-emitting countries to help pay for energy development in Global South countries in ways that don’t add to the climate problem; some also argue for funds to compensate for damages caused by climate impacts, which hit these countries hardest. At the 2024 COP29 climate change conference, wealthy nations set a target of $300 billion in annual funding for climate initiatives in other countries by 2035—three times more than what they had previously pledged. But African countries alone need an estimated $200 billion per year by 2030 to meet their energy goals, according to the International Energy Agency.

Meanwhile, Malo adds, it’s important that local banks in countries like Nigeria also invest in mini-grid development, to lessen dependence on foreign financing. That’s especially the case in light of current freezes in USAID funding, she says, which has resulted in a loss of money for solar projects in Nigeria and other nations.

With enough support, Reber says, mini-grids—along with rooftop and larger solar projects—could make a sizable contribution to lowering carbon emissions in Africa. Those who already have the mini-grids seem convinced they’re on the path toward a better, economically richer future, and Babamanu knows of communities that have written letters to policymakers to express their interest.

Eyakndue Monday, the cassava farmer from Mbiabet, doesn’t keep her community’s news a secret. Those she has told now come to her village to charge their phones and watch television. “I told a lot of my friends that our village is … better because of the light,” she says. “They were just happy.”

This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.

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

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NCI employees can’t publish information on these topics without special approval

Department of Health and Human Services, health, National Cancer Institute, rfk jr, Science, syndication, trump administration / /

The list is “an unusual mix of words that are tied to activities that this administration has been at war with—like equity, but also words that they purport to be in favor of doing something about, like ultraprocessed food,” Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco, said in an email.

The guidance states that staffers “do not need to share content describing the routine conduct of science if it will not get major media attention, is not controversial or sensitive, and does not touch on an administration priority.”

A longtime senior employee at the institute said that the directive was circulated by the institute’s communications team, and the content was not discussed at the leadership level. It is not clear in which exact office the directive originated. The NCI, NIH and HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions. (The existence of the list was first revealed in social media posts on Friday.)

Health and research experts told ProPublica they feared the chilling effect of the new guidance. Not only might it lead to a lengthier and more complex clearance process, it may also cause researchers to censor their work out of fear or deference to the administration’s priorities.

“This is real interference in the scientific process,” said Linda Birnbaum, a former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences who served as a federal scientist for four decades. The list, she said, “just seems like Big Brother intimidation.”

During the first two months of Donald Trump’s second presidency, his administration has slashed funding for research institutions and stalled the NIH’s grant application process.

Kennedy has suggested that hundreds of NIH staffers should be fired and said that the institute should deprioritize infectious diseases like COVID-19 and shift its focus to chronic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity.

Obesity is on the NCI’s new list, as are infectious diseases including COVID-19, bird flu and measles.

The “focus on bird flu and covid is concerning,” Woodruff wrote, because “not being transparent with the public about infectious diseases will not stop them or make them go away and could make them worse.”

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

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Huh? The valuable role of interjections

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Utterances like um, wow, and mm-hmm aren’t garbage—they keep conversations flowing.

Interjections—one-word utterances that aren’t part of a larger sentence—used to be dismissed as irrelevant linguistic detritus. But some linguists now think they play an essential role in regulating conversations. Credit: Daniel Garcia/Knowable Magazine

Interjections—one-word utterances that aren’t part of a larger sentence—used to be dismissed as irrelevant linguistic detritus. But some linguists now think they play an essential role in regulating conversations. Credit: Daniel Garcia/Knowable Magazine

Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you’ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words—mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like—that don’t convey any information about the topic of the conversation itself. For many decades, linguists regarded such utterances as largely irrelevant noise, the flotsam and jetsam that accumulate on the margins of language when speakers aren’t as articulate as they’d like to be.

But these little words may be much more important than that. A few linguists now think that far from being detritus, they may be crucial traffic signals to regulate the flow of conversation as well as tools to negotiate mutual understanding. That puts them at the heart of language itself—and they may be the hardest part of language for artificial intelligence to master.

“Here is this phenomenon that lives right under our nose, that we barely noticed,” says Mark Dingemanse, a linguist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, “that turns out to upend our ideas of what makes complex language even possible in the first place.”

For most of the history of linguistics, scholars have tended to focus on written language, in large part because that’s what they had records of. But once recordings of conversation became available, they could begin to analyze spoken language the same way as writing.

When they did, they observed that interjections—that is, short utterances of just a word or two that are not part of a larger sentence—were ubiquitous in everyday speech. “One in every seven utterances are one of these things,” says Dingemanse, who explores the use of interjections in the 2024 Annual Review of Linguistics. “You’re going to find one of those little guys flying by every 12 seconds. Apparently, we need them.”

Many of these interjections serve to regulate the flow of conversation. “Think of it as a tool kit for conducting interactions,” says Dingemanse. “If you want to have streamlined conversations, these are the tools you need.” An um or uh from the speaker, for example, signals that they’re about to pause, but aren’t finished speaking. A quick huh? or what? from the listener, on the other hand, can signal a failure of communication that the speaker needs to repair.

That need seems to be universal: In a survey of 31 languages around the world, Dingemanse and his colleagues found that all of them used a short, neutral syllable similar to huh? as a repair signal, probably because it’s quick to produce. “In that moment of difficulty, you’re going to need the simplest possible question word, and that’s what huh? is,” says Dingemanse. “We think all societies will stumble on this, for the same reason.”

Other interjections serve as what some linguists call “continuers,” such as mm-hmm — signals from the listener that they’re paying attention and the speaker should keep going. Once again, the form of the word is well suited to its function: Because mm-hmm is made with a closed mouth, it’s clear that the signaler does not intend to speak.

Sign languages often handle continuers differently, but then again, two people signing at the same time can be less disruptive than two people speaking, says Carl Börstell, a linguist at the University of Bergen in Norway. In Swedish Sign Language, for example, listeners often sign yes as a continuer for long stretches, but to keep this continuer unobtrusive, the sender tends to hold their hands lower than usual.

Different interjections can send slightly different signals. Consider, for example, one person describing to another how to build a piece of Ikea furniture, says Allison Nguyen, a psycholinguist at Illinois State University. In such a conversation, mm-hmm might indicate that the speaker should continue explaining the current step, while yeah or OK would imply that the listener is done with that step and it’s time to move on to the next.

Wow! There’s more

Continuers aren’t merely for politeness—they really matter to a conversation, says Dingemanse. In one classic experiment from more than two decades ago, 34 undergraduate students listened as another volunteer told them a story. Some of the listeners gave the usual “I’m listening” signals, while others—who had been instructed to count the number of words beginning with the letter t—were too distracted to do so. The lack of normal signals from the listeners led to stories that were less well crafted, the researchers found. “That shows that these little words are quite consequential,” says Dingemanse.

Nguyen agrees that such words are far from meaningless. “They really do a lot for mutual understanding and mutual conversation,” she says. She’s now working to see if emojis serve similar functions in text conversations.

Storytellers depend on feedback such as mm-hmm and other interjections from their listeners. In this experiment, some listeners were told to count the number of times the storyteller used a word starting with t—a challenging task that prevented them from giving normal feedback. The quality of storytelling declined significantly, with problems like abrupt endings, rambling on, uneven or choppy pacing and overexplaining or justifying the point. Credit: Knowable Magazine

The role of interjections goes even deeper than regulating the flow of conversation. Interjections also help in negotiating the ground rules of a conversation. Every time two people converse, they need to establish an understanding of where each is coming from: what each participant knows to begin with, what they think the other person knows and how much detail they want to hear. Much of this work—what linguists call “grounding”—is carried out by interjections.

“If I’m telling you a story and you say something like ‘Wow!’ I might find that encouraging and add more detail,” says Nguyen. “But if you do something like, ‘Uh-huh,’ I’m going to assume you aren’t interested in more detail.”

A key part of grounding is working out what each participant thinks about the other’s knowledge, says Martina Wiltschko, a theoretical linguist at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona, Spain. Some languages, like Mandarin, explicitly differentiate between “I’m telling you something you didn’t know” and “I’m telling you something that I think you knew already.” In English, that task falls largely on interjections.

One of Wiltschko’s favorite examples is the Canadian eh?  “If I tell you you have a new dog, I’m usually not telling you stuff you don’t know, so it’s weird for me to tell you,” she says. But ‘You have a new dog, eh?’ eliminates the weirdness by flagging the statement as news to the speaker, not the listener.

Other interjections can indicate that the speaker knows they’re not giving the other participant what they sought. “If you ask me what’s the weather like in Barcelona, I can say ‘Well, I haven’t been outside yet,’” says Wiltschko. The well is an acknowledgement that she’s not quite answering the question.

Wiltschko and her students have now examined more than 20 languages, and every one of them uses little words for negotiations like these. “I haven’t found a language that doesn’t do these three general things: what I know, what I think you know and turn-taking,” she says. They are key to regulating conversations, she adds: “We are building common ground, and we are taking turns.”

Details like these aren’t just arcana for linguists to obsess over. Using interjections properly is a key part of sounding fluent in speaking a second language, notes Wiltschko, but language teachers often ignore them. “When it comes to language teaching, you get points deducted for using ums and uhs, because you’re ‘not fluent,’” she says. “But native speakers use them, because it helps! They should be taught.” Artificial intelligence, too, can struggle to use interjections well, she notes, making them the best way to distinguish between a computer and a real human.

And interjections also provide a window into interpersonal relationships. “These little markers say so much about what you think,” she says—and they’re harder to control than the actual content. Maybe couples therapists, for example, would find that interjections afford useful insights into how their clients regard one another and how they negotiate power in a conversation. The interjection oh often signals confrontation, she says, as in the difference between “Do you want to go out for dinner?” and “Oh, so now you want to go out for dinner?”

Indeed, these little words go right to the heart of language and what it is for. “Language exists because we need to interact with one another,” says Börstell. “For me, that’s the main reason for language being so successful.”

Dingemanse goes one step further. Interjections, he says, don’t just facilitate our conversations. In negotiating points of view and grounding, they’re also how language talks about talking.

“With huh?  you say not just ‘I didn’t understand,’” says Dingemanse. “It’s ‘I understand you’re trying to tell me something, but I didn’t get it.’” That reflexivity enables more sophisticated speech and thought. Indeed, he says, “I don’t think we would have complex language if it were not for these simple words.”

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

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New research shows bigger animals get more cancer, defying decades-old belief

animal research, cancer, cancer research, Science, syndication / /

The answer lies in how quickly body size evolves. We found that birds and mammals that reached large sizes more rapidly have reduced cancer prevalence. For example, the common dolphin, Delphinus delphis evolved to reach its large body size—along with most other whales and dolphins (referred to as cetaceans) about three times faster than other mammals. However, cetaceans tend to have less cancer than expected.

Larger species face higher cancer risks but those that reached that size rapidly evolved mechanisms for mitigating it, such as lower mutation rates or enhanced DNA repair mechanisms. So rather than contradicting Cope’s rule, our findings refine it.

Larger bodies often evolve, but not as quickly in groups where the burden of cancer is higher. This means that the threat of cancer may have shaped the pace of evolution.

Humans evolved to our current body size relatively rapidly. Based on this, we would expect humans and bats to have similar cancer prevalence, because we evolved at a much, much faster rate. However, it is important to note that our results can’t explain the actual prevalence of cancer in humans. Nor is that an easy statistic to estimate.

Human cancer is a complicated story to unravel, with a plethora of types and many factors affecting its prevalence. For example, many humans not only have access to modern medicine but also varied lifestyles that affect cancer risk. For this reason, we did not include humans in our analysis.

Fighting cancer

Understanding how species naturally evolve cancer defences has important implications for human medicine. The naked mole rat, for example, is studied for its exceptionally low cancer prevalence in the hopes of uncovering new ways to prevent or treat cancer in humans. Only a few cancer cases have ever been observed in captive mole rats, so the exact mechanisms of their cancer resistance remain mostly a mystery.

At the same time, our findings raise new questions. Although birds and mammals that evolved quickly seem to have stronger anti-cancer mechanisms, amphibians and reptiles didn’t show the same pattern. Larger species had higher cancer prevalence regardless of how quickly they evolved. This could be due to differences in their regenerative abilities. Some amphibians, like salamanders, can regenerate entire limbs—a process that involves lots of cell division, which cancer could exploit.

Putting cancer into an evolutionary context allowed us to reveal that its prevalence does increase with body size. Studying this evolutionary arms race may unlock new insights into how nature fights cancer—and how we might do the same.The Conversation

Joanna Baker, Postdoctoral Researcher in Evolutionary Biology, University of Reading and George Butler, Career Development Fellow in Cancer Evolution, UCL. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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AI firms follow DeepSeek’s lead, create cheaper models with “distillation”

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Thanks to distillation, developers and businesses can access these models’ capabilities at a fraction of the price, allowing app developers to run AI models quickly on devices such as laptops and smartphones.

Developers can use OpenAI’s platform for distillation, learning from the large language models that underpin products like ChatGPT. OpenAI’s largest backer, Microsoft, used GPT-4 to distill its small language family of models Phi as part of a commercial partnership after investing nearly $14 billion into the company.

However, the San Francisco-based start-up has said it believes DeepSeek distilled OpenAI’s models to train its competitor, a move that would be against its terms of service. DeepSeek has not commented on the claims.

While distillation can be used to create high-performing models, experts add they are more limited.

“Distillation presents an interesting trade-off; if you make the models smaller, you inevitably reduce their capability,” said Ahmed Awadallah of Microsoft Research, who said a distilled model can be designed to be very good at summarising emails, for example, “but it really would not be good at anything else.”

David Cox, vice-president for AI models at IBM Research, said most businesses do not need a massive model to run their products, and distilled ones are powerful enough for purposes such as customer service chatbots or running on smaller devices like phones.

“Any time you can [make it less expensive] and it gives you the right performance you want, there is very little reason not to do it,” he added.

That presents a challenge to many of the business models of leading AI firms. Even if developers use distilled models from companies like OpenAI, they cost far less to run, are less expensive to create, and, therefore, generate less revenue. Model-makers like OpenAI often charge less for the use of distilled models as they require less computational load.

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Federal firings could wreak havoc on Great Lakes fishery

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Her performance reviews for the last year had been glowing, so the letter made no sense. “It’s not a real explanation,” she said.

The USFWS layoffs will not affect the sea lamprey control program in Canada, McClinchey said. “The Canadian government has assured us that the money from Canada will continue to be there and we’re on track to deliver a full program in Canadian waters,” he said. “That’s great, but this program works because it’s border blind.”

In other words: Cuts to lamprey control in US waters are a threat to fish and fishermen everywhere on the Great Lakes.

Just a week ago, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission faced a more dire staffing situation, as the USFWS informed directors they’d also be unable to hire seasonal workers to spread lampricide come April. Within a few days, that hiring freeze was reversed, said McClinchey.

This reversal gives him a bit of hope. “That at least tells us no one is rooting for the lamprey,” he said.

McClinchey is currently in DC for appropriation season, presenting the commission’s work to members of Congress and defending the agency’s budget. It’s an annual trip, but this year he’s also advocating for the reinstatement of laid-off lamprey control employees.

He is optimistic. “It seems clear to me that it’s important we preserve this program, and so far everyone we’ve encountered thinks that way and are working to that end,” he said.

Cutting back the program isn’t really on the table for the commission. Even minor cuts to scope would be devastating for the fishery, he said.

Even the former USFWS employee from Marquette is remaining hopeful. “I still think that they’re going to scramble to make it happen,” she said. “Because it’s not really an option to just stop treating for a whole season.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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US Antarctic Program disrupted by DOGE-induced chaos

McMurdo Research Station, National Science Foundation, NOAA, Science, syndication / /

Long-term impacts will affect not only research but also geopolitics.

Credit: Wolfgang Kaehler via Getty

Few agencies have been spared as Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has ripped through the United States federal government. Even in Antarctica, scientists and workers are feeling the impacts—and are terrified for what’s to come.

The United States Antarctic Program (USAP) operates three permanent stations in Antarctica. These remote stations are difficult to get to and difficult to maintain; scattered across the continent, they are built on volcanic hills, polar plateaus, and icy peninsulas.

But to the US, the science has been worth it. At these stations, over a thousand people each year come to the continent to live and work. Scientists operate a number of major research projects, studying everything from climate change and rising sea levels to the cosmological makeup and origins of the universe itself. With funding cuts and layoffs looming, Antarctic scientists and experts don’t know if their research will be able to continue, how US stations will be sustained, or what all this might mean for the continent’s delicate geopolitics.

“Even brief interruptions will result in people walking away and not coming back,” says Nathan Whitehorn, an associate professor and Antarctic scientist at Michigan State University. “It could easily take decades to rebuild.”

The USAP is managed by the National Science Foundation. Last week, a number of NSF program managers staffed on Antarctic projects were fired as part of a wider purge at the agency. The program managers are critical for maintaining communication with the infrastructure and logistics arm of the NSF, and the contractors for the USAP, as well as planning deployment for scientists to the continent, keeping track of the budgets, and funding the maintenance and operations work. “I have no idea what we do without them,” says another Antarctic scientist who has spent time on the continent, who along with several others WIRED granted anonymity due to fears of retaliation.

“Without them, everything stops,” says a scientist whose NSF project manager was fired last week. “I have no idea who I am supposed to report to now or what happens to submitted proposals.”

Scientific research happens at all of the stations. At the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, scientists work on the South Pole Telescope and BICEP telescope, both of which study the cosmic background radiation and the evolution of the universe; IceCube, a cubic-kilometer detector designed to study neutrino physics and high energy emission from astrophysical sources; and the Atmospheric Research Observatory that studies climate science and is run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (Mass firings are also expected at the NOAA.)

“The climate science [at the South Pole Station] is super unique,” an Antarctic scientist says. “The site has so little pollution that we call it ‘the cleanest air on Earth,’ and they have been monitoring the ozone layer and CO2 content in the atmosphere for many decades.”

Other directives from the Donald Trump administration have directly affected daily life on those stations. “Gender-inclusive terms on housing documents” have been removed from Antarctic staffer forms, a source familiar with the situation at McMurdo Station tells WIRED. “It asked if you had a preference with which gender you housed with,” the source says. “That’s all been removed.”

Staffers have already pushed back. “People have been painting waste bins saying “Antarctica is for ALL” in rainbow, people’s email signatures [have] pride additions, [others] keep adding preferred pronouns to emails,” the source says.

“There’s a sense of unease on the station like people have never felt before,” they add. “The job still has to get done, even though people feel like the next shoe can drop at any moment.”

That unease extends to their own job security. “There are some people currently at the South Pole that are worried about losing their jobs any day now,” a source with familiarity of the situation tells WIRED. Workers present at the station aren’t able to physically leave until October, and a midseason firing, or loss of funding, would present a unique set of challenges.

Sources are also bracing for at least a 50 percent reduction in the NSF’s budget due to DOGE cuts. These cuts are sending Antarctic scientists with assistants and graduate students scrambling. “We didn’t know if we could pay graduate students,” says one scientist. While research is conducted on the continent, scientists bring their findings back to the US to process and analyze. A lot of the funding also operates the science itself: For one project that requires electricity to run detectors, the scientist “was paranoid we would not be able to literally pay bills for an experiment starved for data.” That hasn’t come to fruition yet, but as funding cycles restart in the coming weeks and months, scientists are on tenterhooks.

Sources tell WIRED that Germany, Canada, Spain, and China have already started taking advantage of that uncertainty by recruiting US scientists focused on Antarctica.

“Foreign countries are actively recruiting my colleagues, and some have already left,” says one Antarctic scientist. “My students are looking at jobs overseas now … people have been coming [to the US] to do science my whole life. Now people are going the other way.”

“Now is a great time to see if anyone wants to jump ship,” another Antarctic scientist says. “I do worry about a brain drain of tenured academics, or students who are shunted out.”

“The damage caused by gutting the [Antarctic] science budget like this is going to last generations,” says another.

Throughout DOGE’s cuts to the federal government, representatives have said that if something needs to be brought back, it could be. In some cases, reversals have already happened: The US Department of Agriculture said it accidentally fired staffers working on preventing the spread of bird flu and is trying to rehire them.

But in Antarctica, a reversal won’t necessarily work. “One of the really scary things about this is that if the Antarctic program budget is cut, then they’ll very quickly get to the point where they can’t even keep the station open, much less science projects going,” an Antarctic scientist tells WIRED. “If the South Pole [station] is shut down, it’s basically nearly impossible to bring it back up. Everything will freeze and get buried in snow. And some other country will likely immediately take over.

Others share this fear of a station takeover. “Even if science funding is cut back, there is an urgent need for the US to invest in icebreakers and polar airlift capability otherwise at some point the US-managed South Pole station might not be serviceable,” says Klaus Dodds, an Antarctic expert and professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway University of London.

Experts are concerned that countries like Russia and China—who have already been eagle-eyed on continental influence—will quickly jostle to fill the power vacuum. “Presumably it would be humiliating for anyone who wishes to promote ‘America First’ to witness China offer to take over the occupation and management of the base at the heart of Antarctica. China is a very determined polar power,” says Dodds.

The political outcome of the US pulling back from its Antarctic research and presence could be dire, sources tell WIRED.

Antarctica isn’t owned by any one country. Instead it’s governed by the Antarctic Treaty System, which protects Antarctica and the scientific research taking place on the continent, and forbids mining and nuclear activity. Some countries, including China and Russia, have indicated that they would be interested in rule changes to the Treaty system, particularly around resource extraction and fishing restrictions. The US, traditionally, has played a key role in championing the treaty: “Many of the leading polar scientists and social scientists are either US citizens and/or have been enriched by contact with US-led programs,” says Dodds.

That leadership role could change quickly. The US also participates in a number of international collaborations involving major Antarctic scientific projects. A US pullback, Whitehorn says, “makes it very hard to regard the US as a reliable partner, so I think there will be a lot less interest in accepting US leadership in such things … The uncertainty will drive people away and sacrifice the leadership the US already has.”

“If the NSF can’t function, or we don’t fund it, projects with long lead times can just die,” another scientist says. “I’m sure international partners would be happy to partner elsewhere. This is what it means to lose US competitiveness.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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In war against DEI in science, researchers see collateral damage

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Senate Republicans flagged thousands of grants as “woke DEI” research. What does that really mean?

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) at a hearing on Tuesday, January 28, 2025. Credit: Getty Images | Tom Williams

When he realized that Senate Republicans were characterizing his federally funded research project as one of many they considered ideological and of questionable scientific value, Darren Lipomi, chair of the chemical engineering department at the University of Rochester, was incensed. The work, he complained on social media, was aimed at helping “throat cancer patients recover from radiation therapy faster.” And yet, he noted on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and X, his project was among nearly 3,500 National Science Foundation grants recently described by the likes of Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican and chair of the powerful Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, as “woke DEI” research. These projects, Cruz argued, were driven by “Neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda,” and “far-left ideologies.”

“Needless to say,” Lipomi wrote of his research, “this project is not espousing class warfare.”

The list of grants was compiled by a group of Senate Republicans last fall and released to the public earlier this month, and while the NSF does not appear to have taken any action in response to the complaints, the list’s existence is adding to an atmosphere of confusion and worry among researchers in the early days of President Donald J. Trump’s second administration. Lipomi, for his part, described the situation as absurd. Others described it as chilling.

“Am I going to be somehow identified as an immigrant that’s exploiting federal funding streams and so I would just get deported? I have no idea,” said cell biologist Shumpei Maruyama, an early-career scientist and Japanese immigrant with permanent residency in the US, upon seeing his research on the government watch list. “That’s a fear.”

Just being on that list, he added, “is scary.”

The NSF, an independent government agency, accounts for around one-quarter of federal funding for science and engineering research at American colleges and universities. The 3,483 flagged projects total more than $2 billion and represent more than 10 percent of all NSF grants awarded between January 2021 and April 2024. The list encompasses research in all 50 states, including 257 grants totaling more than $150 million to institutions in Cruz’s home state of Texas.

The flagged grants, according to the committee report, “went to questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle.” The committee cast a wide net, using a programming tool to trawl more than 32,000 project descriptions for 699 keywords and phrases that they identified as linked to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Cruz has characterized the list as a response to a scientific grantmaking process that had become mired in political considerations, rather than focused on core research goals. “The Biden administration politicized everything it touched,” Cruz told Undark and NOTUS. “Science research is important, but we should want researchers spending time trying to figure out how to cure cancer, how to cure deadly diseases, not bean counting to satisfy the political agenda of Washington Democrats.”

“The ubiquity of these DEI requirements that the Biden administration engrafted on virtually everything,” Cruz added, “pulls a lot of good research money away from needed research to satisfy the political pet projects of Democrats.”

Others described the list—and other moves against DEI initiatives in research—as reversing decades-old bipartisan policies intended to strengthen US science. For past Congresses and administrations, including the first Trump term, DEI concepts were not controversial, said Neal F. Lane, who served as NSF director in the 1990s and as a science adviser to former President Bill Clinton. “Budget after budget was appropriated funds specifically to address these issues, to make sure all Americans have an opportunity to contribute to advancement of science and technology in the country,” he said. “And that the country then, in turn, benefits from their participation.”

At the same time, he added: “Politics can be ugly.”

Efforts to promote diversity in research predate the Biden administration. A half a century ago, the NSF established a goal of increasing the number of women and underrepresented groups in science. The agency began targeting programs for minority-serving institutions as well as minority faculty and students.

In the 1990s, Lane, as NSF director, ushered in the requirement that, in addition to intellectual merit, reviewers should consider a grant proposal’s “broader impacts.” In general, he said, the aim was to encourage science that would benefit society.

The broader impacts requirement remains today. Among other options, researchers can fulfill it by including a project component that increases the participation of women, underrepresented minorities in STEM, and people with disabilities. They can also meet the requirement by promoting science education or educator development, or by demonstrating that a project will build a more diverse workforce.

The Senate committee turned up thousands of “DEI” grants because the broad search not only snagged projects with a primary goal of increasing diversity—such as a $1.2 million grant to the Colorado School of Mines for a center to train engineering students to promote equity among their peers—but also research that referenced diversity in describing its broader impact or in describing study populations. Lipomi’s project, for example, was likely flagged because it mentions recruiting a diverse group of participants, analyzing results according to socioeconomic status, and posits that patients with disabilities might benefit from wearable devices for rehabilitation.

According to the committee report, concepts related to race, gender, societal status, as well as social and environmental justice undermine hard science. They singled out projects that identified groups of people as underrepresented, underserved, socioeconomically disadvantaged, or excluded; recognized inequities; or referenced climate research.

Red flags also included words like “gender,” “ethnicity,” and “sexuality,” along with scores of associated terms — “female,” “women,” “interracial,” “heterosexual,” “LGBTQ,” as well as “Black,” “White,” “Hispanic,” or “Indigenous” when referring to groups of people. “Status” also made the list along with words such as “biased,” “disability,” “minority,” and “socioeconomic.”

In addition, the committee flagged “environmental justice” and terms that they placed in that category such as “climate change,” “climate research,” and “clean energy.”

The committee individually reviewed grants for more than $1 million, according to the report.

The largest grant on the list awarded more than $29 million to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which contributes to the vast computing resources needed for artificial intelligence research. “I don’t know exactly why we were flagged, because we’re an AI resource for the nation,” said NCSA Director William Gropp.

One possible reason for the flag, Gropp theorized, is that one of the project’s aims is to provide computing power to states that have historically received less funding for research and development—including many Republican-leaning states—as well as minority-serving institutions. The proposal also states that a lack of diversity contributes to “embedded biases and other systemic inequalities found in AI systems today.”

The committee also flagged a grant with a total intended award amount of $26 million to a consortium of five institutions in North Carolina to establish an NSF Engineering Research Center to engineer microbial life in indoor spaces, promoting beneficial microbes while preventing the spread of pathogens. One example of such work would be thinking about how to minimize the risk that pathogens caught in a hospital sink would get aerosolized and spread to patients, said Joseph Graves, Jr., an evolutionary biologist and geneticist at North Carolina A&T State University and a leader of the project.

Graves was not surprised that his project made the committee’s list, as NSF policy has required research centers to include work on diversity and a culture of inclusion, he said.

The report, Graves said, seems intended to strip science of diversity, which he views as essential to the scientific endeavor. “We want to make the scientific community look more like the community of Americans,” said Graves. That’s not discriminating against White or Asian people, he said: “It’s a positive set of initiatives to give people who have been historically underrepresented and underserved in the scientific community and the products it produces to be at the table to participate in scientific research.”

“We argue that makes science better, not worse,” he added.

The political environment has seemingly left many scientists nervous to speak about their experiences. Three of the major science organizations Undark contacted—the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Institute of Physics—either did not respond or were not willing to comment. Many researchers appearing on Cruz’s list expressed hesitation to speak, and only men agreed to interviews: Undark contacted eight women leading NSF-funded projects on the list. Most did not respond to requests for comment, while others declined to talk on the record.

Darren Lipomi, the chemical engineer, drew a parallel between the committee report and US Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign in the early 1950s. “It’s inescapable,” said Lipomi, whose project focused on developing a medical device that provides feedback on swallowing to patients undergoing radiation for head and neck cancer. “I know what Marxism is, and this was not that.”

According to Joanne Padrón Carney, chief government relations officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Republican interest in scrutinizing purportedly ideological research dovetails with a sweeping executive order, issued immediately after Trump’s inauguration, aimed at purging the government of anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Whether and how the Senate committee report will wind up affecting future funding, however, remains to be seen. “Between the executive order on DEI and now the list of terms that was used in the Cruz report, NSF is now in the process of reviewing their grants,” Carney said. One immediate impact is that scientists may become more cautious in preparing their proposals, said Carney.

Emails to the National Science Foundation went unanswered. In response to a question about grant proposals that, like Lipomi’s, only have a small component devoted to diversity, Cruz said their status should be determined by the executive branch.

“I would think it would be reasonable that if the DEI components can reasonably be severed from the project, and the remaining parts of the project are meritorious on their own, then the project should continue,” Cruz said. “It may be that nothing of value remains once DEI is removed. It would depend on the particular project.”

Physicist and former NSF head Neal F. Lane said he suspects that “DEI” has simply become a politically expedient target—as well as an excuse to slash spending. Threats to science funding are already causing huge uncertainty and distraction from what researchers and universities are supposed to be doing, he said. “But if there’s a follow-through on many of these efforts made by the administration, any damage would be enormous.”

That damage might well include discouraging young researchers from pursuing scientific careers at all, Carney said—particularly if the administration is perceived as being uninterested in a STEM workforce that is representative of the US population. “For us to be able to compete at the global arena in innovation,” she said, “we need to create as many pathways as we can for all young students—from urban and rural areas, of all races and genders—to see science and technology as a worthwhile career.”

These questions are not just academic for cell biologist and postdoctoral researcher Shumpei Maruyama, who is thinking about becoming a research professor. He’s now concerned that the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to funding from the National Institutes of Health, which supports research infrastructure at many institutions, will sour the academic job market as schools are forced to shutter whole sections or departments. He’s also worried that his research, which looks at the effects of climate change on coral reefs, won’t be fundable under the current administration—not least because his work, too, is on the committee’s list.

“Corals are important just for the inherent value of biodiversity,” Maruyama said.

Although he remains worried about what happens next, Maruyama said he is also “weirdly proud” to have his research flagged for its expressed connection to social and environmental justice. “That’s exactly what my research is focusing on,” he said, adding that the existence of coral has immeasurable environmental and social benefits. While coral reefs cover less than 1 percent of the world’s oceans in terms of surface area, they house nearly one-quarter of all marine species. They also protect coastal areas from surges and hurricanes, noted Maruyama, provide food and tourism for local communities, and are a potential source of new medications such as cancer drugs.

While he also studies corals because he finds them “breathtakingly beautiful,” Maruyama, suggested that everyone—regardless of ideology—has a stake in their survival. “I want them to be around,” he said.

This story was co-reported by Teresa Carr for Undark and Margaret Manto for NOTUS. This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Can public trust in science survive a second battering?

Science, science education, syndication, trust in science / /

Public trust in science has shown a certain resiliency, but it is being tested like never before.

Public trust in science has been in the spotlight in recent years: After the US presidential election in November, one Wall Street Journal headline declared that “Science Lost America’s Trust.” Another publication called 2024 “the year of distrust in science.”

Some of that may be due to legitimate concerns: Public health officials have been criticized for their lack of transparency during critical moments, including the COVID-19 pandemic. And experts have noted the influence of political factors. For instance, the first Trump administration repeatedly undermined scientists—a trend repeating in his second term so far.

But what does the research say about where public trust in science, doctors, and health care institutions actually stands? In recent years, researchers have been increasingly looking into quantifying these sentiments. And indeed, multiple surveys and studies have reported the COVID-19 pandemic correlated with a decline in trust in the years following the initial outbreak. This decrease, though, seems to be waning as new research shows a clearer picture of trust across time. One 2024 study suggests Trump’s attacks on science during his first term did not have the significant impact many experts feared—and may have even boosted confidence among certain segments of the population.

Overall confidence in scientific institutions has slightly rebounded since the pandemic, some research suggests, with that trust remaining strong across countries. Despite the uptick, there appears to be a still widening divide particularly between political factions, with Democrats showing higher levels of trust and Republicans showing lower levels, a polarization that became more pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What we’re seeing now, several years later, is how deep those divisions really are,” said Cary Funk, who previously led science and society research at the Pew Research Center and has written reports on public trust in science. Funk is now a senior adviser for public engagement at the Aspen Institute Science and Society Program.

Political and economic entities have weaponized certain scientific topics, such as climate change, as well as the mistrust in science to advance their own interests, said Gabriele Contessa, a philosopher of science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. In the future, that weaponization might engender mistrust related to other issues, he added. It remains to be seen what effect a second Trump term may have on confidence in science. Already, Trump issued a communications freeze on Department of Health and Human Services officials and paused federal grants, a move that was ultimately rescinded but still unleashed a flurry of chaos and confusion throughout academic circles.

“To have people like Donald Trump, who clearly do not trust reputable scientific sources and often trust instead disreputable or at least questionable scientific sources, is actually a very, very strong concern,” Contessa said.

Who will act in the public’s best interest?

In the winter of 2021, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of around 14,500 adults in the US, asking about their regard for different groups of individuals, including religious leaders, police officers, and medical scientists. The proportion of the survey takers who said they had a great deal of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interest, the researchers found, decreased from 39 percent in November 2020 to 29 percent just one year later. In October 2023, at the lowest point since the pandemic began, only 23 percent reported a great deal of confidence in scientists. A analysis conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research reported a comparable decline: In 2018, 48 percent of respondents reported a great deal of confidence in scientists; in 2022, it was down to just 39 percent.

But years later, a new survey conducted in October 2024 suggested that the dip in trust may have been temporary. An update to the Pew survey that sought input from almost 10,000 adults in the US shows a slow recovery: Compared to the 23 percent, now 26 percent report having a great deal of confidence.

Similarly, a 2024 study examining attitudes toward scientific expertise during a 63-year period found that Trump and Republican attacks on science, in general, did not actually sway public trust when comparing responses in 2016 to those from 2020. And a recent international survey that asked nearly 72,000 individuals in 68 countries their thoughts on scientists revealed that most people trust scientists and want them to be a part of the policy making process.

“There are still lots of people who have at least a kind of soft inclination to have confidence or trust in scientists, to act in the interests of the public,” said Funk. “And so majorities of Americans, majorities even of Republicans, have that view.”

But while public trust in general seems to be resilient, that finding becomes more complex on closer inspection. Confidence can remain high and increase for some groups, while simultaneously declining in others. The same study that looked at Trump’s influence on trust during his first administration, for instance, found that some polarization grew stronger on both ends of the spectrum. “Twelve percent of USA adults became more skeptical of scientific expertise in response to Trump’s dismissal of science, but 20 percent increased their trust in scientific expertise during the same period,” the study noted. Meanwhile, the neutral middle shrank: In 2016, 76 percent reported that they had no strong opinions on their trust in science. In 2020, that plunged to 29 percent.

The COVID-19 pandemic also seems to have had a pronounced effect on that gap: Consistently, research conducted after the pandemic shows that people with conservative ideologies distrust science more than those who are left-leaning. Overall, Republicans’ confidence in science fell 23 points from 2018 to 2022, dropping by half. Another recent poll shows declining confidence, specifically in Republican individuals, in health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. This distrust was likely driven by the politicization of pandemic policies, such as masking, vaccine mandates, and lockdowns, according to commentaries from experts.

The international survey of individuals in 68 countries did not find a relationship between trust in science and political orientation. Rod Abhari, a PhD candidate at Northwestern University who studies the role of digital media on trust, told Undark this suggests that conservative skepticism toward science is not rooted in ideology but is instead a consequence of deliberate politicization by corporations and Republican pundits. “Republican politicians have successfully mobilized the conspiracy and resistance to scientists—and not just scientists, but government agencies that represent science and medicine and nutrition,” he added.

“Prior to the outbreak,” said Funk, “views of something like medical researchers, medical doctors, medical scientists, were not particularly divided by politics.”

Second time around

So, what does this research mean for a second Trump term?

One thing that experts have noticed is that rather than distrusting specific types of scientists, such as climate change researchers, conservatives have begun to lump scientists across specialties and have more distrust of scientists in general, said Funk.

Going forward, Abhari predicted, “the scope of what science is politicized will expand” beyond hot-button topics like climate change. “I think it’ll become more existential, where science funding in general will become on the chopping block,” he said in mid-January. With the recent temporary suspensions on research grant reviews and payments for researchers and talk of mass layoffs and budget cuts at the National Science Foundation, scientists are already worried about how science funding will be affected.

This weaponization of science has contributed and will continue to lead to eroding trust, said Contessa. Already, topics like the effects of gas stoves on health have been weaponized by entities with political and economic motivation like the gas production companies, he pointed out. “It shows you really any topic, anything” can be used to sow skepticism in scientists, he said.

Many experts emphasize strategies to strengthen overall trust, close the partisan gap, and avoid further politicization of science.

Christine Marizzi, who leads a science education effort in Harlem for a nonprofit organization called BioBus, highlights the need for community engagement to make science more visible and accessible to improve scientists’ credibility among communities.

Ultimately, Abhari said, scientists need to be outspoken about the politicization of science to be able to regain individuals’ trust. This “will feel uncomfortable because science has typically tried to brand itself as being apolitical, but I think it’s no longer possible,” Abhari said. “It’s sort of the political reality of the situation.”

The increasing polarization in public trust is concerning, said Funk. So “it’s an important time to be making efforts to widen trust in science.”

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

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despite-court-orders,-climate-and-energy-programs-stalled-by-trump-freeze

Despite court orders, climate and energy programs stalled by Trump freeze

climate change, environmental justice, EPA, Policy, Science, syndication, trump administration / /

Chief of the EPA is also trying to claw back $20 billion, citing alleged wrongdoing.

President Donald Trump’s freeze on federal funding shows little sign of thawing for climate, energy and environmental justice programs.

Despite two federal court orders directing the administration to resume distributing federal grants and loans, at least $19 billion in Environmental Protection Agency funding to thousands of state and local governments and nonprofits remained on hold as of Feb. 14, said environmental and legal advocates who are tracking the issue.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has vowed to seek return of an additional $20 billion the agency invested last year in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program, calling for a Department of Justice investigation into what he characterized as a “scheme… purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight.”

Environmental advocates said Zeldin was unfairly smearing the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or “green bank,” program, on which EPA worked for more than a year with the Treasury Department to design a standard financial agent arrangement—the kind the government has used many times before to collect and distribute funds.

Critics believe the Trump administration, thwarted last week in its effort to get an appeals court to reinstate its sweeping government-wide freeze on federal funding, is resorting to a new tactic—labeling individual programs as nefarious or fraudulent. Although that approach has met with some success—a federal judge last week allowed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to freeze $80 million in funding from a migrant shelter program in New York—legal experts said courts will be looking for specifics and evidence, not broad assertions that programs are improper.

“They cannot challenge an entire program based on charges of fraud and waste,” said Jillian Blanchard, a vice president of the nonprofit Lawyers for Good Government. “If they had actual concerns about fraud or waste, they would need to follow clear procedures and protocols in the regulations, going grant by grant to address this, but that’s not what’s happening here. They are challenging entire programs whole cloth without evidence.

“The executive does not have the authority to change policies simply because they don’t like them,” Blanchard said at a virtual briefing for reporters on Friday. “Congress makes the law, not the president and certainly not Elon Musk,” she said, referring to the billionaire donor whom Trump has deputized to cut government spending.

Feeling the freeze

Across the country, the spending freeze has thrown into chaos the environmental, resilience and community improvement programs that Congress authorized in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Among the efforts on hold: clean drinking water, air monitoring, hurricane recovery and electric school buses.

“Real people on the ground are being hurt by the stop-start situation,” said Blanchard, whose group is working with the Natural Resources Defense Council on the cases of 230 grantees in 44 states.

Grantees are in a state of confusion because they have not heard directly from EPA, she said.

Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, a coalition of former EPA employees that is also working with Lawyers for Good Government, said many grantees are not sure what is happening because the agency’s employees have been forbidden to talk to people outside of the agency.

Several grantees reached by Inside Climate News said that they were not talking to the press, or did not want to say whether or not they could access their funding.

MDC, a nonprofit in Durham, North Carolina, along with the Hispanic Federation, was supposed to receive a $3 million environmental justice community change grant for disaster recovery and resilience programs in Latino areas of eastern North Carolina.

“We were thrilled to receive federal support to do this work, but unfortunately, like many others, we have experienced an interruption in accessing this funding,” said Clarissa Goodlett, MDC’s director of communications.

Many neighborhoods, especially those that are home to low-income, Black and Latino residents, are still rebuilding from hurricanes that hit in 2016 and 2018.

During the storms, rural counties in eastern North Carolina did not provide real-time emergency alerts or evacuation orders in Spanish, according to Enlace Latino NC, a Spanish-language digital news outlet.

The MDC grant would help Latinos connect with local governments to ensure their communities are included in discussions and decisions about the impact of climate disasters.

“We are investigating and pursuing whatever options and channels are available to us to ensure we can follow through on our commitment to communities in eastern North Carolina,” Goodlett said.

Dorothy Darr, executive director of the Southwest Renewal Foundation in High Point, near Greensboro, North Carolina, said she doesn’t know if the group’s $18.4 million grant is frozen. Southwest Renewal is teaming up with eight partners to support not only environmental projects—tree planting, water testing and building an urban greenway—but also workforce training and infrastructure improvements. These include upgrades to old, leaking sewer lines and inefficient HVAC systems and a new energy-efficient “cool” roof at a Guilford County school.

The money would also pay for nine new public electric vehicle charging stations, anti-littering campaigns and other improvements in historically Black and low-income neighborhoods in the southwest part of the city.

Darr said the foundation only recently received an account number from the EPA, and she plans to try to access the funds Monday.

“The grant title”—Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change Grants—”has the words ‘environment’ and ‘justice’ in it,” Darr said. “If you’re just slashing programs based on words, then we’re a sitting duck.”

In Texas, the nonprofit group Downwiders at Risk received word in a Feb. 4 letter that it had received a $500,000 EPA environmental justice “collaborative problem-solving” grant it had applied for last year. The money was to be used to install community air monitors in neighborhoods near Dallas. But the notification didn’t provide instructions on how to access the money, and no followup ever came.

Executive Director Caleb Roberts called around his local EPA office, but no one could give answers.

“People are still unsure. Our project officer at the EPA has no idea. I’ve emailed people higher up,” Roberts said. “They have no idea if things are funded or not. They are just as in the dark as we are.”

Downwinders’ award letter said they had 21 days to pull their first block of funding. If no instructions to access the money arrive before then, Robert worries they may lose it.

The city of New Haven, Connecticut, only received word on Jan. 21—the day after Trump’s inauguration—that it and its local nonprofit partners had received a $20 million environmental justice community change grant, according to Steve Winter, who heads up the city’s Office of Climate and Sustainability. But he had never been able to access the funds; the online system originally said “unavailable for payment;” that changed on Feb. 10 to “suspended.”

The money was supposed to help fund whole-home energy efficiency retrofits in a city where one-quarter of the population lives in poverty and where energy costs have skyrocketed since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, Winter said. Connecticut, like much of New England, relies heavily on heating oil in winter—not only the most expensive home heating fuel, but the most polluting. The grants also would have helped with asbestos and mold remediation in the homes, which are necessary before energy efficiency upgrades can be done.

Winter said the city has warned its partners that they now may need to lay off staff that they’ve hired for outreach for energy efficiency programs, and the future of a community geothermal project is at risk. Also up in the air: a local food rescue organization’s plans to increase staff and food storage capacity.

“People might say, oh this environmental justice grant is some frivolous thing, but it’s about helping people with quality affordable housing, with lowering their energy bills, alleviating hunger in the community, providing affordable transportation options,” Winter said. “These are all trying to meet basic needs that also have an environmental impact.”

A “rush job” accusation

The Trump administration’s drive to root out “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI programs, throughout the government has swept up environmental justice programs at EPA, even though the two are distinct policy initiatives similar only in that they often involve people of color. After taking office two weeks ago, the first employees that Zeldin announced he was eliminating from the agency were those in DEI and environmental justice programs.

“The previous Administration used DEI and Environmental Justice to advance ideological priorities, distributing billions of dollars to organizations in the name of climate equity,” Zeldin said in a statement. “This ends now. We will be good stewards of tax dollars and do everything in our power to deliver clean air, land, and water to every American, regardless of race, religion, background, and creed.”

Last week, as thousands more employees at EPA and other federal agencies were placed on administrative leave or accepted the deferred retirement offer, Zeldin escalated his critiques on environmental justice and climate programs.

In a video first posted on X, Musk’s social media platform, on Wednesday night,

Zeldin called out $20 billion for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that he said had been “parked at an outside financial institution,” suggesting that the money was given away in a “rush job” in the waning days of the Biden administration. In fact, the money in question was awarded to eight recipients in August, well before the election. The program’s defenders say it went through a rigorous selection process that began more than a year before the awards were announced.

The $20 billion falls under two programs within the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and is intended to support nonprofits and financial institutions to serve as green banks. The eight recipients, which received between $400,000 and $7 billion, are supposed to use that money to finance projects by businesses and nonprofits around the country that would cut climate pollution. Much of the money is dedicated to low-income communities, where it is often harder for businesses to raise private financing.

The recipients have already begun using the funding to support businesses, including $250 million for an electric truck financing program beginning at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, $31.8 million in financing for a solar project for the University of Arkansas System and $10.8 million for solar projects on Tribal lands in Oregon and Idaho.

Electric truck

An electric truck is delivered to the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, Calif. on Dec. 17, 2021.

Credit: Brittany Murray/MediaNews Group/Long Beach Press-Telegram via Getty Images

An electric truck is delivered to the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, Calif. on Dec. 17, 2021. Credit: Brittany Murray/MediaNews Group/Long Beach Press-Telegram via Getty Images

Unlike most of the grant recipients under the IRA, who draw down their money over time as work is completed, the green banks already received their money. Zealan Hoover, who administered IRA programs at EPA during the Biden administration, said the money was placed into bank accounts at Citibank under terms of financial agreements worked out with the Treasury Department.

Although EPA had never used such an outside financial agent before, the Treasury Department had made such agreements with outside institutions many times in the past to distribute or collect money. The system used for electronic federal tax payments, for expanding access to retirement savings and for getting money to assist businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic are just a few of the examples he cited.

“What is underway is not a good-faith effort to fight fraud,” Hoover said. “If it was, federal agencies would not be firing thousands of employees who are hired to conduct robust management and oversight of these programs.”

Zeldin said he was calling for termination of the financial agent agreement for the green bank program, and for the immediate return of the entire fund balance to the United States Treasury. He also said he was referring the issue to the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General and Congress and would “work with the U.S. Department of Justice.” In fact, EPA’s inspector general was dismissed in the early days of the Trump administration along with those at 16 other agencies. EPA’s press office said the agency currently has an acting inspector general but when asked, did not respond with that person’s name. EPA did not answer further questions on the financial agent program, referring only to Zeldin’s video post.

“The American public deserves a more transparent and accountable government than what transpired the past four years,” Zeldin said in the post. “We take our obligations under the law as seriously as it gets. I’ve directed my team to find your ‘gold bars’ and they found them. Now we will get them back inside of control of government as we pursue next steps.”

Citibank declined to comment. Each of the eight recipients of the green bank funds either declined to comment or did not reply to requests for comment.

“Hard for courts to catch up”

What happens next for the grant recipients is not entirely clear. Courts have issued temporary restraining orders to halt the funding freeze until the issue can be argued on its merits. In a five-page order issued Feb. 10, U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. of Rhode Island said that it was clear that the administration had in some instances continued “to improperly freeze federal funds.”

McConnell ordered the administration to “immediately end any funding pause,” but EPA and other agencies that are administering IRA climate programs, like the Department of Energy, are continuing to hold back funds.

“We’re talking about funding for families to make upgrades that help them save on their monthly energy bill, funding for people to buy energy efficient appliances and to retrofit their home so that cold air stays out in the winter and hot air stays out in the summer,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, in a briefing with reporters on Thursday. “Those programs aren’t just important to tackling the climate crisis. They are saving our families money.”

“What is painfully clear is that Trump’s illegal funding freeze is causing chaos and confusion,” Murray said.

But Murray and other Democrats, who helped shepherd the IRA to passage in 2022 with no Republican votes, now have little power to force a showdown in a Congress controlled by Republicans. And although multiple studies have shown that most of the $379 billion Congress devoted to funding the clean energy transition in that legislation has flowed to Republican districts, there has been little sign so far that GOP leaders are inclined to clash with the administration. In a few instances, Republicans have sought protection for individual programs that affect their own states.

Blanchard and other legal experts said the courts will have the final say on whether the Trump administration can continue to selectively freeze federal funds. But the decisions may not come soon enough for the programs that are relying on the money they were promised.

“The problem is, as a practical matter, it’s very hard for the courts to catch up,” said Richard Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Harvard Law School. “And the impact on these communities is immediate. The place is closed down, the services aren’t provided for these communities. So the impact can be immediate and devastating, and the practical remedy may be illusory.”

Lazarus was one of the legal scholars writing about environmental justice in the 1990s, before President Bill Clinton signed the first executive order to address communities that suffer a disproportionate burden of pollution. He said that although these communities now “have a fight on their hands,” it is not a new situation for them.

“It’s not as though the government turning against their hardship is something the EJ communities don’t know,” he said. “They don’t welcome it, but they know what this is. It’s how they’ve lived their lives for decades. They fought, and they’ll continue to fight. And that’ll be fighting in cases and lawsuits, and it’ll be fighting politically.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Photo of Inside Climate News

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