syndication – Page 12

Sen. Susan Collins blasts Trump for cuts to scientific research

public health, Science, syndication / Paul Patrick / May 2, 2025

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) kicked off a Wednesday hearing criticizing the Trump administration for cutting science funding, firing federal scientists, and triggering policy uncertainties that she said threaten to undermine the foundation for America’s global leadership.

Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said the administration’s abrupt cancellation of grants and laying off scientists has little or no justification. “These actions put our leadership in biomedical innovation at real risk and must be reversed,” she said.

Her warning came as American University’s Institute for Macroeconomic & Policy Analysis published a study Wednesday showing how major cuts to federal funding for scientific research could cause economic damage equivalent to a major recession.

In the first 100 days of Trump 2.0, the administration has fired 1,300 employees from the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, and canceled more than $2 billion in federal research grants.

Earlier this week, the administration dismissed all the scientists and other authors working on the next authoritative look at how climate change is affecting the US.

In one such cutback, the Trump administration stripped almost $4 million in federal funding from Princeton’s climate research department as it determined that Princeton’s work did not align with the objectives of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The White House said Princeton’s research on topics including sea level rise, coastal flooding, and global warming promoted “exaggerated and implausible climate threats,” according to a US Department of Commerce press release earlier this month explaining the funding cuts.

The White House is expected to propose additional reductions in discretionary spending as part of the annual budget process. Federal agencies like the NIH and the National Science Foundation are among the few funding basic and applied scientific research.

The study, from a group of American University economists, is among the first to run preliminary macroeconomic estimates of the cost of the Department of Government Efficiency and the Trump administration’s cuts to public spending on science.

Sen. Susan Collins blasts Trump for cuts to scientific research Read More »

Millions of Apple Airplay-enabled devices can be hacked via Wi-Fi

AirPlay, Apple, Biz & IT, Security, syndication / Mike M. / May 1, 2025

Oligo also notes that many of the vulnerable devices have microphones and could be turned into listening devices for espionage. The researchers did not go so far as to create proof-of-concept malware for any particular target that would demonstrate that trick.

Oligo says it warned Apple about its AirBorne findings in the late fall and winter of last year, and Apple responded in the months since then by pushing out security updates. The researchers collaborated with Apple to test and validate the fixes for Macs and other Apple products.

Apple tells WIRED that it has also created patches that are available for impacted third-party devices. The company emphasizes, though, that there are limitations to the attacks that would be possible on AirPlay-enabled devices as a result of the bugs, because an attacker must be on the same Wi-Fi network as a target to exploit them. Apple adds that while there is potentially some user data on devices like TVs and speakers, it is typically very limited.

Below is a video of the Oligo researchers demonstrating their AirBorne hacking technique to take over an AirPlay-enabled Bose speaker to show their company’s logo for AirBorne. (The researchers say they didn’t intend to single out Bose, but just happened to have one of the company’s speakers on hand for testing.) Bose did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Speaker Demo. Courtesy of Oligo

The AirBorne vulnerabilities Oligo found also affect CarPlay, the radio protocol used to connect to vehicles’ dashboard interfaces. Oligo warns that this means hackers could hijack a car’s automotive computer, known as its head unit, in any of more than 800 CarPlay-enabled car and truck models. In those car-specific cases, though, the AirBorne vulnerabilities could only be exploited if the hacker is able to pair their own device with the head unit via Bluetooth or a USB connection, which drastically restricts the threat of CarPlay-based vehicle hacking.

The AirPlay SDK flaws in home media devices, by contrast, may present a more practical vulnerability for hackers seeking to hide on a network, whether to install ransomware or carry out stealthy espionage, all while hiding on devices that are often forgotten by both consumers and corporate or government network defenders. “The amount of devices that were vulnerable to these issues, that’s what alarms me,” says Oligo researcher Uri Katz. “When was the last time you updated your speaker?”

Millions of Apple Airplay-enabled devices can be hacked via Wi-Fi Read More »

Montana’s Republican legislators fight back after successful youth climate lawsuit

climate change, climate lawsuit, montana, Policy, syndication / Rejus Almole / April 30, 2025

Montana Environmental Policy Act

Republican backlash could lead to changes in Montana’s courts and environmental laws.

Supporters gather at a theater next to the court house to watch the court proceedings for the nation’s first youth climate change trial at Montana’s First Judicial District Court on June 12, 2023 in Helena, Montana. Credit: William Campbell via Getty Images

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

In the wake of a high-profile court decision that upended the state of Montana’s climate policy, Republican lawmakers in the state are pushing a suite of bills that could gut the state’s ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The full-court legislative press targets the state’s environmental analysis, air quality regulation, and judicial system. It stems from the Held v. Montana case in which 16 young people sued the state over its contributions to climate change, claiming its fossil fuel-centric approach to energy violated the state constitution’s guarantee of a “clean and healthful environment.” The plaintiffs won, and in December 2024, the Montana Supreme Court upheld their victory.

The case “didn’t just make headlines,” Montana Republican Representative Greg Oblander, a sponsor of one of the bills that could hobble climate action in the state, said in a press conference. “It sent shockwaves through the Montana economy.”

He said the case “was an open invitation for activists to weaponize our environmental laws against the very industries that keep Montana running and Montanans employed.”

The fallout of the Held decision animated the breadth of the state’s 90-day legislative session, poised to end by early May, and bills weakening the state’s bedrock environmental policy are almost certain to be signed into law by the state’s Republican governor. Nonetheless, the battle is likely to continue in the courts.

A clean and healthful environment

The Held decision hinged on Montana’s constitutional protections of the environment. Framers in the state’s 1972 Constitutional Convention took the state’s environmental woes seriously. Extractive industries like mining and logging had left a lasting environmental toll on the air, water, and land in the state, and for decades, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company wielded enormous power at the state legislature, resulting in large-scale mining, logging, and other extractive industry. Today, Montana is home to the largest complex of Superfund sites, or government toxic waste cleanups, in the country.

In response to that environmental degradation, Montana ultimately enshrined some of the strongest environmental protections in the country in its constitution, culminating in the right to “a clean and healthful environment.”

That right played a central role in the Held case. During the trial in the summer of 2023, the state argued that Montana’s contribution to greenhouse gases is but a fraction of a fraction of the world’s pool of emissions.

“Montana’s emissions are simply too minuscule to make any difference,” the state’s attorney argued. “Climate change is a global issue that effectively relegates Montana’s role to that of the spectator.” Meanwhile, the attorney for the young plaintiffs argued that the state’s contributions were equivalent to that of entire countries like the Netherlands, Pakistan, or Argentina, and was actively degrading Montana’s environment.

When the plaintiffs won the case, the state appealed to the Montana Supreme Court. In December 2024, that court also ruled against the state. “Montana’s right to a clean and healthful environment and environmental life support system includes a stable climate system,” Judge Kathy Seeley wrote in the court’s decision.

That decision also hinged on what the state considers when it conducts environmental review.

In 2011, the Montana legislature barred analyses required by the Montana Environmental Policy Act, or MEPA, from considering impacts outside the state. In 2023 the legislature honed MEPA’s focus even more, passing a provision that said greenhouse gas emissions could not be considered in the state’s environmental analyses. That limitation, the Supreme Court ruled, was unconstitutional. MEPA analyses, according to the decision, would have to account for projects’ emissions. Less than a month after the Supreme Court’s decision, Republican legislators set to figuring out how to minimize its impact.

Legislation aims to undercut the Montana Environmental Policy Act

“The backlash [to Held] is profound,” said Anne Hedges, executive director of the Montana Environmental Information Center (MEIC), an organization dedicated to protecting the state’s land, air, and water, in an interview. The pushback, in particular, comes from Republicans in the state, who have strong majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. “Their goal is to prevent the state from being able to do anything to address climate change.”

Part of that backlash came in bills that aimed directly at MEPA. One bill, for example, limits the state to looking only at direct, proximate impacts of projects. This would make upstream or downstream impacts outside the scope of environmental analyses.

In, say, a project to expand a coal mine, the direct emissions associated with extracting the coal would be analyzed, according to the bill, but anything that happens next would be left out.

Montana produces about 5 percent of the country’s coal and contains the largest coal reserves in the US, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Colstrip, the largest coal plant in the state—and the dirtiest in the nation—has a footprint larger than the biggest city in Montana. In 2021 alone, the plant emitted about 11 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. But, under this particular bill, the emissions from burning that coal would not be considered as part of any required MEPA analysis of the plant or of mines that provide it with fuel.

“The Held decision was a gift-wrapped decision for radical environmental activists, an open door for endless lawsuits designed to shut down Montana’s fossil fuel industry,” the sponsor of that bill, Montana Republican Senator Wylie Galt, said in a press conference. “It had nothing to do with protecting our environment and everything to do with weaponizing the courts to strangle our economy.”

But, to opponents of the legislation, it is an intentional effort to ignore the reality of what’s driving climate change. “There’s never anything else to do with coal,” Hedges said. “You burn coal.”

Another bill strikes language that connects MEPA to Montana’s right to a clean and healthful environment and eliminates the ability of analyses to look at long-term impacts of projects. “Montana is a resource-rich state,” that bill’s sponsor, Republican Representative Brandon Ler, said in a press conference. “We have energy, we have agriculture, and we have timber. These industries aren’t just sectors on a spreadsheet. They fund our schools, support our businesses, and keep families together.” Neither Galt nor Ler responded to interview requests for this article.

A final piece of legislation attacking the state’s climate policy, sponsored by Republican Representative Greg Oblander, prevents Montana from implementing air quality standards stricter than those of the federal government. “It’s about making sure that when businesses want to invest in our state, they can do it without fear of being buried under layers of unnecessary regulations,” Oblander said. “Montana is open for business, but only if we keep it that way.”

Taken together, the bills effectively “wash [the legislature’s] hands of the whole problem and there is no way to enforce our right to a healthy climate,” Hedges said.

Proponents of the suite of bills, including mining and oil organizations, the state’s departments of environmental quality and natural resources, chambers of commerce, and other groups, said the bills offer stability, predictability, and certainty. Montana’s emissions, they argued, are but a drop in the global bucket.

“We all share the same air,” said John Iverson, with the Treasure State Resources Association, in a hearing on the air quality bill. “Making one table in a bar the non-smoking table doesn’t do much to improve the air quality. Making one corner of the pool the non-peeing section doesn’t improve your swimming experience.”

Some lawmakers and defendants also questioned the extent to which human-caused climate change is happening at all. “There is a strong sentiment of climate denial in the Capitol,” Hedges said. “They’ll complain about droughts, they’ll complain about wildfires, they will complain about all of the impacts either caused or exacerbated by climate change… but they won’t admit what the problem is and they refuse to do anything about it.”

Other testimony by lawmakers and lobbyists in House and Senate hearings also focused on the state’s constitutionally ordained rights. Along with a clean and healthful environment, the Montana Constitution also grants rights to pursuing life’s basic necessities, protecting liberties and protecting property. The MEPA bills, their supporters argued, help strike a balance between these rights when they butt heads.

In all the hearings, voices opposing the bills—including those of MEIC; conservation groups like Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, Montana Audubon, and Montana Conservation Voters; physicians organizations; citizens and more—have far outnumbered those in favor of the legislation. Testimony focused on the real-time health and environmental impacts of climate change, the importance of the MEPA process and the environmental protections in the Montana constitution.

One additional bill, put forth by a coalition of Democrats, would have revised MEPA to follow the court’s ruling in the Held decision, but it was killed in committee.

Politicizing the judiciary

While legislation directly reacting to Held focused on MEPA and other statutes, another legislative push from Republicans took aim at the branch of government responsible for the decision: the judiciary. Republican frustration with the court system had been building for years, fueled by the Held saga along with other court decisions that blocked laws passed by the legislature rolling back rights for transgender people and abortion access.

After the Held decision, Montana’s Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte put out a statement: “This Court continues to step outside of its lane to tread on the right of the Legislature, the elected representatives of the people, to make policy. This decision does nothing more than declare open season on Montana’s all-of-the-above approach to energy.”

An interim committee of Republican lawmakers put forth more than 27 bills to reform the judiciary ahead of this year’s legislative session. Two could have huge impacts on climate decisions in the courts by politicizing the judiciary. One bill would create a “court of chancery” specifically designed to tackle constitutional questions stemming from legislation. The three judges in that court would be appointed by the governor.

Another bill would politicize the state’s judicial races. Currently, judicial candidates—including state Supreme Court justices—are elected with no official party affiliation. The legislation would make the races partisan, meaning judges can run as Republicans or Democrats. Republican advocates of the legislation contend that through lobbying and campaign contributions, politics have entered the court system already, and this legislation would, as Gianforte argued in his “State of the State” address, “bring light into this darkness” by allowing voters to know the values of the judges for whom they’re voting.

Republican legislators have called the Held plaintiffs and the judges who decided in their favor radicals, activists, even, disparagingly, “little Greta Thunbergs.” Ler, sponsor of one of the MEPA bills, said in a press conference that the judges’ decision in the Held case was driven by an agenda beyond the desire to enforce the constitution’s requirement of a healthy environment. “This isn’t about climate,” he said. “It’s about control.”

Opponents of the judiciary bills—including Montana Supreme Court Chief Justice Cory Swanson—stressed the importance of an independent judicial system as part of the government’s checks and balances.

“You are considering a number of bills that well-respected attorneys are telling you violate the constitutional separation of powers,” Swanson warned lawmakers. “I urge you to listen to those arguments.”

Hedges with the MEIC sees the courts as a scapegoat for those pushing bills to politicize the judiciary. Republican lawmakers, she said, “bitch about the courts on the one hand, but then they give the courts nowhere to turn except to overturn their bills that are unconstitutional. It’s like this little round robin the legislature set up.”

What’s next

All three bills designed to mitigate the impact of Held by limiting the extent to which MEPA can analyze greenhouse gas emissions and the level at which the state can regulate them have passed both chambers of the legislature on party-line votes. Gianforte’s office declined to give an interview about the climate issues being addressed in the legislature, but the governor said in a press conference that he’s looking forward to getting the MEPA bills to his desk.

The bills targeting the judiciary, however, have died—despite being championed by the governor and other powerful Republicans in the legislature. However, things could change. The legislative session will wrap up by early May, and there’s a chance the bills could be revived in another form.

Hedges said the MEPA and air quality bills in particular continue to infringe on Montanans’ right to a clean and healthful environment, and they’re likely to end up in the courts.

“It’s depressing,” she said. “It’s going to take us years to unwind what they’re doing here. And they [Republican lawmakers] know it; to them, that’s a win.”

Montana’s Republican legislators fight back after successful youth climate lawsuit Read More »

50 years later, Vietnam’s environment still bears the scars of war

Science, syndication, vietnam war / Rejus Almole / April 29, 2025

Large amounts of Agent Orange had been stored at the Da Nang airport during the war and contaminated the soil with dioxin. The cleanup project, including heating contaminated soil to high temperatures, was completed in 2018. Credit: Richard Nyberg, USAID

Another major hot spot is the heavily contaminated Biên Hoà airbase, where local residents continue to ingest high levels of dioxin through fish, chicken and ducks.

Agent Orange barrels were stored at the base, which leaked large amounts of the toxin into soil and water, where it continues to accumulate in animal tissue as it moves up the food chain. Remediation began in 2019; however, further work is at risk with the Trump administration’s near elimination of USAID, leaving it unclear if there will be any American experts in Vietnam in charge of administering this complex project.

Laws to prevent future ‘ecocide’ are complicated

While Agent Orange’s health effects have understandably drawn scrutiny, its long-term ecological consequences have not been well studied.

Current-day scientists have far more options than those 50 years ago, including satellite imagery, which is being used in Ukraine to identify fires, flooding, and pollution. However, these tools cannot replace on-the-ground monitoring, which often is restricted or dangerous during wartime.

The legal situation is similarly complex.

In 1977, the Geneva Conventions governing conduct during wartime were revised to prohibit “widespread, long term, and severe damage to the natural environment.” A 1980 protocol restricted incendiary weapons. Yet oil fires set by Iraq during the Gulf War in 1991, and recent environmental damage in the Gaza Strip, Ukraine, and Syria indicate the limits of relying on treaties when there are no strong mechanisms to ensure compliance.

Remediation work to remove dioxin contamination was just getting started at the former Biên Hoà Air Base in Vietnam when USAID’s staff was dismantled in 2025. Credit: USAID Vietnam

An international campaign currently underway calls for an amendment to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to add ecocide as a fifth prosecutable crime alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression.

Some countries have adopted their own ecocide laws. Vietnam was the first to legally state in its penal code that “Ecocide, destroying the natural environment, whether committed in time of peace or war, constitutes a crime against humanity.” Yet the law has resulted in no prosecutions, despite several large pollution cases.

Both Russia and Ukraine also have ecocide laws, but these have not prevented harm or held anyone accountable for damage during the ongoing conflict.

Lessons for the future

The Vietnam War is a reminder that failure to address ecological consequences, both during war and after, will have long-term effects. What remains in short supply is the political will to ensure that these impacts are neither ignored nor repeated.

Pamela McElwee, Professor of Human Ecology, Rutgers University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

50 years later, Vietnam’s environment still bears the scars of war Read More »

Ghost forests are growing as sea levels rise

ghost forest, rising sea, Science, sea level rise, syndication / Paul Patrick / April 20, 2025

Like giant bones planted in the earth, clusters of tree trunks, stripped clean of bark, are appearing along the Chesapeake Bay on the United States’ mid-Atlantic coast. They are ghost forests: the haunting remains of what were once stands of cedar and pine. Since the late 19th century, an ever-widening swath of these trees have died along the shore. And they won’t be growing back.

These arboreal graveyards are showing up in places where the land slopes gently into the ocean and where salty water increasingly encroaches. Along the United States’ East Coast, in pockets of the West Coast, and elsewhere, saltier soils have killed hundreds of thousands of acres of trees, leaving behind woody skeletons typically surrounded by marsh.

What happens next? That depends. As these dead forests transition, some will become marshes that maintain vital ecosystem services, such as buffering against storms and storing carbon. Others may become home to invasive plants or support no plant life at all—and the ecosystem services will be lost. Researchers are working to understand how this growing shift toward marshes and ghost forests will, on balance, affect coastal ecosystems.

Many of the ghost forests are a consequence of sea level rise, says coastal ecologist Keryn Gedan of George Washington University in Washington, DC, coauthor of an article on the salinization of coastal ecosystems in the 2025 Annual Review of Marine Science. Rising sea levels can bring more intense storm surges that flood saltwater over the top of soil. Drought and sea level rise can shift the groundwater table along the coast, allowing saltwater to journey farther inland, beneath the forest floor. Trees, deprived of fresh water, are stressed as salt accumulates.

Yet the transition from living forest to marsh isn’t necessarily a tragedy, Gedan says. Marshes are important features of coastal ecosystems, too. And the shift from forest to marsh has happened throughout periods of sea level rise in the past, says Marcelo Ardón, an ecosystem ecologist and biogeochemist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

“You would think of these forests and marshes kind of dancing together up and down the coast,” he says.

Marshes provide many ecosystem benefits. They are habitats for birds and crustaceans, such as salt marsh sparrows, marsh wrens, crabs, and mussels. They are also a niche for native salt-tolerant plants, like rushes and certain grasses, which provide food and shelter for animals.

Ghost forests are growing as sea levels rise Read More »

14 reasons why Trump’s tariffs won’t bring manufacturing back

manufacturing, Policy, syndication, tariffs / Rejus Almole / April 17, 2025

Op-ed: Trump administration grossly underestimates difficulty of their stated task.

Molson Hart is the founder and president of Viahart, an educational toy company. To see what he’s up to, follow him on X, or watch his educational videos on TikTok.

On April 2, 2025, our president announced major new taxes on imports from foreign countries (“tariffs”), ranging from 10 percent to 49 percent. The stated goal is to bring manufacturing back to the United States and to “make America wealthy again.”

These tariffs will not work. In fact, they may even do the opposite, fail to bring manufacturing back, and make America poorer in the process.

This article gives the 14 reasons why this is the case, how the United States could bring manufacturing back if it were serious about doing so, and what will ultimately happen with this wrongheaded policy.

I’ve been in the manufacturing industry for 15 years. I’ve manufactured in the US and in China. I worked in a factory in China. I speak and read Chinese. I’ve purchased millions of dollars’ worth of goods from the US and China, but also Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Cambodia. I’ve also visited many factories in Mexico and consider myself a student of how countries rise and fall.

In other words, unlike many who have voiced an opinion on this topic, I know what I am talking about. And that’s why I felt compelled to write this article. I had to do it. I’m a first-generation American, and I love my country, and it pains me to see it hurtling at high speed towards an economic brick wall. This article is an attempt to hit the brakes.

1. They’re not high enough

iPhone 15 in all of its colors — The iPhone 15 has been manufactured both in China and India. Credit: Apple

A tariff is a tax on an imported product. For example, when Apple imports an iPhone that was made in China, it declares to the United States government what it paid to make that product overseas. Let’s say it’s $100. When there is a 54 percent tariff, Apple pays $100 to the manufacturer in China and $54 to the US government when importing. In this simplified example, an iPhone used to cost Apple $100, but it now costs $154. For every dollar Apple spends, Apple needs to make a profit. So Apple sells iPhones to stores for double what it pays for them. And stores sell iPhones to consumers like you and me for double what it pays for them, as well.

Before the tariffs, prices looked like this:

Apple bought iPhones it designed for $100
Apple sold iPhones for $200 to stores
Stores sold iPhones to you and me for $400

After the tariffs, prices look like this:

Apple bought iPhones for $154 ($100 + $54 in import taxes)
Apple sells those iPhones for $308 (double what it paid)
Stores sell those iPhones to you and me for $616 (double what they paid)

Now that you know what a tariff is, let me tell you why they aren’t high enough to bring manufacturing back to the United States.

In short, manufacturing in the United States is so expensive, and our supply chain (we’ll explain that next) is so bad that making that iPhone in the United States without that 54 percent tariff would still cost more than in China with a 54 percent tariff. Since it still costs less to make the iPhone in China, both Apple and consumers would prefer it be made there, so it will, and not in the USA.

2. America’s industrial supply chain for many products is weak

Think of a supply chain as a company’s ability to get the components it needs to build a finished product. Suppose you wanted to build and sell wooden furniture. You’re going to need wood, nails, glue, etc. Otherwise, you can’t do it. If you want to build an iPhone, you need to procure a glass screen, shaped metal, and numerous internal electronic components.

Now you might be thinking, “What do you mean America has a weak supply chain? I’ve built furniture; I’ve assembled a computer. I can get everything I want at Home Depot and at Amazon.”

That’s because America has an amazing consumer supply chain, one of the best, if not the best, in the world, but this is totally different from having an industrial supply chain.

When you’re operating a furniture factory, you need an industrial quantity of wood, more wood than any Home Depot near you has in store. And you need it fast and cheap. It turns out that the United States has a good supply chain for wood, which is why, despite higher wages, we export chopsticks to China. We have abundant cheap wood in the forests of the northern United States. But if you decided to move that chopstick factory to desert Saudi Arabia, you would not succeed, because their supply chain for wood is poor; there simply aren’t any trees for thousands of miles.

When it comes to the iPhone, all the factories that make the needed components are in Asia, which is one reason why, even with a 54 percent tariff, it’s cheaper to assemble that iPhone in China than in the United States. It’s cheaper and faster to get those components from nearby factories in Asia than it is to get them from the US, which, because said factories no longer exist here, has to buy these components from Asia anyway.

Supply chains sound complicated but aren’t. If you can’t get the components you need at a reasonable price and timeline to build a finished product, it doesn’t matter what the tariffs are, you have to import it, because you can’t build it locally.

3. We don’t know how to make it

Fabrication plant — TSMC Fab 16. Credit: TSMC

Apple knows how to build an iPhone but may not know how to make the individual components. It may seem trivial to make that glass that separates your finger from the electronic engineering that powers your ability to access the Internet, but it’s difficult.

The world buys semiconductors from Taiwan, not just because it’s relatively inexpensive (but more expensive than China) labor and excellent supply chain, but because they know how to make the best semiconductors in the world. Even with infinite money, we cannot duplicate that, because we lack the know-how.

A 54 percent tariff does not solve that problem. We still need to buy semiconductors from Taiwan, which is perhaps why the administration put in an exception for semiconductors, because we need them and because we can’t make them without their help.

This is a problem that applies to more than just semiconductors. We have forgotten how to make products people wrongly consider to be basic, too.

My company makes educational toys from plastic called Brain Flakes. To make Brain Flakes, you melt plastic and force it into shaped metal molds. Were we to import the machines and molds needed to do this, it would work for a little while, but as soon as one of those molds broke, we’d be in trouble, because there are almost no moldmakers left in the United States. The people who knew how to build and repair molds have either passed away or are long retired. In the event of a problem, we’d have to order a new mold from China or send ours back, shutting down production for months.

People trivialize the complexity and difficulty of manufacturing when it’s really hard. And if we don’t know how to make something, it doesn’t matter what the tariff is. It won’t get made in America.

4. The effective cost of labor in the United States is higher than it looks

Most people think that the reason why we make products in China instead of the United States is cheaper labor. That’s true, but it’s not the whole story. Frankly, the whole story is hard to read. People are not machines, they are not numbers on a spreadsheet or inputs into a manufacturing cost formula. I respect everyone who works hard and the people I have worked with over the years, and I want Americans to live better, happier lives.

Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.

In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.

Chinese workers are much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60 percent of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.

And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.

Chinese workers work longer hours more happily, and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.

Sadly, what I describe above are not theoretical situations. These are things that I have experienced or seen with my own eyes. It’s fixable, but the American workforce needs great improvement in order to compete with the world’s, even with tariffs.

So yes, Chinese wages are lower, but there are many countries with wages lower than China’s. It’s the work ethic, knowhow, commitment, combined with top-notch infrastructure, that makes China the most powerful manufacturing country in the world today.

5. We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture

The inputs to manufacturing are not just materials, labor, and knowhow. You need infrastructure like electricity and good roads for transportation, too.

Since the year 2000, US electricity generation per person has been flat. In China, over the same time period, it has increased 400 percent. China generates over twice as much electricity per person today as the United States. Why?

Manufacturing.

To run the machines that make the products we use, you need electricity, a lot of it. We already have electricity instability in this country. Without the construction of huge amounts of new energy infrastructure, like nuclear power plants, we cannot meaningfully increase our manufacturing output.

And it would put huge stress on our roads and create lots more dangerous traffic. When we import finished goods from foreign countries, a truck delivers them from the port or the airport to distribution centers, stores, and where we live and work.

When you start manufacturing, every single component, from factory to factory, needs to be moved, increasing the number of trucks on the road many times.

Paving more roads, modernizing our seaports, improving our airports, speeding up our train terminals, and building power plants in the costliest nation in the world to build is a huge undertaking that people are not appreciating when they say “well, we’ll just make it in America.”

6. Made in America will take time

We placed a $50,000 order with our supplier overseas before the election in November 2024. At the time of ordering, there were no import taxes on the goods. By the time it arrived, a 20 percent tariff had been applied, and we had a surprise bill for $10,000. It can easily take 180 days for many products to go from order to on your doorstep, and this tariff policy seems not to understand that.

It takes at least, in the most favorable of jurisdictions, two years (if you can get the permits) to build a factory in the United States. I know because I’ve done it. From there, it can take six months to a year for it to become efficient. It can take months for products to come off the assembly lines. All this ignores all the infrastructure that will need to be built (new roads, new power plants, etc.) to service the new factory.

By the time “made in America” has begun, we will be electing a new president.

7. Uncertainty and complexity around the tariffs

An unfinished Ghost Gunner awaits parts at Defense Distributed’s manufacturing facility. Credit: Lee Hutchinson

To start manufacturing in the United States, a company needs to make a large investment. They will need to buy new machinery, and if no existing building is suitable, they will need to construct a new building. These things cost money, a lot, in fact, and significantly more in the USA than they do in other countries. In exchange for this risk, there must be some reward. If that reward is uncertain, no one will do it.

Within the past month, the president put a 25 percent tariff on Mexico and then got rid of it, only to apply it again and then get rid of it a second time. Then, last week, he was expected to apply new tariffs to Mexico but didn’t.

If you’re building a new factory in the United States, your investment will alternate between maybe it will work, and catastrophic loss according to which way the tariffs and the wind blow. No one is building factories right now, and no one is renting them, because there is no certainty that any of these tariffs will last. How do I know? I built a factory in Austin, Texas, in an industrial area. I cut its rent 40 percent two weeks ago, and I can’t get a lick of interest from industrial renters.

The tariffs have frozen business activity because no one wants to take a big risk dependent on a policy that may change next week.

Even further, the tariffs are confusing, poorly communicated, and complex. Today, if you want to import something from China, you need to add the original import duty, plus a 20 percent “fentanyl tariff,” plus a 34 percent “reciprocal tariff,” and an additional 25 percent “Venezuelan oil” tariff, should it be determined that China is buying Venezuelan oil. The problem is, there is no list of countries that are importing Venezuelan oil provided by the White House, so you don’t know if you do or don’t need to add that 25 percent, and you also don’t know when any of these tariffs will go into effect because of unclear language.

As such, you can’t calculate your costs, either with certainty or accuracy; therefore, not only do you not build a factory in the United States, you cease all business activity, the type of thing that can cause a recession, if not worse.

For the past month, as someone who runs a business in this industry, I have spent a huge portion of my time just trying to keep up with the constant changes instead of running my business.

8. Most Americans are going to hate manufacturing

Americans want less crime, good schools for their kids, and inexpensive health care.

They don’t want to be sewing shirts.

The people most excited about this new tariff policy tend to be those who’ve never actually made anything, because if you have, you’d know how hard the work is.

When I first went to China as a naive 24-year-old, I told my supplier I was going to “work a day in his factory!” I lasted four hours. It was freezing cold, middle of winter; I had to crouch on a small stool, hunched over, assembling little parts with my fingers at one-quarter the speed of the women next to me. My back hurt, my fingers hurt. It was horrible. That’s a lot of manufacturing.

And enjoy the blackouts, the dangerous trucks on the road, the additional pollution, etc. Be careful what you wish for America. Doing office work and selling ideas and assets is a lot easier than making actual things.

9. The labor does not exist to make good products

There are over a billion people in China making stuff. As of right now there are 12 million people looking for work in the United States (4 percent unemployment). Ignoring for a moment the comparative inefficiency of labor and the billions of people making products outside of China, where are the people who are going to do these jobs? Do you simply say “make America great again” three times and they will appear with the skills needed to do the work?

And where are the managers to manage these people? One of the reasons why manufacturing has declined in the United States is a brain drain toward sectors that make more money. Are people who make money on the stock market, in real estate, in venture capital, and in startups going to start sewing shirts? It’s completely and totally unrealistic to assume that people will move from superficially high productivity sectors driven by US Dollar strength to products that are low on the value chain.

The United States is trying to bring back the jobs that China doesn’t even want. They have policies to reduce low-value manufacturing, yet we are applying tariffs to bring it back. It’s incomprehensible.

10. Automation will not save us

Most people think that the reason why American manufacturing is not competitive is labor costs. Most people think this can be solved by automation.

They’re wrong.

First, China, on a yearly basis, installs 7x as many industrial robots as we do in the United States. Second, Chinese robots are cheaper. Third, most of today’s manufacturing done by people cannot be automated. If it could, it would have already been done so, by China, which, again, has increasingly high labor costs relative to the rest of the world.

The robots you see on social media doing backflips are, today, mostly for show and unreliable off camera. They are not useful in industrial environments where, if a humanoid robot can do it, an industrial machine that is specialized in the task can do it even better. For example, instead of having a humanoid robot doing a repetitive task such as carrying a box from one station to another, you can simply set up a cheaper, faster conveyor belt.

Said another way, the printer in your office is cheaper and more efficient than both a human and a humanoid robot with a pen hand drawing each letter.

It’s unlikely that American ingenuity will be able to counter the flood of Chinese industrial robots that is coming. The first commercially electrical vehicle was designed and built in the United States, but today China is dominating electric vehicle manufacturing across the world. Industrial robots will likely be the same story.

11. Robots and overseas factory workers don’t file lawsuits, but Americans do

Ford is adding artificial intelligence to its robotic assembly lines.

I probably should not have written this article. Not only will I be attacked for being unpatriotic, but what I have written here makes me susceptible to employment lawsuits. For the record, I don’t use a person’s origin to determine whether or not they will do good work. I just look at the person and what they’re capable of. Doing otherwise is bad business because there are talented people everywhere.

America has an extremely litigious business environment, both in terms of regulation and employment lawsuits. Excessive regulation and an inefficient court system will stifle those with the courage to make products in this country.

12. Enforcement of the tariffs will be uneven and manipulated

Imagine two companies that import goods into the United States. One is based in China, while the other is based in the United States. They both lie about the value of their goods so that they have to pay less tariffs.

What happens to the China company? Perhaps they lose a shipment when it’s seized by the US government for cheating, but they won’t pay additional fines because they’re in China, where they’re impervious to the US legal system.

What happens to the USA company? Owners go to prison.

Who do you think is going to cheat more on tariffs, the China or the US company?

Exactly.

So, in other words, paradoxically, the policies that are designed to help Americans will hurt them more than the competition these policies are designed to punish.

13. The tariff policies are structured in the wrong way

Why didn’t the jobs come back in 2018 when we initiated our last trade war? We applied tariffs; why didn’t it work?

Instead of making America great, we made Vietnam great.

When the United States applied tariffs to China, it shifted huge amounts of manufacturing to Vietnam, which did not have tariffs applied to it. Vietnam, which has a labor force that is a lot more like China’s than the United States’, was able to use its proximity to China for its supply chain and over the past seven or so years, slowly developed its own. With Vietnamese wages even lower than Chinese wages, instead of the jobs coming to the United States, they just went to Vietnam instead.

We’re about to make the same mistake again, in a different way.

Let’s go back to that last example, the China-based and the US-based companies that were importing goods into the United States. That US-based importer could’ve been a manufacturer. Instead of finished iPhones, perhaps they were importing the glass screens because those could not be found in the USA for final assembly.

Our government applied tariffs to finished goods and components equally.

I’ll say that again. They applied the same tax to the components that you need to make things in America that they did to finished goods that were made outside of America.

Manufacturing works on a lag. To make and sell in America, first you must get the raw materials and components. These tariffs will bankrupt manufacturers before it multiplies them because they need to pay tariffs on the import components that they assemble into finished products.

And it gets worse.

They put tariffs on machines. So if you want to start a factory in the United States, all the machinery you need, which is not made here, is now significantly more expensive. You may have heard that there is a chronic shortage of transformers needed for power transmission in the United States. Tariffed that, too.

It gets even worse.

There is no duty drawback for exporting. In the past, even in the United States, if you imported something and then exported it, the tariff you paid on the import would be refunded to you. They got rid of that, so we’re not even incentivizing exports to the countries that we are trying to achieve trade parity with.

Tariffs are applied to the costs of the goods. The way we’ve structured these tariffs, factories in China that import into the United States will pay lower tariffs than American importers, because the Chinese factory will be able to declare the value of the goods at their cost, while the American importer will pay the cost the factory charges them, which is, of course, higher than the factory’s cost.

Worse still.

With a few exceptions like steel and semiconductors, the tariffs were applied to all products, ranging from things that we will never realistically make, like our high-labor Tigerhart stuffed animals, to things that don’t even grow in the continental USA, like coffee.

Call me crazy, but if we’re going to make products in America, we could use some really cheap coffee, but no, they tariffed it! Our educational engineering toy, Brain Flakes, also got tariffed. How is the next generation supposed to build a manufacturing powerhouse if it cannot afford products that will develop its engineering ability? It’s like our goal was to make education and raising children more expensive.

Not only did we put tariffs on the things that would help us make this transformation, we didn’t put higher tariffs on things that hurt us, like processed food, which makes us tired and fat, or fentanyl precursors, which kill us.

The stated goal of many of our tariffs was to stop the import of fentanyl. Two milligrams of fentanyl will kill an adult. A grain of rice is 65 milligrams. How do you stop that stuff from coming in? It’s basically microscopic.

Maybe we could do what every other country has done and focus on the demand instead of the supply, ideally starting with the fentanyl den near my house that keeps my children indoors or in our backyard instead of playing in the neighborhood.

It’s frustrating to see our great country take on an unrealistic goal like transforming our economy when so many basic problems should be fixed first.

14. Michael Jordan sucked at baseball

America is the greatest economic power of all time. We’ve got the most talented people in the world, and we have a multi-century legacy of achieving what so many other countries could not.

Michael Jordan is arguably the greatest basketball player of all time, perhaps even the greatest athlete of all time.

He played baseball in his youth. What happened when he switched from basketball to baseball? He went from being an MVP champion to being a middling player in the minor leagues. Two years later, he was back to playing basketball.

And that’s exactly what’s going to happen to us.

My prediction for what will happen with the tariffs

This is probably the worst economic policy I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s just an opening negotiating position. Maybe it’s designed to crash the economy, lower interest rates, and then refinance the debt. I don’t know.

But if you take it at face value, there is no way that this policy will bring manufacturing back to the United States and “make America wealthy again.” Again, if anything, it’ll do the opposite; it’ll make us much poorer.

Many are saying that this tariff policy is the “end of globalization.” I don’t think so.

Unless this policy is quickly changed, this is the end of America’s participation in globalization. If we had enacted these policies in 2017 or 2018, they stood a much stronger chance of being successful. That was before COVID. China was much weaker economically and militarily then. They’ve been preparing eight years for this moment, and they are ready.

China trades much less with the United States as a percent of its total exports today than it did eight years ago and, as such, is much less susceptible to punishing tariffs from the United States today than it was back then.

Chinese-made cars, particularly electric vehicles, are taking the world by storm, without the United States. Go to Mexico to Thailand to Germany and you will see Chinese-made electric vehicles on the streets. And they’re good, sometimes even better than US-made cars, and not just on a per-dollar basis, but simply better quality.

That is what is going to happen to the United States. Globalization will continue without us if these policies continue unchanged.

That said, I think the tariffs will be changed. There’s no way we continue to place a 46 percent tariff on Vietnam when eight years ago we nudged American companies to put all their production there. Most likely, this policy will continue another round of the same type of investment; rather than replacing made in China with made in the USA, we’ll replace it with made in Vietnam, Mexico, etc.

Finally, in the process of doing this, regardless of whether or not we reverse the policies, we will have a recession. There isn’t time to build US factories, nor is it realistic or likely to occur, and American importers don’t have the money to pay for the goods they import.

People are predicting inflation in the cost of goods, but we can just as easily have deflation from economic turmoil.

The policy is a disaster. How could it be done better? And what’s the point of this anyways?

The 3 reasons why we want to actually bring manufacturing back

It makes our country stronger. If a foreign country can cut off your supply of essentials such as food, semiconductors, or antibiotics, you’re beholden to that country. The United States must have large flexible capacity in these areas.
It makes it easier to innovate. When the factory floor is down the hall, instead of 30 hours of travel away, it’s easier to make improvements and invent. We need to have manufacturing of high-value goods, like drones, robots, and military equipment that are necessary for our economic future and safety. It will be difficult for us to apply artificial intelligence to manufacturing if we’re not doing it here.
People can simplistically be divided into three buckets: those of verbal intelligence, those of mathematical intelligence, and those of spatial intelligence. Without a vibrant manufacturing industry, those with the latter type of intelligence cannot fulfill their potential. This is one reason why so many men drop out, smoke weed, and play video games; they aren’t built for office jobs and would excel at manufacturing, but those jobs either don’t exist or pay poorly.

How to actually bring manufacturing back

Every country that has gone on a brilliant run of manufacturing first established the right conditions and then proceeded slowly.

We’re doing the opposite right now, proceeding fast with the wrong conditions.

First, the United States must fix basic problems that reduce the effectiveness of our labor. For example, everyone needs to be able to graduate with the ability to do basic mathematics. American health care is way too expensive and needs to be fixed if the United States wants to be competitive with global labor. I’m not saying health care should be socialized or switched to a completely private system, but whatever we’re doing now clearly is not working, and it needs to be fixed.

We need to make Americans healthy again. Many people are too obese to work. Crime and drugs. It needs to stop.

And to sew, we must first repair the social fabric.

From COVID lockdowns to the millions of people who streamed over our border, efforts must be made to repair society. Manufacturing and economic transformations are hard, particularly the way in which we’re doing them. Patriotism and unity are required to tolerate hardship, and we seem to be at all-time lows for those right now.

Let’s focus on America’s strengths in high-end manufacturing, agriculture, and innovation instead of applying tariffs to all countries and products blindly. We should be taxing automated drones for agriculture at 300 percent to encourage their manufacture here, instead of applying the same blanket tariff of 54 percent that we apply to T-shirts.

The changes in the policies needed are obvious. Tax finished products higher than components. Let exporters refund their import duties. Enforce the tariffs against foreign companies more strenuously than we do against US importers.

If American companies want to sell in China, they must incorporate there, register capital, and name a person to be a legal representative. To sell in Europe, we must register for their tax system and nominate a legal representative. For Europeans and Chinese to sell in the United States, none of this is needed, nor do federal taxes need to be paid.

We can level the playing field without causing massive harm to our economy by adopting policies like these, which cause foreign companies to pay the taxes domestic ones pay.

And if we want to apply tariffs, do it slowly. Instead of saying that products will be tariffed at 100 percent tomorrow, say they’ll be 25 percent next year, 50 percent after that, 75 percent after that, and 100 percent in year four. And then make it a law instead of a presidential decree so that there is certainty so people feel comfortable taking the risks necessary to make in America.

Sadly, a lot of the knowhow to make products is outside of this country. Grant manufacturing visas, not for labor, but for knowhow. Make it easy for foreign countries to teach us how they do what they do best.

Conclusion and final thoughts

I care about this country and the people in it. I hope we change our mind on this policy before it’s too late. Because if we don’t, it might break the country. And, really, this country needs to be fixed.

14 reasons why Trump’s tariffs won’t bring manufacturing back Read More »

After market tumult, Trump exempts smartphones from massive new tariffs

Apple, Google, Policy, smartphones, syndication, tariffs / Mike M. / April 13, 2025

Shares in the US tech giant were one of Wall Street’s biggest casualties in the days immediately after Trump announced his reciprocal tariffs. About $700 billion was wiped off Apple’s market value in the space of a few days.

Earlier this week, Trump said he would consider excluding US companies from his tariffs, but added that such decisions would be made “instinctively.”

Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the exemptions mirrored exceptions for smartphones and consumer electronics issued by Trump during his trade wars in 2018 and 2019.

“We’ll have to wait and see if the exemptions this time around also stick, or if the president once again reverses course sometime in the not-too-distant future,” said Bown.

US Customs and Border Protection referred inquiries about the order to the US International Trade Commission, which did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The White House confirmed that the new exemptions would not apply to the 20 percent tariffs on all Chinese imports applied by Trump to respond to China’s role in fentanyl manufacturing.

White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said on Saturday that companies including Apple, TSMC, and Nvidia were “hustling to onshore their manufacturing in the United States as soon as possible” at “the direction of the President.”

“President Trump has made it clear America cannot rely on China to manufacture critical technologies such as semiconductors, chips, smartphones, and laptops,” said Leavitt.

Apple declined to comment.

Economists have warned that the sweeping nature of Trump’s tariffs—which apply to a broad range of common US consumer goods—threaten to fuel US inflation and hit economic growth.

New York Fed chief John Williams said US inflation could reach as high as 4 percent as a result of Trump’s tariffs.

Additional reporting by Michael Acton in San Francisco

After market tumult, Trump exempts smartphones from massive new tariffs Read More »

Experimental drug looks to be gastric bypass surgery in pill form

GLP-1, health, obesity, Ozempic, syndication, weight loss / Rejus Almole / April 13, 2025

In rats, the drug produced a consistent 1 percent weekly weight loss over a six-week study period while preserving 100 percent of lean muscle mass.

In a first-in-human pilot study of nine participants, the drug was safe with no adverse effects. Tissue samples taken from the intestine were used to confirm that the coating formed and was also cleared from the body within 24 hours. The study wasn’t designed to assess weight loss, but blood testing showed that after the drug was given, glucose levels and the “hunger hormone” ghrelin were lower while the levels of leptin, an appetite-regulating hormone, were higher.

“When nutrients are redirected to later in the intestine, you’re activating pathways that lead towards satiety, energy expenditure, and overall healthy, sustainable weight loss,” Dhanda says.

Syntis Bio’s findings in animals also hint at the drug’s potential for weight loss without compromising muscle mass, one of the concerns with current GLP-1 drugs. While weight loss in general is associated with numerous health benefits, there’s growing evidence that the kind of drastic weight loss that GLP-1s induce can also lead to a loss of lean muscle mass.

Louis Aronne, an obesity medicine specialist and professor of metabolic research at Weill-Cornell Medical College, says that while GLP-1s are wildly popular, they may not be right for everyone. He predicts that in the not-so-distant future there will be many drugs for obesity, and treatment will be more personalized. “I think Syntis’ compound fits in perfectly as a treatment that could be used early on. It’s a kind of thing you could use as a first-line medication,” he says. Arrone serves as a clinical adviser to the company.

Vladimir Kushnir, professor of medicine and director of bariatric endoscopy at Washington University in St. Louis, who isn’t involved with Syntis, says the early pilot data is encouraging, but it’s hard to draw any conclusions from such a small study. He expects that the drug will make people feel fuller but could also have some of the same side effects as gastric bypass surgery. “My anticipation is that this is going to have some digestive side effects like bloating and abdominal cramping, as well as potentially some diarrhea and nausea once it gets into a bigger study,” he says.

It’s early days for this novel technique, but if it proves effective, it could one day be an alternative or add-on drug to GLP-1 medications.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Experimental drug looks to be gastric bypass surgery in pill form Read More »

How did eastern North America form?

crust, plate tectonics, Science, syndication / Mike M. / April 7, 2025

Collisions hold lessons for how the edges of continents are built and change over time.

When Maureen Long talks to the public about her work, she likes to ask her audience to close their eyes and think of a landscape with incredible geology. She hears a lot of the same suggestions: Iceland, the Grand Canyon, the Himalayas. “Nobody ever says Connecticut,” says Long, a geologist at Yale University in New Haven in that state.

And yet Connecticut—along with much of the rest of eastern North America—holds important clues about Earth’s history. This region, which geologists call the eastern North American margin, essentially spans the US eastern seaboard and a little farther north into Atlantic Canada. It was created over hundreds of millions of years as slivers of Earth’s crust collided and merged. Mountains rose, volcanoes erupted and the Atlantic Ocean was born.

Much of this geological history has become apparent only in the past decade or so, after scientists blanketed the United States with seismometers and other instruments to illuminate geological structures hidden deep in Earth’s crust. The resulting findings include many surprises—from why there are volcanoes in Virginia to how the crust beneath New England is weirdly crumpled.

The work could help scientists better understand the edges of continents in other parts of the world; many say that eastern North America is a sort of natural laboratory for studying similar regions. And that’s important. “The story that it tells about Earth history and about this set of Earth processes … [is] really fundamental to how the Earth system works,” says Long, who wrote an in-depth look at the geology of eastern North America for the 2024 Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Born of continental collisions

The bulk of North America today is made of several different parts. To the west are relatively young and mighty mountain ranges like the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies. In the middle is the ancient heart of the continent, the oldest and stablest rocks around. And in the east is the long coastal stretch of the eastern North American margin. Each of these has its own geological history, but it is the story of the eastern bit that has recently come into sharper focus.

For decades, geologists have understood the broad picture of how eastern North America came to be. It begins with plate tectonics, the process in which pieces of Earth’s crust shuffle around over time, driven by churning motions in the underlying mantle. Plate tectonics created and then broke apart an ancient supercontinent known as Rodinia. By around 550 million years ago, a fragment of Rodinia had shuffled south of the equator, where it lay quietly for tens of millions of years. That fragment is the heart of what we know today as eastern North America.

Then, around 500 million years ago, tectonic forces started bringing fragments of other landmasses toward the future eastern North America. Carried along like parts on an assembly line, these continental slivers crashed into it, one after another. The slivers glommed together and built up the continental margin.

During that process, as more and more continental collisions crumpled eastern North America and thrust its agglomerated slivers into the sky, the Appalachian Mountains were born. To the west, the eastern North American margin had merged with ancient rocks that today make up the heart of the continent, west of the Appalachians and through the Midwest and into the Great Plains.

When one tectonic plate slides beneath another, slivers of Earth’s crust, known as terranes, can build up and stick together, forming a larger landmass. Such a process was key to the formation of eastern North America. Credit: Knowable Magazine

By around 270 million years ago, that action was done, and all the world’s landmasses had merged into a second single supercontinent, Pangaea. Then, around 200 million years ago, Pangaea began splitting apart, a geological breakup that formed the Atlantic Ocean, and eastern North America shuffled toward its current position on the globe.

Since then, erosion has worn down the peaks of the once-mighty Appalachians, and eastern North America has settled into a mostly quiet existence. It is what geologists call a “passive margin,” because although it is the edge of a continent, it is not the edge of a tectonic plate anymore: That lies thousands of miles out to the east, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

In many parts of the world, passive continental margins are just that—passive, and pretty geologically boring. Think of the eastern edge of South America or the coastline around the United Kingdom; these aren’t places with active volcanoes, large earthquakes, or other major planetary activity.

But eastern North America is different. There’s so much going on there that some geologists have humorously dubbed it a “passive-aggressive margin.”

The eastern edge of North America, running along the US seaboard, contains fragments of different landscapes that attest to its complex birth. They include slivers of Earth’s crust that glommed together along what is now the east coast, with a more ancient mountain belt to their west and a chunk of even more ancient crust to the west of that. Credit: Knowable Magazine

That action includes relatively high mountains—for some reason, the Appalachians haven’t been entirely eroded away even after tens to hundreds of millions of years—as well as small volcanoes and earthquakes. Recent east-coast quakes include the magnitude-5.8 tremor near Mineral, Virginia, in 2011, and a magnitude-3.8 blip off the coast of Maine in January 2025. So geological activity exists in eastern North America. “It’s just not following your typical tectonic activity,” says Sarah Mazza, a petrologist at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Crunching data on the crust

Over decades, geologists had built up a history of eastern North America by mapping rocks on Earth’s surface. But they got a much better look, and many fresh insights, starting around 2010. That’s after a federally funded research project known as EarthScope blanketed the continental United States with seismometers. One aim was to gather data on how seismic energy from earthquakes reverberated through the Earth’s crust and upper mantle. Like a CT scan of the planet, that information highlights structures that lie beneath the surface and would not otherwise be detected.

With EarthScope, researchers could suddenly see what parts of the crust were warm or cold, or strong or weak—information that told them what was happening underground. Having the new view was like astronomers going from looking at the stars with binoculars to using a telescope, Long says. “You can see more detail, and you can see finer structure,” she says. “A lot of features that we now know are present in the upper mantle beneath eastern North America, we really just did not know about.”

And then scientists got even better optics. Long and other researchers began putting out additional seismometers, packing them in dense lines and arrays over the ground in places where they wanted even better views into what was going on beneath the surface, including Georgia and West Virginia. Team members would find themselves driving around the countryside to carefully set up seismometer stations, hoping these would survive the snowfall and spiders of a year or two until someone could return to retrieve the data.

The approach worked—and geophysicists now have a much better sense of what the crust and upper mantle are doing under eastern North America. For one thing, they found that the thickness of the crust varies from place to place. Parts that are the remains of the original eastern North America landmass have a much thicker crust, around 45 kilometers. The crust beneath the continental slivers that attached later on to the eastern edge is much thinner, more like 25 to 30 kilometers thick. That difference probably traces back to the formation of the continent, Long says.

Seismic studies have revealed in recent years that Earth’s crust varies dramatically in thickness along the eastern seaboard—a legacy of how this region was pieced together from various landmasses over time. Credit: Knowable Magazine

But there’s something even weirder going on. Seismic images show that beneath parts of New England, it’s as if parts of the crust and upper mantle have slid atop one another. A 2022 study led by geoscientist Yantao Luo, a colleague of Long, found that the boundary that marks the bottom of Earth’s crust—often referred to as the Moho, after the Croatian seismologist Andrija Mohorovičić—was stacked double, like two overlapping pancakes, under southern New England.

The result was so surprising that at first Long didn’t think it could be right. But Luo double-checked and triple-checked, and the answer held. “It’s this super-unusual geometry,” Long says. “I’m not sure I’ve seen it anywhere else.”

It’s particularly odd because the Moho in this region apparently has managed to maintain its double-stacking for hundreds of millions of years, says Long. How that happened is a bit of a mystery. One idea is that the original landmass of eastern North America had an extremely strong and thick crust. When weaker continental slivers began arriving and glomming on to it, they squeezed up and over it in places.

How the Moho is working

The force of that collision could have carried the Moho of the incoming pieces up and over the older landmass, resulting in a doubling of the Moho there, says Paul Karabinos, a geologist at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Something similar might be happening in Tibet today as the tectonic plate carrying India rams into that of Asia and crumples the crust against the Tibetan plateau. Long and her colleagues are still trying to work out how widespread the stacked-Moho phenomenon is across New England; already, they have found more signs of it beneath northwestern Massachusetts.

A second surprising discovery that emerged from the seismic surveys is why 47-million-year-old volcanoes along the border of Virginia and West Virginia might have erupted. The volcanoes are the youngest eruptions that have happened in eastern North America. They are also a bit of a mystery, since there is no obvious source of molten rock in the passive continental margin that could be fueling them.

The answer, once again, came from detailed seismic scans of the Earth. These showed that a chunk was missing from the bottom of Earth’s crust beneath the volcanoes: For some reason, the bottom of the crust became heavy and dripped downward from the top part, leaving a gap. “That now needs to be filled,” says Mazza. Mantle rocks obligingly flowed into the gap, experiencing a drop in pressure as they moved upward. That change in pressure triggered the mantle rocks to melt—and created the molten reservoir that fueled the Virginia eruptions.

The same process could be happening in other passive continental margins, Mazza says. Finding it beneath Virginia is important because it shows that there are more and different ways to fuel volcanoes in these areas than scientists had previously thought possible: “It goes into these ideas that you have more ways to create melt than your standard tectonic process,” she says.

Long and her colleagues are looking to see whether other parts of the eastern North American margin also have this crustal drip. One clue is emerging from how seismic energy travels through the upper mantle throughout the region. The rocks beneath the Virginia volcanoes show a strange slowdown, or anomaly, as seismic energy passes through them. That could be related to the crustal dripping that is going on there.

Seismic surveys have revealed a similar anomaly in northern New England. To try to unravel what might be happening at this second anomaly, Long’s team currently has one string of seismometers across Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, and a second dense array in eastern Massachusetts. “Maybe something like what went on in Virginia might be in process … elsewhere in eastern North America,” Long says. “This might be a process, not just something that happened one time.”

Long even has her eyes on pushing farther north, to do seismic surveys along the continental margin in Newfoundland, and even across to Ireland—which once lay next to the North American continental margin, until the Atlantic Ocean opened and separated them. Early results suggest there may be significant differences in how the passive margin behaved on the North American side and on the Irish side, Long’s collaborator Roberto Masis Arce of Rutgers University reported at the American Geophysical Union conference in December 2024.

All these discoveries go to show that the eastern North American margin, once deemed a bit of a snooze, has far more going for it than one might think. “Passive doesn’t mean geologically inactive,” Mazza says. “We live on an active planet.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.

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

How did eastern North America form? Read More »

USDA cuts could cause long-term damage, reverse hard-won progress

agriculture, climate change, Science, syndication, Trump, USDA / Kris Guyer / April 6, 2025

For decades, environmental and farm groups pushed Congress, the USDA and farmers to adopt new conservation programs, but progress came in incremental steps. With each Farm Bill, some lawmakers threaten to whittle down conservation programs, but they have essentially managed to survive and even expand.

The country’s largest farm lobby, the American Farm Bureau Federation, had long denied the realities of climate change, fighting against climate action and adopting official policy positions that question the scientific consensus that climate change is human-caused. Its members—the bulk of American farmers—largely adhered to the same mindset.

But as the realities of climate change have started to hit American farmers on the ground in the form of more extreme weather, and as funding opportunities have expanded through conservation and climate-focused programs, that mindset has started to shift.

“They were concerned about what climate policy meant for their operations,” Bonnie said. “They felt judged. But we said: Let’s partner up.”

The Trump administration’s rollbacks and freezes threaten to stall or undo that progress, advocacy groups and former USDA employees say.

“We created this enormous infrastructure. We’ve solved huge problems,” Bonnie added, “and they’re undermining all of it.”

“It took so long,” Stillerman said. “The idea that climate change was happening and that farmers could be part of the solution, and could build more resilient farming and food systems against that threat—the IRA really put dollars behind that. All of that is at risk now.”

Burk says he plans to continue with conservation and carbon-storing practices on his Michigan farm, even without conservation dollars from the USDA.

But, he says, many of his neighboring farmers likely will stop conservation measures without the certainty of government support.

“So many people are struggling, just trying to figure out how to pay their bills, to get the fuel to run their tractors, to plant,” he said. “The last thing they want to be doing is sitting down with someone from NRCS who says, ‘If I do these things, maybe I’ll get paid in a year.’ That’s not going to happen.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

USDA cuts could cause long-term damage, reverse hard-won progress Read More »

NASA’s Curiosity rover has found the longest chain carbon molecules yet on Mars

Curiosity rover, mars rover, NASA, Science, Space, syndication / Mike M. / March 31, 2025

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has detected the largest organic (carbon-containing) molecules ever found on the red planet. The discovery is one of the most significant findings in the search for evidence of past life on Mars. This is because, on Earth at least, relatively complex, long-chain carbon molecules are involved in biology. These molecules could actually be fragments of fatty acids, which are found in, for example, the membranes surrounding biological cells.

Scientists think that, if life ever emerged on Mars, it was probably microbial in nature. Because microbes are so small, it’s difficult to be definitive about any potential evidence for life found on Mars. Such evidence needs more powerful scientific instruments that are too large to be put on a rover.

The organic molecules found by Curiosity consist of carbon atoms linked in long chains, with other elements bonded to them, like hydrogen and oxygen. They come from a 3.7-billion-year-old rock dubbed Cumberland, encountered by the rover at a presumed dried-up lakebed in Mars’s Gale Crater. Scientists used the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument on the NASA rover to make their discovery.

Scientists were actually looking for evidence of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins and therefore key components of life as we know it. But this unexpected finding is almost as exciting. The research is published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

Among the molecules were decane, which has 10 carbon atoms and 22 hydrogen atoms, and dodecane, with 12 carbons and 26 hydrogen atoms. These are known as alkanes, which fall under the umbrella of the chemical compounds known as hydrocarbons.

It’s an exciting time in the search for life on Mars. In March this year, scientists presented evidence of features in a different rock sampled elsewhere on Mars by the Perseverance rover. These features, dubbed “leopard spots” and “poppy seeds,” could have been produced by the action of microbial life in the distant past, or not. The findings were presented at a US conference and have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

NASA’s Curiosity rover has found the longest chain carbon molecules yet on Mars Read More »

What could possibly go wrong? DOGE to rapidly rebuild Social Security codebase.

Biz & IT, cobol, doge, elon musk, Java, Policy, syndication / Paul Patrick / March 30, 2025

Like many legacy government IT systems, SSA systems contain code written in COBOL, a programming language created in part in the 1950s by computing pioneer Grace Hopper. The Defense Department essentially pressured private industry to use COBOL soon after its creation, spurring widespread adoption and making it one of the most widely used languages for mainframes, or computer systems that process and store large amounts of data quickly, by the 1970s. (At least one DOD-related website praising Hopper’s accomplishments is no longer active, likely following the Trump administration’s DEI purge of military acknowledgements.)

As recently as 2016, SSA’s infrastructure contained more than 60 million lines of code written in COBOL, with millions more written in other legacy coding languages, the agency’s Office of the Inspector General found. In fact, SSA’s core programmatic systems and architecture haven’t been “substantially” updated since the 1980s when the agency developed its own database system called MADAM, or the Master Data Access Method, which was written in COBOL and Assembler, according to SSA’s 2017 modernization plan.

SSA’s core “logic” is also written largely in COBOL. This is the code that issues social security numbers, manages payments, and even calculates the total amount beneficiaries should receive for different services, a former senior SSA technologist who worked in the office of the chief information officer says. Even minor changes could result in cascading failures across programs.

“If you weren’t worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead,” says Dan Hon, principal of Very Little Gravitas, a technology strategy consultancy that helps government modernize services, about completing such a migration in a short timeframe.

It’s unclear when exactly the code migration would start. A recent document circulated amongst SSA staff laying out the agency’s priorities through May does not mention it, instead naming other priorities like terminating “non-essential contracts” and adopting artificial intelligence to “augment” administrative and technical writing.

What could possibly go wrong? DOGE to rapidly rebuild Social Security codebase. Read More »