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“it’s-only-a-matter-of-time-before-people-die”:-trump-cuts-hit-food-inspections

“It’s only a matter of time before people die”: Trump cuts hit food inspections

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American inspections of foreign food facilities hit historic lows this year.

Credit: Biswa1992/iStock via Getty Images

American inspections of foreign food facilities—which produce everything from crawfish to cookies for the US market—have plummeted to historic lows this year, a ProPublica analysis of federal data shows, even as inspections reveal alarming conditions at some manufacturers.

About two dozen current and former Food and Drug Administration officials blame the pullback on deep staffing cuts under the Trump administration. The stark reduction marks a dramatic shift in oversight at a time when the United States has never been more dependent on foreign food, which accounts for the vast majority of the nation’s seafood and more than half its fresh fruit.

The stakes are high: Foreign products have been increasingly linked to outbreaks of foodborne illness. In recent years, FDA investigators have uncovered disturbing lapses in facilities producing food bound for American supermarkets. In Indonesia, cookie factory workers hauled dough in soiled buckets. In China, seafood processors slid crawfish along cracked, stained conveyor belts. Investigators have reported crawling insects, dripping pipes, and fake testing data purporting to show food products were pathogen free.

In 2011, Congress—concerned about the different standards of overseas food operations—gave the FDA new authority to hold foreign food producers to the same safety standards as domestic ones. Although the agency’s small team remained unable to visit every overseas facility, inspections rose sharply after the mandate—sometimes doubling or tripling previous rates.

Now, the US is on track to have the fewest inspections on record since 2011, except during the global pandemic.

Inspections began to decline early in the administration, after 65 percent of the staff in the FDA divisions responsible for coordinating travel and budgets left or were fired in the name of government efficiency.

Investigators suddenly had to book their own flights and hotels, obtain diplomatic passports and visas, and coordinate with foreign authorities, former and current FDA staffers told ProPublica. After workers tasked with processing expenses were laid off, investigators waited as a backlog of unfulfilled reimbursements climbed to more than $1 million, a former staffer said. (Investigators are responsible for paying off their own credit cards.) Senior investigators close to retirement also took the opportunity to get out.

Played out on a large scale, this combination of firings and voluntary departures has left the agency scrambling to make up for the loss of 1 out of every 5 of its workers responsible for ensuring the safety of America’s food and drugs.

Susan Mayne, the former director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition and an adjunct professor at Yale School of Public Health, expressed alarm at the drop in foreign inspections.

“It’s very concerning that we are seeing these kinds of reductions,” said Mayne, who emphasized the administration’s cuts have hamstrung an agency that has long struggled to retain investigators who conduct both foreign and domestic inspections. In an attempt to maintain its numbers, the agency had been working on initiatives to elevate pay and adopt specialized training for investigators. “The plans that were in place to address staffing have now been undermined.”

The gutting of the workforce coincides with other actions the administration has taken that are poking holes in the nation’s food safety net. In March, the FDA announced it was delaying compliance with a rule to speed up the identification and removal of harmful products in the food system, to give more time for companies to follow the rules. The next month, it suspended a quality control program that ensured consistency and accuracy across its 170 pathogen and contaminant labs as a result of staffing cuts.

Then in July, the administration quietly scaled back the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, also known as FoodNet, shrinking its surveillance to just two pathogens: salmonella and a common type of E. coli. The program—a partnership between the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Agriculture, and state health departments—was responsible for the critical monitoring of eight foodborne illnesses, including infections caused by the deadly bacteria Listeria. In response to the change, a CDC spokesperson previously claimed that the program’s surveillance had been duplicative.

The administration did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about these actions.

“There are going to be things that fall through the cracks, and these things aren’t negligible,” said a current FDA investigations official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal. The same was true of other current and former agency staffers; those who still had jobs risked losing them, while former employees worried about their chances of being rehired or the security of their severance or retirement packages.

The Department of Health and Human Services refused to respond to any of ProPublica’s questions about the decrease in foreign food inspections, citing the government shutdown. “Responding to ProPublica is not considered a mission-critical activity,” said Emily Hilliard, the department’s press secretary. The FDA and the White House also did not respond to requests for comment.

“Basic regulatory oversight functions have been decimated,” said Brian Ronholm, the director of food policy at Consumer Reports. “There’s an enhanced risk of more outbreaks.”

An agency already struggling

The FDA has long been one of the main protectors of the American food supply. The federal agency oversees about 80 percent of what people eat, including fruits, vegetables, processed goods, dairy products and infant formula, and most seafood and eggs. It regulates more than 220,000 farms, food plants, and distributors, inspecting facilities, testing for pathogens, tracing outbreaks, and issuing recalls.

Only 40 percent of the facilities that the FDA regulates are within the nation’s borders. While the agency examines some products at ports of entry, those reviews are often cursory; workers cannot manually inspect every import or uncover whether a foreign plant properly cleans its equipment, conducts adequate salmonella testing, or has a rat infestation. In-person facility inspections are necessary for that kind of insight.

For example, in 2023, an FDA investigator inspected a Chinese manufacturer of soy protein powder, a common additive in shakes and other beverages. While the company had previously imported its products into the United States without scrutiny, the investigator’s thorough visit found numerous violations, according to an agency report obtained through a federal records request.

Live insects crawled through the facility’s production workshop, while dead ones lay on the floor. Condensation from rust-covered pipes dripped into a water tank waiting to be mixed with raw ingredients. Just outside the plant, the investigator found processing waste and stagnant water coated with a green biofilm, attracting a swarm of bugs too numerous to count.

When the investigator reviewed the firm’s bacteria testing records, which purportedly verified the products were free of salmonella and E. coli, he discovered the company was providing fake data to “satisfy the customer specifications,” according to his inspection report.

Company officials also tried to obstruct his inspection, blocking him from entering a packaging room when he tried to photograph the pest infestation. After the three-day review, the federal agent censured the company, Pingdingshan Tianjing Plant Albumen Co. Ltd., which promised to take corrective actions. The company did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions.

If investigators find a foreign food facility is unable to comply with American safety requirements or refuses to permit the FDA to inspect its establishment, the agency can block its products from entering the country.

These crucial foreign inspections are neither easy nor cheap. They typically last longer than domestic ones and cost nearly $40,000 a visit, and they can require months of logistical planning, special visas, and diplomatic approval from the host country.

In part because of these challenges, there was a time when the FDA conducted only a few hundred foreign inspections annually.

Then Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011, which set firm targets for the agency: It needed to conduct more than 19,000 foreign food inspections annually by 2016 and increase the number of food field staff to no fewer than 5,000 workers.

The FDA has never fulfilled this congressional mandate. Even before the second Trump administration, the agency was inspecting less than 10 percent of its target each year.

Dr. Stephen Ostroff, a former acting commissioner of the FDA who also served as the deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, said that the agency’s foreign food inspections have long been hindered by a lack of resources.

“It’s not because the agency isn’t interested in doing more overseas inspections—they are,” said Ostroff, who retired from the agency in 2019. “They simply don’t have the resources to be able to meaningfully do large numbers of overseas inspections.”

One major obstacle has been a lack of financial support. “Congressional appropriators have never provided the funding that FDA has determined it would need to do those foreign inspections,” said Mayne, who retired from the agency in 2023. Before the food safety act passed, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the agency would need about $1.4 billion over five years to comply with the new requirements, which included the expansion of field staff and foreign inspections. But lawmakers approved only a fraction of that amount.

As of last year, the agency had about 430 employees conducting both foreign and domestic food inspections, with only 20 investigators dedicated solely to international assignments.

With such limitations, the agency’s inspections have often been reactive instead of proactive. In 2023, for example, FDA investigators did not descend on a Mexican strawberry farm until about 20 people had been hospitalized with hepatitis A, a highly contagious infection that causes liver inflammation and, in some cases, liver failure and death.

Hepatitis A is spread through the consumption of small or even microscopic bits of feces. Farm workers can shed the virus when picking fruit, or it can be transmitted through contaminated water.

At the Mexican berry farm, federal investigators found significant safety violations, including sanitation facilities with hand-washing water that was dirty, gray, and leaking throughout the growing area; one toilet offered no ability to wash one’s hands. The FDA censured the company, citing 11 violations of American food safety regulations. According to public data, the agency did not reinspect the farm to ensure it had made corrections even as its products kept entering the United States.

In January, less than two weeks before the second Trump administration came in, a report by the Government Accountability Office rebuked the FDA for consistently falling short of its foreign food inspection targets. The oversight office, recognizing the vital importance of the FDA’s food safety mission, urged Congress to direct the agency to assess how many foreign inspections are needed to keep the country’s food supply safe.

The FDA said in response that, in 2025, it would increase staffing levels and prioritize the training and development of investigators.

Then Donald Trump was inaugurated.

Reversing a decade of gains

During the first few weeks of the new Trump administration, foreign inspections carried on as usual. But the sudden hemorrhaging of FDA workers through firings, retirements, and buyouts quickly foiled the agency’s plans to ramp up staff and inspections.

While the administration had vowed that food safety inspectors would be spared, it began to cut critical investigative support staff in March, a move that would eventually incapacitate foreign inspections, current and former FDA staffers told ProPublica.

As the agency lost support staff, their responsibilities shifted to investigators, who were quickly overwhelmed by the new burdens. Passports, visas, and travel were all delayed.

“Support staff are not just there to bide time—they have a meaningful role,” said Sandra Eskin, who served as a top USDA food safety official in the Biden administration and is now the CEO of advocacy group Stop Foodborne Illness. “It’s like a game of Jenga: If you pull out one from the middle or the bottom, the whole tower collapses.”

In recent years, the agency has typically been able to conduct about 110 foreign food inspections each month, but in March, the number of inspections dropped almost in half compared with the monthly average in the previous two years.

As specialists who handled reimbursements were also fired, some investigators waited months for repayment, which made them reluctant to take on other foreign assignments, former and current staffers said.

The cuts and growing work burden quickly collapsed morale across the investigative division, leading many senior investigative officials with decades of experience to retire.

“We already had a significant percentage of our workforce that was eligible for retirement,” said a current FDA employee in the investigations division, “so reading the writing on the wall, they decided to exit.” These departures also interrupted the development of new investigators, as some of the senior staff members who left had been tasked with training new hires, a process that can take up to two years.

“There’s been such a brain drain,” said food safety expert Jennifer McEntire, founder of consulting firm Food Safety Strategy, “when inspectors do go out and are observing things, there’s no phone-a-friend.”

Instead of addressing the shortfall, in May, FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary announced that the agency would expand the number of unannounced foreign inspections, in which investigators show up at facilities without alerting them first. Given the limited staff and resources, several current and former staffers told ProPublica that the prospect of conducting unannounced visits was impractical and even “comical.”

“A foreign unannounced trip is like an accelerated coordination process,” said a current FDA investigations official. “If you’re going to increase the number and not increase the staff, we don’t know how to make some of that stuff work.”

By the end of July, the number of foreign food inspections conducted by the agency was nearly 30 percent lower compared with similar periods in the previous two years. The administration refused to provide ProPublica with up-to-date inspection numbers, so we relied on data from the FDA’s public inspection dashboard to conduct this analysis.

Foreign inspections are not the only tool for overseeing food from abroad. The agency has developed partnerships with counterparts in other countries to ensure comparable oversight and required importers to verify that their foreign suppliers are following American standards. However, former and current agency staffers said that these initiatives also have been impacted by the administration’s cuts and recent departures.

While the administration’s cuts were ostensibly ordered to maximize efficiency and productivity, they have had an opposite effect, several former and current FDA employees said, reversing years of progress.

“The goal is to accomplish as much and more with less resources,” said a former high-level FDA investigations official. “Less inspections translate to less regulatory oversight, and that, from a public health perspective, never benefits the public.”

Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at the nonprofit advocacy organization Environmental Working Group, said the fallout is simple:

“When you take a wrecking ball to the federal government, you are going to wind up undermining important government functions that keep all of us safe, especially our food,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before people die.”

How we calculated foreign food inspections

To understand how inspections of foreign food facilities have changed, we used a publicly available dashboard where the FDA publishes the results of those inspections. This database also includes inspections for manufacturers of drugs, medical devices, cosmetics, tobacco, biologics, and veterinary products.

Beginning in May, we downloaded the entire database weekly and tracked the number of newly added foreign food facility inspections.

The dashboard is continually updated, with data added after inspections are finalized. That typically occurs 45 to 90 days after the close of an inspection, though some reports may not be posted until the agency takes a final enforcement action. Through an analysis, we determined that few reports are added more than 90 days after an inspection date.

Our story therefore only includes inspections through July. In an accompanying chart, we show the more provisional data through September. We asked HHS for recent figures, but the department refused to share them.

We considered the possibility that the downtrend in foreign food inspections was solely due to a lag in inspections being added to the dashboard. To check this, we performed the same analysis on domestic inspections. This analysis showed that while the rate of foreign inspections had significantly decreased, domestic inspections have continued almost uninterrupted.

This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

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Disruption to science will last longer than the US government shutdown

government shutdown, Science, Science policy, syndication / /

President Donald Trump alongside Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.

Credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump alongside Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought. Credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

However, the full impact of the shutdown and the Trump administration’s broader assaults on science to US international competitiveness, economic security, and electoral politics could take years to materialize.

In parallel, the dramatic drop in international student enrollment, the financial squeeze facing research institutions, and research security measures to curb foreign interference spell an uncertain future for American higher education.

With neither the White House nor Congress showing signs of reaching a budget deal, Trump continues to test the limits of executive authority, reinterpreting the law—or simply ignoring it.

Earlier in October, Trump redirected unspent research funding to pay furloughed service members before they missed their Oct. 15 paycheck. Changing appropriated funds directly challenges the power vested in Congress—not the president—to control federal spending.

The White House’s promise to fire an additional 10,000 civil servants during the shutdown, its threat to withhold back pay from furloughed workers, and its push to end any programs with lapsed funding “not consistent with the President’s priorities” similarly move to broaden presidential power.

Here, the damage to science could snowball. If Trump and Vought chip enough authority away from Congress by making funding decisions or shuttering statutory agencies, the next three years will see an untold amount of impounded, rescinded, or repurposed research funds.

photo of empty science lab

The government shutdown has emptied many laboratories staffed by federal scientists. Combined with other actions by the Trump administration, more scientists could continue to lose funding.

Credit: Monty Rakusen/DigitalVision via Getty Images

The government shutdown has emptied many laboratories staffed by federal scientists. Combined with other actions by the Trump administration, more scientists could continue to lose funding. Credit: Monty Rakusen/DigitalVision via Getty Images

Science, democracy, and global competition

While technology has long served as a core pillar of national and economic security, science has only recently reemerged as a key driver of greater geopolitical and cultural change.

China’s extraordinary rise in science over the past three decades and its arrival as the United States’ chief technological competitor has upended conventional wisdom that innovation can thrive only in liberal democracies.

The White House’s efforts to centralize federal grantmaking, restrict free speech, erase public data, and expand surveillance mirror China’s successful playbook for building scientific capacity while suppressing dissent.

As the shape of the Trump administration’s vision for American science has come into focus, what remains unclear is whether, after the shutdown, it can outcompete China by following its lead.

Kenneth M. Evans is a Fellow in Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University.

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

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Inside the marketplace for vaccine medical exemptions

health, medical exemptions, syndication, vaccines / /

Not everything was quite as it seemed

Frontline Health Advocates provides medical exemption notes—for a fee. What exactly are they selling?

Maybe a client hears about them in the comment section of the Facebook group “Medical Exemption Accepted,” or on the r/unvaccinated forum on Reddit. Maybe it’s through an interview posted on the video-sharing platform Rumble. Or maybe it’s the targeted advertisements on Google: “We do medical exemptions.”

Cassandra Clerkin, a mother in upstate New York, first got in touch with Frontline Health Advocates near the start of the 2024–2025 school year, after hearing they had doctors who would write exemptions from school immunization requirements. One of Clerkin’s children, she said, had suffered seizures after receiving a vaccine. The family didn’t want more shots. But New York has some of the country’s strictest school immunization policies.

Perhaps Frontline could help.

Vaccine mandates have a long history in the United States, but they’ve been subject to fresh public attention—and partisan dispute—since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Frontline Health Advocates seemingly emerged from pandemic-era battles with a model that, experts say, appears to be unique: It bills itself as a standalone organization that supplies people across the US with medical exemptions from vaccination requirements—for a fee of $495.

On forms obtained by Undark, Frontline’s listed addresses are a storage facility in Denison, Texas, and a package store in Sedona, Arizona. The group publishes little information online about its leadership or finances, but it has quietly developed a following.

There’s little question that Frontline exemptions sometimes work, and some parents report positive experiences with the organization. But there are real questions about whether its legal strategy would hold up in court—and whether clients are confused about what, precisely, they are receiving.

In upstate New York, Clerkin said she spoke with a representative from Frontline by phone about the process. They made it sound, she said, like getting an exemption “would be pretty seamless.”

Soon after, she recalled, she received a call from a doctor named Andrew Zywiec. A week after the family issued a credit card payment of $495 to a chiropractic firm in California, the medical exemption arrived by email. “The duration of the restriction from receiving VACCINATIONS is PERMANENT,” the document stated, citing a range of health concerns, and warning that civil or criminal penalties could result if the school district ignored the request.

Clerkin submitted the document to the district.

Every state in the country has legal language on the books that seems to require certain immunizations before children can enroll in school—although in some places exemption policies are so lax that shots are effectively optional. The military also has vaccine requirements, as do some civilian workplaces, including many hospitals and nursing homes. Immigration proceedings, too, often require applicants to receive shots.

Some people may register personal objections to vaccination, or they may have medical conditions that could make receiving a shot dangerous. Workarounds exist. Most states, for example, allow parents to apply for religious or personal belief exemptions from school vaccine requirements by stating that they object to vaccination due to deeply held convictions. But those exemptions are sometimes denied, and in four states—California, Connecticut, Maine, and New York—they aren’t an option at all. (The policy in a fifth state, West Virginia, is currently in flux.)

In those states, the only way to attend school without a required shot is to receive a medical waiver. There are real reasons for some people to pursue them: They may be immunocompromised in a way that makes certain vaccines high-risk, or they may have had a bad reaction to a shot in the past. In some cases, families may earnestly believe their child cannot safely receive a vaccine, but have difficulty finding a physician who agrees, or who is willing to attest to that on an exemption.

Interest in medical exemptions tends to grow when laws tighten. In 2015, after a measles outbreak at Disneyland sickened hundreds of people, California lawmakers ended the state’s personal belief exemption. Almost immediately, the medical exemption rate more than doubled, according to a 2019 paper by a team of public health researchers. The law “created a black market for medical exemptions,” one unnamed health officer told the researchers. Parents, the officer added, would go online and “get medical exemptions from physicians who were not their child’s treating physician.”

The state cracked down, prosecuting some health care providers for allegedly providing improper medical exemptions, and tightening the rules for receiving a waiver. New York, which eliminated religious exemptions in 2019, has taken similar steps; the Department of Health maintains a public list of health care providers who have been banned or suspended from using immunization registries in the state, on a webpage titled “School Vaccination Fraud Awareness.”

In New York, advocates say, state policies have made it prohibitively difficult for some families to obtain medical exemptions, regardless of the reason. “My understanding is that up until this year, again, a lot of doctors weren’t willing to write these medical exemptions,” said Chad Davenport, an attorney outside Buffalo, New York, who often represents families seeking medical exemptions. (One of his clients recently won a key ruling in a federal court case against a Long Island school district that had denied medical exemptions from at least six health care providers.)

Enter Frontline Health Advocates. The organization, Davenport said, “kind of stepped in and provided families at least an option, or a potential path.”

Two researchers who have studied vaccination exemptions in the United States said the organization appears to have a unique model: While individual doctors have sometimes gained a reputation for supplying medical exemptions, neither expert had seen a full-fledged national organization offering those services.

“They’re very blatant,” said Dorit Reiss, a professor at UC Law San Francisco who studies vaccine law and policy.

The group’s founder and director is William Lionberger, a chiropractor who has been licensed to practice in California since 1981, and who once maintained a practice north of San Diego. According to public records, he has also served as a police officer in a town near Sedona. (Lionberger declined a request for an on-the-record interview, and the organization did not answer a list of questions from Undark.) Interviewers who have hosted Lionberger on their shows describe him as affiliated with America’s Frontline Doctors, a group that opposed Covid-19 vaccines and other public health measures while promoting unproven treatments like hydroxychloroquine.

Frontline Health Advocates’ webpage was first registered in March 2022, with a name echoing that of America’s Frontline Doctors. By April of that year, the website was inviting visitors to “Get your exemption now.” In a 2023 interview, Lionberger described having a “team of medical experts” who “work with all kinds of situations,” evaluating clients both for “regular vax injuries and regular vax exemptive conditions.”

He added: “People now don’t even want their kids to get anywhere near a regular vaccine.”

The group employs a pair of distinctive legal strategies. One of these is to form itself as something called a Private Ministerial Association. Online, some groups that help set up such private associations describe them as offering special First Amendment protections. A membership application document hosted on Frontline’s website describes the group as “a private, unincorporated ministry that operates as much as possible, outside the jurisdiction of government entities, agencies, officers, agents, contractors, and other representatives, as protected by law.”

Another strategy is to invoke federal disability law. In the 2023 interview, Lionberger boasted that they drew on “the most powerful thing that you can bring against discrimination”—specifically, federal protections. A promotional video posted on the Frontline website makes a similar claim, advertising waivers “supported by the protections under US federal laws.” Undark obtained three near-identical exemptions sent to New York families in 2024. In them, Frontline argues that the client’s need for a medical exemption is protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, which guarantees certain accommodations for people with disabilities and other medical needs.

In Frontline documents from 2024, the organization suggests that this federal protection supersedes state vaccination laws—offering a way around exemption policies across the country.

In New York, Clerkin had received a document combining medical language with legal details. The document bore the signatures of doctor Andrew Zywiec and an administrative law specialist and JD, Christine Pazzula, along with the seal of the United States Department of Justice.

Not everything was quite as it seemed. Frontline has no relationship with the Department of Justice. Pazzula, according to her LinkedIn profile, had received her legal degree from an unaccredited correspondence school in California, and her name does not appear in databases of attorneys admitted to the bar in New York, Texas, or Nevada, where her LinkedIn profile says she is based. (In a brief email to Undark, Pazzula said she no longer works for Frontline.)

Another parent who received a Frontline exemption in 2024 would later testify under oath that she believed Zywiec to be a physician licensed in the state of New York, but state records show that nobody named Zywiec has ever held a medical license in the state.

Multiple online testimonials about Frontline mention Zywiec. A review of public records suggests a turbulent history. Zywiec served in the Army and graduated from medical school in 2019, according to a CV. In 2020, he began a pediatrics residency at The Brooklyn Hospital Center, but the relationship soured: He ultimately sued the hospital, alleging an unsafe work environment, and filed an employment complaint that, among other concerns, said he had been “coerced into taking the so-called Covid-19 vaccine.” In court documents associated with the lawsuit, a hospital official described an employee who was “spotty and difficult.” In 2021, Zywiec’s co-residents had written a letter to their superiors alleging that he had made offensive remarks to colleagues and treated nurses poorly, also writing that he “would delay care to patients because he wanted to participate in procedures unrelated to his patients because they interested him.”

Zywiec maintains an online medical practice, where he describes himself as “an international medical doctor and board-certified indigenous medicine provider” and offers a range of services, including a $150, 30-minute, “Medical Excuse/Note” consultation that yields a “legitimate medical excuse tailored to your situation.” On X, where he has amassed a following in the tens of thousands, Zywiec regularly shares content about the dangers of vaccines.

The promotional video on Frontline’s website describes the exemptions as “signed by state-licensed physicians with full credentials.” Zywiec’s name does not appear in a national database of licensed physicians maintained by the Federation of State Medical Boards. (In a brief email, Zywiec referred interview requests to Frontline. He did not answer a list of questions from Undark, and Frontline did not respond to a question about Zywiec’s license status.)

The exemption that Zywiec had signed for Clerkin was denied. In a letter, the school district explained that New York law requires exemptions to be signed by a physician licensed in the state. Clerkin said that she was aware Zywiec was not licensed in New York, but Frontline seemed confident in their approach, and she thought it might work. That did not pan out, she said. “I feel like they talk this big thing,” Clerkin said. But, she added, “if you know that you can’t help these children, and you’re just preying on these mothers who will do anything for their children, that is evil.”

Some Frontline exemptions do get through, at least in New York. “I can certainly tell you that there have been some people, even this year, who have been able to get their Frontline Health waivers accepted,” Davenport told Undark. But, he said, courts have not tested the argument that an exemption invoking federal law will trump the state’s requirement that the exemption comes from a New York-licensed physician. He does not recommend Frontline to clients. “I basically tell them, although Frontline may technically be correct, it’s not a good legal position for you to be in,” Davenport said. “And so I always advise them to try to get a New York state waiver signed by a New York state doctor and then submit that, because that puts you in the best legal position.”

In a video on its website, Frontline warns potential clients that exemptions may be denied, noting that the group “cannot guarantee that an unknown person you are engaging with is going to abide by federal laws.” But Rita Palma, a health freedom activist on Long Island who has worked with many families seeking medical exemptions, told Undark that she thinks parents are still confused about the limitations of the waivers. “What I’m getting from parents is that Frontline Health Advocates say that federal law overrides state law,” she said. Whether or not that’s true in the case of vaccine exemptions remains unclear.

The $495 fee—extra for expedited service—is a steep price for some families. “They’ve made a nice killing in New York,” Palma said. “I hate to put it like that, but they’ve definitely gotten a lot of parents to pay them to get exemptions.”

It’s difficult to know how many waivers Frontline has sold. In online forums, people describe successes with schools. “I got lifetime medical exemptions for my children,” one parent wrote in a Facebook group in April, noting that she was not affiliated with Frontline. The group is “replete with lawyers to respond to any pushback from schools,” she added.

One mother in Connecticut told Undark that she had contacted Frontline in 2024, when her son needed a flu shot to stay in daycare. “I was looking around for a way to get an exemption,” she said. (The mother spoke on condition of anonymity, citing a professional need for privacy.) After a phone call with a licensed pediatrician in Texas, she received an exemption. The daycare, she said, accepted it. “It was a pretty smooth experience, overall,” she said.

“I was aware that it was a gamble,” the mother said; Frontline had told her the exemption might not be accepted. “But then they kind of were like, well, you know, technically, if they don’t accept it, it’s illegal because it’s protected by ADA and all that kind of thing,” she said.

The group has attracted attention from some public health officials. In Los Angeles County, a public health department website is topped by a large red banner warning that Frontline exemptions don’t work in California. In October 2024, in Connecticut, minutes from a meeting of the state’s School Nurse Advisory Council described Frontline as providing what the council believed to be “fraudulent” exemptions to families. A spokesperson for Connecticut Public Health, Brittany Schaefer, told Undark in late September that Frontline is the subject of “an active investigation.”

Undark asked three legal experts to review a copy of an exemption issued to a family in New York in September 2024 and obtained via court records. “It seems to be a fill-in-the-blank type of form,” said Barbara Hoffman, an expert in disability law at Rutgers Law School. The waiver, Hoffman believes, overstates the penalties generally levied for ADA infractions. School districts, employers, or others who received this form, she speculated, might feel like “it’s not worth the effort to reject this.”

“This looks like an official document,” she added, highlighting the seal of the Department of Justice and references to potential civil penalties. “It’s designed to intimidate somebody who doesn’t really know better, or just doesn’t want to risk any potential litigation.”

Could invoking the ADA really override state-level vaccine requirements? Reiss, the UC Law San Francisco expert, was skeptical, noting that state law has generally held in similar cases. “My expectation,” she wrote in an email, “is that that won’t hold.”

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

http://arstechnica.com/

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NASA test flight seeks to help bring commercial supersonic travel back

Space, supersonic flight, supersonic travel, syndication, X-59 / /

The X-59 has successfully completed its inaugural flight.

Credit: Lockheed Martin/Michael Jackson

About an hour after sunrise over the Mojave Desert of Southern California, NASA’s newest experimental supersonic jet took to the skies for the first time on Tuesday. The X-59 Quesst (Quiet SuperSonic Technology) is designed to decrease the noise of a sonic boom when an aircraft breaks the sound barrier, paving the way for future commercial jets to fly at supersonic speeds over land.

The jet, built by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, took off from US Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California. Flown by Nils Larson, NASA’s lead test pilot for the X-59, the inaugural flight validated the jet’s airworthiness and safety before landing about an hour after takeoff near NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California.

“X-59 is a symbol of American ingenuity,” acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said in a statement. “It’s part of our DNA—the desire to go farther, faster, and even quieter than anyone has ever gone before.”

Commercial planes are prohibited from flying at supersonic speeds over land in the US due to the disruption that breaking the sound barrier causes on the ground, releasing a loud sonic boom that can rattle windows and trigger alarms. The Concorde, which was the only successful commercial supersonic jet, was limited to flying at supersonic speeds only over the oceans.

When a plane approaches the speed of sound, pressure waves build up on the surface of the aircraft. These areas of high pressure coalesce into large shock waves when the plane goes supersonic, producing the double thunderclap of a sonic boom.

The X-59 is capable of reaching supersonic speeds, without the supersonic boom.

Credit: Lockheed Martin/Gary Tice

The X-59 is capable of reaching supersonic speeds, without the supersonic boom. Credit: Lockheed Martin/Gary Tice

The X-59 will generate a lower “sonic thump” thanks to its unique design. It was given a long, slender nose that accounts for about a third of the total length and breaks up pressure waves that would otherwise merge on other parts of the airplane. The engine was mounted on top of the X-59’s fuselage, rather than underneath as on a fighter jet, to keep a smooth underside that limits shock waves and also to direct sound waves up into the sky rather than down toward the ground. NASA aims to provide key data to aircraft manufacturers so they can build less noisy supersonic planes.

A jet like no other

The X-59 is a single-seat, single-engine jet. It is 99.7 feet long and 29.5 feet wide, making it almost twice as long as an F-16 fighter jet but with a slightly smaller wingspan. The X-59’s cockpit and ejection seat come from the T-38 jet trainer, its landing gear from an F-16, and its control stick from the F-117 stealth attack aircraft. Its engine, a modified General Electric F414 from the F/A-18 fighter jet, will allow the plane to cruise at Mach 1.4, about 925 mph, at an altitude of 55,000 feet. This is nearly twice as high and twice as fast as commercial airliners typically fly.

Perhaps the most striking change on the X-59 is that it does not have a glass cockpit window. Instead, the cockpit is fully enclosed to be as aerodynamic as possible, and the pilot watches a camera feed of the outside world on a 4K monitor known as the eXternal Visibility System.

“You can’t see very clearly through glass when you look at it at a very shallow angle, and so you need to have a certain steepness of the view screen to have good optical qualities, and that would develop a strong shock wave that would really corrupt the low-boom characteristics of the airplane,” says Michael Buonanno, the air vehicle lead for the X-59 at Lockheed Martin.

The X-59 has repurposed components of other NASA aircrafts.

Credit: Lockheed Martin

The X-59 has repurposed components of other NASA aircrafts. Credit: Lockheed Martin

For this first flight, the X-59 flew at a lower altitude and at about 240 mph, according to NASA. During future tests, the jet will gradually increase its speed and altitude until it goes supersonic, NASA said, which occurs at about 659 mph at 55,000 feet, or 761 mph at sea level. The speed of sound varies according to temperature and to a lesser degree pressure, causing it to decrease at higher altitudes.

“The primary objective on a first flight is really just to land,” James Less, a project pilot for the X-59 who will be conducting future flights, tells WIRED. Less flew an F-15 fighter jet in formation with the X-59 as a support aircraft during the flight, observing the new experimental jet for any issues.

“I’m looking for anything external to the airplane that the pilot can’t see,” Less says. Generally the first thing he would check for is that the landing gear retracted successfully, but on this initial flight the X-59 intentionally left the landing gear down. “If the aircraft is leaking any kind of fluids, be it fuel or hydraulics, as a chase pilot, you can usually see that… Also I’m looking for other traffic, air traffic, just to point that out to him.”

Following the X-59’s successful touchdown at Armstrong, NASA and Lockheed Martin engineers will review the flight data to prepare for the jet’s future, faster flights.

The design of the X-59 includes a nose that makes up most of the length of the craft, designed to help reduce noise.

Credit: NASA/Steve Freeman

The design of the X-59 includes a nose that makes up most of the length of the craft, designed to help reduce noise. Credit: NASA/Steve Freeman

The future of supersonic flight

The eXternal Visibility System is just one of the modern technologies needed to build a low-boom airplane like the X-59. Decades of computational fluid dynamics research and wind tunnel testing were also required to arrive at the final design.

“We’ve really had the opportunity to spend a lot of time on the computational fluid dynamics application to these low-boom aircraft,” Lori Ozoroski, the commercial supersonic technology project manager at NASA, tells WIRED. “We’ve gone from this computational domain around an aircraft of something that’s got a couple of million cells as you divide up the space around it to… things with a couple million cells, and now we’re pushing a billion cells.”

Once the X-59 gets up to speed, the next step will be to make sure the quieter sonic thumps really are tolerable for people on the ground.

“We have been planning a test campaign where we will fly over various communities in the US, polling them with a survey and understanding how annoyed people are,” Ozoroski says. The flights will produce both loud and quiet sonic booms to see how people react, she explains.

“Our plan is to gather all this data, doing approximately one-month tests in a couple of locations around the country, and then providing all that data to the FAA and the international regulatory community to try to establish a sound limit, rather than the speed limit.”

If the program is a success, it could pave the way for new commercial supersonic aircraft that would cut travel times in half, something that companies such as Boom Supersonic are trying to achieve.

The jet has joined the ranks of innovative NASA X-planes, dating back almost 80 years to the Bell X-1 that Chuck Yeager piloted on the first faster-than-sound flight in 1947.

“I grew up reading Popular Science and Popular Mechanics and reading about the X-planes out at Edwards, and never imagined that I’d be in a position to do something like this,” says Less, who is eagerly awaiting his turn at the X-59’s stick. “This will be the highlight of my career.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Photo of WIRED

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Whale and dolphin migrations are being disrupted by climate change

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Marine mammals are being forced into new and more dangerous waters, scientists warn.

Credit: Martin van Aswegen/NOAA

For millennia, some of the world’s largest filter-feeding whales, including humpbacks, fin whales, and blue whales, have undertaken some of the longest migrations on earth to travel between their warm breeding grounds in the tropics to nutrient-rich feeding destinations in the poles each year.

“Nature has finely tuned these journeys, guided by memory and environmental cues that tell whales when to move and where to go,” said Trisha Atwood, an ecologist and associate professor at Utah State University’s Quinney College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. But, she said, climate change is “scrambling these signals,” forcing the marine mammals to veer off course. And they’re not alone.

Earlier this year, Atwood joined more than 70 other scientists to discuss the global impacts of climate change on migratory species in a workshop convened by the United Nations Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals. The organization monitors and protects more than 1,000 species that cross borders in search of food, mates, and favorable conditions to nurture their offspring.

More than 20 percent of these species are on the brink of extinction. It was the first time the convention had gathered for such a purpose, and their findings, published this month in a report, were alarming.

“Almost no migratory species is untouched by climate change,” Atwood said in an email to Inside Climate News.

From whales and dolphins, to arctic shorebirds and elephants, all are affected by rising temperatures, extreme weather, and shifting ecosystems, which are disrupting migratory routes and reshaping critical habitats across the planet.

Asian elephants, for instance, are being driven to higher ground and closer to human settlements as they search for food and water amidst intensifying droughts, fueling more frequent human-elephant conflicts, the report found. Shorebirds are reaching their Arctic breeding grounds out of sync with the insect blooms their chicks depend on to survive.

The seagrass meadows that migrating sea turtles and dugongs feed on are disappearing due to warmer waters, cyclones, and sea level rise, according to the report. To date, around 30 percent of the world’s known seagrass beds have been lost, threatening not only the animals that depend on them, but also humans. These vital ecosystems store around 20 percent of the world’s oceanic carbon, in addition to supporting fisheries and protecting coastlines.

Together, these examples reveal how climate change is tipping the delicate balance migratory species have long relied on to survive.

“Climate change is disrupting this balance by altering when and where resources appear, how abundant they are, the environmental conditions species must endure, and the other organisms they interact with, reshaping entire networks of predators and competitors,” Atwood said.

Especially among marine life.

On the United States’ West Coast, for instance, Atwood said, warming waters are pushing juvenile great white sharks out of their traditional southern habitats. This shift has led to a sharp rise in sea otter deaths in Monterey Bay, California, where they are increasingly getting bitten by the sharks.

Whales and dolphins are particularly vulnerable species as rising temperatures threaten both their prey and their habitat, according to the report.

Heatwaves in the Mediterranean are projected to reduce suitable habitat for endangered fin whales by up to 70 percent by mid-century as their prey dwindles or moves due to rising temperatures. In some places, such as the Northern Adriatic Sea, hotter temperatures may eventually prove intolerable for bottlenose dolphins. “Rising water temperatures could exceed the species’ physiological tolerance,” the report says, which also acknowledges that this is already happening in other parts of the world, such as the Amazon River.

In 2023, more than 200 river dolphins, which migrate seasonally between tributaries and lagoons in the Amazon, died due to record-high temperatures, along with much of their prey. In some areas, their shallow aquatic habitats exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit. “The river systems were unusually empty and dry and the animals got isolated,” said Mark Simmonds, scientific councilor for marine pollution for the U.N. convention, who led some of the discussions around climate change impacts on cetaceans at the workshop in February. “They lost the water that they would have been living in.”

Loss of prey in traditional habitats is of particular concern for migrating marine mammals that are forced to follow their prey into new, and sometimes more perilous, waters.

This is particularly evident in the case of critically endangered North Atlantic Right whales, which the report says are especially prone to ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear as they pursue their prey—tiny crustaceans called copepods—which are moving toward cooler waters. There are fewer than 400 of the whales left.

The North Pacific humpback whales that feed off the coast of California are also at risk.

According to the report, these whales have experienced significant changes in their migratory routes due to climate-driven shifts, which has resulted in many getting entangled in dungeness crab fishing gear.

While it is not completely clear what is driving these shifts, Ari Friedlaender, an ecologist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who monitors whale migrations and did not attend the convention’s workshop, said it could be that changing ocean conditions may be pushing the whales’ prey closer to shore.

“The timing of when these animals migrate now puts them in overlap with that fishery, whereas [previously] they would have migrated through that same area, but at a different time of year,” he said.

In some places, such as the Southern Ocean, Freidlaender said he is especially concerned about the overall availability of prey needed to sustain the whales that feed there. “The food is limited in Antarctica.”

Ideally, migrating whales arrive at their polar feeding grounds right around the same time that krill, their preferred prey, are swarming in massive aggregations in response to phytoplankton blooms, which the little creatures feed on. This synchronicity allows the whales to gorge for several months while building the fat reserves they need to survive long stretches of time that they will go without food as they migrate back to their breeding grounds to mate and calve. But warmer temperatures and melting sea ice are disrupting these cycles.

Krill blooms in polar regions are weakening, peaking earlier, or failing to materialize altogether, Atwood said.“Increasingly, whales reach their feeding grounds to find krill stocks depleted.” This, in turn, forces the whales to travel even greater distances in search of sustenance. But it doesn’t always mean they find it.

“There may not even be an opportunity to go to a place where there is more food,” said Friedlaender.

Krill thrive in icy environments. They graze on algae growing on the underbelly of sea ice, which also provides a nursery-like environment for krill larvae to grow safely without being preyed upon. But as this sea ice disappears, some krill are leaving their traditional habitats and moving towards colder waters. Others are vanishing altogether. In some years, where there’s less sea ice, Friedlaender said, “There’s just not enough food around.”

As a result, it’s becoming more common to see some of the world’s largest whales, including humpbacks, showing up in tropical breeding grounds “looking very skinny,” Simmonds said.

This can have significant repercussions on their health, Friedlaender said, including their ability to reproduce. “It could have those sort of cascading impacts of really changing the dynamics of how that population grows.”

To conserve whales and other migratory marine life, Friedlaender said, static protections such as implementing marine protected areas are not enough. Instead, he said, dynamic management strategies must be created and implemented that help protect the animals as they move, such as real-time monitoring of whale movements, shifting shipping lanes or requiring vessel speed limits when whales are present, as well as stricter fishing regulations in key habitats. Ongoing research into how climate change is reshaping animal migrations around the world is also critical, Atwood said, not only to safeguard the species themselves but to protect the ecosystems they help sustain.

“Because these animals are so uniquely adapted to move across huge swaths of land and oceans, oblivious to political borders, the solutions must be just as dynamic, far-reaching, and borderless,” she said. “Effective responses therefore require an integrated understanding of projected climatic and habitat changes, species’ ecologies and behavioral responses, and mechanisms for fostering international cooperation.”

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.

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Anti-vaccine activists want to go nationwide after Idaho law passes

anti-vaccine activists, anti-vaxxer, health, public health, syndication, vaccine mandates / /

This is so stupid… and dangerous

The Idaho Medical Freedom Act makes it illegal to require anyone to take a vaccine.

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

Three women become choked up as they deliver news in a video posted to social media. “We did it, everybody,” says Leslie Manookian, the woman in the middle. She is a driving force in a campaign that has chipped away at the foundations of modern public health in Idaho. The group had just gotten lawmakers to pass what she called the first true “medical freedom” bill in the nation. “It’s literally landmark,” Manookian said. “It is changing everything.”

With Manookian in the video are two of her allies, the leaders of Health Freedom Idaho. It was April 4, hours after the governor signed the Idaho Medical Freedom Act into law.

The act makes it illegal for state and local governments, private businesses, employers, schools, and daycares to require anyone to take a vaccine or receive any other “medical intervention.”

Whether the law will actually alter day-to-day life in Idaho is an open question, because Idaho already made it easy to get around the few existing vaccination requirements.

But it could have a significant effect in other states, where rules aren’t already so relaxed. And it comes at a time when diseases once eradicated from the US through vaccination are making a resurgence.

The law runs against one of the hallmarks of modern public health: that a person’s full participation in society depends on their willingness to follow certain rules. (Want to send your child to public school? They’ll need a measles vaccine. Want to work in a retirement community during flu season? You might have to wear a mask.)

The new Idaho law flips that on its head. It not only removes the obligation to follow such rules, it makes the rules themselves illegal.

The new law sets Idaho apart from even conservative-leaning South Carolina, where two schools recently quarantined more than 150 unvaccinated children after measles arrived.

A person can spread measles for four days before symptoms appear. During the South Carolina schools’ quarantine, five students began to show symptoms, but the quarantine kept them from spreading it, the health department said this month.

That precaution would now be illegal in Idaho.

Idaho’s law caught the attention of people who share Manookian’s belief that—contrary to hundreds of years of public health evidence and rigorous regulation in the US—vaccines are worse than the diseases they prevent.

It also caught the attention of people like Jennifer Herricks, a pro-vaccine advocate in Louisiana and advocacy director for American Families for Vaccines.

Herricks and her counterparts in other states say that vaccine requirements have “done so much good for our kids and for our communities.”

An analysis published last year by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that routine childhood vaccines prevented more than 1.1 million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations in the US over three decades, saving $540 billion in direct costs and saving society about $2.7 trillion. The analysis was limited; it didn’t account for the lives and money saved by vaccines for flu or RSV, which kill and hospitalize babies and children each year.

Idaho’s move was “pretty concerning,” Herricks said, “especially seeing the direction that everything is headed at the federal government.”

The law is the culmination of a decade of anti-vaccine activism that got a boost from the pandemic.

It’s rooted in a belief system that distrusts institutions—government health agencies, vaccine makers, medical societies, and others—on the premise that those institutions seek only money and control.

Manookian said in an interview that she believes one person should never be told to risk their health in “the theoretical” service of another.

Now, Manookian and her allies have a new goal in their sights: to make Idaho’s legislation a nationwide standard.

Idaho was already more permissive than other states when it came to vaccine rules. Parents since at least the 1990s could send unvaccinated children to school if they signed a form saying vaccination went against their religious or personal beliefs.

That wasn’t good enough for Idahoans who describe themselves as advocates for health freedom. They worked to shift the paradigm, bit by bit, so that it can be easier now for parents to get a vaccine exemption than to show the school their child is actually vaccinated.

In recent years, lawmakers ordered schools and daycare centers to tell parents about the exemptions allowed in Idaho whenever they communicate about immunizations.

The state also decided to let parents exempt their kids by writing a note, instead of having to fill out a form—one that, in the past, required them to acknowledge the risks of going unvaccinated.

(There is conflicting data on whether these changes truly affected vaccination rates or just led more parents to skip the trouble of handing in vaccine records. Starting in 2021, Idaho schools reported a steady drop in the share of kindergartners with documented vaccinations. Phone surveys of parents, by contrast, showed vaccination rates have been largely unchanged.)

An enduring backlash against Idaho’s short-lived COVID-19 mandates gave Manookian’s movement more momentum, culminating this year in what she considered the ultimate step in Idaho’s evolution.

Manookian had a previous career in finance in New York and London. She transitioned to work as a homeopath and advocate, ultimately returning to her home state of Idaho.

The bill she came up with said that almost nobody can be required to have a vaccine or take any test or medical procedure or treatment in order to go to school, get a job, or go about life how they’d like to. In practice, that would mean schools couldn’t send unvaccinated kids home, even during a measles outbreak, and private businesses and daycares couldn’t require people on their property to follow public health guidance.

The state had just passed “the Coronavirus Stop Act” in 2023, which banned nearly all COVID-19 vaccine requirements. If lawmakers did that for COVID-19, Manookian reasoned, they could do the same for all communicable diseases and all medical decisions.

Her theory was right, ultimately.

The bill she penned in the summer of 2024 made it through the Republican-controlled House and Senate in early 2025.

Manookian took to social media to rally support for the legislation as it sat on the desk of Gov. Brad Little.

But the governor vetoed it. In a letter, he explained that he saw the bill as government intrusion on “parents’ freedom to ensure their children stay healthy.” During an outbreak, he said, schools wouldn’t be able to send home students “with highly contagious conditions” like measles.

Manookian tried again days after the veto. In the next version of the bill, protections during a disease outbreak applied only to “healthy” people.

This time, Little signed it.

Weeks after the signing, Manookian joined like-minded advocates on a stage in Washington, DC, for a launch event for the MAHA Institute, a group with strong ties to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (MAHA stands for Make America Healthy Again.) The new Health and Human Services secretary had denounced vaccines for years before President Donald Trump appointed him.

At the gathering, Manookian announced her next mission: to make it “a societal norm and to codify it in law” that nobody can dictate any other person’s medical choices.

“We’re going to roll that out to other states, and we’re going to make America free again,” Manookian told the audience in May.

Manookian’s commitment to bring along the rest of the country has continued ever since.

Her nonprofit, the Health Freedom Defense Fund, is now distributing model legislation and a how-to guide, with talking points to persuade legislators. Manookian said in podcast interviews that she is working with the nonprofit Stand For Health Freedom to mobilize activists in every state.

In an interview with ProPublica, Manookian said her objective is for people to “understand and appreciate that the most basic and fundamental of human rights is the right to direct our own medical treatment—and to codify that in law in every state. Breaking that barrier in Idaho proves that it can be done, that Americans understand the importance of this, and the humanity of it, and that it should be done in other states.”

Her efforts were rewarded over the summer with a visit from none other than Kennedy, who visited Boise and toured a farm with Manookian and state lawmakers in tow.

“This state, more than any other state in the country” aligns with the MAHA campaign, Kennedy told reporters at a news conference where no one was allowed to ask questions. Kennedy called Idaho “the home of medical freedom.”

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment from Kennedy or his staff on Idaho’s law and his visit to the state.

Children’s Health Defense, the organization Kennedy built into one of the fiercest foes of childhood vaccines, took interest in the Idaho bill early on.

The group promoted the bill as it sat on the governor’s desk, as he vetoed it, then as Manookian worked successfully to get a revived bill through the statehouse and signed into law.

The organization’s online video programming featured Manookian five times in late March and early April. One show’s host told viewers they could follow Idaho in its “very smart strategy” of taking a law against COVID-related mandates, “crossing out ‘COVID,’ making a few other tweaks, and you have an incredible health freedom bill after that.”

Children’s Health Defense CEO Mary Holland said she’s known Manookian for more than 15 years and pushed the national organization to publicize Manookian’s work. Holland introduced her at the Washington, DC, event.

Whereas most states put the onus on unvaccinated people to show why they should opt out of a mandate, Idaho’s legislation made unvaccinated people the norm—shifting the burden of accommodation onto those who support vaccination.

Now, parents of infants too young for a measles vaccine can’t choose a daycare that requires immunization. Parents of immune-compromised students must decide whether to keep their children home from school during an outbreak of vaccine-preventable diseases, knowing unvaccinated children won’t be quarantined.

Holland said Idaho parents who want their kids to be in a learning environment with “herd immunity” levels of measles vaccination can start a private “association”—not a school, because schools can’t require vaccines—just as parents who don’t like vaccines have done in order to dodge requirements imposed by states like California and New York.

“I think you could certainly do that in Idaho,” Holland said. “It wouldn’t be a public school. It might be the Church of Vaccinia school.”

The day Idaho’s Medical Freedom Act was signed, a legislator in Louisiana brought forward the Louisiana Medical Freedom Act. In a hearing later, she pointed to Idaho as a model.

Louisiana followed Idaho once before in 2024, when it passed a law that requires schools to describe the exemptions available to parents whenever they communicate about immunizations. Idaho had passed an almost identical law three years earlier.

Herricks, the Louisiana pro-vaccine advocate, said she watched the Idaho Medical Freedom Act’s progress with “a lot of concern, seeing how much progress it was making.” Now it’s set a precedent, Herricks said.

Holland, the Children’s Health Defense CEO, said she looks forward to Idaho’s approach spreading.

She pointed to a September announcement by Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo that he intends to rid his state of all vaccine mandates. Holland said she expects other Republican-controlled states to take a serious look at the Idaho law. (Ladapo’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)

“It’s a big change,” Holland said. “It’s not just related to vaccines. It’s a blow against the notion that there can be compulsory medicine.”

Some people support the more-than-century-old notion that compelling people to be vaccinated or masked will provide such enormous collective benefits that it outweighs any inconvenience or small incursion on personal liberty.

Others, like Holland and Manookian, do not.

At the heart of laws like Idaho’s is a sense of, “‘I’m going to do what I want to do for myself, and I don’t want anybody telling me what to do,’ which is in direct contrast to public health,” said Paul Offit, pediatrician and vaccinologist at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Offit, who co-invented a vaccine against rotavirus, is a critic of Kennedy and was removed from a federal vaccine panel in September.

A more fundamental conflict is that some people believe vaccines and other tools to prevent the spread of illness, like masks, are harmful. That belief is at odds with the overwhelming consensus of scientists and health experts, including Kennedy’s own Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC.

Both tensions are at play in Idaho.

As is the case nationally, Idaho’s “health freedom” movement has long pushed back against being labeled “anti-vaccine.” Idaho lawmakers and advocates have stressed that their goals are bodily autonomy and informed choice.

They do not take a stance on the bodily autonomy principle when it comes to abortion, however. Almost all state legislators who voted for the Idaho Medical Freedom Act also voted to ban abortion, if they were in office at both times.

“Every action has to be evaluated on its individual morality,” not on whether it does the most good for the most people, Manookian said.

But Manookian’s rejection of vaccine mandates goes beyond a libertarian philosophy.

Manookian has said publicly that she thinks vaccines are “poison for profit,” that continuing to let daycares require vaccination would “put our children on the chopping block,” that measles is “positive for the body,” that the virus protects against cancer, and that it can send people “into total remission”—an assertion she made on an Idaho wellness center’s podcast in April.

Manookian told ProPublica she believes infectious diseases have been made “the bogeyman.”

Against those claims, research has shown that having the measles suppresses immunity to other diseases, a phenomenon dubbed “immune amnesia” that can make children who have recovered from measles more susceptible to pneumonia and other bacterial and viral infections. About 20 percent of unvaccinated people who get measles will be hospitalized, and 1 to 3 of every 1,000 children who are infected will die from complications of the disease, according to the CDC.

And while researchers have studied using engineered measles viruses in a cancer treatment, those same researchers have written that they were “dismayed to learn” their research has been misconstrued by some who oppose vaccination. They said they “very strongly advise” giving children the measles vaccine, that there “is no evidence that measles infection can protect against cancer,” and that measles is “a dangerous pathogen, not suitable for use as a cancer therapy.”

(Manookian said she believes she has evidence for her cancer remission claim but couldn’t readily produce it, adding that she may have been mistaken.)

The measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, meanwhile, is safe and highly effective, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others. The CDC says the most common negative reactions are a sore arm, fever, or mild rash. Two doses of the vaccine provide near total protection, according to the CDC.

Manookian said she doesn’t believe the research on vaccines has been adequate.

She will have another chance to spread her views from a prominent platform in November, when she’s scheduled to speak at the Children’s Health Defense 2025 conference in Austin, Texas.

She’ll share the stage with celebrities in the anti-vaccine movement: Del Bigtree, communications director for Kennedy’s past presidential campaign; actor Russell Brand; Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson; and Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general who made headlines for his push to end vaccine mandates in Florida, months after Idaho wrote that concept into law.

This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

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Teachers get an F on AI-generated lesson plans

AI, AI-generated lesson plans, education, syndication, teachers / /

To collect data for this study, in August 2024 we prompted three GenAI chatbots—the GPT-4o model of ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Flash model, and Microsoft’s latest Copilot model—to generate two sets of lesson plans for eighth grade civics classes based on Massachusetts state standards. One was a standard lesson plan and the other a highly interactive lesson plan.

We garnered a dataset of 311 AI-generated lesson plans, featuring a total of 2,230 activities for civic education. We analyzed the dataset using two frameworks designed to assess educational material: Bloom’s taxonomy and Banks’ four levels of integration of multicultural content.

Bloom’s taxonomy is a widely used educational framework that distinguishes between “lower-order” thinking skills, including remembering, understanding, and applying, and “higher-order” thinking skills—analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Using this framework to analyze the data, we found 90 percent of the activities promoted only a basic level of thinking for students. Students were encouraged to learn civics through memorizing, reciting, summarizing, and applying information, rather than through analyzing and evaluating information, investigating civic issues, or engaging in civic action projects.

When examining the lesson plans using Banks’ four levels of integration of multicultural content model, which was developed in the 1990s, we found that the AI-generated civics lessons featured a rather narrow view of history—often leaving out the experiences of women, Black Americans, Latinos and Latinas, Asian and Pacific Islanders, disabled individuals, and other groups that have long been overlooked. Only 6 percent of the lessons included multicultural content. These lessons also tended to focus on heroes and holidays rather than deeper explorations of understanding civics through multiple perspectives.

Overall, we found the AI-generated lesson plans to be decidedly boring, traditional, and uninspiring. If civics teachers used these AI-generated lesson plans as is, students would miss out on active, engaged learning opportunities to build their understanding of democracy and what it means to be a citizen.

Teachers get an F on AI-generated lesson plans Read More »

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Antarctica is starting to look a lot like Greenland—and that isn’t good

Antarctica, climate change, glaciers, global warming, Science, syndication / /

Global warming is awakening sleeping giants of ice at the South Pole.

A view of the Shoesmith Glacier on Horseshoe Island on Feb. 21. Credit: Sebnem Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images

As recently as the 1990s, when the Greenland Ice Sheet and the rest of the Arctic region were measurably thawing under the climatic blowtorch of human-caused global warming, most of Antarctica’s vast ice cap still seemed securely frozen.

But not anymore. Physics is physics. As the planet heats up, more ice will melt at both poles, and recent research shows that Antarctica’s ice caps, glaciers, and floating ice shelves, as well as its sea ice, are just as vulnerable to warming as the Arctic.

Both satellite data and field observations in Antarctica reveal alarming signs of a Greenland-like meltdown, with increased surface melting of the ice fields, faster-moving glaciers, and dwindling sea ice. Some scientists are sounding the alarm, warning that the rapid “Greenlandification” of Antarctica will have serious consequences, including an accelerated rise in sea levels and significant shifts in rainfall and drought patterns.

The Antarctic ice sheet covers about 5.4 million square miles, an area larger than Europe. On average, it is more than 1 mile thick and holds 61 percent of all the fresh water on Earth, enough to raise the global average sea level by about 190 feet if it all melts. The smaller, western portion of the ice sheet is especially vulnerable, with enough ice to raise sea level more than 10 feet.

Thirty years ago, undergraduate students were told that the Antarctic ice sheets were going to be stable and that they weren’t going to melt much, said Ruth Mottram, an ice researcher with the Danish Meteorological Institute and lead author of a new paper in Nature Geoscience that examined the accelerating ice melt and other similarities between changes in northern and southern polar regions.

“We thought it was just going to take ages for any kind of climate impacts to be seen in Antarctica. And that’s really not true,” said Mottram, adding that some of the earliest warnings came from scientists who saw collapsing ice shelves, retreating glaciers, and increased surface melting in satellite data.

One of the early warning signs was the rapid collapse of an ice shelf along the narrow Antarctic Peninsula, which extends northward toward the tip of South America, said Helen Amanda Fricker, a geophysics professor with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography Polar Center at the University of California, San Diego.

Chunks of sea ice on the shore

Stranded remnants of sea ice along the Antarctic Peninsula are a reminder that much of the ice on the frozen continent around the South Pole is just as vulnerable to global warming as Arctic ice, where a long-term meltdown is well underway.

Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News

Stranded remnants of sea ice along the Antarctic Peninsula are a reminder that much of the ice on the frozen continent around the South Pole is just as vulnerable to global warming as Arctic ice, where a long-term meltdown is well underway. Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News

After a string of record-warm summers riddled the floating Rhode Island-sized slab of ice with cracks and meltwater ponds, it crumbled almost overnight. The thick, ancient ice dam was gone, and the seven major outlet glaciers behind it accelerated toward the ocean, raising sea levels as their ice melted.

“The Larsen B ice shelf collapse in 2002 was a staggering event in our community,” said Fricker, who was not an author of the new paper. “We just couldn’t believe the pace at which it happened, within six weeks. Basically, the ice shelves are there and then, boom, boom, boom, a series of melt streams and melt ponds. And then the whole thing collapsed, smattered into smithereens.”

Glaciologists never thought that events would happen that quickly in Antarctica, she said.

Same physics, same changes

Fricker said glaciologists thought of changes in Antarctica on millennial timescales, but the ice shelf collapse showed that extreme warming can lead to much more rapid change.

Current research focuses on the edges of Antarctica, where floating sea ice and relatively narrow outlet glaciers slow the flow of the ice cap toward the sea. She described the Antarctic Ice Sheet as a giant ice reservoir contained by a series of dams.

“If humans had built those containment structures,” she said, “we would think that they weren’t very adequate. We are relying on those dams to hold back all of that ice, but the dams are weakening all around Antarctica and releasing more ice into the ocean.”

Satellite view of ice cap coverage

A comparison of the average concentration of Antarctic sea ice.

Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

A comparison of the average concentration of Antarctic sea ice. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

The amount of ice that’s entered the ocean has increased fourfold since the 1990s, and she said, “We’re on the cusp of it becoming a really big number… because at some point, there’s no stopping it anymore.”

The Antarctic Ice Sheet is often divided into three sectors: the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, the largest and thickest; the West Antarctic Ice Sheet; and the Antarctic Peninsula, which is deemed the most vulnerable to thawing and melting.

Mottram, the new paper’s lead author, said a 2022 heatwave that penetrated to the coldest interior part of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet may be another sign that the continent is not as isolated from the rest of the global climate system as once thought. The extraordinary 2022 heatwave was driven by an atmospheric river, or a concentrated stream of moisture-laden air. Ongoing research “shows that there’s been an increase in the number of atmospheric rivers and an increase in their intensity,” she said.

Antarctica is also encircled by a powerful circumpolar ocean current that has prevented the Southern Ocean from warming as quickly as other ocean regions. But recent climate models and observations show the buffer is breaking down and that relatively warmer waters are starting to reach the base of the ice shelves, she said.

New maps detailing winds in the region show that “swirls of air from higher latitudes are dragging in all the time, so it’s not nearly as isolated as we were always told when we were students,” she said.

Ice researcher Eric Rignot, an Earth system science professor at the University of California, Irvine, who did not contribute to the new paper, said via email that recent research on Antarctica’s floating ice shelves emphasizes the importance of how the oceans and ice interact, a process that wasn’t studied very closely in early Greenland research. And Greenland shows what will happen to Antarctic glaciers in a warmer climate with more surface melt and more intense ice-ocean interactions, he added.

“We learn from both but stating that one is becoming the other is an oversimplification,” he said. “There is no new physics in Greenland that does not apply to Antarctica and vice versa.”

Rignot said the analogy between the two regions also partly breaks down because Greenland is warming up at two to three times the global average, “which has triggered a slowing of the jet stream,” with bigger wobbles and “weird weather patterns” in the Northern Hemisphere.

Antarctica is warming slightly less than the global average rate, according to a 2025 study, and the Southern Hemisphere jet stream is strengthening and tightening toward the South Pole, “behaving completely opposite,” he said.

Mottram said her new paper aims to help people understand that Antarctica is not as remote or isolated as often portrayed, and that what happens there will affect the rest of the global climate system.

“It’s not just this place far away that nobody goes to and nobody understands,” she said. “We actually understand quite a lot of what’s going on there. And so I also hope that it drives more urgency to decarbonize, because it’s very clear that the only way we’re going to get out of this problem is bringing our greenhouse gases down as much as possible, as soon as possible.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Photo of Inside Climate News

Antarctica is starting to look a lot like Greenland—and that isn’t good Read More »

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Apple ups the reward for finding major exploits to $2 million

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Since launching its bug bounty program nearly a decade ago, Apple has always touted notable maximum payouts—$200,000 in 2016 and $1 million in 2019. Now the company is upping the stakes again. At the Hexacon offensive security conference in Paris on Friday, Apple vice president of security engineering and architecture Ivan Krstić announced a new maximum payout of $2 million for a chain of software exploits that could be abused for spyware.

The move reflects how valuable exploitable vulnerabilities can be within Apple’s highly protected mobile environment—and the lengths the company will go to to keep such discoveries from falling into the wrong hands. In addition to individual payouts, the company’s bug bounty also includes a bonus structure, adding additional awards for exploits that can bypass its extra secure Lockdown Mode as well as those discovered while Apple software is still in its beta testing phase. Taken together, the maximum award for what would otherwise be a potentially catastrophic exploit chain will now be $5 million. The changes take effect next month.

“We are lining up to pay many millions of dollars here, and there’s a reason,” Krstić tells WIRED. “We want to make sure that for the hardest categories, the hardest problems, the things that most closely mirror the kinds of attacks that we see with mercenary spyware—that the researchers who have those skills and abilities and put in that effort and time can get a tremendous reward.”

Apple says that there are more than 2.35 billion of its devices active around the world. The company’s bug bounty was originally an invite-only program for prominent researchers, but since opening to the public in 2020, Apple says that it has awarded more than $35 million to more than 800 security researchers. Top-dollar payouts are very rare, but Krstić says that the company has made multiple $500,000 payouts in recent years.

Apple ups the reward for finding major exploits to $2 million Read More »

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How close are we to solid state batteries for electric vehicles?

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Superionic materials promise greater range, faster charges and more safety.

In early 2025, Mercedes-Benz ran its first road tests of an electric passenger car powered by a prototype solid-state battery pack. The carmaker predicts the next-gen battery will increase the electric vehicle’s driving range to over 620 miles (1,000 kilometers). Credit: Mercedes-Benz Group

Every few weeks, it seems, yet another lab proclaims yet another breakthrough in the race to perfect solid-state batteries: next-generation power packs that promise to give us electric vehicles (EVs) so problem-free that we’ll have no reason left to buy gas-guzzlers.

These new solid-state cells are designed to be lighter and more compact than the lithium-ion batteries used in today’s EVs. They should also be much safer, with nothing inside that can burn like those rare but hard-to-extinguish lithium-ion fires. They should hold a lot more energy, turning range anxiety into a distant memory with consumer EVs able to go four, five, six hundred miles on a single charge.

And forget about those “fast” recharges lasting half an hour or more: Solid-state batteries promise EV fill-ups in minutes—almost as fast as any standard car gets with gasoline.

This may all sound too good to be true—and it is, if you’re looking to buy a solid-state-powered EV this year or next. Look a bit further, though, and the promises start to sound more plausible. “If you look at what people are putting out as a road map from industry, they say they are going to try for actual prototype solid-state battery demonstrations in their vehicles by 2027 and try to do large-scale commercialization by 2030,” says University of Washington materials scientist Jun Liu, who directs a university-government-industry battery development collaboration known as the Innovation Center for Battery500 Consortium.

Indeed, the challenge is no longer to prove that solid-state batteries are feasible. That has long since been done in any number of labs around the world. The big challenge now is figuring out how to manufacture these devices at scale, and at an acceptable cost.

Superionic materials to the rescue

Not so long ago, says Eric McCalla, who studies battery materials at McGill University in Montreal and is a coauthor of a paper on battery technology in the 2025 Annual Review of Materials Research, this heady rate of advancement toward powering electric vehicles was almost unimaginable.

Until about 2010, explains McCalla, “the solid-state battery had always seemed like something that would be really awesome—if we could get it to work.” Like current EV batteries, it would still be built with lithium, an unbeatable element when it comes to the amount of charge it can store per gram. But standard lithium-ion batteries use a liquid, a highly flammable one at that, to allow easy passage of charged particles (ions) between the device’s positive and negative electrodes. The new battery design would replace the liquid with a solid electrolyte that would be nearly impervious to fire—while allowing for a host of other physical and chemical changes that could make the battery faster charging, lighter in weight, and all the rest.

“But the material requirements for these solid electrolytes were beyond the state of the art,” says McCalla. After all, standard lithium-ion batteries have a good reason for using a liquid electrolyte: It gives the ionized lithium atoms inside a fluid medium to move through as they shuttle between the battery’s two electrodes. This back-and-forth cycle is how any battery stores and releases energy—the chemical equivalent of pumping water from a low-lying reservoir to a high mountain lake, then letting it run back down through a turbine whenever you need some power. This hypothetical new battery would somehow have to let those lithium ions flow just as freely—but through a solid.

Diagram of rechargable battery

Storing electrical energy in a rechargeable battery is like pumping water from a low-lying reservoir up to a high mountain lake. Likewise, using that energy to power an external device is like letting the water flow back downhill through a generator. The volume of the mountain lake corresponds to the battery’s capacity, or how much charge it can hold, while the lake’s height corresponds to the battery’s voltage—how much energy it gives to each unit of charge it sends through the device.

Credit: Knowable Magazine

Storing electrical energy in a rechargeable battery is like pumping water from a low-lying reservoir up to a high mountain lake. Likewise, using that energy to power an external device is like letting the water flow back downhill through a generator. The volume of the mountain lake corresponds to the battery’s capacity, or how much charge it can hold, while the lake’s height corresponds to the battery’s voltage—how much energy it gives to each unit of charge it sends through the device. Credit: Knowable Magazine

This seemed hopeless for larger uses such as EVs, says McCalla. Certain polymers and other solids were known to let ions pass, but at rates that were orders of magnitude slower than liquid electrolytes. In the past two decades, however, researchers have discovered several families of lithium-rich compounds that are “superionic”—meaning that some atoms behave like a crystalline solid while others behave more like a liquid—and that can conduct lithium ions as fast as standard liquid electrolytes, if not faster.

“So the bottleneck suddenly is not the bottleneck anymore,” says McCalla.

True, manufacturing these batteries can be a challenge. For example, some of the superionic solids are so brittle that they require special equipment for handling, while others must be processed in ultra-low humidity chambers lest they react with water vapor and generate toxic hydrogen sulfide gas.

Still, the suddenly wide-open potential of solid-state batteries has led to a surge of research and development money from funding agencies around the globe—not to mention the launch of multiple startup companies working in partnership with carmakers such as Toyota, Volkswagen, and many more. Although not all the numbers are public, investments in solid-state battery development are already in the billions of dollars worldwide.

“Every automotive company has said solid-state batteries are the future,” says University of Maryland materials scientist Eric Wachsman. “It’s just a question of, When is that future?”

The rise of lithium-ion batteries

Perhaps the biggest reason to ask that “when” question, aside from the still-daunting manufacturing challenges, is a stark economic reality: Solid-state batteries will have to compete in the marketplace with a standard lithium-ion industry that has an enormous head start.

“Lithium-ion batteries have been developed and optimized over the last 30 years, and they work really great,” says physicist Alex Louli, an engineer and spokesman at one of the leading solid-state battery startups, San Jose, California-based QuantumScape.

Diagram showing how li-ion battery works

Charging a standard lithium-ion battery (top) works by applying a voltage between cathode and anode. This pulls lithium atoms from the cathode and strips off an electron from each. The now positively charged lithium ions then flow across the membrane to the negatively charged anode. There, the ions reunite with the electrons, which flowed through an external circuit as an electric current. These now neutral atoms nest in the graphite lattice until needed again. The battery’s discharge cycle (bottom) is just the reverse: Electrons deliver energy to your cell phone or electric car as they flow via a circuit from anode to cathode, while lithium ions race through the membrane to meet them there.

Credit: Knowable Magazine

Charging a standard lithium-ion battery (top) works by applying a voltage between cathode and anode. This pulls lithium atoms from the cathode and strips off an electron from each. The now positively charged lithium ions then flow across the membrane to the negatively charged anode. There, the ions reunite with the electrons, which flowed through an external circuit as an electric current. These now neutral atoms nest in the graphite lattice until needed again. The battery’s discharge cycle (bottom) is just the reverse: Electrons deliver energy to your cell phone or electric car as they flow via a circuit from anode to cathode, while lithium ions race through the membrane to meet them there. Credit: Knowable Magazine

They’ve also gotten really cheap, comparatively speaking. When Japan’s Sony Corporation introduced the first commercial lithium-ion battery in 1991, drawing on a worldwide research effort dating back to the 1950s, it powered one of the company’s camcorders and cost the equivalent of $7,500 for every kilowatt-hour (KwH) of energy it stored. By April 2025 lithium-ion battery prices had plummeted to $115 per KwH, and were projected to fall toward $80 per KwH or less by 2030—low enough to make a new EV substantially cheaper than the equivalent gasoline-powered vehicle.

“Most of these advancements haven’t really been down to any fundamental chemistry improvements,” says Mauro Pasta, an applied electrochemist at the University of Oxford. “What’s changed the game has been the economies of scale in manufacturing.”

Liu points to a prime example: the roll-to-roll process used for the cylindrical batteries found in most of today’s EVs. “You make a slurry,” says Liu, “then you cast the slurry into thin films, roll the films together with very high speed and precision, and you can make hundreds and thousands of cells very, very quickly with very high quality.”

Lithium-ion cells have also seen big advances in safety. The existence of that flammable electrolyte means that EV crashes can and do lead to hard-to-extinguish lithium-ion fires. But thanks to the circuit breakers and other safeguards built into modern battery packs, only about 25 EVs catch fire out of every 100,000 sold, versus some 1,500 fires per 100,000 conventional cars—which, of course, carry around large tanks of explosively flammable gasoline.

In fact, says McCalla, the standard lithium-ion industry is so far ahead that solid-state might never catch up. “EVs are going to scale today,” he says, “and they’re going with the technology that’s affordable today.” Indeed, battery manufacturers are ramping up their lithium-ion capacity as fast as they can. “So I wonder if the train has already left the station.”

But maybe not. Solid-state technology does have a geopolitical appeal, notes Ying Shirley Meng, a materials scientist at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. “With lithium-ion batteries the game is over—China already dominates 70 percent of the manufacturing,” she says. So for any country looking to lead the next battery revolution, “solid-state presents a very exciting opportunity.”

Performance potential

Another plus is improved performance. At the very time that EV buyers are looking for ever greater range and charging speed, says Louli, the standard lithium-ion recipe is hitting a performance plateau. To do better, he says, “you have to go back and start doing some material innovations”—like those in solid-state batteries.

Take the standard battery’s liquid electrolyte, for example. It’s not only flammable, but also a limitation on charging speed. When you plug in an electric car, the charging cable acts as an external circuit that’s applying a voltage between the battery’s two electrodes, the cathode and the anode. The resulting electrical forces are strong enough to pull lithium atoms out of the cathode and to strip one electron from each atom. But when they drag the resulting ions through the electrolyte toward the anode, they hit the speed limit: Try to rush the ions along by upping the voltage too far and the electrolyte will chemically break down, ending the battery’s charging days forever.

So score one for solid-state batteries: Not only do the best superionic conductors offer a faster ion flow than liquid electrolytes, they also can tolerate higher voltages—all of which translates into EV recharges in under 10 minutes, versus half an hour or more for today’s lithium-ion power packs.

Score another win for solid-state when the ions arrive at the opposite electrode, the anode, during charging. This is where they reunite with their lost electrons, which have taken the long way around through the external circuit. And this is where standard lithium-ion batteries store the newly neutralized lithium atoms in a layer of graphite.

A solid-state battery doesn’t require a graphite cage to store lithium ions at the anode. This shrinks the overall size of the battery and increases its efficiency in uses such as an electric vehicle power pack. The solid-state design also replaces the porous membrane in the middle with a sturdier barrier. The aim is to create a battery that’s more light-weight, safer, stores more energy and makes recharging more convenient than current electric car batteries.

Credit: Knowable Magazine

A solid-state battery doesn’t require a graphite cage to store lithium ions at the anode. This shrinks the overall size of the battery and increases its efficiency in uses such as an electric vehicle power pack. The solid-state design also replaces the porous membrane in the middle with a sturdier barrier. The aim is to create a battery that’s more light-weight, safer, stores more energy and makes recharging more convenient than current electric car batteries. Credit: Knowable Magazine

Graphite anodes were a major commercial advance in 1991—the innovation that finally brought lithium-ion batteries out of the lab and into the marketplace. Graphite is cheap, chemically stable, excellent at conducting electricity, and able to slot those incoming lithium atoms into its hexagonal carbon lattice like so many eggs in an egg carton.

But graphite imposes yet another charging rate limit, since the lattice can handle only so many ions crowding in at once. And it’s heavy, wasting a lot of mass and volume on a simple container, says Louli: “Graphite is an accommodating host, but it does not deliver energy itself—it’s a passive component.” That’s why range-conscious automakers are eager for an alternative to graphite: The more capacity an EV can cram into the same-sized battery pack, and the less weight it has to haul around, the farther it can go on a single charge.

The ultimate alternative would be no cage at all, with no wasted space or weight—just incoming ions condensing into pure lithium metal with every charging cycle. In effect, such a metallic lithium anode would create and then dissolve itself with every charge and discharge cycle—while storing maybe 10 times more electrical energy per gram than a graphite anode.

Such lithium-metal anodes have been demonstrated in the lab since at least the 1970s, and even featured in some early, unsuccessful attempts at commercial lithium batteries. But even after decades of trying, says Louli, no one has been able to make metal anodes work safely and reliably in contact with liquid electrolytes. For one thing, he says, you get these reactions between your liquid electrolyte and the lithium metal that degrade them both, and you end up with a very bad battery lifetime.

And for another, adds Wachsman, “when you are charging a battery with liquids, the lithium going to the anode can plate out non-uniformly and form what are called dendrites.” These jagged spikes of metal can grow in unpredictable ways and pierce the battery’s separator layer: a thin film of electrically insulating polymer that keeps the two electrodes from touching one another. Breaching that barrier could easily cause a short circuit that abruptly ends the device’s useful life, or even sets it on fire.

Dendrite formation

Standard lithium-ion batteries don’t use lithium-metal anodes because there is too high a risk of the metal forming sharp spikes called dendrites. Such dendrites can easily pierce the porous polymer membrane that separates anode from cathode, causing a short-circuit or even sparking a fire. Solid-state batteries replace the membrane with a solid barrier.

Credit: Knowable Magazine

Standard lithium-ion batteries don’t use lithium-metal anodes because there is too high a risk of the metal forming sharp spikes called dendrites. Such dendrites can easily pierce the porous polymer membrane that separates anode from cathode, causing a short-circuit or even sparking a fire. Solid-state batteries replace the membrane with a solid barrier. Credit: Knowable Magazine

Now compare this with a battery that replaces both the liquid electrolyte and the separator with a solid-state layer tough enough to resist those spikes, says Wachsman. “It has the potential of, one, being stable to higher voltages; two, being stable in the presence of lithium metal; and three, preventing those dendrites”—just about everything you need to make those ultra-high-energy-density lithium-metal anodes a practical reality.

“That is what is really attractive about this new battery technology,” says Louli. And now that researchers have found so many superionic solids that could potentially work, he adds, “this is what’s driving the push for it.”

Manufacturing challenges

Increasingly, in fact, the field’s focus has shifted from research to practice, figuring out how to work the same kind of large-scale, low-cost manufacturing magic that’s made the standard lithium-ion architecture so dominant. These new superionic materials haven’t made it easy.

A prime example is the class of sulfides discovered by Japanese researchers in 2011. Not only were these sulfides among the first of the new superionics to be discovered, says Wachsman, they are still the leading contenders for early commercialization.

Major investments have come from startups such as Colorado-based Solid Power and Massachusetts-based Factorial Energy, as well as established battery giants such as China’s CATL and global carmakers such as Toyota and Honda.

And there’s one big reason for the focus on superionic sulfides, says Wachsman: “They’re easy to drop into existing battery cell manufacturing lines,” including the roll-to-roll process. “Companies have got billions of dollars invested in the existing infrastructure, and they don’t want to just displace that with something new.”

Yet these superionic sulfides also have some significant downsides—most notably, their extreme sensitivity to humidity. This complicates the drop-in process, says Oxford’s Pasta. The dry rooms that are currently used to manufacture lithium-ion batteries have a humidity content that is not nearly low enough for sulfide electrolytes, and would have to be retooled. That sensitivity also poses a safety risk if the batteries are ever ruptured in an accident, he says: “If you expose the sulfides to humidity in the air you will generate hydrogen sulfide gas, which is extremely toxic.”

All of which is why startups such as QuantumScape, and the Maryland-based Ion Storage Systems that spun out of Wachsman’s lab in 2015, are looking beyond sulfides to solid-state oxide electrolytes. These materials are essentially ceramics, says Wachsman, made in a high-tech version of pottery class: “You shape the clay, you fire it in a kiln, and it’s a solid.” Except that in this case, it’s a superionic solid that’s all but impervious to humidity, heat, fire, high voltage, and highly reactive lithium metal.

Yet that’s also where the manufacturing challenges start. Superionic or not, for example, ceramics are too brittle for roll-to-roll processing. Once they have been fired and solidified, says Wachsman, “you have to handle them more like a semiconductor wafer, with machines to cut the sheets to size and robotics to move them around.”

Then there’s the “reversible breathing” that plagues oxide and sulfide batteries alike: “With every charging cycle we’re plating and stripping lithium metal at the anode,” explains Louli. “So your entire cell stack will have a thickness increase when you charge and a thickness decrease when you discharge”—a cycle of tiny changes in volume that every solid-state battery design has to allow for.

At QuantumScape, for example, individual battery cells are made by stacking a number of gossamer-thin oxide sheets like a deck of cards, then encasing this stack inside a metal frame that is just thick enough to let the anode layer on each sheet freely expand and contract. The stack and the frame together are then vacuum-sealed into a soft-sided pouch, says Louli, “so if you pack the cells frame to frame, the stacks can breathe and not push on the adjacent cells.”

In a similar way, says Wachsman, all the complications of solid-state batteries have ready solutions—but solutions that inevitably add complexity and cost. Thus the field’s increasingly urgent obsession with manufacturing. Before an auto company will even consider adopting a new EV battery, he says, “it not only has to be better-performing than their current battery, it has to be cheaper.”

And the only way to make complicated technology cheaper is with economies of scale. “That’s why the biggest impediment to solid-state batteries is just the cost of standing up one of these gigafactories to make them in sufficient volume,” says Wachsman. “That’s why there’s probably going to be more solid-state batteries in early adopter-type applications that don’t require that kind of volume.”

Still, says Louli, the long-term demand is definitely there. “What we’re trying to enable by combining the lithium-metal anode with solid-state technology is threefold,” he says: “Higher energy, higher power and improved safety. So for high-performance applications like electric vehicles—or other applications that require high power density, such as drones or even electrified aviation—solid-state batteries are going to be well-suited.”

This story originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

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

How close are we to solid state batteries for electric vehicles? Read More »

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Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas

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Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills, and burns. The Boring Co. has contested the violations. Just last month, a construction worker suffered a “crush injury” after being pinned between two 4,000-foot pipes, according to police records. Firefighters used a crane to extract him from the tunnel opening.

After ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas published their January story, both the CEO and the chairman of the LVCVA board criticized the reporting, arguing the project is well-regulated. As an example, LVCVA CEO Steve Hill cited the delayed opening of a Loop station by local officials who were concerned that fire safety requirements weren’t adequate. Board chair Jim Gibson, who is also a Clark County commissioner, agreed the project is appropriately regulated.

“We wouldn’t have given approvals if we determined things weren’t the way they ought to be and what it needs to be for public safety reasons,” Gibson said, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal. “Our sense is we’ve done what we need to do to protect the public.”

Asked for a response to the new proposed fines, an LVCVA spokesperson said, “We won’t be participating in this story.”

The repeated allegations that the company is violating regulations—including the bespoke regulatory arrangement agreed to by the company—indicates that officials aren’t keeping the public safe, said Ben Leffel, an assistant public policy professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“Not if they’re recommitting almost the exact violation,” Leffel said.

Leffel questioned whether a $250,000 penalty would be significant enough to change operations at The Boring Co., which was valued at $7 billion in 2023. Studies show that fines that don’t put a significant dent in a company’s profit don’t deter companies from future violations, Leffel said.

A state spokesperson disagreed that regulators aren’t keeping the public safe and said the agency believes its penalties will deter “future non-compliance.”

“NDEP is actively monitoring and inspecting the projects,” the spokesperson said.

This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

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Natural disasters are a rising burden for the National Guard

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New Pentagon data show climate impacts shaping reservists’ mission.

National Guard soldiers search for people stranded by flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on September 27, 2024, in Steinhatchee, Florida. Credit: Sean Rayford/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.

The National Guard logged more than 400,000 member service days per year over the past decade responding to hurricanes, wildfires, and other natural disasters, the Pentagon has revealed in a report to Congress.

The numbers mean that on any given day, 1,100 National Guard troops on average have been deployed on disaster response in the United States.

Congressional investigators believe this is the first public accounting by the Pentagon of the cumulative burden of natural disaster response on the nation’s military reservists.

The data reflect greater strain on the National Guard and show the potential stakes of the escalating conflict between states and President Donald Trump over use of the troops. Trump’s drive to deploy the National Guard in cities as an auxiliary law enforcement force—an effort curbed by a federal judge over the weekend—is playing out at a time when governors increasingly rely on reservists for disaster response.

In the legal battle over Trump’s efforts to deploy the National Guard in Portland, Oregon, that state’s attorney general, Dan Rayfield, argued in part that Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek needed to maintain control of the Guard in case they were needed to respond to wildfire—including a complex of fires now burning along the Rogue River in southwest Oregon.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, rejects the science showing that climate change is worsening natural disasters and has ceased Pentagon efforts to plan for such impacts or reduce its own carbon footprint.

The Department of Defense recently provided the natural disaster figures to four Democratic senators as part of a response to their query in March to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth regarding planned cuts to the military’s climate programs. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who led the query on behalf of herself and three other members of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, shared the response with Inside Climate News.

“The effects of climate change are destroying the military’s infrastructure—Secretary Hegseth should take that threat seriously,” Warren told ICN in an email. “This data shows just how costly this threat already is for the National Guard to respond to natural disasters. Failing to act will only make these costs skyrocket.”

Neither the Department of Defense nor the White House immediately responded to a request for comment.

Last week, Hegseth doubled down on his vow to erase climate change from the military’s agenda. “No more climate change worship,” Hegseth exhorted, before an audience of senior officials he summoned to Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia on October 1. “No more division, distraction, or gender delusions. No more debris,” he said. Departing from the prepared text released by the Pentagon, he added, “As I’ve said before, and will say again, we are done with that shit.”

But the data released by the Pentagon suggest that the impacts of climate change are shaping the military’s duties, even if the department ceases acknowledging the science or planning for a warming future. In 2024, National Guard paid duty days on disaster response—445,306—had nearly tripled compared to nine years earlier, with significant fluctuations in between. (The Pentagon provided the figures in terms of “mandays,” or paid duty days over and above reservists’ required annual training days.)

Demand for reservist deployment on disaster assistance over those years peaked at 1.25 million duty days in 2017, when Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria unleashed havoc in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico.

The greatest deployment of National Guard members in response to wildfire over the past decade came in 2023, when wind-driven wildfires tore across Maui, leaving more than 100 people dead. Called into action by Gov. Josh Green, the Hawaii National Guard performed aerial water drops in CH-47 Chinook helicopters. On the ground, they helped escort fleeing residents, aided in search and recovery, distributed potable water, and performed other tasks.

Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois joined Warren in seeking numbers on National Guard natural disaster deployment from the Pentagon.

It was not immediately possible to compare National Guard disaster deployment over the last decade to prior decades, since the Pentagon has not published a similar accounting for years prior to 2015.

But last year, a study by the Rand Corporation, a research firm, on stressors for the National Guard said that service leaders believed that natural disaster response missions were growing in scale and intensity.

“Seasons for these events are lasting longer, the extent of areas that are seeing these events is bigger, and the storms that occur are seemingly more intense and therefore more destructive,” noted the Rand study, produced for the Pentagon. “Because of the population density changes that have occurred, the devastation that can result and the population that can be affected are bigger as well.”

A history of the National Guard published by the Pentagon in 2001 describes the 1990s as a turning point for the service, marked by increasing domestic missions in part to “a nearly continuous string” of natural disasters.

One of those disasters was Hurricane Andrew, which ripped across southern Florida on August 23, 1992, causing more property damage than any storm in US history to that point. The crisis led to conflict between President George H.W. Bush’s administration and Florida’s Democratic governor, Lawton Chiles, over control of the National Guard and who should bear the blame for a lackluster initial response.

The National Guard, with 430,000 civilian soldiers, is a unique military branch that serves under both state and federal command. In Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, the president called on reservists to serve alongside the active-duty military. But state governors typically are commanders-in-chief for Guard units, calling on them in domestic crises, including natural disasters. The president only has limited legal authority to deploy the National Guard domestically, and such powers nearly always have been used in coordination with state governors.

But Trump has broken that norm and tested the boundaries of the law. In June, he deployed the National Guard for law and immigration enforcement in Los Angeles in defiance of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. (Trump also deployed the Guard in Washington, DC, where members already are under the president’s command.) Over the weekend, Trump’s plans to deploy the Guard in Portland, Oregon, were put on hold by US District Judge Karin J. Immergut, a Trump appointee. She issued a second, broader stay on Sunday to block Trump from an attempt to deploy California National Guard members to Oregon. Nevertheless, the White House moved forward with an effort to deploy the Guard to Chicago in defiance of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat. In that case, Trump is calling on Guard members from a politically friendly state, Texas, and a federal judge has rejected a bid by both the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois to block the move.

The conflicts could escalate should a natural disaster occur in a state where Trump has called the Guard into service on law enforcement, one expert noted.

“At the end of the day, it’s a political problem,” said Mark Nevitt, a professor at Emory University School of Law and a Navy veteran who specializes in the national security implications of climate change. “If, God forbid, there’s a massive wildfire in Oregon and there’s 2,000 National Guard men and women who are federalized, the governor would have to go hat-in-hand to President Trump” to get permission to redeploy the service members for disaster response, he said.

“The state and the federal government, most times it works—they are aligned,” Nevitt said. “But you can imagine a world where the president essentially refuses to give up the National Guard because he feels as though the crime-fighting mission has primacy over whatever other mission the governor wants.”

That scenario may already be unfolding in Oregon. On September 27, the same day that Trump announced his intent to send the National Guard into Portland, Kotek was mobilizing state resources to fight the Moon Complex Fire on the Rogue River, which had tripled in size due to dry winds. That fire is now 20,000 acres and only 10 percent contained. Pointing to that fire, Oregon Attorney General Rayfield told the court the Guard should remain ready to respond if needed, noting the role reservists played in responding to major Oregon fires in 2017 and 2020.

“Wildfire response is one of the most significant functions the Oregon National Guard performs in the State,” Rayfield argued in a court filing Sunday.

Although Oregon won a temporary stay, the Trump administration is appealing that order. And given the increasing role of the National Guard in natural disaster response, according to the Pentagon’s figures, the legal battle will have implications far beyond Portland. It will determine whether governors like Kotek will be forced to negotiate with Trump for control of the National Guard amid a crisis that his administration is seeking to downplay.

Photo of Inside Climate News

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