Science & Health

On a 200-acre farm and cattle ranch in Bandera, Texas, Mollie Engelhart grows organic produce, sells raw milk, and writes a daily column about the power of regenerative agriculture. She’s a farmer and a Make America Healthy Again mom who doesn’t like being called a MAHA mom. She prefers to think of herself as “MAHA-aligned.”

In May, Engelhart opened her ranch to a couple hundred pro-MAHA politicians, activists, and leaders for a two-day MAHA farming retreat. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was there. Engelhart’s brother, Ryland, is one of the more well-known figureheads of the movement.

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Her biggest issue with the MAHA label is what she considers the “blue team or red team” politicization of it. Like many MAHA-aligned supporters, she voted for President Donald Trump in the last election largely because of RFK Jr.’s endorsement and their joint promise to clean up America’s chemical-laden food system. Back then, she had faith Trump would make good on that promise. But in the last year and half, that faith has frayed.

“I think that one hundred percent the MAHA movement is very disappointed and disenchanted, and I am not the only one,” said Engelhart. “MAHA voters are homeless.”

MAHA’s disenchantment with the Trump administration has much to do with its open support of Bayer, the manufacturer of the popular pesticide Roundup, which just won a Supreme Court case over the claim that the company failed to adequately warn users about the cancer risk of its weedkiller. First, the administration urged the Supreme Court to take up the case. Then, in February, the president signed an executive order that classified glyphosate-based herbicides like Roundup key to national security and called for increased domestic production of the chemical. In March, it was reported that top officials at the Environmental Protection Agency met with Bayer CEO to discuss “litigation” issues. The following month, the administration sent a lawyer to argue on behalf of the chemical company in a Supreme Court hearing.

Tens of thousands of plaintiffs had sued Bayer, alleging that the active ingredient in Roundup has caused cancer and other health issues and that the company failed to follow state laws when it did not include a warning about cancer risk on its label. But now, the court’s ruling means that states cannot mandate more information on the product’s label than required by federal law, and any such claims against Bayer will have limited pathways of legal recourse.

Just hours after the decision was released, Trump signed an executive order framed as boosting regenerative agriculture and American farm resilience. (Broadly speaking, the term “regenerative agriculture” refers to farming methodologies that boost soil health and its potential for carbon capture, though there is no federal standard or definition like there is for “organic,” leaving it open to interpretation — and, in some cases, greenwashing.) The contradictions between the two actions have sparked a new barrage of criticisms from MAHA voters. “It does seem a little schizophrenic,” said Engelhart. “None of us can be a one-issue voter anymore…I don’t think that anybody is just going to blindly go and vote for one party or another,” she added.

That sentiment is already showing up in the data, though the picture is far from clear-cut. Polling results from last October found that roughly 74 percent of MAHA-supporters identified as Republicans, with 59 percent also identifying as Make America Great Again supporters — the president’s most loyal base. Meanwhile, a POLITICO poll conducted this spring revealed that 47 percent of self-identified MAHA respondents who voted for Trump believe the administration has not done enough to “Make America Healthy Again.” And a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 28 percent of MAHA voters somewhat or strongly disapprove of the way the administration is handling food and vaccine policy, which may affect turnout in the midterm elections that could decide control of Congress. Limiting pesticide use, however, remains one of the movement’s defining causes, with 94 percent of MAHA adherents in favor of reducing exposure to harmful chemicals.

South Dakota farmer Jonathan Lundgren was at the White House on the day that the Supreme Court ruling was announced. Days earlier, he’d been invited to the Rose Garden for a dinner recognizing farmers and was asked to join Trump in the Oval Office for the signing of the regenerative agriculture executive order. Lundgren raises bees, sheep, and poultry, and grows flowers and apples on a 50-acre regenerative farm in Estelline, South Dakota. Like Engelhart, he shirks the political implication of identifying as MAHA, but considers himself aligned with the pro-regenerative agriculture and anti-pesticide faction of the movement.

“They needed some farmer faces to kind of give the whole thing a spin,” he said. Lundgren called the executive order “meaningful,” though it’s not lost on him that it doesn’t introduce new funding or regulations.

Experts say it doesn’t do much at all. “It may sound great, but fundamentally, there’s nothing really new or substantive or meaningful in the EO that I can see that actually changes the equation for how the administration treats regenerative agriculture,” said Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

Inside the Oval Office meeting, Lundgren watched on as Kennedy’s team swiftly mobilized to try to soften the MAHA backlash to the Supreme Court ruling with the president’s executive order, which culminated in an explosive argument between a Department of Health and Human Services official and a top farming lobbyist who was concerned that the order would imply that there are safety issues in the U.S. food supply. Lundgren himself stopped using Roundup about eight years ago when he noticed that agrochemicals were “causing more problems than they were solving” on his farm. But he can’t escape the downwind effects of nearby farms that spray it. Right now, he’s watching scores of bees slow down before outright dying, and his orchard’s leaves cup from herbicide drift. Then there’s the human toll.

“We’re sick this time of year, and it’s a direct result of all of these pesticides being applied. My family is sick. That ain’t right,” Lundgren told Grist. His daughter is grappling with asthma and allergy flare-ups while his farm staff battles recurring headaches and fatigue. “It’s so intense that we call it in my community ‘The Spray Flu.’”

He says these dual actions by the administration, as well as the EPA’s recent approval of yet another batch of pesticides that contain PFAS, often called “forever chemicals,” have changed how he plans to vote in the midterms.

“We’re in a weird state right now that has never really happened before, where food safety and the health of our children is weighing very heavily on American politics,” said Lundgren. “This is far broader than the farming community. I think that this is consumers; I think this is parents; I think this is society at-large.”

Others argue that, despite the administration’s recent pro-regenerative ag messaging, Trump’s track record of anti-climate and pro-chemical policies has not helped the movement to clean up the food system, but hindered it.

Kelly Ryerson, a leading MAHA mom and co-founder of the farming organization American Regeneration, agrees that, when taken together, the ruling and the order reveal a disconnect. “It’s inconsistent, to say the least,” said Ryerson. “If Trump is going to be doing things like the Supreme Court situation, it’s certainly not what anyone voted for…it’ll be really hard to come back from this now.”

For Ryerson, a registered independent who voted for Trump, the two actions have shifted how she plans to approach the midterms. “I don’t care if they’re a Republican or Democrat, I’m going to support the candidate that wants to decrease toxic exposures,” she said.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/trump-tried-to-appease-mahas-fury-over-roundup-it-backfired/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.

As beachgoers flock to water during the busy July Fourth weekend, danger could be lurking in some areas.

Researchers this spring discovered flesh-eating bacteria in water in several coastal locations across New York’s Long Island, and town officials in the Hamptons vacation destination posted an alert about the findings. Eight people in Florida have been infected this year, and Mississippi health officials in June urged people to take precautions.

About 1 in 5 people infected by the bacteria die, sometimes within a day or two of becoming ill, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fact sheet. The bacteria, Vibrio vulnificus, can enter open wounds and cause tissue death and systemic sepsis.

“Many people with Vibrio vulnificus infection can get seriously ill and need intensive care or limb amputation,” the CDC says.

The risk of such public threats is mounting because climate change is expanding the territory of certain pathogens, but researchers say there’s another concern. The Trump administration has cut investments in programs and agencies that prevent, track, and respond to health hazards the federal government is now confronting.

Consider the reemergence of screwworm, which can infest and kill livestock, in the U.S. in June. The U.S. Department of Agriculture lost 18% of its workforce in the first six months of 2025, according to a report from the USDA’s Office of Inspector General, and the agency’s winnowed-down inspection service is helping lead the response to the parasite.

Or malaria. A freeze on foreign aid disrupted international malaria prevention efforts, and new federal guidance in May warned that the U.S. is vulnerable to the reintroduction of the infectious disease.

And when it comes to Vibrio, the Trump administration began removing hundreds of deep-sea instruments that monitor ocean waters and yield data that helps predict conditions that can allow the bacteria to flourish. Researchers have used the data to study Vibrio, which can multiply rapidly when water temperatures and salinity increase.

“It is important to track coastal temperatures, and that will relate to the distributions of Vibrio,” said Christopher Gobler, a professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at New York’s Stony Brook University, though he added that there are also other sources of data for researchers.

The Trump administration reversed its plan to dismantle the ocean monitoring system following bipartisan opposition to the effort in Congress.

But it’s still curtailing Vibrio surveillance. The life-threatening species that’s found in water can also sicken or kill people who eat contaminated seafood, such as raw oysters infected with the bacteria. And infections from Vibrio vulnificus linked to consuming raw or undercooked shellfish have been increasing as the presence of other pathogens in food decrease.

Since 1995, 10 states have participated in a federal program called the Foodborne Disease Active Disease Surveillance Network, or FoodNet. The program, with the CDC, monitors and track cases of foodborne illness caused by eight specific pathogens, including Vibrio. But last year the Trump administration stopped requiring those states to report on all but two pathogens, which means states no longer must report cases to the CDC.

Federal officials deny the moves are putting Americans at risk, saying the CDC continues to monitor these pathogens through other national surveillance systems to ensure ongoing visibility into disease trends and outbreaks.

Meanwhile, some former health leaders say the ramifications of sweeping cuts to health agencies and global prevention programs are becoming more apparent, undermining U.S. response efforts and initiatives that aim to safeguard the country from diseases.

“We are letting down defenses that were necessary to protect against microbial threats,” said Tom Frieden, a former CDC director who is now president and chief executive of Resolve to Save Lives, which works to stop preventable disease. “Instead of protecting, we’re doing the opposite.”

Do Limited Resources Mean Higher Risks?

The administration defends its actions, including massive layoffs at government health agencies, as necessary to eliminate wasteful spending.

The Department of Health and Human Services “is advancing the most significant public health reforms in a generation focused on prevention, accountability, scientific transparency, and better health outcomes,” agency spokesperson Emily Hilliard said in an email. “The Department is putting American families at the center of public health decision-making.”

Evidence suggests health risks are rising even as the Trump administration pulls back on resources for research, detection, and response.

Early in his administration, President Donald Trump opted to freeze and review work on global health programs. Trump’s cost-reduction effort, led by billionaire Elon Musk, also dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development.

As a result, work was disrupted on the President’s Malaria Initiative, a George W. Bush-era program aimed at combating malaria in hard-hit countries that is credited with saving more than 11 million lives. USAID had invested more than $9 billion in the program since 2005.

In addition, 80% of USAID grants for global malaria programs were targeted for termination, according to KFF, an independent research group that includes KFF Health News. The report didn’t include data on the total value of those specific malaria grants.

And the spending freeze halted research for more effective malaria vaccines. The administration dissolved the CDC’s Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria, shuffling staffers to other divisions and interrupting work on the disease. HHS didn’t respond to an email asking how many staff members had been moved.

The life-threatening infectious disease spread by mosquitos was eradicated from the U.S. in 1951. But the CDC’s updated guidance on investigating domestic cases warned in May that “the country remains susceptible to malaria reintroduction.”

An outbreak in 2023 resulted in 10 people in Arkansas, Florida, Maryland, and Texas becoming infected locally, and mosquitoes capable of transmitting malaria are found throughout most of the country.

“The majority of U.S. residents lack protective immunity against malaria, rendering persons susceptible to severe illness and death if infected,” the CDC said in the May report.

HHS declined to comment on any of the specific cuts but said the CDC works with domestic and international partners to reduce the burden of malaria and prevent its reestablishment in the U.S.

It’s not just cuts to funding that are raising health risks, say researchers and former health officials. Significant staffing cuts mean there are fewer people working on preventing or tracking diseases, they say.

“Yes, the programs have been cut in terms of reduction in staff, but I would say, equally important, you have reductions in expertise,” said Jeanne Marrazzo, CEO of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. “It’s irreplaceable.”

Screwworm is a species of parasitic blowfly producing larvae that can enter open wounds and devour tissue, infecting people and animals. Like malaria, it has long been eliminated in the U.S., and disease monitoring efforts have been key to keeping it out.

The cuts at USAID stripped more than $300 million from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, which focuses on global food security and the monitoring of zoonotic diseases such as screwworm.

In the wake of the administration's cost-cutting initiatives, more than 20,000 employees are gone from the USDA, which develops and implements agriculture policy and provides resources to producers of livestock vulnerable to the parasite.

On June 3, the first new case of screwworm in the U.S. was confirmed, and there have now been more than a dozen animals infected with parasite. An expanding outbreak could devastate the cattle industry.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has denied that any staffing cuts during the Trump administration have led to screwworm’s return. Instead, she has blamed the Biden administration, saying it didn’t do enough to prevent reintroduction into the U.S. Rollins said on X that “uncontrolled illegal migration” under the previous Biden administration was partly to blame, providing no evidence.

The USDA did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Ashish Jha, a doctor who served as the White House covid response coordinator during the Biden administration, said there’s no truth to the claim that immigrants lacking legal status have brought screwworm into the U.S.

Investments in tracking and combating diseases have suffered, he said, because HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is prioritizing the prevention of chronic disease at the expense of efforts to curtail infectious disease.

“Who doesn’t want a healthier country? It sounds great, but it’s kind of a bait and switch,” Jha said. “They’re doing the opposite. They’re letting down our defenses that are necessary to protect us against microbial threats.”

HHS’ Hilliard disagreed, saying Kennedy’s actions are making the agency more effective.

“Secretary Kennedy is delivering that reform by streamlining operations, reducing redundancies, and returning HHS to pre-pandemic staffing levels,” she said. “At the same time, he is dismantling policies and incentives that contributed to a nationwide chronic disease epidemic.”

Surveillance Gaps

Jha pointed to Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the World Health Organization, which coordinates global responses to public health issues and crises, and to the dismantling of USAID.

The pullback has had implications for the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, aid workers say.

Without the same amount of funding from USAID, the International Rescue Committee, which partners to deliver front-line health, surveillance, and outbreak preparedness activities in Congo, curtailed its programs.

“Funding cuts have left the region dangerously exposed,” Heather Reoch Kerr, IRC’s country director for Congo, said in a statement.

The outbreak is roughly 7,000 miles away, but its spread has the U.S. on alert, with stepped-up surveillance and entry restrictions on airline travelers. Federal officials have said that the dismantling of USAID hasn’t hampered detection or response.

“The U.S. government continues to move aggressively to contain the Ebola outbreak at its source in order to protect the American people and prevent further international spread,” the State Department said in a May 23 statement.

Trump’s decision to disengage with the WHO was criticized by health leaders following a hantavirus outbreak this spring on a cruise ship that had set sail from Argentina. Some said the federal response was too slow, and they questioned why the president suggested creating a costly new global disease surveillance system rather than sticking with the WHO — especially, they say, when the U.S. is cutting back on the surveillance programs it already has.

The federal government has tracked Vibrio cases as part of the FoodNet program, which aims in part to identify and curtail outbreaks. Reporting on cases of Vibrio is now optional.

Close to half of the cases of foodborne illness caused by Vibrio vulnificus have resulted in death, and some within 24 hours after consumption of tainted shellfish such as raw oysters. The bacteria can multiply rapidly, leading to septic shock and blistering skin lesions. The pathogen is becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics.

The CDC estimates that about 80,000 cases of Vibrio infection occur annually, with infections from the most severe species, Vibrio vulnificus, steadily rising. Over the past five years, that species has led to 429 cases due to infections of open wounds and 135 cases from contaminated food.

“The more surveillance you get, you can connect the dots,” said Bill Marler, a Seattle-area food safety lawyer. “If a tree falls in the woods and you don’t hear it, did the tree fall? It’s easier not to report diseases. Then they can say, ‘Look at how safe our food supply is.’”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

On Tuesday President Donald Trump appointed a famous and controversial Harvard theoretical physicist, cosmologist and astronomer to lead a group of scientists to investigate UFOs and whether they pose a national security threat.

Dr. Avi Loeb, who led Harvard’s astronomy department until 2020 and is widely respected for his research into black holes, was publicly tapped by the Trump administration on Tuesday, according to a report by the Associated Press. In 2022, Dr. Ethan Siegel, an astrophysicist and science writer who frequently criticized Loeb’s work, told this journalist for Salon that Loeb’s research into a mysterious space object that crashed into the ocean, ‘Oumuamua, was a “travesty.” By contrast, Loeb is very popular among the lay UFO fan community, and more than three dozen scientists co-authored a 2023 paper with him in the scientific publication Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation advocating his recommended methods for learning more about UFOs (unidentified flying objects) and UAPS (unidentified anomalous phenomena).

Speaking to AlterNet about his recent appointment, Loeb broke down how he learned about his appointment and what he believes it could mean for American politics.

“I was contacted by the office of the Director of National Intelligence and was asked to lead a council that will advise that office, the ODNI, the White House, the FBI, and the intelligence community, and of course the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office in the Pentagon, providing scientific advice to figure out the nature of unidentified anomalous phenomena, UAP,” Loeb told AlterNet. “And it looks like, if they were sure that they're dealing with human-made objects, they would have a classified memo exchange within the Pentagon or the intelligence agencies. But the fact that they're reaching out to the scientific community for help implies that they cannot really tell that some of these things are definitely human-made. And obviously, if they're human-made, there would be concern for national security, given that these objects are found near strategic assets.”

Because the Trump administration reached out to Loeb, he believes this means that “they really need advice.” He continued by explaining how he will apply the scientific method to his directives.

“First we have to review any information that they can share with us, with the council,” Loeb told AlterNet. “So I first assembled a team of 15 scientists who are exceptional, who have expertise in the physics of oceanography, statistics, and psychology, because these objects are interacting with humans. And we need all these aspects to understand the reported events. And we already submitted, since I assembled this team — and it's really an exceptional team, people who have a fresh mind with respect to the phenomena, I deliberately did not select people with an agenda or baggage regarding their views on the subject, because we need to provide scientific advice — and we already submitted a request for more than 50 items of information on specific incidents, and perhaps materials that the US government might have, and we should see what we hear in response.”

Because Loeb and his scientific team will only analyze unclassified information, they will be able to share their findings with the public, guaranteeing transparency about a subject that is often contentious. Coincidentally, he noted that he recently examined materials released on June 12th of this year, the same day as the Steven Spielberg movie “Disclosure Day,” which explicitly discusses how humanity could be brought together by the revelation that extraterrestrial life exists.

While Loeb admitted that he is not a fan of science fiction “because very often it violates the laws of physics,” he admitted that he feels the sense of wonder and hope captured by Spielberg’s motion picture.

“I feel like a kid in a candy store, in a way, as long as we receive sufficient information that is substantive — because the quality of our deliberations, our analysis, will reflect the quality of the data that we receive,” Loeb told AlterNet. “Science is guided by data. So what I say is, let's keep our eyes on the orbs, not on social media. It's not a matter of opinions — we just need the data, the evidence, just like a detective. So it's a great privilege for me to be involved in figuring things out.”

He added, “Of course, if we find a non-human-made technological object, the implications would be huge for our future. Because, first, we might learn about new science, new technologies. Second, it might imply that we're not at the top of the food chain, cosmologically speaking.

And my hope is that it'll be just like a knock on the door — when all family members in the house hear a knock on the door by a neighbor, all the loud arguments quiet down. So it'll change our priorities from conflicts, which you find every day in the news, to cooperation and response to this neighbor that we just found. It's sort of akin to finding a sibling in our family of intelligent civilizations. And for those people who have religious beliefs, they should not necessarily assume that God is a parent who can attend to only one child.”

Also like “Disclosure Day,” Loeb believes that the discovery of alien organisms could help humanity overcome the differences that sharply divide us. When asked about whether he has yet met President Trump (he said has not), he pivoted to that subject.

“The interesting aspect of this is that both Republican and Democrat members of the House and the Senate are working together on this subject of disclosure, and everyone is excited,” Loeb told AlterNet while laughing. “It's a reminder that science is better than politics. What do I mean by science is better than politics? It brings people together rather than separating them. So in an age where you have a lot of polarization as a result of social media, as a result of political upheaval and so forth, it's really refreshing to find a subject where everyone comes together.”

He then observed, “I was in the US Senate on Thursday for the UAP Disclosure Forum, and there were members of Congress there — you could see half of them were Republicans, half were Democrats, and they were all rooting for it. I find that very refreshing. And I think that is a reflection of what will happen if we do find that we are being visited, because then the mindset will change. People will stop arguing with each other on relatively mundane matters when they realize something cosmologically important — that we are not alone. And it'll change everything.”

Responding to a question from AlterNet about Loeb’s appointment, Siegel reiterated the disdain for Loeb he first expressed to this journalist four years ago.

“This is extremely typical and to be expected of the Trump Administration,” Siegel told AlterNet. “Legitimate science conducted by those who value truth, facts, and the common good of humanity has repeatedly been rejected by this Presidential Administration in favor of sensationalism, grift, and self-enrichment. On those metrics, there is no better qualified astronomer in the country than Avi Loeb, who will no doubt find himself surrounded by like-minded individuals like Dr. Oz, Lee Zeldin, and RFK Jr. in the quest to destroy what remains of the American scientific enterprise entirely, and to replace it with Lysenko-esque policies that will lead to both long-term and short-term harm to all.”

Unlike Siegel, Dr. Franck Marchis — the CEO of SkyMapper and an astronomer at the SETI Institute (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) — had a mixture of praise and criticism for Loeb.

“I also think Avi too often starts with the exciting explanation before the data are strong enough to support it,” Marchis told AlterNet. “That is not how science works. Science is not about making a bold assumption first and then looking for evidence to confirm it. Science is about collecting calibrated data, sharing it, letting other teams verify it, and being ready to change your mind.”

He added, “I also disagree with the idea that scientists are somehow hiding the truth. Most scientists, including my colleagues at the SETI Institute, I know are open, curious, imaginative, and very happy to be surprised. We just know that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. Check our recent discussion with Jill Tarter [a fellow SETI astronomer] for instance. This is exactly why we are building SkyMapper and SkySphere. The goal is to observe the sky all the time, from many places, with instruments that can produce time-stamped and verifiable data.”

A recent study in the scientific journal Current Psychology confirms what many opponents of President Donald Trump long suspected — namely, that demagogic rhetoric such as that promulgated by the Republican president destroys popular faith in democracy.

A group of Dutch, Italian and Spanish researchers determined that “exposure to demagogic discourse increased value threat and reduced political tolerance independent of ideological-matching,” according to a June study in the journal Current Psychology. This means that, when demagogic leaders like Trump went mainstream in those societies, they made it easier for their supporters to rationalize being intolerant of those who disagree with them. At the same time, this conclusion was not without its qualifications.

“Yet, in the U.S., effects on tolerance were moderated by satisfaction with democracy,” the authors wrote. “Ultimately, our research validates warnings about the dangers of demagogic political discourses at a psychological level.”

In their abstract, the authors explained that “rather than mere words, demagogic discourse elicits perceived threat in people that goes against democratic plurality. One can only imagine what, for example, sustained exposure to such discourse across an electoral campaign or a presidential term can do. The first experimental evidence we hereby present on the noxious effects of demagogic discourse compels us to take a more in-depth look at how potentially dangerous words are in this context. Alongside the growth of this kind of discourse, there is also a wave of euphemization by those who use it and those who support them, arguing that, even when foul, words are just words. We have provided some first evidence that this is a crude downplay of the implications of political speech, and that demagogic political discourse contributes to setting the table for potentially antidemocratic confrontation.”

The researchers experimented in three batches on groups of roughly 300 participants, the first collection in Spain and the last two in the United States. In all of the experiments, the researchers asked participants to expose themselves to news articles, political speeches and other forms of polemical rhetoric that to ascertain how such exposure altered their ability to empathize with those who hold differing views. They found that, on a consistent basis, individuals who sincerely internalized those beliefs became less compassionate to anyone who did not share their political views.

“First of all, this seems like a very honest study,” Dr. Henry Abraham, psychiatrist and former professor at Tufts University, told AlterNet. “They don't make wild claims, but they do have statistically meaningful findings, which is why it got published in the first place. And, if I understand the study correctly, it does seem like demagogic language does shape the attitudes of individuals hearing it. And those attitudes shift in a definitely less tolerant direction.”

When it comes to the broader implications for society, Dr. Abraham opined that “these folks are social psychologists, and so they're used to looking at many different variables and seeing how they hang together. This study, by my reading of it, doesn't quite do that. It doesn't look at many possible explanations, like how they drew their sample, whether or not membership in the sample reflected a lot of noise in the form of preexisting political ideas and sensitivities to the questions that were differently distributed between the different groups. That's kind of important.”

He added, “I don't really see in this, in my reading of it, whether people were assigned to their groups randomly or non-randomly. If it was random, that's a real plus. If it was non-random, that would be a source of bias, which could ultimately give you these kinds of results without having great long-term validity. So I hate to be a pain in the — academically — but, you know, this is a complex finding. It seems to be reasonably, thoughtfully done, and it has meaning beyond itself in our greater understanding of how people think. That's saying a lot.”

Previous studies have unpacked how the polarizing rhetoric espoused by Trump on the right and analogous radicals on the left influence widespread perceptions about politics. In April, Futurism analyzed three research papers from the scientific publication Journal of Social and Political Psychology revealed that Trump supporters have been conditioned to reject objective facts when that information contradicts the values with which they have been inculcated by Trump’s political movement.

“While each study is highly complex in their own right, together they reinforce the finding that denial of factual information — Trump’s seedy misdeeds, basically — is a direct response to anxiety caused by cognitive dissonance,” Futurism explained.

Research into the psychology of Trump supporters is a rich field, such as a June study which discovered that right-wingers tend to interpret smiling as an act of dominance more than anti-Trumpers and a May study which revealed that Trump supporters tend to be willing to accept personal hardships as long as they believe that marginalized groups such as Black people, the LGBTQ community and other minorities suffer more than themselves.

A Colorado-based storm chaser was visited by the FBI after cracking a joke about introducing algae spores into the "paint" a Virginia company used on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Patrick Pineda, a photographer of severe weather, motion designer and video game developer, cracked a joke on social media that was so scientifically absurd, he presumably assumed his audience would know it was a joke. The FBI did not.

"I am the leftist who put algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. This plan was months in the making. I introduced spores into the paint used by the contractors who repainted the pool. It was me the whole time," said Pineda, in a since-deleted BlueSky post.

Right Wash, a professional render cleaning service, has a section on its website that explains that algae in a swimming pool can be eliminated by painting over it. It isn't the "best" solution for a number of reasons, it explains, but paint can eliminate an algae problem. But the pool wasn't merely painted.

In a June release, Rhino Linings claimed it was the company that provided an epoxy primer, elastomeric waterproofing and a protective finish coating, tinted American Flag Blue.

"This project demonstrates how modern protective coating systems can help extend the lifespan of aging infrastructure while reducing maintenance requirements and preserving public spaces for future generations," the company said.

To cure, the epoxy needs a low-moisture and chemically hostile surface to adhere. Living organisms like algae need water, light, and nutrients to grow, Florida Atlantic University explains. It simply can't grow in paint, much less the chemicals used for the pricey lining used on the Reflecting Pool.

A swimming pool expert explained that keeping algae out of the reflecting pool will be impossible unless the government uses strong chemicals, which could significantly damage the new liner.

After coming into office, President Donald Trump appointed Kash Patel to lead the FBI. Among his first actions was to fire scores of experienced directors, agents, and other staff, the New York Times reported. It has left the department short-staffed. PBS News explained that this has left both the Justice Department and the FBI in a tough spot as it desperately tries to rebuild.

According to Forbes, leaders are now "easing hiring requirements and accelerating recruitment in ways that some current and former officials see as a lowering of long-accepted standards." The report also said that some current and former agents "say the FBI is promoting into positions of leadership employees with less experience than would be customary for the jobs."

Studies suggest there could be a reason your conservative friend has a bad habit.

“New research published in the Journal of Marketing provides evidence that a person’s political ideology shapes their responses to addictive products,” reports PsyPost. “The findings suggest that political conservatism is associated with more favorable attitudes and behaviors toward items like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling, due to a heightened perception of personal control.

Past studies have confirmed that political ideology affects consumer actions, like charitable giving and recycling. But researchers knew much less about how these same political beliefs affect choices that “carry significant health and financial risks,” like addictive products, which are manufactured specifically to “create physiological and psychological dependencies.”

The difference appears to come down to an individual’s perception of their own self-control — regardless of whether or not they really have any.

“Addictive products, such as gambling, alcohol, tobacco, gaming, fast food, and illicit drugs, create serious public health and social harms,” the authors report. “Yet people differ in how dangerous they think these products are and how favorably they respond to them. We wanted to understand whether political ideology helps explain these differences, as most prior research has focused on how ideology shapes positive consumer behaviors, rather than potentially harmful ones.”

Apparently, an overblown sense of self confidence can lead you into addictions that you’ve convinced yourself you have a handle on.

“The researchers proposed that this heightened feeling of control might lead conservatives to underestimate the inherent dangers of addictive products. If individuals believe they are always in charge of their actions, they might perceive addictive substances as less threatening. This reduced perception of danger could then result in more favorable attitudes and increased consumption,” reports PsyPost.

“Our main finding is that political ideology can shape how people respond to addictive products,” the authors said. “Across ten studies, we found that conservatives, compared with liberals, tended to have more favorable attitudes, intentions, and behaviors toward addictive products. This happened because conservatives reported a stronger sense of personal control over their actions, which made these products seem less dangerous.”

The results came as a bit of a surprise because it ran counter to expectations based on previous psychological profiling.

“Prior research often suggests that conservatives are more sensitive to risk and threat, so one might expect them to view addictive products more negatively,” the authors explained. “Instead, we found the opposite. In this context, conservatives’ stronger sense of agency seemed to reduce their perception of addictive product danger.”

But it wasn’t a fluke, they said.

“We also tested the effect across different countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand,” they said. “The fact that we observed similar results across these settings suggests that the relationship is not unique to a single country or political system. We also found the pattern across several addictive products, including alcohol, tobacco, gambling, fast food, gaming, and drugs.”

Jasmina Ilicic and Stacey Brennan authored the study, “Political Ideology Shapes Consumer Responses to Addictive Products.

El Niño is a recurring climate event with impacts across the globe. It has three phases: one cold (known as La Niña), one neutral, and one warm (El Niño).

The Trump administration has emphasized in recent days that the New World screwworm infection found in a calf in Texas did not pose a threat to the United States’ larger cattle herd, which is at its lowest point in 75 years due largely to drought conditions—but the US Department of Agriculture is now acknowledging that cases of the parasite have been found outside the Texas containment zone and as far away as in New Mexico, as Republican officials attempt to blame the Biden administration for the outbreak.

While Democratic lawmakers are among those connecting the arrival of screwworm—a flesh-eating bug that feeds off the living tissue of warm-blooded animals and had been eradicated in the US in 1966—to cuts by President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that specifically targeted screwworm monitoring programs, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins doubled down on claims that an “open border policy” under the Biden administration was to blame.

“This does trace back to the last administration and the open border policy, and the movement of millions of people and their animals up from South America through Central America,” said Rollins with certainty on Monday.

As David Dayen explained at The American Prospect Tuesday, former President Joe Biden placed a ban on bison, horse, and cattle imports from Mexico in 2024, which Trump lifted in February 2025. At the same time, DOGE, under the leadership of Trump megadonor and tech billionaire Elon Musk, cut screwworm monitoring efforts and animal disease control and prevention efforts, slashing 1,300 employees from USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

Rollins did reinstate the live import ban last May as screwworm cases were rising in Mexico and began funding prevention programs in Texas. But a $600 million facility for breeding sterile screwworm flies—a key component of successful eradication efforts—is not scheduled to be completed until late next year, and sterile flies that have been dispersed from a facility that opened in February at Moore Air Force Base in South Texas only amount to “about one one-hundredth of what it would take each week to eradicate the pest,” Dayen wrote.

He also noted that Rollins has attempted to blame Biden—who has not been in office since January 2025—despite the fact that the total average lifespan of a screwworm fly is 21 days.

“The more likely explanation is that an administration with an antipathy to government ignored government’s purpose until it was too late,” wrote Dayen.

The USDA established a 12-mile quarantine area around the affected area last week when the case was detected in South Texas, but on Monday the agency said another case had been found in Gillespie County, over 100 miles from where the initial case was reported.

A dog was also found to be infested in Lea County, New Mexico, more than 400 miles away.

The parasite is not expected to affect food safety, as it feeds on living tissue, but the outbreak raises concerns about rising beef prices, which are already high due to the low volume of cattle in the US. The high prices of fertilizer and fuel due to the war in Iran, and of equipment and repairs due to Trump’s tariff policy, have also put a strain on the cattle industry.

“The cattle producer in the US has already been under extreme financial stress,” Joe Maxwell, president of Farm Action Fund and a farmer in Missouri, told The American Prospect. “This is serious, the screwworm outbreak. But it’s even more serious because of the financial position they were already under.”

In response to Rollins’ claims, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Tuesday: “Let’s be clear about what happened: DOGE cut the programs and staff that tracked dangerous outbreaks like screwworm.”

“So this has nothing to do with Joe Biden,” she said, “but Trump and DOGE definitely screwed our cattle industry.”

California's fault lines are under the most amount of stress than they've experienced in 1,000 years, researchers revealed.

A new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Solid Earth, cites concerns that a major earthquake might be on the horizon. There's no real way of knowing when it could happen, the experts warned.

Gizmodo reported the study on Tuesday, including a visualization from the research team of the tectonic plates in California. These plates are constantly pushing, pulling or sliding. The fault lines are where fractures in the plates accumulate pressure, and stress on those faults can build up over time.

Eventually, when the stress exceeds the friction holding the rocks together, an earthquake occurs as the fault ruptures. The more often there are little earthquakes that release the pressure, the less buildup there can be. The longer it has been since the last quake, the more energy is accumulated. All of that built-up stress energy is released as waves or vibrations that travel through the Earth, moving the ground.

“The question of when and how the next major earthquake will occur in this region is one of the most pressing problems in applied geoscience,” said lead author Liliane Burkhard, a geophysicist and planetary geologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, in a press release. “Our results provide a clearer, physics-based picture of the current stress state of the fault system, and the framework we developed is not just applicable to California, but also for other complex fault junctions worldwide."

The visualization shows the greatest stress on the fault line northeast of Los Angeles. The last major quake was a magnitude 7.9 in Fort Tejon in 1857. It remains one of the largest on record, Gizmodo recounted. Even the infamous 1994 Northridge quake didn't exceed 7.0, and it cost an estimated $49 billion, the Los Angeles Daily News reported in 2014.

Scientists are fearful that the San Andreas Fault System could move "any day now," the report said.

"Their physics-based earthquake cycle model simulates this process in three spatial dimensions over time," said Gizmodo, citing the research. The scientists put geological data of past quakes into their model, which included things like tree-ring anomalies and radiocarbon dating.

"When they ran it, the results indicated that tectonic stresses along the San Andreas and San Jacinto fault zones have reached and, in some cases, exceeded the highest levels of the last millennium," the report said.

There are two main points in the fault system where the San Andreas and San Jacinto are. Burkhard and her co-researchers called it a kind of "earthquake gate."

“The earthquake gate concept captures something important about how fault junctions work,” Burkhard said in the release. “Cajon Pass doesn’t simply block or channel earthquakes: It responds to stress conditions, and those conditions change over centuries.”

When stress builds up on both faults, it's more likely that one'll rupture at a major joint and cross both systems, the study said. That's why they fear it could be more substantial than quakes in past centuries.

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President Donald Trump prompted a firestorm of commentary and speculation after he stormed out of a major interview, but as one certified psychologist argued, his body language also exposed things about his agitated mental state.

On Sunday, NBC News's Meet the Press aired an interview with Trump conducted by Kristin Welker, in which, among other things, she pressed him about the lack of evidence for his longstanding claims that elections in the U.S. are rigged against Republicans. Trump, after growing increasingly frustrated over the tough questions, cut off the interview early, saying that Welker was either "crooked" or "stupid" before storming out.

Much has already been speculated based on this blow-up from Trump, including from Dr. John Paul Garrison, a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist, who maintains a popular YouTube account, "Dr. G Explains," where he gives forensic breakdowns and body language analyses for over 700,000 subscribers. While he typically focuses on true crime stories, he also delves into politics, and recently released a video breaking down Trump's body language during his interview with Welker.

At the start of the interview, Garrison noted that "most" of Trump's visible behaviors were "pretty standard" and in line with his typical demeanor. He did note one brief movement of Trump's mouth that could potentially indicate a change in the president's motor control, but said that not much could be made of it for now. What he did put particular emphasis on, however, was the sound of rain during the interview, as it was being conducted in a Wisconsin barn during a period of extended downpours.

Garrison argued that as the noise from the rain picked up and became more intense, Trump had a harder time focusing and concentrating on the questions from Welker. While stressing that nothing could be said for sure, he argued that Trump having a greater difficulty dealing with background noise could be a sign that he suffered a neurological episode at some point.

From that point, Garrison noted numerous signs that Trump was growing more and more agitated, including him furrowing his brow, bearing his teeth and putting extra emphasis on certain words, eventually escalating to the point of "real anger" and "real fury." While he concluded that it was typical for Trump to be testy with the press, Garrison argued that he showed an "unusual" level of anger during the interview, and suggested that he might having "a harder time than he used to" dealing with things like the background noise from the rain.

Another medical expert and content creator, speech and language pathologist "Hilary M.A. CCC-SLP," also argued that the weather might have been having an outsized effect on Trump's mood, suggesting in a recent video that he was exhibiting symptoms common in dementia patients, who struggle to keep track of the time of day during periods of extended gloomy weather.

Trump's MAGA movement has centered on themes of traditional masculinity and nationalism. The movement has been associated with Trump's public appearances, including dancing to "Macho Man" by the Village People.

Recent reporting has connected environmental policy decisions to declining male fertility rates. The New Republic reported that higher exposure to pesticides and other chemicals can lower sperm count.

Sperm concentration has fallen dramatically over the past several decades. Researchers have identified specific causes for this decline.

"A large body of research shows that water, air, and soil pollution is a huge factor in the drop in male fertility. Among pollutants, several of the biggest culprits are heavy metals, pesticides, dioxins, and phthalates," the report said.

During his final term, President Joe Biden imposed new rules to limit chemical emissions, restricting power plants' ability to dump arsenic, selenium, and mercury into groundwater. These heavy metals impact male sperm quality by disrupting endocrine functions and altering hormone levels.

The Trump administration's Environmental Protection Agency has adopted a more permissive regulatory stance toward chemical disposal by companies.

"The Trump administration, with Congress's help, weakened much of the Clean Air Act last year, significantly reducing dioxin regulation," the report stated. "Dioxins disrupt the endocrine system, with impacts on spermatogenesis—the development of sperm cells capable of fertilizing an egg."

Research spanning 21 studies over the last 20 years has documented declines in sperm quality in male mice and rats exposed to pesticides.

Conservatives have raised concerns about declining birth rates in the U.S., citing factors including low marriage rates, feminism, and economic conditions. Robert Kennedy Jr. recently announced that teenage men have lower sperm counts than historical levels.

"Democratic politicians have not focused significantly on fertility concerns, despite their regulatory record on pollution affecting male fertility differing from Trump administration policies," reporting indicates. "By not addressing the issue, Democrats may cede concerns to Republican figures," the analysis concluded.

Male fertility decline has emerged as a significant public health concern in recent years. The average sperm count among men has declined by approximately 50% over the past 50 years, according to multiple meta-analyses of global studies.

Environmental exposures, including pesticide residues in food and water, have been identified as key contributors to this trend. Beyond pesticides, other factors linked to declining sperm quality include endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in plastics, flame retardants, and industrial manufacturing byproducts. Health experts warn that without attention to environmental regulation and public health initiatives, fertility challenges may intensify across younger generations, with potential implications for population demographics and family planning decisions.

Elizabeth Bonker is a silent woman with a loud mission. She wants government agencies to cover the costs of training people with autism in a form of communication called assisted spelling. One problem: Leading professional organizations don’t believe it works.

“All nonspeakers above the age of 5 should be given the opportunity,” typed Bonker, who is 28 and cannot talk. Her mother, Virginia Breen, held a wireless keyboard for her. They sat on a hotel patio before an April 27 meeting with a senior aide to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“We are misunderstood and underestimated,” Bonker typed, occasionally humming or lightly groaning as she considered where to place a slender forefinger on the keyboard.

Assisted spelling is used to help nonverbal people communicate by pointing to letters on boards or using keyboards with physical help from another person.

Supporters say assisted spelling has improved the lives of thousands of people with autism, such as Bonker, and they have powerful allies. Kennedy appointed Bonker and another autistic “speller,” as they call themselves, to a 20-member autism panel made up largely of parents with children whose autism they attribute to vaccinations.

At the reconfigured panel’s first public session on April 28, three other members said their nonspeaking adult children were learning to communicate through spelling. The panel issued a resolution with language from Bonker stating that “robust” communications programs are essential for autistic people. Bonker has urged the Department of Health and Human Services to support training in assisted spelling for those who want it.

But leading professional groups for autism science, as well as those representing psychologists and speech pathologists, point to research showing that these methods — premised on the idea that people with autism have the normal range of cognitive powers but are imprisoned in malfunctioning bodies — are flawed or fraudulent.

Other, validated methods enable nonspeakers to communicate through digital and analog pictures and letter boards. But assisted spelling isn’t autonomous communication, critics say: Consciously or not, the board holder may be influencing or responsible for the typed or pointed-at words — as with a Ouija board.

For many parents in Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again community, the spelling controversy is angrily ringing the same bells as the notion that vaccines cause autism — which they refuse to consider debunked. As some people see it: Established medicine damaged them with vaccines and now refuses to accept a helpful treatment.

People with autism are “trapped in bodies that have betrayed them because the medical establishment has betrayed them,” said Louis Conte, who has a child with autism, in a September edition of a Kennedy-allied MAHA publication.

By limiting access to spelling, “you are not just limiting expression, you are erasing identity,” said Katie Sweeney, the mother of an autistic adult who is affiliated with an anti-vaccine medical group, at the autism panel meeting.

Mainstream autism experts and advocates in March convened the Independent Autism Coordinating Committee as a counter to Kennedy’s panel. At the new group’s meeting, one member spoke out against the spelling methods.

“In this underfunded disability environment, I don’t want a single penny diverted to debunked interventions like spelling,” said Amy Lutz, a senior lecturer in history at the University of Pennsylvania and an autism support advocate who described her 27-year-old son as “profoundly autistic.”

It’s not only a waste of time, she said later in an interview, but “people subjected to spelling are not given access to evidence-based education. Every interaction turns someone like my son into a puppet, and I find that very objectionable.”

A Patchwork of Perspectives

The universe of autistic people, their parents, researchers, advocates, and service providers is a broad, acrimonious spectrum. Some say that vaccines or chemical exposures caused a massive increase in autism, others that diagnostic changes account for most of the increase. Some seek mainstream or alternative treatments, some demand classroom inclusion, and others want residential treatment. Some people with autism say it’s a difference, not a disability.

“When I tell the parents of a young child they have autism, it’s a tragedy,” said Audrey Brumback, a child neurologist at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas-Austin. “When I give the same diagnosis to a teenager, it’s good news. It means, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you; you’re just autistic.'”

Scientific medicine has failed to deliver good treatments for autism. After four decades of concerted research, “the results have for the most part been very disappointing,” said David Mandell, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Severely autistic children — those requiring round-the-clock care with ailments like epilepsy and generally lacking in verbal language — account for about a quarter of all U.S. autism diagnoses. Caring for them may mean dropping careers and spending vast sums on therapy. “They ought to spell special education with a dollar sign,” said Tracy Simmons, whose 17-year-old son, Noah, has autism.

Many parents of autistic children have tried vitamins and diets that exclude wheat, soy, or dairy. Some have turned to hyperbaric oxygen chambers, others to pig hormones to repair damage spuriously attributed to measles-mumps-rubella vaccines, and infusions of metal-leaching chemicals to remove traces of heavy metals in childhood shots. Recent regimens include camel milk, broccoli extract, and stem cell injections obtained at great expense in Panama and India.

In September, the White House touted leucovorin, used in some cancer care and for an ultra-rare genetic condition. Marty Makary, then-commissioner of the FDA, said the drug could help 50% to 60% of kids with autism.

There’s little evidence behind any of these treatments, Brumback said. Many parents try multiple remedies at once; if a child’s condition improves, it’s hard to tell what worked — or whether the child simply grew out of a problem.

Noah the Speller

During a Zoom session in which he typed on a keyboard held by his mother, Noah Simmons wrote glowingly about the world opened to him by two years of learning to spell and type.

“Im a new person. I have friends, I write, climbing,” he typed. “Conversation. I can have one. I have a say. Im human now.”

Later, at an indoor climbing center in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Noah scrambled nearly to the top of the wall before he slipped. He glided down the rope and slapped a high five with his climbing instructor as his mother approached. She carried a laminated sheet with the alphabet on it.

Tracy Simmons held the paper while Noah stabbed at the letters one by one, ending with a flourishing swipe at the exclamation mark: “Im going to crush it again!”

There, and at a later keyboard session at home, Noah seemed in control. But when Tracy stopped offering verbal prompts and encouragement, or stopped holding the board, Noah often got lost and signaled a need for help.

Tracy Simmons acknowledges that whoever holds the board could be steering a speller’s words. Despite his climbing prowess, Noah lacks fine motor skills, is anxious, and has trouble controlling his body, she said.

“He’s working on becoming an independent typer. He can do it short amounts of time,” she said. “But at times he gets overwhelmed.”

The method used by Noah and his mother came into use in the United States in the early 1990s. At first, trainers guided the arms or hands of the spellers as they pointed to a letter board. The idea was that the intelligence or literacy of severely autistic people was trapped in bodies they couldn’t control. They needed help physically learning to spell, first with a pencil or finger pointing at stenciled or printed letters, and eventually by typing on a keyboard.

Within a few years, however, dozens of experiments had shown that the facilitators, not the autistic people, were doing the spelling. A review published in 2018 found no evidence that the spellers could identify words or objects without their facilitators.

In addition, the technique has resulted in numerous false sexual abuse charges — sometimes targeting fathers or other people in the autistic person’s life skeptical of the spelling process.

Next came the Rapid Prompting Method, devised by Soma Mukhopadhyay, an Indian mother of a boy with profound autism, who brought her system to the United States in 2001. Elizabeth Vosseller, a speech pathologist in Herndon, Virginia, launched a nearly identical method, Spelling to Communicate. In both, the facilitator, not the speller, holds the letter board. But each method relies on prompts.

Mukhopadhyay and Vosseller, who did not respond to requests for comment, have each declined to submit their systems to the kind of testing that disproved facilitated communication. Bonker said calls for such tests show a lack of respect for the disabled.

Asked why, after 23 years as a speller, she couldn’t communicate alone or without her mother holding the board, Bonker typed, “I can do it in certain environments that don’t include interviews with strangers.” Severely autistic people need coaches to help control their anxiety, Breen said.

Another star of the speller world, Woody Brown, spoke through his mother with Jenna Bush Hager on the Today show on April 1. The Browns were promoting his novel, Upward Bound, which became an immediate New York Times bestseller after its March release. During the segment, Mary Brown spoke in complete sentences that she said came from Woody, but the letters he typed, as far as the program’s viewers could see, did not correspond to her words and often looked like gibberish.

This raised questions about how Woody Brown could be the author of what critics described as a brilliant, sensitive novel. They pointed out that Mary Brown has worked as a Hollywood script analyst. The Browns did not respond to efforts to reach them for comment.

“Spellers” are best known to the public through the success of The Telepathy Tapes, which briefly unseated The Joe Rogan Experience as the country’s most popular podcast early last year. In The Telepathy Tapes’ first season, people with profound autism were allegedly revealed as clairvoyant superhumans.

The evidence for their telepathic abilities was produced through spelling. The host showed spellers and facilitators two things, and the speller, with the facilitator present, typed out what the facilitator saw. Viewers had to wonder whether this was evidence of telepathy or confirmation of what critics have said all along: that the facilitator is the one controlling the words, often by feeding the speller subtle cues.

Bonker said she appreciated the Telepathy Tapes’ host for including her nonprofit group’s information on its website. As for telepathic skills, “I believe nonspeakers have many gifts,” she said. “And I believe what they say.”

The debate over spelling is playing out in boards of education and courtrooms, where parents of autistic children seek aid for their children’s spelling lessons.

In New York state in March, anti-vaccine advocates for spellers showered scorn on state Sen. Patricia Fahy, the Democratic chair of the disabilities committee, after she inserted language into a disability rights bill requiring that payments go to “verified” communication methods that assured patient autonomy.

Vikram Jaswal, a University of Virginia psychologist who works with spellers, said he’s seen people with severe autism who can type independently, though only a handful have that ability out of the couple of hundred spellers he’s met. More research is needed to figure out who can best benefit from the technique, he said.

Tracy Simmons believes in the method, and so does her son — assuming he’s in control of what he types.

On a recent morning, Tracy read aloud a beautiful escape-from-Alcatraz story she said Noah had written with her help and that of his spelling trainer. “He writes all the time in his head,” she said, but it could take years for her son to consistently type independently.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Adults accept it as conventional health wisdom that we require eight hours of sleep each night in order to be healthy. Yet an expert on human evolutionary biology recently argued that this might actually be misleading.

“Do you lose sleep over whether you sleep too little or too much?” Daniel E. Lieberman, a professor at Harvard University, wrote for The New York Times on Sunday. “You can now relax, because scientists have figured out precisely how much sleep you really need. In a recent study in Nature, an international team of experts reports that the ‘sweet spot’ for adults is between 6 hours 24 minutes and 7 hours 48 minutes. Less or more than this ‘Goldilocks’ zone is associated with faster rates of aging in the brain, heart, liver and other vital organs, plus higher rates of illnesses such as heart disease and depression, and ultimately shorter lifespans.”

Lieberman added that a recent study analyzed self-reported sleep habit data from hundreds of thousands of people. It found that people who sleep more than 8 hours per night suffer health problems just like their counterparts who sleep less than 6 hours and 24 minutes per night. In theory, this would demonstrate that excessive sleep can hurt a person’s health just as much as insufficient sleep.

“However, a major concern with the study is that it analyzed only associations and cannot distinguish between cause and effect,” Lieberman wrote. “Since people who don’t feel well often sleep more, it’s possible that more than 7.8 hours of sleep was falsely identified as detrimental. Another drawback is that the study used notoriously inaccurate self-reported sleep data. (Do you know exactly how much sleep you got last night?) An additional flaw is that the researchers included mostly people of European ancestry. Even so, the study adds substantially to evidence of the health benefits of sleeping enough but not too much.”

Despite these doubts about the dangers of excessive sleeping, Lieberman nevertheless urged readers to monitor their sleeping habits and raise concerns to their doctors about possible underlying health issues that may be at work if someone sleeps too much. He added that, on top of this, Americans need to be aware of the rising epidemic of sleeplessness.

“Maybe learning how lack of sleep accelerates aging will serve as a wake-up call to those who shortchange themselves on sleep and induce them to go to bed earlier,” Lieberman wrote. “Perhaps the relatively small percentage of people prone to oversleeping will set their alarm clocks to get up earlier. My worry, though, is with the roughly 35 percent of Americans who say they get less than seven hours of sleep, many of whom have insomnia.”

He added that when people suffer from insomnia, “emphasizing that their lack of sleep might send them to an early grave could increase their anxiety and stress about sleep, thus exacerbating the problem. Anxiety and stress are major risk factors for insomnia because they stimulate the body to produce hormones such as cortisol that arouse us. Studies have shown that medicalizing sleeplessness sometimes worsens the problem by treating a common issue as a medical matter requiring diagnosis and treatment.”

At the same time, Lieberman said that people should not fret if they fail to get exactly eight hours of sleep. Instead what they need to do is ask themselves basic questions about how their day-to-day health is or is not impaired by their quantity and quality of sleep.

“Are you satisfied with your sleep?” Lieberman wrote. “Do you stay awake all day without dozing? Are you asleep between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.? Do you spend less than 30 minutes awake at night? Do you get between six and eight hours of sleep?”

He continued, “If your answers to these questions are not ‘usually’ or ‘always,’ then I hope you find relief through well-studied, effective approaches that reduce sleep-related anxiety and stress. These include developing good habits such as exercising, cognitive behavioral therapy and maintaining a regular sleep schedule.”

Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2023, the inventor of the CPAP — a medical device used to treat sleep apnea — explained that the prevalence of that disorder, in which people frequently wake up at night due to their airways shutting, explains a wide range of other common health problems.

"I've spent a lot of my career looking at pediatric sleep apnea, sleep disorder breathing, and I do think that trying to intervene early, identifying kids who have the risk factors, gives us a chance of preventing it," Sullivan said at the time. "There's no doubt that the size and shape of the upper airway is important. Some orthodontic procedures actually can be very effective. And I think if we can identify earlier, we have a chance of preventing it."

"I don't think the significance of sleep apnea is still fully grasped often by the medical profession," Sullivan explained. "One of the issues that I've become aware of is that I think snoring and sleep apnea put you at risk of getting a number of diseases. I still am astounded when I see patients who have got various cardiac conditions and no one's really looked at or even asked them about what happens to them at nighttime in terms of sleep."

A prominent physician is calling for President Donald Trump’s doctor to hold a press conference to answer questions over what he says are “lingering concerns” about the president’s health.

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine and surgery at The George Washington University, and a CNN medical analyst, says that Trump’s recent seven-day absence from public view only served to heighten concerns.

Last week, Trump — who is quickly approaching his 80th birthday — had his third annual checkup in 13 months, the fourth of his second term in office. He appeared in a televised Cabinet meeting last Wednesday, and then was not seen again in a professional presidential capacity until appearing in a podcast that was published Wednesday morning. (He did, however, enjoy at least two days of golf.)

“I do physicals, because I just want, I think I have an obligation to do it, but I just came out with very, very good results, and I took a test, a cognitive test, and I got 100% on it. I got, as the expression goes, I aced it,” Trump said in the podcast.

“With lingering concerns following the president’s recent physical exam, and the president’s prolonged absence from the public eye, the White House should make available the president’s physician to answer questions from the press,” Dr. Reiner wrote.

Trump exacerbated those concerns when he appeared in the New York Post’s Pod Force One podcast with what appeared to be a swollen right eye and his recurring swollen hand.

The White House Physician to the President, Captain Sean Barbabella, released notes from the president’s checkup that left many questions, critics say, including why the White House waited three days to release the memo.

Speaking about the delayed results, Dr. Reiner told CNN, “the only reason not to release a rosy report right away is that maybe it’s not so rosy, or this is some information you don’t want the public to hear.”

“I’ve read this report multiple times, and every time I read it, it actually seems to be thinner and thinner,” Reiner noted. “And I’m actually not sure what testing the president underwent last week.”

Reiner added that there were very few tests disclosed in Dr. Barbabella’s memo, “and what was confusing, to, you know, many of the physicians who reviewed these reports, is that it appeared that the president had underwent repeat testing, and I’m not sure that’s true.”

“But the president was at Walter Reed for three hours, so what actually was conducted there?” he asked.

He also noted that Barbabella’s report indicated the list of medications the president is taking “was shortened or abbreviated for readability and relevance.”

“I’m not sure what readability means,” Reiner added, “but every medication the president is taking is relevant, and they only released two cholesterol medicines and aspirin.”

President Donald Trump’s policy in trying to contain Ebola may get Americans killed, a former Secretary of State warned on Tuesday.

“As secretary of state, one of us saw firsthand how indispensable the U.S. was in arresting the epidemic,” former Secretary of State John Kerry wrote with his daughter, public health expert Dr. Vanessa Kerry, in a Wall Street Journal editorial. He had described how the Ebola virus had spread through West Africa in September 2014 and risked becoming a global pandemic. The dangerous pathogen is highly lethal, with an average case fatality rate of 50 percent. The common symptoms include fatigue and weakness, fever, sore throat, muscle and joint pain, severe headaches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain and internal hemorrhaging.

“As a physician and global health leader, the other has spent years helping countries strengthen the systems that stop outbreaks,” the two Kerrys added. “Today, another Ebola outbreak is unfolding in Central Africa. Absent a more competent response than we have seen, the outcome could be tragic.”

They added that the World Health Organization (WHO) has already declared a recent Ebola outbreak in the Congo as a “public health emergency of international concern,” with more than 1,000 suspected cases already on the record. Because the disease has since spread into Uganda, and is present in areas marked by poverty, armed conflict and displacement, authorities have struggled to contain it through contact tracing.

“In response to the 2014 epidemic, the U.S. led a historic international public-health mobilization,” the Kerrys wrote. “President Obama treated Ebola as a humanitarian emergency and a national-security priority. The strategy wasn’t simply to keep Ebola out of the U.S. but to stop transmission at the source.”

They added, “More than 3,500 U.S. personnel were deployed across West Africa. Dozens of ministerial-level entreaties by the State Department helped deliver contributions of medical personnel from the U.K. and allies across Europe. The U.S. put boots on the ground to build treatment centers and labs, train thousands of health workers, and support safe burial teams. Congress approved $5.4 billion in emergency funding. Coordinators at the State Department ensured that the Defense Department, Health and Human Services Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, CDC and international partners all worked together. Approximately 28,600 people were infected and more than 11,000 died, but hundreds of thousands of lives were spared because the U.S. and the international community acted decisively.”

By contrast, Trump’s implementation of Project 2025 has weakened the same systems that protected Americans from Ebola at the time.

“The dismantling of USAID; cuts to U.S. foreign assistance, vaccine initiatives, global health funding; and America’s withdrawal from the WHO have left major gaps in international disease surveillance and response,” the Kerrys wrote. In addition to Trump, the world’s richest man Elon Musk and vaccine denier Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were key to implementing some of those initiatives. Instead of using the past successful containment programs, Trump is instead implementing measures the Kerrys perceive as inadequate.

After elaborating on the numerous services that America used to provide and now cannot do, they concluded, “The administration still has time to change course and mobilize America’s scientific expertise, public-health capabilities and diplomatic leadership. The costs of waiting, in dollars and lives, are vastly greater than the costs of acting now.”

The Kerrys are not alone in criticizing Trump’s Ebola response. Speaking to AlterNet earlier this month, one of the nation’s top infectious disease experts also said that the president’s inadequate measures are putting Americans at risk.

“Travel bans are generally not effective for the control of infectious diseases,” Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, told AlterNet. “For instance, the Omicron variant was first discovered for COVID-19 in South Africa on November 26, 2021 and was here in San Francisco two days later because air travel is so frequent and SARS-CoV-2 can spread when asymptomatic.”

The Internet is full of conspiracy theorists who, knowing the stigma associated with the “conspiracy theorist” label, try to conceal their tendencies by seeming reasonable. Yet a new study reveals a simple tell that these conspiracy theorists have — and it may not be what you think.

“Exploratory linguistic analyses revealed that conspiracism was associated with greater use of conspiracy-related vocabulary (e.g., deception, government), a disproportionate use of sophisticated words, and increased syntactic complexity,” explained the authors of a recent article in the scientific journal PLOS One. “These results suggest that conspiracism may emerge more readily at the lexical level rather than through fully structured narratives. We discuss potential methodological and theoretical factors contributing to these unexpected results, including the roles of context, perceived relevance, motivation, and collective social dynamics. We also consider the possibility that conspiracism may not directly translate into conspiratorial narratives.”

In other words, conspiracy theorists like to gussy up their arguments with ornate language and seemingly-sophisticated forms of analysis, all of which serve to conceal from the public whether their ideas are provably connected to demonstrable facts.

“If so, we recommend comparative research on online vs offline conspiratorial writing to clarify whether conspiracy theories emerge spontaneously from genuine beliefs or are constructed strategically, detached from genuinely held beliefs,” PLOS One concluded.

To learn this, the study authors asked participants to watch an apocalyptic thriller, Leave the World Behind, which is notable for its ambiguous ending. When the nearly 400 study participants were asked to write essays interpreting the movie’s vague information, the scholars — using AI to break down the statistics — found that conspiracy theorists use complex language to make their ideas seem more credible. The use of this language, and the fact that it is consistently untethered to any kind of concrete evidence, is the tell.

“We were surprised that conspiratorial narratives did not emerge as we had predicted,” Alessandro Miani, a researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and the study’s lead author, told PsyPost's Eric W. Dolan. “We preregistered the hypothesis that people higher in conspiracism would ‘fill the gaps’ of an ambiguous film with conspiratorial interpretations, and we ran two studies with two different conspiracy-belief scales. In both, the expected link between conspiracism and conspiratorial narrative content simply wasn’t there.”

This is not the first study to determine how cognitive processes influence people believing or not believing in conspiracy theories. In February 2024, The Conversation released a breakdown of numerous studies that traced individual thinking styles to one’s propensity to believe in conspiracy theories.

“Research shows that our thinking style can be predictive of susceptibility to conspiracy theories,” The Conversation explained. “The dual processing theory of cognitive style suggests that we have two routes which we can use to process information.”

The Conversation added, “One route is the fast, intuitive route which leans more on personal experiences and gut feelings. The other route is a slower, more analytical route which instead relies on elaborative and detailed processing of information.” Overall “what you tend to see is that people who are not necessarily smarter but who favour the more effortful, analytical thinking style are more resistant to conspiracy beliefs. For example, a British 2014 study found that those who scored highly for questions such as ‘I enjoy problems that require hard thinking’ were less likely to accept conspiracy beliefs.”

The article added, “It also found those who were less likely to engage in effortful thinking styles and more likely to use intuitive thinking showed a higher belief in conspiracy theories.”

Dr. Rob Davidson, who heads the Committee to Protect Healthcare and has administered the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, expressed concern about President Donald Trump's public statements regarding the screening test. Davidson appeared on former CNN reporter Jim Acosta's show this week to discuss Trump's repeated claims that he has passed the assessment multiple times.

According to Davidson, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment is not a routine evaluation administered to all patients. Instead, it is specifically ordered when a healthcare provider or family member has raised concerns about possible cognitive decline. Typically, the test is administered once and does not need to be repeated.

"It is just not typical, right?" Davidson said. "It isn't typical. It isn't what you would just generally do for any individual when you didn't have a concern."

The MoCA screening is designed to detect mild cognitive impairment rather than measure general intelligence or identify advanced dementia. Davidson characterized it as an assessment for individuals who might be "slipping a little bit" and whose family members or physicians have begun to notice changes. It is not a standard test for healthy adults and is not intended to be taken repeatedly for public validation purposes.

While Davidson declined to diagnose Trump remotely, citing ethical concerns, he acknowledged that the president's public behavior raised questions in his professional assessment.

"I won't make a diagnosis, we don't, it's not ethical to try to diagnose somebody," Davidson said. "And I don't know if the president has a condition, but something just seems not right."

Davidson also highlighted the unusual nature of Trump's pattern of repeatedly requesting and publicly discussing his MoCA results. White House physicians typically do not repeatedly administer the same cognitive screening test to a patient absent clinical concerns, Davidson noted. Trump's apparent desire to continue taking the test is itself noteworthy, he said.

Acosta administered the test on camera during the segment to illustrate the broader concern. After completing the assessment on air, Acosta expressed increased concern about the president's condition.

Trump's medical history has been the subject of ongoing public scrutiny.

During his first term, his then-physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson, declared Trump in "excellent" health following a comprehensive physical examination. However, medical professionals and observers have raised questions about whether a single positive assessment should be sufficient to establish overall fitness for office, particularly given the demands of the presidency.

The Trump White House has released limited additional medical records since that initial evaluation, making independent verification of his current health status difficult.

Medical ethicists have noted that the public nature of Trump's repeated MoCA test-taking represents an unusual approach to cognitive screening, which is typically conducted in private consultation between a patient and their physician. Some health experts have suggested that the frequent public discussion of cognitive assessments may itself warrant evaluation, as repeated testing and public proclamations about results can occasionally indicate underlying concerns that prompted the initial screening.

Talk of a “super El Niño” developing in 2026 is gaining momentum, with concerns rising that this climate pattern could bring extreme rainfall, heat, drought and destructive flooding around the world.