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  • Trump cuts subscriptions to Springer Nature journalsThis link opens in a new windowJun 27, 2025

    The Trump administration has ended several U.S. science agencies’ subscriptions to Springer Nature journals, including the prestigious Nature titles. The move, which will end easy access to the journals for agency staff scientists, follows recent criticisms of academic journals by administration officials who accused them of bias.

    The cuts involving the for-profit, publicly traded Springer Nature—one of the world’s largest scientific publishers, producing more than 3000 journal titles— were first reported Wednesday by Axios , without detailing specific agencies affected. Government officials have given conflicting statements about whether the cut included the company’s single biggest U.S. government subscription contract, with the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Yesterday, Inside Higher Ed reported that NIH first said its Springer Nature subscription had not been canceled, but later the agency’s parent department, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), told the outlet they had; today, HHS provided the same statement to Science, saying “all contracts … are terminated or no longer active.” (The White House press office did not respond to Science’s request for comment.) A Science review of the USASpending.gov database shows that earlier this month the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Department of Energy canceled Springer Nature subscriptions for which they had committed $3 million in funding this year.

    The database shows that at least seven agencies had subscription contracts this year with Springer Nature as of 17 June, for which they had planned to eventually spend up to $25 million. Of that, about half was for NIH, which does not currently appear as canceled—but the database can be up to 2 weeks out of date, and its data are considered incomplete. The National Science Foundation’s subscription doesn’t appear in the database. But a spokesperson said today the agency continues to have a subscription.

    In a statement, Springer Nature said, “We don’t comment on individual contracts, but across our U.S. business there is no material change to our customers or their spend, and we remain confident about the strength of the service we provide.”

    The cancellations were not the first of their kind by President Donald Trump’s administration. In March, USDA told staff members it had canceled subscriptions carried by its National Agricultural Library to save on costs. The move covered nearly 400 of the library’s roughly 2000 journals, published by 15 organizations, most of them nonprofit—but no Springer Nature titles.

    Meanwhile administration officials have criticized journals for their editorial policies. In April, the former interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, wrote journal editors asking them about concerns that “more and more journals … are conceding they are partisans in various scientific debates.” (A Springer Nature spokesperson, Susie Winter, declined to say whether Springer Nature received one.) And in May, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he might ban the agency’s scientists from publishing in leading peer-reviewed medical journals, calling them “corrupt” and under the influence of pharmaceutical companies.

    Despite the broad focus suggested by Martin’s and Kennedy’s comments, the recent terminations of Springer Nature subscriptions appear to be the first since the agriculture library’s. The New England Journal of Medicine , which Kennedy has criticized, has not received a request from any U.S. government agency to change its subscription, a spokesperson told Science . A spokesperson for AAAS, which publishes Science , declined to comment. ( Science ’s news section is editorially independent.)

    An agency may save money when it terminates a journal subscription, but efficiency suffers as researchers there must devote more time spent tracking down the articles they need from other sources, says a scientist at the agriculture department’s Agricultural Research Service. “That slows down and reduces efficiency of literature searches,” says the scientist, who asked not to be identified because they are not authorized to speak to the press. “This loss [of Springer Nature titles] adds to the distressing erosion of journal availability.”

  • WHO panel favors natural origin of COVID-19 virus but decries missing evidenceThis link opens in a new windowJun 27, 2025

    A scientific committee convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) has firmly rejected two minority views about how the COVID-19 pandemic began but could not resolve what actually did spark it. The panel’s report, released today , found no compelling evidence that scientists created the virus responsible for the pandemic, and it dismissed theories, widely promoted by China, that imported frozen fish introduced it to that country. It concluded, however, there still is not enough hard evidence to say whether the origin was a natural spillover from animals infected with the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, or a leak of the pathogen from a laboratory in the city. But like a previous assessment by a WHO panel, it leaned toward a natural origin.

    “While most available and accessible published scientific evidence” supports that SARS-CoV-2 came to humans from bats or an undetermined “intermediate” species that became infected with a bat coronavirus, the report stresses that the panel “is not currently able to conclude exactly when, where and how SARS-CoV-2 first entered the human population.”

    Convened in November 2021, WHO’s Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), which had 27 independent members from 24 countries, relied on published scientific papers, the intelligence agency assessments it could obtain, government reports, and interviews with scientists as well as journalists in China who covered the earliest cases. It wasn’t enough, said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a press conference today to announce the report. “We continue to appeal to China and any other country that has information about the origins of COVID-19 to share that information openly in the interests of protecting the world from future pandemics.”

    The one certain outcome is that the fierce and highly politicized origins debate will continue. The debate was inflamed earlier this year when U.S President Donald Trump declared the origin was clearly a Wuhan lab leak, despite the divided and uncertain assessments of his own intelligence agencies. The contentiousness even extended to SAGO’s deliberations: One member resigned earlier this month, and three others asked not to be listed as authors. The report offered no explanation; at the press conference, WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove, who led the agency’s origin effort, said, “We consider the deliberations in each of the meetings strictly confidential.” The four scientists came from Brazil, China, Russia, and Cambodia.

    Proponents of the natural origin hypothesis point to studies that showed how early cases of COVID-19 clustered around the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where environmental sampling by Chinese scientists after the outbreak surfaced found genetic fragments of both SARS-CoV-2 and mammals susceptible to the virus in the same stalls. “[T]he most compelling evidence of a possible spillover from animals to humans comes from the independent metagenomic data analysis,” the report says. Lab-leak advocates, however, insist that infected people could have just as easily brought the virus to the market.

    The report faults the governments of the United States and Germany for not sharing more information from their intelligence communities but reserves its strongest criticism for China. Records from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which studied bat coronaviruses, or another virology lab run in the city by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, could hold crucial clues, it said.

    Although members of an earlier probe of the pandemic’s origin organized by WHO visited those facilities in 2021, SAGO says there still has not been sufficient access to those labs’ staff health records to examine whether someone might have developed COVID-19 prior to the first known cases. SAGO also says it still lacks results of audits of records from the labs, and reports of biosafety and biosecurity breaches.

    The report says China has not shared SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences from 508 viral samples obtained from Wuhan COVID-19 patients in early 2020 and has not provided “upstream” information about farms that raised animals sold at Huanan and other Wuhan markets, or the traders who handled them.

    The Chinese government and its scientific institutions have pushed the “cold chain” hypothesis that the pandemic virus came into China on frozen fish from other countries, which would mean the true origin was not Wuhan. Contested reports from wastewater and human blood samples in Italy, France, and Brazil also have suggested that SARS-CoV-2 was in those countries before December 2019, when the first cases were detected in Wuhan. An April 2025 white paper from the Chinese government “considers the work on the origins of COVID-19 in China is finished,” the panel said. “That is not the opinion of SAGO.” It concluded that “evidence for widespread infections or cases in any other countries prior to December 2019 is lacking, as well as evidence to support the cold chain hypothesis.”

    The SAGO members did explore the lab leak possibility, which fueled disagreements on the panel. A preliminary report from SAGO in June 2022 noted that three of the four scientists who ultimately did not sign today’s document did “not agree with the inclusion of further studies evaluating the possibility of introduction of SARS-CoV-2 to the human population through a laboratory incident … due to the fact that from their viewpoint, there is no new scientific evidence” to question the earlier WHO probe’s conclusion that this scenario was “extremely unlikely.”

    Carlos Morel, a molecular parasitologist at Brazil’s Oswaldo Cruz Foundation who resigned from SAGO on 13 June, also told Science Insider he was troubled by Van Kerkhove's public criticisms of China in advance of the report and other issues related to the panel. But the underlying reason Morel says he stepped down was the belief a lab leak was not an equally valid origin hypothesis but “a political position supported by intelligence agencies” and that SAGO's focus on it “undermined” the panel’s mission. “At this critical moment for global health and science, when relevant institutions such as universities and the WHO itself are under attack by deniers, anti-vaxxers, and all sorts of fake news,” he wrote in his resignation letter, “I think I will be more useful by returning to dedicating myself full-time to my institutional objectives and duties in Brazil.”

    In the end, the new report echoed the previous WHO group’s conclusion on the lab leak, but in less dismissive language. It notes that “no evidence has been presented, other than speculation from scientific or intelligence reports, that supports a laboratory-related incident causing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 into the human population.”

    Although there’s widespread agreement that both selling exotic mammals in markets and lax biosafety and biosecurity raise the risk of future pandemics, resolving which scenario sparked COVID-19 remains a distant prospect without some fresh evidence. “WHO and SAGO remain ready to evaluate any further information that comes to light,” Tedros said.

  • Social media attacks on public health agencies are eroding trustThis link opens in a new windowJun 27, 2025
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    On 7 March, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sent a tweet alerting its 5.4 million followers about a measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico. The update also encouraged clinicians to be vigilant about symptoms of the disease and urged updated vaccinations for anyone traveling to those areas. Many tweets in response to CDC were in support of the advice, but some argued vaccination was unnecessary. Others went so far as to call the organization criminal .

    Criticism of public health institutions is increasingly common, and a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explored their effects in detail. They surveyed 6800 people in the United States and showed that certain critical social media posts not only led to declining trust, but also incited feelings of anger—and increased readers’ tendency to engage with those posts.

    “Trust is a difficult term to define, never mind study,” says Jevin West, co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, who was not involved with the study. The new work, he says, “has provided a whole set of new questions about what else we should be testing.”

    Jonathan Y. Lee, a psychiatry and behavioral science professor at Stanford University, was inspired to design the study after observing rapid declines in public trust as a graduate student during the COVID-19 pandemic. “It was very unprecedented just how politically polarized it was,” he says.

    Previous studies have linked public criticism with declining trust, but Lee wanted to dive deeper into readers’ responses to different types of criticism. He recruited participants online and showed them fake social media posts, styled like a tweet they thought was real, and attributed to either CDC or the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which studies potential improvements to health care. It contained an inconclusive health recommendation: that all people should seek routine screening for sleep apnea. Lee deliberately chose a health issue without a definitive recommendation on purpose so responses from the groups are not influenced by the topic itself .

    Participants then saw one made-up critical response to that recommendation. Some were shown a post that simply contradicted the recommendation. Another type of response questioned the competence of the organization, whereas some criticism also took the form of an attack on the integrity of the institution—such as suggesting the institution had conflicts of interest, or that the recommendation was being driven by political ideology.

    Lee asked participants to rate their trust in the agency and note their emotional responses, such as anger and worry, to the criticisms. They also indicated whether they wanted to engage with the critical post in any way, such as sharing it or posting a reply.

    Reading a single criticism, regardless of the type, led to decreases in a participant’s trust in an agency, Lee found. But more participants reported feeling angry and wanting to engage with posts that attacked the agencies’ integrity, compared with posts that took issue with the recommendation itself.

    This was equally true for self-identified Republicans and Democrats. That result doesn’t surprise Jon Green, a political science researcher and professor at Duke University who was not involved in the study. Although other studies have shown that misinformation is more prevalent within Republican information environments , they are not inherently more susceptible to misinformation, Green says. “Everyone’s got the same brain.”

    The results are compelling, says James Druckman, a political scientist at the University of Rochester, but he cautions that it’s tough to draw conclusions about subjective experiences such as emotions from a survey, as people may use different words to describe the same reaction. It’s also part of the reason why the findings don’t definitively show that emotions drive social engagement, he says.

    Levels of trust did not appear to improve when participants were shown simulated rebuttals to the criticisms, but Lee still thinks it could be useful for institutions to offer rebuttals to social media criticism. It might be a matter of timing, he suggests, and future research could try to create a longer delay between the anger-inducing criticism and the rebuttal.

    There is also value in an agency expressing uncertainty to the public, West says. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, there were many unknowns, such as how the virus was spreading or whether it had mutated. Being transparent can help bring back trust: “It’s saying, we don’t have the competence here, but we do have the integrity to tell you,” he says.

  • UV-C light kills nearly everything—except this unusual organismThis link opens in a new windowJun 27, 2025
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    If you’ve ever gotten burned at the beach or swimming pool, you’re no stranger to the Sun bombarding Earth with ultraviolet rays. But the UV light that keeps beachgoers reaching for the sunblock isn’t even the worst the Sun sends our way. Lucky for us, Earth’s ozone layer blocks the Sun’s shortest wave radiation, called UV-C, which is so damaging to cells in high doses that it’s a go-to sterilizer in hospitals.

    UV-C is such a killer, in fact, that scientists have questioned whether life can survive on worlds that lack an ozone layer, such as Mars or distant exoplanets. But research published this month in Astrobiology suggests one hardy lichen, a hybrid organism made of algae and fungi, may have cracked the UV-C code with a built-in sunscreen , despite never experiencing these rays in its long evolutionary history.

    “The results are quite exciting for the idea that life is more resilient than we imagined,” says Christopher House, an astrobiologist at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the research. “It’s a quality piece of work.”

    The study arose out of curiosity. In 2020, Henry Sun, an astrobiologist at the Desert Research Institute, a nonprofit research center for the Nevada System of Higher Education, saw near-black lichen growing on the hot desert soil during field work in the Mojave desert. Lichen are composite life forms, a symbiotic pairing of a fungus that provides the organism’s structure and algal cells that live among the fungal strands and photosynthesize for energy. Sun hypothesized that the lichen’s dark color, overriding the green hue usually caused by chloroplasts, might relate to how it survives the sunny desert.

    He brought a sample of the species, the common desert dweller Clavascidium lacinulatum , back to the lab, where graduate student Tejinder Singh, now at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, put the lichen through the wringer. First, Singh dehydrated the lichen, to make sure it couldn’t grow back in real time and mask any UV damage. Then he placed the lichen a few centimeters under a UV lamp and blasted it with radiation. The lichen seemed just fine.

    So Singh purchased the most powerful UV-C lamp he could find online, capable of sending out 20 times more radiation than the amount expected on Mars. When he tested the lamp on the most radiation-resistant life form on Earth, the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans , it died in less than a minute. “We were expecting lichens [to last] maybe on the order of hours or, maximum, days,” Singh says. “But they just kept on going on.”

    After 3 months—likely the highest amount of UV-C radiation ever tested on an organism—Singh pulled the sample so he could finish his master’s thesis in time. About half of the lichen’s algal cells had survived. Then, when Singh and Sun ground up and cultured part of the surviving lichen, about half of its algal cells sprouted new, green colonies after 2 weeks, showing it maintained the ability to reproduce.

    Interestingly, the experiment only worked with a complete lichen sample; a thick layer of algal cells, tested under the UV-C without the fungi, died within a minute, meaning the top cells weren’t simply shielding the others from radiation.

    To determine why the lichen survived, Sun’s team enlisted chemists at the University of Nevada, Reno, who identified UV-absorbing compounds called secondary metabolites in the lichen. Lichen and other organisms produce a wide array of such chemicals to combat stressors such as drying out—and, plausibly, life-threatening sunburns. But since the ozone layer is thought to have arisen about 500 million years ago, long before the first lichens evolved, these secondary metabolites couldn’t have evolved as a defense against UV-C, the researchers concluded. Instead, they posit that the lichens evolved the compounds to protect themselves from Earth’s own atmosphere, as oxygen levels rose because of the proliferation of plants. Though crucial for most organisms’ survival, oxygen can form highly reactive molecules that damage DNA and proteins, some of which also spawn when UV light collides with our cells.

    Curiously, rather than keeping these chemicals in the lichen’s interior, the team found that C. lacinulatum shunted them to its outer layer—effectively serving as a sunscreen. The same technique is used in the plastic industry, which makes products UV-resistant with compounds similar to those in secondary metabolites, Sun says.

    “Fundamentally, we don’t know a ton about the roles of secondary metabolites,” says Steven Leavitt, a biologist and curator of lichens at Brigham Young University. But Leavitt, who was not involved with the research, thinks the chemicals’ multiple uses could indeed be responsible for the “mind-blowing level of harshness that this lichen can survive.”

    That hardiness isn’t just a boon on Earth. Lichen have long been proposed as creatures that could withstand life on Mars or exoplanets, which are theorized to experience five to 40 times more radiation than Earth. Some experiments, such as on the International Space Station, even showed that lichens could continue to live and photosynthesize in space .

    But Leavitt says it’s important to remember that “survival and resilience does not equate to success and longevity and reproduction.” In other words, just because a lichen can live through an episode of intense radiation doesn’t mean it could flourish over thousands of years of unfamiliar extraterrestrial conditions.

    Instead, the researchers could consider such experiments as tests of hypothetical future Earth conditions where the ozone layer erodes, says Erin Manzitto-Tripp, a botanist and lichenologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved with the work.

    Still, these UV-resistant lichen seem to solve at least one biological challenge for any organism that might be tested in space—or even evolve there. When thinking about life on other UV-C–blasted planets, House says, this study “shifted the question from: ‘Is the place habitable?’ … to ‘Yes, it is habitable, but how?’”

  • China’s massive coastal restoration project could backfireThis link opens in a new windowJun 27, 2025
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    In 2023, China embarked on the largest coastal restoration project ever attempted . Threatened by an invasive, fast-growing weed known as smooth cordgrass ( Spartina alterniflora ), which was overrunning clam farms, bird habitats, and shipping channels, the country planned to remove the plant and replace it with environmentally friendly species, such as native reeds and mangrove trees.

    But such efforts would have a huge downside, increasing methane emissions 10-fold , researchers report this month in Geophysical Research Letters . The mangroves would eventually counter these effects, but it could take 5 decades for these native plants to absorb the increasing greenhouse emissions.

    The study highlights the inadvertent environmental cost of coastal restoration, says Steven Pennings, a coastal ecologist at the University of Houston not involved with the work. Bo Li, an invasion ecologist at both Fudan and Yunnan universities, also not involved with the research, says countries considering such efforts in the future “need to look at the bigger picture and weigh all the pros and cons.”

    China brought smooth cordgrass to its shores from the United States in 1979 to protect its beaches. The plant has a strong root system, which binds sediment and stabilizes the coast. The stabilized area was then used for aquaculture development, such as breeding and harvesting fish in ponds. Straw from the weed is also commonly used to produce biofuel and fertilizer.

    But the weed has now grown out of control. The country’s 18,000 kilometers of coastline are now overrun by cordgrass, which has clogged shipping channels and damaged the habitats of migratory birds.

    China launched its Spartina control plan in February 2023, with a goal of completing the project by the end of this year. Apart from digging cordgrass-filled soil, workers widely use physical control measures such as cutting and tilling to eliminate the weed. After the removals, they plant mangrove seedlings. In the first year alone, workers cleared 37,000 hectares—more than half of the total area occupied by this cordgrass—putting these goals well on track.

    Previous studies have shown that disturbing coastal land can have undesirable consequences, such as drastically increasing greenhouse gas emissions. To measure the impact in China, wetland ecologist Xudong Zhu and marine biogeochemist Minhan Dai, both at Xiamen University, and their colleagues studied a cordgrass wetland in the Zhangjiang River estuary. The estuary is part of the country’s coastal restoration project.

    The scientists employed the “eddy covariance method,” where towers equipped with sensors analyze gas and wind speed, measuring the exchange of greenhouse gases between the land and the atmosphere. They installed these towers in November 2021 in the wetland and a mature mangrove forest 1 kilometer away, ensuring greenhouse gas flux differences were due to the distinct habitats, and not the atmosphere. In October 2022, as part of its coastal restoration projects, like the management of harmful species, China conducted intensive Spartina removal here, using mechanical shovels and diggers that are suitable for removing plants with strong root networks. In June 2023, workers used tools such as hoes to remove any seeds or root fragments brought to the surface during the removals. Mangroves are now being planted here as part of the restoration.

    The researchers calculated carbon dioxide and methane emissions for these areas for 2 years, until October 2023, to account for any differences in atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions before and after the digging. The mangrove forest consistently provided environmental benefits: It absorbed more carbon dioxide than it emitted, and it released little methane over the 2 years, the team found. The wetland showed similar benefits before being excavated.

    But after being dredged, this advantage disappeared: The emissions were more than the absorptions before the diggings. Worse, methane emissions increased 20 times here after the government used mechanical shovels, according to the researchers. In the following year, these emissions were 10 times higher than before the excavations, and 100-fold that of median methane emission levels in similar wetlands. In all, the excavations unleashed 11,680 tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere over the following year—the equivalent of burning nearly 6000 tons of coal .

    It takes up to 16 years after the diggings for the wetland to absorb more greenhouse gas and produce fewer such emissions than it did before the digging, according to a computer model. However, the mangroves need up to 48 years after being planted to absorb these increased emissions collected over 16 years, as they need time to reach maturity.

    The team doesn’t recommend abandoning the project, because of the devastating impacts of cordgrass on the region. Instead, it proposes a combination of methods, such as cutting combined with tilling, or smothering the cordgrass with plastic sheets to suppress the regrowth, as they are more environmentally friendly.

    Donald Strong, an ecologist at the University of California, Davis, suggests using herbicides, as they’ve been effective and environmentally friendly for Spartina control in the U.S., Australia, and other countries. Li says herbicide use is a concern because of the potential harmful impact on bird habitats and aquaculture. But now, some safer chemicals are being approved for usage in China to eradicate this weed, he notes, similar to their usage in California. Li believes it’s an example of how countries can learn from each other to find better ways to deal with such invasive species.

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