Welcome to the week.
A quick reminder before we get into it: Our *Actually* Pro Life Member drive is still running, and APL shirts are going fast. The first 50 new Important Members get a free APL t-shirt, designed to be worn in public and mean something. One member who upgrades before June 12th wins the full APL swag bag.
If you’ve been meaning to do it, now’s a good time (you get a 30-day free trial!).
We’ve got a bunch of APL merch up on the shop too (stickers, T-shirts, Pride stuff). If you want to rep the mission without the membership, or in addition to it.
Okay, onto the news!
This Week
And more.
Have a great week,
— Willow
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⚡️ Climate change:
Stop trying to make coal happen! The feds are offering $1 billion to revive coal, while the gap between carbon removal capacity and what’s needed keeps widening. (HEATMAP)
🌍Climate change is shrinking the safe window for Hajj pilgrims, with May temperatures in Mecca now matching what summers looked like in the 1980s. (Mongabay)
The Trump admin is dismantling a $368 million ocean monitoring network that tracks Atlantic currents, carbon absorption, and marine heat waves, creating a huge blind spot in climate science. (The New York Times)
🌎 Scientists are warning that a developing Super El Niño, amplified by climate change and Iran war fuel disruptions, could devastate food systems, forests, and water supplies across the Global South. #2026 amiright? (World Resources Institute)
🦠 Health & Bio:
🌏 China’s biotech sector just got top billing at ASCO for the first time with a cancer drug trial conducted entirely in China, raising questions about drug applicability for US patients and America’s competitiveness in medicine. (The New York Times)
A third of Americans now report energy insecurity, with families in Tampa cutting AC during record heat because they can’t afford the bills. (HEATMAP)
Doctors across the US are treating children with whooping cough, rotavirus, and bacterial pneumonia they’ve barely seen in their careers, as vaccine hesitancy fuels a resurgence of diseases we’d already defeated. (The New York Times)
🌏 Climate change is turning the planet into a petri dish: flesh-eating bacteria are spreading north, heat-adapted fungi are threatening the thermal barrier that protects humans, and zombie microbes are thawing from permafrost (*breathes heavily into a paper bag*). (The New Yorker)
💦 Food & Water:
Arizona and Nevada have struck the first-ever water trade deal with San Diego, which has a surplus thanks to its desalination plant, a creative workaround as the Colorado River faces its worst drought in decades. (The New York Times)
Google is promising to replenish more water than its data centers use by 2030, laying out a five-commitment blueprint after 70% of Americans said they’d oppose a data center in their area. (The Verge)
This opposition isn’t just about noise and water use, but about who controls AI and whether ordinary people have any say in a transformation that’s already shaping their lives. (Vox)
🌏 Papua New Guinea declared a UK-sized no-take marine protected area in the Bismarck Sea in a meaningful step to protect 30% of its waters by 2030. (Oceanographic)
👩💻 Beep Boop:
AI labs are merging chatbots and agents into systems that don’t just answer questions, but take action on your behalf (booking, emailing, trading) with minimal human approval steps. (Big Technology)
Android’s new anti-spoofing feature sends a silent verification signal to confirm callers are who they claim to be. (WIRED)
Peptide and supplement companies are spamming Reddit to manipulate what AI chatbots tell people about their products. (404 Media)
Meta is stuffing billions of dollars of chips into outdoor tents powered by off-grid gas plants, cutting data center build time in half. (Distilled)
Last week’s most popular Action Step was learning about the surveillance tech in use in your community using EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance.
👉 NEW: Find every action recommended in It’s Called Science. right here.
🌎 = Global news/action steps
🙋♀️ Vote!
What did you think of this week's It's Called Science?
Run for Soil and Water and Farmworkers
You may feel like you're giving it all you have, but obviously things are tough out there. We're working on all of it, but in particular, you, our listeners have asked for over and over more examples of a fight and actual progress that you can see and touch and feel.
And in these, the new second batch of conversations, in partnership with our best friends at Run for Something, we're gonna give you more of exactly what you're asking for.
Guests are sourced from the Run for Something pipeline, so they could be candidates or they could be among the graduating classes. But these are no doubt the next generation leaders of this country
Today I'm gonna introduce you to an incredible candidate who's running for a local office in their home state that is specifically working on something they were born into and care about deeply, that they represent.
We're gonna talk about what they're working on and why, where they've made progress, where they've struggled, and tactics and strategies that might be transferable to other school districts or towns or cities or whatever.
📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.
▶ Or watch the full episode on YouTube.
Every mother deserves a doula
Off the coast of Dominica, scientists recently watched 11 sperm whales gather around a birthing mother. What happened next turned out to have a lot to say about one of the most underfunded corners of American healthcare.
This week, Syris Valentine explores what sperm whales, bonobos, and even hamsters can tell us about why every mother deserves a doula.
▶ Watch Life Finds A Way on YouTube
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Gabriel-Philip Santos, co-founder of Cosplay for Science. Credit: Gabriel Santos</span>
Meet the cosplaying paleontologist who teaches Jurassic Park fans about dinosaurs
Many paleontologists credit Jurassic Park and its sequels for sparking an obsession with dinosaurs that set them on their career path.
Yet as their education progressed, some budding scientists became disillusioned with their beloved childhood franchise because of the inaccuracies and outright dinosaur falsehoods it has propagated.
Gabriel-Philip Santos isn't one of them. The director of education at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in Los Angeles, Santos has carried his early love of Jurassic Park forward into his career as a paleontologist and science communicator.
Santos knows there's a lot these films get wrong about dinosaurs. But he also believes they provide paleontologists a tremendous opportunity to engage with the public—even if that means clearing up some misconceptions about feathers and frog DNA.
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