Welcome to the week.
I’m away next week and the week after that is Labor Day so this will be the last It’s Called Science for awhile (but we’ll still have WCID Weekly and various essays coming out). When I’m back we’ll have a brand new and improved version of It’s Called Science ready to go that I’m really excited about: it will be more intentional, actionable, visual, and rooted in data.
But until then, let’s get to the news.
This Week
And more.
Have a great week,
— Willow
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✅ Fact Check
Which disease is the leading cause of death worldwide?
Last week, we asked: Which sector accounts for the largest share of global greenhouse gas emissions?
The answer: Electricity & heat production is consistently the single largest sector across every major dataset, though the exact share varies by year and methodology (roughly 21-34% of global emissions). Only 21% of you got it right! Most of you (53%) went with agriculture, which is a very reasonable guess. It’s the largest source of methane specifically, and broader “food system” accounting (including land-use change, packaging, transport, and retail) can push agriculture’s share as high as 38%. But by the narrower sector definitions used in these comparisons, agriculture falls behind electricity and heat globally. Source: World Resources Institute, Climate Watch, 2023 data.
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Chimneys are younger than you think
⚡️ Climate change:
🌎 The world just hit 3 terawatts of installed solar power (up from 1 terawatt a decade ago). China is leading the way, deploying more solar than most countries’ entire power grids combined. (Fortune)
Two-thirds of the groups urging the Supreme Court to protect ExxonMobil and Suncor from climate accountability are (surprise!) funded by the same small network of oil companies, billionaires, and dark-money foundations. (Consumer Watchdog)
Heat has become deadlier than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined in the US, yet Texas and Florida have passed laws specifically banning cities from requiring water breaks for outdoor workers. (American Inequality)
More than $90 billion in climate grants remain tangled in court after Trump’s funding freeze. (HEATMAP)
🦠 Health & Bio:
🌎 Ending extreme poverty isn’t the moonshot it sounds like: a $1 billion/year, five-year national cash-transfer pilot could prove the concept works, and the full global price tag is just 0.3% of world GDP. (Brookings)
A personalized mRNA vaccine paired with an existing immunotherapy slowed melanoma’s return in the first randomized trial to prove the approach actually works. (STAT)
🌎 Scientists created a vaccine that survives a full year at room temperature, which is a potential game-changer for vaccinating kids in places where reliable refrigeration is a luxury. (Gavi)
🌏 England has already hit its target of treating 80% of known hepatitis C cases, thanks in part to free at-home testing kits that catch the disease before it’s already caused serious liver damage. (BBC)
💦 Food & Water & Ecosystems:
🌎 Nigerian farmers are switching to solar-powered irrigation pumps to cut fuel costs by more than 60% and extending their growing seasons. (Triple Pundit)
🌍 Migrant cacao workers fleeing Côte d'Ivoire's depleted plantations are clearing Liberia’s forests at a record pace, with one district seeing roughly 70-80% of communally-owned forest already converted to cacao farms. (Mongabay)
California’s new plan for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta lets water agencies choose “voluntary agreements” over strict pumping limits. (Los Angeles Times)
The feds are rolling back the 25-year-old “roadless rule”" that has protected tens of millions of acres of public forest from road construction and logging, arguing it’ll help fight wildfires (though more roads statistically means more human-caused fires, not fewer). (NPR (WHRO))
👩💻 Beep Boop:
A new study documents how pickup artist influencers use Meta’s smart glasses to covertly film themselves harassing women in public, then turn the footage into content. (404 Media)
Congressional staffers are increasingly drafting bills with AI, and fixing AI-generated legislation now takes longer than just writing it from scratch, with mistakes ranging from wrong legal terms to bills that accidentally exclude DC and tribal nations. (Politico)
Anthropic’s new watermarking system for Claude works by subtly “nudging” word choices it considers interchangeable to embed a detectable pattern, and the backlash is less about the watermark itself but what the approach reveals about how little AI companies think word choice actually matters. (404 Media)
Facing lawsuits over teen suicides and self-harm linked to the chatbot, OpenAI rolled out an automatic “teen mode” that tracks 2000+ signals to guess a user’s age. (The New York Times)
Last week’s most popular Action Step was checking out the US Wind Power Resource Map to see where the most promising locations in the US are for wind power.
👉 NEW: Find every action recommended in It’s Called Science. right here.
🌎 = Global news/action steps
The medicine hiding in other species
For most of medical history, we’ve studied human disease by studying humans. Duh, of course, why wouldn’t we? But it turns out that when medicine starts looking at the DNA of other species, we can unlock so much more knowledge about ourselves.
Tech and climate journalist Tasmin Lockwood returns this week to explore how cross-species biology, supercharged by AI, is beginning to rewrite what we thought we knew, and what the DNA of animals like elephants can tell us about our own health.
▶ Watch Life Finds A Way on YouTube.
The intrepid Enterprise crew's high-stakes mission to the high seas. Credit: Memory Alpha
Mining the ocean is controversial. Could the Enterprise do it right?
Hundreds of miles offshore and thousands of feet underwater in the middle of the Pacific Ocean sit knobby lumps of rock that could hold the key to humanity’s high-tech future.
These ‘polymetallic nodules’ are rich in metals like nickel, cobalt, and copper—essential ingredients in everything from the lithium-ion batteries inside smartphones and electric vehicles to the power lines that channel electrons from power plants to our homes.
Several private and state-backed companies wish to mine them, but the idea is controversial. Not only could deep sea mining devastate seafloor ecosystems we know precious little about, but it also raises tough questions about fairness and who should reap the benefits of such extraction.
After all, companies are proposing to mine the international seabed, waters that, according to international law, represent the “common heritage of [hu]mankind.”
If someone is going to profit from their exploitation, well, shouldn’t everyone?
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