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Q&A: Why the President’s Executive Order Will Not Help the Climate or Economy

By Annie Sneed

This week Pres. Donald Trump dealt a blow to global warming mitigation efforts with his executive order on energy. The president’s directive intends to “promote energy independence and economic growth,” according to the order—mainly by rolling back Obama-era climate policies. The order’s chief target is the Clean Power Plan, which requires the power sector to reduce its carbon emissions 32 percent below 2005 levels by TK date. It also initiates a review of methane regulations for the oil and gas industry and lifts a freeze on federal land leases for coal mining, among other actions. The executive order does not withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accord but the nation will likely not meet its greenhouse gas emission targets if Trump’s directive succeeds.

Scientific American spoke with Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world’s leading experts on economic development, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and special adviser to the United Nations Secretary General on the Millennium Development Goals, about how the White House’s executive order will affect the climate, national economy and international community.

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Red Planet versus Dead Planet: Scientists Debate Next Destination for Astronauts in Space

By Leonard David

THE WOODLANDS, Texas—Should the U.S. send humans back to the moon in a 21st-century reboot of the cold war–era Apollo program…or should the nation go full-throttle and for the gusto, sending crews to all the way to Mars, where none have gone before? U.S. scientists and policy makers have grappled ad nauseam with America’s next great otherworldly destination for decades, without making much meaningful progress. Now that it is approaching a half-century since an American—or anyone at all, for that matter—last left low Earth orbit, the debate seems lost in space.

Soon that shall change, many advocates of human spaceflight believe, through a hybrid of new initiatives by Pres. Donald Trump’s administration as well as commercial efforts led by private industry. The Trump White House’s vision for U.S. astronauts remains at present a foggy TBD, but there are plans afoot to relaunch a National Space Council. Helmed by Vice Pres. Mike Pence, the council would set a new space agenda not only for NASA but also for U.S. rocket companies, big and small, such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Orbital ATK.

In the meantime, speculation about the U.S.’s future in space has reached its highest point in recent memory, as made clear here last week by the proceedings of the 48th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC). At the meeting, scientists unleashed the latest findings regarding Earth’s moon, Mars, asteroids, comets and myriad other cosmic objects of interest, often with a hopeful eye toward rekindling human voyages to other worlds. Although robotic probes are the persistent currency of discovery in today’s planetary science, many researchers increasingly see astronauts as crucial agents of exploration in the not-too-distant future.

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F.D.A. Approves First Drug to Treat Severe Multiple Sclerosis

By Katie Thomas

The Food and Drug Administration approved on Tuesday the first drug to treat a severe form of multiple sclerosis, offering hope to patients who previously had no other options to combat a relentless disease that leads to paralysis and cognitive decline.

The federal agency also cleared the drug to treat people with the more common, relapsing form of the disease.

“I think that this is a very big deal,” said Dr. Stephen Hauser, the chairman of the neurology department at the University of California, San Francisco, and leader of the steering committee that oversaw the late-stage clinical trials of the drug, ocrelizumab. “The magnitude of the benefits that we’ve seen with ocrelizumab in all forms of M.S. are really quite stunning.”

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The Atheists Struggling to Find Therapists in the Bible Belt

By Angela Almeida

In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, life in the town of Easley, South Carolina, was tense for Leigh Drexler. Pick-up trucks with airborne Confederate flags seemed more prevalent than ever before, and her grandparents—who had never voted in their lives—registered to cast their ballots for the Donald himself.

Drexler felt isolated. “My family has always directed their point of view at me, but it has been a million times worse than normal,” she told me last October. “Every time we’re in a conversation, it’s either about the election or religion.”

It’s a dynamic that led Drexler, who identifies as a democratic socialist and an atheist, to go online in search of a therapist—someone who would perhaps better understand her lack of faith. She scouted towns within a 20-mile radius, but only “faith-based” practitioners turned up. She resorted to distance counseling over the phone with a therapist a few states away. “I knew there would be Christian counselors here, but I didn’t think that was all I was going to find,” she said.

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E.P.A. Chief, Rejecting Agency’s Science, Chooses Not to Ban Insecticide

By Eric Lipton

WASHINGTON — Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, moved late on Wednesday to reject the scientific conclusion of the agency’s own chemical safety experts who under the Obama administration recommended that one of the nation’s most widely used insecticides be permanently banned at farms nationwide because of the harm it potentially causes children and farm workers.

The ruling by Mr. Pruitt, in one of his first formal actions as the nation’s top environmental official, rejected a petition filed a decade ago by two environmental groups that had asked that the agency ban all uses of chlorpyrifos. The chemical was banned in 2000 for use in most household settings, but still today is used at about 40,000 farms on about 50 different types of crops, ranging from almonds to apples.

Late last year, and based in part on research conducted at Columbia University, E.P.A. scientists concluded that exposure to the chemical that has been in use since 1965 was potentially causing significant health consequences. They included learning and memory declines, particularly among farm workers and young children who may be exposed through drinking water and other sources.

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Decommissioned Earth Science Satellite to Remain in Orbit for Decades

By Jeff Foust

WASHINGTON — A NASA Earth science satellite whose mission is ending this week will remain in orbit through the middle of the century, far longer than the limit set by orbital debris mitigation guidelines.

NASA announced earlier this month that it was shutting down the Earth Observing 1 (EO-1) spacecraft on March 30. NASA launched the spacecraft in November 2000 as part of its New Millennium technology demonstration program, originally for a one-year mission.

NASA, in cooperation with several other agencies, extended the life of EO-1 several times, with a final decision in the 2015 senior review of extended NASA Earth science missions to terminate the mission. That decision was made in part on the precession of the spacecraft’s orbit that made its data less useful. [Earth From Space: Classic NASA Photos]

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Implants let quadriplegic man drink from mug and feed himself

By New Scientist staff and Press Association

A quadriplegic man in the US has been able to use his right arm and hand again after eight years of paralysis.

Bill Kochevar, who was paralysed below his shoulders in a cycling accident, was able to do this thanks to a neuroprosthesis. Electrodes implanted under his skull record brain activity in his motor cortex region, sending signals to electrodes in his arm that tell them when to stimulate his muscles.

The device has enabled him to raise a mug of water and drink from a straw, and scoop mashed potato from a bowl. “For somebody who’s been injured eight years and couldn’t move, being able to move just that little bit is awesome to me,” says Kochevar.

In preparation, Mr Kochevar first learned how to use his brain signals to move a virtual-reality arm on a computer screen. “He was able to do it within a few minutes,” says Bob Kirsch, from Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio. “The code was still in his brain.”

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Planet-sized ‘waves’ spotted in the Sun’s atmosphere

By Sid Perkins

Huge ripples in Earth’s atmosphere called Rossby waves help to steer the planet’s jet streams and weather patterns. Now, a study in Nature Astronomy offers the best evidence yet  that similar large-scale features also exist on the Sun1.

Rossby waves were  discovered in Earth’s atmosphere in the late 1930s. Driven by a planet’s rotation, they’ve been seen in the atmospheres of other planets, as well as in Earth’s oceans. In theory, these waves can form in any rotating fluid, says Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado and lead study author.

Researchers have long sought evidence of Rossby waves on the Sun, he says. And an enhanced understanding of these features and their movements could help scientists to better predict the formation of sunspots and the eruption of solar flares.

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A Dream of Clean Energy at a Very High Price

By Henry Fountain

SAINT-PAUL-LEZ-DURANCE, France — At a dusty construction site here amid the limestone ridges of Provence, workers scurry around immense slabs of concrete arranged in a ring like a modern-day Stonehenge.

It looks like the beginnings of a large commercial power plant, but it is not. The project, called ITER, is an enormous, and enormously complex and costly, physics experiment. But if it succeeds, it could determine the power plants of the future and make an invaluable contribution to reducing planet-warming emissions.

ITER, short for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (and pronounced EAT-er), is being built to test a long-held dream: that nuclear fusion, the atomic reaction that takes place in the sun and in hydrogen bombs, can be controlled to generate power.

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Question of the Week- 3/29/2016

The Hubble Deep Field images are just a couple of examples of some of the most breathtaking pictures we have from humanity’s exploration of space. What space images have been the most meaningful to you, and why?

Our favorite answer will win a copy of Brief Candle in the Dark by Richard Dawkins.

Want to suggest a Question of the Week? Email submissions to us at qotw@richarddawkins.net. (Questions only, please. All answers to bimonthly questions are made only in the comments section of the Question of the Week.)