Once thought to be eradicated, the screwworm could be screwing up our food supply as soon as this summer, according to a Bloomberg report.
The screwworm affected live stock ranchers from the 1930s through the 1980s.
The insect is essentially a “flying piranha” that eats its host from the inside out and has the ability to kill a full-grown steer in 10 days.
Eggs are laid in a wound, eye, or even the nose, or the udders of any animal. The eggs then hatch into larvae, which burrow or “screw” deep into the host’s flesh.
“The larvae eat around and down until there is a hole inside the animal the size of your fist,” Rick Tate, a lifelong rancher from Marfa, Texas, told Bloomberg.
After three to five days, the larvae turn into a fly and begin to reproduce.
Experts warn it could be back by this summer as nearly 1,000 cases have been reported in Mexico this year.
It isn’t exclusive to farm animals; it also impacts wildlife, including deer, squirrels, raccoons, and birds.
It’s also been found in horses, dogs, “and at least one goat,” according to the USDA.
The worm has also infected humans: In 2024, screwworms were found in the leg of a Canadian man after a trip to Costa Rica.
While the screwworm was detected in the 1930s, it wasn’t until after WWII that the USDA could fight it.
They used airplanes to drop hundreds of millions of sterilized flies over infected areas. This caused the sterile flies to mate and overwhelm the reproduction of native flies, essentially rendering the population infertile.
Some called the program “wasteful federal spending,” but by 1982, it pushed the screwworms out of the United States to the Darien Gap in Panama.
The Panama-United States Commission for the Eradication and Prevention of Screwworm (COPEG) was keeping the fly at bay until the pandemic, when a “perfect storm” happened.
The number of inspectors looking for the screwworm border decreased. Sterile fly production also slowed because of supply-chain issues. At the same time, the illegal transport of cattle across borders increased as millions of people began moving north through the Darien Gap.
Now the screwworm is making a comeback, and ranchers are attempting to stop it once more before it impacts our wildlife and food supply, the report states.
"But I felt no pain, and the day afterwards I was up and about walking," said Tanya Tanna, who reportedly just received a "breakthrough" surgery for her cancer.
Tanna, of South Ruislip, west London, "feels whole again" after becoming the "first patient in the UK to have a new form of breast reconstruction surgery," according to the BBC.
"A team of London surgeons developed and performed the keyhole procedure, which is less invasive, aids a quicker recovery and reduces the chance of getting a hernia," the outlet reported late on Thursday night. "They called it 'a massive breakthrough in cancer surgery'."
Tanna is quoted as saying, "After this complex surgery, lasting eight hours, I was expecting a large amount of pain... But I felt no pain, and the day afterwards I was up and about walking. The nurses were looking at me as if it was a miracle!"
The report continues:
"Mr Dariush Nikkhah, a consultant plastic surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital, and Mr Alistair Slesser, a consultant colorectal surgeon at Hillingdon Hospital, pioneered the approach using keyhole surgery, which modified a breast reconstruction surgery technique being used in a few places around the world."
Nikkhah is quoted as saying, "The Royal Free Hospital is now one of the few centres in the world which can offer this type of surgery... It's more difficult to perform but improves recovery. Whereas patients usually need four to seven days in hospital to recover, this surgery requires only one to two days."
Slesser further added, "This is a massive breakthrough in cancer surgery."
"The surgeon would control the instruments from a console using robotic arms. This would allow greater control and magnification, for precise and meticulous surgery," he added.
Just 48 short years ago, movie director George Lucas used the phrase “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” as the opening to the first “Star Wars” movie, later labeled “Episode IV: A New Hope.” But at least four important aspects of the “Star Wars” saga are much closer – both in time and space – than Lucas was letting on.
And we, an environmental health engineer and a civil engineer, know there are at least three more elements of these ancient, distant Lucas stories that might seem like science fiction but are, in fact, science reality.
Moisture farming
In that first movie, “Episode IV,” Luke Skywalker’s Uncle Owen was a farmer on the planet of Tatooine. He farmed water from air in the middle of a desert.
Each day, a human needs to consume about the equivalent of 0.8 gallons of water (3 liters). With more than 8 billion people living on the planet, that means engineers need to produce nearly 2.6 trillion gallons (10 trillion liters) of clean drinking water every year. Taken globally, rainfall would be enough, but it’s distributed very unevenly – including landing in the oceans, where it immediately becomes too salty to drink safely.
Researchers at places such as Berkeley have developed solar-powered systems that can produce clean drinking water from thin air. In general, they use a material that traps water molecules from the air within its structure and then use sunlight to condense that water out of the material and into drinkable liquid. But there is still a ways to go before they are ready for commercial distribution and available to help large numbers of people.
Researchers can harvest water from air in the desert, in a process powered only by the Sun.
Space debris
When the second Death Star was destroyed in “Return of the Jedi,” it made a huge mess, as you would expect when blowing to smithereens an object at least 87 miles across (140 kilometers). But the movie’s mythology helpfully explains a hyperspace wormhole briefly opened, scattering much of the falling debris across the galaxy.
As best as anyone can tell, a hyperspace wormhole has never appeared near Earth. And even if such a thing existed or happened, humans might not have the technology to chuck all our trash in there anyway. So we’re left with a whole lot of stuff all around us, including in space.
According to the website Orbiting Now, in late April 2025 there were just over 12,000 active satellites orbiting the planet. All in all, the United States and other space-faring nations are trying to keep track of nearly 50,000 objects orbiting Earth. And there are millions of fragments of space debris too small to be observed or tracked.
Just as on Earth’s roads, space vehicles crash into each other if traffic gets too congested. But unlike the debris that falls to the road after an Earth crash, all the bits and pieces that break off in a space crash fly away at speeds of several thousand miles per hour (10,000 to 30,000 kph) and can then hit other satellites or spacecraft that cross their paths.
Engineers at NASA, the European Space Agency and other space programs are exploring a variety of technologies – including a net, a harpoon and a laser – to remove the more dangerous pieces of space junk and clean up the space environment.
There are many different kinds of mitochondria, and medical professionals are learning how to transplant mitochondria from one cell to another just like they transplant organs from one person’s body to another. Maybe one day a transplant procedure could help people find the light side of the Force and turn away from the dark side.
One of the top medical journals in the world is now directly condemning President Donald Trump's administration over its continued attacks on the scientific community.
In a recent editorial, the Lancet — a highly regarded, peer-reviewed medical journal based in the United Kingdom — tore into the Trump administration over its threatening letters sent to editors of various journals and scientific publications. The Lancet specifically derided a letter that the CHEST medical journal (for medical professionals in the pulmonary field) got earlier this month from Ed Martin, who Trump appointed as the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia following his prior career as a Republican activist.
"This is an obvious ruse to strike fear into journals and impinge on their right to independent editorial oversight," the editorial read. "The Lancet stands with CHEST and the other medical journals that are being intimidated by the Trump administration."
On Friday, the New York Times reported that the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) also received one of Martin's letters. NEJM editor in chief Eric Rubin described the letter as "vaguely threatening." First Amendment expert Amanda Shanor told the Times that the letter appears to violate basic Constitutional rights.
"There is no basis to say that anything other than the most stringent First Amendment protections apply to medical journals,” Shanor said. “It appears aimed at creating a type of fear and chill that will have effects on people’s expression — that’s a constitutional concern."
Martin's letters are asking journals about whether they allow submissions from those who subscribe to "competing viewpoints," and whether they are willing to admit being influenced by "supporters, funders, advertisers and others." But Rubin insisted that journals like his all follow strict procedures for all submissions. The Lancet's editorial encouraged the scientific community to not be afraid to resist politically motivated efforts to muzzle them.
"Science and medicine in the USA are being violently dismembered while the world watches," the editorial read. "While the risks to civil servants and academics’ livelihoods are real and understandably frightening, bullies are only emboldened by acquiescence or indifference."
Scientists whose research has been under attack by President Donald Trump's administration are reportedly clamoring to escape to a place where their contributions will be welcomed and respected.
The Guardian reported Thursday that France's Aix-Marseille University is now offering roughly 20 researchers a three-year position through a program dubbed "Safe Place for Science." The university was apparently inundated with hundreds of applications from scientists in multiple continents around the world for the small number of positions, which are expected to be filled in June.
298 have applied so far according to the Guardian, with 242 of them deemed eligible. 135 applicants were from the United States, and worked at prestigious and elite institutions like Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, Yale University and even the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Aix-Marseille University President Eric Berton said many of the applications were sent via encrypted messaging platforms, and that some contained "worrying, sometimes chilling, accounts from American researchers about the fate reserved for them by the Trump administration." Both Berton and former French President Francois Hollande, who is now a member of parliament, lamented that important scientific research "has become a risk for the propaganda of regimes" and called for France to create a protected status for scientists.
"[C]urrent asylum mechanisms do not take into account the specificities of the academic environment and the threats facing scientists within authoritarian regimes,” Berton and Hollande wrote in the Liberation newspaper. “This is why we are making an urgent request, one that is appropriate for the current situation: the creation of a ‘scientific refugee’ status.”
The news of the "Safe Place for Science" program comes as the Trump administration has been making steep cuts to scientific research on multiple fronts. Earlier this week, the administration announced more than $2 billion in cuts to multi-year grants for the National Institutes of Health, in addition to slashing millions of dollars in funding for Harvard University (which many Boston-area hospitals also depend on).
Recently, comedy actor Seth Rogen ridiculed some Trump-friendly billionaires in the audience during the 2025 awards ceremony for the Breakthrough Prize (deemed "the Oscars of science") including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Rogen said that it was "amazing how much good science you can destroy with $320 million and RFK Jr. very fast." Rogen's comments were eventually cut from the broadcast.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a core component of a neurotech brain implant system from a rival company to Elon Musk's.
CNBC reported that Precision Neuroscience announced on Thursday that the company has received approval for its brain-computer interface, or BCI, called the "Layer 7 Cortical Interface."
The brain chip translates neural signals into commands for external technologies.
The company's website states that its goal is to help patients with severe paralysis regain some functions of speech and movement.
"Only part of Precision’s system was approved by the FDA on Thursday, but it marks the first full regulatory clearance granted to a company developing a wireless BCI," reported CNBC, citing a release from Precision.
Elon Musk's Neuralink wrote on its blog last May that it has struggled with some of the brain chip’s connective threads. The FDA has already cleared Neuralink to conduct trials. Neuralink has not received full regulatory approval to market its BCI system.
“This is a foundational moment for Precision,” said Dr. Benjamin Rapoport, Precision’s co-founder and chief science officer. Rapoport also co-founded Neuralink in 2017, but left the next year.
So far, Precision has temporarily implanted the "Layer 7" tech in 37 patients, the report said.
“This regulatory clearance will exponentially increase our access to diverse, high-quality data, which will help us to build BCI systems that work more effectively,” Rapoport said.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) accused Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) of being one of the worst "anti-vax conspiracy theorists" after she interrupted him at a House Oversight Committee hearing.
The clash came on Wednesday while Garcia discussed the conspiracy theories of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
"RFK Jr. has said that 5G and Wi-Fi can cause brain damage, ADHD, radiation sickness," Garcia explained. "He's said that pesticides are actually turning people transgender. He's even questioned whether HIV causes AIDS."
Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) responded by attacking Democrats.
"The predecessor for the ranking member, Mr. Raskin, said that those of us who wondered if COVID came from the lab at Wuhan, we were conspiracy terrorists," he complained. "And when we started suggesting that maybe former President Biden was in mental decline, that we were conspiracy terrorists."
"It's just that, you know, conspiracy theories are in the eyes of the beholder," he added.
Garcia wondered if Comer supported the measles vaccine.
"All my children are vaccinated," the chair confirmed.
"And again, our current HHS secretary is an anti-vax conspiracy theorist, and that is a fact," Garcia said. "He caused a measles outbreak in another country."
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) expressed support for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy's crusade to remove fluoride from the nation's water supply.
Johnson was asked about Kennedy's effort during a House Republican leadership press conference on Tuesday.
"I don't profess to be an expert in chemistry," the Speaker admitted. "But I'll tell you that I think it deserves, from what I've read and from what I understand, it deserves real evaluation."
"There's a concern that it may be having a negative effect on the health of children, and obviously, we have an obligation at the federal government level to look into that," he added.
University of Florida colleagues of the state's surgeon general are wondering why he's getting paid from their school when they say he's nowhere to be found.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis hired Joseph Ladapo as the state's surgeon general in 2021, and the position adds a "tenured faculty" post at the University of Florida, recalled The Independent Florida Alligator in a Monday report.
"UF fast-tracked Ladapo into a $337,000-a-year contract as part of his role as the state’s top medical official, charging him with launching an internal medicine research program, taking on a part-time teaching role and leading an administrative team," the report explained.
Now, his colleagues are questioning how precisely he's contributing to the university.
On paper, Ladapo is an Ivy League graduate with a résumé the medical school dean called "fabulous." Three years into the term, however, more than a dozen professors and administrators have questions. Internal records also show that Ladapo's work calendar has "monthslong stretches with little or no activity."
The report recalled that Ladapo promised to bring hefty research dollars "from the University of California at Los Angeles, his previous employer. That never happened."
He claimed it was due to his former boss, who disagreed with his position on COVID-19. Ladapo has secured no grants for the University of Florida.
The course he seemed eager to teach, "Critical Evaluations of Scientific Evidence," hasn't happened either.
Yet, he can still collect "$75,000 a year leading what his contract described as an administrative team addressing healthcare disparities within UF’s hospital system," said the report, noting little evidence of the team's work has been found in records.
"Ladapo’s dual appointment is one of the most prominent examples of Florida Republicans installing party officials into lucrative posts at state universities with questionable results. State auditors recently dinged UF for continuing to pay former President Ben Sasse — previously a Republican U.S. Senator — $1 million a year to co-teach a course after his resignation," the report revealed.
Thus far, his colleagues have lodged multiple research integrity complaints. In November, he was formally rebuked by the faculty council at the medical school.
“Ladapo’s a charlatan,” said pediatrics professor Jeffrey Goldhagen. “It completely decimates the reputation of the University of Florida.”
Astronaut Butch Wilmore pushed back after Fox News host Bill Hemmer suggested President Joe Biden's administration left him "marooned" on the International Space Station.
During a Monday interview on Fox News, Hemmer spoke to Wilmore and Suni Williams about their failure to return to Earth on Boeing Starliner, leaving them in space months longer than expected.
President Donald Trump has claimed that the astronauts were "virtually abandoned" and that he had tasked Elon Musk's SpaceX with bringing them home. However, plans were in place to bring the two back on a SpaceX capsule before Trump took office.
"I just wanna put a fine point on this because, Butch, you said, we don't feel abandoned," Hemmer told Wilmore. "We don't feel stuck. We don't feel stranded. Could I use the word maroon?"
Wilmore politely disagreed with the Fox News host.
"Okay, so any of those adjectives, they're very broad in their definition," he explained. "So, okay, in certain respects, we were stuck. In certain respects, maybe we were stranded."
"But based on how they were couching this, that we were left and forgotten and all that, we were nowhere near any of that at all," the astronaut continued. "In the big scheme of things, we weren't stuck. We were planned and trained."
Skygazers across a broad swathe of the Northern Hemisphere will have a chance to see the Moon take a bite out of the Sun on Saturday when a partial solar eclipse sweeps from eastern Canada to Siberia.
The partial eclipse, which is the first of the year and the 17th this century, will last around four hours from 0850 GMT to 1243 GMT.
Curious observers making sure to protect their eyes might be able to see the celestial show in most of Europe, as well as in some areas of northeastern North America and northwest Africa.
Eclipses occur when the Sun, Moon and Earth all line up. When they perfectly align for a total solar eclipse, the Moon fully blots out the Sun's disc, creating an eerie twilight here on Earth.
But that will not happen during Saturday's partial eclipse, which will instead turn the Sun into a crescent.
"The alignment is not perfect enough for the cone of shadow to touch the Earth's surface," Paris Observatory astronomer Florent Deleflie told AFP.
Because that shadow will "remain in space, there will not be a total eclipse anywhere" on Earth, he said.
At most, the Moon will cover around 90 percent of the Sun's disc. The best view will be from northeastern Canada and Greenland at the peak time of 1047 GMT.
- Beware eye damage -
It will be less spectacular in other areas. In France, for example, between 10 to 30 percent of the Sun's disc will be obscured, depending on the region.
Ireland will see around 40 percent, according to Sophie Murray of the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. However rain is forecast.
These smaller percentages of eclipse will not be visible to the naked eye.
However, if the sky is clear, skygazers will be able to watch the eclipse through special viewers -- as long as they take precautions.
Looking straight at the Sun -- during an eclipse or otherwise -- can lead to irreversible vision loss.
Skygazers are advised to buy eclipse-viewing glasses and ensure they are in good condition.
Even a slight defect or "microscopic hole" can cause eye damage, Deleflie warned.
Or, people could watch the eclipse at a local astronomy observation centre where "you can safely verify the precision of celestial mechanics and marvel at interesting details on the Sun's surface, such as sunspots", Deleflie said.
Murray offered another option.
"You can make a simple pinhole projector by poking a small hole in a piece of paper or cardboard and letting sunlight pass through it onto the ground or another surface, where you'll see a small, inverted image of the eclipsed Sun," she said.
The partial eclipse will not turn up on a smartphone camera without a suitable filter, Deleflie added.
The latest celestial show comes two weeks after skygazers across much of the world marvelled at a rare total lunar eclipse, dubbed a "Blood Moon".
These events often happen after each other because the Moon has "completed a half-circle around the Earth in the meantime, reversing the configuration", Deleflie explained.
A greater spectacle is expected on August 12, 2026, when a total solar eclipse will be visible in Iceland, northern Spain and parts of Portugal.
More than 90 percent of the Sun will also be obscured in areas of Europe including Britain, France and Italy.
It will be the first total solar eclipse since one swept across North America in April 2024.
President Donald Trump's purge of U.S. government staff could soon pay dividends — for other countries.
According to Politico, a group of countries in the European Union have hatched a plan to poach ousted researchers from the United States.
"Twelve governments said the European Union needs an 'attractivity boom' to bring over talent from abroad 'who might suffer from research interference and ill-motivated and brutal funding cuts,'" Politico quoted from a letter sent to the commission.
The letter doesn't say the U.S. by name, however. The only reference is the sentence: "The current international context reminds us that freedom of science can be put at risk anywhere and at any time."
When he came into office, Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency by executive order. That initiative has been behind the upheaval and dismantling of government agencies. Websites, grants, programs, and employees have been cut or frozen under the promise that Trump will save taxpayers trillions.
Politico listed the countries interested in such a program as France, the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Spain, Slovenia, Germany, Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania.
"It is urgent ... to organize ourselves to welcome talents who would like or need to leave the United States," said French Research Minister Philippe Baptiste in a statement to the site.
The report also noted that several universities in Europe are also trying to recruit U.S. researchers.
"The Free University Brussels (VUB), on Monday announced 12 positions for international researchers 'with a specific focus on American scholars,'" the report cited.
The French Aix-Marseille University launched its own "safe space for the science program," said the report. According to the site, it said "some scientists in the United States may feel threatened or hindered in their research."
SpaceX founder Elon Musk said Saturday its massive Starship rocket would leave for Mars at the end of 2026 with Tesla humanoid robot Optimus onboard, adding that human landings could follow "as soon as 2029."
"Starship departs for Mars at the end of next year, carrying Optimus. If those landings go well, then human landings may start as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely," Musk said on his X social network.
Musk, who is also the Tesla CEO, brought out the company's Optimus robots at an event last year.
He said the dancing robots would one day be able to do menial tasks, as well as offer friendship, and expected them to retail for $20,000 to $30,000.
Starship -- the world's largest and most powerful rocket -- is key to Musk's long-term vision of colonizing Mars.
Standing 403 feet (123 meters) tall -- about 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty -- Starship is designed to eventually be fully reusable.
NASA is also awaiting a modified version of Starship as a lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the Moon this decade.
But before SpaceX can carry out those missions, it must prove the vehicle is reliable, safe for crew, and capable of complex in-orbit refueling -- critical for deep space missions.
