Science Friday - A Look Back At 2025 In Science, From Federal Cuts To Space Junk

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

This has been a busy year in science, from government budget cuts and policy changes affecting research, to the record rise of renewables, to the surge in AI, and everything in between.Science journalists Sophie Bushwick and Maggie Koerth join Host Ira Flatow to unpack some of the year’s top stories, and some you might have missed.Guests:Sophie Bushwick is a freelance science journalist and editor based in New York.Maggie Koerth is climate and weather editor for CNN, based in Minneapolis.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hi, I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday. What a long, strange year it has been. And today on the podcast, we're looking back on the year in science. It has been very eventful, from slashes to research by the Trump administration, to the record rise of renewables around the world, the surge in AI, the near-Earth comet, and everything in between. Here to help sift through selected science stories of the year are Sophie Bushwick, freelance science journalist and editor based in New York,

and Maggie Kerth, Climate and Weather Editor for CNN, based in Minneapolis. Welcome back, both of you. Hi, thank you. Let's start with the big picture. As I mentioned, one of the big themes this year was the changes and disruption brought by the Trump administration. Maggie, I know you were especially looking at this as related to the CDC. Tell us about that.

Yeah, I mean, the CDC has just been. in chaos all year. It started off with firing, then there was some rehiring. They ended programs like lead surveillance. And this has just been a slow march toward what we've seen this fall, upending the entire vaccine infrastructure of the country. And one of the things that really stood out to me about this was Amy Maxman's reporting on the measles outbreak in Texas for KFF Health News, where she was writing about how officials in Texas were reaching out to the CDC, desperately trying to get advice, and just weren't hearing anything back. They were kind of stuck in this game of telephone. And a lot of it

turned out to be tied to this freeze on communications that had happened before the outbreak started. But then nobody at the CDC felt like they could start communicating again. Like, it just became, this giant mess, and eventually 16 people died in these measles outbreaks and their associated ones in other states, and more than 4,500 were sickened. It's a really awful story, and I think kind of just really sums up the politically motivated malfeasance that we've been seeing. Incredible. Okay, there have also been big policy changes when it comes to clean energy, Sophie. I know you pointed out both good news and bad news on the energy. and climate front, tell us about those.

I'll start with the good news because we could all use some of that. We could all use some of that, yeah. So the good news is that for the first time ever, the world got more energy from renewable energy sources than from coal this year. And a lot of that is due to China, building out its renewable energy infrastructure, so getting power from things like solar and wind.

And that's pretty cool. But at the same time, this year was the second, hottest year since we started recording this type of thing. And that was despite the fact that this was a la Nina year. So the fact that we had such a hot year despite la Nina is not great. And at the same time, ocean acidification got worse to the point where one report said that seven out of nine what they call planetary boundaries have been breached. And this is what we can expect to see as one of the consequences of climate change that it's not just about temperature, right? It's about these massive systems and these can be tipping points. These can affect each other in negative ways. And staying on

this energy theme, Maggie, huge rise in people trying to make more energy because of AI, right? Well, huge demand for that energy at any rate. That's part of the problem is that there's not actually enough energy being generated to meet that demand. At CNN, one of the writers I work with Ella Nilsson has done this really interesting story about how Virginia is like the hub of data centers in the U.S. right now. It's got the most of any other state. And it's raising the energy bills in Maryland across the border, partly because they know that there's going to be this massive demand five years, three years out in the future. And there's also not enough generation to meet that demands. And so that's driving the cost up. And that is really affecting just average people

trying to pay their electric bills. Yes, I can vouch for that myself. Let's move to some more hopeful news in medicine, Sophie. A theme this year was new work on the GLP1 drugs. That's right. So GLP1 drugs were originally intended to treat diabetes. but they show an ability to help with weight loss that a lot of people are taking advantage of now. And there had been hints that it could also be really helpful for a whole range of problems. And now this year we saw some big clinical trials in humans that seemed to bear out that idea. So one big trial found that there's 42 different conditions where your risk of getting that condition is lowered if you're taking a GLP1 drug.

And the interesting thing is that it seems to be independent of the weight loss. So that means the drugs are having some other mechanism that they're using to help with these conditions. And one of the exciting things is a lot of these conditions are related to the brain. So one study of more than 100,000 people found that GLP1 drugs reduced the risk of basically all types of dementia, which is quite exciting. There's other things like alcohol use disorder can benefit from this fatty liver. disease, even it seems like cataracts. Wow. And one study looked at biological age, and it suggested

that receiving Ozempic could reduce your biological age if you receive these injections regularly for 32 weeks. Wow. Wow, Maggie, I want to talk about something you pointed out as a story that hasn't been getting a lot of press this year. And that's geoengineering or conspiracy theories about it? Well, a little bit of both, actually. So this is something that I keep noticing popping up all year long is geoengineering or might also hear it referred to as SRM or solar radiation management. And this is the idea of putting these aerosolized particles up into the atmosphere so that you're reflecting heat back out into space, kind of doing intentionally the same thing that happens when a big volcano erupts and spreads out dust all over the globe and you get like a cooler winter.

Right. And this is something that scientists have been talking about for years and there are more and more startups that are getting involved in this, including a big and kind of secretive one that's based out of Israel and another in the U.S. that actually tried. to put up a test flight of these chemicals up into the atmosphere to kind of just see like how test their dispersal systems and ended up getting the entire concept banned in Mexico. And these things have been increasing over time. And we're all starting to see this year scientists taking this more seriously and having more talks about it that kind of leaned

towards we want to study this in the real world, even if we don't really like the idea of doing this. We want to know what the actual risks are and what the actual benefits could be through real tests. When you get to the part that is conspiracy theory, though, at the same time you have this stuff happening in several U.S. states that's conflating geoengineering with chem trail conspiracies where people believe that the government is already spreading chemicals through plane engines into the sky to control the weather, which isn't happening. But that is getting banned in several states, including Tennessee, Florida, Alabama. And that's going to affect some of these future geoengineering projects.

They're putting up those vapor trails. You know what's happening. Wow. All right, let's talk, Sophie, a little bit more about space because it's been a busy year for satellite launches, but also for space junk, right? Right. We are filling up space with these constellations of satellites. And even though a lot of these can be helpful, they also create problems. So when a satellite breaks, a lot of them don't have any mechanism to bring them back down. And so it just stays into space and becomes space. junk. And we saw some of the consequences of that. This year, some tycho knots got stranded on a Chinese space station because the vehicle that was supposed to take them back to Earth was hit by space debris and damaged. And so they couldn't trust it to carry them back. And this is something that

affects any humans in space, but also any objects that we send up to space. You know, there's the risk that if you've got a lot of satellites, that two satellites could be on a collision course and destroy each other. And then there's also, of course, the idea that this could happen deliberately, that you could have sabotage up in space. One of the really interesting things that I learned this year is that there are people who want to do space recycling and, like, capture this junk and with, you know, robotic arms and things. But there's all of this space law, which is my favorite kind of law. The best kind of law. The best kind of law. That actually makes that illegal in many cases.

Because anything that could be used to capture a dead satellite could also be used as a weapon against a working satellite. And so the only way that you can recapture and destroy space junk is if it is your country's space junk. Wow. So that makes it even more difficult. Right. And just think of all the thousands, tens of thousands of pieces of space junk we have to identify so that you can, could then be sure you're picking up the right piece of space junk for your country? Right. Well, and especially because like so many of them have just smashed into each other and created more small pieces. Who does that belong to now?

And now we have all these little communication satellites that are not in geosynchronous orbit, that are low Earth orbit that are falling down now all the time. Yes, that is another big issue. For another program. Don't get hit, Ira. Do look up. Maggie, a splashy story that maybe got overplayed. I'm talking about the dire wolf. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about this dire wolf. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about it. This company claimed that they had resurrected a extinct ancient species. If you've ever been to the Libreia Tar Pits, you've seen like the rows and rows of dire wolf skulls that they've pulled out of there. So dire wolves are a were a real animal. This company claimed that they had recreated this species.

What they had actually done was tweaked 20 genes in the gray wolf and then just claimed that was a resurrected dire wolf. And in our era of very credulous technology reporting, A bunch of people just went along with this and were reporting it as a resurrected extinct species. And I really liked what Riley Black wrote about in Slate, where she called this not progress, but toys. This has very little to do with actual scientific progress and a lot to do with splashy marketing and fundraising. The clickbait of dire wolfing. I mean, one of the really frustrating things about this story was, you know, there was an interview with a representative at this company. And the representative says they're using the concept of a species that says if it looks like this animal, then they are this animal.

Which is not a definition that anyone else shares. We don't even know what it looked like. They made these animals all like snow white. but which would make sense if you're thinking about like an ice age animal but this is something that lived as far south as again the librea tarpits and wouldn't have necessarily been a snow white animal so like Riley pointed out it feels more like they were trying to recreate the dire wolves from Game of Thrones yeah yeah oh details details all right Sophie has been a lot of downer news this year's please please tell me you You have some good news, a real breakthrough to wrap up with? Yes, I do. This is a great breakthrough for anyone who has ever struggled to move furniture,

which is that a new proof has revealed the answer to the moving sofa problem. Oh, thank God. This is a, yes, right? It's a mathematical version of a very specific definition of this question of the largest sofa you can move around a corner. So if you have an L-shaped hallway and it's one unit wide, what is the object with the greatest area that you can maneuver around that corner without getting it stuck? And, you know, if you think about it, you think about like a square that's one unit on each side, right?

It can just slide along one side, slide on the other. But that's only one unit in area. You can get a little bigger if you take a half circle. And if that has a radius of one, it can slide around the piece. corner and its area will be bigger. Its area will be a little over one and a half units. But in the 90s, one researcher suggested that a curved shape with an area of 2.2 and change units could make it around the corner. And now another researcher has proved that that is the largest possible shape you can have for your moving sofa. Wow. Doesn't say how heavy this sofa is, right?

No, it's all about area and not about. volume. It doesn't say how tall it is either. You get more volume, right? Yeah, yeah. You could have a very, very tall sofa and really blow it up. Yeah. All right. That is a good way to wrap it up. Thank you, Sophie. Sophie Bushwick, freelance science journalist and editor in New York. Magick Kirtz, Climate and Weather Editor for CNN based in Minneapolis. Happy New Year to both of you. Happy New Year. That's it for today. This episode was produced by Charles Burquist. And from all of us at Science Friday, I want to wish you a happy, healthy new year. We'll see you in 2026. Thanks for listening.