Latest news with #Unexplainable
Vox
3 days ago
- Health
- Vox
A wasting disease killed millions of sea stars. After years of searching, scientists just found a cause.
is a senior producer and reporter on Unexplainable, Vox's science podcast. She covers everything scientists don't yet know but are trying to figure out, so her work explores everything from the inner workings of the human body to the distant edges of the universe 'It was like a battleground,' Drew Harvell remembers. 'It was really horrible.' She's reflecting on a time in December 2013, on the coast of Washington state, when she went out at low tide and saw hundreds of sick, dying sea stars. 'There were arms that had just fallen off the stars,' she says. 'It was really like a bomb had gone off.' The stars were suffering from something known as sea star wasting disease. It's a sickness that sounds like something out of a horror movie: Stars can develop lesions in their bodies. Eventually, their arms can detach and crawl away from them before the stars disintegrate completely. Harvell is a longtime marine ecologist whose specialty is marine diseases. And she was out for this low tide in 2013 because a massive outbreak of this seastar wasting had started spreading up and down the West Coast — from Mexico to Alaska — ultimately affecting around 20 distinct species of sea stars and wiping out entire populations in droves. In the decade since, some species have been able to bounce back, but others, like the sunflower sea star, continue to struggle. In California, for example, sunflower stars have almost completely died out. The question in 2013 was: What, exactly, was killing all these stars? While marine ecologists like Harvell could recognize the symptoms of seastar wasting, they weren't actually sure what was causing the disease. From the very beginning, though, it was something they wanted to figure out. And so, soon after the outbreak started, they collected sea stars to see if they could find a pathogen or other cause responsible for the wasting. The hunt for the culprit of this terrible, mysterious disease was on. Unfortunately, it was not straightforward. ' When this disease outbreak happened, we knew quite little about what was normal [in sea stars],' says Alyssa Gehman, who is also a marine disease ecologist. She says that when researchers are trying to do similar work to chase down a pathogen in, say, humans, they have an enormous trove of information to draw on about what bacteria and viruses are common to the human body, and what might be unusual. Not so for sea stars. ' We maybe had a little bit of information, but absolutely not enough to be able to really tease that out easily.' Also, Gehman says, there can be a lag before the disease expresses itself, so some stars have the pathogen that caused the disease, but don't present with symptoms yet, making it harder for scientists to even distinguish between sick stars and healthy ones as they run their tests. So even though a research team identified a virus that they thought might be associated with the wasting disease as early as 2014, over time, it became clear that it was most likely not the culprit, but rather just a virus present in many sea stars. 'The results were always confusing,' Harvell remembers. In the decade since the initial mass outbreak, other researchers have proposed other theories, but none have brought them to a definitive answer either. And yet, it became increasingly clear that an answer was needed, because people started to realize just how important the sunflower stars they had lost really were. ' We actually learned a lot from losing so many of these animals at once,' Gehman says. Before the outbreak, she says, they'd known that sunflower stars — giant sea stars that can be the size of dinner plates, or even bike tires — were skillful hunters and voracious eaters. They even knew that many things on the seafloor would run away from them. Gehman remembers taking a class on invertebrates back in college, where she learned that if you put even just the arm of a sunflower star in a tank with scallops, 'the tank would explode with scallops swimming everywhere trying to get away.' But all that fearsome hunting was, it seems, pretty key to ecosystem health. In many places, she says, ' after the sea sunflower stars were lost, the urchin populations exploded.' And so the die-off of the sunflower star and the explosion of urchins has been connected to the collapse of the Northern California kelp forests, a marine ecosystem that provides a home for a rich diversity of species. A cross-state, cross-organizational partnership between the Nature Conservancy and a variety of research institutions is working hard to breed sunflower seastars in captivity in the hopes that they can be reintroduced to the coast and reassume their role in their ecosystems. But as Harvell remembers, she and Gehman knew that no recovery project would be successful if they couldn't find the cause of sea star wasting disease. 'You're not gonna be able to get these stars back in nature if you don't know what's killing them,' she says. So in 2021, as part of the larger partnership, Harvell and Gehman, along with a number of their colleagues, launched into an epidemiological detective project. Their quest: to finally pin down the cause of seastar wasting disease. 'Really the work over the four years was done in the trenches by Dr. Melanie Prentice and Dr. Alyssa Gehman,' Harvell says, 'and then one of my students, Grace Crandall.' It was an emotionally difficult project because it required Gehman and her colleagues to deliberately infect many stars with the disease. 'It feels bad,' she admits, and they would be open about that in the lab, 'but we also can remember that we're doing this for the good of the whole species.' That work has paid off, though, and now, after four years of research, they've nailed their culprit in a paper out in Nature Ecology & Evolution today. What follows is a conversation with Drew Harvell, edited for clarity and length, about what she and her collaborators found, how marine ecologists do this kind of detective work, and what identifying the culprit could mean for the future health of seastars. The underside of an adult sunflower sea star. Dennis Wise/University of Washington How did you start the journey to figure out what actually had happened? Well, we chose to work with the sunflower star because we knew it was the most susceptible and therefore was going to give us the most clear-cut results. So we set up at Marrowstone Point, which was the USGS Fisheries virus lab [in Washington state], because that would give us the proper quarantine conditions and lots of running seawater. The proper quarantine conditions — what does that mean? All of the outflow water has to be cleansed of any potential virus or bacterium, and so all of the water has to be run through virus filters and also actually bleached in the end, so that we're sure that nothing could get out. We did not want to do this work at our lab, Friday Harbor Labs, or at any of the Hakai labs in Canada because we were really worried that if we were holding animals with an infectious agent in our tanks without really stringent quarantine protocols, that we could be contributing to the outbreak. So you have these sea stars. They're in this quarantined environment. What is the methodology here? What are you doing to them or with them? So the question is: Is there something in a diseased star that's making a healthy star sick? And that's like the most important thing to demonstrate right from the beginning — that it is somehow transmissible. And so Melanie and Alyssa early on showed that even water that washed over a sick star would make healthy stars sick, and if you co-house them in the same aquarium, the healthy ones would always get sick when they were anywhere near or exposed to the water from a diseased star. There's something in the water. That's right. There's something in the water. But they wanted to refine it a little bit more and know that it was something directly from the diseased star. And so they created a slurry from the tissues of the disease star and injected that into the healthy star to be able to show that there really was something infectious from the disease star that was making the healthy star sick and then die. And then you control those kinds of what we call 'challenge experiments' by inactivating in some way that slurry of infected disease stuff. And in this case, what they were able to do was to 'heat-kill' [any pathogens in this slurry] by heating it up. And so the thing that was very successful right from the beginning was that the stars that were infected with a presumptive disease got sick and died, and the controls essentially stayed healthy. You do that control to make sure that it's not like…injecting a slurry into a star is what makes them sick? That's right. And you're also having animals come in sick, right? So you want to know that they weren't just gonna get sick anyway. You want to be sure that it was what you did that actually affected their health status. So you have a slurry — like a milkshake of sea star — and you know that within it is a problematic agent of some kind. How do you figure out what is in that milkshake that is the problem? The real breakthrough came when Alyssa had the idea that maybe we should try a cleaner infection source and decided to test the coelomic fluid, which is basically the blood of the star. With a syringe, you can extract the coelomic fluid of the sick star and you can also heat-kill it, and you can do the same experiment challenging with that. And it was a really exciting moment because she and Melanie confirmed that that was a really effective way of transmitting the disease because it's cleaner. Grace Crandall injects a sea star to expose it to wasting disease at the start of a new experiment. Courtesy Grace Crandall/University of Washington Drew Harvell holds a sunflower star at UW Friday Harbor Laboratories. David O Brown/Cornell University The team poses in the lab at the USGS Marrowstone Marine Field Station. From left to right: Alyssa Gehman, Grace Crandall, Melanie Prentice and Drew Harvell. Courtesy Grace Crandall/University of Washington It's cleaner, like there's less stuff than in the tissue? Like blood is just like a simpler material? Right. So, that was really the beginning of being able to figure out what it was that was in the coelomic fluid that was causing the disease. So basically it's like: We're gonna look in every sample in this fluid. There's gonna be sort of an ingredient list. And in the first one, there's ingredients ABC. In the second one, there's ingredients BDF. And in the third one, there's ingredients BYZ… So it seems like it might be ingredient B that's causing the problem here because it's consistent across all samples? Yeah, that's exactly it. And so then that was very, very incredibly exciting. Wow. There's this one bacterium — Vibrio pectenicida — that's showing up in all of the diseased material samples. Could it be that? We weren't sure. We sort of thought, after 12 years, this is gonna be something so strange! So weird! You know, something alien that we've never seen before. And so to have a Vibrio — something that we think of as a little bit more common — turn up was really surprising. Then one of our colleagues at the University of British Columbia, Amy Chan, was able to culture that particular bacterium from the disease star. And so now she had a pure culture of the presumptive killer. And then last summer, Melanie and Alyssa were able to test that again under quarantine conditions and find that it immediately killed the stars that were tested. How did you all feel? Oh, we were definitely dancing around the room. It was — just such a happy moment of fulfillment. I really do like to say that at the beginning of the task that Nature Conservancy handed us — to figure out the causative agent — we told them again and again that this is a very risky project. We can't guarantee we're going to be successful. So yeah, we were incredibly elated when we really felt confident in the answer. It was just hundreds and hundreds of hours of tests and challenge experiments that came out so beautifully. What does it mean to finally have an answer here? What are the next steps? This was the part of it that really kept me awake at night because I just felt so worried early on at the idea that we were working on a roadmap to recovery of a species without knowing what was killing it, and I just felt like we couldn't do it if we were flying blind like that. We wouldn't know what season the pathogenic agent came around. We wouldn't know what its environmental reservoirs were. We didn't know what was making stars susceptible. It was going to be really hard, and it wasn't going to feel right to just put animals out in the wild without knowing more. And so knowing that this is one of the primary causative agents — maybe the only causative agent — allows us to test for it in the water. It allows us to find out if there are some bays where this is being concentrated, to find out if there are some foods the stars are eating that are concentrating this bacterium and delivering a lethal dose to a star. Now we'll be able to answer those questions, and I think that's going to give us a really good opportunity to design better strategies for saving them. It feels like you now have a key to use to sort of unlock various pieces of this. We totally do. And it's so exciting and so gratifying because that's what we're supposed to do, right? As scientists and as disease ecologists, we're supposed to solve these mysteries. And it feels really great to have solved this one. And I don't think there's a day in the last 12 years that I haven't thought about it and been really frustrated we didn't know what it was. So it's particularly gratifying to me to have to have reached this point. Drew Harvell is the author of many popular science books about marine biology and ecology, including her latest, The Ocean's Menagerie. She also wrote a book about marine disease called Ocean Outbreak.
Vox
4 days ago
- Health
- Vox
For more than a decade, sea stars died by the millions. Now we know what caused it.
is a senior producer and reporter on Unexplainable, Vox's science podcast. She covers everything scientists don't yet know but are trying to figure out, so her work explores everything from the inner workings of the human body to the distant edges of the universe 'It was like a battleground,' Drew Harvell remembers. 'It was really horrible.' She's reflecting on a time in December 2013, on the coast of Washington state, when she went out at low tide and saw hundreds of sick, dying sea stars. 'There were arms that had just fallen off the stars,' she says. 'It was really like a bomb had gone off.' The stars were suffering from something known as sea star wasting disease. It's a sickness that sounds like something out of a horror movie: Stars can develop lesions in their bodies. Eventually, their arms can detach and crawl away from them before the stars disintegrate completely. Harvell is a longtime marine ecologist whose specialty is marine diseases. And she was out for this low tide in 2013 because a massive outbreak of this seastar wasting had started spreading up and down the West Coast — from Mexico to Alaska — ultimately affecting around 20 distinct species of sea stars and wiping out entire populations in droves. In the decade since, some species have been able to bounce back, but others, like the sunflower sea star, continue to struggle. In California, for example, sunflower stars have almost completely died out. The question in 2013 was: What, exactly, was killing all these stars? While marine ecologists like Harvell could recognize the symptoms of seastar wasting, they weren't actually sure what was causing the disease. From the very beginning, though, it was something they wanted to figure out. And so, soon after the outbreak started, they collected sea stars to see if they could find a pathogen or other cause responsible for the wasting. The hunt for the culprit of this terrible, mysterious disease was on. Unfortunately, it was not straightforward. ' When this disease outbreak happened, we knew quite little about what was normal [in sea stars],' says Alyssa Gehman, who is also a marine disease ecologist. She says that when researchers are trying to do similar work to chase down a pathogen in, say, humans, they have an enormous trove of information to draw on about what bacteria and viruses are common to the human body, and what might be unusual. Not so for sea stars. ' We maybe had a little bit of information, but absolutely not enough to be able to really tease that out easily.' Also, Gehman says, there can be a lag before the disease expresses itself, so some stars have the pathogen that caused the disease, but don't present with symptoms yet, making it harder for scientists to even distinguish between sick stars and healthy ones as they run their tests. So even though a research team identified a virus that they thought might be associated with the wasting disease as early as 2014, over time, it became clear that it was most likely not the culprit, but rather just a virus present in many sea stars. 'The results were always confusing,' Harvell remembers. In the decade since the initial mass outbreak, other researchers have proposed other theories, but none have brought them to a definitive answer either. And yet, it became increasingly clear that an answer was needed, because people started to realize just how important the sunflower stars they had lost really were. ' We actually learned a lot from losing so many of these animals at once,' Gehman says. Before the outbreak, she says, they'd known that sunflower stars — giant sea stars that can be the size of dinner plates, or even bike tires — were skillful hunters and voracious eaters. They even knew that many things on the seafloor would run away from them. Gehman remembers taking a class on invertebrates back in college, where she learned that if you put even just the arm of a sunflower star in a tank with scallops, 'the tank would explode with scallops swimming everywhere trying to get away.' But all that fearsome hunting was, it seems, pretty key to ecosystem health. In many places, she says, ' after the sea sunflower stars were lost, the urchin populations exploded.' And so the die-off of the sunflower star and the explosion of urchins has been connected to the collapse of the Northern California kelp forests, a marine ecosystem that provides a home for a rich diversity of species. A cross-state, cross-organizational partnership between the Nature Conservancy and a variety of research institutions is working hard to breed sunflower seastars in captivity in the hopes that they can be reintroduced to the coast and reassume their role in their ecosystems. But as Harvell remembers, she and Gehman knew that no recovery project would be successful if they couldn't find the cause of sea star wasting disease. 'You're not gonna be able to get these stars back in nature if you don't know what's killing them,' she says. So in 2021, as part of the larger partnership, Harvell and Gehman, along with a number of their colleagues, launched into an epidemiological detective project. Their quest: to finally pin down the cause of seastar wasting disease. 'Really the work over the four years was done in the trenches by Dr. Melanie Prentice and Dr. Alyssa Gehman,' Harvell says, 'and then one of my students, Grace Crandall.' It was an emotionally difficult project because it required Gehman and her colleagues to deliberately infect many stars with the disease. 'It feels bad,' she admits, and they would be open about that in the lab, 'but we also can remember that we're doing this for the good of the whole species.' That work has paid off, though, and now, after four years of research, they've nailed their culprit in a paper out in Nature Ecology & Evolution today. What follows is a conversation with Drew Harvell, edited for clarity and length, about what she and her collaborators found, how marine ecologists do this kind of detective work, and what identifying the culprit could mean for the future health of seastars. The underside of an adult sunflower sea star. Dennis Wise/University of Washington How did you start the journey to figure out what actually had happened? Well, we chose to work with the sunflower star because we knew it was the most susceptible and therefore was going to give us the most clear-cut results. So we set up at Marrowstone Point, which was the USGS Fisheries virus lab [in Washington state], because that would give us the proper quarantine conditions and lots of running seawater. The proper quarantine conditions — what does that mean? All of the outflow water has to be cleansed of any potential virus or bacterium, and so all of the water has to be run through virus filters and also actually bleached in the end, so that we're sure that nothing could get out. We did not want to do this work at our lab, Friday Harbor Labs, or at any of the Hakai labs in Canada because we were really worried that if we were holding animals with an infectious agent in our tanks without really stringent quarantine protocols, that we could be contributing to the outbreak. So you have these sea stars. They're in this quarantined environment. What is the methodology here? What are you doing to them or with them? So the question is: Is there something in a diseased star that's making a healthy star sick? And that's like the most important thing to demonstrate right from the beginning — that it is somehow transmissible. And so Melanie and Alyssa early on showed that even water that washed over a sick star would make healthy stars sick, and if you co-house them in the same aquarium, the healthy ones would always get sick when they were anywhere near or exposed to the water from a diseased star. There's something in the water. That's right. There's something in the water. But they wanted to refine it a little bit more and know that it was something directly from the diseased star. And so they created a slurry from the tissues of the disease star and injected that into the healthy star to be able to show that there really was something infectious from the disease star that was making the healthy star sick and then die. And then you control those kinds of what we call 'challenge experiments' by inactivating in some way that slurry of infected disease stuff. And in this case, what they were able to do was to 'heat-kill' [any pathogens in this slurry] by heating it up. And so the thing that was very successful right from the beginning was that the stars that were infected with a presumptive disease got sick and died, and the controls essentially stayed healthy. You do that control to make sure that it's not like…injecting a slurry into a star is what makes them sick? That's right. And you're also having animals come in sick, right? So you want to know that they weren't just gonna get sick anyway. You want to be sure that it was what you did that actually affected their health status. So you have a slurry — like a milkshake of sea star — and you know that within it is a problematic agent of some kind. How do you figure out what is in that milkshake that is the problem? The real breakthrough came when Alyssa had the idea that maybe we should try a cleaner infection source and decided to test the coelomic fluid, which is basically the blood of the star. With a syringe, you can extract the coelomic fluid of the sick star and you can also heat-kill it, and you can do the same experiment challenging with that. And it was a really exciting moment because she and Melanie confirmed that that was a really effective way of transmitting the disease because it's cleaner. Grace Crandall injects a sea star to expose it to wasting disease at the start of a new experiment. Courtesy Grace Crandall/University of Washington Drew Harvell holds a sunflower star at UW Friday Harbor Laboratories. David O Brown/Cornell University The team poses in the lab at the USGS Marrowstone Marine Field Station. From left to right: Alyssa Gehman, Grace Crandall, Melanie Prentice and Drew Harvell. Courtesy Grace Crandall/University of Washington It's cleaner, like there's less stuff than in the tissue? Like blood is just like a simpler material? Right. So, that was really the beginning of being able to figure out what it was that was in the coelomic fluid that was causing the disease. So basically it's like: We're gonna look in every sample in this fluid. There's gonna be sort of an ingredient list. And in the first one, there's ingredients ABC. In the second one, there's ingredients BDF. And in the third one, there's ingredients BYZ… So it seems like it might be ingredient B that's causing the problem here because it's consistent across all samples? Yeah, that's exactly it. And so then that was very, very incredibly exciting. Wow. There's this one bacterium — Vibrio pectenicida — that's showing up in all of the diseased material samples. Could it be that? We weren't sure. We sort of thought, after 12 years, this is gonna be something so strange! So weird! You know, something alien that we've never seen before. And so to have a Vibrio — something that we think of as a little bit more common — turn up was really surprising. Then one of our colleagues at the University of British Columbia, Amy Chan, was able to culture that particular bacterium from the disease star. And so now she had a pure culture of the presumptive killer. And then last summer, Melanie and Alyssa were able to test that again under quarantine conditions and find that it immediately killed the stars that were tested. How did you all feel? Oh, we were definitely dancing around the room. It was — just such a happy moment of fulfillment. I really do like to say that at the beginning of the task that Nature Conservancy handed us — to figure out the causative agent — we told them again and again that this is a very risky project. We can't guarantee we're going to be successful. So yeah, we were incredibly elated when we really felt confident in the answer. It was just hundreds and hundreds of hours of tests and challenge experiments that came out so beautifully. What does it mean to finally have an answer here? What are the next steps? This was the part of it that really kept me awake at night because I just felt so worried early on at the idea that we were working on a roadmap to recovery of a species without knowing what was killing it, and I just felt like we couldn't do it if we were flying blind like that. We wouldn't know what season the pathogenic agent came around. We wouldn't know what its environmental reservoirs were. We didn't know what was making stars susceptible. It was going to be really hard, and it wasn't going to feel right to just put animals out in the wild without knowing more. And so knowing that this is one of the primary causative agents — maybe the only causative agent — allows us to test for it in the water. It allows us to find out if there are some bays where this is being concentrated, to find out if there are some foods the stars are eating that are concentrating this bacterium and delivering a lethal dose to a star. Now we'll be able to answer those questions, and I think that's going to give us a really good opportunity to design better strategies for saving them. It feels like you now have a key to use to sort of unlock various pieces of this. We totally do. And it's so exciting and so gratifying because that's what we're supposed to do, right? As scientists and as disease ecologists, we're supposed to solve these mysteries. And it feels really great to have solved this one. And I don't think there's a day in the last 12 years that I haven't thought about it and been really frustrated we didn't know what it was. So it's particularly gratifying to me to have to have reached this point. Drew Harvell is the author of many popular science books about marine biology and ecology, including her latest, The Ocean's Menagerie. She also wrote a book about marine disease called Ocean Outbreak.
Vox
6 days ago
- Climate
- Vox
The surprising reason fewer people are dying from extreme weather
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. Torrential rain soaking northern China triggered a deadly landslide, burst riverbanks, and washed away cars on July 28, 2025, with thousands of people forced to evacuate the days-long deluge. Jade Gao/AFP via Getty Images From the wildfires that torched Los Angeles in January to the record-setting heat waves that cooked much of Europe in June, the first half of 2025 has been marked by what now seems like a new normal of ever more frequent extreme weather. It's easy to feel that we live in a constant stream of weather disasters, with one ending only so another can begin, thanks largely to the amplifying effects of climate change. Yet behind the catastrophic headlines is a much more positive story. For all of the floods and the fires and the storms and the cyclones, it turns out that globally, fewer people died from the direct effects of extreme weather globally through the first half of 2025 than any six-month period since reliable records began being kept decades ago. About 2,200 people worldwide died in storms, floods, heat waves and other 'weather‐climate' disasters in the first six months of the year, according to the risk consultancy company Aon's midyear catastrophe report. They tallied 7,700 natural-hazard deaths overall, but if you take out the roughly 5,500 people who died in a single non-weather geological event — a major earthquake in Myanmar in March — you're left with the smallest January-to-June weather death toll since we began keeping records. (Hat tip to Roger Pielke Jr., whose Substack post was where I first saw these figures.) All of which raises two questions: How have we managed this? And will this trend continue even in an ever-warmer world? The past was deadly I've been writing this newsletter for a few months now, and if I were to boil down its message into one phrase, it'd be this: Wow, the past was much worse than you think. That's certainly the case for deadly natural disasters and extreme weather. As you can see from the chart above, the first half of the 20th century regularly had years when the death rate from natural disasters was as high as 50 deaths per 100,000 people, and sometimes far higher. (In 2024, it was just 0.2 deaths per 100,000 people.) But annualized death rates hide just how bloody some of these events were. In 1931, massive flooding in China's Yangtze and Yellow River killed perhaps 4 million people due to drowning, disease, and starvation. In 1970, a huge cyclone in Bangladesh killed 500,000 people, and perhaps far more. An earthquake that hit Tokyo in 1923 killed at least 143,000 people. Here in the US, a hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas, in 1900 killed as many as 12,000 people, making it the deadliest natural disaster in US history. Until fairly recently, the Earth was a merciless killer. The 21st century has still been marked by the occasional mega-death toll disaster — though most of them have been earthquake related rather than weather-driven — but they've become far rarer. The frequency of storms and floods hasn't abated. The difference is our ability to protect ourselves. It's the money There's a paradox in our improving response to natural disasters: Even as the deaths from extreme weather and other catastrophes have been falling, the cost of those events has been rising. The same Aon report that contained the good news about falling deaths also tallied up an estimated $162 billion in economic losses from global natural disasters — some $20 billion above the 21st century average. These two trends are deeply connected. The single biggest factor behind the sharp increase in the economic costs of extreme weather is the simple fact that the world keeps getting richer and richer. That means more and more expensive property is at risk every time a hurricane spins up in the Atlantic or a flash flood swamps a major city. Yet at the same time, a richer society is one that can invest in warning systems and infrastructure adaptations that can and do vastly reduce the death toll from a disaster. Property in the path of a storm can't move — but people, if they're warned in time, can. Take the terrible Los Angeles wildfires. The total economic impact from the fires may be as high as $131 billion, which would make it one of the costliest disasters in US history. That shouldn't be surprising: The fires ripped through some of the most valuable real estate in the country. The death toll, by contrast, was 30 people. That makes it the second-deadliest wildfire in California history, but it still had a far lower human toll than wildfires from a hundred years ago or more, which killed hundreds and even thousands of people. It's a basic rule of disasters: A richer society has more to lose in property, but it also has the wealth to protect its people. And property, unlike people, can be restored. Bending toward safety From early warning text chains in Mozambique to cyclone shelters in Bangladesh to heat action plans in India, even some of the poorest countries in the world have built warning and response systems that can blunt the death toll of the worst extreme weather. The question for the rest of the decade is whether we can protect livelihoods as well as lives. A new UN report estimates that when the full effects are counted, disasters cost the world over $2.3 trillion every year. We are getting brilliantly good at saving people; we have not yet figured out how to save their homes, crops and jobs. That will require the hard, unglamorous work of preparing for disasters before they happen. It's an investment that should pay off — that same UN report calculates that every dollar spent on risk reduction leads to at least four dollars in avoided losses. Extreme weather and natural disasters have always been with us and always will be, and climate change will mostly make them worse. But we shouldn't lose sight of one of humanity's greatest triumphs: We are learning, year by year, how not to die when the planet turns against us. The arc of human ingenuity still bends toward safety. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Vox
26-07-2025
- Politics
- Vox
Four stories that are more important than the Epstein Files
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. It's not too much to say that the business of America has all but halted because of a years-old criminal the past couple of weeks, one story has overshadowed every other, no matter how important they might be: Jeffrey Epstein. Unless you've been taking your summer vacation on Mars, you probably know the contours of the story. (And if you don't, my Vox colleague Andrew Prokop wrote a useful summary this week.) But what matters here isn't so much the details as it is the sheer, unrelenting attention it has commanded. Between July 6, before the story really began to blow up, and July 13, online searches on the topic increased by 1,900 percent, according to a Newsweek analysis. A CNN analyst noted that over roughly the same time scale, Epstein was Googled 2.5 times more than Grok — this during the AI model's, uh, newsworthy launch — and 1.4 times more than tariffs. The furor over the case has led to Congress essentially shutting down early for the summer, a Republican effort to evade Democrats' sudden and politically convenient demands for transparency. It's not too much to say that the business of America has all but halted because of a years-old criminal case. I'm not saying the Epstein case is totally without importance. The crime was horrific, the investigation details murky, and the political ramifications if the case shakes the president's connection to his political base are obviously meaningful. (And if you want to read about any of that, well, good news — you have no shortage of sources.) But there is virtually no way we'll look back in 20 years and think that the relitigation of the Epstein case was clearly the most important thing happening in the world in July 2025. Related Something remarkable is happening with violent crime rates in the US Attention is a finite resource, and you are where your attention is. A story like Epstein is analogous to a mindless, out-of-control fire consuming all the oxygen in a burning house. So I thought I'd put together a list of four stories happening right now that matter far more for the country and the world than the contents of the Epstein Files. And fair warning — they're not all good news stories, but they absolutely are worth your attention. 1) America's dangerous debt spiral Through the first nine months of the 2025 fiscal year, which goes up to this June, the United States spent $749 billion on interest on the national debt, more than it spent on anything other than Social Security. Not the debt itself — just the interest. And our debt problem is accelerating: According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), President Donald Trump's recently passed budget bill will add $3.4 trillion to the national balance sheet over the next decade. You might say: So what? Budget scolds have been warning about the debt since at least the 1980s, and the most dire predictions have yet to come true. But as the economist Herbert Simon once warned, referring specifically to unsustainable economic policies: 'If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.' While 'there's no magic number at which the debt load becomes a full-on crisis,' as my colleague Dylan Matthews wrote last year, just about everything that is happening now — including persistently high interest rates, which make debt that much more painful, as anyone with a recent mortgage knows — indicates that crisis point is on its way. And what will happen then? The CBO warns that unless budget patterns shift dramatically, the country will face an unpalatable mix of massive tax hikes, severe cuts to essential services, even default. And our debt problem intersects catastrophically with some of America's other generational challenges, like the fertility and aging crisis (see No. 3) and the country's ability to defend itself (No. 4). 2) A global hunger crisis I've written before about the long-term improvements in child mortality and extreme poverty. Those trends are real, and they represent some of the best reasons to feel optimistic about the world. But positive long-term trends can mask periods of setback. When it comes to childhood hunger, the world is in danger of falling back. A new UNICEF report shows that after more than two decades of consistent progress, child stunting — early-life malnutrition that can lead to less growth and lifelong health problems — appears to be rising again. And while the humanitarian catastrophe that is Gaza at least has the world's attention, if not enough of its help, hunger is spreading in other countries that remain under the radar. In Africa's largest country of Nigeria, nearly 31 million people face acute food insecurity — almost equivalent to the population of Texas. Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Yemen have all seen alarming reversals in childhood nutritional health. Add in surges in food prices driven by extreme weather, and the devastating effects of cuts in US food aid, and you have a recipe for a problem that is getting worse at the very moment when the willingness to help is eroding. 3) A real population bomb When it comes to long-term, world-changing trends, climate change gets most of the attention (if not necessarily the action). But there's another challenge unfolding in nearly every country in the world that will be just as transformative — and for which we may be even less prepared. That's the population slowdown. In 2024, the US fertility rate hit an all-time low of less than 1.6 births per woman, far below the 2.1 required to maintain the current population level. While other countries like Japan or Italy will get there sooner, the US is absolutely on a path to an aging, shrinking future. As early as 2033, annual deaths are predicted to outpace annual births, while by 2050, one in every five Americans will be over the age of 65. An aging and eventually shrinking population will put more stress on everything from health care to pension systems to economic productivity, in ways that — absent some kind of technological miracle — will make us poorer, and will change life in ways we can only begin to imagine. And no one really has any idea how to fix it, or if it's even fixable at all. 4) A generational security challenge The Cold War ended nearly 35 years ago. For all of that time, the US has enjoyed a historically unprecedented position of global military supremacy. Americans have lived with the background assumption that the US would never really face a war with a true geopolitical rival — and certainly wouldn't lose one. Of all our national privileges, that might be the most foundational one. But that foundation is in danger of crumbling. At the same time, America's munitions reserves are dangerously low. In supporting Israel during its recent conflict with Iran, nearly 14 percent of the US's vital THAAD missile interceptor inventory was expended — just replenishing those stores may take up to eight years. Meanwhile, Pentagon authorities temporarily paused shipments of Patriot missiles and other critical air-defense systems to Ukraine amid global stockpile pressures. US air defenses now reportedly have only a quarter of the interceptors needed for all the Pentagon's military plans. Should a major conflict pop up in, oh I don't know, Taiwan, essential munitions could be depleted far faster than production could replace them. That's how you lose wars. None of these stories are scandals, and none of them generate great social media content. They're hard, long-term, wonky, even boring. But they are important. And they deserve our attention. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Vox
19-07-2025
- Health
- Vox
The brain tech revolution is here — and it isn't all Black Mirror
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. When you hear the word 'neurotechnology,' you may picture Black Mirror headsets prying open the last private place we have — our own skulls — or the cyber-samurai of William Gibson's Neuromancer. That dread is natural, but it can blind us to the real potential being realized in neurotech to address the long intractable medical challenges found in our brains. In just the past 18 months, brain tech has cleared three hurdles at once: smarter algorithms, shrunken hardware, and — most important — proof that people can feel the difference in their bodies and their moods. A pacemaker for the brain Keith Krehbiel has battled Parkinson's disease for nearly a quarter-century. By 2020, as Nature recently reported, the tremors were winning — until neurosurgeons slipped Medtronic's Percept device into his head. Unlike older deep-brain stimulators that carpet-bomb movement control regions in the brain with steady current, the Percept listens first. It hunts the beta-wave 'bursts' in the brain that mark a Parkinson's flare and then fires back millisecond by millisecond, an adaptive approach that mimics the way a cardiac pacemaker paces an arrhythmic heart. In the ADAPT-PD study, patients like Krehbiel moved more smoothly, took fewer pills, and overwhelmingly preferred the adaptive mode to the regular one. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic agreed: The system now has US and EU clearance. Because the electrodes spark only when symptoms do, total energy use is reduced, increasing battery life and delaying the next skull-opening surgery. Better yet, because every Percept shipped since 2020 already has the sensing chip, the adaptive mode can be activated with a simple firmware push, the way you'd update your iPhone. Waking quiet muscles Scientists applied the same listen-then-zap logic farther down the spinal cord this year. In a Nature Medicine pilot, researchers in Pittsburgh laid two slender electrode strips over the sensory roots of the lumbar spine in three adults with spinal muscular atrophy. Gentle pulses 'reawakened' half-dormant motor neurons: Every participant walked farther, tired less, and — astonishingly — one person strode from home to the lab without resting. Half a world away, surgeons at Nankai University threaded a 50-micron-thick 'stent-electrode' through a patient's jugular vein, fanned it against the motor cortex, and paired it with a sleeve that twitched his arm muscles. No craniotomy, no ICU — just a quick catheter procedure that let a stroke survivor lift objects and move a cursor. High-tech rehab is inching toward outpatient care. Mental-health care on your couch The brain isn't only wires and muscles; mood lives there, too. In March, the Food and Drug Administration tagged a visor-like headset from Pulvinar Neuro as a Breakthrough Device for major-depressive disorder. The unit drips alternating and direct currents while an onboard algorithm reads brain rhythms on the fly, and clinicians can tweak the recipe over the cloud. The technology offers a ray of hope for patients whose depression has resisted conventional treatments like drugs. Thought cursors and synthetic voices Cochlear implants for people with hearing loss once sounded like sci-fi; today more than 1 million people hear through them. That proof-of-scale has emboldened a new wave of brain-computer interfaces, including from Elon Musk's startup Neuralink. The company's first user, 30-year-old quadriplegic Noland Arbaugh, told Wired last year he now 'multitasks constantly' with a thought-controlled cursor, clawing back some of the independence lost to a 2016 spinal-cord injury. Neuralink isn't as far along as Musk often claims — Arbaugh's device experienced some problems, with some threads detaching from the brain — but the promise is there. On the speech front, new systems are decoding neural signals into text on a computer screen, or even synthesized voice. In 2023 researchers from Stanford and the University of California San Francisco installed brain implants in two women who had lost the ability to speak, and managing to hit decoding times of 62 and 78 words per minute, far faster than previous brain tech interfaces. That's still much slower than the 160 words per minute of natural English speech, but more recent advances are getting closer to that rate. Guardrails for gray matter Yes, neurotech has a shadow. Brain signals could reveal a person's mood, maybe even a voting preference. Europe's new AI Act now treats 'neuro-biometric categorization' — technologies that can classify individuals by biometric information, including brain data — as high-risk, demanding transparency and opt-outs, while the US BRAIN Initiative 2.0 is paying for open-source toolkits so anyone can pop the hood on the algorithms. And remember the other risk: doing nothing. Refusing a proven therapy because it feels futuristic is a little like turning down antibiotics in 1925 because a drug that came from mold seemed weird. Twentieth-century medicine tamed the chemistry of the body; 21st-century medicine is learning to tune the electrical symphony inside the skull. When it works, neurotech acts less like a hammer than a tuning fork — nudging each section back on pitch, then stepping aside so the music can play. Real patients are walking farther, talking faster, and, in some cases, simply feeling like themselves again. The challenge now is to keep our fears proportional to the risks — and our imaginations wide enough to see the gains already in hand. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
