Dr. Sumbul Desai’s job is to think creatively about the different ways that technology can improve health. As Vice President of Health at Apple, she starts with strong data from studies the company conducts with academic institutes, the American Heart Association, and the World Health Organization to understand which metrics give the best window into overall health. Apple received approval in 2024 to turn the iPhone into a professional-grade hearing test, and AirPods Pro 2 got the go-ahead to function as hearing aids with just a few in-app adjustments.

The Trump Administration signed an executive order late last month aiming to fast-track approval for seabed mining critical minerals found in the deep sea. The move has faced international condemnation, particularly from experts who say that more research needs to be done into the impacts the practice might have on deep sea ecosystems, the majority of which remain unexplored. A new study published today in Science Advances shows just how little we know about the deep sea. According to the research, humans have observed less than 0.001% of the deep seafloor—an area roughly the size of Rhode Island. The deep sea refers to the part of the ocean below 200 meters (656 ft.), at which light begins to disappear. Despite making up more than 90% of the Earth’s marine environment, much of the deep-sea ecosystems is still a question mark for researchers. But the area is critical for maintaining our climate—absorbing about 90% of the excess heat and about 30% of the carbon dioxide that's been released into the atmosphere by human activities. “If all of that had stayed into the atmosphere, it would make life on Earth practically impossible,” says Katy Croff Bell, president of Ocean Discovery League, National Geographic Explorer, and lead author of the study. The area humans have explored is vastly limited—and heavily biased towards certain regions. Over 65% of visual observations have occurred within 200 nautical miles of three countries: the United States, Japan, and New Zealand, meaning that much of our assumptions about the deep sea are based on a minuscule sample size. “It’s like if we were to make all assumptions about terrestrial ecosystems from observations of 0.001% of land area, that would equate to smaller than the land area of Houston, Texas,” says Bell. To determine the amount of the seafloor we have explored, the team drew on data from approximately 44,000 deep-sea dives with observations conducted since 1958. The 0.001% also includes assumptions about the number of private dive records that are not publicly recorded. Because so little is still known about this ecosystem, many experts fear deep-sea mining could come with too great a risk to the environment. Thirty-two countries have called for a moratorium on the practice, and Bell hopes the study shows the need for further research before countries begin extractive—and potentially irreparable—mining practices in the deep sea. “[We need to know] what kind of impacts are we going to have on the deep sea, and will the deep sea recover from those activities?” Bell says. “That's a big open question right now. What we don't want to do is do irreparable harm to the deep ocean. So we really need this baseline information about the deep sea.”

In the three years since Ron DeSantis set out to rid Florida’s universities of woke ideology, my campus changed significantly. Professors suddenly worried about what they could say and teach. Some started avoiding terms like “racism.” One student recently told me that when someone used “intersectional” in class, the instructor told her not to use that word. Soon this could be the case in schools across the country. We’ve all heard stories of elite institutions cowering before President Trump’s assault on higher education. Take it from someone who knows: It could get worse — far worse. Mr. Trump has been watching what’s transpired in Florida. The architect of Project 2025’s education policies has said that Florida is “leading the way” on university overhauls. Already, Mr. Trump has threatened to pull funding from colleges that don’t purge language he considers woke. He’s demanded new oversight of certain regional studies departments. Next he could try to ban, as Florida has, “political or social activism.” He could weaken the protections provided by tenure and faculty unions. I saw this happen on my campus, and I know the toll it took. If the Trump administration has its way, my experience could offer a preview of what’s coming for other universities. Before Mr. DeSantis began targeting higher education, Florida faculty members could be confident that the administrators supported our professional judgments about how to teach our students. We had open, complex discussions without fearing for our careers. In a conversation in one of my classes, female students expressed the fear that catcalling provoked, and their male peers responded thoughtfully, reflecting on their own behavior — a learning experience for everyone. Today that conversation would, I fear, violate a Florida law that prohibits teaching male students that they must feel guilt for the actions of other men. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Since Mr. DeSantis’s crackdown, I’ve seen my colleagues harassed and investigated for addressing topical issues, even outside the classroom. The climate of fear gives the government precisely the result it wants. Administrators and faculty members alike practice anticipatory obedience to avoid even the appearance of wokeness, stifling the sort of open and civil discussions that lead students to develop their own views.One colleague told me that he stopped assigning an article about lynching and white evangelicalism for fear that those terms could raise red flags. Another said she was censoring her language not just in class and on campus but also on personal social media. Several professors have been subjected to efforts at entrapment. Last year a man posing as a student tried to encourage Muslim faculty members to criticize Mr. DeSantis and Israel. A similar incident happened to me. In October 2024 my department chair called me into his office to tell me that someone claiming to be a student in my Religion and Science class had complained that I spent 20 minutes talking about specific candidates, including who I was voting for and why. I was stunned. That never happened in that class or any other; it is antithetical to the way I teach. Fortunately, the dean’s office assured me that a single, unsubstantiated accusation was not grounds for disciplinary action. Far worse than the fear of investigation was the way the accusation shook the trust I thought I had with my students. Did one of them hate me so much that one would lie to get me in trouble? In the end, I am convinced that the person making the complaint was not a student in my class but a provocateur. (It was probably not a coincidence that the allegation was lodged shortly after my name appeared in a Politico article about changes to our campus.) That incident shattered my conviction that if I did my job well and followed the rules, I would be safe. In over 30 years at the University of Florida, I have taught thousands of students, written hundreds of recommendation letters and advised countless research projects. I have published a dozen books and scores of articles, won research and teaching awards and served on numerous college and university committees. But the state doesn’t trust me to do my job.How can I challenge my students to ask hard questions, to follow the research wherever it goes, when I am worried about what might happen to me if I do that? And how can I follow the rules when even university administrators are not always sure of how to interpret them? Teaching is, above all, the creation of a community in the classroom, a web of trust and curiosity that binds students and instructors in a shared intellectual project. Mistrust, fear and self-censorship make that project impossible. With Mr. Trump’s recent actions, the campus atmosphere has grown more tense. His orders threaten not only the humanities and social sciences but also research funding for STEM. And as immigration agents detain and deport international students, noncitizen students on campus (and even some students who are naturalized citizens) are keeping their heads down even more. Like Mr. DeSantis and Richard Nixon before him, Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance believe that the professors are the enemy. They want ordinary Americans to mistrust college instructors, to think of us as intolerant militants driven only by political ideology. Teaching college students has been the greatest gift of my professional life. I love my university and my students, and I do good work. I have no desire to indoctrinate anyone. The same is true of my colleagues. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT For those who think that professors are the enemy, I invite you to spend some time in our classrooms. You might discover that we are, in the end, all on the same side.

Three college presidents apologized for not acting more aggressively to curb antisemitism on their campuses during a House committee hearing on Wednesday, in what Republicans billed as an effort to examine colleges beyond the Ivy League. “I am sorry that my actions and my leadership let you down,” Wendy Raymond, the president of Haverford College, a Quaker college outside Philadelphia, said she would like her Jewish students to know. “I am committed to getting this right.” The House Committee on Education and the Workforce has held a number of hearings with schools since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the war in Gaza that followed. In many ways the hearing echoed the first and most dramatic of them, in December 2023, which led to the resignations of the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and of Harvard. During the hearing on Wednesday, the Republican majority threatened to withhold federal funding from uncooperative schools. The Democratic minority accused Republicans of tolerating antisemitism in their own party while using it as a political weapon against others. And university leaders tried to walk a delicate line between showing contrition and not antagonizing the committee, while not undermining academic freedom. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT But it was also a very different moment for higher education and its relationship with the federal government. The hearing looked back mostly to events from a year ago, when campuses across the country were reeling from protest encampments and mass arrests. The war continues, but protests have largely faded, with some notable exceptions. One protest at the University of Washington drew widespread attention this week, but the university quickly cleared demonstrators, to praise from the government. And at Columbia on Wednesday, dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters, wearing masks and kaffiyehs, occupied the main room of Butler Library. Meanwhile, the Republican onslaught against universities has only intensified. The Trump administration has opened investigations at dozens of universities over accusations of antisemitism, and stripped hundreds of millions of dollars from others it says have not done enough to respond to issues raised by the protests, most of them in Democrat-leaning states. President Trump and his officials have focused especially on the schools in the Ivy League. The congressional hearing on Wednesday was titled “Beyond the Ivies.” “Bottom line, we are trying to highlight that this is a problem affecting schools across America, not just the Ivy League,” Audra McGeorge, a committee spokeswoman, said.The hearing focused on schools that received F grades from the Anti-Defamation League. This time around, the three presidents, of Haverford, DePaul University in Chicago, and California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo knew what questions to expect and were able largely to finesse them. (Cal Poly recently raised its grade to a D.) But after refusing to provide statistics on disciplinary cases against protesters, Haverford’s president, Dr. Raymond, came in for especially dogged questioning from Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican. Her harsh interrogations were largely responsible for the damage that helped drive other university presidents to resign. Ms. Stefanik questioned Dr. Raymond about a student group that called for dismantling the state of Israel “by all means necessary,” asking: “What does by ‘all means necessary’ mean to you?” “Invoking that kind of terminology is repugnant because of what it can mean,” Dr. Raymond replied, stressing the word “can.” “Does that depend on the context?” Ms. Stefanik interrupted. Dr. Raymond had been forewarned by the experiences of the presidents of Harvard and Penn. Both gave noncommittal answers to questions about whether they would discipline students who called for the genocide of Jews. Both said that doing so would depend on the context. Dr. Raymond evaded the “context” question, saying that she would not talk about individual cases. To which Ms. Stefanik threatened: “Many people have sat in this position who are no longer in the positions as presidents of universities for their failure to answer straightforward questions.” In the year and a half since that December 2023 hearing, many university leaders appear to have been attentive to the complaints from students, faculty and lawmakers, and to the fate of their peers. Many schools have tightened rules related to protests, locked campus gates to outsiders and issued harsher punishments for participants. The moves may help explain why protests were less frequent and widespread this spring. Many universities have also banned or suspended the most militant pro-Palestinian activist groups. “Both as a university president and a human being, this is a matter I take particularly seriously,” Jeffrey D. Armstrong, president of Cal Poly, told the committee. “We have to do better.” He ticked off plans like endowing a chair in Jewish studies and establishing a task force to increase awareness of antisemitism. On Wednesday, Republicans followed what has become a favored playbook, pushing schools to respond to their complaints by threatening to withhold federal funding. Ryan Mackenzie, a Pennsylvania Republican, demanded that Dr. Raymond collect information about the punishment of students and professors at Haverford and deliver it to the committee or else risk losing federal funding. “You do receive federal money, do you not?” he said. “We do, in a wonderful partnership with the federal government,” Dr. Raymond replied. “Well, that partnership may be in jeopardy,” Mr. Mackenzie said. When her turn to question the presidents came, Representative Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat, dismissed the hearing as a performance. Ms. Bonamici said that as a synagogue-going Jew, “I can no longer pretend that this is a good-faith effort to root out antisemitism, especially when the Trump administration and the majority party are regularly undermining Jewish values.” David Cole, a former national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, testified along with the presidents. He compared the committee’s activities to the Communist-hunting of the 1950s. “They are not an attempt to find out what happened but an attempt to chill protected speech,” he said. Mr. Cole also said that the Trump administration had gutted the government’s ability to investigate discrimination complaints by cutting the staff of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The Trump administration has, nonetheless, promised over 60 investigations into schools over complaints they have allowed antisemitism to fester on their campuses. On Wednesday night, the University of Washington said it had received notice that a federal task force to combat antisemitism, formed by President Trump, was starting a review of the university’s federal grants and contracts. The review came after demonstrators occupied an engineering building for several hours on Monday, damaging the building and setting dumpster fires outside, according to the university. The police arrested 34 people, including 21 students, who have been suspended and banned from campus, the university said. In its most recent fiscal year, about 18 percent of the university’s revenues came from grants and contracts, with most of those dollars coming from the federal government.

NASA has a funny way of framing bad news. On May 2, the White House released its topline budget numbers for fiscal year 2026 and the space agency was quick to respond—with applause. “President Trump’s FY26 Budget Revitalizes Human Space Exploration,” read a press release. In an included statement, acting NASA administrator Janet Petro said, “This proposal includes investments to simultaneously pursue exploration of the Moon and Mars while still prioritizing critical science and technology research. I appreciate the President’s continued support for NASA’s mission and look forward to working closely with the administration and Congress to ensure we continue making progress toward achieving the impossible.” The real impossibility, however, might be in figuring out how NASA will achieve much of anything at all with the draconian cuts the president proposed. Petro is right in touting a relatively modest 10% bump in funding for human space exploration, with $7 billion now proposed for missions to the moon and $1 billion for later travel to Mars. But beyond that, things get awfully bleak. The Mars Sample Return Mission, which is currently underway, with the Perseverance rover collecting and caching soil and rock samples for return by a later robot craft, will be canceled. Twenty-seven sample tubes that have been sealed and left across the Martian surface like Easter eggs for that future rover to gather will be forever untouched. Those samples could have told us about possible conditions for ancient, or even extant, life on the once-watery world—potential knowledge that will now be lost. The Space Launch System (SLS) moon rocket and the Orion spacecraft, both in development in one form or another since 2006, and both intended for crewed travel to the moon, will be scrapped too. Also marked for elimination is the Gateway spacecraft, a small space station planned for lunar orbit—despite the first of its modules having already been built. Gateway was intended to provide rapid service to and from the surface of the moon for future visiting astronauts. Space science missions will be slashed by more than 50%, threatening—among other projects—the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which, like the Gateway module, is already mostly built. Roman is designed to answer deep and thrilling questions, regarding the habitability of exoplanets—or planets orbiting other stars—and the nature of dark energy, which is thought to make up 68% of the universe and holds the key to its accelerating expansion. On top of all this, research into environmentally sustainable aviation technology is one of several “climate scam programs,” as the White House referred to it in a statement, which is also slated for cancellation. Consistent with new government-wide policies, any NASA DEI programs are also to be eliminated. Overall, NASA faces a 24% budget cut, from $24.8 billion in 2025 to $18.8 billion in 2026—its lowest funding level since 2015. “No spin will change the fact that this would end critical missions, dramatically scale back the workforce, and risk our scientific leadership around the globe,” said Rep. George Whitesides, a California Democrat and Vice Ranking Member of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee, on X. “It is completely irresponsible, and I will fight it every way I can.” “The proposed cuts are drastic,” says Stephan McCandliss, research professor with the department of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. “They are devastating and, well, vicious, in terms of [being] unfriendly to science in general.” The proposed cuts don’t just represent opportunity costs, but the loss of sunk costs too. The SLS has already cost nearly $24 billion, with another $20 billion having gone to Orion—money that will have been spent to no end if the two projects are cancelled. The Roman telescope, currently idling in a clean room at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, cost $4 billion. According to the General Accounting Office, $3.5 billion has been spent on Gateway, with the launch of the first module originally set for 2027. Advertisement All of this penury is something of a departure for President Trump, who presided over small but steady budget increases for NASA—from just over $18 billion to just over $21 billion—during his first term. Space Agency funding rose further, to its near-$25 billion peak, under President Joe Biden, before the ax fell this week. The impending starvation rations, as always, have NASA veterans looking wistfully back at the space agency’s golden era, during the space race with the former Soviet Union. Historically, NASA’s peak funding year was 1966, when the agency was allotted $5.93 billion—or $58.5 billion in 2025 dollars. That represented 4% of the government’s overall budget. NASA’s slice of the federal pie today—before the Trump cuts? Just 0.4%. The generous funding of the 1960s yielded impressive results. The U.S. launched 10 crewed flights in just 20 months during NASA’s Gemini program in 1965 and 1966. From 1968 to 1972, eleven Apollo missions were launched—nine of them either to lunar orbit or around the far side of the moon, and six of those proceeding down to the lunar surface. That was all while NASA maintained a robust pure science program, launching more than 20 missions to the moon, Mars, and Venus during the 1960s. It’s the loss of those uncrewed science flights that worries some space experts the most. “It's mortgaging the future,” says Henry Hertzfeld, research professor at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “It takes time to develop these programs, to build the instruments and, of course, to analyze the results.” “I see a role for government in doing the science,” says McCandliss. “That's what government ought to do—the cutting edge stuff that isn't going to be commercially viable, but will in the long run, bring some surprising results.” The matter of commercial viability—with the private sector taking over a growing share of the work now being done by NASA—seems to be driving much of the administration’s budget proposals. The aging International Space Station (ISS) is set to be de-orbited in 2030 and NASA and the White House are looking for industry to bankroll and launch the next generation outpost. “The budget reflects the upcoming transition to a more cost-effective, open commercial approach to human activities in low Earth orbit by … the safe decommissioning of the station and its replacement by commercial space stations,” said NASA in its press release. Currently, NASA spends about $3 billion per year to operate the ISS. Privatization would eliminate that outlay. Similarly, if SLS and Orion stand down, the move would clear the field for SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket. SLS and Orion have flown just once—an uncrewed mission, known as Artemis I, in 2022. Current plans call for Artemis II to carry a crew of four on a circumlunar journey late next year, and Artemis III to follow with a crewed lunar landing before the end of the decade. Artemis IV and beyond were intended to help establish a long-term human presence at the south lunar pole, but the new proposed budget cancels those plans. Starship could be a worthy successor. The biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, Starship stands 40 stories tall and puts out 16.7 million pounds of thrust at launch—nearly twice as much as the SLS’s 8.8 million pounds. The single flight SLS has managed in the 20 years it’s been in development is dwarfed by the eight uncrewed launches Starship has had just since April of 2023. None of those launches has been fully successful, but the business model for SpaceX and its boss, Elon Musk, has always been to fly fast, fail fast, and fly again until you get it right. The unalloyed success of the company’s smaller Falcon 9 rocket, which, with 467 successful flights, has become the world’s workhorse booster, stands as proof that that approach to R&D can work. “It's pretty amazing stuff that they've been doing,” says McCandliss. “When you have a devil-may-care leader who is willing to spend his own personal capital on these sorts of things, it's a different story [from what the government can do]. Musk has not been shy about trying to pursue his dreams, and he has the capital to do that.” If NASA has any hope of escaping the Trump Administration’s proposed cuts it’s in the fact that they are just that—proposed. Presidential budgets are wish lists put forth to Congress, with lawmakers calling the final spending shots, and NASA has seen this movie before—most recently and dramatically in 2010. Back then, President Barack Obama cancelled the space agency’s Constellation program—the precursor of Artemis, which was aiming to have bootprints back on the moon as early as 2015. The move pulled the plug on both Orion and the SLS—the latter of which was then known as Ares V. But legislators from space-friendly states that depend on NASA for thousands of local jobs—most notably Texas, Florida, and California—rebelled, and funding was restored for both vehicles. Today, Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, and Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat—the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Technology respectively—are being looked to for leadership to keep the lights on at NASA. Neither lawmaker has made a public statement yet on the proposed cuts and neither responded to a request from TIME for comment. Still, Capitol Hill will get the final word. “The president proposes and Congress disposes,” says McCandliss. “I know that there's an awful lot of NASA centers that are in red states.” NASA is accountable to Congress for its funding and Congress is accountable to the voters in those red states and all of the others for their own jobs. Ultimately, Americans will get the space program they demand.

Sitting next to President Donald Trump, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney got the clip he wanted Canadians to see: him telling Trump that Canada is “not for sale.” But over the course of the 33-minute exchange in front of reporters in the freshly gilded Oval Office, Carney had to wait patiently as Trump repeatedly made lengthy pitches for why Canada should be the US’s 51st state. It was a meeting that Trump repeatedly described as “friendly” but his words told a different story. The awkward tone was set moments before the tête-à-tête began, as Trump posted on Truth Social that the U.S. was giving Canada “FREE Military Protection” and that the U.S. doesn’t need energy, lumber from Canada or cars built there. “We don’t need ANYTHING they have, other than their friendship, which hopefully we will always maintain,” Trump wrote. It was Carney’s first visit to the White House since he led the Canadian Liberal Party last week to victory over the Conservatives to run the government. Trump opened the meeting by calling Carney a “very good person” and complimented him on his race, noting that Carney's Liberal Party had previously been behind in the polls. Trump called Carney’s win “one of the greatest comebacks in the history of politics, maybe even greater than mine.” Carney returned the compliments, saying Trump was a "transformational president” and praising Trump’s “relentless focus on the American worker, securing your borders” as well as ending the “scourge of fentanyl” and “securing the world.” But Carney started to shift uncomfortably when Trump was asked if he still believes Canada should be the 51st US state. Trump argued Canadians would pay lower taxes and have better security and better health care,if they joined the US. Carney was ready with a response that tried to appeal to Trump’s experience buying and selling buildings. “As you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale. The one we’re sitting in right now. You know, Buckingham Palace, which you visited as well. And having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign last several months, it is not for sale—won’t be for sale, ever. But the opportunity is in the partnership and what we can build together.” Carney said his government is committed to increasing its investment in Canada’s security and working to defend the Arctic. But later on in their meeting, Trump came back to his conviction that one day Canada would become part of the US. “Never say never,” Trump said, at which point, Carney could be seen mouthing the word "never" five times as reporters shouted questions. In justifying his push for expanding the U.S., Trump described himself as “artistic” and liking the shape of the larger border when the two countries are joined on a map. “This is not necessarily a one-day deal. This is over a period of time they have to make that decision,” Trump said. Since he came to office, Trump has imposed 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum exports from Canada and 25% tariffs on cars and some auto parts. Tariffs on several other resources including potash used in crop fertilizers are at 10%. In retaliation, Canada set targeted 25% tariffs on beer, orange juice, peanut butter, wine and spirits and appliances and other goods. The two countries plan to negotiate those rates in a sweeping talks that could also reopen the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, that replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement in July 2020. Trump said Tuesday that he’d be willing to eliminate the USMCA altogether. “We do have a negotiation coming up over the next year or so to adjust it or terminate it,” Trump said. For his part, Carney described USMCA as the basis for “a broader negotiation” and said “some things about it are going to have to change.” As Trump continued to insist that Canada could one day merge with the U.S., the American President seemed to sense there was a risk this meeting could turn into a full-blown confrontation like the now infamous Oval Office meeting in February, where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky refused to agree to a ceasefire with Russia without security guarantees from the U.S. “This is very friendly,” Trump said, as if saying the word itself would make it so. "This is not going to be like–we had another little blow up with somebody else—that was a much different thing. This is a very friendly conversation.”

NASA has a funny way of framing bad news. On May 2, the White House released its topline budget numbers for fiscal year 2026 and the space agency was quick to respond—with applause. “President Trump’s FY26 Budget Revitalizes Human Space Exploration,” read a press release. In an included statement, acting NASA administrator Janet Petro said, “This proposal includes investments to simultaneously pursue exploration of the Moon and Mars while still prioritizing critical science and technology research. I appreciate the President’s continued support for NASA’s mission and look forward to working closely with the administration and Congress to ensure we continue making progress toward achieving the impossible.” The real impossibility, however, might be in figuring out how NASA will achieve much of anything at all with the draconian cuts the president proposed. Petro is right in touting a relatively modest 10% bump in funding for human space exploration, with $7 billion now proposed for missions to the moon and $1 billion for later travel to Mars. But beyond that, things get awfully bleak. The Mars Sample Return Mission, which is currently underway, with the Perseverance rover collecting and caching soil and rock samples for return by a later robot craft, will be canceled. Twenty-seven sample tubes that have been sealed and left across the Martian surface like Easter eggs for that future rover to gather will be forever untouched. Those samples could have told us about possible conditions for ancient, or even extant, life on the once-watery world—potential knowledge that will now be lost. The Space Launch System (SLS) moon rocket and the Orion spacecraft, both in development in one form or another since 2006, and both intended for crewed travel to the moon, will be scrapped too. Also marked for elimination is the Gateway spacecraft, a small space station planned for lunar orbit—despite the first of its modules having already been built. Gateway was intended to provide rapid service to and from the surface of the moon for future visiting astronauts. Space science missions will be slashed by more than 50%, threatening—among other projects—the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which, like the Gateway module, is already mostly built. Roman is designed to answer deep and thrilling questions, regarding the habitability of exoplanets—or planets orbiting other stars—and the nature of dark energy, which is thought to make up 68% of the universe and holds the key to its accelerating expansion. On top of all this, research into environmentally sustainable aviation technology is one of several “climate scam programs,” as the White House referred to it in a statement, which is also slated for cancellation. Consistent with new government-wide policies, any NASA DEI programs are also to be eliminated. Overall, NASA faces a 24% budget cut, from $24.8 billion in 2025 to $18.8 billion in 2026—its lowest funding level since 2015. “No spin will change the fact that this would end critical missions, dramatically scale back the workforce, and risk our scientific leadership around the globe,” said Rep. George Whitesides, a California Democrat and Vice Ranking Member of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee, on X. “It is completely irresponsible, and I will fight it every way I can.” “The proposed cuts are drastic,” says Stephan McCandliss, research professor with the department of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. “They are devastating and, well, vicious, in terms of [being] unfriendly to science in general.” The proposed cuts don’t just represent opportunity costs, but the loss of sunk costs too. The SLS has already cost nearly $24 billion, with another $20 billion having gone to Orion—money that will have been spent to no end if the two projects are cancelled. The Roman telescope, currently idling in a clean room at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, cost $4 billion. According to the General Accounting Office, $3.5 billion has been spent on Gateway, with the launch of the first module originally set for 2027. All of this penury is something of a departure for President Trump, who presided over small but steady budget increases for NASA—from just over $18 billion to just over $21 billion—during his first term. Space Agency funding rose further, to its near-$25 billion peak, under President Joe Biden, before the ax fell this week. The impending starvation rations, as always, have NASA veterans looking wistfully back at the space agency’s golden era, during the space race with the former Soviet Union. Historically, NASA’s peak funding year was 1966, when the agency was allotted $5.93 billion—or $58.5 billion in 2025 dollars. That represented 4% of the government’s overall budget. NASA’s slice of the federal pie today—before the Trump cuts? Just 0.4%. The generous funding of the 1960s yielded impressive results. The U.S. launched 10 crewed flights in just 20 months during NASA’s Gemini program in 1965 and 1966. From 1968 to 1972, eleven Apollo missions were launched—nine of them either to lunar orbit or around the far side of the moon, and six of those proceeding down to the lunar surface. That was all while NASA maintained a robust pure science program, launching more than 20 missions to the moon, Mars, and Venus during the 1960s. It’s the loss of those uncrewed science flights that worries some space experts the most. “It's mortgaging the future,” says Henry Hertzfeld, research professor at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “It takes time to develop these programs, to build the instruments and, of course, to analyze the results.” “I see a role for government in doing the science,” says McCandliss. “That's what government ought to do—the cutting edge stuff that isn't going to be commercially viable, but will in the long run, bring some surprising results.” The matter of commercial viability—with the private sector taking over a growing share of the work now being done by NASA—seems to be driving much of the administration’s budget proposals. The aging International Space Station (ISS) is set to be de-orbited in 2030 and NASA and the White House are looking for industry to bankroll and launch the next generation outpost. “The budget reflects the upcoming transition to a more cost-effective, open commercial approach to human activities in low Earth orbit by … the safe decommissioning of the station and its replacement by commercial space stations,” said NASA in its press release. Currently, NASA spends about $3 billion per year to operate the ISS. Privatization would eliminate that outlay. Similarly, if SLS and Orion stand down, the move would clear the field for SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket. SLS and Orion have flown just once—an uncrewed mission, known as Artemis I, in 2022. Current plans call for Artemis II to carry a crew of four on a circumlunar journey late next year, and Artemis III to follow with a crewed lunar landing before the end of the decade. Artemis IV and beyond were intended to help establish a long-term human presence at the south lunar pole, but the new proposed budget cancels those plans. Starship could be a worthy successor. The biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, Starship stands 40 stories tall and puts out 16.7 million pounds of thrust at launch—nearly twice as much as the SLS’s 8.8 million pounds. The single flight SLS has managed in the 20 years it’s been in development is dwarfed by the eight uncrewed launches Starship has had just since April of 2023. None of those launches has been fully successful, but the business model for SpaceX and its boss, Elon Musk, has always been to fly fast, fail fast, and fly again until you get it right. The unalloyed success of the company’s smaller Falcon 9 rocket, which, with 467 successful flights, has become the world’s workhorse booster, stands as proof that that approach to R&D can work. “It's pretty amazing stuff that they've been doing,” says McCandliss. “When you have a devil-may-care leader who is willing to spend his own personal capital on these sorts of things, it's a different story [from what the government can do]. Musk has not been shy about trying to pursue his dreams, and he has the capital to do that.” If NASA has any hope of escaping the Trump Administration’s proposed cuts it’s in the fact that they are just that—proposed. Presidential budgets are wish lists put forth to Congress, with lawmakers calling the final spending shots, and NASA has seen this movie before—most recently and dramatically in 2010. Back then, President Barack Obama cancelled the space agency’s Constellation program—the precursor of Artemis, which was aiming to have bootprints back on the moon as early as 2015. The move pulled the plug on both Orion and the SLS—the latter of which was then known as Ares V. But legislators from space-friendly states that depend on NASA for thousands of local jobs—most notably Texas, Florida, and California—rebelled, and funding was restored for both vehicles. Today, Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, and Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat—the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Technology respectively—are being looked to for leadership to keep the lights on at NASA. Neither lawmaker has made a public statement yet on the proposed cuts and neither responded to a request from TIME for comment. Still, Capitol Hill will get the final word. “The president proposes and Congress disposes,” says McCandliss. “I know that there's an awful lot of NASA centers that are in red states.” NASA is accountable to Congress for its funding and Congress is accountable to the voters in those red states and all of the others for their own jobs. Ultimately, Americans will get the space program they demand.

Time was, the Soviet Union fairly owned Venus. From 1961 to 1983, the U.S.’s old space race rival launched 16 probes, Venera 1 through Venera 16, that either flew by, orbited, or landed on Venus—with three of them failing en route. It’s been decades since the Russians bothered with Venus, but this week, an artifact from that long-ago space program may very well bother us: Sometime between May 9 and May 11, an 1,100-lb Venus spacecraft known as Kosmos 482, which has been stuck in Earth orbit since 1972, will come crashing back to the ground, potentially threatening anyone on Earth living between 52° North and 52° South of the equator—which covers the overwhelming share of us. Here’s what you need to know. Kosmos 482 was originally intended to be known as Venera 9. It was launched on March 31, 1972, just four days after its sister probe, Venera 8. That ship had a brief but glorious life. It arrived at Venus on July 22, 1972, spent close to an hour descending through the atmosphere, and landed at 6:24 a.m. local Venus time. (Local time on another world is calculated the same way it is on Earth—by measuring the angle of the sun relative to the meridians, or lines of longitude.) Once on the ground, Venera 8 lived for only 63 minutes, which is about what was expected given Venus’s hellish conditions. The atmospheric pressure is 93 times greater than it is on Earth, with a sea level pressure of 1,350 pounds per square inch (psi) compared to just 14.7 psi here. The air is mostly carbon dioxide, which, together with Venus's greater proximity to the sun, means an average temperature 860°F—or more than 200 degrees hotter than the melting point of lead. That was the future that awaited Venera 9 too, but things didn’t work out for what turned out to be a snakebit ship. After reaching Earth orbit, it fired its engine to enter what is known as a Venus transfer trajectory; that engine burn went awry, however, either cutting off too soon or not reaching a sufficient thrust to send the spacecraft on its way. Instead, it remained in an elliptical Earth orbit, with an apogee, or high point, of 560 miles, and a perigee, or low point, of 130 miles. There it has remained for the past 53 years. For its pains, Venera 9 lost not only its mission but its name. Abiding by Soviet-era nomenclature rules, spacecraft that remain in orbit around the Earth are dubbed Kosmos, followed by a number—in this case, Kosmos 482. In 2022, Marco Langbroek, a Dutch archaeologist who toggled over to sky watching mid-career and now lectures on space situational awareness at The Netherlands’ Delft Technical University, completed a round of tracking Kosmos 482's orbit. In The Space Review, he wrote that the object would reenter Earth’s atmosphere sometime in 2025 or 2026, due to the steady accumulation of drag by the atmosphere’s upper reaches. Further tracking of the spacecraft’s trajectory—by Langbroek, NASA, and the nonprofit Aerospace Corporation—now “The reentry is an uncontrolled reentry,” Langbroek wrote on his website on April 24. “It likely will be a hard impact. I doubt the parachute deployment system will still work after 53 years and with dead batteries.” Ordinarily, even a spacecraft as big as Kosmos 482 would not pose much danger to people on the ground. The same atmospheric friction that causes most meteors to burn up before they reach the surface disposes of errant satellites the same way. It is mostly far larger objects, like the U.S.’s Skylab space station—which reentered in July, 1979, scattering debris across the Australian outback—that cause concern. But Kosmos 482 is different; it was intentionally designed to withstand Venus’s pressure-cooker atmosphere, and even colliding with our own atmosphere at orbital speeds of 17,500 miles per hour, it could at least partly survive its plunge. “The risks involved are not particularly high, but not zero,” Langbroek writes. “With a mass of just under 500 kg and 1-meter size, risks are somewhat similar to that of a meteorite impact.” All of the land masses in Earth’s southern hemisphere are within the reentry footprint, along with the large majority of the north. Most of Russia, the U.K. the Balkans, Scandinavia, Canada, and Alaska are among the few places out of harm’s way. Still, nobody is recommending calling the pets inside and crouching in fallout shelters. More than 70% of the Earth’s surface is water, meaning a 70% chance of a splashdown as opposed to a hard landing. What’s more, the landmasses in the reentry zone include largely unpopulated areas like the Sahara, Atacama, and Australian deserts. It would, of course, be best if Kosmos 482 disintegrates entirely on reentry, but space sentimentalists are hoping that at least a bit of it survives. Venera probes, like all of the Soviet spacecraft sent to the moon and the planets, carried along with them small memorial coins, medals and titanium pennants—embossed with the hammer and sickle, the likeness of Lenin, the Earth, and more. Kosmos 482 will return to a world very different from the one it left—with the Soviet Union itself consigned to history. This week, after more than half a century, a bit of commemorative metal just may survive the empire that sent it aloft.

A sluggish line of storms continues to deliver repeated rounds of heavy rainfall across the already saturated ground of the Southeast this week, renewing flash flood risks. In New Orleans, where late last month storms dropped a month’s worth of rain in a day, weary forecasters at the local office of the National Weather Service warned that the area’s “tolerance for another round of heavy rain is fairly low.” Across the region on Wednesday, rainfall totals by late afternoon ranged from between one and three inches in most of Southern Louisiana. Metairie, just outside New Orleans, was an outlier, receiving 4.56 inches, according to the National Weather Service in New Orleans. The Weather Prediction Center placed a broad zone from southeastern Texas to southwestern Alabama under an elevated risk for flash flooding, and a slightly higher risk warning was in effect across southern Louisiana and Mississippi. The day’s highest warning was in place across southeast Louisiana, including New Orleans. “There will still be some showers and thunderstorms throughout the afternoon and into tonight,” Peter Mullinax, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center, said. “But the heaviest action is going on this morning.” A flood watch remained in effect in New Orleans through Thursday, according to the National Weather Service. There were only a few reports of minor flooding on Wednesday afternoon in the city. The repeated downpours are the result of storms breaking out along a nearly stationary front, sitting just north of the Gulf Coast. Warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico is building up along this front, and a weather system approaching from the west is injecting additional energy into the atmosphere. As a result, the storms are dropping large amounts of rain in a short amount of time to the same areas. The slow-moving storms have already been affecting the region since early in the week, delivering significant rainfall and flooding across parts of Texas and Louisiana. On Monday and Tuesday, areas in Louisiana received two to four inches of rain, with some locations in the west surpassing eight inches over the 48-hour period. In Texas, some areas have already exceeded their average monthly rainfall for May in just the first week. In Amarillo, 2.46 inches of rain was recorded by Wednesday morning, far surpassing the city’s May average of 2.27 inches. “It’s been quite wet for a good chunk of the start,” Mr. Mullinax said. “Some of this is welcomed, especially as we get closer to summer, but to have it be that kind of levels, of course it’s going to cause some flooding problems, and unfortunately that’s been the case the last couple of days, especially in northern and eastern Texas.” In Brenham, Texas, between Austin and Houston, a search operation recovered the body of Devah Woods, 10, on Tuesday. She had last been seen on Monday as storms moved through the area. “The response from everyone was overwhelming,” Atwood Kenjura, the mayor of Brenham, said during a news conference, expressing gratitude to rescue workers. The Brenham Fire Department reported that the search effort had included drones, swift water rescue teams and canine units. Severe weather was an added threat in the Southeast through Thursday, especially across portions of Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The Storm Prediction Center warned of hail and damaging winds as the primary threats, along with a low risk of tornadoes. Southeastern Texas, including cities such as Victoria and Missouri City, were under slightly higher risk of severe weather, especially Wednesday afternoon and evening. The Southeast will continue to face severe weather and high rainfall in the coming days. The Weather Prediction Center warned of flash flood risks for parts of Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and, later this week, South Carolina. Southeast Louisiana into southwest Alabama, including New Orleans and Mobile, remain under a slightly higher risk. “We’ve got rainfall in the forecast all the next seven days,” Mr. Mullinax said. “It’s just a tough stretch of unsettled weather in the Southeast for the next week.” There were sporadic power outages in the region. About 16,000 households in Louisiana, 8,000 in Mississippi, and 6,000 in Texas had no power, as of early Wednesday evening, according to PowerOutage.us.

From vehicle exhaust to manufacturing plumes, nearly every person in the world breathes in unhealthy air on a daily basis. The impact is deadly: air pollution is responsible for 7 million premature deaths around the world per year according to the World Health Organization (WHO), making it the second leading risk factor for death behind high blood pressure. But that number could be significantly cut, researchers say, if we reduce greenhouse gases and air pollutants. A new study published in the journal Earth’s Future on May 6 found that up to 250,000 deaths from poor air quality in central and western Europe alone could be prevented by 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions are drastically reduced. The researchers, from the University of Leeds in England, looked at the health impacts in Europe in 2014 and 2050 from exposure to two types of pollution. The first is fine particulate matter, which can penetrate deep into the lungs and pose the greatest health risks. This pollution comes from sources such as wildfires or construction sites. The other is surface level ozone, which forms when sunlight interacts with certain pollutants like nitrogen oxides, and is the result of things like vehicle exhaust and factory emissions. Exposure to these air pollutants can lead to long-term health complications, including stroke, heart disease, and pneumonia. Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang Branded Content Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang By China Daily The team examined three scenarios in which policymakers took low, medium, and high levels of action to combat climate change, and created an atmospheric chemistry model to simulate the possible air quality in 2050. The researchers defined a high level of action as being one where emissions from the housing, industry, transport, and agricultural sectors are cut for 70% of the population of Western and Central Europe to below the WHO's air quality guideline for annual fine particulate matter. Doing so, they found, would improve air quality across the continent and lead to large reductions in mortality overall. And it could help tackle health inequities. Globally, poorer communities are more likely to be exposed to unhealthy air quality when compared with higher-income areas. Researchers found that disadvantaged regions of Europe currently have proportionally higher death rates compared to higher-income regions. Their findings show that a significant reduction in emissions—seen in the high action scenario—would help reduce that inequality. But under the medium and low impact scenarios health impacts would worsen, highlighting the necessity of aggressive climate mitigation practices. Advertisement Air pollution in Europe has been on the decline for the last two decades, as the E.U. has adopted more comprehensive clean air policies, however more work remains to be done. There are still regions across the E.U. that have pollutant concentrations that exceed the bloc’s current standards. The researchers hope that their findings might encourage policymakers to consider not just the health impacts of air pollution, but also how emissions reduction solutions can help marginalized communities who are disproportionately impacted. “The strategies that policymakers take to mitigate climate change will have considerable implications for human exposure to air quality, not least of which are the number of deaths,” lead author Connor Clayton, a PhD student in the School of Earth and Environment and the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at Leeds University, said in a press release. “But they also urgently need to consider the persistent inequity of exposure between wealthier and more deprived populations which continues to be an issue even though air pollution has reduced across Europe.”