James' World 2

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Officials in nine countries are trying to get a handle on the New World screwworm, a fly whose larvae eat the living flesh of livestock.

The pest is marching northward at an alarming rate and has now moved some 1,400 miles from southern Panama to southern Mexico in about two years. Screwworms are disastrous for ranchers, whose cattle can become infected when the flies lay eggs in cuts or wounds, after which their resulting larvae burrow, or screw, into that flesh. The northernmost sighting is currently about 700 miles south of the U.S. border. 

Since the insect overpowered local containment efforts in Panama’s province of Darién in 2023, it has moved through Central America and is now found as far north as the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Thousands of animals have been infected, and officials have reported dozens of human cases in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Mexico this year.

As the fly spreads northward from the narrow Darién Gap in Panama and up the funnel of Central America, it becomes harder to control. Agricultural departments suppress fly populations by releasing millions of sterile male flies per week into the environment throughout Central America. These males are raised in a facility in Panama jointly run by that country’s agricultural department and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Because female screwworms mate only once in their lifetime, this population of infertile males reduces the size of the next generation of flies. Consistent application of this sterile insect technique eradicated the screwworm from the U.S. in 1966 and from regions north of the Darién Gap in 2006.

That invisible wall holding the screwworm back has crumbled, however. “I don’t know how it got away so quickly,” says Maxwell Scott, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, who studies genetic methods to control populations of the fly. “There had to be some movement of infested livestock, particularly through the middle [of Central America]…. It just moved too fast,” Scott says about the swift speed of the screwworm spread. 

On their own, the flies can usually fly no more than about 12 miles in their monthlong lifetime, says Sonja Swiger, an entomologist at Texas A&M University. But the screwworm larvae can travel great distances while developing inside (and gnawing on the flesh of) their hosts. A new generation reaches sexual maturity every week to two weeks, and females can lay up to 2,800 eggs over the course of their lifespan, according to the California Department of Food & Agriculture.

Most people aren’t at risk of screwworm infections, which are rare compared with those in livestock. But cases have appeared in Central America since the breach of the Darién Gap. Nicaragua first detected the parasite in livestock in March 2024; by February 2025, health officials there confirmed 30 human cases. Costa Rica saw 42 confirmed cases between January and May 2025 and at least two deaths, according to the country’s health ministry. Honduras has reported 40 human cases and three deaths, according to the public health network EpiCore, while Guatemala reported its first human case in May. The Mexican Ministry of Health has confirmed eight human cases.

In humans, infection with fly larvae is known as myiasis. Those who are most at risk for screwworm myiasis are people who work closely with livestock or who sleep outdoors. Treatment involves removing the larvae, sometimes with surgery. 

Screwworms haven’t made it back into the U.S. yet. How quickly this might happen depends on whether agricultural officials can hold the line in Mexico or push the fly southward. On May 27, U.S. Department of Agriculture officials announced $21 million in funding to retrofit a fruit fly production plant in Metapa, Mexico, to produce sterile screwworm flies. When operational, the plant will churn out between 60 million and 100 million additional flies a week to help suppress the breeding population in Mexico.

While the sterile insect technique is likely to remain the key tool in the arsenal against screwworms for years to come, new genetic methods of insect control could eventually come to bear against the problem. In May ethicists and entomologists, including Scott, wrote in a paper in Science that the screwworm is a good candidate for complete elimination with gene drive technology, which involves genetic engineering to ensure that a deadly mutation will be included in an animal’s sperm and egg cells and thus will be passed on to the next generation. The loss of screwworms does not seem to substantially affect the ecosystem, the researchers wrote, and death by the insect is painful and slow.

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Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, has publicly accused President Trump of treating Russia with “velvet gloves,” criticized him for gutting AmeriCorps and questioned his power to impose tariffs without congressional approval.

He has described Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of Signal to share sensitive military operations as “unacceptable.” And he was the sole House Republican to vote “no” on a bill to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” He said he thought it was stupid.

Mr. Bacon’s willingness to publicly disagree with the president make him an anomaly in the tribal House Republican Conference, where members tend to fall in line behind Mr. Trump’s agenda and actively seek out ways to demonstrate their loyalty to him. In a Republican-led Congress that has been reluctant to challenge Mr. Trump on almost anything, the Nebraskan is among the last of a disappearing breed in his party. And his recent statements and actions strongly suggest he may be headed for the exits.

While Mr. Bacon has shown an independent streak in his statements, he still often backs down from his “red lines” on policy and votes with his party. After telling the White House that he would not vote for a bill that included more than $500 billion in Medicaid cuts, he ultimately voted “yes” for legislation carrying Mr. Trump’s domestic agenda that included far more.

And after telling The New York Times and House Republican leaders that he was a firm “no” on any cuts to a global anti-AIDS program, he ultimately voted “yes” this week on a package that would claw back $9 billion in spending already approved by Congress and targeted by the Department of Government Efficiency for cuts, including to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

Still, he is more independent than most of his colleagues. In an interview in his office last week, Mr. Bacon, at 61, serving his fifth term in Congress, would not say whether he voted for Mr. Trump last year. He also likened members of his party to people following someone off a cliff, compared himself to Winston Churchill speaking out against Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, and criticized the billionaire tech tycoon Elon Musk, who has bankrolled many of his Republican colleagues.

“I sort of blame him for that disaster,” he said of Mr. Musk, referring to Mr. Musk’s exhorting Republicans late last year to tank a spending deal that was intended to avert a government shutdown. On one level, Mr. Bacon is making a fairly obvious statement: Mr. Musk did play a crucial role in killing the spending bill. But it is the kind of obvious statement that most Republicans on Capitol Hill are not willing to make these days, for fear of jeopardizing their political futures as Mr. Musk has threatened retribution against anyone who fails to vote the way he believes they should.

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Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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Meeaaaoow rises like a question mark before dawn. Anyone living with a cat knows their sounds: broken chirrups like greetings, low growls that warn, purrs stitched into sleepy conversation. Ethologists have organized feline sounds that share acoustic and contextual qualities into more than 20 groupings, including the meow, the hiss, the trill, the yowl, and the chatter. Any individual meow belongs, academically speaking, to a broad “meow” category, which itself contains many variations. The house cat’s verbal repertoire is far greater than that of its largely silent wild cousins. Researchers have even begun to study whether cats can drift into regional dialects, the way human accents bend along the Hudson or the Thames. And just as humans gesticulate, shrug, frown, and raise their eyebrows, cats’ fur and whiskers write subtitles: a twitching tail declares excitement, flattened ears signal fear, and a slow blink promises peace. Felis catus is a chatty species that, over thousands of years of domestication, has pivoted its voice toward the peculiar primate that opens the fridge. Now imagine pointing your phone at that predawn howl and reading: “Refill bowl, please.” Last December, Baidu—a Chinese multinational company that

specializes in Internet services and artificial intelligence—filed a patent application for what it describes as a method for transforming animal vocalizations into human language. (A Baidu spokesperson told Reuters last month that the system is “still in the research phase.”) The proposed system would gather animal signals and process them: it would store kitten or puppy talk for “I’m hungry” as code, then pair it not only with motion-sensing data such as tail swishes but also with vital signs such as heart rate and core temperature. All of these data would get whisked through an AI system and blended before emerging as plain-language phrases in English, Mandarin, or any other tongue.

The dream of decoding cat speech is much older than deep learning. By the early 20th century, meows had been recorded on wax cylinders, and in the 1970s John Bradshaw, a British anthrozoologist, began more than four decades of mapping how domestic cats tell us—and each other—what they mean. By the 1990s, he and his then doctoral student Charlotte Cameron-Beaumont had established that the distinct domestic “meow,” largely absent between adults in feral colonies, is a bespoke tool for managing humans. Even domestic cats rarely use it with each other, though kittens do with their mothers. Yet for all that anecdotal richness, the formal literature remained thin: there were hundreds of papers on bird song and dozens on dolphin whistles, but only a scattering on feline phonology until machine learning revived the field in the past decade.

One of the first hints that computers might crack the cat code came in 2018, when AI scientist Yagya Raj Pandeya and his colleagues released CatSound, a library of roughly 3,000 clips covering 10 types of cat calls labeled by the scientists, from hiss and growl to purr and mother call. Each clip went through software trained on musical recordings to describe a sound’s “shape”—how its pitch rose or fell and how long it lasted—and a second program cataloged them accordingly. When the system was tested on clips it hadn’t seen during training, it identified the right call type around 91 percent of the time. The study showed that the 10 vocal signals had acoustic fingerprints a machine can spot, giving researchers a proof of concept for automated cat-sound classification and eventual translation.

Momentum built quickly. In 2019 researchers at the University of Milan in Italy published a study focused on the one sound aimed squarely at Homo sapiens. The research sliced the meow into three situational flavors: “waiting for food,” “isolation in an unfamiliar environment,” and “brushing.” By turning each meow into a set of numbers, the researchers revealed that a “feed me” meow had a noticeably different shape from a “where are you?” meow or a “brush me” meow. After they trained a computer program to spot those shapes, the researchers tested the system much as Pandeya and colleagues had tested theirs: it was presented with meows not seen during training, all hand-labeled based on circumstances such as hunger or isolation. The system correctly identified the meows up to 96 percent of the time, and the research confirmed that cats really do tweak their meows to match what they’re trying to tell us.

The research was then scaled to smartphones, turning kitchen-table curiosity into consumer AI. Developers at software engineering company Akvelon, including a former Alexa engineer, teamed up with one of the study’s researchers to create the MeowTalk app, which they claim can translate meows in real time. MeowTalk has used machine learning to categorize thousands of user-submitted meows by common intent, such as “I’m hungry,” “I’m thirsty,” “I’m in pain,” “I’m happy,” or “I’m going to attack.” A 2021 validation study by MeowTalk team members claimed success rates near 90 percent. But the app also logs incorrect translation taps from skeptical owners, which serves as a reminder that the cat might be calling for something entirely different in reality. Probability scores can simply reflect pattern similarity, not necessarily the animal’s exact intent.

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People are not born racist. As former U.S. President Barack Obama, quoting Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, tweeted shortly after the tragic events in Charlottesville August 12, 2017 in which the university town was overtaken by white supremacists and hate groups, resulting in the killing of a counter protester, Heather Heyer, “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

Very young children do not naturally choose friends based on the color of their skin. In a video created by the BBC children’s network CBeebies, Everyone’s Welcome, pairs of children explain the differences between themselves without referring to the color of their skin or ethnicity, even though those differences exist. As Nick Arnold writes in What Adults Can Learn About Discrimination From Kids, according to Sally Palmer, Ph.D., lecturer in the Department of Human Psychology and Human Development at University College London, it is not that they don’t notice the color of their skin, it is that the color of their skin is not what is important to them.

Racism is Learned

Racism is learned behavior. A 2012 study by Harvard University researchers showed that children as young as three years of age can adopt racist behavior when exposed to it, even though they may not understand “why.” According to renowned social psychologist Mazarin Banaji, Ph.D., children are quick to pick up on racist and prejudicial cues from adults and their environment. When white children were shown faces of different skin colors with ambiguous facial expressions, they showed a pro-white bias. This was determined by the fact that they ascribed a happy face to a perceived white skin color and an angry face to a face that they perceived to be black or brown. In the study, Black children who were tested showed no color-bias. Banaji maintains that racial bias can be unlearned, though, when children are in situations where they are exposed to diversity and they witness and are part of positive interactions between different groups of people acting as equals. 

Racism is learned by the example of one’s parents, caregivers, and other influential adults, through personal experience, and through the systems of our society that promulgate it, both explicitly and implicitly. These implicit biases permeate not only our individual decisions but also our societal structure. The New York Times has created a series of informative videos explaining implicit biases. 

There are Different Types of Racism

According to social science, there are seven main forms of racism: representational, ideological, discursive, interactional, institutional, structural, and systemic. Racism can be defined in other ways as well — reverse racism, subtle racism, internalized racism, colorism.

In 1968, the day after Martin Luther King was shot, the anti-racism expert and former third-grade teacher, Jane Elliott, devised a now-famous but then-controversial experiment for her all-white third-grade class in Iowa to teach the children about racism, in which she separated them by eye color into blue and brown, and showed extreme favoritism toward the group with blue eyes. She has conducted this experiment repeatedly for different groups since then, including the audience for an Oprah Winfrey show in 1992, known as The Anti-Racism Experiment That Transformed an Oprah Show. People in the audience were separated by eye color; those with blue eyes were discriminated against while those with brown eyes were treated favorably. The reactions of the audience were illuminating, showing how quickly some people came to identify with their eye color group and behave prejudicially, and what it felt like to be the ones who were being treated unfairly. 

Microaggressions are another expression of racism. As explained in Racial Microagressions in Everyday Life, “Racial microaggressions are brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.” An example of microaggression falls under “assumption of criminal status” and includes someone crossing to the other side of the street to avoid a person of color. This list of microaggressions serves as a tool to recognize them and the messages they send. 

Unlearning Racism

Racism in the extreme is manifested by groups such as the KKK and other white supremacist groups. Christoper Picciolini is the founder of the group Life After Hate. Picciolini is a former member of a hate group, as are all the members of Life After Hate. On Face the Nation in Aug. 2017, Picciolini said that the people who are radicalized and join hate groups are “not motivated by ideology” but rather “a search for identity, community, and purpose.” He stated that “if there’s a brokenness underneath that person, they tend to search for those in really negative pathways.” As this group proves, even extreme racism can be unlearned, and the mission of this organization is to help counter violent extremism and to help those participating in hate groups find pathways out of them.

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Multi-ethnic young adults’ hands holding pieces from the same puzzle. Nullplus/E+/Getty Images

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