James' World 2

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Scientific research over the past 30 years has revealed a patchwork of potential causes of autism. Most of them are genetic—the condition is between 60 and 90 percent heritable—and some involve nongenetic risk factors that might impact development during pregnancy.

“We’ve found a great deal of the underlying [causes],” says Helen Tager-Flusberg, an autism researcher and a professor emerita at Boston University. But how these different risk factors come together as the brain develops remains a challenge to piece together. “Autism is not a simple disorder,” she says. “There are no simple answers. There are no so-called smoking guns.”

Even so, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the U.S. secretary of health and human services, talks about autism in a way that suggests he thinks there are simple and direct causes. He often refers to the steady rise in autism prevalence (which is likely due to improved screening and diagnosis) as an indicator that we’re in the middle of an “autism epidemic” driven by “environmental toxins.” He has also refused to disavow the long-debunked idea that vaccines cause autism. This month, as part of Kennedy’s effort to find “the root causes of autism,” the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced that they will create a “data platform” to study the condition. In April, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya had described plans for “national disease registries, including a new one for autism.” The plan involved collecting “comprehensive” private health data on autism that would represent “broad coverage” of the U.S. population, leading autism advocacy organizations, civil rights groups, and research scientists to warn of medical privacy concerns. (Shortly after outlets reported on Bhattacharya’s statements in April, HHS denied that it planned to create an “autism registry.”)

In a budget hearing on Wednesday, Kennedy called for an end to genetic research into autism. “I don’t think we should be funding that genetic work anymore,” he said. “What we really need to do now is to identify the environmental toxins.”

In response to this dismissal of well-established science, Tager-Flusberg has organized a coalition of scientists to push back. The Coalition of Autism Scientists now has 258 members and is still growing.

Scientific American spoke with Tager-Flusberg about Kennedy’s statements this week and how the autism community is responding.

In a Congressional budget hearing Wednesday afternoon, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said: “Autism is an epidemic, and the genes do not cause epidemics. They can contribute a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin. It’s like cigarettes and smoking.” What was your reaction to that?

There is no reason that we need to refer to the increased prevalence rates, which have been rising steadily for many years now, as an epidemic. This is not the definition of an epidemic, so I take issue with highlighting that.

Second of all, genetics are the primary contributing factor to autism. We know specific genes and variants confer increased risk, even in cases where there aren’t any clear environmental contributions. If anything, it’s the other way around—it’s the environmental factors that add to or interact with the genetic risk for autism.

Take one of the very well-regulated nongenetic factors: parental age, particularly paternal age. What we think is going on is that, as parents age, their germ cells [which develop into eggs or sperm] are changing, and so this is leading to alterations in the DNA that then confer risk for autism.

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A federal judge has halted President Donald Trump’s latest attempt to block international students from coming to Harvard University.

The temporary restraining order issued late Thursday by US District Judge Allison Burroughs comes hours after the university urged the judge to step in on an emergency basis to block a proclamation Trump signed a day earlier that suspends international visas for new students at the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university. Foreign students make up roughly a quarter of the school’s student body.

The brief order from Burroughs said if she didn’t intervene now, the school would “sustain immediate and irreparable injury before there is an opportunity to hear from all parties” over the challenge to Trump’s edict. The judge said her order “shall remain in effect until further order of this Court.”

Burroughs, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, set a hearing for mid-June to hear arguments over whether she should block Trump’s proclamation indefinitely.

Harvard’s request to block Trump’s ban amended an existing lawsuit over the administration’s move to end Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, which initially prompted the judge to stop the administration from revoking Harvard’s student visa program.

The amended lawsuit claimed Trump’s proclamation violated the First Amendment by temporarily blocking the entry of nearly all new international Harvard students under visas most use to study at US universities or participate in academic exchange programs.

Trump’s proclamation directed the Secretary of State “to consider revoking” the visas – known as F, M, and J visas – for current Harvard students who meet the proclamation’s “criteria,” the White House said in a statement.

“With the stroke of a pen, the DHS Secretary and the President have sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the University and its mission and the country,” the amended complaint reads.

“Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard,” it says.

The visa program, which allows international students “to enter the United States on nonimmigrant visas to enroll at Harvard and thousands of other schools, have boosted America’s academic, scientific, and economic success and its global standing,” the lawsuit says.

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Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. Fairth Ninivaggi/Reuters/File

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Tornadoes threaten huge swaths of the U.S. this weekend amid a season already marked by unusually high storm activity, even as the National Weather Service faces budget cuts likely to impede its ability to respond to severe weather.

What to Expect

The National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center has forecast severe thunderstorms with scattered tornadoes—some of them intense—across parts of Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Ohio for the afternoon and evening of May 16.

“Today we’re expecting a severe weather outbreak across the mid-Mississippi, Tennessee, and Ohio valleys,” says Jenni Pittman, a meteorologist and deputy chief of the Science and Technology Integration division at the National Weather Service’s Central Region Headquarters. These regions stretch farther east than the historically prevalent “Tornado Alley” of the mid- to late 1900s.

“Then we see a renewed chance for severe weather Sunday, continuing Monday and continuing Tuesday as well,” Pittman says. “A lot of the risks on Sunday through Tuesday are going to be from the High Plains pretty much through the Midwest.” National Weather Service maps show these risks concentrated in Kansas and Oklahoma.

This weekend’s predicted tornadoes would follow a slight lull in the region, she adds. “We’ve had a little bit of a break here in May, which is typically a pretty busy severe weather month,” Pittman says. “April was very active, and the rest of May does look pretty active as well.”

This Year in Tornadoes

As of May 15, the National Weather Service has tallied 779 tornadoes in its local storm reports—a preliminary number but a helpful metric for tracking the season’s severity. For comparison, between 2005 and 2015, that same tally averaged 624; between 2010 and 2024, it was 592.

“As of mid-May, the U.S. is running well above the typical number of tornadoes to this point in the year,” says Rich Thompson, chief of forecast operations for the Storm Prediction Center.

This year to date also stands out against individual years. The most active tornado season of recent years was 2011, when hundreds of storms struck in late April; by mid-May the tally stood at more than 1,300 storms, with more than 2,200 by the end of the year.

That year also demonstrated the close connection between just a few days of serious storms and a bad season. “Intense tornadoes are disproportionately responsible for damage, injuries, and deaths, and such tornadoes are more common on a few ‘outbreak’ days,” Thompson says. “Thus, the number of outbreak days often determines the severity of the season, with 2011 being the prime example of multiple high-impact tornado outbreaks.”

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Thomas Trott/Getty Images

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So much for that. These days, Musk is reduced to begging his followers on X to call their senators and congressmen [sic, obviously] to vote down the Big Beautiful Bill. His nominal reason is that Donald Trump’s budget plan will increase the deficit, but reports indicate that Musk is annoyed an EV credit is getting cut. That makes it harder to sell Teslas in an environment where it’s already hard to sell Teslas. Also, Musk may be annoyed that he didn’t get to stay past his statutory limit as an unpaid advisor and that the FAA isn’t using Starlink, according to Axios.

The cracks have been showing in the MAGA-tech alliance for some time now. When Scott Bessent got Musk’s IRS pick ejected in April, that was notable. (Bessent’s deputy now runs the IRS.) Musk wasn’t politically savvy enough to get Bessent on his side before installing his pick; an end-run like that is insulting, and Musk had been making enemies. Take, for instance, Marco Rubio, who was

furious when Musk destroyed USAID — that was Rubio’s department, and getting rid of it cut his power. Sean Duffy, the reality TV star who is for some reason, running the Department of Transportation, had to intervene to stop DOGE from firing air traffic controllers, while the lack of air traffic controllers remains a hot-button issue.

These men should not have been especially difficult to finesse, but then Musk is known for his bull-in-a-china-shop approach. It is rare that a person in a position of power — a cabinet seat, say — willingly gives up even an inch of leverage. Making enemies of Bessent, Rubio, and Duffy was a strategic error.

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Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

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Most people have never heard of vacuum decay, but if it happened, it would be the biggest natural disaster in the universe. Sure, an asteroid could destroy a city or wipe out life on Earth. A supernova could fry the ozone layer. If a blast of energy from a spinning black hole hit our planet, it could rip apart the entire solar system. As dramatic as these disasters are, they’d still leave behind rocks, gas, and dust. With time that matter could come together again, making new stars and planets and maybe life.

Vacuum decay is different. This cataclysm would result from a change in the Higgs field, a quantum field that pervades all of space. It would be triggered by pure chance, creating a bubble that would expand at almost the speed of light, transforming all in its path. Inside that bubble, the laws of physics we take for granted would change, making matter as we know it (and, consequently, life) impossible.

According to physicists’ current best estimates, vacuum decay is extremely unlikely, with an almost unthinkably small chance of its taking place close enough to our part of the universe to affect us. Still, the chance isn’t zero, and some recent estimates suggest the likelihood might be slightly less minuscule than we used to think. Ultimately, though, the possibility of an apocalyptic quantum bubble shouldn’t cause anyone to lose any sleep.

Even so, scientists have been studying how and why this scenario might play out. The answers to these questions don’t just reveal some fascinating aspects of the quantum world—they may also turn the questions on their heads: rather than making us worry about the threat a vacuum bubble poses, the fact that the universe has survived this long without one may teach us something about the deepest unsolved problems in physics.

All the objects we’re used to—every animal, vegetable, and mineral—are made up of atoms, and those atoms are made up of ripples in quantum fields. Each field is like a setting on a kind of universal control panel. If you could jiggle the electron switch on the control panel, you’d see an electron pop into existence. Most of these switches have a default value of zero: electrons aren’t likely to be in most places, for example. These defaults are sticky—it takes effort, in the form of energy, to push a switch out of its default position. How much energy it requires is determined by Albert Einstein’s famous equation E = mc², which defines the relation between energy and mass: the more massive a particle, the stickier the default for the switch of its field.

Inside the bubble the laws of physics we take for granted would change.

You might think that in truly empty space, all these switches are set to zero. That’s true for most quantum fields, but some have a different default. One such case is a quantum field proposed by several physicists in 1964, including British physicist Peter Higgs, for whom it was later named. Try to set the Higgs field to zero, and it will resist. The universe “wants” to have a certain amount of Higgsness in it, a default called a vacuum expectation value. It is this amount of Higgs field, instead of zero, that one finds in the vacuum of empty space.

Pushing the Higgs field from this default setting is quite difficult. Scientists finally accomplished it in 2012, when an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva managed to measure the tiniest, briefest possible shift in the Higgs field. Just as jiggling the electron switch makes an electron, jiggling the Higgs switch makes a particle called a Higgs boson. These particles swiftly vanish after we create them, with the Higgs switch rushing back to its default while knocking other, easier-to-shift switches around, creating particles such as electrons or photons instead. But LHC scientists managed to create enough Higgs bosons to definitively detect them and prove the Higgs field exists.

The Higgs field is special because it controls the mass of all other particles. In effect, it serves as a kind of master switch, determining how sticky all the other switches’ defaults are. If you could grab the Higgs switch and drag it toward zero, you’d find that all the other switches became much easier to flick. In other words, a lower Higgs value would mean it took less energy to make an electron or a quark.

Physicists think of the task of moving the Higgs field from its default value as being a bit like rolling a boulder up a hill. If the boulder rests at the bottom of a valley, you can try to push it upward, but if you let it go, it will just roll down again.

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