James' World 2

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On a small, gently rocking research boat anchored just offshore in Chesapeake Bay, I lowered a sterile plastic bottle into the water to collect a sample for studying aquatic microbes. Workers nearby dredged oysters from the shallows, and families played in the low waves. To them, it was a perfect summer day. But hidden in the seemingly tranquil waters were Vibrio bacteria, members of a group that exists naturally in coastal environments around the world. Some cause diarrhea, cramping, and nausea, and some can produce severe flesh-eating infections and even lead to death.

Vibrio live freely in the water, concentrate in sediment and on plastics, and colonize the surfaces and guts of shellfish, fish, and zooplankton. For those organisms, the bacteria can often be harmless or even beneficial. The bacteria also recycle nutrients such as carbon and nitrogen by breaking down organic material. They are found in both saltwater and freshwater bodies, and they thrive in warm water. That’s why for many years, Vibrio infections—called vibriosis—generally occurred along the hottest U.S. coastlines, particularly the Gulf Coast. But climate change is warming once cool waters, and vibriosis cases have been relentlessly spreading northward. Today, they are reported across the Eastern Seaboard, along the Baltic Sea in northern Europe, and even as far north as Alaska and Finland.

Not only is the bacteria’s favorable habitat expanding, but higher water temperatures can allow some Vibrio species to multiply more rapidly. That’s especially true when storms and heavy rainfall increase the nutrients and alter salinity in coastal waters, creating ideal conditions for their growth. These perfect circumstances raise the likelihood that someone who steps into the surf with a scraped knee or who accidentally swallows a bit of the water could succumb to serious illness.

Over the past decade, the research team I’m part of has tracked the northward advance of environmental conditions favorable for pathogenic Vibrio, as well as an associated rise in severe illnesses, most alarming, species that infect open wounds, potentially leading to life-threatening conditions such as necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating disease) or blood poisoning. Now we are trying to forecast risk by developing predictive computer models that use environmental data—such as temperature and salinity—gathered from satellites and monitoring stations, along with analyses of microorganisms in water samples when possible. Our goal is to devise a Vibrio alert system, much like the “red flag” system municipalities use to warn swimmers of dangerous surf. As summers grow hotter and storms more intense, we are trying to design and roll out models that can keep up with a shifting environment and to help coastal communities recognize the increasing risks washing up on their shores.

Scientists have described more than 100 Vibrio species. The comma- or bullet-shaped bacteria have evolved to thrive across a wide range of aquatic environments, from shallow coastal bays to deep-sea hydrothermal vents that present some of the most challenging living conditions on Earth. Many species form close symbiotic relationships with their host creatures. For instance, Aliivibrio fischeri organisms colonize the light-emitting organ of Hawaiian bobtail squid, helping the animals emit bioluminescence. Others attach to corals, fishes, oysters, and the exoskeletons of shrimp and copepods—tiny marine crustaceans that are fundamental to the food web and are major reservoirs for Vibrio

A single copepod can carry more than 10,000 Vibrio cells, so swallowing even a small amount of seawater can be enough to cause disease. These bacteria also concentrate in filter-feeding shellfish such as oysters, which continuously draw in and process large volumes of water, capturing suspended particles—including microbes—in their gills and tissues. Vibrio love this environment and can multiply inside oysters after harvest if the shellfish are stored or transported without proper refrigeration, raising the risk of infection for anyone who consumes them raw.

Temperature is the main prerequisite for Vibrio growth. Like many pathogenic bacteria, Vibrio species flourish in temperatures near that of the human body—around 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit)—making warm waters especially favorable. Higher temperatures accelerate their metabolism and reproduction and can trigger the expression of genes involved in infection. Salinity is another key factor; Vibrio typically need the sodium ions of salty or brackish water to maintain their cellular function. They are remarkably adaptable, however, and can live in freshwater lakes or ponds.

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Donald Trump has sued Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal newspaper reporters for libel and slander over claims that he sent sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a bawdy note and sketch of a naked woman.

Trump’s lawsuit on Friday, which also targets Dow Jones and News Corp, was filed in the southern district of Florida federal court in Miami.

It came after the Journal reported on a 50th birthday greeting that Trump allegedly sent to Epstein in 2003 that included a sexually suggestive drawing and reference to secrets they shared. It was reportedly a contribution to a birthday album compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell.

“A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair,” the Journal reported of the alleged drawing. The letter allegedly concluded: “Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Trump vehemently denied the Journal report and claimed the letter was fake. He said on Truth Social that he warned Murdoch, the founder of News Corp, the newspaper’s parent company, that he planned to sue.

The president posted: “Mr Murdoch stated that he would take care of it, but obviously did not have the power to do so. Instead, they are going with a false, malicious, defamatory story anyway. President Trump will be suing the Wall Street Journal, News Corp, and Mr Murdoch shortly.”

Vice-president JD Vance poured scorn on the report, tweeting on Thursday: “Forgive my language but this story is complete and utter bullshit. The WSJ should be ashamed for publishing it. Where is this letter? Would you be shocked to learn they never showed it to us before publishing it? Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?”

Trump aides were also expected on Friday to ask a court to release grand jury testimony about Epstein, as the president fought back against concerns over his administration’s handling of the deceased convicted sex offender’s case.

Trump said earlier his Truth Social platform that he had authorized the justice department to seek the public release of the materials, which are under seal, citing “the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein”.

Trump has faced an extraordinary backlash from his own supporters over the Epstein files. A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week found that 69% of respondents thought the federal government was hiding details about Epstein’s clients, compared to 6% who disagreed and about one in four who said they unsure.

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Trump with Rupert Murdoch at Trump’s golf club in Aberdeen in 2016. Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters

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Donald Trump has been dismantling “critical” parts of California’s response to wildfires as the state braces for peak wildfire season, according to a new report.

The Trump administration has cut thousands of employees from the federal workforce in the name of government efficiency.

One government entity that has been a target of these cuts is the National Weather Service, which keeps Americans informed of weather forecasts in the hopes of preventing catastrophic outcomes from natural disasters.

Tom Fahy, legislative director of the NWS Employees Organization, told the Los Angeles Times in a Wednesday article that the weather service’s staff has decreased from 4,369 to 3,757 employees thanks to layoffs and buyouts.

“This draws attention that we have a lot of critical, critical staff shortages,” Fahy said.

An official from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the NWS, told The Independent it has implemented short-term assignments to fill key vacancies at the weather service.

NOAA has also announced opportunities for its employees to apply and quickly be permanently reassigned to weather offices that need it the most, according to the official.

The official says strategic hiring and reforming how the NWS delivers value to the American people will improve the service in the long term.

Staffing shortages at NWS offices in California could lead to problems in the coming months, when the state experiences the worst of its wildfires.

California is still recovering from devastating wildfires that raged through Los Angeles County in January.

The Palisades and Eaton fires led to 30 deaths and saw thousands of structures destroyed.

The Hanford office, which covers the San Joaquin Valley, including Fresno and Bakersfield, has five meteorologists and eight vacancies, the LA Times reported, citing data from the NWS Employees Organization.

Fahy said the office’s 62 percent vacancy rate is the worst in the country.

The Sacramento office, which also covers Stockton, Modesto, Vallejo, Chico, and Redding, follows the Hanford office with the second-worst vacancy rate in the country. That office has eight meteorologists and eight vacancies, according to Fahy.

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Hmmmm…Everything you wanted to know about Tariffs or Not!

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What is a Tariff?

A tariff is a tax that a government places on goods imported from other countries. It’s usually charged as a percentage of the product’s value, and are often used to protect local industries by making imported goods more expensive, which encourages consumers to buy products made within their own country. Donald Trump wants to “re-shore manufacturing, and drive economic growth for the American people“. Tariffs can be good for domestic manufacturers and workers, because they reduce competition from cheaper foreign products, thus helping to protect jobs and support local businesses.

However, higher tariffs can also have negative effects. They often lead to higher prices for consumers, since companies pass the extra cost on to buyers. They can also hurt businesses that rely on imported materials or sell goods overseas, especially if other countries respond by imposing their own tariffs, triggering a trade war. Over time, this can slow economic growth and increase tension between trading partners.

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George Slavich recalls the final hours he spent with his father. It was a laughter-packed day. His father even broke into the song ‘You Are My Sunshine’ over dinner. “His deep, booming, joyful voice filled the entire restaurant,” says Slavich. “I was semi-mortified, as always, while my daughter relished the serenade.”

Then, about 45 minutes after saying goodbye outside the restaurant, Slavich got a call: his father had died. “I fell to the ground in a puddle of shock and disbelief,” he says.

Slavich recognized the mental and emotional trauma he was feeling, and could imagine how it would affect his health. He studies stress for a living, after all. Yet even after he brought up his concerns, his health-care provider didn’t evaluate his stress.

“If stress isn’t assessed, then it isn’t addressed,” says Slavich, a clinical psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The experience highlighted a paradox between what I know stress is doing to the brain and body, and how little attention it gets in clinical care.”

Decades of research have shown that, although short bursts of stress can be healthy, unrelenting stress contributes to heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory disorders, suicide, and other leading causes of death. In some cases, prolonged stress drives the onset of a health problem. In others, it accelerates a disease — or induces unhealthy coping behaviours that contribute to chronic conditions.

Stress also seems to be on the rise. It increased globally during the recession of 2007 to 2009 and the COVID-19 pandemic, says David Almeida, a developmental psychologist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who studies historical shifts in stress as well as everyday stressors. Polls show that globally, including in the United States, stress hasn’t gone back down to previous levels.

“Any time there is uncertainty in society, we see increases in reports of stress,” says Almeida. Uncertainty can ramp up our responses to stressors that are usually minor, he says: “Being stuck in traffic might make you more upset than it did before.”

Although people tend to be aware of their stress, they often don’t know what to do about it. A physician might recommend leaving a stressful job, engaging in talk therapy, or eating and sleeping better, but those options are not always possible. In fact, many of the individuals who face the greatest stressors also face the greatest barriers to treatment. What’s more, some people take pride in how many demands they can juggle, wearing stress like a badge of honour, says Slavich.

He, Almeida, and other researchers are trying to change the current thinking. Emerging assessment tools, along with basic advances in stress science, now make it possible to answer questions such as ‘When does good stress turn bad?’ and ‘How can we intervene effectively?’ An improved understanding of stress, says Slavich, could “fundamentally transform health care”.

Good versus bad stress

Sources of stress run the gamut: a high-stakes presentation at work, a disagreement among friends, trauma from military conflict, living in poverty, structural racism, divorce, a lost job, or a lost loved one.

When the body perceives a threat, stress hormones, including cortisol, flood the bloodstream. Muscles tense, and blood sugar levels rise. The heart beats faster and stronger, and blood vessels dilate, shuttling extra oxygen through the body to help you think and move quicker. The immune system is put on call for rapid healing and recovery.

This fight-or-flight response has, over millennia, helped humans to survive. But it didn’t evolve to cope with traffic, cyberbullying, credit-card debt and the countless other stressors of modern life.

“There is an evolutionary mismatch happening right now,” says Almeida.

Issues arise when the body fails to control the on–off switch, says Wendy Berry Mendes, a psychologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Stress becomes problematic if the body overreacts to situations that are not life-threatening, anticipates a stressor too soon or dwells on negative feelings after the stressor has passed — or if a source of stress sticks around for too long. When cortisol and the sympathetic nervous system are dialled up for extended periods, good stress can turn bad. But how would someone know when the line is crossed?

Stress assssments tend to rely on self-reported symptoms, such as anxiety or trouble sleeping, plus, in some cases, on measurements of blood pressure, cortisol levels or heart rate. These tools aren’t always sufficient. An elevated cortisol level or heart rate, for example, could be explained by exercise or “that cup of coffee you just had”, says Almeida.

Blood pressure, cortisol, and heart rate also rise and fall naturally throughout the day. The timing of the measurement matters, as do patterns over time. Mendes says she is most confident in cortisol measurements that are taken approximately 30 minutes after waking, when a healthy person should experience a strong spike. Heart-rate variability, a measure of the natural fluctuation in the time between beats, is also much more informative as to how the body regulates stress than is the heart rate itself, she says.

Access to many more types of measurement might offer a fuller picture, say researchers. Nearly the entire body reacts to stress, including the nervous, respiratory, digestive, cardiovascular, immune, circadian, and endocrine systems. In a study that has not yet been peer reviewed, Slavich and his colleagues found that the expression of more than 1,500 genes, especially those involved in inflammation and antiviral responses, can change after a person is socially stressed for as little as 10 minutes.

With this complex cascade in mind, Slavich and his colleagues are investigating a broad array of self-reported measures, including past stress and trauma exposure, as well as data on neurotransmitters, hormones, genetics, gene expression, gut bacteria, inflammatory markers, glucose levels, lipid function, and metabolites. These data are now easier to obtain, often with affordable at-home tests.

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred the creation of simple-to-use devices to collect blood, saliva, and stool samples. In parallel, there are increasingly small and powerful wearables that can continuously assess physical activity, sleep, heart rate, heart rate variability, vestibular balance, and galvanic skin response. Sensors under development aim to detect real-time levels of cortisol and other stress hormones through sweat. Meanwhile, researchers are designing ways to gauge blood pressure when people are on the go.

There are limitations to the wearables currently on the market, says Mendes: “Many physiological measures that wearables can detect are simply easy to obtain rather than being the most informative about stress or health.” Still, optimism is high that measures that can be taken quickly and with little or no effort will help people to become more aware of their stress level and will advance stress science.

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Karol Banach

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Donald Trump’s efforts to dismiss the criticism over his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files as a “hoax” showed no sign of working on Thursday as more prominent figures from across the political spectrum emerged to attack the US president, and some of his supporters recorded videos burning their signature Make America Great Again hats.

Days after the Republican speaker of the House, the Trump loyalist Mike Johnson, called for the release of all documents relating to the late financier, a convicted sex offender and longtime former friend of Trump’s, rebellion continued to simmer within the president’s normally diehard base.

Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, told CBS News on Wednesday that “I think the time has come for the administration to release all of the files regarding Jeffrey Epstein’s investigation and prosecution”, while the conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, a frequent close adviser to Trump, called for the appointment of a special counsel to handle the Epstein files investigation. “Obviously, this is not a complete hoax given the fact that [Epstein associate] Ghislaine Maxwell is currently serving 20 years in prison in Florida for her crimes and activities with Jeffrey Epstein, who we know is a convicted sexual predator,” she said.

The podcast host, Theo Von, who attended Trump’s inauguration and told Fox News it was “inspiring”, commented, “yeah, what changed” on a video of the vice-president, JD Vance, appearing on Von’s show in 2024 and calling for the full Epstein list to be released.

Even some of Trump’s most loyal allies in Congress say they are not satisfied by his decision to not release additional files from the Epstein case.

Senator Josh Hawley questioned the justice department’s claims about the files, saying: “I think it is maybe a little difficult to believe the idea that DoJ and the FBI … don’t have any idea who Epstein’s clients were”, and called for Maxwell to testify.

In a rare moment of friction between Trump and Johnson, meanwhile, the House speaker broke with the president on Tuesday, calling for the justice department to make more Epstein documents public, and urging Pam Bondi, the attorney general, to “come forward and explain” the situation. Bondi has come under particular attack for appearing to claim earlier in the year that she had a client list of Epstein’s, then declaring last week no such list existed.

Still, House Republicans voted twice this week to block Democratic attempts to force the public release of all Epstein files within 30 days, with only one Republican, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, voting in favor.

The controversy deepened on Wednesday evening after news that the federal prosecutor Maurene Comey, daughter of former FBI director James Comey, who worked on the criminal cases of both Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, had been fired. The justice department provided no specific reason for her dismissal.

As the backlash spirals out of his normally firm grasp on the Maga voter, Trump slammed “foolish Republicans” on Wednesday who he said were helping Democrats by focusing on documents related to Epstein.

“Some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fall into the net, and so they try and do the Democrats’ work,” Trump said during an Oval Office meeting with the crown prince of Bahrain. “I call it the Epstein hoax. Takes a lot of time and effort. Instead of talking about the great achievements we’ve had … they’re wasting their time with a guy who obviously had some very serious problems, who died three, four years ago.”

Close to seven in 10 Americans in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll said details around Epstein were being concealed. Sixty-nine per cent said they believed there had been concealment of facts on Epstein’s clients by the federal government, with close to 25% unsure whether facts had been concealed, according to the poll.

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Maga hats burn in an online video. Photograph: X | @ExtremePapist

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