James' World 2

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CLIMATEWIRE | The federal government Tuesday shut down the online system it uses to distribute billions in disaster aid after President Donald Trump ordered agencies to freeze the flow of public money, alarming officials who are struggling to respond to catastrophes.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency cut off access to the online portal, which funnels roughly $30 billion a year to states for disaster expenses ranging from debris cleanup to infrastructure repairs, following Trump’s expansive order to halt federal funding as the White House scrutinizes spending programs, Todd DeVoe, emergency coordinator for Inglewood, California, told POLITICO’s E&E News.

“We may see recovery delayed for years,” said DeVoe, who is second vice president of the International Association of Emergency Managers in the United States. “The grant portal where we do all grant work is inaccessible.”

FEMA did not respond to requests for comment. The spending pause outlined by a memo released late Monday by the Office of Management and Budget was causing confusion within the disaster agency, according to people within FEMA who were not authorized to speak to the press. A federal judge blocked Trump’s spending freeze on Tuesday evening, minutes before it was scheduled to take effect, until Feb. 3.

“It’s going to slow things down when there’s already frustration with how long it takes for communities to recover,” former FEMA chief of staff Michael Coen told E&E News, referring to the funding disruption. “It’s just one more thing they now have to deal with.”

The spending pause was scheduled to take effect at 5 p.m. Tuesday, four days after Trump assailed FEMA and the Biden administration for the response to Hurricane Helene in North Carolina in late September. The freeze affected programs across the government as the administration undertook a sprawling review to ensure they comply with Trump’s executive orders, including cutting off funds for diversity, equity and inclusion.

A halt to FEMA spending could affect every state that has been hit by a major storm, wildfire or other disaster in the past decade or more as they wait for the federal government to reimburse them for recovery projects. FEMA pays 75-100 percent of rebuilding costs and is still reimbursing states for disasters that occurred two decades ago.

“They’re kind of in limbo right now, trying to figure out if they’re going to be funded or not,” DeVoe said. The pause could “really impact low-income states and communities.”

A lot depends on how long FEMA withholds funding. “If this is just a short pause,” DeVoe said, “there may be no harm, no foul.”

It’s unclear how a halt will affect recovery efforts related to the wildfires in Southern California or from Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which battered Florida, Georgia and South Carolina in addition to North Carolina.

Southeastern states are still cleaning up debris left by the hurricanes, but they have not yet sought reconstruction aid from FEMA. The California wildfires are still active. FEMA has agreed to pay a large share of cleanup costs for the hurricanes and fires and for emergency housing.

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It’s the Friday evening of a long work week. Maybe you sit down on the couch and start to scroll on social media. A friend texts you to cancel the dinner you planned, and a part of you is relieved, happy even. Now you can stay home and order in.

Journalist Derek Thompson says this turn toward isolation can’t entirely be blamed on COVID-19. “We are now in the midst of an anti-social century,” he says.

In his most recent article for The Atlantic, Thompson writes that the trend toward isolation has been driven by technology. Cars, he says, “privatized people’s lives” in the second half of the 20th century, by allowing them to move from dense cities into more sprawling suburbs. Televisions, meanwhile, “privatized our leisure” by keeping us indoors. More recently, Thompson says, smartphones came along, to further silo us.

“Smartphones make our alone time feel more crowded than it used to be, at the same time that our smartphones make crowds feel more lonely than they used to be,” he says. “When you’re at a party, it’s easier than ever, arguably, to take out your phone, look into your palm, and suddenly, from an experiential standpoint, you’re not at a party at all.”

In 2023, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued a report about America’s “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” But Thompson makes a distinction between the two.

“If loneliness is an instinct to be around people, I would argue that [the] kind of social isolation that we’re seeing is the opposite of loneliness, choosing to be alone,” he says. “We’re choosing to spend more and more time with ourselves, more and more time, year after year, without feeling that special, important biological cue to be around other people. And that, I think, is something to be quite worried about.”

Interview highlights

On the need for communal spaces

Between the early 1900s and 1950, we built a ton of what the sociologist Eric Klinenberg calls “social infrastructure.” We built library branches and community centers and public pools, and we built places for people to spend time outside of their home and their work. In the last 50, 70 years, we haven’t built nearly as much of this stuff. … “Third space,” or “third place” … it’s not your home and … it’s not your work. And so it’s a place that you choose to be with people you’re not related to and you’re not financially obligated to be around. … These places build community. …

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As the new moon rises this week, it ushers in a new year on the lunar calendar used by many cultures across East and Southeast Asia. On the Chinese zodiac’s 12-year lunar cycle, 2025 is the Year of the Snake—an animal that symbolizes wisdom and change.

These limbless reptiles can be found on every populated continent, thanks to an evolutionary “big bang” some 125 million years ago. There are more than 3,000 snake species, with incredible variation among them. Some of the animals are smaller than an earthworm, while others are longer than a pickup truck. Some are harmless to humans, whereas others are venomous. And the ecological roles they play as critical pest controllers and nutrient cyclers are often underappreciated. So as we look to the year ahead, let’s give our odd, wriggly friends some appreciation.

Shimmying Serpents

Snakes’ signature move is the slither. But they can also scrunch forward like an inchworm or launch themselves from a coiled position to leap or strike. And a few years ago scientists discovered another, stranger method of snake movement: “lasso locomotion.” Researchers were testing ways to keep brown tree snakes away from birds’ nests in Guam. They put wide metal cylinders at the bottom of poles, expecting this to deter the snakes, which generally need to wrap themselves twice around a pole or tree trunk to climb it with their normal, accordionlike “concertina locomotion.”

Instead, the team found that snakes were literally tying themselves into knots to surpass the barriers. The reptiles would wrap their tail just once around the barrier and then hook the tip around their body. This created a sort of lasso shape that the snakes could use to shimmy up the pole—ever so slowly but effectively.

Thermal Vision

Pythons, boas, pit vipers, and more can hunt in total darkness. They sense prey animals not only by smell but also by the heat their quarry emanates. These snake’s so-called pit organs enable them to “see” this heat; the organs act like a thermal camera that allows the reptiles to home in on a target.

Pit organs are membrane-covered divots near a snake’s nostrils. Infrared radiation emanating from potential prey heats up the membrane, which causes it to thicken and changes the small electric charge that runs across the membrane’s outer surface. That voltage change gets passed to nerve cells, which send the information to the brain.

Open Wide

Snakes generally don’t chew their food. Instead, they swallow prey whole and slowly digest it over the course of days. Burmese pythons, for example, can spend an entire week digesting a single meal. While they normally eat smaller mammals like rodents, these pythons have also been spotted consuming comparatively enormous alligators and deer. They can open their mouth four times wider than their skull.

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The brain is a well-designed machine. If it’s working well—like when it’s reading the words on this page—we don’t notice it at all. At night when we sleep, the brain takes our consciousness offline so it can start its real work: sorting through the day’s information, storing the important parts, and cleaning out the gunk that accumulated.

The brain is so well-designed, in fact, that we hardly even notice when it’s breaking down. 

Like the rest of our organs, the brain undergoes its own aging process. And yet the majority of adults don’t experience major cognitive decline—the kind that severely limits their ability to live independently—over time. 

That’s because the brain is one of the most resilient organs in the body. Yes, dementia affects about 5.6% of the world’s population, a share that includes the devastating burden of Alzheimer’s disease. But in normal aging, even as parts of the brain shrink and neurons lose connection with each other, those changes only have a minor effect on our daily lives. It may be frustrating to forget where you put your keys, but you can still learn that you’re prone to forgetting them, and pick up the habit of writing notes for yourself. 

For adults who remain neurologically healthy into their later years, the brain constantly adapts and even thrives under new conditions. But how it pulls it off is a mystery scientists are still trying to solve. The hope is that if researchers can understand how healthy brains stay resilient, they can identify what’s happening when these systems fail—often, leading to dementia. 

Never Constant

The brain’s incredible resilience comes, at least in part, from its plasticity. The rest of the body’s organs carry out roughly the same job from the moment we’re born—albeit on a larger scale as we grow. The heart pumps blood, the liver and kidneys filter, and the stomach churns food.

Not the brain.

Babies’ brains are equipped with billions of neurons, but they have to be warmed up and molded to be useful. Over as many as 25 years, neurons form hundreds of thousands of connections as we learn and make memories. Some of these connections are cropped as they’re not needed; others grow stronger as we learn to reason in the abstract, mitigate impulsive and risky behavior, and plan ahead for the future. 

Shortly after the brain finishes fully forming, though, it starts to wear down. 

“Aging is a lifelong biological process,” says Kristin Kennedy, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Dallas who studies healthy cognitive aging. There’s some disagreement about exactly when the brain starts to show signs of wear and tear. Some of the limited research available suggests it happens around middle age, some suggests our 30s, and some even in our 20s. But the consensus is that some shrinkage is inevitable and normal. Specifically, the prefrontal cortex and medial lobes—areas involved with high-level functions like planning, emotional processing, learning, and memory—get a little smaller, says Elizabeth Zelinski, a neuroscientist and gerontologist at the University of Southern California. 

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For most, the brain constantly adapts and even thrives under new conditions. Photo by Hokyoung Kim for Quartz

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