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CLIMATEWIRE | The Trump administration has reversed course and will restore U.S. Department of Agriculture websites related to climate change in response to a lawsuit brought by environmental organizations and farmers.

Groups represented by Earthjustice and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University had sued in February, alleging that the removal of climate-related policies, datasets, and other resources violated federal laws requiring advanced notice, reasoned decision-making and public access to certain information.

In a letter late Monday, the administration told Judge Margaret Garnett of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that the USDA will restore the climate-related web content that was removed after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, including all USDA webpages and interactive tools listed in the lawsuit.

It noted that the process of restoring the removed content was already underway and that the USDA expects to mostly complete the process in two weeks. The USDA also pledged that it “commits to complying with” federal law governing future “posting decisions.”

The purged material had included information on climate-smart farming, forest conservation, and adaptation. The USDA also took down climate sections from the websites for the Forest Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, including information to help farmers access money for conservation practices.

The move comes days before Garnett was to hear the challengers’ request for a preliminary injunction that sought to require the USDA to restore the webpages and stop taking down additional climate information.

“We’re glad that USDA recognized that its blatantly unlawful purge of climate-change-related information is harming farmers and communities across the country,” said Jeffrey Stein, an associate attorney with Earthjustice. Stein added that farmers depend on the websites to protect their farms from drought, wildfire, and extreme weather.

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Over the last few months, you’ve probably heard more than you ever have about tariffs. Tariffs have been a big focus of President Donald Trump’s second term, and many companies have announced price hikes to offset tariff costs. 

Trump recently announced new 50% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports last week, a move that could hit home appliances particularly hard.

“We expect home appliance prices to rise this year, especially for mid-range and premium models that rely heavily on imported parts and materials,” said David Warrick, executive vice president at Overhaul, a supply chain management platform, and former head of global supply chain technology at Microsoft. 

Larger home appliances could be the most susceptible to price hikes. “Refrigerators, dishwashers, and washing machines are particularly vulnerable because they often include a high percentage of foreign components — even when final assembly happens in the US,” said Warrick. 

CNET has been covering the Trump administration’s tariff policy and changes, and we’ve already seen manufacturers and retailers raise prices on laptops, toys and groceries. Before you panic-buy a home appliance, here’s what you need to know about tariffs and how they could increase appliance prices this year.

How do tariffs impact home appliance prices?

We could see home appliance prices rise on products that are made in countries hit with tariffs. Because tariffs are paid by the importing company, the costs are typically passed along to the consumer in the form of higher prices, although the price hike may not be a 1-to-1 ratio with the tariff rate.

The tariffs that most threaten home appliances include the 50% tariff on all steel and aluminum imports, the 25% tariff on imported goods from Mexico and Canada, and the 30% tariff on imports from China. Higher tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China have been temporarily halted, but this could change in the coming months.

Tariffs don’t only apply to assembled products that are made elsewhere and then shipped here to be sold. Many products that are assembled in the US involve imported components. 

Materials like steel and aluminum are often imported, as are pumps, motors, and hoses, so appliances that include those parts could see notable price increases, according to Travis Tokar, a professor of supply chain management at Texas Christian University.

How tariffs impact home appliance prices could also vary depending on the type of appliance, the size, and where it’s manufactured.

“A lot of this will depend on the agreement with Mexico since many large appliances are assembled in Mexico,” said Patti Jordan, associate professor of professional practice at the Neely School of Business. “Product[s] manufactured primarily in China, such as vacuum cleaners, air purifiers, and small appliances, will most definitely be impacted.”

The Trump administration has also wavered on its tariff policy, making it difficult for the industry to predict what’s next. “It’s the off-and-on tariff strategy that is leading to the supply chain instability more so than the tariffs — at least so far,” Buffington added.

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Trump’s new steel and aluminum tariffs could increase the price of appliances.  Jeffrey Hazelwood/CNET

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We’ve never been so close to discovering life beyond Earth. Our generation could be the one that finds it, provided two essential ingredients exist. First, that there’s life out there. Second, that we’re willing to look.

Alien life’s existence is outside our control, but the universe seems to encourage our attention. Many people rest their optimism about alien life on the remarkable fact that our cosmos is brimming with planetary possibilities. To date, we’ve discovered nearly 6,000 exoplanets, most of them around only the nearest of the Milky Way’s hundreds of billions of stars. That means all our astonishingly successful planet-hunting surveys have studied just a mere teardrop of a vast cosmic sea—and implies there are at least as many planets as stars in our galaxy alone, plus some 10²⁵ worlds in the rest of the observable universe. Chances are we’re not alone, so long as the probability that planets spring forth life is not astronomically miniscule.

Discovering alien life, on the other hand, rests squarely on us. For the first time in human history, we can meaningfully answer once-timeless questions. Countless generations before us could only ask, “Are we alone?” as passive stargazers. Today, our rockets reliably reach otherworldly destinations, our robotic emissaries yield transformative knowledge about our planetary neighbors, and our telescopes gaze ever farther into the heavens, revealing the subtle beauty of the cosmos.

NASA has led the way on this work, but it now faces an existential threat in the form of short-sighted budget cuts proposed by the White House. If passed into law by Congress, these cuts would axe critical space missions, gut NASA’s workforce, and abandon one of the most captivating quests in all of science. Additional sweeping cuts planned for the National Science Foundation would be similarly ruinous for ground-based astronomy and a host of other endeavors that support NASA’s work at the high frontier.

Led by NASA, for more than a half-century, the U.S. has been building toward a golden age of astrobiology, a field of research the space agency helped invent. The groundwork was laid on Mars, beginning with the Viking missions of the 1970s and continuing into today, where the agency has “followed the water” to dried-up lakebeds. In 2014, NASA’s Curiosity rover uncovered clues pointing to an ancient, life-friendly Mars, and more recently, NASA’s Perseverance rover has been caching promising rock samples for return to Earth. Researchers eagerly await their arrival, because if Mars ever did harbor life, then some of Perseverance’s specimens may well contain some sort of Martian fossils.

Besides our own familiar Earth, Mars isn’t the only promising incubator of life around the sun. In the outer solar system, NASA’s Galileo probe and Cassini orbiter lifted the icy veils of Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, respectively. Beneath thick shells of ice, both moons harbor global subsurface oceans, which could be teeming with bacterial or even macroscopic denizens. NASA’s Clipper spacecraft launched in 2024 and is hurtling toward Europa, where it will make close flybys of the moon to assess its habitability. The agency has developed concepts for follow-on missions to land on both worlds and taste the chilly chemistry there for the telltale signs of life.

Every organism on Earth requires liquid water, but perhaps that’s not a strict requirement elsewhere. Astrobiologists speculate about “weird life” in Venus’s sulfuric acid clouds and in the liquid hydrocarbon seas of Saturn’s frigid moon Titan. NASA plans to visit each of these worlds with state-of-the-art spacecraft—two to Venus and one to Titan—in the 2030s.

And then there’s the great expanse of exoplanets. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has furnished unprecedented data about exoplanet atmospheres, most of them hot and puffy—the easiest to observe. But the most alluring exoplanets for astrobiologists—those the size and temperature of Earth—are just beyond our sight. Currently, teams of scientists are conceptualizing NASA’s next great eye in space, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, whose mission is, as its name suggests, to image and examine dozens of notionally Earth-like planets for the global exhalations of alien biospheres.

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Alzheimer’s is a pervasive and devastating disease. An estimated 6.9 million Americans were living with this common type of dementia in 2024, and that number is expected to grow by 2060 unless medical breakthroughs alter its course. The condition is also the fifth-leading cause of death among those 65 and over.

With Alzheimer’s becoming increasingly common within a rapidly aging population, exploring ways to reduce the risk is vital.

That’s why a recent study suggesting certain careers may reduce Alzheimer’s risk is so important to understand — not, of course, because everyone should change their job to avoid dementia, but because understanding why those jobs have a protective effect can be important in identifying new methods of disease prevention.

These two jobs appear to lower dementia risk

To understand whether doing certain work can affect the chances of developing Alzheimer’s, researchers reviewed death certificates from the National Vital Statistics System in the United States that also included occupation.

They discovered that among the 443 occupations studied, workers in two particular career fields had a noticeably lower risk of developing his condition.

The two jobs that appeared to significantly lower the risk were taxi driver and ambulance driver. In fact, just 0.91% of taxi driver deaths were attributed to Alzheimer’s, while only 1.03% of ambulance drivers died of this disease. By comparison, 1.82% of CEOs died of Alzheimer’s, which is fairly close to the overall average death rate from this dementia variant.

Although the difference may not seem very substantial when looking at the raw percentages, ultimately, these numbers show that ambulance drivers and taxi drivers experience around 40% fewer Alzheimer’s-related deaths compared with the general population.

Why are taxi and ambulance drivers experiencing a lower Alzheimer’s risk?

While considering the link between specific careers and a reduced risk is important, determining why this link exists is even more essential. Developing a deeper understanding of factors affecting Alzheimer’s risk increases the likelihood of finding a cure or at least identifying effective prevention methods.

Fortunately, experts were able to determine two key factors that shed more light on the potential reasons for the low prevalence of the disease among taxi and ambulance drivers.

First was the fact that other transportation professionals did not experience a decline in risk. Aircraft pilots and ship captains both had higher-than-average rates of Alzheimer’s disease at 2.34% and 2.12%, respectively. Bus drivers, on the other hand, had a 1.6% death rate from the condition, which is closer to the average among all workers.

Second, ambulance and taxi drivers did not experience lower rates of other types of dementia beyond Alzheimer’s.

One possible explanation for the lower risk is that both taxi and ambulance drivers must regularly exercise their spatial and navigational skills in real time. Moreover, they must do so much more often than other transportation professionals because ambulance and taxi drivers regularly travel different routes in unfamiliar locations, rather than traveling the same route regularly.

Because they must adjust to new conditions in unfamiliar areas, taxi and ambulance drivers may use their hippocampus more regularly, as this is the part of the brain that’s exercised when deploying these skills. This theory is also supported by older studies that demonstrated taxi drivers may experience enlargement in parts of the hippocampus.

“Our results highlight the possibility that neurological changes in the hippocampus or elsewhere among taxi and ambulance drivers may account for the lower rates of Alzheimer’s disease,” senior author Anupam B. Jena, MD, PhD, a physician in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital said of the findings.

This study doesn’t imply that relying on GPS navigation apps while driving will cause Alzheimer’s, but there is evidence that GPS can help people with mild dementia avoid getting lost.

Translating this study into action for you

There is, of course, a limit to the number of people who can work as taxi or ambulance drivers, but identifying the lower rates of Alzheimer’s among people within these professions provides clues into how those concerned about the disease could reduce their risk.

For example, activities like outdoor orienting, which experts have revealed can help develop spatial memory, could help workers in other professions strengthen crucial areas of the brain.

Past research has also revealed that dancing challenges the brain in important ways, especially when learning complex steps such as the waltz and swing dancing. As with navigation, dancing requires the brain to manage an internal three-dimensional map; however, instead of remembering a route, a dancer must recall a sequence of steps and where to place their body.

Games, puzzles, and continued learning are associated with a lower dementia risk, including spatially challenging games like jigsaw puzzles. But what about 3D versions of games? (Remember Dr. Spock’s three-dimensional chess game in Star Trek?) Some studies have shown that playing 3D video games may keep older players sharp. For a truly mind-bending experience, try downloading the app for Monument Valley on your phone, desktop,p or tablet. Your avatar will travel through a beautiful world by rotating building pieces; it’s much more difficult than it sounds.

Ultimately, maintaining a strong mind and body can only help you. While it may not directly prevent Alzheimer’s, challenging your brain’s spatial awareness and memory can help you maintain overall good mental and physical health for as long as possible as you enter older age. It is worth the effort to reduce your overall disease risk and, hopefully, enjoy a happier, healthier retirement.

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One of your best wellness tools may be a journal. Journaling offers an array of benefits — from easing stress to sparking self-discovery.

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Journaling

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