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This episode is part of “The Young American Scientists,” an editorially independent project that was produced with financial support from Regeneron.

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. This week, we’ve been celebrating some of the winners of SciAm’s first-ever Young American Scientist awards.

Today’s guest is Jaye Gardiner. She’s an assistant professor of biology at Tufts University, where her lab has a unique spin on cancer research.

Thanks for chatting with us, Jaye.

So a lot of scientists study the ways that viruses and cancers can interact, but the way you’re doing it is a little unconventional and might surprise our listeners. So, could you tell us more about why your perspective is so unique?

Jaye Gardiner: Yeah. So up to 20 percent of all cancers are actually caused by viruses, so if you think of things like human papillomavirus [HPV] that can cause cervical cancer, head and neck cancers, penile or anal cancers. You have the hepatitis viruses of, like, B and C, that can cause liver cancer, viruses that can cause lymphomas or leukemias.

[In] all of those, the virus changes something in the cell that’s supposed to tamp down its ability to divide endlessly. So, kind of at the heart of all cancers, or at least in the malignant cells, we’re thinking more about the cell cycle and trying to stop that from going on endlessly. The way that I’m thinking about it is more about the contributions to the environment.

So if you use an analogy like the seed and soil, so your tumor cell is the seed, the microenvironment is the soil that can either nourish it or keep it at bay. When our bodies are healthy, that soil is very dry and arid, so it doesn’t allow that seed to germinate. So I want to understand if ways that we have viral infections could cause that soil to be much more rich and fertile, giving all of the nutrients that’s needed to allow that seed to grow whenever it shows up.

Feltman: So speaking of that microenvironment that you compare to soil, uh, I know a lot of your work focuses on the extracellular matrix. Can you explain for us exactly what that is?

Gardiner: The extracellular matrix you can think of as the noncellular components, so no cells whatsoever. These are just, kind of, molecules that can make fibers and kind of create networks and support for your tissues. So things like collagen, that we hear a lot about, or hyaluronic acid, those are components of the extracellular matrix, or ECM.

A really great way to think about it…. So it’s really important for us to heal wounds, right? So if we cut open our hand, we wanna have that close up normally without having a scar. The scar, if it does happen, is an accumulation of the extracellular matrix, where those fibroblasts were there for too long, secreting the extracellular matrix for much longer than they should have. If we think about that now for an entire organ or for fibrosis, we’ll use the lung as an example, where you have to be able to inhale and exhale, your lungs have to expand. If you have scar tissue there, so all of this extracellular matrix being deposited, now that organ can’t function normally.

So you’ve made it, like, really hard and rigid. It can’t open and close. You can’t get the air in. That leads to complications for the patient. So if you think about that in any of the organs that we have, they all have very specific functions that usually require them to be a little bit flexible; otherwise, they would’ve been hard like bone in the first place.

So extracellular matrix—incredibly important, not just for your hair and fingernails and youthful-looking skin, but has a real impact in a lot of diseases as well.

Feltman: Are there any specific viruses that you’re particularly interested in?

Gardiner: So right now, my interests—we’ll start with coxsackievirus, specifically clade B. Any parent out there, you might have heard of the effects of a clade A coxsackievirus, ’cause it can cause hand, foot, and mouth disease, so something very common among children.

But clade B, [when] most people are infected with it, [it] just causes kind of like a common cold. So you wouldn’t really be able to differentiate it between a different virus that caused the cold. But the reason why I’m interested in it is that there have been some studies that showed that virus, even though it’s considered a respiratory virus, so it would primarily be in your lungs, can also infect your pancreas.

And for coxsackievirus in particular, B3, if we want to get very specific, you can actually cause both acute, so a short time to resolve, or chronic, a long time to resolve, form of fibrosis in the pancreas. And so fibrosis is a predisposition for any type of cancer, so now if we have a virus that can cause these long-term fibroses in an organ, now we’ve already set that soil up for that cancer when it takes off.

Feltman: So, as we continue to learn more about how these different viruses can affect the extracellular matrix and contribute to cancer risk, what do you think the impact of that knowledge could be?

Gardiner: I think it would probably redefine what we think of as the causes for cancer, or at least broaden our scope in how we deal and manage with colds.

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Jeffery DelViscio

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Key Points

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Hmmmm ,,,.  Sic Semper Tyrannis – Tarado

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Death Toll

More than 3,000 Iranians were reported to have been killed in the conflict. Israel says 26 Israelis have been killed. Thousands of people in both countries have been injured.

The U.S. military says 13 of its members have been killed.

Israel renewed attacks on Lebanon on March 18 as part of the wider war, and about 3,700 people have been killed there, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

Strikes, mainly by Iran, have also killed people across the Middle East, including workers from South Asian countries in the Persian Gulf.

The U.S. military killed three Indian civilian sailors in a strike on a commercial ship near Oman, raising tensions between the United States and India.

In the deadliest known civilian casualty incident, a U.S. missile strike demolished an Iranian school, killing at least 175 people on the first day of the war, according to Iranian officials.

Financial Costs

Iran’s economy was already deeply troubled before the war. But now it is in free fall. Prices for food and other basic goods have skyrocketed, and daily life is a struggle.

The scale of devastation has been great, with hundreds of schools and health care facilities damaged or destroyed in the war, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, the country’s primary humanitarian relief organization.

For U.S. taxpayers and consumers, the cost of the war is at least $132 billion, according to an estimate by Moody’s Analytics. That factors in military spending, rising energy and commodity prices and interest rates, said Mark Zandi, the company’s chief economist.

A top Pentagon official told Congress last month that the cost had risen to around $29 billion for the military. That estimate did not include the price of repairing more than a dozen U.S. bases in the region damaged by Iranian attacks.

The costs of repair and maintenance, as well as keeping carrier strike groups at sea, also need to be factored in. “It costs a lot of money to just keep everyone and all this apparatus deployed there,” said Linda Bilmes, a public finance expert and senior lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.

ran also severely damaged other U.S. assets in the region, including a valuable military radar jet on a tarmac in Saudi Arabia and the U.S. Embassy compound in Riyadh.

Energy Prices

Americans have paid roughly $60 billion more for gasoline and diesel since the conflict began as a result of higher prices, according to an Iran War Energy Cost Tracker from Brown University. That’s about an extra $460 per household.

When the United States and Israel started the war with Iran, Americans were paying, on average, $2.98 a gallon at the pump, according to AAA, the motor club.

Since then, gas prices have seen large spikes and are now around $4 a gallon.

Oil prices surged when the Iranian military attacked some commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital passageway for shipping. That disrupted the global flow of petroleum. Crude oil is the main ingredient for gas.

The global benchmark for crude oil has dropped since a peace agreement framework was announced days ago. It is currently near $80 a barrel. At one point in March, prices climbed to around $120 a barrel.

Those high fuel prices have trickled down the chain and inflated many other costs tied to fuel, like airline fares and the transportation of commodities and manufactured goods.

Fertilizer and Food

Disruptions to global trade from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have squeezed prices of commodities such as sulfur, a key ingredient of certain fertilizers.

A Council on Foreign Relations report earlier this month by Máximo Torero Cullen, the chief economist of the Food and Agriculture Organization, said the disruptions in the strait would have consequences that “extend well beyond agriculture, threatening higher food prices, higher food inflation, reduced economic growth and increased hunger worldwide.”

More on the Fighting in the Middle East

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• Iran’s Economy: For the first time in decades, Iran’s status as an international economic outlaw could be nearing an end, allowing a leading oil producer to re-establish ties with the rest of the globe.

• J.D. Vance Defends U.S.-Iran Deal: The vice president said the United States had leverage to dictate the outcome of the next round of negotiations. But he claimed incorrectly that Iran got no new benefit from the lifting of oil sanctions.

• Israel’s Reaction to Agreement: The deal is disastrous for Israel, analysts said, because it accomplishes none of Israel’s goals and arguably leaves the country in worse shape. Leading figures from a right-wing Israeli broadcaster are openly attacking President Trump.

• Frustration in the Region: The preliminary deal struck this week between Iran and the United States left out a provision on missiles and drones, leaving officials in the region with a sense of frustration, according to analysts.

• Hegseth Berates NATO Allies: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a meeting of NATO defense ministers to criticize their reluctance to assist in American strikes against Iran, suggesting that the Pentagon would reduce the number of troops it keeps in Europe as a result.

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Service members carrying the remains of one of six U.S. soldiers killed in Kuwait during the dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base in March. Credit…Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

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If something is allowed by the laws of physics, then scientists can assume that it probably exists. Under that reasoning, certain exotic structures of spacetime called closed timelike curves may be real—and they may allow a message to travel from the future to the past.

A new study has calculated how much information can be sent backward through time via closed timelike curves. Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts that these spacetime pathways can form under intensely bending, rotating space—such as around a spinning black hole. “Spacetime can curve around so much that you can be innocently going forward in time and then you meet yourself in the past,” says study co-author Seth Lloyd, a quantum information scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

According to general relativity, in a rotating black hole, the singularity—the theoretical point of infinite density at the center—is really a one-dimensional ring, with closed timelike curves arcing around it. No one knows if these spacetime structures actually exist in our universe, but they are plausible. We do know, however, that black holes are plentiful in space and that most of them spin. “So they might very well exist,” Lloyd says.

Inspiration for the study came in part from a movie. “In early 2025, I watched the film Interstellar,” says Kaiyuan Ji, a graduate student at Cornell University who, with his advisor Mark Wilde, collaborated with Lloyd on the new research. The findings were published recently in Physical Review Letters.

In the movie, an astronaut played by Matthew McConaughey travels up close to a black hole and sends a message to his daughter in the past. Ji realized the plot was mathematically equivalent to a question he and his colleagues had posed in previous research.

The group decided to investigate how best to use closed timelike curves to transmit information between the future and the past. “The strategy has a different structure than communicating forward in time,” Ji says. “The key difference is that the sender in the future has memory of what happened in the past, and that causes a causal loop. You now have the ability to bend the probability of success.”

The researchers assumed that the channel might have some noise—interference preventing the maximum amount of information from passing through. But the sender’s memory of the past can help counter that noise, they found. “Let’s say you drop a message into a black hole in the future and it emerges from the same black hole in the past, but the message gets corrupted or parts of it get lost,” Lloyd says. “The receiver in the past can say, ‘Hey, if you’re going to send me a message last Tuesday, I know the closed timelike curve was super noisy then. Can you send multiple copies or try on Wednesday?’”

The findings could have interesting implications for quantum computing, says Giulio Chiribella, a quantum information scientist at the University of Hong Kong, who was not involved in the study. Chiribella has studied the probability of simulating closed timelike curves in a laboratory on Earth.

“We don’t know if [these curves] exist in our universe, but we do know that if they exist, they have powerful consequences,” he says. “For example, they induce radically new scenarios where the order of events becomes indefinite, boosting quantum computation and quantum communication beyond the limits of conventional setups.”

In the past, scientists have found that closed timelike curves can’t be used for paradoxical time travel. An experiment in a 2011 paper co-authored by Lloyd simulated these pathways in a laboratory and effectively sent a photon (a particle of light) back in time by less than a second. The researchers were curious whether the photon might be able to destroy the past version of itself—akin to a person traveling back in time to kill their grandfather, thus preventing themselves from ever being born. The so-called grandfather paradox is a prickly aspect of time travel, but in the case of closed timelike curves, it seems that quantum physics permits only self-consistent versions of time travel. In other words, you can visit the past, but you can’t change the future—no grandfather murder allowed.

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Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images

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Today, the HISTORY Channel has officially launched Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise, a new eight-part podcast series examining one of the most consequential periods in American history. Available now on major podcast platforms, the project is hosted by bestselling author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell and features commentary from former President Barack Obama.

Produced in partnership with Higher Ground, Pushkin Industries, Audible, and The HISTORY Channel, the series revisits the years following the Civil War, when the United States confronted questions about citizenship, democracy, and what freedom would mean for millions of newly emancipated Black Americans.

While many history lessons end with the Confederacy’s defeat and the abolition of slavery, Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise focuses on the turbulent years that followed. The series also examines why many of those efforts ultimately fell short and how the consequences remain visible today. Obama appears in conversations with Gladwell at both the beginning and conclusion of the series. Their discussions frame the broader themes explored throughout the project, including political power, civic participation, and the unfinished work of American democracy.

“The Reconstruction Era was a brief but pivotal and turbulent chapter in our nation’s history – one that is often overlooked, even though its consequences are still felt today,” said Obama. “In confronting this period honestly, I hope audiences can rediscover an essential part of our past and remember that even in moments of deep conflict and contradiction, persistence and perseverance remain powerful sources of hope.”

Several prominent historians, writers, and cultural commentators also contribute to the podcast. Among them are Jelani Cobb, Eric Foner, Kellie Carter Jackson, Kidada Williams, Manisha Sinha, David Blight, Kai Wright, Ashley C. Ford, and Wyatt Cenac. Their perspectives help illuminate the debates, conflicts, and possibilities that emerged during Reconstruction.

Drawing from letters, court documents, eyewitness accounts, diaries, and historical records, the series paints a detailed portrait of a country attempting to rebuild itself after slavery. Listeners are introduced to political leaders, formerly enslaved people, educators, organizers, and reformers whose efforts helped redefine the nation’s future, even as many of their gains faced fierce resistance.

The release arrives as part of HISTORY Honors 250, a broad initiative commemorating the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States in 2026. Through original programming and special projects, the campaign seeks to revisit pivotal moments, influential figures, and lesser-known stories that have contributed to the country’s development.

For Higher Ground, the podcast adds to a growing slate of audio projects developed in partnership with Audible. Previous productions have included Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast, Your Mama’s Kitchen hosted by Michele Norris, The Wonder of Stevie hosted by Wesley Morris, and Fela Kuti: Fear No Man.

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President Barack Obama and Malcolm Gladwell (2026). Photo Credit: Higher Ground Productions | Photo: Eli Turner | Courtesy of A+E Global Media)

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Israel awoke to a frightening new reality on Thursday as it absorbed, with disbelief and largely in silence, the terms of President Trump’s preliminary agreement to end the war with Iran.

It accomplishes none of Israel’s war aims, analysts and officials said, and arguably leaves the country in worse shape on each of them.

Regime change? The government in Tehran is emerging from the war even more hard-line and emboldened, despite being decapitated at the outset of the conflict in late February. The deal’s requirement that American forces retreat from the “proximity” of Iran within 30 days means that Iran can boast that it has chased the U.S. military out of the region.

Ballistic missiles and proxy militias? The agreement does nothing to address Iran’s missile arsenal or its support of Israel’s enemies, like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

Worse still for Israel, by constraining its military in Lebanon — indeed, by requiring that Israel withdraw its forces from that country — the agreement seeks to handcuff Israel in a way that it was not before the war.

The hundreds of billions of dollars that Iran may receive in sanctions relief, unfrozen assets, or reconstruction aid could wind up funding more missiles in Iran and aiding Tehran’s militia allies around the Middle East.

And Iran’s nuclear program? The existential threat to Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has tried to eliminate throughout his career, and which was Mr. Trump’s primary reason for joining the wars on Iran, was left for a later stage of U.S.-Iran negotiations.

“It’s a bad agreement in which the Americans are paying with cash, and got, at the maximum, a letter of intent,” Yaakov Amidror, a hawkish former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, said in an interview.

David Horovitz, the editor of The Times of Israel, called it “a catastrophic capitulation,” in the headline of a fiery opinion column.

And Nir Dvori, an analyst for Israel’s Channel 12 News, likened the deal to a “diplomatic Oct. 7” — a cataclysmic disaster for which Israel was wholly unprepared.

Mr. Netanyahu addressed the U.S.-Iran agreement only briefly on Thursday, saying “additional challenges lie ahead of us,” requiring “calmness, a firm stance on our security interests, and at the same time, maintaining the important connection with our American friends.”

The prime minister said Israel would stick to its ultimate goal: “Iran will not have nuclear weapons.”

He also vowed that Israel would restore security in the north, near its border with Lebanon. “That requires maintaining the security zone in southern Lebanon, and it requires that we not withdraw from it as long as Israel’s security needs demand it,” he said.

Otherwise, it was left to minor ministers and backbench lawmakers to try put the best possible face on the agreement.

Amichai Chikli, the diaspora affairs minister, speculated in a radio interview that Mr. Netanyahu would know how to say no to Mr. Trump about pulling out of Lebanon just as he knew how “to bring the United States into this war.”

But others more soberly grappled with the degree to which Mr. Netanyahu’s triumphalist rhetoric from early in the war had proved fantastical. He had repeatedly and confidently assured Israelis that the country and its alliance with the United States were “changing the face of the Middle East” to Israel’s advantage.

“We are remaking the region,” Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser, said on Thursday.

“Iran came out stronger, and I believe is now the regional hegemon,” he added. “They stood up to the U.S., the global superpower. They can have missiles, and there’s nothing in the agreement about the nuclear issue except we’ll talk about it. This is an Iranian victory over the U.S. and Israel.”

Even as they reeled from the terms of the agreement, Israelis across the political spectrum seemed also to be reckoning with Mr. Trump, the nature of his support for Israel, and the degree to which Mr. Netanyahu has tied Israel’s fortunes to the American leader’s good will.

On Wednesday at the Group of 7 summit in France, the president had again spoken of Mr. Netanyahu with disdain, suggesting he was excitable and prone to overreacting to Hezbollah’s attacks. He belittled him publicly as the “very small partner” in the relationship and said that Israel would have been annihilated if it had not been for him.

Mr. Trump suggested that Syria could do a better job than Israel of cracking down on Hezbollah in Lebanon without killing as many civilians. And he minimized the ballistic-missile threat from Iran — which forced millions of Israelis to run in and out of shelters throughout the war. He said it was only fair for Iran to have missiles because other countries in the region did as well.

The reactions in Israel evoked a bad divorce.

Hanoch Milwidsky, a lawmaker from Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party, posted a video on social media of himself removing a red MAGA hat and replacing it with a blue one with the Hebrew words for “total victory.”

Ben-Dror Yemini, a columnist at Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s largest newspaper, wrote that Mr. Netanyahu had led Israel into “the most severe collapse in its history.”

“Trump reneged on every promise, turned Iran into a power, strengthened Hezbollah, and as a final flourish, gave Israel a kick and humiliation,” he wrote.

Dahlia Scheindlin, an American-born Israeli pollster, said it was “slowly sinking in” for Israelis that Mr. Netanyahu had staked the entire U.S.-Israeli relationship on his personal bond with a president prone to “temper tantrums” over “simple slights.”

“I think he was hoping that he could employ the tools that he has always employed with American presidents,” she said. “You know, tread carefully and strategically, but push the boundaries, and try to run circles around them if you can,” she added.

“I think that with a bit of a back-and-forth dance, it was largely working for him with Trump,” she said. “But he hit his limit.”

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem on Monday. Credit…Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

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