James' World 2

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Weaver ants’ feet have an incredibly strong grip—individual members of one species can, without slipping, hold an entire dead bird hanging off the edge of a table. And the mighty insects rarely work alone, often teaming up to haul and fold oversized leaves as they build their foliage-filled homes. Scientists have now found that as teams of Asian weaver ants gain more members, they strategically use their grippy feet to become ever more efficient at pulling leaf tips. In contrast to typical human behavior, ants work harder in larger groups than when alone to pull comparatively huge weights.

In a measurable phenomenon called the Ringelmann effect, the more humans join a team, the less effort each individual member tends to exert; researchers generally attribute this to reduced motivation and the difficulty of coordinating more people. “When you’re pulling on a rope, like a tug-of-war, it’s actually less efficient to have more people lined up,” says Macquarie University biologist Chris Reid, co-author on a new study in Current Biology.

Reid and his colleagues connected the tip of a paper leaf to a force-measuring device and filmed weaver ants pulling the tip back across the leaf to fold it. They found single ants pulled 59 times their weight on average, but individuals in groups of 15 pulled 103 times their weight. The more ants were included, the sharper the efficiency increase.

To make this happen, the ants assembled into chains of two to four, one behind the other. The front ants bent their legs and pulled hard at the leaf tip with their mandibles while the rear ants held the leaf still.

The researchers propose these pulling chains could act like force ratchets. The front ants are “active pullers,” and the rear ants are the “passive resisters”—they grab on to the front ants’ bodies, plant their sticky feet firmly on the leaf, and store the forces generated by the front ants so the leaf doesn’t fly backward.

“Examples of true superefficiency are very limited,” says ecologist Scott Powell of George Washington University, who was not involved in the study. Marching army ants, strictly following a pheromone trail to carry heavier loads, are another known example. But along with efficient coordination, weaver ants’ physical traits appear to give them an edge.

These ants’ unusually grippy feet make them “really well adapted to withstanding a strong pulling force in the other direction,” says biologist Helen McCreery of Tufts University, who also was not involved in the study. “The world is full of organisms solving problems in ways that are totally different from the way our brains would think to do it.”

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It is becoming clearer than ever that the rule of law in the White House has depended chiefly on norms — on government lawyers willing to raise objections when merited and to resign in protest if ignored, and on presidents who want to appear law-abiding. This is especially true in an era when party loyalty has defanged the threat of impeachment by Congress, and after the Supreme Court granted presidents immunity from prosecution for crimes committed with official powers.

Every modern president has occasionally taken some aggressive policy step based on a stretched or disputed legal interpretation. But in the past, they and their aides made a point to develop substantive legal theories and to meet public and congressional expectations to explain why they thought their actions were lawful, even if not everyone agreed.

Around 15 years ago, intense legal controversy surrounded President Barack Obama’s drone strikes targeting Al Qaeda militants in ungoverned places where the United States did not have ground troops, like Yemen and tribal Pakistan. Those included the killing of a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was deemed an operational terrorist leader whose capture was infeasible.

Behind the scenes, Obama administration lawyers wrestled with the scope and limits of how the congressionally authorized armed conflict against Al Qaeda could apply to such scenarios. They developed lengthy and detailed memos citing Supreme Court precedents, and systematically worked through issues of domestic and international law.

The details of its legal rationale became known to Congress and the public not only through unauthorized disclosures and Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, but also because the administration delivered speeches and produced a white paper summarizing its reasoning, which it gave to Congress.

Today, the Trump administration is mostly behaving with audacious transparency about its boat attacks. Mr. Trump has posted surveillance videos of the deadly strikes, talked with relish about how “it is violent and it is very — it’s amazing, the weaponry,” and even acknowledged that he had authorized the C.I.A. to take covert actions in Venezuela.

But administration officials have clammed up when asked for the legal analysis to support their assertion that there is a legal state of armed conflict that makes the killings lawful.

Even in closed-door congressional briefings, according to people familiar with them, officials have provided no detailed legal answers. They are said to have cited drug overdose deaths of Americans, and stated that Mr. Trump decided the country was in an armed conflict with drug cartels. They are also said to have pointed to the part of the Constitution that makes the president the commander in chief of the armed forces, without much further elaboration.

Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former top Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, said Mr. Trump’s actions demonstrated an indifference to law that threatened to hollow it out.

“Nixon tried to keep his criminality secret, and the Bush administration tried to keep the torture secret, and that secrecy acknowledged the norm that these things were wrong,” Professor Goldsmith said. “Trump, as he often does when he is breaking law or norms, is acting publicly and without shame or unease. This is a very successful way to destroy the efficacy of law and norms.”

Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that Mr. Trump promised during the campaign to take on drug cartels whose actions “resulted in the needless deaths of innocent Americans.” She suggested his “unprecedented action” would continue.

“All of these decisive strikes have been against designated narcoterrorists, as affirmed by U.S. intelligence, bringing deadly poison to our shores, and the president will continue to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible to justice,” she said.

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The Boring Co., founded by Elon Musk, has begun work on an underground tunnel in Nashville.

Boring’s “Music City Loop” would function like a rideshare. Passengers will ride in individual Tesla cars on a fixed route connecting downtown Nashville to the city’s airport, with possible expansions in the future.

State officials have touted the project as a solution to traffic woes. Others worry about the tunnel’s possible impact on the environment and Nashville’s existing infrastructure.

Here’s everything we know about the project so far.

Function

Currently, the 8-mile journey from the airport to the Music City Convention Center can take anywhere from 12 to 30 minutes during peak traffic times. The Boring Co. estimates the same ride could take as little as 8 minutes with its fleet of underground Teslas.

There are plans for three stops along the Music City Loop: the Nashville International Airport (BNA), the Music City Convention Center, and the Tennessee State Capitol.

Despite talks with several other cities, The Boring Co. only has one other tunnel in operation. The Vegas Loop initially boasted 155 mph rides in self-driving Teslas when it was first announced. Since then, Boring has switched to driver-operated cars for the 2-mile tunnel that currently circles the Vegas strip.

With congestion, Vegas Loop riders have observed a top speed of 40 mph. Nashville’s tunnel would need Tesla drivers to maintain an average speed of 67 mph to deliver on the promise of an 8-minute trip.

In its pitch to Nashville, Boring has been less ambitious about the length and speed of its tunnel rides. Construction, on the other hand, will have a much faster timetable in Music City.

Timeline

The Boring Co. expects a quick turnaround on the project. The company initially estimated that Nashville’s tunnel would be operational by late 2026, but has now adjusted to early 2027.  It’s still an ambitious timeline; it took the company nearly three years to complete a tunnel a tenth of that length in Las Vegas. Other tunnel pitches never got that far. Cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, and Washington D.C. never moved forward on proposed tunnels.

The project is still officially in the planning stages, and The Boring Co. has said that drilling won’t start until the last quarter of the year. However, excavation is already underway at a downtown parking lot.

Government transparency

Fences went up around the state-owned lot before lawmakers officially approved the deal with Boring, a move state officials say is common in construction projects like these.

Members of the State Building Commission, none of whom represent Nashville, voted unanimously to give The Boring Co. a no-cost lease for the tunnel’s starting point. The agreement with the state dictates that Boring has to leave the lot in the same condition or better. If not, the company could be on the hook for the cost of repairing it.

The greenlight came soon after the project was unveiled to the public. Days prior, Gov. Bill Lee and other state Republicans announced the deal, touting that the tunnel would come at no cost to the taxpayer.

“It’s 100% privately funded. There will be no cost to Tennessee taxpayers,” Lee said. “For those that live here, it means that there’ll be less congestion on our roads. There will be less wear and tear on our highways.”

State lawmakers from Nashville disagree. The city’s statehouse delegation has argued that the development will only serve tourists at the expense of locals.

Many, like Rep. Justin Jones, D-Nashville, have criticized the lack of input from both city and state officials who represent Nashville.

“You’re treating us like we’re a colony where you get to dictate to our constituents what is in their best interest. You keep their representation out of meetings,” Jones said. “You don’t even consider the impact to the health and safety of our community.”

State records do not show that there were any environmental reviews of the project — something that has served as a death knell for tunnel proposals in other cities.

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The Boring Co.’s existing tunnel in Las Vegas.

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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

In recent weeks, several prominent public health experts have resigned from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, citing concerns about the agency’s shift away from science-based decision-making.

Among them was Demetre Daskalakis, who until recently directed the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. He’s here today to tell us more about what’s going on at the CDC—and what concerned experts are doing to try to keep America healthy.

Thanks so much for, for joining us today.

Demetre Daskalakis: Thanks for having me.

Feltman: So, to start, could you tell me a bit about your former role at the CDC and what you did there?

Daskalakis: I, actually, in my five years at CDC had seven separate roles …

Feltman: Mm.

Daskalakis: So I will just focus on the last two years, where I was the center director for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

So, you know, CDC is made out of centers—that’s what Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mean—and so the National Center for Immunization Respiratory Diseases, which we’ll call NCIRD for short, is the center that is responsible for a lot of vaccine policy and vaccine-preventable diseases for the country, as well as the jurisdictional immunization programs and the very important Vaccines for Children Program.

Feltman: And how have things been changing there over the last year or so?Daskalakis: I mean, not for the good. I think that with the installation of the new secretary of health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I was seeing a pretty significant shift away from sort of science-based work, more toward this ideologic, almost authoritarian-style leadership coming from the Health and Human Services secretary that didn’t really value or listen to any expert information or advice

Feltman: You recently resigned, as did several other prominent experts at the CDC. And the feeling in, in a lot of your resignation statements was that you felt that the CDC had become something so different from what it was supposed to be that you could do more work from the outside. What do you think that’s going to look like?

Daskalakis: I mean, unfortunately, I think my resignation letter was a little bit prophetic because, I mean, literally right after I resigned, you know, CDC put up a political manifesto as their mission statement that really, again, was all ideology and very light on science or public health. And then, you know, we’ve seen the Advisory Committee [on] Immunization Practices, where the firewall between science and ideology and politics completely broke down, and I feel like I’m sort of in a unique position: I really understand what is supposed to happen and what the normal process is. And so I feel like one of my main roles outside of CDC is going to be to sort of identify when there are glitches in the Matrix and when there are things happening that are atypical and things that aren’t sort of going through a process that value science before sweeping statements and policies are made. And so I will have that utility for as long as I sort of have the awareness; I can point at the chaos.

Feltman: Yeah, and what do you think some of the solutions look like for public health organizations outside of the CDC to keep America actually healthy [laughs]?

Daskalakis: Yeah, I think that this is, like, the key moment where, as someone who’s worked in governmental public health for over a decade and in health care for two decades-plus, it hurts me to say that I don’t trust what’s coming out of the CDC. And as an infectious disease doctor, when I see patients and I have a question, that’s where I go. And so, unfortunately, I think that we’re seeing the decay of the quality of information, and it’s not, like, a random decay; it is a specifically targeted decay to create an ideology propaganda machine that’s Orwellian, as opposed to a trusted health source …

Feltman: Hmm.

Daskalakis: So I think that the first is that this won’t last forever, but it’s what has to happen for now because of the way leadership is at HHS. So I think that, really, a lot of the onus and responsibility now falls on—I’m gonna call them “para-public health”—paragovernmental organizations that are actually using process and data to sort of generate sort of recommendations and, you know, in effect, replacement policies to make sure that the health machine of the U.S. continues to function even as people are trying to destroy it. I think that the answer is that those organizations are going to have to carry the water for a lot of this. They’re going to need to be the trusted voices for the folks at the front line, whether they’re public health practitioners or medical providers.

And what I hope is that they are forming deeper and stronger alliances so that they are gonna be more unified in what they say, because one of the scary parts is these states that are putting together coalitions, they’re doing the right thing, right—let’s just be clear. But it’s gonna create a tapestry across the U.S. that is about have and have-nots. So your California-Hawaii axis and your, like, Northeast axis, you know, they’re doing great. The question’s gonna be: Is there going to be something for the South and parts of the Midwest that may not have that political will that’s necessary to lift up [that works] to make sure that folks are protected? And if government funding—which could be taken away at any minute, and they have really created some levers where they’re going to be able to potentially pull funding with not a good reason from a lot of jurisdictions—like, how is that gonna play out in places that don’t have tax base to be able to cover what the federal government normally provides?

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