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There are pros and cons to living almost anywhere. But deciding where to raise your family feels like an especially heavy decision, with so many factors at play, from housing affordability to education.

To help parents with this all-important choice, personal finance site WalletHub has come out with a report on the Best & Worst States to Raise a Family in 2025. Experts looked at 50 key indicators of family-friendliness to determine how each state ranks, such as health care quality and crime rates.

Here are the top and bottom ten states to raise a family, according to WalletHub’s research.

The Best States To Raise a Family

• 1. Massachusetts
• 2. Minnesota
• 3. North Dakota
• 4. Nebraska
• 5. New Hampshire

• 6. New York
• 7. Illinois
• 8. Wisconsin
• 9. Maine
• 10. Connecticut

Virginia pops onto the list with the highest median family income. Iowa has the most affordable housing. Vermont ranks highest for health and safety while California takes the top spot for family fun.

The Worst States To Raise a Family

• 41. Arizona
• 42. South Carolina
• 43. Louisiana
• 44. Arkansas
• 45. Alabama
• 46. Oklahoma
• 47. Nevada
• 48. West Virginia 
• 49. Mississippi
• 50. New Mexico

Nevada ranks the lowest in terms of affordability. West Virginia is at the bottom when it comes to family fun. Mississippi is the lowest for health and safety.

How the States Were Ranked

So, why did Massachusetts top the list, if parents have to invest time in dressing littles for cold weather for months out of the year, mittens, coats, and all? (Sorry, Floridian here!)

According to the report, The Bay State boasts the highest job security in the country, as well as the lowest poverty rates, with incomes that can support the expense of raising kids. Access to health insurance and a solid education system are other factors that put the home of Mark Wahlberg at the top.

As for states at the bottom, per WalletHub, New Mexico has the highest divorce rate in the U.S., the lowest median family income, and a concerning crime rate.

Other factors that led to certain states being ranked high, while others sank to the bottom, are rankings in family fun, and health and safety, as well as the cost of childcare.

What Parents Should Take Away From the Report

Obviously, we won’t all be packing up our families to move even if our state isn’t high on this list. But as WalletHub writer and analyst Chip Lupo tells Parents, “While relocating to a top-ranked state might not be feasible for everyone, understanding the factors that contribute to family-friendliness can help guide decisions in your current location.”

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Astronomers are grappling with a complex cosmic mystery lurking at the dark heart of a distant galaxy some 270 million light-years from Earth. And its resolution could revolutionize our understanding of how black holes feast on matter throughout the universe.

Known as 1ES 1927+654 and located in the constellation Draco, this far-off island of stars harbors at its core a supermassive black hole weighing more than a million suns—which, surprisingly, isn’t very remarkable. Most large galaxies, including our own, host such hefty monstrosities at their center. But this black hole has proved extraordinarily strange: the object shocked observers with an abrupt outburst of radiation so intense that it apparently obliterated the black hole’s corona, an enveloping cloud of whirling, billion-degree plasma, for three months in 2018. The outburst, it was thought, could’ve come from a tidal disruption event, which occurs when an unlucky star is torn apart and devoured after drifting too close to a black hole. Many research groups began closely monitoring the system, watching across the next few years as the corona reassembled itself and quiescent conditions returned, until the black hole unleashed more surprises—dramatically flaring in radio waves and flickering with rapid pulses of x-rays.

Such a dizzying assortment of dynamic activity is unprecedented around a supermassive black hole and can’t be readily explained by any typical tidal disruption event. Eileen Meyer, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who led an international team in the investigation of the system’s radio emissions with the use of multiple telescopes on the ground and in space, recalls her initial impression of 1ES 1927+654 as that of a very “boring, faint radio blob.” But as she and her colleagues saw more and more strange activity unfold, she realized “this [black hole] was weird, very weird.” In particular, her team’s observations revealed that shortly after its radio wave flare-up, the black hole had belched out a pair of giant, oppositely directed plasma jets traveling at one-third the speed of light. This was the first time the creation of such jets had been witnessed in real-time, and it was a clear indicator of extreme activity closer in to the black hole. Meyer presented her team’s findings last week at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Md., and was lead author on an accompanying paper published January 13 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.If a run-of-the-mill act of stellar destruction wasn’t behind the black hole’s bizarre behavior, what was? A crucial clue could lie in the timing of the black hole’s flickering x-ray pulses, which were unveiled via work led by Megan Masterson, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Using data from the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton x-ray space telescope, Masterson and her colleagues found a telltale pattern in the pulses: an oscillation in their flickering that became faster and faster over two years. “The period of this oscillation changed dramatically from 2022 to 2024,” Masterson says. “We started out in 2022 at an 18-minute period, and by 2024, we were at a seven-minute period—so the period has basically been cut in half. That has never been observed around a supermassive black hole before.” A paper reporting the results, co-authored by Masterson, Meyer, and others, was posted to the preprint server arXiv.org in January and has been accepted for publication in the February 13 edition of Nature.

The most obvious explanation for these x-ray oscillations, the researchers say, is that they’re a clear but indirect signal of a substantial something orbiting very close to the black hole. It’s so close, in fact, that it must be plowing through the black hole’s accretion disk—a maelstrom of infalling matter made incandescent from frictional heating as it piles up around the gravitational monster’s maw. If that were the case, the researchers realized, each flickering eruption would correspond to the object completing one orbital cycle, upon which it would swoop through and agitate the accretion disk to kick out a burst of x-rays. And the curious quickening of the oscillations appeared to be a sign that this object’s orbit was decaying, bleeding off energy and spiraling ever closer and faster toward a point of no return—the black hole’s event horizon—via the emission of ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves.

For Masterson, the next step was simple: “I calculated how long it’s going to take that body to inspiral and be eaten,” she says. The math told Masterson that the hypothetical object’s final plunge would occur in January 2024. Then, at last, the mysterious x-ray oscillations would stop.

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These days, more than 30 percent of Americans sport tattoos—but there’s nothing new about our fascination with body art. As tattoos take over contemporary culture, scientists are looking to the past and uncovering the secrets of centuries-old ink.

By examining mummified remains using a technique called laser-stimulated fluorescence (LSF), researchers are unveiling body art from the Chancay culture, a group that lived on the Peruvian coast between roughly 900 and 1500 C.E., according to a study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“LSF technology lets us see tattoos in their full glory,” says study co-author Thomas G. Kaye, a paleontologist at the Foundation for Scientific Advancement, in a statement. “The Chancay culture, known for its mass-produced textiles, also invested significant effort in personal body art. This could point to tattoos as a second major artistic focus, perhaps carrying deep cultural or spiritual significance.”

Tattoos fade over time, making them difficult for scientists to study centuries later. But with the help of LSF, experts are able to uncover the original lines of the body art.

The technique involves shining a laser onto the mummy so that the skin glows, creating a sharp contrast with the ink that can be seen by taking long-exposure photographs. The team studied tattoos with a variety of patterns on more than 100 mummies.

“To some extent, ancient Chancay tattoos show a lot of parallels to the variation in design and significance we can observe among tattoos today,” study co-author Michael Pittman, a paleobiologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, tells New Scientist’s James Woodford.

Some tattoos were geometric, featuring shapes like triangles and diamonds. Others included vine-like patterns and depictions of animals.

The researchers were especially intrigued by the thinness of some of the lines that made up the intricate designs, finding the level of precision to be “higher than associated pottery, textiles and rock art,” per the study.

“We were most surprised by just how detailed the Chancay tattoos could be,” Pittman tells Popular Science’s Laura Baisas. “The 0.1 [to] 0.2 millimeter lines we discovered are finer than any line a standard #12 modern tattoo needles can produce, so the level of skill and effort that was required from the Chancay artist really blew our minds.”

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Researchers studied tattoos on this mummified hand. Michael Pittman

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On Friday the Supreme Court affirmed that it would be legal to force TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the immensely popular app to a non-China-based company or to ban it in the U.S. Last week an attorney for TikTok had argued before the Supreme Court that a bipartisan law that mandated the sale or ban infringed on the company’s First Amendment rights. The Court disagreed. In an unsigned opinion, the justices wrote that the U.S. government’s security concerns—“countering China’s data collection and covert content manipulation efforts”—were “compelling” and that the law “was narrowly tailored to further those interests.”As a result, TikTok—which about 170 million Americans use to watch short-form videos and shop—is likely to close in the U.S. as soon as next Sunday. (TikTok didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Scientific American.) TikTok’s attorney told the Supreme Court last week that when the law goes into effect on January 19, the app will “go dark.”

What’s Going to Happen to TikTok?

Reuters reported this week that TikTok plans to formally shut down in the U.S.: it will greet users with a message about the ban and give them an option to download their own data from the app.

If TikTok were to remain active in the country, the law would penalize Internet service providers for permitting access to the platform on a browser. Although the law does not make it illegal for people in the U.S. to have TikTok on their phones, it fines app stores, such as Apple’s or Google’s, whenever people download or update TikTok. Because the fines are up to $5,000 per user (which, multiplied by millions, would add up extremely quickly), app stores are expected to remove TikTok next Sunday. If users cannot update TikTok, the app will eventually stop working anyway.

What Might U.S. TikTokers Do?

Hundreds of thousands of U.S. TikTokers have joined other apps. These have included a newly popular China-based app named RedNote.

Additionally, there are potential work-arounds for the U.S. ban—namely, virtual private networks, or VPNs. In India, which banned TikTok in 2020, users have accessed the blocked app via these networks; they can make traffic appear as though it’s coming from a country where TikTok is allowed. This is not necessarily an easy solution, though. People in the U.S. may need a foreign billing address to access TikTok, one popular VPN service has pointed out, and their other apps or subscriptions could stop working.

Will Elon Musk buy TikTok? Will enforcement of the law be delayed? And can incoming president Donald Trump halt the ban—as he asked the Supreme Court to do—to negotiate a deal?

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The first and only phone message I’ve gotten from my kid’s elementary school this year was about parking lot safety reminders: “Please listen to the directions of our staff that are in the parking lot to help direct traffic and keep children safe.” The welcome meeting for new parents was dominated by a discussion of drop-off and pick-up concerns. Last year, at his previous school, the weekly newsletters from the principal always included a note about the same. And I’m guessing if you’re a caregiver in the US, this sounds all too familiar.

I’ve come to see that the inherent chaos, inefficiency, and safety risks of school drop-offs by car mirror the paradox of car dependency more broadly: the more that people who have the choice or the privilege of driving are incentivized to drive, the more difficult, less comfortable, and less safe it becomes for people who don’t. As a parent who can’t drive, I’m reminded of this catch 22 almost daily as I navigate getting my kid across a busy intersection.

While children under the age of 16 make up about 10% of the population, nondrivers— a term that refers to everyone who doesn’t have reliable access to driving themselves in an automobile— all together make up around 30%. That 30% includes people like myself who have disabilities which prevent us from driving, like vision disabilities, developmental disabilities, mobility disabilities, neurological disabilities, mental or chronic health conditions. It also includes people who wouldn’t identify as disabled, but aren’t able to safely drive, or safely drive in all conditions — like seniors who are aging out of driving or people with anxiety or PTSD that prevents them from feeling comfortable getting behind the wheel. And it includes people who are unable to afford vehicles or afford gas, insurance, and maintenance, many of whom are also disabled and from Black, brown, immigrant, and tribal communities. Nondrivers include people whose licenses are suspended, young people who haven’t had the resources to go to driver’s ed, and people who choose not to drive or own vehicles. And of course, children are also nondrivers.

What if, instead of thinking about transportation access for nondriving children and youth as requiring unique and separate interventions, we develop solutions that work for all nondrivers?

For instance, all nondrivers benefit when we invest in safer routes to schools by reducing car speeds, shortening crossing times, and building better sidewalks and protected bike infrastructure. Giant cracks or uplifts in the sidewalk prevent wheelchair access, they also make it really hard to push a stroller, or if you’re a kid, you’re probably going to wipe out if you hit one of these on a bike or scooter.

For children who are fortunate enough to live within walking, rolling, or biking distance to school, it’s wonderful to encourage this “active transportation,” as it’s known. But it’s also important to consider whose work schedule allows the time to bike your kid to school, who has the physical ability to bike, not to mention access to one and somewhere to store it.

I’m particularly excited about some of the programs that exist in Washington state to make biking more available and inclusive. Our state has recently begun to fund statewide in school bike education, which offers adaptive bikes for children who need them. And while bike buses have gained some momentum, I’m more excited about initiatives like the Major Taylor Program at Cascade Bike Club that offers bike instruction and afterschool biking activities to middle school students in under-resourced communities, with the option (with state funding) to earn a bike to keep at the end of the sessions.

At the same time, when schools or after school activities assume or require a driving parent, we are also excluding many of the same families, families with the least resources, and most barriers to participation. For many children, school may not be located close enough for active transportation, especially in rural areas. Many children need to attend a more distant school that offers specialized programs or resources. Access to school buses and access to public transit networks for older children and for children traveling with caregivers can make all the difference between being able to access a school with more resources or a special activity, and not having that access at all.

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We need better transportation options

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From

Neon

There are approximately 76 million Baby Boomers out there, even though there are now more Millennials!

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What is a Baby Boomer and Why Does it Matter?

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Platforms for Baby Boomers

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Facebook is the most used social media platform in Western markets (not including YouTube, which may host user-generated content but is not typically considered in the same category). Yet, the broad consensus, from competitors to Gen Z, is that the platform is ‘dead’. Why?

Notably, it is most prominently used by older demographics. Facebook is by far the most popular platform among over 35s, with roughly ¾s of them using the platform weekly. However, for 20-24s, Instagram and TikTok are more popular and fewer than a third of 16-19s use Facebook weekly. In other words, Facebook going ‘mainstream’ did not just mean it became the most used overall, it meant most used by consumers who are of parent-age and older.

For this sizable group, Facebook is not dead. It is still where they like one another’s posts, share photos of their Elfs on the Shelf, and participate in local community groups. For younger users, however, the app mainly constitutes family photos from their older relatives, ad after promoted content after ad, and re-shared content from platforms like Reddit, X, and Instagram.

Instagram, on the other hand, is still prominently used by younger demographics. It competes neck-and-neck with TikTok for under-25s, surpassing it slightly for 25-34s, with both apps dipping back down for over-35s. So, the signs were already there that Instagram was going culturally ‘mainstream’ as its initial user base — millennials — began to age.

As if on cue, there has been a notable shift over the past several weeks: the feed (anecdotally, from a casual survey of latter-20s women) is starting to look a lot like Facebook’s. There is very little social content; people are posting less often, and if so it is mainly the grandma-safe life events and arty highlights from a roll of film shot six months ago. The app is a hub for memes and news, but many are reposted from other sites and platforms, and ads overpower everything else.

As with Facebook, the use is still high for scrolling – but meaningful interpersonal connection is fading for many original users, and the attention by cultural ‘trend setters’ has all but jumped off a cliff.

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Midia

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In reaction to—or protest over—the impending U.S. TikTok ban, which will take effect on Sunday if the app is not sold or if the Supreme Court doesn’t intervene, thousands of people in the country have joined RedNote. The latter is a China-based e-commerce and lifestyle app that is also known as Xiaohongshu, Mandarin for “Little Red Book”—which is also a nickname for the famous book of quotations from Mao Zedong. About 300 million people, mainly in China, use RedNote for video and image sharing, shopping, and travel recommendations.

This week RedNote climbed to the top of the charts on Apple’s and Google’s U.S. app stores. The potential TikTok ban has so far prompted about 700,000 people to join the Chinese app, according to Reuters. That’s less than 1 percent of the 170 million U.S. users of TikTok, but the influx has been enough to spawn goofy memes and the occasional misunderstanding: a man in Vancouver who welcomed the new arrivals went viral because people mistook him for RedNote’s chief executive.

The rush to this app is an example of the “media substitution hypothesis,” in which people fill a media void with a new platform or network, says Saleem Alhabash, a professor of advertising and public relations at Michigan State University, who studies the psychological effects of social media use. On TikTok, “there is no implicit contract that you have to be an active user,” he points out, unlike arguably more posting-driven platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Bluesky or Instagram. It’s completely acceptable to passively lurk, scroll, and shop on TikTok, and RedNote may be scratching that same itch. “Mix the social with satisfying the need to shop—to buy cheap clothes or exercise equipment—that is the full package, in terms of user experience,” Alhabash says.

Although TikTok owner ByteDance is based in China, the English version of its app operates in the U.S. through an American subsidiary. RedNote, meanwhile, has a single app with mostly Mandarin content and is headquartered in Shanghai. One result of the recent migration has been a cultural exchange between new users in the U.S. and veteran ones in China: Some Americans on RedNote, for instance, marveled at China’s mass-market electric cars, which aren’t sold in the U.S. because of high tariffs. And Chinese students have sought help with their English homework on the app.

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During their prime, the Vikings mastered the seas and went on to make wide-spanning voyages by boat. But how exactly did they know where they were going? A recent study, focused on a set of medieval stone disks found in Ukraine, supports the belief that Viking sailors used solar compasses to navigate and may have passed on this knowledge to other populations in Europe. 

The appraisal of the eight stone disks was featured in a December 2024 paper published in Sprawozdania Archeologiczne, a Polish archeological journal. The study’s authors contend that some of the disks display key features that would have used the sun to operate as a compass, sharing similarities with other Viking artifacts originating from Greenland and Poland.

Identifying the Medieval Disks

The disks, found in several medieval-era archaeological sites in Ukraine, were originally crafted from pyrophyllite, a soft and easy-to-process mineral used for many industrial purposes during the period.

The researchers concentrated on three of the disks that already had detailed descriptions: two from the northern Chernihiv region (referred to as Listven and Liubech) and one from nearby Kyiv. The disks were dated from the 12th and 13th centuries, and they were most likely local products made in workshops near the city of Ovruch. 

Previous interpretations of these objects have ranged from calendars to needle-sharpening devices, but the new study proposes that they were instead used as navigational tools. 

One reason for this is the disks’ design, with the Kyiv and Listven disks featuring a central hole that could hold the gnomon — the pointy component of a sundial that casts a shadow when hit with sunlight. This would help determine latitude in the case of a compass. In addition, concentric rings and radial lines were carved into the three disks, further demonstrating the semblance of a compass.

Similarities Among Viking Solar Compasses

The researchers compared the pyrophyllite disks with other artifacts that have been identified as navigational instruments used by Vikings. Of particular importance are wooden disks, including one from Greenland found in 1948 and one from the Polish island of Wolin found in 2000. These wooden disks contained elements characteristic of sundial-compasses, such as a hole for a gnomon and perimeter notches. 

The wooden disks and the pyrophyllite disks share several features, including certain markings. The Wolin disk, dated to the end of the first half of the 11th century, has concentric rings similar to the pyrophyllite disks. However, the Greenland disk, dated to around the start of the 11th century, does not have concentric rings. The researchers suggest that this could mean concentric rings were not present in early Viking solar compasses but developed in later versions. 

All of the disks were also similar sizes — the Greenland and Wolin disks were measured at 7 cm and 8.6 cm in diameter respectively; the Kyiv and Listven disks were both 6.5 cm in diameter, while the Liubech disk measured 7.5 cm. 

Although additional investigations are needed to confirm the role of the pyrophyllite disks, the researchers say it is possible that Vikings who traveled through what is now Russia and Ukraine during medieval times (known as Varangians) could have imparted technological knowledge that allowed locals to create the solar compasses.

Varangian travelers would have passed by Kyiv, Listven, and Liubech on their journeys along a major trade route connecting Scandinavia with the Eastern Roman Empire, making the spread of Viking-inspired solar compass technology in the region a real possibility.

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CLIMATEWIRE | More than 50,000 scientists and their supporters have signed an open letter asking Congress to safeguard federal research and scientific jobs ahead of the incoming Trump administration.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization, spearheaded and published the letter Monday morning. The document points to concerns that President-elect Donald Trump may eliminate or reorganize federal science agencies, reduce staff, and attack regulations aimed at protecting public health and the environment.

“The Trump administration’s current agenda promises to eviscerate the protections that Americans count on and support: clean air and water; safe food and medicine; products that won’t harm us; and protection from extreme weather and other damaging effects of climate change,” the letter stated. “Without strong federal science, people will suffer, and historically marginalized communities will continue to bear the burden of these harms.”

The letter also asked members of Congress to “oppose anti-science nominees to any federal agency who do not agree on the record to follow and/or implement a scientific integrity policy in their agency.”

Also on Monday, 28 organizations submitted a letter to members of the Senate asking them to vote against political nominees who don’t have appropriate qualifications, exhibit conflicts of interest, fail to recognize the scientific consensus on issues relevant to the agency, or have a record of disregarding scientific integrity.

Signers included public health and medical associations, environmental organizations, and science advocacy groups, the Union of Concerned Scientists among them.

“The decisions you make about nominees will determine whether agencies use the substantial scientific expertise of government employees and advisors to safeguard public health and economic stability, or whether bias and misinformation block effective responses,” the letter said.

Trump was “re-elected by a resounding mandate from the American people to change the status quo in Washington,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump transition, in an email to POLITICO’s E&E News. “That’s why he has chosen brilliant and highly-respected outsiders to serve in his Administration, and he will continue to stand behind them as they fight against all those who seek to derail the MAGA Agenda.”

The letters reflect a growing anxiety among scientists and science advocates about the future of federal research under Trump. Experts have raised concerns that the incoming administration may downsize federal agencies, shift or curtail their research priorities, censor scientists and alter or destroy federal datasets.

Trump has consistently disavowed the seriousness of climate change and pledged to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement for a second time. He’s also recently tapped a number of political nominees known for denying mainstream science on subjects related to public health and the environment.

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