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Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman.

For millions of Americans, Thanksgiving is simply not Thanksgiving without turkey. The bird is native to North America. And yet by the middle of last century, the most likely place to find one was on the dinner table.

A combination of deforestation, agricultural expansion, and overhunting almost brought America’s favorite gobblers to the brink of extinction in the wild. But these days, across the U.S., there are more than six million wild turkeys, up from a low in the 1930s that some observers estimated to be as few as roughly 30,000 birds.

Here to tell us more about the species conservation success story is Michael Chamberlain, National Wild Turkey Federation Distinguished Professor at the University of Georgia.

Thanks for taking the time to chat with me today, Michael.

Michael Chamberlain: Glad to talk to you.

Pierre-Louis: So I think when people think about charismatic critters, they think of bears or coyotes or wolves, and if they think about birds at all, they might think of eagles and hawks; they probably don’t necessarily think of the turkey. Why have you dedicated your career to sort of studying the humble gobbler?

Chamberlain: Yeah, so I got an opportunity in graduate school to kind of pick the research project that I was working on, and one of the options was to work with wild turkeys, and I grew up, as a young person, hunting turkeys in the fall. And so I was really interested in them from that standpoint, but then, when I started doing field research involving turkeys, I became really fascinated with their behavior and how they function as a bird, and the rest is history—I’ve been studying turkeys ever since.

Pierre-Louis: You said you got really fascinated by their behavior. What are some of the fascinating things that they do that, you know, maybe most people don’t know about or don’t even really think about?

Chamberlain: Turkeys have a really complex social system. So when you see a group of turkeys—let’s say there are 10 …

Pierre-Louis: Mm-hmm.

Chamberlain: There’s a very structured order to those 10 birds: there’s a dominant bird, and then there’s a No. 2 bird and a No. 3 bird and a No. 4 bird, and so on and so forth. So those are called dominance hierarchies. And that group of birds, their entire lives are dictated by that dominance structure.

And so that’s why you constantly see turkeys kind of bickering with each other, they’re chasing one another, because they’re constantly testing those dominance hierarchies. And I think a lot of people don’t realize how structured a turkey’s life is, from—literally, from the day they hatch. They’re constantly trying to one up each other and become the dominant bird.

Pierre-Louis: Are there perks to being the dominant bird?

Chamberlain: For sure. There’s preferred access to foraging resources, so the dominant birds are going to—are going to, basically, push off subordinate birds and access food. The dominant birds are going to breed first and more often. So if you’re a male and you’re dominant, you’re going to breed with more females than a subordinate bird.

And if you’re a female, you’re going to reproduce first, you’re going to nest first because you’re the dominant bird, and there’s perks to that because the early bird gets the worm, so to speak. In the turkey world, if you produce a nest early, you’re much more likely to be successful. And if you are successful, your poults, which are the young turkeys that hatch, they’re much more likely to survive if they’re hatched earlier.

So there are definitely perks to being dominant.

Pierre-Louis: So I used to live in the Boston area for a while, and in that area wild turkeys are kind of famously menaces, you know? You see them, like, on the street [Laughs] …

Chamberlain: [Laughs.] Yeah.

Pierre-Louis: Attacking the city bus, holding up traffic. But there was a time when turkeys, despite being from North America, weren’t quite so ubiquitous. Can you talk a little bit about the bird’s decline and then their resurgence?

Chamberlain: So basically, turkeys have gone through this kind of full-circle recovery, if you will. So as the U.S. continent was settled, colonization occurred, turkey populations were really decimated by overharvest—in many ways, for subsistence, right? I mean, humans were trying to put food on the table. And at the same time, we were clear-cutting a lot of the eastern forest of North America as colonization was occurring. And so you saw turkey populations really plummet until around the 1950s and ’60s.

At that point you saw a shift where conservationists, wildlife agencies, nonprofits, they started focusing attention on restoring wild turkeys to their former, you know, range, and so what you saw was the trap and transfer of wild birds. Basically, people like me went into remaining populations of turkeys, we used nets to capture those wild birds, and then we translocated them to places where they had been extirpated, and turkey populations exploded in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.

And now what you’ve kind of seen is a lot of populations, particularly in the Southeast and the Midwest, have declined over the last few decades, and, and there’s a lot of reasons for that, and those reasons are quite complex, which is why I have a job.

They include everything from habitat loss to habitat degradation and fragmentation. We know there are disease issues with turkeys that are very complex. Predator populations, things that eat turkeys and their eggs, appear to be at apex levels now. Predators like coyotes and bobcats, and raccoons, birds of prey, that were persecuted many decades ago, those populations have flourished now.

And so the factors that are influencing turkey populations are very different now than they were 40 or 50 years ago, and we’ve seen predictable declines because of that.

Pierre-Louis: I was reading something where—I think it was Massachusetts, in the 1950s, said that the bird was functionally extinct in the state at that point …

Chamberlain: Uh-huh. That’s right.

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Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Corinne herself, or in the Next Big Idea App.

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The latest death toll makes the fire the deadliest since a 1948 warehouse fire killed 179 people. It also surpassed the toll of the blaze that broke out at Grenfell Tower, an apartment block in central London in 2017, in which 72 people were killed.

“This is absolutely scandalous, this is not what Hong Kong is known for,” said Emily Lau, a longtime pro-democracy politician and former lawmaker who now hosts an interview show on YouTube. She said the scale of the tragedy pointed to insufficient government supervision: “This has opened up a can of worms about misconduct.”

In the face of mounting questions and pressure from China’s leader, Xi Jinping, for “all-out efforts” to respond to the disaster, the Hong Kong government moved to show it was taking swift action.

ohn Lee, the Beijing-backed chief executive of Hong Kong, visited the site and later told reporters that the fires were under control. He announced a 300 million Hong Kong dollar, or $38 million, fund for victims. His government also kicked off a citywide inspection of housing estates currently under renovation. The city’s anticorruption bureau also announced it was setting up a task force to investigate potential corruption related to the construction work on the complex.

By Friday morning, the blaze had been largely extinguished, and firefighters were conducting search-and-rescue operations. But the fire was another crisis for Mr. Lee’s government, which already faces demands from Beijing to fix Hong Kong’s housing market, one of the least affordable in the world, and shore up the economy.

And as public distrust swells, with people posting videos and photos online expressing concern about what they feared was flammable construction materials on other buildings, the political fallout could be significant.

“A bigger question is this: Should a senior official take overall responsibility for this horrendous fire?” said Wang Xiangwei, an associate professor of journalism at Hong Kong Baptist University.

The authorities said that a preliminary investigation revealed that protective nets, tarpaulin, and other materials used for the renovation may not have met fire-safety standards. They identified the registered contractor for the building complex as Prestige Construction and Engineering Company.

The mesh netting was probably a factor in how quickly the fire spread, said Tony Za, a former chairman of the Hong Kong Institute of Engineers Building Division. Typically made of fibers and plastic, such netting is used to keep construction materials and other objects from falling off bamboo scaffolding — which companies in Hong Kong commonly use when repairing a building’s exterior — and hitting the ground below.

Bamboo scaffolding may have also contributed to the blaze, experts said. The government announced earlier this year that it would phase out the use of the material and replace it with steel scaffolding, for greater safety. Last month, another bamboo scaffolding caught fire in Hong Kong’s central business district. That incident along with the devastating fire this week would likely accelerate the construction industry’s switch to metal scaffolding, Mr. Za said.

The government’s investigation also pointed to foam boards that had been found installed on windows.

One Wang Fuk Court resident, Lau Yu Hung, a 78-year-old resident, said that many of the windows in his building were covered with a thin layer of polystyrene foam, and that he had heard that it was meant to protect the glass from the repairs being done to the facade.

The material blocked much of the light and prevented residents from seeing outside, he said. It was only because of a small gap in the foam covering his bathroom window that he had been able to see that a neighboring building was on fire and escape in time, he said.

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Photo by Lam Yik Fei

Residents resting at a temporary shelter near the Wang Fuk Court apartment complex.Credit…Billy H.C. Kwok for The New York Times

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The pill version of Novo Nordisk’s blockbuster weight-loss medication, semaglutide, failed to slow down Alzheimer’s progression in an initial analysis of two clinical phase 3 trials. The company behind the weekly injectable diabetes medication Ozempic and weight-loss drug Wegovy, which are also known as GLP-1 drugs, announced the top-line results today.

Endocrinologist Daniel Drucker says that the trials were well-done, but the results are “a setback for the field.” Novo Nordisk confirmed in a statement to Scientific American that the company is ending its semaglutide trials on Alzheimer’s, including tests involving the injectable version of the drug.

“GLP-1 [drugs] have given us so many wonderful results, but tackling these very challenging brain disorders has been disappointing,” says Drucker, who has consulted for Novo Nordisk in the past but does not currently. “No one expected that it was going to shut down the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, but there was a hope that we would see some benefit, and we didn’t.”

Animal models and reviews of real-world data have previously suggested that GLP-1 drugs might reduce the risk or slow development of Alzheimer’s. The reason why remains elusive, although researchers, including Drucker, suggest that these drugs might reduce inflammation associated with certain neurological conditions.

“GLP-1 does reduce inflammation in many parts of the body, and inflammation does drive part of the pathology of Alzheimer’s,” he says.

Novo Nordisk’s trials, called evoke and evoke+, involved 3,808 people aged 55 to 85 who had early-stage Alzheimer’s, classified as having mild cognitive impairment as a result of the disease. During most of the 156-week trial, the researchers gave half the participants 14 milligrams of oral semaglutide once a day, while the other half received a placebo.

Participants who took the drug did show some improvements in Alzheimer’s biomarkers, but treatment didn’t delay disease progression, according to the company.

Drucker says there are many potential explanations why oral semaglutide didn’t work as hoped. The fatty-acid structure surrounding semaglutide might have prevented it from being able to penetrate certain brain regions, such as the hippocampus, which controls memory and cognitive function. Past studies evaluating the connection between GLP-1 treatment and Alzheimer’s risk or development have mostly drawn from data on the injectables, raising questions on whether changing how people take the drug or the dosage could elicit a different outcome, Drucker says, though he adds that giving higher doses to some older adults may also come with additional risks.

“These are not wonder drugs that will fix everything that is wrong with us, and that’s why we have to do the clinical trials, and we need rigorous evidence,” Drucker says, adding that Novo Nordisk deserves credit for doing the trials despite the low odds of success.

Novo Nordisk plans to present the findings at the Clinical Trials in Alzheimer’s Disease (CTAD) conference next week and the full datasets at the AD/PD Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases Conference in March 2026.

“We will continue to analyze the data and may not have the answer to the ‘why’ next week when we share the results at CTAD,” a Novo Nordisk spokesperson told Scientific American.

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JANNA LEVIN: It’s such a pleasure to be here tonight.

I wonder how many of you have reflected on this phenomenon: everything anyone has ever seen, or ever will see, makes up less than 5% of what is out there in the universe.

All the people, all the faces, all the mountains, the moon, the stars, the galaxies, supernova—everything we’ve ever seen—is less than 5%. The rest is in the form of dark matter and dark energy, as yet unknown.

And the “dark” phrasing is a misnomer. The dark energy is in this room right now. It fills the room. The dark matter is coursing through you right now. They’re not dark; they’re invisible.

I wonder—and maybe you’ve wondered yourself—what is all this dark stuff? Where does it come from? What is it? Or maybe you study astrophysics, and you actually build detectors deep in mines, waiting patiently for years for one dark matter particle to strike your detector. Yet, despite its abundance, the dark matter has never revealed itself.

It could be that it never will, that we’ll never identify exactly what it is. But maybe you’ve reflected on this strange disparity between us and this dark universe. Or maybe this is your first time hearing all of this.

Imagine us as a collection of confetti tossed amongst this impassive void—sparkling because we are luminous—and yet, to the dark matter, we are as invisible to the dark sector as the dark sector is to us.

Consider the visible universe: you can see your hand because the atoms in your body scatter light, your eyes absorb that light, and that light triggers an electrical impulse along nerve endings. That ignites in your mind an image, the qualia of the visual world. You can feel your fingertips because atoms interact. You can smell and taste because of chemical interactions. Your heartbeat is regulated by electrical impulses from specialized cells.

This is the world we know: the visual world. It’s electrical, it’s magnetic, it’s the world of atoms and of light.

But it’s not just our microcosm. This is the same material that burns in stars, the same light that shines from stars, the same matter lingering from the Big Bang. This is everything everyone has ever seen and ever will see.

If we spiral out to the large scale, we enter the domain of dark matter and dark energy.

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Everything ever seen — every star, mountain, and face — makes up less than 5 percent of the universe. Astrophysicist Janna Levin reminds us that the rest — dark matter and dark energy — is invisible, mysterious, and everywhere. We are the luminous exception in a universe of darkness.

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The suspect accused of critically wounding two National Guard members in a shooting near the White House on Wednesday entered the United States in 2021 through a refugee program for people fleeing Afghanistan, officials said.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem confirmed on social media that the suspect had entered from Afghanistan in September 2021 under a Biden-era program called Operation Allies Welcome, which provided entry to Afghan nationals fleeing the Taliban takeover of their country after the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops.

The Trump administration pauses immigration from Afghanistan.

The Trump administration said on Wednesday that it had stopped processing immigration applications from Afghanistan, hours after officials in Washington detained an Afghan man they said had shot two National Guard troops near the White House.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which oversees U.S. immigration, made the announcement on social media late Wednesday. The two Guard members from West Virginia were in critical condition after a 29-year-old man from Afghanistan shot them, officials said. The man, who was also injured, entered the United States in 2021 under a Biden-era immigration program for Afghans leaving their country after the government fell to the Taliban.

The pause on immigration applications from Afghan nationals will affect a number of Afghans who worked for the U.S. government or NATO forces during the 20-year war in Afghanistan. They are eligible to apply for what’s known as a Special Immigrant Visa, but the Trump administration’s recent curbs on immigration have left many of them in limbo – either stranded in third countries or forced into hiding in Afghanistan.Representatives for the Taliban administration in Afghanistan did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the shooting or the suspension of immigration applications from Afghan nationals. In recent months, Afghan officials have said they were ready to discuss the repatriation of Afghan nationals with the United States and other countries.

Before the shooting, some troops and officials worried about the Guard’s safety.

The shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., shocked Americans on Wednesday, but not everyone was surprised.

“I knew this would happen,” a member of the California National Guard texted The New York Times as news spread, speaking on condition of anonymity because he did not have authority to comment publicly.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced on social media that it had paused immigration applications from Afghan nationals. “Effective immediately, processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals is stopped indefinitely pending further review of security and vetting protocols,” the agency said on X.Shawn VanDiver, the president of #AfghanEvac, a coalition of groups helping Afghans immigrate, said in a statement that the organization supports the shooter “facing full accountability and prosecution under the law.” But he urged that the shooting “not be used as an excuse to define or diminish an entire community,” pointing out that Afghans seeking to settle in the United States “undergo some of the most extensive security vetting of any population entering the country.”

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China is set to launch the Shenzhou-22 spacecraft to its orbital space station on November 25, providing a vital lifeboat for its three stranded astronauts after they spent days with no guaranteed trip back to Earth in an emergency.

The spacecraft will launch from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, the China Manned Space Agency said in a statement. After the crew of the damaged spacecraft Shenzhou-20 used Shenzhou-21 to return home, the three Shenzhou-21 astronauts were left with only a damaged spacecraft should they have had to return to Earth. And while they are apparently going about their work on the space station as usual, experts say scenarios like this one are dangerous and need to be better addressed.

Technically, the damaged spacecraft that remains docked at China’s space station could have been used in an emergency, but that poses risks, especially because it remains unclear how much damage the craft suffered, says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.

“I’m not sure NASA would have done that,” McDowell says, but “everything in space flight is a balancing of risks.”

“There’s no not risky option,” he adds. And as the amount of space debris in orbit around Earth grows, space agencies must prepare for more scenarios like this. International cooperation will be critical to protecting astronauts of different nationalities in orbit, McDowell says. And as crewed launches into space increase, having better contingency plans for human rescue will become increasingly necessary, says RAND think-tank analyst Jan Osburg. Government space agencies could delegate these operations to private companies or NGOs who have the capacity and infrastructure to respond quickly, he says.

Already, the U.S. and Russia use the same docking system at the ISS, allowing them to mitigate risks to both groups of astronauts. A partnership like that between the U.S. and China “would demonstrate a capability that each country could rescue the other astronauts in an emergency,” McDowell says.

If Shenzhou-22’s launch is successful tomorrow, China will have demonstrated its ability to respond to such scenarios on short notice, Osburg says. “That’s a pretty good achievement,” he says. China’s astronaut woes are reminiscent of last year’s saga at the ISS, when two NASA astronauts became stuck there for months longer than intended after their capsule—Boeing’s Starliner—encountered problems during the docking process. China’s human exploration program is a top priority for the country, with plans to send two astronauts to the moon by 2030.

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Historic Thanksgiving storms

The busy holiday period, combined with the changing seasons, often threatens chaos on the roads and at airports. And over the years, Thanksgiving has seen some memorable storms. 

Several cities in the Northeast saw near record-breaking cold temperatures on Thanksgiving Day in 2018, with temperatures dropping to 19°F that morning in New York City—making it the second-coldest Thanksgiving in the city’s history. Thousands, though, wrapped themselves in metallic foil blankets and sleeping bags on the sidewalk to watch the parade pass through the streets to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. 

The next year, a bomb cyclone—a large storm that rapidly strengthens over a 24 hour period—brought rain, snow, and hail to the West Coast, disrupting travel in Los Angeles as water flooded the roads.

The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which has not been cancelled since 1944 for any reason, has even been impacted by harsh winter weather. In 1997, 43 mph winds wreaked havoc on the parade, and two people were injured after a Cat-in-the-Hat balloon broke the metal arm off a lamppost. The debacle led New York City officials to declare that it will ground the balloons if winds reach 23 mph—but that has yet to happen since. 

Natural disasters have also made headlines on the holiday. In 1950, an extratropical cyclone impacted 22 states around the holiday week, as significant winds, heavy rain, and blizzard conditions killed 353 and injured 160. On Thanksgiving week in 1992, one of the largest November tornado outbreaks in U.S. history occurred over the course of three days, when severe weather spawned around 100 tornadoes everywhere from Texas to Virginia, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky.

How climate change is impacting Thanksgiving weather

Though it might not feel like it, erratic and intense November storms are being made more likely by rising global temperatures, according to Climate Central. Over 225 cities in the U.S. have seen November temperatures rise since 1970—by 2.4°F on average. It could impact Thanksgiving weather trends—increasing the amount of winter precipitation as the warmer atmosphere is able to carry more moisture.

This increases the likelihood for significant snowfall from lake effect snow, which occurs when warmer temperatures prevent the lakes from freezing over, causing the warmer water to evaporate into passing cold fronts and fall down as snow. Parts of the Midwest and Great Lakes region are expected to see lake effect snow this week. 

“With warmer temperatures from climate change, you’re going to have a warmer November or warmer fall altogether,” says Finch. “And as we get into the later kind of time period in November, if you have warmer lake temperatures, and then you get this burst of intense cold air, that’s going to make the lake effect events a lot more significant when they happen.”

Early research shows that the warmer temperatures are also impacting the polar vortex, a large area of low pressure and cold air that surrounds both of the Earth’s poles. That could make severe winter weather events in some areas more likely—and cause temperatures to fluctuate.

“The research is hinting that as climate change continues, it’s leading to more frequent disruptions, which could lead to more cold air intrusion,” says Finch. “So if you have a disruption in the polar vortex that sends that cold polar air further south into the United States, places like Texas get a really cold freeze, or Florida, where people go to stay warm, they all of a sudden are really cold.”

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A pair of storms packing heavy snow and hurricane-force winds left tens of thousands without power in the United States on Nov. 27, 2019, and wreaked havoc for Americans traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday. Jason Connolly—AFP

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Mr. Trump has hung a photo of an autopen in a space where Mr. Biden’s portrait would otherwise be, and disparages his predecessor’s physicality often.

“He sleeps all the time — during the day, during the night, on the beach,” Mr. Trump said about Mr. Biden last week, adding: “I’m not a sleeper.”

Mr. Trump remains almost omnipresent in American life. He appears before the news media and takes questions far more often than Mr. Biden did. Foreign leaders, chief executives, donors, and others have regular access to Mr. Trump and see him in action.

Still, nearly a year into his second term, Americans see Mr. Trump less than they used to, according to a New York Times analysis of his schedule. Mr. Trump has fewer public events on his schedule and is traveling domestically much less than he did by this point during his first year in office, in 2017, although he is taking more foreign trips.

He also keeps a shorter public schedule than he used to. Most of his public appearances fall between noon and 5 p.m., on average.

And when he is in public, occasionally, his battery shows signs of wear. During an Oval Office event that began around noon on Nov. 6, Mr. Trump sat behind his desk for about 20 minutes as executives standing around him talked about weight-loss drugs.

At one point, Mr. Trump’s eyelids drooped until his eyes were almost closed, and he appeared to doze on and off for several seconds. At another point, he opened his eyes and looked toward a line of journalists watching him. He stood up only after a guest who was standing near him fainted and collapsed.

Mr. Trump has prompted additional questions about his health by sharing news about medical procedures he has had, but not details about them. While in Asia, Mr. Trump revealed that he had undergone magnetic resonance imaging at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in early October.

“I gave you the full results,” Mr. Trump told reporters, mischaracterizing the summary that was released by his physician, which did not say that Mr. Trump had an M.R.I. scan and contained few other details.

“I have no idea what they analyzed,” Mr. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One recently after he was again asked about his M.R.I. “But whatever they analyzed, they analyzed it well, and they said that I had as good a result as they’ve ever seen.”

Mr. Trump also applies makeup to a bruise on the back of his right hand, adding speculation about a medical condition that his physician and aides say is caused by taking aspirin and shaking so many hands. In September, the bruising on his hand, coupled with swollen ankles, caused observers on the internet to speculate wildly about his health.

In response to a list of questions about Mr. Trump’s health, including about the results of his M.R.I. and whether or not he was falling asleep in the Oval Office, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, praised the president’s energy and pointed to Mr. Biden.

“Unlike the Biden White House, who covered up Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and hid him from the press, President Trump and his entire team have been open and transparent about the president’s health, which remains exceptional,” Ms. Leavitt said in a statement.

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