James' World 2

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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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(Credit: maradon 333/Shutterstock)

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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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Scribes and surgeons, thieves and theologians, philosophers and pallbearers. Here’s what they all have—patron saints. Knotmakers have no saints. There is, however, Our Lady Undoer of Knots—Mary, serenely unkinking a long ribbon while stomping on a knotted serpent. Here’s St. Irenaeus of Lyons, a second-century Christian theologian: “The knot of disobedience of the first woman, Eve, was undone by the obedience of Mary; the knot the virgin Eve had created was undone by the Virgin Mary through her faith.” 

Might the tying and the untying be parts of the same whole? A couple thousand years earlier in ancient Egypt, the goddess Isis seemed to be saying so—the one who weaves it is also the one who unweaves the 𓎬 tyet.  The knot itself is endless. Da Vinci knew that, as did Dürer. Not Alexander, though.

I’ve been skimming The Ashley Book of Knots, a charmingly eccentric 1944 volume by sailor and artist Clifford W. Ashley. “I hobnobbed with butchers and steeple jacks, cobblers and truck drivers, electric linesmen, Boy Scouts, and with elderly ladies who knit.” A massive “adventure in unlimited space” with 7,000 illustrations, it is spoken of with near-religious fervor by knotmakers. “In Boston, I halted an operation to see how the surgeon made fast his stitches. I have watched oxen slung for the shoeing, I have helped throw pack lashings, I have followed tree surgeons through their acrobatics, and examined poachers’ traps and snares. But I never saw Houdini,” Ashley goes on to confess. 

This public domain copy has no cover, and so I’ve downloaded the original cover image by George Giguere. Against an opalescent sky and an algal sea, an old, weathered sailor sits on a cask with a (mandatory) pipe clenched in his (mandatory) square jaw. He’s showing us the Tom Fool knot, also known as the conjuror’s knot. Now that’s an old knot. Heraklas, the Greek physician, called this knot epankylotos brokhos—the interlooped noose—in his list of surgical nooses and knots in the first century AD. Our sailor looks pleased he knows his history.

Philippe Petit, legendary highwire artist and star of the Oscar-winning Man on Wire says, “If at first you don’t succeed, tie, tie again.” A card-carrying member of the International Guild of Knot Tyers, the man does know a thing or two about knotsmanship. An ill-made knot on the wire could mean he may not go home that day.

My own stakes are much lower. I’m just learning how to make knots. I’ve got heavy-knit cotton cords in ivory and crimson that I keep in a pouch. Using two colors helps me tell the twists and turns apart. I’ve also got an app called Grog Knots made by Alan Grogono—anesthesiologist, sailor, and curious knotter. (“Alan planned a career as an engineer or a comedian but father wisely interceded on the basis that a medical career would allow both. He was right!”) 

I should be starting with the basics but I’m constantly distracted by more glamorous knots with names like Turk’s Head or Monkey’s Fist. Or Windy Chien’s Dune Creature, a Heaving Line sandworm that reminds me of the exploding palm leaf snakes I made as a kid. I’ll keep at it. Just like in writing, I enjoy working with shape and form, gesture and constraint. As Nick Cave says in The Red Hand Files, “What it takes for me to pursue these freedoms—to feel genuinely free—has paradoxically something to do with order and constraint. . . . Freedom finds itself in captivity.” And someday I’ll get good at this wonderful thing.

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Firefighters in southern California are battling the Palisades and Eaton Fires, which have killed at least 25 people, burning a cumulative 37,700 acres and at least 12,000 structures. The plumes of smoke are even visible from space.

Residents of many fire-prone areas—as well as those far downwind—have grown familiar with the orange, apocalyptic haze of wildfire smoke as these blazes have become more common because of climate change. Such smoke can contain an unpredictable cocktail of chemicals associated with heart and lung diseases and even cancer, which is the leading cause of death among firefighters. Here’s what makes wildfire smoke so dangerous.

No Ordinary Pollutant

When trees, shrubbery, and other organic matter burn, they release carbon dioxide, water, heat—and, depending on the available fuel, various volatile compounds, gaseous pollutants, and particulate matter. Those tiny particles, which become suspended in the air, can include soot (black carbon), metals, dust, and more. If they’re smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter, they can evade our body’s natural defenses when inhaled, penetrating deep into the lungs and triggering a wide variety of health problems.

Such fine particulate matter is a common pollutant; it’s also created by motor vehicles and industrial plants, for example. But the kind present in wildfire smoke might be even more dangerous. Researchers studying health outcomes in southern California concluded that exposure to particular matter smaller than 2.5 microns, called PM_2.5, from wildfires was up to 10 times more harmful to human health compared with exposure to PM_2.5 from other sources. The researchers estimated that wildfire-generated particulate matter was three to four times more toxic—but they don’t yet know why.

More Dangerous Fuel

As humans develop ever more land, we grow the number of points of contact between human settlements and increasingly flammable forests. This makes it more likely that an errant, human-caused spark will ignite a blaze—and that the resulting wildfire will consume homes, offices, cars, and other human-made infrastructure, expanding the types and amounts of toxic compounds going up in the smoke. Paints, sealants, insulations, metals, and more can release many kinds of volatile organic compounds, gaseous pollutants and particulate matter.

A 2023 study by researchers at the Environmental Protection Agency found that emission factors for some toxic compounds were more than 1,000 times higher in urban wildfires than in fires that burned in woodland areas.

Unpredictable Chemistry

It’s surprisingly hard to predict what compounds someone is exposed to when they inhale wildfire smoke. What’s in the smoke depends on a few factors: what was burned (a ponderosa pine, for example, or a car), the temperature at which it burned (was it flaming or smoldering?), and how far and for how long the smoke has traveled. As the smoke ages, it is exposed to sunlight. This radiation can hit nitrogen oxides (NO_x) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), setting off a complex set of reactions that usually results in another secondary pollutant: ozone, the main component of smog, which can damage the lungs.

And as smoke containing VOCs travels and settles over other cities, it can mix with even more local pollution in the form of NO_x—giving it the opportunity to form a larger amount of ozone. Research also suggests that VOCs and particulate matter—each of which can be toxic—can combine to make their respective health risks even worse.

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