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Over the last few months, you’ve probably heard more than you ever have about tariffs. Tariffs have been a big focus of President Donald Trump’s second term, and many companies have announced price hikes to offset tariff costs. 

Trump recently announced new 50% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports last week, a move that could hit home appliances particularly hard.

“We expect home appliance prices to rise this year, especially for mid-range and premium models that rely heavily on imported parts and materials,” said David Warrick, executive vice president at Overhaul, a supply chain management platform, and former head of global supply chain technology at Microsoft. 

Larger home appliances could be the most susceptible to price hikes. “Refrigerators, dishwashers, and washing machines are particularly vulnerable because they often include a high percentage of foreign components — even when final assembly happens in the US,” said Warrick. 

CNET has been covering the Trump administration’s tariff policy and changes, and we’ve already seen manufacturers and retailers raise prices on laptops, toys and groceries. Before you panic-buy a home appliance, here’s what you need to know about tariffs and how they could increase appliance prices this year.

How do tariffs impact home appliance prices?

We could see home appliance prices rise on products that are made in countries hit with tariffs. Because tariffs are paid by the importing company, the costs are typically passed along to the consumer in the form of higher prices, although the price hike may not be a 1-to-1 ratio with the tariff rate.

The tariffs that most threaten home appliances include the 50% tariff on all steel and aluminum imports, the 25% tariff on imported goods from Mexico and Canada, and the 30% tariff on imports from China. Higher tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China have been temporarily halted, but this could change in the coming months.

Tariffs don’t only apply to assembled products that are made elsewhere and then shipped here to be sold. Many products that are assembled in the US involve imported components. 

Materials like steel and aluminum are often imported, as are pumps, motors, and hoses, so appliances that include those parts could see notable price increases, according to Travis Tokar, a professor of supply chain management at Texas Christian University.

How tariffs impact home appliance prices could also vary depending on the type of appliance, the size, and where it’s manufactured.

“A lot of this will depend on the agreement with Mexico since many large appliances are assembled in Mexico,” said Patti Jordan, associate professor of professional practice at the Neely School of Business. “Product[s] manufactured primarily in China, such as vacuum cleaners, air purifiers, and small appliances, will most definitely be impacted.”

The Trump administration has also wavered on its tariff policy, making it difficult for the industry to predict what’s next. “It’s the off-and-on tariff strategy that is leading to the supply chain instability more so than the tariffs — at least so far,” Buffington added.

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Trump’s new steel and aluminum tariffs could increase the price of appliances.  Jeffrey Hazelwood/CNET

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We’ve never been so close to discovering life beyond Earth. Our generation could be the one that finds it, provided two essential ingredients exist. First, that there’s life out there. Second, that we’re willing to look.

Alien life’s existence is outside our control, but the universe seems to encourage our attention. Many people rest their optimism about alien life on the remarkable fact that our cosmos is brimming with planetary possibilities. To date, we’ve discovered nearly 6,000 exoplanets, most of them around only the nearest of the Milky Way’s hundreds of billions of stars. That means all our astonishingly successful planet-hunting surveys have studied just a mere teardrop of a vast cosmic sea—and implies there are at least as many planets as stars in our galaxy alone, plus some 10²⁵ worlds in the rest of the observable universe. Chances are we’re not alone, so long as the probability that planets spring forth life is not astronomically miniscule.

Discovering alien life, on the other hand, rests squarely on us. For the first time in human history, we can meaningfully answer once-timeless questions. Countless generations before us could only ask, “Are we alone?” as passive stargazers. Today, our rockets reliably reach otherworldly destinations, our robotic emissaries yield transformative knowledge about our planetary neighbors, and our telescopes gaze ever farther into the heavens, revealing the subtle beauty of the cosmos.

NASA has led the way on this work, but it now faces an existential threat in the form of short-sighted budget cuts proposed by the White House. If passed into law by Congress, these cuts would axe critical space missions, gut NASA’s workforce, and abandon one of the most captivating quests in all of science. Additional sweeping cuts planned for the National Science Foundation would be similarly ruinous for ground-based astronomy and a host of other endeavors that support NASA’s work at the high frontier.

Led by NASA, for more than a half-century, the U.S. has been building toward a golden age of astrobiology, a field of research the space agency helped invent. The groundwork was laid on Mars, beginning with the Viking missions of the 1970s and continuing into today, where the agency has “followed the water” to dried-up lakebeds. In 2014, NASA’s Curiosity rover uncovered clues pointing to an ancient, life-friendly Mars, and more recently, NASA’s Perseverance rover has been caching promising rock samples for return to Earth. Researchers eagerly await their arrival, because if Mars ever did harbor life, then some of Perseverance’s specimens may well contain some sort of Martian fossils.

Besides our own familiar Earth, Mars isn’t the only promising incubator of life around the sun. In the outer solar system, NASA’s Galileo probe and Cassini orbiter lifted the icy veils of Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, respectively. Beneath thick shells of ice, both moons harbor global subsurface oceans, which could be teeming with bacterial or even macroscopic denizens. NASA’s Clipper spacecraft launched in 2024 and is hurtling toward Europa, where it will make close flybys of the moon to assess its habitability. The agency has developed concepts for follow-on missions to land on both worlds and taste the chilly chemistry there for the telltale signs of life.

Every organism on Earth requires liquid water, but perhaps that’s not a strict requirement elsewhere. Astrobiologists speculate about “weird life” in Venus’s sulfuric acid clouds and in the liquid hydrocarbon seas of Saturn’s frigid moon Titan. NASA plans to visit each of these worlds with state-of-the-art spacecraft—two to Venus and one to Titan—in the 2030s.

And then there’s the great expanse of exoplanets. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has furnished unprecedented data about exoplanet atmospheres, most of them hot and puffy—the easiest to observe. But the most alluring exoplanets for astrobiologists—those the size and temperature of Earth—are just beyond our sight. Currently, teams of scientists are conceptualizing NASA’s next great eye in space, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, whose mission is, as its name suggests, to image and examine dozens of notionally Earth-like planets for the global exhalations of alien biospheres.

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Alzheimer’s is a pervasive and devastating disease. An estimated 6.9 million Americans were living with this common type of dementia in 2024, and that number is expected to grow by 2060 unless medical breakthroughs alter its course. The condition is also the fifth-leading cause of death among those 65 and over.

With Alzheimer’s becoming increasingly common within a rapidly aging population, exploring ways to reduce the risk is vital.

That’s why a recent study suggesting certain careers may reduce Alzheimer’s risk is so important to understand — not, of course, because everyone should change their job to avoid dementia, but because understanding why those jobs have a protective effect can be important in identifying new methods of disease prevention.

These two jobs appear to lower dementia risk

To understand whether doing certain work can affect the chances of developing Alzheimer’s, researchers reviewed death certificates from the National Vital Statistics System in the United States that also included occupation.

They discovered that among the 443 occupations studied, workers in two particular career fields had a noticeably lower risk of developing his condition.

The two jobs that appeared to significantly lower the risk were taxi driver and ambulance driver. In fact, just 0.91% of taxi driver deaths were attributed to Alzheimer’s, while only 1.03% of ambulance drivers died of this disease. By comparison, 1.82% of CEOs died of Alzheimer’s, which is fairly close to the overall average death rate from this dementia variant.

Although the difference may not seem very substantial when looking at the raw percentages, ultimately, these numbers show that ambulance drivers and taxi drivers experience around 40% fewer Alzheimer’s-related deaths compared with the general population.

Why are taxi and ambulance drivers experiencing a lower Alzheimer’s risk?

While considering the link between specific careers and a reduced risk is important, determining why this link exists is even more essential. Developing a deeper understanding of factors affecting Alzheimer’s risk increases the likelihood of finding a cure or at least identifying effective prevention methods.

Fortunately, experts were able to determine two key factors that shed more light on the potential reasons for the low prevalence of the disease among taxi and ambulance drivers.

First was the fact that other transportation professionals did not experience a decline in risk. Aircraft pilots and ship captains both had higher-than-average rates of Alzheimer’s disease at 2.34% and 2.12%, respectively. Bus drivers, on the other hand, had a 1.6% death rate from the condition, which is closer to the average among all workers.

Second, ambulance and taxi drivers did not experience lower rates of other types of dementia beyond Alzheimer’s.

One possible explanation for the lower risk is that both taxi and ambulance drivers must regularly exercise their spatial and navigational skills in real time. Moreover, they must do so much more often than other transportation professionals because ambulance and taxi drivers regularly travel different routes in unfamiliar locations, rather than traveling the same route regularly.

Because they must adjust to new conditions in unfamiliar areas, taxi and ambulance drivers may use their hippocampus more regularly, as this is the part of the brain that’s exercised when deploying these skills. This theory is also supported by older studies that demonstrated taxi drivers may experience enlargement in parts of the hippocampus.

“Our results highlight the possibility that neurological changes in the hippocampus or elsewhere among taxi and ambulance drivers may account for the lower rates of Alzheimer’s disease,” senior author Anupam B. Jena, MD, PhD, a physician in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital said of the findings.

This study doesn’t imply that relying on GPS navigation apps while driving will cause Alzheimer’s, but there is evidence that GPS can help people with mild dementia avoid getting lost.

Translating this study into action for you

There is, of course, a limit to the number of people who can work as taxi or ambulance drivers, but identifying the lower rates of Alzheimer’s among people within these professions provides clues into how those concerned about the disease could reduce their risk.

For example, activities like outdoor orienting, which experts have revealed can help develop spatial memory, could help workers in other professions strengthen crucial areas of the brain.

Past research has also revealed that dancing challenges the brain in important ways, especially when learning complex steps such as the waltz and swing dancing. As with navigation, dancing requires the brain to manage an internal three-dimensional map; however, instead of remembering a route, a dancer must recall a sequence of steps and where to place their body.

Games, puzzles, and continued learning are associated with a lower dementia risk, including spatially challenging games like jigsaw puzzles. But what about 3D versions of games? (Remember Dr. Spock’s three-dimensional chess game in Star Trek?) Some studies have shown that playing 3D video games may keep older players sharp. For a truly mind-bending experience, try downloading the app for Monument Valley on your phone, desktop,p or tablet. Your avatar will travel through a beautiful world by rotating building pieces; it’s much more difficult than it sounds.

Ultimately, maintaining a strong mind and body can only help you. While it may not directly prevent Alzheimer’s, challenging your brain’s spatial awareness and memory can help you maintain overall good mental and physical health for as long as possible as you enter older age. It is worth the effort to reduce your overall disease risk and, hopefully, enjoy a happier, healthier retirement.

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One of your best wellness tools may be a journal. Journaling offers an array of benefits — from easing stress to sparking self-discovery.

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Journaling

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Is it ever okay—or at least, understandable—for one child to bully another?

I spend a lot of time speaking to parent groups and students about bullying, and it’s common for parents to approach me after a talk with questions about their personal situation. A mother once asked for my thoughts about a situation in which her eight-year-old son had been accused of bullying another boy.

In my experience, parents often have a hard time believing that their child could ever engage in bullying; this mother clearly accepted that the behavior had happened, yet she just as clearly felt that there were extenuating circumstances. She pointed out that the target had the annoying habit of picking his nose, and this had bothered her son, who had lashed out.

She hedged; surely, she thought, there could be circumstances under which it’s acceptable for one child to bully another.

If your child is being accused of bullying another, it can be surprising and upsetting. Beyond those understandable emotions, as a parent, you have many options to help your child understand their behavior and why it was seen as bullying.

Let’s first define what it is we are talking about: bullying means that someone repeatedly and deliberately hurts a less powerful person. Bullying is a very unhealthy and potentially damaging behavior, for both the target and the bully. Research tells us that children who bully carry mental health consequences like depression and anxiety into adulthood. This is especially true for kids who are both bullies and victims.

I think most people would agree that bullying sometimes calls for punishment, and often calls for interventions, but is bullying ever a behavior that calls for understanding? If your child is being aggressive once (which doesn’t meet the definition of bullying), and in self-defense, that may indeed be excusable. On the other hand, if your child is bullying, that repeated torment is not excusable. I reminded the mother whose son bullied the nose-picking child that bullying is harmful to both individuals, so even when it happens because of a provocation, it shouldn’t be shrugged off.

What’s interesting is that generally, children don’t excuse bullying. In a study in which scientists interviewed elementary school children (both those involved and uninvolved in bullying) in Sweden to understand how kids view bullying, the students tended to think that bullies were either psychologically troubled, or alternatively, attention seekers—bullying to gain social status (in other words, that they wanted other children to see their power and admire it).

Kids who bully others, however, tend to have justifications for their behavior. In my study of more than 2,200 teens, about 62 percent of those who admitted bullying others offered one or more of the following explanations: “People didn’t try to understand my point of view,” or “I needed to show I wasn’t intimidated or afraid,” or “My behavior was taken way too seriously; I never meant it.”

It’s important to understand that kids can engage in bullying for a variety of reasons. Parents may think of bullying as a behavior reserved for only truly disturbed kids. The research, however, shows that some youth who bully are otherwise doing well socially, while others, who tend to be both bullies and targets, struggle more with making friends and being social. It can be difficult to believe that a child who does well in school and has friends could actually be a bully.

What should parents do when their children are accused of bullying? How should they handle their child’s protests that they were justifiably provoked? Should they believe their child and accept the reasons for the bullying? Should the response be punishment, intervention or understanding—or all three?

The word bullying tends to be overused, and is sometimes applied to any situation (repeated, deliberate or not) when someone hurts someone else. How you approach the situation may be completely different if the aggression in question only happened once, or between two children with relatively equal social and physical power, which likely would not be bullying.

If the power dynamic is unequal, and it appears to be a bullying situation, talk to everyone to determine the facts. Make it clear to everyone involved that you’re approaching this with an open mind. The school’s perspective is almost certain to be different from your child’s. It’s not hard to imagine a situation where a school counselor explains that your child has bullied another student, but your son or daughter claims they were just mad and not thinking. Bullying is a behavior that is planned out. It is not an impulsive, one-time response to someone else’s provocation. A target may have engaged in nose-picking, and that may have been genuinely irritating, but repeated aggression against them isn’t impulsive or thoughtless.

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In 2015, I was teaching a class on estate planning at a local continuing care retirement community. During the audience-participation section, I asked the attendees if they had recently updated their documents. A woman in a wheelchair who’d appeared to be asleep for the entire class, yelled, “None of your (bleeping) business.”

She may have had a point, but it was the last time I raised my hand to teach at that community.

Between 2015 and 2020, I spent many a day teaching financial planning classes for retirees at continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs). I could tell you which communities leaned young, old, left, and right. In Washington, D.C., that left or right leaning is often a dealmaker or breaker.

The point is that these retirement communities are all different. The same person may love one and hate another, which is where we will land in this article. Whether a CCRC makes sense depends on you, your priorities, and how aligned they are with a specific community.

Below, I will highlight major pros and cons as you consider your next move, literally.

PROS OF CCRCS

1. The care will be there when you need it

If you pick the right community, this will be your last move. Residents can move along the spectrum from independent living to nursing care. You may change locations within your community, but you will not be moving furniture up and down stairs right when you start to need help.

2. You’ll have a ready-made community

According to that often-cited Harvard study on happiness, two of the greatest drivers of happiness in retirement are health and social connections. Hopefully, the continuum of care helps with the former. The built-in community of a CCRC should help with the latter.  Having friends in a community is a real bonus, as this can shorten the friend-making curve.

3. Your home will be turn-key, maintenance-free

The general advice for when to move into a CCRC is when you are still active and independent. That means you’re still going places.

You don’t want to have to worry about a pipe bursting when you’re skiing the Rockies. You don’t want the call telling you your HVAC is broken during your summer trip to Europe.

These communities, even if they are not really rentals, carry many of the benefits of being a tenant. And as you age, those benefits become even more important.

CONS OF CCRCS

1. Get ready for hefty entrance fees and monthly fees

The financial structures of these communities come in all shapes and sizes. For the purpose of this column, we are excluding rental communities, and we are not differentiating between A-, B-, and C-level plans.

The expense of a CCRC comes in the form of a buy-in and an ongoing monthly fee. You can think of this as a down payment and a mortgage payment.

The buy-ins can be large, often at $100,000 to $500,000 or more, which is one reason they are on the “cons” list. On top of that, monthly fees for those in independent living can be in the neighborhood of $2,500 to $5,000.

Another con: Entrance fees are often touted as, at least partially, refundable. While this is the case, even a 100% refundable buy-in doesn’t adjust for inflation.

So, if all goes according to plan and you spend your 20 greatest years in the community, the amount refunded to your estate may be worth half what you put in, when you account for inflation.

2. Expect rising costs

It’s 2025, and we are all used to living with rising prices. It’s easy to forget that the decade between 2010 and 2020 had almost no inflation, despite the Fed’s best efforts.

During this period, advisers in my firm got into hot water telling a few of our clients they couldn’t afford a particular community. We received some unhappy calls from the community’s sales office.

The thing that made this community unaffordable was not the buy-in fee. In the D.C. metro area, clients can usually cover large buy-ins with the equity realized from the sale of their forever home.

It was the 4% COLA, which caused the monthly fees to increase every year on a compounding basis, regardless of the inflation rate.

Even very secure financial plans can get a little iffy when you change inflation from 3% to 4%. If you’re considering a move, I’d encourage you to build out a plan in the free version of the software we use.

3. Prepare for a lifestyle adjustment

Earlier, I cited the conventional wisdom of moving into a CCRC while you’re still active and independent. The problem with this is that you’ll likely be one of the youngest in the community. You don’t want to do water aerobics if you can still swim laps. You’re unlikely to take the shuttle to the zoo if you can walk there.

It’s easy to age up quickly, though. Pretty soon, you’ll be yelling at me from a wheelchair.

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Scientific research over the past 30 years has revealed a patchwork of potential causes of autism. Most of them are genetic—the condition is between 60 and 90 percent heritable—and some involve nongenetic risk factors that might impact development during pregnancy.

“We’ve found a great deal of the underlying [causes],” says Helen Tager-Flusberg, an autism researcher and a professor emerita at Boston University. But how these different risk factors come together as the brain develops remains a challenge to piece together. “Autism is not a simple disorder,” she says. “There are no simple answers. There are no so-called smoking guns.”

Even so, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the U.S. secretary of health and human services, talks about autism in a way that suggests he thinks there are simple and direct causes. He often refers to the steady rise in autism prevalence (which is likely due to improved screening and diagnosis) as an indicator that we’re in the middle of an “autism epidemic” driven by “environmental toxins.” He has also refused to disavow the long-debunked idea that vaccines cause autism. This month, as part of Kennedy’s effort to find “the root causes of autism,” the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced that they will create a “data platform” to study the condition. In April, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya had described plans for “national disease registries, including a new one for autism.” The plan involved collecting “comprehensive” private health data on autism that would represent “broad coverage” of the U.S. population, leading autism advocacy organizations, civil rights groups, and research scientists to warn of medical privacy concerns. (Shortly after outlets reported on Bhattacharya’s statements in April, HHS denied that it planned to create an “autism registry.”)

In a budget hearing on Wednesday, Kennedy called for an end to genetic research into autism. “I don’t think we should be funding that genetic work anymore,” he said. “What we really need to do now is to identify the environmental toxins.”

In response to this dismissal of well-established science, Tager-Flusberg has organized a coalition of scientists to push back. The Coalition of Autism Scientists now has 258 members and is still growing.

Scientific American spoke with Tager-Flusberg about Kennedy’s statements this week and how the autism community is responding.

In a Congressional budget hearing Wednesday afternoon, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said: “Autism is an epidemic, and the genes do not cause epidemics. They can contribute a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin. It’s like cigarettes and smoking.” What was your reaction to that?

There is no reason that we need to refer to the increased prevalence rates, which have been rising steadily for many years now, as an epidemic. This is not the definition of an epidemic, so I take issue with highlighting that.

Second of all, genetics are the primary contributing factor to autism. We know specific genes and variants confer increased risk, even in cases where there aren’t any clear environmental contributions. If anything, it’s the other way around—it’s the environmental factors that add to or interact with the genetic risk for autism.

Take one of the very well-regulated nongenetic factors: parental age, particularly paternal age. What we think is going on is that, as parents age, their germ cells [which develop into eggs or sperm] are changing, and so this is leading to alterations in the DNA that then confer risk for autism.

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A federal judge has halted President Donald Trump’s latest attempt to block international students from coming to Harvard University.

The temporary restraining order issued late Thursday by US District Judge Allison Burroughs comes hours after the university urged the judge to step in on an emergency basis to block a proclamation Trump signed a day earlier that suspends international visas for new students at the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university. Foreign students make up roughly a quarter of the school’s student body.

The brief order from Burroughs said if she didn’t intervene now, the school would “sustain immediate and irreparable injury before there is an opportunity to hear from all parties” over the challenge to Trump’s edict. The judge said her order “shall remain in effect until further order of this Court.”

Burroughs, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, set a hearing for mid-June to hear arguments over whether she should block Trump’s proclamation indefinitely.

Harvard’s request to block Trump’s ban amended an existing lawsuit over the administration’s move to end Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, which initially prompted the judge to stop the administration from revoking Harvard’s student visa program.

The amended lawsuit claimed Trump’s proclamation violated the First Amendment by temporarily blocking the entry of nearly all new international Harvard students under visas most use to study at US universities or participate in academic exchange programs.

Trump’s proclamation directed the Secretary of State “to consider revoking” the visas – known as F, M, and J visas – for current Harvard students who meet the proclamation’s “criteria,” the White House said in a statement.

“With the stroke of a pen, the DHS Secretary and the President have sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the University and its mission and the country,” the amended complaint reads.

“Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard,” it says.

The visa program, which allows international students “to enter the United States on nonimmigrant visas to enroll at Harvard and thousands of other schools, have boosted America’s academic, scientific, and economic success and its global standing,” the lawsuit says.

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Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. Fairth Ninivaggi/Reuters/File

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Tornadoes threaten huge swaths of the U.S. this weekend amid a season already marked by unusually high storm activity, even as the National Weather Service faces budget cuts likely to impede its ability to respond to severe weather.

What to Expect

The National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center has forecast severe thunderstorms with scattered tornadoes—some of them intense—across parts of Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Ohio for the afternoon and evening of May 16.

“Today we’re expecting a severe weather outbreak across the mid-Mississippi, Tennessee, and Ohio valleys,” says Jenni Pittman, a meteorologist and deputy chief of the Science and Technology Integration division at the National Weather Service’s Central Region Headquarters. These regions stretch farther east than the historically prevalent “Tornado Alley” of the mid- to late 1900s.

“Then we see a renewed chance for severe weather Sunday, continuing Monday and continuing Tuesday as well,” Pittman says. “A lot of the risks on Sunday through Tuesday are going to be from the High Plains pretty much through the Midwest.” National Weather Service maps show these risks concentrated in Kansas and Oklahoma.

This weekend’s predicted tornadoes would follow a slight lull in the region, she adds. “We’ve had a little bit of a break here in May, which is typically a pretty busy severe weather month,” Pittman says. “April was very active, and the rest of May does look pretty active as well.”

This Year in Tornadoes

As of May 15, the National Weather Service has tallied 779 tornadoes in its local storm reports—a preliminary number but a helpful metric for tracking the season’s severity. For comparison, between 2005 and 2015, that same tally averaged 624; between 2010 and 2024, it was 592.

“As of mid-May, the U.S. is running well above the typical number of tornadoes to this point in the year,” says Rich Thompson, chief of forecast operations for the Storm Prediction Center.

This year to date also stands out against individual years. The most active tornado season of recent years was 2011, when hundreds of storms struck in late April; by mid-May the tally stood at more than 1,300 storms, with more than 2,200 by the end of the year.

That year also demonstrated the close connection between just a few days of serious storms and a bad season. “Intense tornadoes are disproportionately responsible for damage, injuries, and deaths, and such tornadoes are more common on a few ‘outbreak’ days,” Thompson says. “Thus, the number of outbreak days often determines the severity of the season, with 2011 being the prime example of multiple high-impact tornado outbreaks.”

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