Bob Siederer
24 November 2025
Hello again Science fans!
How is it Thanksgiving already? Where has this year gone? When I was growing up in the northeast US, Thanksgiving seemed like a logical progression of the weather into winter. Later, when I moved to south Florida, it appeared as a surprise every year, as it was still summery there. It couldn’t possibly be the start of the Christmas season, what with 80 degree temperatures still common!
Here in northern California, we’re somewhere between the two extremes of heat and cold, but we really haven’t had cold days until this week, at least not what constitutes cold for us!
However you adjust to the seasonal changes of November, have a happy, healthy Thanksgiving from all of us at BayAreaScience.org.
Now, on to the news…
Health
Perhaps the most disturbing, controversial thing to happen in public health in a long time is the news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) changed their website to contradict the scientific conclusion that vaccines do not cause autism.
To make matters worse, the site still says vaccines do not cause autism, but an asterisk has been added that says the phrasing “has not been removed due to an agreement with the chair of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that it would remain on the CDC website” implying that the promise to Senator Bill Cassidy is the only reason the statement is still there and that they don’t believe it.
In a subsequent interview, Robert Kennedy Jr. took responsibility for the website change by saying there are gaps in vaccine safety research. This boils down to not being able to prove a negative!
Kennedy was appointed to his position required Senate approval. Is there a mechanism to rescind that approval and remove him from his position? What about for lying to Congress by promising not to do exactly what he just did?
Environment
The 30th UN Conference of the Parties (COP30) ended Friday. Here’s a look at what was, and wasn’t, accomplished at this years meeting. No one represented the United States at the Federal level. Of specific interest, there was no agreement on fossil fuel use.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration released a plan to open the entire California coastline to offshore oil drilling. There has to be a connection between the timing of this “plan” and the dates for COP30. California has some laws in place that should make implementation of this plan very difficult, and lengthy. But this administration has shown widespread contempt for the law, and this issue will probably be no different.
COP21, held in Paris, produced the Paris Climate Accord which called for capping emissions and global warming to 1.5 C degrees by 2030. The world’s countries have not stayed true to that agreement, however. The US withdrew from the accord during Trump’s first term. President Biden recommitted the US to the agreement. On January 27, 2026, the US will once again be on the outside, as Trump has once again withdrawn us from it.
There is good news offshore, however. Efforts to restore our kelp forests are paying off. Kelp is a key to a complex ecosystem and healthy kelp forests remove a lot of CO2.
We have seasons on Earth because the earth’s rotational axis is not straight up and down. A new study shows that we’ve tilted 31-1/2 inches further in less than 20 years, and this has an effect on sea level and climate. What caused the 31-1/2” shift? Pumping of groundwater!
Artificial Intelligence?
This story is almost too good to be true. It delves into the world of academic research and paper publishing, peer review, and resumes! It seems that letters to the editor in scientific journals are listed in databases along with the articles commented on. Write a letter and you can claim an “article” on your C. V. “Publish or perish”. So some less than scrupulous researchers are using A.I to write letters for them, flooding these journals with letters, which often cover obscure corners of science. This might have gone undetected for a while longer, except for a Carlos Chaccour who disagreed with the conclusions in a letter written to criticize a research article of his. That letter cited additional research, incorrectly it turns out, that was also performed by Dr. Chaccour. AI hallucinated, again!
Artificial Intelligence is in the news daily. The data centers that power this revolution (and billions of dollars of technology) also consume enormous amounts of electricity, materials, and water. Not wanting to be left out, many countries are trying to attract investment through datacenters, with little thought given to the environmental impact on the land, or the social impact on the natives living nearby.
Cosmology and Astronomy
There are two stories of cosmic destruction in the news this month. The first is about comet C/2025/K1, which broke apart into three, huge pieces. The result was captured by cameras using amateur telescopes!
Astronomers using the European Space Agency’s Very Large Telescope captured images of a star exploding, just as the energy blew through the surface of the star. This looks like something out of Star Trek, or some other space sci-fi show! Remember that this star is about 22 million light-years away, so this actually happened 22 million years ago, give or take. But the light from this explosion reached us in 2024.
The other comet that’s been in the news is 3I/ATLAS, only the third interstellar comet discovered (that’s what 3I stands for…third interstellar). 3I has been behaving unusually, at least when compared to comets locked into orbit around our Sun, and differently from the two previously detected “I” comets. But it is definitely a comet, despite what various claims that it is a probe from an advanced civilization sent here to look at us.
Using a technique called 3D eclipse mapping, astronomers have created a three-dimensional map of an exoplanet for the first time, WASP-18b, using the James Webb Space Telescope. This method identified changes in light wavelengths that revealed temperature zones.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is still being calibrated, but early images revealed last June show a stream of stars exiting the M61 galaxy that is 163,000 light years long! That’s roughly the diameter of our home galaxy, the Milky Way! The Rubin Observatory promises to add a significant amount of data to the astronomy catalog. If this interests you, you might consider attending the December 8th Dean Astronomy Lecture at the California Academy of Sciences, which will be about the Rubin.
The existential question facing Humanity is “Are we alone?” One of two possible places that might harbor life within our solar system is Saturn’s moon Enceladus. New analysis of data sent back to Earth by NASA’s Cassini mission caught fresh organic compounds in a plume of ice particles ejected from the moon during a fly-through. This past week’s SETI Live talk also dealt with this data, and you can watch it here.
We wrap up with a visit to Mars, and the discovery of a rock, dubbed Phippsaksia, by the Perseverance rover which is 5 years into its mission of visiting and sampling rocks on Mars. This one may not belong on Mars at all, but be the result of a ancient collision with the red planet.
Have a great, thankful week in Science!
Bob Siederer
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