Bob Park’s What’s New: August 15, 2025
No, Bob Park — the physicist who wrote the What’s New newsletter for years — did not write this. Instead, I am imagining what Park would have said were he alive today. The opinions are mine and not necessarily those of Bob Park (but they should be).
What’s New, by Bob Park
Friday, August 15, 2025
1. POLITICAL CONTROL OVER SCIENCE AND HEALTH GRANTS
President Trump signed an executive order a week ago giving politicians control over billions of dollars in grants from federal agencies. The order requires the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and other science agencies to appoint political officials responsible for ensuring grants “are consistent with agency priorities and the national interest.” When you have a fundamentally anti-science administration in power, this will ensure grants are based on politics instead of science. Oh, why didn’t Congress pass Representative Paul Tonko’s Scientific Integrity Act when Democrats held the House and Senate during the first two years of the Biden administration? This is exactly what that act — which would have required that scientific conclusions are based on scientific and not political considerations — was meant to prevent. It probably wouldn’t have stopped Trump, but at least it would have given science a fighting chance in the courts.
2. BURN BABY BURN (SATELLITE’S VERSION)
According to a Public Broadcasting Service report, the Trump administration is planning to shut down a NASA satellite that measures the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. The plan is to terminate it by letting it burn up during reentry. The reason: “to align with the President’s agenda and budget priorities.” In other words, President Trump would rather destroy a satellite that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to design and launch, a satellite that is working fine and providing critical data about greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, rather than to have to live with the carbon dioxide data. With luck, some other country will take over (buy?) the satellite (if Trump is willing to sell it). This once again highlights the anti-science attitude of the Republican party: it’s better to hide the evidence than to confront it.
3. THE CDC IS ATTACKED, AND I DON’T MEAN FIGURATIVELY
Last Friday, a shooter fired over 500 rounds at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention buildings in Atlanta. It’s a miracle there was only one death; a brave police officer responding to the incident gave his life to protect others. The shooter eventually died by shooting himself. It’s now clear that he was motivated by misinformation about the covid vaccine that has been advanced by anti-vax conspiracy theorists such as Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It’s as if you convinced yourself that leprechauns were poisoning you, so you went to a local Irish pub and shot all the customers. What’s New thinks it’s important to say the following loud and clear: The biomedical scientists at the CDC, and all those involved with developing covid vaccines throughout the country, are American heroes. They saved millions of lives during the last pandemic. We should be thanking them every day for their efforts to keep us all healthy. We should NOT be shooting them.
4. PHYSICS GIRL BREAKS HER WRIST
Dianna Cowern, a scientific communicator and science advocate known to physicists everywhere as “Physics Girl,” has broken her wrist. This setback follows upon Cowern’s difficult multi-year battle with long covid. Many of you may remember all the wonderful Physics Girl videos explaining science that she has produced. In March 2020, when my university shut down because of covid, I had to convert my in-person introductory physics class to online over a long weekend. I assigned Physics Girl videos for my students until I was able to post my more traditional physics lectures on YouTube. They loved them. If you are not familiar with Physics Girl, I suggest you watch the A Capella Science video “Defining Gravity” (Cowern was the one playing Newton). Anyone who wants to support Cowern can do so at her Patreon account. Happy Physicsing!