More progress toward a potential universal flu shot

Intranasal EV vaccine protected mice from H5N1, H7N9

by Georgia State University

edited by Alexander Pol

A novel vaccine platform has been developed to induce broad, protective immunity against numerous influenza virus infections, showing promise as an effective mucosal vaccine strategy, according to a study published by researchers in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University.

The study published in the journal ACS Nano used cell-derived extracellular vesicles (EVs) as a vaccine platform to display various human and avian influenza hemagglutinins (HAs) in an upside-down manner on the EV surfaces. The inverted HA tends to present the conserved HA stalk to the immune system to induce cross-protective influenza immunity while hiding the highly variable HA head to avoid strain-specific immunity.

The investigators used mice to evaluate cellular and mucosal immune responses induced by the multiple HA EV vaccines. HA is a major influenza surface glycoprotein. EVs are natural nanoparticles that facilitate cell-to-cell communications.

The researchers found that EV-based inverted HA vaccines hold great promise for developing universal influenza vaccines that target a mucosal route.

Developing innovative vaccine platforms and delivery strategies to induce protective immunity against diverse influenza virus strains in the respiratory tract is crucial for preventing influenza infection and transmission in potential epidemics and pandemics.

New federal figures reveal 1 in 3 US households struggle to pay energy bills

The reality is likely even worse

Diana Hernández, Columbia University

Americans’ concerns about being able to afford electricity and home heating fuel are elevated since the beginning of the Iran war. But newly released nationwide data shows that even before the war began, these concerns were widespread, long-standing and getting worse faster than the data can reflect.

The new information is from preliminary reports based on the Residential Energy Consumption Survey, a representative survey of U.S. households conducted every four to five years by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. These early results show that energy insecurity, a hidden hardship defined as the inability to adequately meet household energy needs, affects millions of American households and is worsening quickly.

As a scholar who has spent years sitting in hundreds of homes around the country, hearing firsthand accounts about energy insecurity, I turn to this survey data to quantify the suffering I have witnessed up close.

The latest tranche of data was collected in 2024 and released in March 2026, but full results won’t be available for some time. The preceding survey was taken in 2020, but results weren’t finalized until August 2025.

Though that data is incomplete and slow to emerge, the picture is unambiguous: Even households once confident they could afford energy costs are at risk of falling behind on bills, making hard trade-offs to keep the lights on and living in homes they can’t afford to properly heat and cool.

Climate change and the cost of your homeowner's insurance

How wildfires and storms drove insurance losses in 2025

Multiple Authors, Carbon Brief

Extreme weather events around the world, such as wildfires and storms, were the major driver behind $107bn in insured losses in 2025, according to industry data. 

The Los Angeles wildfires alone caused record-high $40bn in insured losses from fires, says a new report from reinsurance company Swiss Re. 

The report notes that, while overall insured losses in 2025 were lower than previous years, this was due to a “[luck] rather than a reduction in risk”, partly due to no major hurricanes hitting the US.

Insured losses refer to damages that are compensated for by insurance companies. 

Despite lower losses in 2025 than the trend over recent years, they are still rising by an average of 5-7% each year since 1996, accounting for inflation, says Swiss Re. 

The report itself does not explicitly discuss the role of human-caused climate change in the events driving these losses. 

But the extensive ways in which climate change exacerbates and drives extreme weather are well established in scientific literature.

Other reports and media coverage also show how some parts of the world hit by frequent and intense extreme weather now face the possibility of becoming “uninsurable” due to unaffordable premiums or insurers pulling out of the market. 

One small problem: no books

And there's this:

Good job, Jack Reed

Rep. Tanzi bill would reform structure of RIPTA board

RIPTA needs a fix

Photo: Steve Ahlquist

Rep. Teresa A. Tanzi has introduced legislation to reform the structure of the board of the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority.

Since 2023, the director of the Rhode Island Department of Transportation has automatically served as the chair of RIPTA’s board. Representative Tanzi’s legislation (2025-H 8127) would instead make the chair a position elected by the members of the board itself. The director of RIDOT would still hold a position on the board.

Why Ozempic doesn’t work for everyone

Scientists just found a hidden reason

Stanford Medicine

A new study reveals that popular diabetes and weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy may not work as effectively for about 10% of people due to specific genetic variants. These individuals appear to have a puzzling condition called “GLP-1 resistance,” where their bodies produce higher levels of the hormone targeted by these drugs—but don’t respond to it properly.

More than one in four people with Type 2 diabetes use GLP-1 receptor agonists, a class of widely prescribed medications. However, new research from Stanford Medicine and international collaborators suggests these drugs may be less effective for some individuals due to genetic differences.

About 10% of the population carries certain genetic variants linked to a newly identified phenomenon called GLP-1 resistance. In these individuals, levels of the hormone GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide-1), which helps regulate blood sugar, are actually higher than normal but appear to be less effective at doing their job.

It is still unclear whether these genetic variants influence weight loss outcomes from GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy, which are increasingly used to treat obesity. These medications are typically prescribed at higher doses for weight loss than for diabetes.

The study, published March 29 in Genome Medicine, focused on how these drugs affect blood sugar. It represents a decade of work involving experiments in both humans and mice, along with analysis of clinical trial data.

Trump's polling is terrible and getting worse

Looking behind Trump's cratering polls

Tom Schaller

The irony is profound: Donald Trump, a man who craves adulation and perhaps deification, is the least-liked American president ever.

Trump’s approval ratings have reached historic lows. He’s polling lower than he did at the same point in his first term, and he suffers net-negative approval ratings in all but nine states. Americans overwhelmingly reject him, his policies, and his job performance as president. 

In fact, if the third of Americans who comprise his bedrock base of red-hatted MAGAs are held aside, the rest of the nation is now nearly unified in deeming Trump’s second term a failure, if not a disaster.

No matter the pollster or topic, no matter how questions are phrased nor the subgroup of Americans tracked, Trump and his policies are disfavored, even despised. His numbers were bad before he started his reckless Iran war and they have fallen further since. And most recent approval ratings came before Trump began circulating images that likened him to Jesus. (More on that at the end.)

Per pollster G. Elliott Morris, comparing Trump to other recent presidents 15 months into their terms confirms how badly the public rates him. At -21.6 net negative approval, Trump lags behind Joe Biden (-10.8), Barack Obama (+2.3), and a post-9/11 George W. Bush (+57.0) at comparable points of their terms. In fact, Trump already lags more than 8 points behind the 15-month mark of his own first term (-13.3).

Even if his current term is treated as a second term — when presidents tend to experience declining approval — the comparisons are still grim.

At the end of the first year of their second terms, only the Watergate-addled Nixon had a lower net approval number, -29.6, than the -16.2 net disapproval Trump had at the end of his fifth combined year in office. And that low rating came three months ago, before the ICE/CBP shootings in Minneapolis and the Iran war eroded Trump’s support by another five points and counting.

Trump’s Budget Proposes Massive Cuts for Climate and Environmental Programs

The budgets of the EPA, NOAA and FEMA would all be slashed, as would incentives for renewable energy.

By Dylan Baddour

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Donald Trump’s annual budget request to Congress continues his administration’s defunding of climate change programs, environmental protection and renewable energy, slashing the budgets of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

The spending plan for fiscal 2027 “builds on the President’s vision by continuing to constrain non-defense spending,” wrote Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, in a foreword to the 92-page document, which includes an historic, $1.5 trillion defense budget, an increase of 44 percent.

EPA spending would be cut in half under Trump’s proposal, released Friday, and grants from the agency would be slashed by $1 billion. Congress rejected a similar budget request from the president last year. 

An Inside Climate News analysis of federal workforce data released by the Office of Personnel Management shows that EPA lost more than 4,000 employees in the first year of Trump’s second term, reducing its workforce to 12,849, its lowest level since the 1980s. The 24 percent reduction was more than double the rate of losses across the entire federal government.

Earth Day program in Peace Dale on wind power

Thank you, Tech Bros

URI bee specialists share information for insect enthusiasts of all ages

Mind your bee’s and q’s

Kristen Curry

Bees are small but play a big role in our
environment. (URI Photos / Casey Johnson)

For Steven Alm and Casey Johnson, it’s a bug’s world every day in the University of Rhode Island Bee Lab. With a new exhibit on insects opening at Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, they could not be happier to see a new generation of insect enthusiasts get an up-close look at their small subjects of study.

Part of URI’s Plant Sciences and Entomology department, Alm and Johnson answered questions on the local bee population for zoo visitors who may be interested in learning more after their day at the park:

Which bees are most common here in Rhode Island?

We know the most about our bumble bees because they are large and fairly easy to identify. The Common Eastern Bumble Bee is our most prevalent bumble bee here. We also have good numbers of sweat, mining, digger, and cellophane bees.  

We have recorded more than 280 bee species in Rhode Island, past and present; they are incredibly diverse with different needs. Some species have evolved to only collect pollen from certain plant families or even a single plant species. This means they are closely linked to these plants and will disappear if the plant disappears.

The Southeastern Blueberry Bee, for instance, forages only on blueberry, lupine or redbud and nests only in loose, sandy soil. This bee was recorded in Rhode Island for the first time in 2024. The Macropis Cuckoo Bee was thought to be extinct for nearly 60 years until it was rediscovered in Nova Scotia in 2004. Since then, it has been recorded in a handful of U.S. states, including one specimen collected here in Rhode Island in 2024.

Tylenol during pregnancy not tied to increased risk of autism in children

Trump and Kennedy are wrong. AGAIN.

Mary Van Beusekom, MS

Bobby Jr. does science. This is a REAL
story, not made up

Danish researchers find no link between maternal use of acetaminophen (Tylenol) during pregnancy and excess risk of autism in children, adding to mounting evidence that the drug is safe to use in pregnancy.

For the nationwide study, published yesterday in JAMA Pediatrics, Copenhagen University Hospital investigators linked prospective individual-level data from national demographic and health care registers on singletons born in Denmark from January 1997 to July 2022 who were alive at one year old. Follow-up was one year or until emigration or autism diagnosis. 

Exposure to acetaminophen during pregnancy was identified by maternal fulfillment of a prescription for the drug in the National Prescription Register. Another analysis compared sibling groups with discordant acetaminophen exposure in pregnancy.

“Evidence regarding the association between prenatal acetaminophen exposure and risk of autism in offspring remains inconsistent,” the study authors wrote. “One large Swedish cohort study reported a small but statistically significant increase in autism risk among children in a population-level analysis; however, the association was not observed in a sibling matched analysis, raising questions about residual confounding.” 

Trump’s unfounded claims spook pregnant women

The researchers initiated the study after Donald Trump’s September 2025 remarks discouraging pregnant women from using acetaminophen because of a purported link to autism. He also claimed, without evidence, that leucovorin (folinic acid) can help autistic children.

Trump regime data shows little evidence that the killing almost 200 people on the high seas has stopped drugs from reaching the US.

Murder at sea and for what?

Julia Conley

As Republicans and several Democrats in the US Senate gave the go-ahead for the US to send more bombs and military equipment to Israel for its attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, the Trump administration was continuing what it claims is an effort to rid Latin American countries of drug traffickers—killing three people aboard a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean in the US military’s third boat bombing in three days.

The US Southern Command posted a video on social media of the bombing, which it said targeted a boat that was “transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.”

As with the 50 previous attacks on boats in the Pacific and the Caribbean Sea, the military did not publicize any evidence that the boat was carrying drugs or that its passengers were “narco-terrorists.”

A small number of the at least 177 victims of the Trump administration’s boat bombings have been identified. The Associated Press reported in November that Robert Sánchez, who was killed in the Caribbean, was a 42-year-old fisherman who made $100 per month and had started helping cocaine traffickers navigate the sea due to economic pressures. Juan Carlos Fuentes was an out-of-work bus driver who also worked as a “drug runner” to make ends meet.

The families of at least two victims have filed legal complaints over the killings of their family members, saying they were fishermen.

Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America has compared the boat bombings, assuming they have targeted people involved in the drug trade at all, to “straight-up massacring 16-year-old drug dealers on US street corners.”

Trump’s sweeping nuclear energy and weapons agenda has prompted revisions of longstanding radiation standards.

The Nuclear Safety Protections in Federal Crosshairs

By Alicia Inez Guzmán, High Country News

Bradley P. Clawson spent more than three decades handling highly radioactive materials at Idaho National Laboratory, a nuclear energy testing and production hub outside Idaho Falls. His work ranged from shipping and receiving nuclear naval fuels to helping bring hundreds of canisters of leftover fuel to Idaho for storage after the catastrophic Three Mile Island meltdown. He often handled nuclear fuel in “hot cells,” immensely contaminated areas reinforced with thick concrete. 

Throughout, Clawson, a member of the United Steelworkers union, leaned on safety standards to argue for extra protections against radiation, including respirators and additional shielding. 

But Donald Trump’s sweeping agenda to expand nuclear energy and modernize nuclear weapons now includes easing the radiation standards that Clawson credits with keeping his exposure as low as possible. 

“They’re pulling away from what’s kept us safe all these years,” said Clawson, who retired in 2021 and now serves on the advisory board on radiation and workers under the Centers for Disease Control. He spoke to High Country News in an unofficial personal capacity.

Last May, Trump signed four executive orders aimed at reviving what he called an industry “atrophied” by regulation. The U.S. Department of Energy quickly began stripping away regulations designed to reduce the amount of radiation exposure workers can face at its national laboratories, cleanup sites, and energy infrastructure.