FDA’s greenlight of old chemical offers chance to restore faith in sunscreen
By Michael Scaturro for KFF Officials, environmental health advocates, and skin care industry groups are expressing hope that the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a sunscreen ingredient on June 9 — after consideration for two decades, and global use for nearly as long — will help restore Americans’ wavering faith in sunscreen. “Bemotrizinol has been used safely in Europe…
Trump’s time warp
If there’s one thing President Donald Trump hates, it’s the First Amendment. From his sexist attacks against women journalists to his MAGA makeover of legacy media, the free press is a thing of the past in Trump’s America. The fallout couldn’t be more clear than at CBS, which is now owned by Trump pals David and Larry Ellison, where reporters are fleeing as CBS News Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss…
The Oligarchy Attends a Cage Fight
While New Yorkers nurse Knicks-championship hangovers in Donald Trump’s hometown, the president is celebrating his 80th birthday tonight by inviting his friends to a party designed to honor himself: a multimillion-dollar cage fight on the White House grounds. The UFC Freedom 250 event is being billed (by its promoters, anyway) as “the most historic sporting event of all time.”
“From the Revolution to the Octagon,” the extravaganza’s Crytpo.com-sponsored website declares, “this historic event will connect fans through cinematic storytelling and unrivaled competition on the world’s greatest proving ground.” According to the Guardian, fighters will earn bonuses to be paid out in a digital asset issued by the Trump family’s crypto company, World Liberty Financial.
Yesterday’s scenes—motocross dirtbikers doing flips against a backdrop of the White House, on a lawn torn up to become a fight stage—were surreal. There were parachute team performances and at least one bald eagle.
Maryland native Travis Pastrana and the Nitro Circus stunt team performed a dirt bike backflip over the octagon on the White House South Lawn, celebrating America’s 250th anniversary and President Donald Trump’s birthday.
: Jeffrey Bill pic.twitter.com/9JAffwQn65
One particularly notable aspect of tonight’s fights will be who is in the audience. David Ellison, whose $111 billion Paramount-Warner Bros. merger was approved by Trump’s Justice Department late last week, will be there. The president and top Republican officials are also expected to personally attend, even as Trump attempts to negotiate a long-awaited agreement with Iran.
“We are very close to a Deal that will bring peace to the region, including to Lebanon, and all sides should stand down,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at 10:46 am, as he criticized Israel for striking Lebanon “on a special day when we are so close to a Peace Deal.”
Whatever happens abroad, Trump will spend the evening watching the title fight between Ilia Topuria and Justin Gaethje. On the off chance that you weren’t invited, it’ll be streamed on Ellison’s Paramount+.
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She broke barriers as a priest. She spends retirement organizing against ‘Christofascism.’
From her ordination to organizing with the NAACP, Rev. Carter Heyward has always set a ‘place at the table’ for those previously denied. By Cassidy Klein for The 19th On “Moral Mondays,” a group of locals — sometimes 10, sometimes 100 — gather on the town square in Brevard, North Carolina, holding signs advocating for voting rights, economic justice and more. Carter Heyward…
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Celebrating Juneteenth with sax master Junior Walker
Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 300 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new. As Juneteenth approaches on June 19, it’s time to put together a soulful playlist for those barbecue family…
Cage fight on the White House lawn
A cartoon by David Horsey. Related | Trump’s cage fight birthday bash faces legal switch kick…
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Nature No Longer Smells So Natural—and That’s Our Fault
This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Across the globe, human activities are changing the way our planet smells. In Egypt, increasing temperatures are shrinking yields of aromatic jasmine flowers; in France, extreme drought has reduced the production of fragrant, night-blooming tuberose, a major ingredient in many perfumes; in Italy, climatic extremes are altering the characteristic floral, citrusy scent of bergamot.
But anthropogenic factors are also reshaping environmental smellscapes, a word coined in the 1980s to describe the totality of scents in a given geographic area, in ways that are far more subtle—and potentially much more harmful.
While humans largely rely on sight and sound in our interactions with each other and with the world around us, many other creatures rely on smells. Ants, for example, require scents for colony cohesion; turkey vultures let scent guide them to far-away carrion; and male moths use scent to find females hundreds of meters away. “Scent is very important because it mediates so many interactions within an ecosystem,” says James Blande, a chemical ecologist at the University of Eastern Finland.
A growing number of scientists are documenting how humans are changing the chemical signals of plants and animals.
These scent-based interactions are crucial for the maintenance of ecosystem services that directly benefit humans, from the bees and moths that pollinate crops to the flies and dung beetles that recycle the nutrients from dead and decomposing matter. Intact channels of scent communication are likely also important for the preservation of biodiversity. For example, many rare orchid species use scent to attract the co-evolved pollinators they need in order to reproduce, and scent helps guide monarch butterflies to the single type of plant on which they lay their eggs.
But just as we are discovering how important these chemical communication channels are to the fabric of the natural world—and the many benefits we reap from it—we are also learning how drastically they can be disrupted by our activities, including climate change and air pollution.
Now, scientists are working to document human-induced changes in smellscapes across the planet—to understand how these changes affect communication between different organisms, and to try to figure out which systems are capable of adaptation and which may be at risk of failure.
Historically, researchers in the field of sensory pollution have been largely focused on noise and light, says Jeff Riffell, a sensory biologist at the University of Washington. Odor pollution, on the other hand, “is really hard to get a handle on because you need these big chemical analysis devices that [cost] hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to characterize it.” Plus, he says, “we’re just not very olfactory.”
Despite these challenges, a growing number of scientists are documenting how humans are changing the chemical signals of plants and animals. For example, researchers have discovered that air pollution degrades many of the volatile organic compounds that make up lavender’s characteristic scent, and increasing temperatures dramatically decrease the floral perfumes released by strawberry plants and wild white petunias. Agricultural chemicals, like fertilizers and fungicides, add additional VOCs to the air in fields and orchards around the world.
A bee pollinates lavender at Castle Farm in Eynsford, England.Dan Kitwood via Getty
But figuring out how these changes affect communication between organisms— and whether this impairs their ability to pollinate, procreate, or otherwise survive—can be a tricky task, as objective differences in the chemical makeup of a scent don’t always predict differences in how they are perceived.
To get inside the mind of a pollinator and parse how much a smell has to change before it becomes unrecognizable, researchers often use a simple test called the proboscis extension response—a sort of Pavlov’s dog for bees. While Pavlov taught dogs to associate food with the sound of a bell, triggering them to drool, researchers teach bees to associate particular scents with the taste of sugar. Once they learn the association, the bees stick out their proboscis—the insect equivalent of a tongue.
In heavily polluted regions, the distance from which a moth can sense a flower is a quarter of what it was in preindustrial times.
Using this paradigm, Stony Brook University pollination biologist Jordanna Sprayberry and her colleagues taught bumblebees to recognize a particular floral odor, then tested how three different fungicides affected the bees’ ability to recognize this odor. “We found negative effects of every fungicide we tested,” she says. One fungicide was disruptive at every concentration tested. This could be especially problematic for fruit and vegetable production, since these crops generally require insect pollination and are often heavily treated with fungicides.
A team of researchers in the United Kingdom has also used this type of test to investigate the impact of oxidizing air pollutants—like ozone and nitrate radicals (NO3)—on honeybees’ ability to recognize scents. These pollutants are naturally present in the air at low levels but are dramatically increased by emissions from cars, power plants, and oil and gas production. Instead of just adding new odor molecules on top of an existing scent, oxidizing pollutants react with different components of floral perfumes, degrading their scents.
After researchers taught honeybees to recognize a floral odor blend, they released that scent into a wind tunnel of ozone-polluted air. At six meters from the source, only about 30 percent of bees could still recognize the scent. This kind of pollution could seriously impair honeybees’ ability to find flowers, which is concerning because honeybees are estimated to be responsible for about half of crop pollination worldwide.
While daytime pollinators get the most attention, nocturnal pollinators are also important for crops and wild plant species. To find out if night-time pollination was similarly affected by pollutants, Riffell turned his attention to a fragrant, night-blooming wildflower called the pale evening primrose and its hawkmoth pollinators.
A farmer sprays fungicide on potato field in Germany, June 2019.Thomas Warnack/picture alliance via Getty
He and his team measured how compounds in the primrose scent changed when exposed to NO3, which increases at night. While some types of odor compounds were relatively resistant to these pollutants, others, like β-Pinene, a woodsy-green scent, and β-Ocimene, which is more floral and herbaceous, began to degrade within seconds.
Next, researchers set up scent traps at their field site in eastern Washington. Over the course of the night, they recorded how often pollinators visited a real flower, a paper cone releasing a simulated floral scent, and a cone releasing floral scent degraded by NO3 exposure. Pollinators stopped by the real flower and the floral-scented cone at similar rates, but the degraded scent received about 70 percent fewer visits. That’s bad news for both players: As natural scents degrade, pollinators may have less access to food while plants may have a lower chance of reproducing.
Using a model of atmospheric conditions that included pollution levels and weather conditions and combining it with data on how quickly oxidizing pollutants can degrade key floral odors, Riffell and his colleagues mapped distances at which a moth would be able to detect a primrose in different locations on Earth. In more heavily polluted regions of the world, the team found, the distance from which a moth can sense a flower has fallen to just a quarter of what it was during preindustrial times. Similar modeling strategies could be used to identify croplands and valuable ecosystems at greatest risk for communication breakdown and the loss of crucial pollination services.
Studies reveal that ozone pollution breaks down pheromones, with serious consequences for insects looking to mate.
Much of the work on the ecology of shifting smells has focused on pollination—and with good reason. “When you go to the grocery store in, say, Canada or the United States, almost 70 percent of the food is actually a result of pollination,” says Riffell. The vast majority of wild flowering plants also depend on pollination by insects and other animals.
But plant-pollinator interaction is just a tiny part of how scents structure our world. How human activities affect other types of chemical messages is largely unexplored, but the few existing studies suggest concerning disruptions. Markus Knaden, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, is exploring how ozone alters chemical communication between insects. “The problem is that [scent] molecules are very sensitive to oxidants,” he says. “Which was not a problem for the last millions of years but is becoming an increasing problem due to us.”
Knaden’s studies revealed that ozone pollution breaks down pheromones, with serious consequences for insects looking to mate. For example, ozone-altered pheromones made male flies less appealing to females of their species and increased male-male courtship behaviors. The mating process leaves insects vulnerable to predation, Knaden says, so if a male wastes time courting other males, he might get eaten before he can reproduce.
Pheromone breakdown can mess with mating in other ways, too: When Knaden’s team exposed flies to ozone-enriched air, females were much more likely to mate with males of a different species, producing hybrid offspring that were often infertile.
A moth pollinates a thistle in in Ladywell Park in London.Dan Kitwood via Getty
Insect populations are already in decline globally, a phenomenon known to be driven by habitat loss and the widespread use of pesticides, but Knaden says it’s possible that oxidizing pollutants could accelerate this decline. “If you take down the population by 30 percent or 50 percent, it is already harder for [insects] to locate each other,” he says. “But if you then take down their communications channel by oxidizing their pheromones, that might be an additional effect.”
What does a future of altered smellscapes look like for organisms that rely on scent to communicate?
“Depending on the relationship, some of the plants and animals can handle these changes,” says Shannon Olsson, who runs the Naturalist-Inspired Chemical Ecology lab at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, in India. “We have seen robustness in the system, but we’ve also seen failures in the system.”
Some insects are quick learners: Bumblebees and honeybees can learn attraction to new scents after just a handful of training runs. And while pollinating hoverflies seem to be innately attracted to certain floral scents and colors, Olsson’s research shows that they can also learn to avoid them, demonstrating that some insects are highly adaptable to changes in the environment.
Pollution can change the scent of a Mediterranean fig enough that it is no longer attractive to its only pollinator, the fig wasp.
But some insects may not live long enough for meaningful learning to occur. Researchers found that ozone pollution can change the scent of a Mediterranean fig enough that it is no longer attractive to its only pollinator, the fig wasp. In the wild, the wasp lives only about two days—likely not enough time to learn an odor that’s different from the tree that it evolved with over millions of years.
Learning may not help buffer insects against pollution-altered sexual signals, either. “People that work on insect mating and on insect pheromones,” Knudsen says, “usually think that this is a really hard-wired system.”
The good news, says Riffell, is that air quality regulations implemented in recent decades have had a substantial impact on reducing oxidizing air pollutants. In the US, levels of ozone and nitrogen oxides—which are also harmful to human health—have been falling slowly but steadily since 1980. Even so, many places in the US and Europe still regularly experience unhealthy levels of these pollutants, and ozone exposure is estimated to be increasing globally.
“I am hopeful that things are getting better,” says Riffell. “But I am very mindful that things can change really dramatically and very quickly. We’ve all experienced this—especially in the US, in the last year or two.” To prevent these anthropogenic pollutants from further affecting animal communication systems, he adds, “we need enhanced regulations.”
For agricultural chemicals, like fungicides, Sprayberry says more research is needed to determine when and how much to use them to minimize the loss of crops to disease while also producing the smallest amount of bee-disturbing olfactory pollution. Ultimately, says Olsson, “We have to learn how to coexist in a way that’s minimally destructive to our plants and animals.”
Upside down and overfed: New thrill ride and treats come to the Boardwalk
The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk’s first major new thrill ride in a decade, Vertigo 360, offers riders a soaring, upside-down view of Monterey Bay while adding to the park’s growing lineup of attractions. Along the way, Lily Belli samples several new food offerings, from smash burgers and smoked brisket to beignets and dirty sodas, highlighting the Boardwalk’s expanding culinary options.
How Substance Use Became a Trojan Horse to Undermine Abortion Rights
In the first two years of post-Dobbs America, 412 people were charged with “pregnancy-related” crimes, with 399 of these being related to substance use—including alcohol. These charges, which most frequently alleged either child abuse or neglect of the fetus, were made possible by politicians who have slow-dripped the language and ideology of fetal personhood into lawmaking for decades, a process that has only amplified since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
For years, anti-choice lawmakers have sought to lay down legal precedents for fetuses and embryos to be considered fully fledged persons in need of legal protections as part of a wider framework to criminalize abortion as murder. But this language and this broader approach to so-called public health have ramifications beyond abortion: If a fetus is a person, then consuming alcohol or narcotics while pregnant and putting the fetus at risk for fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, or FASD, and other substance-related birth defects is a form of child endangerment.
Not only does this result in the criminalizing of pregnant people, it also hinders the prevention, research, and treatment for both the FASD and substance use disorders being weaponized to advance this anti-abortion agenda. What’s more, this ideology has proven to be wholly ineffective in the effort to “protect fetuses.” Laws around “pregnancy-related crimes” have only prevented mothers from seeking support, while simultaneously creating legal frameworks for restricting abortion access, creating a climate where pregnant patients are increasingly policed and where public health policies around prenatal substance exposure, FASD, and reproductive justice movements are increasingly linked.
Dr. Sarah Roberts is a professor and legal epidemiologist at the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health initiative at the University of California at San Francisco, and one of the only researchers in the United States working on the intersections of health care practices and policies around abortion and the criminalization of behaviors while pregnant. “Singling out drinking while pregnant isn’t effective,” she explains, noting that none of the punitive or so-called “supportive” FASD prevention policies that she’s analyzed actually prevented FASD.
The only policies that actually prevented FASD and offered support to mothers and babies with FASD were those that addressed alcohol consumption across the board. “People who are drinking while pregnant were drinking before they got pregnant and are in families and communities where people are drinking as well, so by reducing drinking at a population level, that also relates to improved outcomes during pregnancy,” Dr. Roberts explains.
In her research, Dr. Roberts has found that the states that criminalize pregnant people consuming alcohol largely overlap with states restricting abortion.
“Anti-abortion laws have always opened up the potential for greater surveillance, policing, and punishment of pregnant people. We see that in the way that miscarriage is policed, the way that substance use during pregnancy is increasingly policed, in the way that people have been punished for this, under a range of laws that have nothing to do with abortion,” explains Dr. Gretchen Sisson, sociologist at the University of California at San Francisco, and the author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.
As Roberts explains, many of the policies that target pregnant people who drink also target those who consume other substances. These policies have deep roots, often dating back to the “war on drugs,” and, more specifically, the racist “crack baby” scare in the 1980s and 1990s. Media outlets of that era often presented sensationalist narratives that babies born to mothers using crack cocaine would be born with brain damage and overwhelm welfare systems, leading to a widespread targeting and policing of Black pregnant people, in particular. These policies were often ignored or brushed aside by mainstream pro-choice, often white-led organizing groups at the time, without the foresight of recognizing that this very same positioning of fetuses as people would be used to dismantle abortion access in the years to come. “There is a racist history to this, an ableist history to this, and a classist history to this, that these issues weren’t considered ‘mainstream’ abortion rights or reproductive rights issues,” explains Dana Sussman, the vice president of Pregnancy Justice.
Today, Roberts’s research has found that Black mothers are still excessively targeted by “total welfare reporting,” or laws that require physicians to report pregnant patients to Child Protective Services if alcohol consumption is suspected. This reporting is linked to an increase in adverse effects for Black women and babies, despite the “pro-family” rhetoric behind them. Similarly, Black women are more likely to face restricted abortion access and be targeted by pregnancy-related (and abortion-related) criminal prosecutions.
Pregnancy Justice is a New York–based organization that represents people charged with pregnancy-related crimes, the vast majority of which involve allegations of substance use. For Sussman, the intersections of pro-choice organizing and organizing around FASD and prenatal exposure to substances are clear: “We are all fighting for people to get health care,” she explains. For her organization, the idea of fetal personhood is the product of a shared ideology of control and coercion, linking restricted abortion access and the criminalization of pregnant people. “If your Supreme Court is interpreting your statutes around children to include embryos and fetuses, then how does that work with abortion?”
Many of the clients of Pregnancy Justice under criminal investigation were reported or “found out” when seeking health care, including support for substance use disorders. Where mothers sought support for alcohol or substance use disorders, they found credible, legal threats against them under the guise of child protection policies. “We know that when you put people at risk of losing their children, either children already born or future children, or at risk of losing their liberty because they have a substance use disorder, whether it be alcohol or drugs, they will not get care, and outcomes will be worse for everyone—both mom and baby,” says Sussman.
Advocacy groups for research and funding toward FASD acknowledge and condemn the criminalization of pregnant people consuming alcohol, with one organization, which requested to remain unnamed so as not to put its research at risk, reiterating that the punitive policies only prevent mothers from seeking help and add to the stigma of both mothers and children with FASD, undermining the principles of disability justice for which the movement is often fighting.
At the same time, organizations dedicated to FASD appear to be in an uncomfortable position: Lawmakers supportive of funding and various supportive policies around FASD are not always advocates for struggling pregnant people or for reproductive justice. The FASD Respect Act, a 2025 bill that brought in waves of funding for FASD-related research and programming, for instance, was passed across party lines, with co-sponsorship from Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas, rated an A+ by Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America because he’s “voted to consistently protect the lives of the unborn,” and Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, who describes himself as a “staunch advocate for life.”
Many children diagnosed with FASD are adopted. “Children with special needs are more likely to be adopted because if you have a family that is low-resourced who doesn’t feel equipped to care for a child with special needs, they’re more likely to relinquish; and if you have a mother who is engaged in alcohol use at high levels, she’s more likely to be subject to family policing and child removal,” explains Sisson.
Anti-abortion, pro-FASD-funding lawmakers appear to see adoption as a fundable, moral alternative to abortion, creating a contradictory overlap between the two movements—all while refusing to acknowledge the harmful ramifications of their policies. “There is definitely a pro-adoption thread within the disability community, and I think it is particularly pronounced in cases where disability is attributed to maternal actions during pregnancy, because then [it’s] even more about how adoption can be about saviorism,” Sisson remarks. This overlap also creates an apparent nervousness within FASD organizations to engage with pro-choice movements, reproductive rights organizing, or even the word feminism, for fear of having these lawmakers turn their back on them.
The anti-abortion movement, despite many members labeling themselves as supportive of FASD research funding and programs for those with FASD and their families, seeks a framework that treats fetuses with FASD as the victims of crime—and the mothers as perpetrators. At a lawmaking level, this only propagates extreme stigma against both mothers and babies with FASD and prevents families from seeking help for substance use disorders and for disability support.
Laced with saviorism and the desire to police both disability and pregnancy, the anti-abortion underpinning of pregnancy-related laws and prosecution hinders proactive and effective FASD-related support, resulting only in the targeting of pregnant patients, and not in the protection of children or mothers. On the flip side, for organizers working to support disabled people, abortion rights, and mothers targeted by pregnancy-related prosecutions, reproductive rights and policies on prenatal substance exposure are inseparable: The dismantling of fetal personhood ideologies is critical to the underpinning of both abortion rights advocacy and policies that effectively support mothers and babies, as well as reversing the Trojan horse the anti-abortion camp has been building for decades.
Closing the door on a lifetime of memories in my Aptos house: I’m staying in NYC for good
As she prepares to sell the Aptos house she shared with her late husband for more than four decades, former Lookout columnist Claudia Sternbach revisits the rooms, memories and milestones that shaped the happiest chapter of her life. She will be having an estate sale June 19-21. She bought the house in 1981. She now expects it to fund her life as a widow in New York.