your science briefing for 04.25.2025

The ominous start of the Great American Brain Drain, how rocky planets melt around alien stars, the creepy consequences of selling your face to AI, and more...

One of the biggest red flags that a country’s future isn’t looking stable or prosperous is when scientists and engineers start looking for work overseas because that’s how they can continue their research and sustain their careers. (This is how I ended up in the United States after the collapse of the USSR, by the way.) And now, in a stunning reversal of the past 80 years, scientists are preparing to leave the U.S. as Europe and Canada are rolling out the welcome mat and promising funding and grants. This brain drain is directly attributable to the Trump administration’s war on science, and should be a five alarm fire for those who care about the future of the nation… (Nature)

There are only two objects in our solar system with liquid on their surface. Obviously, Earth is one. The other is Titan. Of course, at -179 °C, you can’t have liquid water but methane will behave very much like water in these conditions. This is why scientists are so interested in studying the large moon for signs of life not quite as we know it, and comparing it to the dynamics of our own world. Except, Titan’s chemistry is very different from ours and things like deltas full of sediment expected to be there simply aren’t. Instead, there are weird pits created by an unknown process… (Space.com)

Here’s a fun fact about our universe. Planets melt all the time. No, seriously. It turns out that during the formation of solar systems, gas giants often drift really close to their parent stars and become Hot Jupiters constantly bombarded with solar winds that superheat and evaporate their atmospheres and can burn them down to rocky, semi-molten cores, if not utterly obliterate them. Another very likely scenario is that larger planets push small, rocky worlds to end up as solar kindling. Which is the case with BD+05 4868 Ab, a planet roughly half the mass of Mercury forming an 8 million kilometer long tail while being melted… (ScienceAlert)

In the USSR and Maoist China, scientific papers weren’t allowed to be published for public consumption until they passed a political review to make sure scientists were not promoting “wrongthink” with actual, verifiable data. And apparently, the Trump administration now wants to join the ranks of these beacons of innovation, freedom, and democracy with the DOJ demanding that the New England Journal of Medicine, respected as one of the gold standards of peer reviewed medical research, prove its publishing process isn’t “biased against certain viewpoints,” which I’m sure doesn’t have anything to do with the first entry in their briefing… (STAT)

Contrary to popular belief, actors who appear on a big show or popular podcast are seldom making enough to pay their bills, especially in the age of streaming where all compensation and front-loaded and royalties can maybe buy you a sandwich once in a great while. So, some actors licensed their likeness to AI avatars they thought were intended for customer support, corporate presentations, and other benign, animated stock asset things. Unfortunately for them, their avatars are now too frequently being used for AI-powered scams and authoritarian propaganda… (ArsTechnica)