Science
Asteroid 2024 YR4 Could Strike Earth, Researchers Say, But the Odds are Small
![Asteroid 2024 YR4 Could Strike Earth, Researchers Say, But the Odds are Small Asteroid 2024 YR4 Could Strike Earth, Researchers Say, But the Odds are Small](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/01/29/multimedia/29sci-asteroid-01-gfpw/29sci-asteroid-01-gfpw-facebookJumbo.jpg)
You may hear about a large asteroid headed toward Earth. Don’t panic.
Just after Christmas Day, astronomers spotted something zipping away from Earth: a rock somewhere between 130 feet and 330 feet long that they named 2024 YR4. Over the next few weeks, they simulated its possible future orbits. They now say, based on the most up-to-date information, that there is a 1.3 percent chance that this asteroid will strike somewhere on Earth on Dec. 22, 2032.
Should this keep you up at night?
“No, absolutely not,” said David Rankin, a comet and asteroid spotter at the University of Arizona.
The object’s current odds of striking Earth may sound scary — and it’s fair to say that an asteroid in this size range has the potential to cause harm. Should it strike a city, the damage would not cause anything close to a mass extinction, but the damage to the city itself would be catastrophic.
But a 1.3 percent chance of a hit is also a 98.7 percent chance of a miss. “It’s not a number you want to ignore, but it’s not a number you need to lose sleep over,” Mr. Rankin said.
And the odds may diminish over time, as astronomers gather new data about the object.
For now, experts say, calm is warranted. The asteroid has been spotted several years ahead of its close shave with Earth — and that’s a good thing.
“The international systems we’re putting in place to find, track and characterize — and, if it comes to it, mitigate the impacts of — hazardous asteroids and comets are working as intended,” said Andy Rivkin, an astronomer and planetary defense researcher at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.
Here’s what you need to know about 2024 YR4.
How was this asteroid discovered?
It was identified by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS, four telescopes around the world that hunt near-Earth objects and are funded by NASA. Its telescope in Chile found 2024 YR4 on Dec. 27, just two days after a close approach to Earth.
It’s now speeding away from the planet and getting fainter by the day.
How big is 2024 YR4?
According to the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre, it is between 130 and 330 feet long. This size range is based on the amount of sunlight it is reflecting. Without knowing exactly how reflective 2024 YR4’s surface is, only a range of sizes can be given.
A more accurate estimate could be made using radar, but that won’t be possible until the asteroid makes another close, but perfectly safe, pass by Earth on Dec. 17, 2028.
Is an asteroid of this size a concern?
Yes.
A 130-foot asteroid is comparable to the Tunguska impactor, a meteor that exploded over a remote patch of Siberia in 1908 and decimated an 800-square-mile forest (that’s over twice the size of New York City). A 330-foot asteroid would cause far greater localized damage: A strike on a city would destroy much of it. If the object survives its journey through the atmosphere and strikes the ocean just offshore, the resulting tsunami could devastate nearby coasts.
How do we know there is a chance of an impact in 2032?
The Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, is home to America’s asteroid and comet cartographers. Using sophisticated software, they track the motion of all known near-Earth objects.
One of their programs, Sentry, assesses the possible orbits of known near-Earth objects and determines whether they stand even a tiny chance of striking Earth within the next century. Those whose impact odds cannot be confidently reduced to (essentially) zero remain on the Sentry Risk List.
“The possibility that 2024 YR4 might impact in 2032 was identified right after discovery,” said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the NASA center. But based on just a few observations, the prediction uncertainties for 2032 were initially very large. As the number of observations grew to the hundreds, he said, “the impact probability has gradually increased over the last month and has now surpassed 1 percent, an important threshold.”
The Torino Scale is a tool for communicating how concerned the public and policymakers should be about an asteroid. It ranges from 0 (the likelihood of a potentially deadly collision is effectively zero) to 10 (a collision is certain and may imperil all of human civilization).
2024 YR4 currently sits at 3: a close encounter, less than a decade away, meriting attention by astronomers, one that has a chance of 1 percent or greater of a collision capable of localized destruction.
This is the second-highest rating ever given to an asteroid. Only Apophis, an asteroid once thought to be a threat, briefly reached a 4. But as we learned more about Apophis, we found it had no chance of striking Earth for at least a century.
When can we expect the impact odds to change?
What normally happens is that the impact odds plummet to zero as more observations come in and the asteroid’s orbit is better known with more precision.
The same story will probably unfold with 2024 YR4. “The most likely outcome is that further observations will rule out an impact,” Mr. Rankin said.
2024 YR4 is getting extremely faint as it travels away from Earth, meaning most telescopes are going to struggle to track it. “However, given this is a special case, members of the community have requested (and received) time on some of the larger and more capable facilities,” Dr. Rivkin said. “Those should do OK through April.”
Astronomers will also have an even greater opportunity to refine their predictions during the December 2028 flyby. But until then, it’s possible that an impact in 2032 won’t be entirely ruled out.
“We expect the impact probability to go to zero rather than 100 percent,” Dr. Rivkin said. “But it may take a few years before we get the data to show that.”
Ultimately, should we be worried about 2024 YR4?
No, not at present. It’s very likely to miss the planet in 2032.
And if we find out that it will hit, “we might be able to do something about it,” Mr. Rankin said.
One option, if space agencies had enough time to mount an operation, would be to attempt to alter the asteroid’s path by crashing a spacecraft into it.
If that failed, or wasn’t possible, and governments worked out a precise impact location, they could evacuate people who might be at immediate risk.
Robin George Andrews is the author of “How to Kill an Asteroid,” a book about the science of planetary defense.
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Science
Dickson Despommier, Who Championed Farming in Skyscrapers, Dies at 84
![Dickson Despommier, Who Championed Farming in Skyscrapers, Dies at 84 Dickson Despommier, Who Championed Farming in Skyscrapers, Dies at 84](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/02/20/multimedia/14Despommier--kcfvprint3/14Despommier--kcfv-facebookJumbo.jpg)
Dickson Despommier, a microbiologist who proposed that cities should grow food in high-rises, popularizing the term “vertical farming” — an idea that crossed over from the realm of the purely fanciful to become a reality around the globe — died on Feb. 7 in Manhattan. He was 84.
His wife, Marlene Bloom, confirmed the death, in a hospital. He lived in Fort Lee, N.J.
Dr. Despommier (pronounced de-POM-ee-yay), who was a professor for 38 years at Columbia’s School of Public Health, specialized in parasitic diseases, but he gained far wider influence as a guru of vertical farming.
In 2001, he and students in a medical ecology class designed a 30-story building that theoretically could grow food for 50,000 people. Some 100 varieties of fruits and vegetables would be grown on upper floors, with chickens housed lower down. Fish would feed on plant waste.
Dr. Despommier argued that vertical farms would use 70 to 90 percent less water than traditional farms, allowing agricultural land to return to a natural state and helping to remediate climate change. He evangelized at TEDx talks and in a book, “The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century.”
“When my book came out, in 2010, there were no functioning vertical farms that I was aware of,” he told The New Yorker several years later. “By the time I published a revised edition in 2011, vertical farms had been built in England, Holland, Japan and Korea.”
Tech investors poured money into vertical farming. The operations generally substituted indoor LED lights for sunlight and used watering systems that spritzed plant roots — no soil needed. The farms sprouted in places as varied as downtown Newark and Dubai, on the Persian Gulf.
The Guardian estimated that there were more than 2,000 vertical farms in the U.S. in 2022, raising vegetables and fruits in stacked trays or long columns, some several stories high, some tended by robots. That year, Walmart announced that it would harvest salad greens from a vertical farm in Compton, Calif., to be run by a company named Plenty.
More recently, the industry has stumbled. High interest rates and energy costs have caused many operations to close or declare bankruptcy. They include the one in Compton and the one in Newark, AeroFarms, which The New Yorker featured prominently in its article about Dr. Despommier in 2017. A company with farms in three Eastern states, Bowery Farming, whose investors included Justin Timberlake and Natalie Portman and which was once valued at $2.3 billion, shut down last year.
Critics questioned if vertical farming really lowers carbon emissions and called it a fad. Others said the industry is merely going through a shakeout and will endure.
Dickson Donald Despommier was born on June 5, 1940, in New Orleans to Roland and Beverly (Wood) Despommier. His father was an accountant for a shipping line. His parents divorced when Dickson was young.
He received a B.S. in biology from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1962, an M.S. in medical parasitology from Columbia in 1964 and a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Notre Dame in 1967.
Dr. Despommier joined Columbia’s faculty in 1971 as an assistant professor of microbiology. He taught a required course in parasitic diseases to second-year medical students for three decades. His research focused on tropical diseases; he was co-author of a textbook, “Parasitic Diseases,” and a director of the website “Parasites Without Borders.”
Besides his wife, he is survived by his sister, Duane Despommier Kuykendall; his sons, Bruce and Bradley; a stepdaughter, Molly Bloom; a stepson, Michael Goodwin; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. An earlier marriage, to Judith Forman, ended in divorce.
The idea of vertical farming emerged when students told Dr. Despommier in 2000 that they were bored with his course on medical ecology. He redirected the semester by posing a question, “What will the world be like in 2050?” and a follow-up question, “What would you like the world to be like in 2050?”
The discussion focused on how densely crowded the planet would be in 50 years and how food would have to be grown then with less water and less pollution from chemical fertilizers. Students said New York City should source all its food from close by. They suggested using the city’s rooftops for agriculture. But then they calculated that if every rooftop in all five boroughs were turned into a garden, the growing acreage would feed only about 2 percent of the population.
Dr. Despommier then thought of raising crops in glass and steel skyscrapers, with plants stacked on multiple levels, just like their human inhabitants. He continued to refine designs with each year’s class of ecology students. In 2001, he adopted the term vertical farming.
After he appeared on the Comedy Central late-night show “The Colbert Report” in 2008 to discuss his eggplants-in-the-sky idea, traffic to his website shot up to 400,000 visitors overnight.
Many of the start-ups that turned Dr. Despommier’s vision into a reality built vertical farms that were only two or three stories high, compared with the 30-story behemoths he had proposed. One was attached to a parking garage in Jackson, Wyo. Others were housed in shipping crates.
But the idea traversed the globe, with a nonprofit, the Association for Vertical Farming, starting up in Germany in 2013.
All along, skeptics questioned whether the cost and the carbon footprint of indoor farming was an improvement over the traditional kind practiced by humanity for some 12,000 years.
“It’s such an appealing idea — ‘Press floor 10 for lettuce’ — that people picked up on it right away,” Bruce Bugbee, a professor of crop physiology at Utah State University, told The New York Times in 2016. “The fundamental problem is that plants need a lot of light. It’s free outside. If we’re going to do it inside, it will require the burning of a lot of fossil fuels.”
The industry shakeout has been brutal, with the editor of the news site Vertical Farming Today declaring in 2023 that venture capital investments in vertical farming had fallen by about 90 percent.
Unfazed, Dr. Despommier kept brainstorming about how modern life could thrive in the face of a dangerously changing climate. In his last book, “The New City: How to Build Our Sustainable Urban Future” (2023), he proposed that cities henceforth be built of wood.
The carbon footprint of making concrete and steel, he explained, is enormous, whereas wood is a carbon sink — trees absorb carbon from the air as they grow — and new technologies for engineering timbers allowed very tall buildings to be built.
“It sounds like we’ll be using up all the wood,” he said last year, “but the fact is that, if vertical farming succeeds, there’ll be a lot more land to grow trees.”
Science
A proposed law could force California health insurers to explain claim denials
![A proposed law could force California health insurers to explain claim denials A proposed law could force California health insurers to explain claim denials](https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/f8a1cd1/2147483647/strip/true/crop/6720x3528+0+476/resize/1200x630!/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F28%2Fc6%2Fe5ca289d40cb8fc9b06ae392ecc0%2Fmedicare-enrollment-66965.jpg)
When Colleen Henderson’s 3-year-old daughter complained of pain while using the bathroom, doctors brushed it off as a urinary tract infection or constipation, common maladies in the potty-training years.
Henderson, however, suspected it could be something worse, and asked for an ultrasound. The doctor and ultrasound technician told her that her insurance provider, UnitedHealthcare, would not cover it, but Henderson decided to do it anyway, charging the $6,000 procedure to her credit card. Then came the news: There was a grapefruit-sized tumor in her toddler’s bladder.
That was in 2008. The next five years, Henderson said, became a protracted battle with UnitedHealthcare over paying for the specialists who finally diagnosed and treated her daughter’s rare condition, inflammatory pseudotumor. She appealed denial of coverage for hospital stays, surgeries and medication to the insurer and state regulators, to no avail. The Sacramento-area family racked up more than $1 million in medical debt, she said, because UnitedHealthcare had decided that treatments recommended by doctors were unnecessary. The family declared bankruptcy.
“If I had not fought tooth and nail every step of the way, my daughter would be dead,” said Henderson, whose daughter eventually recovered and is now a thriving 20-year-old junior at Oregon State University. “You pay a lot of money to have health insurance, and you hope that your health insurance has your well-being at the forefront, but that’s not happening at all.”
While insurance denials are on the rise, surveys show few Americans appeal them. Various analyses have found that many of those who escalate complaints to government regulators successfully get denials overturned (unlike the Hendersons). Consumer advocates and policymakers say that’s a clear sign insurance companies routinely deny care they shouldn’t. Now a proposal in the California legislature seeks to penalize insurers who repeatedly make the wrong call.
While the measure, Senate Bill 363, would cover only about a third of insured Californians whose health plans are regulated by the state, experts say it could be one of the boldest attempts in the nation to rein in health insurer denials — before and after care is given. And California could become one of only a handful of states that require insurers to disclose denial rates and reasoning, data the industry often considers proprietary information.
The measure also seeks to force insurers to be more judicious with denials, by fining them up to $1 million per case if more than half of appeals filed with regulators are overturned in a year.
In 2023, state data show, about 72% of appeals made to the Department of Managed Health Care, which regulates the vast majority of health plans, resulted in an insurer’s initial denial being reversed.
“When you have health insurance, you should have confidence that it’s going to cover your healthcare needs,” said Sen. Scott Wiener, the San Francisco Democrat who introduced the bill. “They can just delay, deny, obstruct, and, in many cases, avoid having to cover medically necessary care, and it’s unacceptable.”
A spokesperson for the California Assn. of Health Plans declined to comment, saying the group was still reviewing the bill‘s language. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s spokesperson Elana Ross said his office generally does not comment on pending legislation.
Concerned about spiraling consumer health costs, lawmakers in states across the nation have increasingly looked for ways to verify that insurers are paying claims fairly.
In 2024, 17 states enacted legislation dealing with prior authorization of care by private insurers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. For example, Connecticut, which has one of the most robust denial rate disclosure laws, publishes an annual report card detailing the number and percentage of claims each insurer has denied, as well as the share that ends up getting reversed. Oregon published similar information until recently, when state disclosure requirements lapsed.
In California, there’s no way to know how often insurers deny care, which health experts say is especially troubling as mental health needs are reaching crisis levels among children and young adults. According to Keith Humphreys, a health policy professor at Stanford University, it’s easier to deny mental health care because a diagnosis of, say, depression can be more subjective than that of a broken limb or cancer.
“We think it’s unacceptable that the state has absolutely no idea how big of a problem this is,” said Lishaun Francis, senior director of behavioral health for the advocacy group Children Now, a sponsor of the bill.
Under Wiener’s proposal, private insurers regulated by the state’s Department of Managed Health Care or Department of Insurance, or both, would be required to submit detailed data about denials and appeals. They would also need to explain those denials and report the outcomes of the appeals.
For appeals that make it to the state’s independent medical review process, or IMR, insurers whose denials are overturned more than half of the time would face staggering penalties. The first case that brings a company above the 50% threshold would trigger a fine of $50,000, with a penalty ranging from $100,000 to $400,000 for a second. Each one after that would cost the company $1 million.
If passed, the measure would apply to roughly 12.8 million Californians on private insurance. It would not apply to patients on Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, or Medicare, and it would exclude self-insured plans offered by large employers, which are regulated by the U.S. Department of Labor and cover roughly 5.6 million Californians.
The phrase “deny and delay” continues to reverberate across the healthcare industry after the killing of UnitedHealthcare Chief Executive Brian Thompson in December. In a survey by the research organization NORC at the University of Chicago, conducted shortly after the attack, 7 in 10 respondents said they believed denials for health coverage and profits by health insurance companies bore a great deal or a moderate amount of responsibility for Thompson’s death.
Following Thompson’s death, UnitedHealthcare said in statements that “highly inaccurate and grossly misleading information” had been circulated about the way the company treats claims, and that insurers, which are highly regulated, “typically have low- to mid-single digit margins.”
Wiener called Thompson’s killing a “cold-blooded assassination,” and said his measure had grown out of a narrower proposal that failed last year aimed at improving mental health coverage for children and adults under age 26. But he acknowledged that the public’s reaction to the killing underscored the long-simmering anger many Americans feel about health insurers’ practices and the urgent need for reform.
Humphreys, the Stanford professor, said the U.S. health system creates strong financial incentives for insurers to deny care. And, he added, state and federal penalties are paltry enough to be written off as a cost of doing business.
“The more care they deny, the more money they make,” he said.
Increasingly, large employers are starting to include language in contracts with claim administrators that would penalize insurance providers for approving too many or too few claims, said Shawn Gremminger, president of the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions.
Gremminger represents mostly large employers that fund their own insurance, are federally regulated, and would be excluded from Wiener’s bill. But even for the so-called self-funded plans, it can be nearly impossible to determine denial rates for the insurance companies hired simply to administer claims, he said.
While the bill may be too late for many families, Sandra Maturino of Rialto said she hopes lawmakers tackle insurance denials so other Californians can avoid the saga she endured to get her niece treatment.
She adopted the girl, now 13, after her sister died. Her niece had long struggled with self-harm and violent behavior, but when therapists recommended inpatient psychiatric care, her insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, would cover it for only 30 days.
For more than a year, Maturino said, her niece cycled in and out of facilities and counseling because her insurance wouldn’t cover a long-term stay. Doctors tested a laundry list of prescription drugs and doses. None of them worked.
Anthem declined to comment for this story.
Unlike so many others in similar situations, Maturino was eventually able to get outside assistance to remedy the situation. She asked her adoption agency for help, and it ended up covering the cost of her niece’s stay in a residential program in Utah, where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has been undergoing treatment for a year.
Maturino said she didn’t have the energy to appeal to Anthem.
“I wasn’t going to wait around for the insurance to kill her, or for her to hurt somebody,” Maturino said.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Science
The Gene That Made Mice Squeak Strangely
![The Gene That Made Mice Squeak Strangely The Gene That Made Mice Squeak Strangely](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/02/18/multimedia/18-language-khlb/18-language-khlb-facebookJumbo.jpg)
Scientists have long struggled to understand how human language evolved. Words and sentences don’t leave fossils behind for paleontologists to dig up.
A genetic study published on Tuesday offers an important new clue. Researchers found that, between 250,000 and 500,000 years ago, a gene known as NOVA1 underwent a profound evolutionary change in our ancestors. When the scientists put the human version of NOVA1 into mice, the animals made more complex sounds.
Erich Jarvis, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University and a co-author of the new study, cautioned that NOVA1 alone did not suddenly switch on our ancestors’ language abilities.
“I wouldn’t say it’s ‘the’ language gene,” Dr. Jarvis said.
Instead, over millions of years, language arose thanks to mutations in hundreds of genes.
“But where does NOVA1 fit into that whole combination? It’s one of the last steps,” Dr. Jarvis said.
NOVA1 drew scientific attention in 2012 when it appeared on a special list of genes that produced proteins that were identical in most mammals, but produced a different form in humans. Out of more than 20,000 protein-coding genes, only 23 made the list. All were probably crucial to the evolution of our species.
That NOVA1 made the list surprised Dr. Robert Darnell, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University who had discovered the gene in 1993. He was startled because the gene appears to be essential to all mammals. A mouse engineered without NOVA1 will die during development. Nothing in Dr. Darnell’s research had hinted that the gene had played a distinctive role in human evolution.
Dr. Darnell began collaborating with evolutionary biologists to find out more. One of them, Adam Siepel of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in New York, led an effort to reconstruct the gene’s history. He looked at the gene’s sequence in the DNA of extinct humans, as well as genetic information from more than 650,000 living people.
Dr. Siepel found that NOVA1 underwent a dramatic change not long after our ancestors split from Neanderthals and Denisovans, providing an evolutionary advantage to early humans who inherited the change. Eventually, it swamped the original version of NOVA1.
Ever since, Dr. Siepel said, that version of the gene has remained overwhelmingly dominant in the human population. Mutations that reversed NOVA1 to its original form must have been harmful, because they are extremely rare. Of the 650,000 people registered in the database, only six carried the original version of the gene.
The researchers do not know anything about who those six people are. Dr. Darnell is now searching for carriers of the original NOVA1, in the hopes of testing them for speech skills.
In the meantime, Dr. Darnell and his colleagues have engineered mice that carry the human version of NOVA1, instead of the one found in other mammals. To all outward appearances, the NOVA1 mice seemed ordinary. But they harbored some telling differences.
The human version of NOVA1 oversaw the production of 200 proteins in mouse brains that the ordinary version of the gene did not. And many of those proteins played a role in how the animals produce sounds.
“For me, that was like, ‘Bingo!’” Dr. Darnell said.
If NOVA1 had shaped the evolution of human language, Dr. Darnell reasoned, then the human version of it might change the way that the mice produce sounds. Dr. Jarvis, an expert on animal vocalization, helped Dr. Darnell eavesdrop on the animals.
Mice typically produce pulses of ultrasonic squeaks that resemble syllables in human language.
But mice carrying the human version of NOVA1 made peculiar squeaks, the scientists found. The difference was especially noticeable when males sang courtship songs to females. Their songs contained more complex sounds, and the mice switched between those sounds in more intricate patterns.
The intriguing changes in NOVA1’s evolution happened after our ancestors split from Neanderthals and Denisovans. But another language gene, known as FOXP2, underwent a burst of important changes before that split. And studies have shown that mice carrying human FOXP2 genes also make strange squeaks.
Some scientists speculated that the two genes both independently altered human brain regions that produce complex sounds.
“The exciting thing about NOVA1 is that there is now another kid on the block,” said Wolfgang Enard, a geneticist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich who worked on the FOXP2 mice.
Dr. Jarvis said that he thinks the common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans could talk, perhaps thanks to genes such as FOXP2. But mutations to other genes, including NOVA1, may have endowed modern humans alone with the ability to produce a wider range of complex sounds, expanding the power of language.
To test that hypothesis, Dr. Jarvis hopes to engineer mice with mutations in NOVA1, FOXP2 and other genes that may have been important in the rise of language. Together, these mutations may let mice produce even more complex calls.
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