Science

Buffalo Bills Fans Have It Tough, Especially in Antarctica

Published

1 week ago

February 4, 2025

Buffalo Bills Fans Have It Tough, Especially in Antarctica

For about a week leading up to the A.F.C. championship game, Meredith Nolan had been living on a hulking research vessel parked in an Antarctic port. The ship, called the Noosfera, had been waiting for favorable sea conditions before plowing into the icy waters below the southern tip of South America.

It was late January, and Nolan was headed home after spending three months at Palmer Station, a tiny American research base in Antarctica.

She had been studying the effects of climate change on zooplankton, and, in her spare moments, cheering for her favorite football team, the Buffalo Bills. She wore a beanie with a Bills logo on the front and a blue poof on top when she went out on a boat to collect zooplankton in nets, or hiked the receding glacier behind the station. Her hat alerted two other Bills fans that she was one of them.

In some ways, she did not behave like a typical Bills fan, causing joyful chaos and destruction to celebrate the team.

When Meredith Nolan isn’t studying the effects of climate change on zooplankton, she is rooting on the Buffalo Bills.Credit…Meredith Nolan

“We’ll see if Meredith starts diving through tables,” Ricky Robbins, who was there studying seabirds, said in reference to a popular activity among fans at Bills tailgates.

But in one important way, she did.

“Every year I get excited,” Nolan said cheerfully in early November. “But I’m hopeful that this is the year.”

Since the 1950s, the National Science Foundation has funded research projects in Antarctica. Palmer Station, built in 1968, is the smallest of its three stations, housing around 40 people in the summer and about 20 in the winter. It is also the warmest, but that still means below-freezing temperatures and snow, even in the summer. Some of those there, like Nolan, are studying the effects of climate change on the environment. For many, sports are a way to stay linked with the outside world, even when connecting with their teams is a challenge.

Until recently, high-speed internet access was limited, when it was available at all. A participant manual from 2018 cautioned: “Large downloads and streaming media have a negative impact on everyone else.”

Sports fans, then, would save up their internet rations for game times.

In 2013, Ken Halanych, then a professor at Auburn University, was on a ship when Auburn won a game against its hated rival, the University of Alabama, by returning a missed field goal 109 yards for a touchdown as time expired.

Halanych spent four hours uploading a video so he could see the play.

He has been to Antarctica eight times since 2000. In 2004, when Auburn was one of three undefeated teams hoping for a spot in the national championship game, he persuaded the station manager at Palmer Station to let him raise an Auburn flag on the ship.

“I wrote ESPN trying to connect with them and saying, ‘Here’s my vote from Antarctica,’” Halanych said. “ESPN never responded.”

Darren Roberts has gone to Antarctica 13 times. He loves the work, though he recognizes that it can be isolating. Roberts isn’t sure he would still be going if his wife, Megan, weren’t part of his research team. Following the Denver Broncos helps him connect with his brother, who is 13 years older.

“It is really sweet,” Megan Roberts said. “They all really bond, especially over the Broncos, even when we’re in these crazy remote places. It’s amazing to see. He keeps in touch with his family because of what’s going on with the Broncos.”

Darren Roberts would follow Broncos games through a Google graphic that showed a little football on a digital field. Its movements corresponded to what was happening in the game.

But when the Broncos won the Super Bowl in 2016, the couple were on a research ship called the Laurence M. Gould. It was captained by a man named Ernest Stelly, a fan of the Dallas Cowboys.

Even though the Cowboys weren’t playing, Stelly pulled the vessel close enough to Palmer Station that it could use the station’s internet to pick up a radio broadcast. The cooks whipped up party snacks, and Stelly hosted a Super Bowl party.

“I remember it was great, like sitting in the dark on the ship listening to the Super Bowl on the bridge,” Roberts said. “And it was really actually very special and kind of a unique thing, especially at that time.

The United States also operates a base at the South Pole, which is much colder but slightly more populous, and an outpost called McMurdo Station, which is south of New Zealand and can support 1,500 residents.

Robbins, who is on the seabirds team with the Robertses, has worked in even more remote locales, which has made it hard for him to follow his favorite teams. He once worked on a small island in Hawaii on which just seven people, including himself, lived. Experiences like that make Antarctica feel “big city almost,” he said.

“Having, like, a galley with chefs and a bedroom and running water and freshwater showers is like, it feels very luxurious,” Robbins said.

The seabird group works out of a small building separate from other scientists. Robbins called it “the birder hut.”

“Darren’s rumor is that we used to be in the big building with an office, but everybody got really sick of smelling penguin poop,” Robbins said.

Work got busier toward the end of their stay, which meant it wasn’t as easy to follow the end of football season. All the birds’ eggs were hatching, and the team had to measure their chicks. The researchers tagged some birds, and removed tags from others, sometimes late at night or early in the morning.

They were out counting penguin colonies and measuring giant petrel chicks when the Broncos lost to the Bills in the playoffs.

Nolan was happy with the outcome of that game. Sports are a bonding point between Nolan and her father, Jim. He is extraordinarily proud that his daughter works in Antarctica, and has grown accustomed to explaining zooplankton to others.

“It’s kind of the bottom of the food chain,” he tells people. “Without zooplankton we’d all be in trouble.”

At home, Meredith lives about 30 minutes away from her parents, as a graduate student at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. They love hearing about her work and receiving pictures of penguins via text message.

“She’s an amazing kid,” Jim said.

They text constantly during games, particularly when Jim isn’t too stressed.

In late December, when the Bills played the New York Jets, she was putting krill into bottles to begin an experiment. Jim texted to her that she shouldn’t worry, the game was a blowout. The Bills won, 40-14.

Palmer base now uses the Starlink satellite system for high-speed internet access. In mid-December the satellites began pinging from the United States rather than Chile, which meant YouTube TV was available on the base. Nolan could stream her Bills live.

Jim is a Bills fan because he grew up in upstate New York, and Meredith inherited the condition from him. He lived through decades of disappointment, including four consecutive losses in the Super Bowl. His daughter, 24, has seen less of that.

“She’s a very optimistic person, probably more optimistic than I am,” Jim said. “But sometimes, being a Bills fan, it can be tough.”

The Noosfera finally got clearance to sail away on that Sunday evening last month, minutes before the A.F.C. championship game kicked off. Jim tracked the boat on a site called MarineTraffic.com. He doesn’t worry about Meredith too much, but the Drake Passage, an expanse of sea between Palmer Station and Chile, can have 40-foot waves.

After she settled in, Nolan fired up her iPad and logged into YouTube TV. She sent a photo of the setup to her father — it showed the back of Josh Allen’s head and the score of the game, 27-10, Chiefs. She watched as the Bills attempted a comeback, then lost, 32-29, just one game short of the Super Bowl.

“It was quite a bummer,” Nolan said in a text message as the ship made its way toward the potentially treacherous Drake Passage. She added an emoji of a crying face. “But still a great season!”

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Science

Bird flu infections in dairy cows are more widespread than we thought, according to a new CDC study

Published

29 minutes ago

February 14, 2025

Press Room

Bird flu infections in dairy cows are more widespread than we thought, according to a new CDC study

A new study published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the H5N1 bird flu virus is probably circulating undetected in livestock in many parts of the country and may be infecting unaware veterinarians.

In the health agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a group of researchers from the CDC, the Ohio Department of Health and the American Assn. of Bovine Practitioners, reported the results of an analysis they conducted on 150 bovine, or cow, veterinarians from 46 states and Canada.

They found that three of them had antibodies for the H5N1 bird flu virus in their blood. However, none of the infected vets recalled having any symptoms — including conjunctivitis, or pink eye, the most commonly reported symptom in human cases.

The three vets also reported to investigators that they had not worked with cattle or poultry known to be infected with the virus. In one case, a vet reported having practiced only in Georgia (on dairy cows) and South Carolina (on poultry) — two states that have not reported H5N1 infections in dairy cows.

Seema Lakdawala, a microbiologist at Emory University in Atlanta — who was not involved in the research — said she was surprised that only 2% of the veterinarians surveyed tested positive for the antibodies, considering another CDC study showed that 17% of dairy workers sampled had been infected. But she said she was even more surprised that none of them had known they were infected or that they had worked with infected animals.

“These surprising results indicate that serum surveillance studies are important to inform risk of infections that are going undiagnosed,” she said. “Veterinarians are on the front line of the outbreak, and increased biosafety practices like respiratory and eye protection should reduce their exposure risk.”

Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University, described the study as a “good and bad news story.”

“On one hand, we see concerning evidence that there may be more H5N1 outbreaks on farms than are being reported,” she said. “On the other hand, I’m reassured that there isn’t evidence that infections among vets have been widespread. This means there’s more work that can and should be done to prevent the virus from spreading to more farms and sickening workers.”

The analysis was conducted in September 2024. At that time, there had been only four human cases reported, and the infection was believed to be restricted to dairy cattle in 14 states. Since then, 68 people have been infected — 40 working with infected dairy cows — and the virus is reported have infected herds in 16 states.

John Korslund, a retired U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist, said in an email that finding H5N1 antibodies in the blood of veterinarians was an interesting “but very imprecise way to measure state cattle incidence.” But it underscored “that humans ARE susceptible to subclinical infections and possible reassortment risks, which we already knew, I guess.”

Reassortment occurs when a person or animal is infected with more than one influenza virus, allowing the two to mingle and exchange “hardware,” potentially creating a new, more virulent strain.

More important, he said, the D1.1 version of the strain — which has been detected in Nevada dairy cattle and one person living in the state — is “changing the landscape. … [P]eople may be more more susceptible (or not) with a greater potential for severeness (or not).”

“I’m confident that we’ll find it in other states. Its behavior and transmissibility within and between cattle herds is still pretty much a black box,” he said.

Science

Top N.I.H. Official Abruptly Resigns as Trump Orders Deep Cuts

Published

17 hours ago

February 13, 2025

Press Room

Top N.I.H. Official Abruptly Resigns as Trump Orders Deep Cuts

The No. 2 official at the National Institutes of Health abruptly resigned and retired from government service on Tuesday, in another sign that the Trump administration is reshaping the nation’s public health and biomedical research institutions.

The official, Dr. Lawrence A. Tabak, a dentist and researcher, was long considered a steadying force and had weathered past presidential transitions. In a letter that Dr. Tabak sent to colleagues on Tuesday, he did not give a reason for his decision. One person familiar with the decision said Dr. Tabak had been confronted with a reassignment that he viewed as unacceptable.

“It has been an enormous privilege to work with each of you (and your predecessors) to support and further the critical NIH mission,” Dr. Tabak wrote.

Dr. Tabak resigned at a turbulent time for the institutes, the nation’s premier biomedical research industry, composed of 27 separate institutes and centers that study and develop treatments for diseases like cancer and heart conditions as well as infectious diseases like AIDS and Covid. The N.I.H. spends roughly $48 billion a year on medical research, much of it in grants to medical centers, universities and hospitals across the country.

President Trump’s decision to slash billions of dollars in N.I.H. grant funding has sparked a bitter court battle. And the Senate on Wednesday voted to advance the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic and the president’s pick for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the N.I.H.

Mr. Kennedy has said he would cut 600 N.I.H. jobs.

The N.I.H. said it would soon have a statement about Dr. Tabak’s decision.

Dr. Tabak was not well-known to the public. But his decision to leave is surprising, and destabilizing for an agency that is on the political hot seat. He was viewed as someone who could work across party lines; he had survived the presidential turnovers of both parties and had indicated he expected to stay on after Mr. Trump was elected in November.

Ordinarily, Dr. Tabak would have ascended to the job of acting N.I.H. director during the transition from one administration to the next. But the Trump administration installed another researcher, Matthew Memoli of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as acting director. Dr. Memoli criticized Covid vaccine mandates, as did Mr. Kennedy.

As acting director of the N.I.H. last year, Dr. Tabak pushed back against Republicans’ assertions that a lab leak stemming from U.S. taxpayer-funded research might have caused the coronavirus pandemic. He told lawmakers that viruses being studied at a laboratory in Wuhan, China, bore no resemblance to the one that set off the world’s worst public health crisis in a century.

Ellen Barry contributed reporting.

Science

California’s Scary Product Warning Labels Might Be Working, Study Says

Published

2 days ago

February 12, 2025

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California’s Scary Product Warning Labels Might Be Working, Study Says

The warnings, on thousands of products sold in California, are stark.

“Use of the following products,” one label says, “will expose you to chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm.”

Now, new research shows the warnings may be working.

A study published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology found that California’s right-to-know law, which requires companies to warn people about harmful chemicals in their products, has swayed many companies to stop using those chemicals altogether.

As it turns out, companies don’t want to sell a product that carries a big cancer warning label, said Dr. Megan Schwarzman, a physician and environmental-health scientist at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health and an author of the study.

Combine that with the threat of lawsuits and reputational costs, as well as companies just wanting to do the right thing for health, and “it becomes a great motivator for change,” she said.

California maintains a list of about 900 chemicals known to cause cancer and other health effects. Under the 1986 right-to-know law, also known as Prop 65, products that could expose people to harmful amounts of those chemicals must carry warning labels.

Critics had long mocked the measure, saying the warnings were so ubiquitous — affixed to cookware, faux leather jackets, even baked goods — that they had become largely meaningless in the eyes of shoppers. But the latest study found that companies, more than consumers, may be most influenced by the warnings.

To assess the law’s effect, researchers carried out interviews at 32 global manufacturers and retailers that sell clothing, personal-care, cleaning, and a range of home products. Almost 80 percent of interviewees said Prop 65 had prompted them to reformulate their products.

Companies can avoid the warning labels if they reduce the level of any Prop 65 chemicals below a “safe harbor” threshold.

A similar share of companies said they looked to Prop 65 to determine which chemicals to avoid. And 63 percent said the law had prompted them to also reformulate products they sold outside California.

The American Chemistry Council, which represents chemical manufacturers, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the study.

No other state has a law quite like Prop. 65, requiring warnings on such a wide range of products about cancer or reproductive harm. New York enacted a more limited law in 2020 that requires manufacturers to disclose certain chemicals in children’s products and that bans the use of certain chemicals by 2023. Other states have laws geared toward disclosure of ingredients on labels.

California, meanwhile, is pushing ahead. A 2018 change to Prop 65 has meant products are starting to carry even more specific labels. Some food and beverage cans, for example, may carry labels that warn that they “have linings containing bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical known to the State of California to cause harm to the female reproductive system.”

The latest research is part of a larger effort to analyze Prop 65’s effect on people’s exposure to toxic chemicals. In a study published last year, researchers at the Silent Spring Institute and UC Berkeley found that in the years after certain chemicals were listed under the law, levels of those chemicals in people’s bodies decreased both in California and nationwide.

That research came with a caveat, however. In some examples where levels of a listed chemical decreased, a close substitute to that chemical, potentially with similar harmful effects, increased. Prop 65 has no mechanism to check the safety of alternative chemicals.

It suggested that stronger policies were needed at both the federal and state levels to study and regulate the thousands of chemicals on the market, Dr. Schwarzman said. “This is so much bigger than the individual consumer and what we choose off-the-shelf,” she said.