Science
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Names Alexandra Bell Its New President
At the end of January, the keepers of the Doomsday Clock announced that the world was 89 seconds to midnight, a metaphor for our proximity to extinction. That’s one second closer than we were for the past two years, and the nearest the clock has ever inched to global destruction by way of human-made risks, including nuclear weapons, climate change and new technologies like artificial intelligence.
The iconic clock is set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an organization founded by American physicists at the dawn of the nuclear age, months after the United States detonated atomic bombs in Japan. On Monday, the Bulletin named Alexandra Bell, a nuclear affairs expert, as its new president and chief executive. She replaces Rachel Bronson, who served in the role for a decade.
Ms. Bell worked on arms control and nonproliferation issues in the U.S. State Department starting in the Obama administration, where she was involved in securing ratification of New START, the nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. She returned to the department as a deputy assistant secretary in 2021, promoting dialogue on nuclear issues with nations around the world. During the last two years of the Biden administration, she led the U.S. delegation of the P5 Process, currently the only forum where the United States, China and Russia discuss nuclear risk reduction.
In an interview last week, Ms. Bell discussed the ever-evolving threats of the day and the role she wants the Bulletin to play in preventing worldwide disaster. “It’s important to listen to the echoes of history,” she said, to be “informed by the past, but not shackled to it.”
The following conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
How does an 80-year-old organization like the Bulletin stay relevant in an ever-changing world?
When I entered the field, the Doomsday Clock was at five minutes to midnight. I remember being struck by the symbolism. The clock being at its closest point to midnight now is really a warning that we are running out of time. The fact that it ticked one second closer is an indication that every second counts.
We are living through an overload of crisis with a compounding nature of threats. The key is to understand those threats and make sure that we’re transitioning to solutions. It will take work and patience and persistence, and a broad demand from the public, to address these concerns.
Hopefully, the Doomsday Clock pulls people in to help them understand the urgency of the moment. There’s no single, neat solution. But there are things we can do to pull ourselves away from the edge.
How does this era of nuclear risk differ from the past?
Nuclear threats are on vivid display for the first time, really, since we pulled ourselves away from the edge of catastrophe in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The United States and Russia are not in a sustained dialogue about how to stabilize nuclear risk. China has embarked on an unprecedented expansion of their nuclear forces. Iran has the potential to create nuclear weapons, and North Korea continues to flout international law, threaten its neighbors and grow its nuclear arsenal.
We also have structures that we’ve spent the last 50 years building now crumbling under us. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which has held back the tide of nuclear chaos, is under duress. The next steps that we were supposed to take in reducing nuclear threat, like the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, haven’t come to pass yet.
I’m sure people living through the height of the Cold War would not have thought it was uncomplicated. But looking back, that was a bipolar conflict — it was the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Now, it’s more complex.
There are no quick fixes here. This time, it won’t just be the nuclear experts alone who come up with solutions. We have to be talking with experts in A.I., quantum, biotechnology and climate change. These risk areas are overlapping and require coordination we haven’t quite mastered yet. But that cross-pollination of expertise will be key to how we manage these threats.
The looming threat for most people these days seems to be climate change, rather than nuclear weapons.
You’re right, younger generations don’t think about nuclear threat as much. We did a good job of reducing that threat, but it never went away. In some ways, it’s become worse. It’s more complex, more diffuse, and there’s not as much attention on it.
The nuclear issue is a matter of minutes. Intercontinental ballistic missiles in the United States or Russia can reach anywhere in the world in about 33 minutes. If we get the nuclear problem wrong, nothing else matters.
Climate change is a longer-term problem. And the potential conflicts that could arise from it, like mass migration, can increase tension. More nuclear-armed states with climate-related conflicts means the likelihood of nuclear war increases. These threats are tied together. All the more reason to be thinking about both at the same time.
What are your thoughts so far on the direction of the new presidential administration?
I was pleased to see President Trump’s comments in Davos about reducing nuclear threats. That was encouraging. But he is also withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. That is a step in the wrong direction.
Hopefully, the administration will see that there are economic and security benefits to the U.S. pursuing a move to greener technology.
I hope there is an acknowledgment that climate change isn’t a matter of belief. This is happening. You can choose not to believe in it, but I guarantee that your insurance company believes in it. When that starts financially impacting people across the country, they will be looking to their leaders to do something about it.
In what ways do you hope to shape the work of the Bulletin in the years ahead?
The Bulletin is trying to facilitate a public reckoning with human-made existential risk. It’s been an increasingly exclusive conversation, and I don’t want it to be that. I want people anywhere to understand why this is so important, and why they have a part in it.
I am from Tuxedo, N.C. — a place with no stoplights. My folks’ house got 40 inches of rain in two days from Hurricane Helene. The havoc caused by a changing climate has now happened in a place like my hometown. How do we connect those people into the conversation about preventing this? It’s our job to make sure they are a part of it just as much as people in the Beltway are.
It can be easy to look at these challenges and go to a dark place. The harder thing is to let those challenges drive you. My mother is from Finland, and we always talk about this Finnish ethos of “sisu” — unstoppable grit in the face of extreme adversity. We need more sisu in this field. We’ve inherited a mess, and we have to work together to clean it up.
new video loaded: Pentagon Releases U.F.O. Files
By Jorge Mitssunaga
May 8, 2026
President Trump has signed off on a plan to fire Dr. Marty Makary, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, after a series of clashes over vaping, oversight of the abortion pill and a series of new drug application denials that rattled biotech companies, according to a person briefed on the matter, who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.
Dr. Makary had a high profile for an F.D.A. commissioner, appearing frequently on television and podcasts to sell the work he was doing at the agency on improving the food supply, speeding up some drug approvals and trying to restore agency morale after thousands of staff members left.
He tried to walk the tightrope between the business-friendly Make America Great Again movement, pledging to get rid of regulations that slow down innovation and to attract more drug trials to the United States. He was an ally of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make American Healthy Again supporters, voicing the skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry and authorizing natural food dyes.
Ultimately, Dr. Makary’s efforts were not enough to overcome the grievances of a growing band of enemies focused on selling tobacco, opposing abortion and seeing biotech therapies authorized.
Mr. Trump’s decision to dismiss him was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The decision could still change, given Mr. Trump’s propensity to change his mind Dr. Makary has also proven persuasive with Mr. Trump in beating back previous efforts to oust him.
Leaving the White House Friday evening, Mr. Trump dismissed the idea that Dr. Makary would be fired.
“I’ve been reading about it, but I know nothing about it,” he said.
The White House has pressured Dr. Makary for months to authorize flavored e-cigarettes, according to a person close to the conversations. The approvals were a top wish of major tobacco companies that have been top donors to Mr. Trump. In March, the F.D.A. issued a memo saying that it would only authorize e-cigarettes in flavors such as mint, tea and spices. The memo said the fruit and candy flavors would be unlikely to pass muster, given their appeal to young people.
Pressure continued, though, and on Tuesday the F.D.A. authorized blueberry and mango flavored e-cigarettes by Glas, a small company based in Los Angeles.
Abortion foes including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America have continued to turn up the heat on Dr. Makary, reiterating their call for his firing on Thursday. The group’s leaders and others view Dr. Makary as dragging his feet on a safety review of the abortion pill mifepristone, which they viewed as a way to highlight what they believe are dangers of the drug. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who also opposes abortion rights, amplified criticism of Dr. Makary on social media as well.
The administration has been under pressure from conservatives to tighten regulations on the prescribing and dispensing of mifepristone. The Supreme Court is reviewing a federal appeals court ruling that temporarily blocked abortion providers from prescribing the drug through telemedicine and sending it to patients by mail.
Biotech companies and their investors have also raised alarms with the White House about agency decisions to reject a series of treatments for rare diseases. The F.D.A. typically turns down about 20 percent of the applications it receives for drug approvals from companies.
Dr. Makary has been aggressive in defending the decisions, which he said came from career scientists who found the medications ineffective.
Dr. Makary also had to contend with a health secretary who seemed to view the F.D.A. as an avenue for getting his favored products authorized, exemplified by Mr. Kennedy’s social media post saying that the agency would end its “war on” stem cell treatments, peptides and raw milk. Mr. Kennedy pushed the F.D.A. to reverse a 2023 ban and allow the use of a number of peptides, unproven compounds purported to offer anti-aging or muscle-recovery benefits.
Before leading the F.D.A., Dr. Makary was a cancer surgeon and health policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He was also the author of several books about the health care system.
Some of Dr. Makary’s more popular moves included encouraging broader use of hormone replacement products for women and lifting the F.D.A.’s warnings on them. He helped speed some promising drugs to market, including a pancreatic cancer therapy and the pill form of the popular GLP-1 weight loss drugs.
Some California residents were among the 147 passengers and staff aboard a luxury cruise ship stricken by a suspected outbreak of hantavirus that has left three people dead and several others severely ill, officials confirmed Thursday.
California public health officials say they are monitoring the situation after being notified by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that some state residents were passengers on the MV Hondius. The precise status of those individuals, however, remains murky.
Hantavirus is a rare but deadly disease that attacks the lungs and is typically contracted by humans through inhalation of particles contaminated with the urine, feces or saliva of a wild rodent.
However, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, confirmed Thursday that the Andes virus — a form of hantavirus that can spread from person to person — was involved in the outbreak.
Here’s what we know:
The MV Hondius cruise ship anchored at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, on Wednesday.
(Misper Apawu / Associated Press)
As its name suggests, the Andes virus is typically found in South America. The Dutch-flagged MV Hondius was on a 46-day journey that traveled from Antarctica with stops in Argentina.
In the case of human-to-human transmission, a person would first be infected by a wild rodent’s contaminated particles and then pass the infection to someone else, said Dr. Gaby Frank, director of the Johns Hopkins Special Pathogens Center.
“In previous outbreaks of Andes virus, transmission between people has been associated with close and prolonged contact, particularly among household members, intimate partners and people providing medical care,” Ghebreyesus said. “That appears to be the case in the current situation.”
None of the remaining passengers or crew members on the ship are symptomatic, he said.
The ship was not permitted to allow passengers to disembark at its original destination, Cape Verde, and is sailing for Spain’s Canary Islands.
“I want to be unequivocal here: This is not SARS-CoV-2. This is not the start of a COVID pandemic. This is an outbreak that we see on a ship. There’s a confined area,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, who leads the WHO’s epidemic and pandemic management, said at a briefing. “This is not the same situation we were in six years ago. It doesn’t spread the same way like coronaviruses do.”
California passengers on the cruise
On April 1, 114 guests boarded the cruise ship in Ushuaia, Argentina. Twenty-three days later, 30 passengers — including six people from the United States — disembarked on a stop in St. Helena, a remote island about 1,100 miles off the coast of Africa, according to the cruise operator Oceanwide Expeditions.
Public health agencies in California, Georgia and Arizona were notified by the CDC that some of their residents were among the passengers on the cruise. It’s unclear whether these individuals disembarked on April 24, however.
The CDC is assisting local health authorities with monitoring California residents who were aboard the cruise, according to a statement by the California Department of Public Health on Friday.
As of Friday, one passenger has returned to their California residence and is in contact with local public health officials, and at least one other remains aboard the ship, according to the state agency.
“We understand that news of an unusual outbreak can be concerning,” said Dr. Erica Pan, director of the California Department of Public Health. “Unlike influenza and COVID-19, years of experience in South America have shown that this Andes hantavirus rarely spreads between people.”
Officials said the current public health protocol is to do daily symptom monitoring and reporting.
“As there are no known cases of Andes hantavirus infection from people without symptoms, and any spread has usually been limited to people with prolonged close contact with an ill person with this virus, the risk to the general public in California is extremely low,” the agency said in a statement.
In a statement earlier this week, the CDC also said that the risk to the American public “is extremely low” at this time.
“We urge all Americans aboard the ship to follow the guidance of health officials as we work to bring you home safely,” the agency said.
The others who exited the ship on April 24 were individuals from Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, Sweden, Singapore, St. Kitts and Nevis, Turkey and the United Kingdom.
Of the remaining passengers still aboard the ship headed for Spain’s Canary Islands, California Department of Public Health said none were ill as of Friday.
How many people have been infected?
The number of lab-confirmed hantavirus cases has risen to five, according to the WHO. There are three additional suspected cases.
A timeline of reported cases of hantavirus aboard the cruise ship can be found here.
The WHO is monitoring reports of other people with symptoms “who may have had contact with one of the passengers. In each case, we are in close contact with the relevant authorities,” Tedros said.
The first passenger to have been infected, a Dutchman, became sick aboard the cruise ship on April 6 and died on April 11.
No samples were taken, because his symptoms were similar to other respiratory diseases. His widow left the ship with his body on April 24 during the scheduled stop at St. Helena.
“She deteriorated during a flight to Johannesburg on the 25th of April and died the next day,” Tedros said.
Before boarding the cruise ship, the Dutch couple had traveled through Argentina, Chile and Uruguay on a bird-watching trip, “which included visits to sites where the species of rat that is known to carry Andes virus was present,” Tedros said.
After leaving the ship, the woman was briefly aboard a KLM aircraft in Johannesburg bound for Amsterdam but was barred from the flight due to her medical condition, the airline said in a statement.
Dutch news outlets reported that a flight attendant on a KLM airplane — who briefly had contact with the widow — started feeling sick and had mild symptoms and was in isolation at a hospital in Amsterdam.
The flight attendant has since tested negative for the Andes virus, Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician, wrote on his Substack blog, Inside Medicine, citing a text message sent to him by Tedros.
“It is still possible that the flight attendant contracted the Andes virus. However, given our understanding of the virus, this information means that the flight attendant’s symptoms are not caused by the Andes hantavirus, but by some other medical illness,” Faust wrote.
More cases may be reported, because the incubation period — the time it takes between exposure to the virus and the onset of illness — for the Andes strain of the hantavirus is up to six weeks.
What we know about hantavirus
There are roughly 50 identified species of hantavirus. The virus that’s found in the Americas tends to cause a cardiopulmonary syndrome, a condition that affects the heart and the lungs, according to Frank.
There have been 890 laboratory-confirmed cases of hantavirus disease reported in the U.S. since surveillance began in 1993, according to the most recent data from the CDC.
From 1980 to 2025, 99 California residents have been diagnosed with a hantavirus infection, according to the California Department of Public Health.
CDC officials said 38% of people who develop respiratory symptoms may die from the disease.
Still, the data suggest that contracting hantavirus is rare, said Dr. Afif El-Hasan, member of the American Lung Assn.’s national board of directors.
There is no vaccine or specific antiviral medicine for hantavirius.
Intensive-care treatment may include intubation and oxygen therapy, fluid replacement and use of medications to lower blood pressure, according to the American Lung Assn.
The signs of hantavirus
Early symptoms of hantavirus are similar to the flu and include fatigue, fever and muscle aches, according to the CDC. Symptoms start to develop within one to eight weeks after contact with an infected rodent.
Half of those who contract the virus also experience headaches, dizziness, chills, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain.
Four to 10 days after the initial phase of the illness, another round of symptoms can develop, which include coughing, shortness of breath and possible tightness in the chest as the lungs fill with fluid.
Even though contracting hantavirus in the U.S. continues to be a rare event, El-Hasan said, people should take these initial symptoms seriously and promptly seek medical care.
How to protect yourself
Hantavirus cases can occur year-round, but the peak seasons in the United States are the spring and summer, which coincide with the reproductive seasons for deer mice.
To lessen your risk of infection, keep wild rodents out of your home and other enclosed spaces by sealing any holes and placing snap traps.
If you find evidence of mice, wear personal protective equipment and disinfect the area. When you’re done, put everything, including cleaning materials, in a bag and toss it in your trash bin.
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