Science
U.S. Denied Entry to French Scientist Over Views on Trump Policies, France Says
A French scientist was prevented from entering the United States this month because of an opinion he expressed about the Trump administration’s policies on academic research, according to the French government.
Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister for higher education and research, described the move as worrying.
“Freedom of opinion, free research and academic freedom are values we will continue to proudly uphold,” Mr. Baptiste said in a statement. “I will defend the possibility for all French researchers to be faithful to them, in compliance with the law, wherever they may be in the world.”
Mr. Baptiste did not identify the scientist who was turned away but said that the academic was working for France’s publicly funded National Center for Scientific Research and had been traveling to a conference near Houston when border officials stopped him.
The U.S. authorities denied entry to the scientist and then deported him because his phone contained message exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed his “personal opinion” on the Trump administration’s science policies, Mr. Baptiste said.
It was not immediately clear what led the border authorities to stop the scientist, why they examined the contents of his phone or what they found objectionable about the conversations.
Customs officers are allowed to search the cellphone, computer, camera or any other electronic device of any travelers crossing the border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, although the agency says that such instances are rare. In 2024, less than 0.01 percent of arriving international travelers had their electronic devices searched, according to the agency.
Mr. Baptiste’s office declined to provide further details about the case. A spokesman for the American Embassy in Paris also declined to comment.
A spokeswoman for the National Center for Scientific Research said that the scientist who was turned back did not wish to speak to the media and declined to comment further.
The Agence France-Presse news agency reported earlier on the scientist’s refused entry to the United States.
Mr. Baptiste, the minister, has been particularly vocal over the past few weeks in denouncing threats to academic freedom in the United States, where funding cuts and layoffs by the Trump administration have targeted institutions of higher education, scientific research and the federal government’s own scientific work force.
Mr. Baptiste has urged French universities and research institutes to welcome researchers seeking to leave the United States.
“Europe must be there to protect research and welcome the talent that can contribute to its success,” Mr. Baptiste wrote on social media after meeting with his European counterparts in Warsaw on Wednesday to address “threats to free research in the United States.”
Jennifer Jones, the director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group in the United States, said she worried that cases like the one involving the French scientist would have a chilling effect on research collaboration across borders.
“My fear is that these are early cases with many more to follow,” Dr. Jones said. “I am hearing from my network that people are very concerned about any kind of international travel in either direction.”
“And that should worry all of us,” she added. If scientists limit their movements to conferences and other events designed to advance research, she said, “it is the public that is going to suffer.”
Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.
Dolphins whistle. Whales sing. Fish croak, chirp, grunt, hum and growl. But in the chatter of the sea, one voice has been missing — until now.
Sharks have long been seen as the silent killers of the water. But scientists at the University of Auckland in New Zealand recently recorded a rig shark, or Mustelus lenticulatus, making a sharp clicking sound, most likely by snapping its teeth together, according to findings published in the journal Royal Society Open Science on Wednesday. They believe it’s the first time a shark has been recorded actively making noise.
The lead researcher, Carolin Nieder, first heard the sound while she was researching the hearing abilities of sharks. While she was handling one shark, it made a clicking, snapping sound similar to that of an electric spark, she said.
The noise came from a rig shark, a fairly small shark common in the waters around New Zealand that grows to up to five feet and mainly eats crustaceans. It is eaten by bigger shark species — and by New Zealanders, who use it to make fish and chips.
Dr. Nieder was taken aback when she heard the noise.
Other sea creatures have mechanisms for making sound. Fish, for example, have a swim bladder, a gas-filled sac that is used for buoyancy but can also be used as a kind of drum. Many fish have a muscle that can vibrate the swim bladder in a way similar to a human’s vocal cords, generating sounds.
But sharks “were thought to be silent, unable to actively create sounds,” Dr. Nieder said.
For the study, she and her co-authors observed the behavior of 10 rig sharks housed in tanks equipped with underwater microphones. They found that all 10 sharks would begin to make the clicking noise when they were being moved between tanks or gently held.
On average, the sharks would click nine times in a 20-second interval, and the researchers believe they made the sound by snapping their teeth together.
They did not make the noise when they were feeding or swimming, leading the scientists to believe the clicking was more likely something they did when stressed or startled, rather than as a means of communicating with one another.
“I think it’s more likely that they would make those noises when they get attacked,” Dr. Nieder said, adding that many other fish snap their teeth or jaws in an attempt to deter or distract predators.
It was unclear whether the sharks could hear the clicks themselves; whether they made the sound in the wild or just in captivity; and whether they made it intentionally or if it was a side effect of their response to being startled, Dr. Nieder said.
Christine Erbe, the director of the Center for Marine Science and Technology at Curtin University in Australia, said that the study expanded on a growing field of research into how marine animals make and hear sounds.
“Once we start looking, we find more and more species that use sound,” she said.
Because of that, it was not surprising to find that sharks can make noise, she said.
However, she added, “I think it’s significant in the sense that we totally underestimate the communication between animals and their environmental sensing abilities, and therefore also how we can impact them with noise.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced plans Thursday to slash the Department of Health and Human Services, cutting nearly a quarter of its workforce in a major restructuring that will consolidate several departments.
According to the Department of Health, the cuts will save $1.8 billion annually and — combined with previous downsizing — reduce the employee headcount from 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees.
Under a restructuring plan, the number of health department divisions will drop from 28 divisions to 15 — including a new Administration for a Healthy America, or AHA. The number of regional offices will drop from 10 to five.
“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl,” the Health secretary said in a statement. “We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic. This Department will do more — a lot more — at a lower cost to the taxpayer.”
Many in the national and global health community have been steeling themselves for dramatic change since Kennedy, an opponent of some vaccines and an advocate of stronger food safety, took office vowing radical reform.
The primary target of Kennedy’s cuts is the Food and Drug Administration, which works to ensure the safety and efficacy of foods, drugs, medical devices, tobacco and other regulated products. It will cut its workforce by 3,500 full-time employees — a reduction that a health department fact sheet said “will not affect drug, medical device, or food reviewers, nor will it impact inspectors.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a vast $9-billion agency that works to prevent chronic diseases, fight infectious disease outbreaks and make vaccine recommendations, will also cut 2,400 employees.
Dr. Tom Frieden, the former CDC director who now works as president and CEO of the nonprofit health organization Resolve to Save Lives, said Kennedy’s plans were unlikely to result in greater efficiency.
“Breaking up the agency by sending the experts in non-communicable diseases to another new agency isn’t efficient, it just creates new bureaucracy,” Frieden said in a statement to The Times. “Infectious diseases do not occur in a vacuum, and factors including pre-existing chronic diseases play critical roles in understanding and controlling infectious diseases.”
The CDC, Frieden said, has been the “flagship of public health for generations” as it pursued its “core mission of saving lives and protecting people from health threats of all kinds.”
“No other part of the federal government has the depth and breadth tracking, understanding and supporting communities and providers to stop our leading killers,” Frieden said. “CDC has contributed to saving millions of lives — not just from infectious diseases but also from cancer, heart attack, stroke and other leading causes of death of Americans; better road safety; and prevention of injury and drug overdose.”
The National Institutes of Health, the primary federal government agency for conducting and supporting medical research, will cut 1,200 employees.
A former NIH official and Trump administration critic said the reductions would have far-reaching consequences.
“You can’t cut that many people without drastically having to scale back the work that NIH and HHS are doing,” said Nate Brought, who resigned last month from his position as director of NIH’s Executive Secretariat. “It’s just not possible.”
Brought said he worried that research on the LGBT community and AIDS would be completely cut and studies on cancer and childhood disease would falter.
“We’ve already seen them cut back on HIV and AIDS assistance and, to some extent, research, and now I would not be surprised to see most of that go away as well,” he said. “Cancer research I think is a huge one… Anything that touches on any childhood disease being cut is going to obviously be a huge problem. I don’t think Americans are about children dying to meet their political goals.”
In an address posted to the social media platform X on Thursday, Kennedy painted a dark, apocalyptic picture of the U.S health department, noting that as its budget and staff increased, all that money has failed to improve the health of Americans.
“In fact, the rate of chronic disease and cancer increased dramatically as our department has grown,” he said. “Our lifespan has dropped. So Americans now live six years shorter than Europeans. We have the sickest nation in the world, and we have the highest rate of chronic disease. The US ranks last among 40 developed nations in terms of health, but we spend two to three times more per capita than those nations.”
Kennedy called his department an “inefficient” and “sprawling bureaucracy” that had seen rates of cancer and chronic disease increase as its budget had increased.
“When I arrived, I found that over half of our employees don’t even come to work,” Kennedy said. “HHS has more than 100 communications offices and more than 40 IT departments and dozens of procurement offices and nine HR departments. In many cases, they don’t even talk to each other. They’re mainly operating in their silos.”
During the Biden administration, Kennedy said the health department budget had increased by 38% as staffing increased by 17%.
“But all that money has failed to improve the health of Americans,” he said.
Dorit Reiss, a professor of law at UC San Francisco who specializes in public health, questioned the premise that the nation’s health agencies were overstaffed.
“If anything, the FDA and CDC are understaffed, they don’t have as many people as they need to combat the many challenges we’re facing,” she said, and noted that the nation was in the middle of a measles outbreak. “This isn’t a good time to cut the organization that’s at the front line of fighting it.”
The new Administration for a Healthy America — which according to a fact sheet will “more efficiently coordinate chronic care and disease prevention programs and harmonize health resources to low-income Americans” — will have multiple divisions including, Primary Care, Maternal and Child Health, Mental Health, Environmental Health, HIV/AIDS, and Workforce.
Kennedy admitted that his overhaul of the department would be a “painful period” for the agency. But he said he wanted all employees to rally together “behind a simple, bold mission.”
“I want every HHS employee to wake up every morning asking themselves, ‘What can I do to restore American health today?’ I want to empower everyone in the HHS family to have a sense of purpose and pride and a sense of personal agency and responsibility to this larger goal. We’re going to save taxpayers nearly $2 billion a year, and we’re going to return HHS to its original commitment to public health.”
Brought however, said that the government had never been less efficient than it was now under the Trump administration.
“At this point, morale is at an all-time low, productivity is at an all-time low, and then you’re going to throw something like this on top of it,” he said.
“People who are constantly being told that they’re about to be fired, that their jobs are in danger,” he added, “are not doing their best work, as efficiently and as well as they are capable of and as they were before.”
Another eclipse is upon us.
On Saturday, the moon will cast its shadow on Earth’s surface, a phenomenon that people in parts of the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Europe, Russia and Africa will get to experience as a partial solar eclipse. It is only partially as impressive as the total solar eclipse that cut across the United States last year, but it is an opportunity to take a break from worldly matters and witness our place in the solar system.
During the eclipse, the moon will appear to take a bite out of the sun, but how much varies by location. And clouds can spoil the view.
The surface of the sun will never be fully obscured during this event, so it is never safe to look at the partial solar eclipse without protective eye gear.
When is the solar eclipse?
People in the regions where the partial solar eclipse is visible will experience it differently. How much of the sun will be covered, and what time it happens, depends on location. You’ll also need to check your local weather report for clear or cloudy conditions.
NASA has published a list of eclipse times in several big cities here.
In North America, the event begins early in the morning around sunrise, and for most, the sun will already be partially eclipsed when it emerges.
Where is the path of the eclipse?
Saturday’s eclipse will be visible in the Northern Hemisphere in a region that includes both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Unlike a total eclipse, it affects the sun in a broad region and has less of a clear path.
In the United States, viewers along the coast in the Northeast will see the greatest eclipse. Those in Boston, for instance, will see 43 percent of the solar surface covered at 6:38 a.m. Eastern. In New York City, the sun will be only 22 percent eclipsed, at 6:46 a.m. People as far south as Washington, D.C., will experience a 1 percent eclipse at 6:59 a.m.
The most obstructed sun will occur much farther north. People in northern Quebec, Nunavut and much of Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada will witness over 90 percent of the sun covered by the moon.
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, people in northern and western Europe, as well as on the northwestern coast of Africa, will see the solar eclipse reach its maximum during late morning or early afternoon. In northern Russia, the eclipse will occur later in the afternoon, and in some places closer to sunset.
The eclipse can last more than an hour in places like Halifax, Nova Scotia, as the moon slowly glides over 83 percent of the sun, reaches a maximum point and then recedes. But in Buffalo, where the eclipse will reach a maximum of 2 percent, it will last only seven minutes.
What is the eclipse weather forecast?
The Mid Atlantic is likely to offer the best chance at viewing the eclipse in the United States. There may be breaks in the clouds across New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
To the north cloudy skies are likely to obstruct views of the solar eclipse in places such as Boston. Gray weather is also expected in eastern Canada.
“There’s going to be a lot of cloud cover,” in the Northeast, said Richard Bann, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center.
People in parts of Europe and Africa could have better luck. Paris, France, and Madrid, Spain, may be good places to take in the eclipse with clear skies expected over parts of western Europe. Another option is Casablanca, Morocco, as sunny weather is projected in northwestern Africa.
But it will be a wet day across much of England on Saturday, and cloud cover is likely over northern Europe.
What is a partial solar eclipse?
Solar eclipses occur when the moon slides between Earth and the sun, shielding all or part of the solar surface from our view.
The most dramatic version of this is a total solar eclipse, when the entire sun is covered and its outer atmosphere, or corona, is visible for a few minutes at the height of the event. This is known as totality.
By contrast, only a chunk of the sun will be obscured on Saturday, in what is known as a partial solar eclipse. This happens when the Earth, moon and sun are imperfectly aligned. Unlike totality, the sky won’t darken enough during a partial solar eclipse for you to see stars or planets in the daytime, and animals are not likely to react as strongly.
Eclipses come in pairs, two weeks apart — the amount of time it takes for the moon to swing around to the other side of Earth. Stargazers recently saw the moon blush red during a total lunar eclipse earlier this month.
Do I need eclipse glasses to safely view it?
Staring at the sun, even for a few seconds, can permanently damage your eyes. Because there are no pain receptors in the retina, you won’t feel it while it’s happening.
The same is true during a partial solar eclipse. But there are several ways to protect your eyes and still see the event. If you saved your paper glasses from last year’s total solar eclipse, you can use them again, as long as they aren’t torn, scratched or otherwise damaged.
Beware of counterfeit eclipse glasses and solar viewers. A list of reliable suppliers, compiled by the American Astronomical Society, can be found here.
If it’s too late to find eclipse glasses, you can safely watch a projection onto the ground using items around the house. Options include fashioning an eclipse viewer from cardstock or a cardboard box. You can also use a kitchen strainer, a straw hat or even your own fingers.
When is the next solar eclipse?
According to NASA, another partial solar eclipse will happen on Sept. 21, best viewed in Australia. A total solar eclipse will occur in summer 2026, visible in upper parts of the Northern Hemisphere.
If that’s too long to wait, two total lunar eclipses are also coming, one in September and another next March. Unlike total solar eclipses, which are visible only along a narrow path on Earth’s surface, total lunar eclipses can be seen by mostly anyone on the night side of the planet.
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