Science
U.S. Terminates Funding for Polio, H.I.V., Malaria and Nutrition Programs Around the World
“People will die,” said Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, “but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.”
The projects terminated include H.I.V. treatment programs that had served millions of people, the main malaria control programs in the worst-affected African countries and global efforts to wipe out polio.
Here are some of the projects that The New York Times has confirmed have been canceled:
A $131 million grant to UNICEF’s polio immunization program, which paid for planning, logistics and delivery of vaccines to millions of children.
A $90 million contract with the company Chemonics for bed nets, malaria tests and treatments that would have protected 53 million people.
A project run by FHI 360 that supported community health workers’ efforts to go door-to-door seeking malnourished children in Yemen. It recently found that one in five children was critically underweight because of the country’s civil war.
All of the operating costs and 10 percent of the drug budget of the Global Drug Facility, the World Health Organization’s main supply channel for tuberculosis medications, which last year provided tuberculosis treatment to nearly three million people, including 300,000 children.
H.I.V. care and treatment projects run by the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation that were providing lifesaving medication to 350,000 people in Lesotho, Tanzania and Eswatini, including 10,000 children and 10,000 pregnant women who were receiving care so that they would not transmit the virus to their babies at birth.
A project in Uganda to trace contacts of people with Ebola, conduct surveillance and bury those who died from the virus.
A contract to manage and distribute $34 million worth of medical supplies in Kenya, including 2.5 million monthlong H.I.V. treatments, 750,000 H.I.V. tests, 500,000 malaria treatments, 6.5 million malaria tests and 315,000 antimalaria bed nets.
Eighty-seven shelters that took care of 33,000 women who were victims of rape and domestic violence in South Africa.
A project in the Democratic Republic of Congo that operates the only source of water for 250,000 people in camps for displaced people located in the center of the violent conflict in the east of the country.
Pre- and postnatal health services for 3.9 million children and 5.7 million women in Nepal.
A project run by Helen Keller Intl in six countries in West Africa that last year provided more than 35 million people with the medicine to prevent and treat neglected tropical diseases, such as trachoma, lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis and onchocerciasis.
A project in Nigeria providing 5.6 million children and 1.7 million women with treatment for severe and acute malnutrition. The termination means 77 health facilities have completely stopped treating children with severe acute malnutrition, putting 60,000 children under the age of 5 at immediate risk of death.
A project in Sudan that runs the only operational health clinics in one of the biggest areas of the Kordofan region, cutting off all health services.
A project serving more than 144,000 people in Bangladesh that provided food for malnourished pregnant women and vitamin A to children.
A program run by the aid agency PATH, called REACH Malaria, which protected more than 20 million people from the disease. It provided malaria drugs to children at the start of the rainy season in 10 countries in Africa.
A project run by Plan International that provided drugs and other medical supplies, health care, treatment of malnutrition programming, and water and sanitation for 115,000 displaced or affected by the conflict in northern Ethiopia.
More than $80 million for UNAIDS, the United Nations agency, which funded work to help countries improve H.I.V. treatment, including data collection and watchdog programs for service delivery.
The President’s Malaria Initiative program called Evolve, which did mosquito control in 21 countries by methods that include spraying insecticide inside homes (protecting 12.5 million people last year) and treating breeding sites to kill larvae.
A project providing H.I.V. and tuberculosis treatment to 46,000 people in Uganda, run by the Baylor College of Medicine Children’s Foundation, Uganda.
Smart4TB, the main research consortium working on prevention, diagnostics and treatment for tuberculosis.
The Demographic and Health Surveys, a data collection project in 90 countries that were crucial and sometimes the only sources of information on maternal and child health and mortality, nutrition, reproductive health and H.I.V. infections, among many other health indicators. The project was also the bedrock of budgets and planning.
Science
Video: Engineer Is First Paraplegic Person in Space
new video loaded: Engineer Is First Paraplegic Person in Space
transcript
transcript
Engineer Is First Paraplegic Person in Space
A paraplegic engineer from Germany became the first wheelchair user to rocket into space. The small craft that blasted her to the edge of space was operated by Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin.
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Capsule touchdown. There’s CM 7 Sarah Knights and Jake Mills. They’re going to lift Michi down into the wheelchair, and she has completed her journey to space and back.
December 21, 2025
Science
This City’s Best Winter Show Is in Its Pitch-Dark Skies
The result is a starry sky visible even from the heart of the city. Flagstaff’s Buffalo Park, just a couple miles from downtown, measures about a 4 on the Bortle scale, which quantifies the level of light pollution. (The scale goes from 1, the darkest skies possible, to 9, similar to the light-polluted night sky of, say, New York City. To see the Milky Way, the sky must be below a 5.)
Science
Social media users in the Central Valley are freaking out about unusual fog, and what might be in it
A 400-mile blanket of fog has socked in California’s Central Valley for weeks. Scientists and meteorologists say the conditions for such persistent cloud cover are ripe: an early wet season, cold temperatures and a stable, unmoving high pressure system.
But take a stroll through X, Instagram or TikTok, and you’ll see not everyone is so sanguine.
People are reporting that the fog has a strange consistency and that it’s nefariously littered with black and white particles that don’t seem normal. They’re calling it “mysterious” and underscoring the name “radiation” fog, which is the scientific descriptor for such natural fog events — not an indication that they carry radioactive material.
An X user with the handle Wall Street Apes posted a video of a man who said he is from Northern California drawing his finger along fog condensate on the grill of his truck. His finger comes up covered in white.
“What is this s— right here?” the man says as the camera zooms in on his finger. “There’s something in the fog that I can’t explain … Check y’all … y’all crazy … What’s going on? They got asbestos in there.”
Another user, @wesleybrennan87, posted a photo of two airplane contrails crisscrossing the sky through a break in the fog.
“For anyone following the dense Tule (Radiation) fog in the California Valley, it lifted for a moment today, just to see they’ve been pretty active over our heads …” the user posted.
Scientists confirm there is stuff in the fog. But what it is and where it comes from, they say, is disappointingly mundane.
The Central Valley is known to have some of the worst air pollution in the country.
And “fog is highly susceptible to pollutants,” said Peter Weiss-Penzias, a fog researcher at UC Santa Cruz.
Fog “droplets have a lot of surface area and are suspended in the air for quite a long time — days or weeks even — so during that time the water droplets can absorb a disproportionate quantity of gasses and particles, which are otherwise known as pollutants,” he said.
He said while he hasn’t done any analyses of the Central Valley fog during this latest event, it’s not hard to imagine what could be lurking in the droplets.
“It could be a whole alphabet soup of different things. With all the agriculture in this area, industry, automobiles, wood smoke, there’s a whole bunch” of contenders, Weiss-Penzias said.
Reports of the fog becoming a gelatinous goo when left to sit are also not entirely surprising, he said, considering all the airborne biological material — fungal spores, nutrients and algae — floating around that can also adhere to the Velcro-like drops of water.
He said the good news is that while the primary route of exposure for people of this material is inhalation, the fog droplets are relatively big. That means when they are breathed in, they won’t go too deep into the lungs — not like the particulate matter we inhale during sunny, dry days. That stuff can get way down into lung tissue.
The bigger concern is ingestion, as the fog covers plants or open water cisterns, he said.
So make sure you’re washing your vegetables, and anything you leave outside that you might nosh on later.
Dennis Baldocchi, a UC Berkeley fog researcher, agreed with Weiss-Penzias’ assessment, and said the storm system predicted to move in this weekend will likely push the fog out and free the valley of its chilly, dirty shawl.
But, if a high pressure system returns in the coming weeks, he wouldn’t be surprised to see the region encased in fog once again.
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