New NASA Missions, Bonus Moons for Saturn and Whale Urine That Balances Ocean Chemistry
The EPA rolls back regulations, NASA launches two exciting missions, and we discuss the surprising way whale urine moves nitrogen across the ocean.
Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific American
Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Let’s get this week started with our usual science news roundup.
First, unfortunately, I need to update you on some troubling environmental news.
Last Wednesday the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, announced that the agency plans to get rid of or weaken many environmental rules and policies. Zeldin said the EPA could even pivot away from officially recognizing that greenhouse gases are bad for us.
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Back in 2007 the Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases are pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act and that meant that the EPA needed to determine whether these emissions by new motor vehicles were tied to air pollution that could harm the public, or if the science was too uncertain. Well, the science was certain. In 2009 the EPA officially determined that greenhouse gases threaten public health. Zeldin announced that the administration plans to reconsider these findings. In a video Zeldin posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, about the plans, he referred to the determination as…
[CLIP: Lee Zedlin on X: “The holy grail of the climate-change religion.”]
Feltman: It’s important to note that since 2009 the evidence that greenhouse gas emissions put human lives in danger has only grown.
According to Zeldin, the EPA plans to take a series of 31 actions to change or eliminate environmental regulations. Now, the big headline is that sectors like power generation and the automotive industry could face fewer regulatory requirements around climate pollution. The agency is also considering going after rules related to hydrofluorocarbons, which are extremely potent greenhouse gases. Zeldin argued that these gases contribute to food inflation by forcing companies to use refrigerant systems that make food more expensive. Other agency targets include regulations around wastewater from coal plants, industrial release of mercury and other toxins, soot pollution, and clean water protections for rivers and wetlands.
In an EPA news release, Zeldin said the following about the proposed changes: “Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen. We are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion.”
E&E News by Politico reports that the EPA won’t be able to do all of this at once. Overturning that 2009 finding on the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions will take at least a year. But there are plenty of environmental regulations the agency could roll back in the meantime. In recent days the EPA has canceled hundreds of grants and Zeldin has pledged to cut more than half of the agency’s spending. Last Monday, Zeldin wrote in a statement that the EPA was “working hand-in-hand with DOGE,” which is overseen by Elon Musk. Last Thursday a federal judge ordered the U.S. DOGE Service to turn over records to 14 state attorneys general who allege that Musk’s cost-cutting sweeps are violating the Constitution.
Meredith Hankins, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told E&E News that the breadth of the proposed EPA rollbacks was surprising. In summary, she said, “the vibes are bad.” We will definitely be keeping an eye on what the EPA is up to in the next few months.
But for now let’s cleanse our palettes with some space news. Last Tuesday two NASA missions headed into space. One of those missions centers on a new space telescope called SPHEREx—no relation to SpaceX; it’s short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer. Of course, NASA loves a good backronym. It’s going to create a three-dimensional map of the sky every six months. The telescope will measure the distances between us and about 450 million other galaxies, in part to help understand how the universe rapidly expanded in the split second after the big bang.
Tagging along on the same flight was NASA’s PUNCH, short for Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere. That mission, which comprises four suitcase-sized satellites, is going to study solar wind. And I bet NASA was pleased as punch to get two awesome missions up on the same ride. But I hope those satellites realized they were getting into like an Uber Pool situation.
In other great space news, Saturn is officially the mooniest planet in our solar system by a landslide. Last Tuesday the International Astronomical Union recognized the discovery of a whopping 128 new moons orbiting Saturn. That brings the planet’s total up to 274, which is more moons than all the other planets in our solar system have combined—or at least the moons we know about, anyway. These findings, which relied on the use of the Canada France Hawaii Telescope to carefully watch Saturn’s skies from 2019 to 2021, deepen the ringed planet’s lunar dominance over Jupiter and its measly 95 moons. If you’re wondering where all these moons could possibly fit, the answer is actually pretty simple: most of them are pretty much just wobbly little rocks. All 128 of the newly discovered moons are so-called irregular moons, meaning they’re fragments of larger objects that got pulled into Saturn’s orbit long ago. Each one is just a few kilometers across. The researchers say that many of these moons could stem from a relatively recent collision—just about a hundred million years ago.
We’ll end things on a delightful note with a new study on the incredible power of whale urine. A paper published last Monday in Nature Communications reports on the “great whale conveyor belt,” which transports what researchers estimate is nearly 4,000 tons of nitrogen around the world each year. Nitrogen is crucial for supporting the ocean’s food chain because it provides fuel for phytoplankton. Without whale pee, it turns out, some marine climates might really be hurting for the stuff.
Many whales spend the summer living in the nutrient-rich waters of cooler climates before traveling thousands of miles to warmer breeding grounds, where they live in higher concentrations. When they shed biomass in the form of poop, placentas and carcasses, they leave some of the nutrients of their summer binge in the waters of their winter homes. But according to this new study, it’s the pee they leave behind that funnels the most nitrogen into their breeding grounds and they leave behind a lot of pee. One study found that a fin whale can produce 250 gallons of urine in a day..
The researchers estimate that whales might have transferred three times as many nutrients before commercial whaling lowered their populations. But even with that huge slowdown in the great whale conveyor belt, the animals are still super impactful: in one sanctuary in Hawaii, for example, whales provide approximately double the amount of nutrients that come from natural processes like ocean currents. Their liquid gold—and other bodily releases—helps support thriving ecosystems in coastal spots all over the world.
That’s all for this week’s science news roundup. We’ll be back on Wednesday to show you that when it comes to colonoscopies, most people don’t know—you get the idea.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great week!
