Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman.
As the year comes to an end, instead of catching up on the latest science stories you might have missed this past week, we are going to take a quick look at 2025 with the help of some Scientific American editors.
Here they are.
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Dan Vergano: Hi, I’m Dan Vergano. I’m a senior editor at Scientific American. My beat is covering science in Washington, D.C.
The biggest news story in science in Washington this year was [Robert F. Kennedy] Jr. He took the helm of [the Department of Health and Human Services] and has reshaped [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], [the Food and Drug Administration], the other agencies under his purview—fired a whole bunch of people, has basically upended the way business is done at a lot of those agencies—and injected his views on science, vaccines, medicine as a whole into the national discussion in a pretty deep way.
So 2025 has shaped science in Washington in a big way because it shattered the social compact between scientists and the federal government that’s existed since World War II. Basically, they’ve shown here in D.C. that they can’t be trusted when it comes to the funding that they’ve promised scientists. The deal was: “You do the science, you decide on the merits of the science, we’ll provide the funding, and the whole country will reap the benefits of it.”
And the Trump administration outlook on that is quite different. They wanna restore a sort of era of patronage in government. They see universities as a power center to be curbed, and research funding is a big way to, to do that. They see scientists as a Democratic Party constituency to be punished and as somebody to blame for the Trump administration’s, you know, disastrous handling of the pandemic—you know, they’re looking to scientists as the fall guys.
So all that has come together to change the way the scientists see Washington. It’s no longer a reliable patron for a career in science. A career in science looks a lot less attractive if you’re a young scientist. And so basically, it’s reset the leadership role the U.S. has had in science worldwide since we basically lifted it from Europe in World War II and is now looking to shift the terrain for how science is conducted in the country.
The one single word I would use to describe how 2025 has shaped science in Washington is “chaos.” Basically, every day is a new, strange thing that happens. And so it’s been quite a roller-coaster ride for scientists and for people covering it.
So the thing I’m looking for in 2026 in science in Washington is the reaction of Congress to all the changes that the Trump administration has pushed. Congress has resisted the big cuts that [the] Trump administration, Russell Vought at [the Office of Management and Budget] originally tried to demand of the science agencies, at places like [the National Institutes of Health] and NASA. They’re gonna try again. They’re gonna try and do this by rescission, and it’ll be up to Congress to decide if they’re gonna put up with that or not.
What we’re gonna see is the real, you know, mess-around-and-find-out results of playing with scientific contracts. People aren’t gonna be happy in the congressman’s district. They’re gonna be going up for reelection. They might not care about scientists, but they probably do care about money going to their district, and so there’s gonna be a big push and pull, and we’re gonna see how much of a lame duck [President Donald] Trump is with respect to cutting science funding in 2026.
Pierre-Louis: As Dan mentioned we’ve talked a lot about RFK Jr. this year. Here to give us a closer look at his actions and a pulse check on the state of public health overall is Tanya Lewis, senior desk editor for health and medicine at Scientific American.
Tanya Lewis: The biggest health story this year has really been the complete overhaul of the Department of Health and Human Services in the U.S. under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., including major cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health and the rollback of public health guidance around things like vaccines.
And related to this we’ve also seen one of the biggest resurgences of measles in recent history in the U.S. This is not a coincidence. Vaccination rates for common childhood diseases have been falling in recent years, driven by mistrust of scientists and experts and sort of a backlash to the COVID pandemic and to the COVID vaccines.
So we’ve seen changes to the vaccine schedule already. As my colleague Lauren [Young] recently mentioned on the podcast the CDC’s advisory panel released new guidance rolling back their recommendation for a birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine. Before this vote the hep B vaccine was given universally, pretty much, to all babies within hours or days after birth, and this vaccine has been incredibly successful. And so this is just one example of how RFK Jr. and HHS have rolled back a lot of evidence-based interventions, and this is going to have direct impacts on the public health of Americans.
So there’s really been a lot of backsliding in vaccine-preventable diseases. I mentioned measles already. In addition to measles we’ve seen whooping cough outbreaks, you know, popping up again. These are all diseases that can be prevented with vaccines, so we shouldn’t be seeing them, but we’re seeing changes now that could result in these outbreaks of preventable disease.
We’ve also seen further politicization of health and distrust in experts, and we’ve already seen a number of outbreaks of foodborne illness. For example, there was a big outbreak of botulism in baby formula earlier this year. And so these are all things that the U.S. government, you know, monitors and regulates, but they need funding in order to do that, so cutting funding and staffing from these agencies is already potentially having serious effects on Americans’ health.
So if I could just pick one word to describe this year in terms of health, I would, unfortunately, have to say “backsliding,” backsliding on a lot of the progress that we’ve made in this country over the past century, honestly, in terms of preventing diseases with vaccines and ensuring that everyone has access to safe and healthy food and that our public health guidelines follow the very best evidence that scientists have gathered.
So in 2026 I’ll be watching a couple things. I’m expecting there to be further changes to the public health agencies, things like vaccine schedules. I’ll be watching closely to see whether the CDC recommends changes to regular, routine childhood vaccines.
Measles is another thing I’ll be keeping a close eye on. In fact, the U.S. could be on track to losing our official measles elimination status as early as January if the current outbreaks continue and are linked together. So that basically just means, if measles has been spreading continuously for a whole year, then the U.S. will no longer be considered measles-free.
I’ll also be keeping an eye on bird flu. As we heard earlier this year on the pod, bird flu is still around and is devastating many flocks of birds and also affecting things like egg prices, also threatening human health because we know that bird flu could potentially spark a pandemic. That hasn’t happened yet, but it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be keeping an eye on it.
Pierre-Louis: Now let’s check in on climate.
Andrea Thompson: I’m Andrea Thompson, Earth and environment editor at Scientific American.
So the biggest story is probably climate action and the hostility to climate science in the United States. It’s 10 years since the Paris climate agreement was negotiated, which was a really landmark achievement at the time. You know, now, a decade later, we’ve made progress. But this year saw a lot of attempts, at least in the U.S., to undo further progress towards meeting the goal of lowering greenhouse gas emissions to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The Trump administration is attempting to undo a lot of the regulations put in under the Biden administration to lower emissions, to incentivize the transition to renewable energy. They’ve also been quashing climate science, reducing funding to it and including things like removing mentions of climate change and climate science from government websites.
There’s also been a lot of hostility to renewable energy in the U.S., especially offshore wind. The administration has tried to revoke permits for certain offshore wind installations and just generally tried to bolster oil and gas and other fossil fuels and downplay renewable energy.
It’s also pretty notable that the administration is trying to bolster coal. There are coal-powered plants that were slated to retire soon that the administration has required to stay open, with the rationale that they need to meet power demand. But that energy is often much more expensive than other types, and it’s costing a lot of money to do that. And the—coal is also one of the more polluting forms of fossil fuel energy.
Outside of the United States, if you look at the global picture, renewables have been rapidly growing, certainly since the Paris Agreement but even in the last year. China is leaning very heavily into their renewable energy sector and pushing for a lot of innovations there, trying to build out a lot of that infrastructure.
And then against the tension of the U.S. sort of retreating on climate and renewables, China somewhat moving ahead, we have an overall increase in energy demand because of the rising use of AI and data centers. So if you didn’t have those elements, renewables might sort of overtake fossil fuels in terms of the economics. Because energy demand is increasing overall, that’s keeping some of these fossil fuel energy sources around longer than maybe they would otherwise be.
I think the one word that would best encapsulate climate this year is “setback.” So we have seen the U.S. make this very notable retreat. The Trump administration also pulled us out of the Paris climate agreements. The annual United Nations meeting to sort of further negotiate how to implement the Paris climate agreement happened in November, and that was a big disappointment to climate advocates and climate scientists. The final agreement that came out of that didn’t even mention fossil fuels. [Laughs.] So we’re in this place of: we know where we need to go, and we’ve made progress towards it over the last decade but not anything close to where it needs to be to meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement.
So in 2026, I’ll, of course, be watching how climate change influences the disasters we feel in the U.S. and around the world. The U.S. got a little bit lucky this year with hurricane season; we were not hit by a major storm. But we have no idea if that might be the case this coming year.
I will also be watching, you know, how the energy landscape in the U.S. changes, whether any of the legal challenges against the Trump administration’s actions play out in terms of trying to take back permits from wind energy or undo state regulations for climate change.
One really interesting point is that the Trump administration is making a really big push on nuclear energy. They’re putting a lot of funding into it. There’s a push to bring back some retired nuclear power plants, in part to meet AI and data-center demand. So that could be one of the really big shifts that we see in 2026.
Pierre-Louis: I don’t know about you, but at times this year has made me feel like I need a break from Earth. So why don’t we blast into outer space?
Lee Billings: I’m Lee Billings. I’m the senior desk editor covering physical sciences at Scientific American, and my favorite topics are space and physics, unsurprisingly.
The biggest space story for me was actually a result from something called the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, that suggests dark energy—this strange, mysterious, accelerating expansion of the universe—is actually changing, or evolving, over time and, in fact, may be getting a little slower or weaker, which is pretty crazy.
And this is really causing a huge uproar in cosmology and physics because no one understood dark energy in the first place, but the models that seemed to describe it best were relatively simple ones. And now, with this more complex behavior, this dynamical behavior, this evolving dark energy idea, that kind of throws all that in the wood chipper. So people are having to go back to the drawing board, and they’re coming up with all kinds of seemingly hairbrained theories and ideas to try to explain this. But again, the universe is just very weird. It’s telling us something very strange, and that, to me, is extraordinarily exciting.
[The year] 2025 has shaped science and shaped space in several important ways, and it’s kind of tough to summarize quickly, but I’ll use a couple of platitudes: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Two steps forward, one step back, right? There’s good and bad things that have happened, and specifically, what I think has really happened in space in 2025 is that just as we’re opening our eyes on the universe in new ways that we could hardly dream of even a decade ago—looking deeper and farther and more broadly into the distant cosmos; looking for life, extraterrestrial life, as it may exist in our own solar system or elsewhere in the galaxy—as all this stuff is just starting to happen, it also kind of seems like the sky is falling.
And what I mean by that is that there’s a whole lot of tumultuous activity going on. You can look at something like NASA, right? Everyone loves NASA—it consistently is one of the most well-regarded governmental agencies by the public—and it’s in trouble. According to a Trump budget that was proposed, maybe we’re gonna slash its space science budget in half. There have been massive layoffs at NASA research centers. There have been work stoppages and lab closures, and all this is related to the political and budgetary uncertainty that is not only affecting NASA, but also other science agencies, like the National Science Foundation.
And amidst all that, we’re losing progress on lots of important space science projects. One that we could mention, for instance, is the long-simmering effort to return human astronauts to the moon. And meanwhile, our geopolitical competitor China plans to do that by 2030.
I think the single word that best describes this year in terms of space is “disruption.” So what I’m watching for in 2026 is, no surprise, much more disruption, for better or worse. You have things like SpaceX’s giant, ultracool megarocket Starship that’s supposed to be fully reusable that will continue its testing, and whether or not Starship sinks or swims—it, it’s been blowing up a whole lot so far, even though it has some successful test flights under its belt—that has great implications for the aforementioned hopes for the U.S. to win its race against China to return to the lunar surface.
The first return of humans to lunar orbit should happen next year. That’s gonna be via the Artemis II mission that could launch in February. There will be launches of various other cool projects in space. Some of them would be NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, [which] may be able to tell us more about this mysterious dark energy evolution that I opened the podcast talking about. They’ll be able to get better measurements that could constrain whether or not dark energy is really, truly behaving like this, and that ultimately has big implications for the fate of the universe and life as we know it.
Now, I’m just giving a smattering of projects here. There’s lots more we could talk about. If you wanna stay up to date on everything that’s happened in 2025, but more importantly, things that are going to happen in 2026, you really should check in at ScientificAmerican.com.
Pierre-Louis: To wrap things up I’ll share one of my favorite scientific breakthroughs of 2025. A 21-year-old man on Long Island was cured of sickle cell disease using a gene therapy called Lyfgenia. SciAm detailed the roots of the inherited blood disorder and the growing hope that these therapies could eliminate the disease in our October 2024 issue. We will include a link to the story in our show notes.
That’s all for today! We’ll be back on Wednesday to talk about how researchers are trying to save Christmas trees amid the pressures of climate change.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Kendra Pierre-Louis, along with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak and Jeff DelViscio. This episode is 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 Kendra Pierre-Louis. See you next time!
