Science-related stories to watch in 2025
Welcome to Ramin’s Space, the newsletter from science writer and editor Ramin Skibba. You can read more about the newsletter here. If you like it, please consider subscribing and sharing this post.
As we roll into 2025, let’s look around at the science-related issues and stories we should follow this year. First, there’s public health. We have increasing numbers of cases of bird flu (H5N1) in California and elsewhere, and it has spread to herds of cattle. The disease could evolve further. There’s also mpox, which has been causing severe infections in Congo and neighboring countries. Our struggle with COVID continues as well, as it has killed 1.2 million Americans so far, and we can expect more variants to emerge this year. The US’s healthcare system remains flawed for tens of millions of Americans too, and it’s clear many people are frustrated with it, as we can see from the public response to the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
President-elect Trump and his incoming government will present all sorts of other science, climate, and tech issues that journalists will follow, including myself. A week after his inauguration, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will update the Doomsday Clock. It’s currently at 90 seconds until an apocalyptic midnight, and predict they’ll keep it at that setting, considering threats posed by nukes, climate change, pandemics, and more, and political leaders inadequate responses to them. I am also not hopeful for a ceasefire anytime soon in Russia’s war in Ukraine or Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon, and I fear the Trump administration and Xi Jinping will have few qualms about escalating tensions.
I’ll continue following climate stories, and I hope to pay more attention to labor issues, green jobs, and the expansion of domestic fossil fuel production, as well as investments in dubious climate solutions. Every country should be engaged in the hard work of shifting away from oil and gas, but the US has been investing heavily in that sector, starting in Obama’s second term, and that will continue into Trump’s second term. Politicians pay attention to gas prices, but if the US government were to stop investing in new oil and gas development, it actually wouldn’t significantly affect those prices, which are just over half the price in many European countries. But we shouldn’t focus on individual consumption as much as on the big villains, starting with the fossil fuel industry itself. I’ll be watching for new efforts to revive the parts of the Green New Deal and efforts to resist new fossil fuel facilities, whether they’re fracking projects or offshore oil drilling or plastics or hydrogen fuel. Even if global greenhouse gas emissions peak this year, so much more needs to be done, quickly.
During the first Trump administration, I reported on the government disbanding a much-needed forensic science commission. Cases involving poorly understood or unreliable forensic techniques pop up all the time, such as the death penalty case of Robert Roberson in Texas, which involves shaken baby syndrome. I supported Biden’s commutation of 37 death sentences, and I believe the death penalty is inhumane and immoral. But even if I didn’t, I’d be troubled by cases of botched lethal injections. As a half-Iranian, I must point out that it’s not just the US that egregiously employs the death penalty: Iran’s government also does so, and the country had a surge in executions in 2024, including of protesters and dissidents.
Personally, I’m also paying closer attention to tech stories, including members of Trump’s team, like his science advisor nominees, who will report to David Sacks, his AI and crypto czar. Crypto played a much bigger role in last year’s US elections than I expected, and it wasn’t just Trump: Kamala Harris was also supported by the crypto industry, and crypto leaders arguably played a role in tipping the Senate toward Republicans, investing heavily in toppling Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, a prominent critic of the industry.
Just to name a few other ongoing tech stories: I expect to see increasingly sophisticated surveillance tech this year, at the militarized US-Mexico border, by police departments, by drones, and more. We should also scrutinize all these AI and data centers, which we don’t really need. They come with huge energy and water costs, and recently the Biden administration encouraged their construction on federal lands. I’d love to see more scrutiny of all the tech overlords, many of whom have already begun bowing down to Trump, who’s known for being susceptible to flattery. And we particularly need more scrutiny of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, whose combined wealth is currently about two thirds of a trillion dollars. Their space companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin, will continue making advances with their Starship and New Glenn spacecraft this year, but those each come with environmental costs, and each company has had cases of labor violations. Yet Musk and Bezos have become close to Trump, recently visiting him at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
In other writing…
Science journalism becomes plain old journalism, a journalism prediction published by Nieman Lab, written by Siri Carpenter, a colleague of mine and the executive director of The Open Notebook
Do insects feel pain?, by Shayla Love in the New Yorker. I’m curious about psychology and the intelligence and possible consciousness of animals and insects, so I’m always drawn to these kinds of stories.
The Hideaway, a profile of climate doomers in Germany, by Michaela Cavanagh in Hazlitt magazine
How to lose your home, an essay by Dan Hancox in Aeon magazine about rising sea levels and England’s disappearing coastlines
WIRE (Wildlife Investigative Reporters & Editors) is a new nonprofit journalism organization founded by people formerly at National Geographic. I recommend following their work.
I often try to keep this newsletter mostly focused on science-related issues, but I also wanted to share these two pieces I recommend: The Ghosts in the Machine, by Liz Pelly in Harper’s magazine about Spotify insidiously using fake musicians, and Sleeping Women, by Sophie Smith in the London Review of Books about the disturbing Pelicot trial in France, Kate Atkinson’s novels, and more.
On Luigi Mangione’s murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, I’ve seen some good commentary and some bad takes. I recommend this New York magazine piece by Sam Adler-Bell, this piece in The Nation by Natalie Shure, and Ken Klippenstein’s takes, including his publishing Mangione’s manifesto. Major news outlets had the manifesto but didn’t publish it; like Klippenstein, I believe that when in doubt, lean toward releasing information, and let readers figure out what they think of it. To do otherwise is paternalistic and condescending, as if a couple influential news editors should have the power to decide what people know and don’t know. Klippenstein also made a good point that healthcare is usually a major presidential campaign issue but strangely wasn’t one last fall. Americans clearly have concerns about the exorbitant costs and problematic bureaucracy of the US healthcare system.
In Ruins, by Jasper Nathaniel in the new issue of The Drift, about archaeological warfare in the West Bank. I also recommend Theater of Warning, about Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, by Zeead Yaghi in the same magazine. And I recommend Parallel Processes, an essay by Hannah Zeavin about the “Palestine exception” and psychoanalysis, in the new issue of n+1 magazine
Refaat Alareer’s book of poetry and prose, If I Must Die, was just published in December a year after he was killed by an Israeli airstrike. It’s already a bestseller—which is all too rare for poetry and for Palestinian writers.
What I’m reading: From the Ashes, by Sarah Jaffe
Looking back: Eight years ago, when Trump first took office, I wrote two news stories for Slate about how the administration sought to reassess and reduce something called the “social cost of carbon.” It informs environmental regulations and it’s meant to demonstrate the drastic and rising costs of climate inaction, costs that Trump and his allies would rather ignore.
More about me: I’m a science writer and journalist based in the Bay Area. I was WIRED magazine’s space writer until December 2023, and before that I worked as a freelance writer and an astrophysicist. You can find me at my website, raminskibba.net, and on Twitter and Bluesky. I’m also former president of the San Diego Science Writers Association (SANDSWA) and on the board of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), though the opinions I express are mine alone. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you’re welcome to subscribe too.