your science briefing for 02.28.2025

A ticking climate time bomb in Arctic ice, the amazing, disappearing yet insatiable job market, anti-vaxxers spread measles and nonsense in Texas, and more...

Thawing permafrost hides a lot of threats. There’s loose soil that can form sinkholes and destroy infrastructure, ancient viruses and microbes, and apparently, reservoirs of a very potent greenhouse gas that can accelerate global warming. This is one of the reasons why scientists worry about ice retreating in polar regions, especially the Arctic: it will make an already bad situation way worse… (Earth.com)

Thanks to modern sanitation and antibiotics, we tend to forget that parasites still very much exist, dealing with them was actually a big part of our lives, and they’re happy to re-infest us again given the opportunity. This is why it took three tries for a woman from New England to get doctors to realize she had parasitic worms making their way into her brain. Take this as a reminder not to get complacent when trying new things around the world, and keep an eye out for warning signs… (News AU)

Everyone is trying to find a good job. Everyone is also trying to hire. And yet, people are struggling to find jobs or qualified candidates. But how? AI, rampant outsourcing of as many things as possible, refusing to train new hires or take any new graduates, and broken HR processes. So, in this new paradoxical market, jobs are shrinking with nothing to replace them, and positions that do need to be done are staying unfilled or being done piecemeal by current employees. Surely, none of this will have any weird or far reaching consequences in economics or politics… (Newsweek)

Successful efforts of anti-vaccination activists to convince Texans to ignore decades of medical science have created a major measles outbreak in the state. Which is par for the course as where anti-vaxxers go, preventable childhood diseases follow. And what do they have to say for themselves? These agents of blight and pestilence are blaming the measles vaccines for spreading measles because why should they even bother trying to make any sense… (NBC)

When I was little, my parents constantly told me not to sit too close to a screen or I’d mess up my eyes. According to a new analysis in JAMA, they had a point. Kids whose eyes are glues to screens do have a higher risk of developing myopia when they grow up unless their screen time is limited to less than four hours a day… (JAMA)