Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific AmericanIt is Science quicklymy name is Kendra Pierre-Louis, I’m replacing Rachel Feltman. You are listening to our weekly summary of scientific news.
First, a quick update on NASA’s lunar mission, which took off last week. Last Thursday Artemis II left Earth’s orbit, making the four astronauts on board the first humans to do so in more than 50 years. And today is a critical day for the mission, as it plans to execute a historic lunar flyby and travel further from Earth than any human has ever gone.
In environmental news, last Tuesday the Endangered Species Committee exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act, or ESA, despite widespread consensus that it could lead to the extinction of some species.
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The last time the committee met was in 1992, under President George HW Bush. At the time, members voted to exempt logging in the habitat of the Oregon spotted owl, an endangered bird. However, this request was ultimately withdrawn.
This time, the committee met at the request of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The defense secretary said the move was necessary for national security. security in light of ongoing lawsuits.
[CLIP: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaking at the committee meeting on March 31, 2026: “This pending litigation in district court seeks to stop Gulf oil and gas activities rather than allowing the integration of oil and gas production with responsible endangered-species protections.”]
Pierre-Louis: Hegseth did not specify which lawsuits he was referring to.
According to data from the United States Energy Information Administration, between 2018 and 2023, the United States produced more crude oil than any other country. other country in the world. Nationally, the United States produced more crude oil in 2025 than ever before, and a March forecast According to the EIA, the country is on track to do about the same this year. The Gulf of Mexico is already one of the nation’s top oil-producing regions, generating some 80 million gallons of oil per day, enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool about 120 times. This represents almost 15 percent of annual U.S. crude oil production.
In April 2010, the Gulf was also the site of the nation’s largest marine oil spill. That’s when Deepwater Horizon, an offshore drilling rig operated by BP, exploded, killing 11 workers, injuring 17 others and releasing more than 130 million gallons of oil in 87 days. The spill also reportedly killed an estimated 95,000 to 200,000 sea turtles, including Kemp’s ridley turtle, green turtle, loggerhead turtle, hawksbill turtle, and leatherback turtle, all of which are threatened or endangered under the ESA. A study that looked on an endangered species of whale known as Rice’s whale, which lives only in the Gulf of Mexico, found that following the spill, the population declined by up to 22 percent. Today, there are only about fifty Rice’s whales left.
A 2011 presidential commission report on the explosion, it was established that the spill was preventable and that the immediate causes could be traced to errors which revealed, quote, “failures in risk management so systematic as to call into question the safety culture of the entire industry”. The report also reveals systemic regulatory failures by the Minerals Management Service, based in part on too close relationships between some officials and the industry they were charged with regulating.
The six-member panel that voted unanimously in favor of the Gulf ESA exemption is made up of political figures, including the Secretary of the Interior and the acting chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
In other Trump administration news, last Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service announced it would move its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, Utah, despite concerns about a worsening brain drain.
The move is part of a broader plan to massively overhaul the agency, including closing all nine existing regional offices and at least 57 of its research and development stations, and pivot to a so-called state organizational model. Tom Schultz, Chief of the Forest Service said in the announcement that the changes will strengthen, quote, “the agency’s connection to forests and the people who depend on them.” The restructuring moves the headquarters to the capital of a state that is currently suing the federal government for control of 18.5 million acres of land. federal lands. Filmmaker and conservationist Jim Pattiz, co-founder of the project More than just parkssaid in a Substack article that the plan essentially incorporates the agency’s leadership, quote, “alongside the same governors, legislators and industry lobbyists who have spent their careers demanding that the Forest Service log more, protect less and get out.” And Pattiz is not the only one to make these criticisms. During a public comment period last year, the agency received 14,000 unique public comments, more than of which 80 percent were negative. Only 5 percent were positive.
Continuing with environmental news, we turn to the alarming levels of snowpack in the Western United States. For much of the West, winter is the wet season, and early April snowpack levels indicate how much water — or how much — states will need to carry them through the summer and early fall.
To tell us more about this, we have Andrea Thompson, Senior Life Sciences Editor here at SciAm.
Thank you very much for being with us today.
Andrea Thompson: Thank you for inviting me.
Pierre-Louis: Before we get into that, can we talk about what snowpack actually is?
Thompson: So basically snowpack just means all the snow that is on all mountain peaks and slopes in the western United States.
When everything works as planned, you have a solid, solid snowpack that slowly melts through the spring and summer, keeping the rivers and reservoirs filled, keeping the soil moist and the plants watered, which unfortunately is not what happened this year. [Laughs.]
Pierre-Louis: And what does it look like?
Thompson: Really bad. [Laughs.] In some parts of California the winter has been quite rainy, but everywhere in the West this year it has been very warm. So this means that in many places, when there was precipitation, it fell as rain instead of snow, which immediately flowed into rivers and other things instead of being accumulated.
And then one of the most incredible heatwaves we’ve ever seen in the Southwest happened. [Laughs.] So it was a heat wave, you know, in mid-March. And it didn’t just set records; it kind of erased them.
So you can check out some of the [snowpack] charts and I just see it diving, and in most places it’s at record highs. Some slopes which should reach their maximum level at the end of winter really have nothing left.
Pierre-Louis: I want to talk to you about the implications of what that means, but before we get into it, I can’t help but ask, for example, how does climate change factor into all of this?
Thompson: Whenever you talk about heat, climate change is there because the average temperature of the planet is increasing, so any heatwave you experience is automatically hotter. But we also know that such heat waves are becoming more and more frequent.
So in the last decade alone, a similar situation is about four times more likely to occur due to climate change and the temperature is about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit, or 0.8 degrees Celsius, higher than it would have been without climate change.
Pierre-Louis: And so, you know, what does that actually mean in terms of what we can expect to see in the West this year? For example, I know that the risk of forest fires, for example, is very high…
Thompson: Yes, definitely. Nebraska experienced the largest wildfire on record. There are some kind of fires here and there. There is huge concern, particularly in some of the high mountain forests which have not been as much of a concern in recent years, that we could see fires there. And, you know, you can’t know in advance where a spark might ignite something, but there are going to be a lot of places that are really prepared for it if that spark happens.
Pierre-Louis: What about the water supply?
Thompson: So this is where things vary. Even though everyone is facing very big snowpack issues this year, it differs a little from basin to basin in terms of people’s concerns.
California is therefore doing well. The big problem is Colorado [River Basin]especially the upper basin, where there is simply nothing. And Colorado was already in a pretty dire situation. There are states arguing over who gets what water, and it’s just that there are more allocations than there is water in the basin, and I think that’s really going to come to a head this year.
There are concerns, you know, I know at Lake Powell there won’t be enough water to run the dam, that they could go below the critical level there, which could even affect the electricity supply.
And, you know, we have a potential El Niño forming later this year that could be very strong, potentially in record territory. But yeah, you know, this could be a really tough summer for a lot of the western United States.
Pierre-Louis: And now let’s talk about something that torments most drivers: why is it that when you pass a car, it always seems to catch up with you at the next red light?
That’s the question that Conor S. Boland, assistant professor of materials science at Dublin City University, addressed in a study published last Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science. The answer, says Boland, is old-school Newtonian physics.
Essentially what matters is how far we can get from the other car before hitting a light, relative to the duration of the red lights. If the red-green cycle is long and predominantly red, we are likely to have it reach when the light is red and our opponent will likely have enough time to catch up before it turns green. On the other hand, if we go fast enough to put a large distance between us and our pursuer, or if the red-green cycles are very short, we will generally manage to escape.
There are probably also cognitive biases at play: we don’t notice when we overtake a car and it doesn’t catch up.
Boland dubbed this phenomenon “Voorhees’ Law of Traffic,” after Jason Voorhees, the film’s antagonist. Friday the 13th film franchise, which always manages to catch its victims despite the fact that they run and he walks.
Pierre-Louis: That’s all for today! Tune in on Wednesday to take stock of the growing number of measles cases in the United States.
Science quickly is produced by me, Kendra Pierre-Louis, with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Emily Makowski, Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck check in on our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Special thanks to Joseph Howlett for helping us interpret the physics in this episode. Subscribe to Scientific American for more recent and in-depth scientific news.
For Scientific American, This is Kendra Pierre-Louis. Have a good week!
