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From 1979: Oil refinery vs. bald eagle
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Trump’s surgeon general pick criticizes others’ conflicts
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — President Donald Trump’s pick to be the next U.S. surgeon general has repeatedly said the nation’s medical, health and food systems are corrupted by special interests and people out to make a profit at the expense of Americans’ health.
Yet as Dr. Casey Means has criticized scientists, medical schools and regulators for taking money from the food and pharmaceutical industries, she has promoted dozens of health and wellness products — including specialty basil seed supplements, a blood testing service and a prepared meal delivery service — in ways that put money in her own pocket.
A review by The Associated Press found Means, who has carved out a niche in the wellness industry, set up deals with an array of businesses.
In her newsletter, on her social media accounts, on her website, in her book and during podcast appearances, the entrepreneur and influencer has at times failed to disclose that she could profit or benefit in other ways from sales of products she recommends. In some cases, she promoted companies in which she was an investor or adviser without consistently disclosing the connection, the AP found.
Means, 37, has said she recommends products that she has personally vetted and uses herself. She is far from the only online creator who doesn’t always follow federal transparency rules that require influencers to disclose when they have a “material connection” to a product they promote.
Still, legal and ethics experts said those business entanglements raise concerns about conflicting interests for an aspiring surgeon general, a role responsible for giving Americans the best scientific information on how to improve their health.
“I fear that she will be cultivating her next employers and her next sponsors or business partners while in office,” said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a progressive ethics watchdog monitoring executive branch appointees.
The nomination, which comes amid a whirlwind of Trump administration actions to dismantle the government’s public integrity guardrails, also has raised questions about whether Levels, a company Means co-founded that sells subscriptions for devices that continuously monitor users’ glucose levels, could benefit from this administration’s health guidance and policy.
Though scientists debate whether continuous glucose monitors are beneficial for people without diabetes, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promoted their use as a precursor to making certain weight-loss drugs available to patients.
The aspiring presidential appointee has built her own brand in part by criticizing doctors, scientists and government officials for being “bought off” or “corrupt” because of ties to industry.
Means’ use of affiliate marketing and other methods of making money from her recommendations for supplements, medical tests and other health and dietary products raise questions about the extent to which she is influenced by a different set of special interests: those of the wellness industry.
Means earned her medical degree from Stanford University, but she dropped out of her residency program in Oregon in 2018, and her license to practice is inactive. She has grown her public profile in part with a compelling origin story that seeks to explain why she left her residency and conventional medicine.
“During my training as a surgeon, I saw how broken and exploitative the healthcare system is and left to focus on how to keep people out of the operating room,” she wrote on her website.
Means turned to alternative approaches to address what she has described as widespread metabolic dysfunction driven largely by poor nutrition and an overabundance of ultra-processed foods. She co-founded Levels, a nutrition, sleep and exercise-tracking app that can also give users insights from blood tests and continuous glucose monitors. The company charges $199 per year for an app subscription and an additional $184 per month for glucose monitors.
Means has argued that the medical system is incentivized not to look at the root causes of illness but instead to maintain profits by keeping patients sick and coming back for more prescription drugs and procedures.
“At the highest level of our medical institutions, there are conflicts of interest and corruption that are actually making the science that we’re getting not as accurate and not as clean as we’d want it,” she said on Megyn Kelly’s podcast last year.
But even as Means decries the influence of money on science and medicine, she has made her own deals with business interests.
During the same Megyn Kelly podcast, Means mentioned a frozen prepared food brand, Daily Harvest. She promoted that brand in a book she published last year. What she didn’t mention in either instance: Means had a business relationship with Daily Harvest.
Influencer marketing has expanded beyond the beauty, fashion and travel sectors to “encompass more and more of our lives,” said Emily Hund, author of “The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media.”
With more than 825,000 followers on Instagram and a newsletter that she has said reached 200,000 subscribers, Means has a direct line into the social media feeds and inboxes of an audience interested in health, nutrition and wellness.
Affiliate marketing, brand partnerships and similar business arrangements are growing more popular as social media becomes increasingly lucrative for influencers, especially among younger generations. Companies might provide a payment, free or discounted products or other benefits to the influencer in exchange for a post or a mention. But most consumers still don’t realize that a personality recommending a product might make money if people click through and buy, said University of Minnesota professor Christopher Terry.
“A lot of people watch those influencers, and they take what those influencers say as gospel,” said Terry, who teaches media advertising and internet law. Even his own students don’t understand that influencers might stand to benefit from sales of the products they endorse, he added.
Many companies, including Amazon, have affiliate marketing programs in which people with substantial social media followings can sign up to receive a percentage of sales or some other benefit when someone clicks through and buys a product using a special individualized link or code shared by the influencer.
Means has used such links to promote various products sold on Amazon. Among them are books, including the one she co-wrote, “Good Energy”; a walking pad; soap; body oil; hair products; cardamom-flavored dental floss; organic jojoba oil; a razor set; reusable kitchen products; sunglasses; a sleep mask; a silk pillowcase; fitness and sleep trackers; protein powder and supplements.
She also has shared links to products sold by other companies that included “affiliate” or “partner” coding, indicating she has a business relationship with the companies. The products include an AI-powered sleep system and Daily Harvest, for which she curated a “metabolic health collection.”
On a “My Faves” page that was taken down from her website shortly after Trump picked her, Means wrote that some links “are affiliate links and I make a small percentage if you buy something after clicking them.”
It’s not clear how much money Means has earned from her affiliate marketing, partnerships and other agreements. Daily Harvest did not return messages seeking comment, and Means said she could not comment on the record during the confirmation process.
Means has raised concerns that scientists, regulators and doctors are swayed by the influence of industry, oftentimes pointing to public disclosures of their connections. In January, she told the Kristin Cavallari podcast “Let’s Be Honest” that “relationships are influential.”
“There’s huge money, huge money going to fund scientists from industry,” Means said. “We know that when industry funds papers, it does skew outcomes.”
In November, on a podcast run by a beauty products brand, Primally Pure, she said it was “insanity” to have people connected to the processed food industry involved in writing food guidelines, adding, “We need unbiased people writing our guidelines that aren’t getting their mortgage paid by a food company.”
On the same podcast, she acknowledged supplement companies sponsor her newsletter, adding, “I do understand how it’s messy.”
Influencers who endorse or promote products in exchange for payment or something else of value are required by the Federal Trade Commission to make a clear and conspicuous disclosure of any business, family or personal relationship. While Means did provide disclosures about newsletter sponsors, the AP found in other cases Means did not always tell her audience when she had a connection to the companies she promoted. For example, a “Clean Personal & Home Care Product Recommendations” guide she links to from her website contains two dozen affiliate or partner links and no disclosure that she could profit from any sales.
Means has said she invested in Function Health, which provides subscription-based lab testing for $500 annually. Of the more than a dozen online posts the AP found in which Means mentioned Function Health, more than half did not disclose she had any affiliation with the company.
Means also listed the supplement company Zen Basil as a company for which she was an “Investor and/or Advisor.” The AP found posts on Instagram, X and on Facebook where Means promoted its products without disclosing the relationship.
Though the “About” page on her website discloses an affiliation with both companies, that’s not enough, experts said. She is required to disclose any material connection she has to a company anytime she promotes it.
Representatives for Function Health did not return messages seeking comment through their website and executives’ LinkedIn profiles. Zen Basil’s founder, Shakira Niazi, did not answer questions about Means’ business relationship with the company or her disclosures of it. She said the two had known each other for about four years and called Means’ advice “transformational,” saying her teachings reversed Niazi’s prediabetes and other ailments.
“I am proud to sponsor her newsletter through my company,” Niazi said in an email.
While the disclosure requirements are rarely enforced by the FTC, Means should have been informing her readers of any connections regardless of whether she was violating any laws, said Olivier Sylvain, a Fordham Law School professor who was previously a senior adviser to the FTC chair.
“What you want in a surgeon general, presumably, is someone who you trust to talk about tobacco, about social media, about caffeinated alcoholic beverages, things that present problems in public health,” Sylvain said, adding, “Should there be any doubt about claims you make about products?”
Means isn’t the first surgeon general nominee whose financial entanglements have raised eyebrows.
Jerome Adams, who served as surgeon general from 2017 to 2021, filed federal disclosure forms that showed he invested in several health technology, insurance and pharmaceutical companies before taking the job — among them Pfizer, Mylan and UnitedHealth Group. He also invested in the food and drink giant Nestle.
He divested those stocks when he was confirmed for the role and pledged that he and his immediate family would not acquire financial interest in certain industries regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.
Vivek Murthy, who served as surgeon general twice, under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, made more than $2 million in COVID-19-related speaking and consulting fees from Carnival, Netflix, Estee Lauder and Airbnb between holding those positions. He pledged to recuse himself from matters involving those parties for a period of time.
Means has not yet gone through a Senate confirmation hearing and has not yet announced the ethical commitments she will make for the role.
Hund said that as influencer marketing becomes more common, it is raising more ethical questions, such as what past influencers who enter government should do to avoid the appearance of a conflict.
Other administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, have also promoted companies on social media without disclosing their financial ties.
“This is like a learning moment in the evolution of our democracy,” Hund said. “Is this a runaway train that we just have to get on and ride, or is this something that we want to go differently?”
___
Swenson reported from New York.
Where’s the beef? Hamburger patties made from plants
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Winning hearts and minds over vaccines
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Mysterious object spotted in our galaxy is emitting X-rays and radio waves, astronomers say
Astronomers have discovered a strange new object in our Milky Way.
An international team reported Wednesday that this celestial object — perhaps a star, pair of stars or something else entirely — is emitting X-rays around the same time it’s shooting out radio waves. What’s more, the cycle repeats every 44 minutes, at least during periods of extreme activity.
X-rays and radio waves are two different types of electromagnetic radiation. The correlation in their emission patterns in this case, along with other mysterious observations, led the study’s authors to characterize what they found as “unlike any known Galactic object.”
Located 15,000 light-years away in a region of the Milky Way brimming with stars, gas and dust, this object could be a highly magnetized dead star like a neutron or white dwarf, Curtin University’s Ziteng Andy Wang said in an email from Australia.
Or it could be “something exotic” and unknown, said Wang, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory spotted the X-ray emissions by chance last year while focusing on a supernova remnant, or the remains of an exploded star. Wang said it was the first time X-rays had been seen coming from a so-called long-period radio transient, a rare object that cycles through radio signals over tens of minutes.
NASA/Chandra/Spitzer/MeerKat via AP
Given the uncertain distance, astronomers can’t tell if the weird object is associated with the supernova remnant or not. A single light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.
The hyperactive phase of this object — designated ASKAP J1832−091 — appeared to last about a month. Outside of that period, the star did not emit any noticeable X-rays. That could mean more of these objects may be out there, scientists said.
“While our discovery doesn’t yet solve the mystery of what these objects are and may even deepen it, studying them brings us closer to two possibilities,” Wang said. “Either we are uncovering something entirely new, or we’re seeing a known type of object emitting radio and X-ray waves in a way we’ve never observed before.”
Launched in 1999, Chandra orbits tens of thousands of miles above Earth, observing some of the hottest, high-energy objects in the universe.
It’s the world’s most powerful X-ray telescope, according to NASA. A description of the telescope on the space agency’s website notes that its purpose is to allow scientists across the globe to obtain X-ray images of faraway environments, in hopes that the images may “help them understand the structure and evolution of the universe.”
NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover captures new selfie featuring a Martian dust devil
The latest selfie by NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover has captured an unexpected guest: a Martian dust devil.
Resembling a small pale puff, the twirling dust devil popped up 3 miles behind the rover during this month’s photo shoot. Dust devils, a combination of air and dust, are common on Mars.
Released Wednesday, the selfie is a composite of 59 images taken by the camera on the end of the rover’s robotic arm, according to NASA.
NASA via AP
It took an hour to perform all the arm movements necessary to gather the images, “but it’s worth it,” said Megan Wu, an imaging scientist from Malin Space Science Systems, which built the camera.
“Having the dust devil in the background makes it a classic,” Wu said in a statement.
The picture — which also shows the rover’s latest sample borehole on the surface — marks 1,500 sols, or Martian days, for Perseverance. That’s equivalent to 1,541 days on Earth.
Perseverance is covered with red dust, the result of drilling into dozens of rocks. Perseverance, which landed on Mars in 2021, is collecting samples for an eventual return to Earth from Jezero Crater, an ancient lakebed and river delta that could hold clues to any past microbial life.
Last month, released images showed a Martian dust devil consuming a smaller one on the surface of the red planet.
Capuchin monkeys kidnap babies of another species — and the deadly abductions are caught on camera
A baby howler monkey clung to the back of an older male monkey, its tiny fingers grasping fur. But they’re not related and not even the same species.
Scientists spotted surprising evidence of what they describe as monkey kidnappings while reviewing video footage from a small island of Panama. The capuchin monkeys were seen carrying at least 11 howler babies between 2022 and 2023, researchers said Monday.
“This was very much a shocking finding,” said Zoë Goldsborough, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany. “We’ve not seen anything like this in the animal kingdom.”
The monkeys’ motivations remain under investigation. Capuchins are house cat-sized monkeys found in South America and Central America. They are long-lived, clever and learn new behaviors from each other. One group of capuchins in Panama has even learned to use stone tools to crack open nuts and seafood.
Brendan Barrett/Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior via AP
Goldsberg and other researchers at Max Planck and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute had set up more than 80 cameras to study capuchin tool use but were surprised to see the first howler babies appear in early 2022.
Goldsborough initially found four different howler infants being carried. In nearly all cases, the culprit was the same subadult male. The scientists nicknamed the capuchin Joker because the small scar at the side of its mouth reminded them of the “Batman” villain.
At first, the scientists thought this was the “heartwarming story of a weird capuchin adopting these infants,” Goldsborough said.
Then the researchers started finding other cases not involving Joker. The scientists were puzzled because the capuchins did not eat or prey on the babies, nor did they seem to enjoy playing with them.
Goldsborough said they eventually realized these abductions were a social tradition or “fad” among the island’s young male capuchins.
Grim fate for abducted babies
The footage showed the capuchins walking and pounding their stone tools with baby howlers on their backs. But cameras did not capture the moments of abduction, which scientists said likely happened up in the trees, where howlers spend most of their time.
“Our window into this story is constrained,” said co-author Margaret Crofoot of Max Planck and the Smithsonian. The findings were published Monday in the journal Current Biology.
In most or all cases, the baby howlers died, researchers said. Infant howler monkeys would normally be carried by their mothers while still nursing. All the babies in the video — from a few weeks to a few months in age — were too young to be weaned.
“A hopeful part of me wants to believe some escaped and went back to their mothers, but we don’t know,” said Crofoot.
The videos recorded a few instances of young capuchin males still carrying howler babies that had died, likely from starvation. Many animals — from gorillas to orcas — have been observed carrying their dead offspring, though scientists aren’t sure the reasons.
Why did the capuchin males do it? There were no signs of deliberate aggression toward the babies and they weren’t eaten, ruling out predation.
“We’ve all spent hours wracking our brains — why they would do this?” said Goldsborough.
The first baby-snatcher may have had a confused “caring motivation,” or parental instinct, because he showed gentleness interacting with the infants, she said. Then four other males copied his actions.
The researchers said they don’t believe the capuchins harmed the babies on purpose. So far, only one group of capuchins has been known to kidnap.
The research shows the “remarkable behavioral variation across social groups of the same species,” said Catherine Crockford, a primatologist at the CNRS Institute for Cognitive Sciences in France, who was not involved in the study.
Cultural fads spreading among animals is rare but not unheard of.
Barrett has previously studied capuchins in Costa Rica that suddenly started grooming porcupines, before growing bored of the trend.
And back in the 1980s, killer whales took to donning dead salmon on their heads off the northwestern U.S. coast. This trend returned decades later when orcas were again spotted wearing these “salmon hats” last year.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.
Universe will die
The universe is poised to die much faster than previously thought, according to new research by Dutch scientists.
But there’s no great need to panic. We still have 10 to the power of 78 years before it happens — that’s a one with 78 zeroes.
However, that is a major revision from the previous estimate of 10 to the power of 1,100 years, notes the research paper from Radboud University, published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
“The final end of the universe is coming much sooner than expected but fortunately it still takes a very long time,” said lead author Heino Falcke.
A trio of scientists at Radboud set out to calculate when the most “durable” celestial bodies — white dwarf stars — would eventually die out.
They based their calculations on Hawking radiation, named after celebrated British physicist Stephen Hawking.
Hawking postulated in the mid-1970s that black holes leak radiation, slowly dissolving like aspirin in a glass of water — giving them a finite lifetime.
The Radboud scientists extended this to other objects in the universe, calculating that the “evaporation time” depends on density.
This enabled them to calculate the theoretical dissolution of the longest-lasting body, the white dwarf.
“By asking these kinds of questions and looking at extreme cases, we want to better understand the theory, and perhaps one day, we can unravel the mystery of Hawking radiation,” said co-author Walter van Suijlekom.
Humankind needn’t worry too much about the end of the universe. Unless we escape planet Earth, we’ll be long gone.
Scientists think that our sun will be too hot for life in about a billion years, boiling our oceans.
In about eight billion years, our star will eventually expand towards the Earth, finally gobbling up our by-then barren and lifeless planet and condemning it to a fiery death.
Shedding light on dark energy
The research comes just weeks after scientists released new findings that may also shed light on the fate of the universe. Researchers in March said new data shows dark energy — a mysterious force that makes up nearly 70% of the universe — may actually be weakening.
If dark energy is constant, an idea first introduced by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity, scientists say our universe may continue to expand forever, growing ever colder, lonelier and still. If dark energy ebbs with time, the universe could one day stop expanding and then eventually collapse on itself in what’s called the “Big Crunch.”
“Now, there is the possibility that everything comes to an end,” said cosmologist and study collaborator Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki of the University of Texas at Dallas. “Would we consider that a good or bad thing? I don’t know.”
NSF’s NoirLab via AP
Other efforts around the globe have an eye on dark energy and aim to release their own data in the coming years, including the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.
Launched in 2023, the ESA’s $1.5 billion Euclid space telescope is equipped with a near-perfect 3-feet 11-inch-wide primary mirror and two instruments: a 600 megapixel visible light camera and a 64-megapixel infrared imaging spectrometer. The telescope’s field of view is roughly twice the size of the full moon.
Webb telescope captures images of Jupiter’s auroras in stunning new detail
Jupiter’s dazzling auroras are hundreds of times brighter than those seen on Earth, new images from the James Webb Space Telescope reveal.
The solar system’s largest planet displays striking dancing lights when high-energy particles from space collide with atoms of gas in the atmosphere near its magnetic poles, similar to how the northern lights are triggered on Earth.
NASA via AP
But Jupiter’s version has much greater intensity, according to an international team of scientists who analyzed the photos from Webb taken on Christmas in 2023. Jonathan Nichols, from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, led the team. In a statement shared with NASA, he said their findings blew him away.
“We wanted to see how quickly the auroras change, expecting them to fade in and out ponderously, perhaps over a quarter of an hour or so,” said Nichols. “Instead, we observed the whole auroral region fizzing and popping with light, sometimes varying by the second.”
Learning more about the variability Nichols’ team observed will help scientists better understand how Jupiter’s atmosphere works, according to NASA.
NASA via AP
Webb’s images of Jupiter may have also opened doors to new questions about the universe. When compared to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, which uses different wavelengths of light to capture them, scientists discovered that certain bright spots seen in Webb’s images did not appear in Hubble’s counterparts.
“This has left us scratching our heads,” Nichols told NASA. “In order to cause the combination of brightness seen by both Webb and Hubble, we need to have a combination of high quantities of very low-energy particles hitting the atmosphere, which was previously thought to be impossible. We still don’t understand how this happens.”
Webb previously captured Neptune’s glowing auroras in the best detail yet, many decades after they were first faintly detected during a flyby of the Voyager 2 spacecraft.