Chris Impey, University of Arizona

America has already lost its global competitive edge in science, and funding cuts proposed in early 2025 may further a precipitous decline.

Proposed cuts to the federal agencies that fund scientific research could undercut America’s global competitiveness, with negative impacts on the economy and the ability to attract and train the next generation of researchers.

I’m an astronomer, and I have been a senior administrator at the University of Arizona’s College of Science. Because of these roles, I’m invested in the future of scientific research in the United States. I’m worried funding cuts could mean a decline in the amount and quality of research published – and that some potential discoveries won’t get made.

The endless frontier

A substantial part of U.S. prosperity after World War II was due to the country’s investment in science and technology.

Vannevar Bush founded the company that later became Raytheon and was the president of the Carnegie Institution. In 1945, he delivered a report to President Franklin D. Roosevelt called The Endless Frontier.

In this report, Bush argued that scientific research was essential to the country’s economic well-being and security. His advocacy led to the founding of the National Science Foundation and science policy as we know it today. He argued that a centralized approach to science funding would efficiently distribute resources to scientists doing research at universities.

Since 1945, advances in science and technology have driven 85% of American economic growth. Science and innovation are the engines of prosperity, where research generates new technologies, innovations and solutions that improve the quality of life and drive economic development.

This causal relationship, where scientific research leads to innovations and inventions that promote economic growth, is true around the world.

The importance of basic research

Investment in research and development has tripled since 1990, but that growth has been funded by the business sector for applied research, while federal investment in basic research has stagnated. The distinction matters, because basic research, which is purely exploratory research, has enormous downstream benefits.

Quantum computing is a prime example. Quantum computing originated 40 years ago, based on the fundamental physics of quantum mechanics. It has matured only in the past few years to the point where quantum computers can solve some problems faster than classical computers.

Worldwide, basic research pays for itself and has more impact on economic growth than applied research. This is because basic research expands the shared knowledge base that innovators can draw on.

For example, a biotech advocacy firm calculated that every dollar of funding to the National Institutes of Health generates US$2.46 in economic activity, which is why a recent cut of $9 billion to its funding is so disturbing.

The American public also values science. In an era of declining trust in public institutions, more than 3 in 4 Americans say research investment is creating employment opportunities, and a similar percentage are confident that scientists act in the public’s best interests.

Science superpower slipping

By some metrics, American science is preeminent. Researchers working in America have won over 40% of the science Nobel Prizes – three times more than people from any other country. American research universities are magnets for scientific talent, and the United States spends more on research and development than any other country.

But there is intense competition to be a science superpower, and several metrics suggest the United States is slipping. Research and development spending as a percentage of GDP has fallen from a high of 1.9% in 1964 to 0.7% in 2021. Worldwide, the United States ranked 12th for this metric in 2021, behind South Korea and European countries.

In number of scientific researchers as a portion of the labor force, the United States ranks 10th.

Metrics for research quality tell a similar story. In 2020, China overtook the United States in having the largest share of the top 1% most-cited papers.

China also leads the world in the number of patents, and it has been outspending the U.S. on research in the past few decades. Switzerland and Sweden eclipse the United States in terms of science and technology innovation. This definition of innovation goes beyond research in labs and the number of scientific papers published to include improvements to outcomes in the form of new goods or new services.

Among American educators and workers in technical fields, 3 in 4 think the United States has already lost the competition for global leadership.

Threats to science funding

Against this backdrop, threats made in the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term to science funding are ominous.

Trump’s first wave of executive orders caused chaos at science agencies as they struggled to interpret the directives. Much of the anxiety involved excising language and programs relating to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.

The National Science Foundation is particularly in the crosshairs. In late January 2025, it froze the routine review and approval of grants and new expenditures, impeding future research, and has been vetting grants to make sure they comply with orders from the U.S. president.

The National Institutes of Health announced on Feb. 7, 2024 a decision to limit overhead rates to 15% which sent many researchers reeling though it has since been temporarily blocked by a judge. The National Institutes of Health is the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, and these indirect costs provide support for the operation and maintenance of lab facilities. They are essential for doing research.

The new administration has proposed deeper cuts. The National Science Foundation has been told to prepare for the loss of half of its staff and two-thirds of its funding. Other federal science agencies are facing similar threats of layoffs and funding cuts.

The impact

Congress already failed to deliver on its 2022 commitment to increase research funding, and federal funding for science agencies is at a 25-year low.

As the president’s proposals reach Congress for approval or negotiation, they will test the traditionally bipartisan support science has held. If Congress cuts budgets further, I believe the impact on job creation, the training of young scientists and the health of the economy will be substantial.

Deep cuts to agencies that account for a small fraction – just over 1% – of federal spending will not put a dent in the soaring budget deficit, but they could irreparably harm one of the nation’s most valuable enterprises.

Chris Impey, University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Steven R. Fassnacht, Colorado State University

It’s extremely easy to get sunburned while you’re skiing and snowboarding in the mountains, but have you ever wondered why?

While it’s true that you’re slightly closer to the Sun when you’re high in the mountains, that isn’t the reason.

If you go up 1 mile (1.6 km), about the elevation from Denver to the peaks of resorts such as Vail or Copper Mountain, you’re less than 1 millionth of a percent closer to the Sun – that’s nothing. Since the Earth’s orbit is an ellipse and not a circle, the planet is about 1.7% closer to the Sun in early January compared with its annual average. This means skiers get about 3.3% more Sun in January than average for the year – so, not much more.

Being 1 mile higher up does mean the atmosphere is thinner, so there are fewer particles to block the ultraviolet radiation that causes sunburns.

But the big reason your skin is more likely to burn has to do with all that fresh powder that skiers and snowboarders crave, especially on perfect, blue-sky days. I’m a snow scientist at Colorado State University and an avid skier. There are many ways that snow conditions affect how much your skin will burn.

Fresh snow is very reflective

When you’re out in the snow, a lot of the solar radiation your skin receives is reflected from the snow itself. The amount of radiation reflected is known as albedo.

Fresh powder snow can have an albedo of almost 95%, meaning it reflects almost all of the Sun’s radiation that hits it. It’s much more reflective than older snow, which becomes less shiny. Fresh snow has a lot of surfaces to reflect the Sun’s rays. As snow ages, the snow crystal becomes more round and there are fewer surfaces to reflect light.

Having lots of fresh snow increases albedo because the Sun penetrates into the powder, reflecting off the small, newly fallen crystals. Think about starting a car after 6 inches of fresh snow fell. Some light still makes its way through the snow-covered windshield.

Having only an inch of powder on crust is not as reflective as knee-deep fresh powder. Shallow snow is less reflective.

A lot of people want to ski on what are known as bluebird days, when there is deep, fresh powder under a clear blue sky following a big snow dump. However, this provides the perfect conditions to burn from two directions: lots of Sun coming down from above and high albedo reflecting it back to your face from below. Clouds block sunlight, with only about one-third of the Sun’s radiation making it through a fully overcast sky.

Which side of the mountain also matters

Where you are on the mountain also makes a difference.

The slope and the direction that the slope faces, called aspect, also influences the intensity of the Sun on a surface. North-facing slopes in the Northern Hemisphere get less direct sunlight in the winter, when the Sun is farther south in the sky, so they stay cooler.

A lot of the runs at Northern Hemisphere ski resorts face north, so the snow melts slower. The snow also varies from the top of the mountain to the base. There is more snow up high, and the snow melts slower there, so the albedo is higher at the top of the mountain than at the base.

How to reduce the risk of sunburn

To avoid sunburns, skiers and snowboarders need to take all of those characteristics into account.

Because solar radiation is reflecting back up, people out in the snow should put sunscreen on the bottom of their noses, around their ears and on their chins, as well as the usual places.

Most sunscreen also needs to be reapplied every two hours, particularly if you’re likely to sweat it off, wipe it off, or wear it off while playing on the slopes. However, surveys show that few people remember to do this. Wearing clothing with UV protection to cover as much skin as possible can also help.

These methods can help protect your skin from burning and the risks of cancer and premature aging that come with it. Snow lovers need to remember that they face higher sunburn risks on the slopes than they might be accustomed to.

Steven R. Fassnacht, Professor of Snow Hydrology, Colorado State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Daniel Brady Mills, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; Jason Wright, Penn State, and Jennifer L. Macalady, Penn State

A popular model of evolution concludes that it was incredibly unlikely for humanity to evolve on Earth, and that extraterrestrial intelligence is vanishingly rare.

But as experts on the entangled history of life and our planet, we propose that the coevolution of life and Earth’s surface environment may have unfolded in a way that makes the evolutionary origin of humanlike intelligence a more foreseeable or expected outcome than generally thought.

The hard-steps model

Some of the greatest evolutionary biologists of the 20th century famously dismissed the prospect of humanlike intelligence beyond Earth.

This view, firmly rooted in biology, independently gained support from physics in 1983 with an influential publication by Brandon Carter, a theoretical physicist.

In 1983, Carter attempted to explain what he called a remarkable coincidence: the close approximation between the estimated lifespan of the Sun – 10 billion years – and the time Earth took to produce humans – 5 billion years, rounding up.

He imagined three possibilities. In one, intelligent life like humans generally arises very quickly on planets, geologically speaking – in perhaps millions of years. In another, it typically arises in about the time it took on Earth. And in the last, he imagined that Earth was lucky – ordinarily it would take much longer, say, trillions of years for such life to form.

Carter rejected the first possibility because life on Earth took so much longer than that. He rejected the second as an unlikely coincidence, since there is no reason the processes that govern the Sun’s lifespan – nuclear fusion – should just happen to have the same timescale as biological evolution.

So Carter landed on the third explanation: that humanlike life generally takes much longer to arise than the time provided by the lifetime of a star.

To explain why humanlike life took so long to arise, Carter proposed that it must depend on extremely unlikely evolutionary steps, and that the Earth is extraordinarily lucky to have taken them all.

He called these evolutionary steps hard steps, and they had two main criteria. One, the hard steps must be required for human existence – meaning if they had not happened, then humans would not be here. Two, the hard steps must have very low probabilities of occurring in the available time, meaning they usually require timescales approaching 10 billion years.

Do hard steps exist?

The physicists Frank Tipler and John Barrow predicted that hard steps must have happened only once in the history of life – a logic taken from evolutionary biology.

If an evolutionary innovation required for human existence was truly improbable in the available time, then it likely wouldn’t have happened more than once, although it must have happened at least once, since we exist.

For example, the origin of nucleated – or eukaryotic – cells is one of the most popular hard steps scientists have proposed. Since humans are eukaryotes, humanity would not exist if the origin of eukaryotic cells had never happened.

On the universal tree of life, all eukaryotic life falls on exactly one branch. This suggests that eukaryotic cells originated only once, which is consistent with their origin being unlikely.

The other most popular hard-step candidates – the origin of life, oxygen-producing photosynthesis, multicellular animals and humanlike intelligence – all share the same pattern. They are each constrained to a single branch on the tree of life.

However, as the evolutionary biologist and paleontologist Geerat Vermeij argued, there are other ways to explain why these evolutionary events appear to have happened only once.

This pattern of apparently singular origins could arise from information loss due to extinction and the incompleteness of the fossil record. Perhaps these innovations each evolved more than once, but only one example of each survived to the modern day. Maybe the extinct examples never became fossilized, or paleontologists haven’t recognized them in the fossil record.

Or maybe these innovations did happen only once, but because they could have happened only once. For example, perhaps the first evolutionary lineage to achieve one of these innovations quickly outcompeted other similar organisms from other lineages for resources. Or maybe the first lineage changed the global environment so dramatically that other lineages lost the opportunity to evolve the same innovation. In other words, once the step occurred in one lineage, the chemical or ecological conditions were changed enough that other lineages could not develop in the same way.

If these alternative mechanisms explain the uniqueness of these proposed hard steps, then none of them would actually qualify as hard steps.

But if none of these steps were hard, then why didn’t humanlike intelligence evolve much sooner in the history of life?

Environmental evolution

Geobiologists reconstructing the conditions of the ancient Earth can easily come up with reasons why intelligent life did not evolve sooner in Earth history.

For example, 90% of Earth’s history elapsed before the atmosphere had enough oxygen to support humans. Likewise, up to 50% of Earth’s history elapsed before the atmosphere had enough oxygen to support modern eukaryotic cells.

All of the hard-step candidates have their own environmental requirements. When the Earth formed, these requirements weren’t in place. Instead, they appeared later on, as Earth’s surface environment changed.

We suggest that as the Earth changed physically and chemically over time, its surface conditions allowed for a greater diversity of habitats for life. And these changes operate on geologic timescales – billions of years – explaining why the proposed hard steps evolved when they did, and not much earlier.

In this view, humans originated when they did because the Earth became habitable to humans only relatively recently. Carter had not considered these points in 1983.

Moving forward

But hard steps could still exist. How can scientists test whether they do?

Earth and life scientists could work together to determine when Earth’s surface environment first became supportive of each proposed hard step. Earth scientists could also forecast how much longer Earth will stay habitable for the different kinds of life associated with each proposed hard step – such as humans, animals and eukaryotic cells.

Evolutionary biologists and paleontologists could better constrain how many times each hard-step candidate occurred. If they did occur only once each, they could see whether this came from their innate biological improbability or from environmental factors.

Lastly, astronomers could use data from planets beyond the solar system to figure out how common life-hosting planets are, and how often these planets have hard-step candidates, such as oxygen-producing photosynthesis and intelligent life.

If our view is correct, then the Earth and life have evolved together in a way that is more typical of life-supporting planets – not in the rare and improbable way that the hard-steps model predicts. Humanlike intelligence would then be a more expected outcome of Earth’s evolution, rather than a cosmic fluke.

Researchers from a variety of disciplines, from paleontologists and biologists to astronomers, can work together to learn more about the probability of intelligent life evolving on Earth and elsewhere in the universe.

If the evolution of humanlike life was more probable than the hard-steps model predicts, then researchers are more likely to find evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence in the future.

Daniel Brady Mills, Postdoctoral Fellow in Geomicrobiology, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; Jason Wright, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Penn State, and Jennifer L. Macalady, Professor of Geoscience, Penn State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.