Science & Health

A Colorado-based storm chaser was visited by the FBI after cracking a joke about introducing algae spores into the "paint" a Virginia company used on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Patrick Pineda, a photographer of severe weather, motion designer and video game developer, cracked a joke on social media that was so scientifically absurd, he presumably assumed his audience would know it was a joke. The FBI did not.

"I am the leftist who put algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. This plan was months in the making. I introduced spores into the paint used by the contractors who repainted the pool. It was me the whole time," said Pineda, in a since-deleted BlueSky post.

Right Wash, a professional render cleaning service, has a section on its website that explains that algae in a swimming pool can be eliminated by painting over it. It isn't the "best" solution for a number of reasons, it explains, but paint can eliminate an algae problem. But the pool wasn't merely painted.

In a June release, Rhino Linings claimed it was the company that provided an epoxy primer, elastomeric waterproofing and a protective finish coating, tinted American Flag Blue.

"This project demonstrates how modern protective coating systems can help extend the lifespan of aging infrastructure while reducing maintenance requirements and preserving public spaces for future generations," the company said.

To cure, the epoxy needs a low-moisture and chemically hostile surface to adhere. Living organisms like algae need water, light, and nutrients to grow, Florida Atlantic University explains. It simply can't grow in paint, much less the chemicals used for the pricey lining used on the Reflecting Pool.

A swimming pool expert explained that keeping algae out of the reflecting pool will be impossible unless the government uses strong chemicals, which could significantly damage the new liner.

After coming into office, President Donald Trump appointed Kash Patel to lead the FBI. Among his first actions was to fire scores of experienced directors, agents, and other staff, the New York Times reported. It has left the department short-staffed. PBS News explained that this has left both the Justice Department and the FBI in a tough spot as it desperately tries to rebuild.

According to Forbes, leaders are now "easing hiring requirements and accelerating recruitment in ways that some current and former officials see as a lowering of long-accepted standards." The report also said that some current and former agents "say the FBI is promoting into positions of leadership employees with less experience than would be customary for the jobs."

Studies suggest there could be a reason your conservative friend has a bad habit.

“New research published in the Journal of Marketing provides evidence that a person’s political ideology shapes their responses to addictive products,” reports PsyPost. “The findings suggest that political conservatism is associated with more favorable attitudes and behaviors toward items like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling, due to a heightened perception of personal control.

Past studies have confirmed that political ideology affects consumer actions, like charitable giving and recycling. But researchers knew much less about how these same political beliefs affect choices that “carry significant health and financial risks,” like addictive products, which are manufactured specifically to “create physiological and psychological dependencies.”

The difference appears to come down to an individual’s perception of their own self-control — regardless of whether or not they really have any.

“Addictive products, such as gambling, alcohol, tobacco, gaming, fast food, and illicit drugs, create serious public health and social harms,” the authors report. “Yet people differ in how dangerous they think these products are and how favorably they respond to them. We wanted to understand whether political ideology helps explain these differences, as most prior research has focused on how ideology shapes positive consumer behaviors, rather than potentially harmful ones.”

Apparently, an overblown sense of self confidence can lead you into addictions that you’ve convinced yourself you have a handle on.

“The researchers proposed that this heightened feeling of control might lead conservatives to underestimate the inherent dangers of addictive products. If individuals believe they are always in charge of their actions, they might perceive addictive substances as less threatening. This reduced perception of danger could then result in more favorable attitudes and increased consumption,” reports PsyPost.

“Our main finding is that political ideology can shape how people respond to addictive products,” the authors said. “Across ten studies, we found that conservatives, compared with liberals, tended to have more favorable attitudes, intentions, and behaviors toward addictive products. This happened because conservatives reported a stronger sense of personal control over their actions, which made these products seem less dangerous.”

The results came as a bit of a surprise because it ran counter to expectations based on previous psychological profiling.

“Prior research often suggests that conservatives are more sensitive to risk and threat, so one might expect them to view addictive products more negatively,” the authors explained. “Instead, we found the opposite. In this context, conservatives’ stronger sense of agency seemed to reduce their perception of addictive product danger.”

But it wasn’t a fluke, they said.

“We also tested the effect across different countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand,” they said. “The fact that we observed similar results across these settings suggests that the relationship is not unique to a single country or political system. We also found the pattern across several addictive products, including alcohol, tobacco, gambling, fast food, gaming, and drugs.”

Jasmina Ilicic and Stacey Brennan authored the study, “Political Ideology Shapes Consumer Responses to Addictive Products.

El Niño is a recurring climate event with impacts across the globe. It has three phases: one cold (known as La Niña), one neutral, and one warm (El Niño).

The Trump administration has emphasized in recent days that the New World screwworm infection found in a calf in Texas did not pose a threat to the United States’ larger cattle herd, which is at its lowest point in 75 years due largely to drought conditions—but the US Department of Agriculture is now acknowledging that cases of the parasite have been found outside the Texas containment zone and as far away as in New Mexico, as Republican officials attempt to blame the Biden administration for the outbreak.

While Democratic lawmakers are among those connecting the arrival of screwworm—a flesh-eating bug that feeds off the living tissue of warm-blooded animals and had been eradicated in the US in 1966—to cuts by President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that specifically targeted screwworm monitoring programs, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins doubled down on claims that an “open border policy” under the Biden administration was to blame.

“This does trace back to the last administration and the open border policy, and the movement of millions of people and their animals up from South America through Central America,” said Rollins with certainty on Monday.

As David Dayen explained at The American Prospect Tuesday, former President Joe Biden placed a ban on bison, horse, and cattle imports from Mexico in 2024, which Trump lifted in February 2025. At the same time, DOGE, under the leadership of Trump megadonor and tech billionaire Elon Musk, cut screwworm monitoring efforts and animal disease control and prevention efforts, slashing 1,300 employees from USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

Rollins did reinstate the live import ban last May as screwworm cases were rising in Mexico and began funding prevention programs in Texas. But a $600 million facility for breeding sterile screwworm flies—a key component of successful eradication efforts—is not scheduled to be completed until late next year, and sterile flies that have been dispersed from a facility that opened in February at Moore Air Force Base in South Texas only amount to “about one one-hundredth of what it would take each week to eradicate the pest,” Dayen wrote.

He also noted that Rollins has attempted to blame Biden—who has not been in office since January 2025—despite the fact that the total average lifespan of a screwworm fly is 21 days.

“The more likely explanation is that an administration with an antipathy to government ignored government’s purpose until it was too late,” wrote Dayen.

The USDA established a 12-mile quarantine area around the affected area last week when the case was detected in South Texas, but on Monday the agency said another case had been found in Gillespie County, over 100 miles from where the initial case was reported.

A dog was also found to be infested in Lea County, New Mexico, more than 400 miles away.

The parasite is not expected to affect food safety, as it feeds on living tissue, but the outbreak raises concerns about rising beef prices, which are already high due to the low volume of cattle in the US. The high prices of fertilizer and fuel due to the war in Iran, and of equipment and repairs due to Trump’s tariff policy, have also put a strain on the cattle industry.

“The cattle producer in the US has already been under extreme financial stress,” Joe Maxwell, president of Farm Action Fund and a farmer in Missouri, told The American Prospect. “This is serious, the screwworm outbreak. But it’s even more serious because of the financial position they were already under.”

In response to Rollins’ claims, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Tuesday: “Let’s be clear about what happened: DOGE cut the programs and staff that tracked dangerous outbreaks like screwworm.”

“So this has nothing to do with Joe Biden,” she said, “but Trump and DOGE definitely screwed our cattle industry.”

California's fault lines are under the most amount of stress than they've experienced in 1,000 years, researchers revealed.

A new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Solid Earth, cites concerns that a major earthquake might be on the horizon. There's no real way of knowing when it could happen, the experts warned.

Gizmodo reported the study on Tuesday, including a visualization from the research team of the tectonic plates in California. These plates are constantly pushing, pulling or sliding. The fault lines are where fractures in the plates accumulate pressure, and stress on those faults can build up over time.

Eventually, when the stress exceeds the friction holding the rocks together, an earthquake occurs as the fault ruptures. The more often there are little earthquakes that release the pressure, the less buildup there can be. The longer it has been since the last quake, the more energy is accumulated. All of that built-up stress energy is released as waves or vibrations that travel through the Earth, moving the ground.

“The question of when and how the next major earthquake will occur in this region is one of the most pressing problems in applied geoscience,” said lead author Liliane Burkhard, a geophysicist and planetary geologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, in a press release. “Our results provide a clearer, physics-based picture of the current stress state of the fault system, and the framework we developed is not just applicable to California, but also for other complex fault junctions worldwide."

The visualization shows the greatest stress on the fault line northeast of Los Angeles. The last major quake was a magnitude 7.9 in Fort Tejon in 1857. It remains one of the largest on record, Gizmodo recounted. Even the infamous 1994 Northridge quake didn't exceed 7.0, and it cost an estimated $49 billion, the Los Angeles Daily News reported in 2014.

Scientists are fearful that the San Andreas Fault System could move "any day now," the report said.

"Their physics-based earthquake cycle model simulates this process in three spatial dimensions over time," said Gizmodo, citing the research. The scientists put geological data of past quakes into their model, which included things like tree-ring anomalies and radiocarbon dating.

"When they ran it, the results indicated that tectonic stresses along the San Andreas and San Jacinto fault zones have reached and, in some cases, exceeded the highest levels of the last millennium," the report said.

There are two main points in the fault system where the San Andreas and San Jacinto are. Burkhard and her co-researchers called it a kind of "earthquake gate."

“The earthquake gate concept captures something important about how fault junctions work,” Burkhard said in the release. “Cajon Pass doesn’t simply block or channel earthquakes: It responds to stress conditions, and those conditions change over centuries.”

When stress builds up on both faults, it's more likely that one'll rupture at a major joint and cross both systems, the study said. That's why they fear it could be more substantial than quakes in past centuries.

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President Donald Trump prompted a firestorm of commentary and speculation after he stormed out of a major interview, but as one certified psychologist argued, his body language also exposed things about his agitated mental state.

On Sunday, NBC News's Meet the Press aired an interview with Trump conducted by Kristin Welker, in which, among other things, she pressed him about the lack of evidence for his longstanding claims that elections in the U.S. are rigged against Republicans. Trump, after growing increasingly frustrated over the tough questions, cut off the interview early, saying that Welker was either "crooked" or "stupid" before storming out.

Much has already been speculated based on this blow-up from Trump, including from Dr. John Paul Garrison, a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist, who maintains a popular YouTube account, "Dr. G Explains," where he gives forensic breakdowns and body language analyses for over 700,000 subscribers. While he typically focuses on true crime stories, he also delves into politics, and recently released a video breaking down Trump's body language during his interview with Welker.

At the start of the interview, Garrison noted that "most" of Trump's visible behaviors were "pretty standard" and in line with his typical demeanor. He did note one brief movement of Trump's mouth that could potentially indicate a change in the president's motor control, but said that not much could be made of it for now. What he did put particular emphasis on, however, was the sound of rain during the interview, as it was being conducted in a Wisconsin barn during a period of extended downpours.

Garrison argued that as the noise from the rain picked up and became more intense, Trump had a harder time focusing and concentrating on the questions from Welker. While stressing that nothing could be said for sure, he argued that Trump having a greater difficulty dealing with background noise could be a sign that he suffered a neurological episode at some point.

From that point, Garrison noted numerous signs that Trump was growing more and more agitated, including him furrowing his brow, bearing his teeth and putting extra emphasis on certain words, eventually escalating to the point of "real anger" and "real fury." While he concluded that it was typical for Trump to be testy with the press, Garrison argued that he showed an "unusual" level of anger during the interview, and suggested that he might having "a harder time than he used to" dealing with things like the background noise from the rain.

Another medical expert and content creator, speech and language pathologist "Hilary M.A. CCC-SLP," also argued that the weather might have been having an outsized effect on Trump's mood, suggesting in a recent video that he was exhibiting symptoms common in dementia patients, who struggle to keep track of the time of day during periods of extended gloomy weather.

Trump's MAGA movement has centered on themes of traditional masculinity and nationalism. The movement has been associated with Trump's public appearances, including dancing to "Macho Man" by the Village People.

Recent reporting has connected environmental policy decisions to declining male fertility rates. The New Republic reported that higher exposure to pesticides and other chemicals can lower sperm count.

Sperm concentration has fallen dramatically over the past several decades. Researchers have identified specific causes for this decline.

"A large body of research shows that water, air, and soil pollution is a huge factor in the drop in male fertility. Among pollutants, several of the biggest culprits are heavy metals, pesticides, dioxins, and phthalates," the report said.

During his final term, President Joe Biden imposed new rules to limit chemical emissions, restricting power plants' ability to dump arsenic, selenium, and mercury into groundwater. These heavy metals impact male sperm quality by disrupting endocrine functions and altering hormone levels.

The Trump administration's Environmental Protection Agency has adopted a more permissive regulatory stance toward chemical disposal by companies.

"The Trump administration, with Congress's help, weakened much of the Clean Air Act last year, significantly reducing dioxin regulation," the report stated. "Dioxins disrupt the endocrine system, with impacts on spermatogenesis—the development of sperm cells capable of fertilizing an egg."

Research spanning 21 studies over the last 20 years has documented declines in sperm quality in male mice and rats exposed to pesticides.

Conservatives have raised concerns about declining birth rates in the U.S., citing factors including low marriage rates, feminism, and economic conditions. Robert Kennedy Jr. recently announced that teenage men have lower sperm counts than historical levels.

"Democratic politicians have not focused significantly on fertility concerns, despite their regulatory record on pollution affecting male fertility differing from Trump administration policies," reporting indicates. "By not addressing the issue, Democrats may cede concerns to Republican figures," the analysis concluded.

Male fertility decline has emerged as a significant public health concern in recent years. The average sperm count among men has declined by approximately 50% over the past 50 years, according to multiple meta-analyses of global studies.

Environmental exposures, including pesticide residues in food and water, have been identified as key contributors to this trend. Beyond pesticides, other factors linked to declining sperm quality include endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in plastics, flame retardants, and industrial manufacturing byproducts. Health experts warn that without attention to environmental regulation and public health initiatives, fertility challenges may intensify across younger generations, with potential implications for population demographics and family planning decisions.

Elizabeth Bonker is a silent woman with a loud mission. She wants government agencies to cover the costs of training people with autism in a form of communication called assisted spelling. One problem: Leading professional organizations don’t believe it works.

“All nonspeakers above the age of 5 should be given the opportunity,” typed Bonker, who is 28 and cannot talk. Her mother, Virginia Breen, held a wireless keyboard for her. They sat on a hotel patio before an April 27 meeting with a senior aide to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“We are misunderstood and underestimated,” Bonker typed, occasionally humming or lightly groaning as she considered where to place a slender forefinger on the keyboard.

Assisted spelling is used to help nonverbal people communicate by pointing to letters on boards or using keyboards with physical help from another person.

Supporters say assisted spelling has improved the lives of thousands of people with autism, such as Bonker, and they have powerful allies. Kennedy appointed Bonker and another autistic “speller,” as they call themselves, to a 20-member autism panel made up largely of parents with children whose autism they attribute to vaccinations.

At the reconfigured panel’s first public session on April 28, three other members said their nonspeaking adult children were learning to communicate through spelling. The panel issued a resolution with language from Bonker stating that “robust” communications programs are essential for autistic people. Bonker has urged the Department of Health and Human Services to support training in assisted spelling for those who want it.

But leading professional groups for autism science, as well as those representing psychologists and speech pathologists, point to research showing that these methods — premised on the idea that people with autism have the normal range of cognitive powers but are imprisoned in malfunctioning bodies — are flawed or fraudulent.

Other, validated methods enable nonspeakers to communicate through digital and analog pictures and letter boards. But assisted spelling isn’t autonomous communication, critics say: Consciously or not, the board holder may be influencing or responsible for the typed or pointed-at words — as with a Ouija board.

For many parents in Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again community, the spelling controversy is angrily ringing the same bells as the notion that vaccines cause autism — which they refuse to consider debunked. As some people see it: Established medicine damaged them with vaccines and now refuses to accept a helpful treatment.

People with autism are “trapped in bodies that have betrayed them because the medical establishment has betrayed them,” said Louis Conte, who has a child with autism, in a September edition of a Kennedy-allied MAHA publication.

By limiting access to spelling, “you are not just limiting expression, you are erasing identity,” said Katie Sweeney, the mother of an autistic adult who is affiliated with an anti-vaccine medical group, at the autism panel meeting.

Mainstream autism experts and advocates in March convened the Independent Autism Coordinating Committee as a counter to Kennedy’s panel. At the new group’s meeting, one member spoke out against the spelling methods.

“In this underfunded disability environment, I don’t want a single penny diverted to debunked interventions like spelling,” said Amy Lutz, a senior lecturer in history at the University of Pennsylvania and an autism support advocate who described her 27-year-old son as “profoundly autistic.”

It’s not only a waste of time, she said later in an interview, but “people subjected to spelling are not given access to evidence-based education. Every interaction turns someone like my son into a puppet, and I find that very objectionable.”

A Patchwork of Perspectives

The universe of autistic people, their parents, researchers, advocates, and service providers is a broad, acrimonious spectrum. Some say that vaccines or chemical exposures caused a massive increase in autism, others that diagnostic changes account for most of the increase. Some seek mainstream or alternative treatments, some demand classroom inclusion, and others want residential treatment. Some people with autism say it’s a difference, not a disability.

“When I tell the parents of a young child they have autism, it’s a tragedy,” said Audrey Brumback, a child neurologist at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas-Austin. “When I give the same diagnosis to a teenager, it’s good news. It means, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you; you’re just autistic.'”

Scientific medicine has failed to deliver good treatments for autism. After four decades of concerted research, “the results have for the most part been very disappointing,” said David Mandell, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Severely autistic children — those requiring round-the-clock care with ailments like epilepsy and generally lacking in verbal language — account for about a quarter of all U.S. autism diagnoses. Caring for them may mean dropping careers and spending vast sums on therapy. “They ought to spell special education with a dollar sign,” said Tracy Simmons, whose 17-year-old son, Noah, has autism.

Many parents of autistic children have tried vitamins and diets that exclude wheat, soy, or dairy. Some have turned to hyperbaric oxygen chambers, others to pig hormones to repair damage spuriously attributed to measles-mumps-rubella vaccines, and infusions of metal-leaching chemicals to remove traces of heavy metals in childhood shots. Recent regimens include camel milk, broccoli extract, and stem cell injections obtained at great expense in Panama and India.

In September, the White House touted leucovorin, used in some cancer care and for an ultra-rare genetic condition. Marty Makary, then-commissioner of the FDA, said the drug could help 50% to 60% of kids with autism.

There’s little evidence behind any of these treatments, Brumback said. Many parents try multiple remedies at once; if a child’s condition improves, it’s hard to tell what worked — or whether the child simply grew out of a problem.

Noah the Speller

During a Zoom session in which he typed on a keyboard held by his mother, Noah Simmons wrote glowingly about the world opened to him by two years of learning to spell and type.

“Im a new person. I have friends, I write, climbing,” he typed. “Conversation. I can have one. I have a say. Im human now.”

Later, at an indoor climbing center in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Noah scrambled nearly to the top of the wall before he slipped. He glided down the rope and slapped a high five with his climbing instructor as his mother approached. She carried a laminated sheet with the alphabet on it.

Tracy Simmons held the paper while Noah stabbed at the letters one by one, ending with a flourishing swipe at the exclamation mark: “Im going to crush it again!”

There, and at a later keyboard session at home, Noah seemed in control. But when Tracy stopped offering verbal prompts and encouragement, or stopped holding the board, Noah often got lost and signaled a need for help.

Tracy Simmons acknowledges that whoever holds the board could be steering a speller’s words. Despite his climbing prowess, Noah lacks fine motor skills, is anxious, and has trouble controlling his body, she said.

“He’s working on becoming an independent typer. He can do it short amounts of time,” she said. “But at times he gets overwhelmed.”

The method used by Noah and his mother came into use in the United States in the early 1990s. At first, trainers guided the arms or hands of the spellers as they pointed to a letter board. The idea was that the intelligence or literacy of severely autistic people was trapped in bodies they couldn’t control. They needed help physically learning to spell, first with a pencil or finger pointing at stenciled or printed letters, and eventually by typing on a keyboard.

Within a few years, however, dozens of experiments had shown that the facilitators, not the autistic people, were doing the spelling. A review published in 2018 found no evidence that the spellers could identify words or objects without their facilitators.

In addition, the technique has resulted in numerous false sexual abuse charges — sometimes targeting fathers or other people in the autistic person’s life skeptical of the spelling process.

Next came the Rapid Prompting Method, devised by Soma Mukhopadhyay, an Indian mother of a boy with profound autism, who brought her system to the United States in 2001. Elizabeth Vosseller, a speech pathologist in Herndon, Virginia, launched a nearly identical method, Spelling to Communicate. In both, the facilitator, not the speller, holds the letter board. But each method relies on prompts.

Mukhopadhyay and Vosseller, who did not respond to requests for comment, have each declined to submit their systems to the kind of testing that disproved facilitated communication. Bonker said calls for such tests show a lack of respect for the disabled.

Asked why, after 23 years as a speller, she couldn’t communicate alone or without her mother holding the board, Bonker typed, “I can do it in certain environments that don’t include interviews with strangers.” Severely autistic people need coaches to help control their anxiety, Breen said.

Another star of the speller world, Woody Brown, spoke through his mother with Jenna Bush Hager on the Today show on April 1. The Browns were promoting his novel, Upward Bound, which became an immediate New York Times bestseller after its March release. During the segment, Mary Brown spoke in complete sentences that she said came from Woody, but the letters he typed, as far as the program’s viewers could see, did not correspond to her words and often looked like gibberish.

This raised questions about how Woody Brown could be the author of what critics described as a brilliant, sensitive novel. They pointed out that Mary Brown has worked as a Hollywood script analyst. The Browns did not respond to efforts to reach them for comment.

“Spellers” are best known to the public through the success of The Telepathy Tapes, which briefly unseated The Joe Rogan Experience as the country’s most popular podcast early last year. In The Telepathy Tapes’ first season, people with profound autism were allegedly revealed as clairvoyant superhumans.

The evidence for their telepathic abilities was produced through spelling. The host showed spellers and facilitators two things, and the speller, with the facilitator present, typed out what the facilitator saw. Viewers had to wonder whether this was evidence of telepathy or confirmation of what critics have said all along: that the facilitator is the one controlling the words, often by feeding the speller subtle cues.

Bonker said she appreciated the Telepathy Tapes’ host for including her nonprofit group’s information on its website. As for telepathic skills, “I believe nonspeakers have many gifts,” she said. “And I believe what they say.”

The debate over spelling is playing out in boards of education and courtrooms, where parents of autistic children seek aid for their children’s spelling lessons.

In New York state in March, anti-vaccine advocates for spellers showered scorn on state Sen. Patricia Fahy, the Democratic chair of the disabilities committee, after she inserted language into a disability rights bill requiring that payments go to “verified” communication methods that assured patient autonomy.

Vikram Jaswal, a University of Virginia psychologist who works with spellers, said he’s seen people with severe autism who can type independently, though only a handful have that ability out of the couple of hundred spellers he’s met. More research is needed to figure out who can best benefit from the technique, he said.

Tracy Simmons believes in the method, and so does her son — assuming he’s in control of what he types.

On a recent morning, Tracy read aloud a beautiful escape-from-Alcatraz story she said Noah had written with her help and that of his spelling trainer. “He writes all the time in his head,” she said, but it could take years for her son to consistently type independently.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Adults accept it as conventional health wisdom that we require eight hours of sleep each night in order to be healthy. Yet an expert on human evolutionary biology recently argued that this might actually be misleading.

“Do you lose sleep over whether you sleep too little or too much?” Daniel E. Lieberman, a professor at Harvard University, wrote for The New York Times on Sunday. “You can now relax, because scientists have figured out precisely how much sleep you really need. In a recent study in Nature, an international team of experts reports that the ‘sweet spot’ for adults is between 6 hours 24 minutes and 7 hours 48 minutes. Less or more than this ‘Goldilocks’ zone is associated with faster rates of aging in the brain, heart, liver and other vital organs, plus higher rates of illnesses such as heart disease and depression, and ultimately shorter lifespans.”

Lieberman added that a recent study analyzed self-reported sleep habit data from hundreds of thousands of people. It found that people who sleep more than 8 hours per night suffer health problems just like their counterparts who sleep less than 6 hours and 24 minutes per night. In theory, this would demonstrate that excessive sleep can hurt a person’s health just as much as insufficient sleep.

“However, a major concern with the study is that it analyzed only associations and cannot distinguish between cause and effect,” Lieberman wrote. “Since people who don’t feel well often sleep more, it’s possible that more than 7.8 hours of sleep was falsely identified as detrimental. Another drawback is that the study used notoriously inaccurate self-reported sleep data. (Do you know exactly how much sleep you got last night?) An additional flaw is that the researchers included mostly people of European ancestry. Even so, the study adds substantially to evidence of the health benefits of sleeping enough but not too much.”

Despite these doubts about the dangers of excessive sleeping, Lieberman nevertheless urged readers to monitor their sleeping habits and raise concerns to their doctors about possible underlying health issues that may be at work if someone sleeps too much. He added that, on top of this, Americans need to be aware of the rising epidemic of sleeplessness.

“Maybe learning how lack of sleep accelerates aging will serve as a wake-up call to those who shortchange themselves on sleep and induce them to go to bed earlier,” Lieberman wrote. “Perhaps the relatively small percentage of people prone to oversleeping will set their alarm clocks to get up earlier. My worry, though, is with the roughly 35 percent of Americans who say they get less than seven hours of sleep, many of whom have insomnia.”

He added that when people suffer from insomnia, “emphasizing that their lack of sleep might send them to an early grave could increase their anxiety and stress about sleep, thus exacerbating the problem. Anxiety and stress are major risk factors for insomnia because they stimulate the body to produce hormones such as cortisol that arouse us. Studies have shown that medicalizing sleeplessness sometimes worsens the problem by treating a common issue as a medical matter requiring diagnosis and treatment.”

At the same time, Lieberman said that people should not fret if they fail to get exactly eight hours of sleep. Instead what they need to do is ask themselves basic questions about how their day-to-day health is or is not impaired by their quantity and quality of sleep.

“Are you satisfied with your sleep?” Lieberman wrote. “Do you stay awake all day without dozing? Are you asleep between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.? Do you spend less than 30 minutes awake at night? Do you get between six and eight hours of sleep?”

He continued, “If your answers to these questions are not ‘usually’ or ‘always,’ then I hope you find relief through well-studied, effective approaches that reduce sleep-related anxiety and stress. These include developing good habits such as exercising, cognitive behavioral therapy and maintaining a regular sleep schedule.”

Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2023, the inventor of the CPAP — a medical device used to treat sleep apnea — explained that the prevalence of that disorder, in which people frequently wake up at night due to their airways shutting, explains a wide range of other common health problems.

"I've spent a lot of my career looking at pediatric sleep apnea, sleep disorder breathing, and I do think that trying to intervene early, identifying kids who have the risk factors, gives us a chance of preventing it," Sullivan said at the time. "There's no doubt that the size and shape of the upper airway is important. Some orthodontic procedures actually can be very effective. And I think if we can identify earlier, we have a chance of preventing it."

"I don't think the significance of sleep apnea is still fully grasped often by the medical profession," Sullivan explained. "One of the issues that I've become aware of is that I think snoring and sleep apnea put you at risk of getting a number of diseases. I still am astounded when I see patients who have got various cardiac conditions and no one's really looked at or even asked them about what happens to them at nighttime in terms of sleep."

A prominent physician is calling for President Donald Trump’s doctor to hold a press conference to answer questions over what he says are “lingering concerns” about the president’s health.

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine and surgery at The George Washington University, and a CNN medical analyst, says that Trump’s recent seven-day absence from public view only served to heighten concerns.

Last week, Trump — who is quickly approaching his 80th birthday — had his third annual checkup in 13 months, the fourth of his second term in office. He appeared in a televised Cabinet meeting last Wednesday, and then was not seen again in a professional presidential capacity until appearing in a podcast that was published Wednesday morning. (He did, however, enjoy at least two days of golf.)

“I do physicals, because I just want, I think I have an obligation to do it, but I just came out with very, very good results, and I took a test, a cognitive test, and I got 100% on it. I got, as the expression goes, I aced it,” Trump said in the podcast.

“With lingering concerns following the president’s recent physical exam, and the president’s prolonged absence from the public eye, the White House should make available the president’s physician to answer questions from the press,” Dr. Reiner wrote.

Trump exacerbated those concerns when he appeared in the New York Post’s Pod Force One podcast with what appeared to be a swollen right eye and his recurring swollen hand.

The White House Physician to the President, Captain Sean Barbabella, released notes from the president’s checkup that left many questions, critics say, including why the White House waited three days to release the memo.

Speaking about the delayed results, Dr. Reiner told CNN, “the only reason not to release a rosy report right away is that maybe it’s not so rosy, or this is some information you don’t want the public to hear.”

“I’ve read this report multiple times, and every time I read it, it actually seems to be thinner and thinner,” Reiner noted. “And I’m actually not sure what testing the president underwent last week.”

Reiner added that there were very few tests disclosed in Dr. Barbabella’s memo, “and what was confusing, to, you know, many of the physicians who reviewed these reports, is that it appeared that the president had underwent repeat testing, and I’m not sure that’s true.”

“But the president was at Walter Reed for three hours, so what actually was conducted there?” he asked.

He also noted that Barbabella’s report indicated the list of medications the president is taking “was shortened or abbreviated for readability and relevance.”

“I’m not sure what readability means,” Reiner added, “but every medication the president is taking is relevant, and they only released two cholesterol medicines and aspirin.”

President Donald Trump’s policy in trying to contain Ebola may get Americans killed, a former Secretary of State warned on Tuesday.

“As secretary of state, one of us saw firsthand how indispensable the U.S. was in arresting the epidemic,” former Secretary of State John Kerry wrote with his daughter, public health expert Dr. Vanessa Kerry, in a Wall Street Journal editorial. He had described how the Ebola virus had spread through West Africa in September 2014 and risked becoming a global pandemic. The dangerous pathogen is highly lethal, with an average case fatality rate of 50 percent. The common symptoms include fatigue and weakness, fever, sore throat, muscle and joint pain, severe headaches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain and internal hemorrhaging.

“As a physician and global health leader, the other has spent years helping countries strengthen the systems that stop outbreaks,” the two Kerrys added. “Today, another Ebola outbreak is unfolding in Central Africa. Absent a more competent response than we have seen, the outcome could be tragic.”

They added that the World Health Organization (WHO) has already declared a recent Ebola outbreak in the Congo as a “public health emergency of international concern,” with more than 1,000 suspected cases already on the record. Because the disease has since spread into Uganda, and is present in areas marked by poverty, armed conflict and displacement, authorities have struggled to contain it through contact tracing.

“In response to the 2014 epidemic, the U.S. led a historic international public-health mobilization,” the Kerrys wrote. “President Obama treated Ebola as a humanitarian emergency and a national-security priority. The strategy wasn’t simply to keep Ebola out of the U.S. but to stop transmission at the source.”

They added, “More than 3,500 U.S. personnel were deployed across West Africa. Dozens of ministerial-level entreaties by the State Department helped deliver contributions of medical personnel from the U.K. and allies across Europe. The U.S. put boots on the ground to build treatment centers and labs, train thousands of health workers, and support safe burial teams. Congress approved $5.4 billion in emergency funding. Coordinators at the State Department ensured that the Defense Department, Health and Human Services Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, CDC and international partners all worked together. Approximately 28,600 people were infected and more than 11,000 died, but hundreds of thousands of lives were spared because the U.S. and the international community acted decisively.”

By contrast, Trump’s implementation of Project 2025 has weakened the same systems that protected Americans from Ebola at the time.

“The dismantling of USAID; cuts to U.S. foreign assistance, vaccine initiatives, global health funding; and America’s withdrawal from the WHO have left major gaps in international disease surveillance and response,” the Kerrys wrote. In addition to Trump, the world’s richest man Elon Musk and vaccine denier Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were key to implementing some of those initiatives. Instead of using the past successful containment programs, Trump is instead implementing measures the Kerrys perceive as inadequate.

After elaborating on the numerous services that America used to provide and now cannot do, they concluded, “The administration still has time to change course and mobilize America’s scientific expertise, public-health capabilities and diplomatic leadership. The costs of waiting, in dollars and lives, are vastly greater than the costs of acting now.”

The Kerrys are not alone in criticizing Trump’s Ebola response. Speaking to AlterNet earlier this month, one of the nation’s top infectious disease experts also said that the president’s inadequate measures are putting Americans at risk.

“Travel bans are generally not effective for the control of infectious diseases,” Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, told AlterNet. “For instance, the Omicron variant was first discovered for COVID-19 in South Africa on November 26, 2021 and was here in San Francisco two days later because air travel is so frequent and SARS-CoV-2 can spread when asymptomatic.”

The Internet is full of conspiracy theorists who, knowing the stigma associated with the “conspiracy theorist” label, try to conceal their tendencies by seeming reasonable. Yet a new study reveals a simple tell that these conspiracy theorists have — and it may not be what you think.

“Exploratory linguistic analyses revealed that conspiracism was associated with greater use of conspiracy-related vocabulary (e.g., deception, government), a disproportionate use of sophisticated words, and increased syntactic complexity,” explained the authors of a recent article in the scientific journal PLOS One. “These results suggest that conspiracism may emerge more readily at the lexical level rather than through fully structured narratives. We discuss potential methodological and theoretical factors contributing to these unexpected results, including the roles of context, perceived relevance, motivation, and collective social dynamics. We also consider the possibility that conspiracism may not directly translate into conspiratorial narratives.”

In other words, conspiracy theorists like to gussy up their arguments with ornate language and seemingly-sophisticated forms of analysis, all of which serve to conceal from the public whether their ideas are provably connected to demonstrable facts.

“If so, we recommend comparative research on online vs offline conspiratorial writing to clarify whether conspiracy theories emerge spontaneously from genuine beliefs or are constructed strategically, detached from genuinely held beliefs,” PLOS One concluded.

To learn this, the study authors asked participants to watch an apocalyptic thriller, Leave the World Behind, which is notable for its ambiguous ending. When the nearly 400 study participants were asked to write essays interpreting the movie’s vague information, the scholars — using AI to break down the statistics — found that conspiracy theorists use complex language to make their ideas seem more credible. The use of this language, and the fact that it is consistently untethered to any kind of concrete evidence, is the tell.

“We were surprised that conspiratorial narratives did not emerge as we had predicted,” Alessandro Miani, a researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and the study’s lead author, told PsyPost's Eric W. Dolan. “We preregistered the hypothesis that people higher in conspiracism would ‘fill the gaps’ of an ambiguous film with conspiratorial interpretations, and we ran two studies with two different conspiracy-belief scales. In both, the expected link between conspiracism and conspiratorial narrative content simply wasn’t there.”

This is not the first study to determine how cognitive processes influence people believing or not believing in conspiracy theories. In February 2024, The Conversation released a breakdown of numerous studies that traced individual thinking styles to one’s propensity to believe in conspiracy theories.

“Research shows that our thinking style can be predictive of susceptibility to conspiracy theories,” The Conversation explained. “The dual processing theory of cognitive style suggests that we have two routes which we can use to process information.”

The Conversation added, “One route is the fast, intuitive route which leans more on personal experiences and gut feelings. The other route is a slower, more analytical route which instead relies on elaborative and detailed processing of information.” Overall “what you tend to see is that people who are not necessarily smarter but who favour the more effortful, analytical thinking style are more resistant to conspiracy beliefs. For example, a British 2014 study found that those who scored highly for questions such as ‘I enjoy problems that require hard thinking’ were less likely to accept conspiracy beliefs.”

The article added, “It also found those who were less likely to engage in effortful thinking styles and more likely to use intuitive thinking showed a higher belief in conspiracy theories.”

Dr. Rob Davidson, who heads the Committee to Protect Healthcare and has administered the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, expressed concern about President Donald Trump's public statements regarding the screening test. Davidson appeared on former CNN reporter Jim Acosta's show this week to discuss Trump's repeated claims that he has passed the assessment multiple times.

According to Davidson, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment is not a routine evaluation administered to all patients. Instead, it is specifically ordered when a healthcare provider or family member has raised concerns about possible cognitive decline. Typically, the test is administered once and does not need to be repeated.

"It is just not typical, right?" Davidson said. "It isn't typical. It isn't what you would just generally do for any individual when you didn't have a concern."

The MoCA screening is designed to detect mild cognitive impairment rather than measure general intelligence or identify advanced dementia. Davidson characterized it as an assessment for individuals who might be "slipping a little bit" and whose family members or physicians have begun to notice changes. It is not a standard test for healthy adults and is not intended to be taken repeatedly for public validation purposes.

While Davidson declined to diagnose Trump remotely, citing ethical concerns, he acknowledged that the president's public behavior raised questions in his professional assessment.

"I won't make a diagnosis, we don't, it's not ethical to try to diagnose somebody," Davidson said. "And I don't know if the president has a condition, but something just seems not right."

Davidson also highlighted the unusual nature of Trump's pattern of repeatedly requesting and publicly discussing his MoCA results. White House physicians typically do not repeatedly administer the same cognitive screening test to a patient absent clinical concerns, Davidson noted. Trump's apparent desire to continue taking the test is itself noteworthy, he said.

Acosta administered the test on camera during the segment to illustrate the broader concern. After completing the assessment on air, Acosta expressed increased concern about the president's condition.

Trump's medical history has been the subject of ongoing public scrutiny.

During his first term, his then-physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson, declared Trump in "excellent" health following a comprehensive physical examination. However, medical professionals and observers have raised questions about whether a single positive assessment should be sufficient to establish overall fitness for office, particularly given the demands of the presidency.

The Trump White House has released limited additional medical records since that initial evaluation, making independent verification of his current health status difficult.

Medical ethicists have noted that the public nature of Trump's repeated MoCA test-taking represents an unusual approach to cognitive screening, which is typically conducted in private consultation between a patient and their physician. Some health experts have suggested that the frequent public discussion of cognitive assessments may itself warrant evaluation, as repeated testing and public proclamations about results can occasionally indicate underlying concerns that prompted the initial screening.

Talk of a “super El Niño” developing in 2026 is gaining momentum, with concerns rising that this climate pattern could bring extreme rainfall, heat, drought and destructive flooding around the world.

For years, scientists have researched whether there is any connection between genetic intelligence and political preference, yet the results were contradictory. By incorporating class into the research, however, one researcher has found a startling and consistent pattern: Intelligent people are inclined to be left-wing economically if they were born poor and right-wing economically if they were born wealthy.

“In this study, I argue that this puzzle can only be understood from a gene–environment interaction (GxE) perspective,” wrote Uppsala University's Department of Government researcher Rafael Ahlskog in the journal Political Psychology. “Drawing on traditional theories of political preference formation, I argue that genetics associated with cognitive performance should cause more left-wing economic preferences if you grow up in relative poverty, but more right-wing economic preferences if you grow up affluent. Utilizing variation in a polygenic index (PGI) of cognitive performance within dizygotic twin pairs, coupled with unique register data on economic conditions for the twins, their parents, and their childhood neighborhood, I show that the causal effect of the PGI on economic conservatism is zero on average, but indeed sizable and sign-discordant by class background.”

Ahlskog added, “The GxE perspective thus has wide-ranging implications for future research attempting to integrate genetic methods into political psychology.”

In short, while intelligence does impact a person’s political preferences, smart people will lean toward conclusions that are perceived as providing the most benefit to their specific class, regardless of its specific ideological content.

To learn this, Ahlskog decided to study a large sample of fraternal twins born between 1943 and 1958 and studied by the Swedish Twin Registry (Zagai et al., 2019).

“The twins have also been connected to rich registry sources for things like education and income, as well as to the intergenerational registry, allowing the addition of the same register variables for the parents of the twins,” Ahlskog added. “A separate full population register dataset has been used to obtain information about context/neighborhood [socioeconomic index].”

Despite its robust source base, the study is not without its limitations.

“he genetic predictor is a noisy measurement that only captures a fraction of the actual heritable traits for cognitive performance,” reported PsyPost's Karina Petrova on Wednesday. “Comparing genetic differences within local twin pairs amplifies this measurement noise even further. As a result, the reported effects are likely much smaller than the actual biological impact.”

Petrova added, “The geographical and historical realities of the respondent group also matter. The individuals in this sample grew up in Sweden during the middle of the twentieth century, a period defined by the rapid expansion of the modern welfare state. Class-based politics and labor movements were highly salient in their daily lives.”

This is not the first study to demonstrate a link between intelligence and political ideology. A February study in the journal Intelligence studied 7,000 third-grade students by determining their IQs, following up with the high IQ and non-high IQ students six years later to confirm their IQs and then do so again 35 years later to assess their political views. It found that non-gifted men were more likely to be conservative than gifted men, while for women there was no difference between IQ groups and their political views.

On a related note, an April study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin revealed that among 1,600 people dating online, liberals overwhelmingly and disproportionately were likely to rank men who supported right-wing conspiracy theories about vaccines and election denial to be less intelligent than those who did not. Liberals were also found to reject conservatives at much higher rates than conservatives rejected liberals.

“Disclosing conspiracy beliefs in online dating profiles undermines impressions of warmth, intelligence, and trustworthiness, which are important for online dating success,” the authors wrote in their conclusion. “Right-wing conspiracy beliefs were particularly stigmatized, with liberals being harsher in their judgments and conservatives showing greater leniency.”

Reports of three deaths from hantavirus on a cruise ship in the Atlantic Ocean are igniting fears of another pandemic. Health experts, however, are cautioning against panic, as hantavirus, a disease spread by rodents, is much different from COVID-19 — which, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) killed more than 7 million people worldwide (including 1 million in the United States alone). COVID-19, according to health experts, is spread much more quicky and easily.

Salon's Troy Farah, however, is arguing that the hantavirus deaths are a major wake-up call for President Donald Trump and his administration — and they're dropping the ball.

"The fact that the outbreak was on a cruise ship, one of the first places COVID-19 started to spread back in early 2020, is giving tons of people déjà vu," Farah explains in an article. "But besides both being viruses, the similarities between SARS-CoV-2 and hantavirus actually aren't close. They infect in different ways and are classed in entirely different phylums, meaning they are not remotely related. Furthermore, hantavirus has been around for decades, it is not spread quickly or easily between people — and those who catch it display symptoms, unlike COVID, which can spread between folks unknowingly. The WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention both report that the current risk to the global population from this event is low."

Farah emphasizes, however, that the United States "will almost certainly experience another pandemic from some highly infectious pathogen in the next 10 years or less" —and MAGA Republicans are dropping the ball by not thinking about preparedness. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, for example, tweeted, "Don’t comply. This time, just don't," while others are falsely claiming that ivermectin can be used to treat hantavirus.

"While hantavirus isn't a huge concern to me right now — and many public health experts seem to agree — I am worried about what comes down the line," Farah warns. " I wouldn't be surprised if people didn't take basic precautions during the next pandemic. No flattening the curve, no masking in crowds, just letting some brutal disease rip through us, as if arrogance and resentment can stop infectious disease — a strategy somehow even less effective than ivermectin!"

Michael Tomasky argues that Republicans have abandoned any pretense of offering healthcare solutions, choosing instead to dismantle the Affordable Care Act's subsidies with devastating real-world consequences. The result is a cautionary tale about what happens when ideology trumps governance.

The central irony is stark: Republicans spent over 70 attempts to repeal Obamacare without ever producing a credible replacement. When expanded ACA subsidies—implemented during the pandemic and set to expire in 2025—became a flashpoint in last year's government shutdown, Republicans refused to renew them. Democrats warned that millions would lose coverage. Republicans didn't care.

They were right to warn. According to the Wall Street Journal, nearly one in 10 people with ACA plans dropped coverage entirely after premiums spiked. In Georgia alone, enrollment plummeted 37 percent, from 1.5 million to 950,000 people. For those earning above $64,000, premiums more than tripled. Similar catastrophes unfolded across the country.

Obamacare's track record tells the story Republicans refuse to acknowledge. From 2013 to 2016, the number of uninsured Georgians dropped by 537,000—a 29 percent decline. Similar gains appeared in Alabama (down 32.5 percent) and Florida (down 34 percent). The program worked. It reduced the uninsured rate dramatically, exactly as promised.

Trump's answer? TrumpRX.com—a discount drug website covering 43 medications out of approximately 24,000 patented drugs on the market. It's performative healthcare theater masquerading as policy.

Meanwhile, Republican-controlled states reveal the depths of their indifference. Texas caps Medicaid eligibility at 15 percent of the poverty level, disqualifying families earning more than $4,098 annually. ACA-participating states set the bar at 138 percent, with federal funding backing most of it. Six states refusing Medicaid expansion are former Confederate states, a pattern that speaks volumes.

Tomasky raises a provocative question: Are Republicans more stupid than cruel? The cruelty is undeniable—millions losing coverage while facing inflation and rising gas prices. But the stupidity compounds it. These policies hurt their own states economically. Hospitals forced to provide uncompensated care have less money for equipment and technology, degrading care quality. Employers struggle to retain healthy workforces. The economic damage radiates outward.

Yet Republicans knowingly pursue policies they should recognize as self-destructive, worshipping a president who proudly admits ignorance about public policy. That's a particular kind of dumb—choosing loyalty over competence, ideology over reality.

The outcome is inevitable: people will go without healthcare. Some will die from treatable conditions. Emergency rooms will overflow with preventable complications. Families will declare bankruptcy over medical bills. And Republicans will offer nothing but TrumpRX and grievance.

Tomasky's conclusion is damning but fair: when cruelty and stupidity collide, the American people suffer. Republicans had a chance to offer healthcare solutions. Instead, they chose to destroy one that worked.

President Donald Trump’s reaction to a recent outbreak suggests that America could be in serious trouble in the event of a more serious pandemic, a conservative recently warned.

“They know that Donald Trump has spent much of his second presidency waging an all-out assault on America’s global health infrastructure—by downsizing or eliminating existing agencies and programs, and transforming them in ways that make them instruments of other goals like extracting mineral rights or ending DEI,” The Bulwark’s Jonathan Cohn wrote on Sunday. “This assault has also included withdrawing from the World Health Organization, and from global health cooperation more generally.”

Cohn added, “That has left the federal government without some of the tools, systems, and personnel it has deployed in the past. The result is a federal response to outbreaks that is weaker overall, and could falter in the face of a more serious threat.”

After breaking down how the hantavirus outbreak both observed that “the CDC hasn’t ‘had a press briefing, we haven’t heard anybody talk about mobilizing investigators across the world who are already working on potential treatments,’” Jeanne Marrazzo, an internationally recognized physician who now leads the Infectious Diseases Society of America, told Cohn by phone. Overall, Marrazzo expressed concern that gutting the CDC weakened America’s ability to effectively monitor and contain outbreaks, with the hit-or-miss reaction to the hantavirus incident serving as key evidence of this.

Cohn is not alone among writers for The Bulwark to issue this warning. Lauren Egan, a reporter for the conservative website The Bulwark, wrote for The Bulwark on August 31st that “the descent of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into an agency of anti-vaccine agendas and organizational chaos…. has created additional fodder for Democrats already keen on campaigning on health care in 2026.” She mentioned that Democrats like Sen. Patty Murray of Washington have focused on the controversial policies promulgated by Trump officials like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

"Democrats are already attacking Republicans for passing Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' that cut Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, which could leave nearly 12 million Americans newly uninsured and unable to afford basic health care," Egan wrote. "When Republicans return to D.C., they will face pressure to extend the enhanced ACA subsidies, which were created with the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and are set to expire at the end of the year…. Some Dem officials and health care advocates see parallels between the upcoming midterms and the 2018 cycle, when the party focused its campaigns on Trump's failed attempt to repeal Obamacare. The difference this time around is that Republicans actually succeeded in passing their legislation."

Brad Woodhouse, executive director of Protect Our Care, warned Egan that the issue of health care costs will be politically fraught for Republicans in 2026.

As Woodhouse told The Bulwark, "I do think it's gonna be a health care election, but I think it's gonna be wrapped into this whole issue of affordability. There's a wicked brew here that is amassing against Republicans, and it's all self-inflicted. They've committed political suicide."