Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to our weekly science news roundup.
First up, a worrying prediction about women’s heart health.
A new analysis by American Heart Association researchers released last Wednesday in its journal Circulation projects that almost 60 percent of women will have some form of cardiovascular disease by 2050. That’s a jump from nearly 50 percent in 2020. The significant increase, according to the scientific statement, will be led by a rise in hypertension, or high blood pressure. That’s when the force of blood on the artery walls is too high, forcing the heart to work harder. Hypertension, which can go undetected because it often has no symptoms, is a leading driver of stroke and can also trigger heart attacks. The paper estimates that rates of diabetes will increase from roughly 15 percent to 25 percent over that same time period, alongside smaller but still significant increases in coronary heart disease and stroke.
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Perhaps the most striking part of the projection is that while cardiovascular diseases will continue to be most common among older women, the rates for younger women are likely to increase significantly. The researchers found that by 2050 roughly a third of women aged 20 to 44 will have some form of cardiovascular disease, up from less than a quarter today. This will be driven in part by increases in risk factors such as hypertension and diabetes. Other risk factors include a lack of physical activity and poor diet, beginning in childhood, as well as what the authors call “deep inequities associated with race and ethnicity.”
Karen E. Joynt Maddox, volunteer chair of the statement writing group, highlighted the urgency of this finding.
[CLIP Karen E. Joynt Maddox speaking about the findings: “We’re setting up millions of girls to develop diabetes, to develop hypertension, to develop pregnancy complications, right—all of the things that we sort of see as the follow-on of having obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes in childhood. And so I think this is really a call to action for us to focus in that space.”]
Staying on the topic of women’s health, laws designed to restrict access to abortion also significantly reduce the number of obstetricians and gynecologists overall. That’s the conclusion of a study published last Wednesday in the journal Health Economics.
The laws in question are called targeted regulation of abortion providers, or TRAP, laws, which are aimed at shutting down abortion providers through requirements that are often expensive and medically unnecessary. Researchers at the University at Albany, State University of New York, collected state-specific data on TRAP laws. They also gathered state-level data on medical licensing for new obstetricians and gynecologists, along with county-level data on the availability of ob-gyns overall.
What they found was that, on average, within two years of the introduction of TRAP laws a state loses just over two ob-gyns for every 100,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44. And that the decline continues for at least nine years after the law is enacted. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 25 states have TRAP laws in effect as of late January.
In some ways this study echoes the finding of a 2025 research letter published in the journal JAMA Network Open. That study followed what happened after an anti-abortion trigger law went into effect in Idaho in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. Trigger laws are called that because they remain unenforceable until a change in statute or a court ruling allows them to go into effect. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision Idaho lost 94 of its 268 practicing ob-gyns who worked in obstetrics. That’s a decline of 35 percent. The researchers in that study also found that over a two-year period 114 obstetricians either shuttered their practices completely, stopped practicing obstetrics and focused only on gynecology, moved out of state or retired. Only 20 new ob-gyns moved to Idaho during that period.
Separate research found a decline in ob-gyns’ residency applications in states with restrictive TRAP laws from 1993 to 2021.
Now for some space news.
Turns out, NASA’s historic moon mission won’t happen in March after all. Last Wednesday the Artemis II rocket and spacecraft was rolled back from its launchpad and a portion of its structure returned to NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building for repair work. This came after engineers detected a problem with how helium was flowing in the upper stage of the Space Launch System rocket. The setback further delays the launch date for the 10-day mission to send four astronauts around the moon and back.
On February 20, NASA had set March 6 as the target date for the Artemis II launch after conducting a successful “wet dress rehearsal” on February 19. But just a day after the launch date announcement, NASA reversed course.
The wet dress rehearsal is a critical prelaunch test that simulates almost everything required for a launch, including loading fuel onto the rocket and running down the launch countdown steps, but without actually launching the vessel. An earlier wet dress rehearsal on February 2 had revealed issues like hydrogen fuel leaks, causing the launch to be pushed to at least March. Now, with the new helium problem, the earliest possible launch date is April 1.
In a surprise move, NASA also announced a revised plan for Artemis III. The mission was slated to land astronauts on the moon in 2027 for the first time in more than half a century. Here’s NASA administrator Jared Isaacman speaking at a press conference last Friday.
[CLIP: Jared Isaacman speaks at a press conference on February 27: “Instead of going directly to a lunar landing, we will endeavor to rendezvous in low-Earth orbit with one or both of our lunar landers.”]
As part of the rationale for the delay Isaacman cited liquid hydrogen leaks and helium flow issues seen in preparations for Artemis II and similar hydrogen fuel leaks that occurred before the launch of the earlier uncrewed moon orbiting mission Artemis I. The space agency will attempt to land on the moon in subsequent missions—Artemis IV and V—in 2028.
Coming back to Earth, a study published last Wednesday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution suggests that the world’s oceans, specifically their marine life, are in dire straits because of climate change.
Researchers at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid and the National University of Colombia found that fish biomass is declining by roughly 20 percent per year in several Northern Hemisphere oceans because of climate change-linked ocean warming. Fish biomass is a measure of the total weight of fish in the world’s oceans.
As human-caused climate change has heated up the planet, oceans have borne the brunt of that warming, absorbing about 90 percent of the additional heat. Between 1955 and 2024 the first roughly 6,500 feet of the world’s oceans absorbed about 372 zettajoules of heat, according to NASA. A typical candle can produce as much as 100 joules of heat per second. A zettajoule, by comparison, takes a candle’s 100 joules of heat and adds 19 additional zeros.
A warming ocean puts stress on fish, the majority of which are cold-blooded. As a result many have evolved to live within specific temperature ranges. To fish, warmer waters might not only feel uncomfortably hot but they can also be asphyxiating because warmer waters contain less oxygen. Some fish deal with the increase in temperatures by moving—worldwide, fish are moving away from equatorial regions and toward the poles in search of cooler waters. But this research suggests that many fish also just die.
The researchers say the scale of the loss has been hidden, in part, by marine heat waves, another product of climate change. Prior to human-caused climate change, marine heat waves—when ocean temperatures far exceed normal temperatures for more than five days—were rare. But as the planet has warmed they have grown increasingly common, especially since the 1980s. This phenomenon can impact fish species unequally. Species on the warmer edge of their range can experience die-offs of up to roughly 43 percent of their biomass. But fish on the cool edge of their range during a marine heat wave can experience a temporary biomass boost of up to 176 percent, potentially obscuring the overall decline.
The researchers say the key takeaway of their study is marine life is declining because of climate change and that especially impacts fisheries. About 40 percent of people worldwide depend on fish for a significant portion of their animal protein, according to a 2020 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
And finally, here’s an animal mystery for you. Why do female reindeer have antlers when no other female deer do? A new study published last Tuesday in the journal Ecology and Evolution suggests an answer: antlers act like postnatal vitamins.
The idea comes from a study led by researchers from the University of Cincinnati that explored how caribou, also known as reindeer, and other arctic mammals use bone resources. Caribou live in the Arctic tundra and boreal landscapes of much of North America, Europe and Asia. And researchers already understood that animals eat bones, a phenomenon known as osteophagy, to get key vitamins and minerals like calcium and phosphorus. But as the Ohio researchers examined antlers and skeletal bones from reindeer calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife refuge they discovered something unusual about which bones were being nibbled on and by whom. For example, they found that just under half of the skeletal remains showed some evidence of having been gnawed on, compared with almost 90 percent of reindeer antlers. And while the skeletal bones were almost exclusively chewed on by carnivores the reindeer antlers primarily featured reindeer bite marks.
Female reindeer shed their antlers shortly after arriving to their calving grounds, within a few days of birthing their young. Given that, the researchers theorize that the antlers act like a store of key vitamins and minerals, which the animals can tap into during the arduous period of raising their calves. This is especially important given that reindeer migrate over extremely long distances, thought to be the longest of all land animals and might need the nutrients more than other deer species. This is not the only theory as to why female reindeer have antlers—they could also be a defensive tool. But Madison Gaetano, a co-author on the study, told SciAm the antlers are on the ground for far longer than they are on the reindeer’s body. So their use as a kind of postnatal vitamin might make more sense.
That’s all for today! Tune in on Wednesday, when we speak with journalist Thomas Germain about hacking ChatGPT.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Kendra Pierre-Louis, along with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Kendra Pierre-Louis. Have a great week!
