Science

Democrats’ midterm sweep is poised to give scientists, disaster officials and weather forecasters new allies in Washington after nearly two years of upheaval under President Trump.

For the weather and climate world, which has flipped between grief and rage over Trump’s science policies, the results reopen fights over funding, staffing and federal oversight. Democratic control of Congress beginning in January will give lawmakers greater power over federal spending and oversight, setting up new fights over science funding, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Weather Service.

The political shift hit close to home at a Vaisala Xweather conference in South Carolina, where physician Annie Andrews had just won a Senate seat.

“We can be optimistic,” meteorologist Jeff Freedman, who leads a University at Albany renewable energy lab, said during the conference’s cocktail hour. He added: “Hey — you can say ‘climate change’ again!”

The most immediate fight is likely to be over money, especially for scientific research. Trump’s attempts to slash funding for climate-change research have had a big effect on science labs in the U.S., which have stalled hiring for postdoctoral researchers and other personnel as they scramble to find new grants.

Experts say Democratic majorities in the House and Senate are likely to zero in on the National Science Foundation. The NSF has long supported basic science research that the private sector can build on. Trump has tried to cut NSF budgets, shrink its staff and redirect resources to American researchers, versus scientists from outside the U.S.

Freedman said grantmaking has slowed dramatically, but Congress still has “the power of the purse” and oversight powers that lawmakers can use to push for changes.

Democratic control will also give lawmakers more power to investigate how the administration has handled disasters and federal agencies.

Expect far more scrutiny of FEMA, including hearings and demands for information from lawmakers representing disaster-stricken districts, according to former FEMA Deputy Administrator for Resilience Daniel Kaniewski, who served during Trump’s first term.

Under federal law, the president ultimately decides whether to unlock FEMA recovery funds after a disaster strikes. Trump has denied requests from blue-state governors. Lawmakers who opposed FEMA job cuts, program cancellations and proposals to dismantle the agency will have far more leverage once Democrats take control of Congress in January.

“I would argue that it would be incumbent upon members of Congress to question a decision like a disaster not being declared in their district,” Kaniewski said, but Trump won’t be legally obligated to provide an answer.

Despite new oversight, the Trump administration may choose to press ahead with big restructuring plans that were already in the works. Staff from the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service were expected to meet this week to discuss a “realignment” effort, according to the Washington Post.

At the National Weather Service, attention is likely to turn to staffing and funding after two years of cuts and departures.

The weather service has bipartisan support in Congress. But Ronald Morales, a former agency meteorologist in Charleston, S.C., said its budget of $1.46 billion barely kept pace with inflation during his 33-year career, which ended in the last winter.

Hundreds of weather service employees left in 2025 through layoffs, retirements and exit incentives aimed at shrinking the federal workforce. The losses ran so deep that the agency later began hiring again to rebuild depleted offices. Budgets remain severely squeezed.

With Democrats leading Congress, the weather service is more likely to get a cash infusion. “We are very much a political animal,” Morales said last week. “We shouldn’t be, but we are.”

Rosenthal writes for Bloomberg.

Lawmakers from California are poised to lead two of Congress’ most consequential energy and environment committees, putting the Golden State at the forefront of efforts to scrutinize the Trump administration’s sweeping changes to federal climate policy.

Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-San José) and Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) have served as the top Democrats on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology and the House Natural Resources Committee, respectively, since Republicans took control of the chamber in January 2023. With Democrats now set to control the next Congress, both are the likely choice for chair.

The committees oversee major areas of federal science and energy research, public lands, water, wildlife and natural resources policy. While neither directly controls federal agencies, their leaders hold significant authority over oversight and legislation.

Both committees have advanced bipartisan legislation under Republican leadership, such as the Fix Our Forests Act from Natural Resources chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) and Calif. Rep. Scott Peters (D-San Diego). But they have also pursued efforts to reverse Biden-era environmental priorities — such as narrowing the Endangered Species Act — and advance President Trump’s domestic energy agenda, which favors oil and gas production.

Lofgren said the change represents a real opportunity to restore faith in science after two years of policies that have undermined it. The committee under Republican leadership launched a probe into the National Academies of Sciences over a report reaffirming the evidence for climate change.

“We’re not confused that climate change is going on. Neither are most Americans,” Lofgren said. “Ask any farmer in my district, and they’ll tell you climate change is going on.”

It’s also a chance to put California’s embattled environmental ambitions back in the congressional spotlight. The White House has challenged the state’s climate goals, slashing $1.2 billion in funding for its nascent hydrogen hub, moving to restart oil drilling off the coast and striking deals with offshore wind developers to abandon their projects and invest instead in fossil fuels.

“Much of what the administration has done the past two years has moved forward simply because there was no congressional check and balance,” Huffman said, pointing to a long list of executive orders, no-bid contracts and spontaneous announcements from the president. “I think you’re going to see a dramatic shift when we begin to have a check in the form of Congress that does its job.”

Though committees cannot prevent the president from issuing executive orders, they can hold hearings, subpoena documents, investigate whether agencies are complying with existing laws, and draft legislation to protect specific programs or funding.

This might not have prevented some of the administration’s most consequential actions — such as the payouts to offshore wind developers, which effectively killed three of the five projects off the coast of California — but would have brought greater public scrutiny and accountability to the process.

The same is true of the administration’s use of the Defense Production Act to restart oil pumping operations at the Sable Platform off the coast of Santa Barbara, which the White House said is a matter of national security.

“We are awash in oil and gas production,” Huffman said, adding that the president has “relied on fake emergency declarations that no one has questioned or challenged.”

Lofgren said she would look into the administration’s dismantling of scientific agencies and cancellation of research grants. The U.S. Department of Energy — whose research and development programs fall under the Science Committee’s purview — recently acknowledged in court documents that the termination of $7.6 billion in funding for clean energy projects was targeted at blue states.

On the legislative side, Huffman said he would pursue a Democratic permitting reform proposal aimed at addressing soaring energy costs. Lofgren said she would push to reauthorize the Energy Act of 2020 and renew federal programs established by the CHIPS and Science Act, which together boosted spending for emerging technologies, clean energy and supply chains.

She would also advance laws supporting fusion research, quantum computing, next-generation nuclear and geothermal technologies, along with greater guardrails around artificial intelligence. The Science Committee’s current chair, Republican Rep. Brian Babin of Texas, has also supported some of these emerging technologies, including fusion and quantum research.

In fact, Lofgren was optimistic that cross-party cooperation would prevail. Nearly all of the committee’s bills adopted this year passed unanimously, or close to it, although many never made it to the House floor, she said.

“I’m not going to compromise on oversight, and I know that the Republicans may not agree with us on some of the oversight issues,” she said. “But when it comes to legislation, we have a long history of bipartisan collaboration, which I anticipate would continue.”

In other election news

Energy affordability was top of mind for voters on Tuesday, with soaring electricity bills at the center of many high-profile national races. Residential electric rates in the U.S. are averaging 18.2 cents per kilowatt-hour, up from 15.9 cents when Trump resumed office in January 2025, according to the latest data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Many Californians pay much more than that.

This turned out to be a formidable weapon for Democrats, many of whom made energy costs central to their campaigns. An analysis from the nonprofit advocacy group Climate Power found that more than $475 million was spent on political ads about utility and energy bills in the first 10 months of this year. In the most competitive races, 32% of all recent Democratic ad spending went to ads mentioning energy affordability issues, compared with 12% from Republicans.

Data centers were perhaps the biggest bogeyman of all. In Michigan’s high-stakes Senate race, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed called for a pause on new data centers until stronger federal guidelines are adopted, and argued that they must pay to cover their own energy demand and not pass down costs to ratepayers.

His opponent, Republican Mike Rogers, was criticized for investments into tech companies that could benefit from the data center boom, and subsequently backed a one-year moratorium on new data centers in Michigan and said guardrails should be put in place to protect against utility price hikes.

The candidates did not agree on the reasons for high prices, however. El-Sayed touted 100% renewable energy as the best path forward, while Rogers said renewables are driving up Michigan’s energy and utility costs. El-Sayed won the state race Tuesday night.

In other climate news

Record hot ocean temperatures, higher-than-normal tides and powerful storms could converge amid a potentially historic El Niño. That’s a recipe for more coastal flooding, erosion and large waves in California this winter. My colleagues Rong-Gong Lin II and Sean Greene took a look at how this “worst-case scenario” for El Niño could play out.

But the news isn’t all bad. After a couple with a plot of land above Santa Clarita marketed it as a potential “glamping” site, they decided instead to sell it back to the local tribe that originally lived there. Read Noah Haggerty’s joyful story about how this 51-acre piece of land along the Pacific Crest Trail will go back to the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians.

And finally, the annual United National Climate Change Conference, COP31, will kick off next week in Turkey. It comes only weeks after U.N. officials reported that the world will not be able to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels — a goal established during the 2015 conference in Paris. This year’s conference is expected to focus on implementing existing climate commitments, reducing emissions and accelerating the clean energy transition, among other topics.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

On the Boiling Point Podcast this week, hear how Hollywood’s approach to climate themes is changing.

Classics like Halloween, The Omen and Nightmare on Elm Street are nowhere to be seen.

Everyone has their own opinion when it comes to the scariest film ever made. What we find terrifying depends on a whole host of factors, whether it’s the “found footage” format of The Blair Witch Project, the blood-soaked slashing of Nightmare on Elm Street, or the supernatural dread of The Autopsy of Jane Doe.

Yet one film has been officially crowned the most frightening of them all, based on scientific evidence. The Science of Scare ranking of 2026 gauged people’s physiological reactions to horror films by monitoring their heart rate, heart rate variability and peak heart rate. Researchers put together a list of English-language horror films and screened them to 250 participants, recording their physical responses using heart monitors.

After gathering each film’s average heart rate increase, largest heart rate spike and heart rate drop, the figures were combined to produce a Science of Scare Score out of 100. This year’s top film achieved a score of 96. For context, Shrek holds a Scare Score of just 3, reports the Express.

However, it’s unlikely to be the film that immediately jumps to mind for most people when they think about the scariest movie of all time. Many will instinctively think of iconic classics such as The Evil Dead, The Omen, Halloween or Don’t Look Now, while others might lean towards more recent offerings like The Exorcism of Emily Rose or Paranormal Activity.

The scariest film of all time

This year’s winner, with a score of 96 out of 100, was the 2012 film Sinister. It pushed viewers’ average heart rate up by 34%. The supernatural horror film establishes its dark and menacing atmosphere from the outset, opening with old home video footage depicting a family of four standing beneath a tree with sacks over their heads and nooses around their necks. It goes on to follow the story of a true crime writer, played by Ethan Hawke, whose family relocates to a new house and uncovers a box of terrifying home movies in the attic. The film was directed by Scott Derrickson.

Séance horror Host came in second place with a score of 95, while Skinamarink claimed third with 91. The scariest new releases, meaning those that came out in 2026, were Undertone and Obsession, both of which scored just 63.

However, the biggest jump scare of all belonged to this year’s Resident Evil, which sent viewers’ heart rates soaring to 134 BPM — a staggering 70 BPM spike, the highest surge ever recorded in the project’s history. Despite this, the film failed to crack the overall top 50 scariest films.

What critics say about Sinister

Sinister may well be the most terrifying film ever made according to this experiment, yet it divided critics sharply. Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, legendary film critic Roger Ebert described it as “an undeniably scary movie, with performances adding enough human interest to give depth to the basic building blocks of horror”.

Meanwhile, Mark Olsen, writing in the Los Angeles Times, said: “As the best horror stories so often do, Sinister makes clear that we are our own boogeymen, the worst monsters of all.”

Yet not everyone was won over. In the Toronto Star, Peter Howell claimed Sinister is “more stupid than scary” and “can’t even figure out who its real demon is”, while Michael O’Sullivan in the Washington Post wrote: “The hero of Sinister is almost unaccountably dumb. So, unfortunately, is the movie.”

The Science of Scare 2026 ranking

Here are the scariest films ever according to The Science of Scare 2026 study, with their “scare score” out of 100.

1. Sinister: 96

2. Host: 95

3. Skinamarink: 91

4. Insidious: 90

5. The Conjuring : 88

6. Hereditary: 81

7. Smile 2: 79

8. Smile: 78

9. The Exorcism of Emily Rose: 76

10=. Talk to Me: 75

10=. Hell House LLC: 75

United States Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has sparked uproar with comments he has made denying Arab contributions to mathematics, science and literature.

In a high-voltage rant on Monday, the US health secretary said, “There’s five hundred million Arabs in the world. And yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.”

RFK Jr, who has been involved in anti-vaccine campaigns and has promoted a debunked theory linking vaccines to autism, made the comments during a US election campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan while supporting Republican nominee Mike Rogers, who is up against Arab-American Democrat nominee Abdul El-Sayed, in a tightly contested battle for Michigan’s Senate seat in next week’s midterm elections.

Critics said the comments were racist, Islamophobic and factually inaccurate, pointing to modern and historic Arab innovation in multiple fields.

Here’s how Arabs have made vital contributions to the human understanding of maths, science and literature through the centuries.

Arab contributions to maths, science and humanities

The period known as the Islamic Golden Age, from around 750 AD to 1258 AD, produced many key Arab contributions to medicine at a time when Europe was said to be in its Dark Ages. During this time, Arabic was the language of science and scholarship.

1st-4th centuries: The numerals 0-9, which originated in ancient India, were adopted by Arab mathematicians who spread them across the world. They displaced Roman numerals as a more advanced number system in mathematics.

8th century: Arab and Persian mathematicians were studying the ancient Indian concept of zero in mathematics in Baghdad, long before the Europeans. The number zero was crucial to the development of mathematics – but was absent from widely used Roman numerals in Europe.

813-833: The Arab mathematician Muḥammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi – one of those studying the number 0 – is often referred to as the “father of algebra” as he was the first to treat the method as a separate mathematical discipline in his work, Al-Jabr. This method provided the first linear and quadratic equations, still used as a core part of mathematical study today.

965-1040: Ibn al-Haytham, known as the “father of modern optics”, explained the role that light entering the eye plays in human vision. He was born in Basra in Iraq, but spent most of his working life in Cairo attending to noble families.

936-1013: Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, called “the father of modern surgery”, was considered the greatest surgeon in the Middle Ages. He wrote a 30-volume encyclopaedia detailing medical practices and designed and illustrated many surgical instruments. Born in Azahara, in Andalusia, he was known as Abulcasis in Europe.

9th century: Fatima al-Fihri founded the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco. It is often cited as the oldest continually operating university.

1213-1288: Ibn al-Nafis described pulmonary circulation – the process by which blood passes through the lungs – several centuries before Europeans understood it. He wrote more than 110 volumes of work on surgery, ophthalmology and philosophy while working as a chief physician in Egypt.

915-965:  Abu al-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi, regarded as the greatest poet in the Arabic language, was Yemeni and grew up immersed in Bedouin Arabic culture. He wrote in classical Arabic and many of his verses became sayings used in everyday Arabic.

1100-1165: Muhammad al-Idrisi was a geographer known for making the Tabula Rogeriana, one of the most accurate and detailed medieval world maps, and a high point of Islamic geography. He was born in Ceuta in Morocco.

Prize-winning Arabs

In more modern times, RFK Jr’s assertion that Arabs do not win Nobel prizes for science and literature is very far from the truth. Here are some of the highlights:

1960: Nobel Prize for Medicine

Peter Medawar won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for work on for work on acquired immune tolerance, which underpins organ transplantation. He was born in Brazil to a Lebanese father.

1966: The Fields Medal

Michael Atiyah won the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award for mathematics, in 1966. He was born in London to a Lebanese father and Scottish mother. Educated in Egypt, he spent much of his childhood in Cairo and Khartoum.

1988: Nobel Prize for Literature

Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his body of work, including the Cairo Trilogy, which the Swedish Academy said formed “an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind”. He is still the only winner of the prize who wrote in Arabic.

1990: Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Elias James Corey won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing retrosynthetic analysis. He is an American of Lebanese descent.

1993: Wolf Prize for Chemistry

Egyptian Ahmed Zewail won the Wolf Prize for Chemistry. The Wolf Prize is an international award which has been presented to living scientists and artists every year in Israel by the Wolf Foundation since 1978.

1999: Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Zewail also won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for pioneering femtochemistry, which is the study of chemical reactions on extremely short timescales. He also won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1993.

2005: Nobel Peace Prize

Egyptian scientist Mohamed ElBaradei shared his Nobel Prize with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which he led.

2018: Wolf Prize for Chemistry

Omar M Yaghi,  born in Jordan to a Palestinian refugee family, won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2018 for work on metal-organic frameworks. He shared the prize with Japan’s Makoto Fujita. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) condemned his acceptance of the award because the prize is awarded by an Israeli foundation.

2023: Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Moungi Bawendi won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots. He was born in France to a Tunisian father, but based in the US.

2025: Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Yaghi also won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing metal-organic frameworks. These are crystalline materials with large internal cavities that can capture and store gases, harvest water from air, and trap pollutants. He shared the prize with Susumu Kitagawa from Japan and Richard Robson from Australia.

In a post on X, vaccine scientist Peter Hotez of the Texas Medical Center weighed in on historical Arab scholarship, saying, “It was the Arab scientists of the Middle Ages who kept Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen alive to hand it down in the Renaissance.”

Broadcaster Mehdi Hasan described RFK Jr’s comments as “racist” and, in a post on X, wrote: “One of the men who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry last year was a Palestinian-American, Omar Yaghi.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations called for the US health secretary to be removed. It said: “To stand on a public stage as a sitting US cabinet official and dehumanise half a billion people – and millions of Muslim and Christian Arab Americans – with fabricated, white supremacist talking points is utterly disqualifying for public office. His sweeping erasure of Arab contributions to humanity is not only maliciously false, but it also fans the flames of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate at a time when communities are already vulnerable to bigoted attacks from other public officials nationwide.”

OpenAI’s announcement is the latest in a series of claimed scientific breakthroughs credited to AI.

OpenAI has announced that its AI models have made several scientific discoveries in mathematics, computer science and physics.

The AI giant said on Monday that the three new discoveries concerned the fields of harmonic analysis, complexity theory and quantum field theory.

Among the discoveries, AI models proved the local smoothing conjecture, one of the central propositions of harmonic analysis, in every spatial dimension for the first time, according to OpenAI.

Researchers in harmonic analysis, a branch of mathematics that studies how complex signals and functions can be broken down into elementary waves, had previously only proved the theory in three dimensions.

‘Historic development’

Alex Iosevich, a professor of mathematics at the University of Rochester who specialises in harmonic analysis, said OpenAI appeared to have “cracked” the conjecture in a “historic development”.

“The conjecture was formulated by my PhD adviser, Chris Sogge, so it is near and dear to my heart, and the news was a shock at first,” Iosevich told Al Jazeera.

“Now I am filled with joy and optimism, because the scientific enterprise as a whole is going to make giant leaps as a result of the AI revolution, and we have the chance to be a part of this historic development.”

Iosevich said he expected the field of theoretical mathematics to “change drastically” due to AI.

“I feel a twinge of sadness as a result,” Iosevich said.

“Many theoretical mathematicians I know feel the same way, but I firmly believe that these feelings will soon give way to the realisation that there is so much we can now accomplish.”

“Problems in pure mathematics did not arise in a vacuum,” he added. “Many of them came out of concrete physical considerations, and these connections can now be explored rapidly and decisively.”

According to OpenAI’s announcement, its models also disproved the Exponential Time Hypothesis, which relates to the time it takes to solve complex computational problems, and provided “mathematically rigorous [proof of the] existence” of quantum chromodynamics, which studies the interaction of quarks and gluons.

The ChatGPT creator said it had reached out to scientists outside the company to turn its “raw research data into scientific understanding”.

The San Francisco-based company said it decided on several different methods for releasing the findings based on consultations with three expert groups chosen to act as “shepherds”.

While the groups collaborating on the mathematics and computer science problems opted to make the AI-produced data public immediately, the physics group decided to defer the release in order to write up their own interpretation of the findings, OpenAI said.

“All of these approaches involve tradeoffs,” OpenAI said.

“On the one hand, the collaborations empower experts to foster unpacking the results and contextualizing them in the broader academic community,” the $852bn start-up said.

“On the other hand, choosing initial shepherds necessarily shapes who gets involved first and creates asymmetry of information. We welcome feedback on how to broaden participation and make this process more useful.”

OpenAI’s announcement is the latest in a series of claimed scientific breakthroughs credited to AI.

Last month, Claude creator Anthropic announced the discovery of a new enzyme said to resemble CRISPR, the groundbreaking gene editing mechanism used in treating conditions such as cancer and sickle cell disease.

Anthropic’s announcement drew mixed reactions among scientists.

While some researchers hailed the finding as an exciting development, others suggested that the AI company had exaggerated its significance.