Bob Park’s What’s New: Friday, September 11, 2026
No, Bob Park — the physicist who wrote the What’s New newsletter for years — did not write this. Instead, I am imagining what Park would have said were he alive today. The opinions are mine and not necessarily those of Bob Park (but they should be).
What’s New, by Bob Park
Friday, September 11, 2026
1. SOME LIKE IT HOT
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According to the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Simon Stiell, August was tied for the hottest month ever recorded across the globe. Europe particularly suffered from the high temperatures. Stiell said that the heat “killed tens of thousands of people in Europe alone and ‘hammered’ infrastructure, businesses and economics, …as well as leading to forced migration around the world… The climate crisis is now a continent-wide economic security emergency… We’ve seen mass evacuations. Power stations closed. And trade routes choked. Crops lost. Yields down. And food prices up.” What’s New thinks that if global warming is a hoax, as President Trump claims it is, then it’s a very effective one. Stiell concluded that “if humanity doesn’t cut the fossil fuel pollution … this summer’s brutal heat, fires and droughts will seem mild compared to the permanent climate nightmare that will follow.”
2. IS SCIENCE PARTISAN?
The American Institute of Physics website FYI: Science Policy News reported this week that “the Justice Department last year queried a dozen scientific publications, including Science, Nature Medicine, and Pediatrics, on their ‘partisan’ positions in scientific debates, newly released records show… The new materials reveal a campaign spearheaded by then-interim US attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin to pressure publications prominent in the public health response to the COVID pandemic and in reproductive medicine.” The problem isn’t that these scientific journals are partisan; the problem is that the Trump administration views science through a partisan lens. Science is ruled by evidence, but politics is not. Politics is ruled by politics.
3. THE MILITARY RAIDS NIH FUNDS
The Trump Administration plans to move hundreds of millions of dollars from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (one of the National Institutes of Health) to the Department of Defense. This is a bad idea. NIH focuses on openness and transparency, but the DoD focuses on secrecy. NIH has experience in translating basic research to clinical advances, but the DoD does not. Congress funded NIH to promote public health. They funded the military to defend the country. Both are important, but we should not mix the two, and we should not expect that the military is better than NIH scientists at biomedical research.
4. WHAT A MEASLES OUTBREAK CAN LOOK LIKE
For years, one country had few measles cases, maintaining a greater than 95% immunization that ensures herd immunity. But a recent drop in its measles vaccination rate has caused an explosion of measles cases and many deaths, almost all among unvaccinated children. Am I talking about the United States? Nope, although this scenario hints at what may be in store for us if vaccine hesitancy accelerates. Actually, I’m speaking of Bangladesh, which has suffered over 100,000 suspected measles cases this year, and nearly 1000 deaths. Bangladesh — with its political instability, overcrowded hospitals, and vaccine shortages — is different than the USA, that is certain. Nevertheless, their situation shows what can happen when vaccination rates drop for the most infectious disease known to mankind: the measles. Let’s get our kids vaccinated!
