Trump Administration Cancels Meetings, Freezes Hiring At NIH | What Is A Meme Coin?

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health say the move has sent fear and confusion throughout the agency. Plus, what's the technology behind meme coins?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ira Flatow?

  Science Friday is supported by MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:19Flora Lichtman?

  This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichtman. It was President Trump's first week back in office, and along with a number of executive orders, the new administration has imposed a range of restrictions on the Department of Health and Human Services, including the National Institutes of Health. Here to get us up to speed is Casey Crownheart, senior climate reporter at the MIT Technology Review. Welcome back to Science Friday, Casey.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  Thanks so much. Always great to be here.

• 0:45Flora Lichtman?

  Casey, what is happening?

• 0:48Speaker 02

  All kinds of things are happening. Mass confusion is happening. So like you said, the Trump administration imposed new restrictions on the NIH. That includes a suspension of all travel, a pause on all external communications out of the agency, and it's also being affected by a government-wide hiring freeze. And researchers are saying that this sort of disruption can have ripple effects that slow down the pace of research. You know, the NIH is responsible for all public health and biomed research for the government. So this could have long-ranging effects, depending on how long this all lasts.

• 1:21Flora Lichtman?

  I'm reading that it's also some grant-making operations. Have you have you heard anything about that?

• 1:28Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So, I mean, it really ranges from, you know, researchers aren't able to travel to conferences, groups that would meet to approve grants aren't meeting. There's really like a range of things that this is affecting at the agency. One thing that really surprised me was, you know, we were expecting reports on the H5N1 bird flu outbreaks this week, and now it's not clear when those reports are going to be published.

• 1:52Flora Lichtman?

  Do you have a sense of how unusual this is? I mean, does this typically happen when a new administration takes over?

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Some section of this is pretty common. So like a short pause on communications has happened in the past when a new administration takes office. But researchers are saying that kind of the scope of this is pretty unusual. So the travel pause, for example, isn't very common. It's also not totally clear how long this communications pause will will be in effect. So it's definitely a little bit out of the ordinary for for an administration taking over.

• 2:23Flora Lichtman?

  How are scientists reacting?

• 2:26Speaker 02

  There's a lot of concern. Like I said, part of this depends on kind of how long this will last. But one researcher, for example, called this devastating in a story in Science Magazine. You know, all of these young researchers just trying to do science and communicate that science to the public. They're really nervous about about what the future might hold here.

• 2:43Flora Lichtman?

  What's the impact or the potential impact on science and scientists?

• 2:48Speaker 02

  I think that pauses and interruptions like this can have long ranging effects on science. So the NIH does research on things like, you know, biomedicine and public health. And so, you know, this could slow down our understanding of important public health phenomenon. Like, you know, we talked about bird flu. It could also, you know, slow down advances in getting new drugs onto the market and kind of the research involved in that. So, like I said, it kind of depends on how long this lasts, but it definitely could come with ripple effects.

• 3:18Flora Lichtman?

  To our scientists, listeners, we would like to hear from you on this. If you have been affected by what's happening at the NIH, please give us a call, 646-767-6532, or you can email us at sci fry at sciencefriday.com. Casey, let's also briefly touch on some of the executive orders that relate to climate and energy.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. So Trump signed 26 executive orders on his first day in office, a whole range of topics. One of the ones that I was, you know, watching the most closely was one that Trump signed to pull out of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. That's the international treaty that aims to limit global warming. That wasn't a big surprise. Trump pulled out in his first term as well. Another big one in the world of science, Trump also signed an executive order to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization. That's the the UN agency that really works on on public health. So that could have ripple effects around the world as well.

• 4:19Flora Lichtman?

  We'll be following this. Let's turn to a story you wrote recently about nuclear power and how we're at a tipping point for it. Tell me what you found.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think 2025 is going to be a really important and exciting time for nuclear energy. Nuclear is a really big chunk of how the world gets electricity, especially electricity that doesn't come with huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions attached. And what we're seeing this year is that advanced reactor technology could really start to kind of take off and enter this new phase. Most nuclear reactors that are on the grid today follow a pretty similar blueprint. They're really big, they use water for a coolant and low enriched uranium as a fuel. And we're starting to see kind of efforts to go outside that blueprint, build smaller reactors, for example, that could be quicker and cheaper to build, or use different things

• 5:13Speaker 02

  for the coolant and the fuel. One expert that I spoke to said that this is really the time that we're starting to see paper reactors turn into real life reactors. So we could see some projects coming online in the next couple of years.

• 5:26Flora Lichtman?

  You wrote that AI is playing a role in nuclear's future, too. Tell me about it.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, I think there's a whole lot of different things that are contributing to rising electricity demand, but AI and big data centers are definitely expected to be a significant part of that. And one effect that we're seeing is that that is driving efforts to squeeze out as much power as we can out of existing reactors. Because those advanced projects, it'll still take years for the first of their kind to be built, not to mention enough to really make a difference on the grid. And so I'm really interested to see reactors that are having their lifetimes extended, for example, or efforts to reopen nuclear plants that have shut down, like at the former Three Mile Island nuclear plant or Palisades in Michigan.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  So I'm really interested to see how people, like I said, try to squeeze everything they can out of nuclear reactors.

• 6:21Flora Lichtman?

  Moving on, it was a dramatic weather week in the Southeast US. I mean, there were record snowfalls in Louisiana and Florida. How did this happen meteorologically speaking?

• 6:35Speaker 02

  It was a super weird week for weather in the Southeast. I saw that since the beginning of December, New Orleans has had more than double the snowfall of Anchorage, Alaska as of earlier this week.

• 6:47Flora Lichtman?

  That's wild. Wait a second. Say that again.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so since the beginning of meteorological winter, which is December 1st, New Orleans has seen about eight inches of snow. Anchorage, Alaska has seen a little under four inches of snow.

• 7:01Flora Lichtman?

  Wow.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Yes, wild. So part of this is kind of is basically lake effect snow. So that kind of phenomenon, that means that the Great Lakes region, the Midwestern US typically sees a lot of snow. You have moisture coming off of the lakes in the Midwest. A similar thing happened with the Gulf. So we often see low pressure systems over the Gulf kind of pushing north and going along the coast. Usually that means rain, but this time there was kind of this weird confluence of an Arctic air mass coming from the north, which made it very cold. And so we saw a lot of snow in places that don't usually get it.

• 7:37Flora Lichtman?

  Wow, so not the lake effect, the Gulf effect.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 7:40Flora Lichtman?

  Is this a symptom of climate change?

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Oh, this is a great question with maybe complicated answer. So we know that overall climate change causes rising temperatures and we're seeing actually overall over the last few decades, fewer cold weather events because of climate change. But climate change isn't just global warming. Some scientists also call it global weirding. So one way that climate change could be contributing to events like this is that there's a polar jet stream, right? There's a band of these strong winds that blows west to east typically, which keeps the polar vortex, that massive cold air up in the Arctic. Some studies suggest that climate change makes that jet stream kind of wobbly, which

• 8:24Speaker 02

  can disrupt that vortex and make it possible and maybe likely for that air to kind of escape and come down south like we saw this week. So definitely kind of potentially a little bit of climate change evolved here, but it's weather and climate are also very complicated, especially in kind of rare events like this.

• 8:42Flora Lichtman?

  Okay. Let's head to Los Angeles. Fires are still burning, but residents are now dealing with something else as well, the aftermath. Will you tell me about it?

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So like you said, some of the biggest fires have been contained, although I will say that there are still dangerous fire conditions in LA. So do, you know, continue to keep watching that. But now, as residents start kind of clean up and recovery efforts, experts are warning that the ash that's left behind from these fires can be very dangerous, especially in fires that burn structures. The ash can contain toxic compounds, you know, things like asbestos and lead that are common in older buildings. Even more common materials like plastics that are all over our homes, things like batteries can, when they burn, you know, release these compounds that you really don't want to be breathing in.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  So if you are involved in recovery, folks should wear N95 masks and gloves and be careful around those efforts.

• 9:40Flora Lichtman?

  Hmm. Does that show up on your air quality app, you know, on your weather app?

• 9:47Speaker 02

  I think it's actually very difficult to measure because even small amounts of this can be, you know, dangerous or have long ranging impacts that are kind of difficult to measure on our health. And a lot of air quality monitoring, it's difficult to pick those things up.

• 10:02Flora Lichtman?

  Let's wrap up with a refreshing dip in the sea. Tell me about this new manta ray finding.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Yes, so big mystery in science up until now has been what in the world are manta rays' tails for?

• 10:19Flora Lichtman?

  Right, because stingrays, we know, they're, they're a weapon.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Yes, infamously used for defense. And most other kind of, you know, sea creatures use their tails to propel through the water. Manta ray tails do neither of those things. And so researchers wanted to look into what in the world they're using their tails for. And so what they found is that their tails might be acting as antenna, basically designed to detect approaching danger.

• 10:47Flora Lichtman?

  Really? What are they sensing?

• 10:50Speaker 02

  So basically, the the organs that are in their tails are linked to their lateral line canal. This is a common system of sensory organs in fish and amphibians that can basically detect movements in surrounding water. For most, you know, aquatic vertebrates, that is most complex and and kind of developed near their head. But in some kinds of rays, that system runs all the way down their tail. And the idea kind of the hypothesis is that it's because a lot of rays bury their heads in the sand to eat and leave their backsides and their tails exposed behind them, sticking up in the water. So if, for example, a shark is swimming by, moving a lot of water around, that tail could kind of detect that and say, oop, time to finish up my lunch.

• 11:33Flora Lichtman?

  Wow, like a spidey sense in their tail.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 11:38Flora Lichtman?

  That's a great image, too.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  I know. So kind of adorable, I think, at least.

• 11:43Flora Lichtman?

  Thanks for bringing us, thanks for bringing us the news this week, Casey.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Thanks so much. Always great to be here.

• 11:49Flora Lichtman?

  Casey Crownart, senior climate reporter at the MIT Technology Review. Don't go away after the break. What is a meme coin?

• 11:59Speaker 02

  The sort of way that this gets referred to is, I'm not kidding, Ponzi-nomics.

• 12:05Speaker 03

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• 12:35Speaker 04

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• 13:11Speaker 05

  I'm Kevin Roos.

• 13:12Speaker 06

  And I'm Casey Newton.

• 13:13Speaker 05

  And together, we've been tech journalists for decades. Now, we're your hosts of Machine Gods, a new podcast from NPR that makes sense of what AI means for your work, your life, and all of our futures.

• 13:24Speaker 06

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• 13:30Speaker 05

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• 13:41Flora Lichtman?

  Last Friday, just before the inauguration, President Trump hosted a crypto ball in DC, where he and Melania Trump unveiled their very own meme coins. You may have heard about it.

• 13:53Ira Flatow?

  President Trump and First Lady Melania launched meme coins. The cryptocurrency world erupted into chaos as Donald Trump and Melania Trump launched rival meme coins.

• 14:03Speaker 07

  Donald Trump has stamped his likeness on his own meme coin.

• 14:06Flora Lichtman?

  I am going to venture that many of us don't have a crystal clear understanding of what this is, or why you'd want to make one, or sell one, or buy one. So up next, what is a meme coin? How is it related to Bitcoin? What do you do with them? As you can hear, I have a lot of question coins in my digital wallet, and we have just the right person to give us some answers. Liz Lopato is a senior writer at The Verge, where she covers cryptocurrency and business. Liz, welcome to Science Friday.

• 14:39Speaker 07

  Thank you very much. Good to be here.

• 14:41Flora Lichtman?

  Liz, what is a meme coin? Is it a meme? Is it a coin?

• 14:46Speaker 07

  I mean, maybe the easiest way of describing this is to say that it's kind of like a digital stock that tracks how popular a meme is. So unlike something like Bitcoin, this isn't really about technical innovation, and it's not meant to be something that could be used as a substitution for currency. It's mostly about going viral.

• 15:08Flora Lichtman?

  So it's like a stock in an idea or in a meme?

• 15:11Speaker 07

  Yeah, so let's just start with stocks, right? You know, those track sort of the future of a company and can be used as a way of understanding how one feels about, let's say, Apple, right? If you feel good about Apple's future, you buy Apple's stock. So to sort of translate that, a meme coin can be thought of as a way of expressing an emotion about a meme with money.

• 15:37Flora Lichtman?

  Hmm.

• 15:38Speaker 07

  Assume that the meme becomes more popular and thus the meme coin will go up. It's almost pure psychology. This is economics without any underlying real world assets. And so there's like a culture of gambling around meme coins, which I'm sure will just shock you.

• 15:57Speaker 07

  And the the sort of way that this gets referred to is, I'm not kidding, Ponzi-nomics. And the idea is, like, everybody knows kind of the trajectory of how meme coins work, which is they go up in value and then they immediately, they drop very steeply and then usually they aren't worth anything. This is just speaking generally.

• 16:21Flora Lichtman?

  That's that's the usually how it goes with a meme coin?

• 16:24Speaker 07

  Usually how it goes.

• 16:25Flora Lichtman?

  Okay.

• 16:25Speaker 07

  Not always, but very often. So the idea, if you're playing in meme coins and you're cynical, is that you buy in thinking that you will sell before the big drop off and you will make money that way.

• 16:40Flora Lichtman?

  Is anyone playing in meme coins who's not cynical?

• 16:43Speaker 07

  We call them bag holders. They're the people who lose all their money.

• 16:46Flora Lichtman?

  They're stuck holding the bag.

• 16:48Speaker 07

  That's right. And, you know, like, listen, there is, there are real ideologically committed people in the crypto space, but they don't typically work on meme coins. And they refer to them as something I don't think I can say on your show.

• 17:03Flora Lichtman?

  Four-letter coins.

• 17:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's right. And these are things that are not taken very seriously. And, you know, sort of the ur meme coin, if you will, is Dogecoin, which was created as a parody of cryptocurrency and then sort of took off. And you may recall, there was a period where Doge had a big run up in value and then Elon Musk went on Saturday Night Live.

• 17:27Speaker 07

  I keep telling you, it's a cryptocurrency you can trade for conventional money. Oh, so it's a hustle. Yeah, it's a hustle.

• 17:38Speaker 07

  And the value immediately plummeted. And that's, that's kind of how these things work, right? Like, you hit the peak and then everybody sells it once. And one of the things that's interesting about how some of these meme coins work is that many people who are getting into them is their first foray into cryptocurrency. And I think it's a very easy way to get burned.

• 17:59Flora Lichtman?

  So it's a hustle?

• 18:00Speaker 07

  It's a hustle.

• 18:02Flora Lichtman?

  How is the crypto community reacting to President Trump's new meme coins?

• 18:08Speaker 07

  They're not happy about it, right? Meme coins are not universally popular within the crypto world. And I think a lot of people who are the true believers really do see the risks that are involved with them. One of my favorite things was actually I saw members of the crypto community who were blaming Gary Gensler, who is the former head of the SEC, for not having created a framework that would have prevented meme coins like this. And it's particularly funny if you are pretty deep in the finance world because the crypto community has hated Gary Gensler for cracking down on crypto. And so to have them suddenly say, oh, he wasn't cracking it down enough, or he wasn't cracking down in the right way is just... Sure, guys.

• 18:51Speaker 07

  There was an op ed in the Wall Street Journal complaining about it. Like, this is something that people who are serious about cryptocurrency feel undermines the seriousness of what they're attempting to do.

• 19:02Flora Lichtman?

  Because this is more cynical? Or because this is not actually about being an alternative to existing currency? Or is this about deeper ethical concerns?

• 19:13Speaker 07

  That's right. And I mean, also, you know, just being blunt here, this is also potentially a root for bribing the president, right? Because who stands to benefit the most when the meme coin goes up in value? It's the person who holds the most of the meme coin, and who is that? So, you know, there's, there are real ethical concerns here, as well as the sort of ideological concerns that come with the launch of a presidential meme coin. And, you know, there's also like the potential reputation hit that comes from a pump and dump, right? So if Donald Trump decides he wants to sell his reserves, because to be clear, only 20% of these coins are trading right now.

• 19:57Speaker 07

  So whatever the value is, is not fully diluted. If he decides he wants to sell some of those non-public coins, he can essentially tank the entire market and walk away with a lot of money, which is one of the things that famously happens with meme coins. It's called rugging or pulling the rug out from under people.

• 20:16Flora Lichtman?

  Is that legal?

• 20:18Speaker 07

  Great question. It's murky territory. And there are a number of things that go on in crypto that would not be allowed in other markets that may very well be illegal, but that are often difficult to prosecute.

• 20:35Flora Lichtman?

  You were telling me before we started chatting that crypto is inherently political. What do you mean by that?

• 20:44Speaker 07

  Essentially, Bitcoin started as a way to hate the federal government with money. Bitcoin comes out of the 2008 financial crisis. It was invented in part because the Satoshi Nakamoto entity didn't trust the banks. And, you know, it was started by a group of cypherpunks who wanted an alternative to the dollar. And the dollar is actually politically incredibly important. You know, it's the world's reserve currency. It's a major source of American soft power. So creating an alternative to that, something that competes with the dollar, is a political action. Investing in Bitcoin is essentially, you know, giving the middle finger to the Fed.

• 21:28Speaker 07

  It's one of the reasons why you see a lot of libertarians in that space and a lot of anarchists. These are people who are not big fans of government generally and our government specifically. So, you know, in terms of the ideology involved, this is in fact inherently political. There is no way to talk about cryptocurrency without talking about politics.

• 21:49Flora Lichtman?

  Do you think meme coins fit into the same bin there? Or are they different in some way?

• 21:55Speaker 07

  I think they're different in the sense that they are a much smaller piece of this, right? Like, this is a very cynical way of expressing what you think the stock market is. Like, in some ways, I think that the rise of meme coins and Ponzi-nomics is a way of essentially critiquing the broader stock market and the broader way that we approach economics by saying, you know, actually, the stock market's a joke. Actually, it's not really worth anything. Actually, it's all, you know, a rigged game.

• 22:27Flora Lichtman?

  I mean, I've read the headlines that President Trump's coins are said to be worth billions now. How should I interpret that? Is that in real money? Like that he could cash out and have?

• 22:39Speaker 07

  No, is the short answer to that question. So again, I think I mentioned that this is not a fully diluted market. So if he were to try to cash out right now, the market would plunge. One of the things that that happens to be true is I think 20% of the tokens are what's trading. And supply and demand sort of suggests that this is a limited supply. Right? So if you add to the supply, the price goes down, the demand goes down. So if you were to sell all of his holdings right now, maybe he would make some money, but it wouldn't be that much.

• 23:14Flora Lichtman?

  Liz, what are you going to be looking out for in the next, you know, whatever, month, year in the meme coin space? Is there anything you're sort of waiting to, something that you're waiting to see happen?

• 23:25Speaker 07

  One of the things about crypto is that it is the most absurd part of the financial industry. And so there are moments where you can sort of predict what'll be happening. And so in the sense, like I, like I said, I kind of think that all of these meme coins eventually go to zero. And I just don't know when or how quickly. So that's, that's one thing. But the other thing is, look, we're looking at a crypto boom. Crypto was huge in the last election. The industry spent a lot of money getting pro crypto lawmakers, including Donald Trump, elected. I think they are expecting some kind of payoff in that, you know, whether that's legislation

• 24:05Speaker 07

  that gives them a friendly regulatory regime or a head of the SEC who's friendlier to crypto than Gary Gensler was. One of the things that I'm trying to track is just sort of the serious piece underlying this. Because the Bitcoin ETF suggests an interest from the broader financial market in this space. And, you know, just today, BlackRock went on

• 24:32Speaker 07

  I think it was CNBC to say that they want to tokenize securities. That would be a significant change. To have something as established as BlackRock operating in the crypto space in this particular way. It would bring the real financial system a lot closer to the crypto system. And the two of those things have been relatively divorced, although they have been getting closer. And like, the last time we had a big crypto crash, it took out two real world banks. So, you know, I'm just watching to see where and how this develops, because obviously there is a lot of political power in play.

• 25:06Flora Lichtman?

  Hmm, it's fascinating. Thank you for taking the time to explain this to us.

• 25:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, my pleasure.

• 25:12Flora Lichtman?

  Liz Lopato is a senior writer at The Verge.

• 25:18Flora Lichtman?

  And that is about all we have time for. Lots of folks helped to make this show happen, including Jason Rosenberg.

• 25:26Speaker 04

  George Harper. Kathleen Davis.

• 25:28Speaker 07

  Shoshana Buckstum.

• 25:30Flora Lichtman?

  I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.