Seven States Passed Ballot Measures To Protect Abortion Rights

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow, celebrating our 33rd anniversary today, when we first went on the air this day in 1991. Later in the hour, why some states are getting rid of their highways, and why your doctor may be taking your blood pressure the wrong way. We’ll talk about how you can help out.

But first, this week, science was on the ballot in many states. Voters weighed in on issues like drug legalization, money to fund climate programs, and of course, abortion rights. 10 states voted on the issue, and in seven of them, voters chose to protect or expand abortion rights. Here with more of the news of this week is Tim Revell, Executive Editor at New Scientist. He’s based in merry old London, England. Welcome back, Tim.

TIM REVELL: Hi, Ira. Thanks for having me in. Happy 33rd birthday.

IRA FLATOW: Thank you very much. Let’s start with the seven states that voted to protect abortion rights. What are they?

TIM REVELL: Yeah, so those states are Arizona, Missouri, Maryland, Montana, Nevada, New York, and Colorado. And there you had a combination of voters formerly voting to enshrine existing abortion rights, and also in the case of Arizona and Missouri, actually expanding them, too.

IRA FLATOW: And what about the states that rejected those measures?

TIM REVELL: Yeah, so Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota, they all rejected ballot initiatives. And South Dakota, of course, is the state with the most restrictive law in the country when it comes to abortion. And so yeah, they voted against any protections of abortion rights and undoing existing abortion laws in two of those cases as well.

IRA FLATOW: Can we draw any conclusions about what this all means in the context of a forthcoming Trump administration?

TIM REVELL: Yeah. So Trump’s views on abortion are unclear at best. He’s previously bragged about his Supreme Court justice appointments and how they overturned Roe v Wade. But he’s also distanced himself to some of the more extreme statements that his vice president to be, JD Vance, has made. So JD Vance has spoken about a national ban on abortion. But then Trump has tended to dodge questions about if he would veto such a thing if it came across his desk, saying that really, it’s a matter for the states. So it’s a bit unclear exactly what it will mean.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s pivot to another ballot issue, this one having to do with psychedelics. In Massachusetts, voters rejected a measure to legalize medicinal psychedelics, and it failed to pass. Tim, tell me more about this ballot measure.

TIM REVELL: Yeah, so this measure, it would have affected five natural psychedelics, including psilocybin, which is the active component in magic mushrooms. And it would have made it possible for these five psychedelics to be administered to people over the age of 21 under licensed supervision, also, for individuals to grow a small amount of psychedelic substances at home. And then it would have also added some taxes on psychedelics, too.

IRA FLATOW: And this didn’t go through, as I say. And in a nutshell, what were the arguments for and against it?

TIM REVELL: So the arguments for this have been that there’s a lot of excitement about the potential use of psychedelics for treating things like mental health conditions, such as depression and anxiety, as well as things like alcoholism. And there is some evidence to back this up. There are initial studies that suggest it could be true. But I guess the main argument against this is that the evidence is still quite weak. It’s yet to be definitively proven. And so the DEA, for example, the Drug Enforcement Administration, currently has these substances classed as Schedule I drugs, which means that according to them, they have no accepted medical use.

IRA FLATOW: But there are a couple of other states that have voted to decriminalize psychedelics.

TIM REVELL: Yeah, that’s right. In the past, Oregon, and Colorado have passed ballots that have allowed psychedelics to become legal. And in Oregon, it’s been the case since about 2023 that it’s possible to legally get hold of psychedelics there. But how that’s played out yet is still a bit uncertain. There are some people studying what those effects are, but actually across the whole state, it’s still a fairly small amount of the drug that’s been handed out. And people are still trying to understand what benefits there have been and also where things have gone wrong.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s shift to another big issue. And I’m talking about climate change. There were also a couple of big climate wins this week. Let’s start with Washington State.

TIM REVELL: Yeah, so in Washington State, voters there backed up a carbon market. So there was a ballot measure that could have removed a carbon market that already exists in Washington State. This carbon market is a– it’s called a cap and trade carbon market. But effectively, what it’s managed to do so far is raise $2 billion for green initiatives. And it does that by gradually reducing the amount of carbon emissions that industry is allowed to release. The result of that is that those industries are forced to invest in clean technology. And voters showed their support for this measure.

IRA FLATOW: California also had a climate win this week. What measures did voters decide on there?

TIM REVELL: Yeah, that’s right. So California passed something called Proposition 4. And that’s about issuing $10 billion worth of bonds to fund climate and environmental projects. And so amongst that, there is nearly $4 billion for safe drinking water, drought, flood, and water resilience programs, $1.5 billion for restoring the health of forests, and just over $1 billion to increase coastal resiliency and mitigate sea level rise.

IRA FLATOW: And this is especially important right now, given that we expect the incoming Trump administration to roll back climate plans, right?

TIM REVELL: Yeah, it’s extremely important right now. COP29 begins on Monday. That’s one of these extremely important and big climate conferences. And of course, it’s still currently a Biden administration. And the Biden administration is sending plenty of delegates to COP29, where they’re meant to be discussing how rich countries can support poorer countries. But given that Biden’s administration now has got a very limited time left, it will be very hard for any agreement to feel like it’s got staying power, given that Trump previously has signaled that he will roll back many environmental protections and climate commitments. He did that last time he was in power and may well do it again this time.

IRA FLATOW: I don’t know about you, but I could use a break from election talk, so–

TIM REVELL: Yes.

IRA FLATOW: –let’s pivot to some fun science this week. And I’m going to start with Japan developing and launching the first wooden satellite.

TIM REVELL: Yeah. This is such an amazing story. I absolutely love it. So it’s the world’s first wooden satellite has launched into space. And it’s really interesting. This satellite is called Lignosat. And it’s what they call a cube satellite. So it’s this really small 10 centimeter box that is made from the wood of a magnolia tree that’s native to Japan. The construction used a traditional Japanese technique, meaning that there’s no screws or glue at all in this satellite, so it’s really quite amazing.

IRA FLATOW: And I saw a picture of this satellite. It’s like the size of a Tupperware.

TIM REVELL: Yeah, it’s really small. And the main thing this satellite is going to be used to test is just how useful is wood as a material off Earth? So it’s currently on its way to the International Space Station. And once it arrives there, shortly afterwards, it’s going to be released into its proper orbit around Earth, and it will be sending back loads of data to researchers on Earth to see, how does this satellite hold up?

It’s really extreme if you’re out orbiting Earth, because once every 45 minutes, your temperature is swapping from between about minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, as you’re in front of the sun and then hidden from the sun. So the material has really got to hold up well if it’s going to stay there in its orbit.

IRA FLATOW: The positive news about this is that if and when it does return, it burns up in the atmosphere completely, as opposed to other space metallic junk that might not.

TIM REVELL: Yeah, that’s correct. So normally, satellites have got plenty of metal in them. And when they come back to Earth, many of the components burn up. But a lot of the metal forms these quite hard, solid balls that end up either existing in the atmosphere or heading down to Earth, whereas a wooden satellite, it should burn up completely in the atmosphere, leaving almost no trace at all.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s round out this conversation with some critter news. There’s a new study about chimps using computers.

TIM REVELL: Yes. So this is a really cool study. And it’s really about performance anxiety and how that may have evolved before humans and chimps diverged. So in this study, there are six chimps, who, over the course of six years, they participated in a study where they had to complete three different tasks on a computer screen. One was easy. One was medium. And one was hard.

And these tasks were repeated over the length of the study, but in front of different numbers of people watching the chimps, including people they knew and people they didn’t. And what the team found– and this was true for every single chimp in the study– was that the easiest to ask, when the chimps tried to complete that, having an audience actually made it harder. But with the hardest task, it actually made the chimps perform a lot better.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. Do we know why the chimps perform that way?

TIM REVELL: We can kind of guess. We know that this kind of thing is called the audience effect. And we know it applies to humans, too, which is when you end up performing better or worse when someone is looking at you. And what seems to be happening is that for the easiest task, it’s just not engaging enough for the chimps. And so they get distracted by the audience. They get a bit bored, and maybe they start playing up to the audience, and then they don’t perform as well as they should on the test. But for the harder task, the audience acts as a kind of stressor, making the chimps want to concentrate even harder, and therefore, perform better.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. That’s something like humans do also.

TIM REVELL: Yeah, it’s really cool. Humans do it as well. But what we don’t know is if humans do it when chimps watch them. But we know that chimps do it when humans watch them.

IRA FLATOW: There’s a test we have to perform.

TIM REVELL: Yeah, I’m happy to volunteer for that study.

IRA FLATOW: I’m going to volunteer. Let’s also talk about something else funny in the realm of animal research. And it’s a new study. Scientists looked at what happened when they had vampire bats run on a treadmill. Why vampire bats?

TIM REVELL: I actually didn’t know before I read about this study that vampire bats could even run. But it turns out that’s something they actually do quite commonly when they’re chasing after prey. They can run across the ground at about 30 meters a minute, which, compared to Usain Bolt, who does 100 meters in 10 seconds, it’s not that fast. But it’s still surprisingly fast for a bat.

Now, the reason researchers have been putting these bats on treadmills– and I must say, the video of this is amazing. You must seek it out. These bats look like part humans on crutches, part mini demon dogs when they’re running. But the reason researchers are interested in them is because they’ve got this very unusual diet of almost entirely fresh blood. Most mammals get their energy for movement from fats and stored sugars. But there’s almost no fat and sugar in blood. Instead, it’s much, much higher in protein. And so that must have been what was providing the energy for movement by the bats.

So to find out how this all worked, researchers, they put these vampire bats on some treadmills, and they were able to monitor the carbon atoms in the food that they had eaten. And what that showed them was actually that these vampire bats, they’re not using energy from any fat stores or any energy stores when they’re running. Instead, they’re using the energy directly from the food they have just eaten, which is a very unusual way of getting energy for movement.

IRA FLATOW: That does sound kind of risky, if you’re a bat and you’re depending on your energy from just your last meal.

TIM REVELL: Yeah. It means that vampire bats can actually starve extremely easily. So even within 24 hours of not eating is a short enough period for bats to starve. But they do have this kind of unusual social adaptation to compensate for this, where if a bat hasn’t eaten for a while, the other bats in the group will regurgitate some of their own food and give it to the bat who’s in need.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

TIM REVELL: Thanks so much for having me.

IRA FLATOW: Tim Revell, Executive Editor at New Scientist, based in London, England.

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