Hi, I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday. What a long strange year it has been. And today on the podcast, we're looking back on the year in science. It has been very eventful, from slashes to research by the Trump administration, to the record rise of renewables around the world,

the surge in AI, the near-earth comet, and everything in between.

Here to help sift through selected science stories of the year are Sophie Bushwick,

freelance science journalist and editor based in New York, and Maggie Kerth, Climate and Weather Editor for CNN, based in

Minneapolis. Welcome back, both of you. Hi. Thank you. Let's start with the big picture. As I mentioned,

one of the big themes this year was the changes and disruption brought by the Trump administration.

Maggie, I know you were especially looking at this as related to the CDC.

Tell us about that. Yeah, I mean, the CDC has just been in chaos all year. It started off with

firing. Then there was some rehiring. They ended programs like led surveillance. And this has just been this slow march toward

what we've seen this fall upending the entire vaccine infrastructure of the country. And one of the

things that really stood out to me about this was Amy Maxman's reporting on the measles outbreak

in Texas for KFF Health News, where she was

writing about how officials in Texas were reaching out to the CDC, desperately trying to get

advice, and just weren't hearing anything back. They were kind of stuck in this game of telephone,

and a lot of it turned out to be tied to

this freeze on communications that had happened before the outbreak started, but then nobody at the

CDC felt like they could start communicating again. Like, just became this giant mess and eventually 16 people died in these measles

outbreaks and their associated ones in other states and more than 4,500 were sickened.

It's a really awful story and I think kind of just really sums up the politically motivated malfeasance that we've been

seeing. Incredible. Okay. There have also been big policy changes when it comes to clean energy,

Sophie. I know you pointed out both good news and bad news on the energy and climate front. Tell us about

those. I'll start with the good news

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