This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, it's a lightning pelusa.

We're going to meet the researchers who are probing the high-voltage mysteries of our atmosphere.

You think you knew everything there was about lightning? Oh, no. We'll talk about what's still left to know.

But first, this week, the Trump administration announced that we'd change the way the Endangered Species Act is implemented starting in September.

Regulators would soon be able to conduct economic assessment to decide whether a species should be protected or not.

The legislative overhaul would not only make it easier to take species off the

endangered list, but it would also weaken protections for ones that remain on the list.

Judging me now to talk about that and other stories from the weekend science is Maggie

Kerth Baker, senior science reporter at 538. Welcome back, Maggie. Hi, thanks for having me. So this is a new way of

evaluating endangered species, different from what we already have in place, right? Right. So historically,

the process of adding animals onto the endangered species Protection Act list has been really all

about scientific evidence. You know, what data suggests that the species

is in danger, how endangered is it, how important is it to the functioning of the ecosystem,

that kind of thing. But now into these new rules, the regulators will also be allowed to consider

cold hard cash, like the money that a timber company might not make if it can't cut trees

in a certain patch of forest.

And these regulations, they also now change the timelines so that the risks have to be in the, quote-unquote, foreseeable future, which is this kind of vague designation that could

really be used to prevent protection from longer-term risks.

So I imagine that scientists are not very happy about this.

No. Some of the scientists have said that under these new timelines, for instance, it would be almost impossible to designate

the polar bear as endangered because the sea ice loss in the Arctic is a longer-term problem than a

short-term one. Oh, details, details. Let's move on to the next one. The first Human CRISPR clinical trials are starting in the U.S.? Tell us about that.

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