The vaccine of the future could look a lot different than the ones today.

This vaccine could be delivered to your home and you could take a sniff of this vaccine and go back to work.

It's Friday, May 17th, and it's also Science Friday. I'm SciFRI producer Dee Petersmith.

Today's vaccines are a bit of a modern miracle, as we saw in 2021

when the COVID-MRNA vaccines were released, just a year after the pandemic began. But despite the

years of innovations that allowed these vaccines to be developed and mass-produced relatively

quickly, their delivery method, an injection, is a pretty old technology that has some drawbacks.

So what could the vaccine of the future look like?

But first, Arafledo discusses the biggest news in science this week.

It's no secret that the U.S. needs to update its electric grid.

As our climate gets warmer, more electricity is required to keep people cool, and even though more

renewable energy is being produced, our current grid largely built in the 1960s and 70s was not

meant to handle those needs, especially now that AI and crypto mining are eating up so much

juice. The good news, last Monday, new federal rules were approved to

upgrade the grid to accommodate those new demands. So what are they and when will they be implemented?

Here to tell us more about this and other news this week is Casey Crownhart, climate reporter for

the MIT Technology Review. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks so much for

having me back. Happy to be here. Nice to have you. Okay, so tell us about these new rules.

Yeah. So like you said, these are from the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,

and they're basically designed to help overhaul our grid. We have a massive line of new projects waiting to connect. We just need to build a lot more transmission. So basically, the commission has addressed the need for long-term planning in these rules. It requires people who own, you know, transmission infrastructure to conduct, you know, long-term 20-year plans to kind of

figure out what, what is needed in the future for the grid, and then also help to kind of solve

the problem of who pays for upgrades to the grid. So it'll, you know, make them make plans in advance

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