Laura Bult | Vox

Should fluoride be in our water?

2025-01-10T15:11:18-05:00

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has put the decades-old debate over water fluoridation back on the table. As President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, he might become the most powerful public health figure in the US who believes we should take fluoride out of our water. Currently, it’s up to municipalities to set their own water fluoride doses — most of them set them around 0.7 milligrams per liter of water — so it’s unclear whether a federal agency will be able to change course on water fluoridation in the US. About 63 percent of Americans have fluoridated water. Millions of Americans also drink water that is naturally fluoridated at even higher levels.

The video explains how this renewed attention on water fluoridation is happening at a time when new science is emerging on the topic. Historically, water fluoridation has done wonders for combatting tooth decay, primarily in children. But scientists are looking into whether it’s still having the same effect today, given how widespread topical fluoride and regular dental care is now.

There is a growing scientific debate about whether the doses we are exposed to in the US are safe for developing brains.

Part of the difficulty of the science on fluoride is that when it comes to studying fluoride’s risks, there has never been a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study — the gold standard in science for proving causation. All of the studies we mention in the video are observational. This lack of study is typical in epidemiology when researching something that could be harmful in some doses. But surprisingly, there’s never been this kind of trial on the benefits of water fluoridation, either. However, the University of North Carolina is currently conducting the first-ever trial of this kind on the benefits of water fluoridation.

It’s worth noting that this video talks about studies that look at the link between childhood IQ and high fluoride levels. These types of studies are done on a population level — so, averaging IQ across a large group. The study of IQ is problematic in some scenarios. But one expert I spoke to explained why it’s the best tool epidemiologists have for doing this type of research.

“Historically, there have been concerns about how IQ is racially biased,“ Bruce Lanphear, a professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University, told me. “But in fact, probably of all the different measures we use for brain function broadly, IQ is the optimal one we use. In contrast with some of the behavioral scores … which are most typically based upon parent report. And those are valuable and they’ve been validated. But IQ is not only validated, it’s been shown to work consistently, at least within homogeneous groups.”

What polls can actually tell us

2024-11-01T12:58:22-04:00

For anyone closely watching the 2024 election, scrutinizing the daily drop of polls has become the norm. Each new data point gives people cause to celebrate or despair depending on how their candidate is faring. But if you understand what polls are actually capable of telling you, it might dispel any desire you have for them to predict whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will be the next president.

For this video, we interviewed pollsters about their processes and explained the basics of how they turn small surveys into a way to measure the opinions and intentions of the American voting population. No matter what measures pollsters take to make their samples as representative as possible, there’s a limit to how precise they can be. And, sometimes, those same measures can make the poll numbers go awry.

Can clean energy handle the AI boom?

2024-09-30T18:03:29-04:00

In our new series, Explain It to Me, Vox takes audience questions and investigates, speaks to experts, and delivers an answer. For this video, a retired schoolteacher in New York named Kathy submitted a question to us about how things like cryptocurrency, cloud storage, and artificial intelligence are impacting the nation’s climate goals.

Crypto, AI, and cloud storage are all a part of the carbon footprint of data centers. In this video, we unpack what exactly we know about data centers’ growing electricity demands, how AI is factoring into that picture, and whether clean energy can keep up.

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Kamala Harris, explained in 7 moments

2024-08-30T13:06:26-04:00

Vice President Kamala Harris is potentially on the verge of becoming one of the most powerful people on Earth. At the same time, in part because her rapid ascent to the Democratic presidential nomination didn’t involve the sustained public attention of a long presidential primary, she’s more of a cipher to many Americans than major party presidential nominees typically are. So who is Kamala Harris? In this video, we hand that story over to four reporters who have covered her at different points in her career.

Kamala Harris first entered public life as the elected district attorney of San Francisco. She tried to distinguish herself from her predecessor, known for taking a progressive approach to crime, by calling herself “smart on crime.” She spoke more clinically and quantitatively than ideologically; she talked about numbers, not ideas or politics. That continued in her next role as California’s attorney general, in which she was often hard to pin down ideologically and reluctant to take political stances. But that role also made her a household name in California, and after six years as attorney general, she won the state’s US Senate race.

Harris quickly became a well-known senator, but not for speeches or policy. Instead she found fame as the Democratic Party’s chief cross-examiner in the Senate, grilling Trump administration officials in confrontations that excited Democratic voters and sparked a movement for her to run for president in 2020. However, the Democratic Party had by that point become more ideologically progressive, and her record of being “smart on crime” no longer played as well with those voters. She struggled to find a political lane in the Democratic primary, and her run was short-lived. But when Democrats ultimately chose Joe Biden as their nominee, Biden vowed to pick a woman as his running mate. And after a summer in which the death of George Floyd and the massive ensuing protests sparked a national reckoning around race, Harris rose to the top of his list.

As vice president, Harris struggled to find a role in the administration. Biden tasked her with an unenviable job: solving the “root causes” of undocumented immigration to the US. It was neither her area of expertise nor her ideological strong suit, and after a disastrous TV interview, she retreated from public view. But after the US Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion, things started to change. Harris had an expertise and authority on reproductive rights that Biden lacked, and she became the administration’s spokesperson on the topic, finding her voice and footing in public life again.

In July 2024, an unpopular and visibly aged President Joe Biden withdrew from his reelection campaign, endorsing Kamala Harris as his successor. Lively and articulate by comparison, Harris quickly captured the enthusiasm of the Democratic Party, gaining momentum in the race against former President Donald Trump. Her continued success will depend on whether she can grow into the role of a galvanizing, inspirational political figure that she’s struggled to fill in the past.

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How AI could help us talk to animals

2024-07-31T18:12:47-04:00

Joyce Poole and Michael Pardo recently published a groundbreaking study on elephant communication: Using a machine learning model, they were able to show strong evidence that African savannah elephants have unique names for one another. The statistical model they used — known as a random forest model — is nothing new or snazzy. It’s been around for 20 years. But it’s one example of how animal communication researchers are using machine learning to decode animal calls they can’t through observation alone.

This video covers some other ways machine learning is solving the limits of human observation in the study of animal communication. And it explains a wild plan for what might be next: deep learning models that could facilitate interspecies communication.

Why China is winning the EV war

2024-06-07T14:19:37-04:00

The Biden administration has a climate goal that 50 percent of all new car sales in the US will be electric by 2030. Meanwhile, China already reached that milestone this year, in 2024. Over the past decade, China has pulled numerous levers to scale up its electric vehicle industry, and key to that strategy has been the development of the most globally competitive EV battery. Their efforts have spawned the world’s biggest battery companies, like CATL and BYD.

The Biden administration wants to keep Chinese cars and batteries out of the country — but that could be counter to our own electric vehicle ambitions in the short term. This video explains how China was able to create the most dominant EV battery, and whether the US can meet its own climate goals without it.

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Should humans get their own geologic era?

2024-05-03T14:54:50-04:00

The word “Anthropocene” has gained cultural resonance in recent years, as it’s become clearer that humans have made an indelible and destructive impact on our planet. But it’s also a term with a specific technical meaning: an epoch, or geologic unit of time, named for humans.

In 2009, a group of scientists first started investigating whether the Anthropocene should be formally recognized as part of the way we record geologic time. They did this by way of a discreet process laid out by a global body of geologists called the International Commission on Stratigraphy. This video explains what happened next: how a team of scientists looked for the evidence to make their case, and what it means to consider humanity’s impact as part of the Earth’s 4.6 billion-year history.

Senior reporter Sigal Samuel has covered the Anthropocene debate for the website here and here.

We don’t mention this in the video, but Phil Gibbard and Erle Ellis co-authored a paper proposing the Anthropocene as a geological “event” rather than an epoch:

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Why it’s so hard for Americans to retire

2024-03-21T15:16:44-04:00

By the standards of most financial experts, Americans are woefully behind on saving for retirement. The reason why is rooted in changes to the country’s retirement system that resulted in a flawed design for how people set aside money.

In this video, we interviewed four people about their level of retirement preparedness and two experts about the state of retirement readiness in the US. One culprit lies in changes to the country’s pension system, which sets the US apart from countries like Australia and the UK, which help people save money for retirement.

Sources and further reading:

Vanguard’s “How America Saves” report was recommended by one of our experts, John Scott, and provided some of the data in the video
John Scott’s work at the Pew Charitable Trusts includes how lack of retirement readiness impacts state and federal budgets
Teresa Ghilarducci has written extensively about retirement, including her book Work, Retire, Repeat
Sen. Bernie Sanders has released a report about how the state of US retirement impacts low-income seniors
We used the TransAmerica Retirement survey for some of our data

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Can AI help us predict extreme weather?

2024-02-21T13:08:57-05:00

We’ve learned how to predict weather over the past century by understanding the science that governs Earth’s atmosphere and harnessing enough computing power to generate global forecasts. But in just the past three years, AI models from companies like Google, Huawei, and Nvidia that use historical weather data have been releasing forecasts rivaling those created through traditional forecasting methods.

This video explains the promise and challenges of these new models built on artificial intelligence rather than numerical forecasting, particularly the ability to foresee extreme weather.

Additional reading:

Here are the papers that describe the models mentioned in the video.
Google’s GraphCast
Huawei’s Pangu-Weather
Nvidia’s FourCastNet
Here is the announcement of the ERA5 dataset, released by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in 2020.
We interviewed Aaron Hill over email for this video. Hill is involved in developing responsible AI for environmental science via AI2ES.
Google has also developed a weather forecasting model called Nowcasting, which is already embedded in its weather products specifically for short-term precipitation forecasts.
If you’re interested in learning more about the history of how we developed weather forecasting, I’d recommend The Weather Machine by Andrew Blum.

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Why most tennis players struggle to make a living

2023-09-20T10:45:21-04:00

During the US Open in New York, Vox video sat down with professional tennis players and the head of the Professional Tennis Players Association to explain the pay problem in the top-five global sport. Tennis is unique among other professional sports in how players are paid, what costs they are responsible for, and how they are categorized: as independent contractors. The result is that — unless you are consistently among the very top-ranked players like Rafael Nadal, Andy Murray, Roger Federer, Serena Williams, and Naomi Osaka — it’s nearly impossible to make a living with income from tennis alone.

Unlike other sports that provide support for people outside the very top performers, tennis leaves them high and dry.

In 2021, Novak Djokovic and Vasek Pospisil co-founded a players’ organization in part to try to address these issues they believe pose an existential threat to the sport. It’s called the Professional Tennis Players Association, and Vox video worked with them to interview players and the organization’s president to shed light on the structural issues that cause such a pay disparity when compared with other global sports.

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