May 4, 2026

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Scorpion stingers with metals, preeclampsia hope, more cuts to U.S. wind energy

A look at what makes scorpions so deadly, why there’s hope for preeclampsia and how President Trump is gutting wind energy

By Rachel Feltman, Andrea Gawrylewski, Sushmita Pathak & Alex Sugiura

Tonini Grbavac / 500px/GettyImages

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Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners, and of course, May the 4th be with you. For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to our weekly science news roundup.

Let’s start with some health news. If you or your partner has ever been pregnant, you may have heard of preeclampsia. It is a life-threatening condition that arises in as many as one out of 12 pregnancies in the U.S. Marked by high blood pressure and protein in the urine, the condition can lead to serious complications like organ damage in the pregnant person and a diminished blood supply to the fetus. There’s currently no cure other than delivery, which is why preeclampsia causes about 15 percent of all premature births in the U.S.

Because of the risks faced by preterm infants, doctors often have to play a waiting game where they monitor a parent’s symptoms to delay inducing labor or performing a C-section as long as possible. The longer they wait, the longer the pregnant person remains in danger.

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Last week researchers published a small, preliminary study in Nature Medicine outlining a potential treatment for patients stuck in this limbo. The pilot trial, which featured 16 women with preterm preeclampsia, filtered a troublesome protein out of patients’ blood.

The treatment targets a protein called sFlt-1, which previous research has identified as a key driver of the blood vessel constriction that can make preeclampsia so dangerous. Using a blood-filtering device, researchers removed sFIt-1 from their subjects and then returned the cleaned blood to their bodies. The procedure seemed to stabilize their blood pressures and extended their pregnancies by an average of 10 days—that’s twice what the researchers would have expected for an untreated group. Five days might not sound like an impressive achievement if you’ve never had to play this dangerous waiting game yourself, but it can make a huge difference. When it comes to preterm birth—birth before 37 weeks of gestation—research shows that even an extra day or two in the womb can drastically improve a baby’s outcomes. The next step is a much larger, randomized control trial to help us understand how effective the treatment really is and how best to implement it.

Last week, genome sequencing pioneer and scientific iconoclast J. Craig Venter died. As we wrote last week, "Venter rose to fame in the field for publishing the first bacterial genome ever decoded, along with a list of gene annotations, in 1995. The achievement kicked off an age of discovery in genetics, with researchers racing to decode the genomes of other pathogens—and eventually animals." He had a conversation with SciAm's executive editor Jeanna Bryner just one month before his passing. Here he is in his own voice sharing his clear-eyed thoughts about science, death, and legacy.

J. Craig Venter: You have to take risks. If you're risk adverse, you're in the wrong field. It's the definition of doing experiment. My favorite job is being an experimentalist, you know. I can ask questions and you try and get answers. Sometimes you get a different answer than you want. Being a fundamental experimentalist is the essence to me of science. I think I've been very lucky in my career in having the ability to try and answer big questions. I always tell people, if you want immortality, do something meaningful while you're alive.

Feltman: Now for some news from the clean energy sector. Last Monday the Trump administration announced that it would pay two energy companies to abandon the U.S. offshore wind projects they’ve been developing. Bluepoint Wind and Golden State Wind, which were slated to sit off the coasts of New York–New Jersey and California, respectively, could have each produced enough energy to power more than one million homes. Instead, the Department of the Interior will refund the companies behind these projects a total of about $885 million in lease fees—on the condition that they reinvest that money in fossil fuel projects. And just to be clear, that money is coming from American taxpayers.

The administration has already made at least one other similar buyout deal after failing to halt various offshore wi