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🌥️Some clouds, some sun, with highs in the 50s. Sunset tonight is at 7:27 p.m.
Today we have a sneak peek into a NOVA documentary premiering tonight, which is focused on finding solutions to climate change. Creating a NOVA episode involves a lot of work from a lot of people, and we hope you find the finished product interesting and informative.
Four Things to Know
1. Gov. Maura Healey visited UMass Chan Medical School to talk about how funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health will affect Massachusetts. The school received $197 million in NIH funding last year, and has seen more than $30 million either withheld or withdrawn.
“As a result of the cuts that have happened already by the Trump administration, UMass Chan has had to cut its class sizes, withdraw offers to individuals to come study here and do research,” Healey said.
2. Tesla sales in Massachusetts fell in the first two months of the year: year-over-year registrations of new Teslas were down 19% in January and 11% in February, according to data from the automotive industry research firm S&P Global Mobility. Teslas still made up the biggest share of new electric vehicle registrations in Massachusetts, but competitors like Ford, Volkswagen and Hyundai did not see a similar drop in sales.
“Tesla might end up moving the portfolio more towards the kinds of vehicles that would align better with the ... base of customers who would be interested in supporting Elon Musk,” said Carey Morewedge, chair of Boston University’s marketing department. “But the majority of their products don’t fall under that umbrella. So if Tesla’s really going to change the way people are perceiving it, it’s going to have to change social groups with which it’s associated.”
3. A federal judge in Boston blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to end the legal immigration status for more than 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — but their status is still up in the air. The program in question allows people to live and work in the U.S. legally, but that status only lasts for two years. Most people with this status try to apply for asylum or other programs that allow them to legally live and work in the U.S. for longer.
Anwen Hughes, the director of legal strategy at Human Rights First’s Refugee Programs division, described the Trump administration’s actions as “planning a triple whammy.” “They were going to terminate people’s parole, block the adjudication of applications for more permanent status that people had filed and do all of this in order to then try to remove them from the United States without giving them the right to a hearing before an immigration judge.”
4. On Monday, Mary Ngugi will be running the Boston Marathon in the elite women’s division for the sixth time. As she runs, Ngugi will be thinking of a team cheering for her back home in Nyahururu City, Kenya: the Nala Run Club, which she founded in 2022. The club’s members consist of about a dozen athletes, aged between15 and 20, who live and train just a few minutes from Ngugi’s home.
She started the club to create a space where girls can feel empowered, especially in the face of violence against women and girls. “When I grew up, I didn’t know a female coach. I was never coached by a female coach,” she said. “And I think it’s good for the girls to see women in power.”
New from NOVA: Secrets of the Forest
By Chris Schmidt, co-executive producer of NOVA
When we were first discussing Secrets of the Forest, I had in my mind the sense that simply planting trees could be a great way to pull carbon out of the atmosphere – helping to reduce the atmosphere’s carbon load. But as we learned more about the featured work of Thomas Crowther, who had originally tried to quantify the amount of carbon locked up in the world’s trees, I became more and more amazed by what his work was discovering. To quote the cliché: we weren’t seeing the forest for the trees — literally!
Turns out that while a single tree does remove quite a bit of carbon from the atmosphere to build its body, the tree itself is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the movement of carbon. What Secrets of the Forest does so beautifully is lay bare the incredibly complex and interdependent web of living systems that support trees and which trees, in turn, give rise to. With stunning visuals and compelling science experts the film takes us deep into those hidden worlds — from the mushrooms and the fungal webs running throughout the forest floor, to the insects and mammals who assist tree reproduction — to the tiniest microbes deep in the soil that make it possible for tree roots to transport water and nutrients. All are systems that depend on and amplify each other to create a healthy forest.
This is something that cannot be recreated simply by planting trees like farmed crops, whether to produce wood products or even in a well-meaning attempt to reduce atmospheric carbon. Watching the finished film now is, for me, a little like listening to a piece of music that begins with a single instrument before adding one after another after another, building towards a revelatory crescendo.
The successive narrative layers build upon one another as we watch. It sounds pretty high minded but, along the way, there are plenty of “earthy” moments — from the scientist who revels in teeming creepy crawlies in a square inch of dirt, to the French mushroom biologist who helpfully points out the one mushroom not to eat for lunch (“you’ll be dead” ) only to turn to another whose outer skin is a potent psychedelic drug. “I’ve never tried it,” he tells us. “Maybe I should. But I prefer a burgundy, or a nice Chablis.”
With tour guides like that, who wouldn’t want to spend some quality time discovering the Secrets of the Forest?
Airs tonight at 9 p.m. on GBH 2. You can also stream it for free tomorrow.
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