By SARA CLINE and MELISSA GOLDIN

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — As Louisiana Rep. Kimberly Landry Coates stood before her colleagues in the state’s Legislature she warned that the bill she was presenting might “seem strange” or even crazy.

Some lawmakers laughed with disbelief and others listened intently, as Coates described situations that are often noted in discussions of “chemtrails” — a decades-old conspiracy theory that posits the white lines left behind by aircraft in the sky are releasing chemicals for any number of reasons, some of them nefarious. As she urged lawmakers to ban the unsubstantiated practice, she told skeptics to “start looking up” at the sky.

“I’m really worried about what is going on above us and what is happening, and we as Louisiana citizens did not give anyone the right to do this above us,” the Republican said.

Louisiana is the latest state taking inspiration from a wide-ranging conspiratorial narrative, mixing it with facts, to create legislation. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed a similar measure into law last year and one in Florida has passed both the House and the Senate. More than a dozen other states, from New York to Arizona, have introduced their own legislation.

Such bills being crafted is indicative of how misinformation is moving beyond the online world and into public policy. Elevating unsubstantiated theories or outright falsehoods into the legislative arena not only erodes democratic processes, according to experts, it provides credibility where there is none and takes away resources from actual issues that need to be addressed.

“Every bill like this is kind of symbolic, or is introduced to appease a very vocal group, but it can still cause real harm by signaling that these conspiracies deserve this level of legal attention,” said Donnell Probst, interim executive director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education.

Louisiana’s bill, which is awaiting Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s signature, prohibits anyone from “intentionally” injecting, releasing, applying or dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere with the purpose of affecting the “temperature, weather, climate, or intensity of sunlight.” It also requires the Department of Environmental Quality to collect reports from anyone who believes they have observed such activities.

While some lawmakers have targeted real weather modification techniques that are not widespread or still in their infancy, others have pointed to dubious evidence to support legislation.

Discussion about weather control and banning “chemtrails” has been hoisted into the spotlight by high-profile political officials, including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Recently, Marla Maples, the ex-wife of President Donald Trump, spoke in support of Florida’s legislation. She said she was motivated to “start digging” after seeing a rise in Alzheimer’s.

Asked jokingly by a Democratic state senator if she knew anyone in the federal government who could help on the issue, Maples smiled and said, “I sure do.”

Chemtrails vs. contrails

Chemtrail conspiracy theories, which have been widely debunked and include a myriad of claims, are not new. The publication of a 1996 Air Force report on the possible future benefits of weather modification is often cited as an early driver of the narrative.

Some say that evidence of the claims is happening right before the publics’ eyes, alleging that the white streaks stretching behind aircrafts reveal chemicals being spread in the air, for everything from climate manipulation to mind control.

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Ken Leppert, an associate professor of atmospheric science at the University of Louisiana Monroe, said the streaks are actually primarily composed of water and that there is “no malicious intent behind” the thin clouds. He says the streaks are formed as exhaust is emitted from aircrafts, when the humidity is high and air temperature is low, and that ship engines produce the same phenomenon.

A fact sheet about contrails, published by multiple government agencies including NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency, explains that the streaks left behind by planes do not pose health risks to humans. However, the trails, which have been produced since the earliest days of jet aviation, do impact the cloudiness of Earth’s atmosphere and can therefore affect atmospheric temperature and climate.

Scientists have overwhelmingly agreed that data or evidence cited as proof of chemtrails “could be explained through other factors, including well-understood physics and chemistry associated with aircraft contrails and atmospheric aerosols,” according to a 2016 survey published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. In the survey of 77 chemists and geochemists, 76 said they were not aware of evidence proving the existence of a secret large-scale atmospheric program.

“It’s pure myth and conspiracy,” Leppert said.

FILE – Jody Fischer, director of flight operations for a North Dakota-based cloud seeding business, adjusts flares used for a seeding on a plane outside the company headquarters in Fargo, N.D., Sept. 20, 2017. (AP Photo/Dave Kolpack, File)

Cloud seeding

While many of the arguments lawmakers have used to support the chemtrails narrative are not based in fact, others misrepresent actual scientific endeavors, such as cloud seeding; a process by which an artificial material — usually silver iodide — is used to induce precipitation or to clear fog.

“It’s maybe really weak control of the weather, but it’s not like we’re going to move this cloud here, move this hurricane here, or anything like that,” Leppert said.

Parker Cardwell, an employee of a California-based cloud seeding company called Rainmaker, testified before lawmakers in Louisiana and asked that an amendment be made to the legislation to avoid impacts to the industry.

The practice is an imprecise undertaking with mixed results that isn’t widely used, especially in Louisiana, which has significant natural rainfall. According to Louisiana’s Department of Agriculture and Forestry, a cloud seeding permit or license has never been issued in the state.

Geoengineering

While presenting Louisiana’s bill last week, Coates said her research found charts and graphics from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on spraying the air with heavy metals to reflect sunlight back into space to cool the Earth.

The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022 directed the Office of Science and Technology Policy, with support from NOAA, to develop an initial governance framework and research plan related to solar radiation modification, or SRM. A resulting report, which Coates holds up in the House session, focuses on possible future actions and does not reflect decisions that had already been made.

SRM “refers to deliberate, large-scale actions intended to decrease global average surface temperatures by increasing the reflection of sunlight away from the Earth,” according to NOAA. It is a type of geoengineering. Research into the viability of many methods and potential unintended consequences is ongoing, but none have actually been deployed.

Taking focus

In recent years, misinformation and conspiratorial narratives have become more common during the debates and committee testimonies that are a part of Louisiana’s lawmaking process.

And while legislators say Louisiana’s new bill doesn’t really have teeth, opponents say it still takes away time and focus from important work and more pressing topics.

State Rep. Denise Marcelle, a Democrat who opposed Louisiana’s bill, pointed to other issues ailing the state, which has some of the highest incarceration, poverty, crime, and maternal mortality rates.

“I just feel like we owe the people of Louisiana much more than to be talking about things that I don’t see and that aren’t real,” she said.

Associated Press writers Kate Payne in Tallahassee, Florida, and Jack Dura in Bismarck, North Dakota, contributed to this story.

Minnesota men’s hockey released a stacked, home-heavy nonconference schedule on Monday. Eight of the 11 two-game series will be held at 3M Arena at Mariucci beginning Oct. 3.

Former WCHA rival Michigan Tech will be at Minnesota Oct. 3-4, the first meeting between the schools since they split a series in 2012. That’s followed by a rare Thursday-Friday home series against Boston College Oct. 9-10.

The Gophers will begin their four-year home-and-home series against North Dakota Oct. 17-18 in Grand Forks, then play host to Minnesota Duluth Oct. 24-25.

Minnesota will make its first trip to play nascent Division I program Long Island Nov. 14-15 before playing University of Denver in the annual U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame game at the Colorado Avalanche’s Ball Arena. That will be Nov. 28 or Nov. 29, depending on the schedule of the NHL team.

The Gophers will play an exhibition game at former WCHA rival Bemidji State on Jan. 2 while the 2026 IIHF World Junior Championships are being held on campus before returning to Big Ten play.

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By CALVIN WOODWARD and NATHAN ELLGREN

WASHINGTON (AP) — In his confirmation hearings to lead the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya pledged his openness to views that might conflict with his own. “Dissent,” he said, ”is the very essence of science.”

That commitment is being put to the test.

On Monday, scores of scientists at the agency sent their Trump-appointed leader a letter titled the Bethesda Declaration, challenging “policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe.”

It says: “We dissent.”

In a capital where insiders often insist on anonymity to say such things publicly, 92 NIH researchers, program directors, branch chiefs and scientific review officers put their signatures on the letter — and their careers on the line. Another 250 of their colleagues across the agency endorsed the declaration without using their names.

The four-page letter, addressed to Bhattacharya, also was sent to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and members of Congress who oversee the NIH. The White House defended its approach to federal research. “In recent years, Americans have lost confidence in our increasingly politicized healthcare and research apparatus that has been obsessed with DEI and COVID, which the majority of Americans moved on from years ago,” spokesman Kush Desai said. “The Trump administration is focused on restoring the Gold Standard of Science — not ideological activism — as the guiding principle of HHS, the NIH, and the CDC to finally address our chronic disease epidemic.”

Confronting a ‘culture of fear’

The signers went public in the face of a “culture of fear and suppression” they say President Donald Trump’s administration has spread through the federal civil service. “We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety and faithful stewardship of public resources,” the declaration says.

Named for the agency’s headquarters location in Maryland, the Bethesda Declaration details upheaval in the world’s premier public health research institution over the course of mere months.

It addresses the termination of 2,100 research grants valued at more than $12 billion and some of the human costs that have resulted, such as cutting off medication regimens to participants in clinical trials or leaving them with unmonitored device implants.

In one case, an NIH-supported study of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis in Haiti had to be stopped, ceasing antibiotic treatment mid-course for patients.

In a number of cases, trials that were mostly completed were rendered useless without the money to finish and analyze the work, the letter says. “Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million,” it says, “it wastes $4 million.”

The mask comes off

Jenna Norton, who oversees health disparity research at the agency’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, recently appeared at a forum by Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., to talk about what’s happening at the NIH.

At the event, she masked to conceal her identity. Now the mask is off. She was a lead organizer of the declaration.

“I want people to know how bad things are at NIH,” Norton told The Associated Press.

The signers said they modeled their indictment after Bhattacharya’s Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, when he was a professor at Stanford University Medical School.

His declaration drew together likeminded infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists who dissented from what they saw as excessive COVID-19 lockdown policies and felt ostracized by the larger public health community that pushed those policies, including the NIH.

“He is proud of his statement, and we are proud of ours,” said Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the NIH’s National Cancer Institute who signed the Bethesda Declaration.

Cancer research is sidelined

As chief of the Health Systems and Interventions Research Branch, Kobrin provides scientific oversight of researchers across the country who’ve been funded by the cancer institute or want to be. Cuts in personnel and money have shifted her work from improving cancer care research to what she sees as minimizing its destruction. “So much of it is gone — my work,” she said.

The 21-year NIH veteran said she signed because she didn’t want to be “a collaborator” in the political manipulation of biomedical science.

Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow with the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, also signed the declaration. “We have a saying in basic science,” he said. “You go and become a physician if you want to treat thousands of patients. You go and become a researcher if you want to save billions of patients.

“We are doing the research that is going to go and create the cures of the future,” he added. But that won’t happen, he said, if Trump’s Republican administration prevails with its searing grant cuts.

The NIH employees interviewed by the AP emphasized they were speaking for themselves and not for their institutes nor the NIH.

Dissenters range across the breadth of NIH

Employees from all 27 NIH institutes and centers gave their support to the declaration. Most who signed are intimately involved with evaluating and overseeing extramural research grants.

The letter asserts “NIH trials are being halted without regard to participant safety” and the agency is shirking commitments to trial participants who “braved personal risk to give the incredible gift of biological samples, understanding that their generosity would fuel scientific discovery and improve health.”

The Trump administration has gone at public health research on several fronts, both directly, as part of its broad effort to root out diversity, equity and inclusion values throughout the bureaucracy, and as part of its drive to starve some universities of federal money.

A blunt ax swings

This has forced “indiscriminate grant terminations, payment freezes for ongoing research, and blanket holds on awards regardless of the quality, progress, or impact of the science,” the declaration says.

Some NIH employees have previously come forward in televised protests to air grievances, and many walked out of Bhattacharya’s town hall with staff. The declaration is the first cohesive effort to register agency-wide dismay with the NIH’s direction.

The dissenters remind Bhattacharya in their letter of his oft-stated ethic that academic freedom must be a lynchpin in science.

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With that in place, he said in a statement in April, “NIH scientists can be certain they are afforded the ability to engage in open, academic discourse as part of their official duties and in their personal capacities without risk of official interference, professional disadvantage or workplace retaliation.”

Now it will be seen whether that’s enough to protect those NIH employees challenging the Trump administration and him.

“There’s a book I read to my kids, and it talks about how you can’t be brave if you’re not scared,” said Norton, who has three young children. “I am so scared about doing this, but I am trying to be brave for my kids because it’s only going to get harder to speak up.

“Maybe I’m putting my kids at risk by doing this,” she added. “And I’m doing it anyway because I couldn’t live with myself otherwise.”

Associated Press Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard contributed to this report.

By JOSH FUNK, Associated Press

Authorities are investigating after a small plane crashed into the ocean 5 miles off the coast near San Diego with six people aboard.

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U.S. Coast Guard officials said a debris field was discovered near Point Loma Sunday afternoon and began searching for the wreckage in an area where the water is about 200 feet deep.

The Federal Aviation Administration said the twin-engine Cessna 414 crashed around 12:30 p.m. Sunday not long after it took off. Flight tracking website, Flightaware.com, showed that the plane was bound for Phoenix.

The National Transportation Safety Board and FAA confirmed they are investigating the crash.