Ripped from the Headlines: June 2025: This Week in Words: Current Events Vocab for June 1–June 7, 2025

A government report on children’s health included citations to scientific papers that did not exist. The Make America Healthy Again Commission released what it called a "clear, evidence-based foundation" for actions to help make kids healthier. After reporters found references to fictional research studies on mental illness, medications, and drug advertising, the White House issued a new, corrected version. Experts said that AI may have been used to write at least part of the report.

After a 10-pound mini dachshund named Valerie was lost in the Australian bush during a camping trip, her owners spent months searching for the tiny dog. Georgia Gardner and Josh Fishlock eventually lost hope that Valerie could have survived, but 529 days after her disappearance, she was found. An ebullient reunion with her relieved and joyful owners followed. Ebullient first meant "boiling," from a Latin root meaning "bubble," and came to mean "bubbling with enthusiasm."

A survey showed that 34 percent of U.S. citizens would move to another country if they could. Americans interested in being expatriates gave various reasons for wishing to live elsewhere; about half cited the country's divisive politics, and 60 percent said they think the U.S. is too conservative. The most popular countries for American expats are Portugal, Spain, and Mexico. The meaning of expatriate changed from "banished person" to "person who lives abroad" around 1902.

Herpetologists in South Africa found a rare gecko that many had assumed was extinct — or imaginary. The Blyde River flat gecko was first recorded in 1991, then never seen again, leading to suspicions that it had never existed in the first place. Two reptile experts were flown by helicopter to the remote area where the gecko had been reported; they spotted more than 30 flat geckos, and photographed seven. The Greek root of herpetologist is herpeton, "creeping thing."

This year, a clinical trial will test a nasal spray containing a monoclonal antibody in patients with Alzheimer's. Seventy-year-old Alzheimer's patient Joe Walsh became the first person to receive the treatment, which is aimed at reducing inflammation in his brain. The drug is also being tested on people with inflammatory diseases like multiple sclerosis, in which the immune system overreacts to an injury or infection. Inflammation is from a Latin root meaning "set on fire."

Gerry Adams, the former president of Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican party, won a libel case against the BBC. Adams argued that a documentary produced by the British broadcaster damaged his reputation by falsely claiming he was a member of the militant IRA and had authorized a 2006 murder. The jury agreed with Adams, finding that the BBC defamed him in a 2016 episode of its Spotlight series and in an accompanying print article, and awarded him €100,000 ($113,000) in damages.

Composer Paola Prestini's new opera Sensorium Ex features two nonverbal actors. She and librettist Brenda Shaughnessy created a character whose disability means he's unable to speak, a role shared by one performer with autism and apraxia and another with cerebral palsy. Prestini used AI to create a voice for the character, which the actors can manipulate to add their own emphasis and emotion. Nonverbal comes from non-, "not," and the Latin verb, "word."

A new tickle lab in the Netherlands will exclusively be used to study the tickling reflex. Scientists say a better understanding of the involuntary physical response to the sensation of being tickled by another person can benefit many other subjects in neuroscience. Researchers plan to investigate the way tickling is interpreted by the nervous system in children and adults, as well as the mystery of why we can't tickle ourselves.

A person described as "suffering from mental illness" damaged two ancient Chinese terra cotta warriors in a burial pit at a museum in Xi’an. The man scaled a fence and jumped down onto the figures, which were made from reddish-brown clay and fired in kilns around 209 BCE. The exhibit at Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum contains 8,000 members of the terra cotta army, along with their horses. In Italian, terra cotta means "cooked earth."

Federal crews have cleaned up most of the homes and buildings that burned in January's Los Angeles fires, but there are still dangerous toxins on at least a quarter of the properties. It's the fastest wildfire cleanup in history, with debris from 16,000 damaged buildings on track to be removed by July. Critics say the process was much too hasty, leaving contaminated material in the soil. Toxin is from the Greek toxikon (pharmakon), "poison for use on arrows."