Science + Tech – The Conversation

Women have been mapping the world for centuries – and now they’re speaking up for the people left out of those maps

2026-02-04T13:45:00Z

Gladys West, right, developed the mathematical models behind GPS. U.S. Navy/Wikimedia Commons

Although women have always been part of the mapping landscape, their contributions to cartography have long been overlooked.

Mapmaking has traditionally featured men, from Mercator’s projection of the world in the 1500s to land surveyors such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson mapping property in the 1700s, to Roger Tomlinson’s development of geographic information systems in the 1960s. Cartography and related geospatial technologies fields continue to be male-dominated.

But as a geographer and specialist in geographic information systems, I have observed how opportunities for women as mapmakers have changed over the past five decades. The advent of technologies such as geographic information systems has increased education, employment and research opportunities for women, making mapmaking more accessible.

The female landscape

Women have long been essential to how people see and understand the world. The concept of Mother Earth or Mother Nature as the center of the universe and source of all life spans Indigenous cultures around the globe.

In the 20th century, the scientific community and environmental activists adopted the term Gaia – the Greek goddess personifying the Earth, the mother of all deities – to reflect the notion of the Earth as a living system. Gaia is represented as female and understood as a guiding force in maintaining the atmosphere, oceans and climate.

The representation of land as woman was reshaped with the rise of nationalism when the terms “fatherland” and “motherland”took on distinct meanings. Fatherland implied heritage and tradition, while motherland suggests place of birth and sense of belonging. These gendered constructs appear across cultures.

Europa Regina (1570). Sebastian Münster/Wikimedia Commons

Another aspect of the gendered nature of cartography is the way maps used female forms to portray features. Anthropomorphic maps from the 16th through 19th centuries demonstrate how cartographers used female figures to depict European countries. For example, cartographer Johannes Putsch’s “Europa Regina,” originally drawn in 1537, set the template for later maps in which nations are depicted as women in various poses and different states of dress – or undress – though they don’t actually correspond closely to the actual shapes of real landforms.

These maps reflect shifting cultural and political meanings attached to territory and power. The female landscape, or woman as map, is often used to portray countries as active, aggressive or supine, depending upon the status of the nation state in relation to war and peace and the stereotypes of a country.

Technology and women’s roles in mapmaking

While the technical contributions women have made to mapping span the entire history of cartography, they are difficult to identify and document. But a closer look reveals the variety of roles women have played in mapmaking.

One of the earliest known examples of a map made by a woman dates to the fourth century, when the sister of the prime minister of the Han Dynasty in China embroidered a map on silk.

During the 15th and 16th centuries, women were employed to color maps and contribute artistic details to borders. Many women cartographers used only a first initial and last name, obscuring their gender and making their work difficult to trace.

The 18th century brought the advent of printing, which opened new avenues for women to participate as engravers of copper plates, publishers of maps, and globemakers.

By the 19th century, cartography became part of formal education for women in North America, where the intersection of embroidery and geography produced fabric globes and linen maps. This was later followed by drawing and coloring maps as access to paper and pencils improved.

World War II ushered in a new era of opportunity for women in the U.S., as they were recruited to fill critical roles in cartographic development while men were sent to war. Known as Millie the Mapper or the Military Mapping Maidens, women produced topographic maps, interpreted aerial photography and helped advance photogrammetry, the use of photos to make 3D models of the Earth’s topography.

The ‘Military Mapping Maidens’ created tens of thousands of maps during World War II. Alfred T Palmer/Office of War Information via Library of Congress

Building on the expanding role of women in cartography, in the 1950s Evelyn Pruitt of the U.S. Office of Naval Research coined the term remote sensing, referring to the use of satellite imagery to observe, measure and map the Earth. In the same period, mathematician Gladys West developed the mathematical models for global positioning systems, known as GPS.

Women creating the maps

Women have also overseen the creation of maps in a number of ways.

Indigenous matriarchal societies expressed spatial information through different forms of cartography. These includes songs, dances and rituals that identified important communal resources such as springs, sacred groves and migration paths.

The development of European cartography was driven by the Age of Exploration from the 15th to 17th centuries and entrepreneurial activities associated with reproducing and selling maps. Women often assumed these roles after the deaths of their husbands, ensuring the continuation of family businesses.

Not only kings but queens also directed what maps were needed. For example, Queen Elizabeth I commissioned the 1579 Atlas of England and Wales, one of the first national atlases. It rendered a map of the entire country, accessible from home or a reading room.

Women setting the direction of maps

While early maps positioned women primarily as symbolic bodies to project political meaning or as supporters of larger mapping enterprises, contemporary cartography reveals a different dynamic between gender and maps: There is a lack of geographic data on issues affecting women, including health, safety and planning for the future.

For example, women are disproportionately affected by disasters, including through a heightened risk of experiencing gender-based violence. Geographic analyses reveal a persistent gender gap in datasets, which often lack information on women’s health and daily needs, reproductive services or child care centers.

Studies have shown that the development of geospatial technologies and open mapping platforms are dominated by men. In situations such as disasters, having a diversity of perspectives in mapmaking is essential to serving the needs of the community.

Millions of people are missing from maps.

Creating maps that specifically reflect women’s needs is foundational for women to fully participate in 21st-century mapmaking. In the past decade, several programs and organizations have been working to reflect women’s contributions to cartography and demonstrate how collective action can make a difference.

For example, African Women in GIS hosts workshops to elevate women’s perspectives and mapping needs, putting mobile mapping technology in women’s hands. GeoChicas and YouthMappers’ Let Girls Map empower women to make maps through training and education that address the digital divide. Women in GIS and Women+ in Geospatial build community in mapmaking through professional networks. Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team amplifies women’s voices to inform geospatial approaches to mapmaking and empowering women’s mapmaking contributions.

Never have there been more opportunities for women to participate in mapmaking, and never has women’s role in mapmaking been as important to address the intractable issues societies face around the world.

Melinda Laituri does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

‘Inoculation’ helps people spot political deepfakes, study finds

2026-02-04T13:35:07Z

Can figurative inoculations ward off the scourge of political deepfakes? Canonmark/iStock via Getty Images

Informing people about political deepfakes through text-based information and interactive games both improve people’s ability to spot AI-generated video and audio that falsely depict politicians, according to a study my colleagues and I conducted.

Although researchers have focused primarily on advancing technologies for detecting deepfakes, there is also a need for approaches that address the potential audiences for political deepfakes. Deepfakes are becoming increasingly difficult to identify, verify and combat as artificial intelligence technology improves.

Is it possible to inoculate the public to detect deepfakes, thereby increasing their awareness before exposure? My recent research with fellow media studies researchers Sang Jung Kim and Alex Scott at the Visual Media Lab at the University of Iowa has found that inoculation messages can help people recognize deepfakes and even make people more willing to debunk them.

Inoculation theory proposes that psychological inoculation – analogous to getting a medical vaccination – can immunize people against persuasive attacks. The idea is that by explaining to people how deepfakes work, they become primed to recognize them when they encounter them.

In our experiment, we exposed one-third of participants to passive inoculation: traditional text-based warning messages about the threat and the characteristics of deepfakes. We exposed another third to active inoculation: an interactive game that challenged participants to identify deepfakes. The remaining third were given no inoculation.

Participants were then randomly shown either a deepfake video featuring Joe Biden making pro-abortion rights statements or a deepfake video featuring Donald Trump making anti-abortion rights statements. We found that both types of inoculation were effective in reducing the credibility participants gave to the deepfakes, while also increasing people’s awareness and intention to learn more about them.

Why it matters

Deepfakes are a serious threat to democracy because they use AI to create very realistic fake audio and video. These deepfakes can make politicians appear to say things they never actually said, which can damage public trust and cause people to believe false information. For example, some voters in New Hampshire received a phone call that sounded like Joe Biden, telling them not to vote in the state’s primary election.

This deepfake video of President Donald Trump, from a dataset of deepfake videos collected by the MIT Media Lab, was used in this study about helping people spot such AI-generated fakes.

Because AI technology is becoming more common, it is especially important to find ways to reduce the harmful effects of deepfakes. Recent research shows that labeling deepfakes with fact-checking statements is often not very effective, especially in political contexts. People tend to accept or reject fact-checks based on their existing political beliefs. In addition, false information often spreads faster than accurate information, making fact-checking too slow to fully stop the impact of false information.

As a result, researchers are increasingly calling for new ways to prepare people to resist misinformation in advance. Our research contributes to developing more effective strategies to help people resist AI-generated misinformation.

What other research is being done

Most research on inoculation against misinformation relies on passive media literacy approaches that mainly provide text-based messages. However, more recent studies show that active inoculation can be more effective. For example, online games that involve active participation have been shown to help people resist violent extremist messages.

In addition, most previous research has focused on protecting people from text-based misinformation. Our study instead examines inoculation against multimodal misinformation, such as deepfakes that combine video, audio and images. Although we expected active inoculation to work better for this type of misinformation, our findings show that both passive and active inoculation can help people cope with the threat of deepfakes.

What’s next

Our research shows that inoculation messages can help people recognize and resist deepfakes, but it is still unclear whether these effects last over time. In future studies, we plan to examine the long-term effect of inoculation messages.

We also aim to explore whether inoculation works in other areas beyond politics, including health. For example, how would people respond if a deepfake showed a fake doctor spreading health misinformation? Would earlier inoculation messages help people question and resist such content?

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Bingbing Zhang receives funding from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa.

Certain brain injuries may be linked to violent crime – identifying them could help reveal how people make moral choices

2026-02-03T13:30:55Z

Neurological evidence is widely used in murder trials, but it’s often unclear how to interpret it. gorodenkoff/iStock via Getty Images Plus

On Oct. 25, 2023, a 40-year old man named Robert Card opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at a bowling alley and nearby bar in Lewiston, Maine, killing 18 people and wounding 13 others. Card was found dead by suicide two days later. His autopsy revealed extensive damage to the white matter of his brain thought to be related to a traumatic brain injury, which some neurologists proposed may have played a role in his murderous actions.

Neurological evidence such as magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, is widely used in court to show whether and to what extent brain damage induced a person to commit a violent act. That type of evidence was introduced in 12% of all murder trials and 25% of death penalty trials between 2014 and 2024. But it’s often unclear how such evidence should be interpreted because there’s no agreement on what specific brain injuries could trigger behavioral shifts that might make someone more likely to commit crimes.

We are two behavioral neurologists and a philosopher of neuroscience who have been collaborating over the past six years to investigate whether damage to specific regions of the brain might be somehow contributing to people’s decision to commit seemingly random acts of violence – as Card did.

With new technologies that go beyond simply visualizing the brain to analyze how different brain regions are connected, neuroscientists can now examine specific brain regions involved in decision-making and how brain damage may predispose a person to criminal conduct. This work may in turn shed light on how exactly the brain plays a role in people’s capacity to make moral choices.

Linking brain and behavior

The observation that brain damage can cause changes to behavior stretches back hundreds of years. In the 1860s, the French physician Paul Broca was one of the first in the history of modern neurology to link a mental capacity to a specific brain region. Examining the autopsied brain of a man who had lost the ability to speak after a stroke, Broca found damage to an area roughly beneath the left temple.

Broca could study his patients’ brains only at autopsy. So he concluded that damage to this single area caused the patient’s speech loss – and therefore that this area governs people’s ability to produce speech. The idea that cognitive functions were localized to specific brain areas persisted for well over a century, but researchers today know the picture is more complicated.

Researchers use powerful brain imaging technologies to identify how specific brain areas are involved in a variety of behaviors.

As brain imaging tools such as MRI have improved since the early 2000s it’s become increasingly possible to safely visualize people’s brains in stunning detail while they are alive. Meanwhile, other techniques for mapping connections between brain regions have helped reveal coordinated patterns of activity across a network of brain areas related to certain mental tasks.

With these tools, investigators can detect areas that have been damaged by brain disorders, such as strokes, and test whether that damage can be linked to specific changes in behavior. Then they can explore how that brain region interacts with others in the same network to get a more nuanced view of how the brain regulates those behaviors.

This approach can be applied to any behavior, including crime and immorality.

White matter and criminality

Complex human behaviors emerge from interacting networks that are made up of two types of brain tissue: gray matter and white matter.Gray matter consists of regions of nerve cell bodies and branching nerve fibers called dendrites, as well as points of connection between nerve cells. It’s in these areas that the brain’s heavy computational work is done. White matter, so named because of a pale, fatty substance called myelin that wraps the bundles of nerves, carries information between gray matter areas like highways in the brain.

Brain imaging studies of criminality going back to 2009 have suggested that damage to a swath of white matter called the right uncinate fasciculus is somehow involved when people commit violent acts. This tract connects the right amygdala, an almond-shaped structure deep in the brain involved in emotional processing, with the right orbitofrontal cortex, a region in the front of the brain involved in complex decision-making. However, it wasn’t clear from these studies whether damage to this tract caused people to commit crimes or was just a coincidence.

In a 2025 study, we analyzed 17 cases from the medical literature in which people with no criminal history committed crimes such as murder, assault and rape after experiencing brain damage from a stroke, tumor or traumatic brain injury. We first mapped the location of damage in their brains using an atlas of brain circuitry derived from people whose brains were uninjured. Then we compared imaging of the damage with brain imaging from more than 700 people who had not committed crimes but who had a brain injury causing a different symptom, such as memory loss or depression.

Brain injuries that may play a role in violent criminal behavior damage white matter connections in the brain, shown here in orange and yellow, especially a specific tract called the right uncinate fasciculus. Isaiah Kletenik, CC BY-NC-ND

In the people who committed crimes, we found the brain region that popped up the most often was the right uncinate fasciculus. Our study aligns with past research in linking criminal behavior to this brain area, but the way we conducted it makes our findings more definitive: These people committed their crimes only after they sustained their brain injuries, which suggests that damage to the right uncinate fasciculus played a role in triggering their criminal behavior.

These findings have an intriguing connection to research on morality. Other studies have found a link between strokes that damaged the right uncinate fasciculus with loss of empathy, suggesting this tract somehow regulates emotions that affect moral conduct. Meanwhile, other work has shown that people with psychopathy, which often aligns with immoral behavior, have abnormalities in their amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex regions that are directly connected by the uncinate fasciculus.

Neuroscientists are now testing whether the right uncinate fasciculus may be synthesizing information within a network of brain regions dedicated to moral values.

Making sense of it all

As intriguing as these findings are, it is important to note that many people with damage to their right uncinate fasciculus do not commit violent crimes. Similarly, most people who commit crimes do not have damage to this tract. This means that even if damage to this area can contribute to criminality, it’s only one of many possible factors underlying it.

Still, knowing that neurological damage to a specific brain structure can increase a person’s risk of committing a violent crime can be helpful in various contexts. For example, it can help the legal system assess neurological evidence when judging criminal responsibility. Similarly, doctors may be able to use this knowledge to develop specific interventions for people with brain disorders or injuries.

More broadly, understanding the neurological roots of morality and moral decision-making provides a bridge between science and society, revealing constraints that define how and why people make choices.

Isaiah Kletenik receives funding from the NIH.

Nothing to disclose.

Christopher M. Filley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

A human tendency to value expertise, not just sheer power, explains how some social hierarchies form

2026-02-03T13:30:36Z

Leaders can seem to emerge from the group naturally, based on their skill and expertise. Hiraman/E+ via Getty Images

Born on the same day, Bill and Ben both grew up to have high status. But in every other way they were polar opposites.

As children, Bill was well-liked, with many friends, while Ben was a bully, picking on smaller kids. During adolescence, Bill earned a reputation for athleticism and intelligence. Ben, flanked by his henchmen, was seen as formidable and dangerous. In adulthood, Bill was admired for his decision-making and diplomacy, but Ben was feared for his aggression and intransigence.

People sought out Bill’s company and listened to his advice. Ben was avoided, but he got his way through force.

How did Ben get away with this? Well, there’s one more difference: Bill is a human, and Ben is a chimp.

This hypothetical story of Bill and Ben highlights a deep difference between human and animal social life. Many mammals exhibit dominance hierarchies; forms of inequality in which stronger individuals use strength, aggression and allies to get better access to food or mating opportunities.

Human societies are more peaceable but not necessarily more equal. We have hierarchies, too – leaders, captains and bosses. Does this mean we are no more than clothed apes, our domineering tendencies cloaked under superficial civility?

I’m an evolutionary anthropologist, part of a team of researchers who set out to come to grips with the evolutionary history of human social life and inequality.

Building on decades of discoveries, our work supports the idea that human societies are fundamentally different from those of other species. People can be coercive, but unlike other species, we also create hierarchies of prestige – voluntary arrangements that allocate labor and decision-making power according to expertise.

This tendency matters because it can inform how we, as a society, think about the kinds of social hierarchies that emerge in a workplace, on a sports team or across society more broadly. Prestige hierarchies can be steep, with clear differences between high and low status. But when they work well, they can form part of a healthy group life from which everyone benefits.

In other primates, leaders secure their dominant roles with physical strength and aggression. Anup Shah/DigitalVision via Getty Images

Equal by nature?

Primate-style dominance hierarchies, along with the aggressive displays and fights that build them, are so alien to most humans that some researchers have concluded our species simply doesn’t “do” hierarchy. Add to this the limited archaeological evidence for wealth differences prior to farming, and a picture emerges of humans as a peaceful and egalitarian species, at least until agriculture upended things 12,000 years ago.

But new evidence tells a more interesting story. Even the most egalitarian groups, such as the Ju/‘hoansi and Hadza in Africa or Tsimané in South America, still show subtle inequalities in status, influence and power. And these differences matter: High-ranking men get their pick of partners, sometimes multiple partners, and go on to have more children. Archaeologists have also uncovered sites that display wealth differences even without agriculture.

So, are we more like other species than we might care to imagine, or is there still something different about human societies?

Dominance and prestige

One oddity is in how human hierarchies form. In other animals, fighting translates physical strength into dominance. In humans, however, people often happily defer to leaders, even seeking them out. This deference creates hierarchies of prestige, not dominance.

Why do people do this? One current hypothesis is that we, uniquely, live in a world that relies on complex technologies, teaching and cooperation. In this world, expertise matters. Some people know how to build a kayak; others don’t. Some people can organize a team to build a house; others need someone else to organize them. Some people are great hunters; others couldn’t catch a cold.

In a world like this, everyone keeps an eye out for who has the skills and knowledge they need. Adept individuals can translate their ability into power and status. But, crucially, this status benefits everyone, not just the person on top.

That’s the theory, but where’s the evidence?

People pay attention to those who are skilled. Virojt Changyencham/Moment via Getty Images

There are plenty of anthropological accounts of skillful people earning social status and bullies being quickly cut down. Lab studies have also found that people do keep an eye on how well others are doing, what they’re good at, and even whom others are paying attention to, and they use this to guide their own information-seeking.

What my colleagues and I wanted to do was investigate how these everyday decisions might lead to larger-scale hierarchies of status and influence.

From theory to practice

In a perfect world, we’d monitor whole societies for decades, mapping individual decisions to social consequences. In reality, this kind of study is impossible, so my team turned to a classic tool in evolutionary research: computer models. In place of real-world populations, we can build digital ones and watch their history play out in milliseconds instead of years.

In these simulated worlds, virtual people copied each other, watched whom others were learning from and accrued prestige. The setup was simple, but a clear pattern emerged: The stronger the tendency to seek out prestigious people, the steeper social influence hierarchies became.

Each dot represents a simulated person, sized according to their social influence. When prestige psychology is weak, most dots are of medium size, corresponding to an egalitarian group. When prestige psychology is strong, a handful of extremely prominent leaders emerge, as shown by the very large dots. The color of the dots corresponds to the beliefs of the simulated people. In egalitarian groups, beliefs are fluid and spread across the group. With hierarchical groups, leaders end up surrounded by like-minded followers.

Below a threshold, societies stayed mostly egalitarian; above it, they were led by a powerful few. In other words, “prestige psychology” – the mental machinery that guides whom people learn from – creates a societal tipping point.

The next step was to bring real humans into the lab and measure their tendency to follow prestigious leaders. This can tell us whether we, as a species, fall above or below the tipping point – that is, whether our psychology favors egalitarian or hierarchical groups.

To do this, my colleagues and I put participants into small groups and gave them problems to solve. We recorded whom participants listened to, and let them know whom their group mates were learning from, and we used this information to find the value of the human “hierarchy-forming” tendency. It was high – well above the tipping point for hierarchies to emerge, and our experimental groups ended up with clear leaders.

One doubt lingered: Our volunteers were from the modern United States. Can they really tell us about the whole human species?

Rather than repeat the study across dozens of cultures, we returned to modeling. This time, we let prestige psychology evolve. Each simulated person had their own tendency for how much they deferred to prestige. It guided their actions, affected their fitness and was passed on to their children with minor mutations.

Over thousands of generations, natural selection identified the most successful psychology: a sensitivity to prestige nearly identical to that we measured in real humans – and strong enough to produce the same sharp hierarchies.

Inequality for everyone?

In other primates, being at the bottom of the social ladder can be brutal, with routine harassment and bullying by group mates. Thankfully, human prestige hierarchies look nothing like this. Even without any coercion, people often choose to follow skilled or respected individuals because good leadership makes life easier for everyone. Natural selection, it seems, has favored the psychology that makes this possible.

Of course, reality is messier than any model or lab experiment. Our simulations and experiment didn’t allow for coercion or bullying, and so they give an optimistic view of how human societies might work – not how they do.

In the real world, leaders can selfishly abuse their authority or simply fail to deliver collective benefits. Even in our experiment, some groups rallied around below-average teammates, the snowballing tendency of prestige swamping signs of their poor ability. Leaders should always be held to account for the outcomes of their choices, and an evolutionary basis to prestige does not justify the oppression of the powerless by the powerful.

So hierarchies remain a double-edged sword. Human societies are unique in the benefits that hierarchies can bring to followers, but the old forces of dominance and exploitation have not disappeared. Still, the fact that natural selection favored a psychology that drives voluntary deference and powerful leaders suggests that, most of the time, prestige hierarchies are worth the risks. When they work well, we all reap the rewards.

Thomas Morgan has received research funding from DARPA, the NSF and the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

NASA’s Artemis II plans to send a crew around the Moon to test equipment and lay the groundwork for a future landing

2026-02-03T13:30:17Z

A banner signed by NASA employees and contractors outside Launch Complex 39B, where NASA’s Artemis II rocket is visible in the background. NASA/Joel Kowsky, CC BY-NC-ND

Almost as tall as a football field, NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and capsule stack traveled slowly – just under 1 mile per hour – out to the Artemis II launchpad, its temporary home at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, on Jan. 17, 2026. That slow crawl is in stark contrast to the peak velocity it will reach on launch day, over 22,000 miles per hour, when it will send a crew of four on a journey around the Moon.

A rocket launch is always at the mercy of a variety of factors outside of the launch team’s control – from the literal position of the planets down to flocks of birds or rogue boats near the launchpad. While Artemis II is currently planned for March 2026, it may not launch until later in April. In fact, March already represents a small delay from the initially estimated February launch opportunity.

Artemis II’s goal is to send people to pass by the Moon and be sure all engineering systems are tested in space before Artemis III, which will land astronauts near the lunar south pole.

If Artemis II is successful, it will be the first time any person has been back to the Moon since 1972, when Apollo 17 left to return to Earth. The Artemis II astronauts will fly by the far side of the Moon before returning home. While they won’t land on the surface, they will provide the first human eyes on the lunar far side since the 20th century.

To put this in perspective, no one under the age of about 54 has yet lived in a world where humans were that far away from Earth. The four astronauts will orbit the Moon on a 10-day voyage and return through a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. As a planetary geologist, I’m excited for the prospect of people eventually returning to the Moon to do fieldwork on the first stepping stone away from Earth’s orbit.

A walkthrough of the Artemis II mission, which plans to take a crew around the Moon.

Why won’t Artemis II land on the Moon?

If you wanted to summit Mount Everest, you would first test out your equipment and check to make sure everything works before heading up the mountain. A lunar landing is similar. Testing all the components of the launch system and crew vehicle is a critical part of returning people safely to the surface of the Moon and then flying them back to Earth.

And compared to the lunar surface, Everest is a tropical paradise.

NASA has accomplished lunar landings before, but the 54-year hiatus means that most of the engineers who worked on Apollo have retired. Only four of the 12 astronauts who have walked on the Moon are still alive.

Technology now is also vastly different. The Apollo lunar landing module’s computer only had about 4 kilobytes of RAM. A single typical iPhone photo is a few megabytes in size, over 1,000 times larger than the Apollo lunar landing module’s memory.

The two components of the Artemis II project are the rocket (the Space Launch System) and the crew capsule. Both have had a long road to the launchpad.

The Orion capsule was developed as part of the Constellation program, announced in 2005 and concluded in 2010. This program was a President George W. Bush-era attempt to move people beyond the space shuttle and International Space Station.

The Space Launch System started development in the early 2010s as a replacement vehicle for the Ares rocket, which was meant to be used with the Orion capsule in the Constellation program. The SLS rocket was used in 2022 for the Artemis I launch, which flew around the Moon without a crew. Boeing is the main contractor tasked with building the SLS, though over 1,000 separate vendors have been involved in the rocket’s fabrication.

The Apollo program, too, first sent a crewed capsule around the Moon without landing. Apollo 8, the first crewed spacecraft to leave Earth orbit, launched and returned home in December 1968. William Anders, one of the astronauts on board tasked with testing the components of the Apollo lunar spacecraft, captured the iconic “Earthrise” image during the mission.

The Apollo 8 ‘Earthrise’ image, showing the Earth over the horizon from the Moon. This image, acquired by William Anders, became famous for its portrayal of the Earth in its planetary context. NASA

“Earthrise” was the first time people were able to look back at the Earth as part of a spacefaring species. The Earthrise image has been reproduced in a variety of contexts, including on a U.S. postage stamp. It fundamentally reshaped how people thought of their environment. Earth is still far and beyond the most habitable location in the solar system for life as we know it.

Unique Artemis II science

The Artemis II astronauts will be the first to see the lunar far side since the final Apollo astronauts left over 50 years ago. From the window of the Orion capsule, the Moon will appear at its largest to be about the size of a beach ball held at arm’s length.

Over the past decades, scientists have used orbiting satellites to image much of the lunar surface. Much imaging of the lunar surface has been accomplished, especially at high spatial resolution, by the lunar reconnaissance orbiter camera, LROC.

LROC is made up of a few different cameras. The LROC’s wide angle and narrow angle cameras have both captured images of more than 90% of the lunar surface. The LROC Wide Angle Camera has a resolution on the lunar surface of about 100 meters per pixel – with each pixel in the image being about the length of an American football field.

The LROC narrow angle camera provides about 0.5 to 2 meters per pixel resolution. This means the average person would fit within about the length of one pixel from the narrow angle camera’s orbital images. It can clearly see large rocks and the Apollo lunar landing sites.

If the robotic LROC has covered most of the lunar surface, why should the human crew of Artemis II look at it, at lower resolution?

Most images from space are not what would be considered “true” color, as seen by the human eye. Just like how the photos you take of an aurora in the night sky with a cellphone camera appear more dramatic than with the naked eye, the image depends on the wavelengths the detection systems are sensitive to.

Human astronauts will see the lunar surface in different colors than LROC. And something that human astronauts have that an orbital camera system cannot have is geology training. The Artemis II astronauts will make observations of the lunar far side and almost instantly interpret and adjust their observations.

The proceeding mission, Artemis III, which will include astronauts landing on the lunar surface, is currently scheduled to launch by 2028.

What’s next for Artemis II

The Artemis II crew capsule and SLS rocket are now waiting on the launchpad. Before launch, NASA still needs to complete several final checks, including testing systems while the rocket is fueled. These systems include the emergency exit for the astronauts in case something goes wrong, as well as safely moving fuel, which is made of hydrazine – a molecule made up of nitrogen and hydrogen that is incredibly energy-dense.

Completing these checks follows the old aerospace adage of “test like you fly.” They will ensure that the Artemis II astronauts have everything working on the ground before departing for the Moon.

Editor’s note: This article was updated on Feb. 3, 2026, to represent the next possible launch window shifting into March.

Margaret Landis receives research funding from NASA. She is affiliated with the Planetary Society as a member for over 20 years.

Building with air – how nature’s hole-filled blueprints shape manufacturing

2026-02-03T13:29:57Z

Engineers use structures found in nature – like the honeycomb – to create lightweight, sturdy materials. Matthew T. Rader, CC BY-NC-SA

If you break open a chicken bone, you won’t find a solid mass of white material inside. Instead, you will see a complex, spongelike network of tiny struts and pillars, and a lot of empty space.

It looks fragile, yet that internal structure allows a bird’s wing to withstand high winds while remaining light enough for flight. Nature rarely builds with solid blocks. Instead, it builds with clever, porous patterns to maximize strength while minimizing weight.

Cross-section of the bone of a bird’s skull: Holes keep the material light enough that the bird can fly, but it’s still sturdy. Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library via Getty Images

Human engineers have always envied this efficiency. You can see it in the hexagonal perfection of a honeycomb, which uses the least amount of wax to store the most honey, and in the internal spiraling architecture of seashells that resist crushing pressures.

For centuries, however, manufacturing limitations meant engineers couldn’t easily copy these natural designs. Traditional manufacturing has usually been subtractive, meaning it starts with a heavy block of metal that is carved down, or formative, which entails pouring liquid plastic into a mold. Neither method can easily create complex, spongelike interiors hidden inside a solid shell.

If engineers wanted to make a part stronger, they generally had to make it thicker and heavier. This approach is often inefficient, wastes material and results in heavier products that require more energy to transport.

I am a mechanical engineer and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, where I research the intersection of advanced manufacturing and biology. For several years, my work has focused on using additive manufacturing to create materials that, like a bird’s wing, are both incredibly light and capable of handling intense physical stress. While these “holey” designs have existed in nature for millions of years, it is only recently that 3D printing has made it possible for us to replicate them in the lab.

The invisible architecture

That paradigm changed with the maturation of additive manufacturing, commonly known as 3D printing, when it evolved from a niche prototyping tool into a robust industrial force. While the technology was first patented in the 1980s, it truly took off over the past decade as it became capable of producing end-use parts for high-stakes industries like aerospace and health care.

3D printing makes it far easier to manufacture lightweight, hole-filled materials. kynny/iStock via Getty Images

Instead of cutting away material, printers build objects layer by layer, depositing plastic or metal powder only exactly where it’s needed based on a digital file. This technology unlocked a new frontier in materials science focused on mesostructures.

A mesostructure represents the in-between scale. It is not the microscopic atomic makeup of the material, nor is it the macroscopic overall shape of the object, like a whole shoe. It is the internal architecture, including the engineered pattern of air and material hidden inside.

It’s the difference between a solid brick and the intricate iron latticework of the Eiffel Tower. Both are strong, but one uses vastly less material to achieve that strength because of how the empty space is arranged.

From the lab to your closet

While the concept of using additive manufacturing to create parts that take advantage of mesostructures started in research labs around the year 2000, consumers are now seeing these bio-inspired designs in everyday products.

The footwear industry is a prime example. If you look closely at the soles of certain high-end running shoes, you won’t see a solid block of foam. Instead, you will see a complex, weblike lattice structure that looks suspiciously like the inside of a bird bone. This printed design mimics the springiness and weight distribution found in natural porous structures, offering tuned performance that solid foam cannot match.

Engineers use the same principle to improve safety gear. Modern bike helmets and football helmet liners are beginning to replace traditional foam padding with 3D-printed lattices. These tiny, repeating jungle gym structures are designed to crumple and rebound to absorb the energy more efficiently than solid materials, much like how the porous bone inside your own skull protects your brain.

Testing the limits

In my research, I look for the rules nature uses to build strong objects.

For example, seashells are tough because they are built like a brick wall, with hard mineral blocks held together by a thin layer of stretchy glue. This pattern allows the hard bricks to slide past each other instead of snapping when put under pressure. The shell absorbs energy and stops cracks from spreading, which makes the final structure much tougher than a solid piece of the same material.

I use advanced computer models to crush thousands of virtual designs to see exactly when and how they fail. I have even used neural networks, a type of artificial intelligence, to find the best patterns for absorbing energy.

My studies have shown that a wavy design can be very effective, especially when we fine-tune the thickness of the lines and the number of turns in the pattern. By finding these perfect combinations, we can design products that fail gradually and safely – much like the crumple zone on the front of a car.

By understanding the mechanics of these structures, engineers can tailor them for specific jobs, making one area of a product stiff and another area flexible within a single continuous printed part.

The sustainable future

Beyond performance, mimicking nature’s less-is-more approach is a significant win for sustainability. By “printing air” into the internal structure of a product, manufacturers can use significantly less raw material while maintaining the necessary strength.

As industrial 3D printing becomes faster and cheaper, manufacturing will move further away from the solid-block era and closer to the elegant efficiency of the biological world. Nature has spent millions of years perfecting these blueprints through evolution – and engineers are finally learning how to read them.

Anne Schmitz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

From ski jumping to speedskating, winter sports represent physics in action

2026-02-02T13:30:26Z

An understanding of angular momentum helps figure skaters glide across the ice and execute complex spins. AP Photo/Jeff Roberson

During the 2026 Winter Olympics, athletes will leap off ramps, slide across ice and spin through the air. These performances will look different to my students who have studied physics through sports. These feats will be something the students have already measured, modeled or felt. As a physicist, I help my students see the games as a place where classroom lessons come to life.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how abstract ideas such as kinematics, forces, energy, momentum and motion are understood in the real world. Recently, I listened to a meeting of the Clemson football team’s offense to gain an appreciation for what my student-athletes do. But I came out with an idea for a new introductory physics class.

While sitting in the back row, listening to the coach break down the Tigers’ upcoming game, I realized that I could understand every single word said, despite never having played football. Most of the guys were called Sam or Mike, and they continually talked about gaps and boxes. I knew the terminology. I followed the diagrams. I could repeat the language. And yet, I understood absolutely nothing about how that information translated into a strategy for winning the game.

It dawned on me that my confusion is likely similar to how many students experience physics. They can follow the individual pieces, equations, definitions and vocabulary, but they have trouble connecting those pieces to real-world meaning. Physics makes sense as a subject of study, yet it often seems disconnected from everyday life.

I created Clemson’s Physics of Sports class to close the gap. The course begins not with abstract problems or idealized systems, but with sports that people already care about. The class then reveals the physics that make those activities possible.

Physics in skiing

Many introductory, algebra-based physics courses have students study frictionless blocks sliding down imaginary planes. In my course, students analyze the newest Olympic sports.

Ski mountaineering, making its Olympic debut in 2026, requires athletes to climb steep, snow-covered slopes entirely under their own power. My students uncover an elegant physics problem involving friction, the force that resists sliding between surfaces.

Ski mountaineers use friction to go uphill before skiing down. AP Photo/Antonio Calanni

To accelerate uphill, the skis must experience a small amount of friction while moving in the forward direction. However, the same ski must provide enough friction in the opposite direction to prevent the skier from sliding back down the slope.

Skiers resolve this contradiction using climbing skins on their skis that are engineered to grip the snow in one direction while allowing smooth sliding in the opposite direction. In class, students examine how the skin material’s design helps climbers summit the mountain efficiently.

Students also look at how specialized materials assist in ski jumping.

The skintight suits skiers wear are not for aesthetics; they help control the physics of air. Loose fabric increases drag and can even generate lift, much like a wingsuit worn by skydivers. Tight-fitting clothing minimizes these effects, making competition fairer by leveling the field for all athletes.

The tight suits ski jumpers wear prevent them from gaining an unfair advantage by using drag and lift from loose fabric. AP Photo/Matthias Schrader

Physics in skating

When it comes to skating, small changes in physics can set medalists apart from the rest of the field. In class, students investigate how speedskaters can lean dramatically toward the ice without falling by analyzing their centripetal acceleration and the forces acting on their bodies during high-speed turns. Centripetal acceleration is the accelerating force directed toward the center of a turn. It keeps the skater moving in a curved path rather than moving along a straight path.

Figure skating provides another striking example where small changes in body positioning can dramatically affect the athlete’s performance. Angular momentum, which describes how much rotational motion an object has, depends on both how fast the object spins and how its mass is distributed. Angular momentum allows skaters to control how many times they spin in midair.

When a figure skater pulls their limbs in toward their torso, they spin faster. In physics, this concept is called the conservation of angular momentum. Sketchplanations, CC BY-NC

In class, students don’t just watch the elite athletes – they model these concepts with their own movements. By sitting on a rotating stool with weights in their outstretched hands, students emulate a figure skater by pulling their arms inward and spinning much faster as their mass moves closer to their axis of rotation.

Physics in action

By studying sports, students begin to see physics not as a collection of formulas but as a framework for understanding how the world works. A basic understanding of physics allows students to critically evaluate everyday claims, ranging from viral sports clips to misleading headlines and exaggerated performance claims.

In highlight reels, for example, athletes often appear to steer left or right after taking off on a jump. Physics students know that can’t be the case – once airborne, there is no way to change that path without pushing on something.

Elite athletic performances aren’t the only places to see physics in action, of course. The same principles underlie most everyday experiences. With sports as an entry point, students can learn a language that allows them to interpret the physical world around them.

Physics does not live only in textbooks or exams. It is written into every stride, turn and jump, at every level, from recreational activities to Olympic competitions.

Amy Pope does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Is the whole universe just a simulation?

2026-02-02T13:30:07Z

Could the Earth and everything on it – and even the whole universe – be a simulation running on a giant computer? OsakaWayne Studios/Moment via Getty Images

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.

Is the whole universe just a simulation? – Moumita B., age 13, Dhaka, Bangladesh

How do you know anything is real? Some things you can see directly, like your fingers. Other things, like your chin, you need a mirror or a camera to see. Other things can’t be seen, but you believe in them because a parent or a teacher told you, or you read it in a book.

As a physicist, I use sensitive scientific instruments and complicated math to try to figure out what’s real and what’s not. But none of these sources of information is entirely reliable: Scientific measurements can be wrong, my calculations can have errors, even your eyes can deceive you, like the dress that broke the internet because nobody could agree on what colors it was.

Because every source of information – even your teachers – can trick you some of the time, some people have always wondered whether we can ever trust any information.

If you can’t trust anything, are you sure you’re awake? Thousands of years ago, Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly and realized that he might actually be a butterfly dreaming he was a human. Plato wondered whether all we see could just be shadows of true objects. Maybe the world we live in our whole lives inside isn’t the real one, maybe it’s more like a big video game, or the movie “The Matrix.”

Are we living in a very sophisticated version of Minecraft? Tofli IV/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

The simulation hypothesis

The simulation hypothesis is a modern attempt to use logic and observations about technology to finally answer these questions and prove that we’re probably living in something like a giant video game. Twenty years ago, a philosopher named Nick Bostrom made such an argument based on the fact that video games, virtual reality and artificial intelligence were improving rapidly. That trend has continued, so that today people can jump into immersive virtual reality or talk to seemingly conscious artificial beings.

Bostrom projected these technological trends into the future and imagined a world in which we’d be able to realistically simulate trillions of human beings. He also suggested that if someone could create a simulation of you that seemed just like you from the outside, it would feel just like you inside, with all of your thoughts and feelings.

Suppose that’s right. Suppose that sometime in, say, the 31st century, humanity will be able to simulate whatever they want. Some of them will probably be fans of the 21st century and will run many different simulations of our world so that they can learn about us, or just be amused.

Here’s Bostrom’s shocking logical argument: If the 21st century planet Earth only ever existed one time, but it will eventually get simulated trillions of times, and if the simulations are so good that the people in the simulation feel just like real people, then you’re probably living on one of the trillions of simulations of the Earth, not on the one original Earth.

This argument would be even more convincing if you actually could run powerful simulations today, but as long as you believe that people will run those simulations someday, then you logically should believe that you’re probably living in one today.

Scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the simulation hypothesis and why he thinks the odds are about 50-50 we’re part of a virtual reality.

Signs we’re living in a simulation … or not

If we are living in a simulation, does that explain anything? Maybe the simulation has glitches, and that’s why your phone wasn’t where you were sure you left it, or how you knew something was going to happen before it did, or why that dress on the internet looked so weird.

There are more fundamental ways in which our world resembles a simulation. There is a particular length, much smaller than an atom, beyond which physicists’ theories about the universe break down. And we can’t see anything more than about 50 billion light-years away because the light hasn’t had time to reach us since the Big Bang. That sounds suspiciously like a computer game where you can’t see anything smaller than a pixel or anything beyond the edge of the screen.

Of course, there are other explanations for all of that stuff. Let’s face it: You might have misremembered where you put your phone. But Bostrom’s argument doesn’t require any scientific proof. It’s logically true as long as you really believe that many powerful simulations will exist in the future. That’s why famous scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and tech titans like Elon Musk have been convinced of it, though Tyson now puts the odds at 50-50.

Others of us are more skeptical. The technology required to run such large and realistic simulations is so powerful that Bostrom describes such simulators as godlike, and he admits that humanity may never get that good at simulations. Even though it is far from being resolved, the simulation hypothesis is an impressive logical and philosophical argument that has challenged our fundamental notions of reality and captured the imaginations of millions.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Zeb Rocklin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Grammys’ AI rules aim to keep music human, but large gray area leaves questions about authenticity and authorship

2026-01-30T13:28:44Z

AI is making it hard for the music industry to embrace innovation while keeping it real. elenabs/iStock via Getty Images

At its best, artificial intelligence can assist people in analyzing data, automating tasks and developing solutions to big problems: fighting cancer, hunger, poverty and climate change. At its worst, AI can assist people in exploiting other humans, damaging the environment, taking away jobs and eventually making ourselves lazy and less innovative.

Likewise, AI is both a boon and a bane for the music industry. As a recording engineer and professor of music technology and production, I see a large gray area in between.

The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences has taken steps to address AI in recognizing contributions and protecting creators. Specifically, the academy says, only humans are eligible for a Grammy Award: “A work that contains no human authorship is not eligible in any categories.”

The academy says that the human component must be meaningful and significant to the work submitted for consideration. Right now, that means that it’s OK for me to use what’s marketed as an AI feature in a software product to standardize volume levels or organize a large group of files in my sample library. These tools help me to work faster in my digital audio workstation.

However, it is not OK in terms of Grammy consideration for me to use an AI music service to generate a song that combines the style of say, a popular male folk country artist – someone like Tyler Childers – and say, a popular female eclectic pop artist – someone like Lady Gaga – singing a duet about “Star Trek.”

This song, one of the most popular on Spotify in Sweden, was banned from the country’s music charts after reporters discovered that it was substantially generated by AI.

The gray zone

It gets trickier when you go deeper.

There is quite a bit of gray area between generating a song with text prompts and using a tool to organize your data. Is it OK by National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Grammy standards to use an AI music generator to add backing vocals to a song I wrote and recorded with humans? Almost certainly. The same holds true if someone uses a feature in a digital audio workstation to add variety and “swing” to a drum pattern while producing a song.

What about using an AI tool to generate a melody and lyrics that become the hook of the song? Right now, a musician or nonmusician could use an AI tool to generate a chorus for a song with the following information:

“Write an eight measure hook for a pop song that is in the key of G major and 120 beats per minute. The hook should consist of a catchy melody and lyrics that are memorable and easily repeatable. The topic shall be on the triumph of the human spirit in the face of adversity.”

If I take what an AI tool generates based on that prompt, write a couple of verses and bridge to fit with it, then have humans play the whole thing, is that still a meaningful and significant human contribution?

The performance most certainly is, but what about the writing of the song? If AI generates the catchy part first, does that mean it is ultimately responsible for the other sections created by a human? Is the human who is feeding those prompts making a meaningful contribution to the creation of the music you end up hearing?

AI music is here

The Recording Academy is doing its best right now to recognize and address these challenges with technology that is evolving so quickly.

Not so long ago, pitch correction software like Auto-Tune caused quite a bit of controversy in music. Now, the use of Auto-Tune, Melodyne and other pitch correction software is heard in almost every genre of music – and no barrier to winning a Grammy.

Maybe the average music listener won’t bat an eye in 10 years when they discover AI had been used to create a song they love. There are already folks listening to AI-generated music by choice today.

You are almost certainly encountering AI-generated articles (no, not this one). You are probably seeing a lot of AI slop if you are an avid social media consumer.

The truth is you might already be listening to AI-generated music, too. Some major streaming services, like Spotify, aren’t doing much to identify or limit AI-generated music on their platforms.

On Spotify, an AI “artist” by the name of Aventhis currently has over 1 million monthly listeners and no disclosure that it is AI-generated. YouTube comments on the Aventhis song, “Mercy on My Grave,” suggest that the majority of commenters believe a human wrote it. This leads to questions about why this information is not disclosed by Spotify or YouTube aside from “[h]arnessing the creative power of AI as part of his artistic process” in the description of the artist.

This AI-generated song has millions of listens on Spotify and views on YouTube.

AI can not only be used to create a song, but AI bots can be used to generate clicks and listens for it, too. This raises the possibility that the streaming services’ recommendation algorithms are being trained to push this music to human subscribers. For the record, Spotify and most streaming services say they don’t support this practice.

Trying to keep it real

If you feel that AI in music hurts human creators and makes the world less-than-a-better place, you have options for avoiding it. Determining whether a song is AI-written is possible though not foolproof. You can also find services that aim to limit AI in music.

Bandcamp recently set out guidelines for AI music on its platform that are like the Recording Academy’s and more friendly to music creators. As of January 2026, Bandcamp does not allow music “that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI.” Regardless of your opinion of AI-generated music, Bandcamp’s approach gives artists and listeners a platform where human creation is central to the experience.

Ideally, Spotify and the other streaming platforms would provide clear disclaimers and offer listeners filters to customize their use of the services based on AI content. In the meantime, AI in music is likely to have a large gray area between acceptable tools and questionable practices.

Mark Benincosa does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

From Colonial rebels to Minneapolis protesters, technology has long powered American social movements

2026-01-30T13:25:08Z

Technology doesn't create social movements, but it can supercharge them. Arthur Maiorella/Anadolu via Getty Images

Tens of millions of Americans have now seen video of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis. The activities organized in response have not been initiated by outside agitators or left-wing zealots, but, rather, by everyday Americans protesting the tactics of federal agents in that city.

These community members are communicating over encrypted messaging apps such as Signal and using their cellphones to record Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers. Some have been using apps such as ICEBlock to help monitor ICE activities. They are using 3D printers to mass-produce whistles for community members to blow to alert each other when federal agents are in the area.

While the technology in some of these instances is new, this pattern – grassroots activists using the latest technology literally at their fingertips – is older than the republic itself. As a legal scholar who has studied American social movements and their relationship to technology, I see that what regular Americans in Minneapolis are doing is part of a very American tradition: building on trusted interpersonal relationships by harnessing the most recent technology to supercharge their organizing.

The app ICEBlock helps communities share information about the presence of federal officers in their areas. The Apple and Google app stores removed the app in October 2025 at the Trump administration’s request. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

From Colonial era to the Civil Rights Movement

As the first stirrings of the American revolutionary spirit emerged in the 1770s, leaders formed the committees of correspondence to coordinate among the Colonies and in 1774 formed the Continental Congress. They harnessed the power of the printing press to promote tracts such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. One of the first acts of the new Congress was to create what it called the Constitutional Post, a mail system from the Maine territories to Georgia that enabled the colonists to communicate safely, out of reach of loyalist postmasters.

And the date Americans will be celebrating in 2026 as the 250th anniversary of the United States, July 4, commemorates when the drafters of the Declaration of Independence sent the final document to John Dunlap, rebel printer. In other words, what we celebrate as the birth of our nation is when the founders pressed “send.”

In the 1830s, as the battle over slavery in the new nation began to emerge, a new type of printing press, one powered by steam, helped supercharge the abolitionist movement. It could print antislavery broadsides much more rapidly and cheaply than manual presses.

The introduction of the telegraph in 1848 helped launch the women’s rights movement, spreading word of its convention in Seneca Falls, New York, while similar meetings had not quite caught the public’s imagination.

Fast-forward over 100 years in U.S. history to the Civil Rights Movement. Leaders of that movement embraced and harnessed the power of a new technology – television – and worked to create opportunities for broadcast media to beam images of authorities attacking young people in Birmingham, Alabama, and marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma, Alabama, into living rooms across the United States. The images galvanized support for legislation such as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Social movements today

Today, new technologies and capabilities such as the smartphone and social media are making it easier for activists – and even those who have never seen themselves as activists – to get involved and help their neighbors. But it’s important not to mistake the method of communication for a movement. Indeed, without people behind the smartphones or as members of a group chat, there is no movement.

And what is happening in Minneapolis and in places across the country is still people organizing. Mutual aid networks are sprouting up nearly everywhere that immigration enforcement agents are amassed to carry out the Trump administration’s deportation policies, helped but not supplanted by technology. These technologies are important tools to support and catalyze the on-the-ground work.

Minnesotans have been using 3D printers to mass-produce whistles for alerting each other to the presence of federal agents.

It’s also important for advocates and would-be advocates to know the limits of such technologies and the risks that they can pose. These tools can sap a movement of energy, such as when someone posts a meme or “likes” a message on a social media platform and thinks they have done their part to support a grassroots effort.

There are also risks with any of these digital technologies, something the founders realized when they created their independent postal system. That is, use of these tools can also facilitate surveillance, expose networks to disruption and make people vulnerable to doxing or worse: charges that they are aiding and abetting criminal behavior.

Technology and trust

Most importantly, while technological tools might facilitate communication, they are no substitute for trust, the type of trust that can be forged only in face-to-face encounters. And that’s another thing that activists across American history have known since before the nation’s founding.

Until the late 1960s, groups participating in the work of democracy have often formed themselves into what political scientist Theda Skocpol calls “translocal networks”: collectives organized into local chapters connected to state, regional and even national networks.

It was in those local chapters where Americans practiced what French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville described in his visit to the United States in the 1830s as uniquely American: the “infinite art” of association and organizing. Americans used this practice to solve all manner of local problems. The local manifestations of those groups would often then engage in larger campaigns, whether to promote women’s rights in the 19th century or civil rights in the 20th.

Today’s technologies are reigniting the kind of grassroots activism that is deeply rooted in trust and solidarity, one block, one text message, one video at a time. It is also a profoundly American method of protest, infused with and catalyzed – but not replaced – by the technology such movements embrace.

Ray Brescia does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Aerial lidar mapping can reveal archaeological sites while overlooking Indigenous peoples and their knowledge

2026-01-29T13:16:04Z

An aerial lidar survey can 'see' beneath the forest canopy. Photodisc via Getty Images

Picture an aircraft streaking across the sky at hundreds of miles per hour, unleashing millions of laser pulses into a dense tropical forest. The objective: map thousands of square miles, including the ground beneath the canopy, in fine detail within a matter of days.

Once the stuff of science fiction, aerial lidar – light detection and ranging – is transforming how archaeologists map sites. Some have hailed this mapping technique as a revolutionary survey method.

Yet when used to scan Indigenous lands and ancestral remains, this powerful technology often advances a more troubling, extractive agenda. As an archaeologist who has worked with lidar and collaborated with people who live in areas that have been surveyed from the sky, I’m concerned that this technology can disempower and objectify people, raising an ethical dilemma for the field of archaeology.

The darker side of lidar

Lidar is a remote sensing technology that uses light to measure distance. Aerial systems work by firing millions of laser pulses per second from an aircraft in motion. For archaeologists, the goal is for enough of those pulses to slip through gaps in the forest canopy, bounce off the ground and return to the laser source with enough energy to measure how far they traveled. Researchers can then use computer programs to analyze the data and create images of the Earth’s surface.

Visualization of surface topography, left, rendered from the aerial lidar scan of Puerto Bello Metzabok in Mexico. The cross-section image, right, is composed of the individual points collected during the aerial scan, which reveal the forest canopy, ground surface and potential archaeological remains. Christopher Hernandez

The power of this mapping technology has led to a global flurry of research, with some people even calling for the laser mapping of the entire landmass of Earth. Yet, in all the excitement and media buzz, there are important ethical issues that have gone largely unaddressed.

To rapidly map regions in fine detail, researchers need national but not necessarily local permission to carry out an aerial scan. It’s similar to how Google can map your home without your consent.

In archaeology, a point of debate is whether it is acceptable to collect data remotely when researchers are denied access on the ground. War zones are extreme cases, but there are many other reasons researchers might be restricted from setting foot in a particular location.

For example, many Native North Americans do not trust or want archaeologists to study their ancestral remains. The same is true for many Indigenous groups across the globe. In these cases, an aerial laser scan without local or descendant consent becomes a form of surveillance, enabling outsiders to extract artifacts and appropriate other resources, including knowledge about ancestral remains. These harms are not new; Indigenous peoples have long lived with their consequences.

A highly publicized case in Honduras illustrates just how fraught lidar technology can be.

La Mosquitia controversy

In 2015, journalist Douglas Preston sparked a media frenzy with his National Geographic report on archaeological work in Honduras’s La Mosquitia region. Joining a research team that used aerial lidar, he claimed the investigators had discovered a “lost city,” widely referred to in Honduras as Ciudad Blanca, or the White City. Preston described the newly mapped settlement and the surrounding area as “remote and uninhabited … scarcely studied and virtually unknown.”

While Preston’s statements could be dismissed as another swashbuckling adventure story meant to popularize archaeology, many pointed out the more troubling effects.

Miskitu peoples have long lived in La Mosquitia and have always known about the archaeological sites within their ancestral homelands. In what some call “Christopher Columbus syndrome,” such narratives of discovery erase Indigenous presence, knowledge and agency while enabling dispossession.

Artifacts excavated in January 2016 from the Ciudad Blanca site in Honduras. Orlando Sierra/AFP via Getty Images

In the wake of the media hype, the expedition, with all required permits, removed artifacts from La Mosquitia.

In response, MASTA (Mosquitia Asla Takanka–Unity of La Moskitia), an organization run by Moskitu peoples, issued the following statement:

“We [MASTA] demand the application of international agreements/documents related to the prior, free, and informed consultation process in the Muskitia, in order to formalize the protection and conservation model proposed by the Indigenous People.” (translation by author)

Their demands, however, seem to have been largely ignored.

The La Mosquitia controversy is one example from a global struggle. Colonialism has changed somewhat in appearance, but it did not end – and Indigenous peoples have been fighting back for generations. Today, calls for consent and collaboration in research on Indigenous lands and heritage are growing louder, backed by frameworks such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the International Labour Organization’s Convention 169.

Metzabok community members, including Felipe Solorzano Solorzano, right, conduct excavations as part of the Mensabak Archaeological Project. Christopher Hernandez

A collaborative way forward

Despite the dilemmas raised by aerial lidar mapping, I contend it’s possible to use this technology in a way that promotes Indigenous agency, autonomy and well-being. As part of the Mensabak Archaeological Project, I have partnered with the Hach Winik people, referred to by outsiders as Lacandon Maya, who live in Puerto Bello Metzabok, Chiapas, Mexico, to conduct archaeological research.

The protected forest of Puerto Bello Metzabok. Christopher Hernandez

Metzabok is part of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, where research often requires multiple federal permissions. Locals protect what, from a Hach Winik perspective, is not an objectified nature but a living, conscious forest. This land is communally owned by the Hack Winik under agreements made with the Mexican federal government.

Building on the the Mensabak Archaeological Project’s collaborative methodology, I developed and implemented a culturally sensitive process of informed consent prior to conducting an aerial laser scan.

In 2018, I spoke via Whatsapp with the Metzabok community leader, called the Comisario, to discuss potential research, including the possibility of an aerial lidar survey. We agreed to meet in person, and after our initial discussion, the Comisario convened an “asamblea” – the public forum where community members formally deliberate matters that affect them.

Joel Palka presents the archaeologists’ proposal in the asamblea. Christopher Hernandez

At the asamblea, Mensabak Archaeological Project founder Joel Palka and I presented past and proposed research. Local colleagues encouraged the use of engaging images and helped us explain concepts in a mix of Spanish and Hach T’an, the Hach Winik language. Because Palka is fluent in Hach T’an and Spanish, he could participate in all the discussions.

Critically, we made sure to discuss the potential benefits and risks of any proposed investigation, including an aerial scan of the community.

The Q&A portion was lively. Many attendees said they could see a value in mapping their forest and the ground beneath the canopy. Community members viewed lidar as a way to record their territory and even promote responsible tourism. There was some hesitation about the potential for increased looting due to media attention or when the federal government released some of the mapping data. But most people felt prepared for that possibility thanks to decades of experience protecting their forest.

In the end, the community formally gave its consent to proceed. Still, consent is an ongoing process, and one must be prepared to stop at any point should the consenting party withdraw permission.

Hach Winik guarding their forest and engaging in excavations. Christopher Hernandez

Aerial lidar can benefit all parties

Too often, in my experience, archaeologists remain unaware – or even defensive – when confronted with issues of Indigenous oppression and consent in aerial lidar research.

But another path is possible. Obtaining culturally sensitive informed consent could become a standard practice in aerial lidar research. Indigenous communities can become active collaborators rather than being treated as passive objects.

In Metzabok, our aerial mapping project was an act of relationship-building. We demonstrated that cutting-edge science can align with Indigenous autonomy and well-being when grounded in dialogue, transparency, respect and consent.

The real challenge is not mapping faster or in finer detail, but whether researchers can do so justly, humanely and with greater accountability to the peoples whose lands and ancestral remains we study. Done right, aerial lidar can spark a true revolution, aligning Western science and technology with Indigenous futures.

The story has been updated to reflect that the La Mosquitia team received all required permits.

Christopher Hernandez received funding from the National Science Foundation (grant number SPRF 1715009) for the lidar work in Puerto Bello Metzabok.

Innovations in asthma care can improve the health of Detroiters living with this chronic disease

2026-01-28T13:35:55Z

Detroiters are hospitalized for asthma up to four times more often than residents across Michigan. Elaine Cromie/Getty Images

Researchers and doctors are beginning to modernize asthma treatment using innovative therapies.

Asthma is a common, chronic and treatable lung disease that touches nearly every family in America. It affects people of all ages and costs our health care system about US$82 billion each year.

In Michigan, the problem is acute. About 12% of Michigan adults live with asthma, compared to almost 9% nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nowhere is the burden heavier than in Detroit, which is ranked No. 1 in the U.S. as the most challenging place to live with asthma – based on prevalence, emergency department visits and deaths.

Between 2021 and 2023, the city’s adult asthma rate was 14.8%, compared with 11.5% statewide, according to data from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. Childhood asthma reaches nearly 15%, almost double the state average.

Between 2019 and 2023, Detroiters were hospitalized for asthma more often than residents elsewhere in the state. Black residents, women and people with lower incomes bear the greatest burden, facing higher rates of disease and worse outcomes, such as hospitalization.

Personalized care based on medical advances

My experience as an asthma specialist has taught me humility in the face of this complex disease. Over the past decade, I’ve learned the value of pausing and inviting each patient to reflect on their own journey with asthma.

For some, it is a new and confusing diagnosis – often accompanied by a degree of denial about having a chronic condition that needs constant management.

For others, this process gives them space to reflect on disease-related harms such as lifetime exposure to corticosteroids, which treat inflammation, or the number of emergency department visits they have endured.

Taking time to reflect also gives doctors and patients an opportunity to think about other issues affecting the patients’ health. For example, patients often struggle with the relationship between asthma and being overweight. It is hard for them to lose weight due to their symptoms or the side effects of oral steroids.

This mutual understanding becomes the foundation for a personalized care plan, often using the latest scientific advances in therapy. My colleagues and I at the University of Michigan are deeply involved in clinical trials investigating novel therapies and forward-thinking approaches to asthma care.

These approaches are centered in the long-held principle that a preventive and proactive approach to care is better than a reactive one.

The problem with ‘wait-and-see’ care

Decades of research show that asthma, while characterized by airway inflammation and spasming, is a heterogenous syndrome. This means it takes many forms and affects patients in different ways.

For some, asthma fades over time or remains mild and manageable. For others, it is a lifelong struggle, marked by frequent flare-ups, hospital visits, missed days at work or school and declining lung function.

Alarmingly, severe outcomes can happen even in those labeled as having “mild” asthma. A seemingly manageable episode can suddenly become serious, reminding us how easily this disease can be underestimated.

Most people seek help for asthma only when symptoms get bad. They may find themselves overusing a rescue inhaler or needing urgent care or the emergency department. These flare-ups, also called exacerbations, are serious.

Patients who have frequent exacerbations are more likely to have future flare-ups and face long-term risks such as loss of lung function or even death.

Even the medicines used to treat flare-ups carry risks. Just two courses of oral steroids per year can raise the risk of osteoporosis, diabetes or cardiovascular disease. It is also important to note that poorly controlled asthma or regularly needing higher-dosage inhalers can lead to irreversible airway damage and loss of lung function.

Many patients also rely on the emergency department for routine asthma care. This is often due to poor knowledge about asthma, high medication costs, insurance barriers and life constraints such as work or school. Yet emergency departments are not designed for ongoing management. Emergency departments cannot provide lung-function testing, maintenance inhalers, long-term monitoring or follow-up care – all critical to keeping asthma under control.

In other words, the health care field’s current approach is reactive, waiting for symptoms to spiral downward and not really focused on addressing risk. Patients with warning signs often go unnoticed or receive treatments that don’t meet their needs. This approach to care is outdated and poorly suited to modern medicine.

Tailoring interventions to each individual

A better approach starts with awareness of asthma’s variability and moving away from “one-size-fits-all” care.

Consider allergen control. Detroiters are exposed to both year-round allergens – such as dust mites, cockroaches and indoor molds – as well as seasonal allergens such as tree, grass and weed pollens.

Ragweed is a common weed found in Michigan. Inhaling pollen from ragweed can cause allergies. Patrick Pleul/picture alliance via Getty Images

Allergen mitigation was once a major strategy for managing asthma and often thought of as a stand-alone intervention. But allergen mitigation alone is rarely enough. For example, if dust mites trigger asthma, using mattress covers alone isn’t sufficient – you also need to wash bedding weekly and avoid heavy humidifiers. The approach should incorporate different methods to reduce exposure.

Meanwhile, allergen control for people without clear sensitivity is often ineffective and expensive. The best care starts with a conversation between patients and a clinician: testing triggers, reviewing evidence-based strategies and tailoring interventions to what will work for each person.

Asthma also often flies under the radar, not just for doctors but for patients too. About 1 in 5 patients underestimate the severity of their asthma, while many overestimate their control. Awareness of red flags – such as frequent flare-ups or poor symptom control – is critical. Daytime symptoms more than twice a week, nighttime symptoms more than twice a month, frequent use of emergency inhalers or limited physical activities all signal risks.

These warning signs can be controlled in nearly 95% of patients with minimal medications, proper inhaler technique, addressing environmental triggers and treating related conditions such as acid reflux.

For 5% to 10% of patients with severe or hard-to-treat asthma, close monitoring and specialist care are essential.

Specialist visits allow a thorough review of a patient’s history, including long-term steroid use, and help identify low-hanging fruit such as poor inhaler technique, lifestyle factors, coexisting conditions or diseases that mimic asthma.

Identifying symptoms early can mitigate health risks

New tools, such as blood tests and breath analyses, can measure airway inflammation and even predict flare-ups, treatment failures or lung function loss. While not yet widely used, these tools are the first giant leap toward proactive care, identifying problems before they take a serious toll. For example, patients with signals of inflammation in both blood and breath tests are at a much higher risk of future loss of lung function and exacerbations than their counterparts without these signals.

Another major advance is targeted therapies called biologics. These shots are usually administered under the skin by patients at home. They help control inflammation caused by asthma. In carefully selected patients, biologics can reduce flare-ups and hospitalizations, improve lung function, enhance quality of life and lower the need for oral steroids.

Many federally sponsored insurance programs now include certain biologics on their list of covered prescription drugs. However, actual approval and patient out-of-pocket costs can vary widely.

Advancing a new vision for asthma care

Michiganders would benefit from raising their awareness of asthma, not just because asthma is common here but because our environment is changing fast. Events like the 2023 Canadian wildfires show that the air we breathe is dynamic and unpredictable.

In my view, it is imperative to adopt a proactive approach that uses commonsense measures, promotes awareness, applies evidence-based practice and identifies at-risk people early. Achieving this vision requires addressing real-world challenges such as research gaps, costs and access to care.

Asthma is not just a personal health issue, it is a public health priority. My patients are impacted not only by lifestyle choices but also by factors outside of their control – factors such as drug costs, insurance plans, environmental changes and access to care.

Arjun Mohan received funding from Verona Pharm LLC and Regeneron Pharm for Consulting Services (one time, relationship has ended). These services have no conflict with the article written here

Can shoes alter your mind? What neuroscience says about foot sensation and focus

2026-01-27T13:19:13Z

Your shoes might not necessarily free your mind. ksana-gribakina/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Athletic footwear has entered a new era of ambition. No longer content to promise just comfort or performance, Nike claims its shoes can activate the brain, heighten sensory awareness and even improve concentration by stimulating the bottom of your feet.

“By studying perception, attention and sensory feedback, we’re tapping into the brain-body connection in new ways,” said Nike’s chief science officer, Matthew Nurse, in the company’s press release for the shoes. “It’s not just about running faster — it’s about feeling more present, focused and resilient.”

Other brands like Naboso sell “neuro-insoles,” socks and other sensory-based footwear to stimulate the nervous system.

It’s a compelling idea: The feet are rich in sensory receptors, so could stimulating them really sharpen the mind?

As a neurosurgeon who studies the brain, I’ve found that neuroscience suggests the reality is more complicated – and far less dramatic – than the marketing implies.

Close links between feet and brain

The soles of the feet contain thousands of mechanoreceptors that detect pressure, vibration, texture and movement.

Signals from these receptors travel through peripheral nerves to the spinal cord and up to an area of the brain called the somatosensory cortex, which maintains a map of the body. The feet occupy a meaningful portion of this map, reflecting their importance in balance, posture and movement.

Footwear also affects proprioception – the brain’s sense of where the body is in space – which relies on input from muscles, joints and tendons. Because posture and movement are tightly linked to attention and arousal, changes in sensory feedback from the feet can influence how stable, alert or grounded a person feels.

This is why neurologists and physical therapists pay close attention to footwear in patients with balance disorders, neuropathy or gait problems. Changing sensory input can alter how people move.

But influencing movement is not the same thing as enhancing cognition.

Proprioception is the sense of where your body is in space.

Minimalist shoes and sensory awareness

Minimalist shoes, with thinner soles and greater flexibility, allow more information about touch and body position to reach the brain compared with heavily cushioned footwear. In laboratory studies, reduced cushioning can increase a wearer’s awareness of where their foot is placed and when it’s touching the ground, sometimes improving their balance or the steadiness of their gait.

However, more sensation is not automatically better. The brain constantly filters sensory input, prioritizing what is useful and suppressing what is distracting. For people unaccustomed to minimalist shoes, the sudden increase in sensory feedback may increase cognitive load – drawing attention toward the feet rather than freeing mental resources for focus or performance.

Sensory stimulation can heighten awareness, but there is a threshold beyond which it becomes noise.

Can shoes improve concentration?

Whether sensory footwear can improve concentration is where neuroscience becomes especially skeptical.

Sensory input from the feet activates somatosensory regions of the brain. But brain activation alone does not equal cognitive enhancement. Focus, attention and executive function depend on distributed networks involving various other areas of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, the parietal lobe and the thalamus. They also rely on hormones that modulate the nervous system, such as dopamine and norepinephrine.

There is little evidence that passive underfoot stimulation – textured soles, novel foam geometries or subtle mechanical features – meaningfully improves concentration in healthy adults. Some studies suggest that mild sensory input may increase alertness in specific populations – such as older adults training to improve their balance or people in rehabilitation for sensory loss – but these effects are modest and highly dependent on context.

Put simply, feeling more sensory input does not mean the brain’s attention systems are working better.

How you move in your shoes might matter more for your cognition than the shoes themselves. Elena Popova/Moment via Getty Images

Belief, expectation and embodied experience

While shoes may not directly affect your cognition, that does not mean the mental effects people report are imaginary.

Belief and expectation still play a powerful role in medicine. Placebo effects and their influence on perception, motivation and performance are well documented in neuroscience. If someone believes a shoe improves focus or performance, that belief alone can change perception and behavior – sometimes enough to produce measurable effects.

There is also growing interest in embodied cognition, the idea that bodily states influence mental processes. Posture, movement and physical stability can shape mood, confidence and perceived mental clarity. Footwear that alters how someone stands or moves may indirectly influence how focused they feel, even if it does not directly enhance cognition.

In the end, believing a product gives you an advantage may be the most powerful effect it has.

Where science and marketing diverge

The problem is not whether footwear influences the nervous system – it does – but imprecision. When companies claim their shoes are “mind-altering,” they often blur the distinction between sensory modulation and cognitive enhancement.

Neuroscience supports the idea that shoes can change sensory input, posture and movement. It does not support claims that footwear can reliably improve concentration or attention for the general population. If shoes truly produced strong cognitive changes, those effects would be robust, measurable and reproducible. So far, they are not.

Shoes can change how we feel in our bodies, how you move through space and how aware you are of your physical environment. Those changes may influence confidence, comfort and perception – all of which matter to experience.

But the most meaningful “mind-altering” effects a person can experience through physical fitness still come from sustained movement, training, sleep and attention – not from sensation alone. Footwear may shape how the journey feels, but it is unlikely to rewire the destination.

Atom Sarkar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

NASA’s Artemis II crewed mission to the Moon shows how US space strategy has changed since Apollo – and contrasts with China’s closed program

2026-01-27T13:18:16Z

As part of the Artemis II mission, humans will fly around the Moon for the first time in decades. Roberto Moiola/Sysaworld via Getty Images

When Apollo 13 looped around the Moon in April 1970, more than 40 million people around the world watched the United States recover from a potential catastrophe. An oxygen tank explosion turned a planned landing into an urgent exercise in problem-solving, and the three astronauts on board used the Moon’s gravity to sling themselves safely home. It was a moment of extraordinary human drama, and a revealing geopolitical one.

The Cold War space race was a two-player contest. The Soviet Union and the United States operated in parallel, rarely cooperating, but clearly measuring themselves against one another. By 1970, the United States had already landed on the Moon, and competition centered on demonstrating technological capability, political and economic superiority and national prestige. As Apollo 13 showed, even missions that did not go as planned could reinforce a country’s leadership if they were managed effectively.

More than half a century later, NASA’s Artemis II mission will send humans around the Moon again in early 2026, this time deliberately. But the strategy going into Artemis II looks very different from that of 1970. The United States is no longer competing against a single rival in a largely symbolic race.

The crew will make a single flyby of the Moon in an Orion capsule, shown in this illustration. NASA, CC BY-NC

As a professor of air and space law, I research questions of governance and conflict avoidance beyond Earth. From a space law perspective, sustained human activity on the Moon and beyond depends on shared expectations about safety and responsible behavior. In practice, the countries that show up, operate repeatedly and demonstrate how activity on the lunar surface and in outer space can be carried out over time shape these expectations.

Artemis II matters not as nostalgia or merely a technical test flight. It is a strategic signal that the United States intends to compete in a different kind of Moon race, one defined less by singular achievements and more by sustained presence, partnerships and the ability to shape how activity on the Moon is conducted.

From a 2-player race to a crowded field

Today, more countries are competing to land on the Moon than ever before, with China emerging as a pacing competitor. While national prestige remains a factor, the stakes now extend well beyond flags and firsts.

Governments remain central actors in the race to the Moon, but they no longer operate alone. Commercial companies design and operate spacecraft, and international partnerships shape missions from the start.

China, in particular, has developed a lunar program that is deliberate, well-resourced and focused on establishing a long-term presence, including plans for a research station. Its robotic missions have landed on the Moon’s far side and returned samples to Earth, and Beijing has announced plans for a crewed landing by 2030. Together, these steps reflect a program built on incremental capability rather than symbolic milestones.

Why Artemis II matters without landing

Artemis II, scheduled to launch in February 2026, will not land on the Moon. Its four-person crew will loop around the Moon’s far side, test life-support and navigation systems, and return to Earth. This mission may appear modest. Strategically, however, crewed missions carry a different weight than robotic missions.

Artemis II’s four-person crew will circle around the Earth and the Moon. NASA

Sending people beyond low Earth orbit requires sustained political commitment to spaceflight, funding stability and systems reliable enough that sovereign and commercial partners can align their own plans around them.

Artemis II also serves as a bridge to Artemis III, the mission where NASA plans to land astronauts near the Moon’s south pole, currently targeted for 2028. A credible, near-term human return signals that the U.S. is moving beyond experimentation and toward a sustained presence.

The Artemis II mission, detailed from launch to splashdown.

2 different models for going back to the Moon

The contrast between U.S. and Chinese lunar strategies is increasingly clear.

China’s program is centrally directed and tightly controlled by the state. Its partnerships are selective, and it has released few details about how activities on the Moon would be coordinated with other countries or commercial actors.

The U.S. approach, by contrast, is intentionally open. The Artemis program is designed so partners, both other countries and companies, can operate within a shared framework for exploration, resource use and surface activity.

This openness reflects a strategic choice. Coalitions among countries and companies expand their capabilities and shape expectations about how activities such as landing, operating surface equipment and using local resources are conducted.

When vague rules start to matter

International space law already contains a framework relevant to this emerging competition. Article IX of the 1967 outer space treaty requires countries to conduct their activities with “due regard” for the interests of others and to avoid harmful interference. In simple terms, this means countries are expected to avoid actions that would disrupt or impede the activities of others.

For decades, this obligation remained largely theoretical. On Earth, however, similarly open-ended rules, particularly in maritime contexts, created international conflicts as traffic on shipping lanes, resource extraction and military activity increased. Disputes intensified as some states asserted claims that extended beyond what international law recognized.

The Moon is now approaching a comparable phase.

As more actors converge on resource-rich regions, particularly near the lunar south pole, due regard becomes an immediate operational question rather than a theoretical future issue. How it is interpreted – whether it means simply staying out of each other’s way or actively coordinating activities – will shape who can operate where, and under what conditions.

Washington is naming the race − without panic

During his second Senate Commerce Committee confirmation hearing, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman was asked directly about competition with China in lunar exploration. He emphasized the importance of keeping U.S. space efforts on track over time, linking the success of the Artemis program to long-term American leadership in space.

A similar perspective appears in a recent U.S. government assessment, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s 2025 annual report to Congress. Chapter 7 addresses space as a domain of strategic competition, highlighting China’s growing capabilities. The report frames human spaceflight and deep-space infrastructure – including spacecraft, lunar bases and supporting technologies – as part of broader strategic efforts. It emphasizes growing a human space program over time, rather than changing course in response to individual setbacks or the accomplishments of other countries.

The U.S. approach to spaceflight is emphasizing international cooperation. Joel Kowsky/NASA via Getty Images

Recent U.S. policy reflects this emphasis on continuity. A new executive order affirms federal support for sustained lunar operations, as well as commercial participation and coordination across agencies. Rather than treating the Moon as a short-term challenge, the order anticipates long-term activity where clear rules, partnerships and predictability matter.

Artemis II aligns with this posture as one step in the U.S.’s plans for sustained activity on the Moon.

A different kind of test

As Artemis II heads toward the Moon, China will also continue to advance its lunar ambitions, and competition will shape the pace and manner of activity around the Moon. But competition alone does not determine leadership. In my view, leadership emerges when a country demonstrates that its approach reduces uncertainty, supports cooperation and translates ambition into a set of stable operating practices.

Artemis II will not settle the future of the Moon. It does, however, illustrate the American model of space activity built on coalitions, transparency and shared expectations. If sustained, that model could influence how the next era of lunar, and eventually Martian, exploration unfolds.

Michelle L.D. Hanlon is affiliated with For All Moonkind, Inc. a non-profit organization focused on protecting human cultural heritage in outer space.

Groundhogs are lousy forecasters but valuable animal engineers – and an important food source

2026-01-26T19:59:03Z

Marmot chomping and digging can keep trees at bay and fields flower-filled. DieterMeyrl/E+ via Getty Images

Whether you call him groundhog, woodchuck, whistle-pig or use the full genus and species name, Marmota monax, the nation’s premiere animal weather forecaster has been making headlines as Punxsutawney Phil for decades.

The largest ground squirrel in its range, groundhogs like Phil are found throughout the midwestern United States, most of Canada and into southern Alaska. M. monax is the most widespread marmot, while the Vancouver Island marmot (M. vancouverensis) is found only on one island in British Columbia.

In total, there are 15 species in the genus Marmota, found around the world from as far south as the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico and the Pyrenees Mountains of Spain, north to regions of Siberia and Alaska so dark and cold that the marmots must hibernate for up to nine months of the year.

Hibernating to escape tough times

Marmots, including all the actors who have played Phil over the years, are the largest “true” hibernators: animals that enter a torpor that reduces their biological functions to a level closer to dead than alive.

Because this phenomenon is so interesting, scientists pay attention to all aspects of marmot anatomy and physiology. Basic observational science like this is important to advance our understanding of the world, and it sometimes leads to discoveries that improve human lives. Marmot studies are the foundation for experiments to address obesity, cardiovascular disease, mpox, stress, hepatitis and liver cancer, and they may inform work on osteoporosis and organ transplantation.

Aging seems to nearly stop during hibernation, as the marmot heart rate drops from nearly 200 beats per minute when active to about nine during hibernation. Similarly, their active body temperature can be 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) – about the same as a dog or cat – but plummet to 41 F (5 C) when hibernating. Humans, in comparison, become hypothermic at a core temperature of 95 F (35 C).

Fueling feast and famine

Marmots’ only source of energy during the hibernation period is stored fat, which they may metabolize as slowly as 1 gram per day. But even that is a large amount when it must suffice for more than half a year.

So, marmots need to double their weight during the summer, even in places where the season is only a few months long. To do so, they double the size of their hibernation-state gastrointestinal tract and liver, and then carefully select the most nutritious plants, including legumes, flowers, grains and grasses. Despite their corpulence, they can also climb trees to eat buds and fruit.

Gardener, architect and menu item

The digging and seed dispersal that accompany foraging create flower-filled meadows. Some marmots, like Mongolia’s Tarbagan marmot (M. siberica), are keystone species whose presence is associated with increased diversity of plants and predators.

Spacious marmot burrows are valuable real estate for other animals. somnuk krobkum/Moment via Getty Images

Marmot burrows are a key architectural component of many other animals’ habitats. Abandoned marmot excavations can provide temperature- and humidity-controlled housing for dozens of species, from frogs to foxes and snakes to owls.

The same activities can make groundhogs a pest to people. In most of the Midwest, groundhog predators were largely eliminated at the same time that agricultural fields became vast marmot buffets. Today, many groundhog populations are tightly controlled by invasive coyotes, as well as recovering populations of bobcats.

Because they are such a high-quality meal, marmots are an important conduit of energy from plants to carnivores. Everything from hawks to eagles, weasels to wolves may eat them. And, like most native birds and mammals, marmots are on the menu of house cats, too. Humans also have long exploited marmots for meat and fur. As a result, once-common marmot species are rare in many places.

But marmots breed like the proverbial bunnies and so have the potential to come back quickly from population declines. They can be reintroduced to former haunts, benefiting the ecosystem.

Hibernation must end at the right time

Shortly after waking from hibernation, marmots mate, giving birth about 4½ weeks later to half a dozen or more offspring. Ideally, pups are born just as the first plants peak through the snowmelt – maximizing the time available to pack on fat for the coming hibernation season.

Given the food needs of these big ground squirrels, and the fact they may be seen poking their heads above the snow before any food is available, it seems reasonable to assume that they have some power of weather prediction. Indeed, people celebrate scores of individual groundhogs across the U.S. and Canada for their ability to anticipate weather six weeks hence.

This American groundhog tradition apparently started with German immigrants recalling the spring emergence of badgers and hedgehogs in the old country. Brown bears have a similar spring schedule and are still celebrated in Romania and Serbia.

People ascribe weather-predicting abilities to other species, too, including woolly bear caterpillars, sheep, cats and dormice.

One tradition holds that tree squirrel nests, called dreys, can predict the severity of the coming winter. Leafy dreys are well ventilated and private – good choices if you need less protection during a warm winter. More insulated hollow trees are cozy in the cold but communal, and so come with the risk of sharing parasites. As a squirrel researcher, I’ve noted the location, number and size of nests for years but seen no discernible patterns related to weather.

Weather responders, not weather predictors

Flatiron Freddy did cast a shadow on Feb. 2, 2023, in Boulder. Matthew Jonas/MediaNews Group/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images

Despite traditional claims, you’ve probably already guessed that Phil and his friends are about as good at predicting the coming weather as that kid who answers “C” for every multiple choice question. A 2021 study on the subject reported that groundhogs’ “predictions of spring onset (are) no better than chance.” That’s right, groundhogs are correct 50% of the time.

One big problem with relying on any species on a specific calendar day is that seasons follow latitude and altitude. Anyone who has hiked the Appalachian Trail can tell you that trekking from south to north maximizes your time in cool spring weather. Similarly, if you venture to the peaks of the Rockies in August, you’ll find spring wildflowers.

For this reason, groundhogs in Alabama emerge from their dens much earlier than those in Wisconsin. As one Canadian newspaper put it in 1939, “Here in Manitoba, no woodchuck in his senses would voluntarily emerge into the cold on February 2.”

Animals’ senses are tools for survival

Modern technology can accurately predict the average weather – that is, climate – far into the future, and the precise weather five days in advance. But the accuracy of a forecast at a given point on Earth 10 days in the future is only about 50% – as good as a groundhog.

However, many animals are sensitive to phenomena that humans need tools to even notice.

Flocks of warblers, sparrows and other birds sometimes seem to appear out of nowhere before a storm. These species often migrate at night, navigating across land and sea by the stars and Earth’s magnetic fields. To avoid getting lost in fog or blown off course, they’ll “fall out” of the sky at good resting spots when bad weather is building. At such times, take the warbler’s advice and don’t venture out on the water.

Frogs chirping in spring indicate that water temperatures are warm enough for eggs, while air temperatures influence caterpillar hatching and activity. Farmers over the centuries have recorded the blooming dates of flowers over the years as a way to predict when to plant and harvest.

Phenology keeps track of the emergence of the first groundhog’s emergence, the melting of the last snow patch, and countless other natural phenomena. Matthias Balk/picture alliance via Getty Images

Noticing and tracking timing of annual events

Phenology is the study of these natural phenomena and their annual cycles, from the first springtime peek of a groundhog to the last autumn honk of a goose. When does the first flower bloom in your neighborhood, the first thunder clap rumble, or the last cricket chirp?

No individual observation, even Phil’s, has the power to predict the weather. But in aggregate, these observations can tell us a lot about what the world is doing and predict how it will change. You can be like Phil and look for your shadow, or a nice legume to eat, and then contribute to science by adding your observations to the National Phenology Network.

Traditions don’t need to be factually true to be useful. Groundhog shadows bring people together at a cold time of year to look at the clouds, notice buds on the trees and track down the earliest green sprouts, such as skunk cabbage, which warms the snow around it. This Groundhog Day, get out there and enjoy nature as you celebrate the lengthening days and increased activities of the organisms we share this planet with.

Steven Sullivan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Where do seashells come from?

2026-01-26T13:35:05Z

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.

Where do seashells come from? – Ivy, age 5, Phoenix, Arizona

Seashells are so plentiful that you may sometimes take them for granted.

Scientists have estimated that just one small stretch of beaches along the Gulf of California contained at least 2 trillion shells. That is 2 followed by 12 zeros.

2,000,000,000,000 shells – in just one small stretch of coast! Imagine if every human alive today went there to collect shells. Each of them would be able to claim nearly 1,000 shells.

But where do all these shells come from, and what tales can they tell us?

We are a paleontologist and marine ecologist, and our scientific research involves looking at shells and discovering where they came from and how old they are.

Skeletons on the beach

Shells are simply skeletons of animals, the remains of dead organisms. But unlike humans and most other animals, these mollusks, such as snails, clams, oysters and mussels, have an exoskeleton, meaning it’s on the outside of their bodies.

When people talk about seashells, they usually mean shells of mollusks. And these are, indeed, the most common types of shells we find on the beach today. Many other marine animals also make skeletons, including, among others, echinoids such as sand dollars that make internal skeletons called tests, and brachiopods, also known as “lampshells.”

These marine animals build their own shells to protect their soft bodies from external threats, such as predators or changes that happen around them in their habitat. Shells can also help these sea creatures stay stable on the seafloor, grow bigger or move around more efficiently.

Just as our bones provide a scaffold to which we attach our muscles, shells provide a rigid frame to which sea creatures attach their muscles. Some mollusks, such as scallops, can even swim by using powerful muscles to vigorously flap the two valves that make their shell. Other sea creatures use muscles attached to their shells to quickly bury themselves in the sediment.

A clam on the beach buries itself in the sand then releases water and waste.

Variety is the spice of marine life

The process of making a shell is known as biomineralization. How marine animals build their shells can vary greatly depending on the species, but all of these animals have special tissues to make their shells, just as humans have special tissues to grow and strengthen our bones.

Most marine animals form their shells from calcium carbonate, which is a tough mineral also found in limestone. Some sponges and microorganisms use another compound silica. There is also a group of brachiopods that build shells using calcium phosphate, which we use to build our bones, too.

More than 50,000 mollusk species live today on our planet, and most of them make shells. But each species makes a different shell. This accounts for the huge variety of shapes and sizes in the seashells you find on the beach.

With over 50,000 species of mollusk, seashells come in all different shapes and sizes. Amanda Bemis/Invertebrate Zoology Collections, Florida Museum of Natural History

Just as with bones, shells can last for a very long time. The shells of dead animals are moved around by currents and waves. Many eventually wash up on shorelines. Other shells get buried beneath the seafloor. With pressure and time, the buried seafloor sediment becomes a rock, and shells turn into fossils. In fact, seashells are among the most common types of fossils large enough to see with the naked eye.

When an experienced hunter finds a bone in the forest, they know right away whether it came from a deer, rabbit or wild boar. Similarly, when a seashell expert finds a shell, they can tell you what sea creature made it.

What shells can teach us

Besides the sheer number of sea creatures, another reason shells are so prolific is that they last for a very long time. In our research, we use a process called carbon dating to figure out how old a shell is. Mollusks and many other animals use calcium, carbon and oxygen to build their shell. There are three types of carbon – called isotopes – and one of them, known as radiocarbon, is unstable. As a shell ages, its radiocarbon decays at a constant rate. Older shells have less radiocarbon, and we scientists can estimate their age based on that fact.

This process has allowed us and other researchers to date thousands of shells collected from modern beaches and sea bottoms all around the globe. We discovered that many of those shells are hundreds or thousands of years old.

These shells are not just beautiful to look at – they’re also very useful. Like little time machines, these shells carry within them a wealth of information about the past, including details about the habitats in which they lived. Scientists like us can often tell from a shell whether the animal that created it was a predator, a plant eater or even a parasite.

By studying the chemical makeup of the shell, scientists can learn about past climates and environments. We can often even discern how the owner of a shell died and the hazards it faced during its life.

So the next time you admire shells on your favorite beach, inspect them for clues about their past lives. Does the shell contain a round hole? That reveals that the animal was killed by a drilling predator. Does it have a repair scar? It may have survived an attack by a crab. Does the shell belong to an animal that lived in a seagrass meadow that is no longer there?

Each shell is a little diary, and if you know how to read it, it can tell you exciting stories of animals and habitats from the past.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Michal Kowalewski receives funding from federal agencies (National Science Foundation) and private organizations such as Felburn Foundation and University of Florida Foundation.

Thomas K. Frazer receives funding from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Florida Department of Transportation, and South Florida Water Management District and The Ocean Conservancy.

Artificial metacognition: Giving an AI the ability to ‘think’ about its ‘thinking’

2026-01-26T13:34:44Z

AIs could use some self-reflection. davincidig/iStock via Getty Images

Have you ever had the experience of rereading a sentence multiple times only to realize you still don’t understand it? As taught to scores of incoming college freshmen, when you realize you’re spinning your wheels, it’s time to change your approach.

This process, becoming aware of something not working and then changing what you’re doing, is the essence of metacognition, or thinking about thinking.

It’s your brain monitoring its own thinking, recognizing a problem, and controlling or adjusting your approach. In fact, metacognition is fundamental to human intelligence and, until recently, has been understudied in artificial intelligence systems.

My colleagues Charles Courchaine, Hefei Qiu and Joshua Iacoboni and I are working to change that. We’ve developed a mathematical framework designed to allow generative AI systems, specifically large language models like ChatGPT or Claude, to monitor and regulate their own internal “cognitive” processes. In some sense, you can think of it as giving generative AI an inner monologue, a way to assess its own confidence, detect confusion and decide when to think harder about a problem.

Why machines need self-awareness

Today’s generative AI systems are remarkably capable but fundamentally unaware. They generate responses without genuinely knowing how confident or confused their response might be, whether it contains conflicting information, or whether a problem deserves extra attention. This limitation becomes critical when generative AI’s inability to recognize its own uncertainty can have serious consequences, particularly in high-stakes applications such as medical diagnosis, financial advice and autonomous vehicle decision-making.

For example, consider a medical generative AI system analyzing symptoms. It might confidently suggest a diagnosis without any mechanism to recognize situations where it might be more appropriate to pause and reflect, like “These symptoms contradict each other” or “This is unusual, I should think more carefully.”

Developing such a capacity would require metacognition, which involves both the ability to monitor one’s own reasoning through self-awareness and to control the response through self-regulation.

Inspired by neurobiology, our framework aims to give generative AI a semblance of these capabilities by using what we call a metacognitive state vector, which is essentially a quantified measure of the generative AI’s internal “cognitive” state across five dimensions.

5 dimensions of machine self-awareness

One way to think about these five dimensions is to imagine giving a generative AI system five different sensors for its own thinking.

Emotional awareness, to help it track emotionally charged content, which might be important for preventing harmful outputs.
Correctness evaluation, which measures how confident the large language model is about the validity of its response.
Experience matching, where it checks whether the situation resembles something it has previously encountered.
Conflict detection, so it can identify contradictory information requiring resolution.
Problem importance, to help it assess stakes and urgency to prioritize resources.

We quantify each of these concepts within an overall mathematical framework to create the metacognitive state vector and use it to control ensembles of large language models. In essence, the metacognitive state vector converts a large language model’s qualitative self-assessments into quantitative signals that it can use to control its responses.

For example, when a large language model’s confidence in a response drops below a certain threshold, or the conflicts in the response exceed some acceptable levels, it might shift from fast, intuitive processing to slow, deliberative reasoning. This is analogous to what psychologists call System 1 and System 2 thinking in humans.

This conceptual diagram shows the basic idea for giving a set of large language models an awareness of the state of its processing. Ricky J. Sethi

Conducting an orchestra

Imagine a large language model ensemble as an orchestra where each musician – an individual large language model – comes in at certain times based on the cues received from the conductor. The metacognitive state vector acts as the conductor’s awareness, constantly monitoring whether the orchestra is in harmony, whether someone is out of tune, or whether a particularly difficult passage requires extra attention.

When performing a familiar, well-rehearsed piece, like a simple folk melody, the orchestra easily plays in quick, efficient unison with minimal coordination needed. This is the System 1 mode. Each musician knows their part, the harmonies are straightforward, and the ensemble operates almost automatically.

But when the orchestra encounters a complex jazz composition with conflicting time signatures, dissonant harmonies or sections requiring improvisation, the musicians need greater coordination. The conductor directs the musicians to shift roles: Some become section leaders, others provide rhythmic anchoring, and soloists emerge for specific passages.

This is the kind of system we’re hoping to create in a computational context by implementing our framework, orchestrating ensembles of large language models. The metacognitive state vector informs a control system that acts as the conductor, telling it to switch modes to System 2. It can then tell each large language model to assume different roles – for example, critic or expert – and coordinate their complex interactions based on the metacognitive assessment of the situation.

Metacognition is like an orchestra conductor monitoring and directing an ensemble of musicians. AP Photo/Vahid Salemi

Impact and transparency

The implications extend far beyond making generative AI slightly smarter. In health care, a metacognitive generative AI system could recognize when symptoms don’t match typical patterns and escalate the problem to human experts rather than risking misdiagnosis. In education, it could adapt teaching strategies when it detects student confusion. In content moderation, it could identify nuanced situations requiring human judgment rather than applying rigid rules.

Perhaps most importantly, our framework makes generative AI decision-making more transparent. Instead of a black box that simply produces answers, we get systems that can explain their confidence levels, identify their uncertainties, and show why they chose particular reasoning strategies.

This interpretability and explainability is crucial for building trust in AI systems, especially in regulated industries or safety-critical applications.

The road ahead

Our framework does not give machines consciousness or true self-awareness in the human sense. Instead, our hope is to provide a computational architecture for allocating resources and improving responses that also serves as a first step toward more sophisticated approaches for full artificial metacognition.

The next phase in our work involves validating the framework with extensive testing, measuring how metacognitive monitoring improves performance across diverse tasks, and extending the framework to start reasoning about reasoning, or metareasoning. We’re particularly interested in scenarios where recognizing uncertainty is crucial, such as in medical diagnoses, legal reasoning and generating scientific hypotheses.

Our ultimate vision is generative AI systems that don’t just process information but understand their cognitive limitations and strengths. This means systems that know when to be confident and when to be cautious, when to think fast and when to slow down, and when they’re qualified to answer and when they should defer to others.

Ricky J. Sethi has received funding from the National Science Foundation, Google and Amazon.

Feeling unprepared for the AI boom? You’re not alone

2026-01-23T13:44:21Z

Many workers feel helpless – and anticipate widespread economic displacement – as companies scramble to incorporate AI into their business models. imagedepotpro/iStock via Getty Images

Journalist Ira Glass, who hosts the NPR show “This American Life,” is not a computer scientist. He doesn’t work at Google, Apple or Nvidia. But he does have a great ear for useful phrases, and in 2024 he organized an entire episode around one that might resonate with anyone who feels blindsided by the pace of AI development: “Unprepared for what has already happened.”

Coined by science journalist Alex Steffen, the phrase captures the unsettling feeling that “the experience and expertise you’ve built up” may now be obsolete – or, at least, a lot less valuable than it once was.

Whenever I lead workshops in law firms, government agencies or nonprofit organizations, I hear that same concern. Highly educated, accomplished professionals worry whether there will be a place for them in an economy where generative AI can quickly – and relativity cheaply – complete a growing list of tasks that an extremely large number of people currently get paid to do.

Seeing a future that doesn’t include you

In technology reporter Cade Metz’s 2022 book, “Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World,” he describes the panic that washed over a veteran researcher at Microsoft named Chris Brockett when Brockett first encountered an artificial intelligence program that could essentially perform everything he’d spent decades learning how to master.

Overcome by the thought that a piece of software had now made his entire skill set and knowledge base irrelevant, Brockett was actually rushed to the hospital because he thought he was having a heart attack.

“My 52-year-old body had one of those moments when I saw a future where I wasn’t involved,” he later told Metz.

In his 2018 book, “Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” MIT physicist Max Tegmark expresses a similar anxiety.

“As technology keeps improving, will the rise of AI eventually eclipse those abilities that provide my current sense of self-worth and value on the job market?”

The answer to that question, unnervingly, can often feel outside of our individual control.

“We’re seeing more AI-related products and advancements in a single day than we saw in a single year a decade ago,” a Silicon Valley product manager told a reporter for Vanity Fair back in 2023. Things have only accelerated since then.

Even Dario Amodei – the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, the company that created the popular chatbot Claude – has been shaken by the increasing power of AI tools. “I think of all the times when I wrote code,” he said in an interview on the tech podcast “Hard Fork.” “It’s like a part of my identity that I’m good at this. And then I’m like, oh, my god, there’s going to be these (AI) systems that [can perform a lot better than I can].”

What will happen to workers who have spent their entire lives learning a skill that AI can replicate? jokerpro/iStock via Getty Images

The irony that these fears live inside the brain of someone who leads one of the most important AI companies in the world is not lost on Amodei.

“Even as the one who’s building these systems,” he added, “even as one of the ones who benefits most from (them), there’s still something a bit threatening about (them).”

Autor and agency

Yet as the labor economist David Autor has argued, we all have more agency over the future than we might think.

In 2024, Autor was interviewed by Bloomberg News soon after publishing a research paper titled Applying AI to Rebuild Middle-Class Jobs. The paper explores the idea that AI, if managed well, might be able to help a larger set of people perform the kind of higher-value – and higher-paying – “decision-making tasks currently arrogated to elite experts like doctors, lawyers, coders and educators.”

This shift, Autor suggests, “would improve the quality of jobs for workers without college degrees, moderate earnings inequality, and – akin to what the Industrial Revolution did for consumer goods – lower the cost of key services such as healthcare, education and legal expertise.”

It’s an interesting, hopeful argument, and Autor, who has spent decades studying the effects of automation and computerization on the workforce, has the intellectual heft to explain it without coming across as Pollyannish.

But what I found most heartening about the interview was Autor’s response to a question about a type of “AI doomerism” that believes that widespread economic displacement is inevitable and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

“The future should not be treated as a forecasting or prediction exercise,” he said. “It should be treated as a design problem – because the future is not (something) where we just wait and see what happens. … We have enormous control over the future in which we live, and [the quality of that future] depends on the investments and structures that we create today.”

At the starting line

I try to emphasize Autor’s point about the future being more of a “design problem” than a “prediction exercise” in all the AI courses and workshops I teach to law students and lawyers, many of whom fret over their own job prospects.

The nice thing about the current AI moment, I tell them, is that there is still time for deliberate action. Although the first scientific paper on neural networks was published all the way back in 1943, we’re still very much in the early stages of so-called “generative AI.”

No student or employee is hopelessly behind. Nor is anyone commandingly ahead.

Instead, each of us is in an enviable spot: right at the starting line.

Patrick Barry does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Dealing with a difficult relationship? Here’s how psychology says you can shift the dynamic

2026-01-23T13:43:59Z

A heated exchange may stem from something deeper than the issue at hand. skynesher/E+ via Getty Images

Relationships can feel like both a blessing and the bane of your existence, a source of joy and a source of frustration or resentment. At some point, each of us is faced with a clingy child, a dramatic friend, a partner who recoils at the first hint of intimacy, a volatile parent or a controlling boss — in short, a difficult relationship.

As a psychology professor and relationship scientist, I’ve spent countless hours observing human interactions, in the lab and in the real world, trying to understand what makes relationships work – and what makes them feel utterly intractable.

Recently, I teamed up with psychologist Rachel Samson, who helps individuals, couples and families untangle difficult dynamics in the therapy room. In our new book, “Beyond Difficult: An attachment-based guide for dealing with challenging people,” we explore the roots of difficult behavior and evidence-based strategies for making difficult relationships more bearable.

So what’s really going on beneath the surface of “difficult” behavior? And more to the point, what can you do about it?

Difficult interactions can have deep roots

When a conversation with a co-worker goes sideways or a phone call with a friend goes off the rails, it’s easy to assume the issue stems from the situation at hand. But sometimes, big emotions and reactions have deeper roots. Difficult interactions often result from differences in temperament: your biologically based style of emotional and behavioral responses to the world around you.

People with a sensitive temperament react more strongly to stress and sensory experiences. When overwhelmed, they may seem volatile, moody or rigid — but these reactions are often more about sensory or emotional overload than malice. Importantly, when sensitive children and adults are in a supportive environment that “fits” their temperament, they can thrive socially and emotionally.

Attachment style traces back to how you interacted with your earliest caregivers. KDP/Moment via Getty Images

Beyond neurobiology, one of the most common threads underlying difficult relationships is what psychologists call insecure attachment. Early experiences with caregivers shape the way people connect with others later in life. Experiences of inconsistent or insensitive care can lead you to expect the worst of other people, a core feature of insecure attachment.

People with insecure attachment may cling, withdraw, lash out or try to control others — not because they want to make others miserable, but because they feel unsafe in close relationships. By addressing the underlying need for emotional safety, you can work toward more secure relationships.

Managing difficult emotions

In challenging interactions, emotions can run high — and how you deal with those emotions can make or break a relationship.

Research has shown that people with sensitive temperament, insecure attachment or a history of trauma often struggle with emotion regulation. In fact, difficulty managing emotions is one of the strongest predictors of mental illness, relationship breakups and even aggression and violence.

It’s easy to label someone as “too emotional,” but in reality, emotion is a social event. Our nervous systems constantly respond to one another — which means our ability to stay regulated affects not only how we feel, but how others react to us. The good news is that there are evidence-based strategies to calm yourself when tensions rise:

Take a breath. Slow, deep breathing helps signal safety to the nervous system.
Take a break. Relationship researchers John and Julie Gottman found that taking a 20-minute break during conflict helps reduce physiological stress and prevent escalation.
Move your body. Exercise – particularly walking, dancing or yoga – has been shown to reduce depression and anxiety, sometimes even more effectively than medication. Movement before or after a difficult interaction can help “work out” the tension.
Reframe the situation. This strategy, called cognitive reappraisal, involves changing the way you interpret a situation or your goals within it. Instead of trying to “fix” a difficult family member, for example, you might focus on appreciating the time you have with them. Reappraisal helps the brain regulate emotion before it escalates, lowering activity in stress-related areas like the amygdala.

People may not know the effect their behavior has on you until you tell them. Klaus Vedfelt/DigitalVision via Getty Images

Giving better feedback

Difficult people are usually unaware of how their behavior affects you — unless you tell them. One of the most powerful things you can do in a difficult relationship is give feedback. But not all feedback is created equal.

Feedback, at its core, is a tool for learning. Without it, you would never have learned to write, drive or function socially. But when feedback is poorly delivered, it can backfire: People become defensive, shut down or dig in their heels. Feedback is most effective when it stays focused on the task rather than the individual; in other words, don’t make it personal.

Research points to four keys to effective feedback, based in learning theory:

Mutuality: Approach the conversation as a two-way exchange. Be open to the needs and ideas of both parties.
Specificity: Be clear about what behaviors you’re referring to. Citing particular interactions is often better than “You always ….”
Goal-directedness: Connect the feedback to a shared goal. Work together to find a constructive solution to the problem.
Timing: Give feedback close to the event, when it’s still fresh but emotions have settled.

Also, skip the so-called “compliment sandwich” of a critique between two pieces of positive feedback. It doesn’t actually improve outcomes or change behavior.

Interestingly, the most effective sequence is actually to start with a corrective, followed by positive affirmation of what’s going well. Leading with honesty shows respect. Plus, the corrective is more likely to be remembered. Following up with warmth builds connection and shows that you value the person.

The bottom line

Difficult relationships are part of being human; they don’t mean someone is broken or toxic. Often, they reflect deeper patterns of attachment, temperament and differences in how our brains work.

When you understand what’s underneath the behavior – and take steps to regulate yourself, communicate clearly and give compassionate feedback – you can shift even the most stuck relationship into something more bearable, perhaps even meaningful.

Strengthening relationships isn’t always easy. But the science shows that it is possible – and can be rewarding.

Jessica A. Stern does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

‘Expertise’ shouldn’t be a bad word – expert consensus guides science and society

2026-01-22T13:35:54Z

Training and experience are the foundation for a group of experts to provide solid guidance. Tashi-Delek/E+ via Getty Images

A growing distrust of expertise is reshaping the terrain of science in the United States.

Since the pandemic, the partisan divide over science has widened dramatically. While 77% of Americans have at least a fair amount of confidence that scientists act in the best interests of the public, that breaks down to 90% of Democrats and 65% of Republicans.

If people think scientists are trying to impose their political beliefs rather than expressing honest scientific judgments in the pursuit of truth, public trust in expert consensus will continue to erode.

With recent events, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. replacing the expert vaccine panel at the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Trump administration threatening to withdraw research funding from universities that don’t follow its ideological dictates, the political divide in public perception may grow even deeper.

As social scientists who study the role of science in society, we are deeply concerned about the decline of public trust in expertise, which is often fueled by politicians who manipulate people’s suspicions about experts. Skepticism is sometimes justified, of course. But a system based on expertise is the best one modern democracies have come up with to offer guidance on the various complex issues they face.

Education and training within accredited programs help people gain expertise. Anthony Souffle/Star Tribune via Getty Images

Who is an expert?

Before you can place your trust in a community of experts, you need a way to determine who counts as an expert. Modern societies usually do this through a sequence of training within accredited schools and universities – institutions whose reputations depend on their ability to train reliable and trustworthy experts.

Unlike the ancient alchemists’ guilds or modern elites, science is not secret, nor gated by family descent or social ties. Today anyone is permitted to become a scientific expert by attaining academic degrees and certifications and establishing a public track record of published research, teaching and contributions to one’s field.

The government also plays a critical role by requiring doctors or engineers to hold certain degrees or by granting universities formal quality certifications, such as accreditation. As an individual, you can’t evaluate the trustworthiness of every person claiming to have expertise – whether a heart surgeon or an electrician. The governmental license carried by these professionals makes that unnecessary.

In any field of knowledge, there is a web of legitimacy, knotted together by visible signals of trust, such as degrees, publications, affiliations and accreditations. Expertise is a team sport.

What is expert consensus?

The most reliable guidance is based on a rigorous group decision-making process, in which people with diverse training and experience contribute their expertise to a dialogue aimed at reaching consensus. The scientific approach to consensus is transparent and deliberate: Scientific consensus processes – such as the National Academies consensus study process, or a PRISMA review – are systematic in incorporating the credible evidence that is available and synthesizing different expert judgments.

The system, honed over decades, is based on the theory that better decisions can be achieved by systematically aggregating many independent opinions – if the group is well trained, draws from a common body of evidence, relies on a common understanding of research practices, and each of its members are able to independently weigh the evidence.

Such communities of experts arise in many settings, from engineers recommending building codes to epidemiologists proposing policies to contain a viral epidemic.

An expert community doesn’t need everyone to be right – or even to agree – in every case for the process to generate useful results. As long as each person is usually right and the community deliberates systematically on the basis of reason and evidence, the resulting consensus will be the best that can be achieved within the limits of current knowledge.

In short, expert consensus requires trained experts, common evidence and systematic deliberation.

Professional consensus vs. individual opinion

Expert consensus doesn’t mean that experts agree on everything, or that everyone must agree with the experts. In a democracy, expert advice is valuable, but it’s not the last word.

The U.S. Bill of Rights enshrines the idea that freedom of speech is fundamental to good government and to leading good lives. But there’s a distinction between speaking one’s mind and speaking from authority. Experts have a right to express their personal opinions and also a duty to exercise care when speaking in areas of their expertise.

This distinction is at issue in the Chiles vs Salazar case before the Supreme Court. It centers on a Colorado state law that prohibits so-called “conversion therapy” for gay or trans children.

Does doing so violate the free speech rights of therapists? It’s not illegal to believe trans children can be talked out of being trans, it’s just illegal to pursue that practice as a licensed professional, because medical experts have reached a consensus that conversion therapy is both useless and harmful.

Expert consensus is necessary to make sound decisions based on science and evidence, but that doesn’t mean experts must abstain from politics or refrain from expressing dissenting opinions. In fact, political restrictions on scientific debate weaken science, as seen in repressive societies.

Experts can disagree in good faith – and that doesn’t mean the system doesn’t work. FangXiaNuo/E+ via Getty Images

What does expert consensus provide?

In our fractious political climate, people sometimes think divergent expert opinions mean that consensus does not exist, or no experts can be trusted. Some people say, “Do your own research,” which often leads to rejecting consensus and falling victim to conspiracies and disinformation.

In practice, consensus is compatible with substantial disagreement. In many fields, scientific consensus deals with broad patterns rather than individual cases. For example, medical experts may agree on the nature of a specific condition, and the average efficacy of a given treatment, yet make different predictions about the benefits for a specific patient.

Society faces pressing questions about the behavior of complex and uncertain systems: How much is climate likely to change if CO₂ emissions continue at the current rate – and what ecological changes should we expect? What accounts for changing cancer rates – and what are the most promising paths to develop a broad “cure”? Are AIs developing intelligence and self-awareness – and how can they be designed to be behave safely? What social institutions are essential for human flourishing – and how can they be preserved?

It’s the fundamental role of democratic government to determine which goals we as a society pursue and how to balance competing values. And when we face high-stakes issues involving complex systems and uncertain approaches, scientific expert consensus can act as an honest broker to provide a menu of possible approaches and predictions for each one’s likely consequences.

Micah Altman received research funding from the National Science Foundation and the Andrew W Mellon Foundation to conduct research related to the science of science, and related to open science.

Philip N. Cohen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Hacking the grid: How digital sabotage turns infrastructure into a weapon

2026-01-22T13:34:22Z

Today's power grid equipment incorporates internet-connected – and therefore hackable – computers. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The darkness that swept over the Venezuelan capital in the predawn hours of Jan. 3, 2026, signaled a profound shift in the nature of modern conflict: the convergence of physical and cyber warfare. While U.S. special operations forces carried out the dramatic seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a far quieter but equally devastating offensive was taking place in the unseen digital networks that help operate Caracas.

The blackout was not the result of bombed transmission towers or severed power lines but rather a precise and invisible manipulation of the industrial control systems that manage the flow of electricity. This synchronization of traditional military action with advanced cyber warfare represents a new chapter in international conflict, one where lines of computer code that manipulate critical infrastructure are among the most potent weapons.

To understand how a nation can turn an adversary’s lights out without firing a shot, you have to look inside the controllers that regulate modern infrastructure. They are the digital brains responsible for opening valves, spinning turbines and routing power.

For decades, controller devices were considered simple and isolated. Grid modernization, however, has transformed them into sophisticated internet-connected computers. As a cybersecurity researcher, I track how advanced cyber forces exploit this modernization by using digital techniques to control the machinery’s physical behavior.

Hijacked machines

My colleagues and I have demonstrated how malware can compromise a controller to create a split reality. The malware intercepts legitimate commands sent by grid operators and replaces them with malicious instructions designed to destabilize the system.

For example, malware could send commands to rapidly open and close circuit breakers, a technique known as flapping. This action can physically damage massive transformers or generators by causing them to overheat or go out of sync with the grid. These actions can cause fires or explosions that take months to repair.

Simultaneously, the malware calculates what the sensor readings should look like if the grid were operating normally and feeds these fabricated values back to the control room. The operators likely see green lights and stable voltage readings on their screens even as transformers are overloading and breakers are tripping in the physical world. This decoupling of the digital image from physical reality leaves defenders blind, unable to diagnose or respond to the failure until it is too late.

Today’s electrical transformers are accessible to hackers. GAO

Historical examples of this kind of attack include the Stuxnet malware that targeted Iranian nuclear enrichment plants. The malware destroyed centrifuges in 2009 by causing them to spin at dangerous speeds while feeding false “normal” data to operators.

Another example is the Industroyer attack by Russia against Ukraine’s energy sector in 2016. Industroyer malware targeted Ukraine’s power grid, using the grid’s own industrial communication protocols to directly open circuit breakers and cut power to Kyiv.

More recently, the Volt Typhoon attack by China against the United States’ critical infrastructure, exposed in 2023, was a campaign focused on pre-positioning. Unlike traditional sabotage, these hackers infiltrated networks to remain dormant and undetected, gaining the ability to disrupt the United States’ communications and power systems during a future crisis.

To defend against these types of attacks, the U.S. military’s Cyber Command has adopted a “defend forward” strategy, actively hunting for threats in foreign networks before they reach U.S. soil.

Domestically, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency promotes “secure by design” principles, urging manufacturers to eliminate default passwords and utilities to implement “zero trust” architectures that assume networks are already compromised.

Supply chain vulnerability

Nowadays, there is a vulnerability lurking within the supply chain of the controllers themselves. A dissection of firmware from major international vendors reveals a significant reliance on third-party software components to support modern features such as encryption and cloud connectivity.

This modernization comes at a cost. Many of these critical devices run on outdated software libraries, some of which are years past their end-of-life support, meaning they’re no longer supported by the manufacturer. This creates a shared fragility across the industry. A vulnerability in a single, ubiquitous library like OpenSSL – an open-source software toolkit used worldwide by nearly every web server and connected device to encrypt communications – can expose controllers from multiple manufacturers to the same method of attack.

Modern controllers have become web-enabled devices that often host their own administrative websites. These embedded web servers present an often overlooked point of entry for adversaries.

Attackers can infect the web application of a controller, allowing the malware to execute within the web browser of any engineer or operator who logs in to manage the plant. This execution enables malicious code to piggyback on legitimate user sessions, bypassing firewalls and issuing commands to the physical machinery without requiring the device’s password to be cracked.

The scale of this vulnerability is vast, and the potential for damage extends far beyond the power grid, including transportation, manufacturing and water treatment systems.

Using automated scanning tools, my colleagues and I have discovered that the number of industrial controllers exposed to the public internet is significantly higher than industry estimates suggest. Thousands of critical devices, from hospital equipment to substation relays, are visible to anyone with the right search criteria. This exposure provides a rich hunting ground for adversaries to conduct reconnaissance and identify vulnerable targets that serve as entry points into deeper, more protected networks.

The success of recent U.S. cyber operations forces a difficult conversation about the vulnerability of the United States. The uncomfortable truth is that the American power grid relies on the same technologies, protocols and supply chains as the systems compromised abroad.

The U.S. power grid is vulnerable to hackers.

Regulatory misalignment

The domestic risk, however, is compounded by regulatory frameworks that struggle to address the realities of the grid. A comprehensive investigation into the U.S. electric power sector my colleagues and I conducted revealed significant misalignment between compliance with regulations and actual security. Our study found that while regulations establish a baseline, they often foster a checklist mentality. Utilities are burdened with excessive documentation requirements that divert resources away from effective security measures.

This regulatory lag is particularly concerning given the rapid evolution of the technologies that connect customers to the power grid. The widespread adoption of distributed energy resources, such as residential solar inverters, has created a large, decentralized vulnerability that current regulations barely touch.

Analysis supported by the Department of Energy has shown that these devices are often insecure. By compromising a relatively small percentage of these inverters, my colleagues and I found that an attacker could manipulate their power output to cause severe instabilities across the distribution network. Unlike centralized power plants protected by guards and security systems, these devices sit in private homes and businesses.

Accounting for the physical

Defending American infrastructure requires moving beyond the compliance checklists that currently dominate the industry. Defense strategies now require a level of sophistication that matches the attacks. This implies a fundamental shift toward security measures that take into account how attackers could manipulate physical machinery.

The integration of internet-connected computers into power grids, factories and transportation networks is creating a world where the line between code and physical destruction is irrevocably blurred.

Ensuring the resilience of critical infrastructure requires accepting this new reality and building defenses that verify every component, rather than unquestioningly trusting the software and hardware – or the green lights on a control panel.

Saman Zonouz receives funding from the Department of Energy Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (DOE CESER) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Filming ICE is legal but exposes you to digital tracking – here’s how to minimize the risk

2026-01-21T13:36:20Z

If you're going to record ICE agents, recognize that the risks go beyond physical confrontation. Madison Thorn/Anadolu via Getty Images

When an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in south Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026, what happened next looked familiar, at least on the surface. Within hours, cellphone footage spread online and eyewitness accounts contradicted official statements, while video analysts slowed the clip down frame by frame to answer a basic question: Did she pose the threat federal officials claimed?

What’s changed since Minneapolis became a global reference point for bystander video in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder is how thoroughly camera systems, especially smartphones, are now entangled with the wider surveillance ecosystem.

I am a researcher who studies the intersection of data governance, digital technologies and the U.S. federal government. The hard truth for anyone filming law enforcement today is that the same technologies that can hold the state accountable can also make ordinary people more visible to the state.

Recording is often protected speech. But recording, and especially sharing, creates data that can be searched, linked, purchased and reused.

Video can challenge power. It can also attract it.

Targeting the watchers

Documentation can be the difference between an official narrative and an evidence-based public record. Courts in much of the U.S. have recognized a First Amendment right to record police in public while they perform official duties, subject to reasonable restrictions. For example, you can’t physically interfere with police.

An ICE officer tells a photographer to back up. AP Photo/Adam Gray

However, that right is uneven across jurisdictions and vulnerable in practice, especially when police claim someone is interfering, or when state laws impose distances people must maintain from law enforcement actions – practices that chill filming.

While the legal landscape of recording law enforcement is important to understand, your safety is also a major consideration. In the days after Good’s killing, Minneapolis saw other viral clips documenting immigration enforcement and protests, along with agents’ forceful engagement with people near those scenes, including photographers.

It’s difficult to know how many people have been targeted by agents for recording. In Illinois in late 2025, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, operated by advocacy group Freedom of the Press Foundation, documented multiple incidents in which journalists covering ICE-facility protests reported being shot with crowd-control munitions or tackled and arrested while filming.

These incidents underscore that documentation isn’t risk-free. There is an additional layer of safety beyond the physical to take into account: your increased risk of digital exposure. The legal right to record doesn’t prevent your recording from becoming data that others can use.

Both camera and tracking device

In practical terms, smartphones generate at least three kinds of digital exposure.

The first is identification risk, including through facial recognition technology. When you post footage, you may be sharing identifiable faces, tattoos, voices, license plates, school logos or even a distinctive jacket. That can enable law enforcement to identify people in your recordings through investigative tools, and online crowds to identify people and dox or harass them, or both.

That risk grows when agencies deploy facial recognition in the field. For example, ICE is using a facial recognition app called Mobile Fortify.

Facial recognition accuracy also isn’t neutral. National Institute of Standards and Technology testing has documented that the technology does not perform equally across different demographic groups, meaning the risk of misidentification is not evenly distributed across groups. For example, studies have shown lower recognition accuracy for people with darker skin color.

Second is the risk of revealing your location. Footage isn’t just images. Photos and video files often contain metadata such as timestamps and locations, and platforms also maintain additional logs. Even if you never post, your phone still emits a steady stream of location signals.

This matters because agencies can obtain location through multiple channels, often with different levels of oversight.

Agencies can request location or other data from companies through warrants or court orders, including geofence warrants that sweep up data about every device in a place during a set time window.

Agencies can also buy location data from brokers. The Federal Trade Commission has penalized firms for unlawfully selling sensitive location information.

Data brokers collect location data from people’s phones and sell it, including to law enforcement and federal agencies.

Agencies also use specialized “area monitoring” tools: ICE purchased systems capable of tracking phones across an entire neighborhood or block over time, raising civil liberties concerns. The tools could track a phone from the time and place of a protest – for example, to a home or workplace.

There are more pathways for tracking than most people realize, and not all are constrained by the courtroom rules people picture when they think “warrant.”

The third type of potential exposure is the risk of having your phone seized. If police seize your phone, temporarily or for evidence, your exposure isn’t just the video you shot. It can include your contacts and message history, your photo roll, location history and cloud accounts synced to the device.

Civil liberties groups that publish protest safety guidance consistently recommend disabling the face and fingerprint unlocking features and using a strong passcode. Law enforcement officials can compel you to use biometrics more easily in some contexts than reveal memorized secrets.

Digital safety when recording police

This isn’t legal advice, and nothing is risk-free. But if you want to keep the accountability benefits of filming while reducing your digital exposure, here are steps you can take to address the risks.

Before you go, decide what you’re optimizing for, whether it is preserving evidence quickly or minimizing traceability, because those goals can conflict. Harden your lock screen with a long passcode, disable face and fingerprint ID, turn off message previews and reduce the risk of what you carry by logging out of sensitive accounts and removing unnecessary apps. Even consider leaving your primary phone at home if that’s realistic.

If you’re worried about having your recording deleted, plan ahead for how you’ll secure footage. You can either send it to a trusted person through an encrypted app or keep it offline until you’re safe.

While filming, keep your phone locked when possible using the camera-from-lock-screen feature and avoid livestreaming if identification risk is high, since live posts can expose your location in real time. Focus on documenting context rather than creating viral clips: Capture wide shots, key actions and clear time-and-place markers, and limit close-ups of bystanders. Assume faces are searchable, and if you can’t protect people in the moment, consider waiting to share until you can edit safely.

Afterward, back up securely and edit for privacy before posting by blurring faces, tattoos and license plates, removing metadata, and sharing a privacy-edited copy instead of the raw file. Think strategically about distribution because sometimes it’s safer to provide footage to journalists, lawyers or civil rights groups who can authenticate it without exposing everyone to mass identification. And remember the “second audience” beyond police, including employers, trolls and data brokers.

A new reality

Recording law enforcement in public is often a vital democratic check, especially when official narratives and reality conflict, as they have in Minneapolis since Jan. 7, 2026.

But the camera in your pocket is also part of a maturing surveillance ecosystem, one that links video, facial recognition and location data in ways most people never consented to and often don’t fully recognize.

In 2026, filming still matters. The challenge is ensuring the act of witnessing doesn’t quietly become a new form of exposure.

Nicole M. Bennett is affiliated with the Center for Refugee Studies at Indiana University.

Antibiotic resistance could undo a century of medical progress – but four advances are changing the story

2026-01-21T13:36:09Z

Scientists are fighting back against antibiotic resistance with new strategies and tools. wildpixel/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Imagine going to the hospital for a bacterial ear infection and hearing your doctor say, “We’re out of options.” It may sound dramatic, but antibiotic resistance is pushing that scenario closer to becoming reality for an increasing number of people. In 2016, a woman from Nevada died from a bacterial infection that was resistant to all 26 antibiotics that were available in the United States at that time.

The U.S. alone sees more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant illnesses each year. Globally, antimicrobial resistance is linked to nearly 5 million deaths annually.

Bacteria naturally evolve in ways that can make the drugs meant to kill them less effective. However, when antibiotics are overused or used improperly in medicine or agriculture, these pressures accelerate the process of resistance.

As resistant bacteria spread, lifesaving treatments face new complications – common infections become harder to treat, and routine surgeries become riskier. Slowing these threats to modern medicine requires not only responsible antibiotic use and good hygiene, but also awareness of how everyday actions influence resistance.

Since the inception of antibiotics in 1910 with the introduction of Salvarsan, a synthetic drug used to treat syphilis, scientists have been sounding the alarm about resistance. As a microbiologist and biochemist who studies antimicrobial resistance, I see four major trends that will shape how we as a society will confront antibiotic resistance in the coming decade.

1. Faster diagnostics are the new front line

For decades, treating bacterial infections has involved a lot of educated guesswork. When a very sick patient arrives at the hospital and clinicians don’t yet know the exact bacteria causing the illness, they often start with a broad-spectrum antibiotic. These drugs kill many different types of bacteria at once, which can be lifesaving — but they also expose a wide range of other bacteria in the body to antibiotics. While some bacteria are killed, the ones that remain continue to multiply and spread resistance genes between different bacterial species. That unnecessary exposure gives harmless or unrelated bacteria a chance to adapt and develop resistance.

In contrast, narrow-spectrum antibiotics target only a small group of bacteria. Clinicians typically prefer these types of antibiotics because they treat the infection without disturbing bacteria that are not involved in the infection. However, it can take several days to identify the exact bacteria causing the infection. During that waiting period, clinicians often feel they have no choice but to start broad-spectrum treatment – especially if the patient is seriously ill.

Amoxicillin is a commonly prescribed broad-spectrum antibiotic. TEK IMAGE/Science Photo Library via Getty Images

But new technology may fast-track identification of bacterial pathogens, allowing medical tests to be conducted right where the patient is instead of sending samples off-site and waiting a long time for answers. In addition, advances in genomic sequencing, microfluidics and artificial intelligence tools are making it possible to identify bacterial species and effective antibiotics to fight them in hours rather than days. Predictive tools can even anticipate resistance evolution.

For clinicians, better tests could help them make faster diagnoses and more effective treatment plans that won’t exacerbate resistance. For researchers, these tools point to an urgent need to integrate diagnostics with real-time surveillance networks capable of tracking resistance patterns as they emerge.

Diagnostics alone will not solve resistance, but they provide the precision, speed and early warning needed to stay ahead.

2. Expanding beyond traditional antibiotics

Antibiotics transformed medicine in the 20th century, but relying on them alone won’t carry humanity through the 21st. The pipeline of new antibiotics remains distressingly thin, and most drugs currently in development are structurally similar to existing antibiotics, potentially limiting their effectiveness.

To stay ahead, researchers are investing in nontraditional therapies, many of which work in fundamentally different ways than standard antibiotics.

One promising direction is bacteriophage therapy, which uses viruses that specifically infect and kill harmful bacteria. Others are exploring microbiome-based therapies that restore healthy bacterial communities to crowd out pathogens.

Researchers are also developing CRISPR-based antimicrobials, using gene-editing tools to precisely disable resistance genes. New compounds like antimicrobial peptides, which puncture the membranes of bacteria to kill them, show promise as next-generation drugs. Meanwhile, scientists are designing nanoparticle delivery systems to transport antimicrobials directly to infection sites with fewer side effects.

Beyond medicine, scientists are examining ecological interventions to reduce the movement of resistance genes through soil, wastewater and plastics, as well as through waterways and key environmental reservoirs.

Many of these options remain early-stage, and bacteria may eventually evolve around them. But these innovations reflect a powerful shift: Instead of betting on discovering a single antibiotic to address resistance, researchers are building a more diverse and resilient tool kit to fight antibiotic-resistant pathogenic bacteria.

3. Antimicrobial resistance outside hospitals

Antibiotic resistance doesn’t only spread in hospitals. It moves through people, wildlife, crops, wastewater, soil and global trade networks. This broader perspective that takes the principles of One Health into account is essential for understanding how resistance genes travel through ecosystems.

Researchers are increasingly recognizing environmental and agricultural factors as major drivers of resistance, on par with misuse of antibiotics in the clinic. These include how antibiotics used in animal agriculture can create resistant bacteria that spread to people; how resistance genes in wastewater can survive treatment systems and enter rivers and soil; and how farms, sewage plants and other environmental hot spots become hubs where resistance spreads quickly. Even global travel accelerates the movement of resistant bacteria across continents within hours.

Antibiotic misuse in agriculture is a significant contributor to antibiotic resistance.

Together, these forces show that antibiotic resistance isn’t just an issue for hospitals – it’s an ecological and societal problem. For researchers, this means designing solutions that cross disciplines, integrating microbiology, ecology, engineering, agriculture and public health.

4. Policies on what treatments exist in the future

Drug companies lose money developing new antibiotics. Because new antibiotics are used sparingly in order to preserve their effectiveness, companies often sell too few doses to recoup development costs even after the Food and Drug Administration approves the drugs. Several antibiotic companies have gone bankrupt for this reason.

To encourage antibiotic innovation, the U.S. is considering major policy changes like the PASTEUR Act. This bipartisan bill proposes creating a subscription-style payment model that would allow the federal government up to US$3 billion to pay drug manufacturers over five to 10 years for access to critical antibiotics instead of paying per pill.

Global health organizations, including Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), caution that the bill should include stronger commitments to stewardship and equitable access.

Still, the bill represents one of the most significant policy proposals related to antimicrobial resistance in U.S. history and could determine what antibiotics exist in the future.

The future of antibiotic resistance

Antibiotic resistance is sometimes framed as an inevitable catastrophe. But I believe the reality is more hopeful: Society is entering an era of smarter diagnostics, innovative therapies, ecosystem-level strategies and policy reforms aimed at rebuilding the antibiotic pipeline in addition to addressing stewardship.

For the public, this means better tools and stronger systems of protection. For researchers and policymakers, it means collaborating in new ways.

The question now isn’t whether there are solutions to antibiotic resistance – it’s whether society will act fast enough to use them.

André O. Hudson, PhD. receives funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

AI cannot automate science – a philosopher explains the uniquely human aspects of doing research

2026-01-20T13:37:05Z

Human scientists lay the foundations for every scientific breakthrough. Qi Yang/Moment via Getty Images

Consistent with the general trend of incorporating artificial intelligence into nearly every field, researchers and politicians are increasingly using AI models trained on scientific data to infer answers to scientific questions. But can AI ultimately replace scientists?

The Trump administration signed an executive order on Nov. 24, 2025, that announced the Genesis Mission, an initiative to build and train a series of AI agents on federal scientific datasets “to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.”

So far, the accomplishments of these so-called AI scientists have been mixed. On the one hand, AI systems can process vast datasets and detect subtle correlations that humans are unable to detect. On the other hand, their lack of commonsense reasoning can result in unrealistic or irrelevant experimental recommendations.

While AI can assist in tasks that are part of the scientific process, it is still far away from automating science – and may never be able to. As a philosopher who studies both the history and the conceptual foundations of science, I see several problems with the idea that AI systems can “do science” without or even better than humans.

AI models can only learn from human scientists

AI models do not learn directly from the real world: They have to be “told” what the world is like by their human designers. Without human scientists overseeing the construction of the digital “world” in which the model operates – that is, the datasets used for training and testing its algorithms – the breakthroughs that AI facilitates wouldn’t be possible.

Consider the AI model AlphaFold. Its developers were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the model’s ability to infer the structure of proteins in human cells. Because so many biological functions depend on proteins, the ability to quickly generate protein structures to test via simulations has the potential to accelerate drug design, trace how diseases develop and advance other areas of biomedical research.

As practical as it may be, however, an AI system like AlphaFold does not provide new knowledge about proteins, diseases or more effective drugs on its own. It simply makes it possible to analyze existing information more efficiently.

AlphaFold draws upon vast databases of existing protein structures.

As philosopher Emily Sullivan put it, to be successful as scientific tools, AI models must retain a strong empirical link to already established knowledge. That is, the predictions a model makes must be grounded in what researchers already know about the natural world. The strength of this link depends on how much knowledge is already available about a certain subject and on how well the model’s programmers translate highly technical scientific concepts and logical principles into code.

AlphaFold would not have been successful if it weren’t for the existing body of human-generated knowledge about protein structures that developers used to train the model. And without human scientists to provide a foundation of theoretical and methodological knowledge, nothing AlphaFold creates would amount to scientific progress.

Science is a uniquely human enterprise

But the role of human scientists in the process of scientific discovery and experimentation goes beyond ensuring that AI models are properly designed and anchored to existing scientific knowledge. In a sense, science as a creative achievement derives its legitimacy from human abilities, values and ways of living. These, in turn, are grounded in the unique ways in which humans think, feel and act.

Scientific discoveries are more than just theories supported by evidence: They are the product of generations of scientists with a variety of interests and perspectives, working together through a common commitment to their craft and intellectual honesty. Scientific discoveries are never the products of a single visionary genius.

Breakthroughs are possible through collaboration across generations of scientists. Jacob Wackerhausen/iStock via Getty Images Plus

For example, when researchers first proposed the double-helix structure of DNA, there were no empirical tests able to verify this hypothesis – it was based on the reasoning skills of highly trained experts. It took nearly a century of technological advancements and several generations of scientists to go from what looked like pure speculation in the late 1800s to a discovery honored by a 1953 Nobel Prize.

Science, in other words, is a distinctly social enterprise, in which ideas get discussed, interpretations are offered, and disagreements are not always overcome. As other philosophers of science have remarked, scientists are more similar to a tribe than “passive recipients” of scientific information. Researchers do not accumulate scientific knowledge by recording “facts” – they create scientific knowledge through skilled practice, debate and agreed-upon standards informed by social and political values.

AI is not a ‘scientist’

I believe the computing power of AI systems can be used to accelerate scientific progress, but only if done with care.

With the active participation of the scientific community, ambitious projects like the Genesis Mission could prove beneficial for scientists. Well-designed and rigorously trained AI tools would make the more mechanical parts of scientific inquiry smoother and maybe even faster. These tools would compile information about what has been done in the past so that it can more easily inform how to design future experiments, collect measurements and formulate theories.

But if the guiding vision for deploying AI models in science is to replace human scientists or to fully automate the scientific process, I believe the project would only turn science into a caricature of itself. The very existence of science as a source of authoritative knowledge about the natural world fundamentally depends on human life: shared goals, experiences and aspirations.

Alessandra Buccella does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

An ultrathin coating for electronics looked like a miracle insulator − but a hidden leak fooled researchers for over a decade

2026-01-19T13:34:35Z

Tiny insulating layers inside electronics help store charge so computers can run smoothly. bee32/iStock via Getty Images

When your winter jacket slows heat escaping your body or the cardboard sleeve on your coffee keeps heat from reaching your hand, you’re seeing insulation in action. In both cases, the idea is the same: keep heat from flowing where you don’t want it. But this physics principle isn’t limited to heat.

Electronics use it too, but with electricity. An electrical insulator stops current from flowing where it shouldn’t. That’s why power cords are wrapped in plastic. The plastic keeps electricity in the wire, not in your hand.

From coffee sleeves to wire coatings, insulators slow unwanted flow. In daily life, that’s heat flow. In electronics, it’s the flow of electricity. Joe Christensen/iStock via Getty Images; Jose A. Bernat Bacete/Moment via Getty Images

Inside electronics, insulators do more than keep the user safe. They also help devices store charge in a controlled way. In that role, engineers often call them dielectrics. These insulating layers sit at the heart of capacitors and transistors. A capacitor is a charge-storing component – think of it as a tiny battery, albeit one that fills up and empties much faster than a battery. A transistor is a tiny electrical switch. It can turn current on or off, or control how much current flows.

Together, capacitors and transistors make modern electronics work. They help phones store information, and they help computers process it. They help today’s AI hardware move huge amounts of data at high speed.

What surprises most people is how thin these insulating, current-quelling dielectrics are. In modern microchips, key dielectric layers can be only a few nanometers thick. That’s tens of thousands of times thinner than a human hair. A modern phone can contain billions of transistors, so at that scale, slimming them down by even 1 nanometer can make a difference.

As an electrical and material scientist, I work with my adviser, Tara P. Dhakal, at Binghamton University to understand how to make these insulating layers as thin as possible while preserving their reliability.

Thinner dielectrics don’t just shrink devices. They can also help store more charge. But at such scale, electronics get finicky. Sometimes what looks like a breakthrough isn’t quite what it seems. That’s why our focus is not just making dielectrics thin. It’s making them both thin and trustworthy.

What makes one dielectric better than another?

In both capacitors and transistors, the basic structure is simple: They contain two conductors separated by a thin insulator. If you bring the conductors closer, more charge can build up. It’s like two strong magnets with a sheet between them – the thinner the sheet, the stronger the pull.

But thinning has a limit. In transistors, the classic insulator silicon dioxide loses its ability to insulate at about 1.2 nanometers. At that scale, electrons can sneak through a shortcut called quantum tunneling. Enough charge leaks through that the device is no longer practical.

When materials are so thin that they start to leak, engineers have another lever. They can switch to an insulator that stores more charge without being made extremely thin. That ability is described by a metric called the dielectric constant, written as k. Higher-k materials can achieve that storage with a thicker layer, which makes it much harder for electrons to slip through.

For example, silicon dioxide has k of about 3.9, and aluminum oxide has k of about 8, twice as high. If a 1.2-nanometer silicon dioxide layer leaks too much, you can switch to a 2.4-nanometer aluminum oxide layer and get roughly the same charge storage. Because the film is physically thicker, it won’t leak as much.

The breakthrough that wasn’t

In 2010, a team of researchers at Argonne National Laboratory reported something that sounded almost impossible: They’d made an ultrathin coating that apparently had a giant dielectric constant, near 1,000. The material wasn’t a single new compound. It was a nanolaminate – a microscopic layer cake. In nanolaminates, you stack two materials in repeating A-B-A-B layers, hoping their interfaces create properties neither material has on its own.

An electron microscope view shows the repeating layers in a nanolaminate coating. It’s a bit like a cake – thin layers stacked on top of each other. Mahesh Nepal and Dmytro Hrushchenko/iStock via Getty Images

In that work, the stack alternated aluminum oxide, with a k of about 8, and titanium oxide, with a k of about 40. The researchers built the stack by growing one molecular layer at a time, which is ideal for building and controlling the nanometer-scale layers in a nanolaminate.

When the team made each sublayer less than a nanometer, it found that the entire material was able to hold an incredible amount of charge – thus, the giant k.

The result triggered years of follow-up work and similar reports in other stacks of oxides.

But there’s a twist. In our recent study of the aluminum oxide/titanium oxide nanolaminate system, we found that the apparent giant k value was a measurement error.

In our study, the nanolaminate wasn’t acting like a clean insulator, and it was leaking enough to inflate the k value. Think of a bucket with a hairline crack: You keep pouring, and it seems like the bucket holds a lot, even though the water won’t stay inside.

Once we figured that a leak was behind the giant k result, we set out to solve the larger puzzle. We wanted to know what makes the nanolaminate leak, and what process change could make it truly insulating.

The culprit

We first looked for an obvious culprit: a visible defect. If a film stack leaks, you expect pinholes or cracks. But the nanolaminate looked smooth and continuous under the microscope. So why would a stack that looks solid fail?

The answer wasn’t in the shape, it was in the chemistry. The earliest aluminum oxide sublayers didn’t contain enough aluminum. That meant the film looked continuous, yet was still incomplete at the atomic scale. Electrons could find connected paths and escape through it. It was physically continuous but electrically leaky.

Our process to create these films, called atomic layer deposition, uses tiny, repeatable cycles. You add in two chemicals, one after the other. Each pair is one cycle. For aluminum oxide, the pair is often trimethylaluminium (TMA), which is the aluminum source, and water, which is the oxygen source. Together, they create the aluminum oxide, and one cycle adds roughly a single layer of material – about one-tenth of a nanometer. By repeating the cycles, you can grow the film to the thickness you need: about 10 cycles for 1 nanometer, 25 cycles for 2.5 nanometers, and so on.

But there’s a catch. When you deposit aluminum oxide on top of titanium oxide, the first chemical for aluminum oxide – TMA – can steal oxygen from the titanium oxide layer below. This issue removes some of the sites the aluminum source normally reacts with on the layer’s surface. So, the first aluminum oxide layer doesn’t grow evenly and ends up with less aluminum than it should have.

That problem leaves tiny weak spots where electrons can slip through and cause leakage. Once the aluminum oxide becomes thick enough – around 2 nanometers – it forms a more complete barrier, and those leakage paths are effectively sealed off.

One small change flipped the outcome. We kept the same aluminum source, TMA, but swapped the oxygen source. Instead of water, we used ozone. Ozone is a stronger oxygen source, so it can replace oxygen that gets pulled out during the TMA step. That shut down leakage paths. The aluminum oxide then behaved like a real barrier, even when it was thinner than a nanometer. With the ozone fix, the nanolaminate acted like a true insulator.

The takeaway is simple: When you’re down to a few atomic layers, chemistry can matter as much as thickness. The types of chemical compounds you use can decide whether those early layers become a real barrier or leave behind leakage paths.

Mahesh Nepal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.