Category: Academic Reportage

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Kathryn Spearman, Assistant Professor of Nursing, Penn State

Dr. Cerina Wanzer Fairfax was an accomplished dentist and a loving mom to two teenage children. On April 16, 2026, she was killed by her estranged husband, former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who then killed himself, according to news reports. This apparent intimate partner murder-suicide has garnered widespread media attention because of Justin Fairfax’s public profile.

As if to prove how pervasive such incidents are, just three days later, on April 19, 2026, eight children were killed in a mass shooting related to intimate partner violence in Louisiana. Seven of the children were shot by their father, who also killed another child and wounded his wife and another woman in the same attack, according to news reports. Both wounded women were mothers of some of the seven children.

Two-thirds of mass shootings in the United States are linked to domestic violence, and 40% of the victims in domestic violence-related mass shootings are children. The terms domestic violence homicide and intimate partner homicide are often used interchangeably, but the former includes all killings within a household or family, while the latter specifically refers to murders related to a current or former partner.

I am a public health nurse scientist who studies risk factors for intimate partner homicides and post-separation abuse. Research consistently shows that the period of separation and divorce is when the risk of intimate partner homicide is highest.

Tragically, the warning signs that precede homicides by an intimate partner are common but often misunderstood or unrecognized. All too often, escalating behaviors during separation may be chalked up to a “messy divorce” or “custody battle.” But such language obscures patterns of danger that are recognizable, predictable – and, importantly, preventable.

Clear warning signs for domestic violence homicides

Four of the most dangerous warning signs that a woman is at risk of being murdered by an intimate partner are firearm access, separation, prior nonfatal strangulation and stalking. Other red flags that indicate a partner may kill include unemployment, substance use, problematic drinking, controlling or jealous behavior, abuse during pregnancy, rape and prior threats of suicide or with weapons.

The pattern of behavior matters. These risk factors have been studied extensively and are best understood not in isolation but in how they interact.

Several elements in the Fairfax case were red flags that should have prompted intervention: Justin Fairfax’s unemployment, problematic drinking and firearm access; a prior concern for suicide; and a separation that involved an ongoing family court case for divorce and child custody. The warning signs were there: Dr. Cerina Wanzer Fairfax was in danger.

Who is most at risk?

Nearly five women are murdered in America every day by a current, former or estranged intimate partner. Intimate partner homicide is a leading cause of mortality for women of reproductive age, and Black women are murdered at disproportionately higher rates. The vast majority of adult victims of intimate partner murder-suicides – 95% – are women. The killer is almost always a man, the weapon is most often a gun, and these incidents occur most often in the home.

The uncomfortable truth is that the home is the most dangerous place for women.

Children are not spared from this danger. Research shows that children are at risk if their mothers are at risk, and intimate partner violence is also a leading cause of death of American children. What’s more, 40% of children who are murdered in a domestic violence mass shooting are killed by a parent – someone who should love and protect them – most often in their homes.

Turns out, home is the most dangerous place for children too.

Children who survive their mothers’ murder find their bodies or witness the homicide in about 70% of cases.

Cerina Wanzer Fairfax’s teenage son found her and called 911. Behind these heartbreaking details is trauma that is difficult to comprehend. The needs and long-term outcomes of child survivors of intimate partner homicide, like the Fairfax children and those who may have witnessed the Louisiana mass shooting, remain largely invisible in the research on domestic violence. Addressing this research gap is essential for communities to respond effectively to support the needs of children who are surviving devastating grief.

Separation is the most lethal time

Contrary to common misperception, leaving an abusive relationship does not end the abuse – nor does it necessarily lead to safety. About half of murders of women by an intimate partner occur as or after a woman tries to leave the relationship or when she is involved in civil family law proceedings, including civil protective orders, child custody, separation and divorce. Physical separation, such as moving out, coupled with legal separation is associated with the greatest risk.

The gunman in the Louisiana case was separating from his wife, and the duo had a court appearance scheduled for the day following the shooting, according to news reports.

Separation is particularly risky from a controlling partner, or perhaps more aptly worded, from someone who is losing control. Women who leave a controlling male partner are nine times more likely to be murdered.

The judge in the Fairfax custody proceedings noted that Justin Fairfax had purchased a gun in 2022 with money designated for their children’s activities. People who engage in abusive behaviors may directly or indirectly threaten their partners with firearms, which can often include subtle threats toward their children.

Assessing risk and accessing interventions

Guns and separation are a deadly combination. Research shows that in about 3 in 5 cases of murder-suicide perpetrated by men with a firearm, family court is somehow involved. In other words, the homicide perpetrator was participating in legal proceedings relating to separation, divorce or child custody.

This evidence points to family court proceedings as a place where interventions could work. Research shows that domestic violence protection orders, which allow courts to remove firearms from people identified as being at high risk for using violence against a partner, reduce the risk of intimate partner homicide-suicides. Removing firearm access is one of the few effective interventions for reducing intimate partner homicide.

Researchers have developed tools that can help advocates and legal professionals identify women most at risk as well as help women recognize their own risk. A particularly well-tested one is the danger assessment, which can be used in health, legal and advocacy settings.

But screening on its own is not enough. Women at high risk need to be connected to safety planning resources. People who may be concerned for themselves or a loved one can use an app such as MyPlan, which incorporates the danger assessment and provides safety planning suggestions.

Intimate partner homicides follow a pattern of known, predictable risks. And predictable patterns are very often preventable. The warning signs are well studied. Translating that knowledge into consistent recognition and response across courts, law enforcement and communities is where the work remains.

Kathryn Spearman has received funding for her research from Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and The Pennsylvania State University Child Maltreatment Solutions Network.

– ref. Intimate partner homicide has clear warning signs – and is often preventable, research shows – https://theconversation.com/intimate-partner-homicide-has-clear-warning-signs-and-is-often-preventable-research-shows-280984

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Robert Forrant, Professor of U.S. History and Labor Studies, UMass Lowell

On a spring morning in 1914, miners in Ludlow, Colorado, were celebrating Greek Easter when the Colorado National Guard and a private security agency opened fire on their camp with a machine-gun-equipped armored car called the Death Special.

The miners waged a pitched battle with the National Guard for 10 days before President Woodrow Wilson ordered federal soldiers to intervene. An estimated 69 to 199 people were killed. It was the end of one of the most bitter and violent miner strikes in U.S. labor history, which had begun in September 1913. The strike and massacre prompted Congress to take a hard look at labor reform. But significant changes in labor relations and unionization didn’t come until the mid-1930s.

Some state labor laws were on the books, but in 1914 the U.S. House Committee on Mines and Mining reported: “Colorado has good mining laws and such that ought to afford protection to the miners as to safety in the mine if they were enforced, yet in this State the percentage of fatalities is larger than any other, showing there is undoubtedly something wrong in reference to the management of its coal mines.”

Once the initial shock of the violence wore off, the Ludlow strike received little public attention outside of the immediate families affected and some Colorado residents until late in the 20th century. In “Where Are the Workers,” Mary Anne Trasciatti, a professor at Hofstra University, and I edited a collection of essays written by labor historians and archivists that explore nationwide efforts to bring the history of labor and working people into mainstream narratives of U.S. history.

The Ludlow Massacre is one of the most dramatic and deadly of those stories. It rivals the West Virginia Mine Wars of the 1920s.

The Ludlow Massacre

In September 1913, roughly 10,000 mostly immigrant miners who worked for the Colorado Fuel & Iron Co. went on strike. The miners were represented by the United Mine Workers of America, which submitted a list of demands when the strike began, including implementing the eight-hour workday, being compensated for the time miners spent in the shafts, and the right to select their own housing and doctors.

Since national strikes were called in the 1880s demanding the eight-hour day, this had been a goal for workers throughout the U.S. In Colorado, voters had endorsed such an amendment to the state constitution in 1902, but it was not uniformly enforced.

Coal mining in the early 1900s was labor intensive and dangerous. Death rates were high. Workers had no say in how the mines operated. From 1884 to 1912, more than 1,708 men died in the state’s coal mines, a rate twice the national average. In 1910, explosions at two Colorado Fuel & Iron mines killed 131 people. In 1912, 125 workers lost their lives in mine accidents across Colorado. That year, the annual death rate in Colorado’s mines was 7.06 per 1,000 employees, compared to a national rate of 3.15. Every trip down a shaft was fraught, with workers paid only for the weight of the coal they mined, not for their travel time.

John D. Rockefeller, the nation’s wealthiest man at the time of the strike, was the main owner of the fuel and iron company. With about 10,000 workers and nearly 70,000 acres of land under control, Colorado Fuel and Iron was one of the most powerful mining companies of that era.

Coal companies often owned entire towns, including miners’ homes, which was the case in Ludlow. Worker protests often led to widespread evictions. As a result of the Ludlow strike, 1,200 coal miners and their families were evicted and took refuge in tent colonies around the mines during the winter of 1913-14.

Colorado Fuel & Iron hired and armed 300 members of a private security agency known as Baldwin-Felts when the strike began. The agency was founded in the early 1890s by William Gibbony Baldwin and employed by mining companies in West Virginia and Colorado to repress strikes. Their job was to keep order and – if possible – break the walkout and reopen the mines.

Members of the United Mine Workers of America armed themselves as conflicts with the mining company’s private security force intensified.

Eventually, the Colorado governor, Elias M. Ammons, ordered the Colorado National Guard to join the fray on the corporation’s side, with the Rockefellers paying their wages. The Guard arrested hundreds of strikers.

Then, on April 20, 1914, the National Guard and the private company opened fire on the tent colonies where the miners lived. After several hours of gunfire, with miners defending their camp, 25 people were dead, including two women and eleven children trapped when the camp was intentionally set ablaze.

Months earlier, miners had dug foxholes under tents so women and children could avoid bullets randomly fired through the camps. When the armored vehicle opened fire, everyone in the camps ducked into the holes. Later, women and children were found by miners huddled together at the bottoms of their burned-out tents.

Many miners’ family members were saved when the engineer on a passing train witnessed what was happening and stopped on the track to shield them from the gunfire.

This violence led to 10 more days of conflict before President Wilson finally ordered federal troops to disarm both sides.

Changes to labor law

In Congress, the House Committee on Mines and Mining conducted an investigation into the events and released a report in 1915. John D. Rockefeller Jr. was summoned before the committee, where he was questioned for several hours on May 20, 1914. There, he admitted that he had not visited the site since the incidents that led to the deaths of workers and their families.

According to a New York Times report, when asked whether he knew that thousands of his employees had been evicted from their homes and were living in tent colonies, and that the striking workers and their families were suffering without work or food, Rockefeller replied that he could not say, but that company officials could provide the facts. None were forthcoming.

A federal Commission on Industrial Relations also held hearings, determined to quell the upsurge in early 20th-century labor violence.

In 1912, the immigrant- and women-led Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, also led to a congressional investigation. In its report on the 1914 miners’ strike, the commission described the strike by workers as “against arbitrary power.” It summarized that miners “passionately felt” that they were denied “a voice in fixing working conditions in the mines” and that political democracy had been “repudiated by the owners.”

The commission determined that the strike raised a fundamental question about whether workers had a right to a voice at work. This question would animate labor struggles into the 1930s.

In 1935, Congress passed and President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the National Labor Relations Act, which provided federal guidelines for labor union formation and stated that workers had a federal right to bargain over wages, hours and conditions of employment, the very things Colorado coal miners sought when they went on strike in 1913.

Commemorating the Ludlow strike and massacre

In 1915, officers of the United Mine Workers of America purchased 40 acres of land north of the Ludlow, Colorado, train depot, on the site where the tent colony had sheltered coal miners and their families during the 1913-14 strike.

Three years later, United Mine Workers officials dedicated a granite monument at the site where the women and children were killed. Labor historian James Green noted that of all the violence against workers at the time, none shocked the nation or troubled its collective conscience more than the Ludlow massacre because of the deaths of children. However, even incidents like the Ludlow Massacre did not become a significant part of the public discourse. This has changed some in the recent past.

Today, the tent colony site is a National Historic Landmark.

The labor movement in the United States remains a bulwark of democracy, and workers have often been a driving force for social and economic equality in their communities. Yet its stories are not widely known, even one so dramatic as this battle in the Colorado coalfields.

The recognition of the Ludlow site as a National Historic Landmark and the recent release of a Library of Congress research guide propel the history of labor and working people into the mainstream. Such place-based labor history promotes our understanding of how and why things we sometimes take for granted – such as the eight-hour workday, paid holidays or workplace safety laws – came about only because people were willing to risk their lives fighting for these rights.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Robert Forrant 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.

– ref. 1914 Ludlow Massacre took lives of 25 miners and family members during bitter strike for fair wages and conditions – https://theconversation.com/1914-ludlow-massacre-took-lives-of-25-miners-and-family-members-during-bitter-strike-for-fair-wages-and-conditions-278626

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jonathan van Harmelen, Visiting Assistant Professor, Oberlin College and Conservatory

For the past 13 years, Maricopa County in Arizona has attempted to reform its sheriff’s department after Joe Arpaio made it into a national flash point for extreme immigration tactics. After a legal immigrant sued Arpaio and the county Sheriff’s Office, a federal district court ruled in 2015 that Arpaio and his deputies relied on racial profiling to target Latinos.

Arpaio was at the center of that suit. From 2006 to 2017, he implemented his own immigration detention program, instructing deputies to detain anyone who did not carry a valid identification and did not speak English. One U.S. Department of Justice attorney characterized Arpaio as overseeing “the worst pattern of racial profiling by a law enforcement agency in U.S. history.”

Federal oversight has since aimed to reform the sheriff’s department and improve trust with the county’s Latino residents, which had been destroyed under Arpaio’s tenure.

As a historian of U.S. immigration, I believe Arpaio’s immigration detention methods are clearly echoed in the hardline immigration policies devised by presidential aide Stephen Miller. That’s evident in actions by immigration agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection that have been described as inhumane by some lawmakers and civil rights groups.

A blueprint for ICE facilities

From his election to sheriff in 1993 until 2017, Arpaio made constant headlines for his creation of a tent jail and his heavy-handed immigration enforcement tactics.

Using surplus army tents from the Korean War to house up to 1,700 inmates, Arpaio built Tent City in August 1993 to address overcrowding in Phoenix jails. By the time the jail closed in 2017, Sheriff Paul Penzone estimated that running Tent City cost taxpayers US$8.5 million annually.

Tent City was initially used for detaining criminals, but after 2009, Arpaio used the facility for housing detained immigrants.

News reports said Arpaio forced inmates to wear pink underwear and often fed them expired food and undrinkable water. The tents did little to shield inmates from the Arizona desert, where temperatures rose to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, (54 degrees celsius) at times. Tent City stirred a national uproar.

Starting in 2006, Arpaio and Maricopa County sheriffs engaged in a pattern of “unlawful discriminatory police conduct directed at Hispanic persons,” according to Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mark Kappelhoff. During these operations, he directed deputies to detain people suspected as being undocumented immigrants without legal immigration authorization.

Arpaio’s deputies explicitly targeted Latino drivers in their traffic stops. A Department of Justice investigation concluded that Arpaio used race as a criteria for stopping and detaining Latino drivers. Legal U.S. residents and U.S. citizens were occasionally arrested in these sweeps.

Phoenix News-Times journalist Stephen Lemons in January 2009 noted that, during operations, some Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies wore ski masks and carried assault rifles while conducting immigration sweeps.

Camp East Montana

Tent City appears to be an early version of the detention facilities used by ICE today, where detainees have complained of squalid conditions and poor food.

ICE currently detains some 70,000 people in 224 detention centers nationwide. Of those, two camps, Camp East Montana near El Paso, Texas, and Alligator Alcatraz in Florida, are eerily similar to Tent City.

Camp East Montana is the most recent of these new facilities. Opened in August 2025, the 60-acre detention center has become one of the largest ICE facilities in the U.S., holding 5,000 detainees.

Like Tent City, Camp East Montana was constructed using tents that do little to shield inmates from the elements. The Washington Post reported in September that the facility’s poor food, shoddy living quarters and exposure to the desert sun violated 60 federal regulations.

The cost of inhumane policies

During Arpaio’s tenure, his office faced 6,000 federal lawsuits.

Those included a $9 million payout to the parents of Charles Agster III, after a federal jury found Arpaio and jailhouse nurses negligent in his death. And they included a $2 million payout to the parents of Brian Crenshaw after the disabled man died following an altercation with a sheriff’s detention officer.

The most costly, though, was the 2013 ruling in Melendres v. Arpaio. U.S. District Judge Murray Snow found Arpaio guilty of racial profiling. The ruling placed Arpaio’s office under federal monitoring with orders to overhaul the department. As a result, Maricopa County residents have paid $323 million to reform the department.

Arpaio left office in January 2017. Months later, Tent City closed. After a failed attempt to run for U.S. Senate in 2018, Arpaio retired from politics.

But I believe that the resemblance between Arpaio’s fixation on immigration and Trump’s deportation campaign remains.

Since Trump’s second election, ICE and CBP agents have followed Arpaio’s playbook. Along with erecting tent jails for detaining immigrants, agents have used racial profiling during immigration raids. Consequently, hundreds of U.S. citizens have been detained during raids and protests.

On April 2, 2026, Judge Jennifer Thurston ruled that CBP agents violated court orders and “again detained people without reasonable suspicion” – tactics similar to those used by Arpaio.

Arpaio’s policies foreshadowed Trump’s deportation policy: one that uses racial profiling and shows little regard for human rights.

As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in her dissent in Noem v. Vazquez-Perdomo in 2025, many Latinos now carry proof of citizenship out of fear of racial profiling.

In July 2017, a federal court found Arpaio guilty of criminal contempt for violating a 2011 federal order to stop detaining people solely on suspicion of illegal immigration status.

A month later, before Arpaio’s sentencing, Trump pardoned Arpaio. He described the sheriff as a “great American patriot” who had “done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration.”

Jonathan van Harmelen 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.

– ref. ICE’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement was tried once before – by Arizona’s notorious sheriff Joe Arpaio in the early 2000s – https://theconversation.com/ices-heavy-handed-immigration-enforcement-was-tried-once-before-by-arizonas-notorious-sheriff-joe-arpaio-in-the-early-2000s-279310

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Lise Eliot, Professor of Neuroscience, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science

Girls and boys are equally social at birth.

This finding, based on my team’s synthesis of six decades of research, may come as a surprise. Gender differences in adults’ social sensitivity are famous. Women outperform men at recognizing faces and emotions, and they score modestly higher on measures of empathy. They are likelier to take jobs working with people, such as in teaching and health care, whereas men are likelier to choose jobs working with “things,” such as in engineering or plumbing.

But how early do these differences emerge, and are they a matter of evolution or social learning? For years, some theorists have argued the former: that the difference is innate, built into the brain hardware of girls and boys through Darwinian selection. But this perspective relies almost exclusively on just one high-profile, yet deeply flawed, study of 102 newborns.

Mining the neonatal research trove

Realizing that psychologists have been studying newborns’ social orientation for decades, my team of neurobehavioral researchers and I set out to collect all the data – every published study that has compared boys’ and girls’ attention to social stimuli in the first month of life. Our goal was to better test the hypothesis of an inborn gender difference in attention to, or interest in, other people.

Our study was a systematic review, meaning we searched through every published report indexed in both medical and psychological databases from the 1960s onward.

We cast a wide net, looking for any research that measured newborns’ attention to or preference for human faces or voices and that reported the data separately by gender. Importantly, we did not limit our search to the terms “gender difference” or “sex difference,” since these would bias the collection by potentially excluding studies that failed to find boy-girl differences.

As expected, we unearthed dozens of studies comparing newborn boys and girls on social perception: 40 experiments reported in 31 peer-reviewed studies and involving nearly 2,000 infants. The majority of studies measured the amount of time newborns spent looking at faces, either at a single face or comparing a baby’s preference between two faces of differing social value, such as their own mother versus a woman who was a stranger.

Our data collection was large enough that we were able to carry out meta-analysis, which is a statistical method for combining the results of many studies. Meta-analysis essentially turns many small studies into a single large one. For studies measuring neonates’ looking time at faces, this included 667 infants, half of them boys and half of them girls.

The result was clear: nearly identical social perception between baby boys and girls. There was no significant difference between genders overall, nor was there a difference when we focused only on studies measuring babies’ gaze duration on a single face, or only on studies measuring babies’ gaze preference between two different faces.

Our search also netted two other types of studies. One focused on a remarkable behavior: newborns’ tendency to start crying when they hear another baby cry. An early study found this “contagious crying” to be marginally more common in girls. But when we performed meta-analysis on data across nine contagious-crying experiments, including 387 infants, there was again no solid evidence for male-female difference.

The last dataset we analyzed compared babies’ orientation to both social and inanimate objects using a newborn behavior assessment scale developed by legendary pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton. Across four studies involving 619 infants, girls did pay somewhat greater attention to the social stimuli (a human face or voice), but they also paid more attention to the inanimate stimuli (a ball or the sound of a rattle).

In other words, girls in this test seemed a bit more attuned to every type of stimulus, perhaps due to a general maturity advantage that they hold from fetal development through puberty. But there was nothing special about their interest in people, according to the Brazelton assessment.

Boys, too, prefer faces

Our findings align with other well-designed studies, including one finding that 5-month-old boys and girls equally prefer looking at faces over toy cars or other objects, and another finding that 2-month-old boys actually perform better than girls at detecting faces. So taken together, current research dispels a common myth that girls are innately “hardwired” to be more social than boys in early life.

The truth is that all babies are wired for social engagement at birth. Boys and girls are both primed to pay attention to human faces and voices, which, after all, belong to those who will keep them fed, safe and comforted.

Despite their best intentions, most parents cannot help but stereotype their infants by gender and begin treating boys and girls differently early on. Presuming that sons are already less social is not a recipe for remedying this bias. Our research can help dispel this myth, giving every child, male or female, the best possible start for connecting with and caring about other people.

Lise Eliot receives research funding from the Fred B. Snite Foundation.

– ref. It’s a myth that baby boys are less social than girls – a new look at decades of research shows all babies are born to connect – https://theconversation.com/its-a-myth-that-baby-boys-are-less-social-than-girls-a-new-look-at-decades-of-research-shows-all-babies-are-born-to-connect-277453

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Andras Molnar, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan

Two new experiments show that most people do not even consider that a personal message could be AI-generated, even when they themselves use artificial intelligence to write.

To see how people judge someone based on their writing in the age of ChatGPT, my colleague Jiaqi Zhu and I recruited more than 1,300 U.S.-based participants, ages 18 to 84, and showed them AI-generated messages like an apology sent in an email. We split our volunteers into four groups: Some people saw the messages with no information about who or what wrote them, as in everyday life. Others were told the messages were definitely written by a human, definitely AI-generated, or that the source could be either.

We found a clear “AI disclosure penalty.” When people knew a message was AI-generated, they rated the sender much more negatively – “lazy,” “insincere,” “lack of effort” – than when they believed that the same text was written by a person – “genuine,” “grateful,” “thoughtful.”

But here is the twist: The participants who were not told anything about authorship formed impressions that were just as positive as those from people who were told the messages were genuinely human.

This complete lack of skepticism surprised us – and it raises new questions. Maybe participants were not familiar enough with AI to realize that today’s models can produce detailed and personal messages. (They can.) Or perhaps participants have never used AI themselves. (They likely have.) So we also tested whether participants’ own AI use changed how they judged senders.

To our even bigger surprise, we found little to no effect. People who use generative AI quite frequently in their daily lives – at least every other day – did penalize AI use slightly less when AI authorship was disclosed, compared with people who never or rarely use AI. But participants were no more skeptical by default: When authorship was not disclosed, heavy AI users, light AI users and nonusers all tended to assume the text was written by a person and formed essentially the same impressions.

Why it matters

Lack of skepticism and a lack of negative impressions matter because people make social judgments from text all the time. Recipients consider taking the time and effort to send written messages as an insight into the writer’s sincerity, authenticity or competence, and those impressions shape people’s decisions in friendships, dating and work.

Yet our main findings reveal a striking disconnect: People usually do not suspect AI use unless it is obvious. This unawareness creates a moral dilemma: People who use AI in secret can enjoy the benefits while facing almost no risk of detection. Meanwhile, paradoxically, people who are upfront and admit to using AI suffer a reputational hit.

Over time, lack of skepticism and awareness could reshape what writing means in everyday life. Readers might learn to treat writing as a less reliable signal of someone’s character or effort, and instead rely on other forms of communication. For example, widespread AI use has already prompted employers to discount the value of cover letters from job applicants. Instead, they are relying more on personal recommendations from an applicant’s current supervisor or connections made through in-person networking.

What other research is being done

Other researchers have documented a wide range of negative impressions about people who disclose their AI use. Studies show it makes job applicants seem less desirable and employees seem less competent. Readers of creative writing perceive AI users as less creative and inauthentic. People see personal apologies and corporate apologies that stem from AI as less effective. In general, disclosing AI use decreases trust and undermines legitimacy.

Yet without disclosure, there is clear evidence that most people cannot reliably detect AI-generated text, even with the help of detection tools, especially when the text is a mix of human-written and AI-generated content. Even when people feel confident about their ability to spot AI text, their confidence may be nothing more than a self-affirming illusion.

What’s next

Even though our experiments did not reveal suspicion of AI use, that doesn’t mean people never suspect it in the real world. In some settings, people may already be hypervigilant about AI. Use in academia is an obvious example. In our next studies, we want to understand when and why people naturally start to suspect AI use, and what flips the switch between trust and doubt.

Until then, if you want your personal message to be judged as heartfelt, the safest strategy may be to make a phone call, leave a voicemail or, better yet, say it in person.

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

Andras Molnar 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.

– ref. Most people do not realize when a personal message they receive was written by AI, study finds – https://theconversation.com/most-people-do-not-realize-when-a-personal-message-they-receive-was-written-by-ai-study-finds-278874

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Greg Eghigian, Professor of History, Penn State

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 science that we do today truth, likely to be a lie, or is it undetermined? – Nathaniel K., age 15, Hamilton, Ohio

For most students, science is something you study and something you have to learn. I remember when I was in school, adults were always asking me things like “Do you like math?” and “Do you like science?” It’s almost like asking someone if they like spinach or broccoli.

In reality, science is not really a specific thing to like or hate, or something to believe in or not. Science is an activity. As one famous scientist put it, “Science is what scientists do.” It’s a way of working, a way to get things done.

So, then, what is it that scientists do? As a historian of science and medicine, I’ve studied how scientists try to understand the rules that govern things in the universe. For example, what makes the Moon orbit the Earth? How do clouds produce rain? How do people catch a cold? To answer questions like these, they do three things: They observe, they experiment and they analyze.

The process of science

All scientists carefully observe the subjects they are studying. Take the case of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin traveled the world collecting specimens of plants, animals and fossils to figure out how they came by their different features.

He soon came up with an idea: Maybe certain species in an area look the way they do because they have characteristics that are best adapted to the environment they live in, and they are passing these on to their offspring. Darwin kept testing out this idea everywhere he went, and in the end his theory seemed to work. Ever since, scientists have conducted countless studies that affirm his theory.

Many scientists take observation a step further by performing experiments. In an experiment, the scientist might use a laboratory and special instruments to modify something they’re studying and look at the effects of the change. Their aim is either to test a theory or to see whether certain changes occur regularly.

A good example of this process can be seen in the experiments conducted by Ivan Pavlov in the 1890s with dogs. By introducing a sound right before a dog would be fed, Pavlov found the dog would start reacting to the sound the very same way it reacted to a bowl of food. For Pavlov, this demonstrated that animals learned through a process of association, or “conditioning.”

Finally, scientists are constantly analyzing the results of their observations and experiments. Scientists use measurements, logic and math to consider what their findings mean. But it’s often not clear what the findings mean, and so the investigators end up having to make more observations, conduct more experiments and rethink their methods and guesses.

Reporting the findings

The analysis process doesn’t stop there. Scientists show the results of their work to others, who, in turn, are invited to weigh in on whether they did a good job answering their research question. The criticism can be pretty intense at times. In most cases, this practice includes telling other scientists who work in the same field about what they did and what they found by giving presentations at conferences.

Scientists also have to submit their work for more evaluation if they hope to get money to support their research. After that, they go through even more evaluation when they try to publish the findings of their research in professional magazines called journals.

In both cases, scientists undergo a process called peer review, during which other scientists who study similar topics are asked to basically grade the quality of the researcher’s work and provide both negative and positive feedback.

If reviewers decide the study is not good enough, the researcher won’t get funding or their study published.

Is science truth?

The work of a scientist isn’t just observing something out in the world. Scientists must invite other experts to weigh in on what is right and wrong about their methods and ideas. As a result, every scientist has to be ready to rethink what they have been doing and believing.

Through this process, scientists work at getting closer and closer to the truth. New observations and new experiments may support or disprove earlier ones, or they might open up a whole new set of questions to answer.

The scientific results of today aren’t the whole truth, but they are the closest we can come to it right now. And as scientists today and in the future keep working, they seek to bring the whole truth more and more into focus.

When you see science as something people do to reach the truth, you realize it’s a way of working, whose strength comes from scientists being open to changing their approaches and conclusions.

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.

Greg Eghigian 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.

– ref. Is the science that we do today truth, likely to be a lie, or is it undetermined? – https://theconversation.com/is-the-science-that-we-do-today-truth-likely-to-be-a-lie-or-is-it-undetermined-278947

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Matthew E. Oliver, Associate Professor of Economics, Georgia Institute of Technology

The market for oil is global, which is why events like the war in Iran affect oil prices – and prices of the wide range of products made from oil – literally everywhere. Federal data shows that the price at the primary crude oil hub in the U.S. was US$66 a barrel in late February 2026 – before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran – and $101 a barrel on April 13. Similar price increases have reverberated around the globe.

As an energy economist and an international trade economist, we field a lot of questions during such episodes, because when oil prices go up, manufacturers, businesses and ultimately consumers pay more.

Some basic economics

Crude oil may be the most important commodity in the global economic system.

It’s a literal fuel for the industrial economy. It powers the engines that drive transportation and paves the roads vehicles drive on. It’s a source for plastics from which the world’s products get made and packaged, and a key ingredient at some point in almost every supply chain. Even fertilizers that boost the food supply are made from it. In short, it is difficult to imagine modern life without oil and its derivatives.

And when its supply changes, its price changes. Economists explain this using a fundamental model of our field: the supply-demand diagram. When there’s less of something to go around, competition among consumers who want it and companies that need it can drive the price up.

Sometimes this process can play out over time, allowing people to adjust their purchasing or activities to dampen price shocks. But when a significant source of the world’s oil is effectively blocked without much advance notice, such as when the the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, prices can rise sharply in a short period of time.

A natural question many people ask when oil prices spike is: Where does all that additional money go, and who benefits from it?

Some people have written entire books dissecting all the places that money goes when it leaves consumers’ pockets. But ultimately, the bulk of the money heads in the direction of the source of the oil itself – the oil companies.

What they do with the money varies widely, depending on where in the world an oil company is operating and who owns it. What also matters is the business environment – the set of laws and regulations – in which the company operates.

Middle East faces danger

Oil producers in the Middle East face significant new risk because of the war in Iran, including threats to production, processing locations and shipping routes. These risks raise their costs for insurance, security and transportation.

But production costs in the region are relatively low, so higher global oil prices typically still translate into strong profits.

For a major exporter such as Saudi Arabia, the government owns and controls nearly all oil production, so high prices generally benefit the government’s finances and investments, even during a war. In Saudi Arabia, oil revenue has historically been used to fund public spending.

West Texas gets a windfall

The Permian Basin, the largest oil field in the U.S., is a long way from the Persian Gulf. When global oil prices rise because of the war in Iran, oil companies operating in West Texas effectively get a windfall gain: Prices rise more quickly than costs, at least in the short run.

The immediate effect is more income from higher prices. The money largely goes to company owners – meaning shareholders – through dividends, debt reduction, company-backed purchases of its own stock, and reinvestment in drilling and production. Over time, companies may decide to spend some of that windfall on building more production capacity or pipelines to get more oil and gas to market.

North Sea boosts government revenue

In the North Sea, between the island of Great Britain and Scandinavia, a mix of multinational and government-owned companies produce most of the oil.

In the U.K., private shareholders are the primary beneficiaries of higher profits from increased oil prices, though an additional tax on oil and gas companies’ profits means the government also collects a significant share of the money, which it uses to help pay public expenses.

In Norway, oil revenues flow into the Government Pension Fund Global, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, valued at over $2 trillion. Laws govern how much, and for what purposes, money can be withdrawn from the fund, supporting public spending and preserving wealth for future generations. This is a similar model to Alaska’s state-owned program, funded by oil revenue, that pays for government services and sends an annual dividend to every permanent resident.

Russian oligarchs get rich

Russian oil is subject to stringent economic sanctions imposed by major industrial countries as a response to the Russian invasion and occupation of parts of Ukraine. While the U.S. cannot control how much Russia charges for its oil, it can control services needed to move Russian oil around the world. Under current price sanctions, Western shipping, insurance and financing can be used to ship and sell Russian crude oil only if the price is below $60 per barrel.

Russia’s oil industry is dominated by government-controlled companies whose leaders maintain close ties to President Vladimir Putin. The dealings of those shadowy figures are often shrouded in secrecy, but it is likely that they and Putin’s military-industrial complex – not the Russian people – are the main beneficiaries of high oil prices.

What this means for you

Everyday U.S. consumers may not like the idea of their hard-earned cash going into the already deep pockets of any of these groups. But in the short run, there’s not much to do but pay the price. For the long run, however, people around the world are already thinking and talking about, and opting for, sources of energy that don’t depend on fossil fuels.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. When oil prices spike, where does the money go? – https://theconversation.com/when-oil-prices-spike-where-does-the-money-go-280763