Category: Academic Reportage

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Matthew D. Dean, Assistant Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine

When the power goes out and stays off for hours, the result can be more than just a hassle – for millions of Americans who rely on medical equipment, losing electricity can become a medical emergency.

Your neighbor might rely on an oxygen concentrator to breathe – a machine the size of a carry-on bag that hums quietly through the night. Or they might need a CPAP – continuous positive airway pressure – machine to keep them breathing safely in their sleep, or a ventilator.

Most home medical devices run on backup batteries that last only 3 to 8 hours. Yet people in over half of U.S. counties experienced at least one outage lasting more than eight hours between 2018 and 2021. Power outages are becoming more common in the U.S., too. They grew 9% more frequent and lasted 56% longer between 2014 and 2023, driven by severe weather, winter storms, hurricanes and wildfires linked to climate change.

Studies following major blackouts show an increase in disease-related deaths, including a 25% rise during a three-day blackout in New York City in August 2003. Emergency rooms can become overwhelmed with device users seeking backup power and medical care.

But not everyone with a medical device faces the same risks during a power outage. In a new study published in the journal Environmental Research: Health, we show which groups need the most help and who is slipping through the cracks in life-threatening ways.

Four very different realities

We analyzed data from more than 2,600 households reporting the use of medical devices, drawn from a nationally representative federal survey of nearly 18,500 American homes. Using statistical modeling, we identified four distinct groups, each facing a very different situation when the power goes out.

About 60% of medically dependent households are financially stable homeowners. They face outages, but they are the most likely group to have backup generators.

A second group, roughly 20%, are homeowners who struggle to pay their energy bills and sometimes skip medicine or meals to keep the lights on, but who also tend to have backup power sources. This group had the highest likelihood of experiencing dayslong power outages in the past year, but was also more likely to have a generator or access to solar power than the average American.

A third group is apartment renters who can afford their electricity bills but are typically unable to make long-term upgrades for more resilient power supplies. For example, they can’t install solar panels or add permanent backup power because those decisions belong to their landlord, not them.

The fourth class is the smallest, roughly 7% of medical device households, and by far the most at risk. These are mostly low-income urban renters, and they face two compounding problems: They struggle to pay their electricity bills every month, and they have almost no backup resources when the power goes out.

Nearly 58% of these at-risk renters said they had received a disconnection notice from their utility within the previous year. One in eight had needed medical attention because their home got too hot or too cold. This group is also disproportionately Black or Hispanic.

Our findings confirm what researchers have long suspected: Energy insecurity among medical device users is deeply tied to income, housing type and race. Our study also shows the importance of understanding where people are both energy insecure and less likely to have access to backup power sources during outages.

What communities are doing today

Some communities are finding ways to tackle pieces of this problem.

Most utility companies maintain lists of households with medical devices, and they are supposed to notify customers ahead of power shutoffs and prioritize restoring power to their homes. However, studies show that these registries capture only a fraction of the people who qualify.

If medical device users were instead automatically enrolled during a doctor’s visit, or if landlords were required to notify new tenants of these registries, those steps could help reach more people.

Portable battery programs, like those run by California’s largest utilities, provide free or low-cost rechargeable batteries and a solar panel kit to homeowners and renters with medical devices who are most at risk of power shutoffs. Contractors can work with households to choose an appropriate battery to ensure it isn’t too heavy or difficult to transport if evacuating because of a wildfire or other disaster.

As climate change makes blackouts longer and more frequent – and as federal low-income energy assistance programs face cuts – providing help to residents falls increasingly on states and cities. Knowing which households face the greatest risks can make it easier to target aid to those in need.

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. Power outages in heat waves and storms can threaten the lives of medical device users – we looked at who is most at risk – https://theconversation.com/power-outages-in-heat-waves-and-storms-can-threaten-the-lives-of-medical-device-users-we-looked-at-who-is-most-at-risk-276501

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Monica Duffy Toft, Professor of International Politics and Director of the Center for Strategic Studies, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

Wars are rarely lost first on the battlefield. They are lost in leaders’ minds − when leaders misread what they and their adversaries can do, when their confidence substitutes for comprehension, and when the last war is mistaken for the next one.

The Trump administration’s miscalculation of Iran is not an anomaly. It is the latest entry in one of the oldest and most lethal traditions in international politics: the catastrophic gap between what leaders believe going in and what war actually delivers.

I’m a scholar of international security, civil wars and U.S. foreign policy, and author of the book “Dying by the Sword,” which examines why the United States repeatedly reaches for military solutions and why such interventions rarely produce durable peace. The deeper problem with the U.S. war in Iran, as I see it, was overconfidence bred by recent success.

Dismissed concerns

Before the conflict involving Iran, Israel and the U.S. escalated, Energy Secretary Chris Wright dismissed concerns about oil market disruption, noting that prices had barely moved during the 12-day war in June 2025 between Israel and Iran. Other senior officials agreed.

What followed was significant: Iranian-aimed missile and drone barrages against U.S. bases, Arab capitals and Israeli population centers. Then Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes daily − not with a naval blockade, not with mines or massed anti-ship missiles, but with cheap drones.

A few strikes in the vicinity of the strait were enough. Insurers and shipping companies decided the transit was unsafe. Tanker traffic dropped to zero, although the occasional ship has made it through recently. Analysts are calling it the biggest energy crisis since the 1970s oil embargo.

Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, has since vowed to keep the strait closed. U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, reported after a closed-door briefing that the administration had no plan for the strait and did not know how to get it safely back open.

With no embassy in Tehran since 1979, the U.S. relies heavily for intelligence on CIA networks of questionable quality and Israeli assets who have their own country’s interests in mind. So the U.S. did not anticipate that Iran had rebuilt and dispersed significant military capacity since June 2025, nor that it would strike neighbors across the region, including Azerbaijan, widening the conflict well beyond the Persian Gulf.

The war has since reached the Indian Ocean, where a U.S. submarine sank an Iranian frigate 2,000 miles from the theater of war, off the coast of Sri Lanka – just days after the ship had participated in Indian navy exercises alongside 74 nations, including the U.S.

The diplomatic damage to Washington’s relationships with India and Sri Lanka, two countries whose cooperation is increasingly important as the United States seeks partners to manage and mitigate Iran’s blockade, was entirely foreseeable. Washington has put them in a difficult position, with India choosing diplomacy with Iran to secure passage for its vessels and Sri Lanka opting to retain its neutrality, underscoring its vulnerable position.

But U.S. planners didn’t foresee any of this.

The wrong lesson from Venezuela

The swift military intervention by the U.S. in Venezuela in January 2026 produced rapid results with minimal blowback − appearing to validate the administration’s faith in coercive action.

But clean victories are dangerous teachers.

They inflate what I call in my teaching the “hubris/humility index” − the more a leadership overestimates its own abilities, underestimates the adversary’s and dismisses uncertainty, the higher the score and the more likely disaster will ensue. Clean victories inflate the index precisely when skepticism is most needed, because they suggest the next adversary will be as manageable as the last.

Political scientist Robert Jervis demonstrated decades ago that misperceptions in international relations are not random but follow patterns. Leaders tend to project their own cost-benefit logic onto opponents who do not share it. They also fall into “availability bias,” allowing the most recent operation to stand in for the next.

The higher the hubris/humility index, the less likely there is to be the kind of strategic empathy that might ask: How does Tehran see this? What does a regime that believes its survival is at stake actually do? History shows that such a regime escalates, improvises and takes risks that appear irrational from an outside perspective but are entirely rational from within.

Recent cases reveal this unmistakable pattern.

The United States in Vietnam, 1965–1968

American war planners believed material superiority would force the communists in Hanoi to surrender.

It didn’t.

American firepower alone didn’t lead to military defeat, much less political control. The Tet Offensive in 1968 – when North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched coordinated attacks across South Vietnam – shattered the official U.S. narrative that the war was nearly won and that there was “light at the end of the tunnel.”

Athough the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces ultimately repelled the attacks, their scale and surprise caused the public not to trust official statements, accelerating the erosion of public trust and decisively turning American opinion against the war.

The U.S. loss in Vietnam didn’t occur on a single battlefield, but through strategic and political unraveling. Despite overwhelming superiority, Washington was incapable of building a stable, legitimate South Vietnamese government or recognizing the grit and resilience of the North Vietnamese forces. Eventually, with mounting casualties and large-scale protests at home, U.S. forces withdrew, ceding control of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces in 1975.

The U.S. failure was conceptual and cultural, not informational. American analysts simply couldn’t picture the war from their opponent’s perspective.

Afghanistan: Deadly assumptions

The Soviet Union in Afghanistan in 1979 and the United States in Afghanistan after 2001 conducted two different wars but held the same deadly assumption: that external military force can quickly impose political order in a fractured society strongly resistant to foreign control.

In both cases, great powers believed their abilities would outweigh local complexities. In both cases, the war evolved faster − and lasted far longer − than their strategies could adapt.

Russia, Ukraine and the Strait of Hormuz

This is the case that should most haunt Washington.

Ukraine demonstrated that a materially weaker defender can impose huge costs on a stronger attacker through battlefield innovation: cheap drones, decentralized adaptation, real-time intelligence, and the creative use of terrain and chokepoints to find asymmetrical advantages. The U.S. watched it all unfold in real time for four years and helped pay for it.

Iran was also watching − and the Strait of Hormuz is the proof.

Iran didn’t need a navy to close the world’s most important energy chokepoint. It needed drones, the same cheap, asymmetric technology Ukraine has used to blunt Russia’s onslaught, deployed not on a land front but against the insurance calculus of the global shipping industry.

Washington, which had underwritten much of that playbook in Ukraine, apparently never asked the obvious question: What happens when the other side has been taking notes? That is not a failure of U.S. intelligence. It is a failure of strategic imagination − exactly what the hubris/humility index is designed to highlight.

Iran does not need to defeat the U.S. conventionally. It needs only to raise costs, exploit chokepoints and wait for a fracture among U.S. allies and domestic political opposition to force a fake U.S. declaration of victory or a genuine U.S. withdrawal.

Notably, Iran has kept the strait selectively open to Turkish, Indian and Saudi vessels, rewarding neutral countries and punishing U.S. allies, driving wedges through the coalition.

Historian Geoffrey Blainey famously argued that wars start when both sides hold incompatible beliefs about power and only end when reality forces those beliefs to align.

That alignment is now happening, at great cost, in the Persian Gulf and beyond. The Trump administration scored high on the hubris index at exactly the moment when it most needed humility.

Monica Duffy Toft 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. Overconfidence is how wars are lost − lessons from Vietnam, Afghanistan and Ukraine for the war in Iran were ignored – https://theconversation.com/overconfidence-is-how-wars-are-lost-lessons-from-vietnam-afghanistan-and-ukraine-for-the-war-in-iran-were-ignored-278604

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Karen Schlatter, Director, Colorado Water Center, Colorado State University

The seven U.S. states that make up the Colorado River basin are struggling to agree on how best to manage the river’s water as its supply dwindles due to climate change and a period of prolonged drought. Their negotiations, which are not open to the public, missed a Feb. 14, 2026, deadline the federal government had established, after which federal officials said they would impose their own plan.

The federal government has not yet done so, but the prospect of such an action is not good news for the nearly 40 million people who depend on the Colorado River for water, energy, agriculture and recreation, nor for the estimated US$1.4 trillion in economic activity the river supports.

We have led or participated in complex water management discussions from the river’s headwaters in Colorado to its delta in Mexico and elsewhere in the arid Southwest and around the world. Even on less contentious issues, the keys to success involve learning together, understanding one another’s interests, working through conflict and developing inclusive solutions for diverse participants. And that works best with an outside facilitator.

The five most common sources of conflict between people are values, data, relationships, interests and structure. The current Colorado River negotiations include all five. We believe a process designed and facilitated by negotiation experts could help break the logjam.

We recognize it can be very hard to reach an agreement when what’s at stake are countless lives, massive amounts of money, enormous quantities of hydroelectric power and not nearly enough water.

But compromise on Colorado River management is possible and, in fact, was achieved to curb California’s water use in the 2000s, to negotiate an interim agreement to coordinate operations at the Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs in 2007, and to enact contingency plans to manage drought in 2019. But this time around, circumstances are different.

Previous negotiations

The negotiations leading up to those agreements were often facilitated by officials from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation who focused on reaching broad agreements on general principles and concepts before delving into details. Federal staff also actively guided key agreements and provided the science and computer models to make well-informed decisions. And the states’ negotiators knew the Department of Interior would act unilaterally to make damaging cuts to water supply if states couldn’t come to their own agreement.

The negotiators for the states had long-standing relationships and built trust by frequently communicating outside formal meetings and seeking to listen to and understand other states’ perspectives, even if they didn’t agree.

The states also agreed to use the bureau’s computer model for analyzing scenarios of climate change and management decisions. That meant all the negotiators were looking at the same data when delving into possible options. And the political and social environment was less polarized than today.

The current situation

In this round of negotiations, federal leadership has been lagging. The Department of the Interior has not made clear what the consequences might be for the states if they fail to agree. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has been without a permanent commissioner since President Donald Trump retook office in January 2025.

And federal staff have only recently begun helping to facilitate the discussions.

The states are fractured into subgroups, according to whether they are in the river’s Upper Basin – Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico – or the Lower Basin, which includes Arizona, Nevada and California. Each basin group holds strong positions and has generally been unwilling to shift.

Each basin group is using a different set of assumptions for the bureau’s computer model to explore options. And the discussion often gets stuck on details, which prevents progress toward broader agreements.

In addition, the political context has shifted significantly, with increased polarization and politicization of the issues, creating barriers to effective dialogue and deliberation. Today, compromise can seem unattainable.

But those relatively new challenges to Colorado River compromise are not an excuse for failure.

A way forward?

The current negotiations have all been done behind closed doors. From talking with people involved in the negotiations, we understand the negotiators have been left to set their own agendas and meeting plans and conduct their own communications and follow-up, with no formal facilitators.

It’s reasonable to expect the negotiators to be ready to represent their states’ interests, working through an incredibly complicated landscape of hydrology, climate and management scenario modeling, water law and administration, and politics. But we believe it’s unreasonable – and unrealistic and unfair – to expect them to also be experts at designing and facilitating an effective process for sorting out their differences.

Federal officials are not necessarily the best people to run the process either. And if the agency that ultimately needs to approve any deal is the one leading the process, real or perceived biases about the states or key issues in the agreement could further complicate the discussions.

We believe that agreement between the seven states is still possible. It may be less effective to bring in a third-party facilitator at this stage in the negotiation process, though, because of the degraded trust, hardened positions and shortage of time.

One possible outcome is that the Bureau of Reclamation will select and enforce one of the five management alternatives it outlined in January 2026. But that could lead to decades of litigation going up to the Supreme Court. No one wins in this scenario.

A more hopeful possibility is that the bureau adopts short-term rules that would give the states another chance to negotiate a longer-term deal – ideally with an unbiased third-party facilitator for support.

A collaborative and consensus-based planning process in the Yakima River Basin in Washington state in the early 2010s is evidence that while nobody gets everything they want in a negotiated agreement, “if they can (all) get something, that’s really the basis of the plan,” as a Washington state official told The New York Times.

Sharon B. Megdal is principal investigator on multiple grants and contracts, none of which funded or influenced the content of this essay. Megdal served as an elected member of the Central Arizona Project Board of Directors from 2009 through 2020.

Karen Schlatter 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. Why Colorado River negotiations stalled, and how they could resume with the possibility of agreement – https://theconversation.com/why-colorado-river-negotiations-stalled-and-how-they-could-resume-with-the-possibility-of-agreement-278029

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Katrine L. Wallace, Epidemiologist, University of Illinois Chicago

Public health advocates have largely applauded a Massachusetts judge’s ruling on March 16, 2026, to temporarily block major changes to vaccine policy made by the Department of Health and Human Services since 2025.

The ruling pauses two major actions ushered in by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. since he stepped into the role. First, it blocks Kennedy’s restructuring of a key vaccine panel called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in June 2025. Second, it suspends HHS’s overhaul of the childhood vaccine schedule in January 2026, which cut the number of routine vaccinations children are recommended to receive from 17 to 11.

As an epidemiologist who studies vaccine hesitancy and a public-facing science communicator, I view these HHS actions as extremely damaging to public health, and I am relieved they have been paused, at least while legal proceedings are ongoing.

However, I also worry that this back-and-forth is detrimental to trust in science, especially for families who are already uneasy about vaccinating their kids or feel hesitant to do so.

What exactly happened?

The March 16 decision follows a lawsuit originally brought in July 2025 by six medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics. The medical organizations argued that HHS’s changes were implemented without following established legal and scientific processes.

The ruling seems to align with that view, concluding that the government’s overhaul of the vaccine committee likely “fails to comport with governing law” and that its changes to the vaccine schedule were “arbitrary and capricious.”

The judge’s action suggests that the court believes the plaintiffs are likely to succeed in showing that the HHS changes violated federal law.

The ruling returns recommendations on the childhood vaccine schedule – made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of HHS’s primary divisions – to their pre–June 2025 status while the case proceeds. It also blocks HHS’s replacement of members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which reviews evidence and develops recommendations that guide vaccine-related decisions by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The ruling effectively pauses the vaccine committee’s work. The members appointed by Kennedy cannot serve at the moment, and the previous members do not automatically return, leaving the committee inactive for now.

Officials from HHS have indicated that they are likely to appeal the ruling.

Does the ruling change people’s ability to access vaccines?

Not at the moment, because right now nothing has changed about what vaccines children should receive. Pediatricians should be following the long-standing vaccine schedule as it existed before the HHS’s change in June 2025. Most physicians already are, having followed the American Academy of Pediatrics’ decision not to back HHS’s revised schedule.

Additionally, private insurers as well as federal health programs such as Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Vaccines for Children had already agreed to continue covering all the vaccines through 2026, even before the judge intervened.

From a health economics perspective, data shows that the downstream costs of treating vaccine-preventable illnesses are much higher than the cost of reimbursing vaccines, so insurance companies may be motivated to continue covering them.

Moving forward, however, the ongoing court case could affect vaccine availability because many insurance companies and public programs rely on recommendations from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to determine which vaccines are covered or provided at no cost.

If your children are behind on any vaccines, it would be a good idea to get them now, given the uncertainty.

What effect might the ruling have longer term?

It’s important to remember that even though policy shifts in vaccine recommendations can be confusing, the data on the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccines has not changed. There were no safety alerts or new clinical trials that precipitated HHS’s change to the vaccine schedule.

Even with the prior recommendations back in place, however, all the back-and-forth in the headlines may create confusion for parents. Mistrust of vaccines and public health is at an all-time high, fueled by disinformation, poor communication on the part of public health agencies, and other factors that arose mostly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Parents have long considered health agencies such as the CDC to be trustworthy but increasingly look upon them with skepticism. A survey in January 2026 showed public trust in federal health agencies has declined following HHS’s changes to the childhood vaccine schedule.

Immunization rates, meanwhile, are on the decline, particularly for measles. An analysis released by Reuters on March 18, 2026, of vaccination data from Michigan suggests the number of toddlers receiving routine vaccines fell sharply from January 2025 to January 2026, and that Kennedy’s attack on vaccines influenced parents’ decisions to forgo them.

Rebuilding trust in vaccines and public health will take time and will require consistent, transparent communication and strong engagement between clinicians and families. The court ruling potentially represents an initial step in that process.

For parents with questions about vaccines, the best source of information remains their child’s pediatrician. Parents can also look to evidence-based vaccine schedules maintained by health groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Katrine L. Wallace 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. Federal judge temporarily blocks RFK Jr.’s vaccine agenda – an epidemiologist answers questions parents may have – https://theconversation.com/federal-judge-temporarily-blocks-rfk-jr-s-vaccine-agenda-an-epidemiologist-answers-questions-parents-may-have-278709

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Mary Magnuson, Associate Science Editor, The Conversation

“Project Hail Mary,” the movie adaptation to Andy Weir’s 2021 novel about a science teacher attempting to save the Earth from sun-eating microbes, was released in March 2026 to stellar ratings from critics and audiences alike. The movie explores a few unique forms that extraterrestrial life could take, from space microorganisms that produce both infrared light and an unfathomable amount of energy, to rocklike aliens that live under crushing pressure and breathe ammonia.

Over the past decade, scientists have come up with a variety of frameworks to guide their search for life in the universe. While it’s most convenient to start looking for life using the knowledge that biologists have about life on Earth, scientists have also begun integrating broader conceptions of life, including life that perhaps evolved in different chemical environments.

To expand on the idea that life out in space might look nothing like life on Earth, here are five articles The Conversation U.S. rounded up from our archives, and written by astronomers and astrobiologists.

1. Why base the search on life on Earth?

Astronomers participating in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence typically start by identifying potentially habitable planets. And to do that, they look for what sustains life on Earth: water.

Planets that are close enough to their Sun that liquid water wouldn’t freeze, but far enough away that it wouldn’t evaporate, fall into what’s called the Goldilocks Zone. But why base the search on water, which complex life on Earth uses to survive, if an extraterrestrial life-form might use different chemistry?

Cole Mathis, a physicist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University who studies complex adaptive systems, explained that out of convenience, astronomers start by looking for signals similar to those produced by life on Earth.

Detecting chemical signatures using the instruments on telescopes is tricky – it’s like playing hide-and-seek, but you’re outside the house and can only peer in through the window. You might as well start by ruling out the easy and more obvious hiding spots.

Missions to Mars have looked for signs of photosynthesis – the process by which plants take in energy – and telescopes peering deep into space look for oxygen, which organisms on Earth release into the atmosphere.

“Most astronomers and astrobiologists know that if we only look for life that’s like Earth life, we might miss the signs of aliens that are really different,” Mathis wrote. “But honestly, we’ve never detected aliens before, so it’s hard to know where to start. When you don’t know what to do, starting somewhere is usually better than nowhere.”

---

Read more:
Why do astronomers look for signs of life on other planets based on what life is like on Earth?

---

2. Finding patterns of purpose

Sometimes, scientists find chemical ingredients that make up life on Earth out in space, but they can’t assume that these ingredients on their own indicate life. Geological and environmental processes on planets may produce these chemical signatures without any living organisms involved.

The key difference, to Amirali Aghazadeh, a computational scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is purpose. Life grows, adapts and changes over time to better fit its environment.

His research team came up with a framework that, instead of looking for a specific type of life-form, looks at patterns in collections of chemicals and evaluates whether they could have been produced by processes like metabolism and evolution.

“If we assume that alien life uses the same chemistry, we risk missing biology that is similar – but not identical – to our own, or misidentifying nonliving chemistry as a sign of life,” wrote Aghazadeh.

---

Read more:
Can scientists detect life without knowing what it looks like? Research using machine learning offers a new way

---

3. Lessons from complex, evolving systems

Like Aghazadeh, many astrobiologists are starting to look more broadly at how complexity emerges, rather than searching for a specific type of molecule that could indicate the presence of extraterrestrial life. Other forms of life may be made up of entirely different chemical ingredients to humans, but to be considered life, they would still have to adapt and evolve over time.

Chris Impey, an astronomer from the University of Arizona, attended a workshop where scientists across disciplines came together to try to understand how and why systems in the universe – from organisms to languages and information – change or grow more complex over time.

Figuring out these underlying drivers of complexity, or finding signals that indicate the presence of a complex system, could help scientists search for unique forms of life in the universe.

“As astrobiologists try to detect life off Earth, they’ll need to be creative,” Impey wrote. “One strategy is to measure mineral signatures on the rocky surfaces of exoplanets, since mineral diversity tracks terrestrial biological evolution. As life evolved on Earth, it used and created minerals for exoskeletons and habitats.”

---

Read more:
Extraterrestrial life may look nothing like life on Earth − so astrobiologists are coming up with a framework to study how complex systems evolve

---

4. Beyond biology: Looking for ‘technosignatures’

Another option for searching for life has nothing to do with biology. Some scientists, wrote astronomers Macy Huston and Jason Wright from Penn State University, look for “technosignatures:” signals that would come from technology originating beyond Earth.

Human technology – from TV towers to satellite and spacecraft communications – emits enough radio waves to create faint but detectable signals traveling through space. Scientists use this idea to search for artificial signals that could potentially come from an extraterrestrial civilization.

Other technosignatures could include chemical pollution, artificial heat or light from industry, or signals from a large number of satellites.

“While many astronomers have thought a lot about what might make for a good signal, ultimately, nobody knows what extraterrestrial technology might look like and what signals are out there in the universe,” wrote Huston and Wright.

---

Read more:
Signatures of alien technology could be how humanity first finds extraterrestrial life

---

5. Evaluating extraordinary claims

Detecting extraterrestrial life in any form would be a momentous occasion, so, as Impey wrote, making a declaration might not be cut-and-dried. In “Project Hail Mary,” the fictional scientists sample and study the “space dots” they find extensively before drawing a conclusion.

Scientists must first rule out any possible non-biological explanations for a discovery, meaning the discovery would have to be unexplained by any chemical or geological processes. If scientists ever found a potential life-form very different from all life on Earth, it might take extensive research before they could rule out all other possibilities and determine that it’s a living organism. But setting this bar so high protects scientists from making a claim they would later need to walk back.

“A detection of life would be a remarkable development,” Impey wrote. “On scales large and small, astronomers try to set a high bar of evidence before claiming a discovery.”

---

Read more:
‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’ − an astronomer explains how much evidence scientists need to claim discoveries like extraterrestrial life

---

This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.

– ref. ‘Project Hail Mary’ explores unique forms of life in space – 5 essential reads on searching for aliens that look nothing like life on Earth – https://theconversation.com/project-hail-mary-explores-unique-forms-of-life-in-space-5-essential-reads-on-searching-for-aliens-that-look-nothing-like-life-on-earth-278757

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jeffrey Tully, Associate Clinical Professor of Anesthesiology, University of California, San Diego

HBO Max’s enormously popular television series “The Pitt” is receiving plaudits for its realistic depiction of the trials and tribulations of health care in an urban emergency room.

Now in its second season, which premiered on Jan. 8, 2026, the show follows Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (played by Noah Wyle) and his colleagues through a single 15-hour clinical shift, divided into one-hour episodes. The team treats patients against a backdrop of all-too-common American societal plagues, from substance use disorder to medical bankruptcies and mass shootings.

Spoiler alert: About halfway through the season, Dr. Robby and the staff at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center grapple with chaos ensuing from a less commonly depicted disaster – a hospital cyberattack. The hospital’s network and computers were incapacitated, resulting in scenes of millennial residents struggling with fax machines, laboratory orders disappearing in a shuffle of papers, and constant communication breakdowns culminating in a missed life-threatening diagnosis.

All this might prompt viewers to wonder: Does this actually happen in real life?

As physicians who study cyberattacks and their impact on patient care, we have seen many of the same events depicted in “The Pitt” play out in the real world.

These attacks have severe clinical consequences. In an unfortunate case of art imitating life, the show’s cyberattack story arc began on the same day that the University of Mississippi Medical Center suffered the same fate, resulting in the sudden closure of more than 30 affiliated clinics across the state while also disrupting Mississippi’s only Level I trauma center.

Modern health care is critically dependent on digital technologies, such as electronic health records, laboratory machines and radiology platforms, that shut down when hospital networks are taken offline. Losing access to these tools for prolonged periods of time puts patients’ lives at grave risk.

What’s at stake

The most dire real-life cyberattacks on hospitals involve ransomware, a class of malicious software that encrypts data and locks down computers and networks, demanding significant amounts of cash for the promise of relief. Unfortunately, these events are not rare. Comparitech, a cybersecurity research firm, recorded 445 ransomware attacks on hospitals and clinics in 2025 – a new peak following several years of annual increases.

Such attacks are especially dangerous for patients with time-sensitive emergencies like strokes, heart attacks or sepsis, but they affect hospital outcomes broadly. For example, a 2026 analysis of Medicare data found that hospitalized patients had a 38% higher risk of death during a ransomware attack.

Moreover, the health impacts of ransomware are not confined to the hospitals under attack. “The Pitt” demonstrates this phenomenon well in earlier episodes. When Westbridge, another hospital in the community, is struck first, a wave of patients arriving by ambulance strains Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s already packed emergency room, leading to delays in care and overwhelming already-strained clinicians. Our team found that a hospital cyberattack cut the odds of surviving a cardiac arrest without devastating brain damage by nearly 90% at nearby hospitals, not just the one that was attacked.

And even when a hospital’s computer systems are restored and normal care resumes, a cyberattack leaves enormous financial damage in its wake. Class action lawsuits, fragmented billing and steep regulatory fines due to patient privacy breaches and other issues often result in tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of losses.

In the worst cases, hospitals or clinics in rural areas have been forced to shutter their doors, leaving their communities with one less place to receive care and exacerbating existing health care deserts.

Protecting cyber infrastructure

We have no doubt that Dr. Robby will rally his team to ultimately save the day from malicious cyberattacks on “The Pitt.” But what is the prognosis for the rest of us, in the real world?

The good news is that a number of efforts are underway to improve the cybersecurity of the U.S. health care system.

The federal government has recognized the particular risk posed to rural and critical access hospitals and has identified increased investment in cybersecurity technologies as one of the goals of the Rural Health Transformation Program, a US$50 billion package distributed across all 50 states.

Several states, including New York and Connecticut, have taken further action, enshrining new bills in 2025 and 2026 mandating hospitals develop specific cybersecurity plans to protect patients. And the Food and Drug Administration now evaluates the cybersecurity of new medical devices prior to their arrival to market, and can issue recalls of those found to have significant vulnerabilities.

Cybersecurity remains one of the few bipartisan issues on Capitol Hill. A health care cybersecurity bill co-sponsored by Senators Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Mark Warner, D-Va., introduced in December 2025, would require hospitals to adopt security practices, including multifactor authentication and data encryption, allocate additional grants for hospitals and clinics, and strengthen the pipeline for cybersecurity professionals working in the health care sector, among other provisions.

However, this problem isn’t going away. Artificial intelligence and the expansion of remote and virtual care mean that malicious hackers have sophisticated new tools and increased opportunities to target hospitals. Researchers like us will have to find new ways to prevent cyberattacks when possible and protect patients when they inevitably erupt.

Jeffrey Tully is the co-founder of Inoculum Labs. He receives funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. He is affiliated with the Healthcare and Public Health Sector Coordinating Council Cybersecurity Working Group.

Christian Dameff co-founded inoculum labs. He receives funding from ARPA-H.

– ref. HBO’s ‘The Pitt’ nails how hospital cyberattacks create chaos, endanger patients and disrupt critical care – https://theconversation.com/hbos-the-pitt-nails-how-hospital-cyberattacks-create-chaos-endanger-patients-and-disrupt-critical-care-278795