Category: Academic Reportage

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jeanne Beatrix Law, Professor of English, Kennesaw State University

Artificial intelligence is fast becoming part of the furniture. A decade after IBM’s Watson triumphed on “Jeopardy!,” generative AI models are in kitchens and home offices. People often talk about AI in science fiction terms, yet the most consequential change in 2025 may be its banal ubiquity.

To appreciate how ordinary AI use has become, it helps to remember that this trend didn’t start with generative chatbots. A 2017 Knowledge at Wharton newsletter documented how deep learning algorithms were already powering chatbots on social media and photo apps’ facial recognition functions. Digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa were performing everyday tasks, and AI-powered image generators could create images that fooled 40% of viewers.

When ChatGPT became publicly available on Nov. 30, 2022, the shift felt sudden, but it was built on years of incremental integration. AI’s presence is now so mundane that people consult chatbots for recipes, use them as study partners and rely on them for administrative chores. As a writer and professor who studies ways that generative AI can be an everyday collaborator, I find that recent usage reports show how AI has been woven into everyday life. (Full disclosure: I am a member of OpenAI’s Educator Council, an uncompensated group of higher education faculty who provide feedback to OpenAI on educational use cases.)

Who’s using ChatGPT and why?

Economists at OpenAI and Harvard analyzed 1.5 million ChatGPT conversations from November 2022 through July 2025. Their findings show that adoption has broadened beyond early users: It’s being used all over the world, among all types of people. Adoption has grown fastest in low- and middle-income countries, and growth rates in the lowest-income countries are now more than four times those in the richest nations.

Most interactions revolve around mundane activities. Three-quarters of conversations involve practical guidance, information seeking and writing. These categories are for activities such as getting advice on how to cook an unusual type of food, where to find the nearest pharmacy, and getting feedback on email drafts. More than 70% of ChatGPT use is for nonwork tasks, demonstrating AI’s role in people’s personal lives. The economists found that 73% of messages were not related to work as of June 2025, up from 53% in June 2024.

Claude and the geography of adoption

Anthropic’s economic index paints a similar picture of uneven AI adoption. Researchers at the company tracked users’ conversations with the company’s Claude AI chatbot relative to working-age population. The data shows sharp contrasts between nations. Singapore’s per-capita use is 4.6 times higher than expected based on its population size, and Canada’s is 2.9 times higher. India and Nigeria, meanwhile, use Claude at only a quarter of predicted levels.

In the United States, use reflects local economies, with activity tied to regional strengths: tech in California, finance in Florida and documentation in D.C. In lower-use countries, more than half of Claude’s activity involves programming. In higher-use countries, people apply it across education, science and business. High-use countries favor humans working iteratively with AI, such as refining text, while low-use countries rely more on delegating full tasks, such as finding information.

It’s important to note that OpenAI reports between 400 million and 700 million weekly active users in 2025, while third-party analytics estimate Claude at roughly 30 million monthly active users during a similar time period. For comparison, Gemini had approximately 350 million monthly active users and Microsoft reported in July 2025 more than 100 million monthly active users for its Copilot apps. Perplexity’s CEO reported in an interview that the company’s language AI has a “user base of over 30 million active users.”

While these metrics are from a similar time period, mid-2025, it’s important to note the differences in reporting and metrics, particularly weekly versus monthly active users. By any measure, though, ChatGPT’s user base is by far the largest, making it a commonly used generative AI tool for everyday tasks.

Everyday tool

So, what do mundane uses of AI look like at home? Consider these scenarios:

• Meal planning and recipes: A parent asks ChatGPT for vegan meal ideas that use leftover kale and mushrooms, saving time and reducing waste.
• Personal finance: ChatGPT drafts a budget, suggests savings strategies or explains the fine print of a credit card offer, translating legalese into plain language.
• Writing support: Neurodivergent writers use ChatGPT to organize ideas and scaffold drafts. A writer with ADHD can upload notes and ask the model to group them into themes, then expand each into a paragraph while keeping the writer’s tone and reasoning. This helps reduce cognitive overload and supports focus, while the writer retains their own voice.

These scenarios illustrate that AI can help with mundane decisions, act as a sounding board and support creativity. The help with mundane tasks can be a big lift: By handling routine planning and information retrieval, AI frees people to focus on empathy, judgment and reflection.

From extraordinary to ordinary tool

AI has transitioned from a futuristic curiosity to an everyday co-pilot, with voice assistants and generative models helping people write, cook and plan.

Inviting AI to our kitchen tables not as a mysterious oracle but as a helpful assistant means cultivating AI literacy and learning prompting techniques. It means recognizing AI’s strengths, mitigating its risks and shaping a future where intelligence — human and artificial — works for everyone.

Jeanne Beatrix Law serves on the OpenAI Educator Council, an uncompensated group of higher education faculty who provide feedback to OpenAI on educational use cases and occasionally tests models for those use cases.

– ref. AI chatbots are becoming everyday tools for mundane tasks, use data shows – https://theconversation.com/ai-chatbots-are-becoming-everyday-tools-for-mundane-tasks-use-data-shows-266670

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Dagomar Degroot, Associate Professor of Environmental History, Georgetown University

In May 2024, part of the Sun exploded.

The Sun is an immense ball of superheated gas called plasma. Because the plasma is conductive, magnetic fields loop out of the solar surface. Since different parts of the surface rotate at different speeds, the fields get tangled. Eventually, like rubber bands pulled too tight, they can snap – and that is what they did last year.

These titanic plasma explosions, also known as solar flares, each unleashed the energy of a million hydrogen bombs. Parts of the Sun’s magnetic field also broke free as magnetic bubbles loaded with billions of tons of plasma.

These bubbles, called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, crashed through space at around 6,000 times the speed of a commercial jetliner. After a few days, they smashed one after another into the magnetic field that envelops Earth. The plasma in each CME surged toward us, creating brilliant auroras and powerful electrical currents that rippled through Earth’s crust.

You might not have noticed. Just like the opposite poles of fridge magnets have to align for them to snap together, the poles of the magnetic field of Earth and the incoming CMEs have to line up just right for the plasma in the CMEs to reach Earth. This time they didn’t, so most of the plasma sailed off into deep space.

Humans have not always been so lucky. I’m an environmental historian and author of the new book “Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System.”

While writing the book, I learned that a series of technological breakthroughs – from telegraphs to satellites – have left modern societies increasingly vulnerable to the influence of solar storms, meaning flares and CMEs.

Since the 19th century, these storms have repeatedly upended life on Earth. Today, there are hints that they threaten the very survival of civilization as we know it.

The telegraph: A first warning

On the morning of Sept. 1, 1859, two young astronomers, Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson, became the first humans to see a solar flare. To their astonishment, it was so powerful that, for two minutes, it far outshone the rest of the Sun.

About 18 hours later, brilliant, blood-red auroras flickered across the night sky as far south as the equator, while newly built telegraph lines shorted out across Europe and the Americas.

The Carrington Event, as it was later called, revealed that the Sun’s environment could violently change. It also suggested that emerging technologies, such as the electrical telegraph, were beginning to link modern life to the extraordinary violence of the Sun’s most explosive changes.

For more than a century, these connections amounted to little more than inconveniences, like occasional telegraph outages, partly because no solar storm rivaled the power of the Carrington Event. But another part of the reason was that the world’s economies and militaries were only gradually coming to rely more and more on technologies that turned out to be profoundly vulnerable to the Sun’s changes.

A brush with Armageddon

Then came May 1967.

Soviet and American warships collided in the Sea of Japan, American troops crossed into North Vietnam and the Middle East teetered on the brink of the Six-Day War.

It was only a frightening combination of new technologies that kept the United States and Soviet Union from all-out war; nuclear missiles could now destroy a country within minutes, but radar could detect their approach in time for retaliation. A direct attack on either superpower would be suicidal.

Suddenly, on May 23, a series of violent solar flares blasted the Earth with powerful radio waves, knocking out American radar stations in Alaska, Greenland and England.

Forecasters had warned officers at the North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD, to expect a solar storm. But the scale of the radar blackout convinced Air Force officers that the Soviets were responsible. It was exactly the sort of thing the USSR would do before launching a nuclear attack.

American bombers, loaded with nuclear weapons, prepared to retaliate. The solar storm had so scrambled their wireless communications that it might have been impossible to call them back once they took off. In the nick of time, forecasters used observations of the Sun to convince NORAD officers that a solar storm had jammed their radar. We may be alive today because they succeeded.

Blackouts, transformers and collapse

With that brush with nuclear war, solar storms had become a source of existential risk, meaning a potential threat to humanity’s existence. Yet the magnitude of that risk only came into focus in March 1989, when 11 powerful flares preceded the arrival of back-to-back coronal mass ejections.

For more than two decades, North American utility companies had constructed a sprawling transmission system that relayed electricity from power plants to consumers. In 1989, this system turned out to be vulnerable to the currents that coronal mass ejections channeled through Earth’s crust.

In Quebec, crystalline bedrock under the city does not easily conduct electricity. Rather than flow through the rock, currents instead surged into the world’s biggest hydroelectric transmission system. It collapsed, leaving millions without power in subzero weather.

Repairs revealed something disturbing: The currents had damaged multiple transformers, which are enormous customized devices that transfer electricity between circuits.

Transformers can take many months to replace. Had the 1989 storm been as powerful as the Carrington Event, hundreds of transformers might have been destroyed. It could have taken years to restore electricity across North America.

Solar storms: An existential risk

But was the Carrington Event really the worst storm that the Sun can unleash?

Scientists assumed that it was until, in 2012, a team of Japanese scientists found evidence of an extraordinary burst of high-energy particles in the growth rings of trees dated to the eighth century CE. The leading explanation for them: huge solar storms dwarfing the Carrington Event. Scientists now estimate that these “Miyake Events” happen once every few centuries.

Astronomers have also discovered that, every century, Sun-like stars can explode in super flares up to 10,000 times more powerful than the strongest solar flares ever observed. Because the Sun is older and rotates more slowly than many of these stars, its super flares may be much rarer, occurring perhaps once every 3,000 years.

Nevertheless, the implications are alarming. Powerful solar storms once influenced humanity only by creating brilliant auroras. Today, civilization depends on electrical networks that allow commodities, information and people to move across our world, from sewer systems to satellite constellations.

What would happen if these systems suddenly collapsed on a continental scale for months, even years? Would millions die? And could a single solar storm bring that about?

Researchers are working on answering these questions. For now, one thing is certain: to protect these networks, scientists must monitor the Sun in real time. That way, operators can reduce or reroute the electricity flowing through grids when a CME approaches. A little preparation may prevent a collapse.

Fortunately, satellites and telescopes on Earth today keep the Sun under constant observation. Yet in the United States, recent efforts to reduce NASA’s science budget have cast doubt on plans to replace aging Sun-monitoring satellites. Even the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the world’s premier solar observatory, may soon shut down.

These potential cuts are a reminder of our tendency to discount existential risks – until it’s too late.

Dagomar Degroot has received funding from NASA.

– ref. Solar storms have influenced our history – an environmental historian explains how they could also threaten our future – https://theconversation.com/solar-storms-have-influenced-our-history-an-environmental-historian-explains-how-they-could-also-threaten-our-future-258668

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Daniel J. Sherman, Lineberger Distinguished Professor of Art History and History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In early November 1927, the front pages of newspapers all over France featured photographs not of the usual politicians, aviators or sporting events, but of a group of archaeologists engaged in excavation. The slow, painstaking work of archaeology was rarely headline news. But this was no ordinary dig.

The archaeologists pictured were members of an international team assembled to assess the authenticity of a remarkable site in France’s Auvergne region.

Three years before, farmers plowing their land at a place called Glozel had come across what seemed to be a prehistoric tomb. Excavations by Antonin Morlet, an amateur archaeologist from Vichy, the nearest town of any size, yielded all kinds of unexpected objects. Morlet began publishing the finds in late 1925, immediately producing lively debate and controversy.

Certain characteristics of the site placed it in the Neolithic era, approximately 10,000 B.C.E. But Morlet also unearthed artifact types thought to have been invented thousands of years later, notably pottery and, most surprisingly, tablets or bricks with what looked like alphabetic characters. Some scholars cried foul, including experts on the inscriptions of the Phoenicians, the people thought to have invented the Western alphabet no earlier than 2000 B.C.E.

Was Glozel a stunning find with the capacity to rewrite prehistory? Or was it an elaborate hoax? By late 1927, the dispute over Glozel’s authenticity had become so strident that an outside investigation seemed warranted.

The Glozel affair now amounts to little more than a footnote in the history of French archaeology. As a historian, I first came across descriptions of it in some histories of French archaeology. With a bit of investigating, it wasn’t hard to find first-person accounts of the affair.

But it was only when I began studying the private papers of one of the leading contemporary skeptics of Glozel, an archaeologist and expert on Phoenician writing named René Dussaud, that I realized the magnitude and intensity of this controversy. After publishing a short book showing that the so-called Glozel alphabet was a mishmash of previously known early alphabetic writing, in October 1927 Dussaud took out a subscription to a clipping service to track mentions of the Glozel affair; in four months he received over 1,500 clippings, in 10 languages.

The Dussaud clippings became the basis for the account of Glozel in my recent book, “Sensations.” That the contours of the affair first became clear to me in a pile of yellowed newspaper clippings is appropriate, because Glozel embodies a complex relationship between science and the media that persists today.

Serious scientists in the trenches

The international commission’s front-page visit to Glozel marked a watershed in the controversy, even if it did not resolve it entirely.

In a painstaking report published in the scholarly Revue anthropologique just before Christmas 1927, the commission recounted the several days of digging it conducted, provided detailed plans of the site, described the objects it unearthed and carefully explained its conclusion that the site was “not ancient.”

The report emphasized the importance of proper archaeological method. Early on, the commissioners noted that they were “experienced diggers, all with past fieldwork to their credit,” in different chronological subfields of archaeology. In contrast, they noted that the Glozel site showed clear signs of a lack of order and method.

In their initial meeting in Vichy, the assembled archaeologists agreed that they would give no interviews during their visit to Glozel and would not speak to the press afterward. But, aware of “certain tendentious articles published by a few newspapers,” the visitors issued a communiqué stating that they would neither confirm nor deny any press reports. Their scholarly publication would be their final word on the “non-ancientness” of the site.

The distinction between true science – what the archaeologists were practicing – and the media seemed absolute.

Sensationalist coverage, but careful details, too

And yet matters were not so simple.

Many newspapers devoted extensive and careful coverage to Glozel. They offered explanations of archaeological terminology. They explained the larger stakes of the controversy, which, beyond the invention of the alphabet, involved nothing less than the direction of the development of Western civilization itself, whether from Mesopotamia in the east to Europe in the west or the reverse.

Even articles about seemingly trivial matters, such as the work clothes the archaeologists donned to perform their test excavations at Glozel, served to reinforce the larger point the commissioners made in their report. In contrast to the proper suits and ties they wore for formal photographs marking their arrival, the visitors all put on blue overalls, which for one newspaper “gave them the air of apprentice locksmiths or freshly decked-out electricians.”

The risk, apparent in this jocular reference, of losing the social standing afforded them by their professional degrees and education was worth taking because it drove home these archaeologists’ devotion to their discipline, which their report described as “a daily moral obligation.”

Skeptical scientists did rely on journalism

If archaeologists continued to mistrust the many newspapers that sensationalized Glozel, its stakes and their work in general, they could not escape the popular media entirely, so they confided in a few journalists at papers they considered responsible.

Shortly after the publication of the report, which was summarized and excerpted in the daily press, original excavator Morlet accused Dorothy Garrod, the only woman on the commission, of having tampered with the site. A group of archaeologists responded on her behalf, explaining what she had actually been doing and defending her professionalism – in the press.

At the most basic level, media coverage recorded the standard operating procedures of archaeology and its openness to outside scrutiny. This was in contrast to Morlet’s excavations, which limited access only to believers in the authenticity of Glozel.

Under the watchful eyes of reporters and photographers, the outside archaeologists investigating Glozel knew quite well that they were engaged in a kind of performance, one in which their discipline, as much as this particular discovery, was on trial.

Like the signs in my neighborhood proclaiming that “science is real,” the international commission depended on and sought to fortify the public’s confidence in the integrity of scientific inquiry. To do that, it needed the media even while expressing a healthy skepticism about it. It’s a balancing act that persists in today’s era of “trusting science.”

This article draws on research funded by the Institut d’Études Avancées (Paris), the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as Daniel Sherman’s employer, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

– ref. The Glozel affair: A sensational archaeological hoax made science front-page news in 1920s France – https://theconversation.com/the-glozel-affair-a-sensational-archaeological-hoax-made-science-front-page-news-in-1920s-france-260967

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, Professor of Anthropology, Rice University

Almost 2 million years ago, a young ancient human died beside a spring near a lake in what is now Tanzania, in eastern Africa. After archaeologists uncovered his fossilized bones in 1960, they used them to define Homo habilis – the earliest known member of our own genus.

Paleoanthropologists define the first examples of the genus Homo based largely on their bigger brains – and, sometimes, smaller teeth – compared with other, earlier ancestors such as the australopithecines – the most famous of these being Lucy. There were at least three types of early humans: Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis and the best documented species, Homo erectus. At least one of them created sites now in the archaeological record, where they brought and shared food, and made and used some of the earliest stone tools.

These archaeological sites date to between 2.6 to 1.8 million years ago. The artifacts within them suggest greater cognitive complexity in early Homo than documented among any nonhuman primate. For example, at Nyayanga, a site in Kenya, anthropologists recently found that early humans were using tools they transported over distances of up to 8 miles (13 kilometers). This action indicates forethought and planning.

Traditionally, paleoanthropologists believed that Homo habilis, as the earliest big-brained humans, was responsible for the earliest sites with tools. The idea has been that Homo habilis was the ancestor of later and even bigger-brained Homo erectus, whose descendants eventually led to us.

This narrative made sense when the oldest known Homo erectus remains were younger than 1.6 million years old. But given recent discoveries, this seems like a shaky foundation.

In 2015, my team discovered a 1.85 million-year-old hand bone at Olduvai Gorge, the same place the original Homo habilis had been found. But unlike the hand of that Homo habilis juvenile, this fossil looked like it belonged to a larger, more modern, fully land-based rather than tree-based human species: Homo erectus.

Over the past decade, new finds have continued to push back the earliest dates for Homo erectus: about 2 million years ago in South Africa, Kenya and Ethiopia. Taken together, these discoveries reveal that H. erectus is slightly older than the known H. habilis fossils. We cannot simply assume that H. habilis gave rise to H. erectus. Instead, the human family tree looks far bushier than we once thought.

What do all these finds suggest? Only one Homo species is our likely ancestor, and probably only one can be responsible for the complex behaviors revealed at the Olduvai Gorge sites. My colleagues and I hit on a way to test whether Homo habilis was top dog at Olduvai Gorge, so to speak, based on whether they were the hunters or the hunted.

Who was hunting who?

At Olduvai Gorge, there is overwhelming evidence that early humans were consuming animals as big as a gazelle or even a zebra. Not only did they hunt, but they repeatedly brought these animals back to the same location for communal consumption. This is the concept of a “central provisioning place,” much like a campsite or home today. Dating to 1.85 million years ago, this is the oldest evidence of frequent meat-eating – and of early humans regularly acting as predators rather than prey.

All animals occupy a position on a food web, from top to lower ranks. Top-ranking predators, such as lions, are usually not preyed upon by lower ranking carnivores, such as hyenas.

If Homo habilis was acquiring large animal carcasses, either by hunting or by chasing lions away from their own kills, it seems logical that these hominids could effectively cope with predation risks. That is, a hunter usually isn’t hunted.

In African savannas, apex predators like lions do not usually die from other predator attacks. Humans today also occupy a top predatory niche: For example, Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania not only hunt game, but also fend off lions from their kills, and successfully defend themselves from attacks by other predators, such as leopards.

But, if Homo habilis was not yet a top predator, then you would expect them to have occasionally been prey to lower-on-the-food-chain carnivorous cats – such as leopards – who often hunt primates.

Most known human fossils at this stage of evolution do bear traces of carnivore damage, including the two best preserved H. habilis fossils from Olduvai Gorge. Was it caused after death, by a scavenging carnivore? Or did a big cat at the top of the food chain kill these early humans?

My colleagues and I set out to address the question of which predators were getting their teeth on H. habilis and presumably whether before or after the ancient humans died.

AI suggests H. habilis wasn’t an apex predator

Here’s where artificial intelligence comes in. Using computer vision, we trained AI on hundreds of microscopic images showing tooth marks left by the main carnivores in Africa today: lions, leopards, hyenas and crocodiles. The AI learned to recognize the subtle differences between the marks made by the different predators and was able to classify the marks with high accuracy.

When we combined different AI approaches, they all pointed to the same result: The tooth marks on the Homo habilis bones matched those made by leopards. The size and shape of the marks on the fossils from those two early Homo habilis individuals line up with what leopards leave today when feeding on prey.

Our discovery challenges the long-standing view of Homo habilis as the first skilled toolmaker, hunter and meat-eater.

But maybe it shouldn’t be too surprising. The only complete skeleton of this species found at Olduvai Gorge belonged to a very small individual – just about 3 feet tall (less than 1 meter) – with a body that still showed features suited for climbing trees. That hardly matches the image of a hunter able to bring down large animals or steal carcasses from lions.

If it wasn’t Homo habilis performing these feats, maybe it was Homo erectus, a species with a larger body and more modern anatomy. But that opens up other mysteries for future researchers: What was Homo habilis doing at the archaeological sites of Olduvai Gorge if it was not responsible for the tools and signs of hunting we find there? Where exactly did Homo erectus come from, and how did it evolve?

My team and others will be returning to places like Olduvai Gorge to ask these questions in the years to come.

Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo receives funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Universities

– ref. AI reveals which predators chewed ancient humans’ bones – challenging ideas on which ‘Homo’ species was the first tool-using hunter – https://theconversation.com/ai-reveals-which-predators-chewed-ancient-humans-bones-challenging-ideas-on-which-homo-species-was-the-first-tool-using-hunter-266561