Il est entre parenthèses mais il donne tout son sens au thème. En ajoutant un « s » au thème de son édition 2025, la Fête de la science (dont The Conversation est cette année encore partenaire) nous propose d’explorer toutes les formes d’intelligence.
Mais en vidéo, cette année, nous avons voulu mettre l’accent sur deux formes bien spécifiques d’intelligence.
Tout d’abord celle qui permet de lutter contre la bêtise humaine. En poussant les portes d’Inria, nous avons découvert les travaux de Célia Nouri, doctorante en intelligence artificielle, à la croisée du traitement automatique du langage et des sciences sociales. Elle développe des modèles de détection prenant en compte le contexte social et communautaire des propos haineux, modèle qui servent à mieux lutter contre le harcèlement en ligne.
Le Cnes nous a également ouvert ses portes et avec elles, l’horizon de nos préoccupations. Jacques Arnould, théologien et spécialiste en éthique du centre national d’études spatiales, il nous encourage à réfléchir aux intelligences extraterrestres. Si demain nous devions en rencontrer, comment arriverions-nous à leur faire reconnaître notre intelligence ? Des pistes de réponse dans cette vidéo.
Jacques Arnould, expert du Cnes en matière d’éthique.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By William Crozier, Duns Scotus Assistant Professor of Franciscan Studies, Durham University
Bruised by recent events, the Church of England has just entered a new era. Dame Sarah Mullally’s appointment as the first female archbishop of Canterbury is momentous. But Mullally has an enormous challenge ahead of her in healing the wounds that afflict her church. Restoring trust in the church’s senior leadership and preventing the church from fracturing over issues of sexuality and gender will be at the top of her agenda.
Mullally’s appointment comes on the heels of a period of crisis in the church. The former archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, was forced to resign following revelations about how he and other senior church leaders handled historic cases of child abuse.
Mullally made clear that her first task will be to restore confidence in the church’s senior management and safeguarding processes: “As archbishop, my commitment will be to ensure that we continue to listen to survivors, care for the vulnerable, and foster a culture of safety and wellbeing for all.”
As the first female archbishop of Canterbury, Mullally faces a unique set of challenges. A former chief nursing officer for England, Mullally was one of the first women to be made a senior bishop in a diocese when she was made bishop of London in 2018. While many in the Church of England have welcomed women priests and bishops, some – particularly on the traditionalist Evangelical and Catholic wings of the church – continue to oppose women’s ordination.
Mullally’s role in guiding the global Anglican family is also complicated by the fact that many of its member churches do not accept women bishops and priests. Senior Anglican leaders from Africa and Asia have openly criticised her appointment, both because she is a woman and because of her views on same-sex marriage.
Mullally will have to try and build bridges with those who oppose women priests and bishops – and who thereby deny her right to hold the office of archbishop – while assuring them that the church can still provide suitable provisions for them.
Leadership culture
Along with restoring trust in the church’s safeguarding processes, Mullally must also heal divisions within the church’s hierarchy over leadership culture. In the weeks leading up to Welby’s resignation, both he and the archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, were accused of using “coercive language” by the bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley.
According to Hartley, both archbishops showed a “complete lack of awareness of how power dynamics operate in the life of the church”. Mullally is now in a position to encourage reconciliation within the church’s hierarchy, and to lead it in a way that fosters mutual respect and accountability.
Mullally must also encourage more people to join the priesthood, especially among the under-40s. Key here will be attracting new vocations not only to the parish system, but to “non-stipendary” forms of ministry – priests who hold down regular secular jobs while helping out in local churches. Mullally may have a unique advantage in this respect, given that she was a non-stipendary priest prior to resigning her post as chief nursing officer.
While overall church attendance has declined in recent decades, the trend has reversed slightly in the last few years. In 2024, some 582,000 people regularly attended Sunday services, up from 574,000 in 2023. Mullally’s task will be to help foster this growth, while finding new ways of communicating to a radically changing society.
Same-sex marriage
Currently, the Church of England does not conduct same-sex marriages, nor does it allow its clergy to enter them. In 2017, however, it launched Living in Love and Faith – a project to “listen, learn and respond to changing views” on gender, marriage, relationships and sexual identity.
In light of this, the House of Bishops – one of the church’s main systems of government – voted in 2023 to allow the clergy to offer prayers of blessing for same-sex couples. Mullally was one of the bishops who voted for this move.
Many in the church, including several bishops, are pushing for the church to go further and conduct same-sex marriages. A poll of clergy taken in 2023 by the Times revealed that 49.2% of Church of England clergy would be willing to conduct same-sex weddings. Others, though, oppose any change to the current doctrine, arguing that such a move would contradict both the Bible and tradition.
As archbishop, how Mullally steers the church on this issue will be one of the defining characteristics of her tenure. But she herself cannot change church doctrine. Only the General Synod – the church’s chief governing body – has the power to do this.
Adding an extra degree of complexity is that, as the new archbishop of Canterbury, Mullally is also the spiritual leader of the 85 million-strong global Anglican communion.
Present in 165 countries, the Anglican communion consists of 42 member churches. Some of these, including the Scottish and Canadian Episcopal Churches, already permit same-sex marriage. Others, however, oppose it. Laurent Mbanda, the archbishop of Rwanda, said Mullally had “repeatedly promoted unbiblical and revisionist teachings regarding marriage and sexual morality”.
Should the Church of England – as the “mother church” of the Anglican communion –move towards same-sex marriage during Mullally’s time in office, it is possible that the already deeply divided Anglican communion could fracture irrevocably.
William Crozier does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
US President Donald Trump’s efforts to deploy the military for law enforcement duties in selected American cities is likely to end up before the US Supreme Court.
If it does, the nine justices will be faced with sorting out a dog’s breakfast of constitutional and statutory laws full of contradictions and ambiguities.
Given the propensity of the current Supreme Court to support and even extend the scope of presidential authority, it could very well rule in Trump’s favour. And this would have far-reaching implications for civil liberties and democracy in the United States.
How did we get to this point, and what does the law actually say about using the National Guard in US cities?
What is Trump attempting to do?
The National Guard is made up of part-time reservists assigned to units in each state. These soldiers are typically called into service by the governors of the states where they serve to respond to disasters or large protests.
In certain circumstances, presidents can also “federalise” National Guard troops, though it rarely happens against a governor’s wishes. Before this year, the last time this happened was in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, to protect civil rights protesters.
In recent months, Trump has attempted to “federalise” the National Guard units belonging to several states and dispatch them to cities (Los Angeles, Memphis, Washington DC, Portland and Chicago) that he claims are out of control.
The troop deployments have been opposed by the Democratic governors in some of these states, then blocked or restricted by temporary restraining orders issued by federal district court judges. (The order in California was subsequently stayed by the US Court of Appeals, pending a further appeal).
There are several issues being contested:
the conditions under which the National Guard can be mobilised by the federal government
the degree of collaboration between federal and state governments in issuing orders to the National Guard, and
the prohibition on the military being used for domestic law enforcement purposes.
Trump’s moves are testing the uncertain boundaries of all these constraints on executive power. But, more significantly, he is also challenging the long-standing American tradition of keeping the military out of domestic politics.
What are the legal issues at play?
The constitutional authority to deploy the National Guard is actually assigned to Congress, not the president. Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution gives Congress the power to “provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions”. Militias have been interpreted to include the National Guard.
However, the Constitution also charges the president with two very significant duties. The first is to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”; the second is to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed”. These two duties can amount to a significant grant of power in times of crisis.
The Trump administration will almost certainly argue he is deploying the National Guard in these US cities to carry out these duties.
There’s a bigger issue for Trump, though. Another law, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, makes it illegal for federal troops to engage in civilian law enforcement unless expressly authorised by the Constitution or the law.
Trump is currently acting without this explicit legal authorisation. However,
as the Brennan Center for Justice has recently pointed out, there are 26 different laws that allow for the military to execute the law in specific situations. These exceptions undermine the purpose of the Posse Comitatus Act, making the case for urgent reform of the law.
What about the Insurrection Act?
One of these exceptions is the Insurrection Act of 1807, which gives the president the power to use the military or federalise National Guard troops to put down domestic uprisings. Since the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the act has seldom been used.
Trump said this week he would consider invoking the act to “get around” any court decisions blocking his move to deploy National Guard troops in US cities.
He also claimed the demonstrations against the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) building in Portland amounted to a “criminal insurrection”.
Trump then ramped up the rhetoric and the hyperbole even further by calling for the jailing of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson for failing to protect ICE agents in that city.
The demonstrations against Trump’s immigration policies in Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago are nowhere near meeting the definition of insurrection.
But, as the president told the meeting of military generals in Virginia last week, he is keen to push the bounds on using the military in domestic affairs. Or, as he put it, to use these cities as “training grounds” for the armed forces.
If the Supreme Court rules in Trump’s favour on this issue, it would be tantamount to saying the president is the only arbiter on whether a political protest amounts to an insurrection and when it’s necessary to use the military to quell it.
It would also expand the scope for Trump to use the military in other areas of domestic politics.
The president has already deployed the military for border protection, so patrolling universities or even the lines outside polling stations on election day could be next.
John Hart does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military[…]
They’re poisoning the blood of our country.
Stand back and stand by.
The president has been saying it out loud all along.
During his first administration, in 2019, US President Donald Trump said the Constitution gave him “the right to do whatever I want”. Five years later, the Supreme Court affirmed that view when it ruled the president has quasi-regal powers of immunity for “official acts”.
And then last week at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, Trump’s existential threat to American democracy escalated significantly.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had assembled around 800 of the United States military’s top leaders. Hegseth convened the conference in an attempt to impose an ex-National Guard major’s authority on America’s professional military leadership. He reduced professionalism to physical appearance and fitness standards dressed up as “the warrior ethos” and “lethality”.
His speech was a charge of far-right talking points. Obesity and beards are out. Hyper-masculinisation and misogyny are in.
No more identity months, DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) offices, dudes in dresses, no more climate change worship, no more division, distraction or gender delusions – we are done with that shit.
Trump commandeered the event. The president’s stream-of-consciousness, campaign-style speech took an even more radical turn.
His disdain for the admirals and generals was clear from the outset. “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room – of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.”
From both Hegseth and Trump, the message was clear. The military leaders in the room – who have all sworn an oath to defend and uphold the Constitution (not, it should be noted, the commander-in-chief) – should consider themselves nothing more than obedient servants of the president.
That in itself would represent a radical shift in civil-military relations.
But Trump, as he always does, took things even further.
He said:
I told Pete [Hegseth] we should use some of these dangerous cities [Washington DC, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Portland] as training grounds for our military.
The president of the United States has decided that the US military, which is now meant to be more focused than ever on “lethality”, should include American cities and the people who live in them in their operational plans.
‘Do whatever the hell you want’
Trump’s main audience for this speech, as usual, was not really the people in the room. It was his MAGA (Make America Great Again) base, a movement that he knows well and plays like a virtuoso. The same base he told to “stand back and stand by” in 2020, just before the January 6 insurrection.
We can bet they are listening. That base knows, instinctively – as does the leadership of the movement – that Trump’s promise of no consequences extends beyond the military. He showed them that when he pardoned those that had tried to overthrow a democratically elected government on his behalf.
This context matters, because Trump, Hegseth and the rest are reshaping not just the military but the entire federal government in their ideological image. Through mass layoffs and recruitment – all laid out in Project 2025 – they are consolidating their power everywhere.
The cities Trump wants the military to use as “training grounds” are the same cities being targeted by violent, oppressive enforcement of the Trump administration’s “mass deportations” policy, led by the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
In practice, those operations include the arbitrary arrest and detention of American citizens and the denial of legal rights and due process. In Chicago, where Trump has just deployed the National Guard, raids have reportedly included pulling children naked from their beds in the middle of the night and separating them from their mothers. Those same agencies using these practices are clashing with protesters in increasingly violent confrontations, and the National Guard is being deployed as reinforcement.
At times during his speech, Trump spoke directly to “border patrol, ICE” saying that if they were spat at or had bricks thrown at their vehicles, “you get out of that car and you can do whatever the hell you want to do”.
The president then went on to immediately compare this to the administration’s attacks on Venezuelan boats in international waters, which the New York City Bar Association has described as “unlawful executions”. As Trump put it: “we take them out.”
ICE is currently engaged in a program of mass recruitment, spending $30 billion to find 10,000 new deportation officers, even going so far as to offer $50,000 bonuses. In July, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said that recruits were needed because “Together, we must defend the homeland”.
This blood-and-soil style violent nationalism infuses everything the administration is doing, from its recruitment to its firings, from its promises to crackdown on the “radical left” to its suppression of free speech.
The president has repeatedly told the movement behind him, and the military and law enforcement agencies, directly and indirectly, that they are free to impose this radical vision for America violently – without fear of consequence.
An American tragedy
Trump has long mused about using the military against his own people. According to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, during his first administration, enraged at Black Lives Matter protests, Trump reportedly asked “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?”
On Thursday US time, NBC reported that officials in the White House were having “increasingly serious discussions” about invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow the President to deploy the military domestically for civilian law enforcement. That process is now, according to an unnamed source, on its way up “an escalatory ladder”.
As has been noted many times, Trump is now surrounded by people who are all-in on his agenda. The guardrails have been dismantled.
What Trump suggested in Quantico would mean the use of unaccountable, unsanctioned force against American citizens delivered by the all-volunteer personnel of the US military.
None of the assembled generals or admirals walked out when he said that.
In the absence of resistance, this transforms the US military into a domestic political tool of the executive and turns American military leaders into the enforcers of presidential political will against the American people themselves.
The meeting at Quantico was a transformation point in the second Trump presidency. It turned the assembled admirals and generals into a de facto enemy of the people.
It transforms the United States into an autocracy and the presidency into a dictatorship.
This is the tragedy of Trump’s America.
Emma Shortis is Director of International and Security Affairs at The Australia Institute, an independent think tank.
Can a new satellite constellation create sunlight on demand?SpaceX/Flickr, CC BY
A proposed constellation of satellites has astronomers very worried. Unlike satellites that reflect sunlight and produce light pollution as an unfortunate byproduct, the ones by US startup Reflect Orbital would produce light pollution by design.
The company promises to produce “sunlight on demand” with mirrors that beam sunlight down to Earth so solar farms can operate after sunset.
It plans to start with an 18-metre test satellite named Earendil-1 which the company has applied to launch in 2026. It would eventually be followed by about 4,000 satellites in orbit by 2030, according to the latest reports.
So how bad would the light pollution be? And perhaps more importantly, can Reflect Orbital’s satellites even work as advertised?
Bouncing sunlight
Sunlight can be bounced off a wristwatch to produce a spot of light . M. Brown, CC BY-SA
In the same way you can bounce sunlight off a watch face to produce a spot of light, Reflect Orbital’s satellites would use mirrors to beam light onto a patch of Earth.
But the scale involved is vastly different. Reflect Orbital’s satellites would orbit about 625km above the ground, and would eventually have mirrors 54 metres across.
When you bounce light off your watch onto a nearby wall, the spot of light can be very bright. But if you bounce it onto a distant wall, the spot becomes larger – and dimmer.
This is because the Sun is not a point of light, but spans half a degree in angle in the sky. This means that at large distances, a beam of sunlight reflected off a flat mirror spreads out with an angle of half a degree.
What does that mean in practice? Let’s take a satellite reflecting sunlight over a distance of roughly 800km – because a 625km-high satellite won’t always be directly overhead, but beaming the sunlight at an angle. The illuminated patch of ground would be at least 7km across.
Even a curved mirror or a lens can’t focus the sunlight into a tighter spot due to the distance and the half-degree angle of the Sun in the sky.
Would this reflected sunlight be bright or dim? Well, for a single 54 metre satellite it will be 15,000 times fainter than the midday Sun, but this is still far brighter than the full Moon.
Last year, Reflect Orbital’s founder Ben Nowack posted a short video which summarised a test with the “last thing to build before moving into space”. It was a reflector carried on a hot air balloon.
In the test, a flat, square mirror roughly 2.5 metres across directs a beam of light down to solar panels and sensors. In one instance the team measures 516 watts of light per square metre while the balloon is at a distance of 242 metres.
For comparison, the midday Sun produces roughly 1,000 watts per square metre. So 516 watts per square metre is about half of that, which is enough to be useful.
However, let’s scale the balloon test to space. As we noted earlier, if the satellites were 800km from the area of interest, the reflector would need to be 6.5km by 6.5km – 42 square kilometres. It’s not practical to build such a giant reflector, so the balloon test has some limitations.
So what is Reflect Orbital planning to do?
Reflect Orbital’s plan is “simple satellites in the right constellation shining on existing solar farms”. And their goal is only 200 watts per square metre – 20% of the midday Sun.
Can smaller satellites deliver? If a single 54 metre satellite is 15,000 times fainter than the midday Sun, you would need 3,000 of them to achieve 20% of the midday Sun. That’s a lot of satellites to illuminate one region.
Another issue: satellites at a 625km altitude move at 7.5 kilometres per second. So a satellite will be within 1,000km of a given location for no more than 3.5 minutes.
This means 3,000 satellites would give you a few minutes of illumination. To provide even an hour, you’d need thousands more.
And yet, that vast constellation would deliver only 20% of the midday Sun to no more than 80 locations at once, based on our calculations above. In practice, even fewer locations would be illuminated due to cloudy weather.
Additionally, given their altitude, the satellites could only deliver illumination to most locations near dusk and dawn, when the mirrors in low Earth orbit would be bathed in sunlight. Aware of this, Reflect Orbital plan for their constellation to encircle Earth above the day-night line in sun-synchronous orbits to keep them continuously in sunlight.
Cheaper rockets have enabled the deployment of satellite constellations. SpaceX/Flickr, CC BY-NC
Bright lights
So, are mirrored satellites a practical means to produce affordable solar power at night? Probably not. Could they produce devastating light pollution? Absolutely.
In the early evening it doesn’t take long to spot satellites and space junk – and they’re not deliberately designed to be bright. With Reflect Orbital’s plan, even if just the test satellite works as planned, it will sometimes appear far brighter than the full Moon.
A constellation of such mirrors would be devastating to astronomy and dangerous to astronomers. To anyone looking through a telescope the surface of each mirror could be almost as bright as the surface of the Sun, risking permanent eye damage.
The light pollution will hinder everyone’s ability to see the cosmos and light pollution is known to impact the daily rhythms of animals as well.
Although Reflect Orbital aims to illuminate specific locations, the satellites’ beams would also sweep across Earth when moving from one location to the next. The night sky could be lit up with flashes of light brighter than the Moon.
The company did not reply to The Conversation about these concerns within deadline. However, it told Bloomberg this week it plans to redirect sunlight in ways that are “brief, predictable and targeted”, avoiding observatories and sharing the locations of the satellites so scientists can plan their work.
The consequences would be dire
It remains to be seen whether Reflect Orbital’s project will get off the ground. The company may launch a test satellite, but it’s a long way from that to getting 250,000 enormous mirrors constantly circling Earth to keep some solar farms ticking over for a few extra hours a day.
Still, it’s a project to watch. The consequences of success for astronomers – and anyone else who likes the night sky dark – would be dire.
The number of satellites visible in the evening has skyrocketed.
Michael J. I. Brown receives research funding from the Australian Research Council.
Matthew Kenworthy receives research funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
OpenAI’s recent rollout of its new video generator Sora 2 marks a watershed moment in AI. Its ability to generate minutes of hyper-realistic footage from a few lines of text is astonishing, and has raised immediate concerns about truth in politics and journalism.
But Sora 2 is rolling out slowly because of its enormous computational demands, which point to an equally pressing question about generative AI itself: What are its true environmental costs? Will video generation make them much worse?
The recent launch of the Stargate Project — a US$500 billion joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and MGX — to build massive AI data centres in the United States underscores what’s at stake. As companies race to expand computing capacity on this scale, AI’s energy use is set to soar.
The debate over AI’s environment impact remains one of the most fraught in tech policy. Depending on what we read, AI is either an ecological crisis in the making or a rounding error in global energy use. As AI moves rapidly into video, clarity on its footprint is more urgent than ever.
OpenAI showcases Sora 2’s capabilities.
Two competing narratives
From one perspective, AI is rapidly becoming a major strain on the world’s energy and water systems.
Alex de Vries-Gao, a researcher who has long tracked the electricity use of bitcoin mining, noted in mid-2025 that AI was on track to surpass it. He estimated that AI already accounted for about 20 per cent of global data-center power consumption; this is likely to double by year’s end.
According to the International Energy Agency, data centres used up to 1.5 per cent of global electricity consumption last year, with consumption growing four times faster than total global demand. The IEA predicts that data centres will more than double their use by 2030, with AI processing the leading driver of growth.
Research cited by MIT’s Technology Review concurs, estimating that by 2028, AI’s power draw could exceed “all electricity currently used by US data centers” — enough to power 22 per cent of U.S. households each year.
Hardware turnover adds further strain. A 2023 study found that chip fabrication requires “huge quantities” of ultra-pure water, energy-intensive chemical processes and rare minerals such as cobalt and tantalum. Manufacturing the high-end graphics processing units — the engines that drive AI boom — has a much larger carbon footprint than most consumer electronics.
Generating an image uses the electricity of a microwave running for five seconds, while making a five-second video clip takes up as much as a microwave running for over an hour.
The next leap from text and image to high-definition video could dramatically increase AI’s impact. Early testingbears this out — finding that energy use for text-to-video models quadruples when video length doubles.
The case for perspective
Others see the alarm as overstated. Analysts at the Center for Data Innovation, a technology and policy think tank, argue that many estimates about AI energy use rely on faulty extrapolations. GPU hardware is becoming more efficient each year, and much of the electricity in new data centres will come from renewables.
Context is key. An hour of high-definition video streaming on Netflix uses roughly 100 times more energy than generating a text response. An AI query’s footprint is tiny, yet data centres now process billions daily, and more demanding video queries are on the horizon.
Jevons paradox
It helps to distinguish between training and use of AI. Training frontier models such as GPT-4 or Claude Opus 3 required thousands of graphics chips running for months, consuming gigawatt-hours of power.
Using a model takes up a tiny amount of energy per query, but this happens billions of times a day. Eventually, energy from using AI will likely surpass training.
The least visible cost may come from hardware production. Each new generation of chips demands new fabrication lines, heavy mineral inputs and advanced cooling. Italian economist Marcello Ruberti observes that “each upgrade cycle effectively resets the carbon clock” as fabs rebuild highly purified equipment from scratch.
Is AI an ecological menace or a manageable risk? The truth lies somewhere in between.
A single prompt uses negligible energy, but the systems enabling it — vast data centres, constant chip manufacturing, round-the-clock cooling — are reshaping global energy and water patterns.
The International Energy Agency’s latest outlook projects that data-centre power demand could reach 1,400 terawatt-hours by 2030. This is the equivalent of adding several mid-sized countries to the world’s grid. AI will count for a quarter of that growth.
Transparency is vital
Many of the figures circulating about AI energy use are unreliable because AI firms disclose so little. The limited data they release often employ inconsistent metrics or offset accounting that obscures real impacts.
One obvious fix would be to mandate disclosure rules: standardized, location-based reporting of the energy and water used to train and operate models. Europe’s Artificial Intelligence Act requires developers of “high-impact” systems to document computation and energy use.
Similar measures elsewhere could guide where new data centres are built, favouring regions with abundant renewables and water — this could encourage longer hardware lifecycles instead of annual chip refreshes.
Balancing creativity and cost
Generative AI can help unlock extraordinary creativity and provide real utility. But each “free” image, paragraph or video has hidden material and energy costs.
Acknowledging those costs doesn’t mean we need to halt innovation. It means we should demand transparency about how great the environmental cost is, and who pays it, in order to address AI’s environmental impacts.
As Sora 2 begins to fill social feeds with highly realistic visuals, the question won’t be whether AI uses more energy than Netflix, but whether we can expand our digital infrastructure responsibly enough to make room for both.
Robert Diab does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Why should women in British Columbia, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island and the Yukon have access to free contraception while the rest of Canadians do not? Our new research, published in the British Medical Journal and JAMA Pediatrics, underscores the urgent need for universal prescription contraception coverage nationwide. Spoiler alert: cost matters.
When B.C. launched universal coverage for prescription contraception in April 2023, more people used contraceptives, and importantly, more chose the most effective methods. When Ontario introduced universal coverage for those younger than age 25 in January 2017, we found a similar jump in the most effective contraceptive methods.
In October 2024, the National Pharmacare Act received royal assent, establishing a framework for a national, universal, single-payer pharmacare program, beginning with free access to contraception and diabetes medications. Now, almost a year later, only four provinces and territories (B.C., Manitoba, P.E.I. and the Yukon) have bilateral agreements to implement this legislation on the ground.
As reproductive health policy researchers (including two health-care providers), we know that universal coverage for contraception is essential to uphold reproductive population health and to achieve gender equity in Canada. We have recently published evidence demonstrating the effect of universal contraception funding policies on contraception use, which reaffirm how critical this policy is in the Canadian context.
Everyone in Canada, regardless of income or postal code, deserves access to the contraception that is right for them, without cost standing in the way. As former Federal Health Minister Mark Holland stated when announcing national pharmacare on Feb. 29, 2024: “Waking up in a country where every single woman has access to the contraception she needs to control her future is an absolutely critical part of having a just society.” He added: “This is about health equity.”
When women can’t afford contraception, the risk of unplanned pregnancy increases. When contraception is accessible without financial or logistical barriers, women are more likely to plan pregnancies around their health, education, career and family goals. This benefits not only the individual but also children, families and society overall by improving gender equity in education and workforce participation, reducing poverty and supporting better health outcomes.
Beyond this, free contraception is a cost-effective policy, expected to save our health systems money in the long term by reducing health-care costs linked with unplanned pregnancies.
Private and public drug plans
Some critics argue that many Canadians already have drug insurance and plans that cover contraceptive costs. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
Most private and public plans do not cover 100 per cent of prescription drug costs. Deductibles and co-pays leave patients paying at least a portion out-of-pocket, and some private plans exclude contraception altogether. The most effective contraceptives (intrauterine devices (IUDs) and subdermal implants) can cost up to $450 up front, even with coverage.
Many young people or those working in seasonal or temporary jobs don’t have drug insurance at all. Others choose to pay out-of-pocket to avoid having birth control charges show up on a shared plan with a partner, spouse or parent — to preserve privacy. That is why first-dollar, universal coverage for contraception — as outlined in federal pharmacare — is essential. It guarantees access free from financial strain, coercion, loss of privacy or compromise.
If Canada’s pre-existing mix of public and private insurance provided sufficient access to contraception, we would have seen little or no change when contraception became free in B.C. But we did see change. Our research showed a 49 per cent increase in the use of the most effective contraceptive methods when they were available at no cost.
Clear evidence for pharmacare
This provides clear evidence that cost has been a barrier for individuals in B.C. and highlights a critical point: without universal coverage, many Canadians simply cannot afford their preferred method of birth control. When costs are taken out of the equation, more people choose the most effective contraception methods.
Similarly, when Ontario provided universal prescription coverage for youth 24 years old or younger in 2018, we found that prescriptions for IUDs and oral contraceptive pills jumped, with the greatest increases for those in low-income areas.
When this coverage was revised to exclude those with private insurance, use declined. This shows us that private insurance is inadequate to cover gaps in contraception needs, especially for youth.
All Canadians seeking to manage their reproductive futures deserve equitable access to safe, effective and affordable contraception. Our new findings show just how strongly cost influences these choices.
The federal government has promised to implement national pharmacare, starting with contraception (and diabetes medication). On Sept. 2, Michel said “we are tracking those [agreements] that have already been done to see how it works.”
The evidence is now available and is clear: pharmacare works. Our analysis of B.C.’s policy shows the clear public health benefits that could result from expanding pharmacare and making no-cost contraception a reality for all Canadians. Further, our analysis of Ontario’s experience show that a watered-down version of pharmacare policy (like Ontario’s policy for youth since 2019) does not suffice.
All Canadians, regardless of where they live, deserve access to the contraception that they need to control and plan their reproductive health futures. Now is the time to implement universal, first-payer coverage for contraception for all Canadians.
Elizabeth Nethery receives funding from Health Research BC.
Amanda Black has received research funding from CIHR. She sits on the Board of Directors of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada. She has been on advisory boards for Bayer, Organon, Searchlight, and Pfizer.
Amanda K Downey works for Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. The company had no role in the development of this article. She receives funding from the Canadian Institutes of Heath Research.
Laura Schummers receives funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the BC Ministry of Health, and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation. She consults for Canada’s Drug Agency.
Wendy V. Norman receives funding from the Canada Research Chairs program, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Health Canada, and The Public Health Agency of Canada. Professor Norman is affiliated with the Society of Family Planning Research Committee, and the board of directors for FIAPAC, a not for profit association of family planning professionals, based in Europe.
Awarding the Nobel prize for literature to László Krasznahorkai today, the Swedish Academy commended the author’s “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”. But in itself their decision is also a commitment to the value of serious and intellectual writing in an age characterised by immediacy, the distractions of digital culture and the entertainment industry.
Krasznahorkai was first propelled into literary fame in Hungary, his home country, with his first novel Satantango (1985), a novel about a squalid, rain-soaked village visited by a mysterious man. He could be a prophet, Satan or merely a con man.
This book established the coordinates for the subsequent series of ambitious novels that cemented Krasznahorkai’s status as one of the great contemporary global writers.
The Melancholy of Resistance (2019) features a mysterious, charismatic figure, the Prince, who brings a rebellious carnival to a small community and tears it apart. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2016) tells of an eccentric aristocrat returning to Hungary after exile in Argentina.
He is greeted by the townspeople as a great benefactor who will enrich the town. Little do they know he has returned saddled with a crippling gambling debt.
The 2014 work Herscht 07769 centres on a baker in a neglected eastern German town who is drawn into the world of a cleaning company, which is a front for a neo-Nazi gang.
The epithets which tend to be applied to his fiction include “hopeless”, “obsessive”, “unsettling” and “intense”. He was famously labelled, in a blurb for his book The Melancholy of Resistance, by the cultural critic Susan Sontag as the “contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse”.
More precisely, though, I would say that there are three distinctive features about Krasznahorkai’s writing. There’s his ability to depict social disintegration, often hastened by the influence on a community of mysterious individuals or companies.
Then there’s how he sustains a mood of dread in his fiction – a mood which lends itself to a fear of living under authoritarianism without ever being directly allegorical. This is captured powerfully in the section of his 2013 book The World Goes On entitled “How Lovely”.
This story imagines a lecture series where speakers from all over the world take their turn giving talks, only for one to give three lectures: the first by choice, the second reluctantly, after an invitation to return, and the third because he has been imprisoned in the lecture theatre.
The third distinctive feature is the innovation and complexity of his writing. Herscht 07769 contains only a single full stop in 400 pages. The World Goes On arranges its 17 stories in a Fibonacci sequence – the mathematical sequence in which each element is the sum of the two elements that precede it.
Satantango (made into a seven-hour film by his collaborator Béla Tarr) has a chapter that focuses on two characters who are not identified for nine pages. The experience of reading Krasznahorkai can feel as disorienting and alienating as the situations his characters face.
But this uncompromising literary quality, and the way it still captures the tenor of our times, is what I love about Krasznahorkai’s work. The Nobel committee’s bio-bibliography of the author references, as many critics have done, the fact that he belongs to the great “central European tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard”.
Krasznahorkai’s is fundamentally a modernist kind of writing, one which confronts us with a world without meaning, yet still affirms its faith in beauty and art. The very writing itself is proof of this faith, because it shows that it is possible to think deeply about what matters and to articulate this.
Appropriately enough for a writer famous for his sentences, the Nobel committee’s reference to Krasznahorkai’s capacity to reaffirm the power of art “in the midst of apocalyptic terror” is an intriguingly artful piece of phrasing.
Krasznahorkai’s fiction does not really depict terror, but specialises in the apprehension of future breakdown. This suggests that the “apocalyptic terror” is not within his fiction but is the broader context for it – and contemporary literature itself. Krasznahorkai demonstrates that art can counter this.
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Bran Nicol does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Stiff knees, aching hips and the slow grind of chronic joint pain are often accepted as an unavoidable part of getting older. But while osteoarthritis is the world’s most common joint disease, experts say the way we treat and prevent it is badly out of step with the evidence.
The best medicine isn’t found in a pill bottle or an operating theatre – it’s movement. Yet across countries and health systems, too few patients are being guided toward the one therapy proven to protect their joints and ease their pain: exercise.
Exercise is one of the most effective treatments for chronic, disabling joint conditions such as osteoarthritis. Yet very few patients actually receive it.
Research across health systems in Ireland, the UK, Norway and the United States shows the same pattern: fewer than half of people with osteoarthritis are referred to exercise or physiotherapy by their primary care provider. More than 60% are given treatments that guidelines do not recommend, and around 40% are sent to a surgeon before non-surgical options have even been tried.
To understand why those figures are so troubling, it helps to understand what exercise does for joints. Osteoarthritis is by far the most common form of arthritis, already affecting more than 595 million people worldwide.
According to a global study in The Lancet, that number could approach one billion by 2050. Longer life expectancy, increasingly sedentary lifestyles and rising numbers of overweight or obese people are driving the trend.
Yet people who exercise regularly are physically and biologically protecting themselves from developing the disease and from suffering its worst effects.
The cartilage that covers the ends of our bones is a tough, protective layer with no blood supply of its own. It relies on movement.
Like a sponge, cartilage is compressed when we walk or load a joint, squeezing fluid out and then drawing fresh nutrients back in. Each step allows nutrients and natural lubricants to circulate and maintain joint health.
That is why the old idea of osteoarthritis as simple “wear and tear” is misleading. Joints are not car tyres that inevitably grind down.
Osteoarthritis is better understood as a long process of wear and repair in which regular movement and exercise are critical to healing and to the health of the entire joint.
A disease of the whole joint
We now know osteoarthritis is a whole-joint disease. It affects the joint fluid, the underlying bone, the ligaments, the surrounding muscles and even the nerves that support movement.
Therapeutic exercise targets all these elements. Muscle weakness, for instance, is one of the earliest signs of osteoarthritis and can be improved with resistance training. There is strong evidence that muscle weakness increases the risk of both developing the disease and seeing it progress.
Nerve and muscle control can also be trained through neuromuscular exercise programmes such as GLA:D® (Good Life with osteoArthritis: Denmark) for hip and knee osteoarthritis. Usually delivered in supervised group sessions by physiotherapists, these programmes focus on movement quality, balance and strength to improve joint stability and rebuild confidence.
Significant improvements in pain, joint function and quality of life have been recorded for up to 12 months after completing the programme.
Exercise is good medicine for the whole body: it has documented benefits across more than 26 chronic diseases. In osteoarthritis, it helps not only by strengthening cartilage and muscle but also by tackling the inflammation, metabolic changes and hormonal shifts that drive the disease.
Obesity is a major risk factor for osteoarthritis, and not merely because of the extra mechanical load on joints. High levels of inflammatory molecules in the blood and in joint tissues can degrade cartilage and accelerate disease.
For osteoarthritis, regular activity can counter this at a molecular level, lowering inflammatory markers, limiting cell damage and even altering gene expression.
Exercise first, surgery later
Currently there are no drugs that modify the course of osteoarthritis. Joint replacement surgery can be life-changing for some people, but it is major surgery and does not succeed for everyone.
Exercise should be tried first and continued throughout every stage of the disease. It carries far fewer side effects and brings many additional health benefits.
Osteoarthritis is not simply a matter of “worn out” joints. It is shaped by muscle strength, inflammation, metabolism and lifestyle.
Regular, targeted exercise addresses many of these factors at once – helping to protect cartilage, strengthen the whole joint and improve overall health. Before considering surgery, movement itself remains one of the most powerful treatments we have.
Clodagh Toomey receives funding from the Health Research Board (Ireland) for research in the area of osteoarthritis. She is affiliated with non-profit initiative GLA:D(r) (Good Life with osteoArthritis Denmark).
This roundup of The Conversation’s climate coverage was first published in our award-winning weekly climate action newsletter, Imagine.
As the world mourns Jane Goodall, the pioneering chimpanzee scientist and campaigner who died last week aged 91, it’s worth asking what chimpanzees can still teach us about climate change. They not only have a few tricks for surviving a warming planet – they’ve also helped to cool it.
Most of the world’s 200,000 or so wild chimpanzees live in the huge rainforests of west and central Africa, the second largest in the world.
As recently as 2,500 years ago, much of this rainforest had withered away, broken into scattered fragments by a sudden lengthening of the dry season. Yet within five centuries, the forest had largely recovered.
Trees didn’t do this by themselves.
Chimpanzees, among other species, had acted as the forest’s “proto-gardeners”. That’s according to Alex Chepstow-Lusty, a paleoecologist then the University of Cambridge (now at the University of Sussex).
Chepstow-Lusty looked at the oil palm tree, which “demands a lot of light and so thrives in open areas or in the gaps created in forests when the canopy opens up rather than in the dense centre”. This means it often acts as a “‘pioneer species’ allowing the forest to regrow”.
But, he notes a problem: the oil palm’s large seeds are too heavy to be blown in the wind. “They therefore need to be dispersed in the poo of animals such as chimpanzees which are able to swallow the large seeds and for whom the bright orange flesh can be an important part of the diet. And this is how chimps and other seed-dispersers played a crucial role in regenerating Africa’s rainforests.”
Chimps will eat almost anything – but fruit is their favourite. Sam DCruz / shutterstock
Without chimpanzees, the forest would have taken far longer to recover – if it ever did. “Maybe we need to consider the true value of chimp poo, and those that produce it”, says Chepstow-Lusty.
But if chimpanzees once helped the planet heal itself, today that partnership is under strain.
Across Africa’s mix of forest and savanna, chimpanzees have evolved with their habitats. Harrison J. Ostridge of UCL Genetics Institute and his co-authors recently wrote about their work with a team who collected faecal samples from “hundreds of wild chimpanzees across 17 African countries”.
This, they suggest, means chimpanzee populations across Africa are “not interchangeable”. Genetic diversity is typically a form of resilience, but as climate zones shift and habitats shrink, some chimpanzees may find themselves trapped in the wrong place. And while it takes thousands of years for genes to change, the climate is changing in decades.
If DNA adapts over millennia, behaviour can adapt within a lifetime.
A team from UCL, Harvard and Liverpool John Moores wrote about their work compiling data from 144 wild chimpanzee communities across Africa’s forests and savanna. They found populations that had learned to dig wells, or to take refuge from extreme heat in caves. Some chimpanzee populations used all sorts of tools, while others barely used any.
Chimpanzees teach each other new tricks. Paco Forriol / shutterstock
This flexibility may help chimpanzees weather the next degree or two of climate breakdown. But behavioural diversity depends on a strong social life. Young chimps learn by watching others, by playing and imitating. And if that social culture is lost, so is some of their ability to adapt to climate change.
That same UCL–John Moores team have documented a “cultural collapse” in chimpanzees. “The more that humans had disturbed an area”, they write, “the less behavioural variants are exhibited by nearby chimpanzees”. Animals are forced to forage in smaller groups, with less long distance communication through hoots or drumming on tree trunks. This “lowers the chance of learning socially from one another” and makes it harder to spread any culture.
Why does it matter, they ask, “if the species is gradually merging into a single cultural entity that stretches all the way from Senegal to Tanzania”? After all, most animals don’t have distinct cultures.
One reason is that a loss of social learning makes chimpanzees more vulnerable: “A loss of behavioural diversity [could compromise how they respond] to changes in food availability and how they adapt to climate change.”
Jane Goodall bridged science and society in a way very few others have managed since. One of those few is Ben Garrod, a professor of evolutionary biology and science engagement at the University of East Anglia. A BBC television presenter and a primate scientist, he’s worked with Goodall and her foundation and says we need more Jane Goodalls.
“There will be countless ways we can carry on with Jane’s legacy”, he writes, “but one of the most powerful is to encourage more of us to make science accessible for all of us”.
