Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Ali Mirchi, Associate Professor of Water Resources Engineering, Oklahoma State University

Fall marks the start of Iran’s rainy season, but large parts of the country have barely seen a drop as the nation faces one of its worst droughts in decades. Several key reservoirs are nearly dry, and Tehran, the nation’s capital, is facing an impending “Day Zero” – when the city runs out of water.

The situation is so dire, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has revived a long-debated plan to move the capital from this metro area of 15 million people.

Previous administrations have floated the idea of moving the capital but never implemented it. Tehran’s unbridled expansion has created a host of problems, ranging from chronic water stress and land subsidence to gridlocked traffic and severe air pollution, while also heightening concerns about the city’s vulnerability to major seismic hazards.

This time, Pezeshkian has framed relocation as a mandate, not a choice. He warned in November 2025 that if nothing changes, the city could become uninhabitable.

How Iran got to the point of water bankruptcy

Drought has been a concern in this part of the world for millennia. A prayer by the Persian King Darius the Great that was carved in stone more than 2,000 years ago asked his god to protect the land from invaders, famine and lies.

However, today, Iran’s escalating water and environmental problems are the predictable outcome of decades of treating the region’s finite water resources as if they were limitless.

Iran has relied heavily on water-intensive irrigation to grow food in dry landscapes and subsidized water and energy use, resulting in overpumping from aquifers and falling groundwater supplies. The concentration of economic activity and employment in major urban centers, particularly Tehran, has also catalyzed massive migration, further straining already overstretched water resources.

Those and other forces have driven Iran toward “water bankruptcy” – the point where water demand permanently exceeds the supply and nature can’t keep up.

Iran’s centralized, top-down approach to water governance has proven ineffective in ensuring the sustainability of its water resources and in maintaining a balance between renewable water supply and demand, a gap that has continued to widen.

Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has pursued an aggressive hydraulic mission, building dams and diverting rivers to support sprawling cities and expanding irrigated agriculture. Driven by ideological ambitions, the country’s focus on food self-sufficiency together with international sanctions and economic isolation, have taken a heavy toll on the nation’s environment, particularly its water resources. Drying lakes, groundwater depletion and rising salinity are now prevalent across Iran, reflecting dire water security risks throughout the country.

As water resource and environmental engineers and scientists, including a former deputy head of Iran’s Department of Environment, we have followed the county’s water challenges for years. We see viable solutions to its chronic water problems, though none is simple.

Falling water reserves leave Iran vulnerable

Experts have been warning for years that the lack of foresight to tackle Iran’s water bankruptcy problem leaves the country increasingly vulnerable to extreme climate conditions.

Iranians are again seeing those risks in this latest drought.

Precipitation has been well below normal in four of the water years since 2020. That has contributed to a sharp decline in reservoir levels. Fall 2025 has been the hottest and driest fall on record for Tehran since 1979, testing the resilience of its water system.

The city faces mounting stress on already diminished groundwater reserves, with little relief in sight without significant rainfall.

Shrinking snowpack and shifting rainfall patterns make it harder to predict how much water will flow in rivers and when. Rising temperatures make the problem worse by boosting demand and leaving less water in the rivers.

There is no quick fix to resolve Tehran’s water emergency. In the near term, only significantly more rainfall and a reduction in consumption can offer respite.

Panicky moves to increase interbasin water transfers, such as the Taleqan‑to‑Tehran water transfer to pump water from the Taleqan Dam, over 100 miles (166 km) away, are not only inadequate, they risk worsening the water supply and demand imbalance in the long run. Iran has already experimented with piping water between basins, and those transfers have in many cases fueled unsustainable growth rather than real conservation, worsening water problems both in the donor and recipient basins.

At its core, Tehran’s predicament stems from a chronic mismatch between supply and demand, driven by rapid population growth.

Whether relocating the political capital, as suggested by Pezeshkian, could meaningfully reduce the city’s population, and hence the water demand, is highly doubtful.

The sparsely populated Makran region in the country’s southeast, along the Gulf of Oman, has been mentioned as a potential option, touted as a “lost paradise,” though details on how much of the city or population would move remain unclear.

Meanwhile, other major Iranian cities are facing similar water stresses, highlighting the fact that this is a nationwide threat.

Water solutions for a dry country

The country needs to start to decouple its economy from water consumption by investing in sectors that generate value and employment opportunities with minimal water use.

Agricultural water consumption can be reduced by producing higher-value, less water-intensive crops, taking into account food security, labor market and cultural considerations. Any water savings could be used to replenish groundwater.

Becoming more open to global trade and importing water-intensive crops, rather than growing them, would also allow Iran to use its limited agricultural land and water to grow a smaller set of strategic staple crops that are critical for national food security.

That’s a transition that will be possible only if the country moves toward a more diversified economy that allows for reduced pressure on the country’s finite resources, an option that seems unrealistic under economic and international isolation.

Urban water demand could be reduced by strengthening public education on conservation, restricting high-consuming uses such as filling private swimming pools, and upgrading distribution infrastructure to minimize leaks.

Treated wastewater could be further recycled for both drinking and nonpotable purposes, including maintaining river flows, which are currently not prioritized.

Where feasible, other solutions such as flood management for aquifer recharge, and inland groundwater desalination, can be explored to supplement supplies while minimizing environmental harm.

Taken together, these measures require bold, coordinated action rather than piecemeal responses.

Renewed talk of relocating the capital signals how environmental stresses are adding to the complex puzzle of Iran’s national security concerns. However, without addressing the root causes of the nation’s water bankruptcy, we believe moving the capital to ease water problems will be futile.

Nothing to disclose.

Mojtaba Sadegh receives funding from the US National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Joint Fire Science Program.

Amir AghaKouchak and Kaveh Madani 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. Iran’s president calls for moving its drought-stricken capital amid a worsening water crisis – how Tehran got into water bankruptcy – https://theconversation.com/irans-president-calls-for-moving-its-drought-stricken-capital-amid-a-worsening-water-crisis-how-tehran-got-into-water-bankruptcy-270456

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Ivano W. Aiello, Professor of Marine Geology, San José State University

When fire broke out at the world’s largest battery energy storage facility in January 2025, its thick smoke blanketed surrounding wetlands, farms and nearby communities on the central California coast.

Highways closed, residents evacuated and firefighters could do little but watch as debris and ash rained down. People living in the area reported headaches and respiratory problems, and some pets and livestock fell ill.

Two days later, officials announced that the air quality met federal safety standards. But the initial all-clear decision missed something important – heavy metal fallout on the ground.

When battery energy storage facilities burn, the makeup of the chemical fallout can be a mystery for surrounding communities. Yet, these batteries often contain metals that are toxic to humans and wildlife.

The smoke plume from the fire in Vistra’s battery energy storage facility at Moss Landing released not just hazardous gases such as hydrogen fluoride but also soot and charred fragments of burned batteries that landed for miles around.

I am a marine geologist who has been tracking soil changes in marshes adjacent to the Vistra facility for over a decade as part of a wetland-restoration project. In a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports, my colleagues and I were able to show through detailed before-and-after samples from the marshes what was in the battery fire’s debris and what happened to the heavy metals.

The batteries’ metal fragments, often too tiny to see with the naked eye, didn’t disappear. They continue to be remobilized in the environment today.

What’s inside the batteries

Moss Landing, at the edge of Monterey Bay, has long been shaped by industry – a mix of power generation and intensive agriculture on the edge of a delicate coastal ecosystem.

The Vistra battery storage facility rose on the site of an old Duke Energy and PG&E gas power plant, which was once filled with turbines and oil tanks. When Vistra announced it was converting the site into the world’s largest lithium-ion battery facility, the plan was hailed as a clean energy milestone. Phase 1 alone housed batteries with 300 megawatts of capacity, enough to power about 225,000 homes for four hours.

The energy in rechargeable batteries comes from the flow of electrons released by lithium atoms in the anode moving toward the cathode.

In the type of batteries at the Moss Landing facility, the cathode was rich in three metals: nickel, manganese and cobalt. These batteries are prized for their high energy density and relatively low cost, but they are also prone to thermal runaway.

Lab experiments have shown that burning batteries can eject metal particles like confetti.

Metals found in wetlands matched batteries

When my team and I returned to the marsh three days after the fire, ash and burned debris covered the ground. Weeks afterward, charred fragments still clung to the vegetation.

Our measurements with portable X-ray fluorescence showed sharp increases in nickel, manganese and cobalt compared with data from before the fire. As soon as we saw the numbers, we alerted officials in four counties about the risk.

We estimate that about 25 metric tons (55,000 pounds) of heavy metals were deposited across roughly half a square mile (1.2 square kilometers) of wetland around Elkorn Slough, and that was only part of the area that saw fallout.

To put this in perspective, the part of the Vistra battery facility that burned was hosting 300 megawatts of batteries, which equates to roughly 1,900 metric tons of cathode material. Estimates of the amount of batteries that burned range from 55% to 80%. Based on those estimates, roughly 1,000 to 1,400 metric tons of cathode material could have been carried into the smoke plume. What we found in the marsh represents about 2% of what may have been released.

We took samples at hundreds of locations and examined millimeter-thin soil slices with a scanning electron microscope. Those slices revealed metallic particles smaller than one-tenth the width of a human hair – small enough to travel long distances and lodge deep in the lungs.

The ratio of nickel to cobalt in these particles matched that of nickel, manganese and cobalt battery cathodes, clearly linking the contamination to the fire.

Over the following months, we found that surface concentrations of the metals dropped sharply after major rain and tidal events, but the metals did not disappear. They were remobilized. Some migrated to the main channel of the estuary and may have been flushed out into the ocean. Some of the metals that settled in the estuary could enter the food chain in this wildlife hot spot, often populated with sea otters, harbor seals, pelicans and herons.

Making battery storage safer as it expands

The fire at Moss Landing and its fallout hold lessons for other communities, first responders and the design of future lithium-ion battery systems, which are proliferating as utilities seek to balance renewable power and demand peaks.

When fires break out, emergency responders need to know what they’re dealing with. A California law passed after the fire helps address this by requiring strengthening containment and monitoring at large battery installations and meetings with local fire officials before new facilities open.

Newer lithium-ion batteries that use iron phosphate cathodes are also considered safer from fire risk. These are becoming more common for utility-scale energy storage than batteries with nickel, manganese and cobalt, though they store less energy.

How soil is tested is also important. At Moss Landing, some of the government’s sampling turned up low concentrations of the metals, likely because the samples came from broad, mixed layers that diluted the concentration of metals rather than the thin surface deposits where contaminants settled.

Continuing risks to marine life

Metals from the Moss Landing battery fire still linger in the region’s sediments and food webs.

These metals bioaccumulate, building up through the food chain: The metals in marsh soils can be taken up by worms and small invertebrates, which are eaten by fish, crabs or shorebirds, and eventually by top predators such as sea otters or harbor seals.

Our research group is now tracking the bioaccumulation in Elkhorn Slough’s shellfish, crabs and fish. Because uptake varies among species and seasons, the effect of the metals on ecosystems will take months or years to emerge.

Ivano Aiello receives funding from private donors.

– ref. When the world’s largest battery power plant caught fire, toxic metals rained down – wetlands captured the fallout – https://theconversation.com/when-the-worlds-largest-battery-power-plant-caught-fire-toxic-metals-rained-down-wetlands-captured-the-fallout-268848

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Sheneka Williams, Professor of Educational Administration, Michigan State University

Many high school seniors are currently in the midst of the college application process or are already waiting to hear back from their selected schools.

For high school students in rural parts of the United States, the frantic pace of the college application process can look a bit different. For starters, some of these rural students might not have large numbers of elite universities and colleges coming to admissions fairs in their areas. They might not have all of the required high school courses to attend some of these schools, either, according to Sheneka Williams, a scholar of educational leadership and rural education who graduated from a small, rural high school in Alabama.

Amy Lieberman, the education editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Williams to understand the particular experiences of rural students – and what, exactly, coming from a rural background can mean as students think about college.

How are rural high school students’ experiences unique?

Nationally, nearly 10 million students – or 1 in 5 public school students in the U.S. – attended rural schools in the fall of 2022.

Research suggests that rural students finish or complete high school at a higher rate than urban students.

While approximately 90% of rural high school students graduated in 2020, 82% of urban high school students got their diplomas that year.

But rural students’ college entrance rate is lower than that of urban and suburban students.

Within four years of graduating high school, 71% of rural students attended college, compared to 73% of suburban and 71% of city students who also went to college, according to 2023 findings by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Why are rural students finishing high school at a higher rate than their suburban and urban peers but attending college at a lower rate?

First, we know that some colleges are not really recruiting students in rural areas. If these universities don’t know you exist, and if your parents haven’t gone to college and don’t know how the admission system works, you might not have help as you move closer to attending college. Some rural schools also do not have college counselors.

There are other reasons why some rural high school graduates are not going to college, I have personally seen. Some students are apprehensive about leaving home. They have close-knit families and communities, and they might be wondering where they fit in at a school in a large place that is much bigger than where they grew up.

Do any of these scenarios describe your own educational journey?

I grew up in a small town in Alabama and was different from some of the other Black students, since I came from a family of educators who had gone to college for two generations.

But when I did go to college, I went to a campus that was two times the size of my hometown, which has a population of just 12,000. It takes a confident student, as well as encouragement from parents or mentors, to believe that you can go to school away from home.

We had some college fairs in high school, but the visiting colleges were state universities and regional schools. You did not have selective schools coming to recruit.

Students today can learn about schools online, but there is still the issue that universities are not, on their own, connecting enough with rural students.

Do rural students fit into universities’ diversity goals?

Only recently have people begun to think and talk more about what rural really means. Some people use the U.S. Census Bureau’s definition of rural, which is “all population, housing, and territory not included within an urban area.”

But that’s a somewhat surface definition. It’s hard for some scholars to agree on what counts as rural, including me. It feels like something you have to experience and know, and that is hard to define. Part of the issue is that rural has been defined by what urban is not, and that makes it seem it doesn’t deserve its own definition.

Universities are beginning to think about these rural students more and the particular challenges they experience in school. That includes not necessarily having stable access to high-speed internet, which approximately 22.3% of Americans in rural areas and 27.7% of Americans in tribal areas don’t have, compared to only 1.5% of Americans in urban areas.

Another issue is that even for rural students who want to go to college, they might not have the right qualifications, such as certain courses they have completed.

I am currently involved in research with sociologists Barbara Schneider and education scholars Joe Krajcik and Clausell Mathis about how some rural high schools in Alabama and Mississippi aren’t able to teach physics or chemistry. Physics and chemistry are both gateway courses to college, and if you want to be an engineer or STEM major, you have to complete these courses in order to have a shot at certain colleges.

Rural high schools tend to have a lack of resources, in terms of both budget and their staffing. Schools not being able to find teachers who are qualified or certified in certain subject areas, such as science courses, is a nationwide problem. But this issue is tougher in smaller, rural towns.

Schools will say they don’t have students interested in those subjects. But the states also aren’t requiring that these classes are offered.

This lack of science course offerings can create a whole block of students who are not going to college. And if we are talking about the South, in particular, and states that have a high population of Black students in rural areas, we are talking about a whole swath of students who don’t have this education and would find it a struggle to get into larger, splashier schools that are not near home.

What do you think are some of the solutions to these challenges?

There are many local efforts to offer tutoring and things of that nature for rural high school students. Some of those efforts have been blunted because schools are funded by property taxes, and some of them just don’t have the revenue to pay for these add-ons without federal support.

I think colleges need to do a better job of recruiting students at rural high schools. I also think that once these students make it to college, it would help if there were support or affinity groups.

Some colleges have not thought enough about rural students. I think the narrative around rural students and college needs to shift – these students may want to go to college, but nobody is looking for them. When you live in small, geographically isolated places, sometimes you only know what you see.

Sheneka Williams receives funding from the U.S. Department of Education.

– ref. Rural high school students are more likely than city kids to get their diplomas, but they remain less likely to go to college – https://theconversation.com/rural-high-school-students-are-more-likely-than-city-kids-to-get-their-diplomas-but-they-remain-less-likely-to-go-to-college-269246

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Cristobal Young, Associate Professor of Sociology, Cornell University

New York’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, campaigned on a promise to raise the city’s income tax on its richest residents from 3.9% to 5.9%. Combined with the state income tax, which is 10.9% for the top bracket, the increase would cement the city’s position as having the highest taxes on top earners in the country.

It set off a chorus of warnings about the tax flight of the city’s wealthiest residents.

Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman claimed that both the city’s businesses and wealthy residents “have already started making arrangements for the exits.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul echoed the concern, opposing the proposal “because we cannot have them leave the state.” Before the election, Mamdani’s opponent, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, joked that if Mamdani won, “even I will move to Florida.”

I research whether high earners actually move when their taxes go up. My colleagues and I have analyzed millionaire taxes in New Jersey and California, the migration of Forbes billionaires globally and decades of IRS data tracing where Americans with million-dollar incomes live.

Top earners are often thought of as “mobile millionaires” who are ever searching for lower-tax places to live. In reality, they’re often reluctant to leave the places where they built their careers and raised their families.

At the same time, there are grains of truth in the tax migration arguments, so it’s important to carefully parse the evidence.

A small fraction of a small fraction

The first fact is simple: Millionaires have low migration rates.

Mobility in America is highest among people who are still searching for their economic place in life. Workers who earn the lowest wages move across state lines at relatively high rates, about 4.5% per year, often in search of more affordable housing. People making $1 million-plus a year move only half as often: Just 2.4% of them pack up each year.

When millionaires do move, it rarely appears to be for tax reasons. For example, Florida is the top destination for New York movers in general. But among the richest 1% of New Yorkers, the top destination is Connecticut, followed by New Jersey and California, all three of which levy a millionaire tax.

Some millionaires certainly do favor lower-tax destinations. But many moves to low-tax states are offset by moves in the opposite direction to higher-tax states, and many other moves take place between states that have the same tax rate.

Overall, only about 15% of millionaires who move end up with a lower tax bill. That shows the rich are willing and able to move for tax reasons. But because only about 2.4% of millionaires move each year – and only a fraction of those moves reduce their taxes – overall tax migration ends up being a small fraction of a small fraction. Not never, but not often.

Some benefits don’t have a dollar sign

Migration is mostly a young person’s game.

The most mobile Americans are recent college graduates who are brimming with potential, searching for work and unburdened by major responsibilities. Their rate of migration from one state to another is over 12%, more than four times the rate of millionaires.

The typical adult mover is about 30 years old, while the highest income earners are typically about 50. People choose where to build their careers and families decades before they reach their peak earnings phase.

By the time someone earns enough to be taxed in the highest brackets, they’re usually late into their careers. They are almost always married, often have children at home, own their homes and, in many cases, own a business. Their social lives and their economic success are linked to local networks of colleagues, clients and connections built up over a long career. Moving away from those networks means giving up a great deal of social capital and starting over somewhere new.

Top earners know that some states have lower taxes, but for most, tax flight is simply a bad deal. The social and economic costs of uprooting are bigger than the tax savings.

When your social world collapses

Two recent events showed why the rich generally stay where they are – and what it takes to move them.

The first was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law in late 2017. The tax reform package capped the federal deduction for state and local taxes and raised taxes on high earners in states like New York, New Jersey and California. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “So Long, California. Sayonara, New York,” economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore predicted that 800,000 people a year would flee those states.

They didn’t. A colleague and I studied every millionaire tax return in the country for two years before and after the reform. Nothing happened. There was no increase in migration out of the states where tax burdens rose. The predicted exodus simply did not occur.

We were about to wrap up the study and call it case closed. Then something unexpected did happen: In early 2020, millionaires began leaving high-tax states in large numbers. Low-tax states saw no comparable outflows. The pattern matched those tax-flight predictions from just a few years earlier.

It was the COVID-19 pandemic, and it brought a profound shock to the social lives of city residents.

Offices emptied out, with entry swipes in major cities dropping by nearly 90%. Time spent at work fell sharply, local amenities were shuttered, and time spent alone grew as in-person contact became a health risk. K–12 schools closed, disrupting children’s relationships with teachers and classmates.

For many households, this was also a strange form of freedom, and a chance to rethink the geography of work and life, especially for top earners who could work remotely from anywhere. Disconnected from the bonds of place, top earners moved and clearly favored low-tax destinations.

The lesson is that social lives and economic policies are deeply intertwined. The 2017 tax reform had no effect on migration because the social cost of moving is high – especially for people at the peak of their careers who are enjoying the many social benefits of economic success. As long as those connections to others are strong, they outweigh the appeal of moving to lower-tax states.

When the pandemic broke apart so much of social life, the ledger shifted. If your office, school, friendships and daily routines no longer anchor you in place, what is keeping you in a high-tax place?

But by early 2023, as social and economic life returned to normal, we found that millionaire migration patterns mostly reverted to their prepandemic baselines.

In other words, the surge in tax flight was temporary.

If you want the rich, appeal to the young

There is a big lesson here for state and city policies.

Every place wants to attract high-income earners and the spending power and tax dollars that accompany their salaries. Many policymakers think that tax cuts will lure them in, but this is mostly a fool’s errand. In normal times, the rich are deeply rooted and not movable.

The real opportunity lies in attracting and retaining the next generation of top earners – young people who are unattached to place and looking for opportunities to build their careers and their lives. Places that draw young professionals build the pipeline of future top earners.

Those early-career folks are mobile, but they are not thinking about the top tax rate. Their salaries are low. They are trying to find good jobs, pay the rent, form relationships and start families. They hope to be successful enough to one day be paying Mamdani’s millionaire tax. For the time being, though, they need the basic costs of living to be manageable. Soon they will need affordable child care and good public schools for their kids.

If the city helps them that far along, many of them would gladly pay a millionaire tax when and if the time comes. In this light, the Mamdani plan is simply practical: Higher taxes at the top support the services and quality of life that keep the next generation in the city.

Cristobal Young received funding from the Russell Sage Foundation and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth in support of this research project.

– ref. New York’s wealthy warn of a tax exodus after Mamdani’s win – but the data says otherwise – https://theconversation.com/new-yorks-wealthy-warn-of-a-tax-exodus-after-mamdanis-win-but-the-data-says-otherwise-270415

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Katherine Cobb-Pitstick, Assistant Professor of Child Neurology, University of Pittsburgh

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

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Why do people get headaches? – Evie V., age 10, Corpus Christi, Texas

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Whether sharp and stabbing or dull and throbbing, a headache can ruin your day. But your brain doesn’t actually feel pain. So what is going on when it feels like your head is in a vise or about to explode?

I am a child neurologist – that is, a doctor who specializes in diseases of the brain in kids. Most of my patients are kids and adolescents who are struggling with headaches.

Head pain is complicated, and there is still a lot to learn about what causes it and how it can be treated. But researchers know there are a few key players that take part in generating pain.

What are headaches?

Nerves communicate information like pain through electrical signals between the body and the brain.

While the brain itself doesn’t have any nerve sensors to feel pain, blood vessels in the head and structures that protect and surround the brain do sense pain. When these tissues detect injury or damage, they release chemicals that trigger transmission of electrical signals through nerves to tell the brain the head is hurting.

The brain will also use nerves to signal the body to respond to pain with symptoms like feeling tired, teary eyes, runny nose, upset stomach and discomfort in bright or loud environments. It’s not clear why humans evolved to feel these symptoms, but some scientists theorize that this can lead to healthier lifestyle choices to decrease the chance of future headache attacks.

What causes headaches?

Often, headaches are a sign that the body is under some kind of stress. That stress triggers chemical and physical changes to the nerves and blood vessels around your brain, head and neck that can cause headaches.

Many types of stresses can cause headaches, including an infection, allergies, hormone changes during puberty and menstrual cycles, not getting enough sleep, not drinking enough water, skipping meals or drinking too much caffeine or alcohol. Sometimes, headaches happen with emotional stress, like feeling anxious or depressed. Even pressure in your sinuses due to changes in the weather can cause your head to hurt.

One in 11 kids have had a type of severe headache called a migraine. They feel like a pulsing and pounding pain in your head and come with other symptoms, including nausea or being sensitive to lights and sounds. During a migraine, it can be hard to do everyday activities because they can make the pain worse. It is also very common to feel unwell or irritable before the head pain starts and after the pain is gone.

Migraines occur when the nerves and other structures used in signaling and interpreting pain aren’t working properly, leading to pain and discomfort from stimulation that wouldn’t normally provoke this. There are many environmental and genetic factors that contribute to this dysfunction. Some people are born with a higher risk of developing migraines. Most people with migraines have someone in their family who also experiences them.

What can treat and prevent headaches?

Identifying what type of headache you’re experiencing is crucial to making sure it is treated properly. Because migraines can be severe, they’re the type of headache that most often leads to doctor’s visits for both kids and adults.

There are several ways to reduce your chances of having headaches, such as drinking plenty of water and limiting caffeine. Eating, sleeping and exercising regularly are other ways you can help prevent headaches.

While painkillers like ibuprofen are often enough to relieve a headache, prescription medications are sometimes necessary to make head pain more bearable. Some medications can also help control or prevent headache episodes. Physical therapy to exercise the body or behavioral therapy to work on the mind can also help you manage headache pain. There are even electronic devices to treat headaches by stimulating different parts of the nervous system.

It is important to talk with a doctor about headaches, especially if it’s a new problem or you experience a change in how they usually feel. Sometimes, brain imaging or blood tests are needed to rule out another health issue.

Recognizing a headache problem early will help your doctor get started on helping you figure out the best way to treat it.

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

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

Katherine Cobb-Pitstick 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 do people get headaches and migraines? A child neurologist explains the science of head pain and how to treat it – https://theconversation.com/why-do-people-get-headaches-and-migraines-a-child-neurologist-explains-the-science-of-head-pain-and-how-to-treat-it-268838

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Kobi V. Ajayi, Research Assistant Professor of Maternal and Child Health, Texas A&M University

Seven years ago, at 30 weeks into a seemingly low-risk pregnancy, I unexpectedly began to bleed. Doctors diagnosed me with complete placenta previa. Then, while on bed rest at 32 weeks, my placenta suddenly ruptured, leading to an immediate emergency cesarean section.

I became one of about 10% of women giving birth in Nigeria to experience a preterm birth, which means before 37 weeks of pregnancy.

Now, as a maternal and child health researcher in the U.S., I’m struck by the stubbornly high preterm birth rate here. According to the most recent March of Dimes Report Card on maternal and infant health, released on Nov. 17, 2025, 10.4% of babies in the U.S. were born prematurely in 2024.

Preterm birth is the second-leading cause of infant deaths in the U.S., contributing to over 20,000 infant deaths each year. Some who survive are at increased risk of immediate and long-term health problems, with substantial emotional and financial tolls.

That rate has not budged for three years, according to the report – and it is consistently higher than in many other countries, particularly those in the Global North. That’s also true for other crucial aspects of maternal and infant health, such as cardiovascular diseases and mental health needs.

One key factor underlying the problem of preterm birth in the U.S. is extensive disparities in health care access for expectant mothers. In Texas, where I conduct my research and where I managed the state’s maternal mortality and morbidity review committee in 2023 and 2024, this issue plays out very clearly.

Revealing disparities that drive preterm birth rates

The March of Dimes report scored the U.S. overall a D+ grade on preterm birth rate at 10.4%, but states differ dramatically in their scores. New Hampshire, for example, scored an A- with 7.9% of infants born prematurely, while Mississippi, where 15% of infants are born prematurely, scored an F.

Texas’ rates aren’t the worst in the country, but it scores notably worse than the national rate of 10.4%, with 11.1% of babies – 43,344 in total – born prematurely in 2024. And Texas has an especially large effect on the low national score because 10 of the 46 cities that receive a D or F grade – defined in the report as a rate higher than the national rate of 10.4% – are located there. In 2023, Texas had the highest number of such cities in the U.S.

That may be in part because access to maternal care in Texas is so limited. Close to half of all counties across the state completely lack access to maternity care providers and birthing facilities, compared with one-third of counties across the U.S. Moreover, more counties in Texas are designated as health professional shortage areas, meaning they lack enough doctors for the number of people living in these areas. Shortages exist in 257 areas in Texas for primary care doctors, 149 for dentists and 251 for mental health providers.

But even against the backdrop of geographic differences in health care access, the starkest contribution to the state’s preterm birth rates comes from ethnic and racial disparities. Mothers of non-Hispanic Black (14.7%), American Indian/Alaskan Native (12.5%), Pacific Islander (12.3%) and Hispanic (10.1%) descent have babies prematurely much more often than do mothers who are non-Hispanic white (9.5%) or Asian (9.1%).

These numbers reflect the broader landscape of maternal health in the U.S. Although nationwide maternal mortality rates decreased from 22.3 to 18.6 deaths per 100,000 live births from 2022 to 2023, Black women died during pregnancy or within one year after childbirth at almost three times the rate (50.3%) of white (14.5%), Hispanic (12.4%) and Asian (10.7%) women.

Preterm birth in context

Having a baby early is not the normal or expected outcome during pregnancy. It occurs due to complex genetic and environmental factors, which are exacerbated by inadequate prenatal care. According to the World Health Organization, women should have eight or more doctor visits during their pregnancy. Without adequate and quality prenatal care, the chances of reversing the preterm birth trends are slim.

Yet in Texas, unequal access to prenatal care remains a huge cause for concern. As the March of Dimes report documents, women of color in Texas receive adequate prenatal care at vastly lower rates than do white women – a fact that holds true in several other states as well. In addition, Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the nation, with 17% of women uninsured for health coverage, compared with a national average of 8%.

Nationwide, public health experts, community advocates and families are calling for comprehensive health insurance to help cover the costs of prenatal care, particularly for low-income families that primarily rely on Medicaid for childbirth. Cuts to funding for the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid outlined in the 2025 Budget Reconciliation Act make it likely that more Americans will lose access to care or see their health care costs balloon.

But state-level action may help reduce access barriers. In Texas, for example, a set of laws passed in 2025 may help improve access to care before, during and after pregnancy. Texas legislators funded initiatives targeted at workforce development in rural areas – particularly for obstetrician-gynecologists, emergency physicians and nurses, women’s preventive safety net programs, and maternal safety and quality improvement initiatives.

Rising rates of chronic diseases, such as hypertension, obesity and diabetes, also contribute to women giving birth prematurely. While working with the state maternal mortality and morbidity review committee, my team and I found that cardiovascular conditions contributed to the 85 pregnancy-related deaths that occurred in 2020.

An upward trend in obesity, diabetes and hypertension before pregnancy are pressing issues in the state, posing a serious threat to fetal and maternal health.

Learning from other countries

These statistics are grim.

But proven strategies to reduce these and other causes of maternal mortality and morbidity are available. In Australia, for instance, maternal deaths have significantly declined from 12.7 per 100,000 live births in the early 1970s to 5.3 per 100,000 between 2021 and 2022. The reduction can be linked to several medical interventions that are based on equitable, safe, woman-centered and evidence-based maternal health services.

In Texas, some of my colleagues at Texas A&M University use an equitable, woman-centered approach to develop culturally competent care centered on educational health promotion, preventive health care and community services.

Utilizing nurses and nonmedical support roles such as community health workers and doulas, my colleagues’ initiatives complement existing state efforts and close critical gaps in health care access for rural and low-income Texas families.

Across the country, researchers are using similar models, including the use of doulas, to address the Black maternal health crisis.

Research shows the use of doulas can improve access to care during pregnancy and childbirth, particularly for women of color.

It’s all hands on deck

There isn’t one, single risk factor that leads to a preterm birth, nor is there a universal approach to its prevention.

Results from my work with Black mothers who had a preterm birth aligns with what other experts are saying: Addressing the maternal health crisis in the U.S. requires more than policy interventions. It involves the dismantling of system-level and policy-driven inequities that lead to high rates of preterm births and negative pregnancy and childbirth outcomes, particularly for women of color, through funding, research, policy changes and community voices.

Although I had my preterm birth in Nigeria, my story and those shared by the Black mothers I have worked with in the U.S. show eerily similar underlying challenges across different settings.

Kobi Ajayi founded and remains affiliated with EDEN Foundation, Nigeria, a local non-profit organization with a mission to improve preterm infant outcomes.

– ref. Texas cities have some of the highest preterm birth rates in the US, highlighting maternal health crisis nationwide – https://theconversation.com/texas-cities-have-some-of-the-highest-preterm-birth-rates-in-the-us-highlighting-maternal-health-crisis-nationwide-270251

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Carl Lipo, Professor of Anthropology and Associate Dean for Research, Binghamton University, State University of New York

Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, is often portrayed in popular culture as an enigma. The rationale is clear: The tiny, remote island in the Pacific features nearly 1,000 enormous statues – the moai. The magnitude and number of these monuments defy easy explanation.

Since European ships first encountered these stone giants in the 18th century, outsiders have branded the island as fundamentally mysterious, possibly beyond archaeologists’ ability to explain. This characteristic is part of what makes the island famous. Tour operators market the inexplicable. Documentaries promise unsolved puzzles. Popular books ask how “primitive people” could possibly move 70-ton megaliths.

Archaeological researchers have put forward various explanations for the statues, which were made between 1200 and 1700, but there remains no consensus. For decades, experts offered plausible scenarios: powerful chiefs commanding workers, elite-controlled statue quarries, wooden sleds drawn by hundreds of islanders, roller systems, wooden rails and ceremonial pathway markers. Based on authoritative assertions and compelling narratives, these accounts are rarely connected to archaeological evidence.

I’m an archaeologist who has been studying Rapa Nui for more than two decades. In newly published research, my colleagues and I believe we’ve solved the mystery in three essential ways.

First, using 11,686 photographs taken by drone, we created a comprehensive, three-dimensional model of Rano Raraku, the volcanic crater where 95% of Rapa Nui’s moai were carved. It was a systematic documentation – every slope, every carved surface, every production feature captured at a resolution down to the centimeter. The model generated predictions that we and other researchers could test: If production had been centralized, workshops would have been clustered; if they’d been hierarchical, we’d find differences in resources used at each level; if it had been dictated by elites, techniques would be standardized.

Our data revealed the opposite: Drone imagery shows 30 independent workshops working simultaneously. Instead of top-down organization, small, clan-level groups seem to have used innovative human engineering.

Previous attempts to understand Rano Raraku failed not because the quarry held impenetrable secrets but due to the lack of published documentation and the limitations of traditional mapping methods. Two-dimensional maps couldn’t capture three-dimensional relationships. Statues emerge from cliff faces at various angles. Production areas overlap vertically. Carving sequences intersect across time. Traditional archaeological methods provided impressions but missed details and couldn’t capture the system as a whole.

Our 3D model changes that. We identified 426 moai in various stages of production, 341 extraction trenches, 133 voids where completed statues were removed, and previously unmapped quarrying areas on the exterior slopes. Each workshop was self-contained, demonstrating decentralization. Three distinct carving techniques emerge, showing that different groups employed different approaches while producing standardized forms.

The walking moai

Second, we generated data to resolve the age-old question about moai transport: How did Rapanui people move these megalithic giants? Despite many decades of attempts, previous transport theories all shared a fatal flaw: They made no predictions that were testable, meaning that scientists could prove or disprove.

Our walking hypothesis – based on oral traditions, ideas by our colleague Sergio Rapu Haoa and tested by Czech engineer Pavel Pavel – made specific, testable predictions. We found that “road moai,” those statues that were abandoned along constructed roads used for transport, differ morphologically from those that reached their final destinations, large platforms called ahu.

We measured 62 moai abandoned along ancient roads. The road moai proved distinct, characterized by wider bases, D-shaped cross sections and a forward lean of 5-15 degrees. These features wouldn’t be necessary if the moai were transported in a horizontal position. They make vertical transport – “walking” the statues – possible.

In 2013, we built a 4.35-ton concrete replica scaled from road moai. It wasn’t an artistic interpretation but a precise reproduction of measurable features from a statue found along the road and abandoned during transport. With 18 people and three ropes, the statue walked 100 meters in 40 minutes.

In recently published work, we documented that physics confirmed what walking the replica demonstrated about the road moai shape. The forward lean creates an inverted pendulum that converts lateral oscillation into forward progress.

Those moai that reached ahu must have been altered in order for them to stand upright stably, while those along the roads would retain the features that enabled them to be “walked.”

The distribution data for moai across the landscape provided another test: The locations of road moai leading from the quarry follow an exponential decay curve, meaning that probability of a moai falling in transport is highest near the quarry and decreases with distance since those that fall over never get any farther. Fracture patterns on those road moai with breaks align with vertical impact stresses, meaning the broken moai were damaged by falling from a standing position.

Our testable predictions held.

Deforestation without collapse

The third “mystery” is how an advanced society could destroy its own environment. The island was deforested by the end of the 17th century. This mystery also yielded to systematic analysis. We analyzed data from previous archaeological excavations. Rather than finding increased rat consumption by people, indicating dietary stress from a lack of other food sources, remains of rats eaten by people decreased over time while seafood dominated throughout.

Ecological modeling revealed what we think really happened. Polynesian rats, introduced with the arrival of the first Polynesian colonists around 1200, could grow into a population of millions within just a few years. By eating 95% of the island’s tree seeds, rats prevented forest regeneration. Humans cleared land for cultivation, but rats made the recovery of the palm forests impossible. The synergistic interaction seems to have accelerated deforestation within five centuries.

This wasn’t “ecocide” – intentional self-destruction – but rather unintended ecological transformation caused by an introduced species. Our research also demonstrated that the Rapanui adapted through the use of rock mulch agriculture, which improved soil productivity. They continued to eat seafood and produce monuments for 500 years after deforestation began.

To tackle Rapa Nui’s mysteries, we used systematic documentation. We specified testable predictions, gathered data that could prove us wrong and accepted what the evidence showed. Rapa Nui shows that even entrenched mysteries yield to methodical investigation.

Carl Lipo receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society.

– ref. Drones, physics and rats: Studies show how the people of Rapa Nui made and moved the giant statues – and what caused the island’s deforestation – https://theconversation.com/drones-physics-and-rats-studies-show-how-the-people-of-rapa-nui-made-and-moved-the-giant-statues-and-what-caused-the-islands-deforestation-270023

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Tevis Garrett Graddy-Lovelace, Provost Associate Professor of Environment, Development and Health, American University School of International Service

The U.S. government has caused massive food waste during President Donald Trump’s second term. Policies such as immigration raids, tariff changes and temporary and permanent cuts to food assistance programs have left farmers short of workers and money, food rotting in fields and warehouses, and millions of Americans hungry. And that doesn’t even include the administration’s actual destruction of edible food.

The U.S. government estimates that more than 47 million people in America don’t have enough food to eat – even with federal and state governments spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on programs to help them.

Yet, huge amounts of food – on average in the U.S., as much as 40% of it – rots before being eaten. That amount is equivalent to 120 billion meals a year: more than twice as many meals as would be needed to feed those 47 million hungry Americans three times a day for an entire year.

This colossal waste has enormous economic costs and renders useless all the water and resources used to grow the food. In addition, as it rots, the wasted food emits in the U.S. alone over 4 million metric tons of methane – a heat-trapping greenhouse gas.

As a scholar of wasted food, I have watched this problem worsen since Trump began his second term in January 2025. Despite this administration’s claim of streamlining the government to make its operations more efficient, a range of recent federal policies have, in fact, exacerbated food wastage.

Immigration policy

Supplying fresh foods, such as fruits, vegetables and dairy, requires skilled workers on tight timelines to ensure ripeness, freshness and high quality.

The Trump administration’s widespread efforts to arrest and deport immigrants have sent Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Border Patrol and other agencies into hundreds of agricultural fields, meat processing plants and food production and distribution sites. Supported by billions of taxpayer dollars, they have arrested thousands of food workers and farmworkers – with lethal consequences at times.

Dozens of raids have not only violated immigrants’ human rights and torn families apart: They have jeopardized the national food supply. Farmworkers already work physically hard jobs for low wages. In legitimate fear for their lives and liberty, reports indicate that in some places 70% of people harvesting, processing and distributing food stopped showing up to work by mid-2025.

News reports have identified many instances where crops have been left to rot in abandoned fields. Even the U.S. Department of Labor declared in October 2025 that aggressive farm raids drive farmworkers into hiding, leave substantial amounts of food unharvested and thus pose a “risk of supply shock-induced food shortages.”

Foreign aid cuts

When the Trump administration all but shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development in early 2025, the agency had 500 tons of ready-to-eat, high-energy biscuits worth US$800,000, stored to distribute to starving people around the world who had been displaced by violence or natural disasters. With no staff to distribute the biscuits, they expired while sitting in a warehouse in Dubai.

Incinerating the out-of-date biscuits reportedly cost an additional $125,000.

An additional 70,000 tons of USAID food aid may also have been destroyed.

Tariffs

In the late 20th century, as globalized trade patterns grew, U.S. farmers struggled with agricultural prices below their production costs. Yet tariffs in the first Trump administration did not protect small farms.

And the tariffs imposed in early 2025, after Trump regained the White House, severed U.S. soybean trade with China for months. Meanwhile, there’s nowhere to store the mountains of soybeans. An October 2025 agreement may resume some activity, but at lower price levels and a slower pace than before, as China looks to Brazil and Argentina to meet its vast demand.

Though the soybeans were intended to feed the Chinese pig industry, not humans, the specter of waste looms both in terms of the potential spoilage of soybeans and the actual human food that could have been grown in their place.

Other efforts lead to more waste

Since taking office, the second Trump administration has taken many steps aimed at efficiency that actually boosted food waste. Mass firings of food safety personnel risks even more outbreaks of foodborne diseases, tainted imports, and agricultural pathogens – which can erupt into crises requiring mass destruction, for instance, of nearly 35,000 turkeys with bird flu in Utah.

In addition, the administration canceled a popular program that helped schools and food banks buy food from local farmers, though many of the crops had already been planted when the cancellation announcement was made. That food had to find new buyers or risk being wasted, too. And the farmers were unable to count on a key revenue source to keep their farms afloat.

Also, the administration slashed funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency that helped food producers, restaurants and households recover from disasters – including restoring power to food-storage refrigeration.

The fall 2025 government shutdown left the government’s major food aid program, SNAP, in limbo for weeks, derailing communities’ ability to meet their basic needs. Grocers, who benefit substantially from SNAP funds, announced discounts for SNAP recipients – to help them afford food and to keep food supplies moving before they rotted. The Department of Agriculture ordered them not to, saying SNAP customers must pay the same prices as other customers.

Food waste did not start with the Trump administration. But the administration’s policies – though they claim to be seeking efficiency – have compounded voluminous waste at a time of growing need. This Thanksgiving, think about wasted food – as a problem, and as a symptom of larger problems.

American University School of International Service master’s student Laurel Levin contributed to the writing of this article.

Garrett Graddy-Lovelace received funding from the NSF Multiscale RECIPES for Sustainable Food Systems project.

– ref. As US hunger rises, Trump administration’s ‘efficiency’ goals cause massive food waste – https://theconversation.com/as-us-hunger-rises-trump-administrations-efficiency-goals-cause-massive-food-waste-270027

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Stephen Siff, Associate Professor of Journalism, Miami University

As the Detroit Lions barrel toward a Thanksgiving Day game with the Green Bay Packers, some die-hard fans may be fantasizing about what it would be like to be on the field themselves: calling plays from the Lions huddle, accepting the snap from between a crouching center’s thighs, and spinning to hand off the football before the defensive linemen come crashing down.

In 1963, Lions head coach George Wilson allowed writer and Paris Review editor George Plimpton to enact that fantasy.

With a Sports Illustrated contract in hand, Plimpton convinced Lions management to allow him to enter preseason training camp at Cranbrook, the private boys school in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. His plan was to go undercover as a rookie quarterback for a magazine article that would reach dramatic culmination when he called a series of plays in a game of professional football.

No one expected the amateur athlete to survive for long on a field with real-life Lions. But in writing about the experience, Plimpton turned off-field fandom and on-field bumbling into literary gold.

His resulting 1966 book, “Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback,” became a bestseller that was praised by The New York Times as “one of the greatest books written on sports, and the most thoroughly engaging book on any subject in recent memory.”

A 1968 movie based on the book starred Alan Alda as Plimpton and members of the 1967 Lions team as themselves.

Decades before I became a journalism professor at Miami University of Ohio, I discovered Plimpton’s sportswriting from reading the paperback versions I found on my parents’ bookshelves. Plimpton was a leading member of a mid-20th-century class of literary journalists, including Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Gay Talese and Norman Mailer, who were becoming known for applying novelistic techniques and sometimes personal, subjective perspectives to nonfiction.

While the other literati tackled heavy topics, Plimpton’s engaging, conversational prose goofed around on the fringes of pro sports. Many of his books followed the same “participatory journalism” formula. He wrote about pitching against MLB all-stars, traveling with the PGA tour, boxing a bout against Archie Moore and playing with the Boston Bruins.

Those were just the full-length books. Other television and magazine projects had Plimpton competing in tennis and bridge; performing stand-up comedy; acting in a Western; playing with the New York Philharmonic; and attempting to be an aerialist with the circus.

However, he is best known for trying his hand quarterbacking for the Lions.

Posh writer meets the gridiron

In some ways, Plimpton seemed exactly the wrong person for this job. The possessor of a distinctively old money accent and patrician wealth and manners, he was founding editor of The Paris Review and in 1967 a mainstay of literary salons in Paris and New York. “Author, critic, interviewer, party-giver … friend of everybody, gifted, personable, energetic, bright, with-it, rich, a legend in his own time,” The New York Times gushed.

Just the kind of person whom your average football fan might enjoy seeing knocked flat.

Plimpton joined a team he described as recovering from scandal. After ending the 1962 season with an 11-3 record and a Playoff Bowl victory for third place in the NFL, the NFL commissioner’s office fined six Lions for gambling on the championship game between Green Bay and New York. More significant on field, the commissioner suspended Lions great defensive tackle and future Pro Football Hall of Famer Alex Karras for one year. Without him, the Lions would end the 1963 season 5-8-1.

Plimpton wrote his way onto the team by promising to “just hang around on the periphery of things and not bother anyone, just try to participate enough to get the feel of things.”

Wilson agreed, and Plimpton arrived at training camp a few months later with his own football, purchased from an army-navy store in Times Square, and a “mild fiction” about having played quarterback at Harvard and for the nonexistent Newfoundland Newfs.

Plimpton’s attempt at deception might raise ethical questions; however, the joke is always on him. The coaching staff seemed to have thought it would be hilarious if anyone on the team actually took the gangly 36-year-old with the nasal accent as a professional football player. It seems unlikely that anyone did.

“I never had the temerity to pretend I was something that I wasn’t,” Plimpton wrote. “The team caught on quickly enough.”

At camp, Plimpton hung around the dining hall and sat in the back of team meetings. A master of small talk, he lets the reader eavesdrop on conversations with Hall of Famers Karras, Dick “Night Train” Lane and Joe Schmidt.

Plimpton takes us with him one night to a bar frequented by coaches, where we listen in rounds of liars’ poker with Wilson, Scooter McLean and Les Bingaman. We tag along as he chats with Karras at Lindell’s A.C., the bar the player owned in downtown Detroit at the time.

Lessons in grit

At training camp, Plimpton faced the teasing of players but earned respect by facing the brutality of sport and by persisting despite the inevitability of pain. He never played football in school, beyond a beery game between Harvard Crimson and Harvard Lampoon, and did not know the basics of playing quarterback.

Several days into camp, he was allowed to participate in a play where, as quarterback, he was supposed to quickly hand off the ball to another player.

“At ‘two’ the snap back came,” Plimpton wrote. “I began to turn without the proper grip on the ball, moving too nervously, and I fumbled the ball, gaping at it, mouth ajar, as it fell and bounced twice, once away from me, then back, and rocked back and forth gaily at my feet. I flung myself on it (…) and I heard the sharp strange whack of gear, the grunts, and then a quick sudden weight whooshed the air out of me.”

The same thing happened when Plimpton was allowed to take the field in an annual intra-squad game played in Pontiac. Over his first three plays he lost 20 yards by falling down, getting knocked over by his own teammates and being literally picked from the ground by a zealous defender. On the bus ride home, Plimpton admitted to Wilson that he didn’t like being hit.

The coach gently explained that “love of physical contact” was necessary to make it in pro football.

“When kids, out in a park, chose of sides for tackle rather than touch, the guys that want to be ends and go out for the passes, or even quarterback, because they think subconsciously they can get rid of the ball before being hit, those guys don’t end up as football players,” Wilson mused. “They become great tennis players, or skiers, or high jumpers. It doesn’t mean they lack courage or competitiveness.”

“But the guys who put up their hands to be tackles or guards, or fullbacks who run not for daylight but for trouble – those are the ones who will make it as football players.”

This quality of great football players – an irrational enthusiasm for bruising physical contact – is celebrated by Plimpton in the veteran Lions who take him into their orbit. He becomes friends with Karras and offensive lineman John Gordy, in particular, and shoots the breeze on topics ranging from the NFL commissioner to Adolf Hitler.

In a subsequent book, Plimpton goes with the pair to a madcap golf tournament and starts a ridiculous business venture, suggesting the on-field madness necessary to succeed in football bleeds into off-field life as well.

But it is not Plimpton’s way to delve into the psychology of his idols. Rather, he listens as they spin tales that show how reckless the grown men who run toward trouble really are.

Stephen Siff 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. George Plimpton’s 1966 nonfiction classic ‘Paper Lion’ revealed the bruising truths of Detroit Lions training camp – https://theconversation.com/george-plimptons-1966-nonfiction-classic-paper-lion-revealed-the-bruising-truths-of-detroit-lions-training-camp-267946

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Saif Khan, Ph.D. Candidate in Biology, University of Southern California

Naloxone, also known by the brand name Narcan, is one of the most important drugs in the United States’ fight against the opioid crisis. It reverses an opioid overdose nearly instantly, restarting breathing in a person who was unresponsive moments before and on the brink of death. To bystanders witnessing it being administered, naloxone can appear almost supernatural.

Although the Food and Drug Administration approved naloxone for medical use in 1971 and for over-the-counter purchase in 2023, exactly how it works is still unclear. Researchers know naloxone acts on opioid receptors, a family of proteins responsible for the body’s response to pain. When opioids such as morphine and fentanyl bind to these receptors, they produce not only pain relief and euphoria but also dangerous side effects. Naloxone competes with opioids for access to these receptors, preventing the drugs from triggering effects in the body. How it does this at the molecular level, however, has been an ongoing question.

In our recently published research in the journal Nature, my team and I were able to provide some definitive evidence of how naloxone works by capturing images of it in action for the first time.

Biology of opioids

To better grasp how naloxone works, it’s helpful to first zoom in on the biology behind opioids.

One member of the family of opioid receptors, MOR – short for µ-opioid receptor – is a central player in regulating the body’s response to pain. It sits on the surface of neurons, mostly in the brain and spinal cord, and acts as a communication hub.

When an opioid – such as an endorphin, the body’s natural painkillers – interacts with MOR, it changes the structure of the receptor. This change in shape allows what’s called a G protein to bind to the receptor and trigger a signal to the rest of the body to reduce pain, induce pleasure, or – in the case of overdose – dangerously slow breathing and heart rate.

In everyday terms, MOR is like a lock on the outside of the cell. The G protein is the mechanism inside the lock that turns when the correct key – in this case, an endorphin or a drug like fentanyl – goes in. For decades, scientists believed that an opioid’s ability to enable this signaling cascade was linked to how effectively it reshaped the structure of the receptor – essentially, whether the lock could open wide enough for the internal mechanism of the G-protein to engage.

Yet, recent research – including our work – has revealed that the critical step to how opioids work is not how wide they open the lock but how well the mechanism works. G proteins act like a switch, releasing one molecule in exchange for another molecule that triggers the protein to send the signal that sets off opioid effects.

In essence, drugs like fentanyl, by acting on the receptor, transmit physical changes to G proteins that result in the switch flipping more rapidly. What we now see is that naloxone jams the mechanism, preventing the switch from flipping and sending the signal.

Capturing the switch

Researchers know that the effects of opioids are triggered when the G protein switch is flipped. But what does this process look like?

For years, attempts to visualize this mechanism were largely limited to two states – before the G protein binds to the µ-opioid receptor, and after the molecule was released from the G protein. The states in between were considered too unstable to isolate. My team and I wanted to capture these unseen states moment by moment as the switch flips and the molecule is released.

To do this, we used a technique called cryo-electron microscopy, which freezes molecules in motion to visualize them at near-atomic resolution. For both naloxone and the opioid drug loperamide (Imodium), we trapped the G protein bound to the opioid receptor right before it released the molecule.

We captured four distinct structural states leading up to the release of the molecule from the G protein.

The first of these, which we call the latent state, is the earliest form of the opioid receptor and G protein after they make contact. We found that both the opioid receptor and the G protein are inactive at this point. Moreover, naloxone stabilizes this latent state. What this means is that naloxone effectively jams the mechanism right at the start, preventing all subsequent steps required for activation.

In the absence of naloxone, an opioid drug promotes a transition to the remaining three states: The G-protein rotates and aligns itself with the receptor (engaged), swings open the door blocking the molecule that would trigger the switch from flipping (unlatched), and holds that door open so the molecule can be released (primed) and send the signal to carry out the drug’s effects.

To confirm that our snapshots reflect what’s really happening, we performed extensive computational simulations to watch these four states change over time. Together, these findings point to the molecular root of naloxone’s therapeutic effects: By stalling the opioid receptor and G protein at a latent state, it shuts down opioid signaling, reversing an opioid overdose within minutes.

Visualizing new drugs

Designing a new key for a lock is most successfully done when you know exactly what that lock looks like. By mapping the exact sequence of how opioids interact with opioid receptors and pinpointing where different drugs can intervene in this process, our findings provide a blueprint for engineering the next generation of opioid medicines and overdose antidotes.

For example, one of the persistent challenges with naloxone is that it must often be administered repeatedly during an overdose. This is especially the case for fentanyl overdoses, where the opioid can outcompete or outlast the effects of the treatment.

Knowing that naloxone works by stalling the µ-opioid receptor in an early, latent state suggests that molecules that can bind more tightly or more selectively to this form of the receptor could be more effective at stabilizing this inactive state and thus preventing an opioid’s effects.

By uncovering the structure of molecules involved in opioid signaling, researchers may be able to develop drugs that provide longer-lasting protection against overdose.

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

– ref. How does Narcan work? Mapping how it reverses opioid overdose can provide a molecular blueprint for more effective drugs – https://theconversation.com/how-does-narcan-work-mapping-how-it-reverses-opioid-overdose-can-provide-a-molecular-blueprint-for-more-effective-drugs-269706