Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Nilton O. Rennó, Professor of Climate and Space Sciences Engineering, University of Michigan

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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Are there thunderstorms on Mars? – Cade, age 7, Houston, Texas

Mars is a very dry planet with very little water in its atmosphere and hardly any clouds, so you might not expect it to have storms. Yet, there is lightning and thunder on Mars – although not with rain, nor with the same gusto as weather on Earth.

More than 10 years ago, my planetary science colleagues and I found the first evidence for lightning strikes on Mars. In the following decade, other researchers have continued to study what lightning might be like on the red planet. In November 2025, a Mars rover first captured the spectacular sounds of lightning sparking on the Martian surface.

Lightning on Mars

On Earth, lightning is an electric discharge that begins inside big clouds.

But because Mars is so dry, it doesn’t have clouds of water – instead, it has clouds of dust. With little water to weigh down dirt on Mars, dust clouds can quickly grow into huge, windy dust storms a few times taller than Earth’s tallest thunderstorms.

When smaller dust particles and larger sand particles collide with each other while being whipped around by these storms, they pick up a static charge. Smaller dust particles take on a positive charge, while larger sand particles become negative. The smaller dust particles are lighter and will float higher, while the heavier sand tends to fall closer to the ground.

Because oppositely charged particles don’t like to be apart, eventually the energy building between the negative charges higher up in the dust storm and the positive charges closer to the ground becomes too great and is released as electricity – similar to lightning.

The air around the electricity rapidly warms up and expands – on Earth, this creates the shock waves that you hear as thunder.

Nobody has seen a flash of lightning on Mars, but we suspect it’s more like the glow from a neon light rather than a powerful lightning bolt. The atmosphere near the surface of Mars is about 100 times less dense than on Earth: It’s much more similar to the air inside neon lights.

Releasing radio waves

Besides shock waves and visible light, lightning also produces other types of waves that the human eye can’t see: X-ray and radio waves. The ground and the top of the atmosphere both conduct electricity well, so they guide these radio waves and cause them to produce signals with specific radio frequencies. It’s kind of like how you might tune into specific radio channels for news or music, but instead of different channels, scientists can identify the radio waves coming from lightning.

While nobody has ever seen visible light from Martian lightning, we have heard something similar to the radio waves created by lightning on Earth. That’s the noise that the Perseverance rover reported at the end of 2025. They sound like electric sparks do on Earth. The rover recorded these signals on a microphone as small, sandy tornadoes passed by.

Searching for Martian lightning

When my colleagues and I went hunting for lightning on Mars a decade ago, we knew the red planet emitted more radio waves during dust storm seasons. So, we searched for modest increases in radio signals from Mars using the large radio dishes that NASA uses to talk to its spacecraft. The dishes function like big ears that listen for faint radio signals from spacecraft far from Earth.

We spent from five to eight hours every day listening to Mars for three weeks. Eventually, we found the signals we were looking for: radio bursts with frequencies that matched up with the radio waves that lightning on Earth can create.

To find the particular source of these lightning-like signals, we searched for dust storms in pictures taken by spacecraft orbiting Mars. We matched a dust storm nearly 25 miles (40 kilometers) tall to the time when we’d heard the radio signals.

Learning about lightning on Mars helps scientists understand whether the planet could have once hosted extraterrestrial life. Lightning may have helped create life on Earth by converting molecules of nitrogen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into amino acids. Amino acids make up proteins, tens of thousands of which are found in a human body.

So, Mars does have storms, but they’re far drier and dustier than the thunderstorms on Earth. Scientists are continually studying lightning on Mars to better understand the geology of the red planet and its potential to host living organisms.

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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.

Nilton O. Rennó receives funding from NASA, JPL, DARPA, and IARPA.

– ref. Are there thunderstorms on Mars? A planetary scientist explains the red planet’s dry, dusty storms – https://theconversation.com/are-there-thunderstorms-on-mars-a-planetary-scientist-explains-the-red-planets-dry-dusty-storms-271364

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Mahesh Nepal, Ph.D. Student in Electrical Engineering, Binghamton University, State University of New York

When your winter jacket slows heat escaping your body or the cardboard sleeve on your coffee keeps heat from reaching your hand, you’re seeing insulation in action. In both cases, the idea is the same: keep heat from flowing where you don’t want it. But this physics principle isn’t limited to heat.

Electronics use it too, but with electricity. An electrical insulator stops current from flowing where it shouldn’t. That’s why power cords are wrapped in plastic. The plastic keeps electricity in the wire, not in your hand.

Inside electronics, insulators do more than keep the user safe. They also help devices store charge in a controlled way. In that role, engineers often call them dielectrics. These insulating layers sit at the heart of capacitors and transistors. A capacitor is a charge-storing component – think of it as a tiny battery, albeit one that fills up and empties much faster than a battery. A transistor is a tiny electrical switch. It can turn current on or off, or control how much current flows.

Together, capacitors and transistors make modern electronics work. They help phones store information, and they help computers process it. They help today’s AI hardware move huge amounts of data at high speed.

What surprises most people is how thin these insulating, current-quelling dielectrics are. In modern microchips, key dielectric layers can be only a few nanometers thick. That’s tens of thousands of times thinner than a human hair. A modern phone can contain billions of transistors, so at that scale, slimming them down by even 1 nanometer can make a difference.

As an electrical and material scientist, I work with my adviser, Tara P. Dhakal, at Binghamton University to understand how to make these insulating layers as thin as possible while preserving their reliability.

Thinner dielectrics don’t just shrink devices. They can also help store more charge. But at such scale, electronics get finicky. Sometimes what looks like a breakthrough isn’t quite what it seems. That’s why our focus is not just making dielectrics thin. It’s making them both thin and trustworthy.

What makes one dielectric better than another?

In both capacitors and transistors, the basic structure is simple: They contain two conductors separated by a thin insulator. If you bring the conductors closer, more charge can build up. It’s like two strong magnets with a sheet between them – the thinner the sheet, the stronger the pull.

But thinning has a limit. In transistors, the classic insulator silicon dioxide loses its ability to insulate at about 1.2 nanometers. At that scale, electrons can sneak through a shortcut called quantum tunneling. Enough charge leaks through that the device is no longer practical.

When materials are so thin that they start to leak, engineers have another lever. They can switch to an insulator that stores more charge without being made extremely thin. That ability is described by a metric called the dielectric constant, written as k. Higher-k materials can achieve that storage with a thicker layer, which makes it much harder for electrons to slip through.

For example, silicon dioxide has k of about 3.9, and aluminum oxide has k of about 8, twice as high. If a 1.2-nanometer silicon dioxide layer leaks too much, you can switch to a 2.4-nanometer aluminum oxide layer and get roughly the same charge storage. Because the film is physically thicker, it won’t leak as much.

The breakthrough that wasn’t

In 2010, a team of researchers at Argonne National Laboratory reported something that sounded almost impossible: They’d made an ultrathin coating that apparently had a giant dielectric constant, near 1,000. The material wasn’t a single new compound. It was a nanolaminate – a microscopic layer cake. In nanolaminates, you stack two materials in repeating A-B-A-B layers, hoping their interfaces create properties neither material has on its own.

In that work, the stack alternated aluminum oxide, with a k of about 8, and titanium oxide, with a k of about 40. The researchers built the stack by growing one molecular layer at a time, which is ideal for building and controlling the nanometer-scale layers in a nanolaminate.

When the team made each sublayer less than a nanometer, it found that the entire material was able to hold an incredible amount of charge – thus, the giant k.

The result triggered years of follow-up work and similar reports in other stacks of oxides.

But there’s a twist. In our recent study of the aluminum oxide/titanium oxide nanolaminate system, we found that the apparent giant k value was a measurement error.

In our study, the nanolaminate wasn’t acting like a clean insulator, and it was leaking enough to inflate the k value. Think of a bucket with a hairline crack: You keep pouring, and it seems like the bucket holds a lot, even though the water won’t stay inside.

Once we figured that a leak was behind the giant k result, we set out to solve the larger puzzle. We wanted to know what makes the nanolaminate leak, and what process change could make it truly insulating.

The culprit

We first looked for an obvious culprit: a visible defect. If a film stack leaks, you expect pinholes or cracks. But the nanolaminate looked smooth and continuous under the microscope. So why would a stack that looks solid fail?

The answer wasn’t in the shape, it was in the chemistry. The earliest aluminum oxide sublayers didn’t contain enough aluminum. That meant the film looked continuous, yet was still incomplete at the atomic scale. Electrons could find connected paths and escape through it. It was physically continuous but electrically leaky.

Our process to create these films, called atomic layer deposition, uses tiny, repeatable cycles. You add in two chemicals, one after the other. Each pair is one cycle. For aluminum oxide, the pair is often trimethylaluminium (TMA), which is the aluminum source, and water, which is the oxygen source. Together, they create the aluminum oxide, and one cycle adds roughly a single layer of material – about one-tenth of a nanometer. By repeating the cycles, you can grow the film to the thickness you need: about 10 cycles for 1 nanometer, 25 cycles for 2.5 nanometers, and so on.

But there’s a catch. When you deposit aluminum oxide on top of titanium oxide, the first chemical for aluminum oxide – TMA – can steal oxygen from the titanium oxide layer below. This issue removes some of the sites the aluminum source normally reacts with on the layer’s surface. So, the first aluminum oxide layer doesn’t grow evenly and ends up with less aluminum than it should have.

That problem leaves tiny weak spots where electrons can slip through and cause leakage. Once the aluminum oxide becomes thick enough – around 2 nanometers – it forms a more complete barrier, and those leakage paths are effectively sealed off.

One small change flipped the outcome. We kept the same aluminum source, TMA, but swapped the oxygen source. Instead of water, we used ozone. Ozone is a stronger oxygen source, so it can replace oxygen that gets pulled out during the TMA step. That shut down leakage paths. The aluminum oxide then behaved like a real barrier, even when it was thinner than a nanometer. With the ozone fix, the nanolaminate acted like a true insulator.

The takeaway is simple: When you’re down to a few atomic layers, chemistry can matter as much as thickness. The types of chemical compounds you use can decide whether those early layers become a real barrier or leave behind leakage paths.

Mahesh Nepal 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. An ultrathin coating for electronics looked like a miracle insulator − but a hidden leak fooled researchers for over a decade – https://theconversation.com/an-ultrathin-coating-for-electronics-looked-like-a-miracle-insulator-but-a-hidden-leak-fooled-researchers-for-over-a-decade-272009

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Robert A. Strong, Senior Fellow, Miller Center, University of Virginia

Now that the 2026 midterm elections are less than a year away, public interest in where things stand is on the rise. Of course, in a democracy no one knows the outcome of an election before it takes place, despite what the pollsters may predict.

Nevertheless, it is common for commentators and citizens to revisit old elections to learn what might be coming in the ones that lie ahead.

The historical lessons from modern midterm congressional elections are not favorable for Republicans today.

Most of the students I taught in American government classes for over 40 years knew that the party in control of the White House was likely to encounter setbacks in midterms. They usually did not know just how settled and solid that pattern was.

Since 1946, there have been 20 midterm elections. In 18 of them, the president’s party lost seats in the House of Representatives. That’s 90% of the midterm elections in the past 80 years.

Measured against that pattern, the odds that the Republicans will hold their slim House majority in 2026 are small. Another factor makes them smaller. When the sitting president is “underwater” – below 50% – in job approval polls, the likelihood of a bad midterm election result becomes a certainty. All the presidents since Harry S. Truman whose job approval was below 50% in the month before a midterm election lost seats in the House. All of them.

Even popular presidents – Dwight D. Eisenhower, in both of his terms; John F. Kennedy; Richard Nixon; Gerald Ford; Ronald Reagan in 1986; and George H. W. Bush – lost seats in midterm elections.

The list of unpopular presidents who lost House seats is even longer – Truman in 1946 and 1950, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966, Jimmy Carter in 1978, Reagan in 1982, Bill Clinton in 1994, George W. Bush in 2006, Barack Obama in both 2010 and 2014, Donald Trump in 2018 and Joe Biden in 2022.

Exceptions are rare

There are only two cases in the past 80 years where the party of a sitting president won midterm seats in the House. Both involved special circumstances.

In 1998, Clinton was in the sixth year of his presidency and had good numbers for economic growth, declining interest rates and low unemployment. His average approval rating, according to Gallup, in his second term was 60.6%, the highest average achieved by any second-term president from Truman to Biden.

Moreover, the 1998 midterm elections took place in the midst of Clinton’s impeachment, when most Americans were simultaneously critical of the president’s personal behavior and convinced that that behavior did not merit removal from office. Good economic metrics and widespread concern that Republican impeachers were going too far led to modest gains for the Democrats in the 1998 midterm elections. The Democrats picked up five House seats.

The other exception to the rule of thumb that presidents suffer midterm losses was George W. Bush in 2002. Bush, narrowly elected in 2000, had a dramatic rise in popularity after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The nation rallied around the flag and the president, and Republicans won eight House seats in the 2002 midterm elections.

Those were the rare cases when a popular sitting president got positive House results in a midterm election. And the positive results were small.

Midterms matter

In the 20 midterm elections between 1946 and 2022, small changes in the House – a shift of less than 10 seats – occurred six times. Modest changes – between 11 and 39 seats – took place seven times. Big changes, so-called “wave elections” involving more than 40 seats, have happened seven times.

In every midterm election since 1946, at least five seats flipped from one party to the other. If the net result of the midterm elections in 2026 moved five seats from Republicans to Democrats, that would be enough to make Democrats the majority in the House.

In an era of close elections and narrow margins on Capitol Hill, midterms make a difference. The past five presidents – Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden – entered office with their party in control of both houses of Congress. All five lost their party majority in the House or the Senate in their first two years in office.

Will that happen again in 2026?

The obvious prediction would be yes. But nothing in politics is set in stone. Between now and November 2026, redistricting will move the boundaries of a yet-to-be-determined number of congressional districts. That could make it harder to predict the likely results in 2026.

Unexpected events, or good performance in office, could move Trump’s job approval numbers above 50%. Republicans would still be likely to lose House seats in the 2026 midterms, but a popular president would raise the chances that they could hold their narrow majority.

And there are other possibilities. Perhaps 2026 will involve issues like those in recent presidential elections.

Close results could be followed by raucous recounts and court controversies of the kind that made Florida the focal point in the 2000 presidential election. Prominent public challenges to voting tallies and procedures, like those that followed Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of victory in 2020, would make matters worse.

The forthcoming midterms may not be like anything seen in recent congressional election cycles.

Democracy is never easy, and elections matter more than ever. Examining long-established patterns in midterm party performance makes citizens clear-eyed about what is likely to happen in the 2026 congressional elections. Thinking ahead about unusual challenges that might arise in close and consequential contests makes everyone better prepared for the hard work of maintaining a healthy democratic republic.

Robert A. Strong 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. For 80 years, the president’s party has almost always lost House seats in midterm elections, a pattern that makes the 2026 congressional outlook clear – https://theconversation.com/for-80-years-the-presidents-party-has-almost-always-lost-house-seats-in-midterm-elections-a-pattern-that-makes-the-2026-congressional-outlook-clear-271605

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Kelsey Roberts, Post-Doctoral Scholar in Marine Ecology, Cornell University; UMass Dartmouth

Climate change is already fueling dangerous heat waves, raising sea levels and transforming the oceans. Even if countries meet their pledges to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change, global warming will exceed what many ecosystems can safely handle.

That reality has motivated scientists, governments and a growing number of startups to explore ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or at least temporarily counter its effects.

But these climate interventions come with risks – especially for the ocean, the world’s largest carbon sink, where carbon is absorbed and stored, and the foundation of global food security.

Our team of researchers has spent decades studying the oceans and climate. In a new study, we analyzed how different types of climate interventions could affect marine ecosystems, for good or bad, and where more research is needed to understand the risks before anyone tries them on a large scale. We found that some strategies carry fewer risks than others, though none is free of consequences.

What climate interventions look like

Climate interventions fall into two broad categories that work very differently.

One is carbon dioxide removal, or CDR. It tackles the root cause of climate change by taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

The ocean already absorbs nearly one-third of human-caused carbon emissions annually and has an enormous capacity to hold more carbon. Marine carbon dioxide removal techniques aim to increase that natural uptake by altering the ocean’s biology or chemistry.

Biological carbon removal methods capture carbon through photosynthesis in plants or algae. Some methods, such as iron fertilization and seaweed cultivation, boost the growth of marine algae by giving them more nutrients. A fraction of the carbon they capture during growth can be stored in the ocean for hundreds of years, but much of it leaks back to the atmosphere once biomass decomposes.

Other methods involve growing plants on land and sinking them in deep, low-oxygen waters where decomposition is slower, delaying the release of the carbon they contain. This is known as anoxic storage of terrestrial biomass.

Another type of carbon dioxide removal doesn’t need biology to capture carbon. Ocean alkalinity enhancement chemically converts carbon dioxide in seawater into other forms of carbon, allowing the ocean to absorb more from the atmosphere. This works by adding large amounts of alkaline material, such as pulverized carbonate or silicate rocks like limestone or basalt, or electrochemically manufactured compounds like sodium hydroxide.

Solar radiation modification is another category entirely. It works like a sunshade – it doesn’t remove carbon dioxide, but it can reduce dangerous effects such as heat waves and coral bleaching by injecting tiny particles into the atmosphere that brighten clouds or directly reflect sunlight back to space, replicating the cooling seen after major volcanic eruptions. The appeal of solar radiation modification is speed: It could cool the planet within years, but it would only temporarily mask the effects of still-rising carbon dioxide concentrations.

These methods can also affect ocean life

We reviewed eight intervention types and assessed how each could affect marine ecosystems. We found that all of them had distinct potential benefits and risks.

One risk of pulling more carbon dioxide into the ocean is ocean acidification. When carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater, it forms acid. This process is already weakening the shells of oysters and harming corals and plankton that are crucial to the ocean food chain.

Adding alkaline materials, such as pulverized carbonate or silicate rocks, could counteract the acidity of the additional carbon dioxide by converting it into less harmful forms of carbon.

Biological methods, by contrast, capture carbon in living biomass, such as plants and algae, but release it again as carbon dioxide when the biomass breaks down – meaning their effect on acidification depends on where the biomass grows and where it later decomposes.

Another concern with biological methods involves nutrients. All plants and algae need nutrients to grow, but the ocean is highly interconnected. Fertilizing the surface in one area may boost plant and algae productivity, but at the same time suffocate the waters beneath it or disrupt fisheries thousands of miles away by depleting nutrients that ocean currents would otherwise transport to productive fishing areas.

Ocean alkalinity enhancement doesn’t require adding nutrients, but some mineral forms of alkalinity, like basalts, introduce nutrients such as iron and silicate that can impact growth.

Solar radiation modification adds no nutrients but could shift circulation patterns that move nutrients around.

Shifts in acidification and nutrients will benefit some phytoplankton and disadvantage others. The resulting changes in the mix of phytoplankton matter: If different predators prefer different phytoplankton, the follow-on effects could travel all the way up the food chain, eventually impacting the fisheries millions of people rely on.

The least risky options for the ocean

Of all the methods we reviewed, we found that electrochemical ocean alkalinity enhancement had the lowest direct risk to the ocean, but it isn’t risk-free. Electrochemical methods use an electric current to separate salt water into an alkaline stream and an acidic stream. This generates a chemically simple form of alkalinity with limited effects on biology, but it also requires neutralizing or disposing of the acid safely.

Other relatively low-risk options include adding carbonate minerals to seawater, which would increase alkalinity with relatively few contaminants, and sinking land plants in deep, low-oxygen environments for long-term carbon storage.

Still, these approaches carry uncertainties and need further study.

Scientists typically use computer models to explore methods like these before testing them on a wide scale in the ocean, but the models are only as reliable as the data that grounds them. And many biological processes are still not well enough understood to be included in models.

For example, models don’t capture the effects of some trace metal contaminants in certain alkaline materials or how ecosystems may reorganize around new seaweed farm habitats. To accurately include effects like these in models, scientists first must study them in laboratories and sometimes small-scale field experiments.

A cautious, evidence-based path forward

Some scientists have argued that the risks of climate intervention are too great to even consider and all related research should stop because it is a dangerous distraction from the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

We disagree.

Commercialization is already underway. Marine carbon dioxide removal startups backed by investors are already selling carbon credits to companies such as Stripe and British Airways. Meanwhile, global emissions continue to rise, and many countries, including the U.S., are backing away from their emissions reduction pledges.

As the harms caused by climate change worsen, pressure may build for governments to deploy climate interventions quickly and without a clear understanding of risks. Scientists have an opportunity to study these ideas carefully now, before the planet reaches climate instabilities that could push society to embrace untested interventions. That window won’t stay open forever.

Given the stakes, we believe the world needs transparent research that can rule out harmful options, verify promising ones and stop if the impacts prove unacceptable. It is possible that no climate intervention will ever be safe enough to implement on a large scale. But we believe that decision should be guided by evidence – not market pressure, fear or ideology.

Through his role at Cornell University, Daniele Visioni receives funding from the Quadrature Climate Foundation and the Advanced Research + Invention Agency UK. Daniele Visioni is Head of Data for Reflective, a philanthropically-funded initiative focused on responsibly accelerating sunlight reflection research.

In addition to her primary role as UCSB faculty, Morgan Raven serves as the Chief Science Officer for, and holds minor equity in, a seed-funded startup company exploring applications of biomass-related CDR (Carboniferous). This work was supported by a grant from the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment to UCSB.

Through his role at the Univeristy of Tasmania, Tyler Rohr receives funding from the Australian government and Co-Labs ICONIQ Impact Co-Labs to research impacts and efficeincy of marine carbon dioxide removal.

Kelsey Roberts 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. Climate engineering would alter the oceans, reshaping marine life – new study examines each method’s risks – https://theconversation.com/climate-engineering-would-alter-the-oceans-reshaping-marine-life-new-study-examines-each-methods-risks-270659

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Kent Jones, Professor Emeritus, Economics, Babson College

The future of many of Donald Trump’s tariffs are up in the air, with the Supreme Court expected to hand down a ruling on the administration’s global trade barriers any day now.

But the question of whether a policy is legal or constitutional – which the justices are entertaining now – isn’t the same as whether it’s wise. And as a trade economist, I worry that Trump’s tariffs also pose a threat to “economic democracy” – that is, the process of decision-making that incorporates the viewpoints of everyone affected by the decision.

Founders and economic democracy

In many ways, the U.S. founders were supporters of economic democracy. That’s why, in the U.S. Constitution, they gave tariff- and tax-making powers exclusively to Congress.

And for good reason. Taxes can often represent a flash point between a government and its people. Therefore, it was deemed necessary to give this responsibility to the branch most closely tied to rule of, and by, the governed: an elected Congress. Through this arrangement, the legitimacy of tariffs and taxes would be based on voters’ approval – if the people weren’t happy, they could act through the ballot box.

To be fair, the president isn’t powerless over trade: Several times over the past century, Congress has passed laws delegating tariff-making authority to the executive branch on an emergency basis. These laws gave the president more trade power but subject to specific constitutional checks and balances.

The stakes for economic democracy

At issue before the Supreme Court now is Trump’s interpretation of one such emergency measure, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977.

Back in April 2025, Trump interpreted the law – which gives the president powers to respond to “any unusual and extraordinary threat” – to allow him to impose tariffs of any amount on products from nearly every country in the world.

Yet the act does not include any checks and balances on the president’s powers to use tariffs and does not even mention tariffs among its remedies. Trump’s unrestrained use of tariffs in this way was unprecedented in any emergency action ever taken by a U.S. president.

Setting aside the constitutional and legal issues, the move raises several concerns for economic democracy.

The first danger is in regards to a concentration of power. One of the reason tariffs are subjected to congressional debate and voting is that it provides a transparent process that balances competing interests. It prevents the interests of a single individual – such as a president who might substitute his own interests for that of the wider public interest – from controlling complete power.

Instead it subjects any proposed tariffs to the open competition of ideas among elected politicians.

Compare this to the way Trump’s tariffs were made. They were determined in large part by the president’s own political score-settling with other countries, and an ideological preference for trade surpluses. And they were not authorized by Congress. In fact, they bypassed the role of Congress as a check and balance – and this is not good for economic democracy in my view.

The second danger is uncertainty. Unlike congressional tariffs, tariffs rolled out through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act under Trump have been altered many times and can continue to change in the future.

While supporters of the president have argued that this unpredictability gives the U.S. a bargaining advantage over competitor nations, many economists have noted that it severely compromises any goal of revitalizing American industries.

This is because both domestic and foreign investment in U.S.-based industries depends on stable and predictable import market access. Investors are unwilling to make large capital expenditures over several years and hire new workers if they think tariff rates might change at any time.

Even in the first year of the Trump tariffs, there is evidence of large-scale reductions in hiring and capital investment in the manufacturing sector due to this uncertainty.

The third danger concerns that lack of accountability involved in circumventing Congress. This can lead to using tariffs as a stealth way of increasing taxes on a population.

Importing companies generate revenue for the government through the additional levies they pay on goods from overseas. These costs are typically borne by domestic consumers, through increased prices, and importing companies, through lower profit margins.

Either way, Trump’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act interpretation has allowed him to use tariffs in a way that would – if allowed to stand – bring in additional government revenue of more than US$2 trillion over a 10-year period, according to estimates.

Trump frames the revenue his tariffs have raised as a windfall of foreign-paid duties. But in fact, the revenue is extracted from domestic consumer pockets and producer profit margins. And that amounts to a tax on both.

Corruption concerns

Finally, the way Trump’s used the act to roll out unilateral and changeable tariffs creates an incentive for political favoritism and even bribery.

This is down to what economists call “rent seeking” – that is, the attempt by companies or individuals to get extra money or value out of a policy through influence or favoritism.

As such, Trump can, should he wish, play favorites with “priority” industries in terms of tariff exemptions. In fact, he has already done this with major U.S. companies that import cell phones and other electronics products. They asked for special exemptions for the products they imported, a favor not granted to other companies. And there is nothing stopping recipients of the exemptions offering, say, to contribute to the president’s political causes or his renovations to the White House.

Smaller and less politically influential U.S. businesses do not have the same clout to lobby for tariff relief.

And this tariff-by-dealmaking goes beyond U.S. companies looking for relief. It extends into the world of manipulating governments to bend to Washington’s will. Unlike congressional tariffs under World Trade Organization rules, International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs discriminate from country to country – even on the same products.

And this allows for trade deals that focus on extracting bilateral deals that take place without considering broader U.S. interests. In the course of concluding bilateral Trump trade deals, some foreign governments such as Switzerland and Korea have even offered Trump special personal gifts, presumably in exchange for favorable terms. Presidential side deals and gift exchanges with individual countries are, as many scholars of good international governance have noted, not the best way to conduct global affairs.

The harms of having a tariff system that eschews the normal checks and balances of the American system are nothing new, or at least shouldn’t be.

Back in the late 1700s, with the demands of a tyrannical and unaccountable king at the front of their minds, the founders built a tariff order aimed at maintaining democratic legitimacy and preventing the concentration of power in a single individual’s hands.

A challenge to that order could have worrisome consequences for democracy as well as the economy.

Kent Jones 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. Supreme Court is set to rule on constitutionality of Trump tariffs – but not their wisdom – https://theconversation.com/supreme-court-is-set-to-rule-on-constitutionality-of-trump-tariffs-but-not-their-wisdom-273092

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Spencer Overton, Professor of Law, George Washington University

One year after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, a pattern emerges. Across dozens of executive orders, agency memos, funding decisions and enforcement changes, the administration has weakened federal civil rights law and the foundations of the country’s racially inclusive democracy.

From the start, the U.S. was not built to include everyone equally. The Constitution protected and promoted slavery. Most states limited voting to white men. Congress restricted naturalized citizenship to “free white persons.” These choices were not accidents. They shaped who could belong and who could exercise political power, and they entrenched a racial political majority that lasted for generations.

That began to change in the 1960s. After decades of protest and pressure, Congress enacted laws that prohibited discrimination in employment, education, voting, immigration and housing.

Federal agencies were charged with enforcing those laws, collecting data to identify discrimination and conditioning public funds on compliance. These choices reshaped U.S. demographics and institutions, with the current Congress “the most racially and ethnically diverse in history,” according to the Pew Research Center. The laws did not eliminate racial inequality, but they made exclusion easier to see and harder to defend.

The first year of the second Trump administration marks a sharp reversal.

Cumulative retreat

Rather than repealing civil rights statutes outright, the administration has focused on disabling the mechanisms that make those laws work.

Drawing on over two decades of teaching and writing about civil rights and my experience directing a GW Law project on inclusive democracy, I believe this pattern reflects not isolated administrative actions but a cumulative retreat from the federal government’s role as an enforcer of civil rights law.

Over the past year, the president and his administration have taken a series of connected actions:

• On its first day in office, announced the end of all federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs, including diversity officers, equity plans and related grants and contracts.

• Shut down or sharply cut funding for federal programs aimed at reducing inequality, including offices focused on minority health, minority-owned businesses, fair federal contracting, environmental justice and closing the digital divide in broadband.

• Warned schools that diversity programs could jeopardize their federal funding, opened investigations into colleges offering scholarships to students protected under DACA – the Obama-era policy providing deportation protection for undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children – and signaled that colleges risk losing federal student aid if their accrediting agencies consider diversity.

• Revoked security clearances and access to federal buildings for employees at law firms with diversity policies. The FCC investigated media companies for promoting diversity and threatened to block mergers by companies with similar programs, leading several companies to drop their initiatives.

• Issued a government-wide memo labeling common best practices in hiring, admissions and other selection and evaluation processes – such as compiling diverse applicant pools, valuing cultural competence, considering first-generation or low-income status and seeking geographic and demographic representation – as potentially legally suspect. The memo warned that federal funding could be cut to schools, employers and state and local governments using such practices. Federal prosecutors reportedly investigated federal contractors that consider diversity, characterizing such initiatives as fraud.

• Weakened enforcement against discrimination by ordering agencies to stop using disparate impact analysis. That kind of analysis identifies disparities in outcomes, assesses whether they are justified by legitimate objectives, and intervenes when they are not. The Department of Justice, the EEOC, the National Credit Union Administration and other agencies complied and dropped disparate impact analysis. Because algorithmic systems typically operate without explicit intent, eliminating disparate impact analysis reduces federal agencies’ ability to detect and address discriminatory outcomes produced by increasingly automated government and private-sector decision-making.

• Rescinded an executive order that barred discrimination by federal contractors, required steps to ensure nondiscriminatory hiring and employment, and subjected contractors to federal compliance reviews and record-keeping. This weakened a key mechanism used since 1965 to detect and remedy workplace discrimination.

• Eliminated data used to track inequality, including rolling back guidance encouraging schools to collect data on racial disparities in discipline and special education. The administration also removed data used to identify racial disparities in environmental harms.

• Dismantled or sharply reduced civil rights offices across federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education. About three-quarters of lawyers in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division left.

• Pressured the Smithsonian to remove exhibits about racial injustice, restored Confederate monuments and military base names, and barred schools and teacher training programs from including material the administration labeled divisive, such as unconscious bias.

• Declared English the nation’s only official language, repealed a requirement that federal agencies provide meaningful access to government programs and services for people with limited English proficiency, and prompted the General Services Admininistration and the departments of Justice, Education and other agencies to scale back language-assistance requirements and services.

• Attempted to limit birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, and adopted practices that treat ethnicity and non-English accents as legitimate reasons for immigration stops.

The pattern is hard to miss

Taken together, these shifts have practical consequences.

When agencies stop collecting data on racial disparities, discrimination becomes harder to detect. When disparate impact analysis is abandoned, unfair practices with no legitimate purpose go unchallenged. When diversity programs are chilled through investigations and funding threats, institutions respond by narrowing opportunity. When history and language are recast as threats to unity, truth and freedom of speech and thought are suppressed and undermined.

Administration officials argue that these steps are needed to prevent discrimination against white people, promote unity, ensure “colorblind equality” and comply with a Supreme Court decision that struck down affirmative action in college admissions. But that ruling did not ban awareness of racial inequality, or neutral policies aimed at reducing it. Many of the administration’s actions rely on broad claims of illegality without providing specific violations.

The selective nature of enforcement is also telling.

Books about racism and civil rights were removed from military libraries, while books praising Nazi ideas or claiming racial intelligence differences were left untouched. The administration suspended admissions of refugees – over 90% of whom have been from Africa, Asia and Latin America in recent years – but then reopened the refugee program for white South Africans.

One year in, the pattern is hard to miss.

The administration is not simply applying neutral rules. It is dismantling the systems that once helped the U.S. move toward a more open and equal democracy. It is replacing them with policies that selectively narrow access to economic, cultural and educational participation.

The result is not simply a change in policy, but a fundamental shift in the trajectory of American democracy.

Spencer Overton is the faculty director of a program at GW Law that receives grants from non-profit foundations like the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, Democracy Fund, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

– ref. 12 ways the Trump administration dismantled civil rights law and the foundations of inclusive democracy in its first year – https://theconversation.com/12-ways-the-trump-administration-dismantled-civil-rights-law-and-the-foundations-of-inclusive-democracy-in-its-first-year-273433

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Amanda Meng, Senior Research Scientist, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology

The Iranian regime’s internet shutdown, initiated on Jan. 8, 2026, has severely diminished the flow of information out of the country. Without internet access, little news about the national protests that flared between Dec. 30, 2025, and Jan. 13, 2026, and the regime’s violent crackdown has reached the world. Many digital rights and internet monitoring groups have assessed the current shutdown to be the most sophisticated and most severe in Iran’s history.

We are a social scientist and two computer scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Internet Intelligence Lab who study internet connectivity.

Through the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis project, we have been measuring internet connectivity globally since 2011. The project was motivated by the internet shutdowns during the Arab Spring mass protests that began in December 2010 against Middle Eastern and North African regimes.

The project provides a public dashboard of internet connectivity measurements. Its long view of global internet connectivity offers insight into the Iranian regime’s developing sophistication in controlling information and shutting down the internet in the country.

Our measurements show that Iran has been in a complete internet shutdown since Jan. 8. This is longer than the 48½-hour shutdown in June 2025 during the Israel-Iran war and surpasses the duration of the November 2019 shutdown that lasted almost seven days. Compared to the two weeks of nightly mobile phone network shutdowns in September to October of 2022 during the Women, Life, Freedom protests, this shutdown is more complete by also closing down fixed-line connectivity.

Measuring internet connectivity

The Internet Outage Detection and Analysis project measures global internet connectivity through three signals related to internet infrastructure: routing announcements, active probing and internet background noise.

Core routers, unlike the router in your home, are responsible for directing traffic to and from networks. Routing announcements are how they communicate with each other. If a nation’s network of routers stop making these announcements, the network will disappear from the global internet.

We also measure the responsiveness of networks through probing. To create the probing signal, we continuously ping devices in millions of networks around the globe. Most devices are designed to automatically respond to these pings by echoing them back to the sender. We collect these responses and label networks as “connected/active.”

A tool we use dubbed “network telescope” captures internet background noise – traffic generated by hundreds of thousands of internet hosts worldwide. A drop in this signal can indicate an outage.

A history of shutdowns

The first nationwide shutdown that the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis project observed in Iran was during the “Bloody November” uprising that happened in 2019. During that shutdown, the primary method the regime used was turning off routing announcements, which stopped all traffic between routers. This is a blunt force tool that makes the internet essentially go dark; no connectivity is possible for affected networks.

However, our measurement reporting showed differences in signal-drop patterns among the three data sources we track. These patterns demonstrate the regime’s adoption of diverse disconnection mechanisms and large differences in the timing of disconnection by various Iranian internet service providers (ISPs).

This reporting also showed evidence that the 2019 blackout was not complete and some people were able to circumvent it. Nevertheless, as documented by Amnesty International, the internet darkness created a “web of impunity” that allowed the regime to violate international human rights law without any accountability.

In September 2022, the Women, Life, Freedom protests erupted after the killing of Mahsa Amini in state custody. To suppress the nationwide mobilization without exacting a high cost, the Iranian regime implemented nightly shutdowns affecting only mobile networks. Keeping fixed-line internet connections online limited the impact of these shutdowns to mitigate the economic, political and social costs.

These nightly internet curfews lasted about two weeks. During this time the regime implemented other forms of censorship, specifically blocking applications to further control the information environment and to prevent access to technologies for circumventing censorship.

In June 2025, the Israel-Iran war began and we observed initial degradation in internet connectivity, which often occurs during times of conflict, when internet and power infrastructure are affected by missile attacks. The Iranian regime shut down the internet over four days, citing national security as its rationale.

That time, the regime did not use routing announcements to implement the shutdown. Our measurement data shows that routing announcements were largely unaffected. Instead, the Iranian regime implemented the shutdown by interfering with key protocols that allow the internet to function, including transport layer security and the domain name system.

The regime used these techniques to shut off Iran’s connectivity with the global internet while allowing specific, sanctioned access in a policy called whitelisting. This strategy shows an increased sophistication in how the Iranian regime implements shutdowns and controls the flow of information.

Organizations that support digital human rights in Iran report that some Iranians were able to circumvent the shutdown using virtual private networks and various censorship-resilient technologies such as peer-to-peer networks.

Jan. 8, 2026

On Dec. 30, 2025, the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis project team received reports of internet disruptions amid the start of nationwide protests. At 8 p.m. Iran Standard Time on Jan. 8, 2026, the Iranian regime shut down the internet. Our measurements show a nominal amount of responsiveness to our active probing, about 3%. This small amount could be an artifact of our measurements or lingering connectivity for whitelisted access, for example for Iranian government officials and services.

Outside of very limited whitelisted connectivity, digital human rights groups reported severely limited access to the internet both internationally and domestically. According to digital rights group Project Ainita, the Iranian regime implemented the shutdown by interfering with transport layer security and the domain name system. In addition, landline phone calls have been only intermittently available.

Aside from these more sophisticated techniques, this shutdown evokes the Bloody November shutdown of 2019 in that it has been ordered during a time of protest with mass civilian casualties.

Jammed satellites

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, low Earth orbit satellite services, such as Starlink, can help people maintain internet connectivity during outages and government-ordered shutdowns. These satellite services can allow users to bypass damaged or state-censored terrestrial internet infrastructure.

However, accessing the internet via satellite services during a shutdown is not without risk. User terminals communicate with satellites via radio frequency links that can be detected through surveillance, for example from planes or drones, potentially exposing users’ locations and putting them at risk of being identified. Currently, the Iranian regime is using jammers to degrade the Starlink connection.

One of the most significant barriers to connecting users in Iran to satellite services is a logistical one. Providing connectivity via Starlink’s service would require distributing a large number of user terminals within the country, a feat that would be difficult because the devices are likely to be considered illegal contraband by the government. This severely limits the scale at which such services can be adopted.

Recent technological developments, however, may partially mitigate this challenge. Starlink’s direct-to-cell capability, which aims to provide LTE cellular connectivity directly to ordinary cellphones, could reduce dependence on specialized hardware. If they become widely available, such systems would allow users to connect using common devices already in circulation, sidestepping one of the most difficult barriers to providing connectivity.

Like other radio-based communications, however, direct-to-cell connectivity would remain vulnerable to signal jamming and other forms of electronic interference by the government.

For the time being, the Iranian regime controls the country’s internet infrastructure, which means it still has a virtual off switch.

Amanda Meng receives funding from the State Department.

Alberto Dainotti receives funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation. IODA was initially built with funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security Science & Technology Directorate. A large body of IODA work was also funded by the U.S. State Department and by the Open Technology Fund.

Zachary Bischof receives funding from the State Department.

– ref. Iran’s latest internet blackout extends to phones and Starlink – https://theconversation.com/irans-latest-internet-blackout-extends-to-phones-and-starlink-273439

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Kelly Lambert, Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Richmond

When a curious raccoon broke into an Ashland, Virginia, liquor store in December 2025, sampled the stock and passed out on the bathroom floor, the story went viral within minutes. The local animal shelter’s Facebook post was picked up by national and international outlets and quickly inspired raccoon-themed cocktails, “trashed panda” merchandise and even a cameo on “Saturday Night Live.”

For me, the story hit close to home. The store that hosted this inebriated bandit sits just blocks from the small behavioral neuroscience laboratory where I began investigating raccoon brains about 15 years ago. Although the so-called drunken raccoon made questionable decisions after breaking into the liquor store, the species – Procyon lotor – is known for its impressive intelligence, curiosity and problem-solving skills.

Despite being one of the most intriguing mammals living alongside humans, raccoons have avoided the scientific spotlight. Why aren’t more neuroscientists and psychologists studying raccoons? What have researchers missed about the mammalian brain by focusing on rodents instead?

Why raccoons aren’t lab staples

In the U.S., it is estimated that laboratories use more than 100 million rodents, including mice and rats, each year. Rodents are ideal for research because they reproduce easily and adapt well to confinement. Scientists have tailored extensive research tools to study them. Long before rats dominated psychology labs, raccoons were actually a leading candidate for animal models of problem-solving and intelligence.

That ended when scientists realized they’d met their cognitive match. In one study, researchers reported that all raccoon participants escaped through the laboratory ventilation system.

Unsurprisingly, scientists promptly shifted to rodents. Practicality – not scientific suitability – ultimately crowned the rat as king of the laboratory. I have studied rats for decades, and I can confirm that none have ever disappeared into the ceiling.

Neither pet nor pest

Humans have an ambivalent relationship with raccoons. They appear too wild to be domesticated, too endearing to be treated purely as pests and too ubiquitous to be considered exotic wildlife. Even President Calvin Coolidge, who famously received a raccoon intended for the dinner table from a supporter in Mississippi, ended up keeping it as a beloved White House pet.

And the role confusion continues today with glimpses of humanlike behaviors in raccoons as they enter our living spaces. One report described raccoons interacting with playground equipment at a child care center on Canada’s west coast in ways similar to human children, and even breaking into classrooms as if they were auditing the morning lesson.

Inspired by Montessori education principles, I visited a raccoon rehabilitation center in Saskatoon, Canada, called Bandit Ranch Rehab a few years ago. After introducing young raccoons to slinkies, puzzles and blocks, I sat in awe as they interacted with these objects with the focused enthusiasm of preschoolers on a mission.

This interspecies confusion seems to be mutual. Recent evidence suggests that urban raccoons are becoming increasingly tolerant of humans, especially when it suits them. But they are quick to leave when curiosity or opportunity calls.

Raccoon imagination

The drunken Ashland raccoon captured global attention because it fit the narrative people have projected onto the species: mischievous, opportunistic, clever and more than a little humanlike. But their sophisticated brains and mental capacities, aligning more with primates than other mammals, are even more intriguing.

Early behavioral research suggested that raccoons can learn a task, walk away and later return to solve it accurately – as if having mentally rehearsed the solution. In contrast, other species, including dogs and rats, needed to maintain continuous focus. Scientists have speculated that raccoons have mental imagery capabilities similar to humans.

When a rogue raccoon scaled a 25-story skyscraper in Minneapolis several years ago, I couldn’t help but wonder what that animal was anticipating at the top. Do raccoons form internal representations of future outcomes? And if so, how much agency and foresight do they bring to their decisions?

To answer these questions, I have collaborated with wildlife biologists, veterinarians and neuroscientists around the country to study what may be one of the most underestimated and understudied brains in the animal kingdom.

What’s going on inside the raccoon brain?

Working with neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, my laboratory at the University of Richmond has found that raccoons pack an astonishing number of neurons – an amount comparable to primates – into their brains. Scaled up to size, a raccoon brain would contain roughly the same number of neurons as a human brain.

We also found that raccoons possess specialized fast-conducting brain cells known as von Economo neurons, which are also found in humans, other great apes and a few additional large-brained mammals. In apes, these neurons appear in both the insula – a part of the brain important for processing internal body states – and the anterior cingulate, which plays a key role in emotional regulation. In raccoons, these neurons are present only in the insula and not in the anterior cingulate.

This neural arrangement may help explain the species’ striking combination of clever problem-solving and rapid decision-making during exploration – frequently leading to risky behaviors that can have unfortunate consequences. These findings raise the possibility that raccoon neuroscience could offer useful insights into the neural foundations of impulse control and distracted attention.

In collaboration with ecologist Sara Benson-Abram’s research team, we also found that raccoons with more sophisticated cognitive abilities had more neural cells in the hippocampus, reinforcing the idea that their learning and memory capacities map onto similar brain systems as those in people. Taxi drivers in London, who frequently use their knowledge of the 25,000 streets in London, also have a larger hippocampal area.

In addition to their impressive brains, raccoons’ dexterous hands play a key role in their cognitively creative escapades. Indeed, researchers have found that raccoon forepaws are mapped onto their cerebral cortex – the outer layer of the brain – in a similar manner as human hands. Both take up a lot of real estate in the brain. As journalist Carl Zimmer wrote, “The hand is where the mind meets the world.”

What raccoons can teach us about the human brain

As I argue in my upcoming book “Wild Brains,” understanding raccoon intelligence requires observing them in the environments they choose – not confining them to the small, simple spaces that suit rats and mice. So-called living laboratories that monitor wildlife without restricting their behavior may be scientists’ best chance at unlocking the secrets of this species’ remarkable mind.

In my graduate training, I was taught to avoid anthropomorphizing animal research subjects – to resist the temptation to project human thoughts and emotions onto nonhuman minds, because human brains likely contribute to uniquely human cognitive and emotional experiences. But primatologist Frans de Waal later introduced the useful counterpoint of anthropodenial: the mistaken assumption that animals cannot share emotional or cognitive capacities with humans simply because they are not human.

The drunken Ashland raccoon captured global attention not just because the story was funny, but because it felt familiar. People recognized something of themselves in this curious, impulsive, problem-solving animal navigating a very human environment. A willingness to lean away from anthropodenial – while remaining grounded in rigorous science – may open new paths for understanding raccoon intelligence and, ultimately, the wonderfully complex human brain.

Kelly Lambert received funding from the NIH and NSF.

– ref. Raccoons break into liquor stores, scale skyscrapers and pick locks – studying their clever brains can clarify human intelligence, too – https://theconversation.com/raccoons-break-into-liquor-stores-scale-skyscrapers-and-pick-locks-studying-their-clever-brains-can-clarify-human-intelligence-too-272487

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Peter Simons, Lecturer in History, Hamilton College

President Donald Trump appears to have upended an 85-year relationship between American farmers and the United States’ global exercise of power. But that link has been fraying since the end of the Cold War, and Trump’s moves are just another big step.

During World War II, the U.S. government tied agriculture to foreign policy by using taxpayer dollars to buy food from American farmers and send it to hungry allies abroad. This agricultural diplomacy continued into the Cold War through programs such as the Marshall Plan to rebuild European agriculture, Food for Peace to send surplus U.S. food to hungry allies, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which aimed to make food aid and agricultural development permanent components of U.S. foreign policy.

During that period, the United States also participated in multinational partnerships to set global production goals and trade guidelines to promote the international movement of food – including the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Wheat Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

When U.S. farmers faced labor shortfalls, the federal government created guest-worker programs that provided critical hands in the fields, most often from Mexico and the Caribbean.

At the end of World War II, the U.S. government recognized that farmers could not just rely on domestic agricultural subsidies, including production limits, price supports and crop insurance, for prosperity. American farmers’ well-being instead depended on the rest of the world.

Since returning to office in January 2025, Trump has dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development. His administration has also aggressively detained and deported suspected noncitizens living and working in the U.S., including farmworkers. And he has imposed tariffs that caused U.S. trading partners to retaliate, slashing international demand for U.S. agricultural products.

Trump’s actions follow diplomatic and agricultural transformations that I research, and which began with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Feed the world, save the farm

Even before the nation’s founding, farmers in what would become the United States staked their livelihood on international networks of labor, plants and animals, and trade.

Cotton was the most prominent early example of these relationships, and by the 19th century wheat farmers depended on expanding transportation networks to move their goods within the country and overseas.

But fears that international trade could create economic uncertainty limited American farmers’ interest in overseas markets. The Great Depression in the 1930s reinforced skepticism of international markets, which many farmers and policymakers saw as the principal cause of the economic downturn.

World War II forced them to change their view. The Lend-Lease Act, passed in March 1941, aimed to keep the United States out of the war by providing supplies, weapons and equipment to Britain and its allies. Importantly for farmers, the act created a surge in demand for food.

And after Congress declared war in December 1941, the need to feed U.S. and allied troops abroad pushed demand for farm products ever higher. Food took on a significance beyond satisfying a wartime need: The Soviet Union, for example, made special requests for butter. U.S. soldiers wrote about the special bond created by seeing milk and eggs from a hometown dairy, and Europeans who received food under the Lend-Lease Act embraced large cans of condensed milk with sky-blue labels as if they were talismans.

Another war ends

But despite their critical contribution to the war, American farmers worried that the familiar pattern of postwar recession would repeat once Germany and Japan had surrendered.

Congress fulfilled farmers’ fears of an economic collapse by sharply reducing its food purchases as soon as the war ended in the summer of 1945. In 1946, Congress responded weakly to mounting overseas food needs.

More action waited until 1948, when Congress recognized communism’s growing appeal in Europe amid an underfunded postwar reconstruction effort. The Marshall Plan’s more robust promise of food and other resources was intended to counter Soviet influence.

Sending American food overseas through postwar rehabilitation and development programs caused farm revenue to surge. It proved that foreign markets could create prosperity for American farmers, while food and agriculture’s importance to postwar reconstruction in Europe and Asia cemented their importance in U.S. foreign policy.

Farmers in the modern world

Farmers’ contribution to the Cold War shored up their cultural and political importance in a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing United States. The Midwestern farm became an aspirational symbol used by the State Department to encourage European refugees to emigrate to the U.S. after World War II.

American farmers volunteered to be amateur diplomats, sharing methods and technologies with their agricultural counterparts around the world.

By the 1950s, delegations of Soviet officials were traveling to the Midwest, including Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s excursion to Iowa in 1959. U.S. farmers reciprocated with tours of the Soviet Union. Young Americans who had grown up on farms moved abroad to live with host families, working their properties and informally sharing U.S. agricultural methods. Certain that their land and techniques were superior to those of their overseas peers, U.S. farmers felt obligated to share their wisdom with the rest of the world.

The collapse of the Soviet Union undermined the central purpose for the United States’ agricultural diplomacy. But a growing global appetite for meat in the 1990s helped make up some of the difference.

U.S. farmers shifted crops from wheat to corn and soybeans to feed growing numbers of livestock around the world. They used newly available genetically engineered seeds that promised unprecedented yields.

Expecting these transformations to financially benefit American farmers and seeing little need to preserve Cold War-era international cooperation, the U.S. government changed its trade policy from collaborating on global trade to making it more of a competition.

The George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations crafted the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization to replace the general agreement on trade and tariffs. They assumed American farmers’ past preeminence would continue to increase farm revenues even as global economic forces shifted.

But U.S. farmers have faced higher costs for seeds and fertilizer, as well as new international competitors such as Brazil. With a diminished competitive advantage and the loss of the Cold War’s cooperative infrastructure, U.S. farmers now face a more volatile global market that will likely require greater government support through subsidies rather than offering prosperity through commerce.

That includes the Trump administration’s December 2025 announcement of a US$12 billion farmer bailout. As Trump’s trade wars continue, they show that the U.S. government is no longer fostering a global agricultural market in which U.S. farmers enjoy a trade advantage or government protection – even if they retain some cultural and political significance in the 21st century.

Peter Simons 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. American farmers, who once fed the world, face a volatile global market with diminishing federal backing – https://theconversation.com/american-farmers-who-once-fed-the-world-face-a-volatile-global-market-with-diminishing-federal-backing-271369

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By JT Torres, Director of the Harte Center for Teaching and Learning, Washington and Lee University

The average American checks their phone over 140 times a day, clocking an average of 4.5 hours of daily use, with 57% of people admitting they’re “addicted” to their phone. Tech companies, influencers and other content creators compete for all that attention, which has incentivized the rise of misinformation.

Considering this challenging information landscape, strong critical reading skills are as relevant and necessary as they’ve ever been.

Unfortunately, literacy continues to be a serious concern. Reading comprehension scores have continued to decline. The majority of Gen Z parents are not reading aloud to their young children because they view it as a chore. Many college students cannot make it through an entire book.

With their endless scrolling and easy reposting and sharing of content, social media platforms are designed to encourage passive engagement that people use to relieve boredom and escape stress.

As a cognitive scientist and a literacy expert, we research the ways people process information through reading. Based on our work, we believe that deep reading can be an effective way to counter misinformation as well as reduce stress and loneliness. It can be tough to go deeper than a speedy skim, but there are strategies you can use to strengthen important reading skills.

Deep reading versus doomscrolling

People use smartphones and social media for a variety of reasons, such as to relieve boredom, seek attention, make connections and share news. The infinite amount of information available at your fingertips can lead to information overload, interfering with how you pay attention and make decisions. Research from cognitive science helps to explain how scrolling trains your brain to think passively.

To keep people engaged, social media algorithms feed people content similar to what they’ve already engaged with, reinforcing users’ beliefs with similar posts. Repeated exposure to information increases its believability, especially if different sources repeat the information, an effect known as illusory truth.

Deep reading, on the other hand, refers to the intentional process of engaging with information in critical, analytical and empathetic ways. It involves making inferences, drawing connections, engaging with different perspectives and questioning possible interpretations.

Deep reading does require effort. It can trigger negative feelings like irritation or confusion, and it can very often feel unpleasant. The important question, then: Why would anyone choose the hard work of deep reading when they can just scroll and skim?

Motivating mental effort

Mindless scrolling may come with unintended consequences. Smartphone and social media use is associated with increased boredom and loneliness. And doomscrolling is related to higher levels of existential anxiety and misanthropy.

In contrast, attention and effort, despite being exhausting, can deepen your sense of purpose and strengthen social connection. People also feel motivated to complete tasks that help them pursue personal goals, especially when these tasks are recognized by others. For these reasons, sharing books may be one tool to promote deep reading.

One example is a teacher who guides students through longer texts, like novels, paired with active discussions about the books to reinforce comprehension and interpretation. While the debate over the ongoing practice of assigning excerpts over full books in schools continues, evidence does suggest that sustained reading in social settings can promote lifelong enjoyment in reading.

With social connection in mind, social media can actually be used as a positive tool. BookTok is a popular online community of people who use TikTok to discuss and recommend books. Fans post in-depth analyses of “K-Pop Demon Hunters” and other movies or shows, demonstrating that close analysis still has a place in the endless scroll of social media.

Slowing yourself down to read deeply

There are steps you can take to meaningfully engage with the constant stream of information you encounter. Of course, this process can be taxing, and people only have so much effort and attention to expend. It’s important to both recognize your limited cognitive resources and be intentional about how you direct those resources.

Simply being aware of how digital reading practices shape your brain can encourage new attitudes and habits toward how you consume information. Just pausing can reduce susceptibility to misinformation. Taking a few extra seconds to consciously judge information can counteract illusory truth, indicating that intentionally slowing down even just a bit can be beneficial.

Reading deeply means being able to intentionally choose when to read at different speeds, slowing down as needed to wrestle with difficult passages, savor striking prose, critically evaluate information, and reflect on the meaning of a text. It involves entering into a dialogue with the text rather than gleaning information.

Awareness does not mean that you never doomscroll at the end of a long day. But it does mean becoming conscious of the need to also stick with a single text more frequently and to engage with different perspectives.

You can start small, perhaps with poems, short stories or essays, before moving up to longer texts. Partner with a friend or family member and set a goal to read a full-length novel or nonfiction book. Accomplish that goal in small chunks, such as reading one chapter a day and discussing what you read with your reading buddy. Practicing deep reading, such as reading novels, can open you up to new perspectives and ideas that you can explore in conversation with others, in person or even on TikTok.

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

– ref. Deep reading can boost your critical thinking and help you resist misinformation – here’s how to build the skill – https://theconversation.com/deep-reading-can-boost-your-critical-thinking-and-help-you-resist-misinformation-heres-how-to-build-the-skill-268082