Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Vidya Mani, Associate Professor of Business Administration, University of Virginia; Cornell University

The boom in data center construction is taking up much of the supply of high-tech components, especially processor and memory chips. This demand is squeezing consumer device makers, which are having trouble acquiring enough chips.

This is happening even though data center servers and smartphones use different types of chips. The key distinction between consumer electronics and data centers is what they need chips to be optimized for. Smartphones and PCs require low power use, thermal efficiency and tight integration. Data centers that run AI systems such as large language models, or LLMs, require maximum compute power, memory bandwidth and storage throughput.

To meet these needs, consumer devices tend to rely on systems-on-a-chip – chips that combine processing and storage – with dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, and NAND, a type of nonvolatile memory. In contrast, AI servers rely on graphics processing units, or GPUs, or other accelerator processors combined with high-bandwidth memory chips.

I study global supply chains and how businesses respond to market constraints within these supply chains. The reason for the consumer electronics supply crunch has to do with the nature of the chip market: its concentration and high costs and how it responds to boom-and-bust cycles.

AI is not replacing consumer electronics; it is reorganizing the chip market around new priorities for specific chip characteristics. Data centers are pulling capital and scarce memory capacity toward the production of accelerator processors and high-bandwidth memory and the data handling and electronics equipment that surround them.

A winner-takes-most industry

Chip manufacturing behaves less like a competitive commodity market and more like a layered oligopoly. Scale matters because the leading firms can reinvest in research, improve yields, secure equipment and deepen customer relationships. In the case of graphics processor chips, designers such as NVIDIA, which has 85% market share, depend on advanced semiconductor foundries such as TSMC, which has more than 70% market share, to manufacture chips using extreme ultraviolet lithography machines from ASML, a monopoly.

A small number of producers both design and manufacture memory chips. Currently, three companies – Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix – hold a majority market share in the memory chips market. Long development cycles, extremely high fixed costs and the need for technological leadership reinforce concentration over time.

Consumer electronics firms such as Apple, along with other technology firms such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Xiaomi, increasingly design their own processor chips, because these chips shape the user experience, AI performance, power efficiency and system-level differentiation. Manufacturing memory chips, by contrast, is extraordinarily capital-intensive; requires high precision, efficiency and production line utilization; and is dominated by a few incumbent suppliers.

Since 2000, the memory chip industry has moved through repeated cycles of overcapacity and undersupply: the post-dot-com collapse, the 2007-09 glut, the tighter 2010s after consolidation, the severe 2022-23 downturn, and the AI-driven tightness of 2024-25. This has led to high levels of concentration in the industry and chipmakers that are hesitant to add capacity. Producers often operate chip fabrication plants, or fabs, at or near capacity due to high fixed costs. The risk of having expensive facilities go underused keeps chipmakers from bringing new fabs online in lockstep with demand increases.

Consolidation has reduced the number of major suppliers, who now increasingly direct investment toward higher-margin products rather than broadly adding capacity. That shift is important for understanding why AI demand is tightening chip supplies even as demand for consumer electronics continues to grow.

How the AI data center boom redirects capacity

The AI boom has changed memory demand from a broad consumer cycle into a more segmented market centered on high-bandwidth memory chips. In 2023, Micron cut capital spending and the company’s fabs operated below levels needed to justify their cost. By 2026, however, Micron was reporting strong AI demand, record data center DRAM revenue and rapidly rising high-bandwidth memory sales.

This shift matters because the market for supplying memory cannot respond quickly. Opening new fabs requires years of planning, large capital commitments and investments in advanced process equipment and skills. Memory chip manufacturers are likely to remain cautious about expanding capacity even as their profitability improves, with 2026 spending focused more on technology upgrades and high-value products than on large increases in chip supply.

In practical terms, AI is not simply lifting all memory demand equally; it is redirecting scarce capacity toward massive, or hyperscale, data centers and server markets first.

Can consumer electronics catch up?

Consumer electronics can catch up, assuming the manufacturers can weather the cost increases from tariffs and geopolitical pressures. One way they could is by making investments to enable small AI language models to run on consumer devices, a move analysts expect the companies to attempt.

Apple shifted a growing share of U.S.-bound iPhone production out of China to India and moved much of its iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and AirPods assembly for the U.S. market to Vietnam to lower the company’s tariff burden. Yet relocation does not eliminate cost pressure. Manufacturing iPhones in India still costs roughly 5% to 8% more than in China, and in some cases closer to 10%, because supplier ecosystems, logistics and production efficiency remain stronger in China.

Rising geopolitical tensions between the United States and China led to supply constraints and export controls on critical minerals and chip components, raising input costs for consumer electronics manufacturers. This led to higher total import costs and reduced margins for firms unable to pass costs fully to consumers, leading to further consolidation in supply.

Consumer devices do not need to replicate data center infrastructure to offer AI on their products. Their opportunity lies in running small language models on-device for summarization, rewriting, search, assistance and lightweight reasoning. Doing so, however, creates a distinct hardware requirement. Phones and laptops need to incorporate multiple functions on the same chip, combining processing capability with fast local memory and enough storage to keep on-device AI responsive. Apple’s current device requirements for the company’s AI, Apple Intelligence, also show that older phones often lack the compute power and memory needed for useful on-device AI.

To adopt AI, device makers need to redesign their products with higher-end chips – both processors and memory – that can piggyback on the AI model-oriented growth in the chips market driven by the data center boom. Such a shift by the device makers could also provide a useful backstop for the memory chipmakers in case the projected AI and data center growth does not materialize in the medium to long term, a boom-and-bust cycle that memory chipmakers have had to endure many times in the past.

What this means for the wider economy

The AI and data center boom is redistributing capital, supplier attention and pricing power across the broader economy. Sectors with limited purchasing leverage are especially vulnerable when chip supplies tighten. For example, medical technology accounts for less than 1% of the overall chip market, leaving essential equipment manufacturers exposed during shortages.

In contrast, sectors linked to power delivery and digital infrastructure may benefit from the boom because they try to keep up with demand for cloud services and electrification. The International Energy Agency estimates that data centers consumed about 415 TWh of electricity in 2024 and notes that AI is accelerating the deployment of high-performance servers, which implies stronger demand for the grid, storage, cooling and networking equipment around them.

For the consumer electronics industry, the strategic task is not to try to match the AI data centers chip for chip but to build differentiated, energy-efficient, on-device AI services while managing higher supply chain and tariff risks.

And for consumers looking to buy phones, games and laptops, because of high demand from data centers, the next few years are likely to bring higher prices, shortages and delayed product releases.

Vidya Mani has received funding from LMI. I am a Senior Research Fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue and a member of GRI

– ref. AI data center boom is leaving consumer electronics short of chips − even though they don’t use the same kinds – https://theconversation.com/ai-data-center-boom-is-leaving-consumer-electronics-short-of-chips-even-though-they-dont-use-the-same-kinds-277069

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Allyson Gold, Professor of Law, Wake Forest University

Housing costs are eating up more and more of Americans’ monthly budgets.

Half of renters and a quarter of homeowners are cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than a third of their income to pay their rent or mortgage. Roughly 27% of renters are spending more than half of their income on rent.

In March 2026, the U.S. Senate passed a bipartisan housing bill to boost housing supply in the United States. More supply, the thinking goes, will staunch the surge in homes prices and rents. In the nation’s 50 biggest cities, for example, rents for one- and two-bedroom apartments have increased roughly 40%, not adjusted for inflation, since 2020. This legislation, however, is currently stuck in the House, overshadowed by issues like the Iran war and Supreme Court decisions.

While housing reforms in the U.S. remain gridlocked, the U.K. has been dealing with its own housing problems: 70% of Britons say housing unaffordability has become a national crisis. Across England, rents have spiraled, homelessness has risen and deteriorating and dangerous housing conditions have threatened the health of tenants.

In response, the U.K. Parliament passed the Renters’ Rights Act, a major housing law that officials described as a “once in a generation” set of reforms.

More power for tenants

The bill became law after receiving Royal Assent and took effect in England on May 1, 2026.

Its signature reform is to eliminate no-fault eviction, also known as Section 21 eviction. Under a Section 21 eviction, landlords were able to terminate a month-to-month or fixed-term tenancy without fault, even if tenants paid rent on time and complied with the lease. The only stipulation was they had to provide two months’ notice.

This will sound somewhat familiar to American readers: The vast majority of jurisdictions in the U.S. allow a landlord to terminate a month-to-month tenancy for any reason, as long as the landlord provides adequate notice.

In North Carolina, for example, where I live, a tenant with a month-to-month lease is only legally entitled to a seven-day notice of eviction under state law.

In England, Section 21 evictions were responsible for a 50% increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness from 2021 to 2022. Going forward, a landlord can still remove a tenant for a valid reason, but tenants will no longer be vulnerable to eviction when they have done nothing wrong.

The legislation also limits rent increases. Under the new law, a landlord may only increase the rent to market price, must provide at least two months’ notice before an increase can take effect, and can only increase the rent once per year. A tenant who suspects their landlord has imposed an “above market” rent increase can bring the landlord to court.

It’s important that this change is occurring in tandem with the discontinuation of no-fault eviction. Without restrictions on rent increases, a landlord who lost the ability to use no-fault eviction could still empty a property by simply jacking up the rent to a rate that the tenant could not afford.

Finally, the law also takes steps to improve the conditions of England’s private rental housing stock by applying certain existing public housing standards, like strict timelines to address mold and damp, to the private rental sector.

It gives local housing authorities the ability to levy fines against private landlords who fail to meet these new standards. The new law also creates a rental housing registry that British tenants can search to get information about a prospective landlord or property. This will give tenants crucial information about a property before moving in and entering into a lease with a landlord.

A legislative pie in the sky?

Even though housing advocates have long pushed for these types of reforms to U.S. landlord-tenant law, the current legislation under consideration by Congress doesn’t directly address renters’ rights. Instead, it seeks to streamline costs and regulations for builders to boost the housing supply, while giving access to more financing for buyers.

One reason renters’ rights are often not addressed at the federal level is the U.S. system of federalism, which divides authority between the federal government and the states. By and large, landlord-tenant regulation falls within the realm of state or municipal government.

Some state and local governments have used this power to enact rental housing policy. For example, Oregon largely prohibits eviction without cause. Chicago keeps a Building Department registry that tenants can search to see if a prospective rental has a history of building code violations. And New York City’s rent regulations have survived multiple court challenges over the years. As recently as 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court reiterated that states have broad discretion to regulate the landlord-tenant relationship, which includes implementing rent control and rent stabilization arrangements.

This jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction approach means that an American tenant’s rights can vary dramatically based on where they happen to live.

When crisis expands the window of possibility

That said, the U.S. federal government has intervened to protect tenants during acute crises.

In 2009, during the mortgage foreclosure crisis, Congress passed legislation to prevent tenants from experiencing eviction if banks foreclosed on the homes they occupied.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used its public health powers to institute a nationwide eviction moratorium to slow the spread of infection. Though the Supreme Court struck down the order 11 months later, the fears that opponents to the moratorium raised didn’t pan out: There was no widespread, coordinated nonpayment of rents, nor did the rental housing supply collapse.

These reforms helped widen the Overton window – the range of policies deemed politically possible.

If unaffordability in the U.S. continues to worsen, perhaps rental housing issues will receive more political oxygen, with more legislation proposed at the federal level.

Until then, cities and states will have to continue leading the way.

Allyson Gold 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. England’s ‘once in a generation’ housing law takes effect as US housing legislation sits in congressional purgatory – https://theconversation.com/englands-once-in-a-generation-housing-law-takes-effect-as-us-housing-legislation-sits-in-congressional-purgatory-281504

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Geoff Childs, Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis

Imagine a place where every home has paraphernalia for distilling spirits, where there is a toast for nearly any occasion, and where your taxes – paid in grain, not cash – are deposited straight into a communal still.

Welcome to Nubri.

A valley in northern Nepal, Nubri is home to roughly 3,000 Tibetan Buddhist highlanders. Over the course of three decades, I have spent a lot of time in Nubri studying the interplay of demographic trends and social change. Often that has been in the company of an ethnomusicologist colleague, Mason Brown, who studies local musical traditions.

While conducting research, we both became aficionados of the local intoxicants chang and arak, and we were taught how to brew and distill them by Nubri resident and research collaborator Jhangchuk Sangmo Thakuri.

Other scholars of Tibetan and Himalayan societies have commented on the importance of chang for ritual purposes and as a social lubricant. In Nubri, which is predominantly ethnic Tibetan, we learned firsthand the integral role both drinks had in maintaining local rituals, the economy and developing social relationships.

The basics of brewing

Let’s start with the basics. Chang is a fermented, noncarbonated beverage made from corn, barley or rice. A starter culture, partially derived from a previous fermentation, is added to warm, boiled grain, which is then stuffed into a container with water and sealed. The fermentation process takes a few days to two weeks, depending on variables such as temperature and one’s preference for the brew’s strength.

To make arak, the mash of fermented grain is transferred to a still that is placed over an open fire. The evaporated liquid – essentially concentrated alcohol – condenses and drops into a catch basin when it contacts a vessel at the top filled with cool water. The distillation process takes roughly an hour.

Chang is unfiltered and often contains a fair amount of sediments. It is low in alcohol – roughly 3% to 6% ABV, or equivalent to a European lager – and is considered a refreshing drink, especially while working in hot weather. Although it varies by brew, chang is generally slightly sweet, with a tinge or sourness.

Arak, by contrast, is clear and dry, similar in flavor and mouthfeel to Japanese sake. Based on taste and effect, we estimate that most batches clock in at 15% to 25% ABV – stronger than a glass of wine, but less potent than, say, whiskey.

All but the poorest households in Nubri own a still; those who don’t borrow one from neighbors when they have surplus grain.

To hell … or glory?

Evidence suggests that chang has been consumed by Tibetans for centuries. A story purportedly from the seventh century describes how court officials were dispatched by an emperor to find a boy with magical powers. When they encountered a child and asked where his parents were, he responded, “Father has gone to search for words. Mother has gone to search for eyes.” The father showed up carrying chang and the mother bearing fire.

Despite chang’s antiquity, Tibetans have their share of teetotalers and prohibitionists. For example, 15th-century Buddhist lama Ngorchen Kunga Zangpo argued, “Since one (who drinks) created and accumulated the karma of a mad person, one’s body will come to ruin, and after one has died, one will be born among the hell-beings of the lower realms of existence.”

The message is elegant in its simplicity – drink and you’ll go to hell!

Kunga Zangpo’s warning aside, intoxicating beverages have long been valued in Nubri society.

Writing in the mid-18th century, Pema Wangdu, a Nubri lama famous for composing songs of spiritual realization, recounts how when seeking guidance from a local lama, he needed to present an offering, so he filched chang from home while his family members were working in the fields.

Pema Wangdu’s main teacher, Pema Döndrub, also from Nubri, describes a visit to a neighboring valley in which an official asks local villagers to bring the lama and his entourage some chang. Apparently they brought more than enough, because Pema Döndrub retorted, “We kept the tasty chang and sent the unappealing stuff away.”

Chang is also commonly mentioned in Nubri’s folk songs, which have been passed down for generations. In one, the singer rejoices that he has had multiple windfalls of good luck: He lives in a civilized country, inhabits a golden chamber and has an elegant foal and many sheep. Proclaiming that his prosperity is deserved, the singer commands his wife, “Don’t even think of giving me less chang!”

A drink for all occasions

Nowadays, people in Nubri prefer the more potent arak over chang. This is evident during Buddhist rituals where arak provides some participants with stamina and a bit of levity. Others, especially monks, abstain.

The drinks are procured through the local temple’s tax system. When a couple form a new household, they accept a mandatory loan of roughly 100 kilos of grain from the village temple. Every subsequent year they are required to repay one-third of the loan as interest.

Each ritual has an associated “Loan Document” that specifies what percentage of a household’s annual repayment is used to support that event. The system ensures that a tremendous amount of the harvest is acquired so that it can be fermented and then processed in the temple’s stills.

An associated document titled “Rules (Made By) the Monasteries” specifies when, how much and to whom arak should be distributed throughout the ritual.

Each serving event has a name. There is “connection chang” honoring the auspicious first gathering of ritual participants, “commencement chang” to mark the beginning of each day, and “bedtime chang” for the end of each day.

During an offering to the deities, participants are served “victory chang,” signaling a wish that their entreaties are successful, and “good fortune chang” in anticipation of positive outcomes.

One more for the road

A final vignette helps illustrate how chang and arak are woven into Nubri’s social and religious fabric.

In May 2023, we departed Nubri after completing a long research stint. Dorje Dundul, an old friend, accompanied us to a religious structure marking the outer boundary of his village. From the depths of his tunic, he extracted a flask filled with arak, inserted the stem of a medicinal herb into the liquid while chanting prayers, then sprinkled droplets into the four directions as an offering to ensure our safe passage.

Afterward, he handed us the flask and urged, “Chö, chö” (“Drink, drink”). We each took a long draft of the warming liquid.

He then capped the flask, placed it into the side pocket of our backpack and said, “This is lamchang (road beer). Travel safely.”

During the grueling descent to the lowlands, the parting gift fortified us while providing a constant reminder of Dorje’s concern for our well-being. “One for the road” never felt so good.

Ethnomusicologist Mason Brown and Nubri researcher Jhangchuk Sangmo Thakuri contributed to this article.

Geoff Childs receives funding from the National Science Foundation.

– ref. Cheers! Welcome to the Nepalese village where everybody knows how to distill – https://theconversation.com/cheers-welcome-to-the-nepalese-village-where-everybody-knows-how-to-distill-271372

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Casey Pinto, Associate Professor of Public Health Sciences, Penn State

Syphilis is a sexually transmitted infection caused by the bacteria Treponema pallidum.

During pregnancy, this bacteria can pass from a mother with untreated syphilis, known as maternal syphilis, to her child in utero, causing the fetus to contract congenital syphilis.

In January 2026, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the rate of maternal syphilis rose by 28% from 2022 to 2024, from just over 280 to nearly 360 cases per 100,000 births.

I’m a public health researcher and infectious disease nurse practitioner. I study disparities in sexually transmitted infections, or STIs, and I’m currently conducting a study on syphilis in pregnancy.

A perfect storm of factors behind the rise

Two factors in particular have to be taken into consideration to understand the steep rise in cases.

One is the rise in syphilis cases in the general population – which naturally leads to an increase in maternal syphilis – and the other is the specific variables such as funding and access to care barriers that affect pregnant women when it comes to the spread of this disease.

The overall trend of increasing syphilis rates is the result of what I would describe as a perfect storm of factors, from lack of funding to COVID-19. The rate of syphilis infections in the U.S. has been steadily increasing since 2000.

In 2018, there was a sharp increase in this rate, as the group predominantly affected by this STI shifted from men who have sex with men to the general population of both men and women.

This shift caused an increase in rates of maternal syphilis, which has led to a 700% increase in congenital syphilis cases since 2015.

Public health funding for all sexually transmitted infections, excluding HIV, has been stagnant for decades, at about US$160 million annually. When accounting for inflation and rising costs, this has resulted in a 40% reduction in spending power today.

Unfortunately, each year Congress suggests cutting funding to both STI and healthcare access programs. These cuts have largely not been implemented in the final appropriations packages.

But each year, further steep cuts are proposed. The 2026 appropriations recommend combining three programs – HIV, STI and tuberculosis – and cutting $70 million from the combined programs.

On top of this funding shortfall, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated many of the underlying barriers to healthcare access that allowed the steadily increasing syphilis rates to increase faster. During the pandemic, safety-net clinic staffing and hours were reduced, which limited the availability of screening and treatment services.

Another factor driving the increase in syphilis cases has been a change in sexual behaviors over the past 25 years. During the early days of the HIV epidemic in the 1980s, sexual behaviors that led to HIV rapidly changed, leading to safer sex habits. However, by the early 2000s, improved HIV treatments meant that HIV was no longer a death sentence, but a manageable chronic condition.

While this was, of course, good news, it also meant that safer sexual behaviors began to decline, resulting in increased chances of exposure to HIV and other STIs, including syphilis.

The role of stigma

Social stigma and biases from both healthcare providers and patients themselves can affect whether someone gets tested or seeks treatment for symptoms.

While this affects all patients, it is particularly problematic for pregnant patients. Pregnant people are supposed to be screened for syphilis in the first and third trimesters. But a healthcare provider may assume it’s unnecessary to ask questions about a patient’s sexual behaviors or to order the necessary tests, especially in the case of longtime patients known to be in monogamous relationships.

Furthermore, the patient may hesitate to admit to risky sexual behaviors, or may not realize they have been exposed through a partner’s infidelity.

Barriers to care

Another driver of the increase in maternal syphilis is the difficulty in accessing prenatal care: 1 in 4 pregnant people do not have access to prenatal care in their first trimester.

Barriers to accessing healthcare vary based on race and ethnicity, availability of transportation, economic status, rural or urban location and insurance status. Most of these factors exist across all health conditions, but for pregnancy, insurance status offers a particular obstacle. Pregnancy is a qualifier for enrolling in Medicaid if income requirements are met. However, this enrollment can sometimes take months, and some prenatal care clinics will not see patients until coverage is approved.

This means patients are beyond the first trimester before their syphilis screening is done. But that first-trimester screening and intervention has the greatest potential to reduce the risk of congenital syphilis

Knowing the symptoms

Syphilis is characterized by different symptoms in each of the four stages of the disease. During the primary stage, within a few days to a few weeks of infection, most patients develop a painless ulcer at the site of exposure. This sore may go unnoticed and resolve on its own. However, the infection remains.

The secondary stage occurs 3 to 6 months after exposure. Patients commonly have flu-like symptoms, possibly some weight loss, swollen lymph nodes and a rash that covers the chest and back. This rash doesn’t itch, and it can spread to the palms of the hands or soles of the feet. Other symptoms include hair loss, mouth lesions, hearing loss and vision changes, but these symptoms may not all appear. This phase typically lasts a few weeks and then resolves with or without treatment.

The disease then enters the latent phase, when the bacteria can still be active in the body without causing acute symptoms and can last for decades.

Finally, 40% to 60% of patients with untreated syphilis will progress to a tertiary phase of the disease that can lead to any number of negative outcomes, including seizures, heart defects, bone growths, skin growths, confusion and dementia.

Transmission and treatments

The syphilis bacteria can spread easily through the placenta as part of the shared blood supply between mother and fetus. This is more likely to happen within the first year that a person is infected with syphilis, although the syphilis bacteria can spread to a fetus at any stage of infection, causing the unborn baby to develop what’s known as congenital syphilis.

Congenital syphilis can result in a range of negative outcomes, the most serious of which is miscarriage or stillbirth. If the fetus survives, long-term developmental delays, blindness, hearing loss, permanent teeth and bone malformation, heart defects and rashes can occur. Symptoms of congenital syphilis can happen immediately at birth, or they may not be recognized until the child is over 2 years old, when molars erupt, or as bones grow and the changes become more pronounced.

Congenital syphilis is treatable with antibiotics, which will stop progression of the disease but cannot reverse any negative outcomes that have already occurred.

Luckily, syphilis is easily treated with antibiotics such as a long-acting penicillin injection into a muscle. Unfortunately, the long-acting intramuscular injection is in short supply. But anyone who is not pregnant and does not have neurological symptoms – which require intravenous penicillin – can be cured with a course of another antibiotic, doxycycline, for 14-28 days.

Preventing maternal syphilis

The mainstay of prevention is to use a condom when sexually active, or to ensure sexual partners have tested negative for all sexually transmitted infections and are exclusively having sex with each other. In some cases, a person might take doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis, also called doxy PEP, within 72 hours of sexual activity to prevent syphilis, similar to the way Plan B can be taken to prevent pregnancy.

The most effective prevention method for congenital syphilis is universal screening of all pregnancies at three points: during the first trimester, the third trimester and at delivery.

However, some published studies and a paper currently under review show that only 80% to 90% of pregnancies with private healthcare insurance and [56% to 90% of those on Medicaid] are screened for syphilis at least one time during the entire pregnancy.

Casey Pinto has received funding from Hologic Inc. She has also received honorariums from Hologic and Roche in the past 24 months.

– ref. Syphilis cases in expectant mothers have dramatically risen since the pandemic – here’s what’s driving the trend – https://theconversation.com/syphilis-cases-in-expectant-mothers-have-dramatically-risen-since-the-pandemic-heres-whats-driving-the-trend-275646

Source: The Conversation – USA – By André O. Hudson, Dean of the College of Science, Professor of Biochemistry, Rochester Institute of Technology

When scientist J. Craig Venter and his team announced in 2010 that they had created the first cell controlled by a fully synthetic genome, it marked a turning point in how scientists think about life.

For the first time, DNA – the molecule that carries the instructions for life – had been written on a computer, assembled in a laboratory and used to control a living cell. The achievement suggested something profound: Life might not only be understood but designed.

A biologist widely recognized for his groundbreaking contributions to genomics, including leading efforts to sequence the first draft of the human genome, Venter and his team’s successful creation of the first synthetic bacterial cell is considered pivotal to the field of synthetic biology.

By combining biology and engineering, synthetic biology seeks to design and build new biological systems or redesign existing ones for useful purposes. Rather than only observing how life works, scientists use tools such as DNA synthesis and genetic engineering to “program” cells to perform specific tasks, such as producing vaccines, developing sustainable fuels or detecting environmental toxins.

But how far has the field gone since Venter’s original synthetic bacterial cell?

As a biochemist who uses genomics in my teaching and research, I am interested in understanding what this shift in biology means and how far it has actually taken scientific innovation. Following Venter’s death on April 29, 2026, it is worth revisiting that moment and asking whether synthetic biology has delivered on its promise.

What is synthetic biology?

For much of the 20th century, biology focused on decoding life.

The discovery of DNA’s structure in 1953 revealed how genetic information is stored. Decades later, the Human Genome Project that Venter helped accelerate mapped the full set of human genes.

But Venter and others pushed the field further: If DNA could be read like code, could it also be written?

This idea underpins synthetic biology, which aims to design and construct biological systems rather than simply study them. Instead of modifying one gene at a time, researchers began exploring whether entire genomes could be built and inserted into cells.

In 2010, Venter’s team demonstrated that this was possible. They constructed a bacterial genome and used it to take control of a living cell. While the cell itself was not built entirely from scratch, their work showed that the instructions for life could be engineered.

In other words, synthetic biologists were moving from reading life to rewriting it entirely.

Big promises and bold expectations

Synthetic biology has already led to a range of promising outcomes across medicine, energy and environmental science.

Researchers have engineered microbes to produce lifesaving drugs such as artemisinin, an antimalarial compound, and to manufacture sustainable biofuels that could reduce reliance on fossil fuels. In addition, researchers are using synthetic biology to design organisms capable of detecting and breaking down environmental pollutants, offering new tools for bioremediation.

At the heart of these ideas was a powerful analogy: If biology could be treated like software, then designing organisms might one day resemble writing code.

This vision attracted significant investment and policy attention. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has highlighted synthetic biology’s potential to address challenges in multiple industries while also raising important ethical and safety considerations. For example, synthetic biology techniques could be used to develop biological weapons and could unintentionally harm ecosystems and human health.

Progress slower than expected

Despite this progress, synthetic biology has not fully realized its early ambitions. One major reason is the complexity of living systems.

Early approaches to synthetic biology treated cells as modular systems, where components could be predictably exchanged. In practice, biological systems are highly interconnected. Gene interactions are difficult to predict, and results observed in controlled laboratory conditions do not always scale to real-world environments.

This challenge has been particularly evident in areas such as biofuels, where translating laboratory successes into industrial-scale production has proved difficult.

There are also more fundamental limitations. Scientists still cannot construct a fully living organism from nonliving components alone. Even Venter’s synthetic cell depended on an existing biological system to function.

As a result, the goal of creating life entirely from scratch remains out of reach for now.

New questions and emerging risks

As technology has advanced, it has also raised new ethical and security concerns. The same tools used to design beneficial organisms could potentially be misused.

Synthetic biology is widely recognized as a dual-use field, where advances in gene editing, DNA synthesis and bioengineering may enable not only medical and environmental innovations but also the creation or modification of harmful organisms.

The increasing accessibility of these technologies further lowers barriers to misuse, making biosecurity threats more distributed and difficult to control. At the same time, governance frameworks often struggle to keep pace with rapid technological developments, leaving gaps in oversight and international coordination.

Beyond immediate risks, broader questions remain about how far humans should go in redesigning life and what unintended consequences such changes could have for ecosystems. Engineered organisms may introduce risks such as genetic contamination and ecosystem disruption, which would harm biodiversity and ecosystem services.

These concerns are likely to become more pressing as the technology behind synthetic biology continues to develop, particularly as emerging tools such as artificial intelligence accelerate the design of new biological systems.

Venter’s legacy

The implications of the idea that life could be engineered rather than just observed is still unfolding.

Synthetic biology has not yet delivered a world of fully programmable organisms solving global challenges. But it has changed expectations, both within science and beyond, about what might be possible in biological design.

In that sense, the impact of synthetic biology is already clear: It has altered not just how scientists study life but how society imagines its future.

Venter’s legacy includes the questions he made unavoidable: how far scientists should go in designing life, who gets to decide, and what responsibilities come with that power. The answers remain unsettled. But the trajectory seems to be that science is learning, cautiously and imperfectly, to author life.

André O. Hudson receives funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation

– ref. Synthetic biology promised to rewrite life – with the death of its pioneer, J. Craig Venter, how close are scientists? – https://theconversation.com/synthetic-biology-promised-to-rewrite-life-with-the-death-of-its-pioneer-j-craig-venter-how-close-are-scientists-281963

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Daniel A. Smith, Professor of Political Science, University of Florida

The Sunshine State has joined Texas, California and a handful of other states in the battle of mid-decade redistricting.

On April 29, 2026, in a near party-line vote, the Florida Legislature adopted new congressional maps drawn by a staffer of Gov. Ron DeSantis. The GOP-led effort could lead to four more of Florida’s 28 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives turning Republican. Florida redrew its maps with the same underlying population data just four years ago.

Mid-decade redistricting in Florida was all but inevitable once Donald Trump made partisan map-drawing a national priority. Florida’s Republican legislators had little incentive – or political cover – to resist.

I’m a political scientist, and my research focuses on voting and elections. I’ve served as an expert in redistricting cases in Florida, and I’ve been tracking Florida voters’ opinions on DeSantis’ 2026 redistricting efforts.

What Florida voters think about gerrymandering overall

University of Florida Ph.D. student Rolland Grady and I conducted a representative survey of more than 2,300 Florida registered voters drawn randomly from the publicly available Florida voter file.

Participants had one week, from April 6-13, 2026, to fill out our web-based survey linked to an email invitation. We did not offer any incentives to respondents providing us with their opinions.

The results show broad, principled opposition to partisan gerrymandering in Florida. Roughly two-thirds of Florida voters we contacted said they oppose redrawing district lines to advantage a political party.

What they think about their own party gerrymandering

But beyond gauging how Florida voters feel about gerrymandering in theory, we wanted to see how they responded to actual scenarios of mid-decade redistricting, and whether it mattered to them which party was leading the redistricting.

So we designed an experimental survey: Before respondents were asked how they felt about mid-decade redistricting, each participant was randomly shown one of five different statements.

The control version of this statement read, “The redrawing of congressional district boundaries typically occurs every 10 years, immediately following the U.S. Census.”

The other versions gave that control statement, and then added information about a particular state – California, Texas or Florida – that was redrawing its maps, and which party was endorsing that gerrymandering.

Finally, there was a version of the statement that included the control statement, told voters that Republican Ron DeSantis was endorsing the redistricting in Florida, and then added a third line of text: “As you might know, in 2010 citizens in Florida passed the Fair Districts Amendment with bipartisan support of more than 60% of the vote.”

According to our survey results, Florida Democrats are intensely opposed to gerrymandering for partisan purposes when it is framed as benefiting Republicans. This strong opposition may increase the focus of big donors on Florida, helping to drive fundraising for Democratic candidates. It may also mobilize some Democrats to come out to the polls in November. But when it comes to persuasion, most Democrats who plan to vote in the midterm elections are already highly engaged and unlikely to support GOP candidates anyway.

Florida Republicans also oppose mid-decade redistricting in the abstract. Not surprisingly, support for drawing lines to help the GOP increases when framed as something DeSantis is pursuing, but only by 15 percentage points.

This suggests some latent, principled discomfort among GOP voters. On the other hand, strong messaging from Republican leaders, particularly Trump, in the run-up to the election may override concerns about fairness. Partisanship and leader-motivated behavior will drive many Republican voters to rationalize the GOP’s effort to increase their congressional margins by four seats.

Where independent voters fall

Finally, our poll finds that Florida independent voters have strong and consistently principled opposition to partisan gerrymandering; their support rarely exceeds 15% under any condition. But in Florida, independent voters, who are often registered with no party affiliation, are less politically organized or active than registered Republicans and Democrats. And it’s likely that these voters redrawn into a new congressional district will be even less knowledgeable about who represents them when it’s time to pick candidates.

It is possible that Democrats will be able to use GOP gerrymandering in November to get independent voters to the polls and oppose Republican candidates. But opposition to gaming the system is just one of many factors that will shape how independents vote. Other issues, such as concerns over the rising cost of living, immigration, foreign policy and presidential approval, usually play a much greater role in determining candidate choice in midterm elections.

The Florida GOP’s mid-decade redistricting gambit reveals a troubling truth about American democracy: Voters oppose partisan gerrymandering in principle but tolerate it in practice when their side benefits.

So even though a majority of Florida voters disapprove of the GOP’s effort to tilt the state’s map even further toward electing Republicans, I’m not expecting widespread punishment of Republican incumbents due to these redistricting efforts.

DeSantis is betting that Trump’s influence will paper over GOP voters’ discomfort, that Democrats will stay demoralized, and that independents will stay home in November.

How GOP gerrymandering could backfire

But just because the GOP’s gerrymandering won’t sway voters away from their party doesn’t mean it won’t end up hurting them at the polls.

DeSantis’ map crams Democrats into just four of 28 districts – a high-stakes gamble that requires lightning to strike twice. To succeed for the GOP, the map requires both 2024’s Democratic and independent voter apathy and 2022’s swing to the right by independents.

But midterms tend to bring lower turnout, and today’s economic squeeze plus Trump’s dismal approval ratings make another 2022-style GOP surge highly unlikely.

The worst case for the GOP would be a 2018-style blue wave. It would destroy DeSantis’ gerrymander and could potentially flip three South Florida GOP seats and two in Central Florida to Democrats. Aggressive redistricting may meet unintended consequences come November.

See you in court

Florida Democrats and other groups will likely sue under the state constitution’s Fair Districts amendments, which were adopted in 2010 by Florida voters of all political stripes. These amendments to the Florida Constitution expressly prohibit redrawing districts with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent.

But DeSantis and his lawyers are setting the stage to defend the mid-decade partisan gerrymander. They fully expect that the Florida Supreme Court will strike down the Fair Districts amendments’ ban on partisan redistricting. The odds are stacked against the citizens of Florida who support fair districts.

In my view, the real losers here are the Florida voters, particularly those who approved the state’s Fair Districts amendments in 2010, which were a bipartisan triumph.

Daniel A. Smith is an Advisory Board Member of Common Cause Florida and President of ElectionSmith.

– ref. Gerrymandering is unpopular with Florida voters – my recent survey shows why DeSantis pushed it through anyway – https://theconversation.com/gerrymandering-is-unpopular-with-florida-voters-my-recent-survey-shows-why-desantis-pushed-it-through-anyway-281792

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College

President Donald Trump sparked immediate outcry on April 12, 2026, when he posted an image of himself as a Jesus-like figure. The post, which Trump later said was supposed to depict him as a doctor, came shortly after the president criticized Pope Leo XIV as “weak” and “terrible.”

Three days later, Trump posted an image depicting Jesus with his left hand on the president’s shoulder. Referring to that post, Trump observed, “Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!”

These posts help illustrate the political messianism that Trump has brought to the Oval Office.

Political messianism is a style of leadership that places great faith in a single leader who is endowed with godlike attributes. It does not welcome dissent, and it portrays politics as a struggle between good and evil.

Eric Voegelin, a 20th-century political thinker, warned that political messianism often fuels authoritarian rule. It divides society, with a messianic leader’s supporters seeing him as a savior who will deliver their country into a golden age, while opponents foresee a coming apocalypse.

Democratic politics thrive when leaders and followers act with modesty and humility, when no one sees themselves as infallible or indispensable. As someone who teaches and writes about U.S. democracy, I don’t think it can thrive, or even survive, when its leaders see themselves as godlike and when the citizenry is divided into true believers and heretics.

Trump’s messianic vision

The image depicting Trump as a Jesus-like figure is the latest evidence of the president’s messiah complex.

At the Republican National Convention in 2016, he boasted that “I alone can fix it,” referring to a system that was responsible for what he would later call “American carnage.”

In a 2019 speech, Trump referred to himself as “the chosen one.”

In 2023, he described what he had done in his first term this way: “I think you would have a nuclear war if I weren’t elected.” As president, “I was very busy. I consider this the most important job in the world, saving millions of lives.”

And in a Jan. 8, 2026, interview with The New York Times, Trump said, “I don’t need international law,” since his actions as commander in chief were guided only by “my own morality. My own mind.”

The president is not alone in believing in his messiah status, or in comparing himself to Christ. On April 2, 2026, at a White House Easter celebration, Paula White-Cain, one of his spiritual advisers, used Jesus’ death and resurrection to explain what had happened to Trump.

“Jesus taught so many lessons through his death, burial, and resurrection,” she said. “He showed us great leadership, great transformation requires great sacrifice. And Mr. President … you were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our lord and savior showed us.”

Democracy and humility

In a democracy, it’s dangerous for leaders to see themselves as better than or morally superior to the people they serve. President Joe Biden captured that insight when, after he was elected, he recalled a family mantra instilled in him by his mother: “‘Joey, no one is better than you. Everyone is your equal, and everyone is equal to you.’”

The political philosophy scholar Michael Sandel, whose book “The Tyranny of Merit” seeks to explain what happens to democracy when people, not just leaders, think that they are better than others, argues that such a view breeds “meritocratic hubris.” Such hubris has “a corrosive effect … on the social bonds that constitute our common life,” he writes.

“Humility is a civic virtue essential to this moment,” he adds. “It’s a necessary antidote to the meritocratic hubris that has driven us apart. It points … toward a less rancorous, more generous public life.”

Michael Walzer, another political theorist, explained the dangers of messianic politics this way: It “poses dangers to social order and national survival.” When it takes hold, he writes, “compromise is preempted by command; moral absolutism leaves no room – or all too little – for maneuver in times of crisis and emergency.”

Presidential fallibility

Even the greatest American presidents have not seen themselves as American saviors. They embraced at least some of the humility Sandel describes.

George Washington described the kind of person who would succeed him in office as just “a citizen,” not a savior or a person of extraordinary gifts. Their task, he thought, would not be grand. They would be chosen “to administer the executive government of the United States.”

Washington acknowledged that his judgment was “fallible” and that he’d made numerous errors during his time in office. “Whatever they may be,” he said, “I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend.”

He resisted the idea advanced by John Adams, who wanted the first U.S. chief executive to be called “His Elective Majesty,” “His Mightiness” and even “His Highness, the President of the United States of America and the Protector of their Liberties.” Washington turned down the pompous titles and accepted instead the simple title adopted by the House: “The President of the United States.”

Not a trace of a messiah complex in someone who could understandably have seen himself that way.

Or take Abraham Lincoln.

In his Gettysburg Address, considered one of the greatest speeches in American history, Lincoln did not toot his own horn or exaggerate the significance of his own words. Just the opposite.

As Rabbi Menachem Genack observes, Lincoln asserted during the dedication of the cemetery for fallen soldiers at Gettysburg that “’the world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here.’ (T)hat phrase was not an expression of false modesty nor just a poor prediction of how that tribute would be recorded. It was a symbol of deep-seated humility.”

And in an 1860 letter to an admirer who wanted to inscribe a book to him during his first presidential campaign, Lincoln responded that “begging only that the inscription may be in modest terms, not representing me as a man of great learning, or a very extraordinary one in any respect.”

Almost 100 years later, President Harry Truman referred to himself as nothing more than an “old man who by accident became president of the United States.”

‘If men were angels’

Writing in 1788, Alexander Hamilton reminded Americans of a key maxim of life in a constitutional democracy. Government, he said, is “the greatest of all reflections on human nature. If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

“If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary,” Hamilton said. “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

Democracy is a mode of government built on the idea that none of us is infallible, including those who assume positions of leadership. Elections give the people the chance to change course and correct mistakes.

Presidential scholar Stephen Hess captured the essence of democratic leadership in a 2009 interview with Reuters. He said: “It’s more important to admit mistakes than to make them.”

In the end, as Walzer observes, there can be no messiahs in a democracy. The leader cannot “cast aside” the people. In a democracy, they must be “chastised, defended, argued with, educated” by those who lead.

Those “activities,” Walzer insists, “undercut and defeat” any pretense that it is only the leader who knows the way.

Austin Sarat 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. What Trump’s post as a Jesus-like figure tells us about political messianism – https://theconversation.com/what-trumps-post-as-a-jesus-like-figure-tells-us-about-political-messianism-281415

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Robert D. Bland, Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies, University of Tennessee

Divided along ideological lines, the U.S. Supreme Court on April 29, 2006, issued a ruling that severely weakens a provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. That provision, known as Section 2, prohibited any discriminatory voting practice or election rule that results in less opportunity for minority groups to exercise their political clout.

In her dissent on the ruling, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that it is the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

The decision in the case known as Louisiana v. Callais struck down a Louisiana voting district drawn to consolidate Black voters into a district where they would be the majority. The court’s conservative majority deemed the drawing of the district an unconstitutional gerrymander.

That, wrote Kagan, will “systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power.”

I’m a historian of racial formation and electoral and cultural politics in the U.S. I see this decision by the nation’s highest court as the latest in a long line of successful attempts, by both state and federal authorities, to limit the political power of Black Americans and, most recently, to reverse the gains they won in two periods of civil rights advancement.

Etching away at voting rights

Back in 2013, the Supreme Court tossed out a key provision of the Voting Rights Act regarding federal oversight of elections.

In the Louisiana v. Callais case, the court seemed ready to abolish Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

While the conservative majority in Louisiana v. Callais did not explicitly strike down Section 2, the ruling appears likely to nonetheless open the floodgates for widespread vote dilution by allowing primarily Southern state legislatures to redraw political districts, weakening the voting power of racial minorities.

The case was brought by a group of Louisiana citizens who declared that the federal mandate under Section 2 to draw a second majority-Black district violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and thus served as an unconstitutional act of racial gerrymandering.

Initially designed to enshrine federal civil rights protections for freed people facing a battery of discriminatory “Black Codes” in the postbellum South, the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause has been the foundation of the nation’s modern rights-based legal order, ensuring that all U.S. citizens are treated fairly and preventing the government from engaging in explicit discrimination.

The cornerstone of the nation’s “second founding,” the Reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution, including the 14th Amendment, created the first cohort of Black elected officials.

As I highlight in my new book “Requiem for Reconstruction,” the struggle over the nation’s second founding not only highlights how generational political progress can be reversed but also provides a lens into the specific historical origins of racial gerrymandering in the United States.

Without understanding this history – and the forces that unraveled Reconstruction’s initial promise of greater racial justice – we cannot fully comprehend the roots of those forces that are reshaping our contemporary political landscape in a way that I believe subverts the true intentions of the Constitution.

The long history of gerrymandering

Political gerrymandering, or shaping political boundaries to benefit a particular party, has been considered constitutional since the nation’s 18th-century founding, but racial gerrymandering is a practice with roots in the post-Civil War era.

Expanding beyond the practice of redrawing district lines after each decennial census, late 19th-century Democratic state legislatures built on the earlier cartographic practice to create a litany of so-called Black districts across the postbellum South.

The nation’s first wave of racial gerrymandering emerged as a response to the political gains Southern Black voters made during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in the 1870s. Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina and Louisiana all elected Black congressmen during that decade. During the 42nd Congress, which met from 1871 to 1873, South Carolina sent Black men to the House from three of its four districts.

Initially, the white Democrats who ruled the South responded to the rise of Black political power by crafting racist narratives that insinuated that the emergence of Black voters and Black officeholders was a corruption of the proper political order. These attacks often provided a larger cultural pretext for the campaigns of extralegal political violence that terrorized Black voters in the South, assassinated political leaders, and marred the integrity of several of the region’s major elections.

Election changes

Following these pogroms during the 1870s, southern legislatures began seeking legal remedies to make permanent the counterrevolution of “Redemption,” which sought to undo Reconstruction’s advancement of political equality. A generation before the Jim Crow legal order of segregation and discrimination was established, southern political leaders began to disfranchise Black voters through racial gerrymandering.

These newly created Black districts gained notoriety for their cartographic absurdity. In Mississippi, a shoestring-shaped district was created to snake and swerve alongside the state’s famous river. North Carolina created the “Black Second” to concentrate its African American voters to a single district. Alabama’s “Black Fourth” did similar work, leaving African American voters only one possible district in which they could affect the outcome in the state’s central Black Belt.

South Carolina’s “Black Seventh” was perhaps the most notorious of these acts of Reconstruction-era gerrymandering. The district “sliced through county lines and ducked around Charleston back alleys” – anticipating the current trend of sophisticated, computer-targeted political redistricting.

Possessing 30,000 more voters than the next largest congressional district in the state, South Carolina’s Seventh District radically transformed the state’s political landscape by making it impossible for its Black-majority to exercise any influence on national politics, except for the single racially gerrymandered district.

Although federal courts during the late 19th century remained painfully silent on the constitutionality of these antidemocratic measures, contemporary observers saw these redistricting efforts as more than a simple act of seeking partisan advantage.

“It was the high-water mark of political ingenuity coupled with rascality, and the merits of its appellation,” observed one Black congressman who represented South Carolina’s 7th District.

Racial gerrymandering in recent times

The political gains of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes called the “Second Reconstruction,” were made tangible by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The law revived the postbellum 15th Amendment, which prevented states from creating voting restrictions based on race. That amendment had been made a dead letter by Jim Crow state legislatures and an acquiescent Supreme Court.

In contrast to the post-Civil War struggle, the Second Reconstruction had the firm support of the federal courts. The Supreme Court affirmed the principal of “one person, one vote” in its 1962 Baker v. Carr and 1964 Reynolds v. Sims decisions – upending the Solid South’s landscape of political districts that had long been marked by sparsely populated Democratic districts controlled by rural elites.

The Voting Rights Act gave the federal government oversight over any changes in voting policy that might affect historically marginalized groups. Since passage of the 1965 law and its subsequent revisions, racial gerrymandering has largely served the purpose of creating districts that preserve and amplify the political representation of historically marginalized groups.

This generational work is being undone by the current Supreme Court with its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Feb 3, 2026.

Robert D. Bland 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 ruling: The latest in history of diminishing minority voting rights – https://theconversation.com/supreme-court-ruling-the-latest-in-history-of-diminishing-minority-voting-rights-281815

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Kerri J. Malloy, Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies, San José State University

Many universities and museums in the U.S. have long held Native American burial artifacts, other sacred objects and even human remains.

Most of these collections were acquired in the late 19th and 20th centuries. They came from grave excavations, anthropological research and other practices carried out without the consent of Native American communities.

In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA. This law requires federally funded institutions, including museums and universities, to identify Native American artifacts, consult with tribes and return them to descendants, tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations.

Some institutions, like the University of California, have publicly committed to returning Native American artifacts and remains to the proper communities, in a process known as repatriation. But progress has been slow, and many sacred objects and remains are still held in collections.

As a scholar of Native American genocide, memory and justice, I think repatriation is about more than merely returning items taken without permission.

It’s about how universities and other institutions are confronting the histories that produced these collections in the first place.

The case of the University of California

The University of California is not the only institution confronting this issue of repatriation. But it is one of the country’s most visible university systems, with 10 campuses across the state.

The University of California has publicly stated in a detailed policy document and other places online that it is “committed to the repatriation of Native American human remains and cultural items.” It publicly tracks its work on returning Native American items and remains via a searchable database.

As of February 2026, the university repatriated 9,303 human remains, 476,592 items used for burials, and 140,443 other cultural items, among other objects, according to its database.

Between 2020 and 2024 alone, the University of California campuses completed 100 repatriations involving thousands items, according to the California state audit released in April 2025.

However, the university is facing criticism from tribal leaders and state auditors for moving too slowly.

The 2025 audit found that the University of California still holds the remains of thousands of Native American individuals, along with hundreds of thousands of cultural items. The university’s own database confirms this analysis.

The audit also found gaps in the repatriation work. Some campuses are still discovering new collections that they did not initially document. The University of California’s office of the president does not systematically track this recovery effort, the audit found.

At the university’s current pace, some of its campuses could take more than a decade to finish repatriation.

Earlier state audits in 2019 and 2021 reached similar conclusions. They pointed to weak oversight, delayed planning and limited funding to make good on repatriation promises.

Although the president of the University of California required all campuses to create repatriation plans, many still lack full timelines or other clear steps to solve complex situations.

At the University of California, Santa Barbara, for example, some items were loaned to other institutions and have not been returned.

At the University of California, Davis, 30 items believed to be part of Native American collections were stolen from a display case in 2022. In this case, the university was not sure whether the stolen items initially came from Native communities or not.

A deeper meaning for Native Americans

For Native American communities, ancestral remains are not specimens – they are relatives.

Some of these artifacts were placed with the dead as part of burial practices. These sacred and cultural objects carry ceremonial, historical and communal meaning that does not disappear when they enter a university or museum collection.

Some tribes believe their ancestors’ spirits cannot rest until they are properly reburied, as California’s audits note.

When institutions hold on to Native people’s bodies and belongings for decades, fail to track them fully and then delay their return, the issue is not only administrative. It is also a matter of authority and respect.

This question is especially urgent in California, where many Native American tribes are not federally recognized.

In 2001, California created its own repatriation law, CalNAGPRA, to include these tribes in repatriation work.

However, changes to federal rules in 2024 have made it harder to return certain ancestral remains and cultural items to nonfederally recognized California tribes.

That conflict between federal and state law has made an already difficult process harder.

A widespread issue

This problem is not limited to California.

Across the country, a small number of universities, museums and government agencies hold a large share of the Native American remains and cultural items that have not yet been returned.

Harvard University and Indiana University, for example, are among the schools working to repatriate Native American ancestral remains and cultural items.

Some institutions have interpreted the 1990 law narrowly. In some cases, they have discounted tribal knowledge and labeled ancestral remains as “culturally unidentifiable,” meaning no clear tribal affiliation could be determined.

Moving beyond symbolism

Repatriation at the University of California is part of a broader reckoning. Universities and museums across North America and Europe face the same question: How will they move beyond symbolic statements and address the legacy of colonialism in their collections?

The University of California says campuses are updating plans, budgets and reporting in response to the 2025 audit. It has pledged to return all items by 2028.

I think that these are important steps. But a larger question remains: Will this action lead to more accountability and a quick return of all Native American items and ancestral human remains?

Repatriation is not only about correcting the past. It is a test of how universities serve the public, including Native American communities.

The University of California has adopted policies that include language of repair. The challenge now is to match that language with meeting self-imposed deadlines, and holding true to promises and the federal law in a timely matter.

Kerri J. Malloy 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. Universities returning Native American remains and artifacts isn’t just about physical objects – it’s about dignity and justice – https://theconversation.com/universities-returning-native-american-remains-and-artifacts-isnt-just-about-physical-objects-its-about-dignity-and-justice-281278

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Lakshmi Chauhan, Associate Professor of Infectious Disease Medicine, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

Spring’s warmer weather lures people outdoors – and into possible contact with ticks that spread Lyme disease.

Already, the 2026 tick season is booming. On April 23, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that emergency room visits due to tick bites are at their highest level since 2017. That may portend an especially severe season for Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses.

State health departments reported more than 89,000 cases of Lyme disease in 2023, the last year for which data is available. But public health experts believe that close to 500,000 people in the U.S. get Lyme disease every year.

As an infectious disease doctor with experience treating some of this infection’s long-term outcomes, I know that Lyme disease can be tricky because people often don’t notice tick bites and may overlook early symptoms of an infection. But left untreated, the infection can cause serious lingering – and even permanent – health issues.

Here’s what you need to know about Lyme disease to stay safe this season:

What causes Lyme disease?

Lyme disease, named after the Connecticut town where the disease was first identified in 1975, is caused by a group of bacteria called Borrelia – most often, the species Borrelia burgdorferi.

Deer ticks – also called black-legged ticks, and members of a group called Ixodes – transmit the disease after feeding on an infected animal, usually a bird, mouse or deer. When they then bite a person, they can transmit the bacteria into the person’s bloodstream.
Usually, the tick must attach for 24-48 hours to transmit the bacteria causing Lyme disease.

Where and when does Lyme disease occur?

Lyme disease can occur in most regions where deer ticks live.

These ticks are most active in late spring, summer and fall – usually April to November in most regions. They emerge when the temperature is above freezing. In years when winter is shorter, ticks can emerge earlier. And they may be active year-round in regions where freezing temperatures are rare.

Approximately 90% of U.S. cases are reported from states in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic from Virginia to eastern Canada, and Upper Midwest regions including Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. A few cases occasionally pop up in California, Oregon and Washington.

Since 1995, the incidence of Lyme disease in the U.S. has almost doubled.

Warmer weather and changes in rainfall patterns now allow ticks to survive in new regions of the country – and for longer periods. But even in regions where ticks lived before, Lyme disease has become more common due to increases in deer populations. As woodland areas are increasingly being developed, it may be bringing the habitat of deer and mice closer to people, increasing the risk of transmission.

Lyme disease symptoms to watch for

Early symptoms of Lyme disease – fever, muscle aches and fatigue – generally emerge within three to 30 days after a tick bite. Another classic symptom in the first month is a target or bull’s eye rash at the site of tick bite, which occurs in about 70% to 80% of cases.

Other rashes following a tick bite can also occur. Some may be due to irritation from the bite, and not necessarily an infection.

If you know you’ve had a tick bite and experience flu-like symptoms – or if you see a bull’s-eye rash, whether you know you were bitten or not – it’s important to check with your healthcare provider about whether you should be treated with antibiotics.

A blood test for antibodies can help confirm the infection, but it can sometimes yield a false negative result, particularly in the first couple of weeks of the disease.

In most people, the rash goes away on its own. However, treatment may shorten its duration and is important for preventing other symptoms. A two- to four-week course of antibiotics can generally treat Lyme disease. Severe cases might require intravenous antibiotics.

A promising new vaccine for Lyme disease is currently being tested. In March 2026, Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company developing it, announced that in a late-stage study, the vaccine prevented the disease in 70% of people who received it.

Later Lyme symptoms

If left untreated, the bacteria that causes Lyme can spread, potentially causing longer-term symptoms. About 60% of people who get Lyme disease and don’t treat it can develop arthritis.

In rare cases, Lyme disease can also affect the heart and the nervous system. Inflammation in the brain or the tissues surrounding it, called meninges, can cause headaches and neck pain, as well as balance issues and memory and behavior changes. It can also cause nerve damage that results in numbness, tingling and muscle weakness.

These symptoms can appear right away or much later – sometimes months to years after infection. And in cases where the disease wasn’t promptly treated, late-stage symptoms can linger even after antibiotics kill the bacteria.

Scientists don’t fully understand why, but one intriguing study found that some particles from the bacteria’s cell wall leak into the joints and can persist after treatment, spurring ongoing inflammation and arthritis symptoms.

Another reason for Lyme’s long-term effects is that it can trigger autoimmune disease, which is when the immune system attacks its own cells. What’s more, because the nervous system may be particularly sensitive to damage caused by the bacteria and related inflammation, it may take an especially long time to heal. In some situations, the damage could be permanent.

Preventing Lyme disease

Until a vaccine becomes available, there are steps you and your family can take to help protect against Lyme disease:

• Use tick and insect repellents such as DEET and picaridin, which can be applied to skin, and permethrin, which is sprayed onto clothing, to keep ticks at bay. Treating clothing with permethrin may be especially beneficial, since the substance withstands several washes.

• Wear long-sleeve shirts and pants while you are gardening, hiking or walking through grass or woods to prevent tick bites. Wearing light-colored clothes makes ticks more visible, and tucking your pants into your socks can also prevent the little buggers from traveling from your pants, shoes and socks onto your legs.

• Remove your outdoor clothes immediately. Washing and drying clothes at high temperature can help kill any ticks that managed to hitch a ride. And a quick shower immediately after spending time outdoors can wash ticks off the skin before they have a chance to attach.

• If you spend time outdoors, perform daily tick checks, paying special attention to warm areas like your armpits, neck, ears and underwear line. If you find a tick attached, pull it off with tweezers, holding them perpendicular to the skin.

• If you find a tick that may have been on the skin for more than 36 hours, ask your healthcare provider whether a dose of preventive antibiotics – generally given within 72 hours of the bite – would be appropriate.

Lakshmi Chauhan receives funding from NIH.

– ref. Warmer temps bring soaring tick populations – here’s how to stay safe from Lyme disease – https://theconversation.com/warmer-temps-bring-soaring-tick-populations-heres-how-to-stay-safe-from-lyme-disease-263303