Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA – By David Patterson Soule, Lecturer of Economics, University of Richmond

After the U.S. census is conducted every 10 years, each state must redraw its congressional districts to account for any loss or gain of congressional seats and to maintain an equal population in each district.

But in 2025, breaking from standard practice, President Donald Trump has asked Republican states to redraw their districts mid-decade to provide a greater Republican advantage in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections.

Not to be outdone, the Democrats have responded by starting a redistricting effort in California to offset the Republican gains in Texas. Californians will decide whether to approve those changes in a ballot measure on Nov. 4, 2025.

As other states join the fray, this battle for control of the U.S. House of Representatives has escalated to what the media has called a “Redistricting War.” In this war, the control of the House may be determined more by how each party is able to redistrict states they control and less by how citizens vote.

The media and politicians focus on which party is winning or losing seats. But are the citizens winning or losing in this conflict?

Studies have shown that districts contorted for political purposes make it more difficult for constituents to know who their representatives are, reduces representative-citizen interactions and lowers voter participation in elections.

Changing a resident’s congressional district will sever any existing relationship or understanding of who their current representative is and how to seek help or share policy concerns. This forces residents to navigate unfamiliar political terrain as they figure out their new district, who is running, and what the candidates stand for. This added complexity discourages residents from voting.

More importantly, it diminishes their faith in the democratic process.

Staggering scale of changes

Just how big are the changes already enacted in Texas and proposed in California?

The University of Richmond Spatial Analysis Laboratory, which co-author Kyle Redican directs, has analyzed the impact of the mid-decade redistricting changes. The number of redistricting casualties – residents reassigned to a new congressional district – caused by these mid-decade changes in Texas and California is nearly 20 million. That’s about 6% of the overall U.S. population.

The scale of the changes is staggering: 10.4 million Texas residents, about 36% of the state’s population, and 9.2 million California residents, about 23% of the state’s population, will find themselves in new, unfamiliar congressional districts.

Only one district in Texas, of 38 total districts, and eight districts in California, of 52 total districts, remain untouched, making this a pervasive upheaval, not a surgical adjustment.

Most dramatically, nine districts in California and eight districts in Texas will have more than 50% new residents, fundamentally changing the overall composition of those districts.

The 41st District in California will have 100% new residents, while the 9th District in Texas will have 97% new residents, essentially becoming entirely different constituencies.

Making a change of this size mid-decade, as opposed to once every decade, will be highly disruptive and represent a major tear in the fabric of representative democracy.

Lawmakers picking their voters

So who exactly is being moved? The demographic patterns reveal the calculated nature of these partisan manipulations.

In Texas, Black and Hispanic residents are disproportionately shuffled into new districts compared to white residents.

Minorities constitute 67.1% of Texans who have been moved into a new district, while minorities constitute only 56.4% of Texans who get to remain in their same district. By moving more minorities out of a district and into another reliably Republican district, partisan mapmakers are able to reduce the likely Democratic voter share in that district and swing it to be a Republican-leaning district.

California follows the opposite playbook: White residents are disproportionately moved.

There, 41.2% of those moved into a new district are white, while only 32.7% of those who get to remain in their same district are white. In this case, California is moving likely Republican voters into another reliably Democratic district, which reduces the Republican voter share in the original district and swings it to be a Democratic-leaning district.

In either case, legislators are making deliberate decisions about which residents to move to achieve a political goal.

Yet fundamental to a representative democracy is a simple principle: The people choose their representatives. It’s not that representatives choose their constituents. The founders envisioned the House of Representatives as the people’s house, representing and accountable to the voters.

In the current mid-decade redistricting, the legislators are handpicking their constituencies.

Mocking the fundamental idea

Does the redistricting battle ever end?

If mid-decade redistricting becomes an accepted way to win elections, each time a party wins control of a state legislature and governorship they will have the incentive to redistrict. Each of these future redistrictings will continue to negatively affect citizens’ participation in the representative process and mock the fundamental idea that citizens should choose their representatives.

It’s entirely possible that redistricting could happen every two years – though that is an extreme outcome of this competition.

Texas and California have fired the opening shots in the redistricting arms race. Other states – Missouri, North Carolina and Virginia – are joining the fight, each time diminishing the public trust in our democratic process.

Today, it’s 20 million Americans caught in the crossfire. Tomorrow, it could be 100 million as this conflict spreads from state to state. With tit-for-tat redistricting offsetting gains in seats, who is really winning?

For sure, we know who is losing – the people and representative democracy.

Spatial Analysis Lab intern Ryan Poulsen worked on the block data processing for this story.

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. Voters lose when maps get redrawn before every election instead of once a decade − a trend started in Texas, moving to California and likely spreading across the country – https://theconversation.com/voters-lose-when-maps-get-redrawn-before-every-election-instead-of-once-a-decade-a-trend-started-in-texas-moving-to-california-and-likely-spreading-across-the-country-268181

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By C. Michael White, Distinguished Professor of Pharmacy Practice, University of Connecticut

If you take cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins, you may have noticed a flurry of news coverage since late October 2025 about an extensive recall of thousands of bottles of atorvastatin, the generic version of Lipitor.

Both generic atorvastatin and brand-name Lipitor contain the same active ingredient, atorvastatin calcium, and are considered bioequivalent by the Food and Drug Administration. This medication is the No. 1-selling drug in the U.S., with over 115 million prescriptions going to more than 29 million Americans.

I am a clinical pharmacologist and pharmacist who has assessed the manufacturing quality of prescription, over-the-counter and illicit drugs, as well as dietary supplements.

This atorvastatin recall is large, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of patients. But it’s only the latest in a series of concerning manufacturing issues that have come to light since 2019.

What pills are being recalled, and why?

Ascend Laboratories, based in New Jersey, originally issued the recall for about 142,000 bottles of its generic atorvastatin on Sept. 19. Each bottle contained 90, 500 or 1,000 tablets, enough to fill prescriptions for three, 17 or 33 patients, respectively, for one month.

About three weeks later, on Oct. 10, the FDA quantified the risk of using these poor-quality tablets and gave the recall a Class II status, which means that the medication could cause “temporary or medically reversible adverse health consequences.”

Manufacturers must conduct quality tests on random samples of tablets from every batch they make. These tests make sure the pills contain the correct dosage of the active ingredient, are made to the proper physical specifications and are not contaminated with heavy metals or microbes. If the samples test “out of specification” for any feature, the company must conduct further testing and destroy defective batches, losing the cost of manufacturing them.

In this case, sample pills failed to dissolve properly when they were tested. Batches manufactured from November 2024 through September 2025 all had this defect.

As with other drugs, when you swallow atorvastatin, it must dissolve before the active ingredient can be absorbed by the body. It then goes to the liver, where it reduces the blood concentrations of low-density lipoproteins – also called LDL, or “bad cholesterol.”

If the drug doesn’t dissolve properly, the amount absorbed by the body is substantially reduced.

Lowering LDL with atorvastatin has been shown to reduce cardiovascular events like heart attacks and strokes after a few years by 22%. When almost 30,000 people in a 2021 study stopped taking their atorvastatin or other statin for six months, the risk of cardiovascular events, deaths and emergency room visits increased between 12% to 15%.

So, while patients wouldn’t immediately feel a difference if their atorvastatin tablets didn’t dissolve properly, their risk of cardiovascular events would significantly rise.

What should patients on generic atorvastatin do?

First, don’t stop taking the medication without talking with your pharmacist or prescriber. Even if you have the recalled pills, taking them is still better than not taking the medicine at all.

You can determine whether your medication came from Ascend Laboratories by looking at your prescription label.

Search for the abbreviations MFG or MFR, which stand for “manufacturing” or “manufacturer.” If it says “MFG Ascend” or “MFR Ascend,” that means that Ascend Laboratories supplied the medication.

The first five letters of a National Drug Code, abbreviated as NDC on the prescription label, also reveal the manufacturer or distributor. Ascend products have the number 67877.

If Ascend Laboratories is the distributor, a pharmacist can cross-reference your prescription number to obtain the lot number and compare it with the posted lot numbers on the FDA website for recalled atorvastatin. If your product has been recalled, your pharmacy may have other generic versions of atorvastatin in stock that are not part of this recall.

Alternatively, the pharmacist can get a new prescription from your health care provider for another generic statin drug, such as rosuvastatin, which works similarly.

A pattern of lapses for overseas manufacturers

While the defective atorvastatin is distributed by a U.S. company, it is actually manufactured by Alkem Laboratories in India.

In fact, many aspects of pharmaceutical drug manufacturing are now occurring overseas, primarily in China and India. This has limited the FDA’s ability to provide the oversight required for drugs sold in the U.S.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the FDA performed routine surveillance inspections of U.S. manufacturing plants every three years, but seldom conducted them overseas. In the wake of several high-profile manufacturing quality lapses, including at the Indian generic drug giant Ranbaxy Laboratories, Congress established a funding mechanism and the FDA established a universal standard for inspecting both U.S. and overseas manufacturers every five years.

However, the U.S. fell behind with international inspections after COVID-19 shut down international travel, and it has yet to catch up. Additionally, overseas manufacturers generally get warning of an upcoming inspection, making the process potentially less rigorous than in the U.S.

A lack of inspections for eye drop manufacturers, especially in India, led to massive recalls in 2023 after a wave of rare eye infections caused some people to lose their eyesight. The problem was traced to widespread unsanitary manufacturing conditions and improper testing for sterility at overseas facilities.

In 2024, eight deaths and multiple hospitalizations led an Indian manufacturer, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals, to recall 47 million potassium chloride extended-release capsules that did not dissolve properly. In February 2025, inspectors found that the company had falsified quality results.

The FDA recently started laboratory spot testing of prescription and over-the-counter drugs arriving in the U.S. to compensate for these limitations. Outside laboratories such as Valisure also do independent testing. Independent testing has caught several dangerous products, but due to limited resources, only a few products can be tested each year.

In 2023, Alkem Laboratories, which manufactured the currently recalled atorvastatin, had to recall 58,000 bottles of the blood pressure drug metoprolol XL because the pills also did not properly dissolve. Spot testing also led to widespread recalls after FDA and Valisure laboratories found cancer-causing chemicals called nitrosamines in some blood pressure, diabetes and indigestion drugs tested between 2019 and 2020, as well as benzene in numerous sunscreen and antibacterial gel products tested between 2020 and early 2025.

Raising consumer vigilance

With these growing gaps in oversight, it’s reasonable to be mindful of changes in how a particular medication affects you. If your prescription drug suddenly stops working, it might be because that particular batch of the medication was not manufactured properly. Alerting the FDA about sudden loss of drug effectiveness could help the agency more quickly identify manufacturing issues.

In 2024, the FDA started sharing the inspection burden with other regulatory agencies like the European Medicines Agency for the European Union. Such coordinated efforts could lead to less duplication and a bump in inspections of overseas manufacturers.

In the meantime, however, consumers are largely at the mercy of spotty inspections and testing, and rarely hear about problems unless poorly manufactured drugs cause widespread adverse events.

C. Michael White 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. Atorvastatin recall may affect hundreds of thousands of patients – and reflects FDA’s troubles inspecting medicines manufactured overseas – https://theconversation.com/atorvastatin-recall-may-affect-hundreds-of-thousands-of-patients-and-reflects-fdas-troubles-inspecting-medicines-manufactured-overseas-268364

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Eli Alshanetsky, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Temple University

The latest generation of artificial intelligence models is sharper and smoother, producing polished text with fewer errors and hallucinations. As a philosophy professor, I have a growing fear: When a polished essay no longer shows that a student did the thinking, the grade above it becomes hollow – and so does the diploma.

The problem doesn’t stop in the classroom. In fields such as law, medicine and journalism, trust depends on knowing that human judgment guided the work. A patient, for instance, expects a doctor’s prescription to reflect an expert’s thought and training.

AI products can now be used to support people’s decisions. But even when AI’s role in doing that type of work is small, you can’t be sure whether the professional drove the process or merely wrote a few prompts to do the job. What dissolves in this situation is accountability – the sense that institutions and individuals can answer for what they certify. And this comes at a time when public trust in civic institutions is already fraying.

I see education as the proving ground for a new challenge: learning to work with AI while preserving the integrity and visibility of human thinking. Crack the problem here, and a blueprint could emerge for other fields where trust depends on knowing that decisions still come from people. In my own classes, we’re testing an authorship protocol to ensure student writing stays connected to their thinking, even with AI in the loop.

When learning breaks down

The core exchange between teacher and student is under strain. A recent MIT study found that students using large language models to help with essays felt less ownership of their work and did worse on key writing‑related measures.

Students still want to learn, but many feel defeated. They may ask: “Why think through it myself when AI can just tell me?” Teachers worry their feedback no longer lands. As one Columbia University sophomore told The New Yorker after turning in her AI-assisted essay: “If they don’t like it, it wasn’t me who wrote it, you know?”

Universities are scrambling. Some instructors are trying to make assignments “AI-proof,” switching to personal reflections or requiring students to include their prompts and process. Over the past two years, I’ve tried versions of these in my own classes, even asking students to invent new formats. But AI can mimic almost any task or style.

Understandably, others now call for a return to what are being dubbed “medieval standards”: in-class test-taking with “blue books” and oral exams. Yet those mostly reward speed under pressure, not reflection. And if students use AI outside class for assignments, teachers will simply lower the bar for quality, much as they did when smartphones and social media began to erode sustained reading and attention.

Many institutions resort to sweeping bans or hand the problem to ed-tech firms, whose detectors log every keystroke and replay drafts like movies. Teachers sift through forensic timelines; students feel surveilled. Too useful to ban, AI slips underground like contraband.

The challenge isn’t that AI makes strong arguments available; books and peers do that, too. What’s different is that AI seeps into the environment, constantly whispering suggestions into the student’s ear. Whether the student merely echoes these or works them into their own reasoning is crucial, but teachers cannot assess that after the fact. A strong paper may hide dependence, while a weak one may reflect real struggle.

Meanwhile, other signatures of a students’ reasoning – awkward phrasings that improve over the course of a paper, the quality of citations, general fluency of the writing – are obscured by AI as well.

Restoring the link between process and product

Though many would happily skip the effort of thinking for themselves, it’s what makes learning durable and prepares students to become responsible professionals and leaders. Even if handing control to AI were desirable, it can’t be held accountable, and its makers don’t want that role. The only option as I see it is to protect the link between a student’s reasoning and the work that builds it.

Imagine a classroom platform where teachers set the rules for each assignment, choosing how AI can be used. A philosophy essay might run in AI-free mode – students write in a window that disables copy-paste and external AI calls but still lets them save drafts. A coding project might allow AI assistance but pause before submission to ask the student brief questions about how their code works. When the work is sent to the teacher, the system issues a secure receipt – a digital tag, like a sealed exam envelope – confirming that it was produced under those specified conditions.

This isn’t detection: no algorithm scanning for AI markers. And it isn’t surveillance: no keystroke logging or draft spying. The assignment’s AI terms are built into the submission process. Work that doesn’t meet those conditions simply won’t go through, like when a platform rejects an unsupported file type.

In my lab at Temple University, we’re piloting this approach by using the authorship protocol I’ve developed. In the main authorship check mode, an AI assistant poses brief, conversational questions that draw students back into their thinking: “Could you restate your main point more clearly?” or “Is there a better example that shows the same idea?” Their short, in-the-moment responses and edits allow the system to measure how well their reasoning and final draft align.

The prompts adapt in real time to each student’s writing, with the intent of making the cost of cheating higher than the effort of thinking. The goal isn’t to grade or replace teachers but to reconnect the work students turn in with the reasoning that produced it. For teachers, this restores confidence that their feedback lands on a student’s actual reasoning. For students, it builds metacognitive awareness, helping them see when they’re genuinely thinking and when they’re merely offloading.

I believe teachers and researchers should be able to design their own authorship checks, each issuing a secure tag that certifies the work passed through their chosen process, one that institutions can then decide to trust and adopt.

How humans and intelligent machines interact

There are related efforts underway outside education. In publishing, certification efforts already experiment with “human-written” stamps. Yet without reliable verification, such labels collapse into marketing claims. What needs to be verified isn’t keystrokes but how people engage with their work.

That shifts the question to cognitive authorship: not whether or how much AI was used, but how its integration affects ownership and reflection. As one doctor recently observed, learning how to deploy AI in the medical field will require a science of its own. The same holds for any field that depends on human judgment.

I see this protocol acting as an interaction layer with verification tags that travel with the work wherever it goes, like email moving between providers. It would complement technical standards for verifying digital identity and content provenance that already exist. The key difference is existing protocols certify the artifact, not the human judgment behind it.

Without giving professions control over how AI is used and ensuring the place of human judgment in AI-assisted work, AI technology risks dissolving the trust on which professions and civic institutions depend. AI is not just a tool; it is a cognitive environment reshaping how we think. To inhabit this environment on our own terms, we must build open systems that keep human judgment at the center.

Eli Alshanetsky 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. Where does human thinking end and AI begin? An AI authorship protocol aims to show the difference – https://theconversation.com/where-does-human-thinking-end-and-ai-begin-an-ai-authorship-protocol-aims-to-show-the-difference-266132

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Tyler J. Woodward, Graduate Research Assistant, University of Iowa

A newly discovered protein from Earth’s toughest animal is inspiring breakthrough therapies for cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Tardigrades, often called water bears or moss piglets, are microscopic creatures that can survive just about anything: boiling heat, freezing cold and crushing pressure. In fact, tardigrades are the only known animal to survive in outer space. They can also endure radiation levels up to 2,000 times higher than what human cells can tolerate. Naturally, scientists have long wondered: How do they do it?

In 2016, researchers uncovered one of the tardigrade’s secrets: a gene with a sequence unlike any other known to exist in nature that makes a protein found only in tardigrades. When they introduced this protein into human cells, those cells also became more resistant to radiation. The protein was named damage suppressor, or Dsup, because it helps protect DNA – the blueprint for life – from damage.

Since then, researchers around the world have been trying to figure out exactly how Dsup works. As a biochemist studying Dsup, my goal is to uncover how this protein functions and one day use these insights to design new therapies that protect human cells from DNA damage.

How Dsup protects tardigrade DNA

Scientists have proposed several explanations for Dsup’s remarkable ability to protect DNA from radiation. However, these models have varying levels of experimental support, and no single explanation has gained broad consensus from the field.

In my recent work, I found that Dsup interacts strongly with DNA. It clings tightly to DNA – not just at one spot of the molecule but along its entirety. Dsup doesn’t have a fixed shape. Instead, it behaves more like a spaghetti noodle in water, constantly shifting, bending and adopting many different shapes. When it binds to DNA, it causes the strands to slightly unwind, like a zipper being loosened. This gentle unwinding may make DNA less susceptible to damage when exposed to radiation.

Some scientists instead believe Dsup acts like a shield. In this model, Dsup coats and physically blocks radiation from striking DNA. Others think it boosts the cell’s repair machinery, fixing damage before it causes detrimental effects.

In fact, it’s possible many of these models could be true at the same time. Since Dsup protects against many types of radiation – as well as the toxic byproducts created from radiation damage – it’s likely this mysterious protein has multiple functions.

Understanding Dsup could one day help people better protect their own cells – bringing a bit of the tardigrade’s extraordinary resilience to human health.

Using Dsup to advance medicine

Scientists are exploring whether Dsup could be used in medicine, especially in diseases where DNA damage plays a major role.

Because nearly all cancers involve DNA damage, some researchers think Dsup – or treatments inspired by it – could one day help prevent cells from turning cancerous. It might also protect healthy tissue during cancer treatments such as radiation or chemotherapy, which work by damaging DNA but often harm healthy cells in the process.

Dsup’s potential in human health extends much further. For instance, during heart attacks or strokes, organ tissues experience bursts of oxidative stress – chemical reactions that lead to extensive DNA damage. This oxidative stress can worsen disease severity and long-term outcomes for patients suffering from cardiovascular diseases. If Dsup can protect DNA during these stressful events, it might be able to reduce the cellular damage they cause.

Early animal studies are already showing promising results, demonstrating that mammals can produce Dsup, eliciting similar effects. In one study, scientists used an injection of mRNA – similar to the technology behind COVID-19 mRNA vaccines – to deliver the genetic instructions to produce Dsup in mice. When the mice were later exposed to high doses of radiation, those producing Dsup had far less DNA damage than untreated mice, suggesting real protective power in living organisms.

Dsup in agriculture, space and more

Beyond medicine, Dsup could make an impact in agriculture, space exploration and even data storage.

When researchers engineered rice and tobacco plants to produce Dsup, the plants became more resistant to radiation – an exciting sign for Dsup’s potential to mitigate crop damage.

In space biology, Dsup could help astronauts withstand the intense cosmic radiation that limits long-term missions.

And in a futuristic twist, some scientists are investigating how creatures like tardigrades could be used for ultrastable data storage. Current digital media is susceptible to damage from environmental conditions such as high temperatures or high levels of radiation. Digital media could be converted into a DNA sequence and genetically engineered into the tardigrade genome. Dsup could then aid in protecting the data from extreme conditions.

What’s next for Dsup?

Since its discovery nearly a decade ago, the scientific community has been excited about the potential technological advancements that Dsup could enable. However, significant research is still required to fully understand exactly how this mysterious protein functions in living organisms. Several scientific groups around the world are actively studying the unique properties of this protein.

Despite the work ahead, the story of Dsup demonstrates how scientists can learn lessons from tiny animals such as tardigrades. By studying the molecular mysteries of these remarkably resilient creatures, researchers are creating breakthrough tools to combat human disease and advance biotechnology.

Tyler J. Woodward receives support through the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

– ref. Water bears survive cosmic radiation with one DNA-protecting protein – learning how could boost human resilience, too – https://theconversation.com/water-bears-survive-cosmic-radiation-with-one-dna-protecting-protein-learning-how-could-boost-human-resilience-too-268057

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Carl F. Weems, Professor of Human Development and Family Studies, Iowa State University

Opening my social media feed, I’m often confronted with a jarring contrast: intense, diametrically opposed perspectives from different friends. The comments can be laced with insult, character attack and invective.

I’m certainly not the only one noticing this kind of vitriolic polarization. Recent polling suggests a majority of Americans believe that the country cannot overcome its current divisions.

As a professor of human development and family studies, I’ve researched and written about traumatic and adverse childhood experiences and existential anxiety for over 20 years. Scrolling through my feed, I was struck by the recognition that both sides had something in common: a profound sense of existential fear.

While political polarization has many potential causes, existential anxiety is one that has received less attention.

What is existential anxiety?

Philosophers have written about the concept of existential anxiety for centuries. My own empirical research is based on the writings of the mid-20th century philosopher Paul Tillich, who outlines three facets of this fundamental human fear:

• Fate and death – fears of nonexistence and uncertainty about one’s ultimate destiny.
• Emptiness and meaninglessness – fears about life’s deeper purpose or ultimate concern.
• Guilt and condemnation – fears of moral failure or threats to one’s ethical self.

Existential anxiety is humanity’s inherent confrontation with mortality, moral responsibility and search for meaning.

My colleagues and I have found that these fears are very common – between 75% and 86% of participants in our research endorsing at least one concern. Higher levels of existential anxiety are associated with indicators of poor mental health, such as symptoms of depression and suicidal ideation. Existential anxiety levels are also elevated among those who have experienced a life-threatening event. For instance, after surviving a natural disaster, up to 94% of research participants reported at least one dimension of this fear.

Importantly, our research suggests that existential anxiety is associated with aggression. In one study of teens, we found that more extreme existential anxiety as measured with the existential anxiety questionnaire was associated with two kinds of aggression: proactive and reactive. Proactive aggression is goal driven, deliberate and unprovoked, while reactive aggression comes in response to a real or perceived provocation or threat.

Underlying theme in existential anxiety

Existential fears have their roots in things that pretty much everyone worries about, at least from time to time. But what specifically triggers this anxiety can be different depending on your worldview.

For instance, as I scroll social media, I see friends expressing anxiety about fundamental safety issues, the fate of the nation, cultural erosion and the loss of traditional values. These concerns are mirrored by other friends’ posts expressing concern that the environment is being destroyed, democracy is failing and equality is lost.

Though the content of these expressions can be ideologically opposed, each reflects deeper concerns about societal fate, death or the end of a meaningful way of life. Unspoken but underlying is the fear that the “other side” represents a real and impending threat to one’s very existence.

Though the triggering circumstances can differ based on personal beliefs, both sides’ perspectives reflect existential concerns about meaning, moral direction and survival.

But existential anxiety isn’t just the likely root of some of this distress. Research suggests that underlying fear can increase aggression. Left unchecked, fears may spiral into potential violence.

Where do we go?

The good news is that while core existential fears may never fully abate, you can identify them, alleviate them and possibly even channel them toward adaptive action.

The techniques of cognitive behavior therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy provide a path toward finding common ground and preventing existential fears from escalating into violence.

Core to these techniques is recognizing and facing the fear. They both help participants overcome common tendencies such as seeing only one side of the evidence or catastrophizing that things are much worse than they really are. Acceptance and commitment therapy, for example, teaches participants how to cultivate psychological flexibility, learn to tolerate uncomfortable thoughts or emotions, and practice acting in alignment with one’s core values. Together, these skills foster positive action as opposed to destructive reaction.

As disturbing as my social media feed can be, I’ve also seen real-world instances of people figuring out how to connect across a divide. For instance, one poster appreciated another’s comment for helping her realize the existential value his perspective represented to him. Following that exchange, the second poster acknowledged he’d been seeing only one side. In other words, they each recognized the other person’s existential fear – accepting it as such helped them de-escalate the confrontation and move forward more constructively.

The critical point is that people on all sides of every issue yearn for safety, purpose and belonging. Recognizing that the core existential concerns we all share underlie polarized fears might be an important step toward bridging divides and reducing the risk of fear-driven aggression.

Carl F. Weems receives or has received funding from the state of Iowa, Youth Shelter Services of Iowa, Environmental Protection Agency, US National Science Foundation, and US National Institutes of Health. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, Association for Psychological Science, a member of the Iowa Academy of Education, and American Association for the Advancement of Science.

– ref. What both sides of America’s polarized divide share: Deep anxieties about the meaning of life and existence itself – https://theconversation.com/what-both-sides-of-americas-polarized-divide-share-deep-anxieties-about-the-meaning-of-life-and-existence-itself-266551

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Canton Winer, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Northern Illinois University

When I asked Manisha to describe her gender identity, she gave a simple answer: “Meh.”

“I don’t have a gender identity,” Manisha explained. “I get that other people look at me and see a woman but, for myself, there’s a blank space where my gender ‘should’ be. My gender is ‘none.’”

Manisha’s response didn’t shock me. In my work as a sociologist, I had been interviewing asexual individuals – people who experience low to no sexual attraction – across the United States for months from 2020 to 2021. Like Manisha, more than a third of the 77 people I talked to were uncomfortable with defining themselves through the lens of gender. Gender was, as I came to describe it, detached from their sense of self.

This finding comes at a tumultuous time in the politics of gender. On the one hand, transgender and queer social movements have sought to expand people’s ability to break out of the gender binary of man or woman. On the other, the Trump administration has aggressively worked to reassert the gender binary by law.

In my recently published research, I draw on interviews with 30 asexual people who, like Manisha, felt uncomfortable adopting any gender identity. These individuals said they felt that gender was irrelevant, unimportant, pointless and, overall, not a helpful framework for understanding and defining themselves.

These feelings of not identifying with gender highlight an unexpected belief shared by conservative politicians and by many within transgender and queer communities: the assumption that everyone has a gender identity.

Gender detachment

During this research, I spoke with asexual people from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S., ranging from ages 18 to 50. When I began, I planned on comparing the gendered experiences of three groups: asexual men, asexual women and nonbinary asexuals. I quickly had to abandon that plan as I repeatedly encountered interviewees who did not fit into any gender category.

Ollia was the first person who struck me as impossible to assign a gender to. “My gender is like an empty lot: There may have been a building there at some point, but it’s long since fallen away, and there’s no need to rebuild it,” they explained. “The space is better for being left empty.”

Many struggled to explain this sense that they did not truly have a gender identity. “There really isn’t a specific term that can be used to describe how uninterested I am in the concept of gender as a whole,” said a respondent named Faye.

Faced with a language vacuum, I eventually coined a term to describe these distant and skeptical relationships with gender: gender detachment.

Compulsory gender

Gender detachment might sound similar to being agender – that is, not having a gender. Researchers often see agender as a subset of nonbinary. However, most respondents drew a distinction between gender detachment and being agender or nonbinary.

For example, when I initially asked Brandy about their gender identity, they said they were agender. When I asked how accurate that label felt, however, Brandy explained that the term ultimately felt incorrect.

“A lot of people see gender as a spectrum from pink to purple to blue … and I’m a splotch of green on the frame,” Brandy explained. “I just don’t see myself in that spectrum. While agender and nonbinary are handy terms, they still work within a gendered framework I don’t place myself in.”

Brandy quietly pointed out something I found profound: The assumption that everyone has a gender is so omnipresent that even the sense that you do not have a gender has been turned into a gender identity – agender.

In other words, gender detachment poses a significant challenge to how people often think about gender – namely, the assumption that everyone has a gender identity. Gender detachment isn’t just about not identifying as a man or a woman; it’s about not identifying with gender at all.

Sociologists broadly agree that gender is a social construct, meaning its definition, norms, behaviors and roles are created and shaped by society, not by biology. This perspective implicitly understands gender categories to also be concepts created and shaped by cultural norms.

Western societies generally assume that everyone does – and should – have a gender identity. But what people who experience gender detachment show is that the very system of gender categorization is itself a social construct: an idea based on cultural norms rather than in empirical reality. I call this assumption compulsory gender.

Resisting compulsory categorization

Gender detachment represents a way people are resisting gender as a compulsory system of categorization.

Asexual people are uniquely positioned to question conventions surrounding gender. Asexuality upends the belief that everyone experiences sexual attraction – an assumption often called compulsory sexuality. It made sense to me that as asexual people begin questioning the universality of sexuality, some might also being to question the universality of gender. As compulsory sexuality crumbles, so does compulsory gender.

Sociologists often reinforce compulsory gender in how they measure and ask questions about gender. Indeed, that was initially the case for my own study. In each interview, I asked respondents about their gender identity. Almost all gave one. It was only when I asked them about their feelings about gender that I realized the identity they gave me did not feel entirely accurate to them. Rather, they felt detached from gender overall. My findings suggest that going beyond simply asking respondents to report their gender could help researchers better understand how people feel about the very concept of having a gender identity.

One way of understanding the current gender tug-of-war in U.S. culture is as a struggle over what gender identities people are allowed to claim. One camp seeks to expand how many gender identities are available and allow people to choose what resonates most with them. The other camp seeks to obligate people to identify solely within a gender binary of man or woman.

My findings on gender detachment suggest that despite their consequential differences, both camps reinforce compulsory gender by assuming gender is a universal element of who people are.

Canton Winer 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. ‘My gender is like an empty lot’ − the people who reject man, woman and any other gender label – https://theconversation.com/my-gender-is-like-an-empty-lot-the-people-who-reject-man-woman-and-any-other-gender-label-267286

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Mariel Borowitz, Associate Professor of International Affairs, Georgia Institute of Technology

Interest in the Moon has been high – just in the past two years there have been 12 attempts to send missions to the Moon, nearly half of which private companies undertook. With so much activity, it’s important to start thinking about coordination and safety.

To some, this concern may seem premature. About 10 to 20 missions are headed to the Moon in the next few years – far short of the thousands of satellites operating in Earth’s orbit. And the area around the Moon, referred to as cislunar space, is very large. Earth’s orbital area is often considered to extend from near Earth out to geostationary orbit, where a spacecraft orbits at a speed that makes it appear stationary from the Earth’s surface.

Cislunar space extends from geostationary orbit out to the Moon – an area with a volume 2,000 times larger than Earth’s orbital area. This size discrepancy seems to suggest crowding around the Moon may not be an immediate concern.

However, missions tend to choose from a select set of stable orbits around the Moon, so the vastness of cislunar space may be misleading when thinking about whether missions will intersect. Also, most government sensors that track spacecraft aren’t capable of consistently detecting and monitoring objects so far away from Earth, partly due to the glare from the Moon itself.

That uncertainty, combined with the high cost of lunar missions, makes operators more likely to move their spacecraft to avoid a collision, even when the probability of a collision is quite low.

As an interdisciplinary team combining space policy and astrodynamics expertise, we’ve been studying how companies and space agencies could manage traffic in lunar orbit without unnecessary maneuvers. Our research, published in March 2025 in the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, shows that due to the popularity of certain orbits and the uncertainties regarding each spacecraft’s location, potential collisions become an issue surprisingly quickly.

Our simulations show that with only 50 satellites in lunar orbit, each of those satellites will need to maneuver four times a year on average to avoid a potential crash – a significant cost in terms of fuel as well as potential disruption to mission objectives. Lunar orbit could easily reach that number of satellites within a decade if activity continues to increase.

Maneuvering satellites

Countries’ reports on their current operations in lunar orbit seem to support our finding that congestion around the Moon is quickly becoming a significant issue. In 2023, the Indian Space Research Organization reported it had maneuvered its Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft three times in four years, even though only six spacecraft orbited the Moon in that time.

Better monitoring and coordination between different space agencies could prevent congestion and keep countries from having to regularly move their spacecraft.

Monitoring cislunar space is not just important for safety – it can also help support national security. Multiple countries have weapons that can destroy satellites, and some in the space community are concerned that space weapons could be placed in cislunar space to escape detection. The U.S. Space Force is considering the potential security dimensions of cislunar space.

The U.S. currently has significant gaps in its ability to monitor this region, and Mariel’s research suggests that developing this capability – referred to as cislunar space domain awareness – should be a priority for national security. Improved monitoring would help the U.S. military observe activity in cislunar space, gather intelligence and assess potential threats.

Solutions in progress

Several research programs are experimenting in this area. The Air Force Research Laboratory is funding a program called Oracle that is developing multiple systems to improve the U.S. ability to monitor cislunar space.

The first Oracle satellite is expected to launch in 2027. It will be located at a Lagrange point, which is a spot between the Earth and the Moon where the gravitational pull of each object keeps the spacecraft in a stable position. From there, it can detect objects in cislunar space that sensors on Earth cannot see.

Improving monitoring is only one part of the solution. Entities sending missions to the Moon, including governments and companies, will need to share the locations of their operational missions and coordinate to avoid predicted collisions.

A NASA program dedicated to tracking and assessing lunar traffic is helping to facilitate this effort. The program compares individual operators’ information about their spacecraft’s current and future planned location to identify potential close approaches. In the future, this type of coordination could improve safety, when combined with sensor observations from systems like Oracle.

Countries and companies planning missions to the Moon could also try to coordinate before they launch their systems, so no missions end up operating too close together.

The Outer Space Treaty, a set of basic principles developed early in the space age, requires that countries avoid harmfully interfering with other countries’ activities, but the treaty doesn’t outline how to do this.

The United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space formed a team in February 2025 that hopes to address these and other coordination issues on the Moon.

With government and commercial missions to the Moon increasing, and NASA’s next human mission to the Moon planned for early 2026, countries will need to work together to protect everyone’s interest in the Moon.

Mariel Borowitz has previously received funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Defense, and the National Science Foundation.

Brian Gunter has current or prior funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Defense, and the National Science Foundation.

– ref. With more Moon missions on the horizon, avoiding crowding and collisions will be a growing challenge – https://theconversation.com/with-more-moon-missions-on-the-horizon-avoiding-crowding-and-collisions-will-be-a-growing-challenge-261344

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Ryan D. Griffiths, Professor of Political Science, Syracuse University

The United States government has been shut down for nearly a month, yet another indication that the political system has become deeply dysfunctional.

President Donald Trump has blamed the Democrats and called their negotiating strategy a “kamikaze attack.” Democrats are keen to stand their ground, hoping that the fallout is worse for Republicans. While each side casts blame on the other, it is Americans who suffer.

But the shutdown is just another episode in a series of polarization-fueled events that are leading Americans to lose faith in their government. Every nation has it limits, and one wonders how much America can take before the pressure to divide into separate countries becomes too great.

Consider the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which raised the specter of polarization-fueled conflict in America. Mentions of “civil war” surged online, fears grew over rising political violence, and the Trump administration vowed to crack down on left-leaning groups.

These are merely the latest examples of the mounting pressure on the American political system. A recent New York Times/Siena poll found that 64% of Americans think the country is too politically divided to solve the nation’s problems. The same poll showed that only 42% of Americans held that position in 2020.

In other words, nearly two-thirds of Americans think the system is broken, and the number is growing fast.

Calls for a national divorce

It should come as no surprise, then, that some are calling for radical solutions like a national divorce.

On Sept. 15, 2025, five days after Kirk’s killing, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that America needs “a peaceful national divorce. Our country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us.”

National divorce is the term used to describe the splitting of America into two parts: a red America and a blue America. Secessionist movements like Yes California and Red-State Secession have for over a decade been calling for a national divorce along political lines. And a 2023 Axios poll found that as many as 20% of Americans see national divorce as a solution to political polarization.

As a political scientist who studies secessionist conflict, I’ve found that the national divorce argument is commonly used as an analogy with marital divorce. Just as two spouses may be extremely ill-suited for one another, and far better off if they separated, the same can be said of red and blue America. They no longer see eye to eye on a range of issues, from reproductive rights to the environment and gun control.

If they seceded from one another and formed their own countries, the argument goes, then they could establish policies that would ensure the future they wanted.

But as I show in my new book, there is no way to disentangle red and blue America without tremendous violence. Additionally, a large and increasingly ignored percentage of Americans hold moderate views.

There is no doubt that polarization in America is a problem that is getting worse, but a national divorce is simply not the solution.

And yet America’s leaders continue to lead their country toward that outcome. The deployment of National Guard troops to blue cities, the polarization-enhancing consequences of competitive gerrymandering in states like Texas and California, and the spectacle of government shutdown are eroding the public trust. By continuing with policies that amplify polarization and erode the public trust, America’s leaders are fueling the calls for a national divorce.

How much can the country take?

The trend toward heightened polarization in America is not irreversible, but there are limits to how much the country can take before secession becomes a serious project. Some of the limits can be identified in advance.

First, it’s important that the country’s leaders take the pulse of America. If 20% of Americans favored national divorce in early 2023, what is the percentage now? That kind of sentiment can increase surprisingly fast.

Between 2006 and 2014, for example, Catalonian support for independence from Spain increased from 14% to 45%. If something like 50% of Americans concluded that America didn’t work and was better off broken up into smaller parts, then the country could tip rapidly into a secessionist crisis.

Second, high levels of secessionist support make the country vulnerable to trigger events that convince Americans that secession is the answer. The polarization-inspired assassination of prominent leaders can lead to a cycle of recrimination. Upcoming elections are also a concern. If they are closely contested and the losing side is unwilling to admit defeat, then the bedrock of democracy is broken. Both triggers can accelerate polarization and the turn to secessionism.

A third threshold moment is when a prominent leader decides to champion the cause of a national divorce.

Should someone like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott or the sore loser of a 2028 election conclude that the system is rigged, and secession is the only solution, then the entire project gains legitimacy.

It was that kind of elite conversion to the secessionist cause that energized the movement in places like Scotland and Catalonia.

The U.S. is a robust country and the longest-running democracy in the world. Americans have more in common than they realize, and the country can be a positive force in the world.

But without decisive action by political leaders to reduce the polarization that threatens to tear the country apart, the United States is at risk of turning from one country into two.

Ryan D. Griffiths receives funding from the National Science Foundation.

– ref. Polarizing political events are leading Americans to increasingly call for a national divorce – https://theconversation.com/polarizing-political-events-are-leading-americans-to-increasingly-call-for-a-national-divorce-267812

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Richie Zweigenhaft, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Guilford College

For years, Donald Trump’s distinctive, large and bold signature has captured the public’s attention. Not only did it recently come to light that his signature appeared in a book that Jeffrey Epstein received for his 50th birthday, but it fits neatly alongside Trump’s long history of brash self-adulation. “I love my signature, I really do,” he said in a Sept. 30, 2025, speech to military leaders. “Everyone loves my signature.”

His signature also happens to be of particular interest to me, given my decades-long fascination with, and occasional academic research on, the connection between signature size and personal attributes.

A long-time social psychologist who has studied America’s elite, I made an unintentional empirical discovery as an undergraduate more than 50 years ago. The link that I found then – and that numerous studies have since echoed – is that signature size is related to status and one’s sense of self.

Signature size and self-esteem

Back in 1967, during my senior year of college, I was a work-study student in Wesleyan University’s psychology library. My task, four nights a week, was to check out books and to reshelve books that had been returned.

When students or faculty took books out, they were asked to sign their names on an orange, unlined card found in each book.

At some point, I noticed a pattern: When faculty signed the books out, they used a lot of space to sign their names. When students checked them out, they used very little space, leaving a lot of space for future readers.

So I decided to study my observation systematically.

I gathered at least 10 signatures for each faculty member and comparison samples of student signatures with the same number of letters in their names. After measuring by multiplying the height versus the width of the amount of space used, I found that eight of the nine faculty members used significantly more space to sign their names.

In order to test for age as well as status, I did another study in which I compared the signatures of blue-collar workers such as custodians and groundskeepers who worked at the school with a sample of professors and a sample of students – again matched for the number of letters, this time on blank 3-by-5-inch cards. The blue-collar workers used more space than the students but less than the faculty. I concluded that age was at play, but so was status.

When I told psychologist Karl Scheibe, my favorite teacher, about my findings, he said I could measure the signatures in his books, which he had been signing for more than a decade since his freshman year in college.

As can be seen in the graph, his book signatures mostly got bigger. They took a major leap in size from his junior year to his senior year, dipped a bit when he entered graduate school and then increased in size as he completed his Ph.D. and joined the Wesleyan faculty.

I did a few more studies, and published a few articles, concluding that signature size was related to self-esteem and a measure of what I termed “status awareness.” I found that the pattern held in a number of different environments, including in Iran – where people write from right to left.

The narcissism connection

Although my subsequent research included a book about the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, it never crossed my mind to look at the signatures of these CEOs.

However, it did cross the minds of some researchers, 40 years later. In May 2013, I received a call from the editor of the Harvard Business Review because of the work I had done on signature size. They planned to run an interview with Nick Seybert, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Maryland, about the potential link between signature size and narcissism in CEOs.

While Seybert told me his research had not found direct evidence for a positive relationship between the two, the possibility of the connection he inferred nonetheless intrigued me.

So I decided to test this using a sample of my students. I asked them to sign a blank 3-by-5 card as if they were writing a check, and then I gave them a widely used 16-item narcissism scale.

Lo and behold, Seybert was right to deduce a link: There was a significant positive correlation between signature size and narcissism. Although my sample size was small, the link subsequently led Seybert to test two different samples of his students. And he found the same significant, positive correlation.

Others soon began to use signature size to assess narcissism in CEOs. By 2020, growing interest in the topic saw the Journal of Management publish an article that included signature size as one of five ways to measure narcissism in CEOs.

A growing field

Now, almost six years later, researchers have used signature size to explore narcissism in CEOs and other senior corporate positions such as chief financial officers. The link has been found not only in the U.S. but in countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Uruguay, Iran, South Africa and China.

In addition, some researchers have studied the effect of larger versus smaller signatures on the viewers. For example, in a recent article in the Journal of Philanthropy, Canadian researchers reported on three studies that systematically varied the signature size of someone soliciting funds in order to see whether it affected the size of donations. It did. In one of their studies, they found that increasing the size of the sender’s signature generated more than twice as much revenue.

The surprising resurgence of research using signature size to assess narcissism leads me to a few conclusions.

For one, signature size as a measure of certain aspects of personality has turned out to be much more robust than I imagined as an observant undergraduate working in a college library back in 1967.

Indeed, signature size is not only an indicator of status and self-esteem, as I once concluded. It is also, as recent studies suggest, an indicator of narcissistic tendencies – the kind that many argue are exhibited by Trump’s big, bold signature.

Where this research is taken next is anyone’s guess, least of all for the person who noticed something intriguing about signature size so many years ago.

Richie Zweigenhaft 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. Signature size and narcissism − a psychologist explains a long-ago discovery that helped establish the link – https://theconversation.com/signature-size-and-narcissism-a-psychologist-explains-a-long-ago-discovery-that-helped-establish-the-link-267572

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Joshua Anbar, Clinical Assistant Professor in Healthcare Administration and Policy, Arizona State University

I can say from personal experience that being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder can feel very isolating. Increasingly, however, it’s not unusual.

In the U.S., 1 in 31 children are diagnosed with autism each year by age 8, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number, released in April 2025, is up from 1 in 36 in 2023.

These statistics have been widely characterized as concerning. But I would like to offer a different perspective.

I am a researcher studying how young people with autism transition to adulthood. I also work on the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, which was established by the CDC two decades ago to determine the prevalence of autism in the U.S. and which produced the 2025 report.

Additionally, this topic is deeply personal to me, since I am diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, now known as autism spectrum disorder.

While autism does present challenges, my professional and personal experiences have taught me that creating space for autistic people’s perspectives affords opportunities for making the world a more vibrant place.

A rare condition?

Autism spectrum disorder is a developmental condition that manifests differently from person to person but commonly affects how a person communicates, socializes and interacts with the world.

In the 1990s, researchers and clinicians estimated that autism was a relatively rare condition, affecting an estimated 1 in 500 children. But the real-world experiences of families and clinicians suggested that it was more common.

In a landmark study published in 1998, researchers examined autism prevalence in a community in New Jersey to determine a more realistic estimate in the U.S. population. They found that approximately 1 in 150 children had autism – making it more than three times more common than previously believed.

Then, in 2000, the newly formed Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, which set out to study autism among 8-year-olds, looked across a much broader population and confirmed the higher prevalence.

A growing recognition

Since then, the number of children recognized as having autism by a doctor or an education specialist has continued to rise. The 2025 report shows that autism occurs in all types of communities. Autism affects children regardless of race, ethnicity or income level.

Autism prevalence does vary by location, though. It is highest in California, where it is recognized in around 1 in 19 children, and lowest in Texas, where the prevalence ranges from around 1 in 103 to 1 in 51 children. In Arizona, where I live and work, the prevalence is around 1 in 32, which is very close to the CDC’s overall nationwide estimate.

Researchers believe that this wide geographic variability in autism prevalence reflects complex interactions between community awareness and acceptance, the availability of clinical and education services in schools and communities that serve people with autism, broader culture acceptance of mental health challenges, and other societal factors.

The number of autism diagnoses also varies by gender. One well-known feature of autism is that it affects boys more often than girls. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, four boys for every one girl was diagnosed with autism. This disparity persisted for many years. But now, it seems to be shrinking: In the May 2025 data, the ratio for boys versus girls is 3.4 to 1.

This shift reflects the growing understanding that autism looks different in girls than in boys, which in turn allows clinicians to accurately identify it in girls in larger numbers.

From recognition to acceptance

Research shows, however, that this increase in autism diagnoses is not something to fear.

While some children diagnosed with autism are profoundly affected and require significant support, many others successfully engage in everyday activities like school, sports and work. One 2022 study found that a majority of children reported as having autism by their parents expect to attend college. This suggests that many people diagnosed with autism feel they are capable of living full and productive lives.

Of course, understanding the patterns of autism prevalence does not explain why it occurs in the first place. Research suggests that genes are a major cause of autism. But many things have changed over the past several decades since researchers and clinicians began tracking autism occurrence. For example, the criteria clinicians use to diagnose autism have changed over time to become less restrictive.

Today, a wider variety of symptoms are included in the diagnostic definition of autism spectrum disorder than when autism was first introduced as a mental health condition in 1980.

Another change is that autism is much more widely accepted in society than it was just a decade ago. For example, autistic characters are often portrayed in media as protagonists that the audience is cheering for. This growing recognition and acceptance is associated with an increase in self-diagnosis of autism.

Building richer communities

While autistic people tend to have some unique challenges, including repetitive behaviors, restricted interests and social communication difficulties, they also have particular strengths, such as creative, out-of-the-box thinking. For me, this includes seeing connections that others miss.

Autistic people report that their unique perspective offers specific benefits in their workplaces and careers. Many go on to make important contributions to their communities and to shape society as a whole.

For example, Temple Grandin, an outspoken author and speaker on autism and a professor of animal science at Colorado State University, has credited her autism with influencing her research on animal handling and animal behaviors. Comedian Dan Aykroyd, who was an original cast member and host of “Saturday Night Live”, credits his diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome and fixation on ghosts for developing the movie “Ghostbusters”.

A more complete picture of autism that includes strengths as well as challenges creates a starting point for building communities that are inclusive and accepting of autistic people. From there, policymakers, employers and others can start to create dynamic and vibrant places where people with autism can successfully live, work and play alongside their nonautistic peers.

And, given that children with autism will become adults with autism, it allows experts like me to identify needs and design policies that help communities support autistic people at different stages of their life.

For example, the growing number of students with developmental challenges raises demands on special education services. This means state and local education systems may need to develop and implement specialized training programs for educators to better support autistic students in the classroom.

Autistic children who need accommodations in school may also need support to succeed in adulthood. This can range from having physicians who gear their clinical practices to better listen to autistic patients to work-from-home and other accommodations that encourage engagement with traditional employment.

Broader frameworks such as laws and policies can also help attune workplaces and other environments to the needs of people with autism. For example, independent living programs and programs that train, hire and retain workers with disabilities can ensure the economic success of people with autism.

Cities can also become autism certified, a process that brings together community stakeholders in health care, education, local government, hospitality and leisure to better serve those with autism. This includes training on how to interact with people who have cognitive differences as well as creating sensory-friendly environments. The city that I live in – Mesa, Arizona – was the first to gain such certification in 2019, and a handful of other cities have followed suit.

As I see it, rather than a cause for fear, the growing recognition of autism is an invitation to build a world where every way of thinking and being has a chance to thrive.

Joshua Anbar receives funding from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. He is member of the Self-Advocate Advisory Board at the Southwest Autism Research and Resource Center (SARRC), where he also completed his postdoc work.

– ref. How autism rates are rising – and why that could lead to more inclusive communities – https://theconversation.com/how-autism-rates-are-rising-and-why-that-could-lead-to-more-inclusive-communities-257811