Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Elizabeth Riley, Lecturer in Psychology, Cornell University

Most people think of Alzheimer’s disease as an illness of aging. But in fact, the brain changes that characterize it begin much earlier – sometime around the third decade of life.

In the earliest of these changes, a tangled version of a protein called tau starts building up in a tiny region deep in the brain involved in sleep, attention and alertness, called the locus coeruleus. Tau later spreads to the rest of the brain.

Developing tau tangles doesn’t mean a person has Alzheimer’s disease – in fact, it happens to nearly everyone to varying degrees. But because these changes start in the locus coeruleus, some brain researchers – myself included – see this area as a canary in the coal mine for developing Alzheimer’s disease

We are exploring whether stopping or slowing down tau tangles in this brain region, or otherwise maintaining its health, may be a way to interrupt how the disease ultimately unfolds and to prevent other aspects of cognitive aging.

Emerging research from my lab and others is investigating the idea that a therapy called vagus nerve stimulation, which is already widely used for other health conditions, could be one way of keeping the locus coeruleus functioning properly.

The locus coeruleus and Alzheimer’s disease

The locus coeruleus sits in the brain stem, the lowest part of the brain. Its name, “blue spot,” comes from a pigment called neuromelanin that its cells produce.

The locus coeruleus plays a crucial role in multiple aspects of basic human functioning. It makes virtually all of the brain’s norepinephrine, a chemical critical for sleep, alertness, focus, learning and even immune function. And it receives inputs from nerves originating throughout the brain and body – including from the vagus nerve, which carries information to and from the heart, lungs and other organs.

My research explores this brain region’s structure, how nerve cells pass messages within it and how it connects with other brain regions. I also investigate how those features change throughout life and affect thinking and memory.

Studies suggest that starting in middle age, nerve cells in the locus coeruleus may get damaged by tau buildup, and that damage may correlate with declines in memory. Tau buildup, cell death and loss of function in the locus coeruleus precedes and predicts Alzheimer’s diagnosis and symptoms.

This has led researchers to hypothesize that keeping the locus coeruleus healthy could be a way to protect the rest of the brain, too.

Vagus nerve stimulation and brain health

The vagus nerve carries information between the brain and organs in the chest and abdomen, such as the heart and intestines, helping the brain monitor and regulate many of the body’s essential organs. It is responsible for sending rest and digest messages throughout the brain and body, stimulating digestion and promoting cellular repair.

In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers discovered that stimulating the vagus nerve can help ease epilepsy. They also found that doing so often also had other benefits, such as improving mood and thinking.

Today, vagus nerve stimulation is approved by the Food and Drug Administration not just for treating epilepsy, but also for migraine and depression, as well as to aid with stroke rehabilitation.

Vagus nerve stimulation for epilepsy and depression generally involves implanting an electrical stimulator in the left side of a patient’s chest, where the vagus nerve passes. Noninvasive devices for treating headaches deliver gentle pulses of electricity to certain places on the neck or ear where the vagus nerve is very close to the surface of the skin.

Even before the discovery of locus coeruleus’s link to Alzheimer’s disease, researchers hypothesized that vagus nerve stimulation might help mood and thinking in people with the condition. That’s because vagus nerve stimulation might work in part by raising brain levels of norepinephrine – and people with Alzheimer’s have too little norepinephrine in their brains.

Keeping the pace

Neuroscientists still don’t know exactly how or why vagus nerve stimulation might be beneficial for the brain, but one leading theory is that it helps regulate the activity of nerve cells in the locus coeruleus, enabling it to function properly.

Too much locus coeruleus activity could potentially make people too alert, causing them to feel stressed or even panicked. In fact, a hyperactive locus coeruleus fuels some symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Conversely, too little could cause depression or memory problems.

Some forms of vagus nerve stimulation neither turn up nor turn down locus coeruleus activity. Instead, they seem to affect the timing and pace of firing in its neurons. Other forms of vagus nerve stimulation seem to increase norepinephrine in the brains of rats, and researchers hypothesize that this may also be how vagus nerve stimulation treats epilepsy.

These different findings have led researchers to suggest that vagus nerve stimulation could act as an effective regulator for the locus coeruleus, enabling it to establish just the right level of activity for optimal functioning.

Can vagus nerve stimulation counter memory loss?

Intriguing hints are emerging that vagus nerve stimulation may help the aging brain.

A handful of studies have found that vagus nerve stimulation can prevent memory from worsening, or even improve it, in people with mild cognitive impairment or in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. One trial of 52 people ages 55 to 75 who were diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment reported meaningful improvements in memory and overall cognition after getting vagus nerve stimulation for an hour per day, five days a week for about six months.

Research in healthy adults around age 60 – and in healthy adults age 18 to 25 – has even reported improvements in different aspects of memory after just one session of vagus nerve stimulation.

This work is still very preliminary, but it offers hope for a new way of keeping some of the distressing symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and aging at bay.

Elizabeth Riley receives funding from the National Institute on Aging.

– ref. Vagus nerve stimulation shows promise as a way to counter Alzheimer’s disease- and age-related memory loss – https://theconversation.com/vagus-nerve-stimulation-shows-promise-as-a-way-to-counter-alzheimers-disease-and-age-related-memory-loss-269465

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Brian C. Keegan, Associate Professor of Information Science, University of Colorado Boulder; Harvard University

Paul Ehrlich opened his 1968 book “The Population Bomb” with a scene recounting returning to his hotel through a crowded Delhi neighborhood on a stifling night in the mid-1960s. He described the physical sensation of overpopulation: people eating, washing, arguing, begging – “people, people, people, people.”

From that visceral opening, he declared that famine, conflict and nuclear war would sweep the globe in the 1970s because of overpopulation. Hundreds of millions of people would starve to death regardless of any crash programs launched to prevent it. Ehrlich argued for population control, chillingly describing population growth as a “cancer” that needed to be cut out.

Ehrlich’s predictions were conspicuously wrong – and experts said so at the time. But his logic resonated through the 1970s and ’80s across the political spectrum. Its shadow is evident in today’s anti-immigration campaigns and White House arguments for mass deportation.

We have followed its long afterlife, as a computational social scientist studying contemporary extremism and as a historian whose book “Building the Population Bomb” analyzed Ehrlich’s impact.

Getting it wrong

Demographers and economists in the decades after World War II rejected the idea that Ehrlich was promoting to millions of readers: that population growth is the primary cause of environmental degradation. Instead, the expert consensus showed how pollution and resource depletion are driven far more by extraction and overconsumption than by head count.

Princeton demographer Ansley Coale told the Population Association of America in 1968, the year “The Population Bomb” was published, that attributing national failures to population growth had become fashionable despite most of the country’s problems having little to do with it.

His colleague and former Population Association of America president Frank Notestein demonstrated at the association’s 1970 meeting that increases in pollution had far outpaced increases in population. Notestein called population control in “developed regions” a distraction from the more immediate need to regulate industry.

Ecologist Barry Commoner’s 1971 empirical study confirmed that postwar environmental damage had stemmed almost entirely from new production methods and rising per capita consumption, not from the growing number of people. When the economist Julian Simon challenged Ehrlich in 1980 to a wager on changes in commodity prices over the next decade, Ehrlich accepted – and lost.

In a 2009 retrospective, Ehrlich acknowledged some of “The Population Bomb’s” flaws but did not revisit its central claim. The mass famines he predicted had not materialized in the 1970s because he had not anticipated the Green Revolution, a dramatic expansion of agriculture output. He said the book’s catastrophic scenarios were illustrative exercises, not inevitable forecasts. He dismissed his critics as shills for polluters. Ehrlich’s retrospective concluded, “It was thus a successful tract, and we’re proud of it.”

Origins of the ‘population bomb’ analogy

Ehrlich’s arguments resonated with the popular anxieties of the late 1960s. By tying population growth to the environment, the threat of nuclear war and the sexual revolution, Ehrlich generated left-wing support for population control, which had previously been primarily a concern of the political right.

With the publication of “The Population Bomb,” Ehrlich became a celebrity almost overnight. Though his claims about the consequences of population growth were consistently wrong, Ehrlich had an enormous public impact. A butterfly biologist, he was suddenly booking appearances on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.” He influenced dystopian Hollywood productions, such as “ZPG” (1972), “Soylent Green” (1973) and “Logan’s Run” (1976).

The intellectual genealogy behind “The Population Bomb” ran deeper than Ehrlich’s own career. The “bomb” analogy was borrowed from a 1954 pamphlet by Hugh Moore, a businessman whose population anxieties descended from Guy Irving Burch, the anti-immigrant eugenicist who founded the Population Reference Bureau in 1929.

Burch, worried about “alien or negro stock” replacing Europeans, introduced the phrase “population explosion” to American public discourse in the 1930s as part of a campaign for immigration restriction. Moore updated Burch’s framework for the Cold War, warning that population growth in Africa, Asia and Latin America would produce communist expansion and nuclear war.

Ehrlich’s use of ecological carrying capacity – the idea that any environment has a finite number of resources to support a population before collapsing – justified coercive population control initiatives as foreign and domestic environmental policies in the minds of many Americans.

India’s “Emergency” period from 1975-77 subjected an estimated 8 million people to sterilization under conditions ranging from financial inducement to outright coercion. China’s one-child policy was enforced through fines, forced sterilizations and compelled abortions for nearly three decades. Population control programs in some developing countries imposed contraception and sterilization on women without their consent.

California performed sterilizations on some inmates until the 2010s. Hysterectomies on detainees continued in at least one U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center until 2019.

Ehrlich tied environment to immigration

Within the United States, Ehrlich co-founded the organization Zero Population Growth, which quickly outlasted its original premise. By 1972, the total fertility rate in the United States was already below the replacement level, and ZPG pivoted to immigration restriction as its primary policy target.

David Brower, the first director of the Sierra Club, authored the famous line “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” in the foreword to “The Population Bomb.” He appointed John Tanton, Ehrlich’s ZPG co-founder, to chair the Sierra Club’s national population committee.

Tanton would go on to build a network of groups that would implement the logic Ehrlich had popularized. This logic linked Ehrlich’s ecological carrying capacity, lifeboat ethics – the idea that wealthy nations risked being swamped by immigration – and reactionary anxieties about demographic change.

Tanton’s anti-immigration network became one of the most influential organizations in late-20th-century American politics. In addition to ZPG, Tanton founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in 1979, the Center for Immigration Studies in 1985, The Social Contract Press in 1990 and NumbersUSA in 1996.

This network produced policy research and lobbied for drastic reductions in both legal and illegal immigration. It was also instrumental in repackaging nativism into genteel policy briefs for the 1994 Republican revolution, securing the bipartisan passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, and backing anti-immigration efforts that passed in California and Arizona. Ehrlich served on FAIR’s board of advisers until 2002. He died on March 13, 2026.

Ehrlich, Tanton and Brower, as part of Californians for Population Stabilization, tried to push the Sierra Club to adopt immigration restrictions as an official position, but members of the influential environmentalist group resisted. Ballot measures and board elections for the Sierra Club from the late 1990s into the early 2000s exposed the deep ties to anti-immigration activists – and defeated them.

Overpopulation in politics today

Ehrlich’s population anxieties continue to have a long afterlife as political figures build on the idea that immigration constitutes a form of “replacement” of existing populations. Once-fringe grievances suggesting white people were being replaced by people of color have become part of President Donald Trump’s MAGA allies’ “mass deportation now” agenda.

Fifty years separate India’s sterilization camps from today’s ICE detention warehouses, but we believe the logic connecting them is direct: a population defined as excessive, a government apparatus authorized to reduce it, and a scientific vocabulary used by some of the president’s closest allies to justify the means as an ecological necessity. Ehrlich’s contributions to that vocabulary proved far more durable than his predictions.

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. The long shadow of Paul Ehrlich’s ‘Population Bomb’ is evident in anti-immigration efforts today – https://theconversation.com/the-long-shadow-of-paul-ehrlichs-population-bomb-is-evident-in-anti-immigration-efforts-today-279151

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Jeanne Beatrix Law, Professor of English, Kennesaw State University

Debates about generative AI in higher education have been informed by studies of completed student papers, or self-reported survey data. Research shows that artificial intelligence tools can support learning, but also has raised concerns, including students’ overreliance, cheating, and the potential degradation of critical thinking and engagement.

While these types of studies provide interesting snapshots of reported practices, their methodologies may hide something important: how writing actually unfolds while students are composing with the assistance of AI.

A pilot study I led of undergraduate writers at Kennesaw State University takes a different approach. Using think-aloud protocols – a method where participants verbalize their thoughts while performing – our research captures how students interact with generative AI tools during the writing process itself. This method helps us understand decision-making processes as they occur.

Our preliminary findings suggest a more complex reality than the common narrative that students are simply having AI write their assignments. Instead, many students appear to be negotiating when and how AI belongs in their writing.

Looking inside the writing process

In our study, 20 undergraduate students completed a 20-minute writing session responding to the following prompt:

People spend a lot of time trying to achieve perfection in their personal or professional lives. People often demand perfection from others, creating expectations that may be challenging to live up to. In contrast, some people think perfection is not attainable or desirable.

The assignment was to draft a thesis and evidence-based paragraphs that argue their position on the value of striving for perfection. Students were told they were not expected to complete them but to work through their writing process toward finishing. Students were told there were no right or wrong ways to use AI and were asked to use generative AI exactly as they normally would while writing.

Instead of direct observation, the study relied on post-session screen recordings and analysis of students describing their process. Collecting this data – their actions on the computer and transcripts of the voice recordings – allowed researchers to analyze the writing process without interrupting it. To reduce the possibility that students might alter their behavior if they felt observed, researchers set a timer and left the room during the writing session. The goal was to minimize the Hawthorne Effect, a phenomenon in which people change their behavior because they know they are being watched.

What we found

Across the transcripts, a few qualitative patterns consistently emerged in how students collaborated with AI while writing.

First, many participants turned to AI at the beginning of the writing process to help generate ideas or draft a thesis.

What we see in this practice is the student using AI-generated output to spark and shape their own ideas. One student explained the strategy this way: “After [generating a few ideas,] I usually just use that [output] as a prompt.”

In these moments, AI functioned less as a final answer and more as a brainstorming tool that helped students move past the blank page.

However, students frequently continued drafting independently after generating initial ideas. Many transcripts include statements such as “I think my thesis should be …” or “Let me write this part,” suggesting that some students retained control over their argument.

Editing the bot

Another strong pattern across transcripts is that students rarely accept AI text without editing it. Instead, they actively revise the generated language. As one student described the process, the AI “rewrites” their initial prompts and then the student rewrites the AI’s output. This allows the student to claim “authorship and ownership” of the final draft.

Another participant redirected the AI response when it did not align with the assignment: “AI is not following the prompt … try again.”

These moments show students evaluating AI output critically and treating it almost as a sparring partner, rather than simply copying it.

We also found that some students rejected AI’s suggestions altogether.

In several writing sessions, participants explicitly decided not to use the AI responses. One student reflected on this decision while composing: “I don’t really use AI for my research.”

Other transcripts show students switching back to their own writing when AI responses felt too generic or disconnected from their argument. These moments indicate that students are not only collaborating with AI, but they are also drawing boundaries around where it belongs in their writing process.

Finally, several transcripts showed students turning to AI during moments of uncertainty or when they felt stuck.

As one participant explained, “I used a lot of AI because I was struggling.”

Even in those cases, students often used AI as support as they drafted their essays, rather than directly copying and pasting its responses.

What this says about AI and writing

Our analysis suggests that generative AI is entering student writing not as a wholesale replacement for human authorship, but as part of a negotiated collaboration. The results suggest that AI most often enters the composing process during idea generation, revision and moments of writer’s block, while students maintain control over argument choice, voice and final phrasing.

Understanding how decisions to use AI unfold during the writing process, and not just what appears in the final essay, may help educators design assignments and policies that keep the human writer firmly at the helm.

Because our current findings come from a pilot cohort of 20 undergraduate writers, the results should be interpreted cautiously. To test whether these patterns hold at a larger scale, the research team is expanding the study to 100 undergraduate participants. The expanded study will also examine how neurodivergent writers interact with generative AI during composing, an area that remains largely unexplored in current research.

Undergraduate student researchers at Kennesaw State contributed to the preliminary analysis described in this article: Kylee Johnson, Vara Nath, Ruth Sikhamani and Kaylee Ward.

Jeanne Beatrix Law serves on an OpenAI Educator Advisory Group and on an advisory educator group for BoodleBox AI.

– ref. College students are writing with AI – but a pilot study finds they’re not simply letting it write for them – https://theconversation.com/college-students-are-writing-with-ai-but-a-pilot-study-finds-theyre-not-simply-letting-it-write-for-them-276856

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Peter R. Crabb, Professor of Finance and Economics, Northwest Nazarene University; Institute for Humane Studies

U.S. companies stung by President Donald Trump’s emergency tariffs had hoped for relief when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in February 2026 in their favor. But settling on a remedy – namely, rebate checks from the government – may be an even bigger headache.

Fresh wrinkles are prompting businesses to take different routes as they try to recoup money, with many opting to sue to improve their odds. These lawsuits are also underscoring the complex ways that tariffs worked their way through corporate accounting. In some cases, their cost was a clear line item; in others, the impact was muddier – say, through changed supply lines or selective increases in retail pricing. And some have backed off from a legal fight altogether and sold their refund rights to investment firms, often at a deep discount, figuring that getting something is better than risk getting nothing.

These technicalities didn’t seem to concern most members of the high court. In fact, only one Justice, Brett Kavanaugh, raised the question of the decision’s practical complications in his dissent. But his warning of “substantial” repercussions now looks more prescient by the day.

“The United States may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who have paid the … tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed down costs to consumers or others,” he wrote. “As was acknowledged at oral argument, the refund process is likely to be a ‘mess.’”

We are professors of finance and law who have been following these cases closely. To begin untangling the “mess” this ruling created, it’s helpful to focus on the different ways companies processed these tariffs – and why this means that a quick and clean remedy is unlikely.

To refund or not to refund

In its 6-3 decision, the high court concluded that a broad category of Trump’s tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act exceeded the president’s legal authority. Many companies that had sued for relief in the form of rebate checks cheered the ruling.

Judge Richard Eaton at the Court of International Trade, tasked with overseeing the refund distribution, then ordered the Trump administration to immediately start the process by asking Customs and Border Protection to recalculate its revenues without the tariffs to determine the rebate total – a tally that the agency estimates at about US$166 billion. But no one is sure how long it will take or whether it will work. And that uncertainty is sparking a fresh round of litigation.

Consider the different approaches taken by two businesses that paid the tariffs: logistics giant FedEx and the retail chain Costco. Costco filed suit against the Trump administration before the Supreme Court decision, while FedEx was among the many businesses that sued after the ruling.

Fedex, which saw some of its cross-border business plummet by 25% to 35%, collected tariffs from both U.S. companies importing goods and from U.S. customers ordering from abroad. In this function as broker, it was able to separate out the tariffs as a line item. That means it can more easily calculate what it would pay back to its customers. If Fedex gets the rebates, it has said it will refund all clients who bore the cost.

The accounting for Costco, by contrast, is less straightforward. It paid the duties but reallocated much of the cost internally. For some goods, it shuffled its extensive global supply chains to mitigate the tariffs’ bite or covered the cost by selectively hiking prices on items where demand would be less affected. It has not made as explicit a commitment of repaying its customers, although it has said it will try to honor it.

In both cases, executive pledges of refunds weren’t enough to prevent class action lawsuits by skeptical consumers since the Supreme Court’s decision, arguing they needed a more ironclad guarantee.

Avoiding the fight

Other companies, meanwhile, are waiving a legal fight altogether and selling their refund rights to investment firms, often at only a fraction of what they had paid in levies, in the expectation that full repayment is unlikely.

These companies typically are too small to finance a legal battle but big enough to have sufficient money at stake for Wall Street to take interest. For example, Atlanta-based Kids2, which sources almost all of its toy and infant products in China, sold its rights before the high court’s ruling for about a quarter of what it paid out in the emergency tariffs.

Legal complications aside, logistical snags are also emerging. In response to Eaton’s order, Customs and Border Protection chief Brandon Lord stated in a filing on March 6, 2026, that the government was “not able to comply” due to the “unprecedented volume of refunds” overwhelming the agency’s technology. It’s working on an online system to “streamline and consolidate refunds and interest payments,” to be operational in 45 days of that filing, he wrote.

In response, Eaton paused his order requiring immediate refunds, but he has demanded regular updates on CBP’s progress. On March 19, Lord reported
that the four components of the new online system were between 45% and 80% functional.

New tariffs may loom

While some companies may get relief for levies they already paid, there’s the risk Trump could still make good on his threat to use other federal statutes to impose tariffs. Those laws aren’t an easy workaround for the administration, but they still provide some options for Trump to apply tariffs on imports, including those that had been affected under the emergency levies.

Further uncertainty, in short, is likely.

As the stock market volatility in 2025 after Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement showed, this uncertainty can be costly. And the Supreme Court’s decision hasn’t allayed those fears. Companies have delayed investment, stockpiled inventory and diverted resources into compliance and legal review since the tariff wars kicked off.

Such actions can tie up capital that could otherwise fund new employment, higher wages or product innovation. Trump’s trade policy is, in fact, underscoring the basic economic lesson that tariffs don’t eliminate trade but simply make it more expensive, research shows.

Businesses have to decide to either pass these import taxes along to consumers via higher prices or absorb higher input costs themselves. Trump’s experiment is no different. According to fresh research from the New York Federal Reserve, as the average tariff rate jumped from 2.6% to 13% from January through November 2025, almost 90% of the burden hit consumers and businesses.

That’s why tariffs are a rare point of consensus among economists: They harm economic growth and are more costly today than ever before, given how interconnected global supply chains have become. And as the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling shows, undoing their effect is a lot messier than tariff boosters would admit.

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. Supreme Court’s tariff decision still leaves a ‘mess’ for companies trying to grab refunds – https://theconversation.com/supreme-courts-tariff-decision-still-leaves-a-mess-for-companies-trying-to-grab-refunds-276822

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Alejandro N. Flores, Professor of Geoscience, Boise State University

Across much of the Western United States, winter 2026 was the year the snow never came. Many ski resorts got by with snowmaking but shut down their winter operations early. Fire officials and water supply managers are worried about summer.

Where I live in Boise, Idaho, temperatures hit the low 80s Fahrenheit (high-20s Celsius) in mid-March. The same heat dome sent temperatures soaring to 105 F (40 C) in Phoenix.

Ordinarily, water managers and hydrologists like me who study the Western U.S. expect the mountain snowpacks to be at their fullest around April 1. Snowpacks are natural reservoirs of water that farms and communities depend on through the hot, dry summer. Their snow water equivalent, meaning the amount of liquid water in the snowpack, is seen as a bellwether for water supplies.

But the 2026 water year has been anything but ordinary. In fact, its snow drought has few historical analogs.

Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service shows that out of approximately 70 river basins across the Western U.S., only five are at or above the 1991-2020 median snow water equivalent for this time of year. Most of those are clustered around the Yellowstone region of western Wyoming and eastern Idaho.

By contrast, 11 basins have less than 25% of the 1991-2020 median, and more than half are below 50%. The headwaters of critically important rivers, including the Colorado, the Columbia and the Missouri, are peppered with basins that are far below historical averages.

Other important measures of snow water storage and ecosystem health, including which areas have snow cover in the Western U.S and how long it’s been there, also point toward snow reserves that are far below recent years.

How did we get here?

Just because the Western U.S. is in a snow drought doesn’t mean it isn’t getting precipitation. Temperatures have been high enough since the start of the water year in October that a lot of what normally would have fallen as snow fell as rain instead.

The West experienced a very warm December at all but the highest elevations, but strong storms also drenched large parts of the region. Washington state was swamped with rain that triggered flooding and melted the existing snowpack.

Temperatures in January were less extreme but still warmer than historical averages. However, precipitation in January was far below the 1991-2020 average throughout much of the region. February brought precipitation conditions closer to historical averages, but temperatures were much warmer than normal.

The Western U.S., therefore, got a triple whammy: Two of the three critical snow-accumulation months were too warm, and the third was too dry.

Water worries ahead

So what does this mean for water supplies and river flows?

A recent assessment of drought conditions from NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System suggests 2026 will be a tight year for water supplies.

Water managers in Wyoming and Washington are already signaling that some water rights holders – cities, irrigation districts, individual farms and industries can take limited amounts of water from rivers, canals and aquifers – can expect to receive less than their full allotment of water in 2026. It’s not unreasonable to expect other states to soon follow suit.

Throughout the Western U.S., water rights are administered according to the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation – those who hold the oldest legitimate claims to water from a river, reservoir or aquifer are entitled to receive their allotments first.

Junior water rights holders who may be at risk of receiving less than their full allotment of water likely have difficult decisions ahead related to the planting and management of their crops. The challenges are compounded by the likelihood of increases in fertilizer and transportation costs associated with the ongoing war in Iran.

In the Colorado River Basin, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s most probable forecast indicates water levels in Lake Powell falling below the minimum power pool elevation in December 2026. That’s bad news for power supplies, because below that level, the Glen Canyon Dam can’t produce hydroelectric power. The dam contributes power for millions of customers across seven states.

What the snow drought means for fire season

Another big concern is whether the historic snow drought is setting up the West for a bad fire season. That’s still an open question.

Rain has meant moisture is available now for plants to grow, but the lack of snowpack that normally keeps meltwater flowing through summer raises concerns about whether those plants will dry out, leaving them ready to burn.

Fire is a historically important feature of the forest and rangeland ecosystems of the West, and these ecosystems are to some degree adapted to large swings in conditions from year to year and season to season.

Because precipitation across much of the West is close to historical averages, there is snow in some of the highest-elevation mountains. And at lower elevations, some of the precipitation that fell as rain likely remains in the soils.

Weather conditions in the late spring and summer – how much rain falls and how hot and dry conditions become – will play critical roles in determining the shape forests and rangelands will be in for fire season.

What this winter suggests about the future

The record-low snowpack may be a harbinger of what a warmer future will look like in the region. Many researchers have investigated how climate change will influence snowpacks and water supply throughout the Western U.S., but questions and critical challenges remain.

Among them: In years like this, with near-normal precipitation but low snowpack, are there difficult-to-observe stores of water in the deeper subsurface that can help buffer against loss of snow for periods of time? That’s one of several questions my colleagues and I have been working on.

This year’s snow drought presents a timely, albeit high-stakes, stress test for the West. Everyone will be watching.

Alejandro N. Flores receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the US Bureau of Reclamation, and the USDA Agricultural Research Service.

– ref. 2026’s historic snow drought brings worries about water, wildfires and the future in the West – https://theconversation.com/2026s-historic-snow-drought-brings-worries-about-water-wildfires-and-the-future-in-the-west-279163

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Carolina Rossini, Professor of Practice and Director for Program, Public Interest Technology Initiative, UMass Amherst

The verdict in a Los Angeles courtroom on March 25, 2026, may become one of the most consequential legal challenges that Big Tech has ever faced.

This is an inflection point in the global debate over Big Tech liability: For the first time, an American jury had been asked to decide whether platform design itself can give rise to product liability – not because of what users post on them, but because of how they were built. The jury found that Meta and Google knew the design or operation of Instagram and YouTube was or was likely to be dangerous when used by a minor, and that the platforms failed to adequately warn of that danger.

As a technology policy and law scholar, I believe that the decision will likely generate a powerful domino effect in the United States and across jurisdictions worldwide.

The jury awarded the plaintiff US$3 million in damages and recommended to the court an additional $3 million in punitive damages. The jury split responsibility for the award between the companies: 70% from Meta and 30% from Google. A Meta spokesman stated that the company disagrees with the verdict and is evaluating its legal options.

Separately, a jury in New Mexico on March 24 found that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

The case

The plaintiff in the Los Angeles case is a 20-year-old California woman identified by her initials, K.G.M. She said she began using YouTube around age 6 and created an Instagram account at age 9. Her lawsuit and testimony alleged that the platforms’ design features, which include likes, algorithmic recommendation engines, infinite scroll, autoplay and deliberately unpredictable rewards, got her addicted. The suit alleges that her addiction fueled depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia – when someone see themselves as ugly or disfigured when they aren’t – and suicidal thoughts.

TikTok and Snapchat settled with K.G.M. before trial for undisclosed sums, leaving Meta and Google as the remaining defendants. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the jury on Feb. 18.

The stakes extend far beyond one plaintiff. K.G.M.’s case is a bellwether trial, meaning the court chose it as a representative test case to help determine verdicts across all connected cases. Those cases involve approximately 1,600 plaintiffs, including more than 350 families and over 250 school districts. Their claims have been consolidated in a California Judicial Council Coordination Proceeding, No. 5255. This means potential awards could run into the billions of dollars.

The California proceeding shares legal teams and evidence pool, including internal Meta documents, with a federal multidistrict litigation that is scheduled to advance in court later this year, bringing together thousands of federal lawsuits.

Legal innovation: Design as defect

For decades, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shielded technology companies from liability for content that their users post. Whenever people sued over harms linked to social media, companies invoked Section 230, and the cases typically died early.

The K.G.M. litigation used a different legal strategy: negligence-based product liability. The plaintiff argued that the harm arises not from third-party content but from the platforms’ own engineering and design decisions, the “informational architecture” and features that shape users’ experience of content. Infinite scrolling, autoplay, notifications calibrated to heighten anxiety and variable-reward systems operate on the same behavioral principles as slot machines.

These are conscious product design choices. The plaintiff contended – and the jury agreed – that the platforms should be subject to the same safety obligations as any other manufactured product, thereby holding their makers accountable for negligence, strict liability or breach of warranty of fitness.

Judge Carolyn Kuhl of the California Superior Court agreed that these claims warranted a jury trial. In her Nov. 5, 2025, ruling denying Meta’s motion for summary judgment, she distinguished between features related to content publishing, which Section 230 might protect, and features like notification timing, engagement loops and the absence of meaningful parental controls, which it might not.

Here, Kuhl established that the conduct-versus-content distinction – treating algorithmic design choices as the company’s own conduct rather than as the protected publication of third-party speech – was a viable legal theory for a jury to evaluate. This fine-grained approach, evaluating each design feature individually and recognizing the increased complexities of technology products’ design, represents a potential road map for courts nationwide.

What the companies knew

The product liability theory depends partly on what companies knew about the risks of their designs. The 2021 leak of internal Meta documents, widely known as the “Facebook Papers,” revealed that the company’s own researchers had flagged concerns about Instagram’s effects on adolescent body image and mental health.

Internal communications disclosed in the K.G.M. proceedings have included exchanges among Meta employees comparing the platform’s effects to pushing drugs and gambling. Whether this internal awareness constitutes the kind of corporate knowledge that supports liability is a central factual question for the jury to decide.

There is a clear analogy to tobacco litigation. In the 1990s, plaintiffs succeeded against tobacco companies by proving they had concealed evidence about the addictive and deadly nature of their products. In K.G.M., the plaintiff here is making the same core argument: Where there is corporate knowledge, deliberate targeting and public denial, liability follows.

K.G.M.’s lead trial attorney, Mark Lanier, is the same lawyer who won multibillion-dollar verdicts in the Johnson & Johnson baby powder litigation, signaling the scale of accountability they are pursuing.

The science: Contested but consequential

The scientific evidence on social media and youth mental health is real but genuinely complex. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) does not classify social media use as an addictive disorder. Researchers like Amy Orben have found that large-scale studies show small average associations between social media use and reduced well-being.

Yet Orben herself has cautioned that these averages might mask severe harms experienced by a subset of vulnerable young users, particularly girls ages 12 to 15. The legal question under the negligence theory is not whether social media harms everyone equally, but whether platform designers had an obligation to account for foreseeable interactions between their design features and the vulnerabilities of developing minds, especially when internal evidence suggested they were aware of the risks.

First, a manufacturer has a duty to exercise reasonable care in designing its product, and that duty extends to harms that are reasonably foreseeable. Second, the plaintiff must show that the type of injury suffered was a foreseeable consequence of the design choice. The manufacturer doesn’t need to have foreseen the exact injury to the exact plaintiff, but the general category of harm must have been within the range of what a reasonable designer would anticipate.

This is why the Facebook Papers and internal Meta research are so legally significant in K.G.M.’s case: They go directly to establishing that the company’s own researchers identified the specific categories of harm – depression, body dysmorphia, compulsive use patterns among adolescent girls – that the plaintiff alleges she suffered. If the company’s own data flagged these risks and leadership continued on the same design trajectory, that would considerably strengthen the foreseeability element.

Why it matters

Even if the science is unsettled, the legal and policy landscape is shifting fast. In 2025 alone, 20 states in the U.S. enacted new laws governing children’s social media use. And this wave is not only in the U.S.; countries such as the U.K., Australia, Denmark, France and Brazil are also moving forward with specific legislation, including mandates banning social media for those under 16.

The K.G.M. trial represents something more fundamental: the proposition that algorithmic design decisions are product decisions, carrying real obligations of safety and accountability. If this verdict causes that framework to take hold, every platform will need to reconsider not just what content appears, but why and how it is delivered.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on March 6, 2026. It was updated to include the jury’s verdict.

I was staff at organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and the Harvard Berkman Klein Center, which were funded by various foundations and companies. Refer to their websites for disclosures. I was a staff member in the connectivity policy team at Facebook (2016-2018). I am an advisory board member of non-profits, including Internet Lab (Brazil) and Derechos Digitales (Chile). I am a senior advisor (without any honorarium) at the Datasphere Initiative and Portulans Institute. More details at https://www.carolinarossini.net/bio

– ref. Jury finds Instagram and YouTube addictive in lawsuit poised to reshape social media – platform design meets product liability – https://theconversation.com/jury-finds-instagram-and-youtube-addictive-in-lawsuit-poised-to-reshape-social-media-platform-design-meets-product-liability-277066

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

The disruptions from the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran spread quickly to commercial aircraft, shipping lanes and the world’s energy supply. Those repercussions have already hit fuel costs, including for motorists, truckers and fishermen, and are set to spread even more widely, to packaging, household goods, appliances, medicines and electronics.

I study global supply chains and how they interconnect and depend on each other around the world. There are several ways in which U.S. consumers will begin to feel the pinch of the war. Some of those effects have to do with domestic commerce, and some are a result of the interwoven nature of global trade, where raw materials from one place are shipped somewhere they are manufactured into specific items that are then transported to consumers.

Rising costs in the US

There are three main categories in which costs will begin to rise.

Fuel shortages and freight surcharges: From March 2-16, 2026, the average nationwide price of U.S. regular gasoline rose from US$3.01 to $3.96 per gallon, while diesel fuel rose from $3.89 to $5.37. Diesel prices matter to consumer costs because diesel engines power trucks, farm machines, construction equipment, fishing vessels and many of the vehicles that carry domestic freight. When items become more expensive to harvest, build and ship, diesel costs spread quickly into grocery, household and building material prices.

Chemicals, fertilizer and packaging: QatarEnergy has said Iranian attacks on the world’s largest liquefied natural gas export plant at Ras Laffan and another plant in Mesaieed, both in Qatar, forced the company to stop producing LNG and associated products on March 2. Two days later, the company declared that it could not fulfill its contracts due to extreme external pressures that would require many years to recover from. The affected products included urea, polymers and methanol, used to make fertilizer, plastics, detergents, packaging and other consumer goods. Reduced production and closed transit routes are also affecting supplies of aluminum and helium produced in the Gulf countries.

Factory slowdowns abroad: When shipping slows and energy costs rise, factories abroad face higher operating costs. As a result they ration production, diverting energy supplies to producing a narrow range of high-value products that can absorb these costs. Diversions of shipment traffic and fewer transportation routes lead to delivery delays. Economic research shows that shipping-cost increases also raise import prices, producer costs and consumer inflation.

Air cargo and delivery delays: Early in the conflict, several countries, including Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, closed their airspace to all traffic. Later advisories warned of risks to planes over neighboring countries as well, except for limited corridors. Those closures affected 20% of global air cargo capacity, raising the risk of delays for higher-value cargo such as medicines, aircraft components and electronics.

Global disruptions

About 80% of the oil and 90% of the LNG moving through the Strait of Hormuz, between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, is destined for Asian markets. With strait shipments stopped, consumer electronics and manufacturing hubs in China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea are drawing on their energy reserves and inventories. But those supplies will run out in a few months. Reduced manufacturing capacity can be expected to cause shortages and higher costs for textiles, chemicals, consumer goods, electronics, appliances, auto parts and fertilizer-intensive industries.

Europe is less directly dependent than Asia on Hormuz shipments, but it is still vulnerable to high LNG prices, increased shipping costs and diesel fuel shortages. Europe has also already faced shortages of heating oil and other fuels as a result of Russia’s war on Ukraine. The strait carried about 7% of Europe’s LNG inflows in 2025, and higher costs for energy, ship fuel, freight and insurance can ripple through global trade. For the U.S., that matters because Europe supplies industrial equipment, precision components, medical technology and specialty chemicals sold to businesses and directly to consumers.

African economies are especially exposed to fuel and fertilizer shocks. Large volumes of fertilizer pass through Hormuz, and higher energy and fertilizer prices threaten crop yields and food systems across most of Africa. As a result, U.S. prices can rise for coffee and chocolate – much of which originates in Africa – as well as critical minerals for electric vehicles, energy storage and high-tech equipment.

Coming home to Americans

This war is not a distant geopolitical shock for U.S. households. It reaches everyday life through fuel, freight, fertilizer, petrochemicals and global supply chains through factories that produce consumer goods.

Some mitigation is possible: 32 nations will be releasing more than 400 million barrels of oil to the global market over the next few months. There are pipelines and alternative ports in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that, if they remain undamaged and uninterrupted, can handle potentially 40% of the 20 billion barrels per day that was passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Combined with a temporary easing of sanctions on Russian oil, limited shipments to India and China through the Strait of Hormuz and the March 23 announcement of a five-day pause on U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, it is possible to head off the worst-case scenario.

But these measures cannot fully replace the strait’s normal oil and LNG shipment volume. And if oil production, refining and shipment locations continue to be targeted, recovery can be expected to stretch into many months. The likely result is broader inflation, prolonged shortages and longer waits for goods of all sorts, including food and packaging as well as electronics and appliances.

Vidya Mani has received funding from LMI. She is a Senior Research Fellow with the Mexico Program and Inter-American Dialogue and an Expert Advisor on Critical Minerals, Emerging Technologies, and Supply Chain Resilience at the Public Spend Forum.

– ref. Soaring gas prices and disrupted supply chains will ripple out to increase costs in every store and sector of the economy – https://theconversation.com/soaring-gas-prices-and-disrupted-supply-chains-will-ripple-out-to-increase-costs-in-every-store-and-sector-of-the-economy-278349

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Alejandro N. Flores, Professor of Geoscience, Boise State University

Across much of the Western United States, winter 2026 was the year the snow never came. Many ski resorts got by with snowmaking but shut down their winter operations early. Fire officials and water supply managers are worried about summer.

Where I live in Boise, Idaho, temperatures hit the low 80s Fahrenheit (high-20s Celsius) in mid-March. The same heat dome sent temperatures soaring to 105 F (40 C) in Phoenix.

Ordinarily, water managers and hydrologists like me who study the Western U.S. expect the mountain snowpacks to be at their fullest around April 1. Snowpacks are natural reservoirs of water that farms and communities depend on through the hot, dry summer. Their snow water equivalent, meaning the amount of liquid water in the snowpack, is seen as a bellwether for water supplies.

But the 2026 water year has been anything but ordinary. In fact, its snow drought has few historical analogs.

Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service shows that out of approximately 70 river basins across the Western U.S., only five are at or above the 1991-2020 median snow water equivalent for this time of year. Most of those are clustered around the Yellowstone region of western Wyoming and eastern Idaho.

By contrast, 11 basins have less than 25% of the 1991-2020 median, and more than half are below 50%. The headwaters of critically important rivers, including the Colorado, the Columbia and the Missouri, are peppered with basins that are far below historical averages.

Other important measures of snow water storage and ecosystem health, including which areas have snow cover in the Western U.S and how long it’s been there, also point toward snow reserves that are far below recent years.

How did we get here?

Just because the Western U.S. is in a snow drought doesn’t mean it isn’t getting precipitation. Temperatures have been high enough since the start of the water year in October that a lot of what normally would have fallen as snow fell as rain instead.

The West experienced a very warm December at all but the highest elevations, but strong storms also drenched large parts of the region. Washington state was swamped with rain that triggered flooding and melted the existing snowpack.

Temperatures in January were less extreme but still warmer than historical averages. However, precipitation in January was far below the 1991-2020 average throughout much of the region. February brought precipitation conditions closer to historical averages, but temperatures were much warmer than normal.

The Western U.S., therefore, got a triple whammy: Two of the three critical snow-accumulation months were too warm, and the third was too dry.

Water worries ahead

So what does this mean for water supplies and river flows?

A recent assessment of drought conditions from NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System suggests 2026 will be a tight year for water supplies.

Water managers in Wyoming and Washington are already signaling that some water rights holders – cities, irrigation districts, individual farms and industries can take limited amounts of water from rivers, canals and aquifers – can expect to receive less than their full allotment of water in 2026. It’s not unreasonable to expect other states to soon follow suit.

Throughout the Western U.S., water rights are administered according to the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation – those who hold the oldest legitimate claims to water from a river, reservoir or aquifer are entitled to receive their allotments first.

Junior water rights holders who may be at risk of receiving less than their full allotment of water likely have difficult decisions ahead related to the planting and management of their crops. The challenges are compounded by the likelihood of increases in fertilizer and transportation costs associated with the ongoing war in Iran.

In the Colorado River Basin, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s most probable forecast indicates water levels in Lake Powell falling below the minimum power pool elevation in December 2026. That’s bad news for power supplies, because below that level, the Glen Canyon Dam can’t produce hydroelectric power. The dam contributes power for millions of customers across seven states.

What the snow drought means for fire season

Another big concern is whether the historic snow drought is setting up the West for a bad fire season. That’s still an open question.

Rain has meant moisture is available now for plants to grow, but the lack of snowpack that normally keeps meltwater flowing through summer raises concerns about whether those plants will dry out, leaving them ready to burn.

Fire is a historically important feature of the forest and rangeland ecosystems of the West, and these ecosystems are to some degree adapted to large swings in conditions from year to year and season to season.

Because precipitation across much of the West is close to historical averages, there is snow in some of the highest-elevation mountains. And at lower elevations, some of the precipitation that fell as rain likely remains in the soils.

Weather conditions in the late spring and summer – how much rain falls and how hot and dry conditions become – will play critical roles in determining the shape forests and rangelands will be in for fire season.

What this winter suggests about the future

The record-low snowpack may be a harbinger of what a warmer future will look like in the region. Many researchers have investigated how climate change will influence snowpacks and water supply throughout the Western U.S., but questions and critical challenges remain.

Among them: In years like this, with near-normal precipitation but low snowpack, are there difficult-to-observe stores of water in the deeper subsurface that can help buffer against loss of snow for periods of time? That’s one of several questions my colleagues and I have been working on.

This year’s snow drought presents a timely, albeit high-stakes, stress test for the West. Everyone will be watching.

Alejandro N. Flores receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the US Bureau of Reclamation, and the USDA Agricultural Research Service.

– ref. What the historic snow drought means for water, wildfires and the future of the West – https://theconversation.com/what-the-historic-snow-drought-means-for-water-wildfires-and-the-future-of-the-west-279163

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Armin Sorooshian, Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, University of Arizona

The waves of U.S. and Israeli bomb strikes in Tehran and Beirut, and Iran’s missile and drone attacks on neighboring countries in response, are damaging more than buildings – they are sending toxic debris into the air in cities that are home to millions of people.

Military strikes have hit Iran’s missile stockpiles, nuclear facilities and oil refineries. When a strike set fire to an oil depot, it sent toxic black clouds billowing over Tehran and created oily rain that settled on buildings, cars and people. Residents described having headaches and difficulty breathing.

As a chemical and environmental engineer who studies the behavior and effects of airborne particles, I have been following the damage reports to understand the health risks residents are facing as toxic materials get into the air. The risks come from many sources, from heavy metals in the munitions themselves to the materials sent airborne by what they blow apart.

The invisible enemy during war: Air pollution

A disaster’s effects on air quality and public health depend in large part on what is being destroyed.

The terrorist attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, were localized, but they ejected massive bursts of pollutants into the air. These included gases such as volatile organic compounds and particulates – often called aerosols – containing a myriad of substances, such as dust, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, metals, asbestos and polychlorinated biphenyls.

These pollutants can harm the lungs, making breathing difficult, and worsen cardiovascular problems, contributing to heart attacks, among other health damage. Tiny particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers, called PM2.5, are especially harmful because they can travel deep into the human respiratory system. But larger particles can also bring major airborne health risks.

When buildings are heavily damaged or collapse, the rubble often contains crushed concrete, gypsum and carcinogenic fibrous materials, such as asbestos. Even after the initial dust settles, wind and other disturbances, including efforts to find survivors or clear the rubble, can send those materials back into the air, putting more people at risk.

Many rescue and recovery workers who responded to the World Trade Center collapse in 2001 developed chronic respiratory problems. That’s also a risk for people searching for survivors in bombed buildings after military strikes and later when cleaning up the debris.

Fires create additional hazards as vehicles, buildings and the chemicals and other materials in them burn. The January 2025 fires in Los Angeles sent a stew of dangerous particles and gases into the lower atmosphere. Studies have shown how lead particles that fell to the ground were kicked back up into the air again where people could inhale them, along with other contaminants.

Munitions and oil facilities

Military attacks degrade air quality in other ways. The Gaza Strip, Iraq, Kuwait, Ukraine and most recently Iran and surrounding countries have all faced extensive damage from munitions, which contain toxic materials. Bombs and artillery often contain explosives and heavy metals, such as lead and mercury, which also contaminate soil, water and the environment.

When oil storage facilities and pipelines are damaged, they emit an especially harmful cocktail of pollutants. This chemical blend includes airborne soot particles, which darken the sky and contribute to the “black rain” observed in Iran.

During the Gulf War in 1991, downwind countries experienced similar polluted rain as Kuwait’s oil fields burned. The U.S. Department of Defense found that the smoke plumes contained sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, among other gases and soot.

The severe consequences of environmental pollution during wars prompted the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine to publish a series of reports on Gulf War military veterans’ health, starting in the early 2000s. They documented illnesses soldiers suffered after being exposed to chemicals and heavy metals, including from oil well fires. They also examined scientific evidence on potential associations between pollution in war and reproductive and developmental effects in the veterans’ children.

Getting pollution out of the air

Nature, including rain and wind, can help reduce the pollution levels in the air.

Rain helps pull particles out of the air, depositing them back on the ground and surfaces. The raindrops form around particles and also collect more particles as they fall. However, rain has occurred only sporadically since the military attacks began in Iran.

And rain also contributes to runoff into streams, and pollutants can damage crops and contaminate waterways, soil and vegetation.

Wind can help blow pollutants out of an area, though at the expense of downwind sites.

Tehran has another challenge when it comes to pollution because of its terrain. The city is surrounded by mountains and prone to the effects of low-altitude temperature inversions in the wintertime, which concentrates pollutants even more by holding them closer to the ground. These attacks have been slightly outside the coldest periods for Tehran, allowing for deeper mixing of air, but the inversion still has an effect.

Can people in war zones protect their health?

People in war zones, where they are already under stress, can reduce their health risks by staying indoors in the days after military attacks, if possible. Keeping windows and doors closed can help reduce the amount of polluted ambient air that comes inside.

Indoor air quality is just as important as the air outside. For example, infants crawling on floors can be exposed to deposited particles with toxic materials that are tracked in or blow in under sills and doors, similar to wildfire smoke exposure.

As buildings continue to smolder and clearing debris sends harmful particles back into the air, the pollutants can also contaminate agriculture and waterways. People can try to avoid crops, water and seafood that were likely to have been affected by toxic airborne pollutants. However, getting information about risks gets harder in a time of war, and scarcity can leave people with few choices.

Armin Sorooshian 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. In war-torn cities, air pollution from burning oil depots and bombed buildings unleashes invisible health threats – https://theconversation.com/in-war-torn-cities-air-pollution-from-burning-oil-depots-and-bombed-buildings-unleashes-invisible-health-threats-278407

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Bryan Kirschen, Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics, Binghamton University, State University of New York

When Passover arrives each spring, Jewish families around the world gather at their tables to retell a story passed down for thousands of years. At ritual dinners known as Seders, they recount the Exodus, the biblical story of the Israelites’ liberation from slavery in Egypt – asking questions, singing songs and explaining the meaning behind symbolic foods like matzo.

In the United States, most Seders move between English, Hebrew and Aramaic, which was once the lingua franca of much of the ancient Middle East. In some homes, another language joins the table: Ladino, a form of Judeo-Spanish that Jews carried across the Mediterranean after being expelled from Spain in 1492.

Multilingualism has long been part of Jewish tradition. For Sephardic Jews who spent centuries in Ottoman and Muslim lands after their forced exodus from Spain – or Sepharad, as it is called in Hebrew – Ladino has played a central role at Passover. For many families today, the holiday provides a rare opportunity to hear the now-endangered language spoken aloud – a focus of my sociolinguistic research.

My work with Sephardic communities has demonstrated the ways in which the language is preserved across generations. Just as the story of Passover is transmitted each year, the holiday also provides a recurring encounter with Ladino.

Spanish roots

To the ear, Ladino sounds very much like Spanish. However, it has been shaped by many other languages with which its speakers have come into contact: Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese, French, Italian and Turkish, to name a few.

To the eye, however, Ladino used to look very different; it was traditionally written in Hebrew-based characters. Over the past century, most people who write the language have used the Latin alphabet.

Meanwhile, Ladino speakers assimilated to the majority languages of their countries – that is, if they were not from communities entirely wiped off the map during the Holocaust. Today, Ladino is an endangered language, spoken mostly by older Sephardic Jews.

However, since the turn of the 21st century, speakers from around the world have found new opportunities to communicate with each other, especially online.

Most speakers can be found in Israel, Turkey and the United States. A 2025 report from JIMENA, a Jewish nonprofit based in California, estimates that about 10% of Jews in the U.S. are Sephardic and/or Mizrahi. The latter term includes other populations of Jews from around the Middle East and North Africa. The Pew Research Center estimates that 4% of American Jews are Sephardic or Mizrahi, and another 6% say they are a combination of those groups and Ashkenazi – the term for Jews with ancestors from Eastern Europe.

Two varieties

“Ladino” is regularly used to refer to the everyday spoken language of Judeo-Spanish. Many native speakers simply call it “Spanyol” or “Espanyol.”

However, some speakers and scholars use the term “Ladino” to refer to a very particular variety: the form of the language found in religious materials like the Haggadah, the text that guides the Seder ritual. For many Sephardim, the word “Haggadah” also refers to the Seder itself.

This variety of Ladino preserves the structure of Hebrew, using a word-for-word translation – what linguists call a “calque.” For example, a native speaker might say “esta noche,” as in other varieties of Spanish, to refer to “tonight.” The Ladino textual tradition, though, reads “la noche la esta.” This mirrors the word order of the Hebrew phrase: “ha-laylah ha-zeh,” or “the night the this.”

That this practice has endured for centuries is both remarkable and, in some ways, unsurprising.

Sephardic populations once regularly spoke Judeo-Spanish as an everyday language, reserving the calque variety for religious or instructional contexts. Today, though, the spoken language is rarely transmitted to younger generations and has entered what linguists call a “post-vernacular” phase.

Many Sephardic Jews have completely lost the language of their ancestors, but others have preserved it and even found new ways to use it. One New York native with Sephardic roots in Turkey who I interviewed said she uses Ladino not just with relatives, friends and students, but even with “neighbors and Uber drivers, who are very interested in knowing more; when speaking to animals; or thinking by myself.”

Still, the calque variety – the word-for-word translation from Hebrew – persists. Importantly, someone does not need to be fluent in the spoken language to participate, just as many Jews can recite prayers, lists and songs in Hebrew and Aramaic without necessarily being able to communicate in those languages. In this sense, engaging with multiple languages is a natural part of Jewish cultural practice.

Honoring tradition

Just as Passover tells the story of the ancient Israelites’ exodus and liberation, the use of Ladino today is a story of survival.

In my research, American Sephardim share that it is important to preserve their families’ heritage, referring to themes such as tradition, ancestry, memory and nostalgia. One Los Angeles native with roots in Turkey and Greece noted that it’s important “to honor our family members who survived to pass things along to us … to create new memories for the next generation. I think my kids cherish that their Passover is different from others.” Another, a Seattle native with roots on the Greek island of Rhodes, said, “I want to keep it alive in some way or another. And the only way I’m able to do that is by using it at the Seder.”

Beyond the read-aloud portions of the Haggadah, Sephardim of different generations keep Judeo-Spanish alive through songs and cuisine. Traditional dishes include “mina de karne,” meat pie; “keftes de prasa,” leek patties; “guevos haminados,” slow-cooked eggs; “bimuelos,” fried fritters; and even “arroz,” rice – a staple in some communities, but less common in others.

The Seder provides many different ways to engage with the language, often alongside older generations who acquired varying degrees of proficiency from their forebears. One Los Angeles native whose family came from Rhodes shared that all five generations of her family and their guests sing Ladino songs like “Un Kavretiko” – which many other Jews know as “Chad Gadya,” or “One Little Goat” – and “Ken Supiense,” or “Who Knows One?” Each family makes deliberate decisions about language use, customizing traditions and even the Haggadah text to suit their cultural and linguistic needs.

Like the Passover story itself, Ladino persists through the voices of relatives who learned the language from generations before them. For many Sephardic families, the Passover Seder remains one of the few moments each year when these sounds return to the table, linking the past and present through shared practices of storytelling, memory and language.

Bryan Kirschen is affiliated with the American Ladino League.

– ref. On Passover, some Sephardic Jews revisit not only the story of their ancestors, but also their Ladino language – https://theconversation.com/on-passover-some-sephardic-jews-revisit-not-only-the-story-of-their-ancestors-but-also-their-ladino-language-278290