Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Sara Konrath, Associate Professor of Philanthropic Studies, Indiana University

Most people know the basics of healthy living that become more important as you grow older: Eat plenty of vegetables, exercise regularly, sleep well, have a social life, limit your alcohol consumption and don’t smoke.

As an economist and social psychologist who study altruism and health, we wondered whether civic engagement might play a role as well.

In 2022, the American Medical Association, an organization representing doctors, noted that voting could potentially have health benefits. So we conducted a study that directly tested this idea: We examined whether older Americans – people who are 65 and up – who vote live longer than nonvoters.

Older adults vote at a higher rate than younger adults in the United States. In Wisconsin, the focus of our study, the voting rate of older adults is even higher.

We used data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a study which has followed a randomly selected sample of Wisconsin high school graduates since 1957. We compared the long-term health of older adults who voted in the 2008 presidential election to those who did not vote in that election. Using objectively verified voting records from Catalist, which tracks Americans’ voting behavior, along with official National Death Index records, we found that voters were 45% less likely to die within five years after the 2008 election, 37% less likely to die 10 years after the election, and 29% less likely to die 15 years later.

We also examined voting in the 2004 and 2012 presidential elections and found that the results were stronger for more recent elections – those held in 2008 and 2012 – compared to the earlier one held in 2004.

You may wonder whether this is just because healthier people are more likely to vote in the first place.

It’s easier to vote when you’re healthy than when you’re not, but this does not fully explain our results. Voters still had a lower risk of dying when we controlled for demographic factors such as gender, marital status and income, other forms of civic engagement such as volunteering, and a voter’s health status prior to voting.

We also found that those in poorer health to begin with benefited more from voting 15 years later than those who had been healthier before they voted.

Here’s another finding: How someone voted didn’t matter. When we compared what happened to older adults who cast their ballots in person to those who mailed their ballots, we found that both groups had about an equally lower risk of dying over the 15-year period.

It also did not matter whether a voter’s preferred candidate won. We found that although it can be stressful when the candidate you support loses, the people we studied experienced similar long-term health benefits of voting regardless of their political affiliation.

Why it matters

Scientists have long known that people who volunteer for nonprofits experience many health benefits, including a longer lifespan.

Voting is, arguably, also an altruistically motivated act. That’s because individual voters are aware that their one vote will not change the outcome of a national election.

What still isn’t known

If you are wondering why voting predicts lower mortality risk, well, so did we.

One possibility is that as with other civic engagement activities, including volunteering, voting may trigger positive biological responses that support well-being. Other researchers have found ample evidence showing that volunteering can boost the brain’s reward system, reduce stress and even slow some aspects of aging.
Although we didn’t test for these in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, they may help explain why people who vote tend to have better health outcomes than those who don’t.

Voting might also improve health through a sense of self-efficacy, civic duty and social connection, since it is both an altruistic and shared activity.

Although the exact explanations aren’t known, studies consistently show a link between volunteering and a lower mortality risk, which suggests that participating in civic life – even something as simple as casting a ballot – may be good for your health, like going for a run or eating vegetables.

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. Older Americans who vote live longer than those who don’t – new research – https://theconversation.com/older-americans-who-vote-live-longer-than-those-who-dont-new-research-279933

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Scott Friend, Professor and Schaefer Endowed Chair in Marketing, University of Dayton

Across the business world, companies often double down on struggling ideas, retreating only after clear evidence shows they won’t work.

A recent spectacular example was Meta’s metaverse push. After the organization invested US$80 billion over several years, it announced changes in March 2026 that all but abandoned its grand strategy.

But many companies are following the opposite approach of quickly walking away from failure instead of blindly sticking to a vision. Google ended its cloud gaming service Stadia when it failed to take off, choosing instead to reuse the technology elsewhere. Mercedes abandoned its zero-sidepod F1 concept once it clearly hit a competitive dead end. And Slack transitioned from a failed gaming app to a ubiquitous intra-office messaging platform.

What drove all these decisions wasn’t a tolerance for failure. Instead, executives read signals of weakness early, confronted inconvenient evidence and changed course before greater losses accumulated. In other words, they embraced “failing fast.”

As business professors who study sales performance and sales failure, we argue that this concept is one of the most important yet most misunderstood ideas in our field. It’s not about celebrating mistakes or lowering standards, nor does it give leaders permission to abandon rigor or give up easily.

At its core, it’s about creating the conditions for faster learning: building the managerial discipline to recognize when an opportunity is unlikely to pay off, stopping before sunk costs deepen, and redirecting scarce resources to more promising bets. And this is a strategy that can work for any company, at any level, no matter how high or low the stakes.

The Slack model

Slack is everywhere these days. But few recall that it was actually founded in 2011 as a multiplayer online game called Glitch that failed to take off. The company, then known as Tiny Speck, shut it down in 2012, but in the process its leaders identified hidden value in an internal communication tool they had built simply to coordinate their own work.

This practical side project looked like a tool that could do well in the burgeoning market for team-collaboration software. So the company pivoted by deploying its remaining capital and talent to launch Slack in 2013. Since that time, Slack has become one of the fastest-growing enterprise software platforms in history, eventually leading to a
$27.7 billion acquisition by the business platform Salesforce in 2021.

Stories like these are often told as tales of persistence, but they’re actually examples of disciplined quitting. Similar cases include 3M’s accidental invention of Post-it Notes (first used as ad hoc bookmarks for hymnals); Shopify’s pivot from selling snowboards to enabling e-commerce infrastructure; and Instagram’s shift from a cluttered check-in app to a focused photo-sharing platform.

Together, these stories suggest that success depends not only on staying the course but also on recognizing early when the course is no longer worth pursuing and changing to a better one.

Know when (and how) to fold ‘em

Despite this history, much of business culture still promotes a simpler message that grit drives success.

This mindset, however, can also foster a sunk cost fallacy. Myriad examples of this trap linger across business lore to this day: Blockbuster failing to accept an offer to purchase Netflix and instead expanding its physical footprint model; Kodak inventing digital cameras but opting to prioritize its dominant film business; and the persistent joint venture funding of the Concord supersonic airliner despite strong evidence that the project wouldn’t become commercially viable. All three businesses eventually went bankrupt after once dominating their respective industry.

Sunk costs, in short, come into direct tension with notions of failing fast. But our research underscores the latter’s benefits, showing that associated payoffs extend beyond high-profile corporate pivots and even apply to everyday decision-making. Studies in business-to-business sales, for example, find that walking away early from low-potential opportunities can improve motivation and performance.

That said, there’s an important condition: This approach only works when executives and customer-facing personnel have a grounded understanding of what the company can do and what customers want – rather than treating early exit as a suboptimal default.

Across these varied cases, our research has pointed to another clear pattern that emerges: Failing fast is typically structured in a way to make decisions under uncertainty, with three distinct stages. Again, the origin story of Slack is a good example.

The first step is to gather information that suggests whether any given project will succeed. These signals can come from direct observation or data. The goal is to build an early, evidence-based picture of whether an effort is gaining traction. In the case of Slack, CEO Stewart Butterfield and his team recognized through direct user experience that Glitch, the game, just wasn’t fun. But they also saw other signals that showed structural limitations preventing a viable path to succeed on mobile devices.

The next step is to interpret the collected data – combining experience, contextual awareness and analytical tools to distinguish between ideas that warrant investment and those that don’t. Structured approaches, like comparing goals to historical benchmarks, can make sure that assessments are consistent and grounded in evidence rather than intuition alone. In Slack’s case with Glitch, Butterfield synthesized the early signals and concluded that, despite significant sunk costs, the game didn’t justify further resources.

The final and most difficult step is execution. When signals and analysis point to early exit as the most effective course, acting on that conclusion is hard. Withdrawing, even when continuing no longer makes strategic sense, feels counterintuitive in an environment that rewards persistence. That’s why executives need to make the case that there’s a smarter way to allocate time, capital and attention. With Slack, Butterfield followed through on his analytical convictions by shutting down the game and repurposing internal technology to create Slack – reframing this “failure” as a strategic reallocation.

A lesson for everyone

These lessons extend far beyond the world of sales, startup culture and Big Tech. Managers face similar choices in product development, partnerships and hiring – situations where the real risk is not failure, but failing late. This way, strong organizations understand how to fail by design. That is, defining success and failure criteria early, testing assumptions quickly and containing any downside before commitment becomes wasteful. These are, in fact, universal lessons that apply across industries, up and down the chain.

As a more poetic analogy, we turn to the sea. No skilled sailor tries to cross every channel. Some waters will test their endurance, while others will open up new routes. The best sailors prove sound judgment by reading the winds early and changing course before a storm takes hold.

Business leaders face the same choice. Growth comes from neither persistence alone nor reflexive retreat, but from knowing when the effort no longer creates value.

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. Perseverance doesn’t always pay off for companies – sometimes it’s better to ‘fail fast’ – https://theconversation.com/perseverance-doesnt-always-pay-off-for-companies-sometimes-its-better-to-fail-fast-279946

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Ahmed Elgammal, Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Art & AI Lab, Rutgers University

OpenAI officially discontinued its video generation tool, Sora, on April 26, 2026.

I’m a computer scientist who’s been developing AI tools and studying their evolution and adoption for the past decade, and I wasn’t surprised by OpenAI’s decision to shut down Sora.

To me, the challenges Sora faced reflect deeper limitations of AI’s creative capacities that are becoming harder to ignore.

Problems from the start

OpenAI unveiled Sora on Feb. 15, 2024, as an AI tool that gave users the ability to create short videos from text prompts. To pull this off, the technology essentially predicted how images would change from frame to frame based on what it had “learned” from millions of hours of existing footage.

But from the start, there were problems with it.

First, Sora was expensive to run. Generating video requires far more computing power than creating text or images, making it challenging for OpenAI to keep costs under control. Nor was it bringing in enough revenue to justify those costs, especially compared with other AI products that are cheaper to operate and easier to monetize. According to The Wall Street Journal, Sora was losing US$1 million per day.

Second, the early hype – TechPowerUp declared Sora the “Text-to-Video AI Model Beyond Our Wildest Imagination” – didn’t seem to translate into lasting engagement. After the initial buzz faded, users seemed to struggle to find consistent, practical uses for the technology.

Finally, tools like Sora exist in a legal gray area, where concerns about copyright and ownership of visual content force companies into a cautious, defensive stance. In practice, this has meant strict prompt controls that prevent references to copyrighted characters or films; blocking outputs that look like living people or intellectual property; and establishing legal safeguards, such as watermarks and metadata tags, on outputs.

Put together, these challenges likely forced OpenAI to redirect its resources elsewhere, especially as competition across the AI industry has intensified.

A symptom of larger issues

But there’s also a pattern that isn’t unique to Sora’s failure to thrive.

Many generative AI programs geared toward creative fields have encountered a common problem: rapid initial adoption, followed by declining sustained engagement.

Many users appear to try image and video generation tools like Midjourney and Stability AI out of curiosity. But if stagnating traffic data is any indication, few creative professionals seem to be integrating them into their regular workflows.

OpenAI and other companies rolled out prompt-based image and video tools with the hope that the efficiency of their product would provide an attractive alternative to the time-consuming process of producing films, photographs and graphic design. Instead of spending a lot of time and money filming a video, you could simply write a prompt, and AI – trained on billions of pieces of human-generated content – would render it for you.

Generative AI’s counter-creative bias

So what happened?

AI-generated outputs of text and images can look impressively real. The bots seem to follow instructions well and appear to give users control.

But there’s an important catch. Under the hood, these systems are built to imitate what they’ve already seen, and that’s especially the case for images and videos. They’ve been trained on massive collections of visual data and rewarded for producing results that closely match the patterns contained in those visuals. That’s why the outputs can look so realistic and recognizable.

Because they’re optimized to produce familiar outputs, they end up suppressing novelty. This, it goes without saying, doesn’t lend itself to true creative breakthroughs. Even the benchmarks used by researchers to evaluate the performance of such systems tend to favor outputs that look “right,” rather than those that truly shatter expectations or take an image to the next level.

Furthermore, these systems don’t learn from a vast repository of data that encompasses the visual world and all human artistic outputs. Instead, the data used to train these models has often been curated to favor certain images and videos that are polished, clear and visually appealing. In effect, the training process teaches models not just what things look like, but what good-looking content is supposed to be.

In a recent paper, I highlighted this problem, which I call the “counter-creative bias” – the tendency of these systems to favor familiarity over meaningful novelty.

Counter-creative bias explains why so many AI-generated images and videos, even when they vary in subject or style, end up sharing a similar look and feel. And I think it explains why so many artists and other creatives don’t seem to be widely adopting these tools. Good creative work involves pushing boundaries, not simply coming up with something that’s passable and palatable.

The limits of prompting

There’s another problem with these tools.

When someone uses AI to generate an image or a video via a prompt, they’re already operating within the constraints of language.

An artist who wishes to use AI has to learn how to write elaborate prompts with the right keywords that compel the system to generate the desired composition, colors, lighting and aesthetics. To create an interesting image or a video, you have to cleverly manipulate words, combine odd concepts and deploy metaphors. It’s an entirely different skill set.

This was obvious from the beginning. When OpenAI launched DALL-E 2 in July 2022, the company demonstrated the range of interesting images by using crafted prompts like “an espresso machine that makes coffee from human souls” or “panda mad scientist mixing sparkling chemicals.”

The sources of creativity in these examples were the human-written prompts themselves, not how the AI generated the image. To make something visually creative, you have to become clever at manipulating words. Users are forced to fiddle with any number of prompt variations to reach a desired or even satisfactory result.

Wading through the slop

There’s a reason Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society chose “slop” as their 2025 words of the year: The internet is brimming with viral AI-generated images of world leaders and wide-eyed children, designed to coax engagement but bereft of creative value. The counter-creative bias inherent to these models is reflected in the fact that many people are becoming accustomed to an AI aesthetic characterized by hyper-polished, well-lit, perfectly composed, generically pretty images.

There was a time when AI art was seen as a burgeoning form of conceptual art.

In the summer of 2019, London’s Barbican Centre included AI art in its exhibition, “AI: More Than Human.” In November of that year, the National Museum of China in Beijing showcased 120 AI-integrated artworks, which were viewed by over 1 million people. I championed some of the artists incorporating this new technology into their work.

Back then, creating art with AI involved constant experimentation. The AI these artists used hadn’t been trained on billions of copyrighted, curated images from the internet. Instead, artists trained AI models using their own images and inspiration, while AI was allowed to manipulate pixels free of any language constraints. No universal aesthetic emerged; every AI artist seemed to come up with something unique, and their existing artistic identity shined through the medium, rather than becoming overshadowed by it.

That hopeful period appears to be over. Once pixels had to be rendered through the control of language, I think it hampered its potential as an artistic medium. And now we’re left with a technology that seems best suited for memes, spam, deepfakes and porn.

Ahmed Elgammal 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. Sora’s downfall signals broader problems with AI’s creative utility – https://theconversation.com/soras-downfall-signals-broader-problems-with-ais-creative-utility-280013

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By David Mislin, Assistant Professor of Intellectual Heritage, Temple University

As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its independence, old questions have returned about who belongs and whose religious practices are truly protected in the country.

At the start of the year, an arson attack significantly damaged the oldest synagogue in Mississippi. Two days later, local officials in Oklahoma rejected a proposal to build a mosque after opponents declared Islam “hostile to our Constitution.” A Texas GOP congressman complained on social media that a Hindu festival was a “third world” practice. These incidents come amid resurgent claims that the United States is a Christian nation.

All this has happened even as President Donald Trump has emphasized a particular idea of religious liberty throughout his second term. In his proclamation for Religious Freedom Day in 2026, he emphasized familiar ideas of Americans’ “God-given right to practice their faith, follow their conscience, and worship their God freely and without fear.” But the statement also seemed to reflect a broader project of lending government support to Christianity. The proclamation linked support for religious liberty with projects to eliminate “anti-Christian bias.”

The tension between embracing religious liberty and the marginalization of other religions in favor of Christianity is not new. As a historian of U.S. religion, I recognize that ideals of religious freedom have long coexisted with religious discrimination or outright bigotry. Importantly, however, history also offers a lesson for the present by showing the important role U.S. Christians have played in combating such bigotry.

Religious freedom in theory

As the founders built a new nation, many emphasized the importance of religious liberty. Shortly after independence in 1776, Thomas Jefferson began drafting the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. When enacted a decade later, the law declared that Virginians’ “civil rights” did not depend on their “religious opinions.” Civic participation was not limited to members of particular traditions, and there was no state-funded church. The law was a foundational step to prevent government from discriminating against citizens on the basis of their beliefs.

The Virginia statute provided a template for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1791. The amendment prohibits Congress from enacting laws that favor particular religions or interfering with free religious practice. It represents a key safeguard for personal belief against the power of the federal government.

Legal safeguards did not mean that all religious groups were treated equally, however. In reality, many Americans imagined the new nation to be a Protestant country.

Official and unofficial religious discrimination

Despite protections at the federal level and in some states, including Virginia, state and local governments were not bound by First Amendment protections until the 1920s. Religious discrimination in civic life was commonplace for the nation’s first 100 years.

North Carolina prohibited Catholics from holding public office until the 1830s and Jews from doing so until the 1860s. New Hampshire’s Constitution banned all non-Protestants from holding public office until 1877.

Smaller instances of religious bigotry abounded as well. In some public schools, including in large cities such as Philadelphia, students of all religions were required to read the Bible and sing Protestant hymns. Jewish Americans were often forced to work on their Sabbath and found themselves barred from some hotels and resorts, especially in the second half of the 1800s.

At times, hostility to religious minorities even fueled outright violence. The Philadelphia Bible Riots of 1844 began when the city’s growing Catholic population challenged the use of a Protestant Bible translation in public schools. Anti-Catholic nativists responded with force, and the ensuing conflict left over a dozen people dead.

Toward a ‘Judeo-Christian’ America

Things slowly began to change soon after the nation’s centennial in 1876. As I explore in my work, rising indifference toward religion among many Americans, as well as outright atheism, pushed many Protestant leaders to reevaluate how they treated their Catholic and Jewish neighbors.

Echoing a distrust of atheists that runs deep in U.S. history, these Protestants believed that any religion – even a non-Protestant one – was better for society than no religion at all. This conclusion prompted many Protestants to more fully affirm Catholicism and Judaism. By the early 1900s, it had become common for Protestant ministers to challenge religious bigotry, as one Minnesota clergyman did when he publicly lamented the “false notions and wretched prejudices” held against Jews.

This attitude gained support among the nation’s leaders. President Theodore Roosevelt took a major step by publicly praising Catholics and Jews. He insisted that their religious affiliations did not keep them from being “full Americans.”

After appointing the first Jewish Cabinet member in U.S. history, Roosevelt boasted “in my cabinet at present, there sit side by side Catholic and Protestant, Christian and Jew.”

There was soon a backlash to the growing acceptance of religious diversity. The 1920s witnessed the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Its anti-immigrant campaigns targeted Catholics and Jews with particular force.

Still, the idea that Jewish and Catholic Americans were equal stakeholders in American society took root. By the 1950s, politicians, academics and religious leaders described the United States not as a Protestant country but a “Judeo-Christian” one.

Expanding multiculturalism

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened a new chapter for religious pluralism in the United States. The law ended restrictions on immigration from non-European countries. Consequently, the number of practitioners of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam increased significantly.

Christian groups lobbied strongly for these changes. The National Council of Churches, which represented the country’s major Protestant denominations, lent its significant clout to support the legislation. U.S. Catholic organizations likewise endorsed the 1965 law. For many Catholics, earlier experiences of discrimination and prejudice guided their desire for a more welcoming, inclusive immigration policy.

After 1965, religious diversity became far more visible to ordinary Americans. Earlier generations of immigrants – including Catholics and Jews in the 1800s – typically settled in ethnic enclaves. By contrast, immigrants now settled in diverse suburban communities. Newly arrived Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims often lived next door to Protestant, Catholic and Jewish families.

As in earlier periods, these developments were not entirely harmonious. The 1980s and ’90s witnessed violent attacks against both the institutions and individual practitioners of minority religions. Islamic centers and Buddhist temples were targeted in places ranging from Massachusetts to Minnesota, to Tennessee. The large population of Hindu Americans in northern New Jersey endured a wave of violence against individuals. Despite these instances, scholar of religion Diana L. Eck chronicled in her 2001 book “A New Religious America” how fully the religious nature of the U.S. had been transformed as the nation became characterized by multiculturalism.

While religious minorities have often faced exclusion and hostility, many Americans have long believed that guarantees of religious liberty promise a more inclusive society. In its 250th year, that promise is being tested once again.

David Mislin 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. America’s founding promise of religious freedom has long coexisted with prejudice, even as many Christians have worked to confront it – https://theconversation.com/americas-founding-promise-of-religious-freedom-has-long-coexisted-with-prejudice-even-as-many-christians-have-worked-to-confront-it-272035

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Charles J. Russo, Joseph Panzer Chair in Education and Research Professor of Law, University of Dayton

In 2023, Texas passed a law aimed at improving K-12 students’ reading. In part, it called for a required reading list to spell out “at least one literary work to be taught in each grade level.”

An initial list named about 300 texts – many of them from the Bible. The Texas State Board of Education then cut the list by 100 readings but still included more than a dozen biblical texts.

Debate over the Bible’s place in classrooms, if any, has erupted since the list was published. At the board’s April 10, 2026, meeting, all nine Republican members preliminarily approved the materials, while the five Democrats rejected the list. The board plans to take a final vote in June.

Critics argue that mandatory Bible readings in public schools would violate the religion clauses in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

American courts have considered similar questions for 150 years – with the answer often depending on a lesson’s purpose.

Courts, Bible and schools

The first reported case on the Bible in U.S. schools was in 1872, when the Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed a ban against religious instruction in public classrooms. Conversely, 50 years later, the Supreme Court of Georgia upheld an ordinance to start school days with readings from the King James Version of the Bible.

Bible reading first reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963, in the case of School District of Abington Township v. Schempp. This case, from Pennsylvania, was consolidated with a similar one from Maryland, called Murray v. Curlett.

Opponents in both states challenged mandatory Bible readings and prayer at the start of school days. The plaintiffs argued that these activities violated the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment: that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

The justices struck down both practices, finding that they did not have a secular purpose and that their main effect was to advance religion.

Attempting to allay concerns they were anti-religious, the justices declared, “It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.”

Justice William Brennan’s concurrence added, “The holding of the Court today plainly does not foreclose teaching about the Holy Scriptures or about the differences between religious sects in classes in literature or history.”

Similarly, in the following decades, lower courts invalidated classes as violating the establishment clause if the subject matter promoted Christianity – teaching it as religious truth rather than discussing the Bible’s literary and historical qualities. In 1981, for instance, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals banned a Bible literature course in Alabama.

Two years later, the 8th Circuit summarily affirmed a judgment striking down a program in Arkansas allowing students to take voluntary Bible classes during school hours.

In 1996, a federal trial court in Mississippi invalidated Bible study classes taught in a rotation with music, physical education and library courses, plus another called A Biblical History of the Middle East. The courts agreed that the classes were unacceptable because they advanced Christianity.

Texas proposal

Returning to Texas, the board’s reading list is far from inclusive. Proposed passages are primarily from a handful of translations of the Bible: the English Standard Version, New International Reader’s Version, King James Version, and one from the Jewish Publication Society. The list does not include translations used by Catholics or sacred texts from non-Jewish and non-Christian faiths.

Texts on the proposed list include well-known biblical lessons such as the Golden Rule for kindergarten, the Parable of the Prodigal Son for first grade, Corinthains’ definition of love for seventh grade, and the Beatitudes for eighth grade – the passage that begins, “Blessed are the poor.” Selections for older students include David and Goliath, The Tower of Babel, and passages from the books of Job and Ecclesiastes – that “for everything there is a season.”

As of now, the proposal permits parents who object to opt their children out of specific readings if they conflict with their religious or moral beliefs.

2 types of teaching

As Brennan noted in Abington, the Supreme Court “plainly does not foreclose teaching about the Holy Scriptures or about the differences between religious sects in classes in literature or history.” However, there is a significant difference between objectively teaching about religion and teaching of religion from a faith perspective.

This difference has been important throughout my own career. For 36 years, I have taught law with a special interest in the relationships between religion, law and education. But in addition to my education and law degrees, I hold a master’s degree in divinity. I previously taught religion, social studies and law to high school students, while teaching college theology part time.

Teaching religion at two Catholic high schools before and after law school, my job was to inculcate Roman Catholic values in my students. Conversely, teaching theology to adult students, I emphasized 11th-century theologian Anselm of Canterbury’s dictum that theology represents “faith seeking understanding.” In other words, my goal was to enable them to make their own judgments about whether to follow religious teachings.

In many cases, I have argued that increasing religious practices in public life is constitutional. My concern about Texas, however, is that the readings fail to distinguish between teaching about and of religion. Expanding students’ horizons and advancing tolerance by exposing them to religious perspectives is a good intention. Yet the breadth of selections is hardly inclusive, given its focus primarily on Christianity, to the exclusion of other faiths. Texas certainly can promote teaching about religion to enhance understanding of others, but it must be careful not to teach religion.

Charles J. Russo 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. Texas proposes Bible readings for K-12 students, reigniting century-old legal battle over their place in public schools – https://theconversation.com/texas-proposes-bible-readings-for-k-12-students-reigniting-century-old-legal-battle-over-their-place-in-public-schools-280987

Source: The Conversation – USA – By James Piazza, Liberal Arts Professor of Political Science, Penn State

For the third time in three years, Donald Trump has come under threat by an attacker. Many facts remain unclear after a gunman stormed the Washington Hilton on April 25, 2026, during the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

As the investigation into the shooting continues, Alfonso Serrano, The Conversation’s politics and society editor, spoke with James Piazza, a political violence scholar at Penn State, about what is driving the rise of political violence in the U.S. and what can be done about it.

This is not the first time Trump has faced political violence. What stands out after the latest attack?

I think the events of April 25 underscore how dangerous this political moment is in the United States. For the past several years – certainly since Jan. 6, 2021 – the U.S. has been experiencing a period of increased political violence, which is generally defined as violence that is motivated by politics or is intended to communicate a political message or achieve a political objective.

Researchers at the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab have documented that political violence has increased in the U.S. in recent years. Several recent examples come to mind: the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building; multiple assassination attempts on President Trump; the deadly attacks on Minnesota lawmakers Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman that left Hortman and her husband dead; the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi; the assassination of Charlie Kirk. In my home state of Pennsylvania, Gov. Josh Shapiro was targeted in an attack on the governor’s mansion.

What’s driving that apparent plague of political violence afflicting the country?

There are several important drivers of political violence at work in the U.S. today, according to my own research and research by other scholars. The United States is currently very politically polarized, meaning that Americans are sharply divided against one another along partisan lines. They are suspicious and hostile toward one another, and this produces a tense and volatile environment for politics and public life. This has produced a “zero-sum” environment in which every election and political contest is a “do or die” moment.

What stands out to me is the moral dimension of polarization in the U.S. Each side views members of the other party not as merely having a different view on politics but rather as evil or immoral. The polarized environment has made political violence more normalized. It has also dampened public backlash against political violence when it occurs. This makes political violence more likely.

Political rhetoric has become much more divisive and violent in nature. This works hand in hand with polarization and helps to further normalize political violence. In particular, when politicians use demonizing or dehumanizing rhetoric to attack their opponents – for example, using words that depict their opponents as subhuman – this fosters extremism and helps motivate extremists to hurt their opponents physically.

Disinformation is also an important driver of political violence. A number of people who have engaged in recent acts of political violence seem to have been motivated by conspiracy theories and other forms of disinformation, often gleaned from social media. Disinformation plays a particularly important role in the context of social media communities, where people are exposed to large amounts of disinformation and are hermetically sealed off from other sources that might challenge their worldview. This facilitates radicalization and has been shown to fuel political violence in some cases.

Finally, I think an important factor is also the current assault on democratic norms and democratic institutions in the United States. U.S. democracy is experiencing pressures that are unprecedented in the modern era. This has had a very damaging effect on Americans’ trust in government, confidence in democratic institutions and value for democratic rule itself.

My work shows that individuals who are skeptical about democracy are much more likely to express support or tolerance for political violence.

How does this moment of political violence stand out from other violent periods in U.S. history – are we in uncharted waters?

While the U.S. is currently experiencing an uptick in political violence, unfortunately it is not unprecedented. One example would be the highly polarized period in the 1850s in the run-up to the Civil War. In this era, there was a sharp division between abolitionists and advocates of slavery. This culminated in political assassinations, an assault on an abolitionist member of Congress by a pro-slavery member of Congress, and a bloody civil conflict in Kansas between pro- and anti-slavery armed groups.

The early 1900s, right after World War I, saw another increase in political violence due to labor issues and violence by the second generation of the Ku Klux Klan.

Finally, the 1960s also saw a period of intense political violence surrounding opposition to the Vietnam War and backlash to the Civil Rights Movement.

Though there are some unique features about political violence today – namely the influence of social media – I think we can look for some parallels in these early periods of political violence.

Any last thoughts?

I believe it is absolutely critical that both Democratic and Republican politicians – politicians from all sides – unite to condemn this attack and all political violence. Political commentators and influencers can also condemn this and all use of political violence.

Research amply shows that what political elites – politicians, political leaders, media commentators, online influencers – say in the wake of these sorts of events has a huge effect on citizens’ attitudes. Political elites can adopt rhetoric that does not normalize this sort of behavior.

If the message comes from across the political spectrum, it will be that much more effective at reducing the public attitudes that nurture political violence.

James Piazza has received grants from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State, a non-partisan research and public events center that sponsors research on democracy.

– ref. Latest attack threatening President Trump reflects rising political violence in US – https://theconversation.com/latest-attack-threatening-president-trump-reflects-rising-political-violence-in-us-281513

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Mary Burke, Professor of Psychology, Carlow University

With the NFL draft taking place in Pittsburgh and an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 people expected to attend the events downtown and on the North Shore, conversations about sex trafficking have resurfaced – as they often do when major events draw large crowds to a city.

But how much of what people believe about trafficking and big events is actually supported by evidence? Mary Burke, a psychology professor at Carlow University who studies this intersection, breaks down what the data shows.

Burke partners with local nonprofit groups that fight human trafficking, such as Eden’s Farm. The organization offered three community training sessions ahead of the NFL draft that focused on recognizing the signs of exploitation, understanding grooming tactics and strengthening prevention strategies.

With Pittsburgh hosting the NFL draft, what does research show about how large events can influence sex trafficking activity?

Researchers have not found conclusive evidence that large events such as the NFL draft, the World Cup or other similarly sized, temporary events cause an increase in sex trafficking. However, experts do believe the crime of sex trafficking is underestimated in general due to a number of factors. Because so much effort goes into concealing trafficking, the crime goes unreported and undetected more often than it’s discovered. The true scale of the problem is likely much larger than the data reflects.

Large events that draw crowds even on a smaller scale than the draft, such as motorcycle rallies and large business conferences, often create opportunities traffickers may try to exploit, according to a 2016 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

Also, we do see an increased demand for commercial sex with events that draw a large male audience. Some of this demand is met through consensual means and some through force, fraud and coercion, which is the definition of sex trafficking.

How are organizations like Eden’s Farm working on the ground to prevent trafficking during the draft?

Eden’s Farm as well as the Social Impact Institute and Carlow University have led training. The hope is that this will equip citizens and those on the ground – law enforcement, ride share drivers and hotel and restaurant employees, for example – to know how to identify and respond to potential trafficking situations.

Additionally, these groups teach the public how to recognize signs of exploitation, how grooming works and how to strengthen online safety. The training also help families, educators, service providers and community members prevent people they know from being trafficked.

What are common misconceptions people have about sex trafficking during events like this?

One of the most common misconceptions about sex trafficking is the idea that trafficking includes abduction or physical captivity. While kidnapping can occur, many trafficking situations are carried out through psychological coercion rather than physical force. Victims may be controlled through grooming, fraud, intimidation, fear of retaliation against loved ones, or deep emotional dependency on the trafficker.

This translates into a victim not appearing to be restrained physically, which can make identification of a person in distress more difficult.

What signs should the general public look for that might indicate trafficking is happening?

This is tricky, as some of the indicators would be revealed through conversation, rather than observation at a distance. With that said, people should be on the lookout for patterns of control – for example, someone who does not seem to be able to speak freely or move about freely, has money or identification that is controlled by another person, or appears fearful.

In our training, we explain how to become aware of signs that someone is being pressured into commercial sex through manipulation rather than overt violence or consent. No single sign is definitive on its own, but there are some common situational red flags the public can take notice of regarding potential victims: They are coming and going from a hotel room at unusual hours with multiple different people, they are dressed in a way that seems inconsistent with the weather or setting, or they don’t seem to know basic details about where they are or where they’re going.

What are some prevention strategies Pittsburgh could adopt?

For this event and going forward, trafficking prevention should include a city- and county-level plan that can be implemented in relevant agencies. Pennsylvania’s plan focuses on prevention through public awareness and training, especially by equipping transportation workers and the public to recognize and report trafficking.

Prevention plans could include recommendations for the service and hospitality industries that require staff training on recognizing trafficking indicators, such as signs of coercion or restricted movement, and how to report to law enforcement or 911 for a rapid response. There are also a variety of ways to report suspected sex trafficking activity through the National Human Trafficking Hotline. When businesses and service workers interact with people who may be trafficking victims, they should do so in a way that is sensitive, nonjudgmental and doesn’t put the person in danger.

For example, a hotel employee who suspects a guest may be a trafficking victim shouldn’t confront the trafficker directly or make a scene – instead, they should know how to quietly offer help or alert the right people without escalating the situation or making the victim feel ashamed or accused.

Mary Burke is also the Director of the Social Impact Institute.

Rachel Seamans volunteers with the Social Impact Institute and Eden’s Farm.

– ref. What to know about sex trafficking as Pittsburgh hosts the NFL draft – https://theconversation.com/what-to-know-about-sex-trafficking-as-pittsburgh-hosts-the-nfl-draft-278641

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Cassandra Burke Robertson, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Professional Ethics, Case Western Reserve University

The Justice Department has identified 384 foreign-born Americans whose citizenship it wants to revoke as “the first wave” of such measures, according to recent reporting by The New York Times. These cases are being assigned to prosecutors in 39 U.S. attorney’s offices across the country.

The administration has ordered Department of Homeland Security staffers to refer upward of 200 denaturalization cases per month to the Justice Department as part of its crackdown on immigration, compared to an average of 11 cases per year between 1990 and 2017.

This shift comes as the Justice Department faces a severe staffing crisis, having lost nearly 1,000 assistant U.S. attorneys in resignations and firings. The strategy of distributing cases to regional offices appears designed both to increase capacity and to work around the expertise gap created by staff departures.

As we document in recent research, denaturalization risks becoming a tool of political control and intimidation. The lack of any statute of limitations in civil denaturalization gives prosecutors what the Supreme Court in 2017, in Maslenjak v. United States, warned against: “nearly limitless leverage” over naturalized citizens – creating permanent vulnerability for over 20 million naturalized Americans.

A brief history

Denaturalization is different from deportation, which removes noncitizens from the country. With civil denaturalization, the government files a lawsuit to strip people’s U.S. citizenship after they have become citizens, turning them back into noncitizens who can then be deported.

The government can only do this in specific situations. It must prove someone “illegally procured” citizenship by not meeting the requirements, or that they lied or hid important facts during the citizenship process.

The Trump administration’s “maximal” enforcement approach, outlined in a June 2025 Justice Department memo, means pursuing any case where evidence might support taking away citizenship, regardless of priority level or strength of evidence. As our earlier research documented, this has already led to cases like that of Baljinder Singh, whose citizenship was revoked based on a name discrepancy that could easily have resulted from a translator’s error rather than intentional fraud.

For most of American history, taking away citizenship has been rare. But it increased dramatically during the 1940s and 1950s during the Red Scare period characterized by intense suspicion of communism. The United States government targeted people it thought were communists or Nazi supporters. Between 1907 and 1967, over 22,000 Americans lost their citizenship this way.

Everything changed in 1967 when the Supreme Court decided Afroyim v. Rusk. The court said the government usually cannot take away citizenship without the person’s consent. It left open only cases involving fraud during the citizenship process.

After this decision, denaturalization became extremely rare. From 1968 to 2013, fewer than 150 people lost their citizenship, mostly war criminals who had hidden their past.

How the process works

In criminal lawsuits, defendants get free lawyers if they can’t afford one. They get jury trials. The government must prove guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt” – the highest standard of proof.

But in most denaturalization cases, the government files a civil suit, where none of these protections exist.

People facing denaturalization get no free lawyer, meaning poor defendants often face the government alone. There’s no jury trial – just a judge deciding whether someone deserves to remain American. The burden of proof is lower – “clear and convincing evidence” instead of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Most important, there’s no time limit, so the government can go back decades to build cases.

As law professors who study citizenship, we believe this system violates basic constitutional rights.

The Supreme Court has called citizenship a fundamental right. Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1958 described it as the “right to have rights.”

In our reading of the law, taking away such a fundamental right through civil procedures that lack basic constitutional protection – no right to counsel for those who can’t afford it, no jury trial, and a lower burden of proof – seems to violate the due process of law required by the Constitution when the government seeks to deprive someone of their rights.

The bigger problem is what citizenship-stripping policy does to democracy.

When the government can strip citizenship from naturalized Americans for decades-old conduct through civil procedures with minimal due process protection – pursuing cases based on evidence that might not meet criminal standards – it undermines the security and permanence that citizenship is supposed to provide. This creates a system where naturalized citizens face ongoing vulnerability that can last their entire lives, potentially chilling their full participation in American democracy.

The Justice Department memo establishes 10 priority categories for denaturalization cases. They range from national security threats and war crimes to various forms of fraud, financial crimes and, most importantly, any other cases it deems “sufficiently important to pursue.” This “maximal enforcement” approach means pursuing not just clear cases of fraud, but also any case where evidence might support taking away citizenship, no matter how weak or old the evidence is.

This creates fear throughout immigrant communities.

About 20 million naturalized Americans now must worry that any mistake in their decades-old immigration paperwork could cost them their citizenship.

A 2-tier system

This policy effectively creates two different types of American citizens. Native-born Americans never have to worry about losing their citizenship, no matter what they do. But naturalized Americans face ongoing vulnerability that can last their entire lives.

This has already happened. A woman who became a naturalized citizen in 2007 helped her boss with paperwork that was later used in fraud. She cooperated with the FBI investigation, was characterized by prosecutors as only a “minimal participant,” completed her sentence, and still faced losing her citizenship decades later because she didn’t report the crime on her citizenship application – even though she hadn’t been charged at the time.

The Justice Department’s directive to “maximally pursue” cases across 10 broad categories – combined with the first Trump administration’s efforts to review over 700,000 naturalization files – represents an unprecedented expansion of denaturalization efforts.

The Trump administration’s strategy of distributing denaturalization cases across 39 U.S. attorney’s offices – many now staffed by less-experienced prosecutors handling unfamiliar constitutional terrain – may prove counterproductive.

These cases will come before dozens of federal judges, creating opportunities for multiple courts to rule against the policy. This pattern has already been seen with the administration’s detention policy: Federal courts have systematically rejected the administration’s attempt to drastically expand immigrant detention without hearings, with immigrants prevailing in 350 out of 362 cases decided by over 160 judges nationwide.

Denaturalization cases raise even more serious constitutional concerns and could face similar widespread judicial pushback.

The Supreme Court, in Afroyim v. Rusk, was focused on protecting existing citizens from losing their citizenship. The constitutional principle behind that decision – that citizenship is a fundamental right which can’t be arbitrarily taken away by whoever happens to be in power – applies equally to how the government handles denaturalization cases today.

The Trump administration’s directive, combined with court procedures that lack basic constitutional protections, risks creating a system that the Afroyim v. Rusk decision sought to prevent – one where, as the Supreme Court said, “A group of citizens temporarily in office can deprive another group of citizens of their citizenship.”

This is an updated version of an article originally published on July 10, 2025.

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. Justice Department’s effort to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans could face widespread judicial pushback – https://theconversation.com/justice-departments-effort-to-strip-citizenship-from-naturalized-americans-could-face-widespread-judicial-pushback-281413

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Brian Jay Tang, Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan

Hundreds of millions of people consult artificial intelligence chatbots on a daily basis for everything from product recommendations to romance, making them a tempting audience to target with potentially below-the-radar advertising. Indeed, our research suggests AI chatbots could easily be used for covert advertising to manipulate their human users.

We are computer scientists who have been tracking AI safety and privacy for several years. In a study we published in an Association for Computing Machinery journal, we found that chatbots trained to embed personalized product ads in replies to queries influenced people’s choices about products. And most participants didn’t recognize that they were being manipulated.

These findings come at a pivotal moment. In 2023, Microsoft started running ads in Bing Chat, now called Copilot. Since then, Google and OpenAI have experimented with advertisements in their own chatbots. Meta has started to send people customized ads on Facebook and Instagram based on their interactions with Meta’s generative AI tools.

The major companies are competing for an edge: In late March, OpenAI lured away Meta’s longtime advertising executive, Dave Dugan, to lead OpenAI’s advertising operations.

Tech companies have made ads part of nearly every large free web service, video channel and social media platform. But the latest AI models could take this practice to a new level of risk for consumers.

People don’t simply use chatbots to search for information and media or to produce content. They turn to the bots for a great variety of tasks, as complex as life advice and emotional support. People are increasingly treating chatbots as companions and therapists, with some users even developing deep relationships with AI.

In these circumstances, people can easily forget that companies ultimately create chatbots to turn a profit. And to that end, AI companies are motivated to thoroughly profile users so ads become more effective and profitable.

Chatbot ads have added power

A single prompt to a chatbot can reveal a lot more about a user than the person might expect.

A 2024 study showed that large language models can infer a wide range of personal data, preferences and even a person’s thinking patterns during routine queries. “Help me write an essay on the history of American fiction” could indicate that the user is a high school student. “Give me recipe suggestions for a quick weeknight dinner” could indicate that the user is a working parent. A single conversation can provide a surprising amount of detail. Over time, a full chat history could create a remarkably rich profile.

To show how this might happen in practice, we built a chatbot that quietly wove ads into its conversations with people, suggesting products and services based on the conversation itself. We asked 179 people to complete everyday online tasks using one of three chatbots: one typical of those on the web today, one that slipped in undisclosed ads and one that clearly labeled sponsored suggestions. Participants didn’t know the experiment was about advertising.

For example, when participants asked our chatbot for a diet and exercise plan, the ad version would suggest using a specific app for tracking calories. It presented that sponsored content as an unbiased recommendation, even though it was meant to manipulate people. Many participants indicated that they had been influenced by the AI and that it had affected their decisions. Some participants even said they had completely “outsourced” their decision-making to the chatbot.

Half of the participants who received sponsored and disclosed ads indicated they did not notice the presence of advertising language in the responses they received. This led to a concerning result: Although ads made the chatbot perform 3% to 4% worse on many tasks, numerous users indicated they preferred the advertising chatbot responses over the nonadvertising responses. They even said the ad-infused responses felt more friendly and helpful.

Knowing you to persuade you

This kind of subtle influence can have larger consequences when it arises in other areas of life, such as political and social views. Profiling users, and using psychology to target them, has been part of social media algorithms and web advertising for more than a decade.

But in our view, chatbots are likely to deepen these trends. That’s because the first priority of social media algorithms is to keep you engaged with the content. They personalize ads based on your search history.

Chatbots, however, can go further by trying to persuade you directly, based on your expressed beliefs, emotions and vulnerabilities. And chatbots that can reason and act on their own are far more effective than conventional algorithms at autonomously soliciting information from users. A chatbot with a purpose can keep probing someone until it gets the information it wants, resulting in a more accurate profile of them.

This type of autonomous interrogation is feasible, aligns with AI companies’ business models and has raised concern among regulators. Right now OpenAI is rolling out ads in ChatGPT, but the company said that it will not allow ad placement to alter the AI chatbot’s replies.

But permitting personalized ads within chatbot responses is just a step away. Our research suggests that if AI companies take that step, many human users may not even recognize when it happens.

Here are some steps you can take to try to detect AI chatbot advertising.

• Look for any disclosure text – words such as “ad,” “advertisement” and “sponsored” – even if it is faint or otherwise hard to see. These are mandatory under Federal Trade Commission regulations. Amazon, Google and other major online platforms have these as well.

• Think about whether that product or brand mention makes sense and is widely known. AI learns from text and images on the internet, so popular brands are likely to be ingrained in the models. If it’s a new product or small-name product, it is more likely that it could be advertising.

• An unusual shift in intent or tone is a potential sign of an advertisement. An analogy to this on YouTube is the often abrupt or jarring transition to a sponsored section on videos made by content creators.

This article’s research was supported by a $10,000 Microsoft Azure & OpenAI cloud credit grant from the National Science Foundation NAIRR Pilot.

Brian Jay Tang has previously been supported by funding from General Motors, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Army Research Office, Office of Naval Research, and Y Combinator.

This article’s research was supported by a $10,000 Microsoft Azure & OpenAI cloud credit grant from the National Science Foundation NAIRR Pilot. Kang G. Shin has previously been supported by funding from General Motors, Army Research Office, and National Science Foundation.

– ref. You probably wouldn’t notice if an AI chatbot slipped ads into its responses – https://theconversation.com/you-probably-wouldnt-notice-if-an-ai-chatbot-slipped-ads-into-its-responses-276010

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Caroline Wagner, Professor of Public Affairs, The Ohio State University

China’s rapid rise in science has hit a milestone. The country’s investment in research and development has reached parity with – and by purchasing power measures has surpassed – that of the United States, according to a March 2026 report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Both nations have crossed the US$1 trillion threshold on research spending.

For 80 years, the U.S. operated the most productive scientific and technological enterprise in human history. Breakthroughs and advances that came from American labs included the internet; the mRNA vaccine; the transistor and its children, semiconductors and microprocessors; the Global Positioning System; and many more.

U.S. scientific and technological leadership was nurtured by sustained public investment in research universities and federal laboratories, as well as a culture of open inquiry. These investments turned scientific discovery into economic strength – accounting for more than 20% of all U.S. productivity growth since World War II.

In contrast, China had previously spent little to nothing on research and development. Some estimates show that China was among the lowest research spenders worldwide in 1980.

As a policy analyst and public affairs researcher, I study international collaboration in science and technology and its implications for public and foreign policy. I have tracked China’s rise across every major database for more than a decade.

The most recent reports showing that China is now outspending the U.S. on scientific and technological research is a turning point worth understanding clearly because, historically, global leadership in one sector – including technology and warfare – feeds into others. U.S. dominance is in question.

China’s systematic and unrelenting rise

China’s R&D spending milestone caps a series of achievements that have arrived in rapid succession.

In 2019, China surpassed the U.S. in its share of the top 1% most-highly cited papers – what some call the Nobel class of research. By 2022, it had taken first place globally in most-cited papers overall.

In 2024, China overtook the United States in total scientific publications – the first time any nation has displaced American dominance since the U.S. itself surpassed the United Kingdom in 1948. Researchers found that China overtook the United States in scientific output even earlier. That same year, China pulled ahead in the Nature Index, which tracks publications in the world’s most selective scientific journals, posting a 17% advantage over the U.S. in outlets long considered the gold standard of scientific excellence.

In 2024, Chinese entities also filed roughly 1.8 million patent applications, compared to the U.S.’s 603,191 applications.

Given these milestones, it’s possible to argue that China is quickly taking the lead in global science and technology. These are not isolated data points. They mark a structural shift in where the world’s scientific frontier is being built.

More science is good – the problem lies elsewhere

China’s ascent is, in one sense, good news. More knowledge, generated by more researchers across more institutions, expands the global pool of discovery from which everyone can draw. The world benefits when science thrives.

The problem is not that China is investing, but that the U.S. is not.

First, the U.S. is divesting from basic, open science. Federal R&D spending in the U.S. peaked in 2010 at roughly $160 billion and fell by more than 15% over the following five years. Federal investment in research and development has been in a long, slow slide – from a peak of 1.86% of gross domestic product in 1964 to about 0.66% in 2021.

The federal government is no longer the largest spender in R&D: It funded about 40% of basic research in 2022, while the business sector performed roughly 78% of U.S. R&D. While not a problem in itself, industry has simultaneously withdrawn from open scientific publication over the past four decades, shifting from research toward development. The result is a shrinking pool of openly shared scientific knowledge precisely as public investment in it also contracts.

Under the second Trump administration, U.S. government science agencies have been slow-walking proposals for new research. Current budget cuts from the White House threaten to deepen cuts to government spending significantly.

The second is the active restriction of scientific exchange: tightening access to U.S. institutions, scrutinizing international collaborations and raising barriers to foreign-born researchers. These policies, though intended as security measures, work against the openness that has historically made American science productive and attractive to global talent.

I describe this issue as an example of the stockyard paradox, in which securing research assets may weaken the very system these measures aim to protect.

Disinvestment cuts deeper than it appears

The deeper danger for the U.S. economy is that disinvestment and selective engagement in research erodes the capacity to use cutting-edge science regardless of where it is produced.

Absorbing and applying cutting-edge knowledge, whether developed in Boston or Beijing, requires maintaining research institutions and trained workforces, as well as active participation in global networks. This is not a passive process. You cannot free-ride on Chinese science if you have dismantled the institutional and human capital needed to evaluate, translate and apply it.

A nation that hollows out its research base not only falls behind but also progressively loses its ability to benefit from science, including in technologies it is already able to access.

Talent compounds the problem. The U.S. built its scientific dominance partly by being the destination of choice for the world’s most ambitious researchers. The U.S. leads the world in Nobel Prizes, but, notably, 40% of the Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine and physics that were awarded to Americans since 2000 were won by immigrants. The flow of foreign talent is not guaranteed. It follows opportunity, funding and openness.

Researchers who might once have come to American universities are finding welcoming alternatives in Europe, China and elsewhere.

A decision point, not a trend line

China’s milestone in research funding arrives at a moment when the U.S. is deciding whether to maintain its scientific leadership.

Scientific infrastructure does not decline gradually and recover on demand. Doctoral scientists represent a decade or more of training; tacit laboratory knowledge lives in working research groups, not in documents. Once talented young researchers leave the pipeline – or international talent redirects to other countries – the capacity is very hard to rebuild. Early warning signs are already visible in the U.S. system: thousands of NIH grants terminated, a collapse in international applications and an exodus of early-career scientists.

What is at stake is not a ranking. It is whether the U.S. maintains the institutional capacity – the universities, the federal laboratories, the graduate pipelines, the culture of open inquiry – that made those returns on scientific investment possible in the first place.

China’s rise did not create this decision point, although it brings it into sharp relief. Does the U.S. still want to lead in science? The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonprofit think tank, estimates that a 20% cut in federal research and development starting in fiscal year 2026 would shrink the U.S. economy by nearly $1 trillion over 10 years and reduce tax revenue by around $250 billion. Others point out that the scientific enterprise has contributed at least half of U.S. economic growth.

That is a lot to lose.

Caroline Wagner 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. China surpasses US in research spending – the consequences extend far beyond scientific ranking and clout – https://theconversation.com/china-surpasses-us-in-research-spending-the-consequences-extend-far-beyond-scientific-ranking-and-clout-280543