Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Mary Foskett, Professor of Religious Studies, Wake Forest University

On Easter Sunday, festively decorated churches across the United States will be filled with worshippers eager to celebrate the most important day in the Christian year.

While some will attend services led by pastors who are women, the overwhelming majority of worshippers will not. Women constitute 23.7% of professional clergy in the U.S. and an increasing percentage of people earning graduate theology degrees. However, data from 2018-19 shows that only 14% of U.S. congregations, most of which are Christian, are led by women.

The number of women in Christian pulpits stands in jarring juxtaposition with the Easter narratives in the New Testament. The Gospel stories of the resurrection of Jesus point to how essential women’s witness and proclamation were in the earliest stages of Christianity.

First witness

Many denominations share a system assigning particular Bible verses to be read at each week’s services – a cycle that takes three years, called Years A, B and C, to complete. Because Easter 2026 falls in year A in the common lectionary, the Gospel reading that many congregations across the U.S. will hear read on Easter Sunday 2026 is Matthew 28:1-10, while others will hear John 20:1-18.

A beloved New Testament passage, John’s account of Jesus’ resurrection, is perhaps the most familiar. Following Jesus’ death on the cross – the day that Christians around the world mark as Good Friday – the text describes two men, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, retrieving his body. They prepare it for a traditional Jewish burial, then leave the shrouded corpse in a nearby tomb.

As Chapter 20 begins, one of Jesus’ most devoted followers, Mary Magdalene, approaches the tomb. Upon finding it empty, she tells two angels in white that “they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”

As the story unfolds, a weeping Mary is greeted by the risen Jesus, whom she at first mistakes for the gardener. When Jesus calls her by her name, Mary immediately recognizes him, calling him “Rabbouni,” or “teacher.” Jesus explains he will soon ascend to God, instructing her to go to the other disciples and share what he has revealed to her. As the story concludes, “Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her.”

It is for this reason that Mary Magdalene has long been known as the first witness to the resurrection of Jesus. In his 13th-century commentary on the Gospel of St. John, Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas called Mary “apostle of the apostles.”

Women watching

The Gospel of John’s description of Mary Magdalene’s actions aligns with the other canonical Gospels’ portrayal of women who followed Jesus. Despite small differences, all four describe women being the first to proclaim the resurrection.

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, all of which were likely written before John, are known as the “Synoptic Gospels” because they narrate the basic story of Jesus’ life in the same general sequence. All three depict a group of women witnessing the end of Jesus’ life. They are identified as disciples who followed Jesus in Galilee, which was at the time a largely Jewish region under Roman rule. Galilee was central to Jesus’ ministry: It included Nazareth, where he was raised, and Capernaum, on the Sea of Galilee, which seems to have served as the hub of Jesus’ ministry.

According to the Synoptic Gospels, the women watched from a distance as Jesus was crucified and “saw the tomb and how his body was laid.” The three books differ in which women they name at the scene, although all include Mary Magdalene.

Most importantly, all the Synoptic Gospels narrate the women’s encounter with angelic figures at the empty tomb, who, in Matthew and Mark, instruct them to tell the other disciples that Jesus has been raised from the dead. In Luke 24:9, the women immediately proclaim the news. In Matthew’s telling, the women are greeted by the risen Jesus himself.

The Gospel of Mark, the earliest of the four canonical Gospels, differs in the way it concludes the story. As scholars have long recognized, Mark 16:8 formed the original, very terse conclusion to Mark’s narrative. After the women are told that Jesus has been resurrected, Mark writes, “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

On a first reading, the stark ending seems anticlimactic. Indeed, later editors eventually added two more endings to Mark’s Gospel. The longest ending includes the risen Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene, whose testimony is initially rebuffed, and then to others.

No matter which ending we read, though, the Gospel of Mark underscores that it was a woman’s voice that first proclaimed Jesus’ resurrection. Even the terse original ending suggests that the women eventually found their voices. By describing only the women as witnesses, Mark implies that they had to eventually share news about Jesus’ resurrection in order for the Gospel to be written.

Preaching today

Together, the canonical Gospels underscore the importance of women’s proclamation in the Easter story. Yet opposition to women regularly preaching persists in some Christian circles.

A majority of Protestant groups ordain women, including all seven “mainline” denominations – including the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Episcopal Church – as well as some Pentecostal and evangelical bodies, such as the Assemblies of God and Church of the Nazarene.

Yet multiple studies have pointed to the gap between supporting women clergy in principle and hiring them in practice, particularly as lead pastors. In 2017, about 27% of pastors in mainline Protestant churches were women, including, but not limited to, those in senior positions. Moreover, the two largest Christian bodies in the U.S., the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, officially oppose women serving as pastors.

The SBC’s Baptist Faith and Message 2000 states that “the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” In February 2023, in a move that attracted national attention, the denomination expelled Saddleback Church one of the most prominent megachurches in the country, because it had hired Stacie Woods for a preaching position. In total, the SBC deemed five churches “to be not in friendly cooperation” because of women’s roles. Since then, the convention has been mired in disagreement over how to apply the ban on women as pastors.

The matter is an especially timely one to consider at Easter. Churches will continue to debate whether to ordain women, depending on how they interpret specific parts of the Bible. Yet according to the Gospels, the New Testament as we know it would simply not exist were it not for the proclamation of women.

Mary Foskett wrote a successful NEH grant and a Hanes Foundation grant for the WFU Humanities Institute. She serves on boards for the Foundation for Theological Education in Asia and the Pacific, Feminist Studies in Religion, and Pacific Asian and North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry; she was once a member of a church that was affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.

– ref. In the Easter story, women are the first to proclaim the resurrection – but churches today are still divided over female preachers – https://theconversation.com/in-the-easter-story-women-are-the-first-to-proclaim-the-resurrection-but-churches-today-are-still-divided-over-female-preachers-253005

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Matthew D. Dean, Assistant Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine

When the power goes out and stays off for hours, the result can be more than just a hassle – for millions of Americans who rely on medical equipment, losing electricity can become a medical emergency.

Your neighbor might rely on an oxygen concentrator to breathe – a machine the size of a carry-on bag that hums quietly through the night. Or they might need a CPAP – continuous positive airway pressure – machine to keep them breathing safely in their sleep, or a ventilator.

Most home medical devices run on backup batteries that last only 3 to 8 hours. Yet people in over half of U.S. counties experienced at least one outage lasting more than eight hours between 2018 and 2021. Power outages are becoming more common in the U.S., too. They grew 9% more frequent and lasted 56% longer between 2014 and 2023, driven by severe weather, winter storms, hurricanes and wildfires linked to climate change.

Studies following major blackouts show an increase in disease-related deaths, including a 25% rise during a three-day blackout in New York City in August 2003. Emergency rooms can become overwhelmed with device users seeking backup power and medical care.

But not everyone with a medical device faces the same risks during a power outage. In a new study published in the journal Environmental Research: Health, we show which groups need the most help and who is slipping through the cracks in life-threatening ways.

Four very different realities

We analyzed data from more than 2,600 households reporting the use of medical devices, drawn from a nationally representative federal survey of nearly 18,500 American homes. Using statistical modeling, we identified four distinct groups, each facing a very different situation when the power goes out.

About 60% of medically dependent households are financially stable homeowners. They face outages, but they are the most likely group to have backup generators.

A second group, roughly 20%, are homeowners who struggle to pay their energy bills and sometimes skip medicine or meals to keep the lights on, but who also tend to have backup power sources. This group had the highest likelihood of experiencing dayslong power outages in the past year, but was also more likely to have a generator or access to solar power than the average American.

A third group is apartment renters who can afford their electricity bills but are typically unable to make long-term upgrades for more resilient power supplies. For example, they can’t install solar panels or add permanent backup power because those decisions belong to their landlord, not them.

The fourth class is the smallest, roughly 7% of medical device households, and by far the most at risk. These are mostly low-income urban renters, and they face two compounding problems: They struggle to pay their electricity bills every month, and they have almost no backup resources when the power goes out.

Nearly 58% of these at-risk renters said they had received a disconnection notice from their utility within the previous year. One in eight had needed medical attention because their home got too hot or too cold. This group is also disproportionately Black or Hispanic.

Our findings confirm what researchers have long suspected: Energy insecurity among medical device users is deeply tied to income, housing type and race. Our study also shows the importance of understanding where people are both energy insecure and less likely to have access to backup power sources during outages.

What communities are doing today

Some communities are finding ways to tackle pieces of this problem.

Most utility companies maintain lists of households with medical devices, and they are supposed to notify customers ahead of power shutoffs and prioritize restoring power to their homes. However, studies show that these registries capture only a fraction of the people who qualify.

If medical device users were instead automatically enrolled during a doctor’s visit, or if landlords were required to notify new tenants of these registries, those steps could help reach more people.

Portable battery programs, like those run by California’s largest utilities, provide free or low-cost rechargeable batteries and a solar panel kit to homeowners and renters with medical devices who are most at risk of power shutoffs. Contractors can work with households to choose an appropriate battery to ensure it isn’t too heavy or difficult to transport if evacuating because of a wildfire or other disaster.

As climate change makes blackouts longer and more frequent – and as federal low-income energy assistance programs face cuts – providing help to residents falls increasingly on states and cities. Knowing which households face the greatest risks can make it easier to target aid to those in need.

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. Power outages in heat waves and storms can threaten the lives of medical device users – we looked at who is most at risk – https://theconversation.com/power-outages-in-heat-waves-and-storms-can-threaten-the-lives-of-medical-device-users-we-looked-at-who-is-most-at-risk-276501

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Monica Duffy Toft, Professor of International Politics and Director of the Center for Strategic Studies, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

Wars are rarely lost first on the battlefield. They are lost in leaders’ minds − when leaders misread what they and their adversaries can do, when their confidence substitutes for comprehension, and when the last war is mistaken for the next one.

The Trump administration’s miscalculation of Iran is not an anomaly. It is the latest entry in one of the oldest and most lethal traditions in international politics: the catastrophic gap between what leaders believe going in and what war actually delivers.

I’m a scholar of international security, civil wars and U.S. foreign policy, and author of the book “Dying by the Sword,” which examines why the United States repeatedly reaches for military solutions and why such interventions rarely produce durable peace. The deeper problem with the U.S. war in Iran, as I see it, was overconfidence bred by recent success.

Dismissed concerns

Before the conflict involving Iran, Israel and the U.S. escalated, Energy Secretary Chris Wright dismissed concerns about oil market disruption, noting that prices had barely moved during the 12-day war in June 2025 between Israel and Iran. Other senior officials agreed.

What followed was significant: Iranian-aimed missile and drone barrages against U.S. bases, Arab capitals and Israeli population centers. Then Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes daily − not with a naval blockade, not with mines or massed anti-ship missiles, but with cheap drones.

A few strikes in the vicinity of the strait were enough. Insurers and shipping companies decided the transit was unsafe. Tanker traffic dropped to zero, although the occasional ship has made it through recently. Analysts are calling it the biggest energy crisis since the 1970s oil embargo.

Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, has since vowed to keep the strait closed. U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, reported after a closed-door briefing that the administration had no plan for the strait and did not know how to get it safely back open.

With no embassy in Tehran since 1979, the U.S. relies heavily for intelligence on CIA networks of questionable quality and Israeli assets who have their own country’s interests in mind. So the U.S. did not anticipate that Iran had rebuilt and dispersed significant military capacity since June 2025, nor that it would strike neighbors across the region, including Azerbaijan, widening the conflict well beyond the Persian Gulf.

The war has since reached the Indian Ocean, where a U.S. submarine sank an Iranian frigate 2,000 miles from the theater of war, off the coast of Sri Lanka – just days after the ship had participated in Indian navy exercises alongside 74 nations, including the U.S.

The diplomatic damage to Washington’s relationships with India and Sri Lanka, two countries whose cooperation is increasingly important as the United States seeks partners to manage and mitigate Iran’s blockade, was entirely foreseeable. Washington has put them in a difficult position, with India choosing diplomacy with Iran to secure passage for its vessels and Sri Lanka opting to retain its neutrality, underscoring its vulnerable position.

But U.S. planners didn’t foresee any of this.

The wrong lesson from Venezuela

The swift military intervention by the U.S. in Venezuela in January 2026 produced rapid results with minimal blowback − appearing to validate the administration’s faith in coercive action.

But clean victories are dangerous teachers.

They inflate what I call in my teaching the “hubris/humility index” − the more a leadership overestimates its own abilities, underestimates the adversary’s and dismisses uncertainty, the higher the score and the more likely disaster will ensue. Clean victories inflate the index precisely when skepticism is most needed, because they suggest the next adversary will be as manageable as the last.

Political scientist Robert Jervis demonstrated decades ago that misperceptions in international relations are not random but follow patterns. Leaders tend to project their own cost-benefit logic onto opponents who do not share it. They also fall into “availability bias,” allowing the most recent operation to stand in for the next.

The higher the hubris/humility index, the less likely there is to be the kind of strategic empathy that might ask: How does Tehran see this? What does a regime that believes its survival is at stake actually do? History shows that such a regime escalates, improvises and takes risks that appear irrational from an outside perspective but are entirely rational from within.

Recent cases reveal this unmistakable pattern.

The United States in Vietnam, 1965–1968

American war planners believed material superiority would force the communists in Hanoi to surrender.

It didn’t.

American firepower alone didn’t lead to military defeat, much less political control. The Tet Offensive in 1968 – when North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched coordinated attacks across South Vietnam – shattered the official U.S. narrative that the war was nearly won and that there was “light at the end of the tunnel.”

Athough the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces ultimately repelled the attacks, their scale and surprise caused the public not to trust official statements, accelerating the erosion of public trust and decisively turning American opinion against the war.

The U.S. loss in Vietnam didn’t occur on a single battlefield, but through strategic and political unraveling. Despite overwhelming superiority, Washington was incapable of building a stable, legitimate South Vietnamese government or recognizing the grit and resilience of the North Vietnamese forces. Eventually, with mounting casualties and large-scale protests at home, U.S. forces withdrew, ceding control of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces in 1975.

The U.S. failure was conceptual and cultural, not informational. American analysts simply couldn’t picture the war from their opponent’s perspective.

Afghanistan: Deadly assumptions

The Soviet Union in Afghanistan in 1979 and the United States in Afghanistan after 2001 conducted two different wars but held the same deadly assumption: that external military force can quickly impose political order in a fractured society strongly resistant to foreign control.

In both cases, great powers believed their abilities would outweigh local complexities. In both cases, the war evolved faster − and lasted far longer − than their strategies could adapt.

Russia, Ukraine and the Strait of Hormuz

This is the case that should most haunt Washington.

Ukraine demonstrated that a materially weaker defender can impose huge costs on a stronger attacker through battlefield innovation: cheap drones, decentralized adaptation, real-time intelligence, and the creative use of terrain and chokepoints to find asymmetrical advantages. The U.S. watched it all unfold in real time for four years and helped pay for it.

Iran was also watching − and the Strait of Hormuz is the proof.

Iran didn’t need a navy to close the world’s most important energy chokepoint. It needed drones, the same cheap, asymmetric technology Ukraine has used to blunt Russia’s onslaught, deployed not on a land front but against the insurance calculus of the global shipping industry.

Washington, which had underwritten much of that playbook in Ukraine, apparently never asked the obvious question: What happens when the other side has been taking notes? That is not a failure of U.S. intelligence. It is a failure of strategic imagination − exactly what the hubris/humility index is designed to highlight.

Iran does not need to defeat the U.S. conventionally. It needs only to raise costs, exploit chokepoints and wait for a fracture among U.S. allies and domestic political opposition to force a fake U.S. declaration of victory or a genuine U.S. withdrawal.

Notably, Iran has kept the strait selectively open to Turkish, Indian and Saudi vessels, rewarding neutral countries and punishing U.S. allies, driving wedges through the coalition.

Historian Geoffrey Blainey famously argued that wars start when both sides hold incompatible beliefs about power and only end when reality forces those beliefs to align.

That alignment is now happening, at great cost, in the Persian Gulf and beyond. The Trump administration scored high on the hubris index at exactly the moment when it most needed humility.

Monica Duffy Toft 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. Overconfidence is how wars are lost − lessons from Vietnam, Afghanistan and Ukraine for the war in Iran were ignored – https://theconversation.com/overconfidence-is-how-wars-are-lost-lessons-from-vietnam-afghanistan-and-ukraine-for-the-war-in-iran-were-ignored-278604

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Karen Schlatter, Director, Colorado Water Center, Colorado State University

The seven U.S. states that make up the Colorado River basin are struggling to agree on how best to manage the river’s water as its supply dwindles due to climate change and a period of prolonged drought. Their negotiations, which are not open to the public, missed a Feb. 14, 2026, deadline the federal government had established, after which federal officials said they would impose their own plan.

The federal government has not yet done so, but the prospect of such an action is not good news for the nearly 40 million people who depend on the Colorado River for water, energy, agriculture and recreation, nor for the estimated US$1.4 trillion in economic activity the river supports.

We have led or participated in complex water management discussions from the river’s headwaters in Colorado to its delta in Mexico and elsewhere in the arid Southwest and around the world. Even on less contentious issues, the keys to success involve learning together, understanding one another’s interests, working through conflict and developing inclusive solutions for diverse participants. And that works best with an outside facilitator.

The five most common sources of conflict between people are values, data, relationships, interests and structure. The current Colorado River negotiations include all five. We believe a process designed and facilitated by negotiation experts could help break the logjam.

We recognize it can be very hard to reach an agreement when what’s at stake are countless lives, massive amounts of money, enormous quantities of hydroelectric power and not nearly enough water.

But compromise on Colorado River management is possible and, in fact, was achieved to curb California’s water use in the 2000s, to negotiate an interim agreement to coordinate operations at the Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs in 2007, and to enact contingency plans to manage drought in 2019. But this time around, circumstances are different.

Previous negotiations

The negotiations leading up to those agreements were often facilitated by officials from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation who focused on reaching broad agreements on general principles and concepts before delving into details. Federal staff also actively guided key agreements and provided the science and computer models to make well-informed decisions. And the states’ negotiators knew the Department of Interior would act unilaterally to make damaging cuts to water supply if states couldn’t come to their own agreement.

The negotiators for the states had long-standing relationships and built trust by frequently communicating outside formal meetings and seeking to listen to and understand other states’ perspectives, even if they didn’t agree.

The states also agreed to use the bureau’s computer model for analyzing scenarios of climate change and management decisions. That meant all the negotiators were looking at the same data when delving into possible options. And the political and social environment was less polarized than today.

The current situation

In this round of negotiations, federal leadership has been lagging. The Department of the Interior has not made clear what the consequences might be for the states if they fail to agree. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has been without a permanent commissioner since President Donald Trump retook office in January 2025.

And federal staff have only recently begun helping to facilitate the discussions.

The states are fractured into subgroups, according to whether they are in the river’s Upper Basin – Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico – or the Lower Basin, which includes Arizona, Nevada and California. Each basin group holds strong positions and has generally been unwilling to shift.

Each basin group is using a different set of assumptions for the bureau’s computer model to explore options. And the discussion often gets stuck on details, which prevents progress toward broader agreements.

In addition, the political context has shifted significantly, with increased polarization and politicization of the issues, creating barriers to effective dialogue and deliberation. Today, compromise can seem unattainable.

But those relatively new challenges to Colorado River compromise are not an excuse for failure.

A way forward?

The current negotiations have all been done behind closed doors. From talking with people involved in the negotiations, we understand the negotiators have been left to set their own agendas and meeting plans and conduct their own communications and follow-up, with no formal facilitators.

It’s reasonable to expect the negotiators to be ready to represent their states’ interests, working through an incredibly complicated landscape of hydrology, climate and management scenario modeling, water law and administration, and politics. But we believe it’s unreasonable – and unrealistic and unfair – to expect them to also be experts at designing and facilitating an effective process for sorting out their differences.

Federal officials are not necessarily the best people to run the process either. And if the agency that ultimately needs to approve any deal is the one leading the process, real or perceived biases about the states or key issues in the agreement could further complicate the discussions.

We believe that agreement between the seven states is still possible. It may be less effective to bring in a third-party facilitator at this stage in the negotiation process, though, because of the degraded trust, hardened positions and shortage of time.

One possible outcome is that the Bureau of Reclamation will select and enforce one of the five management alternatives it outlined in January 2026. But that could lead to decades of litigation going up to the Supreme Court. No one wins in this scenario.

A more hopeful possibility is that the bureau adopts short-term rules that would give the states another chance to negotiate a longer-term deal – ideally with an unbiased third-party facilitator for support.

A collaborative and consensus-based planning process in the Yakima River Basin in Washington state in the early 2010s is evidence that while nobody gets everything they want in a negotiated agreement, “if they can (all) get something, that’s really the basis of the plan,” as a Washington state official told The New York Times.

Sharon B. Megdal is principal investigator on multiple grants and contracts, none of which funded or influenced the content of this essay. Megdal served as an elected member of the Central Arizona Project Board of Directors from 2009 through 2020.

Karen Schlatter 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. Why Colorado River negotiations stalled, and how they could resume with the possibility of agreement – https://theconversation.com/why-colorado-river-negotiations-stalled-and-how-they-could-resume-with-the-possibility-of-agreement-278029

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Katrine L. Wallace, Epidemiologist, University of Illinois Chicago

Public health advocates have largely applauded a Massachusetts judge’s ruling on March 16, 2026, to temporarily block major changes to vaccine policy made by the Department of Health and Human Services since 2025.

The ruling pauses two major actions ushered in by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. since he stepped into the role. First, it blocks Kennedy’s restructuring of a key vaccine panel called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in June 2025. Second, it suspends HHS’s overhaul of the childhood vaccine schedule in January 2026, which cut the number of routine vaccinations children are recommended to receive from 17 to 11.

As an epidemiologist who studies vaccine hesitancy and a public-facing science communicator, I view these HHS actions as extremely damaging to public health, and I am relieved they have been paused, at least while legal proceedings are ongoing.

However, I also worry that this back-and-forth is detrimental to trust in science, especially for families who are already uneasy about vaccinating their kids or feel hesitant to do so.

What exactly happened?

The March 16 decision follows a lawsuit originally brought in July 2025 by six medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics. The medical organizations argued that HHS’s changes were implemented without following established legal and scientific processes.

The ruling seems to align with that view, concluding that the government’s overhaul of the vaccine committee likely “fails to comport with governing law” and that its changes to the vaccine schedule were “arbitrary and capricious.”

The judge’s action suggests that the court believes the plaintiffs are likely to succeed in showing that the HHS changes violated federal law.

The ruling returns recommendations on the childhood vaccine schedule – made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of HHS’s primary divisions – to their pre–June 2025 status while the case proceeds. It also blocks HHS’s replacement of members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which reviews evidence and develops recommendations that guide vaccine-related decisions by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The ruling effectively pauses the vaccine committee’s work. The members appointed by Kennedy cannot serve at the moment, and the previous members do not automatically return, leaving the committee inactive for now.

Officials from HHS have indicated that they are likely to appeal the ruling.

Does the ruling change people’s ability to access vaccines?

Not at the moment, because right now nothing has changed about what vaccines children should receive. Pediatricians should be following the long-standing vaccine schedule as it existed before the HHS’s change in June 2025. Most physicians already are, having followed the American Academy of Pediatrics’ decision not to back HHS’s revised schedule.

Additionally, private insurers as well as federal health programs such as Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Vaccines for Children had already agreed to continue covering all the vaccines through 2026, even before the judge intervened.

From a health economics perspective, data shows that the downstream costs of treating vaccine-preventable illnesses are much higher than the cost of reimbursing vaccines, so insurance companies may be motivated to continue covering them.

Moving forward, however, the ongoing court case could affect vaccine availability because many insurance companies and public programs rely on recommendations from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to determine which vaccines are covered or provided at no cost.

If your children are behind on any vaccines, it would be a good idea to get them now, given the uncertainty.

What effect might the ruling have longer term?

It’s important to remember that even though policy shifts in vaccine recommendations can be confusing, the data on the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccines has not changed. There were no safety alerts or new clinical trials that precipitated HHS’s change to the vaccine schedule.

Even with the prior recommendations back in place, however, all the back-and-forth in the headlines may create confusion for parents. Mistrust of vaccines and public health is at an all-time high, fueled by disinformation, poor communication on the part of public health agencies, and other factors that arose mostly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Parents have long considered health agencies such as the CDC to be trustworthy but increasingly look upon them with skepticism. A survey in January 2026 showed public trust in federal health agencies has declined following HHS’s changes to the childhood vaccine schedule.

Immunization rates, meanwhile, are on the decline, particularly for measles. An analysis released by Reuters on March 18, 2026, of vaccination data from Michigan suggests the number of toddlers receiving routine vaccines fell sharply from January 2025 to January 2026, and that Kennedy’s attack on vaccines influenced parents’ decisions to forgo them.

Rebuilding trust in vaccines and public health will take time and will require consistent, transparent communication and strong engagement between clinicians and families. The court ruling potentially represents an initial step in that process.

For parents with questions about vaccines, the best source of information remains their child’s pediatrician. Parents can also look to evidence-based vaccine schedules maintained by health groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Katrine L. Wallace 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. Federal judge temporarily blocks RFK Jr.’s vaccine agenda – an epidemiologist answers questions parents may have – https://theconversation.com/federal-judge-temporarily-blocks-rfk-jr-s-vaccine-agenda-an-epidemiologist-answers-questions-parents-may-have-278709

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Mary Magnuson, Associate Science Editor, The Conversation

“Project Hail Mary,” the movie adaptation to Andy Weir’s 2021 novel about a science teacher attempting to save the Earth from sun-eating microbes, was released in March 2026 to stellar ratings from critics and audiences alike. The movie explores a few unique forms that extraterrestrial life could take, from space microorganisms that produce both infrared light and an unfathomable amount of energy, to rocklike aliens that live under crushing pressure and breathe ammonia.

Over the past decade, scientists have come up with a variety of frameworks to guide their search for life in the universe. While it’s most convenient to start looking for life using the knowledge that biologists have about life on Earth, scientists have also begun integrating broader conceptions of life, including life that perhaps evolved in different chemical environments.

To expand on the idea that life out in space might look nothing like life on Earth, here are five articles The Conversation U.S. rounded up from our archives, and written by astronomers and astrobiologists.

1. Why base the search on life on Earth?

Astronomers participating in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence typically start by identifying potentially habitable planets. And to do that, they look for what sustains life on Earth: water.

Planets that are close enough to their Sun that liquid water wouldn’t freeze, but far enough away that it wouldn’t evaporate, fall into what’s called the Goldilocks Zone. But why base the search on water, which complex life on Earth uses to survive, if an extraterrestrial life-form might use different chemistry?

Cole Mathis, a physicist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University who studies complex adaptive systems, explained that out of convenience, astronomers start by looking for signals similar to those produced by life on Earth.

Detecting chemical signatures using the instruments on telescopes is tricky – it’s like playing hide-and-seek, but you’re outside the house and can only peer in through the window. You might as well start by ruling out the easy and more obvious hiding spots.

Missions to Mars have looked for signs of photosynthesis – the process by which plants take in energy – and telescopes peering deep into space look for oxygen, which organisms on Earth release into the atmosphere.

“Most astronomers and astrobiologists know that if we only look for life that’s like Earth life, we might miss the signs of aliens that are really different,” Mathis wrote. “But honestly, we’ve never detected aliens before, so it’s hard to know where to start. When you don’t know what to do, starting somewhere is usually better than nowhere.”

Read more:
Why do astronomers look for signs of life on other planets based on what life is like on Earth?

2. Finding patterns of purpose

Sometimes, scientists find chemical ingredients that make up life on Earth out in space, but they can’t assume that these ingredients on their own indicate life. Geological and environmental processes on planets may produce these chemical signatures without any living organisms involved.

The key difference, to Amirali Aghazadeh, a computational scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is purpose. Life grows, adapts and changes over time to better fit its environment.

His research team came up with a framework that, instead of looking for a specific type of life-form, looks at patterns in collections of chemicals and evaluates whether they could have been produced by processes like metabolism and evolution.

“If we assume that alien life uses the same chemistry, we risk missing biology that is similar – but not identical – to our own, or misidentifying nonliving chemistry as a sign of life,” wrote Aghazadeh.

Read more:
Can scientists detect life without knowing what it looks like? Research using machine learning offers a new way

3. Lessons from complex, evolving systems

Like Aghazadeh, many astrobiologists are starting to look more broadly at how complexity emerges, rather than searching for a specific type of molecule that could indicate the presence of extraterrestrial life. Other forms of life may be made up of entirely different chemical ingredients to humans, but to be considered life, they would still have to adapt and evolve over time.

Chris Impey, an astronomer from the University of Arizona, attended a workshop where scientists across disciplines came together to try to understand how and why systems in the universe – from organisms to languages and information – change or grow more complex over time.

Figuring out these underlying drivers of complexity, or finding signals that indicate the presence of a complex system, could help scientists search for unique forms of life in the universe.

“As astrobiologists try to detect life off Earth, they’ll need to be creative,” Impey wrote. “One strategy is to measure mineral signatures on the rocky surfaces of exoplanets, since mineral diversity tracks terrestrial biological evolution. As life evolved on Earth, it used and created minerals for exoskeletons and habitats.”

Read more:
Extraterrestrial life may look nothing like life on Earth − so astrobiologists are coming up with a framework to study how complex systems evolve

4. Beyond biology: Looking for ‘technosignatures’

Another option for searching for life has nothing to do with biology. Some scientists, wrote astronomers Macy Huston and Jason Wright from Penn State University, look for “technosignatures:” signals that would come from technology originating beyond Earth.

Human technology – from TV towers to satellite and spacecraft communications – emits enough radio waves to create faint but detectable signals traveling through space. Scientists use this idea to search for artificial signals that could potentially come from an extraterrestrial civilization.

Other technosignatures could include chemical pollution, artificial heat or light from industry, or signals from a large number of satellites.

“While many astronomers have thought a lot about what might make for a good signal, ultimately, nobody knows what extraterrestrial technology might look like and what signals are out there in the universe,” wrote Huston and Wright.

Read more:
Signatures of alien technology could be how humanity first finds extraterrestrial life

5. Evaluating extraordinary claims

Detecting extraterrestrial life in any form would be a momentous occasion, so, as Impey wrote, making a declaration might not be cut-and-dried. In “Project Hail Mary,” the fictional scientists sample and study the “space dots” they find extensively before drawing a conclusion.

Scientists must first rule out any possible non-biological explanations for a discovery, meaning the discovery would have to be unexplained by any chemical or geological processes. If scientists ever found a potential life-form very different from all life on Earth, it might take extensive research before they could rule out all other possibilities and determine that it’s a living organism. But setting this bar so high protects scientists from making a claim they would later need to walk back.

“A detection of life would be a remarkable development,” Impey wrote. “On scales large and small, astronomers try to set a high bar of evidence before claiming a discovery.”

Read more:
‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’ − an astronomer explains how much evidence scientists need to claim discoveries like extraterrestrial life

This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.

– ref. ‘Project Hail Mary’ explores unique forms of life in space – 5 essential reads on searching for aliens that look nothing like life on Earth – https://theconversation.com/project-hail-mary-explores-unique-forms-of-life-in-space-5-essential-reads-on-searching-for-aliens-that-look-nothing-like-life-on-earth-278757

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jeffrey Tully, Associate Clinical Professor of Anesthesiology, University of California, San Diego

HBO Max’s enormously popular television series “The Pitt” is receiving plaudits for its realistic depiction of the trials and tribulations of health care in an urban emergency room.

Now in its second season, which premiered on Jan. 8, 2026, the show follows Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (played by Noah Wyle) and his colleagues through a single 15-hour clinical shift, divided into one-hour episodes. The team treats patients against a backdrop of all-too-common American societal plagues, from substance use disorder to medical bankruptcies and mass shootings.

Spoiler alert: About halfway through the season, Dr. Robby and the staff at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center grapple with chaos ensuing from a less commonly depicted disaster – a hospital cyberattack. The hospital’s network and computers were incapacitated, resulting in scenes of millennial residents struggling with fax machines, laboratory orders disappearing in a shuffle of papers, and constant communication breakdowns culminating in a missed life-threatening diagnosis.

All this might prompt viewers to wonder: Does this actually happen in real life?

As physicians who study cyberattacks and their impact on patient care, we have seen many of the same events depicted in “The Pitt” play out in the real world.

These attacks have severe clinical consequences. In an unfortunate case of art imitating life, the show’s cyberattack story arc began on the same day that the University of Mississippi Medical Center suffered the same fate, resulting in the sudden closure of more than 30 affiliated clinics across the state while also disrupting Mississippi’s only Level I trauma center.

Modern health care is critically dependent on digital technologies, such as electronic health records, laboratory machines and radiology platforms, that shut down when hospital networks are taken offline. Losing access to these tools for prolonged periods of time puts patients’ lives at grave risk.

What’s at stake

The most dire real-life cyberattacks on hospitals involve ransomware, a class of malicious software that encrypts data and locks down computers and networks, demanding significant amounts of cash for the promise of relief. Unfortunately, these events are not rare. Comparitech, a cybersecurity research firm, recorded 445 ransomware attacks on hospitals and clinics in 2025 – a new peak following several years of annual increases.

Such attacks are especially dangerous for patients with time-sensitive emergencies like strokes, heart attacks or sepsis, but they affect hospital outcomes broadly. For example, a 2026 analysis of Medicare data found that hospitalized patients had a 38% higher risk of death during a ransomware attack.

Moreover, the health impacts of ransomware are not confined to the hospitals under attack. “The Pitt” demonstrates this phenomenon well in earlier episodes. When Westbridge, another hospital in the community, is struck first, a wave of patients arriving by ambulance strains Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s already packed emergency room, leading to delays in care and overwhelming already-strained clinicians. Our team found that a hospital cyberattack cut the odds of surviving a cardiac arrest without devastating brain damage by nearly 90% at nearby hospitals, not just the one that was attacked.

And even when a hospital’s computer systems are restored and normal care resumes, a cyberattack leaves enormous financial damage in its wake. Class action lawsuits, fragmented billing and steep regulatory fines due to patient privacy breaches and other issues often result in tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of losses.

In the worst cases, hospitals or clinics in rural areas have been forced to shutter their doors, leaving their communities with one less place to receive care and exacerbating existing health care deserts.

Protecting cyber infrastructure

We have no doubt that Dr. Robby will rally his team to ultimately save the day from malicious cyberattacks on “The Pitt.” But what is the prognosis for the rest of us, in the real world?

The good news is that a number of efforts are underway to improve the cybersecurity of the U.S. health care system.

The federal government has recognized the particular risk posed to rural and critical access hospitals and has identified increased investment in cybersecurity technologies as one of the goals of the Rural Health Transformation Program, a US$50 billion package distributed across all 50 states.

Several states, including New York and Connecticut, have taken further action, enshrining new bills in 2025 and 2026 mandating hospitals develop specific cybersecurity plans to protect patients. And the Food and Drug Administration now evaluates the cybersecurity of new medical devices prior to their arrival to market, and can issue recalls of those found to have significant vulnerabilities.

Cybersecurity remains one of the few bipartisan issues on Capitol Hill. A health care cybersecurity bill co-sponsored by Senators Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Mark Warner, D-Va., introduced in December 2025, would require hospitals to adopt security practices, including multifactor authentication and data encryption, allocate additional grants for hospitals and clinics, and strengthen the pipeline for cybersecurity professionals working in the health care sector, among other provisions.

However, this problem isn’t going away. Artificial intelligence and the expansion of remote and virtual care mean that malicious hackers have sophisticated new tools and increased opportunities to target hospitals. Researchers like us will have to find new ways to prevent cyberattacks when possible and protect patients when they inevitably erupt.

Jeffrey Tully is the co-founder of Inoculum Labs. He receives funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. He is affiliated with the Healthcare and Public Health Sector Coordinating Council Cybersecurity Working Group.

Christian Dameff co-founded inoculum labs. He receives funding from ARPA-H.

– ref. HBO’s ‘The Pitt’ nails how hospital cyberattacks create chaos, endanger patients and disrupt critical care – https://theconversation.com/hbos-the-pitt-nails-how-hospital-cyberattacks-create-chaos-endanger-patients-and-disrupt-critical-care-278795

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Laura Aull, Professor of English and Linguistics, University of Michigan

Suspicion and affection. Apprehension and excitement. Most people have mixed feelings about AI English, whether or not they always recognize it. When reading text generated by AI, people feel it sounds off, or fake. When reading English by a human, people are more likely to feel it has a characteristic voice or a personal touch.

What exactly makes English sound human, or sound like AI? And does it matter if AI English never truly achieves a human feel?

I research the institutionalization of English. There is a long, problematic history of people feeling positively or negatively toward different kinds of English, rewarding how it is spoken or written by some sectors of society and devaluing how it is used by others.

When generative AI language tools came along, they scaled up these problems. English-based large language models are trained on text from the public internet. Human instructions tell the models to sound like formal English. Because of that, large language models end up trained on all the bias baked into standardized human texts and ideas.

In my work, I encounter people who would never trust the internet to tell them what is right and wrong, yet they trust generative AI to tell them how to write.

Human vs. AI

The first step to becoming a more informed user of AI English is to try to understand what people mean when they say writing sounds human. This understanding will improve your AI literacy. Most importantly, it will allow you to learn to recognize two qualities that make human English different from AI English: variation and readability.

Human English contains persistent, if subtle, linguistic patterns of variation and readability. By contrast, AI uses what I call exam English – a rather formal, dense English that is favored in academic tests and papers. It is less varied and less readable. People perceive it as robotic, but they also perceive it as smart.

Here’s a quick test: Read the two text messages below and guess which one is by a human and which one is by ChatGPT.

“i’m not sure how to break this to you. there’s no easy way to put it…i can’t make the friday-night fun. sorry. however, feel free to text me during the evening if there are any lulls in conversation. anyway, hope ur exotic trip goes well. see u next term.”

“Hey! I’m really sorry, but I won’t be able to make it Friday night. I hope you all have a great time, and I’ll see you next term!”

A human reader would probably notice several patterns right away. The first message has more “textese”: It defaults to lowercase and includes phonetic spellings “ur” and “u.” The second text has exam English capital letters, commas and spelling.

People are likely to have other impressions, too. Perhaps the first text feels more personal, and less sure of itself. Maybe the second text feels stiff, like it was written by an acquaintance. The first text contains different kinds of phrases and clauses, while the second text repeats the same clause structure four times.

On some level, human readers pick up on such patterns. Most people would say that the first text is by a human and the second is by AI. Indeed, the second passage was generated by ChatGPT.

Even this basic illustration shows that human English includes variation in word usage and grammatical structures that breaks up information and conveys personal meaning. AI English has less variation and more dense noun phrases. In research studies, these patterns appear repeatedly across genres and registers.

Some AI English patterns change

AI writing tools evolve, and large language models vary. GPT 5 was infamously cold-sounding compared with its predecessor GPT 4, for example.

But the patterns I am talking about are likely to persist. AI English favors what exam English has always rewarded: homogeneity and information density. And thus far, instructional tuning – training AI models to follow human instruction – only makes AI English less like human English. It doesn’t help that AI writing is part of what AI bots train on.

The net effect today is that AI English has been trained on English that is much more narrow than actual, collective human English in practice. Humans, by contrast, don’t just use language that is probable, but language that is possible – based on the varied language use they have observed, their creative capacity for new utterances and their propensity to blend personal and impersonal language patterns.

How AI and human English can coexist

If you can become more aware of differences between AI and human English, those insights can help you use both language forms more productively. Here are a few steps to take:

Use language labels. When describing a given passage, use labels like “dense,” “plain,” “interpersonal” or “informational”, not social labels like “sounds smart” or “sounds off.” Consider exploring the actual patterns in human and AI English and trying to describe language patterns, not feelings about them, in other words.

Use AI tools selectively. Not only does human English have more accessible and varied patterns, it also engages the brain more than using AI language tools. To help prevent AI English from overshadowing human varied language in the world, use AI selectively.

Use curated tools. Tools like small language models and programs that you can add to a web browser to root out bias, such as Bias Shield, can help people make principled choices about AI English use. Tools such as translingual chatbots can also bring to AI English much more of the global variation in human English.

Be conscious of what sounds smart, and why. A century and a half of exam English makes it easy to think that dense, impersonal writing patterns are smart. But like any language patterns, they have pros and cons. They are not particularly personable or readable, especially for diverse audiences, and they are not representative of the range of global English in use today.

There can be good reasons to use exam English, but not just because AI bots generate it, or because people have learned to perceive it as smarter.

At its best, AI English is a language database driven by statistics. It’s big, but it’s canned. History tells us that a full range of global human English gives people the greatest possibilities for expression and connection.

Laura Aull 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. How AI English and human English differ – and how to decide when to use artificial language – https://theconversation.com/how-ai-english-and-human-english-differ-and-how-to-decide-when-to-use-artificial-language-277455

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Vice Provost and Dean of College of Arts, Sciences, and Education, Missouri University of Science and Technology

The Trump administration announced a US$10 million reward on March 15, 2026, for information leading to the capture of several senior Iranian figures.

While two of these leaders have since been killed by Israeli strikes, they are included here to provide a more complete picture of Iran’s powerful elite – people deeply embedded in the Islamic Republic’s political, intelligence and security architecture.

As an international affairs scholar, I know their careers reflect the institutional pillars of the regime – clerical authority, intelligence coordination, military power – and help explain why they are considered high-value targets.

Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei

The son of former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a U.S.-Israeli strike in February 2026, Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, was chosen as Iran’s new supreme leader in early March.

Long viewed as a powerful behind-the-scenes figure, he operated within his father’s inner circle. He has cultivated strong relationships with Iran’s security and intelligence institutions and earned a reputation as a political fixer and enforcer.

Despite never holding formal elected or senior appointed office, Khamenei had been widely perceived as a potential successor to his father. Such a transition would have been controversial under normal circumstances, given his lack of experience and the ideological sensitivity around hereditary succession in a system born from anti-monarchical revolution.

Khamenei has also been linked to political controversies. During the 2005 presidential election, reformist candidate Mehdi Karroubi accused him of involvement in electoral manipulation. Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad later alleged that Khamenei engaged in financial misconduct.

Public opposition to his perceived rise was visible during the 2022–23 protests, when demonstrators explicitly rejected the prospect of his leadership by shouting “Mojtaba, may you die and never see leadership.”

Seyyed Ali-Asghar (Mir) Hejazi

A cleric with long-standing ties to Iran’s intelligence apparatus, Seyyed Ali-Asghar Hejazi had been among the closest aides to Ali Khamenei. He began his political career in 1980 as part of a “purification committee” tasked with firing perceived opponents from state institutions in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Hejazi later served as deputy for foreign affairs in the Ministry of Intelligence in the early 1980s and, more recently, as deputy chief of staff in the Office of the Supreme Leader. In this role, he has functioned as a key intermediary between various branches of government as well as religious and political personalities – transmitting Khamenei’s directives, shaping high-level policy and coordinating Iran’s complex intelligence and security networks.

He was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2013 for alleged human rights violations, including involvement in the suppression of the 2009 Green Movement, and by the European Union in 2019. He apparently survived an Israeli attack on March 6, 2026.

Seyyed Esmail Khatib

Seyyed Esmail Khatib, 64, who was killed on March 18, 2026, had built his career within Iran’s intelligence and security establishment. He joined intelligence operations linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in 1980 and was wounded during the Iran–Iraq War.

Following the war, this cleric held a series of senior intelligence roles, including director general of intelligence for Qom province, starting in 1991. He also held positions within the supreme leader’s security office from 2009–11 and was head of the judiciary’s Protection and Intelligence Center, a counterintelligence body within Iran’s judiciary, from 2012–19. He later served as a senior official within Astan Quds Razavi, a major religious and economic conglomerate controlled directly by Iran’s supreme leader.

Sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2020 for alleged human rights abuses, Khatib became Iran’s minister of intelligence in 2021.

Ali Larijani

Ali Larijani, who was assassinated on March 17, 2026, was one of the Islamic Republic’s most experienced political insiders. Born into a prominent clerical family, he rose through both military and civilian institutions, beginning with roles linked to the Revolutionary Guard in the early 1980s.

Over the decades, Larijani, 68, held numerous senior positions. Those include minister of culture from 1992–94 and head of state broadcasting from 1994–2004. He was also secretary of the Supreme National Security Council from 2004–08 and again from 2025–26. Larijani also served as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator from 2005-07.

From early January 2026, and more clearly following the Feb. 28 killing of Ayatollah Khamenei, Larijani emerged as a central decision-maker within the system before his death.

Brig. Gen. Eskandar Momeni

A Revolutionary Guard-affiliated security official, Eskandar Momeni, 64, is a veteran of the Iran–Iraq War and participated in counterinsurgency operations against leftist groups in northern Iran.

He later held a range of senior law enforcement roles, including head of the Police Emergency Center, a dispatch center that directs emergency response units, from 2004–05, deputy for operations of the national police from 2005–08, and chief of traffic police from 2009–14. He also holds a doctorate in national security.

As deputy commander of Iran’s Law Enforcement Force, responsible for public security, from 2015–18, Momeni oversaw security responses during the 2017-18 protests, which were met with force. Since becoming minister of interior in August 2024, he has remained a central figure in domestic security policy, including the lethal response to unrest in early 2026 in which an estimated 7,000 to 30,000 Iranians were killed.

Maj. Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi

A senior Revolutionary Guard commander and longtime military strategist, Yahya Rahim Safavi, 73, received military training in Syria prior to the 1979 revolution and later became a key figure during the Iran–Iraq War.

He served as commander of the Revolutionary Guard ground forces, from 1985–89, deputy commander in chief from 1989–97 and commander in chief of the Revolutionary Guard from 1997–2007. During his tenure, he reportedly also earned a Ph.D. in geography.

In December 2006, the U.N. Security Council put Safavi on its sanctions list for his involvement in Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. After stepping down as Revolutionary Guard commander, Safavi was appointed senior military adviser to the supreme leader and is still serving in that role. He remains under U.S. sanctions.

Mehrzad Boroujerdi 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. Who are Iran’s new leaders? A look at 6 the US placed a bounty on – 2 of whom are already dead – https://theconversation.com/who-are-irans-new-leaders-a-look-at-6-the-us-placed-a-bounty-on-2-of-whom-are-already-dead-278509

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Logan S. James, Research Associate in Animal Behavior, The University of Texas at Austin; McGill University

Animals do all sorts of things to attract each other as potential mates. Many birds, for example, produce feathers with elaborate color patterns – from the iridescent plumage of many hummingbirds to the famously brilliant tail of a peacock. Charles Darwin, an early pioneer in the theory of evolution, saw these colors and concluded that they exist because other birds find them attractive.

But this raised a peculiar question: Why did Darwin himself find these colors beautiful too?

Indeed, he noted that some animals have “nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have,” a simple observation with radical implications. Our sense of beauty might be something we humans share with other animals, rooted in biology.

Over a century after Darwin made his observations, my colleagues and I decided to actually test this idea.

I am an expert in animal communication, with a focus on sound production and perception. I have worked with species such as zebra finches, fringe-lipped bats and túngara frogs. For example, late at night in Panama, I have watched remote video feeds of female túngara frogs as they listened to calls that I played from different speakers. Eventually a female will hop toward one speaker, revealing which of the calls she preferred.

Could it really be possible that this tiny frog and I are attracted to some of the same sounds? What might shared preferences say about what animals and people have in common? We needed data to find out.

A global experiment

To test Darwin’s idea properly, we needed two things: a large collection of animal sounds that had already been tested on animals, and a large number of human listeners willing to give their opinions.

For the sounds, we drew on decades of published research, including some of our own as well as studies from generous colleagues who let us use their recordings. We ended up with 110 pairs of sounds from 16 different species, including frogs, insects, birds and mammals. In each pair, the sounds are used to attract potential mates; scientists had already found which of the two versions that animals tended to prefer.

For the human listeners, we built a gamified online experiment played by over 4,000 participants from around the world. The task was quite simple: We played each pair of sounds in random order, and then asked which one the human participant liked more.

What we found

The results were striking. Across our dataset, including animals separated from human beings by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, people tended to agree with the animals about which sound was more pleasant.

Amazingly, the stronger the animal’s preference, the more likely humans were to agree. We also found that people were measurably faster to click or tap on the sound that animals found more attractive, suggesting a subconscious aspect of these preferences.

People particularly agreed with animals when it came to what researchers call “adornments”: the extra trills, chucks, clicks and flourishes that animals can add to their calls. These sounds were more appealing to both animal and human listeners alike.

Why do we share these preferences?

This is a key question, and it will take many more studies to piece together. Our current work suggests that the architecture of the nervous system may help drive shared preferences. Despite the enormous diversity of life on Earth, many basic structures of sensory systems are similar across species. Shared mechanisms of sound perception may lead to shared biases in sound preference.

We also found a lot of factors that didn’t predict agreement. Participants with expertise in animal sounds or highly trained musicians were no different than other human judges. Intriguingly, those who reported spending more time listening to music on a daily basis agreed with animals more, a surprising finding worth investigating.

More to investigate

We focused on sound, while Darwin’s original observation was about color and visual beauty. Do humans share visual preferences with animals too? What about smell? And what’s happening in our brains when we make these snap aesthetic judgments? Are the same neural circuits at work when a human and a frog both choose the same call?

Preferences in animals are often subtle and variable across individuals and populations. I would love to ask birds what they think of different frog calls and vice versa, but it’s only humans that we can directly ask such questions.

We also found cases where humans disagreed with animals. Our results show a tendency, not a rule, and understanding where this variation comes from will be fascinating to discover.

My favorite takeaway from this research is a simple reminder.

People find so much beauty in nature, from the dazzling colors of butterflies to the melodious songs of birds and the aromas of flowers. Yet all of these evolved to attract other species, not us. Perhaps it’s because we humans share something fundamental with other animals that we too find these to be beautiful.

Logan S. James is affiliated with Earth Species Project.

– ref. You probably agree with the animals on which bird calls, frog noises and cricket chirps are most attractive – new research – https://theconversation.com/you-probably-agree-with-the-animals-on-which-bird-calls-frog-noises-and-cricket-chirps-are-most-attractive-new-research-276958