Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Jon Bergdoll, Associate Director of Data Partnerships at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Indiana University

Many provisions in the huge tax-and-spending package that President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025, sometimes called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will influence how much money Americans give to charity.

We conduct in-depth research on philanthropy. Together, we have analyzed the tax policy changes.

After crunching the numbers, we predict that the number of U.S. donors will rise, but that individuals, families and corporations will give less overall. We estimate that giving will be around US$5.7 billion less due to these tax policy changes, which went into effect on Jan. 1, 2026. That’s roughly 1% of the nearly $600 billion Americans gave in 2024.

Everyone gets a charitable deduction

As the reforms take effect, the provision likeliest to affect the most Americans should increase giving.

All taxpayers will finally get something that many nonprofit leaders had long sought: a universal charitable deduction.

The new rule will allow people who file on their own to shave up to $1,000 off their taxable income, or $2,000 for married couples who file jointly. Those amounts will not be adjusted for future inflation and will remain the same unless Congress changes them. They won’t affect anyone’s 2025 tax bill, but they will play a role in 2026 and beyond, especially when Americans file their 2026 tax returns in 2027.

The way this works is fairly simple. If a single person gives up to $1,000 or a married couple who file their taxes jointly give $2,000 to charity in a calendar year, they can deduct that much from their taxable income if they do not itemize their taxes.

This new deduction will allow every American individual and family to deduct charitable gifts, at least up to these limits. In practice, if your marginal tax rate is 22%, taking the charitable deduction could cut your tax bill by $220 if you file on your own and $440 if you’re married and file with your spouse, and this opportunity is available for the 90% of households who claim the standard deduction when they file their taxes.

The standard deduction is a fixed amount that all taxpayers may deduct from their taxable income.

Unlike the $300 charitable deduction that all American taxpayers could claim in 2020 and 2021 as part of economic relief measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, the measure is permanent this time around.

While charitable giving did increase in those years, it’s unclear whether this policy contributed to the higher levels of donations. Most likely, that temporary universal charitable deduction was set too low to make a significant difference. What’s more, people tend to respond more strongly to permanent policy changes than temporary ones.

The standard deduction no longer restricts access

Previously, only people who itemized their tax returns – around 10% of filers in recent years – could deduct the value of their charitable gifts from their taxable income.

Using data from 2022, we have estimated around 85% of non-itemized giving was coming from Americans who made donations totaling above the $1,000 and $2,000 amounts Congress set for the universal charitable deduction.

These taxpayers will now get tax breaks for some of that amount when they give to charity. There remains no incentive to give more than they already did in the past.

Encouraging more people to give to charity

While there are many factors that can affect giving patterns, evidence suggests that getting a new tax break makes any given person or family more likely to donate to charity.

Due to the introduction of a permanent universal charitable deduction, we project that 8.7 million more tax filers will donate. Adding this number of people to the most recently available data would bring the share of Americans who give charitably to 52%.

Our colleagues have identified a long-running decline in the number of U.S. individuals and families who give anything to charity each year. In 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, 46% of households made charitable gifts, down from 64% in 2008.

Changes for those who itemize

Two new tax rules, however, could discourage giving by higher-income donors. Those who itemize their taxes can’t deduct any giving below 0.5% of their income. Only their donations that exceed this floor can be deducted.

We found that only a small portion of itemized giving – less than 2% in the data we used – was done by households giving less than 0.5% of their income. We project individual giving will be $2.4 billion lower within this group of donors in 2026 and moving forward – at least relative to what individual giving would have been absent this tax-changing provision.

Another tax change could depress giving by larger amounts. It’s a reduction in the cap on all tax deductions – including the charitable deduction – from 37% to 35%.

While this might sound like a relatively minor difference, we and other scholars have found that high-income Americans tend to be highly responsive to tax policy changes. Perhaps that’s because they hire tax advisers, whose job it is to pay attention to changes like these.

According to 2022 IRS data, the most recent available, around half of all individual giving by people who itemize their tax returns – more than $100 billion – came from households likely to be affected by this 35% ceiling on deductions.

We project that this cap will decrease individual giving by $6.1 billion.

Corporate giving

Corporations gave an estimated $44 billion to charity in 2024, around 7% of all charitable gifts.

They might give less beginning in 2026, due to weaker incentives. The tax reform package includes a measure that makes it impossible for corporations to deduct any charitable gifts from their taxes unless those donations add up to at least 1% of their pretax profits.

Corporate giving has until now hovered around 1% of pretax profits. That pattern might suggest that this provision is likely to significantly discourage corporate giving because many companies will have to choose between getting no tax break at all or giving more to be eligible for one.

However, we’ve found that corporate giving is very top-heavy – as is the case with individual giving. While most corporations don’t give more than 1%, most of the money corporations give to charity actually comes from those that donate at least 1% of their profits.

Donors, including corporations, have a way to avoid missing out on the charitable deduction for those who itemize their tax on their returns. It’s possible to give more money to charity in one year to optimize the tax effects of their donations over time.

One way to go about this is to make gifts to a donor-advised fund, a financial account that people and companies can use to reserve charitable dollars. If a company deposits donations that are large enough to qualify for the corporate charitable tax deduction for one year into a donor-advised fund, it can get a tax break for that year and distribute gifts over two or more years as its executives see fit.

Taking all of the above into account, we project corporate giving to decline by only $1.55 billion, starting in 2026.

A mixed picture

In short, we project that these new tax policy changes will reduce total giving overall by $5.7 billion annually. The greatest downward pressure will be on individual donors who make large charitable gifts and bump up against the 35% cap on what they can deduct from their taxable income when they itemize.

But there is also a new disincentive for some of the middle-class donors who itemize their tax returns due to the new floor for itemizers being able to deduct charitable gifts. And the similar floor for corporate donations could discourage some companies from making gifts they would have made under the old rules.

At the same time, we expect to see the introduction of a permanent universal charitable deduction increase the total number of donors and the gifts that donors with more modest incomes make. Many nonprofit leaders had asked for this change for many years because they believed this change might increase giving overall.

To be clear, these estimated changes are relative to what would have happened had the government not enacted these new tax policies. Giving could still rise, just by less than it otherwise would have.

In addition, other factors affect giving besides taxation, including changes to income, wealth, stock market performance, economic growth and corporate profits.

Jon Bergdoll received funding from Independent Sector, a nonprofit membership group, for an earlier iteration of this research. This research was funded in partnership with CCS Fundraising.

Patrick Rooney does consulting for Rooney & Associates. He has received funding from Independent Sector, which earlier funded the portion of this work on the tax cap at 35%. This current work was funded by CCS, a fundraising consulting firm.

– ref. Tax changes taking effect in 2026 may boost the number of donors but lead to the US missing out on an estimated $5.7B a year in charitable giving – https://theconversation.com/tax-changes-taking-effect-in-2026-may-boost-the-number-of-donors-but-lead-to-the-us-missing-out-on-an-estimated-5-7b-a-year-in-charitable-giving-278137

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Gayle Rogers, Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh

It’s a familiar feeling: You start a text message, and your phone’s auto-complete function suggests several choices for the next word, ranging from banal to hilarious. “I love…” you, or coffee? Or you’re finishing an email, and merely typing the word “Let” prompts your app to suggest “Let me know if you have any questions” in light gray text.

Predictive language technologies have become so routine – baked into smartphones, email services and chatbots – that we barely notice them anymore. But they raise a difficult question: What happens to a writer’s unique voice when AI routinely completes their thoughts – or generates them altogether from scratch?

As the chair of a large English department – and as a scholar who researches the effects of predictive writing – I’ve witnessed firsthand the challenges that generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude pose for individual expression.

This technology has been incorporated into the writing process so fully that it’s almost impossible to imagine encountering a scene from the not-so-distant past: a writer, alone, with a pen and a piece of paper, wrestling with how to best translate their ideas, arguments and stories into something legible and interesting.

Predictive text leads to predictive writing

As many scholars have noted, though, this vision of writing was never fully accurate.

Essays have always incorporated guidance from teachers, professors or writing tutors. A friend might give feedback, or your favorite novelist’s turn of phrase might offer inspiration. The language we use is never fully “ours,” but draws on millions of sources absorbed over the course of our lives.

Just as it’s a myth to imagine that writers compose in a vacuum, there has never been a clear line between genuine human expression versus machine-generated text. As scholars have pointed out, we have been using machines to communicate for a long time. Every technological development – from the quill pen and the typewriter to the word processor – has brought with it changes in how humans express themselves.

However, the ubiquity of predictive language technologies directly threatens human creativity – or, as one study put it, “Predictive Text Encourages Predictive Writing.”

Because generative AI composes and suggests text in highly standardized, predictable patterns, its outputs can read as if they’re dressed-up versions of what linguists call “phatic expression.” These are the overly common phrases that function as social glue more than as conveyors of sentiment: “How are you?”, “Have a good day” or “See you soon.”

But this glue can lose its hold if the technology is used in the wrong situations. Using artificial intelligence to compose a social media post in the wake of a tragedy, or using it to write a fan letter to an Olympic athlete, comes off as insincere.

People are starting to catch on to generative AI’s prose, not because it’s clunky or poorly written, but because it all sounds the same. That’s because large language models are trained on gigantic masses of examples of human writing, and they predict text based on probabilities and commonalities.

Those predictive outputs often end up producing a singular, recognizable voice. Or, as Sam Kriss explained in a recent essay for The New York Times Magazine, “Once, there were many writers, and many different styles. Now, increasingly, one uncredited author turns out essentially everything.”

Slouching toward a cultural mean

Generative AI is accelerating the types of cultural convergence and uniform expression that were already happening.

For example, linguists have shown that regional accents in the U.S. are fading and becoming homogenized due to a mix of migration, urbanization, mass media and social media. Meanwhile, American English continues supplanting many other forms internationally due to the global predominance of U.S.-based media, TV, film and more.

Are we all destined to write and speak alike? Generative AI doesn’t know in advance whether you call soft drinks “soda,” “pop” or “coke.” If you let it choose, it will simply select “soda” for you, since that’s the most common term in its training data.

By contrast, what people typically value in a personal essay, novel, poem or message to a grieving friend is the ability of the human author to demonstrate – clearly and distinctly – something powerful and singular.

Making chatbots less appealing

So how can teachers compel students to craft their own voices? How is that task different today than it was even a decade ago?

It helps to think here about where generative AI struggles, and why.

Chatbots are great at creating relatively bland, highly readable prose, since that’s what is omnipresent in their training data. But they struggle to create the kinds of radically unexpected shifts that appear in novels like James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or songs like Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Several techniques exist to encourage these types of stylistic leaps among student writers.

Teachers can bake unpredictability into the assignment. Creative writing instructors have used techniques for decades to encourage out-of-the-box thinking. They might ask students to draft a poem and then rewrite it while avoiding the letter “E,” or limit themselves to two adjectives at most.

Another tactic involves having students draw from distinctly personal experiences. Teaching students how to explore connections between characters and conflicts in a novel to people and situations in their own lives makes resorting to chatbots less appealing, if not altogether useless. By contrast, impersonal assignments – “Discuss the symbolism of the color green in ‘The Great Gatsby’” – will likely produce generic, predictable results.

Teachers can also ensure the work of their students has a range of readers. If it’s just the professor, students may be less likely to invest time into cultivating their own voice. But if they have to write an essay or story for, say, their friends or their grandparents, they might have more of an incentive to sound like themselves.

Many other strategies exist, from being forced to reverse the argument of an essay to favor the other side, to interviewing strangers for an assignment and including their quotes.

The bottom line: Writers have access to sources – and language – that machines cannot access or generate. Having students wrestle with unconventional modes of composition and revision lies at the heart of ensuring that the technology is more of a helpful thought partner, but not a substitute for their voice.

Gayle Rogers 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. With AI finishing your sentences, what will happen to your unique voice on the page? – https://theconversation.com/with-ai-finishing-your-sentences-what-will-happen-to-your-unique-voice-on-the-page-276036

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By David Kroll, Professor of Natural Products Pharmacology & Toxicology, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

A Denver food and cannabis investigator became suspicious of PolkaDot-branded chocolate bars sitting next to convenience store energy shots and nicotine pouches in January 2026.

Months earlier, California public health officials warned about PolkaDot-branded chocolate bars. California authorities destroyed more than US$3 million of the chocolate after laboratory testing revealed added synthetic psychoactive drugs. The agency warned of severe illness, hospitalization or worse – particularly in children who could mistake the bars for ordinary candy.

Unfortunately, the California case was a beacon of a more widespread problem. In Denver, investigators from the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment and Denver Licensing and Consumer Protection the Denver Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection warned consumers and removed these products from three retailers. They then partnered with the Denver Police Department to destroy similar products from six additional retailers.

I’m a natural products pharmacologist and professor based in Colorado who has studied the emergence of known and novel psychoactive substances in consumer products. I did some investigating to find out how these products landed on shelves, and how dietary supplement loopholes allowed them to initially evade detection by licensing authorities.

False labels fool retailers and mislead consumers

The PolkaDot-branded chocolate bars were marketed as “mushroom blends” and said to include lion’s mane, reishi, turkey tail and cordyceps — all non-hallucinogenic varieties. But laboratory tests showed otherwise. The bars contained psychoactive drugs: psilocybin and psilocin, the principal psychedelics found in Psilocybe mushrooms, as well as other chemical relatives called synthetic tryptamines.

“We didn’t want any one retailer to feel singled out,” said Jessica Davis, Denver health department’s food and cannabis investigator, in an interview. “We simply asked if they were carrying any mushroom blends. Most didn’t know they contained hallucinogenic mushroom compounds.”

This isn’t the first time psilocybin-laced products have been found in Denver. In the summer 2025, tobacco licensing authorities warned consumers about the same issue in West Coast Gold Caps chocolate bars. And in late 2024, Colorado was one of 34 states where the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported hospitalizations and suspected deaths associated with Diamond Shruumz chocolate bars and gummies.

What PolkaDot is – and isn’t

PolkaDot products look like everyday treats: 2-ounce chocolate bars in multiple flavors, gummies and even liquid “shots” or seltzers. They’re advertised as containing a blend of non-hallucinogenic mushrooms. These products are often sold in natural foods stores as nutritional supplements, even though there is little clinical evidence for their health benefits.

But according to public advisories, PolkaDot bars in Denver contained chemicals prohibited in retail food products.

PolkaDot brand materials, including the paper wrapping of the chocolates – but not the chocolates themselves – are widely available online. That means there isn’t a single regulated manufacturer of the chocolate. Instead, multiple unconnected players can purchase packaging kits and fill them with whatever compounds they choose. As a result, the composition of the same PolkaDot-labeled product can vary considerably across the U.S.

Davis, the food safety investigator, said gas station retailers frequently produced apparently factual invoices from wholesalers, but the paperwork rarely verified what was actually found inside the bars.

“Wholesalers weren’t doing their due diligence,” she said. “Some said they found these at trade shows and were told they were legal.”

No, Colorado didn’t legalize retail sales of psilocybin

Much of the confusion among wholesalers and consumers stems from Colorado’s 2022 Natural Medicine Act. Voters approved Proposition 122, leading to the state’s decriminalization of personal possession, cultivation and sharing of certain natural psychedelic substances. So, while people are free to grow, share and use “magic mushrooms,” it is unlawful to sell them.

Colorado is also building a system for licensed facilitators to offer supervised use of hallucinogenic mushrooms for a variety of mental health issues, but the law did not authorize over-the-counter retail sales at gas stations, smoke shops or corner stores.

“People assume that because Colorado decriminalized natural medicines, anything ‘mushroom’ is fair game to buy. It isn’t. Retail sales are prohibited,” Davis said.

So-called natural or herbal medicine products, such as chamomile for relaxation and echinacea for colds, are regulated in the U.S. as foods – not drugs – under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994. Retailers are free to sell products as long as the label does not make false or misleading medical claims or contain unapproved or illicit drugs. The Food and Drug Administration issues a formal warning letter to prohibit sales when products are misbranded, spiked with unapproved drugs or when adverse reactions appear in consumers.

Psilocybin and some semi-synthetic tryptamines are prohibited under Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, governed by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. But some of the synthetic tryptamines found in the PolkaDot-branded bars are not explicitly named in this most restrictive classification, although the main building block of these chemicals, diethyltryptamine, or DET, is.

Some of the slightly modified psychoactives found in PolkaDot products are presumed by the DEA and other authorities to circumvent the law.

Small gas station convenience stores buy products from dozens of regional wholesalers. PolkaDot chocolates and other products can slip into local gas stations and evade detection. By contrast, GNC, a national health and nutrition company, manufactures many of its own products and receives others from a select few wholesalers. These retailers tend to know better what’s in the products they carry.

“If you keep [these products] under the FDA’s radar – in small gas stations rather than doing a mass distribution at GNC – you avoid detection until something really bad happens,” Harvard physician Dr. Pieter Cohen told STAT News.

By avoiding federal detection, the detection of problematic products is left to local and regional public health officials or food inspectors and tobacco licensing authorities. If they discover these products, they can revoke food or tobacco licenses, which can cause extensive financial losses, due in part to the low profit margins of gasoline sales alone.

Education first, but enforcement is real

The Denver health department’s messaging has emphasized consumer education and retailer outreach. Advisories urge residents to avoid purchasing PolkaDot products and to report sightings to 311 or via the city’s consumer protection portal so inspectors can track their spread. The department has also underscored that businesses selling unlawful products face fines, license suspension or revocation, and potential criminal penalties.

According to Davis, the Denver food and cannabis investigator, the city’s licensing team has begun coaching retailers on basic due diligence: Does the price point make sense for a legitimate product? Can the wholesaler connect the retailer to the manufacturer? Can the manufacturer provide clear, complete ingredient disclosures and testing documentation? If clerks or suppliers can’t answer conclusively, that’s a red flag.

The practical reality is that routine sweeps won’t catch every mislabeled mushroom product. Denver needs the public to report what they see.

“If you’re seeking natural medicine, we want you to do it safely,” Davis said. “Cultivate it yourself within the law, obtain it from someone you trust or work with a licensed facilitator. Don’t buy mystery bars at a gas station.”

David Kroll 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. Magic mushroom-infused products appear in Colorado gas stations – what public health officials want consumers to know – https://theconversation.com/magic-mushroom-infused-products-appear-in-colorado-gas-stations-what-public-health-officials-want-consumers-to-know-274935

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Dannell D. Boatman, Assistant Professor and Health Communication Researcher, West Virginia University

Scientists are making rapid progress toward a long-awaited goal that could help to reshape cancer care: mRNA cancer vaccines with the potential to significantly boost the immune system’s ability to fight and eliminate tumors.

Since the early 2000s, there have been over 120 promising clinical trials testing the use of mRNA vaccines to treat multiple cancer types, such as melanoma, brain, breast, lung and prostate cancer.

At the same time, misinformation about so-called turbo cancer began spreading widely on social media, with mainstream media outlets first reporting on it in late 2022. Turbo cancer refers to the false claim that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines cause unusually aggressive cancers.

As a researcher in health communication who monitors cancer-related conversations online, I have seen how quickly new misinformation can spread and the impact it can have on people’s health decisions. In the case of mRNA cancer vaccines, this false narrative could undermine public confidence in an important tool that may help prevent or treat cancer in the future.

Cancer research and mRNA vaccines

Most people likely first heard about mRNA technology through COVID-19 vaccines, but scientists have been studying it for decades.

How mRNA vaccines work is by delivering instructions that prompt the body’s cells to make specific proteins. This process teaches the immune system how to recognize and attack those proteins. In cancer research, scientists can design highly targeted vaccines that train the immune system to find tumor cells and more effectively kill them without harming healthy cells.

One example of this potential comes from studies on glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor with few effective treatments. Researchers have found that a personalized mRNA vaccine can rapidly activate people’s immune systems against this type of brain cancer and improve survival.

The body of evidence that mRNA vaccines can transform how researchers harness the immune system to treat cancer is growing. However, even the most promising medical advances can only improve health if people are willing to use them.

Rise of the ‘turbo cancer’ narrative

“Turbo cancer” is a term often used by anti-vaccine advocates who claim – without credible evidence – that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are causing unusually aggressive cancers.

This inaccurate narrative has trickled into the mainstream news. In September 2025, a controversial U.K. cardiologist claimed that the COVID-19 vaccine contributed to the royal family’s recent cancer diagnoses, spurring immediate backlash from the medical community. Although uncommon, some public figures and health professionals have claimed that the vaccines could cause cancer despite ample contradictory evidence, often by misinterpreting or misrepresenting studies.

Health misinformation can be described as false or misleading health-related claims shared with the public that are not supported by scientific evidence, are based on unverified personal stories or are opinions presented as facts. For example, while tracking discussions about the HPV vaccine across social media platforms, my team and I found that safety fears, mistrust of authority and conspiracy claims were widespread online.

Vaccine misinformation accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, causing what researchers call an infodemic: the rapid spread of both accurate and false health information during a public health crisis. The COVID-19 infodemic made it harder for people to find trustworthy guidance and shaped public attitudes toward vaccines.

“Turbo cancer” reflects many of the same patterns and narratives as the COVID-19 infodemic.

In a social listening study, which involves systematically monitoring online conversations about different topics, my team and I observed countless posts about turbo cancer beginning in July 2023 and continuing through early 2026. Many posts rely on emotionally compelling anecdotes, misinterpretations of animal studies, misuse of adverse events reporting and recycled myths that vaccines alter human DNA. Some posts also link rising cancer rates in younger adults to the COVID-19 vaccine. However, large population studies have found no increased cancer risk following vaccination.

None of these turbo cancer claims are supported by credible evidence. But on social media, repetition, personal stories and scientific-sounding language can make misinformation appear legitimate and help it spread quickly.

Cancer vaccine misinformation harms health

At first glance, fringe claims such as turbo cancer may seem easy to dismiss. But research shows that they can have real-world consequences, and cancer-related misinformation can be particularly consequential.

Inaccurate information about cancer treatment is common online, and researchers have shown that it influences patient decisions. When patients rely on unproven approaches instead of recommended therapies, their risk of death can increase substantially.

Clinicians are already seeing the effects of misinformation in routine care. Oncologists report having to address myths or misleading information that patients have encountered, though researchers do not yet know how common these conversations are across cancer care.

mRNA technology is entering a pivotal phase in its development. Scientific progress is accelerating, but public understanding has not kept pace. Repeated exposure to misleading claims can erode trust in mRNA technology over time, increasing the likelihood that some patients will decline mRNA therapies in the future.

If misleading narratives such as turbo cancer continue to spread, they could complicate the future rollout of mRNA vaccines and limit their lifesaving benefits.

Keeping communication in pace with science

Once misinformation takes hold of public understanding, changing its course can be difficult.

Research has consistently shown that proactive, transparent and persuasive communication can counter misinformation. It also shows that trust, once lost, is difficult to rebuild.

Medical innovations can save lives, but only if communication keeps up. This means monitoring emerging misinformation trends on social media, addressing concerns early on, equipping clinicians to have effective patient conversations and designing public health messaging that builds public understanding of new medical technologies before they are widely introduced in the clinic.

Scientific innovation alone is not enough to improve health. Ensuring that the public can evaluate medical innovations like mRNA cancer vaccines based on evidence, rather than viral misinformation, is part of the scientific challenge.

The future of cancer care depends not just on scientific discovery, but on public understanding and trust.

Dannell D. Boatman receives funding from Merck, Sharp & Dohme LLC, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

– ref. Cancer vaccines could transform treatment and prevention – but misinformation about mRNA vaccines threatens their potential – https://theconversation.com/cancer-vaccines-could-transform-treatment-and-prevention-but-misinformation-about-mrna-vaccines-threatens-their-potential-276809

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Leanne Snyder, Assistant Professor of Exercise Science, Loyola University Chicago

Every March, millions of Americans fill out brackets and tune in to watch the NCAA college basketball tournaments known as March Madness. The men’s and women’s competitions unfold in parallel, each with their own brackets, champions, storylines and fan bases.

The separation reflects one of the most deeply embedded assumptions in sports: that women and men perform differently enough that they must compete apart.

The divide is so normal, it’s rarely explained: On average, men are faster, stronger and have more endurance. As a result, performance differences between men and women are often assumed to follow directly from these physical traits.

This notion shape how sports organizations structure competition, how coaches train athletes and how researchers study performance. Sex becomes a shortcut – a way to predict what athletes can do before they ever step onto the court.

As an exercise scientist who studies the physical demands of Paralympic sports, I wanted to know whether this assumption actually holds up.

My research on elite wheelchair basketball suggests it may not. I found that many of the differences widely attributed to physiological differences between women and men in sports are far less pronounced in wheelchair basketball players – and in most cases absent altogether.

It may seem that wheelchair sports are too different from nondisabled sports to compare. But in my view, they may instead reveal what sports look like when performance is measured by what athletes can do, rather than presumptions tied to their sex.

Testing different abilities

In most sports, presumptions about physical differences between the sexes appear early, often starting with elementary school physical education classes and youth teams.

Wheelchair basketball works differently. Although international competitions have separate women’s and men’s teams, athletes at the national level often train together, while women sometimes compete in men’s leagues and vice versa.

As part of my Ph.D. research, I examined how elite wheelchair basketball players move during competition by asking athletes from the Australian national men’s and women’s teams to wear movement sensors during five international-level games in 2022.

The sensors recorded how often players accelerated and decelerated, how frequently they changed direction, how fast they moved and how much distance they covered. Accelerations, decelerations and changes of direction are typically the most physically demanding movements in wheelchair basketball. To ensure fair comparisons, I adjusted all measures for playing time.

A consistent difference emerged. Players with less severe impairments – those with greater trunk control and stability – performed more high-intensity actions than players with more severe impairments. Female athletes with less severe impairments accelerated and decelerated more frequently and reached higher peak speeds, and male athletes showed the same pattern.

When I compared performance by sex, however, the differences were much less pronounced. Across most measures – including distance covered, average speed and high-intensity movements – female and male athletes performed similarly over the course of multiple games.

Performance beyond sex

If sex-based performance differences are so common in sports, why didn’t they appear in my research? The answer lies partly in how wheelchair basketball is organized.

To compete, athletes are assigned a classification based on how their impairment affects movement during play. These classifications range from 1.0 to 4.5, with lower numbers indicating more severe impairments. The system is designed to account for athletes with wide variations in physical disabilities, particularly differences in trunk control, balance and the ability to generate force and change direction in their game wheelchairs.

During games, teams must stay under a combined classification limit of 14 points for the five players on court. This means lineups are built around functional movement ability rather than sex, balancing players with different movement capacities within lineups so that no single team gains an unfair advantage.

With this in mind, it makes sense that classification, not sex, explained the differences I observed. In other words, wheelchair basketball is designed around physical variation in sports – not just between women and men, but across individuals with very different movement capacities and roles on the court. In this context, sex becomes one variable among many, rather than the primary basis for performance.

This pattern isn’t unique to wheelchair basketball. In wheelchair rugby, where women and men compete together on the same international teams, research has also found that game demands are shaped more by players’ classification and on-court roles than by sex.

Challenging sports science norms

My findings challenge a near-universal assumption in sports: that sex is the primary factor defining physical ability.

To be clear, there are contexts where sex-based comparisons matter. Differences in average muscle mass, body size and hormone profiles can influence performance in many sports, which is one reason competitions are typically separated into women’s and men’s divisions. Safety concerns are also frequently cited as a reason for maintaining separate competitions.

But when sex becomes the primary framework for understanding performance, it can obscure other important factors such as strength, body size, training history and access to coaching.

Research supports this idea. One study comparing athletes by both sex and strength found that many differences often attributed to sex were better explained by strength. Another review found little consistent evidence for sex-specific movement patterns in jumping and landing tasks, concluding that many reported differences are better explained by training exposure, motor skill or sociocultural factors than by sex alone.

Put simply, what is often labeled a sex difference may instead reflect unequal opportunities to develop physical capacity – much of which is trainable – rather than fixed, innate ability.

This perspective does not mean sex differences disappear, but it suggests that they may not always be the most informative way to understand performance. In some cases, focusing primarily on sex-based categories may even risk underselling what some young athletes are capable of.

Looking more closely at individual factors such as strength, agility, sport-specific skills and training exposure may give coaches a clearer picture of how athletes actually perform, rather than relying on long-standing presumptions about what girls and boys are capable of.

Leanne Snyder does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. My research on wheelchair basketball challenges one of the biggest assumptions about sex differences in sports – https://theconversation.com/my-research-on-wheelchair-basketball-challenges-one-of-the-biggest-assumptions-about-sex-differences-in-sports-261624

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

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

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

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

The invisible enemy during war: Air pollution

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

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

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

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

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

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

Munitions and oil facilities

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

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

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

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

Getting pollution out of the air

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

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

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

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

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

Can people in war zones protect their health?

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

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

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

Armin Sorooshian does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By William J. (Bill) Kovarik, Professor of Communication, Radford University

Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, who died March 15, 2026, in Palo Alto, California, was a scientific crusader whose dire predictions about population growth, world hunger and environmental collapse made headlines and sparked controversy for decades.

Sometimes called a “prophet of doom” by his detractors, Ehrlich was among the most public figures of the environmental movement. He was admired and often honored for his prophetic warnings. But he was also excoriated when his worst predictions failed to come true.

Ehrlich founded Stanford’s Center for Nature and Society in 1984 and wrote more than 40 books and over 1,100 scientific articles on ecology, the environment and population dynamics. He is best known outside of academia for writing “The Population Bomb” in 1968, along with his wife, conservation biologist Anne H. Erhlich, who survives him.

The book became a bestseller that was reprinted more than 20 times and translated into multiple languages. It starkly predicted that population growth would exhaust Earth’s resources, leading to wars and social collapse.

Ultimately, the book both popularized and polarized the U.S. environmental movement.

As a scholar of communications and environmental history, I see Ehrlich’s difficult fight for the environment as emblematic of the vast chasm between science on one side and political culture influenced by the mass media on the other side.

And I see Ehrlich’s passing – along with others of his generation, such as Carl Sagan, E.O. Wilson and Jane Goodall – as a loss for a world that needs visionaries and public scientists now more than ever. Public understanding of science and technology is critical for political discussion, for environmental preservation and, in the words of British physical chemist C.P. Snow, for the sake of “the poor who needn’t be poor if there is intelligence in the world.”

The battle over the book

“The Population Bomb” opened with a verbal blast: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” And because the “stork had passed the plow,” the Ehrlichs wrote, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Overpopulated India was doomed, they contended, and England “will not exist in the year 2000,” following a massive social and environmental breakdown.

These stark warnings, while overstated, seemed at least plausible at the time. Older scientists, including Snow and oceanographer Roger Revelle, had also warned about population growth overtaking food production.

The Ehrlichs were influenced by books such as the 1948 bestsellers “Road to Survival,” by ecologist William Vogt, and “Our Plundered Planet,” by paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn. All of these thinkers owed a debt to the original Cassandra of population catastrophe, English economist Thomas Malthus, whose 1798 book “An Essay on the Principle of Population” warned that the world’s population would inevitably outstrip its food supply.

Even worse, Malthus predicted, efforts to produce more food would simply continue the cycle of famine and poverty. However, new crops and agricultural techniques forestalled Malthus’ catastrophe in the 19th century. As a result, the term “Malthusian” came to signify overly pessimistic views about complex social problems.

A different sort of Malthusian

Handsome and well-spoken, Ehrlich captured the public imagination through news articles, public lectures and television appearances. “The Population Bomb” launched him into the center of a raging global debate over environment and conservation. He appeared as a guest on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson more than 20 times in the 1970s and early ’80s.

This wasn’t the typical public profile for a biology professor. As New York Times reporter Robert Reinhold observed in 1969, Ehrlich was “representative, perhaps, of a growing new breed of scientists who are willing to get involved in the unscientific and sometimes rough business of crusading in public against such things as DDT, highway building and population growth.”

Not all environmental advocates agreed with Ehrlich’s view that population growth was the critical threat. Another prominent biologist, Barry Commoner, saw faulty technology as the primary source of environmental problems.

In fairness, Ehrlich and his frequent collaborator, physicist John Holdren, saw technology and population as cofactors in a complex social problem, which they summarized with the equation I = P x A x T, or Impact equals Population times Affluence times Technology. Put another way, population growth, wealth and the types of technologies people chose to use all contributed to human impacts on the environment.

The debate between Ehrlich and Commoner perplexed some people, but it showed two different approaches to environmental policy. With Commoner’s approach, technological problems such as toxic waste and nuclear radiation, would be solved through cleanups and improved processes.

Ehrlich said reducing overconsumption and addressing population growth would also help ease these challenges. To slow population growth, Ehrlich called for promoting contraception and increasing access to abortions, and perhaps even resorting to coercive methods, such as forced sterilization.

By the 1970s, a focus on population growth had become widely accepted. The first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972, ranked population growth alongside pollution and underdevelopment as the top action items on the global agenda. Later that year, a prominent European think tank, the Club of Rome, echoed Ehrlich’s warnings in its widely circulated Limits to Growth report.

Scarcity or abundance?

World population continued to grow through the 1970s and ’80s, but the impacts that Ehrlich predicted did not occur. This was largely due to the Green Revolution, a broad campaign by governments and research institutes to provide high-yield varieties of wheat and rice, along with pesticides and mechanized agriculture, to developing countries. These new tools increased harvests and dramatically reduced the risk of famine.

Agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, a leader of this effort, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. Borlaug made a point of agreeing with Ehrlich in his Nobel lecture, saying the Green Revolution was a temporary reprieve and that population control was also essential in the ongoing battle against hunger.

Conservative economists and scientists weren’t persuaded. One prominent critic, academic economist Julian Simon, argued for what came to be called the cornucopian view, which held that the only limits to growth were imagination and ingenuity. Simon said the Earth had infinite capacity to provide materials and that humans would constantly innovate and find new ways to use them.

In 1980 Simon publicly bet Ehrlich that prices of five important industrial raw materials – copper, nickel, tungsten, chromium and tin – would fall rather than rise over the next decade. Ehrlich said he would have preferred some environmental measure rather than metals, but he said resources would become scarce and prices would rise.

Simon, on the other hand, argued that markets and new technologies would drive prices down. Ultimately, although prices for these five metals had risen during the preceding decades and would also rise during the 1990s, they declined between 1980 and 1990. Simon won the bet, and Ehrlich wrote him a check in 1990 for US$576.07, the difference between the 1980 and 1990 prices.

A matter of when

After the catastrophes that Ehrlich predicted in “The Population Bomb” failed to occur, many critics had a laugh at his expense. “As you may have noticed, England is still with us. So is India,” chuckled New York Times columnist Clyde Haberman in 2015.

“Paul Ehrlich is a misanthrope who’d make you apply for a government permit to have a baby if he could,” wrote Chelsea Follett of the libertarian Cato Institute in 2023.

Ehrlich and his supporters replied that while the Green Revolution might have forestalled widespread famine, human impacts were weighing ever more heavily on the planet. Taking problems such as climate change and toxic pollution into account, Ehrlich asserted in 2009 that “The Population Bomb” had been “way too optimistic.”

In his 2023 memoir, “Life,” Ehrlich expressed deep gratitude for a 70-year career in science. However, he was frustrated over what he saw as the inability of science to penetrate America’s stubbornly unscientific political culture. He was also saddened that the environmental movement was failing to effectively oppose “the forces that pose existential threats to civilization.” Throughout his career as a public scholar, Ehrlich was never afraid to look into the abyss.

William J. (Bill) Kovarik 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. Paul Ehrlich, often called alarmist for dire warnings about human harms to the Earth, believed scientists had a responsibility to speak out – https://theconversation.com/paul-ehrlich-often-called-alarmist-for-dire-warnings-about-human-harms-to-the-earth-believed-scientists-had-a-responsibility-to-speak-out-178492

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Paul C. Sereno, Professor of Paleontology, University of Chicago

My fixation on a small, desolate locale in the heart of the Sahara Desert started with a single line buried in a 630-page tome in French about the rocks of the central Sahara: “Dent de Carcharodontosaurus saharicus Depéret,” which translates to “tooth of Carcharodontosaurus saharicus Depéret” – “Depéret” refers to the scientist who originally named the species.

The intrepid French geologist Hugues Faure (1928-2003) had collected one saber-shaped tooth in the early 1950s at a small exposure he labeled “Akarazeras” on one of his maps, identifying the tooth as belonging to the T. rex-size predator Carcharodontosaurus. That beast was named years before based on fossils in the Western Desert of Egypt, and Faure correctly figured the tooth and outcrop in Niger might be the same age. Faure’s tooth, unfortunately, was never figured or photographed and has been lost.

In the 70 years since Faure’s account, no paleontologist had ventured back to this hyperarid, windswept landscape to attempt to relocate Akarazeras. In truth, the tooth might have been all that was there, and the site itself could easily have disappeared under drifting dunes. Yet, after reading about it early in my career as a paleontologist, Akarazeras became my fossil Shangri-La, a place I dreamed of visiting.

Akarazeras relocated

With a small exploratory team in 2019, I followed a desert trail to the remote oasis of Tanout, the closest inhabited point to Akarazeras. There we refreshed our supplies – food, water and fuel – to survive a three-day foray in the open desert in search of the locale. Besides binoculars, we had a few gadgets Faure couldn’t have imagined: GPS hand units and a drone.

Navigating using Faure’s map brought us to a flat, barren spot with nothing in sight to the horizon. We drove several kilometers to the north, climbed to the top of our vehicles and launched the drone. One of my team members spotted a low rocky outcrop at distance.

Soon after arriving at the exposure, we found several Carcharodontosaurus teeth and, a short distance away, the rim of an infilled, hand-dug well. We had found Akarazeras. By the next afternoon, we had finished packing up a few dozen fossil teeth and bones. We probed in every direction and sent the drone farther to see if there was anything else to find. Nothing but sand.

A chance encounter

That might have been the end of the story had not a tall, lanky man arrived in our Tanout campground the evening we returned. Looking like a Tuareg Marvel character, Abdoul Nasser stood next to his Honda motorbike, dressed in a full-length black overcoat, a cheche head wrap, sunglasses and a sheathed sword slung over his shoulder.

“I can take you to some large bones, farther than Akarazeras,” he said in Tamasheq, with guides translating to French. This seemed more than a boast or scam. I decided to devote our final three days to this venture.

A day and a half later, we had spent half our fuel chasing our motorbike guide over an endless dunescape. Just as we questioned going farther, Abdoul slowed to a stop in front of the largest fossil hind leg I had ever seen, its thigh bone nearly 6 feet (2 meters) long.

As the sun set, we scurried from skeleton to skeleton – it was a veritable dinosaur graveyard. The next morning we had a half-hour at this place locals called Jenguebi before we had to leave. I and my colleague, Spanish paleontologist Dan Vidal, quickly collected large jaw pieces of what we assumed was Carcharodontosaurus.

Epiphany in the lab and field

Back in Chicago, the cleaned and assembled jaw pieces told another story. They belonged to the giant fish-eating dinosaur called Spinosaurus, which refers to a group of semiaquatic, T. rex-size beasts known from the northern shores of Africa.

For more than two years, plans to return to Niger were scuttled by the pandemic. Finally, in 2022, I led an international, 20-person field crew with a larger guard back to Jenguebi to see whether we could turn up more of the elusive predator.

I was busy arranging the campsite an hour after arriving when Dan Vidal approached, wide-eyed.

“You won’t believe what we just found … the snout end of our skull!”

The team quickly gathered around the toothed bone jutting from the surface of the desert, some in tears, bearing witness to an extraordinary discovery. The snout end fit onto one of the jaw pieces we had collected in 2019. Hours later, Dan approached again with a curved bone in hand.

“What do you think this is?” he asked, wanting confirmation for what we both immediately recognized as a landmark discovery.

The scimitar-shaped bone he held came from the top of the skull. Unlike the low, fluted crest atop the cranium of Spinosaurus from Egypt, called Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, this bone swept upward and backward over the orbital – the space for the eyes. In the cool of the evening, the team gathering around Dan and his laptop to get a glimpse of an initial skull reconstruction, an assembly of digital versions of the bones we had discovered. In awe, we saw the Jenguebi spinosaurid for the first time, a spectacular southern variant of the sail-backed predator first described in Egypt in 1915.

Back in the lab, we coined a species name in Latin that captured our collective “astonishment” upon its discovery, Spinosaurus mirabilis.

An organization I launched with Nigeriens, NigerHeritage, has visualized new museums in the country’s capital, Niamey, and closer to the fossil sites in Agadez that will preserve and display these and many other fossils. A secure homecoming for these remarkable finds also involves a new generation of Nigerien museologists, scholars and museums.

An inland fish-eater

Other animals at the site included two new long-necked plant-eaters, a partial skull of Carcharodontosaurus, a large skull of a freshwater fish and fossil wood. All of the fossils came from a layer of river-borne sediment less than a meter thick, indicating they lived in the same forested inland area far from a marine coastline.

In recent years, the giant fish-eater Spinosaurus has been depicted in Hollywood’s “Jurassic World Rebirth” as a swimming, diving ocean predator alongside other undoubtedly marine creatures like mosasaurs. In 2020, a team of researchers had reinterpreted Spinosaurus aegyptiacus in this way.

Dubbed the “aquatic hypothesis,” the key inspiration was the discovery that the sail on its back extended over its tail. The structure of the tail and other lines of evidence, however, led me and my research team to an alternative view of the fish-eater – as a shallow-water, wading, ambush predator with little capacity for swimming and none for diving.

Aside from its crest, S. mirabilis is very similar to its cousin S. aegyptiacus from the northern coast of Africa. Their lifestyles likely also were very similar.

Evolutionary stages

The early record of spinosaurids, known only from a few teeth, is rooted in the Jurassic, when they first gained a taste for fish. Over the past few years, researchers have found spinosaurid fossils in many locales in rocks of Early Cretaceous age in southern Europe and Asia, sites that once were near the ancient Tethys Sea. At that time, 115 to 130 million years ago, spinosaurids had split into two subgroups – baryonychines and spinosaurines – that collectively dominated the Tethyan realm as the largest predators of the day.

By the dawn of the Late Cretaceous, only spinosaurines remained as larger and more specialized and flamboyant fish-eaters on the southern side of the Tethys Sea in coastal and inland habitats.

S. mirabilis is among the last of these great predators. It is perhaps best understood as a “hell heron,” the likes of which we can only imagine when observing the more graceful, if less fearsome, herons of today.

Paul C. Sereno received funding from an anonymous donor for the 2022 expedition and subsequent research on the new spinosaurid.

– ref. Paleontologists uncover a new ‘Spinosaurus’ species by following a clue from a decades-old book into the Sahara Desert – https://theconversation.com/paleontologists-uncover-a-new-spinosaurus-species-by-following-a-clue-from-a-decades-old-book-into-the-sahara-desert-274182

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Erin Potter, Lecturer in Geography and Ph.D. student in Earth Sciences, Binghamton University, State University of New York

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.

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What was the very first plant in the world? – Ivy, age 6, Phoenix

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Long before dinosaurs roamed the land, Earth looked very different from the planet we know today. Around 500 million years ago, most of Earth’s surface was bare rock and dry soil. There were no trees, no grass and no flowers. Life existed almost entirely in the oceans.

Then something amazing happened: Plants began to grow on land.

This moment was one of the most important events in Earth’s history because it changed the planet forever. As a geoscientist, I am interested in changes in the diversity of flora and fauna – that’s plants and animals – over time.

Predecessors of plants lived in water

The story of plants begins in the water. The earliest plantlike organisms were simple, tiny green life-forms such as algae. You can still see algae today as seaweed along beaches or as green slime on rocks in ponds.

Algae have lived in Earth’s oceans and lakes for over 1 billion years. They can make their own food, using sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to create sugars. This process is called photosynthesis; it releases oxygen – the gas we need to breathe – as a byproduct.

At first, Earth’s atmosphere had very little oxygen. Over millions of years, photosynthesizing organisms like algae and some bacteria slowly released oxygen into the air. This change, sometimes called the Great Oxygenation Event, made it possible for larger and more complex life to evolve. Without oxygen-producing organisms, animals, including humans, could never have existed.

Scientists believe the first true plants evolved from green algae around 470 million years ago. These early plants lived in shallow water near shorelines, where conditions changed often. Sometimes they were underwater, and sometimes they were exposed to air. This habitat helped them slowly adapt to life on land.

Getting a foothold on dry land

Moving onto land was not easy. Water plants are supported by water and can absorb nutrients easily, but land plants faced new challenges. How would they avoid drying out? How could they stand upright without floating? How would they get water and nutrients from dry ground?

To survive, early plants evolved important new features. One key adaptation was a waxy coating, called a cuticle, which helped keep water inside the plant. Plants also developed stronger cell walls that allowed them to stand upright against gravity. Simple rootlike structures, called rhizoids, helped anchor plants to the ground and absorb water and minerals from the soil.

The earliest land plants were very small and simple. They looked similar to modern mosses, liverworts and hornworts, which still grow today in damp places like forest floors and stream edges. These plants did not have true roots or stems, and they stayed close to the ground. Fossils of early land plants, such as Cooksonia, date back to about 430 million years ago and show small branching stems only an inch or two tall.

Even though these plants were tiny, they had a huge impact on Earth. As plants spread across land, their roots helped break down rocks into soil, a process called weathering. This created richer soil that could support more life.

Plants also released more oxygen into the atmosphere, improving air quality and helping animals breathe. Plants created new habitats and food sources, allowing insects and other animals to move from water onto land.

Increasing complexity across millions of years

Once plants became established on land, evolution continued. Around 420 million years ago, plants evolved vascular tissue: tiny tubes that transport water and nutrients throughout the plant. This adaptation allowed plants to grow taller and stronger because water could be moved upward from the roots to the leaves. These vascular plants included early relatives of ferns and club mosses.

With vascular tissue, plant life really started to flourish. By about 360 million years ago, vast forests covered much of Earth. Giant ferns and treelike plants, some over 100 feet (30 meters) tall, dominated the landscape. Over time, dead plant material from these forests was buried and compressed, eventually forming coal, which people still use as an energy source today.

Another major step in plant evolution was the development of seeds, around 380 million years ago, found in seed ferns. Other seed plants, such as early conifers – a group that includes modern pine trees – could reproduce without needing water for fertilization. Seeds protected plant embryos and allowed plants to survive harsh conditions like drought or cold.

The most recent major plant evolution happened around 140 million years ago, when flowering plants, what scientists call angiosperms, appeared. Flowers helped plants attract animals like insects and birds, which spread pollen and seeds. Fruits developed to protect seeds and help them travel. Today, flowering plants make up most of the plants we see, including trees, grasses, fruits and vegetables.

The first plants didn’t just survive; they transformed Earth. They changed the atmosphere, built soil, and created ecosystems that allowed animals to thrive on land. Thanks to plant evolution, Earth became a green, living planet full of diverse life.

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Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Erin Potter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. What was the very first plant in the world? – https://theconversation.com/what-was-the-very-first-plant-in-the-world-271828

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Michael Carrafiello, Professor of History, Miami University

Apollo 11 first landed astronauts on the Moon in 1969, but the journey to the lunar surface actually began 43 years before, in snowy Massachusetts.

Exactly 100 years ago, on March 16, 1926, Robert H. Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket. Liquid-fueled rockets would eventually provide the power to send humans to the Moon. Still, Goddard’s vehicle was small, flew for only 42 seconds, reached a height of a mere 184 feet and sustained damage that created more doubters than believers in the prospects for human space flight.

Despite this less-than-spectacular start to the space age, Goddard’s rocket was the beginning of a century of innovation. Today, hundreds of rockets launch each year. Giant liquid-fueled rockets combine liquid oxidizer – a substance that releases oxygen – and liquid fuel. These create chemical reactions that produce the explosive thrust necessary to propel humans to the Moon.

As a historian, I’ve spent 40 years studying the winding path that led to the development of modern rocketry. I’ve also seen how, over the past few years, private companies have played a much larger role in spaceflight than they did throughout most of its history.

Early days of spaceflight

After Goddard’s first liquid-fueled rocket launch, the development of American rocketry crept along at a snail’s pace until World War II. Nazi Germany’s invention of the V-2 missile proved that rockets could provide immense strategic and scientific value during both war and peace.

In war, the V-2 terrorized Britain and its allies. In peace, scientists looked at launching artificial satellites, or “moons” as they were originally called, to survey weather and boost intercontinental communication.

The United States government did not invest heavily in rocketry throughout most of the 1950s. Then, on Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I. Millions of Americans feared that the USSR would soon rain nuclear missiles on them.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his advisers, however, displayed little anxiety at this prospect. They believed that America’s problems down on Earth were more urgent than those that might emanate from space.

Political pressure from the Senate majority leader, Lyndon B. Johnson, caused Eisenhower to reconsider. Late in 1958, the Republican president gave his consent for Congress’ establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This new agency then went about selecting America’s first seven astronauts, introducing them to the nation in 1959.

Americans to the Moon

The arrival of a new, young chief executive, John F. Kennedy, sharpened the United States’ commitment to space. In September 1962, the president publicly challenged the nation to land an astronaut on the Moon before 1970. To Kennedy, the enormity of such a scientific and public achievement would provide unimpeachable proof to the world that the American way was superior to life behind the Iron Curtain.

JFK’s untimely death in the autumn of 1963 only served to strengthen the nation’s commitment to the late president’s lofty goal.

A mere five-and-a-half years later, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the lunar surface during the Apollo 11 mission. To get them there, NASA had spent nearly US$26 billion – $338 billion today. They had employed hundreds of scientists and engineers, and hired thousands of workers from dozens of contractors.

Yet, at almost the very moment the supreme triumph of Apollo 11 unfolded, public support for the manned space program evaporated. Preoccupation with the Vietnam War, economic inflation and nagging social and political inequality, as well as boredom with moonshots, led most Americans to turn away from the cosmos.

Richard Nixon, who followed Johnson into the Oval Office, slashed NASA’s budget. Three of the remaining lunar missions were abruptly and unceremoniously canceled. NASA had to abandon spectacular yet wasteful rockets like the Saturn V in favor of cheaper and more versatile launch vehicles.

Enter the Space Shuttle

Unlike earlier rockets, the next generation of rockets had to become almost completely reusable. The result: development of the Space Shuttle. NASA promised that the shuttle would launch no later than 1977 and that, when fully operational, it would rocket into orbit every two weeks.

That vision never materialized. By the time the first shuttle finally took off in 1981, it was grossly over budget. Problems with the heat tiles necessary for reentry persisted. Ultimately, the shuttles never came close to launching biweekly. Instead, only six to eight missions per year proved feasible. Worst of all, the program would eventually sustain two heartbreaking tragedies.

In 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after takeoff. In 2003, Columbia – the first shuttle to ever reach space – disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere over Texas. The following year, President George W. Bush announced that the remaining shuttle fleet would retire no later than 2011.

NASA’s air of invincibility and inexhaustible stream of funding had long vanished. The final shuttle flight served as a coda to the heady days of the 1960s and ‘70s.

Subsequent presidents talked of missions to Mars and created a Space Force, but the old Apollo launchpads at Cape Canaveral were abandoned, or “mothballed,” as NASA termed it. Thousands of workers were laid off. Leadership in space passed to private corporations like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.

Enter private companies

As early as 2006, NASA began contracting with SpaceX to launch its payloads and astronauts to the International Space Station. By 2024, SpaceX had realized the unfulfilled vision of NASA, launching on a nearly biweekly basis.

Meanwhile, while NASA’s Artemis program plans to send a crewed mission around the Moon using a launch system developed by the agency, the program remains years behind schedule. To date, it has cost at least three times more than originally budgeted.

Across the Pacific, China has announced that it will place astronauts on the Moon by 2030, with missions to Mars planned after that. For America’s rival on the world stage, government, industry and science all move in concert. Compared with China, the United States’ future in space appears far less unified, coordinated and purposeful.

A dynamic president once galvanized the U.S. government and its people to produce a “giant leap for mankind.” But since that July day in 1969, leadership in space has steadily passed from government to private hands, with the future of American space flight appearing murky.

Michael Carrafiello 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. The first modern rocket launched 100 years ago, beginning a century of both innovations and challenges for spaceflight – https://theconversation.com/the-first-modern-rocket-launched-100-years-ago-beginning-a-century-of-both-innovations-and-challenges-for-spaceflight-269061