Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Kristi Girdharry, Associate Teaching Professor of Arts and Humanities, Babson College

I was early to the generative AI wave in higher education: I was among the first professors who teach writing to publish in an academic journal about generative AI and critical thinking, and I am now part of an interdisciplinary team at Babson College thinking about how AI is impacting education, industry and society.

But that does not mean I am all in on AI – nor am I anti-AI. I am pro-learning. As my co-authors and I argue in a forthcoming book on realizing the promise of higher education, even the most powerful tools are only as good as the learning environments we build around them.

So what does “getting learning right” look like in the age of generative AI? It involves a lot of experimentation and leaning in with students as a co-learner when I don’t have all of the answers, while remaining staunchly committed to sharing my expertise in writing, critical thinking and learning. I also hope that they trust me enough to follow my lead and persevere when the work becomes difficult.

From hope to grief

Navigating the rise of generative AI seemed easier to me in the earlier days. In spring 2023, for example, soon after ChatGPT went public, I asked students to use it to research their favorite musical artist and then fact-check the results as part of a unit in my senior-level social media class. The responses sounded polished and confident, but they were often wrong. Album dates were scrambled. Tours were invented. At one point, a student threw up her hands and shouted, “It lies!” The room erupted. The “lies” were especially apparent with less popular artists, about whom less had been written. “How might that translate to other knowledge areas?” I asked. They were pretty quick to thinking about whose voices might not make the cut in a different scenario.

While this was a promising start, by fall 2023 I found myself starting to grieve the passing of the pre-AI-everywhere world. Once again, I leaned in with my students, now in a sophomore-level research writing class. In their proposals, I included a new required section called “Be Better Than a Robot” – the gist being that if ChatGPT could write your research paper, what was the point of us spending weeks on it?

I asked: Where would your own work – your own human thinking – need to come in to create a tiny piece of new knowledge in the world? We practiced primary research, we used time during class for reading and annotating, and I extended deadlines to account for the rigor we were undertaking.

AI usage was discouraged but not outright banned: If used, careful and explicit descriptions of exactly how were required, and I even gave examples of things like brainstorming academic titles as a potential option. While not all of the final research projects seemed completely AI-generated, the few that did caused me to spiral – like it was my fault that I didn’t come down harder on not using AI when I was trying to be neutral and understand how we could use it as a tool and not as a replacement.

Cognitive blind spots

Since those early days in 2023, discussions around college students’ use of AI have only become more fraught and complicated. There are no easy answers, and there are a lot of fears about overreliance, loss of learning and even the value of a college degree. There are also plenty of ethical concerns that go beyond academic integrity, such as the environmental impact of AI and concerns over data and privacy. But AI usage is not slowing down.

Recent data from the Pew Research Center shows that more than half of teenagers are turning to AI for help with finding information and getting help with schoolwork. By the time these students arrive in my classes, many have already developed habits around these tools, and these habits may or may not serve their learning. For me, that’s not an argument for banning AI in the classroom, but rather an argument for taking it seriously.

But here’s the honest difficulty: When students use AI, they often can’t tell when they’re shortcutting their own thinking. A study published from late 2024 in the British Journal of Educational Technology found that students using ChatGPT improved their essay scores in the short term but showed no meaningful gains in knowledge. Moreover, they were prone to what the researchers called “metacognitive laziness,” meaning a dependence on the tool that undermined their ability to self-regulate and engage deeply in learning. This is a result of cognitive offloading.

Teaching discernment

At this point, I feel my role is shifting from neutral observer or co-learner to something more like a guide with a point of view. I know what rigorous thinking looks like in my discipline. I know the difference between a paper that has moved through genuine intellectual struggle and one that has been assembled. My job is to make that difference visible to students who may not yet have the experience to see it themselves.

So, yes, there are moments in my writing courses where I ask students to write without AI. Not as a purity test, although I could see it used that way, and not because I believe they’ll go on to spend their careers avoiding it, but because understanding what AI does to your thinking first requires knowing what your thinking can do without it.

This matters especially now as many college students I meet arrive already anxious, already performing, already optimizing for the grade rather than the learning. Many have spent years learning to produce the right answer rather than to wrestle with hard questions. Before they can develop discernment about any tool, they need something more foundational: a sense of their own thinking as worth trusting.

In practice, this looks like drafting with AI and without it, comparing versions, and being asked to justify choices out loud. It looks like noticing when the tool accelerates routine work and when it flattens complexity.

Like many faculty navigating this moment, I find myself in what Auburn University professors Christopher Basgier and Lydia Wilkes describe as an “unsettled middle,” neither fully embracing nor refusing the technology, but doing the uncomfortable work of engaging with it critically. My students, I’ve found, often end up in a version of that same uncertain space. Learning to sit with that uncertainty – to tolerate the slowness and mess of thinking things through rather than reaching for the frictionless answer – is where discernment begins.

If students are going to continue encountering these tools throughout their lives, then ignoring that reality does them no favors. My responsibility is to help them develop the judgment to decide when a shortcut is strategic and when it undermines their own thinking. That is pro-learning.

Kristi Girdharry 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. A writing professor’s new task in the age of AI: Teaching students when to struggle – https://theconversation.com/a-writing-professors-new-task-in-the-age-of-ai-teaching-students-when-to-struggle-276590

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Jonathan Deutsch, Professor of Food and Hospitality Management, Drexel University

Springtime in Pennsylvania is peanut butter egg season. This year some consumers may taste the eggs a bit more critically and scrutinize the ingredients and label more carefully.

Reese’s, a Hershey brand, is known for combining chocolate and peanut butter in delicious and iconic ways. Reese’s products come in a variety of formats, called “line extensions.” These include everything from peanut butter chips for baking and chocolate peanut butter popcorn for snacking to limited-time offers for holidays – such as the popular Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs for Easter.

On Feb. 14, 2026, Brad Reese, grandson of the founder, issued an open letter criticizing the Hershey Company for introducing line extensions – in this case, mini hearts for Valentine’s Day, with the flavors familiar to Reese’s lovers but made with cheaper ingredients, such as “chocolate candy” and “peanut butter creme.”

Ingredients like these seem similar but do not meet the FDA standards of identity for milk chocolate and peanut butter, the key components of the original Reese’s cups. For example, the FDA standard for milk chocolate requires at least 10% chocolate liquor.

Hershey responded in a statement: “As we’ve grown and expanded the Reese’s product line, we make product recipe adjustments that allow us to make new shapes, sizes and innovations that Reese’s fans have come to love and ask for, while always protecting the essence of what makes Reese’s unique and special: the perfect combination of chocolate and peanut butter.”

I am a certified research chef and food and hospitality professor in Philadelphia, where I founded the Drexel Food Lab, a culinary innovation and food product development lab. I am also a huge fan of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. When my older daughter was a toddler, learning her colors and shapes, I trained her to organize her trick-or-treat loot by separating the orange squares for dad.

As someone with decades of experience in product formulation, I am not surprised that the ingredients for some Reese’s products have changed over the years. One of my first jobs as an intern in corporate R&D was formulating cost reductions for existing products and later developing cost-effective line extensions building on the brand equity of the original product. What Hershey is doing with the Reese’s brand is Consumer Packaged Goods Marketing 101.

How food manufacturers deal with rising costs

Much has changed in the marketplace since Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups were developed by H.B. Reese in 1928 in Hershey, Pennsylvania, about two hours northwest of Philadelphia.

Inflation, tariffs, labor costs, fuel costs, employee benefits, competition and the vulnerability of climate-threatened crops, such as cacao, vanilla and sugar – none of which are produced anywhere near Pennsylvania – have made the confectionery business increasingly challenging.

When faced with rising costs, food manufacturers have three options:

1. Shrink the product. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups have gradually shrunk from 0.9 ounce in the 1980s to 0.75 ounce today. That’s a 17% reduction. This phenomenon has been dubbed “shrinkflation.”

2. Raise prices. There is certainly a market for premium peanut butter cups, but how much will a consumer pay for the Reese’s brand? $5? $10? I suspect most consumers expect a single serving to be a couple of bucks at most.

3. Lower costs. While the company can improve operational efficiencies, changing the formula to reduce or eliminate high-cost ingredients is a standard industry practice to keep prices consistent for consumers in the midst of a dynamic supply chain. This phenomenon has been dubbed “skimpflation” and is Brad Reese’s main complaint.

Reformulations are common in the food industry. In addition to prices rising in general, a supplier could go out of business or have a shortage. A regulatory change or shift in consumer sentiment might prohibit the use of an ingredient. Wars, tariffs or climate change can raise costs temporarily or permanently.

Reformulations can be done well

Sensory and food science tools that we teach in our Drexel culinary and food science programs help ensure little market disruption and a consumer mostly unaware of the changes.

For example, a consumer discrimination test that food product developers love is a called the triangle test. Two samples from the original formula and one sample from the new formula – or vice versa – are presented to the consumer. If the consumer can identify the different one, the product developer did a poor job in preserving the beloved brand through the reformulation. But if consumers can’t tell the difference, the reformulation may be able to move forward.

Sometimes product developers get it wrong in introducing a new formulation. Some of us are old enough to remember Crystal Pepsi, the McLean Deluxe burger or Doritos made with olestra. These products failed, respectively, due to lack of defined consumer benefit, misalignment with the brand, and bad press due to digestive side effects.

But most reformulations go unnoticed – the good work of food technologists who strive to keep food safe, affordable and delicious for consumers.

So, are these new Reese’s products inferior to the original? Maybe. Like with taste in art or wine, if it tastes good to you, it’s good. If not, send the company a note like Brad Reese did.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

Jonathan Deutsch has previously consulted with The Hershey Company. The Drexel Food Lab has conducted multiple projects with The Hershey Company.

– ref. Controversy over Reese’s ingredients reveals standard food industry practices most consumers never notice – https://theconversation.com/controversy-over-reeses-ingredients-reveals-standard-food-industry-practices-most-consumers-never-notice-276808

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Benjamin F. Henwood, Professor of Social Policy and Health, University of Southern California

When homeless shelters allow people to stay with their dogs and other pets, more unhoused people become more willing to stay in a shelter.

That’s what my team at the University of Southern California’s Homelessness Policy Research Institute learned when we evaluated California’s Pet Assistance and Support Program.

California’s Department of Housing and Community Development established this pilot program in 2019. Its goals were straightforward: to make homeless shelters more accommodating to people with pets – mostly dogs – so that people living on the streets don’t have to choose between staying in shelters or abandoning their pets.

The program disbursed US$15.75 million between 2020 and 2024 to 37 organizations across the state. The funding allowed shelters to build kennels or other pet-friendly spaces, provide pet food and supplies, and offer basic veterinary care. It also covered the costs of staffing and maintaining insurance required to operate pet-friendly shelters.

Evaluating the program

We did this evaluation in collaboration with My Dog Is My Home, a nonprofit that supports pet-inclusive housing and services for the homeless, and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

By all accounts, the program was a success.

We found that the program helped 4,407 people experiencing homelessness keep their pets while getting support. Many were able to enter shelters, and their animals received needed veterinary care. A total of 886 people ultimately moved into permanent housing with their pets – a higher success rate than the statewide average for homeless people in California.

Theoretically, this funding should have reduced the number of pet owners living on the streets. Yet since 2019, the year the program began, the number of homeless people in Los Angeles with dogs and other pets has increased.

I’ve seen this change firsthand.

Since 2017, I’ve led the USC research team that produces the annual homeless count estimates for Los Angeles. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires this exercise for any city seeking federal funding for homelessness services.

One of the questions my team asks when interviewing thousands of homeless people each year is whether they have any pets.

Before the pandemic, we generally found that roughly 1 in 8 people did. We also found that nearly half of homeless pet owners had been turned away from a homeless shelter because it couldn’t accommodate their animal.

Despite programs like California’s Pet Assistance and Support program, my research team has found that the share of people living on the streets of Los Angeles who say they have a pet increased to roughly 1 in 5 by 2025.

Need for more pet-friendly programs

We still don’t know why the share of homeless people with pets has gotten so much larger.

It could be that rising housing costs, which is the main driver of homelessness, is pushing more pet owners into homelessness. Or, perhaps more homeless are adopting pets to deal with their social isolation and loneliness, two common conditions for people with nowhere to go.

Either way, proposed cuts by the federal government to affordable housing and homeless services will only make matters worse.

The number of homeless people in Los Angeles has fallen by more than 4% since 2023 to just over 72,000 people in 2025. But based on my research findings, I would expect the number of people living on the city’s streets – with and without pets – to rise over time unless more affordable housing becomes available.

And growth in the homeless population may be hard to avoid without more efforts like California’s Pet Assistance and Support Program – on a larger scale than the pilot we studied.

Benjamin F. Henwood receives funding from National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Hilton Foundation, Los Angeles Homelessness Services Authority, LA Care.

– ref. A pet-friendly homeless shelter pilot reduced the rate of homelessness among the people it helped in California – https://theconversation.com/a-pet-friendly-homeless-shelter-pilot-reduced-the-rate-of-homelessness-among-the-people-it-helped-in-california-276255

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Jennifer Pollitt, Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Temple University

Four years ago, I started a class at Temple University titled, “Social Perspectives of Digital Pornography: The Other Sex Ed,” centered on porn literacy, or what young people learn – or don’t learn – from digital porn.

I wanted to create a space to examine these issues, not from the assumption that pornography is entirely good or entirely bad, but that avoiding the conversation altogether only does harm.

Teaching this semester-long course to college students has given me a unique window into the virtual spaces young people turn to not, only when they want to be turned on, but also when they want to learn about sex.

Only recently did AI porn start to crop up in our class discussions. And this semester marked the first time that “gooning” and “gooners” entered our class’s collective consciousness.

If you’re unfamiliar with gooning, you’re not alone. Until recently, so was I. Then I began noticing it written on Post-its in the elevator on the way to my office – “gooner forever,” “goon life” and “welcome to the goonverse.” Soon I started seeing the term on social platforms and elsewhere: in Reddit threads, on TikTok, in video titles uploaded to porn sites and in memes circulating on X.

Gooning is a form of prolonged masturbation. The goal is not orgasm but staying in a sustained state of arousal for an extended period of time. Self-proclaimed “gooners” may deliberately delay or avoid climax to experience what they describe as a “goon state” – a trancelike condition characterized by reduced self-awareness and a sense of time distortion.

It draws on familiar sex techniques such as edging – the practice of delayed orgasm – and prolonged arousal.

But unlike edging, gooning usually involves streaming online pornography across multiple screens and browsers for hours at a time; frenetically edited videos, which are often called porn music videos, or PVMs; and, in some cases, real-time interaction with other gooners through online platforms.

Gooning isn’t just about masturbating alone in your room. It’s a community that appears to be born out of the broader dynamics of digital life: abundant stimulation, parasocial connection and forms of intimacy that can feel safer and more controllable than face-to-face relationships.

Stimulation overload

The more I learned about gooning, the more the scale and intensity of the visual stimulation stood out to me.

Gooners, awash in algorithmically curated sexual content designed to maximize novelty and attention, often stream these rapid-cut porn clips on multiple screens. Music thumps in the background. There’s no plot.

In other words, this isn’t like finding some X-rated VHS tapes or a stack of Playboy magazines tucked away in your father’s closet.

Gooning has also morphed into an identifiable online subculture, replete with a shared language, rituals, memes and groups hosted on platforms such as Discord, Reddit and X. Members recommend pornography clips, circulate memes and tell inside jokes. They share tips for extending or intensifying porn-viewing sessions. They also trade screenshots, discuss favorite performers or genres, and post encouragement to other participants.

Some see gooning as a form of sexual exploration or experimentation. For others, it functions as a coping mechanism for loneliness, anxiety or emotional distress. And for others still, it’s a place for community, belonging and joy in reaching the “goon state.”

Sex repackaged for the digital age

While gooning may feel new, elements of gooning have long existed.

Edging and delayed orgasm have been studied for decades in sexology and sexuality studies; practitioners of tantric sex and members of fetish communities also seek to reach trancelike states; and porn enthusiasts – whether they perused cam sites or collected magazines, VHS tapes and DVDs – have long participated in porn marathons.

Gooning simply packages old sexual practices inside a radically new digital landscape, one defined by physical isolation, an abundance of images and videos, and connection mediated through a screen. Though there is a communal element to gooning among users, intimacy toward performers is often one-sided: Content flows toward the user, affirmation is algorithmic, and arousal is engineered, rather than negotiated.

But to many gooners, that’s the appeal.

Intimate relationships with real people can involve rejection, awkwardness, time and emotional labor. In the “goonverse,” on the other hand, desire is predictable, endlessly available and never says no.

Focus and fragmentation

It’s important to remember that not all prolonged masturbation is pathological, and gooning illustrates a familiar pattern in sexual subcultures: When pleasure is abundant and easily accessible, transgression becomes a way to make it meaningful again.

Sometimes, when an experience becomes routine, people often seek to intensify it. Similar dynamics appear outside of sexuality as well: extreme eating challenges, endurance drinking games or ultra-spicy food competitions transform ordinary pleasures like eating or drinking into tests of excess, risk or spectacle.

Millions of Americans view porn every day, typically in private, spending roughly 10 minutes per session perusing.

Gooners, on the other hand, can spend hours intensely focused on masturbating while deliberately delaying climax.

The over-the-top excess twinned with control may seem appealing in a world where smartphones offer a mindless, constant and banal source of stimulation. For gooners, the arousal could come as much from the boundary crossing as from the sexual imagery itself.

Immersion without vulnerability

My recent class discussion on gooning was one of the most lively of the semester.

Whereas many students commonly use “to goon” as a verb, meaning to excessively masturbate, they were less familiar with the intricacies and inner workings of goon subculture and the lives of the gooners themselves.

The more they learned, the more some of my students became dispirited by what seemed to be a dystopian and lonely form of pleasure seeking. Others, however, were enthusiastic participants in the “goonverse,” taking great joy and pleasure in this form of sexual exploration.

The most revealing aspect of gooning may not be what it says about porn, but what it says about intimacy in the digital age.

In the U.S., dating apps have turned romance into a swipe-based marketplace. Influencer culture encourages one-sided, parasocial bonds. People present curated versions of themselves on social media. Relationships, attention and arousal are increasingly mediated by screens and shaped by algorithms. These shifts may also be changing behavior. Surveys suggest that Gen Z is dating less frequently, having less sex and spending less time socializing with friends in person than previous generations did at the same age.

“Gooning” is unlikely to be the last new term that enters my classroom. But there’s some logic to its rise in a digital world characterized by endless content, battles for attention and fleeting relationships. It offers immersion without vulnerability, community without physical presence and arousal without negotiation.

Sex, as it often does, is simply where the culture shows its hand first.

Jennifer Pollitt is affiliated with Woodhull Freedom Foundation.

– ref. What ‘gooning’ reveals about intimacy in a world cordoned off by screens – https://theconversation.com/what-gooning-reveals-about-intimacy-in-a-world-cordoned-off-by-screens-273185

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Deldhy Nicolás Moya Sánchez, Psychiatrist and Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)

For decades, one of the greatest challenges to treating neurological disorders like attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder is that its symptoms often resemble those of several other conditions. Overlapping disorders are extremely common when it comes to neurological diagnoses.

A child who struggles to sit still, focus or complete tasks could have ADHD, anxiety, a learning disability or simply be reacting to stress at home. A teenager who seems emotionally volatile and impulsive might be showing early signs of a mood disorder, ADHD or trauma. An adult who constantly misses deadlines, forgets important obligations and feels chronically overwhelmed might be dealing with workplace burnout, a severe anxiety disorder or undiagnosed ADHD.

I am a practicing psychiatrist at the National Medical Center “20 de Noviembre” in Mexico City, and a professor of medicine at UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In my work, I frequently see cases that initially look like anxiety, but I often find that this issue is only the tip of the iceberg. Anxiety improves, and what emerges is undiagnosed ADHD.

The reverse can also be true: What looks like ADHD — difficulty focusing, restlessness, poor performance — sometimes turns out to be driven primarily by anxiety. However, in my practice, I most frequently see the opposite scenario. Young adults arrive seeking treatment for severe anxiety, but clinical evaluation often shows that their condition is rooted in executive functions – such as planning and problem-solving – that have been fragile since childhood. Patients in this situation have compensated for their undiagnosed ADHD for years through exhausting effort and the fear of failure.

Diagnosing untreated ADHD matters because in adults, this condition is associated with depression, anxiety, work difficulties, academic problems and financial stress.

Because these conditions are so tightly interwoven, it is not always possible to know which came first — and in many cases, both are genuinely present at the same time. Treating only what is visible may bring real but only partial relief, leaving the underlying driver unaddressed.

This is why evaluation by a clinician who can assess the full picture matters. When ADHD is properly identified and treated, secondary anxiety often resolves more completely than it ever did with therapy or medication alone. But the reverse is not reliably true: Treating anxiety does not correct the underlying attention issues that may be driving it. Identifying the right target – or targets – is what leads to lasting improvement. This comprehensive approach is especially important given the growing recognition that emotional dysregulation – such as intense, rapid mood shifts or an inability to manage one’s distress – is often a core, yet historically overlooked, symptom of undiagnosed ADHD.

Here’s why undiagnosed ADHD can hide behind anxiety, some signs that can help differentiate these two conditions, and why this diagnostic blind spot – treating the visible anxiety while missing the underlying ADHD – is so common.

How ADHD lurks

I had been seeing a patient in his late 20s for some time who suffered from anxiety when he came to an appointment convinced that he was finally emerging from a terrible year. He had stopped having panic attacks, was sleeping better and no longer lived intensely focused on his own body, waiting for the next wave of fear. After months of antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy, the crises seemed controlled.

But then something different emerged: constant difficulty concentrating, procrastination that left him stuck for hours, impulsive speech and a stubborn inner restlessness. These symptoms are often overshadowed when someone feels suffocated by anxiety and consumed by worries.

Anxiety and ADHD have many common symptoms, including restlessness, irritability, sleep difficulties and concentration problems. This overlap can lead to diagnostic errors and treatments that don’t address the root cause.

During childhood, many ADHD symptoms are interpreted as personality traits. A child may be labeled as distracted, inconsistent, impulsive or restless. Over time, these people learn to compensate through excessive effort, perfectionism or constant self-monitoring – strategies that raise baseline stress and may trigger anxiety years later.

When the brain leaves survival mode

Anxiety is often the first way the body expresses overload. When this threat response eases, previously masked struggles with planning, organization, sustained attention and time management surface.

Several studies show a strong association between ADHD traits, anxiety and depression. In the United Kingdom, recent research found that ADHD traits predict emotional problems more strongly than traits related to the autism spectrum.

Systematic reviews indicate that 25% to 50% of adults with ADHD experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives. Major depressive disorder is also more common among this group than in the general population. For many people, anxiety is the consequence of years trying to function with an impaired executive system, the part of the brain that manages planning, organization and impulse control.

Why ADHD can elude early detection

It can be easy for parents, teachers or co-workers to misinterpret ADHD symptoms as character traits. Impulsivity can be seen as bad temper, disorganization as laziness, and difficulty maintaining attention as lack of interest. In adults, these difficulties are often interpreted as personal flaws rather than neuropsychiatric disorders.

ADHD rarely causes physical symptoms, but anxiety does. Heart palpitations, intense fear or insomnia drive people to seek care, while attention symptoms are less recognized.

ADHD is strongly genetic, with inheritance rates estimated at 70% to 80%. This genetic component also means that closely related relatives have a higher risk of emotional disorders such as anxiety and depression. When several family members share similar traits, these attributes often are considered part of the family personality.

Primary anxiety versus anxiety due to ADHD

The key question in clinical practice is this: What remains when the anxiety decreases?

If emotional distress diminishes but the following symptoms persist, then the pattern aligns more with adult ADHD:

– prolonged procrastination

– difficulty initiating tasks requiring mental effort

– frequently forgetting instructions or appointments

– constant inner restlessness

– daily disorganization

– easy distraction by minimal stimuli

A formal diagnosis, made by a trained health professional, requires an assessment of symptoms that have been present since childhood and a determination that the patient is impaired in more than one life area. Caregivers will rule out other medical or psychiatric causes, using validated tools such as structured interviews and specific scales.

Neurobiological studies have shown that people with ADHD have identifiable differences in several brain regions, including their connections in the deep neural tissue known as white matter and the reward circuitry of the brain. They also have imbalances in dopamine and norepinephrine — brain chemicals that regulate attention, motivation and impulse control. These differences can make it harder for people to initiate tasks or sustain efforts.

The risk of treating only what is visible

Antidepressants and therapy can reduce emotional distress and overlapping symptoms such as restlessness or sleep disruption, but they do not modify the attention difficulties that create daily chaos – affecting relationships, academic performance and work functioning. If this root is not addressed, the patient improves partially but continues living in disorganization, leading to new cycles of distress.

When I explain how anxiety can mask ADHD to patients, their most common reaction is a mix of relief and frustration. They finally understand their emotional history, but see that they spent years interpreting their symptoms and struggles as flaws.

Studies show that adults with anxiety and untreated ADHD suffer greater functional impairment and more frequent relapses, meaning their severe anxiety or depressive episodes keep returning despite therapy or medication. They live under a burden of self-reproach that harms their self-esteem. This cycle can repeat for years: emotional improvement, relapse and seeking treatment again, without identifying the main problem.

The good news is that once ADHD is diagnosed, it is treatable. Robust evidence shows that treatment for ADHD reduces impulsivity and improves sustained attention and daily functioning at all ages.

Regulating dopamine and norepinephrine enables patients to initiate tasks and sustain their efforts until the work is completed. When this happens, secondary anxiety often decreases more deeply and stably because people no longer have to work twice as hard just to keep up. This also improves their relationships at home, school and work.

Identifying hidden ADHD does not erase the past, but it changes the future. When people understand the root cause of their anxiety and gain tools to manage it, they can move from surviving to living a more functional life.

Deldhy Nicolás Moya Sánchez 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. Anxiety and ADHD can overlap – here’s how to untangle these widespread mental health disorders – https://theconversation.com/anxiety-and-adhd-can-overlap-heres-how-to-untangle-these-widespread-mental-health-disorders-271124

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Daniel M. Stuart, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of South Carolina

Silent retreats have become increasingly common in the United States in recent years.

To calm down and reset their nervous systems, people relinquish their phones and reading materials and commit to speaking at a bare minimum to learn practices of self-awareness.

Silent meditation and silent prayer have shaped spiritual lives within a variety of religious traditions for thousands of years. Today, however, those practices are often being offered in secular settings.

One particular form of meditative silence, the 10-day mindfulness retreat, has had an outsized impact. Research I have carried out over the past two decades sheds light on the role of the Burmese meditation master Sayagyi U Ba Khin in popularizing mindfulness meditation. The term “sayagyi” means “respected teacher.”

Ba Khin was one of a small number of prominent Buddhist lay meditation teachers in late colonial and early postcolonial Burma. His silent, 10-day retreat became a model for a wide range of intensive meditation traditions. Three of Ba Khin’s students were instrumental in bringing his teaching to the United States.

The emergence of mass meditation

Mindfulness meditation practices can be traced to ancient India. The clearest historical evidence of such practices comes from the teachings of the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, and his contemporaries.

Most of these practitioners were monastics or ascetics. Historical questions remain, however, regarding whether such practices were primarily reserved for monastics or widely practiced among laypeople.

The monk and scholar Bhikkhu Anālayo argues that the oldest historical sources provide evidence for widespread lay meditation practice beginning in the fifth century B.C.E. Other scholars suggest that laypeople had access only to teachings on devotional practices, such as reflections on the qualities of the Buddha, that would encourage offerings and lay support for the monastic community.

A striking development in the mid-20th century was the emergence of mass Buddhist meditation movements in Southeast Asia. Countries such as Myanmar, Thailand and Sri Lanka promoted meditation among lay people to build national identities in the face of colonialism.

In post-colonial Burma – Myanmar’s name until 1989 – being an ideal citizen meant being an ideal Buddhist; meditation was seen as a visible expression embodying that ideal. With the globalization of such meditation practices in the latter half of the 20th century, such meditation practices expanded beyond the borders of these countries.

The Burmese silent retreat

Following Burma’s independence in 1948, Ba Khin became its first accountant general – a role in which he developed a close relationship with the first prime minister, U Nu.

With the blessing of U Nu, Ba Khin began teaching meditation to his employees. At the time, many of his students were neither Burmese nor Buddhist; they were civil servants originally working for the colonial government.

The context of teaching was therefore both lay-oriented – taking place in work contexts – and religiously pluralistic, involving Buddhists and non-Buddhists.

Ba Khin had learned meditation from Maung Po Thet, who was born in colonial Burma in 1873. A farmer by profession, Thet learned meditation from teachers who believed that lay people, and not just monks, should practice meditation.

To make practice accessible, Maung Po Thet introduced a seven-day retreat for lay people. At the time, meditation typically involved longer periods of retreat.

Following his teacher’s approach, Ba Khin started teaching 10-day retreats in 1952. He later authorized students to carry his teaching abroad – to North America, Europe, Australia and India.

Globalization of the silent retreat

The most famous of these students was S.N. Goenka. Born in colonial Burma in 1924, Goenka was a wealthy businessman and leader of the Hindu community in Rangoon.

He initially sought out Ba Khin for relief from severe migraine headaches; Ba Khin was known as a healer. Despite reservations about Buddhist practice, Goenka enrolled in a 10-day retreat after experiencing relief from his headaches in an initial encounter with Ba Khin.

The experience proved transformative.

From 1969 until his death in 2013, Goenka devoted his life to spreading Ba Khin’s teachings globally while retaining his Hindu identity. Like his teacher, and his teacher’s teacher, Goenka taught practices of meditation that focused on the cultivation of continuous concentration on a single object of focus for sustained periods of time.

This was done through the observation of the breath, leading to a comprehensive awareness of bodily sensations in all postures and at all times when not sleeping.

Along with his wife, Ilaichidevi Goenka, he taught hundreds of 10-day retreats and trained assistants to facilitate retreats at roughly 200 meditation centers worldwide.

Millions have participated in these retreats, and many influential meditation teachers in India, Europe, Australia and North America first encountered meditation under Goenka’s guidance.

Roots of techno-mindfulness

One particularly consequential aspect of Goenka’s work was his use of audio and video recordings, beginning in the 1980s. In the face of increased demand for his courses, Goenka recorded teachings and instructions and established a highly structured retreat format.

This innovation allowed retreats to be facilitated worldwide in his absence, dramatically accelerating the global spread of the practice and foreshadowing later developments, such as meditation apps.

Goenka was also skilled at using the language of universalism to secularize Buddhist meditation, presenting himself as a committed non-Buddhist who nevertheless accessed its benefits.

This approach echoed that of Ba Khin, who spoke of teaching meditation without interfering in his students’ personal faith. Such rhetorical tactics proved crucial in making meditation accessible to global audiences.

Two lesser-known figures

Two other students of Ba Khin, rarely mentioned in historical accounts, also catalyzed the study of mindfulness in the U.S.: aerospace engineer Robert H. Hover and Leon E. Wright, a Black Christian theologian.

Robert H. Hover played a crucial role in initiating the scientific study of mindfulness and in the founding of the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts, one of the first U.S. centers dedicated to Southeast Asian Buddhist meditation.

Hover’s work helped bring mindfulness into mainstream medicine and society. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who created the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, a program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School to help patients cope with chronic pain and stress, credits Hover as one of his primary teachers.

From the 1970s through the ’80s, Hover taught 10-day silent retreats across the U.S., Europe, India and Australia, helping to build communities of meditators through newsletters and informal networks.

Leon E. Wright
began teaching Ba Khin’s meditation techniques in the U.S. in the late 1950s, well before any of Ba Khin’s other students.

Wright’s work remained largely unknown because he was working primarily in the Black community. Until quite recently, very little attention has been paid to the role of Black practitioners in the modern history of Buddhism. Over the course of the past decade, however, scholars have begun to fill that gap.

Wright taught Ba Khin’s techniques for decades at Howard University and organized silent retreats for the broader public. He was also a spiritual healer with interests in extrasensory perception and psychic experience.

His universalist teachings influenced generations of Black theologians. The Covenant Christian Community, a church in the Washington, D.C., area, continues to practice his meditation teachings in silence as well as gather for communal rituals on Sundays.

When people come to silent retreats today, they rarely learn about the networks and the individuals who made the teachings they receive possible to access, or whose work is seen and which voices may have been silenced.

An awareness of this history enriches the silence of a silent retreat.

Daniel M. Stuart 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 long history of silent meditation retreats and the individuals who helped shape them – https://theconversation.com/the-long-history-of-silent-meditation-retreats-and-the-individuals-who-helped-shape-them-272034

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Boaz Dvir, Associate Professor of Journalism, Penn State

It’s a scene that’s played out in K-12 schools around the country in recent years. Unprompted, a student expresses her thoughts or feelings about a difficult issue, such as the Iran war. A murmur spreads through the classroom. Other students prepare to jump into a heated discussion. But the teacher nips the conversation in the bud, redirecting everyone’s attention to the lesson of the day.

This approach, while perhaps well-meaning, can silence students, curtail their growth and rob them of learning opportunities.

Elementary, middle and high school teachers generally act with their students’ best interests in mind. Many simply lack the training to manage student concerns over distressing current events, according to research I’ve conducted with colleagues at Penn State and the University of North Dakota.

In 2019, I founded Penn State’s Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative. The program trains K-12 educators in six states to effectively teach difficult issues that pop up in the news but are not part of the curriculum. This includes fighting in the Middle East, Ukraine and Sudan. It also offers tips for talking about thorny issues like immigration, school shootings, Islamophobia, antisemitism and LGBTQ+ rights.

We also train teachers to better discuss complex topics that are often embedded in students’ curricula, like indigenous history, slavery, the American Civil War, gender and evolution.

When a difficult issue arises, our research shows that educators in all grade levels and subject matters often freeze, punt to buy time or forgo the teachable moment altogether.

By using certain teaching strategies, educators can responsibly and safely encourage students to participate in respectful, constructive conversations about difficult topics, such as the Iran war. This ongoing conflict has triggered strong reactions among many K-12 students who have families in the Middle East or worry about a widening conflict reaching American shores.

A path toward critical thinking

Our initiative has developed a teaching approach for tackling controversial issues. This work can help students develop crucial skills, such as critical thinking, primary and secondary research, active listening, civic discourse and empathy for others.

Rather than having teachers announce their point of view on a particular issue, we instruct them to let the students do the research and explore various perspectives. We also emphasize the importance of teachers taking a nonpartisan stance.

So, instead of sharing their own opinion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a teacher would task her students with researching and presenting viewpoints that differ from what they personally believe.

Teachers learn strategies on how to help students connect lessons to local conditions and experiences. For instance, a teacher may ask a student with relatives in the Middle East to describe how the Iran war has affected their daily routines and mental health.

We also teach educators to recognize the psychological wounds that many children and adolescents carry.

Ultimately, the more than 3,000 elementary, middle and high school educators who have participated in our initiative’s professional development programs learn to teach students how, not what, to think.

These educators encourage students to channel their curiosities into inquiries. When children and adolescents come up with and pursue their own questions, they gain ownership over their education. In the process, they learn to identify credible sources, tell facts from fiction, cross-reference, find documents, conduct interviews, gather data and review findings.

Exposure to a range of viewpoints helps broaden students’ horizons. It allows them to realize that people draw different conclusions from the same set of facts. They start feeling comfortable revealing their opinions and stop feeling threatened by what others think. They grow to see difficult issues as multilayered.

Teachers can also encourage students to become aware of misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, propaganda, deepfakes and whatever other cognitive junk foods algorithms feed them.

This work offers various benefits. Teachers may no longer resort to sharing upsetting content to shock students into paying attention. Research shows disturbing visuals and recordings can traumatize or retraumatize some students. They can also dull others’ sensitivity to violence and hatred.

Crafting compelling inquiries

In classrooms where such interactions have yet to take shape, it’s understandable why many educators shy away from unplanned discussions about difficult issues. The teachers who allow such moments tend to use traditional methods like lectures, which can backfire. For instance, even the most well-meaning, fact-based lecture about, let’s say, the Iran war can be misinterpreted by students and parents as an attempt at indoctrination. Students might go home and tell their parents, “My teacher told me …”

By focusing on helping students craft compelling questions rather than handing them answers, teachers can send children and adolescents home with a message such as, “I’m interested in hearing what Iranian Americans think about the war. Can I interview our neighbor?”

Parents, legal guardians, youth group leaders, ministers, priests, imams, rabbis and other adults working with children and adolescents can also use this approach to promote critical thinking.

Trusting students

The Iran war is the latest difficult issue to challenge educators in schools across the country.

I believe it’s essential that teachers avoid suppressing spontaneous discussions and revamp how they approach difficult discussions about current events and other topics. Rather than insulating students from complexity or dictating what conclusions they should reach, educators should trust students of all ages to develop skills to navigate current affairs.

When students are granted that trust, they tend to thrive. Over time, such experiences cultivate intellectual habits that extend beyond the classroom.

As the U.S., Israel, Iran and other countries trade precision-guided bombs, ballistic warheads, air-to-surface missiles, suicide drones and laser beams, educators fight a different battle: helping students make sense of a fast-changing, increasingly shaky world.

Boaz Dvir 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. Iran war and other tough topics give K-12 teachers chance to teach students how, not what, to think – https://theconversation.com/iran-war-and-other-tough-topics-give-k-12-teachers-chance-to-teach-students-how-not-what-to-think-278067

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Paula Kane, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Pittsburgh

Downtown Pittsburgh will turn green on Saturday, March 14. Tens of thousands will line Grant Street for the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade, one of the largest celebrations of its kind in the country.

In Pittsburgh, one of the nation’s most Irish cities, the holiday is less a performance of ethnic nostalgia than a genuine sense of homecoming for many residents. The story of how so many Irish came to call this corner of Pennsylvania their own stretches back nearly three centuries, shaped by famine and faith, hard labor and hard politics, and a tenacity that left its mark on nearly every institution the city holds dear.

As professor of religious studies and chair of Catholic studies at the University of Pittsburgh, my work focuses on American religious history and the history of Catholicism.

Irish foundation

Some Scotch-Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics came to the Pittsburgh region in the 18th century, drawn by economic opportunity and the desire to escape British Anglican religious tyranny. In the first U.S. census of 1790, the population of Pittsburgh was already 19% Irish, with over 250,000 having emigrated from Ulster alone in the previous century. Both Presbyterians and Catholics made the journey across the Atlantic.

An even larger wave of Irish immigration, however, came with the Catholic exodus during the potato blight that triggered the Great Famine of 1845-51, in which an estimated 1 million people died. Irish Catholics were disproportionately affected by the blight, having been forced onto marginal land where they relied mostly on potatoes for survival. Centuries of penal laws had left Catholics as impoverished tenant farmers, while Protestants – wealthier and less reliant on the crop – had greater resources to survive. By 1900, more Irish lived in the United States than in Ireland itself. Today, between 11% and 16% of Pittsburgh’s population claims Irish ancestry.

Neighborhoods and parish life

The Irish settled throughout Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods. The Hill District, Lawrenceville, Homewood and Hazelwood all had significant Irish populations. On the South Side of the Monongahela River, one neighborhood was called Limerick, named after the county in Ireland. From the 1840s through the 1880s, the Point – today’s downtown area – was so densely populated with Irish immigrants it was known as Little Ireland.

On the city’s North Side, then called Allegheny City, the immigrant community was similarly Irish. Women worked as domestics; men served as unskilled laborers, canal diggers and later as mill workers across the river. As in eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, they dug canals and fell victim to cholera in large numbers, many buried in mass graves along the canal routes.

Parish life formed the backbone of the community. The first Catholic church in Pittsburgh was St. Patrick’s in the Strip District, built in 1808. It houses a replica of the Holy Stairs, 28 white marble steps in Rome that many Christians believe Jesus Christ climbed in Jerusalem before his crucifixion, and a piece of the Blarney Stone, a famous block of limestone built into the battlements of Blarney Castle in County Cork, Ireland. In Allegheny City, St. Peter’s was established in 1848 to serve the Irish, while Germans, Italians, Poles and Eastern Europeans attended their own parishes.

As was typical of the national pattern in the United States, the diocesan bishops and local clergy in Pittsburgh were dominated by the Irish. From Michael O’Connor, born in County Cork and named the first bishop in 1843, to subsequent bishops, clergy and sisters – primarily the Sisters of Mercy, who founded Mercy Hospital in 1847 – Irish roots ran deep in the church. The Sisters of St. Joseph also maintained a strong presence. Notable clergy included the Rev. Charles Owen Rice, a prominent labor activist.

Orders of nursing sisters treated the sick during fierce outbreaks of epidemic disease, often for free at Mercy Hospital. Irish fraternal organizations, including the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Catholic Sacred Heart Society, also contributed to community welfare in an era of high child mortality from cholera, diphtheria, measles and smallpox.

From the mill to the mayor’s office and more

As Pittsburgh grew into the nation’s steel capital in the late 19th century, Irish immigrants and their families became an integral part of its working-class communities and labor movements. A majority of Irish immigrants worked as unskilled laborers during this time, though many advanced into skilled metal trades in iron mills. Irish workers also labored in rail yards and mines in the area.

Construction of the Pennsylvania Canal system, which connected Philadelphia to Pittsburgh in the 1830s, relied on Irish laborers to perform grueling excavation work. Many of them transitioned into industrial employment as the city’s iron and steel industries expanded.

The Irish were also central to Pittsburgh’s labor movement. Philip Murray, who came from a coal mining background, rose to become president of both the United Steelworkers of America and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The Homestead Strike of 1892 drew in members of the Irish community as workers pushed back against the industrial order that had built the city’s wealth on their labor.

Several Irish mayors were elected in the 20th century, including David Lawrence, Pete Flaherty, Tom Murphy and Bob O’Connor, whose son Corey O’Connor is mayor today.

Lawrence served as mayor from 1946 until 1959, when he became the only Pittsburgh mayor ever elected governor of Pennsylvania.

And a more modern Pittsburgh professional, Dan Rooney, served the Obama administration as ambassador to Ireland. Locally, he is better known as the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers and son of the Steelers’ founder, Art Rooney.

Pittsburgh Irish today

The Irish cultural presence in Pittsburgh remains vibrant. The city hosts a very large St. Patrick’s Day Parade each March, drawing 200,000 to 350,000 spectators from across the region. In September, there’s an annual Irish festival where roughly 25,000 attendees gather to celebrate their Irish heritage through music, dance and food.

Year-round, the community sustains Pittsburgh Irish Classical Theater, the Irish Rowing Club, the Gaelic Arts Society and the Ceili Club.

Each June, Bloomsday is celebrated with readings from James Joyce’s fiction at locations across the city. Numerous Irish pubs and at least one Irish import shop keep the connection to the old country alive for generations that have never left Pennsylvania. Three major Irish dancing companies operate around the Pittsburgh area and perform at the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

The industries that once drew Irish immigrants to Pittsburgh may have largely disappeared, but their legacy remains visible in the city’s Irish culture and celebrations.

Paula Kane 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 the Emerald Isle shaped the Steel City – Pittsburgh’s rich Irish history – https://theconversation.com/how-the-emerald-isle-shaped-the-steel-city-pittsburghs-rich-irish-history-278027

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Darrell Evans, Professor of Environmental Science and Sustainability, Purdue University

President Donald Trump directed the Pentagon and other federal agencies to begin releasing government files related to UFOs and unidentified anomalous phenomena – called UAP – in February 2026, following years of pressure from Congress, military whistleblowers and the public.

Congress formally mandated UAP investigations through the National Defense Authorization Act in December 2022. The Pentagon’s official UAP investigative body, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, AARO, now carries a caseload exceeding 2,000 reports dating back to 1945. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed this figure earlier this year.

The cases were submitted by military personnel, pilots and government employees describing aerial objects that could not be explained as known aircraft, drones or weather phenomena. Governments in Japan, France, Brazil and Canada also have their own formal UAP investigation programs.

Yet modern research universities remain almost entirely absent from this conversation. No major university has established a dedicated UAP research center. No federal science agency offers competitive grants for UAP inquiry. No doctoral programs train researchers in UAP methodology. The gap between what governments openly acknowledge and what universities are willing to study is, at this point, difficult to explain on purely intellectual grounds.

I have navigated this gap while conducting my own UAP research. My work developing the temporal aerospace correlation tool, a standardized framework for correlating civilian UAP sighting reports with documented rocket launch activity from Cape Canaveral, is currently under peer review at Limina: The Journal of UAP Studies.

Designing that framework meant making methodological decisions without community standards, without institutional funding and without the professional infrastructure many researchers in established fields take for granted. What is missing is not interest or data – it is the shared scaffolding that turns isolated curiosity into cumulative science.

Stigma is measurable

The most rigorous evidence for the gap between faculty interest in UAP and faculty willingness to study it UAP comes from peer-reviewed studies by Marissa Yingling, Charlton Yingling and Bethany Bell, published in the scholarly journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

Across 14 disciplines at 144 major U.S. research universities, 1,460 faculty responded to their 2023 national survey. Most surveyed believed UAP research was important. Curiosity outweighed skepticism in every discipline that was part of the study. Nearly one-fifth had personally observed something aerial they could not identify. Yet fewer than 1% had ever conducted UAP-related research.

The gap was not explained by intellectual dismissal, but it was in part explained by fear. Researchers were not primarily deterred by intellectual skepticism because they doubted the topic’s merits. Instead, they feared they might lose funding, face ridicule from colleagues or find their careers quietly derailed. Faculty reported being told to “be careful.”

A 2024 follow-up study found that roughly 28% said they might vote against a colleague’s tenure case for conducting UAP research, even when they personally believed the topic warranted study.

Historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific communities suppress anomalous questions not because those questions are unanswerable, but because they fall outside the boundaries the community has collectively decided are worth investigating.

Sociologist Thomas Gieryn called this suppression “boundary work,” referring to the active process by which scientists police what counts as legitimate science.

For UAP researchers, the data and tools to study the phenomenon exist. What may not exist is social permission to use them without professional consequence.

Creating an academic discipline

Academic disciplines do not emerge spontaneously. They require dedicated journals, agreed-upon methods, graduate programs and professional societies.

The history of cognitive neuroscience demonstrates how disciplines emerge. Before the 1980s, researchers at the intersection of neuroscience and cognitive psychology faced resistance from both parent disciplines.

These fields achieved mainstream acceptance only after targeted funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, new brain-imaging tools and the gradual formation of academic programs that created career pathways for researchers. Researchers at the nexus of these fields did not wait for central questions to be resolved. They built infrastructure, and the infrastructure made progress possible.

UAP studies as a discipline is developing some of these elements, but largely outside universities. The Society for UAP Studies, a nonprofit of scholars and researchers, operates Limina as a double-blind, peer-reviewed journal and has convened international symposia drawing researchers from physics, philosophy of science and the social sciences. But a nonprofit scholarly society without tenured faculty does not constitute a discipline.

To turn UAP studies into a recognized academic field would require three things.

First, funding. The Yingling studies found that competitive research grants would do more to unlock faculty participation than any other single factor. Without grants, researchers cannot hire students to assist them, maintain instruments or sustain the multiyear projects that produce meaningful results.

Second, shared methodological standards – these would entail agreed-upon procedures for collecting, recording and evaluating UAP reports – would mean findings from one research group can be compared and built upon by others.

Third, institutions could publicly affirm that they will evaluate appropriately rigorous UAP scholarship on its scientific merits during tenure reviews. Several universities have already done this for gun violence research and psychedelic-assisted therapy studies.

These are not isolated examples. Research into near-death experiences and adverse childhood experiences followed similar trajectories, moving from being a professional liability to mainstream legitimacy after the removal of institutional barriers.

The international comparison

This gap in UAP scholarship is unique to the United States. France’s GEIPAN, a dedicated investigation unit within its national space agency, has operated since 1977. It has publicly archived approximately 5,300 French UAP cases, of which about 2% to 3% remain unexplained after rigorous analysis.

In 2020, Japan formalized UAP reporting protocols for its Self-Defense Forces, the branch of the Japanese military responsible for national defense. By June 2024, more than 80 lawmakers had formed a parliamentary UAP investigation group that by May 2025 had formally proposed a dedicated UAP research office to the defense minister. Canada launched its own multiagency UAP investigation survey in 2023.

None of these actions has produced a corresponding response from American research universities. Universities provide independent, peer-reviewed analyses that government programs structurally cannot.

The University of Würzburg in Germany became the first Western university to officially recognize UAP as a legitimate object of academic research in 2022, when it formally added UAP investigation to its research canon. Researchers at Stockholm University and the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Sweden have been actively publishing peer-reviewed UAP research since 2017, most recently in Scientific Reports in October 2025.

Congress has passed legislation, the Pentagon is reporting on its investigations, and the president has directed federal agencies to begin releasing records. So the question no longer is whether governments take UAP seriously – it is whether universities will follow, and which ones will get there first.

Darrell Evans 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. While the US government is investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena, academic researchers studying them face stigma – https://theconversation.com/while-the-us-government-is-investigating-unidentified-anomalous-phenomena-academic-researchers-studying-them-face-stigma-277722

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jose Abisambra, Professor of Neuroscience, University of Florida

“Yes, doctor. My dad’s first fall was on his 65th birthday. He stood in the driveway and suddenly dropped backwards on his back. After he fell two more times, we came to the clinic.”

The symptoms the patient’s son described didn’t fit the usual diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. The family noted mood changes, including outbursts of anger. When the patient tried reading, the words “jumped” at him. Instead of looking down the page with his eyes, he moved his entire head. While his hands didn’t shake, he noticeably moved around more slowly.

Dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. The doctors weren’t convinced this was the right diagnosis, but it was the best they could come up with. He was given medications for Parkinson’s. They treated his symptoms with physical therapy and blood thinners to prevent clots if he got injured from a fall. But his condition worsened, and he died within 10 years.

He had been misdiagnosed. He actually had progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare and aggressive neurodegenerative disease with similar symptoms to Parkinson’s. The late Rev. Jesse Jackson, who died on Feb. 17, 2026, at age 84, had a similar experience of misdiagnosis.

About 6 to 10 in 100,000 people are affected by progressive supranuclear palsy, totaling around 30,000 patients in the United States. But because this disease is often misdiagnosed, the real numbers are likely higher. It shares similar symptoms with Parkinson’s, making it very challenging to distinguish between the two. In fact, PSP is also called atypical parkinsonism. Moreover, the brain cells of people with PSP share similar pathological signs with 20 other neurodegenerative disorders.

There are no biological tests to screen for progressive supranuclear palsy and no therapies specifically for this disease. Patients like Jackson are stuck with treatments that don’t improve their quality of life. In our recently published research, my neuroscience lab identified a potential biomarker that could help change how doctors approach this disease.

Genetics of progressive supranuclear palsy

Rare genetic changes can increase someone’s risk of developing progressive supranuclear palsy.

For example, researchers found that a single mutation on the gene coding for the stress sensor protein PERK increases a person’s risk of developing the disease. PERK helps relieve stress from a part of the cell that acts as a warehouse for newly made proteins. When the cell becomes stressed, PERK dials down the production of new proteins and gives this warehouse time to recover.

Many labs worked to find why this single change in DNA could unleash a devastating life sentence. My team and I had previously found that alterations in a key protein involved in neurodegenerative diseases, tau, can activate PERK, which further weaponizes abnormal tau against cells.

After identifying three other PERK mutations, the field focused on targeting PERK as a way to treat the disease. However, results were conflicting: Both increasing and decreasing PERK activity improved cell survival and brain function in animal and cell models.

Then researchers made a crucial discovery: Unlike properly functioning PERK, the mutant form of this protein could not eliminate tau clumps in the brain. This meant that the brain normally has a way to get rid of toxic tau, but this mechanism was compromised in people who have the mutation.

Treatment strategies that could change the activity of PERK, even in sick patients, could provide a way to fight this disease.

How PERK connects to PSP

My team and I wanted to understand how PERK promotes the abnormal accumulations of tau protein that causes progressive supranuclear palsy.

First, we genetically engineered cells to express normal or mutant PERK. As expected, while both forms of PERK carried out nearly identical functions, mutant PERK did not sufficiently clear out tau. Our next step was to identify which proteins PERK actually affected.

We hypothesized that both versions of PERK reduced the production of different proteins. To test this, we tagged cells with an antibiotic that attaches to newly made proteins.

Surprisingly, only four proteins differed between normal and mutant PERK cells, suggesting we’d found a potential key to understand how progressive supranuclear palsy develops and how it kills brain cells.

One of the proteins we identified, DLX1, was previously associated with the disease. After confirming that DLX1 is enriched in the brains of people with PSP, we tested how changing DLX1 levels would affect fruit flies engineered to produce high levels of tau in their brains.

We found that reducing DLX1 levels in the flies minimized the damage tau causes on cells. These findings strongly imply that DLX1 plays a role in the development of progressive supranuclear palsy.

Future of PSP treatment

Effectively treating diseases requires identifying how they damage cells at the molecular level. Early diagnosis is especially critical to opening an effective therapeutic window before irreversible damage occurs.

Our study offers the first evidence linking key proteins involved in the development of progressive supranuclear palsy, which has major implications for how it’s treated and diagnosed. For example, screening for higher DLX1 levels in the brain or blood could confirm a diagnosis of the disease. Also, developing drugs that reduce DLX1 could potentially reduce symptoms in patients.

Importantly, our team identified three other proteins we are currently testing to see whether they can also offer improved diagnostic and therapeutic value. Combination therapies that target these proteins could potentially help improve patients’ lives.

As researchers work toward more accurate diagnoses and treatment, patients can have more hope to alleviate the devastating consequences of progressive supranuclear palsy.

Jose Abisambra receives funding from the National Institutes of Health. Prior research funding for his work originated from the Department of Defense, the Alzheimer’s Association, the Rotary Club, and the CurePSP foundation. He is a consultant for CurieBio and co-editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Brain Research.

– ref. Jesse Jackson’s misdiagnosis of Parkinson’s is common – new genetic discovery could lead to treatment for this deadly disease – https://theconversation.com/jesse-jacksons-misdiagnosis-of-parkinsons-is-common-new-genetic-discovery-could-lead-to-treatment-for-this-deadly-disease-276944