Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Brittany Romanello, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Arkansas

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has spent the past few weeks in a moment of both mourning and transition. On Sept. 28, 2025, a shooting and arson at a Latter-day Saints meetinghouse in Michigan killed four people and wounded eight more. What’s more, Russell M. Nelson, president of the church, died the day before at age 101. Based on protocol, his role will most likely be filled by Dallin H. Oaks, the longest-serving of the church’s top leaders.

The next president will inherit leadership of a religious institution that is both deeply American and increasingly global – diversity at odds with the way it’s typically represented in mainstream media, from “The Secret Life of Mormon Wives” to “The Book of Mormon” Broadway musical.

As a cultural anthropologist and ethnographer, I research Latter-day Saints communities across the United States, particularly Latina immigrants and young adults. When presenting my research, I’ve noticed that many people still closely associate the church with Utah, where its headquarters are located.

The church has played a pivotal role in Utah’s history and culture. Today, though, only 42% of its residents are members. The stereotype of Latter-day Saints as mostly white, conservative Americans is just one of many long-standing misconceptions about LDS communities and beliefs.

Many people are surprised to learn there are vibrant congregations far from the American West’s “Mormon Corridor.” There are devout Latter-day Saints everywhere from Ghana and the United Arab Emirates to Russia and mainland China.

Global growth

Joseph Smith founded The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in upstate New York in 1830 and immediately sent missionaries to preach along the frontier. The first overseas missionaries traveled to England in 1837.

Shortly after World War II, church leaders overhauled their missionary approach to increase the number of international missions. This strategy led to growth across the globe, especially in Central America, South America and the Pacific Islands.

Today, the church has over 17.5 million members, according to church records. A majority live outside the U.S., spread across more than 160 countries.

One way the church and researchers track this global growth is by construction of new temples.These buildings, used not for weekly worship but special ceremonies like weddings, were once almost exclusively located in the United States. Today, they exist in dozens of countries, from Argentina to Tonga.

During Nelson’s presidency, which began in 2018, he announced 200 new temples, more than any of his predecessors. Temples are a physical and symbolic representation of the church’s commitment to being a global religion, although cultural tensions remain.

Among U.S. members, demographics are also shifting. Seventy-two percent of American members are white, down from 85% in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center. Growing numbers of Latinos – 12% of U.S. members – have played a significant role sustaining congregations across the country.

There are congregations in every U.S. state, including the small community of Grand Blanc, Michigan, site of the tragic shooting. Suspect Thomas Jacob Sanford, who was fatally shot by police, had gone on a recent tirade against Latter-day Saints during a conversation with a local political candidate.

In the following days, an American member of the church raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Sanford’s family.

Growing pains

Despite the church’s diversity, its institutional foundations remain firmly rooted in the United States. The top leadership bodies are still composed almost entirely of white men, and most are American-born.

As the church continues to grow, questions arise about how well the norms of a Utah-based church fit the realities of members in Manila or Mexico City, Bangalore or Berlin. How much room is there, even in U.S. congregations, for local cultural expressions of faith?

Latino Latter-day Saints and members in Latin America, for example, have faced pushback against cultural traditions that were seen as distinctly “not LDS,” such as making altars and giving offerings during Dia de los Muertos. In 2021, the church launched a Spanish-language campaign using Day of the Dead imagery to increase interest among Latinos. Many members were happy to see this representation. Still, some women I spoke with said that an emphasis on whiteness and American nationalism, as well as anti-immigrant rhetoric they’d heard from other members, deterred them from fully celebrating their cultures.

Even aesthetic details, like musical styles, often reflect a distinctly American model. The standardized hymnal, for example, contains patriotic songs like “America the Beautiful.” This emphasis on American culture can feel especially out of sync in places in countries with high membership rates that have histories of U.S. military or political interventions.

Expectations about clothing and physical appearance, too, have prompted questions about representation, belonging and authority. It was only in 2024, for instance, that the church offered members in humid areas sleeveless versions of the sacred garments Latter-day Saints wear under clothing as a reminder of their faith.

Historically, the church viewed tattoos as taboo – a violation of the sanctity of the body. Many parts of the world have thousands of years of sacred tattooing traditions – including Oceania, which has high rates of church membership.

Change ahead?

Among many challenges, the next president of the church will navigate how to lead a global church from its American headquarters – a church that continues to be misunderstood and stereotyped, sometimes to the point of violence.

The number of Latter-day Saints continues to grow in many parts of the world, but this growth brings a greater need for cultural sensitivity. The church, historically very uniform in its efforts to standardize Latter-day Saints history, art and teachings, is finding that harder to maintain when congregations span dozens of countries, languages, customs and histories.

Organizing the church like a corporation, with a top-down decision-making process, can also make it difficult to address painful racial histories and the needs of marginalized groups, like LGBTQ+ members.

The transition in leadership offers an opportunity not only for the church but for the broader public to better understand the multifaceted, global nature of Latter-day Saints’ lives today.

Brittany Romanello 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 new president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will inherit a global faith far more diverse than many realize – https://theconversation.com/the-new-president-of-the-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints-will-inherit-a-global-faith-far-more-diverse-than-many-realize-266337

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Gregory P. Magarian, Thomas and Karole Green Professor of Law, Washington University in St. Louis

The assassination in September 2025 of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has heightened attention on the relationship between political rhetoric and political violence.

Even before police had identified a suspect, President Donald Trump blamed the shooting on the “rhetoric” of the “radical left.” The Trump administration has since acted to silence left-leaning speakers and is threatening to intensify its attacks on left-wing political speech.

But my decades of studying free speech law have convinced me that suppressing political rhetoric, even through social norms rather than law, undermines the discussion, debate and constructive disagreement essential for a healthy democracy.

Gun proliferation complicates the problem by making political violence much easier to carry out.

Rise of political violence

Political violence – by which I mean any physical attack on people that aims to achieve a political goal – harms democracy by shifting the field of political disagreement from debate to aggression.

Under the U.S. constitutional system of limited government and individual rights, political violence by the government – for example, government assaults on anti-government protesters – is among the gravest threats to liberty.

But political violence committed by private individuals or groups also corrodes constitutional democracy. In the United States, acts of private political violence against members of government and against ordinary people have both increased dramatically in recent years.

Political assassinations are the most vivid form of political violence. The Kirk assassination is only the latest example.

In June 2025, a shooter with a “hit list” of left-liberal targets assassinated Minnesota Democratic Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband. In December 2024, a shooter angry about health insurance costs killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. In July 2024, a shooter wounded Trump at a campaign rally in a failed assassination attempt.

Political violence also includes bias-motivated murders. In 2022, a white supremacist murdered 10 Black patrons at a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y. In 2019, an anti-immigrant racist murdered 23 mostly Latino shoppers at a Wal-Mart in El Paso, Texas. In 2018, an antisemite murdered 11 congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

In those incidents and numerous others, extreme political ideas appear to have motivated the attackers. The linkage of extremist speech to lethal violence has prompted calls to legally restrict or punish extremist speech.

Political violence, free speech and cultural editing

The First Amendment, however, protects extremist speech, including advocacy of violence. Violent rhetoric must actually incite or threaten violence to lose the First Amendment’s shelter.

If law cannot curb the sorts of speech that may inspire political violence, what about social norms – widely shared beliefs about what speech is socially acceptable or appropriate?

Much speech that the First Amendment protects from government regulation eventually disappears from public discourse. That happens through a process I call “cultural editing”: popular and institutional rejection of outmoded or repellent ideas. For example, no serious medical conference discusses treating hay fever with cocaine, and no respectable political science panel includes Nazis.

The Trump administration’s blaming of the Kirk assassination on “radical left” rhetoric points toward a deeper level of cultural editing.

Trump and other conservatives have not cited speech that advocated violence against Kirk. Instead, some conservative activists, spurred on by Trump administration officials, called for harassing and punishing critics of Kirk’s statements and actions.

But such criticisms of Kirk, whatever their merits or lack thereof, fall within the scope of ordinary political debate.

Kirk was not a government official, but he had strong influence in the Trump administration. Robust democratic discourse requires space for people to criticize such powerful figures. Large-scale cultural editing of those criticisms, amounting to suppression of left-leaning views, would hurt the public’s ability to discuss and resolve political disagreements.

However, Trump and others who push for suppressing harsh political rhetoric might argue that the stakes of verbal attacks have increased. They might say that U.S. political culture can no longer indulge political invective because political violence has become more common.

Political violence and guns

That argument for suppressing harsh political speech ignores an independent cause of political violence: gun proliferation.

Most political violence in the U.S. involves guns. Guns make political violence easier by erasing the distance between extremist ideas and lethal action. Hate or fanaticism can end a life in an instant, hundreds of yards from the victim.

The U.S. has by far the highest number of civilian guns and rate of civilian gun ownership in the world. Since 2008, when the Supreme Court declared an individual Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, annual U.S. gun purchases have increased from about 9 million to about 16 million.

Governments often find regulating speech easier, even though less effective, than tackling underlying problems. At times, federal and state governments have addressed political violence by regulating guns. The 1994 federal assault weapons ban exemplifies regulatory efforts to curb overall gun violence.

But the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment cases now appear to bar strong gun regulations.

People in a democratic society need freedom to make harsh, even extreme political statements with a minimum of cultural editing. The Second Amendment protects access to lethal weapons. This combination of free speech and gun rights makes the growing problem of political violence much harder to solve.

Gregory P. Magarian 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. Political violence: What can happen when First Amendment free speech meets Second Amendment gun rights – https://theconversation.com/political-violence-what-can-happen-when-first-amendment-free-speech-meets-second-amendment-gun-rights-265223

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jessica D. Ayers, Assistant Professor of Psychological Science, Boise State University

Despite how natural friendship can feel, people rarely stop to analyze it. How do you know when someone will make a good friend? When is it time to move on from a friendship? Oftentimes, people rely on gut intuitions to answer these kinds of questions.

In psychology research, there’s no universally accepted definition of a friend. Traditionally, when psychologists have analyzed friendship, it’s often been through the lens of exchange. How much did that friend do for me? How much did I do for them? The idea is that friendships are transactional, where friends stick around only as long as they are getting at least as much as they are giving in the friendship.

But this focus doesn’t capture what feels like the essence of friendship for many people. We and our colleagues think another model for relationships – what we call risk-pooling – better matches what many people experience. In this kind of friendship, no one is keeping track of who did what for whom.

Our research over the past decade suggests that this kind of friendship was essential for our ancient ancestors to survive the challenges they encountered. And we feel it’s essential for surviving the challenges of life today, whether navigating personal struggles or dealing with natural disasters.

A focus on what friends give you

The traditional social exchange theory of friendship views relationships as transactions where people keep a tally of costs and benefits. Building on this framework, researchers have suggested that you approach each friendship with a running list of pluses and minuses to decide whether to maintain the bond. You keep friendships that provide more benefits than costs, and you end those that don’t.

The theory holds that this balancing act comes into play when making decisions about what kinds of friendships to pursue and how to treat your friends. It’s even made its way into pop psychology self-help spaces.

We contend that the biggest issue with social exchange theory is that it misses the nuances of real-life relationships. Frankly, the theory’s wrong: People often don’t use this cost-to-benefit ratio in their friendships.

Less accounting, more supporting

Anybody who has seen a friend through tough times – or been the one who was supported – can tell you that keeping track of what a friend does for you isn’t what friendships are about. Friendships are more about companionship, enjoyment and bonding. Sometimes, friendship is about helping just because your friend is in need and you care about their well-being.

Social exchange theory would suggest that you’d be better off dropping someone who is going through cancer treatment or a death in the family because they’re not providing as many benefits to you as they could. But real-life experiences with these situations suggest the opposite: These are the times when many people are most likely to support their friends.

Our research is consistent with this intuition about the shortcomings of social exchange theory. When we surveyed people about what they want in a friend, they didn’t place a high value on having a friend who is conscientious about paying back any debts – something highly valued from a social exchange perspective.

People considered other traits – such as loyalty, reliability, respectfulness and being there in times of need – to be much more important. These qualities that relate to emotional commitment were seen as necessities, while paying back was seen as a luxury that mattered only once the emotional commitment was met.

Having friends who will help you when you’re struggling, work with you in the friendship and provide emotional support all ranked higher in importance than having a friend who pays you back. While they might not always be able to provide tangible benefits, friends can show they care in many other ways.

Of course, friendship isn’t always positive. Some friends can take advantage by asking too much or neglecting responsibilities they could handle themselves. In those cases, it can be useful to step back and weigh the costs and benefits.

Friendship is more than the sum of its parts

But how do friendships actually help people survive? That is one question that we investigated as part of The Human Generosity Project, a cross-disciplinary research collaboration.

The risk-pooling rather than exchange pattern of friendship is something that we found across societies, from “kere kere” in Fiji to “tomor marang” among the Ik in Uganda. People help their friends in times of need without expecting to be paid back.

The Maasai, an Indigenous group in Kenya and Tanzania who rely on cattle herds to make their living, cultivate friends who help them when they are in need, with no expectation about paying each other back. People ask for help from these special friends, called osotua partners, only when they are in genuine need, and they give if they are asked and able.

These partnerships are not about everyday favors – rather, they are about surviving unpredictable, life-altering risks. Osotua relationships are built over a lifetime, passed down across generations and often marked with sacred rituals.

When we modeled how these osotua relationships function over time, we found they help people survive when their environments are volatile and when they ask those most likely to be able to help. These relationships lead to higher rates of survival for both partners compared to those built on keeping track of debts.

These friends act as social insurance systems for each other, helping each other when needs arise because of unpredictable and uncontrollable events.

And we see this in the United States, just as we do in smaller-scale, more remote societies. In one study, we focused on ranchers in southern Arizona and New Mexico embedded in a network of what they call “neighboring.” They don’t expect to be paid back when they help their neighbors with unpredictable challenges such as an accident, injury or illness. We also found this same pattern in an online study of U.S.-based participants.

In contrast, people such as the ranchers we studied are more likely to expect to be paid back for help when needs arise because of more predictable challenges such as branding cattle or paying bills.

Catastrophic insurance, not tit for tat

What all this research suggests is that friendship is less about the exchange of favors and more about being there for each other when unforeseeable disaster strikes. Friendship seems more like an insurance plan designed to kick in when you need it most rather than a system of balanced exchange.

What lets these partnerships endure is not only generosity, but also restraint and responsibility: Maasai expect their osotua partners to take care of themselves when they can and to ask only when help is truly needed. That balance of care, respect and self-management offers a useful model.

In a world of growing uncertainty, cultivating risk-pooling friendships and striving to be a good partner yourself may help you build resilience. Our ancestors survived with the help of this kind of relationship; our future may depend on them too.

Athena Aktipis receives funding from the National Science Foundation. She is the Executive Director of the Cooperative Futures Institute.

Jessica D. Ayers 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. Friendships aren’t just about keeping score – new psychology research looks at why we help our friends when they need it – https://theconversation.com/friendships-arent-just-about-keeping-score-new-psychology-research-looks-at-why-we-help-our-friends-when-they-need-it-258549

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jie Huang, Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology

When the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry honored Omar Yaghi – the “father of metal-organic frameworks,” or MOFs – along with Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson, it celebrated more than the creation of a new class of crystalline materials. It recognized a revolution quietly reshaping how scientists capture, store and sense molecules. These MOFs could allow for sensor technologies that make workplaces, the environment and human bodies safer.

What are MOFs, and why do they matter?

MOFs are made by linking metal ions – atoms that carry an electrical charge – with organic molecules, the carbon-based building blocks found in most living things. Together they form tiny, sponge-like structures full of microscopic pores. You can imagine them as an atomic-scale scaffold filled with nano-sized rooms, each precisely engineered to host certain molecules like guests.

Because chemists can mix and match different metals and organic linkers, there are thousands of possible MOFs – each with unique properties. Depending on how they’re structured, some have so much internal surface area that a single gram could cover a football field.

This sponge-like porosity – meaning lots of tiny holes inside – lets MOFs trap and release gases, store energy-rich fuels like hydrogen, and capture harmful pollutants. MOFs can use a variety of chemicals in their structure, which lets researchers fine-tune how strongly an MOF interacts with specific molecules.

These features have already inspired potential uses such as capturing carbon dioxide from the air to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, pulling clean water from humid air, and delivering medicines inside the body. Over the past decade, the unique properties of MOFs have also opened new possibilities for sensing and detection.

Since 2016, our team of engineers has been developing MOF-based sensors that can detect certain gases and vapors in an environment in real time. These materials’ unique properties are opening new possibilities for sensing in health, safety and environmental monitoring.

From a storage material to a sensing material

When an MOF takes in gas or liquid molecules, its tiny framework changes ever so slightly: It may change in size, how it bends light, or how it conducts electricity, depending on what and how many molecules it absorbs.

By connecting MOFs to devices that can sense changes in light or electricity, researchers can turn these tiny shifts into measurable signals such as light, frequency or voltage. The signals then reveal what chemical is present and how much of it there is. In simple terms, when molecules enter or leave the MOF’s pores, they slightly change how light travels through it or how electricity behaves around it, and those changes become the sensor’s readable output.

Our group at Missouri University of Science and Technology has developed several kinds of MOF-based sensor platforms. Across all these platforms, the core idea is the same: MOFs act as selective sponges that temporarily hold certain gas molecules in their tiny cages, and our devices measure the timing and amount of this uptake and release.

In one study, we attached a single crystal of a copper-based MOF called HKUST-1 to the smooth, flat end of a cut optical fiber – the same kind of thin glass strand used to carry internet and phone signals.

This crystal-fiber combination worked as a tiny device that could measure how light waves interfere with each other. As nearby gas molecules moved into the tiny pores of the MOF crystal, the way it bent and reflected light changed slightly. The optical fiber – connected to a light source and detector – picked up these changes, allowing us to see in real time how many gas molecules the material was taking in.

Our probes show not just that gas molecules enter the tiny cages of the MOF, but also how fast they come and go. By measuring both the amount and the speed of adsorption and release, we can tell which molecules are being taken up and in what proportion, when several are present together. This dynamic view helps us see, in real time, how the material selects one target gas over others. It turns adsorption into a measurable, useful signal for sensing and identification.

In health care, an MOF can act like a selective sponge for specific breath molecules that indicate real, measurable diseases. For example, an MOF designed to adsorb acetone can capture and concentrate this gas from exhaled breath. Acetone levels rise above normal values in people with diabetic ketoacidosis, allowing the sensor to clearly and quantitatively detect the disease.

Likewise, an MOF that selectively adsorbs ammonia can concentrate this compound from exhaled breath. Ammonia levels increase above normal values in people with chronic kidney disease, so the sensor can provide a definite indicator of reduced kidney function. Integrating such MOFs into sensor hardware would allow for sensitive, noninvasive screening for these two diseases, based on quantifiable breath markers.

Coating a material in a thin layer of MOFs can take hours. But recently, we developed a quick and simple “droplet-drying” method that forms a crystal layer of the copper-based MOF HKUST-1 directly onto the end of an optical fiber in under two minutes. The resulting film, only about 1/20th the width of a human hair, acted as a high-performance gas sensor that detected humidity, ethanol or carbon dioxide in the environment within seconds.

We also combined MOFs with a hand-held metal device that can sense changes in microwave signals – a bit like how a radio antenna picks up invisible waves in the air. When gas molecules entered the MOF layer, they slightly changed how the device responded to those waves, allowing it to detect gases with remarkable sensitivity.

This sensor made for a low-cost, portable device that could tell one kind of gas molecule apart from another, rather than just detecting that some gas is present. It’s like having a nose that can tell apples from oranges, not just detect that something smells fruity.

Our research suggests that MOF sensors within compact, energy-efficient devices can pick out specific molecules – even when only trace amounts are present in the air. The pores of an MOF can be designed to concentrate specific target molecules. All molecules smaller than the window to an MOF cage will get into the cage. So, we design the sensors so that the molecules we are interested in sensing will reside in the cages longer. The huge internal surface area created by these pores makes them incredibly responsive. Even just a few trapped molecules can trigger a clear signal.

These sensors also work at room temperature and our research suggests they are more precise and adaptable than many traditional chemical sensors.

Toward real-world impact

The main challenges lie in improving MOFs’ long-term durability and environmental resistance. Many frameworks degrade under humidity or heat, though some research groups are looking into how to make them more stable.

When combined with machine-learning algorithms, these sensors can learn to recognize patterns from several gases at once, rather than detecting just one chemical at a time – much like how a human nose can tell different smells apart. This capability could even extend to human breath monitoring, where subtle changes in exhaled gases provide early clues to diseases such as diabetes, lung infections or cancer.

Researchers are working to embed MOFs into flexible films, printed circuits and wireless devices. With these new advances and further research, MOFs could bridge chemistry and engineering one day. As the Nobel Prize recognized, MOFs exemplify how design at the molecular scale can help mitigate problems humans face at a global scale.

If researchers can scale up this technology and overcome the challenges, networks of fiber-optic and microwave MOF sensors could one day monitor industrial plants, pipelines and even human breath for unwanted chemicals to improve safety, efficiency and health.

Jie Huang receives research funding from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the National Institutes of Health.

Rex Gerald receives research funding from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the National Institutes of Health.

Bohong Zhang and Chen Zhu do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Our engineering team is making versatile, tiny sensors from the Nobel-winning ‘metal-organic frameworks’ – https://theconversation.com/our-engineering-team-is-making-versatile-tiny-sensors-from-the-nobel-winning-metal-organic-frameworks-267103

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Matthew Redmond, Lecturer, Université de Lille

In one of his stand-up sets, comedian David Cross rejects all political commentary that tries to answer the question, “What would America’s Founding Fathers think if they were alive today?”

For Cross, it is pointless to speculate about the present-day views of men who could not have imagined cotton candy, let alone the machine that makes it.

“What’s a machine? What’s a machine???” he screams in their collective voice, recoiling from the sorcery of the state fair.

The first time I saw this bit, something odd happened. Having just read the 1776 political pamphlet “Common Sense,” I could hear its author, one of America’s founders, laughing louder than anybody.

That would be Thomas Paine, the man credited with turning the American Revolution from a complicated Colonial fracas into a titanic struggle for the soul of liberty itself.

If Cross is skeptical that anything 250 years old still holds up, Paine, were he alive today, could probably name one thing: skepticism. Ways of thinking and being do not grow out of the ground; we make them ourselves, then hand them down as best we can. Paine would smile to see his favorite heirloom, the skeptical worldview, still intact.

Saying “no” – especially to those in power – is an underrated American pastime, and Paine was its Babe Ruth. If you plan on joining No Kings rallies and have yet to find a slogan for your sign, Paine’s got you covered: “In America, the law is king!” “No King! No Tyranny!” “Monarchy hath poisoned the republic.”

I could go on. Because he did.

Birth of a revolutionary

Where did all this anti-monarchical fire come from? Originally, from a small town in Norfolk, England, in 1737. Turning from his father’s trade of corset-making, Paine tried his hand at business, met and impressed Benjamin Franklin in London, sailed to America, and there found his true metier as a pamphleteer and radical.

Using simple yet incandescent prose, Paine renounced, repudiated and ridiculed at a clip seldom witnessed in print before or since. Hereditary privilege, colonialism, the supernatural: no, no, no.

But what Paine made his name lambasting – what he knocked out of the park with almost steroidal force – were kings. All of them, from the figures of ancient legend and Scripture to those who warmed England’s throne during his lifetime.

“Common Sense,” his first major work, was an urgent wake-up call to every light-sleeping lover of liberty within earshot. In that pamphlet, Paine labels kingship “the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry.” He never minced words; he wanted the right people to choke on them.

‘Simple facts, plain arguments’

Exactly what was Paine’s problem with kings?

The same problem you’ll have, “Common Sense” promises, when you examine the evidence.

This is partly the secret of Paine’s rhetorical power: It’s hard to imagine any wordsmith demanding more vigorously that you not take his word for it.

Paine was a student of history, and history is chock-full of receipts. It shows that abuses of kingly power extend back to the “early ages of monarchy,” when some “principal ruffian” first took power, and “it was very easy, after the lapse of a few generations, to trump up some superstitious tale, conveniently timed … to cram hereditary right down the throats of the vulgar.”

Since that time, says Paine, even those fortunate enough to live under benevolent rule have seldom been more than one generation away from yet another dreadful monarch.

“One of the strongest NATURAL proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ASS FOR A LION.” What a tweet this would have made, caps and all.

Bring the Paine

The only thing Paine liked less than monarchical rule was its enablers, anyone who relinquished their freedom willingly to an aspiring tyrant.

This is not only wrong, Paine insists, but against nature, since all of us are created equal.

But even that’s not the worst part. Those who sacrifice their own freedom on the altar of monarchy also sacrifice that of future generations. Their “unwise, unjust, unnatural compact might (perhaps) in the next succession put them under the government of a rogue or a fool.” Ouch.

“Most wise men,” Paine adds, “in their private sentiments, have ever treated hereditary right with contempt; yet it is one of those evils, which when once established is not easily removed; many submit from fear, others from superstition, and the more powerful part shares with the king the plunder of the rest.”

Federal worker firings, court settlements, a government shutdown. Paine would loathe how right the U.S. is proving him.

Besides criticizing both tradition and manipulative elites for their role in abetting monarchs, Paine’s writing gestures toward a more widely accessible sense of false freedom that comes with getting what you want from whoever happens to wear the crown.

This kind of pleasure obscures a painful reality: that the tyrant can strike as well as stroke.

The problem of unchecked power is not nearly counterbalanced by any number of indulgences the wielder of that power deigns to bestow. Freedom, Paine insists, is not transactional; whatever price you name, you’re getting fleeced.

Or, to put it his way: “O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!”

Matthew Redmond 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 1776, Thomas Paine made the best case for fighting kings − and for being skeptical – https://theconversation.com/in-1776-thomas-paine-made-the-best-case-for-fighting-kings-and-for-being-skeptical-266448

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Philip Steenstra, Ph.D. Candidate in Toxicology, University of Michigan

When fire erupted at the Intercontinental Terminals Co. bulk liquid petroleum storage terminal, large plumes of dark smoke billowed into the clear skies over Deer Park, Texas. Despite the efforts of site staff and local firefighters, more than 70 million gallons of petroleum products burned or were otherwise released into the environment over the following three days in March 2019.

Even while the fire was still burning, investigations began looking into what had happened and what was still happening. The Environmental Protection Agency tested air and water samples to determine how much pollution was being released – both to determine cleanup efforts and to assess fines. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration reviewed what had happened, but found that with no workers injured, there was no reason to investigate further or impose fines or other penalties on the company.

A third federal agency, the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, often known as the CSB, got to work figuring out what had gone wrong, without assigning legal or financial responsibility, but rather seeking to learn from this disaster how to prevent future accidents. It’s an approach much like the National Transportation Safety Board takes toward airplane crashes, train derailments and other transportation-related tragedies: document what happened and identify every opportunity to prevent or reduce the chances of it happening again.

That deep investigative process reportedly will not happen in the wake of the October 2025 explosion and fire at a Chevron refinery in El Segundo, California, because of the federal government shutdown and lack of funding for the organization.

As scholars of chemical disasters, we believe this absence – and the potential for the board to be eliminated entirely under the proposed 2026 federal budget – raises the risk of more, and more serious, chemical disasters, not just in the U.S. but around the world.

Many serious incidents

The CSB investigation of that 2019 fire that burned 15 petroleum tanks at the Intercontinental Terminals Co., near the Port of Houston, yielded key recommendations to the company, OSHA and the EPA. They included necessary updates to safety management systems, the need for flammable-gas detectors to identify leaks, and remotely operated emergency shutoff valves so workers could close tanks containing hazardous material without exposing themselves to danger. The company has addressed the first recommendation and is reportedly working on the next two.

The board also recommended to the petroleum industry that storage tanks be spaced farther apart so they would be less likely to catch each other on fire – a recommendation that is still under review.

And the Texas fire was just one of several disasters the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board investigated that year. Since its activation in 1998, the board has conducted in-depth investigations of 102 chemical disasters in the chemical and industrial sectors – an average of about four per year. And its reports are regularly used worldwide, including in France, South Korea and China.

Creation and goals of the CSB

The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board was created by Congress in a 1990 amendment to the Clean Air Act, in the wake of several high-profile chemical disasters around the world.

Those included the 1976 dioxin release in Seveso, Italy, which caused skin lesions on over 600 people and contaminated nearly 7 square miles of land; the deaths of thousands in Bhopal, India, from the 1984 release of methyl isocyanate from a Union Carbide pesticide plant; and the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in 1986 in what was then the Soviet Union. The goal was to prevent similar accidents from occurring on U.S. soil by investigating the causes of incidents and providing recommendations for improvement.

Specifically designed to be independent of other organizations and political influence, the CSB cannot be forced to modify its findings by other agencies, branches or political parties, ensuring its impartiality.

It has no power to issue regulations, nor any authority to impose fines or other punishments for wrongdoing. Rather, it is a fact-finding, investigative body designed to learn from past disasters and issue voluntary recommendations so chemical companies can improve their equipment and processes to prevent future tragedies. The vast majority of its recommendations are adopted by the industries affected, usually by the investigated company, though sometimes recommendations become industry standards. These recommendations can range from changes in procedure, the addition of safety devices or even overall facility design recommendations.

What does the board do?

There are several kinds of events companies must report to the federal government, including deaths and releases of particular chemicals, such as chlorine, naphthalene and vinyl chloride.

The board reviews those reports and decides on its own which to investigate. When an inquiry is opened, a group of experts who work for the board travel to the incident site to gather evidence to understand not only what happened in the big picture but a detailed view of how events unfolded.

After the investigation, the board issues a report detailing what it found and recommending specific changes to the company to reduce the risk of that sequence of events happening again. The board also delivers its information to other federal agencies, such as the EPA and OSHA, which can determine whether changes would be appropriate to federal regulations that apply to all companies in an industry.

The board’s value

The board had a US$14 million annual budget for 2025, which is a tiny part of the more than $6 trillion the U.S. government spends each year.

The current administration’s justification for eliminating the CSB is that its capabilities are duplicated by agencies such as the EPA and OSHA. But the EPA focuses specifically on environmental violations and potential threats to human life. OSHA investigates regulatory violations leading to personal injury.

In fact, the CSB has helped the EPA and OSHA evaluate and improve regulations, such as for the open burning of waste explosives, and improved methods of investigating accidental chemical releases and implementing new emergency response rules.

The CSB is the only organization that looks into improving processes to prevent future accidents instead of punishing past acts. It’s the difference between investigating who robbed a bank to hold the robbers accountable and improving bank security so another robbery can’t occur.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Refinery fires, other chemical disasters may no longer get safety investigations – https://theconversation.com/refinery-fires-other-chemical-disasters-may-no-longer-get-safety-investigations-265546

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Sarah Stella, Professor of Medicine, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

On a recent early fall morning, hope was in short supply.

My first patient was a regular. Mr. D was a man in his 50s with diabetes. He had been living on Denver’s streets for most of the past five years, two of them with a walker in tow. Without stable housing and reliable access to insulin, he’d come to the hospital that morning with another limb-threatening infection.

I examined the telltale ulceration on the sole of his foot. It had progressed to the underlying bone and would require another amputation. This time he would be dependent on a wheelchair. I asked him about his prospects for housing. He shook his head and said, “Doc, I just keep falling through the cracks.”

Mr. D is one of the 10,774 people who experienced homelessness on a single night in 2025 across metro Denver, according to a count conducted by the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative and partner organizations. Of these, 35% were experiencing a chronic form of homelessness.

As an internal medicine physician whose focus is caring for hospitalized patients, my experience suggests that this count is too low. People in hospitals and other institutional settings the day of the survey are not reflected in these numbers. Others are hard to spot, staying out of sight on couches or in creek beds, or hiding in plain sight while they serve our food or fix our roads. For these reasons, point-in-time counts underestimate the true prevalence of homelessness in the city.

I work at Denver Health, the region’s comprehensive safety net health system, where I’m on the front lines of Denver’s homelessness crisis. My perspectives on this issue have been shaped by nearly two decades of experience caring for some of the city’s most vulnerable patients.

I’ve helped create and oversee hospital partnerships that help people like Mr. D find housing. But recent federal actions will only worsen homelessness and weaken the response to it in Colorado and across the nation.

Falling through the cracks

When people like Mr. D fall through the cracks, my colleagues and I are there to catch them. In 2024, Denver Health served more than 16,000 patients experiencing homelessness who collectively had 78,000 visits to the integrated health system.

I’ve watched these cracks widen as Colorado has become one of the least affordable places in the country to live. According to a report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, in 2025 a Coloradan can work more than 80 hours per week and still be unable to afford a one-bedroom apartment. This means that housing is woefully out of reach for many of my patients.

As physicians, we are trained to address the root causes of the diseases we treat. I care for elderly patients who are newly homeless following an eviction, as well as homeless veterans and Lyft drivers who sleep in their vehicles. Though their individual circumstances vary — loss of job or a loved one, an illness or a battle with addiction — the root cause of their homelessness is the same: a lack of affordable and available housing.

Because of an increased prevalence of serious health conditions and structural barriers – such as marginalization and discrimination – that prevent equitable access to primary and preventive health care, people experiencing homelessness often rely on hospitals like ours for care.

In 2024, roughly 1 in 6 adults admitted to Denver Health’s hospital for an illness or injury were experiencing homelessness, according to internal data. Like Mr. D, many are aging and have cognitive and mobility impairments, along with the frailty characteristic of much older patients.

Those living unsheltered suffer preventable harms such as frostbite and heatstroke in Colorado’s climate of extremes. And for many, homelessness is lethal. Last year at least 223 people died while living on Denver’s streets.

At Denver Health, homeless adults who are admitted to the hospital stay on average 2.4 days longer than housed patients, translating into 5,400 excess hospital days for Denver residents alone, according to internal data. And without a safe place to recover, they have significantly higher readmission rates.

Evidence of the negative impacts of homelessness on health and hospital resources is so compelling that the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services has recognized homelessness as a comorbid condition. This designation gives homelessness a similar weight to chronic health conditions such as heart disease or diabetes.

Seeing the needless suffering brought about by patients’ lack of housing and feeling powerless to stop it also contributes to moral injury among health care providers. Moral injury refers to the psychological and emotional wounds that occur when one witnesses events that violate their moral and ethical beliefs.

I’ve certainly recognized these feelings in myself or in colleagues who’ve been at the bedside with me all these years. To me, treating the symptoms of homelessness without addressing the underlying cause feels like treating a gunshot wound with a Band-Aid.

Cure for homelessness

But unlike many of the conditions I treat, homelessness does have a cure.

Simply put, it’s deeply affordable and supportive housing. Evidence shows that Housing First – an approach that prioritizes housing as a critical foundation for engagement in health care services – results in high rates of housing stability and brings down high-cost health care utilization.

Yet many of the patients I treat, as one of my colleagues likes to say, “will never darken the door of a homeless service agency.”

In 2021, only 53% of patients on our health system’s homeless registry were using homeless services in the community. In a cruel irony, the chaos of homelessness that forces people to prioritize survival, combined with health conditions such as physical disabilities, dementia or serious mental illness, often collude to prevent patients from engaging with the very systems that could end their homelessness. Sometimes, like Mr. D, they give up trying.

This creates the heartbreaking situations I see in my daily work. Too often the patients with the greatest health care needs and vulnerability are the most underserved.

Over time, I’ve learned that improving health inside the hospital walls increasingly means working beyond them to build collaborations to address the myriad ways our systems are failing patients like Mr. D.

Housing and health partnerships

In Denver some progress has been made. In 2023 Mayor Mike Johnston issued an emergency declaration on homelessness. He subsequently enacted All in Mile High, a citywide strategy to address street homelessness. Through the collaborative efforts of the city and partnering agencies, on Aug. 27,2025, Denver announced a 45% reduction in unsheltered homelessness between January 2023 and January 2025.

Denver Health has aided these efforts by investing in strategic partnerships that provide alternatives to discharging hospitalized patients back to the streets.

Since 2023, Denver Health has discharged roughly 700 patients into medical respite beds through a partnership with the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. The hospital helps fund a portion of beds at the John Parvensky Stout Street Recuperative Care Center to provide patients who are too ill or frail to recover in shelters or on the streets with a safe place and the right support to heal.

In another effort to offer housing to at-risk patients, the hospital system sold its former administration building to the Denver Housing Authority, which then redeveloped the property. The hospital now leases 14 apartments that it makes available to provide temporary housing and case management to elderly or disabled patients experiencing homelessness following a hospitalization. Most of the 39 patients who have been housed there have attained more permanent housing, according to internal data.

Denver Health also partners on Denver’s Housing to Health Program, a permanent supportive housing program launched in 2022 that aims to reduce health care expenditures for people experiencing chronic homelessness. A hospital team identifies eligible patients and provides “warm handoffs” to directly connect them with the program’s housing service providers during hospitalizations or emergency room visits. While the evaluation is ongoing, it’s a promising partnership model for how hospitals might collaborate to address homelessness.

Impact of federal policies and funding cuts

With accompanying investments in proven solutions to homelessness, such partnerships have the potential to deliver better care at lower cost.

Actions taken by the federal government in 2025 that criminalize people experiencing homelessness, defund Housing First initiatives and dismantle Medicaid and other essential benefits threaten these partnerships and our progress. These policies will worsen homelessness, and patients will continue to be “housed” in the least appropriate and most expensive way – in the hospital.

In addition to harming patients, this trend is not sustainable for safety net hospitals like Denver Health that already provide millions of dollars annually in uncompensated care.

As a physician working at the intersection of housing and health, I believe hospitals are key partners in the fight to end homelessness. I’ve observed the hopelessness that homelessness can bring. But I’ve also seen how the right partnerships can transform a routine hospitalization into an unexpected opportunity for meaningful connection that puts patients on the path to housing and health.

Now when I see patients like Mr. D, I see possibility rather than another dead end for them. After all, for all their adversity, my patients’ stories are also stories of beauty, strength and resilience. While the “cracks” keep me up at night, their stories, and the partnerships we’ve created, bring me hope at a time when hope seems in short supply.

Note: Patient initials and other identifying details have been changed to protect confidentiality.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Sarah A. Stella, MD, works for Denver Health and Hospital Authority. She receives funding from the City and County of Denver, the Caring for Denver Foundation, and the Colorado Health Foundation.

– ref. A Denver MD has spent 2 decades working with hospitalized patients experiencing homelessness − here’s what she fears and what gives her hope – https://theconversation.com/a-denver-md-has-spent-2-decades-working-with-hospitalized-patients-experiencing-homelessness-heres-what-she-fears-and-what-gives-her-hope-261234

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Stavroula Alina Kampouri, Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Chemistry, Rice University

The 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Richard Robson, Susumu Kitagawa and Omar Yaghi on Oct. 8, 2025, for the development of metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, which are tunable crystal structures with extremely high porosity. These are a class of materials that have truly changed the way scientists design and think about matter, inspiring progress in various applications.

I’m a MOF scientist and for many of us in the field, this recognition feels both historic and deeply personal. MOFs are not just elegant crystals you’d admire under a microscope; they’re an entire universe of structures, each like a miniature city of tunnels and rooms waiting to be filled. They’ve been my scientific home since I first stepped into research, and they still feel a little bit like magic to me.

So, what exactly are MOFs?

Metal-organic frameworks are like crystalline scaffolds built from two ingredients: metals that act like connective joints and organic – that is, carbon-based – molecules that behave as bridges to link those joints in a repeating pattern. The result is a highly ordered, porous framework – a kind of molecular architecture that’s both sturdy and full of empty space.

These frameworks are so porous, like sponges with tiny voids, that it’s almost impossible to picture them. One gram of a MOF has so many pores that it can expose as much internal surface area as a soccer field. It’s astonishing that a handful of powder could hide an entire landscape of surface within it.

That enormous surface area is one of the unique things that make MOFs so powerful, and it comes from the nanoscale pores – tiny molecular rooms that can trap, separate, transform or transport gases, ions and other molecules. In a way, MOFs are like molecular hotels with countless doors, each programmed to admit only certain guests.

Why scientists love them

What fascinates me most about metal-organic frameworks is their limitless design space. Just by glancing at the periodic table, every metal could, in principle, serve as a cornerstone, and countless organic molecules can act as bridges connecting them. Even using the same combination can produce entirely different architectures.

So far, scientists have synthesized over 90,000 MOFs, and computational chemists have predicted hundreds of thousands more. Few material families offer this much versatility.

I like to think of MOFs as puzzles or Lego sets, but on the atomic scale. You can replace a single piece, or change its color or shape, and end up with a material that behaves completely differently.

Add a new “decoration” – what chemists call a functional group – and the framework suddenly recognizes a new molecule. Stretch the organic bridges, and the same architecture inflates like a balloon, giving what we call isoreticular MOFs. These have the same structure, but bigger pores. In short, MOFs can come in almost every imaginable shape, size and texture.

Pushing the boundaries of these materials

Beyond their scientific elegance, MOFs are incredibly promising for real-world technologies. Different structures and functionalities lead to different properties and, therefore, different uses.

Some MOFs act as molecular sieves, selectively capturing carbon dioxide from industrial exhaust or even directly from air. Others clean polluted water by removing heavy metals, dyes or “forever chemicals.”

Certain MOFs can also carry drugs or imaging agents inside the body for medical applications. In the energy world, they function as electrodes or electrolytes that make batteries safer and more efficient. And many serve as catalysts, accelerating chemical reactions that transform one molecule into another.

When I began my Ph.D., my senior colleagues warned me that MOFs might be too delicate – beautiful crystals that would crumble at the first hint of air or moisture. And indeed, some of the early frameworks were fragile curiosities, admired more for their elegance than their endurance. But that perception has changed dramatically.

Many MOFs are now remarkably robust. The material I first worked on was a titanium-based metal-organic framework named MIL-125. It was first reported by Gérard Férey, one of the foundational figures in the MOF and porous framework community who sadly died in 2017. MIL-125 was not only stable, it was practically indestructible in my lab. After synthesizing two grams of it, I stored it on my bench in an open vial and used that same batch for every catalytic experiment throughout my Ph.D. No glovebox, no desiccator – just a jar of yellow powder sitting happily on my bench.

That experience taught me something important: While stability can be a legitimate concern, MOFs have grown up. Thanks to smart chemistry, we have materials that can withstand water, heat and repeated use. Since their foundation, researchers around the world have introduced new properties to these materials – from electrical conductivity to light responsiveness – and, crucially, made major progress in scaling up MOF synthesis for industrial applications.

Scaling is the key step in bridging the gap between fundamental discovery and large-scale deployment. Researchers are no longer content with studying MOFs in milligrams – we’re often planning for grams, kilograms and beyond.

Some startups are turning these advances into real technologies – from storing gases more safely, to pulling clean water straight from desert air, to building more energy-efficient air conditioners. What once felt like science fiction – powders that breathe, trap and transform molecules – is now science fact.

Despite these advances, researchers will need to continue improving the stability and scalability of MOFs to fully realize these materials’ potential in the real world.

A Nobel moment that honors creativity

The 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry goes beyond honoring three remarkable scientists – it celebrates an entire community: a generation of chemists and engineers who transformed a single idea into a thriving field. The pioneering visions of Richard Robson, Susumu Kitagawa and Omar Yaghi laid the foundations for a vibrant discipline that has grown to encompass everything from gas storage and catalysis to energy and environmental technologies.

When I attended my first MOF conference as a second-year Ph.D. student, I listened in awe to many of the pioneers of this field, some of whom are now Nobel laureates. Back then, MOFs felt like magical sponges, and that sense of wonder never left me. It led me to continue my research on conductive MOFs: materials that can carry electricity. Now, in my own research group, we study how these frameworks can make batteries safer and more efficient, and how they can capture waste gases and turn them into useful chemicals using sunlight.

For me, this Nobel Prize celebrates more than a discovery, it celebrates a philosophy: Chemistry is creative, we can design and engineer matter with imagination, and sometimes emptiness can be the very essence of a material.

Stavroula (Alina) Kampouri receives research funding from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund (ACS PRF) and other public research agencies.

– ref. Metal-organic frameworks: Nobel-winning tiny ‘sponge crystals’ with an astonishing amount of inner space – https://theconversation.com/metal-organic-frameworks-nobel-winning-tiny-sponge-crystals-with-an-astonishing-amount-of-inner-space-267089

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Eli Levenson-Falk, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Electrical and Computer Engineering, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Quantum mechanics describes the weird behavior of microscopic particles. Using quantum systems to perform computation promises to allow researchers to solve problems in areas from chemistry to cryptography that have so many possible solutions that they are beyond the capabilities of even the most powerful nonquantum computers possible.

Quantum computing depends on researchers developing practical quantum technologies. Superconducting electrical circuits are a promising technology, but not so long ago it was unclear whether they even showed quantum behavior. The 2025 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three scientists for their work demonstrating that quantum effects persist even in large electrical circuits, which has enabled the development of practical quantum technologies.

I’m a physicist who studies superconducting circuits for quantum computing and other uses. The work in my field stems from the groundbreaking research the Nobel laureates conducted.

Big, cold, quantum

In their 1984 and 1985 work, then-Ph.D. student John Martinis, then-postdoctoral researcher Michel Devoret and UC Berkeley professor John Clarke showed that even large electrical circuits could exhibit quantum behavior. They used a circuit made from niobium and lead. When cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero, these metals become superconductors. A superconductor is a material that carries a current without generating any heat.

Martinis, Devoret and Clarke showed that in a superconductor, the voltages and currents are governed by quantum mechanics. The circuit has quantized – meaning discrete and indivisible – levels of energy, and it can be in superpositions of multiple states.

Any physical system can be described by a state, which tells you everything there is to know about that system. Quantum mechanics shows that a state can have certain quantized values of things that can be measured. An example is energy: A particular system could have energy 1 or energy 2, but nothing in between. At the same time, a quantum system can be in a superposition of more than one state, much like you can add different amounts of red/green/blue to get any color in a pixel of an image.

Importantly, the laureates showed that researchers can describe one of these superconducting circuits as if it’s a single quantum particle. This simple behavior is what makes superconducting circuits so useful as a technology.

Today, superconducting circuits are used to study fundamental quantum physics, to simulate other physical systems and to test protocols for ultraprecise sensing. For instance, the Devoret group recently demonstrated a near-ideal microwave amplifier based on a superconducting circuit. Microwave amplifiers are widely used in communications, radar and scientific instruments.

The Martinis group has used superconducting circuits to emulate a group of electron-like particles. This type of simulation is a key technique in studying fundamental physics.

In my own group, we recently used a superconducting circuit to demonstrate a protocol for measuring a magnetic field more sensitively than standard techniques. Quantum sensors measure physical quantities with extreme precision, from biological activity to gravity anomalies.

But by far the biggest application of superconducting circuits is as a platform for quantum computing.

Superconducting quantum computers

Multiple quantum systems can interact with each other and become entangled, so that they act like a single system. This combination of quantization, superposition and entanglement is what gives quantum computers their power.

In quantum computing technology, researchers use a quantum system – a quantum bit or qubit – that can be in only two states. Qubits need to be coherent. This means that if we put it in a particular state, we want it to stay there and not get randomly scrambled to another state. Qubits need to be controllable. This means that researchers should be able to get a qubit to change state as needed and get it to interact with other qubits. And qubits need to be scalable, meaning that we need to make a lot of them.

Many technologies show promise, such as arrays of atoms in a vacuum, trapped ions, trapped electrons in seminconductors, and photons controlled by optical circuits. But all technologies make trade-offs, sacrificing coherence, controllability or scalability to improve something else.

The simplicity and flexibility of superconducting circuits mean that by changing the design of the circuit, researchers can get almost any qubit behavior we want, and that behavior is easy to predict. This hits the technological sweet spot for quantum computing. More obviously quantum technologies, such as trapped atoms, are so small that they can be hard to control and interact with. Superconducting qubits are big enough to be easy to control, simple enough to be reliable and quantum enough to make the whole thing work.

Today, academic research groups like mine develop new types of superconducting qubits, look for ways to make them more coherent, try to improve our control of them, and develop techniques to make them easier to scale up. Companies and government labs take these academic results along with their own basic research and apply them, doing the difficult engineering to create large-scale quantum processors for practical use.

Superconductor pioneers

Unsurprisingly, the Nobel laureates made and continue to make huge contributions beyond their work in the 1980s. In addition to their academic work, Martinis formerly headed the Google quantum processor effort and now has his own company, while Devoret now assists with the Google effort. Clarke, now retired, also did much of his late-career work on quantum circuits. And they have had major impacts on my career and on so many others.

I had the privilege to do a panel discussion with Devoret on May 22, 2025. He made a memorable claim: Picking an academic adviser can be even more of a big deal than picking a spouse, because “you can’t divorce your adviser.”

It’s often joked that half the researchers in the field of quantum superconductors can trace an academic lineage to Clarke. I can do it twice: My Ph.D. adviser, Irfan Siddiqi, was advised by Devoret, and Clarke was my secondary adviser. And one of my proudest accomplishments as a grad student was not panicking when Martinis snagged me after I gave a talk to grill me on the details.

Today they are honored for their work, and tomorrow I and the other researchers they trained will do our best to continue it.

Eli Levenson-Falk 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. Nobel Prize in physics awarded for ultracold electronics research that launched a quantum technology – https://theconversation.com/nobel-prize-in-physics-awarded-for-ultracold-electronics-research-that-launched-a-quantum-technology-266979

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Paul M. Collins Jr., Professor of Legal Studies and Political Science, UMass Amherst

Former FBI Director James Comey pleaded not guilty to two criminal charges in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, on Oct. 8, 2025. The charges allege that Comey lied to Congress in September 2020 when he stood by earlier testimony that he did not authorize a leak of an FBI investigation involving Hillary Clinton.

Numerous legal commentators on both the left and right have argued that Comey’s indictment is little more than the Trump administration seeking vengeance on one of the president’s perceived enemies. They allege that the president has it out for Comey, who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and was fired by Trump in 2017.

The president’s own words support the idea that the Trump administration is targeting Comey. In a social media post on Sept. 20, 2025, Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to move forward with prosecutions against Comey, Democratic U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James: “They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done. …JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

If the case against Comey is exceedingly weak – and little more than a political prosecution – then, in my view as a scholar of the U.S. legal system, it should result in the dismissal of charges by the judge or a not guilty verdict by the jury.

But even when an individual is not convicted, the process of defending against charges can itself be a form of punishment, as renowned legal scholar Malcolm Feeley pointed out almost 50 years ago.

Here’s how the criminal justice process punishes even innocent people.

The criminal justice process

The criminal justice process is complex.

After a grand jury returns an indictment at the request of a prosecutor, the accused appears in court for their arraignment. They are informed of the charges against them and typically enter a plea.

During what’s called “discovery,” the prosecution and defense investigate the evidence the other side plans to rely on. There are also pretrial motions in which the parties ask judges to dismiss charges and accept or exclude evidence.

The defense and prosecution may also meet to discuss a plea bargain, wherein the accused may plead guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence or reduced charges.

If there is no plea bargain, then the case moves to trial, which is itself a complicated process. If a defendant is found guilty, they can mount an appeal to higher courts in an attempt to have their conviction overturned.

To help navigate this process, criminal defendants typically hire a lawyer.

And good lawyers don’t come cheap.

Money and time

Indigent defendants, who do not have the financial resources to pay their own legal fees, can rely on public defenders paid for by the government.

But individuals who can afford to pay for their own lawyer face a substantial financial burden for attorney services and court fees. An experienced criminal defense lawyer can charge more than US$1,000 per hour, with fees quickly adding up. This means that mounting a legal defense can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars.

On top of this, it takes a great deal of time to prepare for a criminal case. While lawyers and their staff do much of the legwork for trial preparation, a client works with their attorneys to help formulate a defense.

As a result, criminal defendants lose one of the most precious commodities in the world: their time.

And this time can come at a tangible cost in the form of lost wages, which harms their day-to-day lives. Put simply, every hour spent preparing for trial is an hour defendants could spend working or enjoying their lives.

Stress and embarrassment

It’s not pleasant being charged with a crime.

The criminal process, which typically lasts months, takes a toll on one’s mental health. This is largely driven by the uncertainty surrounding the outcome of a criminal trial and the possibility of losing one’s freedom if convicted.

In addition, there is a social stigma that comes with being accused of a crime. This can result in reputational damage, anxiety and embarrassment.

The Trump administration appears to recognize this reality.

Several media outlets have reported that FBI leadership had planned a public perp walk for Comey.

According to a CBS News report, this was to have included “‘large, beefy’ agents … ‘in full kit,’ including Kevlar vests and exterior wear emblazoned with the FBI logo.” Apparently, the plan was aborted after several FBI supervisors refused to cooperate, viewing it as inappropriate. One agent was disciplined for insubordination after refusing to go along with the plan to embarrass Comey in this way.

Not all criminal defendants suffer the same

The extent to which criminal defendants experience the criminal justice process as a form of punishment varies from person to person.

For high-status people like Comey, lost wages and attorneys’ and court fees may not be that big of a deal.

But these costs may be incredibly significant for other people who have been, or are likely to be, targeted by the Trump administration.

The high costs of lawyers’ fees are well known to the president. For instance, his political action committee spent millions of dollars on attorneys’ fees in an unsuccessful effort to defend Trump from criminal charges in New York.

In addition, people no doubt experience the psychological stress and stigma of a possible criminal conviction differently. But regardless of one’s wealth, the lost time spent preparing a criminal defense is something that cannot be replaced.

The recognition that the criminal process is itself a form of punishment is one of the reasons that the Department of Justice has maintained independence from the president. By violating the tradition of staying out of politics, the Justice Department in the Trump administration has opened the door for the president to seek retribution on his perceived political enemies.

The mere act of putting them through the criminal process ensures that they suffer, regardless of their guilt or innocence.

Paul M. Collins Jr. 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. For Trump’s perceived enemies, the process may be the punishment – https://theconversation.com/for-trumps-perceived-enemies-the-process-may-be-the-punishment-266747