Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Li Li (李黎), Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Penn State

When you think about heat waves, you might picture sweltering cities, shimmering asphalt and unbearable summer afternoons. These heat waves dominate the headlines because we feel them directly.

Rivers, on the other hand, are often seen as cool refuges, places to escape the heat of summer.

Yet rivers are heating up, too. In fact, they’re heating up faster than the air.

New research from my team shows that riverine heat waves – periods of abnormally high water temperatures in rivers – are becoming more common, more intense and longer-lasting than they were 40 years ago. Their frequency, intensity and duration are also increasing at rates more than twice as fast as heat waves in the atmosphere.

The increased heat puts more stress on aquatic ecosystems, water quality, energy production and agriculture, and it can threaten species that rely on cool streams.

A hidden threat

Riverine heat waves are disruptive in ways that can cascade through aquatic ecosystems.

Cold-water fish such as trout and salmon are especially vulnerable: Extended periods of abnormally high water temperatures can impair reproduction, slow growth and trigger mass die-offs.

Warmer water also holds less oxygen, potentially suffocating aquatic life. In addition, hot water increases the likelihood of algae blooms and elevates the cost of treating water to make it safe for drinking. Warmer water can also create problems for energy production. Many thermoelectric fossil fuel plants and nuclear plants depend on river water for cooling, and warmer water reduces energy production efficiency, which could mean higher power costs.

Despite these serious risks, riverine heat waves have gone quietly unnoticed.

That’s due, in part, to the narrow width of rivers and streams. Oceans and lakes are large enough that they can be monitored consistently by satellites. Rivers, however, are harder to track, especially small rivers. Measuring the temperatures in narrow, winding streams requires high resolution that many satellite sensors lack.

Scientists with universities and government agencies have installed many sensors in streams to measure water temperature, and sensor numbers have proliferated since the 1990s. But the data has been patchy and inconsistent. Until recently, scientists lacked the tools to stitch these fragments into a coherent picture. We developed a way to do it.

AI helps create the full picture

To overcome this challenge, we trained a deep learning model to use scattered and inconsistent records to reconstruct continuous daily water temperatures across 1,471 river sites in the contiguous U.S. from 1980 to 2022.

The reconstructed histories of change enabled us, for the first time, to systematically compare the characteristics of riverine and air heat waves across a large and diverse set of rivers and reveal trends that might otherwise remain invisible.

The results reveal a troubling pattern.

On average, we found that riverine heat waves occur about half as often as air heat waves, and their temperature increases are a third as intense, but they last nearly twice as long.

More strikingly, their frequency is increasing faster than air heat wave events are. Compared to 1980, an average U.S. river experienced nearly two additional heat wave events in 2022. In 2022, those river heat waves lasted more than three extra days on average than in 1980 and were nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit (almost half a degree Celsius) hotter than in 1980.

Rivers in the Rockies and the Northeast showed some of the steepest increases, driven in part by shrinking snowpacks that once buffered streams with steady supplies of cold meltwater. The rivers are heating up quietly but faster than the air above them.

The drivers: Climate change and human infrastructure

We also wanted to find out whether these trends were mainly driven by climate change or by local infrastructure and other activity, such as dams and agriculture.

A machine learning model we developed to rank the importance of influential environmental factors that drive riverine heat waves found that rising air temperatures, particularly at night, were consistently the strongest factors behind river warming. Declines in snow and streamflow also played major roles, especially in mountain regions where dwindling snowpacks produce less meltwater.

Human infrastructure and other activities also play important supporting roles.

For example, the presence of large dams tends to lengthen heat waves, as warm reservoir water is released downstream. Agriculture shows more complex effects: In some areas, particularly the Midwest, irrigation and crop cover can actually cool rivers by altering local climate and hydrology. But these influences, whether harmful or helpful, are secondary compared to the overarching force of climate change.

What does the future hold?

In a warming world, riverine heat waves threaten to become a critical but underappreciated dimension of the global water–energy–food nexus.

Heat waves often coincide with low streamflows – a likely outcome as climate change reduces runoff from snowmelt. The risks compound. Low, slow-moving water warms more easily and holds less oxygen, creating dangerous conditions for aquatic life and increasing the chances of large-scale die-offs.

These are not just ecological problems. They also directly influence water and food supplies, along with energy reliability.

Unlike air heat waves, riverine heat waves currently remain largely absent from global monitoring systems and adaptation plans. Better understanding the changes and risks will require more coordinated data collection, better global data sharing across agencies and countries, and incorporating river temperature trends into climate risk assessments.

Li Li (李黎) 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. Rivers are heating up faster than the air − that’s a problem for aquatic life and people – https://theconversation.com/rivers-are-heating-up-faster-than-the-air-thats-a-problem-for-aquatic-life-and-people-263718

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Amy Adamczyk, Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice, City University of New York

Many factors can shape how someone views abortion – gender, age and education, to name a few. Around the world, however, religious belief is the most powerful predictor that someone will disapprove, as I document in my 2025 book, “Fetal Positions.” Faith traditions’ teachings about abortion vary – and there is diversity of opinions within faiths, too. On average, though, people who say that religion is important in their lives are far more likely to think abortion is morally wrong.

But here’s the paradox: There’s a difference between abstract views and personal decisions. On average, strong religious beliefs and involvement in a religious community do not make an American woman less likely to terminate her first pregnancy, so long as she conceives without a potential marriage partner.

The picture becomes even more complex when we consider not just how religious someone is but which tradition they belong to. Young American women in conservative Protestant churches are about half as likely to say they have aborted a premarital pregnancy than Catholics and mainline Protestants, regardless of how devout they are, according to my co-authored research. Other work has found similar differences among Christian groups. There were too few respondents from other religions to fully assess differences, though unmarried young Jewish women in the U.S. likewise appear to have higher odds of obtaining an abortion than conservative Protestants.

Religion’s role in women’s actual decisions about whether to have an abortion is far more nuanced than abortion attitudes alone would suggest. Understanding these relationships can help lawmakers, advocates and the public develop policies that reflect lived realities, rather than relying on assumptions about ideology alone.

Beyond the clinic

Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, I followed approximately 5,000 women over six years. The data covers a period from the mid-1990s, when the women were teenagers, to the early 2000s, when they were in their early 20s.

My goal was to examine their views about abortion, their sexual behavior, whether they had a premarital pregnancy, and whether they gave birth. The survey also asked respondents to indicate their religious affiliation; how much they regularly attended services, participated in youth group activities and prayed; and how important religion was in their lives.

Longitudinal data is especially useful for sorting out patterns between religion and abortion, compared to surveys that look at a single moment in a woman’s life. For example, if someone is seeking an abortion, but their faith tradition disapproves, that cognitive dissonance may affect how she answers questions about her beliefs.

These six years of data form the basis of my earlier studies and contribute to my recent book. I was particularly interested in decisions about first pregnancies, which are especially pivotal. They can derail a college education, limit career opportunities, and reshape long-term goals in ways that can feel irreversible at a young age.

I focused only on unmarried young women who were pregnant for the first time. Approximately 25% of the women who had a premarital pregnancy during the six-year period said that they had terminated it. This percentage was roughly the same regardless of how important faith was to them, how much they prayed, or how often they participated in religious activities.

Sociologists Lexie Milmine and Tina Fetner analyzed 2017 data from Canadian women and came to a similar conclusion. They found that neither religious affiliation nor religious service attendance was significantly associated with the odds that a woman reported one or more abortions.

Type, not intensity

There is one religious factor that makes a difference, though: the type of tradition women report belonging to when they were teenagers.

Although various faiths hold different views of abortions, conservative Christian groups, which are influential in the U.S., generally oppose it – including the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination. The Catholic Church also officially disapproves of abortion, though 6 in 10 U.S. Catholics say it should be legal in all or most cases.

Therefore, in addition to researching strength of religious belief and involvement, I also examined whether the type of Christian religious affiliation mattered in shaping abortion decisions.

Focusing on the same group of unmarried young women, I found that regardless of how much they attended religious activities, prayed or reported that religion was very important in their lives, those who affiliated with a conservative Protestant faith when they were teenagers were less likely to terminate their first pregnancies than Catholics or mainline Protestants, which is similar to findings from other research.

The attitude-behavior gap

My research highlights the disconnect between religion’s role in shaping public opinion about abortion versus its influence on women’s actual decisions.

When it comes to attitudes, the relationship is clear and powerful. Regardless of which specific faith they affiliate with, people who say religion is important in their lives on average express stronger opposition to abortion.

But when women face the reality of an unintended pregnancy, religion’s influence is more nuanced. The strength of her personal devotion fails to explain whether a woman will actually choose to terminate her first pregnancy. In the U.S., the more influential religious factor seems to be which specific religious tradition she belongs to.

Decisions about later pregnancies may be more complicated. For example, around 6 in 10 U.S. abortion patients have had at least one child. It’s not clear how religion shapes mothers’ decisions about how an unexpected pregnancy would affect their family.

In the U.S., public opinion about reproductive rights is largely driven by different religious factors. When it comes to individual decisions about pregnancy, though, which religious tradition someone is affiliated with seems to hold the most sway – at least for first pregnancies outside of marriage.

Amy Adamczyk has received funding from a range of organizations, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Department of Homeland Security, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Association for the Sociology of Religion, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.

– ref. Religion often shapes someone’s view of abortion – but what about a woman’s actual decision? – https://theconversation.com/religion-often-shapes-someones-view-of-abortion-but-what-about-a-womans-actual-decision-265330

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By David L Levy, Professor Emeritus of Management, UMass Boston

Another business-led effort to fight climate change is unraveling.

On Aug. 27, 2025, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance suspended its activities after several major U.S. and European banks backed out.

While most observers are blaming the strong political backlash in the U.S. against climate change action and sustainable investing, we believe the banks didn’t need much of a push: These net-zero alliances never made much business sense and were not particularly effective at fighting climate change. Indeed, for us the puzzle was why they had flourished in the first place.

To examine their rise and fall, we recently conducted a research project that encompassed interviews with more than 80 executives from various financial institutions, activist organizations and oil and gas companies.

Powerful allies grasped climate risks

The Net-Zero Banking Alliance was founded in 2021. Members agreed to limit lending to carbon-intense sectors so that total greenhouse gas emissions from companies in the banks’ loan portfolios are close to zero by 2050.

This target aligned with the goals of the Paris Agreement but was not binding and lacked clear shorter-term targets and plans. Similar net-zero networks were established for insurance, asset management and other financial areas, all under the umbrella of the United Nations Environment Program’s Finance Initiative. Over the past 16 months, the insurance and asset managers’ alliances have also suspended their activities.

These net-zero alliances were built on the premise that climate risk equals financial risk and that the challenge requires a collective response. Their goal was to leverage the power of finance to push companies to decarbonize their products and processes.

Key financial regulators, central banks and a few of the largest asset managers propelled these alliances because they perceived that climate change poses serious long-term systemic risks to markets and economies around the world. Influential figures such as Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, and former Bank of England head Mark Carney, now the prime minister of Canada, lent legitimacy to these initiatives.

Some environmental groups also supported these alliances as a smart strategy to pressure companies on climate. Many other financial institutions then joined the net-zero bandwagon, but our research revealed that they didn’t do so because of concern about climate-related financial risks. Rather, they felt an array of pressure from peers, investors, activists, regulators and even their families.

Many people we interviewed mentioned reputational risk as a key driver and saw a low-carbon transition as inevitable, driven by regulation, technological innovation and consumer demand. This was the Biden era, with billions of dollars flowing to clean energy through the Inflation Reduction Act.

The burgeoning field also spawned a specialized but lucrative industry of data providers and consultants who actively marketed carbon management, disclosure and broader sustainability services. The global market for sustainability data and software was estimated at more than US$1 billion in 2024 and growing rapidly.

Climate strategy and sustainability reporting was the fastest-growing business sector for accounting and consulting firms. And asset managers were happy to collect higher fees for funds screened for sustainability – even though these funds have not outperformed the broader market.

These vested interests spurred continued expansion of net-zero networks. Indeed, at its peak in 2024, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance included over 140 members globally with $74 trillion in estimated total assets, representing over 40% of global banking assets.

Political backlash

Given the size and scope of these net-zero networks, what triggered their rapid collapse?

One major factor, of course, was the political backlash against anything connected with climate action and sustainable investing following the 2024 election of President Donald Trump.

Finance officials in more than 20 U.S. states have demanded that major asset managers restrict the use of environment, social and governance benchmarks, accusing them of eroding “traditional fiduciary duty” and claiming they hurt investors.

In August, 23 Republican attorneys general accused organizations created to set standards for corporate climate disclosures of operating an anticompetitive “climate cartel” and violating antitrust laws.

Fossil fuels – too lucrative to abandon

While the political pressure in the U.S. has indeed been intense, the collapse of net-zero networks and the broader corporate retreat from climate commitments is largely due to the continued profitability of fossil fuels and the high costs and risks of deep decarbonization. Investors and banks, of course, want to keep on financing profitable companies and avoid pressuring their clients to take risky measures.

Oil companies such as BP and Shell that had relatively strong climate targets suffered financially as a result, prompting them to retreat from these targets and shift capital from renewable projects back toward fossil fuels. High energy prices in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war made the sector even more lucrative. Low-carbon fuels and processes for industries such as aviation, steel and cement are still very expensive.

Moreover, the Trump administration is abolishing most subsidies for clean energy and freezing permits for offshore wind, while easing regulations and opening more land for oil and gas exploration.

These economic incentives made it hard for the banking alliance to reduce financing for fossil fuels – and the money has kept on flowing into oil and gas projects.

European banks that sharply cut funding to fossil fuel companies saw their business diverted to other banks and to private, nonbank sources of finance, which has soared in the past two years. Facing this loss of business, major banks’ lending to oil and gas companies surged in 2024, driving loans to a three-year high of $869 billion.

The costs of membership in the net-zero alliances also increased over time, with the adoption of stricter standards that called for specific plans and timelines for ending fossil fuel financing entirely. The new standards also required loan recipients to disclose Scope 3 emissions, which include emissions from a company’s suppliers and customers.

Managers in financial institutions told us that the increasingly complex and demanding requirements were generating strong pushback from their clients. We also heard that membership was turning from a reputational asset to a liability, as activist organizations called out the hypocrisy of continued fossil fuel lending despite their commitments to phasing it out.

Ignoring climate change’s long-term risks

Although banks are rushing back to finance fossil fuel projects, these loans typically have long terms of 10 to 25 years. This means they carry the risk that an eventual transition to clean energy will make these projects worthless, “stranded assets.” One study estimates that investors are currently exposed to more than $1 trillion in potential losses.

Why do banks often ignore these risks?

Our interviewees mentioned the organizational silos that separate analysts who assess climate risks from the loan originators. In other words, the employees deciding where to lend money may not be talking to the team that best understands the long-term risks. Moreover, current risk assessment tools are quite crude and don’t generate the quantitative metrics that loan underwriters want.

Finally, loans are increasingly repackaged and sold, or securitized, into the larger corporate debt market, obscuring the risks.

Climate risks are real and growing

The Net-Zero Banking Alliance isn’t disappearing entirely. The group is currently deciding on whether to restructure into a much weaker “framework initiative” that provides voluntary guidance instead of binding commitments.

And some banks leaving the alliance have stated that they will maintain their climate goals and sustainability policies.

But climate risks are real and growing. The Boston Consulting Group recently estimated that just the physical risks – floods, drought and wildfires – could cost companies up to 25% of their profits by 2050 and substantially cut global GDP.

A transition to a low-carbon economy will cost trillions of dollars and create massive disruption – as well as opportunities – as new technologies and companies emerge. The longer that action is delayed, the greater the risks to the planet – and of more drastic shocks to the global economy and financial system.

David L Levy receives funding from the BSF, the Bi-national US-Israel Science Foundation

Rami Kaplan receives funding from the BSF, the Bi-national US-Israel Science Foundation

– ref. Banks retreat from climate change commitments – but it’s business more than politics – https://theconversation.com/banks-retreat-from-climate-change-commitments-but-its-business-more-than-politics-265176

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Peter McGraw, Professor of Marketing and Psychology, University of Colorado Boulder

How can you get ahead in your career and still enjoy the ride?

One solution offered in business books, LinkedIn posts and team-building manuals is to use humor. Sharing jokes, sarcastic quips, ironic memes and witty anecdotes, the advice goes, will make you more likable, ease stress, strengthen teams, spark creativity and even signal leadership potential.

We are professors of marketing and management who study humor and workplace dynamics. Our own research – and a growing body of work by other scholars – shows that it’s harder to be funny than most people think. The downside of cracking a bad joke is often larger than what you might gain by landing a good one.

Fortunately, you don’t have to tell sidesplitting jokes to make humor work for you. You can learn to think like a comedian instead.

Humor is risky business

Comedy works by bending and breaking norms – and when those rules aren’t broken in just the right way, it’s more likely to harm your reputation than to help your team.

We developed the “benign violation theory” to explain what makes things funny – and why attempts at humor so often backfire, especially in the workplace. Essentially, humor arises when something is both wrong and OK at the same time.

People find jokes funny when they break rules while seeming harmless. Miss one of those ingredients when you tell a joke and your audience won’t appreciate it. When it’s all benign and there’s no violation, you get yawns. When it’s all violation and not benign, you could end up triggering outrage.

It’s hard enough to get laughs in the darkness of a comedy club. Under fluorescent office lights, that razor-thin line becomes even harder to walk. What feels wrong but OK to one colleague can feel simply wrong to another, especially across differences in seniority, culture, gender or even the mood they’re in.

An advertising study

In our experiments, when everyday people are asked to “be funny,” most attempts land flat or cross lines.

In a humorous caption contest with business students, described in Peter McGraw’s book on global humor practices, “The Humor Code,” the captions weren’t particularly funny to begin with. However, the ones that were rated by judges as the most funny were often also rated the most distasteful.

Being funny without being offensive is of paramount importance. This is particularly true for women, as a robust literature shows women face harsher backlash than men for behavior seen as offensive or norm-violating such as expressing anger, acting dominantly or even “making asks” in negotiations.

You might end up getting no respect

Research by other scholars who examine leader and manager behavior in organizations tells a similar story.

In one study, managers who used humor effectively were seen as more confident and competent, boosting their status. Yet when their attempts misfired, those same managers lost status and credibility. Other researchers have found that failed humor doesn’t just hurt a manager’s status – it also makes employees less likely to respect that manager, seek their advice, or trust their leadership.

Even when jokes land, humor can backfire. In one study, marketing students instructed to write “funny” copy for advertisements wrote ads that were funnier, but also less effective, than students instructed to write “creative” or “persuasive” copy.

Another study found that bosses who joke too often push employees into pretending to be amused, which drains energy, reduces job satisfaction and increases burnout. And the risks are higher for women due to a double standard. When women use humor in presentations, they are often judged as being less capable and having lower status than men.

The bottom line is that telling a great joke rarely gets you a promotion. And cracking a bad one can jeopardize your job – even if you’re not a talk show host who earns a living making people laugh.

Flip the script

Instead of trying to be funny on the job, we recommend that you focus on what we call “thinking funny” – as described in another of McGraw’s books, “Shtick to Business.”

“The best ideas come as jokes,” advertising legend David Ogilvy once said. “Try to make your thinking as funny as possible.”

But Ogilvy wasn’t telling executives to crack jokes in meetings. He was encouraging employees to think like comedians by flipping expectations, leveraging their networks and finding their niche.

Comics often lead you one way and then flip the script. Comedian Henny Youngman, a master of one-liners, famously quipped, “When I read about the dangers of drinking, I gave up … reading.” The business version of this convention is to challenge an obvious assumption.

For example, Patagonia’s “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign, which the outdoor gear company rolled out Black Friday in 2011 as a full-page ad in The New York Times, paradoxically boosted sales by calling out overconsumption.

To apply this method, pick a stale assumption your team holds, such as that adding features to a product always improves it or that having more meetings will lead to smoother coordination, and ask, “What if the opposite were true?”

You’ll discover options that standard brainstorming misses.

Create a chasm

When comedian Bill Burr has his fans in stitches, he knows some people won’t find his jokes funny – and he doesn’t try to win them over.

We’ve observed that many of the best comics don’t try to please everyone. They succeed by deliberately narrowing their audience. And we also find that businesses that do the same build stronger brands.

For example, when Nebraska’s tourism board embraced “Honestly, it’s not for everyone” in a 2019 campaign, targeting out-of-state visitors, web traffic jumped 43%.

Some people want hot tea. Others want iced tea. Serving warm tea satisfies no one. Likewise, you can succeed in business by deciding whom your idea is for, and whom it’s not for, then tailoring your product, policy or presentation accordingly.

Cooperate to innovate

Stand-up may look like a solo act. But comics depend on feedback – punch-ups from fellow comedians and reactions from audiences – iterating jokes in the same way lean startups may innovate new products.

Building successful teams at work means listening before speaking, making your partners look good, and balancing roles. Improv teacher Billy Merritt has described three types of improvisers. Pirates are risk-takers. Robots are structure builders. Ninjas are adept at both, taking risks and building structures.

A team designing a new app, for instance, needs all three: Pirates to propose bold features, robots to streamline the interface, and ninjas to bridge gaps. Empowering everyone in these roles leads to braver ideas with fewer blind spots.

Gifts aren’t universal

Telling someone to “be funny” is like telling them to “be musical.” Many of us can keep a beat, but few have what it takes to become rock stars.

That’s why we argue that it’s smarter to think like a comedian than to try to act like one.

By reversing assumptions, cooperating to innovate, and creating chasms, professionals can generate fresh solutions and stand out – without becoming an office punchline.

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. Why you seriously need to stop trying to be funny at work – https://theconversation.com/why-you-seriously-need-to-stop-trying-to-be-funny-at-work-265036

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Michael Nalick, Assistant Professor of Management, University of Denver

A CEO’s canoodling with his company’s human resources chief – caught on the “kiss cam” at a Coldplay concert – made global headlines this summer. Beyond the memes and tabloid fodder, personal lives were shattered and a company was left in turmoil after its leader’s sudden exit.

The case, involving the AI firm Astronomer, may be the most visible of recent CEO personal scandals – think sex affairs, drug abuse or embarrassing behavior – but it’s not an isolated incident. Just weeks following the Coldplay “kiss cam,” the CEO of Nestlé was shown the door for similar behavior involving a relationship with a subordinate. Personal scandals have been the top cause of CEO terminations in recent years.

How do these scandals stack up to other corporate indiscretions, such as financial fraud? As a management professor, I knew that there’s lots of research on CEOs’ financial crimes, but surprisingly little on personal misdeeds.

So my colleagues and I examined nearly 400 CEO scandals involving either financial or personal misconduct. In this research, published in August 2025 in the journal Strategic Organization, we found that not all CEO scandals are treated equally: The type makes all the difference.

Personal scandals are harder to survive

For most people, personal indiscretions – such as having an extramarital affair or abusing drugs – are a private matter. But for CEOs, even scandals unrelated to business create doubt about their judgment, integrity and leadership. The result is usually career-ending for the CEO, research shows, and can create lasting harm for the company.

We found that CEOs overwhelmingly exit in the wake of personal scandals – five times as often as CEOs who commit financial misconduct do, in fact. And strong business performance doesn’t tend to offer protection.

For example, Hewlett-Packard’s Mark Hurd, who’s widely credited with turning around HP in the mid-2000s, was ousted following a very visible personal misconduct scandal 15 years ago. The fallout was swift: The company’s stock fell nearly 10% immediately after the announcement, and with leadership in a tailspin, it dropped more than 40% within a year.

Why bad numbers come with better odds

Companies are also routinely accused of “cooking the books.” In recent months, several firms have been forced to restate their earnings after their financial statements didn’t add up. These scandals shake investor trust, trigger sharp drops in company stock and often lead to the chief financial officer’s departure – with some CEOs following suit.

However, while cooking the books is considered a severe form of corporate misconduct, our research suggests that it has fewer job-ending repercussions for CEOs than personal scandals do. Roughly half of all CEOs implicated in financial scandals survive, we found – because, unlike in personal scandals, CEOs can often shift blame.

We also found that CEOs dismissed due to financial scandals tend to be replaced with outside candidates, which has been shown to stabilize a company’s stock price and lead to stronger long-term performance.

It might be surprising to learn that a CEO’s personal misconduct can come at a greater cost – both to the business and the executive – than outright financial fraud. Is corporate America overestimating the importance of CEOs’ private behavior? Or is it underestimating the importance of cooking the books?

While I don’t have answers to these questions, I think our findings show the need for more discussion – and more research.

I have received funding from Deloitte for a separate project on sociopolitical activism.

– ref. Personal scandals sink CEOs faster than financial fraud, research shows – https://theconversation.com/personal-scandals-sink-ceos-faster-than-financial-fraud-research-shows-265725

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Arturo Porzecanski, Research Fellow, Center for Latin American & Latino Studies, American University

President Donald Trump vowed to help out his Argentine counterpart Javier Milei on Sept. 23, 2025, a day after the U.S. administration said “all options” were on the table in regard to a bailout for the Latin American country’s rocky economy.

A day after Trump and Milei’s meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he was prepared to lend Argentina up to US$20 billion via currency swaps and bond purchases.

But what caused Milei to go hat in hand to the U.S. in the first place? And what would a U.S. bailout of Argentina look like? For answers, The Conversation turned to Arturo Porzecanski, an expert on Latin American economies at American University.

Why is the Argentine government seeking a bail out?

The event that sparked discussion of U.S. intervention was a sharp sell-off of the Argentine currency, the peso, as well as the country’s stocks and bonds.

Over the course of three days ending on Sept. 19, the country’s central bank spent over $1 billion of its hard-currency reserves defending the Argentine peso from further depreciation. To be sure, instead of dialing up his contacts in the Trump administration, Milei could have allowed the currency to find its market-clearing value – that is, the price at which supply and demand match.

Alternatively, he could have kept up the effort to stabilize the peso by spending still more billions of dollars previously borrowed from the International Monetary Fund.

However, he decided to call Washington and ask for financial support, hoping that the friendship with Trump he has been cultivating from even before Milei was elected would finally pay off.

The Argentine authorities fear that a sharper depreciation will reignite expectations of high inflation, and they also wish to conserve those IMF funds to help cover nearly $20 billion in interest and principal payments on dollar debts coming due in the next 15 months. The Argentine government would also rather not have the central bank raise interest rates by tightening monetary policy still more, nor implement additional cuts in government spending given that the economy is either stagnant or already in a recession.

Argentina’s economy got here because prior to Milei taking office in December 2023, his predecessor applied very loose monetary and fiscal policies – such as keeping interest rates low and spending high to stimulate the economy – as well as business-unfriendly regulations. That rocketed annual inflation into triple digits and led to the crumbling of confidence among domestic and foreign investors, thus complicating the government’s ability to refinance its maturing debt obligations.

While Milei reversed many of those harmful policies during the course of 2024, notably achieving a balanced government budget and a sharp deceleration of inflation, his popular support and confidence in his ability to manage the country’s remaining challenges have weakened in recent months.

The economy has stalled, with job losses and unemployment rising. Phone recordings suggesting corruption involving the president’s family were released. And Milei’s party did surprisingly poorly in recent elections that took place in the large province of Buenos Aires. With midterm congressional elections scheduled for Oct. 26, Milei badly needs political and financial support from the Trump administration in order to stabilize the local financial markets and project a sense of order.

What options are there for the US to help Argentina?

The U.S. government has already been unusually supportive of Argentina from its dominant positions on the board of directors of the IMF, World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank. Earlier this year, it helped the country to secure from them pledges and disbursements worth tens of billions of dollars in new loans.

What is very new and different now is the prospect of direct lending from the U.S. Treasury to the government of Argentina. As previewed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Sept. 24, his team is currently in negotiations with their counterparts in Argentina for a $20 billion swap line, which presumably would involve the Treasury’s temporary purchase of Argentine pesos in exchange for the delivery of U.S. dollars. This could possibly be supplemented by the Treasury’s temporary purchase of Argentine government bonds, likely payable in dollars, whether newly issued or already in circulation.

Bessent’s announcement, coming on the heels of Trump’s vow to help out his Argentine counterpart, has prompted local and foreign investors to regain confidence in Argentina, such that beaten-up stocks and bonds have bounced back and the currency has appreciated.

This immediate and enthusiastic market response, if sustained, means that the Treasury may not have to spend too many billions of U.S. dollars to boost public confidence in Milei and Argentina, at least until the upcoming midterm elections.

Should Milei’s party do well in the late-October contest, enabling it to gain seats in the House and Senate and thus have more political support in the national legislature, a relatively small and temporary investment may yield a worthwhile payoff for the Trump and Milei administrations.

Why is the US keen on helping out?

Normally the U.S. government does not involve itself directly in foreign bailouts unless a country is systemically important – namely, when its troubles affect its neighbors, a number of other countries, or the United States itself.

For example, in the 1990s the U.S. Treasury offered direct support to other countries during crises in Mexico, East Asia and Russia, and in 1995 Argentina was one of the beneficiaries. And in 2008, in the wake of the global financial crisis, the Fed made available dollars in exchange for the currencies of about a dozen foreign countries – currency swaps mainly with European countries but also with Brazil, Canada and Mexico, since the meltdown affected Washington’s North American neighbors and many nations in Europe.

Moreover, in most cases, whatever Treasury or Fed funding is made available is soon repaid by upcoming loans from institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, or else by major banks or institutional investors. In other words, most U.S. official support has been of the “bridge lending” kind, because the Treasury and the Fed can act within days, whereas other financial actors require weeks or even months to approve and disburse funding.

In the case of Argentina, it is notable that Bessent has stated that Argentina is systemically important, even though its troubles have so far not affected any other country. Left unsaid is how Argentina would repay the U.S. Treasury, because the pipeline of upcoming disbursements from official international organizations is not very large.

Therefore, the funds under discussion are not clear bridges to anything. In similar circumstances in the past, the U.S. Treasury has sought payment guarantees from foreign governments. Given the transactional approach favored by Trump, certain conditions may be demanded from Argentina – a country endowed with lithium, rare earths, shale oil and other resources.

What is the US Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund?

The Exchange Stabilization Fund is the Treasury’s crisis-funding vehicle through which the bridging loan to prop up the Argentine currency would be made.

The fund was established in the mid-1930s. It was endowed with the profits that the U.S. Treasury realized when the official price of gold rose from $20.67 to $35 per ounce, increasing the value of U.S. government gold holdings.

For several decades through the 1980s, namely before the U.S. currency was allowed to float freely, the fund’s main purpose was to provide the funding for Treasury operations to affect the price of the dollar. A secondary purpose was to provide short-term, government-to-government loans mainly to Latin American countries, yet starting in the mid-1990s this became its primary objective.

The last Exchange Stabilization Fund loan was granted to Uruguay in mid-2002, in the wake of a major financial crisis in next-door Argentina that had triggered a bank run in Uruguay – and threatened to spread elsewhere around the region. The Treasury sent $1.5 million to Uruguay on a Monday to back at least the government-owned banks, and the funds were returned to Washington that same Friday. The bank run was stopped and thus the loan succeeded magnificently.

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

– ref. Why Argentina is looking to the Trump administration for a bailout − and what the US Treasury can do to help – https://theconversation.com/why-argentina-is-looking-to-the-trump-administration-for-a-bailout-and-what-the-us-treasury-can-do-to-help-265924

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Ray Brescia, Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life, Albany Law School

Imagine a protest outside the funeral of a popular political leader, with some of the protesters celebrating the death and holding signs that say things like “God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11,” “America is Doomed” and “Don’t Pray for the USA.”

No matter the political leanings of that leader, most Americans would probably abhor such a protest and those signs.

What would tolerate such activities, no matter how distasteful? The First Amendment.

The situation described above is taken from an actual protest, though it did not involve the funeral of a political figure. Instead, members of the Westboro Baptist Church protested outside the funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, a U.S. service member killed in Iraq.

Through demonstrations like this, members of this group were conveying their belief that the U.S. is overly tolerant of those they perceive as sinners, especially people from the LGBTQ community, and that the death of U.S. soldiers should be recognized as divine retribution for such sinfulness.

Snyder’s family sued for intentional infliction of emotional distress, among other claims. A jury issued a US$5 million jury award in favor of the family of the deceased service member. But in a nearly unanimous decision issued in 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the First Amendment insulated the protesters from such a judgment.

This holding is particularly instructive today.

The Trump administration has vowed to crack down on what it calls hate speech. It has labeled antifa, a loosely organized anti-fascist group, a terrorist organization. And it has sought to punish figures such as TV host Jimmy Kimmel for statements perceived critical of conservative activists.

What the First Amendment makes clear is that it does not just protect the rights of speakers who say things with which Americans agree. Or, as the Supreme Court said in a separate decision it issued one year after the case involving the funeral protesters: “The Nation well knows that one of the costs of the First Amendment is that it protects the speech we detest as well as the speech we embrace.”

But free speech is not absolute. As a legal scholar who has studied political movements, free speech and privacy, I realize the government can regulate speech through what are known as “reasonable time, place, and manner” restrictions. These limits cannot depend upon the content of the speech or expressive conduct in which a speaker is engaged, however.

For example, the government can ban campfires in an area prone to wildfires. But if it banned the burning of the U.S. flag only as a form of political protest, that would be an unconstitutional restriction on speech.

Protected and unprotected speech

There are certain categories of speech that are not entitled to First Amendment protection. They include incitement to violence, obscenity, defamation and what are considered “true threats.”

When, for example, someone posts threats on social media with reckless disregard for whether they will instill legitimate fear in their target, such posts are not a protected form of speech. Similarly, burning a cross on someone’s property as a means of striking terror in them such that they fear bodily harm also represents this kind of true threat.

There are also violations of the law that are sometimes prosecuted as “hate crimes,” criminal acts driven by some discriminatory motive. In these cases, it’s generally not the perpetrator’s beliefs that are punished but the fact that they act on them and engage in some other form of criminal conduct, as when someone physically assaults their victim based on that victim’s race or religion. Such motives can increase the punishment people receive for the underlying criminal conduct.

Speech that enjoys the strongest free-speech protections is that which is critical of government policies and leaders. As the Supreme Court said in 1966, “There is practically universal agreement that a major purpose of (the First) Amendment was to protect the free discussion of governmental affairs.”

As the late Justice Antonin Scalia would explain in 2003, “The right to criticize the government” is at “the heart of what the First Amendment is meant to protect.”

Restrictions on government action

The First Amendment prevents the government from taking direct action to curtail speech by, for example, trying to prevent the publication of material critical of it. Americans witnessed this in the Pentagon Papers case, where the Supreme Court ruled that the government could not prevent newspapers from publishing a leaked – and politically damaging – study on U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

But it also applies when the government acts in indirect ways, such as threatening to investigate a media company or cutting funding for a university based on politically disfavored action or inaction.

In 2024 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the state of New York’s efforts to punish companies that did business with the National Rifle Association because of the organization’s political positions violated the group’s First Amendment rights.

Similarly, in recent months, courts have ruled on First Amendment grounds against Trump administration efforts to punish law firms or to withhold funds from Harvard University.

And just last week, a federal court in Florida threw out a lawsuit filed by President Trump against The New York Times seeking $15 billion for alleged harm to the president’s investments and reputation.

Nevertheless, some people fear government retribution for criticizing the administration. And some, like the TV network ABC, have engaged in speech-restricting action on their own, such as taking Kimmel temporarily off the air for his comments critical of conservative activists in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing.

Before Kimmel’s suspension, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr described his negotiations with ABC’s parent company, Disney, to take action against him. “We could do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. And Trump said that some media companies might “lose their license” for criticizing the president. It is encouraging that, in the face of these threats, ABC has reversed course and agreed to put Kimmel back on the air.

The First Amendment protects speech across the political spectrum, even speech Americans do not like. Both liberal comedian Jon Stewart and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson have recently agreed on this. As Carlson said recently, “If they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think. … There is nothing they can’t do to you because they don’t consider you human.”

Just last year in the NRA case referenced above, the Supreme Court clearly stated that even indirect government efforts to curtail protected speech are indeed unconstitutional. In light of that ruling, efforts to limit criticism of the administration, any administration, should give all Americans, regardless of their political views, great pause.

Ray Brescia 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 First Amendment protects Americans’ speech − and how it does not – https://theconversation.com/how-the-first-amendment-protects-americans-speech-and-how-it-does-not-265655

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Paul Draus, Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan-Dearborn

Watching the space between two nations shrink became a regular pastime for Detroiters over the past decade as the segments of the Gordie Howe International Bridge gradually grew, extending meter by meter from Ontario on one side and Michigan on the other.

The gap finally closed in July 2024 with the two halves coming together in a long-awaited kiss.

The official grand opening of the bridge was originally scheduled for fall of 2025, but it seems now likely to be delayed into 2026.

I’m a sociologist who has worked alongside neighborhood revitalization projects in Detroit for the past 15 years. I’ve observed the bridge project – and the many tensions around it – from the perspective of adjacent communities of Delray and Mexicantown, communities that are largely home to low-income Latino, Black and white residents.

The costs and benefits of this binational behemoth are complex and intertwined.

Clearing a chokehold

Boosters on both sides of the border have spoken frequently of the bridge’s expected benefits.

Detroit and Windsor would finally be free of the perpetual chokehold produced by the privately owned Ambassador Bridge.

Auto parts will flow more freely over the border, according to the Cross-Border Institute at the University of Windsor. And the Detroit Greenways Coalition is celebrating that its advocacy led to the inclusion of free pedestrian and bike lanes.

People living close to the existing bridge will gain some relief from truck traffic and pollution. But this burden won’t simply disappear – it will be shifted nearby, where others will have to cope with increased traffic flowing over six lanes 24 hours a day.

A political football

The costs and benefits of the bridge were contested from the beginning.

In the early days, the debate concentrated on who would own the bridge and who would pay for it.

Once just a concept known by the acronym DRIC, or Detroit River International Crossing, the project became real under former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder. In July 2018, representatives from both Ottawa and Washington broke ground on the bridge situated in an area of Detroit empty enough to contain its significant footprint and bear its weight without fear of sinkholes from underground salt mines.

“Every Michigander should thank every Canadian,” said Snyder at the time, alluding to the agreement that Canadian taxpayers alone would pay for the bridge’s construction in exchange for collecting all the tolls.

The bridge’s designers attempted to honor the cultural and natural history of the region. It was named after the legendary Canadian hockey player who was also a longtime stalwart for the Detroit Red Wings. The bridge’s towers are adorned with murals by First Nations artists.

But serious questions remain.

Today the debates center on whether the Trump administration’s increased tariffs and trade conflicts with Canada could negatively affect the value of the bridge – and if it will ever pay for itself. Even before President Donald Trump took office for the second time, truck traffic on the Ambassador Bridge was down, falling 8% from 2014 to 2024.

One bridge was always a bad idea, (nearly) everyone agreed

Residents and politicians have long agreed that having a single, privately owned bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor was a bad idea. This felt especially apparent after the 9/11 terrorist attacks laid bare the possibility of suddenly losing critical infrastructure.

For many years, travelers’ only other connection between Canada and Detroit has been a tunnel that runs underneath the Detroit River. However, the tunnel doesn’t offer direct access to interstate highways, making it less suitable for commercial trucks.

Adding another bridge makes it harder to disrupt trade and transport.

But the project has had one stalwart critic. Matty Moroun, the trucking billionaire who purchased the Ambassador Bridge in 1979, ferociously protected his asset against potential competition. He actively sought to thwart the construction, launching numerous lawsuits against the state of Michigan and the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority, the entity managing construction of the new bridge.

Those lawsuits continued even after Moroun’s death in 2020, as his heirs asserted significant damages to the value of their property.

Was enough done for nearby homeowners?

Others have criticized the attempts to compensate the residents of Delray, a once-vibrant neighborhood that has been impacted by industrialization since the 1960s.

Benefits negotiated for residents and homeowners affected by the construction have not increased as the project’s costs ballooned and the timeline to complete it stretched out.

The cost of the Gordie Howe bridge is now estimated at around $6.4 billion Canadian – or about $US4.7 billion. That is $700 million more than the original projected cost. The project is at least 10 months behind schedule.

Simone Sagovac, director of the SW Detroit Community Benefit Coalition, said they did not anticipate the immense scale of the development and its continued effects on the community.

“That scale affected health and quality of life significantly every day, with years of continuous industrial dust causing sinus problems, headaches, and increasing asthma, and then there will be thousands of daily truck impacts to come,” Sagovac wrote to me in an email.

A baseline health impact assessment, issued in 2019 by University of Michigan researchers working closely with the coalition, expressed concern about the heightened airborne pollution that would likely activate asthma, especially in children. Matching the findings of so many other epidemiological studies, the assessment found that residents living within 500 feet (152 meters) of a truck route reported a significantly higher likelihood of experiencing asthma or allergies affecting their breathing.

Sagovac wrote that the project took 250 homes, 43 businesses and five churches by eminent domain, and “saw the closing of more after.” One hundred families left the neighborhood via a home swap program funded as a result of the benefits agreement administered by a local nonprofit. Two hundred and seventy families remain, but most businesses have left the area over decades of decline.

The families that remain are often long-term residents wanting or needing a cheap place to live and willing to put up with dust, noise and smells from nearby factories and a sewage treatment plant.

“They constantly face illegal dumping and other unanswered crimes, and will face the worst diesel emissions exposure and other trucking and industry impacts,” Sagovac wrote.

Heather Grondin, chief relations officer of the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority, wrote in an emailed statement
that they have taken steps to minimize impacts from construction and that they regularly meet with the community to hear concerns.

“Construction traffic is using designated haul routes to minimize community impacts, traffic congestion and wear and tear on existing infrastructure while maximizing public and construction safety,” Grondin wrote.

According to Grondin, cars will be forced to follow a “no idling” rule on the American side to minimize pollution. Other aspects of the Community Benefits Plan included $20,000 in free repairs for 100 homes, planting hundreds of trees and investing in programs addressing food insecurity and the needs of young people and seniors, Grondin wrote.

An updated Health Impacted Assessment is expected to be released later in 2025.

History lost

Lloyd Baldwin, a historian for the Michigan Department of Transportation, was tasked with evaluating whether local landmarks like the legendary Kovacs Bar needed to be preserved.

“Kovacs Bar was one among many working-class bars in the Delray neighborhood but stands out for its roughly eight-decade association as a gathering place for the neighborhood and downriver Hungarian-American community,” Baldwin wrote in one such report.

The bar was nonetheless demolished in November 2017.

This was not MDOT’s only loss. While the agency made some sincere efforts to leverage other benefits for residents who remained, dynamic factors at many levels were out of the agency’s control.

For one thing, the numerous lawsuits filed by the bridge company over parcels of contested land limited MDOT’s ability to talk openly to the public about the land acquisition process.

In the period of legal limbo, Baldwin said, “the neighborhood imploded.”

Baldwin gave the example of the Berwalt Manor Apartments, built in the 1920s and located on Campbell Street near the bridge entrance. MDOT committed to preserve the historic building and proposed to mitigate the environmental impacts on mostly low-income residents by paying for new windows and HVAC units once the bridge was built.

But the speed of development outstripped the pace of community compensation. The building passed through probate court in 2018 and has since changed hands multiple times, so it is now unclear whether there are any low-income residents left to benefit from upgrades.

Benefits yet to be measured

On the brighter side, environmentalists have pointed to the expansion and connection of bicycle trails and bird migration corridors as long-term benefits of the Gordie Howe bridge.

On the Canadian side, the bridge construction falls largely outside of Windsor’s residential neighborhoods, so it caused less disruption. As part of the project,bike lanes, enhanced landscaping, and gathering spaces were added to an approach road called Sandwich Street.

Cross-border tourism spurred on by a proposed system of greenways called the “Great Lakes Way” may provide new opportunities for people and money to flow across the Detroit River, improving the quality of life for communities that remain.

But if the trade war between the Trump administration and Canada continues, observers may question whether the bridge is a graceful gift of infrastructure to two nations or one of the world’s longest and skinniest white elephants.

Paul Draus is affiliated with the Downriver Delta CDC and Friends of the Rouge. The Fort Street Bridge Park, a project that Draus is affiliated with, received a donation for a public sculpture from the Windsor Detroit Bridge Authority in 2020.

– ref. Detroit’s Gordie Howe bridge is poised to open as truck traffic between US-Canada slows – low-income residents are deciding whether to stay or go – https://theconversation.com/detroits-gordie-howe-bridge-is-poised-to-open-as-truck-traffic-between-us-canada-slows-low-income-residents-are-deciding-whether-to-stay-or-go-260280

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Ryan French, Research Scientist, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado Boulder

Even at a distance of 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) away, activity on the Sun can have adverse effects on technological systems on Earth. Solar flares – intense bursts of energy in the Sun’s atmosphere – and coronal mass ejections – eruptions of plasma from the Sun – can affect the communications, satellite navigation and power grid systems that keep society functioning.

On Sept. 24, 2025, NASA launched two new missions to study the influence of the Sun on the solar system, with further missions scheduled for 2026 and beyond.

I’m an astrophysicist who researches the Sun, which makes me a solar physicist. Solar physics is part of the wider field of heliophysics, which is the study of the Sun and its influence throughout the solar system.

The field investigates the conditions at a wide range of locations on and around the Sun, ranging from its interior, surface and atmosphere, and the constant stream of particles flowing from the Sun – called the the solar wind. It also investigates the interaction between the solar wind and the atmospheres and magnetic fields of planets.

The importance of space weather

Heliophysics intersects heavily with space weather, which is the influence of solar activity on humanity’s technological infrastructure.

In May 2024, scientists observed the strongest space weather event since 2003. Several Earth-directed coronal mass ejections erupted from the Sun, causing an extreme geomagnetic storm as they interacted with Earth’s magnetic field.

This event produced a beautiful light show of the aurora across the world, providing a view of the northern and southern lights to tens of millions of people at lower latitudes for the first time.

However, geomagnetic storms come with a darker side. The same event triggered overheating alarms in power grids around the world, and triggered a loss in satellite navigation that may have cost the U.S. agricultural industry half a billion dollars.

However, this is far from the worst space weather event on record, with stronger events in 1989 and 2003 knocking out power grids in Canada and Sweden.

But even those events were small compared with the largest space weather event in recorded history, which took place in September 1859. This event, considered the worst-case scenario for extreme space weather, was called the Carrington Event. The Carrington Event produced widespread aurora, visible even close to the equator, and caused disruption to telegraph machines.

If an event like the Carrington event occurred today, it could cause widespread power outages, losses of satellites, days of grounded flights and more. Because space weather can be so destructive to human infrastructure, scientists want to better understand these events.

NASA’s heliophysics missions

NASA has a vast suite of instruments in space that aim to better understand our heliosphere, the region of the solar system in which the Sun has significant influence. The most famous of these missions include the Parker Solar Probe, launched in 2018, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, launched in 2010, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, launched in 1995, and the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, launched on March 11, 2025.

The most recent additions to NASA’s collection of heliophysics missions launched on Sept. 24, 2025: Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, or IMAP, and the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory. Together, these instruments will collect data across a wide range of locations throughout the solar system.

IMAP is en route to a region in space called Lagrange Point 1. This is a location 1% closer to the Sun than Earth, where the balancing gravity of the Earth and Sun allow spacecraft to stay in a stable orbit.

IMAP contains 10 scientific instruments with varying science goals, ranging from measuring the solar wind in real time to improve forecasting of space weather that could arrive at Earth, to mapping the outer boundary between the heliosphere and interstellar space.

This latter goal is unique, something scientists have never attempted before. It will achieve this goal by measuring the origins of energetic neutral atoms, a type of uncharged particle. These particles are produced by plasma, a charged gas of electrons and protons, throughout the heliosphere. By tracking the origins of incoming energetic neutral atoms, IMAP will build a map of the heliosphere.

The Carruthers Geocorona Observatory is heading to the same Lagrange-1 orbit as IMAP, but with a very different science target. Instead of mapping all the way to the very edge of the heliosphere, the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory is observing a different target – Earth’s exosphere. The exosphere is the uppermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere, 375 miles (600 kilometers) above the ground. It borders outer space.

Specifically, the mission will observe ultraviolet light emitted by hydrogen within the exosphere, called the geocorona. The Carruthers Geocorona Observatory has two primary objectives. The first relates directly to space weather.

The observatory will measure how the exosphere – our atmosphere’s first line of defense from the Sun – changes during extreme space weather events. The second objective relates more to Earth sciences: The observatory will measure how water is transported from Earth’s surface up into the exosphere.

Looking forward

IMAP and the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory are two heliophysics missions researching very different parts of the heliosphere. In the coming years, future NASA missions will launch to measure the object at the center of heliophysics – the Sun.

In 2026, the Sun Coronal Ejection Tracker is planned to launch. It is a small satellite the size of a shoebox – called a CubeSat – with the aim to study how coronal mass ejections change as they travel through the Sun’s atmosphere.

In 2027, NASA plans to launch the much larger Multi-slit Solar Explorer to capture high-resolution measurements of the Sun’s corona using a state-of-the-art instrumentation. This mission will work to understand the origins of solar flares, coronal mass ejections and heating within the Sun’s atmosphere.

Ryan French receives funding from NASA.

– ref. 2 newly launched NASA missions will help scientists understand the influence of the Sun, both from up close and afar – https://theconversation.com/2-newly-launched-nasa-missions-will-help-scientists-understand-the-influence-of-the-sun-both-from-up-close-and-afar-264646

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Tesla Monson, Professor of Anthropology, Western Washington University

Until Homo floresiensis was discovered, scientists assumed that the evolution of the human lineage was defined by bigger and bigger brains. Via a process called encephalization, human brains evolved to be relatively more massive than would be expected based on corresponding body size.

This proportionally bigger brain is what anthropologists argued enabled us and our relatives to perform more complex tasks such as using fire, forging and wielding tools, making art and domesticating animals.

But these theories had to be thrown out the window when archaeologists announced our fossil cousins Homo floresiensis via scientific publication in 2004. Homo floresiensis lived from about 700,000 to 60,000 years ago in the rainforests of Indonesia, partially contemporaneous with our own species.

Aptly nicknamed Hobbits, Homo floresiensis were short-statured, at just over 3 feet (1 meter) tall, and had a chimp-size brain. This discovery upended the assumption that brains have been increasing in size over the past several million years and generated confusion about what separates recent human relatives in our genus Homo from our more ancient ancestors.

Our new research on the skulls and teeth provides a novel theory for how the Hobbits evolved to be small.

We are professors of anthropology at Western Washington University. After attending a 2023 workshop for biological anthropologists studying juveniles in the fossil record, we began looking at brain size changes across human evolution.

Our previous work on the proportions of molar teeth generated new insights into the evolution of pregnancy by demonstrating that fetal growth rates are tightly linked to molar proportions in primates. Now, we wanted to see whether we could uncover a relationship between tooth proportions and brain size among our fossil relatives.

Paleontologists have only limited skeletal materials, sometimes only a few teeth, for many fossil species, including Homo floresiensis. If tooth proportions can provide information about fossil brain size, it opens up a world of possibilities for assessing past changes in encephalization.

Reconstructing brain size using teeth

We collated data on tooth and brain size for 15 fossil species on the human family tree, spanning about 5 million years of evolution. Somewhat oxymoronically, the third molars – otherwise known as wisdom teeth – have gotten proportionally smaller as brain size has gotten larger throughout human evolution, for most species.

Overall, human relatives with relatively larger wisdom teeth are more ancient and had smaller brains. More recent taxa, like Homo neanderthalensis, had relatively smaller third molars, compared to their other teeth, and larger brains.

This relationship allows researchers to figure out something about brain size for fossils that are incomplete, perhaps existing only as a few lone teeth. Since teeth are predominately made of inorganic matter, they survive in the fossil record much more often than other parts of the body, making up the vast majority of paleontological materials recovered. Being able to know more about brain size from just a few teeth is a truly useful tool.

Scientists recognize now that the formation of the brain and the teeth are inextricably connected during gestation. And for most species, larger brains are correlated with smaller wisdom teeth.

The one exception in genus Homo is Homo floresiensis, the Hobbit. The wisdom teeth of the Hobbits are small proportional to the other molars – the typical pattern for members of genus Homo. But their brains are also small, which is quite unusual.

There are two primary ways for brain size to decrease: by slowing down growth during gestation before birth or by slowing down growth after birth, during childhood. Because teeth develop early in gestation, slowing down growth rates during pregnancy tends to affect tooth shape and size, or even whether the teeth develop at all. Slowing growth later, during childhood, influences skeletal shape and size in other ways, because different parts of the body develop at different times.

Our new research provides evidence that the body size of Homo floresiensis likely shrank from a larger-bodied Homo ancestor by slowing down growth during childhood. The Hobbits’ small wisdom teeth suggest that, at least in utero, they were on track for the proportionally bigger brains that are the trademark of humans and their relatives. Any brake that slowed down brain growth likely occurred after birth.

In fact, this is the same mechanism through which some short-statured modern human populations have adapted to their local ecological conditions.

Getting small on islands

The small body size of Homo floresiensis was likely an adaptation to the unique conditions of their island environment on Flores.

Evolving small body size as an adaptation to living on an isolated island is known as insular nanism. There are many examples of other mammals becoming small on islands over the past 60 million years. But one of the most relevant examples is the dwarf elephant, Stegodon sondaarii, that lived on Flores and was hunted by H. floresiensis for food.

Both Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis, another short, island hominin from southeast Asia, likely evolved very short stature because of the ecological effects of limited food availability and lack of large predators, which tends to characterize island habitats.

Because brain size and body size are tightly linked, body size evolution inherently affects brain evolution. Among modern humans, larger people have larger brains, and smaller people have smaller brains.

But people with smaller brains are certainly no less intelligent than people with larger brains. Variation in body size dictates brain size; it is not a measure of cognitive ability. The island Hobbits crafted tools, hunted large-for-them game in the form of pygmy elephants, and likely made and used fire.

Our research supports that their small body size originated from a slowdown in growth during childhood. But this process would likely have had little impact on brain function or cognitive ability. We hypothesize that the Hobbits were small but highly capable.

Understanding the evolution of us

New research, including our study, continues to reinforce the importance of understanding how pregnancy and child growth and development evolved. If we want to know what distinguishes humans from our evolutionary ancestors, and how we evolved, we must understand how the earliest moments of life have changed and why.

Our work also encourages the reevaluation of endless attention on increasing brain size as the predominant force in human evolution. Other species in genus Homo had small brains but were likely not much different from us.

Tesla Monson receives funding from the National Science Foundation.

Andrew Weitz 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. Hobbits of Flores evolved to be small by slowing down growth during childhood, new research on teeth and brain size suggests – https://theconversation.com/hobbits-of-flores-evolved-to-be-small-by-slowing-down-growth-during-childhood-new-research-on-teeth-and-brain-size-suggests-261257