Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Jerrid Kruse, Professor of Science Education, Drake University

Some school districts, including ones in Maine, New Mexico, Iowa and Oregon, are shifting to standards-based grading, where students are graded on the skills and concepts they learn instead of points accumulated from assignments and tests throughout the school year.

Jerrid Kruse, a professor of education at Drake University, studies how people learn and teach science, and standards-based grading is one aspect of this work.

The Conversation has collaborated with SciLine to bring you highlights from the discussion, edited for brevity and clarity.

What is standards-based grading, and how is it different from traditional grading?

Jerrid Kruse: The main thrust of standards-based grading is really an increased transparency between what teachers are teaching and how they are assessing their students.

I think when most people think of traditional grading, they think of accumulating points or making deposits like in a banking model, where if I turn in the homework every day, I get 5 points. And I keep building those points up so that even if I do poorly on a test, I still end up with a B in the class, even though I may have gotten a C or even lower on a test.

Standards-based grading is a shift away from that. Instead of focusing on student behaviors, such as completing homework and showing up to class on time, standards-based grading focuses on if the student is actually learning the things we’re trying to teach them.

How exactly does it impact student learning?

Kruse: If teachers can assess student learning more transparently, then teachers have more accurate information about what students do and do not know, and students also have more information about what they themselves do and do not know. Then teachers and students can act on that information; that’s the key.

We cannot expect standards-based grading to magically fix the teaching and the learning that’s happening in the classroom. Instead, what it does is provide a more transparent assessment of to what extent the learning is happening in the classroom. And then it’s up to the teachers and the students to act on that information.

So the student can go home and study the particular things that they’re having trouble with, and the teachers can say, “OK, my class is really struggling with standard number 4, so let’s spend some more time on standard number 4.” It’s really about what teachers and students do with that information.

What are some of the challenges?

Kruse: One of the big things is teacher buy-in. Top-down initiatives oftentimes end up with really poor implementation or superficial implementation. In my experience, the best standards-based grading efforts have come from the teachers themselves rather than from an administrator. So I think it’s important to spend time getting teacher buy-in and maybe even making it optional at first to let it be more of a grassroots effort.

Another challenge for teachers is identifying the key standards. So rather than thinking, “Okay, I’m going to teach Chapter 3,” it’s shifting that thinking to: “What is the thing or concept that I want students to learn out of Chapter 3?” From there, they can better communicate that to students.

Also, what will the report card look like? Are we going to continue to report A, B, C, D and F grades? Are we going to report all of the standards? These are questions teachers and school administrators need to decide together.

Then finally, in terms of helping parents and students understand why a school might move to standards-based grading, I suggest leaning into the transparency piece. The goal is more communication and more accurate communication between schools and kids and parents. That’s going to be a key piece for any district considering this.

Why should people care?

Kruse: Grades are a consistent source of struggle for students. For some kids, it’s really about how we can help them be less concerned about the grade and more concerned about the learning. And so standards-based grading can help push in that direction.

And then on the other side, we have kids who have been underserved by traditional education, and a standards-based approach can help these kids see school as something that they can do because they can see incremental progress on the standards rather than just a C or other letter grade. It’s the difference between “I got a C,” and “I got a C, and these are the three standards that I need to work on.”

I think it helps all students, including high achievers and traditionally low achievers, but in different ways.

SciLine is a free service based at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a nonprofit that helps journalists include scientific evidence and experts in their news stories.

Jerrid Kruse receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the William G. Stowe Foundation.

– ref. Standards-based grading offers a different model of assessing student learning in the classroom – https://theconversation.com/standards-based-grading-offers-a-different-model-of-assessing-student-learning-in-the-classroom-277792

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Ryan Creps, Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership, University at Buffalo

The Department of Justice announced in March 2026 that it is suing Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles.

The lawsuits allege that both universities failed to adequately address antisemitism on campus, violating students’ civil rights.

These cases follow earlier efforts by the Trump administration in 2025 to block federal funding to several major universities. The Trump administration has also – largely unsuccessfully – pushed universities to sign agreements that would give the federal government greater oversight over their day-to-day operations.

In 2025, the Trump administration launched broad Title VI investigations into 60 colleges and universities. These investigations focused on whether schools had done enough to protect Jewish students from discrimination and harassment, particularly in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, the subsequent war in Gaza, and widespread protests across U.S. college campuses.

Many of those investigations continue. Title VI is part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin in any program that receives federal funding.

These federal investigations have prompted scientific researchers, among others, across higher education to ask whether the government can invoke claims of civil rights law violations to justify cutting off federal research funding that supports their labs and projects.

As a scholar of educational leadership and policy, I think it is helpful to place the Trump administration approach to higher education within a broader understanding of how courts have interpreted civil rights laws within the past few decades and the nuanced way the Supreme Court has found they apply to universities.

Supreme Court weighs in

In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. This law banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin in employment, education and public places.

Congress then passed the Higher Education Act in 1965. This law significantly increased the federal government’s investment in colleges and universities. It also created the Pell Grant program – the first federally funded need-based financial aid program for undergraduate students.

In addition, the Higher Education Act spelled out that schools that receive federal funding need to comply with civil rights laws.

Leaders of Grove City College, a small nondenominational Christian college in rural Pennsylvania, were concerned that this law would bring unwanted government oversight.

At the time, the college did not accept any direct federal funding. But some of its students received Basic Educational Opportunity Grants. These grants helped undergraduate students pay for college. Unlike loans, these grants did not have to be repaid.

In 1975, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare asked all universities and colleges with students who received federal grants to agree to comply with Title IX, a 1972 law that prohibits discrimination based on someone’s sex.

In 1976, Grove City refused to sign on to this agreement. A legal back-and-forth ensued.

Grove City College argued that the federal government’s request amounted to unwarranted government intervention, because the college did not directly receive federal funding. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare threatened to cut off the federal grants Grove City students received.

The Supreme Court eventually ruled in 1984 that Grove City’s financial aid program – but not the entire college – needed to comply with Title IX in order to receive federal aid. That’s because this specific office directly handled federal student aid.

A 1988 law clarifies the ruling

Many House Democrats perceived this Supreme Court ruling as a loophole that would let universities and colleges sidestep civil rights laws by applying them only to the specific programs that received federal funds.

In 1984, a group of Democrats unsuccessfully tried to pass legislation that would have extended civil rights protections across all programs within colleges and universities that receive federal aid for any program. A different version of this bill passed Congress with bipartisan support in 1988, on the brink of the presidential elections.

President Ronald Reagan vetoed the bill. Reagan stated in his explanation to the Senate that this bill “would vastly and unjustifiably expand the power of the Federal Government over the decisions and affairs of private organizations.”

However, many Republicans seeking reelection in Congress feared that rejecting the bill could alienate women and people of color in the upcoming election.

Within a week, Congress voted to override the veto and enacted the Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1988. This law clarified that any college accepting federal funds must comply with civil rights laws in all of its programs. This law also allowed the government to withhold federal research funding from colleges based on civil rights violations.

Enforcing civil rights laws today

The Trump administration is testing just how much the federal government can exert power over colleges and universities that receive federal funding. Some Trump administration supporters say they see this strategy as overdue enforcement against discrimination.

On the other hand, the Association of American Universities, an organization made up of American research universities, is among the opposition arguing that the administration is trying to weaponize civil rights laws to control how colleges and universities are run.

Antisemitic incidents are on the rise in the U.S., including on college campuses. But some observers have noted that the issue is nuanced, and that the administration is likely exploiting a controversial issue to achieve ideological goals.

Federal courts’ interpretations in the Harvard and UCLA lawsuits will further shape how civil rights protections are enforced at colleges and universities. Specifically, these cases will help determine whether the mere allegations of civil rights violations against a university can justify a sweeping freeze of federal research funding.

Ryan Creps 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. Trump administration’s lawsuits against Harvard and UCLA have roots in a decades-old fight over civil rights law – https://theconversation.com/trump-administrations-lawsuits-against-harvard-and-ucla-have-roots-in-a-decades-old-fight-over-civil-rights-law-276586

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Christina Grozinger, Professor of Entomology, Penn State

North America’s bee populations are in trouble, but don’t blame the honey bees. While some people argue that an overabundance of managed honey bees – those raised to help pollinate crops and produce honey – is causing native bees to disappear, the evidence doesn’t support the claim.

What is true is that populations of many species of bees, including honey bees, are struggling.

Half of all honey bee colonies die every winter in the United States, on average. Commercial beekeepers experienced their highest losses on record – more than 60% of their colonies – in the winter of 2024-25. Overall, one-fifth of pollinators in North America are considered to be at risk for extinction due in large part to habitat loss, rising temperatures, extreme weather, diseases and pesticides.

We study bees and other vital pollinators, and we can tell you that there are good reasons to love all the bees. In fact, they’re essential.

Why care about pollinators?

Bees help farmers grow the foods people love to eat, everything from apples to almonds.

Along with other pollinators – such as flies, butterflies and moths – bees help nearly 80% of flowering plants produce fruit and seeds, which in turn support birds and other wildlife.

About 75% of the world’s agricultural crops, including vegetables, fruits and tree nuts, benefit from pollinators. Additionally, pollinators contribute to production of feed for livestock and fiber crops, such as cotton.

In the United States, pollination by insects contributes $34 billion to the economy.

Among the pollinators, honey bees are the most important for agriculture crops. Managed honey bees, which beekeepers can move from field to field, are particularly essential in intensively farmed areas that lack the natural habitat to support wild bees.

So, why are people concerned about honey bees?

Honey bees were introduced to North America by European settlers in the early 1600s.

Since honey bees are not a native species, the most common concern you might hear is that they will outcompete wild bees for pollen and nectar. This is typically portrayed as a numbers game: If resources are limited, the more bees present on the landscape, the less food there is to go around.

Honey bees live in large social colonies and are adept at capitalizing on high-quality patches of flowers, leading to the concern that this species in particular may have a rapid, outsized effect on native bees that share the same food.

Managed bees can also carry viruses and other pathogens that may infect native bee species. Because viruses are shared among colony members, viruses can persist in managed honey bee colonies and then be spread to other bees that forage on the same flowers.

Scientists and farmers also have a concern about economic sustainability if farms are too reliant on honey bees alone for crop pollination. Threats to honey bee health and high colony mortality in the United States could put crops at risk if other pollinators aren’t in the vicinity to do the job.

Why don’t studies find a honey bee impact on native bees?

Humans actually know little about bee interactions. The U.S. has more than 4,000 native bee species, but there is enough data to estimate population sizes and ranges for less than half of them. Meaningful data examining the effects of honey bees on other species are even more scarce.

In a recent analysis, we found that only 15% of 116 published studies on resource competition involving honey bees measure how competition from honey bees affects the survival, reproductive output and long-term population trends of native species.

The majority of published studies on honey bee and wild bee competition address different versions of a narrow question: Do honey bees and native bees visit the same plants?

Because honey bees are “super generalists” that thrive worldwide well beyond their native range, most scientists would predict that the answer to this question is a resounding “yes.”

However, about half of the research suggests that honey bees don’t change the way native bees go about their day at all. From the perspective of a wild bee, the honey bees simply don’t exist in their world.

Different bee species can coexist with very little evidence of direct interaction. An analysis of bee communities measured across diverse agricultural, urban, grassland and forested environments found the abundance of honey bees and the abundance of native bees were positively associated about five times as often as they were negatively associated. In other words, rather than landscapes supporting one bee species at the expense of another, the same habitats support both.

Calls to restrict honey bees from certain locations also often miss a key reality: Native bee hot spots and urban and commercial beekeeping rarely overlap.

Beekeeping is anchored in agricultural lands. North America’s rarest bees thrive in environments like the Sonoran Desert – habitats that are poorly suited for managed colonies.

If competition occurs, it is typically the product of agriculture practices that strip the land of flowering plants that bees need.

Research that has artificially introduced hives into natural areas like the high Sierra – places beekeepers don’t typically go – has generated competition that left less pollen and nectar for the native bees. But frequently competition involves common native bees that are not under threat.

So, if honey bees aren’t to blame, what is?

The top drivers of pollinator declines are considered to be land use – the spread of cities and agriculture, as well as the way land is managed – along with rising temperatures, extreme weather and pesticide use.

Agriculture and urbanization reduce the amount and diversity of flowering plants, and droughts can reduce plant flowering and the resources bees rely on. Pesticides can reduce bees’ ability to lay eggs and care for their offspring, or they can kill bees outright.

The U.S. Geological Survey’s Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab tracks bee populations in the U.S. mid-Atlantic region. Studies using its data have found that urbanization and weather changes have been the major drivers of changes in wild bee abundance and diversity in that region.

As temperatures rise, wild bee populations are expected to decline there. Warmer winters mean bees active in spring emerge earlier from their nests, and increased spring rain and temperature fluctuations can limit their ability to feed their offspring, meaning fewer bees.

The western bumble bee, Bombus occidentalis, was once widespread and abundant across western North America, but it has been in decline since the late 1990s. Long-term monitoring of its populations from 1998 to 2020 shows the primary reasons are land management changes, increasing temperature, drought and pesticide use.

What can you do to support pollinators?

The biggest threat to pollinators is the disappearing variety of flowering plants.

You can help reverse this by filling your garden with more flowering plants, trees and shrubs to give bees, butterflies and other pollinators a variety of food sources.

You can also advocate for bee-friendly behavior in your community, such as creating pollinator habitats in public and private spaces and reducing the use of harsh pesticides and herbicides. Planting more flowers in parks and along roadsides, and protecting wildlands where the rarest native bees live, can help keep these wonderful species thriving.

Christina Grozinger receives funding to study honey bee and wild bee health, management and conservation from the National Science Foundation, US Department of Agriculture, Foundaiton for Food & Agriculture Research, Human Science Frontiers Program.

Andony Melathopolous receives funding from USDA-NIFA – 2022-08511.

Clare Rittschof receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the Kavli Foundation, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, USDA-AFRI, the Bill Gatton Foundation, and the Research Corporation for Science Advancement.

Harland Patch has received funding to study pollinator heath, floral traits and plant-pollinator interactions from the National Science Foundation, US Department of Agriculture, Gates Foundation and the Horticultural Research Institute.

Jay Evans receives funding from USDA-ARS and USDA-NIFA

– ref. It’s OK to love all the bees (the honey bees, too) – https://theconversation.com/its-ok-to-love-all-the-bees-the-honey-bees-too-279849

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Hollis Karoly, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

Amid a renaissance in the science of psychedelics, public interest in psilocybin – or magic mushrooms, as they’ve long been known – is surging.

One study found that rates of psilocybin use increased 44% among adults ages 18-29 from 2019 to 2023, and 188% among those over age 30. This amounts to more than 5 million adults using psilocybin in 2023 alone. And those numbers are rising: A study published in early 2026 found that about 11 million adults in the United States used psilocybin in the previous year.

In many ways, the growing scientific and public interest in psilocybin mirrors the early days of recreational cannabis legalization in the U.S. Much like how cannabis commercialization quickly outpaced the development of regulations necessary to protect public health, the expanding psilocybin market and surging public interest are moving faster than the science and regulations needed to ensure it is used safely.

We are substance use researchers who have spent more than a decade studying the many new, high-THC cannabis products that have flooded the legal-market.

Now, we similarly aim to bridge the gap between public enthusiasm for psilocybin and the limited scientific evidence available about its potential benefits and risks. Currently, this type of real-world data on the effects of psilocybin mushrooms is almost nonexistent.

How do psilocybin mushrooms work?

Psilocybin is a prodrug, which means that it has very low activity until the body converts it into psilocin. Psilocin is the compound primarily responsible for the psychoactive effects of psilocybin mushrooms.

Psilocin resembles the chemical messenger serotonin, which is involved in regulating a range of physiological and psychological functions, including mood, appetite, cognition and sensory perception. As a result, when psilocin binds to serotonin receptors, it alters how people think, feel and experience the world.

Importantly, research suggests that psilocin also alters the brain’s ability to strengthen or weaken neural connections, referred to as synaptic plasticity. This process likely underlies the profound and sometimes long-lasting effects psilocybin mushrooms can have on thoughts, emotions and perception.

Psilocybin mushrooms contain numerous other compounds, together known as tryptamines, such as baeocystin, norbaeocystin and aeruginascin. Research on rodents shows that mushrooms containing these compounds may elicit stronger and longer-lasting effects than psilocybin alone.

But very little is known about how these other tryptamines affect humans. This is because federal regulations require researchers to use an isolated, synthetic version of psilocybin in clinical studies rather than the entire mushroom.

Thus, the many ongoing clinical trials testing psilocybin as a treatment for various mental health conditions use synthetic psilocybin that does not contain these other tryptamines.

Psilocybin mushrooms sit in a legal gray area

Psilocybin is more accessible than ever before.

In 2019, Denver, Colorado, became the first American city to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms. This means that possession becomes the lowest law enforcement priority and criminal penalties are reduced or eliminated, but it does not fully legalize them.

Over the next two years, several other U.S. cities including Oakland and Santa Cruz, California; Seattle, Washington; and Detroit, Michigan, followed suit. In 2020, Oregon legalized psilocybin for supervised use in licensed settings, and Colorado did the same in 2022. These legal, supervised-use programs allow access to psilocybin mushrooms in regulated environments without a prescription.

Even for people living outside those states and cities, the barriers to accessing psilocybin mushrooms are low. With a quick Google search and around US$35, anyone can legally purchase kits containing the materials needed to grow psilocybin-containing mushrooms. These kits are legal to buy and sell because they contain only mushroom spores, which are tiny reproductive cells from which mushrooms grow. Once these spores begin growing into mushrooms, they can produce psilocybin, making the mushrooms a federal Schedule 1 substance.

Because psilocybin mushrooms exist in this legal gray area and are governed by different rules across states, psilocybin mushrooms are essentially unregulated across most of the U.S.

As a result, consumers lack reliable information about what their mushrooms contain, how much they should take and how to use them safely.

Psilocybin potency is increasing in the US

Much like the cannabis industry, which has seen a steady increase in product variety and product strength since legalization, the psilocybin mushroom market is experiencing rapid growth.

For instance, psilocybin edibles are now available and increasingly popular.

In addition, selective cultivation practices are being used by individual and commercial growers to systematically increase the amount of psilocybin contained in their mushroom strains. For example, the Oakland Hyphae Cup, a community contest intended to identify the best mushroom strains, has shown wide variability in psilocybin content across samples.

Researchers are identifying a similar pattern of widely variable psilocybin content in scientific studies of psychedelic mushrooms from around the world.

Potential harms of psilocybin

Despite psilocybin’s therapeutic promise, it also carries risks. Psilocybin can cause headaches, nausea, dizziness and changes in blood pressure.

Less commonly, some people experience psychotic symptoms, suicidal thoughts, anxiety, paranoia, confusion or emotional distress.

Another serious potential side effect of psychedelic drugs is what’s known as hallucinogen persisting perception disorder. It involves ongoing perceptual distortions similar to those experienced while directly under the influence of psilocybin, which can persist for weeks, months or years, even once the psilocybin has left the body.

Harms are more likely when people take high doses.

As mushroom potency increases without market regulation, consumers may inadvertently ingest more psilocybin than intended, increasing the risk of harm. Without sufficient research on modern psilocybin products, consumers have little guidance on how to reduce potential harms.

Next steps in research and regulation

Studying psilocybin in the real world requires creative research approaches.

Our team hopes to work within federal restrictions to study people using their own psilocybin mushroom products at home, while providing real-time data to our research team using app-based surveys.

Independent laboratories using state-of-the-art measurement techniques can aid researchers like us by providing information about the potency of the mushroom products that people are using.

While ongoing clinical trials provide important data about the effects of psilocybin under tightly controlled conditions, real-world data is needed to understand how modern psilocybin mushrooms are used and experienced by consumers.

These insights matter not only for scientists and policymakers but for the growing number of people trying psilocybin mushrooms for relief, self-improvement or out of curiosity. In a largely unregulated market, and with few clear guidelines on safe use, consumers are left to simply figure it out on their own.

Hollis Karoly receives funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Institute for Cannabis Research (ICR).

Kent Hutchison 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. Psilocybin mushrooms are going mainstream, but scientific research and regulation lag behind – https://theconversation.com/psilocybin-mushrooms-are-going-mainstream-but-scientific-research-and-regulation-lag-behind-277472

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Stephen D. Turner, Associate Professor of Data Science, University of Virginia

Artificial intelligence is rapidly learning to autonomously design and run biological experiments, but the systems intended to govern those capabilities are struggling to keep pace.

AI company OpenAI and biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks announced in February 2026 that OpenAI’s flagship model GPT-5 had autonomously designed and run 36,000 biological experiments. It did this through a robotic cloud laboratory, a facility where automated equipment controlled remotely by computers carries out experiments. The AI model proposed study designs, and robots carried them out and fed the data back to the model for the next round. Humans set the goal, and the machines did much of the work in the lab, cutting the cost of producing a desired protein by 40%.

This is programmable biology: designing biological components on a computer and building them in the physical world, with AI closing the loop.

For decades, biology mostly moved from observation toward understanding. Scientists sequenced the genomes of organisms to catalog all of their DNA, learning how genes encode the proteins that carry out life’s functions. The invention of tools like CRISPR then allowed scientists to edit that DNA for specific purposes, such as disabling a gene linked to disease. AI is now accelerating a third phase, where computers can both design biological systems and rapidly test them.

The process looks less like traditional benchwork in a lab and more like engineering: design, build, test, learn and repeat. Where a traditional experiment might test a single hypothesis, AI-driven programmable biology explores thousands of design variations in parallel, iterating the way an engineer refines a prototype.

As a data scientist who studies genomics and biosecurity, I research how AI is reshaping biological research and what safeguards that demands. Current safety measures and regulations have not kept pace with these capabilities, and the gap between what AI can do in biology and what governance systems are prepared to handle is growing.

What AI makes possible

The clearest example of how researchers are using AI to automate research is AI-accelerated protein design.

Proteins are the molecular machines that carry out most functions in living cells. Designing new ones has traditionally required years of trial and error because even small changes to a protein’s sequence can alter its shape and function in unpredictable ways.

Protein language models, which are AI systems trained on millions of natural protein sequences, can quickly predict how mutations will change a protein’s behavior or design new proteins. These AI models are designing potential new drugs and speeding vaccine development.

Paired with automated labs, these models create tight loops of experimentation and revision, testing thousands of variations in days rather than the months or years a human team would need.

Faster protein engineering could mean faster responses to emerging infections and cheaper drugs.

The dual-use problem

Researchers have raised concerns that these same AI tools could be misused, a challenge known as the dual-use problem: Technologies developed for beneficial purposes can also be repurposed to cause harm.

For example, researchers have found that AI models integrated with automated labs can optimize how well a virus spreads, even without specialized training. Scientists have developed a risk-scoring tool to evaluate how AI could modify a virus’s capabilities, such as altering which species it infects or helping it evade the immune system.

Current AI models are able to walk users through the technical steps of recovering live viruses from synthetic DNA. Researchers have determined that AI could lower barriers at multiple stages in the process of developing a bioweapon, and that current oversight does not adequately address this risk.

Risk from bio AI

Experienced scientists are already using AI to plan and design biological experiments. The question of whether AI can help people with limited biology training carry out dangerous lab work is the subject of active research.

Two recent studies have reached different conclusions.

A study by AI company Scale AI and biosecurity nonprofit SecureBio found that when people with limited biology experience were given access to large language models, which is the type of AI behind tools like ChatGPT, they were able to complete biosecurity-related tasks, such as troubleshooting complex virology lab protocols with four times greater accuracy. In some areas, these novices outperformed trained experts. Around 90% of these novices reported little difficulty getting the models to provide risky biological information, such as detailed instructions on working with dangerous pathogens, despite built-in safety filters meant to block such outputs.

In contrast, a study led by Active Site, a research nonprofit that studies the use of AI in synthetic biology, found that AI help did not lead to significant differences in the ability of novices to complete the complex workflow to produce a virus in a biosafety laboratory. However, the AI-assisted group succeeded more often on most tasks and finished some steps faster, most notably on growing cells in the lab.

Hands-on work in the lab has traditionally been a bottleneck to translating designs into results. Even a brilliant study plan still depends on skilled human hands to carry out. That may not last, as cloud laboratories and robotic automation become cheaper and more accessible, allowing researchers to send AI-generated experimental designs to remote facilities for execution.

Responding to AI-driven biological risks

AI systems are now able to run experiments autonomously and at scale, but existing regulations were not designed for this. Rules governing biological research do not account for AI-driven automation, and rules governing AI do not specifically address its use in biology.

In the U.S., the Biden administration had issued a 2023 executive order on AI security that included biosecurity provisions, but the Trump administration revoked it. Screening the synthetic DNA that commercial providers make to ensure it cannot be misused to make pathogens or toxins remains mostly voluntary. A bipartisan bill introduced in 2026 to mandate DNA screening does not yet address AI-designed sequences that evade current detection methods.

The 1975 Biological Weapons Convention, an international treaty prohibiting the production and use of bioweapons, contains no provisions for AI. The U.K. AI Security Institute and the U.S. National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology have both called for coordinated government action.

The safety evaluations that AI labs run before releasing new models are often opaque and unsuited to capture real-world risk. Researchers have estimated that even modest improvements in an AI model’s ability to help plan pathogen-related experiments could translate to thousands of additional deaths from bioterrorism per year. Timelines for when these capabilities cross critical thresholds remain unclear.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative has proposed a managed access framework for biological AI tools, matching who can use a given tool to the risk level of the model rather than blanket restrictions. The RAND Center on AI, Security and Technology outlined a set of actions researchers could take to improve biosecurity, including improved DNA synthesis screening and model evaluations before release. Researchers have also argued that biological data itself needs governance, especially genomic data that could train models with dangerous capabilities.

Some AI companies have started voluntarily imposing their own safety measures. Anthropic activated its highest safety tier when it released its most advanced model in mid-2025. At the same moment, OpenAI updated its Preparedness Framework, revising the thresholds for how much biological risk a model can pose before additional safeguards are required. But these are voluntary, company-specific steps. Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, wrote that the pace of AI development may soon outrun any single company’s ability to assess the risk of a given model.

When used in a well-controlled setting, AI can help scientists quickly reach their research goals. What happens when the same capabilities operate outside those controls is a question that policy has not yet answered. Overreact, and talent and investment may move elsewhere while the technology continues advancing anyway. Underreact, and the risks of that technology could be exploited to cause real harm.

I am applying for grants in this area.

– ref. AI can design and run thousands of lab experiments without human hands. Humanity isn’t ready for the new risks this brings to biology – https://theconversation.com/ai-can-design-and-run-thousands-of-lab-experiments-without-human-hands-humanity-isnt-ready-for-the-new-risks-this-brings-to-biology-279191

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Ross Channing Reed, Lecturer in Philosophy, Missouri University of Science and Technology

Friends can help us with all kinds of things in life. How could I forget moving that piano for friends in Chicago? Fortunately, none of us ended up in the ER.

One of the most important things friends do, though, might seem surprising: They help us get to know ourselves.

Both in their 50s, Cindy and Ann had been friends since the second grade. Year after year, they never missed a birthday. Cindy would give Ann gourmet popcorn or maybe a sweatshirt from her alma mater, while Ann would give Cindy a special book on a topic that interested her, or maybe an old batch of family recipes. At one point, it dawned on Cindy just how thoughtful Ann’s gifts were. It wasn’t about the cost. “She really thinks about my life and what I’m doing,” Cindy said. “It’s amazing. Ann is just really thoughtful.”

Cindy had always imagined herself as a thoughtful person, too. But in comparing the kinds of gifts they sent to each other, she realized that she was not thinking about Ann in the way that Ann was thinking about her. And so began her deliberate process of becoming more thoughtful – as a result of the self-insight she had gained from her friendship with Ann.

As a philosopher and philosophical counselor, I’ve noticed the pronounced connection between friendship and self-knowledge in my counseling practice. Cindy and Ann are one example among many. I’ve come to the conclusion that to really know yourself, it’s necessary to have good friends.

The link between self-knowledge and friendship was key for Aristotle, too, more than 2,000 years ago. “Eudaimonia” – roughly translated as living well, or happiness – often remains elusive, yet Aristotle believed it didn’t have to be. Eudaimonia is largely within people’s control, he said, so long as they aim at the right targets.

Two of those targets are knowing yourself and having good friends. The two are tied together – you can’t develop self-knowledge in a vacuum. Happiness, for Aristotle, can never be a solitary pursuit.

Knowing – and befriending – yourself

Humans have a highly developed capacity to think about their thinking. This is possible because of a split in human consciousness: There is consciousness, and there is consciousness of consciousness – what is known as reflection or metacognition. Metacognition allows us to step back and note our thoughts and feelings, analyzing them almost as if they belonged to someone else.

This split makes reason, self-knowledge and morality possible. We can deliberate about our thoughts, feelings and potential actions.

Self-knowledge isn’t the same as being intellectual or even intelligent. Instead, it’s about using self-awareness and reason to develop character.

In Aristotle’s view, character arises from developing habits that lead to intellectual and moral virtue, so that personal integrity is possible. This, in turn, builds self-trust and self-respect, as you learn to rely on yourself to do what is right – what Aristotle called “enkratēs,” or continence.

In other words, self-knowledge is developing a good relationship with yourself. In your own internal dialogue, you become another trusted friend to yourself, based on what you’ve seen in your friendships: virtues like generosity, courage, truthfulness and prudence. Self-knowledge and moral development are tied together and realized in community, as underscored by Aristotle scholar Joseph Owens.

Friendship based on character

Aristotle recognized three types of friendship. Some are based on utility, like a study-group friend. Others are based on pleasure, such as friends in an antique car club.

The third and highest form of friendship, which can last a lifetime, is based on virtue, or “arete.”

In these situations, Aristotle wrote, a friend becomes “another self.” These friendships are based on mutual goodwill and love for the other person’s character; they are not fundamentally transactional. Instead, they are anchored in care and concern for the other.

Such friendships are few, but foster self-knowledge. As philosopher Mavis Biss emphasizes, a good friend has a perspective on you that you yourself do not. You can step back and analyze your desires, thoughts and feelings, but you can never actually observe yourself.

That means self-knowledge always has a social dimension. True friends enhance each other’s insight and capacity for virtue. As you get to know your friend, you get to know yourself – and are challenged to become a better version of yourself.

“To perceive and to know a friend, therefore, is necessarily in a manner to perceive and in a manner to know oneself,” Aristotle wrote in the “Eudemian Ethics.” The friend is a mirror that helps refine our thinking, perception and moral understanding.

Aiming at the good life

In the end, what makes eudaimonia – the good life – possible? For Aristotle, it’s using reason to become our best selves. Knowledge and self-knowledge are the most desirable of all things, Aristotle argued: “One always desires to live because one always desires to know, and because one wishes to be oneself the object known.”

And there’s no way to get there without good friends. A trusted and respected friend shares perceptions, enhances self-knowledge and magnifies life’s pleasures.

The desire to know and be known is part of the quest for happiness. Knowledge of self, others and everything else is interconnected. For Aristotle, relationships are a portal into the realms of the vast and mysterious universe.

Ross Channing Reed 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 good life requires two things, self-knowledge and friends – you can’t have one without the other – https://theconversation.com/the-good-life-requires-two-things-self-knowledge-and-friends-you-cant-have-one-without-the-other-277935

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Mathew Schmalz, Professor of Religious Studies, College of the Holy Cross

Pope Leo XIV will begin his journey to four African countries – Algeria, Cameroon, Angola and Equatorial Guinea – on April 13, 2026.

Africa represents the fastest-growing part of the Catholic Church worldwide, seeing an increase from 281 million members in 2023 to over 288 million in 2024.

The Vatican has announced a theme for each country along the pope’s journey and four logos that combine Christian images with symbols of each nation. As a scholar of global Catholicism, I argue that these themes, taken together, relate to the major focus of Leo’s papacy: the need for peace in a divided world.

1. ‘Dialogue and encounter’ in Algeria

In Algeria, the logo is two doves drinking from the same cup, with the words “Peace be with you” in French, along with the traditional Muslim greeting “Peace be upon you” rendered in Arabic. The same phrase is also written in Berber, one of Algeria’s official languages. The theme for this first stop of Leo’s trip is “dialogue and encounter.”

With this symbolism, Leo is inviting deeper understanding and collaboration between Christians and Muslims.

Catholics are a tiny community in Muslim-majority Algeria. Interreligious tension exists, with arbitrary detentions of Christians and arrests under the nation’s blasphemy laws. And Algeria is still dealing with the aftermath of its “Black Decade.” This period from 1991 to 2002 saw nearly 200,000 Algerians killed in violence between the government and Islamist rebel groups.

Nineteen Catholic men and women killed during the conflict were officially recognized as “blessed” by the Vatican because they died as martyrs. Among these were the seven Trappist monks of Tibhirine who were killed by Islamist insurgents after they refused to leave their monastery during the violence. Expecting his own death, the leader of the monastery, Christian De Chergé, had written a spiritual testament that emphasized the power of interreligious encounter and the deep spiritual ties that bind Christians and Muslims.

Against this background, Leo’s planned visit to Maqam Echahid, a memorial honoring Algeria’s struggle for independence, as well as his presence at the Great Mosque of Algiers, will be important opportunities for him to put encounter and dialogue into practice.

2. Unity in Cameroon

In Cameroon, the logo has Leo praying over an open Bible with a map of Cameroon as an overlay. The theme is “unity in Christ,” specifically relating to Leo’s own motto “in Illo uno unum,” or “In the one Christ, we are one.”

Cameroon is a majority-Christian country, with a significant Muslim minority. Approximately 25% of the population is Catholic.

Within this complex nation, there are real threats to unity. There was violence after the disputed 2025 reelection of 92-year-old Cameroonian President Paul Biya, who first came to power in 1982. Most significantly, there is the “Anglophone crisis,” a consequence of the colonial divide between French- and English-speaking areas of the country. Hundreds of thousands of Cameroonians have been displaced by violence between the government and separatists in the English-speaking north and southwest regions of the country.

There has also been competition between Christian denominations – especially amid the rise of new “Christian revivalist” groups that preach the “prosperity gospel,” which promises that faith in Jesus will bring riches and other material rewards.

Leo has said that the Christian idea of unity respects “the mystery that every person and every community carries within them.” Given the linguistic and ethnic diversity of Cameroon, Leo is calling on Cameroonians to envision how Christianity can become a unifying force for peace in a nation still struggling with a colonial legacy of division.

3. Reconciliation and peace in Angola

Angola’s logo is dominated by a map of the country, and the motto is “Pope Leo XIV, pilgrim of hope, reconciliation, and peace, blesses Angola.”

Angola is a Christian-majority country, with Catholics constituting approximately 49% of the population. Catholicism came to Angola with the Portuguese in 1491. Angola remained a Portuguese colony until 1975, after which followed a 27-year civil war, which was fueled, in part, by the U.S. and the Soviet Union competing for oil resources and influence during the Cold War.

Of the countries Leo is visiting, Angola has the most income inequality, caused by corruption and the nation’s elite taking advantage of the country’s oil revenue. The nation’s human rights record is also poor.

The theme of reconciliation and peace relates to the continuing aftermath of the civil war, which can be seen not just in wealth inequality but also in the lack of critical infrastructure. The Catholic Church in Angola has been the primary nongovernmental institution filling this gap by establishing schools and hospitals. But such efforts require conditions of peace.

Angola has also seen waves of refugees fleeing violence in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo. Catholic churches in Angola have played a central role in welcoming and resettling those crossing the 1,560-mile (2,511-kilometer) border between the two nations.

Many Angolan Catholics are especially looking forward to Leo’s visit to a shrine to Mary at the Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição in Muxima, built in 1599. During the colonial era, slaves were forcibly baptized here before being sold.

When Leo visits Muxima, Angolan Catholics hope for a celebration that reflects the country’s diversity. The shrine regularly attracts 2 million visitors each year, including Protestants and Muslims. Catholic leaders hope that a similar number will attend to see the pope and honor “Mamã Muxima,” the Black Madonna who presides at the shrine.

4. Hope in Equatorial Guinea

In Equatorial Guinea, the logo for the pope’s visit is a golden cross with the words, in Spanish, “Christ, light of Equatorial Guinea, toward a future of hope.”

Equatorial Guinea is a Catholic-majority country struggling to develop a model of “inclusive growth” that spreads its oil income more equitably. The country has been led by only one leader since 1979, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

Most notable will be Leo’s visit to Bata, the site of a munitions explosion that killed over 100 people in 2021. While the exact cause behind the blast is a matter of controversy, the munitions dump ignited while construction and brush clearing was happening in the area.

In choosing Bata as the site for his visit, Leo is drawing attention to how preparations for war can often bring violence to the innocent. The hope that this motto refers to is the hope of the resurrection – of life triumphing over death – as reflected in the golden cross.

A pope of peace

Leo has praised the African church as a “dynamic reality,” meaning that it is growing and evolving. And Africa’s importance to Catholicism is not just about demographics. African Catholicism has a vibrant intellectual life. In particular, African Catholic theologians have addressed what is called contextual theology, which often integrates themes and practices from indigenous African traditions in addition to relying on the Bible.

It will be interesting to see whether Leo will explicitly draw upon African theological resources in his public speeches. As planned now, Leo’s African journey will intertwine the theme of peace with other concerns central to his pontificate: the plight of the poor and marginalized, the experiences of migrants and refugees, and the possibility of finding common ground amid the world’s divisions.

In his most recent Easter blessing, Leo remarked that the power of Christ is “totally nonviolent.” In this sense, the pope is arguing, peace is necessary not just for any kind of social change but for being faithful to the example of Jesus Christ, which likely will be his central message for Africa.

Mathew Schmalz 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. Pope Leo XIV’s Africa journey: How each stop reflects his message of peace – https://theconversation.com/pope-leo-xivs-africa-journey-how-each-stop-reflects-his-message-of-peace-279217

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Stephanie A. (Sam) Martin, Frank and Bethine Church Endowed Chair of Public Affairs, Boise State University

Among the most disorienting things about President Donald Trump’s public language is how easily it can feel numbing and shocking in the same moment. He says something outrageous, the country recoils, and then the recoil itself begins to feel familiar.

As a scholar who studies presidential rhetoric, I know that over time that rhythm does its own kind of damage. It teaches the public to absorb the breach. What once might have sounded like a genuine political emergency or a violation of constitutional decorum begins to register as just another day in American political life.

But the past few days merit notice. The president’s demagoguery has taken a darker turn.

Trump’s rhetoric about Iran has become more than inflammatory. Beginning with posts to Truth Social in early April, he has used profanity-laden language – “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell” – to threaten attacks on the country’s infrastructure. He urged Iranians to rise up against their government. He warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not comply with U.S. demands.

The Associated Press treated those remarks as a significant escalation in the context of a live conflict, not merely as familiar Trumpian excess: “As the conflict has entered its second month, Trump has escalated his warnings to bomb Iran’s infrastructure.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross also issued the unusual reminder that the rules of war must be respected “in words and action,” suggesting that the rhetoric itself had become part of the danger.

But were Trump’s recent remarks really different from his many earlier outbursts?

I think they were. For years, Trump’s rhetoric has relied on insult, ridicule, threat and contempt. He has degraded opponents and helped coarsen the terms of public life.

What seems different about his words during the first week of April 2026 is the scale of violence his language primed people to imagine. His remarks about Iran moved beyond personal attacks or chest-thumping nationalism to take on a tone of collective punishment and civilizational destruction. The style was familiar. The horizon of harm was not.

Politics of fear

Presidential rhetoric is more about permission than persuasion. Presidents do not only argue. They signal.

Through those signals, they tell the public what kind of situation this is, what kind of danger is at hand, and what kinds of response are reasonable. In that sense, the president can function like a human starting gun. His words cue journalists, legislators, party allies and ordinary supporters about how to classify events before anyone has fully processed them.

Political theorist Corey Robin’s work on the politics of fear is a useful lens for understanding what is happening with Trump’s violent rhetoric.

Fear, in Robin’s view, is not simply a feeling that arises naturally in response to danger. It is politically manufactured. Power teaches people what to fear, how to name danger, and where to direct their apprehension. Presidential rhetoric is an essential tool for performing that work.

Thus, a president does not only describe a threat. He also gives it shape and scale. He tells the public how large it is, how close it is, and what kinds of response should feel reasonable in its presence.

A good example of a president doing this happened after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when, while visiting ground zero in New York City, George W. Bush said, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” With that sentence, Bush acknowledged the gravity of what had happened, but also promised to fight back and bring justice to the terrorists.

When it comes to statements like those Trump has recently made about Iran, the worry is not that the president has said something extreme. Instead, the larger concern lies in what repeatedly using extreme language does to the atmosphere in which judgment takes place.

Political hyperbole lowers the threshold of what the public can imagine as legitimate, as allowable. When presidents make threats like the ones Trump issued, mass suffering becomes more imaginable. The president’s words and social media posts test whether the public will continue to hear such language as over the line, or whether it will be absorbed as one more hard-edged negotiating tactic.

Shaping reality

Presidential rhetoric matters for reasons that go beyond persuasion or style.

It helps arrange reality. It tells the public what is serious, who is dangerous, whose suffering counts, and what forms of violence can be described as necessary. President Barack Obama did this in 2012, when he was speaking at a vigil to honor the shooting victims at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

“We bear a responsibility for every child because we’re counting on everybody else to help look after ours,” he said. “That we’re all parents; that they’re all our children.” With these words, Obama called everyone to feel, up close, the horrific loss of 20 children shot dead, and to work for a solution to gun violence.

Trump has benefited from a public worn down by repetition. Every new breach arrives trailing the memory of earlier ones.

People begin to doubt their own reactions. Surely this is appalling, they may think, but also, somehow, this is what he always does. That dual feeling is part of the harm. A damaged baseline makes serious escalation harder to recognize and judge.

The disorientation and disgust that so many people experienced in response to Trump’s thundering, violent proclamations is important. Even after years of erosion of what was deemed normal, some lines remain visible.

Paying attention now is not about pretending Trump has suddenly become someone new. It is about recognizing more clearly what his presidency has been teaching the public to hear as thinkable. The most serious harm may lie not only in what follows such rhetoric, but in the world it helps prepare people to accept.

Stephanie A. (Sam) Martin 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. Presidential words can turn the unthinkable into the thinkable − for better or for worse – https://theconversation.com/presidential-words-can-turn-the-unthinkable-into-the-thinkable-for-better-or-for-worse-280126

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Magdalena Stawkowski, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of South Carolina

About a year into my field research in Kazakhstan, I went to the city of Kurchatov, once the secret command center of the Soviet nuclear program, to make some photocopies. On the ground floor of an apartment building I found a store whose owner had a copy machine as well as several glass display cases selling souvenir stickers, magnets and other objects featuring hammers and sickles, stars and mushroom clouds.

These kinds of trinkets were not particularly surprising to me. You can find them in many places. But a bright yellow button about the size of my palm stopped me in my tracks: “I am a radioactive mutant” (“Ya radioaktivnyy mutant”), read its simple message.

I laughed to myself, thinking that the button was meant to be funny, that a tourist would buy it to wear ironically and tell stories about having been near a nuclear test site.

But the button’s message is also true for the thousands of people who live in this area. Residents actually say, “I am a mutant,” when they talk about their bodies, their family histories and their radioactive environment.

As a cultural-medical anthropologist, I study health and illness as life experiences. I’ve spent many months in villages around the Soviet-era Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan, known locally as the Polygon.

In my book “Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan,” I explore how the people here have created new forms of mutual aid and camaraderie in the shadow of nuclear catastrophe. Their stories weave together fallout, the Cold War and secret government agencies, international aid workers and scientists, and everyday life in the Anthropocene.

Scale of nuclear testing in Kazakhstan

The Polygon is a roughly 7,000-square-mile (18,000-square-kilometer) area, close to the size of New Jersey, that was the Soviet Union’s primary nuclear testing ground for 40 years.

Between 1949 and 1989, more than 450 nuclear tests took place here with a total explosive yield of 2,500 Hiroshima bombs. The most devastating were the above-ground tests, 116 of which were detonated between 1949 and 1963. I’ve seen the archival footage: mushroom clouds rising over the steppe, shock waves knocking people down dozens of miles away.

Today, this history is etched into a landscape pockmarked with deep craters and atomic lakes, contaminated with radioactive isotopes cesium-137, strontium-90 and plutonium-239 that can remain dangerous for thousands of years.

I brought the mutant button to show Burkut. At 78, he was the oldest resident in the village of Koian. A pensioner, he was once a tractor operator on a massive Soviet state farm. He and others of his age watched bombs going off in the distance as they worked.

He laughed at the button, and we sat down for tea. His wife boiled the water longer than needed – as was explained to me as a matter of fact, everyone in the village does this “for the radiation.”

When nuclear testing ended and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Polygon was closed and then simply abandoned. Kazakhstan became an independent nation stuck with legacies of nuclear testing. No cleanup, no warnings, no evacuations – just a vast, contaminated landscape left to nature, metal scavengers and whoever called it home.

This abandonment has never been formally addressed: As of today, there is not a single international body with a mandate to assist communities like Koian. What residents experience as personal abandonment is also a global policy failure.

When I talk about my fieldwork, many Americans are shocked to find that “living on a nuclear test site” is even a logical statement. But thousands of people do still live in scattered villages and homesteads around the test site’s borders or inside the official perimeter, with some settlements just a thousand feet from atomic craters that have become watering holes for livestock.

A landmark 2025 report released by Norwegian People’s Aid estimates that atmospheric nuclear tests are on track to cause at least 2 million additional cancer deaths worldwide, a figure that includes the region around the Polygon.

What is particularly devastating about the Polygon’s story is that Soviet state institutions knew about the health impacts of radiation exposure early on. In the late 1950s, secret medical clinics monitored nearby populations, under the pretext of treating animal-borne diseases as they cataloged radiation-induced illnesses and tracked death rates. This went on for almost 40 years and affected mostly ethnic Kazakhs.

Burkut is one of many people around the Polygon I came to know who lived through it all – the mushroom clouds, the shaking house. He buried neighbors and family members who died of strange cancers or what doctors called “mysterious illnesses.” The same doctors blamed their problems on “unsanitary lifestyles” and never mentioned nuclear fallout.

Only during the Soviet policy of glasnost (openness) in the 1980s did information begin to appear.

Embracing radiation

Health studies, albeit partial, document elevated cancer rates throughout the region, and the Kazakh state officially recognizes Burkut and over 1 million others as radiation victims. So the state has enshrined victimhood in law, even though the science remains contested.

Bodies respond to radiation exposure differently, and decades of secrecy mean that exposure documentation is partial at best. Science can’t draw a clear line between residents’ headaches, dizziness, intestinal issues and kidney problems, let alone the cancers and radiation. Burkut and the rest have local antidotes for the problem. Boiling water is but one.

My first question about life in the Polygon was always, “Why do people stay?”

As Burkut and others explained without jest, “Our organism is different now.” They would tell me, “Clean air is our death,” meaning that the radioactive environment as they know it has changed them so they now depend on it.

I found that people live in what I call an “atomic collective” – a community bound together by contamination and cultural, political, economic and social abandonment. Their logic for staying is not rooted in denial but in affirmation and adaptation. Decades of shared experience in a place where scientific uncertainty runs deep has galvanized local perceptions. “People who move to the city can survive only two years – maximum,” Burkut told me. “Only two are still alive of those who left.”

Those who have tried relocating to cities faced discrimination as “people of the Polygon,” or were thought of as backward peasants who end up cleaning floors and living in moldy apartments. Where Burkut focuses on the dead, Ainur, a 40-year-old woman who grew up in the shadow of the test site, focuses on staying put. “At least here we can grow our own food, raise animals, and the air is clean,” she explained.

They’re affected by their ecosystem, Koian’s residents will say, but they’ve survived. “We’re used to it,” many people told me.

Refusal to be victims

When I lived in Koian, I watched neighbors share everything from gasoline to food to medicine. Everyone helps cut grasses in the fall and build towering piles of it on the village’s barns for winter feed. Together, their herds of horses, cows and sheep number in the thousands. Networks are everything when alternatives don’t exist.

Some of the younger men work in mines in the region, some even within the Polygon itself. Others have scavenged metal from grown-over nuclear sites. These prospects are dwindling, though. “We can survive on our livestock,” one herder explained, rejecting how outsiders see their impoverished life. These descendants of Kazakh nomadic herders, who once moved freely across the steppe with their animals, now speak of staying put as a mark of strength rather than constraint.

No one is asking for paved roads, new schools, emergency services or clean land. When electricity is knocked out by the common winter blizzards, they light candles. Outsiders may see apathy. During my time in Koian I understood this as their collective refusal – a community’s decision to reject systems that had abandoned them and instead create their own terms for survival.

“I am a radioactive mutant” isn’t just a darkly humorous button – it is a declaration of collective strength that emerged from collective abandonment.

Today’s policy debates about resuming nuclear testing largely ignore these stories. But the atomic collective is the living present, not ancient history – and a future that any new testing will necessarily produce.

“Radioactive mutant” is not some abstract concept – it’s what human beings call themselves after surviving what strategists deemed necessary. Kazakhstan’s Polygon offers a warning: There is no such thing as a limited nuclear test, only communities left to become self-sufficient by abandonment, on their own by necessity, enduring what others decided was worth the cost.

Magdalena Stawkowski received funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, IREX, Social Science Research Council Eurasia Program, The Danish Institute for International Studies (Danish Council for Independent Research).

– ref. Mutual aid and self-sufficiency are key to life near USSR’s contaminated nuclear test zone in Kazakhstan – https://theconversation.com/mutual-aid-and-self-sufficiency-are-key-to-life-near-ussrs-contaminated-nuclear-test-zone-in-kazakhstan-260862

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Menika Dirkson, Associate Professor of History, Morgan State University

In the midst of a civil war, married couple Ernesto and Linda Fuentes fled their home country of El Salvador and headed for Philadelphia, via Mexico, in November 1983.

Ernesto was an activist who dispensed food and medicine in Salvadoran refugee camps. Linda was a union organizer for banks and clothing factories.

The Salvadoran government viewed activists, especially suspected guerrilla fighters and union leaders, as threats to its regime. It placed activists’ names on “death squad hit lists.” The couple decided to leave after receiving threatening letters and phone calls.

With false documents and the help of a humanitarian church group, they arrived at the Tabernacle United Church in West Philadelphia on May 12, 1984. The congregation declared itself a public sanctuary for undocumented refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala. An estimated 500,000 undocumented Salvadorans lived in the U.S. around that time.

The Fuenteses used the pastor’s office as their bedroom. Church members were instructed to keep the doors locked and not admit strangers, including the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

As a historian of race and policing in Philadelphia after the Civil Rights Movement, and the daughter of an immigrant, I’ve been exploring Philly’s history of sanctuary and how religious congregations, activists and city officials have supported local refugees over the past 40 years.

A ‘welcoming city’ for immigrants

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker has emphasized since May 2025 that Philadelphia is a certified “welcoming city.” She notably does not call Philadelphia a “sanctuary city.”

Welcoming cities have immigrant-friendly initiatives that make education, housing, workers’ rights, legal aid and language services accessible to immigrants and refugees without using the term “sanctuary city” in their laws and policies.

The presumed goal of this phrasing is to keep Philadelphia off the Trump administration’s radar and protect its US$2.2 billion in federal funding for health and human services.

However, Philly was, at various points, an official sanctuary city.

In 2014, then-Mayor Michael Nutter signed an executive order detailing that local police were not required to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement unless the case involved a warrant or violent felon.

Nutter later rescinded Philadelphia’s sanctuary city status in an effort to dissuade congressional Republicans from passing a House bill that would deny sanctuary cities federal money earmarked for law enforcement and recidivism reduction. However, the next mayor, Jim Kenney, reinstated the order on Jan. 4, 2016.

Throughout 2017, President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions used executive orders, speeches and the immigration raid Operation Safe City to force Philadelphia officials to assist ICE or lose federal grants.

In 2018, Philadelphia won a lawsuit against the Trump administration that denied ICE access to police databases to find undocumented immigrants and prohibited city employees from assisting ICE.

Roots of sanctuary cities

The sanctuary movement started back in the 1960s. But it wasn’t immigrants who were seeking sanctuary. It was Americans.

Around 1968, drafted resisters who were opposed to fighting in the Vietnam War sought refuge in churches in the U.S. Northeast. One of the earliest cases involved Robert Talmanson, who received sanctuary in Boston’s Arlington Street Unitarian Church. He was later arrested by U.S. marshals and local police and incarcerated in Virginia for three years.

In November 1971, Berkeley, California, became the first sanctuary city in the country when 12 local churches inspired the City Council to pass a resolution offering sanctuary to draft resisters. It also banned city employees from “assisting in the investigation or arrest of any sanctuary seeker.”

In the two decades that followed, several Quaker, Presbyterian, Catholic and Jewish congregations across America and Canada used their houses of worship as sanctuaries for Central American refugees who were fleeing civil war, government repression and genocide.

Philly joins national movement

Frustration and outcry over the United States’ low acceptance rates of Central American asylum-seekers sparked Philadelphia’s sanctuary movement.

In January 1984, members of Tabernacle United Church, where the Fuentes couple would soon take refuge, voted to join the national sanctuary network. As the Rev. James MacDonald explained at the time, the congregation chose to “violate a human law in order to respond in obedience to God’s law.”

By May, the First United Methodist Church of Germantown also became a sanctuary church. A few months later, the church sheltered a young Guatemalan couple, Joel and Gabriela, and their 3-year-old daughter, Lucy. Joel, an activist who worked with unions and student groups, had been tortured by Guatemala City police.

On Jan. 14, 1985, INS staged nationwide raids of sanctuaries and arrested 60 undocumented immigrants and 16 sanctuary workers – including pastors, nuns and priests – for violating immigration laws. Joel and his family were among those seized. They were released when church members bailed them out as they awaited deportation hearings.

A new pathway to citizenship

By the mid-’80s, 42,000 people from 2,000 religious institutions in 60 cities nationwide had joined the sanctuary movement.

On Nov. 6, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act. It granted undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before 1982 one year to apply for amnesty. If eligible, they would begin a five-year pathway to citizenship.

Approximately 3 million people successfully became naturalized citizens through the amnesty program.

In the Philadelphia area, at least 5,000 to 7,000 people were undocumented in 1986. Advocates at the nonprofit Nationalities Service Center and American Friends Service Committee noted that many immigrants wanted to apply for amnesty but feared the program was a trick.

A decade later, immigration enforcement got tougher.

Local police assist ICE

In 1996, Congress passed Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. This granted local police the right to assist immigration officials in arresting and detaining unauthorized immigrants.

As of April 2026, over 1,600 law enforcement agencies in 39 states and two U.S. territories have a 287(g) agreement with ICE. The program offers local police free training in ICE procedures along with funding for equipment, vehicles and overtime pay.

While the Philadelphia Police Department has never signed a Section 287(g) agreement, about 68 Pennsylvania agencies have, including in neighboring Delaware County.

But these agreements aren’t always long-lasting. Between January and March 2026, two departments in Bucks and Chester counties rescinded their agreements with ICE to make residents feel safe after American-born protesters Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed during ICE operations in Minneapolis.

Community activism continues

According to Pew Charitable Trusts, nearly 16% of Philadelphia’s 1.6 million residents are immigrants, largely from Asia and the Caribbean.

The exact number of undocumented immigrants in Philadelphia is unknown. However, the Migration Policy Institute estimates that 250,000 immigrants in Pennsylvania – 1.5% of the state’s total population – are undocumented.

Since January 2025, ICE crackdowns in sanctuary cities such as Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago and New York have resulted in the number of people held in ICE detention jumping from 40,000 to 73,000 people in January 2026.

Citizens and advocacy groups have stepped up to protect immigrants from ICE. The Party for Socialism and Liberation and the AR-12-toting members of the Black Lion Party for International Solidarity participated in protests in Philadelphia. Public school students from Northeast and Edison high schools have led anti-ICE walkouts.

On Jan. 29, 2026, City Council members Kendra Brooks and Rue Landau introduced an “ICE Out” package. The bills aim to codify the right of police to not share immigration, citizenship and personal data with ICE, or detain and hand over arrested individuals to the federal agency.

The legislation also proposes a ban on ICE agents who wear masks or hide their badges, use unmarked cars and city vehicles, or use municipal spaces as staging areas for enforcement and raids. And it would prohibit city employees from giving ICE access to libraries, shelters, health centers and recreation centers without a judicial warrant.

Community activists have long used civil disobedience and humanitarian aid to protect undocumented immigrants who are searching for a fresh start in the U.S.

An interfaith network inspired Philadelphia to become a sanctuary city. Today, churches such as Center City’s Arch Street United Methodist Church and North Philly’s Church of the Advocate, along with other congregations, uphold this tradition while a multicultural community across the city continues that fight.

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Menika Dirkson 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. Philadelphia’s 40-year history of protecting undocumented immigrants began with churches hiding refugees from El Salvador – https://theconversation.com/philadelphias-40-year-history-of-protecting-undocumented-immigrants-began-with-churches-hiding-refugees-from-el-salvador-278756