Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Claudio Villanueva, Professor of Integrative Biology and Physiology, University of California, Los Angeles

Over the past few years, a new class of medications has transformed the treatment of obesity. Drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro work primarily by reducing appetite, helping people eat less and feel full sooner. Their success has demonstrated something important: Body weight is biologically regulated, and targeting the right biological pathways can lead to meaningful weight loss that can help transform lives.

But appetite is only half of the equation. Your weight reflects a balance between the calories you consume through your diet and the energy you expend through movement, exercise and maintaining basic cellular function. While recent therapies have focused on controlling energy intake, scientists are increasingly turning their attention to the other side of the ledger: the tissues that burn energy.

At the center of this conversation is an organ most people misunderstand: fat. For decades, fat – also known as adipose tissue – was thought of as passive storage: a biological pantry for excess calories. Scientists now know this view is incomplete.

Fat is not just storage

White adipose tissue, the most abundant type of fat in adults, does store energy in the form of triglycerides. But it also has several other functions.

For one, white fat is a powerful endocrine organ, releasing hormones like leptin that reduce appetite, as well as adiponectin, which regulates insulin and blood sugar levels. It also cushions organs, insulates against heat loss and acts as a metabolic buffer, safely storing excess lipids that would otherwise accumulate in the liver or muscle.

When white adipose cells expand in a healthy, flexible way, they protect the body. When they become inflamed or dysfunctional, they contribute to insulin resistance, fatty liver disease and cardiovascular risk. Obesity arises from both the expansion of white adipose cells and an increase in their number.

In other words, fat is not inherently harmful. Its health impact depends on the size of adipose cells, and when they become too large, they are unable to function optimally. Increasing the number of new fat cells can sometimes improve metabolic function.

Moreover, there are additional types of fat, and they behave in different ways.

Brown fat: The cellular furnace

Unlike white fat, brown fat is specialized to burn energy. Brown adipose cells are packed with mitochondria – the tiny power plants inside cells – and contain a protein called UCP1 that allows them to convert chemical energy directly into heat. Instead of storing calories, brown fat dissipates them.

In infants, brown fat helps maintain body temperature. For years, scientists believed it largely disappeared in adulthood. But imaging studies in the late 2000s revealed that many adults retain metabolically active brown fat, particularly in the neck and upper chest.

Exposure to cold temperatures naturally triggers the brain to stimulate brown fat cells and generate heat. As energy use rises for this process, so does calorie-burning.

If activating brown fat increases energy expenditure, could it be harnessed to treat obesity?

The challenge is that human metabolism is tightly regulated. When energy expenditure increases, the body often compensates by stimulating hunger. Studies in animals – and observations in humans – show that cold exposure not only activates brown fat but also increases appetite. The brain detects the higher energy demand and signals for greater food intake.

From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. For our human ancestors, cold environments meant survival required more fuel. A system that failed to replace calories burned to keep you warm would have been dangerous. This homeostatic defense of body weight is powerful. It is one reason why weight loss is difficult to sustain and why increasing energy expenditure alone may not be sufficient to lose weight.

But when coupled with GLP-1 drugs that suppress appetite, promoting energy expenditure could lead to therapies that are even more powerful at promoting weight loss.

Beige fat and metabolic plasticity

Adding further complexity to fat’s role in weight loss are beige fat cells. These cells arise within white fat depots under certain conditions – such as cold exposure or specific hormonal signals – and acquires some of the heat-producing properties of brown fat. This process, often called browning, reveals that adipose tissue is remarkably flexible.

Fat is not a static mass. It contains stem and progenitor cells capable of generating new adipocytes with distinct properties. That flexibility opens intriguing therapeutic possibilities: Instead of merely shrinking fat, could researchers reprogram it to become something else?

Researchers like me are exploring ways to safely enhance the heat-generating capacity of fat cells, potentially increasing energy expenditure without relying solely on environmental cold. Brown and beige fat are compelling targets because they are purpose-built for heat production, which is why my lab is focusing on harnessing them to treat metabolic disease.

But fat is not the only tissue in the body that consumes energy or can generate heat in the cold. Skeletal muscle accounts for a substantial portion of daily energy expenditure, particularly during activity. The liver continuously engages in metabolically expensive processes. Even subtle futile cycles – processes in which molecules are repeatedly built and broken down – consume energy and generate heat.

The future of metabolic therapeutics for weight loss may involve carefully increasing energy flux across multiple tissues. The challenge is doing so without triggering compensatory hunger or unintended side effects. Any intervention that dramatically raises metabolic demand risks being interpreted by the brain as a threat to survival.

A two-sided strategy to maximize weight loss

The success of GLP-1–based medications has demonstrated that targeting appetite pathways can overcome some of the body’s resistance to weight loss. The next generation of therapies may build on that foundation.

One possibility is combining medications that modulate appetite with interventions that enhance energy expenditure. By influencing both sides of the energy balance equation – intake and output – it might be possible to achieve more durable metabolic improvements.

Equally important is shifting the public narrative. Fat is not merely an enemy to eliminate. It is a dynamic, multifunctional organ that protects, communicates, adapts and, under the right conditions, burns energy.

Understanding that complexity moves society beyond simplistic views of weight regulation. It also points toward a future in which therapies are not just about eating less, but about strategically harnessing the body’s own metabolic machinery.

The era of appetite control has begun. I believe the era of precision energy expenditure will be next.

Claudio Villanueva receives funding from National Institutes of Health.

– ref. Fat cells burn energy to make heat – making them the next frontier of weight loss therapies – https://theconversation.com/fat-cells-burn-energy-to-make-heat-making-them-the-next-frontier-of-weight-loss-therapies-277596

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jon R. Lindsay, Associate Professor of Cybersecurity and Privacy and of International Affairs, Georgia Institute of Technology

The U.S. military was able “to strike a blistering 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of its attack on Iran” thanks in part to its use of artificial intelligence, according to The Washington Post. The military has used Claude, the AI tool from Anthropic, combined with Palantir’s Maven system, for real-time targeting and target prioritization in support of combat operations in Iran and Venezuela.

While Claude is only a few years old, the U.S. military’s ability to use it, or any other AI, did not emerge overnight. The effective use of automated systems depends on extensive infrastructure and skilled personnel. It is only thanks to many decades of investment and experience that the U.S. can use AI in war today.

In my experience as an international relations scholar studying strategic technology at Georgia Tech, and previously as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy, I find that digital systems are only as good as the organizations that use them. Some organizations squander the potential of advanced technologies, while others can compensate for technological weaknesses.

Myth and reality in military AI

Science fiction tales of military AI are often misleading. Popular ideas of killer robots and drone swarms tend to overstate the autonomy of AI systems and understate the role of human beings. Success, or failure, in war usually depends not on machines but the people who use them.

In the real world, military AI refers to a huge collection of different systems and tasks. The two main categories are automated weapons and decision support systems. Automated weapon systems have some ability to select or engage targets by themselves. These weapons are more often the subject of science fiction and the focus of considerable debate.

Decision support systems, in contrast, are now at the heart of most modern militaries. These are software applications that provide intelligence and planning information to human personnel. Many military applications of AI, including in current and recent wars in the Middle East, are for decision support systems rather than weapons. Modern combat organizations rely on countless digital applications for intelligence analysis, campaign planning, battle management, communications, logistics, administration and cybersecurity.

Claude is an example of a decision support system, not a weapon. Claude is embedded in the Maven Smart System, used widely by military, intelligence and law enforcement organizations. Maven uses AI algorithms to identify potential targets from satellite and other intelligence data, and Claude helps military planners sort the information and decide on targets and priorities.

The Israeli Lavender and Gospel systems used in the Gaza war and elsewhere are also decision support systems. These AI applications provide analytical and planning support, but human beings ultimately make the decisions.

The long history of military AI

Weapons with some degree of autonomy have been used in war for well over a century. Nineteenth-century naval mines exploded on contact. German buzz bombs in World War II were gyroscopically guided. Homing torpedoes and heat-seeking missiles alter their trajectory to intercept maneuvering targets. Many air defense systems, such as Israel’s Iron Dome and the U.S. Patriot system, have long offered fully automatic modes.

Robotic drones became prevalent in the wars of the 21st century. Uncrewed systems now perform a variety of “dull, dirty and dangerous” tasks on land, at sea, in the air and in orbit. Remotely piloted vehicles like the U.S. MQ-9 Reaper or Israeli Hermes 900, which can loiter autonomously for many hours, provide a platform for reconnaissance and strikes. Combatants in the Russia-Ukraine war have pioneered the use of first-person view drones as kamikaze munitions. Some drones rely on AI to acquire targets because electronic jamming precludes remote control by human operators.

But systems that automate reconnaissance and strikes are merely the most visible parts of the automation revolution. The ability to see farther and hit faster dramatically increases the information processing burden on military organizations. This is where decision support systems come in. If automated weapons improve the eyes and arms of a military, decision support systems augment the brain.

Cold War era command and control systems anticipated modern decision support systems such as Israel’s AI-enabled Tzayad for battle management. Automation research projects like the United States’ Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, or SAGE, in the 1950s produced important innovations in computer memory and interfaces. In the U.S. war in Vietnam, Igloo White gathered intelligence data into a centralized computer for coordinating U.S. airstrikes on North Vietnamese supply lines. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s strategic computing program in the 1980s spurred advances in semiconductors and expert systems. Indeed, defense funding originally enabled the rise of AI.

Organizations enable automated warfare

Automated weapons and decision support systems rely on complementary organizational innovation. From the Electronic Battlefield of Vietnam to the AirLand Battle doctrine of the late Cold War and later concepts of network-centric warfare, the U.S. military has developed new ideas and organizational concepts.

Particularly noteworthy is the emergence of a new style of special operations during the U.S. global war on terrorism. AI-enabled decision support systems became invaluable for finding terrorist operatives, planning raids to kill or capture them, and analyzing intelligence collected in the process. Systems like Maven became essential for this style of counterterrorism.

The impressive American way of war on display in Venezuela and Iran is the fruition of decades of trial and error. The U.S. military has honed complex processes for gathering intelligence from many sources, analyzing target systems, evaluating options for attacking them, coordinating joint operations and assessing bomb damage. The only reason AI can be used throughout the targeting cycle is that countless human personnel everywhere work to keep it running.

AI gives rise to important concerns about automation bias, or the tendency for people to give excessive weight to automated decisions, in military targeting. But these are not new concerns. Igloo White was often misled by Vietnamese decoys. A state-of-the-art U.S. Aegis cruiser accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner in 1988. Intelligence mistakes led U.S. stealth bombers to accidentally strike the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1999.

Many Iraqi and Afghan civilians died due to analytical mistakes and cultural biases within the U.S. military. Most recently, evidence suggests that a Tomahawk cruise missile struck a girls school adjacent to an Iranian naval base, killing about 175 people, mostly students. This targeting could have resulted from a U.S. intelligence failure.

Automated prediction needs human judgment

The successes and failures of decision support systems in war are due more to organizational factors than technology. AI can help organizations improve their efficiency, but AI can also amplify organizational biases. While it may be tempting to blame Lavender for excessive civilian deaths in the Gaza Strip, lax Israeli rules of engagement likely matter more than automation bias.

As the name implies, decision support systems support human decision-making; AI does not replace people. Human personnel still play important roles in designing, managing, interpreting, validating, evaluating, repairing and protecting their systems and data flows. Commanders still command.

In economic terms, AI improves prediction, which means generating new data based on existing data. But prediction is only one part of decision-making. People ultimately make the judgments that matter about what to predict and how to use predictions. People have preferences, values and commitments regarding real-world outcomes, but AI systems intrinsically do not.

In my view, this means that increasing military use of AI is actually making humans more important in war, not less.

Jon R. Lindsay 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. US military leans into AI for attack on Iran, but the tech doesn’t lessen the need for human judgment in war – https://theconversation.com/us-military-leans-into-ai-for-attack-on-iran-but-the-tech-doesnt-lessen-the-need-for-human-judgment-in-war-277831

Source: The Conversation – USA – By André O. Hudson, Dean of the College of Science, Professor of Biochemistry, Rochester Institute of Technology

Tensions in the Middle East often trigger concerns about rising gasoline prices. But disruptions to oil supplies could affect much more than the cost of filling up a car. That’s because crude oil is not only burned as fuel. It is also the raw material for thousands of products that modern societies depend on, including plastics, fertilizers, clothing fibers, medicines and electronics.

As a biochemist, I’m interested in how certain chemicals can shape society, and oil is a prime example.

The stakes become clearer when looking at the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway between Iran and Oman. About one-fifth of the world’s petroleum liquids consumption passes through the strait each day, making it one of the most important oil shipping routes on Earth. If conflict significantly disrupts traffic there, the effects could ripple far beyond energy markets.

Oil is a chemical starting point

Crude oil is a complex mixture of hydrocarbons – molecules made mainly of carbon and hydrogen. Refineries and chemical plants separate and transform these molecules into smaller chemical building blocks known as petrochemicals.

Some of the most important petrochemical building blocks include chemicals such as ethylene, propylene and benzene. Manufacturers can then convert these building blocks into more complex forms, which make up plastics, solvents, synthetic rubber and other industrial materials.

While fuel is a well-known product, fuels actually represents only a portion of what is produced from crude oil. The refining process generates a wide range of petroleum-based materials used to manufacture everyday items, such as plastics, medicines, electronics, cosmetics, clothing fibers and household goods.

Plastics that shape modern life

One of the most visible uses of oil is the production of plastics. Scientists can link individual petrochemical molecules to form polymers, which are long chains of repeating units that create materials such as polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene.

Because plastics are lightweight, durable and relatively inexpensive, they have become essential to global manufacturing.

These plastics appear in countless products, including food packaging and water bottles; medical equipment, such as syringes and IV bags; electronics casings and appliances; automotive parts; and construction materials, such as pipes and insulation.

Even technologies designed to reduce carbon emissions depend on them. Wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles all contain plastic components derived from petrochemicals.

Fertilizer that feeds billions

Oil and natural gas also play a critical role in agriculture. Modern fertilizers rely on nitrogen compounds, such as ammonia. Ammonia is produced through the Haber-Bosch process, which uses hydrogen typically derived from natural gas or other fossil fuels.

These fertilizers replenish nutrients in soil and dramatically increase crop yields. Without them, global food production would be far lower. Petrochemicals are also used to produce pesticides, herbicides and plastics used in irrigation systems and agricultural equipment.

Clothing, cosmetics and medicines

Petrochemicals also appear in many everyday consumer goods. Synthetic fabrics, such as polyester, nylon and acrylic, are made from petrochemical feedstocks. These feedstocks are the basic chemicals, made from crude oil or natural gas, that serve as the starting ingredients for products widely used in clothing, carpets and furniture.

Petroleum-derived ingredients are also common in cosmetics and personal care products. Certain lotions, shampoos and lipsticks rely on these compounds because they help stabilize formulas and extend shelf life.

Petrochemicals are also important in medicine. Petroleum-derived chemical intermediates − compounds made during the process of turning raw materials into a final product − are used to manufacture pharmaceuticals, medical tubing, sterile packaging and disposable gloves.

These materials help hospitals maintain sterility and safety in health care environments.

Why the Strait of Hormuz matters

Because oil and petrochemical feedstocks move through global shipping routes, disruptions in one region will affect supply chains worldwide. The Strait of Hormuz is particularly important. If conflict or political tensions continue to interrupt shipping through the Strait, oil prices will rise quickly. Energy analysts have long warned that disruptions to the strait could send shock waves through global markets. The impact would not be limited to transportation fuels.

Petrochemical industries depend on steady supplies of crude oil and natural gas liquids as raw materials. If those supplies become more expensive or harder to obtain, manufacturers could face higher production costs.

The proportion of crude oil used for petrochemical feedstocks to create plastics, fertilizers and other materials represents around 10% to 20% of oil consumption. Most crude oil is refined for fuel production, including gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, so these fuel supply chains would likely be the first to take a hit. But over time, disruptions could affect the availability and price of products ranging from plastics and packaging to fertilizers, synthetic clothing fibers and even food.

A hidden foundation of modern economies

Because petrochemicals are often used behind the scenes as ingredients rather than finished products, the connection many agricultural, medical and consumer goods have to oil is easy to overlook. Yet, petrochemicals form a hidden foundation for modern economies. They enable large-scale agriculture, advanced health care systems and global manufacturing supply chains.

At the same time, concerns about climate change and plastic pollution are driving research into alternatives. Scientists are developing bio-based plastics made from plant materials, improving recycling technologies and exploring new ways to produce fertilizers with lower carbon emissions.

For now, the modern world remains deeply dependent on oil, not only for energy but also for the materials that shape everyday life. When news headlines focus on disruptions to oil supply, the consequences may extend far beyond the gas pump, affecting the products that underpin modern society.

André O. Hudson receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health

– ref. Oil isn’t just fuel: Iran conflict could disrupt markets for everything from plastics to fertilizers – https://theconversation.com/oil-isnt-just-fuel-iran-conflict-could-disrupt-markets-for-everything-from-plastics-to-fertilizers-277946

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Arryn Robbins, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Richmond

Even with no fur in frame, you can easily see that a photo of a hairless Sphynx cat depicts a cat. You wouldn’t mistake it for an elephant.

But many artificial intelligence vision systems would. Why? Because when AI systems learn to categorize objects, they often rely on visual cues – like surface texture or simple patterns in pixels. This tendency makes them vulnerable to getting confused by small changes that have little effect on human perception.

A vision system aligned more closely with human perception – one that perhaps emphasizes shape, for instance – might still confuse the cat for another similarly shaped mammal, like a tiger; but it is unlikely to indicate an elephant.

The kinds of mistakes an AI makes reveal how it organizes visual information, with potential limitations that become concerning in higher-stakes settings.

Imagine an autonomous vehicle approaching a vandalized stop sign. While a human driver recognizes the sign from its shape and context, an AI that relies on pixel patterns may misclassify it, pushing the altered sign out of the category “sign” altogether and into a different group of images that it identifies as similar, such as a billboard, advertisement or other roadside object.

Together, these problems point to a misalignment between how humans perceive the visual world and how AI represents it.

We are experts in visual perception, and we work at the intersection of human and machine perception. People organize visual input into objects, meaning and relationships shaped by experience and context. AI models don’t organize visual information the same way. This key difference explains why AI sometimes fails in surprising ways.

Seeing objects, not features

Imagine that in front of you is a small, opaque object with both straight and curved edges. But you don’t see those features; you just see your coffee mug.

Vision isn’t a camera, passively recording the world. Instead, your brain rapidly turns the light your eyes absorb into objects you recognize and understand, organizing experience into structured mental representations.

Researchers can understand how these representations are structured by examining how people judge similarity. Your coffee mug is not like your computer, but it’s similar to a glass of water despite differences in appearance. That judgment reflects how the mug is mentally represented: not just in terms of appearance, but also what the mug is used for and how it fits into everyday activities.

Importantly, the mental organization of representations is flexible. Which aspects of an object stand out change with context and goals. If packing a moving box, shape and size matter most, so your mug might be placed anywhere it fits. But when putting it away in a cupboard, it goes next to other drinkware. The mug hasn’t changed, only the way it is organized in your mind.

Human visual perception is adaptive, driven by meaning and tied to how we interact with the world.

Aligning AI with humans

AI systems, however, organize visual input in fundamentally different ways than people – not because they are machines, but because of how narrowly they are trained. When an AI is trained to categorize a cat or an elephant, it only needs to learn which visual patterns lead to the correct label, not how those animals relate to each other or fit into the broader world.

In contrast, humans learn within a broader context. When we learn what an elephant is, we weave that representation into the tapestry of everything else we have learned: animals, size, habitats and more. Because AI is graded only on label accuracy, it can rely on shortcuts that work in training but sometimes fail in the real world.

The issue of representational alignment refers to whether AI organizes information in ways that resemble how people do. It’s not to be confused with value alignment, which refers to the challenge of making sure AI systems pursue outcomes and goals that humans intend.

Because human learning embeds new information into a web of prior knowledge, the relationships between new and existing concepts can be studied and measured. This means that representational alignment may be a solvable problem and a step toward addressing broader alignment challenges.

One approach to representational alignment focuses on building AI systems that behave like humans on psychological tasks, allowing researchers to compare representations directly. For example, if people judge a cat as more similar to a dog than to an elephant, the goal is to build AI models that arrive at those same judgments.

One promising technique involves training AI on human similarity judgments collected in the lab. In these studies, human participants might be shown three images and asked which two objects are more similar; for example, whether a mug is more like a glass or a bowl. Including this data during training encourages AI systems to learn how objects relate to one another, producing representations that better reflect how people understand the world.

Alignment beyond vision

Representational alignment matters beyond vision systems, and AI researchers are taking notice. As AI increasingly supports high-stakes decisions, differences between how machines and humans represent the world will have real consequences, even when an AI system appears highly accurate. For example, if an AI analyzing medical images learns to associate the source of an image or repeated image artifacts with disease rather than the real visual signs of the disease itself, that is obviously problematic.

AI doesn’t necessarily need to process information exactly the way people think, but training AI using principles drawn from human perception and cognition – such as similarity, context and relational structure – can lead to safer, more accurate and more ethical systems.

Eben W. Daggett receives funding from the NMSU Institute for Applied Practice in AI and Machine Learning (IAAM). He is currently employed by Medtronic PLC.

Michael Hout has received funding from the New Mexico State University Institute for Applied Practice in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Arryn Robbins 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. AI doesn’t ‘see’ the way that you do, and that could be a problem when it categorizes objects and scenes – https://theconversation.com/ai-doesnt-see-the-way-that-you-do-and-that-could-be-a-problem-when-it-categorizes-objects-and-scenes-271481

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Allie Mazurek, Engagement Climatologist and Researcher, Colorado Climate Center, Colorado State University

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

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Why do we see snow on mountaintops that are closer to the Sun but not near the ground? – Ms. Drews’ third grade class, Beechview Elementary School, Farmington Hills, Michigan

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There’s not much better than a bluebird day in the mountains – a crisp, sunny day accompanied by a fresh blanket of snow. But why doesn’t the Sun quickly melt all that high altitude snow away?

It all boils down to our atmosphere, which is what I research as a scientist in Colorado. Let’s dive in!

Our atmosphere: Earth’s armor

Earth’s atmosphere begins right at its surface and extends to outer space, and it is filled with a mixture of many different gases. Gases in the atmosphere include the oxygen we breathe and the water vapor that makes it rain and snow. They are essential to supporting life on Earth in several ways.

One of the most important jobs those gases have is to protect us from harmful things in space, including our closest star: the Sun.

The Sun’s radiation provides heat to our planet, but too much of it can be a problem. If you’ve ever gotten a sunburn, then you’re already familiar with this idea.

Some of our atmospheric gases limit the amount of radiation from the Sun that can reach the Earth’s surface by absorbing some of it, which prevents temperatures from being way too warm in the daytime. At night, certain atmospheric gases also trap some of the heat that the Earth’s surface releases as it cools down, protecting us from unsurvivable cold.

The way the atmosphere regulates Earth’s temperatures is known as the greenhouse effect. You’ll often hear this term used alongside climate change or global warming. That is because global warming is caused by enhancing the greenhouse effect: As people burn fossil fuels in cars and factories, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases. These extra gases allow the Earth’s atmosphere to trap more heat, causing an increase in temperatures.

The atmosphere likes to stay grounded

If you were to compare the Earth’s atmosphere along a Caribbean beach to that surrounding the top of Mount Everest, it would look quite different.

That is because as you go higher up in the atmosphere, it gets “thinner,” meaning that there are less gases present at higher elevations and altitudes.

Why? Blame it on gravity.

In the same way that gravity keeps people and objects from flying away to outer space, Earth’s gravitational force pulls on the gases in our atmosphere, trying to keep them as close to Earth as possible.

As a result, there are fewer gas molecules in the atmosphere as you go higher up in altitude, making the air thinner, or less dense. Humans can sometimes experience altitude sickness at high elevations because there is less oxygen present in the air as a result of this phenomenon.

Closer to the Sun, but still cold and snowy?

Our high-elevation mountains protrude into higher altitudes of the atmosphere, where the air has fewer gas molecules. While this thinner air allows more of the Sun’s radiation to pass through compared with the atmosphere at sea level, thinner air tends to be colder for two reasons:

First, collisions between gas molecules generate heat, and if you have fewer molecules available to run into each other, that heat generation is lower.

Second, a thinner atmosphere is less effective at maintaining heat because there are fewer molecules available to trap and hold on to heat.

Colder temperatures can create more opportunities for precipitation to fall in the form of snow rather than rain, which is why some mountains can be so snowy.

And if the ground is habitually covered in snow, as is the case in many mountain ranges, it can be even easier to maintain cooler temperatures. That’s because snow-covered surfaces are very reflective, making them highly effective at causing the Sun’s incoming rays to bounce back toward space instead of getting absorbed by the ground.

So if you visit the mountains to have fun in the snow, be sure to pack your jacket, but don’t forget that sunscreen too.

Allie Mazurek 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 do mountaintops stay snowy even when it’s dry at the base? – https://theconversation.com/why-do-mountaintops-stay-snowy-even-when-its-dry-at-the-base-277560

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Charles Edward Gehrke, Deputy Division Director of Wargame Design and Adjudication, US Naval War College

The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Since the beginning of the conflict involving the United States, Israel and Iran on Feb. 28, 2026, oil tanker traffic through the world’s most critical oil shipping choke point has collapsed, dropping by more than 90%.

Iran has threatened to destroy any ships, including oil tankers, that pass through the strait from the oil depots of the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea and the rest of the world. Companies that insure ships against the risks of traveling in war zones are deciding whether to issue coverage on an individual-ship basis. The international body that sets many shipping regulations has told ships’ crews that they have the right to refuse to sail into the area.

As of March 6, more than 400 tankers were stranded in the Persian Gulf, without permission from their owners to move.

But some vessels are still transiting the strait. Most of the ships still moving are those that operate outside the rules.

In maritime circles, these vessels are called the “shadow fleet.” They are vessels that ignore international restrictions on trade with certain countries, violate anti-pollution regulations, smuggle unauthorized goods or don’t want their cargo or activities too closely monitored.

They exist, even in a world filled with electronic tracking, because the world’s oceans aren’t governed the same way the land is. On land, armed personnel closely monitor carefully delineated borders, seeking to force everyone to follow clear rules. But at sea, regulation is almost the opposite. The system that governs international shipping is, at its foundation, voluntary.

The oceans run on trust

The tracking of ships is voluntary. The International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea – signed by 167 countries – requires almost every commercial vessel to carry a radio transponder that broadcasts the ship’s identity, position, speed and heading to port authorities, coast guards and commercial tracking networks.

That international agreement, which is enforced by individual countries, requires ships to leave the transponders on and active. But there is no physical mechanism preventing a crew from switching it off or broadcasting a false position.

When a vessel turns off its transponder and goes dark, it doesn’t trigger an alarm at some global maritime headquarters. There is no such headquarters. The ship simply disappears from the map. Every map.

National jurisdiction is a matter of preference, not law. Every vessel sails under the flag of a nation, and that nation is theoretically responsible for regulating and inspecting it. But in practice, a ship’s registration in a particular country is a commercial transaction. Many law-abiding shipping companies make this business decision, but this system leaves an opening for those who seek to skirt the rules.

A ship owned by a shell company in the United Arab Emirates can register under the flag of Cameroon, Palau or Liberia, or any country that may lack the resources or the incentive to conduct real inspections. Even landlocked Mongolia has a registry of oceangoing ships flying its flag.

When a vessel comes under scrutiny from port inspectors or coast guards, it can simply reregister under a different flag. Some registries even offer online registration. If the new registration is fraudulent or the registry doesn’t actually exist, the vessel effectively becomes stateless.

Then there is insurance, which is the closest thing the maritime system has to a real enforcement mechanism. Mainstream insurers, mostly based in London, require vessels to meet safety standards, carry proper documentation and comply with international trade sanctions. A ship without insurance coverage cannot easily enter major ports or secure cargo contracts with reputable firms.
Those restrictions are precisely what froze so many law-abiding ships in the Persian Gulf when war broke out.

But companies can avoid those rules, too. Two-thirds of ships carrying Russian oil – the trade of which is restricted by the U.S. and other countries – reportedly have “unknown” insurance providers, meaning nobody knows whom to call to cover the cleanup costs after a spill or collision. The enforcement mechanism works until ship owners realize they can just opt out of it entirely, using less reputable ports or transferring oil from ship to ship out at sea.

What opting out looks like

The results of this voluntary system can be surreal. In December 2025, the United States seized a sanctioned tanker called the Skipper, which was flying the flag of Guyana – even though that country had never registered it. The vessel was, in legal terms, stateless, sailing under the authority of no nation on Earth.

Another vessel, the Arcusat, went further. Investigative reporting found that it had changed its International Maritime Organization identification number, a unique seven-digit code assigned permanently to every ship. It is the maritime equivalent of scraping the VIN off a car.

Now layer these techniques together. An entity purchases an aging tanker that would otherwise be scrapped. It registers the ship through a shell company, pays for a flag of convenience, carries opaque insurance and switches off its transponder when approaching sensitive waters.

It loads sanctioned oil through a ship-to-ship transfer on the open ocean and delivers its cargo to a buyer who asks no questions. If the vessel attracts attention, it changes its name, reregisters under a different flag and starts over.

According to maritime intelligence firm Windward, approximately 1,100 dark fleet vessels have been identified globally, representing roughly 17% to 18% of all tankers carrying liquid cargo, which is primarily oil.

Why it matters now

The dark fleet did not emerge because the maritime system is broken. It emerged because the system is built on voluntary participation, all theoretically ensured by market forces.

For decades, the system worked not because it forced compliance but rather because opting out was more costly than opting in.

What changed is that international sanctions made compliance ruinously expensive and politically disastrous for some countries. A system built on voluntary participation, it turned out, could be voluntarily left.

If your national economy depends on oil exports, and the compliance system is preventing those exports, you build a parallel system. Iran began doing so in 2018, after sanctions were reimposed as part of negotiations over its nuclear development. Russia dramatically expanded that system in 2022 as restrictions hit in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine.

Now, with the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed to aboveboard maritime trade, the only vessels still moving are the ones that ignore the rules.

But the existence of the dark fleet doesn’t mean that the rules of the sea have failed. Rather, it reveals what kind of rules they always were. Illegal oil is the only oil moving in a crisis. In my view, that sends a message to those still playing by the rules: Opting out might be a viable option.

The opinions and views expressed are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent those of the Department of the Navy or the U.S. Naval War College.

Charles Edward Gehrke 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 shadow tankers are the only ships still moving through the Strait of Hormuz – https://theconversation.com/why-shadow-tankers-are-the-only-ships-still-moving-through-the-strait-of-hormuz-277785

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Charles Walldorf, Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Wake Forest University

It’s clear that regime change is among the biggest objectives of the U.S. war in Iran.

“I have to be involved in the appointment” of Iran’s next leader, President Donald Trump said on March 5, 2026.

Trump has also said he might put U.S. boots on the ground to get the job done.

Trump now joins a long list of modern U.S. presidents – from Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush and Barack Obama – who started wars to either overthrow hostile regimes or support embattled friendly governments abroad.

For all the parallels to history, though, Trump’s Iran war is historically unique in one critically important way: In its early stages, the war is not popular with the American public.

A recent CNN poll found that 59% of Americans oppose the war – a trend found in poll after poll since the war began.

As an expert on U.S. foreign policy and regime change wars, my research shows that what’s likely generating public opposition to the Iran war today is the absence of a big story with a grand purpose that has bolstered public support for just about every major U.S.-promoted regime change war since 1900. These broad, purpose-filled narratives generate public buy-in to support the costs of war, which are often high in terms of money spent and lives lost when regime change is at stake.

Two historical examples

In the 1930s and ’40s, a widely accepted – and largely true – story about the dangers of fascism spreading and democracies falling galvanized national support in the United States to enter and then take on the high costs of fighting in World War II.

Likewise, in the 2000s a dominant narrative about preventing a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and stopping terrorism brought strong initial public support for the war in Afghanistan, with 88% support in 2001, and the war in Iraq, with 70% support in 2003.

With no comparable narrative around Iran today, Trump and Republicans could face big problems, especially as costs continue to rise.

No anti-Iran narrative

Iran has been a thorn in the side of many American presidents for a long time. So, what’s missing? Why no grand-purpose narrative at the start of this war?

Two things.

First, grand-purpose narratives are rooted in major geopolitical gains by a rival regime – the danger to the U.S. For the anti-fascism narrative, those events were German troops plowing across Europe and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the anti-terrorism narrative, it was planes crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Gains like these by rivals prove traumatic to the nation. They also dislodge the status quo and provide the opportunity for new grand-purpose narratives with new policy directions to emerge.

Today, most Americans see no existential danger around Iran. A Marist poll from March 3, 2026, found that 55% of Americans view Iran as a minor threat or no threat at all. And the number who see Iran as a major threat, 44%, is down from 48% in July 2025.

By contrast, 64% of Americans saw Iraq as a “considerable threat” prior to the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq.

The poll numbers on Iran aren’t surprising. Iran is far from a geopolitical menace to the United States today. To the contrary, it’s been in geopolitical retreat in the Middle East in recent years.

In the summer of 2025, Iran’s nuclear nuclear enrichment facilities were significantly damaged – “completely and totally obliterated,” according to Trump, though there is no confirmation of that claim – during the 12-Day war between Iran and Israel.

And in recent years, Tehran has lost a major ally in Syria and witnessed its proxy network all but collapse. Iran has also faced crippling economic conditions and historic protests at home.

As the polls show, none of that has sparked a grand-purpose narrative.

Missing a good story

The second missing factor for narrative formation today is any strong messaging from the White House.

In the months prior to World War II, Roosevelt used his position of authority as president to give speech after speech, setting the context of the traumatic events of the 1930s, explaining the dangers at hand and outlining a course going forward. Though less truthful in its content, Bush did the same for nearly two years before the Iraq War.

Trump did almost none of this storytelling leading up to the Iran war. Five days before the war started, the president devoted three minutes to Iran in a nearly two-hour State of the Union Address.

Prior to that, he made a comment here and there to the press about Iran, but no storytelling preparing the nation for war. Likewise, since the war began, the administration’s stated reasons for military action keep shifting.

No wonder 54% of Americans polled disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran and 60% of Americans say Trump has no clear plan for Iran. Also, 60% disapprove of Trump’s handling of foreign policy in general.

By comparison, Americans approved of Bush’s handling of foreign policy by 63% in early 2003.

Absent a cohesive, unifying story, it’s also no surprise there is lots of political fracturing today.

Partisan divides run deep – Democrats and independent voters strongly oppose the war. But Trump’s MAGA coalition is cracking too, with people like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene sharply criticizing the war.

The way out

If he opts for it, there is an off-ramp for Trump from the Iran war. It’s one he knows well.

When U.S. leaders get caught up in costly regime change wars that outrun national support, they tend to back down, often with far fewer political costs than if they’d continued their unpopular war.

When the disaster referred to as Black Hawk Down hit in Somalia in 1993, killing 18 U.S. Marines, President Bill Clinton opted to end the mission to topple the warlords that ruled the country. Troops came home six months later.

Likewise, after the Benghazi attack killed four Americans in Libya in 2012, Obama pulled out all U.S. personnel working in Libya on nation-building operations.

And just last year, when Trump realized that U.S. ground troops would be necessary to topple the Houthi militant group in Yemen, he negotiated a ceasefire and ended his air war in that country with no significant political fallout.

With Trump’s Iran war, gas prices keep rising, more soldiers are likely to die, and stocks are highly volatile.

Backing down makes a lot of sense. History confirms that.

Charles Walldorf is a Senior Fellow at Defense Priorities.

– ref. Trump’s war against Iran is uniquely unpopular among US military actions of the past century – https://theconversation.com/trumps-war-against-iran-is-uniquely-unpopular-among-us-military-actions-of-the-past-century-277586

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Simone Dichiara, Assistant Research Professor of Astrophysics, Penn State

Billions of light years away in a remote part of the universe, two neutron stars – the ultradense remnants of dead stars – collided. The catastropic cosmic event sent light and particles, including a sudden flash of gamma rays, streaming through the universe. These gamma rays traveled for 8.5 billion years before reaching Earth.

In a new study, our team of astrophysicists examined this gamma-ray signal. We learned that the stellar collision it came from was likely caused by an even more catastrophic encounter – a merger between two galaxies.

This is the first time astronomers associated this type of signal with such a large-scale galactic interaction. Our finding offers new insight into how stellar collisions spread metals across the universe.

Why it matters

When two neutron stars orbit each other and finally collide – a system called a binary neutron star merger – they produce the most powerful explosions in the universe. They release intense flashes of gamma rays, which astronomers call short gamma-ray bursts. They can release as much energy as our Sun will produce over its entire lifetime in less than a couple of seconds.

These collisions can also eject debris pieces into space, which may create new radioactive elements when they collide. Many valuable elements, including gold and platinum, are forged in these mergers.

What makes the particular event, known as GRB 230906A, extraordinary is where it happened. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope, we pinpointed the location of the explosion and identified its host galaxy as one of the faintest galaxies ever associated with a short GRB.

Observations obtained by the Very Large Telescope in Chile revealed that the burst occurred within a tangled system of interacting galaxies. Streams of stars and gas, torn out by past galactic encounters, stretched across the region. The gamma-ray burst lies directly within one of these tidal streams, suggesting it took place inside a tiny dwarf galaxy formed from the material stripped away from its host during a galaxy collision.

This is the first time that a binary neutron star merger has been linked to such an environment. This discovery reveals new homes for these cosmic collisions and shows they don’t just happen in big galaxies. It points to a new path for spreading heavy metals where we least expect them.

Our study traces the origin of these neutron star mergers back to the slow and far-reaching pull of gravity between galaxies. It tells us more about where these extraordinary events can take place and, most importantly, how the elements that make up our world came to be.

What still isn’t known

As this explosion was far away, our instruments could not measure which elements were forged in the collision. Similar bright explosions may be produced not only by binary neutron star mergers, but also by mergers involving neutron stars and black holes, or even other types of compact stellar remnants such as white dwarfs, the leftover cores of Sun-like stars.

What’s next

New powerful observatories, such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, will enable the discovery and detailed study of distant mergers responsible for producing heavy elements.

Future advanced X-ray missions, such as NewAthena and AXIS, will increase our ability to identify these types of explosions.

These new capabilities will move side by side with the development of the next generation of gravitational wave detectors: Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer. These will allow us to decipher the nature of these mergers, marking a new era for multimessenger astronomy. Together, these telescopes will be essential for understanding how the elements that make up our world are formed.

Simone Dichiara receives funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

Eleonora Troja receives funding from European Research Council.

– ref. Astrophysicists trace the origin of valuable metals in space, from colliding stars to merging galaxies – https://theconversation.com/astrophysicists-trace-the-origin-of-valuable-metals-in-space-from-colliding-stars-to-merging-galaxies-272328

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By David Campbell, Professor of Public Administration, Binghamton University, State University of New York

The 50 American individuals and couples who gave or pledged the most to charity in 2025 committed US$22.4 billion to foundations, universities, hospitals and more. That total was 35% above an inflation-adjusted $16.6 billion in 2024, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s latest annual tally of these donations.

Media entrepreneur and former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg led the Chronicle’s Philanthropy 50 list, followed by Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Allen died in 2018, but his estate is still being settled.

The Conversation U.S. asked David Campbell, Lindsey McDougle and Hans Peter Schmitz, three scholars of philanthropy and nonprofits, to assess the significance of these gifts and to consider what they indicate about the state of charitable giving in the United States.

What trends stand out overall?

Schmitz: Higher education, hospitals, medical research, foundations and donor-advised funds – which serve as savings accounts reserved for charitable giving – drew the biggest gifts in 2025. The education and medical fields are a perennial favorite of high-dollar donors. To a degree, these preferences for supporting education and health were first expressed by Andrew Carnegie in his 1889 essay, “The Gospel of Wealth,” in which he famously claimed that “the man who dies rich dies disgraced.”

Campbell: This list changes little from year to year. Of this year’s top 20 donors, 16 have appeared at least one other time over the past five years. Six others have also made this list at least two other times since 2021. For the third year in a row, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is at the top of the list. He gave away over $4 billion in 2025, over $500 million more than the next highest donor.

Half of these 22 repeat top-50 givers have signed The Giving Pledge, in which they made a public commitment “to give the majority of their wealth to charitable causes in their lifetime or wills.” Their appearance on the list shows that they are making at least some progress toward that commitment.

How they give their money hasn’t changed much either. A dozen of the 22 who make this list year after year regularly fund the same causes – often their own family foundations. Donations to foundations increase the amount of money those philanthropic institutions may give away in the future, but that money might not be disbursed anytime soon. By law, foundations only have to donate or spend 5% of the money they possess every year.

McDougle: The top 50 donors gave more in 2025 than they had since 2021. But this growth is highly concentrated. Mike Bloomberg alone accounts for 19% of the $22.4 billion they gave in 2025, and the top 10 accounted for nearly three-quarters of what all 50 gave to charity.

This pattern reflects a broader reality: A small number of ultra-wealthy individuals increasingly dominate American philanthropy. This concentration is raising questions about democratic accountability, including this one: Whose priorities define the public good?

In my opinion, this kind of concentration can skew philanthropic priorities. Decisions about education, health care, climate policy and democracy can increasingly become influenced not through public deliberation, but through the discretionary choices of a few members of a financial elite.

What surprises you about the biggest donors?

Schmitz: I find it odd that MacKenzie Scott isn’t on this list. She says she gave $7.1 billion in 2025. If she had met the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s criteria, that would have landed her in first place by far. Unfortunately, the Chronicle says that MacKenzie Scott has never provided sufficient information about her generosity since becoming a major donor on her own, following her 2019 divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. And that leaves her off the list year after year.

Campbell: The Trump administration’s defunding of the U.S. Agency for International Development is among the most significant events of 2025. When it began, some philanthropy scholars wondered whether wealthy donors would replace at least a portion of the lost funds.

One example of that happening: Jacklyn and Miguel Bezos, the parents of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, pledged up to $500 million to UNICEF, the United Nations humanitarian relief organization. No other donors on this list clearly made gifts for international development or foreign aid such a high priority. However, some of these donors’ foundations, notably the Gates Foundation, do support those efforts.

Similarly, it’s unclear to what extent these donors are responding to the huge funding cuts to research that the Trump administration made in 2025.

Several of them have supported medical research in the past and continued to do in 2025. Sergey Brin gave the Michael J. Fox Foundation $50 million for Parkinson’s disease research, a continuation of his past commitment to that organization. Phil and Penny Knight, the founder of Nike and his wife, announced plans to give $2 billion to the Oregon Health & Science University’s Knight Cancer Institute.

McDougle: I think it’s striking that there are no women who made this year’s Philanthropy 50 list on their own. The women listed appear only as part of a married couple, as members of a family, or within joint giving structures that include a male donor. By contrast, there are 24 male donors listed on their own.

Last year’s list included multiple women as sole donors, including two in the top 10.

The absence of women listed here who gave independently of men mirrors broader wealth disparities in the U.S.: About 86% of U.S. billionaires are men, according to the Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires list.

What concerns do you have?

Schmitz: The list excludes donors like MacKenzie Scott, but includes other very rich donors with serious ethical issues. Businessman Denny Sanford is one example. He signed the Giving Pledge in 2010. He was removed from it in 2023 after being investigated for the alleged possession of child pornography. South Dakota prosecutors ultimately declined to levy charges against the philanthropist, who ranked 14th among the top 50 donors of 2025.

The reputation of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, one of the world’s biggest donors, is also getting tarnished. In February 2026, he apologized to the staff of the Gates Foundation for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

I suggest that the Chronicle of Philanthropy take ethically problematic behavior into consideration when it composes this annual list.

Campbell: It’s a bit surprising to see that only 19 of the top 50 donors are also on the Forbes 400, which lists the nation’s richest people. The wealthiest Americans have the most to give, and I would have expected to see more of them among the top 50 givers as well. Instead, what we see is that philanthropy is a higher and consistent priority more for some than for others, which I find disappointing.

I would like to see more members of the Forbes 400 on this list next year.

What do you expect to see in 2026 and beyond?

Campbell: We are living in a politically volatile moment, with high levels of polarization and increased concerns about democratic backsliding in the United States.

Several of these donors have made strengthening democracy a high priority, including Pierre and Pam Omidyar, and Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank, through his family foundation. However, I don’t believe that this issue has been a high enough priority among the biggest givers in recent years. I would think that this kind of giving could increase in 2026.

McDougle: Another factor is demographic. Most of the top 50 donors are in their 60s or older. In the years ahead, philanthropy is likely to be influenced by a significant intergenerational transfer of wealth. Philanthropy scholars and consultants estimate that tens of trillions of dollars will transfer from older Americans to their younger heirs over the coming decades.

That shift could have substantial implications for large-scale giving. At the same time, it remains unclear whether the top 50 donors under 60 will be inclined to establish foundations. Surveys of very wealthy families suggest that younger donors often express different priorities than older ones.

Whether those preferences will reshape elite philanthropy remains an open question.

David Campbell is chair of the Conrad and Virginia Klee Foundation Board.

Lindsey McDougle is president-elect of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA).

Hans Peter Schmitz 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. Gifts from top 50 US philanthropists jumped to $22.4B in 2025 − Mike Bloomberg, Bill Gates and the estate of Paul Allen lead a list of the biggest givers – https://theconversation.com/gifts-from-top-50-us-philanthropists-jumped-to-22-4b-in-2025-mike-bloomberg-bill-gates-and-the-estate-of-paul-allen-lead-a-list-of-the-biggest-givers-276825

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Doug Jacobson, University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Iowa State University

When most people think about the internet, they likely picture websites and apps. What they rarely see are the invisible services that make those experiences possible: systems that translate names into numbers, verify who you are, deliver messages and block malicious traffic.

For example, DNS, the Domain Name System, has quietly become a single point of failure. DNS is the internet’s phone book. When it fails, large parts of the internet effectively disappear, even if servers are still running.

DNS is not alone. Over the past decade, four core internet services – DNS, authentication, email and security infrastructure – have consolidated into a small number of global platforms. As a cybersecurity researcher, I see that this concentration has fundamentally changed how outages unfold. What would once have been a local failure is now often a systemic event, affecting thousands of organizations simultaneously.

The internet was designed to assume failure. Mail servers, DNS resolvers, authentication systems and security monitors were meant to be distributed and locally controlled. Today, for reasons that make economic sense, many companies and organizations outsource all four to the same handful of providers. One cloud service monitoring organization referred to 2025 as the year of the global cloud outage.

DNS, authentication, email and security

Outages are no longer rare exceptions, but a predictable byproduct of efficiency at a global scale. That pattern becomes apparent when you look at a few major outages that have affected each of the four services.

DNS outages are a prime example of systemic risk. If DNS cannot resolve a name, a website may as well not exist. A growing share of global DNS resolution now depends on a small number of providers. That concentration means that a single configuration error, routing issue or attack can ripple across much of the web.

Authentication outages are less visible to the public but often more disruptive inside organizations.

For example, on Oct. 29, 2025, Microsoft Azure experienced a major outage that disrupted authentication and access for millions of users worldwide for over five hours. Another authentication provider, Okta, suffered an outage on Oct. 3.

Authentication has become a universal gatekeeper. When identity services fail, modern organizations don’t degrade gracefully; they come to a halt.

Despite decades of predictions about its decline, email remains a central component of how employers function. Password resets, invoices, legal notices, emergency notifications and incident response coordination all depend on it. When large cloud email providers experience outages, companies and organizations not only lose communication but also struggle to recover accounts and coordinate recovery efforts effectively. In 2025, both Yahoo and Microsoft email services suffered outages.

Since many companies and organizations no longer operate independent mail systems, email outages are increasingly affecting entire industries simultaneously. In an emergency, the system that people rely on to respond may be unavailable.

Security as a service is a rapidly growing market. Cybersecurity infrastructure, including distributed denial-of-service mitigation, firewalls and bot protection, is designed to keep services online. When this infrastructure fails, it can have the opposite effect.

Misconfigured security rules and routing errors at global security providers have repeatedly blocked legitimate traffic on a massive scale. In one well-documented incident in 2024, a routine configuration change by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused widespread outages across thousands of unrelated websites.

Why outages are getting more expensive

Industry data suggests that while outages may be becoming less frequent, they are becoming far more costly.

The professional services organization Uptime Institute reports that more than half of major outages now cost over US$100,000, and roughly 1 in 5 exceeds $1 million. These estimated costs reflect lost revenue, stalled operations, reputational damage and, in some cases, risks to health and public safety.

Centralization magnifies these costs. A single failure now affects a greater number of users, employers and critical services simultaneously. What was once an IT problem has evolved into a multifaceted economic and societal issue.

Concentration is the real risk.

Regulators are beginning to recognize this pattern. In the United States, federal guidance now emphasizes the importance of inventorying cloud dependencies and reducing reliance on a single provider. These efforts reflect a growing realization: The greatest risk is not any one outage, but the structure of dependency that makes those outages unavoidable and wide-reaching.

Accounting for inevitable failures

The internet was designed to route around damage. In the pursuit of convenience and scale, the tech industry has rebuilt key parts of it around a small number of global trust brokers for names, identity, messaging and security. The result is a byproduct of the cloud services business model, where routine failures become systemic events.

Companies and organizations don’t need to abandon the cloud to address this issue. But I believe that it’s important to measure concentration, design for diversity, and rehearse what happens when shared services fail. Resilience does not come from perfection. It stems from choice, redundancy and the ability to fail locally rather than everywhere at once.

Doug Jacobson 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 cloud service outages ripple across the internet – and the economy – https://theconversation.com/why-cloud-service-outages-ripple-across-the-internet-and-the-economy-272241