A research ship sails in the Atlantic Ocean, where scientists are studying the roles of marine viruses.SW Wilhelm
Virus. The word evokes images of illness and fears of outbreaks. Yet, in the oceans, not all viruses are bad news.
Some play a helpful, even critical, role in sustaining marine life.
In a new study, we and an international team scientists examined the behavior of marine viruses in a large band of oxygen-rich water just under the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. What we discovered there – and its role in the food web – shows marine viruses in a new light.
Studying something so tiny
Viruses are incredibly small, typically no more than tens of nanometers in diameter, nearly a hundred times smaller than a bacterium and more than a thousand times smaller than the width of a strand of hair.
In fact, viruses are so small that they cannot be seen using conventional microscopes.
An electron microscope view shows examples of Prochlorococcus myoviruses. Images A and D show different viruses with their tails. In B and C, the tail is contracted. The black scale bar indicates a length of 100 nanometers. MB Sullivan, et al., 2005, PLOS One, CC BY
Decades ago, scientists thought that marine viruses were neither abundant nor ecologically relevant, despite the clear relevance of viruses to humans, plants and animals.
Then, advances in the use of transmission electron microscopes in the late 1980s changed everything. Scientists were able to examine sea water at a very high magnification and saw tiny, circular objects containing DNA. These were viruses, and there were tens of millions of them per milliliter of water – tens of thousands of times greater than had been estimated in the past.
A theory for how viruses feed the marine world
Most marine viruses infect the cells of microorganisms – the bacteria and algae that serve as the base of the ocean food web and are responsible for about half the oxygen generated on the planet.
By the late 1990s, scientists realized that virus activity was likely shaping how carbon and nutrients cycled through ocean systems. We hypothesized, in what’s known as the viral shunt model, that the marine viruses break open the cells of microorganisms and release their carbon and nutrients into the water.
This process could increase the amount of nutrients reaching marine phytoplankton. Phytoplankton provide food for krill and fish, which in turn feed larger marine life across the oceans. That would mean viruses are essential to a food web that drives a vast global fisheries and aquaculture industry producing nearly 200 million metric tons of seafood.
The team took samples from a meters-thick band of oxygen that spreads for hundreds of miles across the subtropical Atlantic Ocean. In this region, part of the Sargasso Sea, single-celled cyanobacteria known as Prochlorococcus dominate marine photosynthesis with nearly 50,000 to upwards of 100,000 cells in every milliliter of seawater. These Prochlorococcus can be infected by viruses.
What are Prochlorococcus? Science Magazine.
By sequencing community RNA – molecules that carry genetic instructions within cells – our team was able to look at what nearly all viruses and their hosts were trying to do at once.
The viruses were attacking cells and spilling organic matter, which bacteria were taking up and using to fuel new growth. The bacteria respired away the carbon and released nitrogen as ammonium. And this nitrogen appears to have been stimulating photosynthesis and the growth of more Prochlorococcus cells, resulting in greater production that generated the ribbon of oxygen.
The viral infection was having an ecosystem-scale impact.
Scientists aboard a National Science Foundation research expedition in the open Atlantic in 2019 prepare equipment to collect water samples at different depths to analyze the activity of marine viruses. SW Wilhelm
Understanding the microscopic world matters
Viruses can cause acute, chronic and catastrophic effects on human and animal health. But this new research, made possible by an open-ocean expedition supported by the National Science Foundation, adds to a growing range of studies that demonstrate that viruses are central players in how ecosystems function, including by playing a role in storing carbon in the deep oceans.
We are living on a changing planet. Monitoring and responding to changes in the environment require an understanding of the microbes and mechanisms that drive global processes.
This new study is a reminder of how important it is to explore the microscopic world further – including the life of viruses that shape the fate of microbes and how the Earth system works.
Steven Wilhelm’s work on this study was supported by The National Science Foundation, The National Institute of Environmental Health Science, the Simons Foundation and the Allen Family Philanthropies.
Joshua Weitz’s work on this study was supported by The National Science Foundation, the Simons Foundation, and the Blaise Pascal Chair of the Île-de-Paris Region.
Scholars widely agree that astronomy is a gateway science – that it inspires a core human interest in science among people of all ages, from senior citizens to schoolchildren. Helping young people tap into their excitement about the night sky helps them build confidence and opens career pathways they may not have considered before.
Yet today the night sky is often hidden from view. Almost all Americans live under light-polluted skies, and only 1 in 5 people in North America can see the Milky Way. When people live in areas where the night sky is clearer, they tend to express a greater wonder about the universe. Altogether, this means communities with less light pollution have great potential to educate the next generation of scientists.
Rural communities have some of the darkest skies in the country, making them perfect for stargazing. Yet while students in rural areas are in the optimal physical environment to be inspired by the night sky, they are the most in need of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, education resources to support their interests and build the confidence they need to pursue careers in science.
Stargazing, finding constellations and watching meteor showers as a kid inspired my own sense of awe around the vastness of space and possibilities in our universe. Now, I’m the executive director of the Smithsonian’s Scientists Taking Astronomy to Rural Schools, or STARS, a new program led by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, that delivers telescopes and associated lesson plans to rural schools across the United States, free of charge. I’m working to share my excitement and wonder with students in rural areas.
A solar eclipse, as viewed through a telescope. STARS
Why hands-on STEM learning matters
Students need direct exposure to STEM careers and hands-on experiences that help them learn the skills they will need to pursue these careers on their own. Hands-on activities ground new knowledge in ways that lectures and reading often cannot. Experiential opportunities connect what may be distant or abstract concepts to clear, tangible, real-world skills. This experiential learning improves students’ understanding of astronomy content and increases their motivation to learn.
Telescopes are important tools for astronomy that scientists use all the time. When students use telescopes as part of their learning, they are experiencing real techniques that scientists use. Using a telescope brings the viewer closer to fantastic celestial objects – allowing them to see galaxies, nebulas, planets, the Moon and the Sun, with solar filter protection, more closely or in greater detail.
Telescopes help students view astronomical objects, like the Moon, up close. STARS
There is nothing quite like seeing the soaring peaks and shadowed valleys of the Moon, or the distinct ring structure of Saturn, or endless other astronomical objects, through a telescope lens. This inspiration can motivate students to use their curiosity to explore the universe and see STEM careers as potential pathways.
Rural STEM education
The National Rural Education Association’s Why Rural Matters 2023 report estimates that there are 9.5 million students attending school in rural areas in the U.S., across more than 32,000 schools. This is more students than the student population of the 100 largest U.S. school districts combined.
While rural communities around the country all look different, they can face similar challenges: limited access to broadband internet, reduced state funding support and restricted geographical access to field trip opportunities, such as museums. Why Rural Matters found, on average, that 13.4% of rural households have a limited internet connection, and for some states this increases to 20%.
Each state distributes their education funding differently. The percentage allocated to rural schools varies from state to state, ranging from 5% to 50% of the total funding, which results in a wide range of money spent per student. Nonrural districts spend an average of US$500 more per student than rural districts. Looking state by state, however, this disparity climbs into the thousands of dollars.
Educators may also consider STEM topics daunting. Many teachers do not feel adequately prepared or confident to introduce these topics to students. In other situations, there simply aren’t enough teachers to cover these topics. Shortages of STEM-focused teachers occur at some of the highest rates in rural districts, reducing rural students’ access to these subjects.
These reasons are why, through the STARS program, we give teachers access to a national community of practice that supports peer sharing and participation, alongside the telescope and science-aligned lesson plans. The lesson plans will be available online for anyone to use later this spring, whether or not they are part of the program.
Rural areas farther from cities tend to have darker skies, better for stargazing. Ryan Hutton/Unsplash
Opportunities to observe the sky with telescopes lead to an improvement in learning outcomes and STEM identity, and rural schools are uniquely situated to introduce students to the night sky. With a little extra support, through community events and educational programs, these schools have the opportunity to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.
Emma Marcucci works for the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, as Executive Director of the Smithsonian STARS program, which is supported through private gifts and donations.
Small businesses are planning to hire fewer recent college graduates than they did in 2025, making it likely harder for this cohort to find entry-level jobs.
In our recent national survey, we found that small businesses are 30% more likely than larger employers to say they are not hiring recent college graduates in 2026. About 1 in 5 small-business employers said they do not plan to hire college graduates or expect to hire fewer than they did last year.
This would be the largest anticipated decrease in small businesses hiring new graduates in more than a decade.
This slowdown is happening nationwide and is affecting early-career hiring for people graduating from both college and graduate programs – and is more pronounced for people with graduate degrees.
Nearly 40% of small businesses also said they do not plan to hire, or are cutting back on hiring, recent grads who don’t have a master’s of business administration. Almost 60% said the same for people with other professional degrees.
National data shows the same trend. Only 56% of small businesses are hiring or trying to hire anyone at all, according to October 2025 findings by the National Federation of Independent Business, an advocacy organization representing small and independent businesses.
Job openings at small employers are at their lowest since 2020, when hiring dropped sharply during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some small businesses may change their hiring plans later in the spring, but our survey reveals that they are approaching hiring cautiously. This gives new graduates or students getting their diplomas in a few months information on what they can expect in the job market for summer and fall 2026.
About two-thirds of them were small businesses, which reflects their distribution and proportion nationally.
Small businesses employ nearly half of private-sector workers. They also offer many of the first professional jobs that new graduates get to start their careers.
Many small employers in our survey said they want to hire early-career workers. But small-business owners and hiring managers often find that training new graduates takes more time and support than they can give, especially in fields like manufacturing and health care.
That’s why many small employers prefer to hire interns they know or cooperative education students who had previously worked for them while they were enrolled as students.
Larger employers are also being more careful about hiring, but they usually face fewer challenges. They often have structured onboarding, dedicated supervisors and formal training, so they can better support new employees. This is one reason why small businesses have seen a bigger slowdown in hiring than larger employers.
Then there are small businesses in cities that are open to hiring recent graduates but are struggling to find workers. In cities, housing costs are often rising faster than starting salaries, so graduates have to live farther from their jobs.
In the suburbs and rural areas, long or unreliable commutes make things worse. Since small businesses usually hire locally and cannot pay higher wages, these challenges make it harder for graduates to accept and keep entry-level jobs.
Job prospects for recent college graduates depend on the industry. The 2026 survey shows that employers in health care, construction and finance plan to hire more graduates than other fields. In contrast, manufacturing and arts and entertainment expect to hire fewer new graduates.
Most new jobs are in health care and construction, but these fields usually do not hire many recent college graduates. Health care growth is focused on experienced clinical and support roles, while construction jobs are mostly in skilled trades that require prior training or apprenticeships instead of a four-year degree.
So, even in growing industries, there are still limited opportunities for people just starting their careers.
Even though small businesses are hiring less, there are still opportunities for recent graduates. It’s important to be intentional when preparing for the job market. Getting practical experience matters more than ever. Internships, co-ops, project work and short-term jobs help students show they are ready before getting a full-time position.
Employers often say that understanding how the workplace operates is just as important as having technical skills for people starting their careers.
We often remind students in our classes at LeBow College of Business that communication and professional skills matter more than they expect. Writing clear emails, being on time, asking thoughtful questions and responding well to feedback can make candidates stand out. Small employers value these skills because they need every team member to contribute right away.
Students should also prepare for in-person work. Almost 60% of small employers in our survey want full-time hires to work on-site five days a week. In smaller companies, graduates who can take on different tasks and adjust quickly are more likely to set themselves apart from other candidates.
Finally, local networking is still important. Most small employers hire mainly within their region, so building relationships and staying active in the community are key for early-career opportunities.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
I’m an emergency medicine and critical care physician at the University of Colorado. In my 18 years of practicing clinical medicine, this year is one of the worst I have seen. Our emergency department hit a record number of single-day total visits over the holidays, and visit volumes have stayed high. Flu is likely contributing to this trend.
While there is always a season where respiratory viruses hit hard, this year influenza is making patients miserable and wreaking havoc on both the state and national health care system.
How does this year’s ‘super flu’ differ from other flu seasons?
This season is especially rough because of the volume of people seeking emergency care. This flu came on fast and seems to be very contagious, and its symptoms are more severe than other recent years’ flu strains.
Flu tends to cause fever, body aches and maybe a cough. But this so-called super flu has also caused vomiting and diarrhea, which has made people feel much worse than isolated respiratory symptoms alone. When people are feeling worse, they seek emergency care, which is part of why our emergency department is seeing so many people.
In past flu seasons, which typically run from October through February, emergency rooms were full because they were facing multiple outbreaks, such as the 2022 “tripledemic” of COVID-19, flu and RSV.
But this 2025-26 flu season, we’re seeing high emergency department visits specifically from the flu. The first group of patients we’re seeing are healthy people who are feeling worse with this flu, which comes with nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, and come to the emergency department looking for symptomatic relief.
The second group are those with severe manifestations of the flu or who have underlying comorbidities such as asthma or heart disease that can be exacerbated by influenza. This is a population that may require oxygen, or they’re a transplant patient and they’re requiring hospitalization.
This double whammy of people feeling really miserable from their symptoms plus people with comorbidities experiencing complications is when you really see a strain on the health care system.
The CDC ranks Colorado’s flu activity among the highest in the U.S., along with Louisiana, New Jersey, New York and South Carolina.
Kids generally seem to be having milder flu cases than adults, which is typical for some of these viruses. But there have been 17 pediatric deaths associated with influenza across the U.S., with eight in the week ending January 3. That number of deaths in children is not typical at this point in the season.
Young people in their 20s are feeling pretty bad from this year’s flu, but we’re not seeing a lot of complications or hospitalizations in this group across the U.S. and in emergency departments in Colorado.
We’re seeing a lot of people who have underlying conditions, such as asthma, as well as diabetes, obesity, heart disease and those who are immune-compromised. They get the flu, and then it leads to kind of a cascade, or a worsening of their underlying medical problems. This is different from what we saw with COVID-19, where healthy people got very, very sick from COVID-19 itself.
The older you get, the more likely you are to experience complications, such as needing oxygen, which typically requires hospitalization.
Are you still encouraging people to get the flu shot if they haven’t yet?
Yes, you should still consider getting your flu shot, especially if you have medical problems.
Getting the flu shot reduces the risk of severe illness and hospitalization, especially for people who are older or have other medical conditions. Genaro Molina/Getty Images
When should you consider going to an emergency room?
Anytime breathing becomes difficult, or you experience severe chest pain or headaches that are abnormal, that’s something that we want you to seek medical care for right away. And of course, if somebody’s worried about a symptom, we’re here 365 days a year, and we’re happy to help.
If you are feeling bad – such as a mild headache, body aches, fever, sometimes some cough and congestion, and as I mentioned with this flu, potentially vomiting and diarrhea – that is very normal.
If it’s flu, COVID-19 or RSV in a healthy, mildly symptomatic patient, it doesn’t really matter what they have, because there’s not a specific treatment. There’s not anything that we can do that’s going to make them better, other than “tincture of time,” meaning lots of rest.
If you have underlying medical problems, such as diabetes, lung problems or are immune-compromised, and you are experiencing severe symptoms, you should at the very least see your primary care doctor if not the emergency department.
Is it important to get tested for the sake of knowing what you have?
A lot of patients want to know what virus they have, but if you’re young and healthy, there’s not really a need for testing other than surveillance.
Colorado’s infectious disease trackers say wastewater surveillance is the No. 1 way to figure out what infectious diseases are in the community. We can’t get a comprehensive sample through hospitals and clinics, because there are so many people who are home, don’t get tested and do not seek health care.
In Colorado and other states, wastewater is tested for infectious pathogens, including influenza, COVID-19 and RSV. This testing indicates the prevalence of a virus in a given community. Portland Press Herald/Getty Images
In addition, it’s important for the overall health care system that laboratory testing be used judiciously. Testing does help us understand what’s in the community. But from a hospital and emergency department lens, the more tests we send to the lab that have to be run, the more testing services for other illnesses get backed up. It also adds a burden to nursing and other clinical staff, as well as costs for the patient and hospital.
But if a patient is sick with manageable symptoms from a virus, it’s the same standard advice: Stay at home, wash your hands and consider a mask if you have to go out in public.
Jean Hoffman 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.
Imagine a map that allows you to see what your neighborhood looked like a century ago in immense detail. What you’re thinking of is probably very much like the fire insurance maps produced from the 1860s to the 1970s for insurance companies to identify potential fire risks.
Often referred to as Sanborn maps, after the Sanborn Map Co. that produced them, fire insurance maps were created for every city in the United States with a population greater than 1,000 people. Over a century, more than 50,000 editions of these maps were produced, comprising over 700,000 map sheets – many of which have been scanned and are publicly accessible through the Library of Congress.
1917 Sanborn map of The Hill at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Library of Congress
Genealogists, historic preservationists, historians and urban planners commonly use these maps to understand past urban landscapes. But as a critical cartographer interested in how maps shape how people understand the world, I see these maps differently.
Fire insurance maps supply more than just detailed insights into how neighborhoods looked decades ago. Needing to turn a profit, insurers sought to minimize the amount of risk they underwrote or charged higher premiums to account for risk. These maps provide important clues into how insurance companies understood how risk was distributed across cities, revealing costly biases.
Mapping fire risk
Before zoning and land-use planning, American cities frequently mixed industrial, commercial and residential buildings in the same block. Insurance agents used the immense detail of fire insurance maps to determine whether a property was too risky to underwrite, often weighing the demographics of the neighborhoods with the flammability of the buildings in the neighborhood.
For example, an Atlanta neighborhood called Lightning was a Black, working-class district composed of a mixture of rail yards, noxious industries and residences in 1911. The neighborhood was also an immense fire hazard. Atlanta’s primary trash incinerator stood less than 150 feet from two massive natural gas storage tanks, while two gas processing plants manufactured specialized fuels just feet from homes.
Underwriters would use information from fire insurance maps to understand the local landscape. In these maps, colors correspond to the building’s construction material: pink indicates brick, while yellow indicates wood. Lightning was primarily made from wood, placing the entire neighborhood at risk if a fire broke out.
Fire insurance maps and discrimination
At the same time, fire insurance maps also highlight the social landscape of the neighborhood.
Many buildings in the Lightning fire insurance map are labeled “F.B.,” which stands for “female boarding,” a euphemism for brothels. While brothels were not a fire risk themselves, this code indicated the alleged moral hazard of a neighborhood, or the likelihood that property owners would allow riskier activities to occur on their property that could cost insurers more.
1911 Sanborn map of the Lightning neighborhood of Atlanta, Ga. It’s now Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home to the Atlanta Falcons of the National Football League and the Atlanta United FC of Major League Soccer. Library of Congress
From this one map, an underwriter could quickly see that Lightning was an extremely risky place to insure. Along with disinvestment from fire insurers, marginalized communities like Lightning also experienced other forms of systemic discrimination. Scholars have documented racial discrimination in car, life and health insurance underwriting.
Although fire insurance maps are no longer used in the insurance industry, they provide researchers one way of seeing how discrimination in fire insurance and urban planning manifested in the United States during the 20th century.
Jack Swab 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.
The Department of Justice’s decision to open a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell has reignited concern over the independence of the central bank.
But how unique are such apparent attempts to undermine the central bank’s authority? And what would be the consequences of chipping away at Fed independence? To understand what’s at stake, The Conversation turned to Cristina Bodea, a Michigan State University professor who has been studying central bank best practices for more than two decades.
How unique is this moment in American history?
It is unique in the sense that we haven’t seen a Fed chair criminally investigated ever.
But if we go back in history to the Nixon and Reagan years, presidents have put a lot of pressure on Fed chairs when economic conditions were bad – more precisely, there was high unemployment and high inflation.
In more recent history, Fed chairs and the U.S. Federal Reserve have enjoyed bipartisan support in being independent.
Why are central banks independent, and what is at stake?
Independence comes in two forms: legal and in practice. In the recent past, the laws governing central banks have tended to favor an arms-length relationship in which experts in these institutions look at the economic data and make interest rate decisions based on their mandate. If their mandate includes low inflation, they’re supposed to adjust interest rates based on their data so that they can achieve their goal in the medium term.
Legal independence means that the law governing the institution allows them to do this without politicians interfering in day-to-day operations. This does not mean that the institution is not accountable. The Fed is accountable to Congress, and the people who run the Fed are appointed by the president and voted on by the Senate
Then, there is the de facto independence. Because laws are debatable, what happens in practice can differ from the law, and there isn’t an application of the law to each and every instance in which an institution makes a decision.
In the past 30 years, the U.S. Federal Reserve has been more independent than the law suggests because there was a clear bipartisan consensus to not politicize the institution so that it could safeguard the country’s price environment and employment outcomes, without taking into account elections, electoral cycles and who is or isn’t in the White House.
Why do politicians seek to interfere with this independence?
Monetary policy is a fairly powerful tool, meaning that it can have fairly large and quick effects on outcomes. So, politicians would like to use it; the short-term political gains might include cheaper credit and somewhat more employment.
But it’s kind of a double-edged sword because politicians cannot fool people repeatedly. Along with people expecting politicians to use and misuse monetary policy comes inflation as well as an expectation of inflation. If people expect inflation rates to increase, they will adjust their expectations, and employment will only increase if your inflation expectations are stable.
It makes very little sense to put pressure on the Fed in the way that the current administration is – like a full-on assault, an attempt to take over the institution. The institution is useful. If you have an institution that is not a credible inflation fighter, it will actually not be able to stabilize employment either.
What are the stakes here for the American consumer?
The concern is inflation. Currently, data is ambiguous about the right monetary policy, and there are debates within the Fed about the right course of action. But there is no full-blown financial crisis or unemployment crisis.
Interest rates should not be lowered by 3 percentage points under these circumstances, as Trump has urged. Fairly drastic measures should be reserved for fairly drastic circumstances, and I don’t think we are in fairly drastic circumstances. If low interest rates are employed at this moment, you’re basically using all your ammunition on a moment that doesn’t seem to warrant using it.
We are at an uncertain juncture: There are risks to employment, tariffs can further damage the labor market, there is an affordability crisis. There could be an actual financial crisis in the future.
Lowering interest rates now would make the Fed’s interest rate instrument incapable of working should there be a true crisis in the near future.
Traders digest news of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s comments over a criminal investigation. AP Photo/Richard Drew
Have we seen the independence of central banks under attack in other countries, or is this uniquely American?
This is not uniquely American, and has happened in countries like Turkey, Venezuela and Argentina. Central bank independence globally has been under attack, but not in democracies or in countries that claim to have strong institutions and rule of law.
Cristina Bodea 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.
What is below Earth, since space is present in every direction? – Purvi, age 17, India
If you’ve seen illustrations or models of the solar system, maybe you noticed that all the planets orbit the Sun in more or less the same plane, traveling in the same direction.
But what is above and below that plane? And why are the planets’ orbits aligned like this, in a flat pancake, rather than each one traveling in a completely different plane?
I’m a planetary scientist who works with robotic spacecraft, such as rovers and orbiters. When my colleagues and I send them out to explore our solar system, it’s important for us to understand the 3D map of our space neighborhood.
Which way is ‘down’?
Earth’s gravity has a lot to do with what people think is up and what is down. Things fall down toward the ground, but that direction depends on where you are.
Imagine you’re standing somewhere in North America and point downward. If you extend a line from your fingertip all the way through the Earth, that line would point in the direction of “up” to someone on a boat in the southern Indian Ocean.
In the bigger picture, “down” could be defined as being below the plane of the solar system, which is known as the ecliptic. By convention, we say that above the plane is where the planets are seen to orbit counterclockwise around the Sun, and from below they are seen to orbit clockwise.
Even more flavors of ‘down’
Is there anything special about the direction of down relative to the ecliptic? To answer that, we need to zoom out even farther. Our solar system is centered on the Sun, which is just one of about 100 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way.
Each of these stars, and their associated planets, are all orbiting around the center of the Milky Way, just like the planets orbit their stars, but on a much longer time scale. And just as the planets in our solar system are not in random orbits, stars in the Milky Way orbit the center of the galaxy close to a plane, which is called the galactic plane.
This plane is not oriented the same way as our solar system’s ecliptic. In fact, the angle between the two planes is about 60 degrees.
A side view of galaxy NGC 4217 taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows how all the stars and their planetary systems lie on one plane. NASA Goddard, CC BY
Going another step back, the Milky Way is part of a cluster of galaxies known the the Local Group, and – you can see where this is going – these galaxies mostly fall within another plane, called the supergalactic plane. The supergalactic plane is almost perpendicular to the galactic plane, with an angle between the two planes of about 84.5 degrees.
How these bodies end up traveling paths that are close to the same plane has to do with how they formed in the first place.
Collapse of the solar nebula
The material that would ultimately compose the Sun and the planets of the solar system started out as a diffuse and very extensive cloud of gas and dust called the solar nebula. Every particle within the solar nebula had a tiny amount of mass. Because any mass exerts gravitational force, these particles were attracted to each other, though only very weakly.
The particles in the solar nebula started out moving very slowly. But over a long time, the mutual attraction these particles felt thanks to gravity caused the cloud to start to draw inward on itself, shrinking.
There would have also been some very slight overall rotation to the solar nebula, maybe thanks to the gravitational tug of a passing star. As the cloud collapsed, this rotation would have increased in speed, just like a spinning figure skater spins faster and faster as they draw their arms in toward their body.
Watch how the cloud’s particles collided and eventually clumped.
As the cloud continued shrinking, the individual particles grew closer to each other and had more and more interactions affecting their motion, both because of gravity and collisions between them. These interactions caused individual particles in orbits that were tilted far from the direction of the overall rotation of the cloud to reorient their orbits.
For example, if a particle coming down through the orbital plane slammed into a particle coming up through that plane, the interaction would tend to cancel out that vertical motion and reorient their orbits into the plane.
On much bigger scales, similar sorts of interactions are probably what ended up confining most of the stars that make up the Milky Way into the galactic plane, and most of the galaxies that make up the Local Group into the supergalactic plane.
The orientations of the ecliptic, galactic and supergalactic planes all go back to the initial random rotation direction of the clouds they formed from.
So what’s below the Earth?
So there’s not really anything special about the direction we define as “down” relative to the Earth, other than the fact that there’s not much orbiting the Sun in that direction.
If you go far enough in that direction, you’ll eventually find other stars with their own planetary systems orbiting in completely different orientations. And if you go even farther, you might encounter other galaxies with their own planes of rotation.
This question highlights one of my favorite aspects of astronomy: It puts everything in perspective. If you asked a hundred people on your street, “Which way is down?” every one of them would point in the same direction. But imagine you asked that question of people all over the Earth, or of intelligent life forms in other planetary systems or even other galaxies. They’d all point in different directions.
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.
And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.
Jeff Moersch receives funding from NASA an the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Kathy Kiely, Professor and Lee Hills Chair of Free Press Studies, University of Missouri-Columbia
President Donald Trump, who has been involved in thousands of lawsuits, has made news outlets a particular target for litigation this year.AP Photo/Evan Vucci
In December 2025, President Donald Trump filed a US$10 billion lawsuit against the BBC in a federal court in Florida. It was only the latest in a long series of high-dollar legal challenges Trump has brought against prominent media organizations, including ABC, CBS, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among others.
Trump has won some sizable settlements in cases legal scholars had dismissed as largely lacking in merit. But as mediascholars, we believe prevailing in court is not necessarily his primary goal. Instead, Trump appears to use lawsuits as a strategic weapon designed to silence his enemies and critics – who sometimes seem to be one and the same in his eyes.
Trump has always been litigious. Over the course of his life, he has been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits. Many of these involved Trump suing for defamation over perceived threats to his reputation. Relatively few, however, have been successful, if success is defined as prevailing in courts of law.
But using litigation as a tool for intimidation can produce other results that can count as victory. We are concerned that the president may be using the courts as a tool not to correct the record but to muzzle potential watchdogs and deprive the public of the facts they need to hold him accountable.
Winning major settlements
Trump claims the BBC attempted to interfere with the 2024 election by misrepresenting statements he’d made. As with Trump’s other defamation suits, the odds appear long against the president winning his case against the British broadcaster in court.
Just after Trump’s election in 2024, ABC, whose parent company is Disney, promised to make a $15 million contribution to the Trump presidential library to settle a defamation suit many experts said had dubious merit.
Those two defamation suits were filed while Trump was still a presidential candidate. Weeks after winning reelection, Trump sued The Des Moines Register for publishing a preelection poll that suggested he might lose the swing state of Iowa. Instead, he carried the state by 13 percentage points.
Paramount Global agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit Trump had filed complaining that a CBS News interview with Kamala Harris had been misleadingly edited. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
Trump could have just gloated over his victory, as President Harry Truman did when he famously posed holding the Chicago Tribune’s “Dewey Beats Truman” headline the day after his reelection. Instead, Trump went to court, accusing The Des Moines Register and its pollster, J. Ann Selzer, of violating Iowa’s consumer protection laws by fraudulently deceiving consumers and campaign donors.
Even if Trump loses this suit, he has inflicted expensive litigation costs on a news organization.
The considerable costs of defense
From the 1960s until the late 1990s, leading media outlets, rich from advertising dollars, could afford to hire lawyers to defend against governmental overreach and protect their role in the U.S.’s democratic order. Those fights led to Supreme Court decisions shielding media outlets from most libel complaints and government censorship prior to publication.
But the rise of the internet and then social media led to the collapse of the economic model supporting traditional news production. As audiences and advertisers have fled traditional media outlets, including newspapers and broadcasters, the money to hire lawyers to defend against expensive defamation suits or fight for access to government information is much harder to find.
If even media giants such as ABC and CBS are settling rather than fighting, what local news editor is going to assign a story that might trigger a presidential lawsuit? That’s why Trump’s suit against The Des Moines Register is such an ominous development.
Giving up without a fight
What’s disheartening about the media giants’ capitulation is that they are at risk of squandering the protections afforded by the Constitution and the courts.
In medieval England, criticizing the king or peers of the realm was a crime. But early in U.S. history, attempts to enforce seditious libel laws by the British government and later by President John Adams and the Federalist-controlled Congress generated public outcry and rebuke. This was based in part on the understanding that in a democracy the people must be free to criticize those who govern them, a principle enshrined in the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court ratified this understanding of press freedom in its 1964 decision New York Times v. Sullivan. In a resounding victory for free expression, the justices held that government officials cannot prevail in defamation cases unless there is clear and convincing proof that their critics knowingly or recklessly disregarded the truth. Careless errors are not enough.
Trump addressed supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, prior to their march to Capitol Hill. The question of whether he incited them to riot is at the heart of his lawsuit against the BBC. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
Under these protections, even Trump’s case against the BBC – where the network has admitted an ethical lapse – is not a certain winner, especially since the contested content didn’t air in Florida, where the lawsuit was filed.
Although Trump claims the BBC’s misleading edits implied that he directly incited protesters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the network can argue in court that the inaccuracy is only technical, given that Trump truly did give a firebrand speech that was widely criticized as at least indirectly leading to the violence that followed . If the edited version of Trump’s speech is not appreciably more harmful to Trump’s reputation than his actual speech, Trump’s defamation claim would likely fail.
Trump is the first U.S. president to use the weight of his office to extract private settlements from news outlets tasked with holding him accountable. Ostensibly, these suits are to recover monetary damages for harm to his reputation, but they are part of a broader attack on what Trump perceives as hostile media coverage.
New limits from states
Some of Trump’s targets are fighting back.
One is the Pulitzer Prize Board, the defendant in yet another Trump defamation suit – in this case, over the awards the board gave for reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
In December 2025, the Pulitzer Prize Board asked the judge in the case to force the president to hand over tax and medical records to prove that he had suffered the financial and emotional harm he is claiming.
Another key development: Most states have enacted anti-SLAPP laws. SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuits against public participation,” referring to cases filed to intimidate and discourage public criticism. Thirty-eight states, plus the District of Columbia, now have anti-SLAPP laws in place. It’s probably not a coincidence that Trump filed the latest iteration of his suit against The Des Moines Register on June 30, which happened to be one day before Iowa’s anti-SLAPP law took effect.
These state laws allow targets of SLAPPs to get early resolutions of meritless suits and can force people found to have filed such suits to pick up their targets’ legal bills.
Without such tools protecting First Amendment rights – and media organizations taking steps themselves to defend such rights – dissent might be characterized as a “deceptive trade practice,” and speech is no longer truly free.
Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky is affiliated with the Florida First Amendment Foundation.
Kathy Kiely 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.
The next day, the U.S. seized two tankers bound from Venezuela for other markets – less than a month after it seized two others it said were transporting Venezuelan oil.
Long-term plans go much further. Trump envisions major U.S. oil companies, such as Chevron and ExxonMobil, to invest some US$100 billion into reviving Venezuela’s struggling industry, with the investing companies reimbursed through future production. So far, neither Venezuelan authorities nor U.S. oil companies have said whether they’re willing to do this.
Trump’s “Venezuela took our oil, we’re taking it back” rationale apparently references the South American nation’s initial nationalization of its oil industry in 1976, plus a wave of expropriations in 2007 under Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
U.S. oil companies played a big role in launching and sustaining Venezuela’s oil boom, starting in the 1910s. Companies such as Standard Oil, a predecessor of ExxonMobil, and Gulf Oil, which eventually became part of Chevron, invested heavily in exploration, drilling and infrastructure, transforming Venezuela into a major global supplier.
Contracts from that era often blurred lines between reserve ownership and production rights. Venezuela legally retained subsoil ownership but granted or sold broad concessions to foreign operators, such as Royal Dutch-Shell. That effectively gave control of reserves and production to the oil companies, but not forever.
This ambiguity likely has played a role in Trump alleging outright theft through nationalization, a claim that holds little grounding in the historical precedent of how Venezuela and other nations have managed ownership of their natural reserves.
Nationalization can involve the outright expropriation of facilities and reserves – with or without compensation – or the renegotiation of oil production contracts. Alternatively, a government may get a bigger stake in the joint ventures it already has with foreign oil companies.
While privately owned oil companies primarily are accountable to their shareholders and focus mainly on maximizing profits, most government-run oil companies have other priorities too. These might include pumping revenue into safety net programs, domestic energy security, the development of other industries and military spending.
Sometimes those other goals take so much money out of the oil company’s orbit that they interfere with operational efficiency and reinvestment, slowing growth or even reducing production capacity. That’s what happened in Venezuela, where oil production has fallen sharply since 2002.
But other Latin American countries have also nationalized their oil industries with better results.
Mexico’s experience
In Mexico, President Lázaro Cárdenas’ 1938 expropriation of foreign oil assets – primarily from U.S. and British companies – was the region’s first such assertion of economic independence.
Amid labor disputes and perceived exploitation, 17 privately owned companies were nationalized, creating Petróleos Mexicanos as Mexico’s government-run oil monopoly. Mexicans celebrate the formation of this company, known as Pemex, every year on March 18 as a symbol of national sovereignty.
Despite initial boycotts and diplomatic strain, Mexico eventually compensated the foreign companies that lost their property. But it isolated its oil sector from international capital and technology for decades.
By 2018, political backlash around a perceived loss of sovereignty and uneven benefits led to a policy reversal. Oil output continues to shrink; it now stands at 1.8 million barrels per day.
Mexico’s experience underscores how oil nationalization can foster self-reliance while hindering production.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, left, delivers a speech on the 86th anniversary of the nationalization of oil on March 18, 2024. Rodrigo Oropeza/AFP via Getty Images
From the start, Petrobras had a monopoly over all Brazilian oil exploration and production. The government expanded the company’s scope when it nationalized all privately owned refineries by 1964.
Brazil’s oil nationalization was part of the country’s broader effort to develop its own industrial capacity and reduce its dependence on foreign oil.
Petrobras has changed significantly since its founding, especially after President Fernando Henrique Cardoso signed an oil deregulation law in 1997. It’s now a state-controlled company, in which investors may buy and sell shares. The government has forged many partnerships with private oil companies, drawing foreign investment.
This strategy succeeded. Production has quadrupled from 0.8 million barrels per day in 1997 to 3.4 million in 2024.
Venezuela’s oil nationalization, by contrast, shifted from cooperation with foreign oil companies to confrontation with them.
President Carlos Andrés Pérez first nationalized Venezuela’s oil industry in 1976, creating Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. Foreign companies received compensation of about 25% for losing their assets. Many transitioned into service providers or formed joint ventures with the new company, PDVSA.
In 2003, after a strike briefly but severely slashed national output, Chávez consolidated control over the oil industry. He purged PDVSA of his critics, replacing managers who had expertise with his political allies, and fired over 18,000 employees.
Venezuela expropriated operating assets, converted contracts held by private companies into PDVSA-controlled joint ventures and made sharp and unpredictable increases in the taxes and royalties foreign oil companies had to pay.
Foreign oil companies suffered from chronic payment delays, along with restrictive foreign exchange rules and new laws that weakened contract enforcement and made it harder for companies to use arbitration to resolve disputes.
In 2007, Chávez forced foreign oil companies partnering with PDVSA to renegotiate their agreements, leading to the partial nationalization of their stakes in those ventures.
The government also reclassified vast oil deposits as “proven” at a time when global oil prices were very high, rendering their exploration and production more economically viable. That change tripled this self-reported and never-verified estimate of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves to approximately 300 billion barrels.
Conditions get worse under Maduro
Venezuelan oil output further declined while Maduro served as president, falling to 665,000 barrels per day in 2021. Since then, production has recovered somewhat, rebounding to about 1.1 million barrels per day by late 2025 – about one-third of its historic high.
Many hurdles are in the way of the industry’s recovery, including ongoing and potentially future legal disputes, geopolitical risks and the need for massive investments. Returning Venezuela’s oil production to its peak of 3 million barrels per day could cost more than $180 billion.
As Brazil’s experience suggests, governmental control over oil production and sales is not inherently bad for a country’s economic welfare.
Norway is an even stronger example. That oil-rich Nordic country has evaded what some scholars call the “resource curse” by treating the oil that its nationally owned company, now called Equinor, has produced as a source of lasting wealth for the Norwegian people.
Revenue from the Norwegian government’s 67% stake in Equinor has accumulated in a sovereign wealth fund worth more than $2 trillion and helped Norway diversify its economy.
As the Venezuelan government regroups following Maduro’s removal, there’s much it can learn from other countries that have managed to maintain more stability alongside state-controlled oil production.
A college degree was once seen as the golden ticket to landing a well-paying job. But many people are increasingly questioning the value of a four-year degree amid the rising cost of college.
Almost two-thirds of registered voters said in an October 2025 NBC News poll that a four-year college degree isn’t worth the cost – marking an increase from 40% of registered voters who said that college wasn’t worth the cost in June 2013.
Caroline Field Levander, the vice president for global strategy and an English professor at Rice University, argues in her December 2025 book “Invent Ed” that people have lost sight of two factors that made universities great to begin with: invention and creativity.
Amy Lieberman, education editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Levander to break down the benefits of going to college and university – and how schools can better demonstrate their enduring value.
How can we measure the value of a college degree?
College graduates earn substantially more than people who do not have a college degree.
The average high school graduate over a 40-year career earns US$1.6 million, according to 2021 findings by the Georgetown University Center on Education and Workforce. The average college graduate, over this same 40-year time frame, earns $2.8 million. That $1.2 million difference amounts to around $30,000 more salary per year.
People who earn a degree more advanced than a bachelor’s, on average, earn $4 million over 30 years, making the lifetime earning difference $2.4 million between these graduates and people with just a high school diploma.
College graduates are also better protected against job loss, and they weather job disruption cycles better than high school graduates.
Do any of these benefits extend beyond individual students?
In addition to the substantial financial benefits college graduates experience, colleges and universities are major employers in their communities – and not just professors and administrators. Higher education institutions employ every trade and kind of worker, from construction workers to police, to name a few.
Universities are crucial to developing and strengthening the U.S. economy in other ways. The discoveries that faculty and researchers make in laboratories lead to new products, businesses and ideas that drive the U.S. economy and support the country’s financial health.
Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern did important work in helping to discover statins, while scientists at the University of Pennsylvania developed the mRNA vaccine. The list of inventions that started at universities goes on and on.
Some people are questioning the value of a degree. What role can universities play in reassuring them of their relevance?
Discovery and invention have traditionally been the focus of many graduate programs and faculty research, while undergraduate college educations tend to focus on ensuring that students are able to successfully enter the workforce after graduation.
Undergraduate students need to gain competency in a field in order to contribute to society and advance knowledge.
But I believe universities need to teach something else that is equally valuable: They also need to build creative capacity and an inventive mindset into undergraduate education, as a fundamental return on the investment in education.
Employers report that creativity is the top job skill needed today. The IBM Institute for Business Value, for example, concluded in 2023 that creativity is the must-have skill for employee success in the era of generative AI.
Creativity and innovation are both likely to become increasingly important for young people entering the workplace, especially as AI continues to grow. Andriy Onufriyenko/iStock/Getty Images
What can faculty and students easily do to encourage creativity and innovation?
Professors can build what I call a “growth mindset” in the classroom by focusing on success over time, rather than the quick correct answer. Faculty members can ask themselves as they go into every class, “Am I encouraging a growth mindset or a fixed mindset in these students?” And they can use that answer to guide how they are teaching.
Students could also consider committing to trying new courses in areas where they haven’t already been successful. They could approach their college experience with the idea that grades aren’t the only marker of success. And I think they could benefit from developing thoughtful ways to describe their journey to future employers. Simple practices like keeping a creativity notebook where they record the newest ideas they have, among many others that I describe in my new book, will help.
And university leaders need to open the aperture of how we define our own success and our university’s success so that it includes creative capability building as part of the undergraduate curriculum.
Caroline Levander 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.
