Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Nicholas Jacobs, Goldfarb Family Distinguished Chair in American Government, Colby College; Institute for Humane Studies

An unusually large majority of Americans agree that the recent scenes of Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Minneapolis are disturbing.

Federal immigration agents have deployed with weapons and tactics more commonly associated with military operations than with civilian law enforcement. The federal government has sidelined state and local officials, and it has cut them out of investigations into whether state and local law has been violated.

It’s understandable to look at what’s happening and reach a familiar conclusion: This looks like a slide into authoritarianism.

There is no question that the threat of democratic backsliding is real. President Donald Trump has long treated federal authority not as a shared constitutional set of rules and obligations but as a personal instrument of control.

In my research on the presidency and state power, including my latest book with Sidney Milkis, “Subverting the Republic,” I have argued that the Trump administration has systematically weakened the norms and practices that once constrained executive power – often by turning federalism itself into a weapon of national administrative power.

But there is another possibility worth taking seriously, one that cuts against Americans’ instincts at moments like this. What if what America is seeing is not institutional collapse but institutional friction: the system doing what it was designed to do, even if it looks ugly when it does it?

For many Americans, federalism is little more than a civics term – something about states’ rights or decentralization.

In practice, however, federalism functions less as a clean division of authority and more as a system for managing conflict among multiple governments with overlapping jurisdiction. Federalism does not block national authority. It ensures that national decisions are subject to challenge, delay and revision by other levels of government.

Dividing up authority

At its core, federalism works through a small number of institutional mechanics – concrete ways of keeping authority divided, exposed and contestable. Minneapolis shows each of them in action.

First, there’s what’s called “jurisdictional overlap.”

State, local and federal authorities all claim the right to govern the same people and places. In Minneapolis, that overlap is unavoidable: Federal immigration agents, state law enforcement, city officials and county prosecutors all assert authority over the same streets, residents and incidents. And they disagree sharply about how that authority should be exercised.

Second, there’s institutional rivalry.

Because authority is divided, no single level of government can fully monopolize legitimacy. And that creates tension. That rivalry is visible in the refusal of state and local officials across the country to simply defer to federal enforcement.

Instead, governors, mayors and attorneys general have turned to courts, demanded access to evidence and challenged efforts to exclude them from investigations. That’s evident in Minneapolis and also in states that have witnessed the administration’s deployment of National Guard troops against the will of their Democratic governors.

It’s easy to imagine a world where state and local prosecutors would not have to jump through so many procedural hoops to get access to evidence for the death of citizens within their jurisdiction. But consider the alternative.

If state and local officials were barred without consent from seeking evidence – the absence of federalism – or if local institutions had no standing to contest how national power is exercised there, federal authority would operate not just forcefully but without meaningful political constraint.

Third, confrontation is local and place-specific.

Federalism pushes conflict into the open. Power struggles become visible, noisy and politically costly. What is easy to miss is why this matters.

Federalism was necessary at the time of the Constitution’s creation because Americans did not share a single political identity. They could not decide whether they were members of one big community or many small communities.

In maintaining their state governments and creating a new federal government, they chose to be both at the same time. And although American politics nationalized to a remarkable degree over the 20th century, federal authority is still exercised in concrete places. Federal authority still must contend with communities that have civic identities and whose moral expectations may differ sharply from those assumed by national actors.

In Minneapolis it has collided with a political community that does not experience federal immigration enforcement as ordinary law enforcement.

The chaos of federalism

Federalism is not designed to keep things calm. It is designed to keep power unsettled – so that authority cannot move smoothly, silently or all at once.

By dividing responsibility and encouraging overlap, federalism ensures that power has to push, explain and defend itself at every step.

“A little chaos,” the scholar Daniel Elazar has said, “is a good thing!”

As chaos goes, though, federalism is more often credited for Trump’s ascent. He won the presidency through the Electoral College – a federalist institution that allocates power by state rather than by national popular vote, rewarding geographically concentrated support even without a national majority.

Partisan redistricting, which takes place in the states, further amplifies that advantage by insulating Republicans in Congress from electoral backlash. And decentralized election administration – in which local officials control voter registration, ballot access and certification – can produce vulnerabilities that Trump has exploited in contesting state certification processes and pressuring local election officials after close losses.

Forceful but accountable

It’s helpful to also understand how Minneapolis is different from the most well-known instances of aggressive federal power imposed on unwilling states: the civil rights era.

Then, too, national authority was asserted forcefully. Federal marshals escorted the Black student James Meredith into the University of Mississippi in 1962 over the objections of state officials and local crowds. In Little Rock in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent in U.S. Army troops after Gov. Orval Faubus attempted to block the racial integration of Central High School.

Violence accompanied these interventions. Riots broke out in Oxford, Mississippi. Protesters and bystanders were killed in clashes with police and federal authorities in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama.

What mattered during the civil rights era was not widespread agreement at the outset – nationwide resistance to integration was fierce and sustained. Rather, it was the way federal authority was exercised through existing constitutional channels.

Presidents acted through courts, statutes and recognizable chains of command. State resistance triggered formal responses. Federal power was forceful, but it remained legible, bounded and institutionally accountable.

Those interventions eventually gained public acceptance. But in that process, federalism was tarnished by its association with Southern racism and recast as an obstacle to progress rather than the institutional framework through which progress was contested and enforced.

After the civil rights era, many Americans came to assume that national power would normally be aligned with progressive moral aims – and that when it was, federalism was a problem to be overcome.

Minneapolis exposes the fragility of that assumption. Federalism does not distinguish between good and bad causes. It does not certify power because history is “on the right side.” It simply keeps power contestable.

When national authority is exercised without broad moral agreement, federalism does not stop it. It only prevents it from settling quietly.

Why talk about federalism now, at a time of widespread public indignation?

Because in the long arc of federalism’s development, it has routinely proven to be the last point in our constitutional system where power runs into opposition. And when authority no longer encounters rival institutions and politically independent officials, authoritarianism stops being an abstraction.

Nicholas Jacobs 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. Federal power meets local resistance in Minneapolis – a case study in how federalism staves off authoritarianism – https://theconversation.com/federal-power-meets-local-resistance-in-minneapolis-a-case-study-in-how-federalism-staves-off-authoritarianism-274685

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Robert D. Bland, Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies, University of Tennessee

Back in 2013, the Supreme Court tossed out a key provision of the Voting Rights Act regarding federal oversight of elections. It appears poised to abolish another pillar of the law.

In a case known as Louisiana v. Callais, the court appears ready to rule against Louisiana and its Black voters. In doing so, the court may well abolish Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a provision that prohibits any discriminatory voting practice or election rule that results in less opportunity for political clout for minority groups.

The dismantling of Section 2 would open the floodgates for widespread vote dilution by allowing primarily Southern state legislatures to redraw political districts, weakening the voting power of racial minorities.

The case was brought by a group of Louisiana citizens who declared that the federal mandate under Section 2 to draw a second majority-Black district violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and thus served as an unconstitutional act of racial gerrymandering.

There would be considerable historical irony if the court decides to use the 14th Amendment to provide the legal cover for reversing a generation of Black political progress in the South. Initially designed to enshrine federal civil rights protections for freed people facing a battery of discriminatory “Black Codes” in the postbellum South, the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause has been the foundation of the nation’s modern rights-based legal order, ensuring that all U.S. citizens are treated fairly and preventing the government from engaging in explicit discrimination.

The cornerstone of the nation’s “second founding,” the Reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution, including the 14th Amendment, created the first cohort of Black elected officials.

I am a historian who studies race and memory during the Civil War era. As I highlight in my new book “Requiem for Reconstruction,” the struggle over the nation’s second founding not only highlights how generational political progress can be reversed but also provides a lens into the specific historical origins of racial gerrymandering in the United States.

Without understanding this history – and the forces that unraveled Reconstruction’s initial promise of greater racial justice – we cannot fully comprehend the roots of those forces that are reshaping our contemporary political landscape in a way that I believe subverts the true intentions of the Constitution.

The long history of gerrymandering

Political gerrymandering, or shaping political boundaries to benefit a particular party, has been considered constitutional since the nation’s 18th-century founding, but racial gerrymandering is a practice with roots in the post-Civil War era.

Expanding beyond the practice of redrawing district lines after each decennial census, late 19th-century Democratic state legislatures built on the earlier cartographic practice to create a litany of so-called Black districts across the postbellum South.

The nation’s first wave of racial gerrymandering emerged as a response to the political gains Southern Black voters made during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in the 1870s. Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina and Louisiana all elected Black congressmen during that decade. During the 42nd Congress, which met from 1871 to 1873, South Carolina sent Black men to the House from three of its four districts.

Initially, the white Democrats who ruled the South responded to the rise of Black political power by crafting racist narratives that insinuated that the emergence of Black voters and Black officeholders was a corruption of the proper political order. These attacks often provided a larger cultural pretext for the campaigns of extralegal political violence that terrorized Black voters in the South, assassinated political leaders, and marred the integrity of several of the region’s major elections.

Election changes

Following these pogroms during the 1870s, southern legislatures began seeking legal remedies to make permanent the counterrevolution of “Redemption,” which sought to undo Reconstruction’s advancement of political equality. A generation before the Jim Crow legal order of segregation and discrimination was established, southern political leaders began to disfranchise Black voters through racial gerrymandering.

These newly created Black districts gained notoriety for their cartographic absurdity. In Mississippi, a shoestring-shaped district was created to snake and swerve alongside the state’s famous river. North Carolina created the “Black Second” to concentrate its African American voters to a single district. Alabama’s “Black Fourth” did similar work, leaving African American voters only one possible district in which they could affect the outcome in the state’s central Black Belt.

South Carolina’s “Black Seventh” was perhaps the most notorious of these acts of Reconstruction-era gerrymandering. The district “sliced through county lines and ducked around Charleston back alleys” – anticipating the current trend of sophisticated, computer-targeted political redistricting.

Possessing 30,000 more voters than the next largest congressional district in the state, South Carolina’s Seventh District radically transformed the state’s political landscape by making it impossible for its Black-majority to exercise any influence on national politics, except for the single racially gerrymandered district.

Although federal courts during the late 19th century remained painfully silent on the constitutionality of these antidemocratic measures, contemporary observers saw these redistricting efforts as more than a simple act of seeking partisan advantage.

“It was the high-water mark of political ingenuity coupled with rascality, and the merits of its appellation,” observed one Black congressman who represented South Carolina’s 7th District.

Racial gerrymandering in recent times

The political gains of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes called the “Second Reconstruction,” were made tangible by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The law revived the postbellum 15th Amendment, which prevented states from creating voting restrictions based on race. That amendment had been made a dead letter by Jim Crow state legislatures and an acquiescent Supreme Court.

In contrast to the post-Civil War struggle, the Second Reconstruction had the firm support of the federal courts. The Supreme Court affirmed the principal of “one person, one vote” in its 1962 Baker v. Carr and 1964 Reynolds v. Sims decisions – upending the Solid South’s landscape of political districts that had long been marked by sparsely populated Democratic districts controlled by rural elites.

The Voting Rights Act gave the federal government oversight over any changes in voting policy that might affect historically marginalized groups. Since passage of the 1965 law and its subsequent revisions, racial gerrymandering has largely served the purpose of creating districts that preserve and amplify the political representation of historically marginalized groups.

This generational work may soon be undone by the current Supreme Court. The court, which heard oral arguments in the Louisiana case in October 2025, will release its decision by the end of June 2026.

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

– ref. The Supreme Court may soon diminish Black political power, undoing generations of gains – https://theconversation.com/the-supreme-court-may-soon-diminish-black-political-power-undoing-generations-of-gains-274179

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Michael I Goran, Professor of Pediatrics and Vice Chair for Research, University of Southern California

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans aim to translate the most up-to-date nutrition science into practical advice for the public as well as to guide federal policy for programs such as school lunches.

But the newest version of the guidelines, released on Jan. 7, 2026, seems to be spurring more confusion than clarity about what people should be eating.

I’ve been studying nutrition and chronic disease for over 35 years, and in 2020 I wrote “Sugarproof,” a book about reducing consumption of added sugars to improve health. I served as a scientific adviser for the new guidelines.

I chose to participate in this process, despite its accelerated and sometimes controversial nature, for two reasons. First, I wanted to help ensure the review was conducted with scientific rigor. And second, federal health officials prioritized examining areas where the evidence has become especially strong – particularly food processing, added sugars and sugary beverages, which closely aligns with my research.

My role, along with colleagues, was to review and synthesize that evidence and help clarify where the science is strongest and most consistent.

What’s different in the new dietary guidelines?

The dietary guidelines, first published in 1980, are updated every five years. The newest version differs from the previous versions in a few key ways.

For one thing, the new report is shorter, at nine pages rather than 400. It offers simpler advice directly to the public, whereas previous guidelines were more directed at policymakers and nutrition experts.

Also, the new guidelines reflect an important paradigm shift in defining a healthy diet. For the past half-century, dietary advice has been shaped by a focus on general dietary patterns and targets for individual nutrients, such as protein, fat and carbohydrate. The new guidelines instead emphasize overall diet quality.

Some health and nutrition experts have criticized specific aspects of the guidelines, such as how the current administration developed them, or how they address saturated fat, beef, dairy, protein and alcohol intake. These points have dominated the public discourse. But while some of them are valid, they risk overshadowing the strongest, least controversial and most actionable conclusions from the scientific evidence.

What we found in our scientific assessment was that just a few straightforward changes to your diet – specifically, reducing highly processed foods and sugary drinks, and increasing whole grains – can meaningfully improve your health.

What the evidence actually shows

My research assistants and I evaluated the conclusions of studies on consuming sugar, highly processed foods and whole grains, and assessed how well they were conducted and how likely they were to be biased. We graded the overall quality of the findings as low, moderate or high based on standardized criteria such as their consistency and plausibility.

We found moderate to high quality evidence that people who eat higher amounts of processed foods have a higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia and death from any cause.

Similarly, we found moderately solid evidence that people who drink more sugar-sweetened beverages have a higher risk of obesity and Type 2 diabetes, as well as quite conclusive evidence that children who drink fruit juice have a higher risk of obesity. And consuming more beverages containing artificial sweeteners raises the risk of death from any cause and Alzheimer’s disease, based on moderately good evidence.

Whole grains, on the other hand, have a protective effect on health. We found high-quality evidence that people who eat more whole grains have a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and death from any cause. People who consume more dietary fiber, which is abundant in whole grains, have a lower risk of Type 2 diabetes and death from any cause, based on moderate-quality research.

According to the research we evaluated, it’s these aspects – too much highly processed foods and sweetened beverages, and too little whole grain foods – that are significantly contributing to the epidemic of chronic diseases such as obesity, Type 2 diabetes and heart disease in this country – and not protein, beef or dairy intake.

From scientific evidence to guidelines

Our report was the first one to recommend that the guidelines explicitly mention decreasing consumption of highly processed foods. Overall, though, research on the negative health effects of sugar and processed foods and the beneficial effects of whole grains has been building for many years and has been noted in previous reports.

On the other hand, research on how strongly protein, red meat, saturated fat and dairy are linked with chronic disease risk is much less conclusive. Yet the 2025 guidelines encourage increasing consumption of those foods – a change from previous versions.

The inverted pyramid imagery used to represent the 2025 guidelines also emphasizes protein – specifically, meat and dairy – by putting these foods in a highly prominent spot in the top left corner of the image. Whole grains sit at the very bottom; and except for milk, beverages are not represented.

Scientific advisers were not involved in designing the image.

Making small changes that can improve your health

An important point we encountered repeatedly in reviewing the research was that even small dietary changes could meaningfully lower people’s chronic disease risks.

For example, consuming just 10% fewer calories per day from highly processed foods could lower the risk of diabetes by 14%, according to one of the lead studies we relied on for the evidence review. Another study showed that eating one less serving of highly processed foods per day lowers the risk of heart disease by 4%.

You can achieve that simply by switching from a highly processed packaged bread to one with fewer ingredients or replacing one fast-food meal per week with a simple home-cooked meal. Or, switch your preferred brands of daily staples such as tomato sauce, yogurt, salad dressing, crackers and nut butter to ones that have fewer ingredients like added sugars, sweeteners, emulsifiers and preservatives.

Cutting down on sugary beverages – for example, soda, sweet teas, juices and energy drinks – had an equally dramatic effect. Simply drinking the equivalent of one can less per day lowers the risk of diabetes by 26% and the risk of heart disease by 14%.

And eating just one additional serving of whole grains per day – say, replacing packaged bread with whole grain bread – results in an 18% lower risk of diabetes and a 13% lower risk of death from all causes combined.

How to adopt ‘kitchen processing’

Another way to make these improvements is to take basic elements of food processing back from manufacturers and return them to your own kitchen – what I call “kitchen processing.” Humans have always processed food by chopping, cooking, fermenting, drying or freezing. The problem with highly processed foods isn’t just the industrial processing that transforms the chemical structure of natural ingredients, but also what chemicals are added to improve taste and shelf life.

Kitchen processing, though, can instead be optimized for health and for your household’s flavor preferences – and you can easily do it without cooking from scratch. Here are some simple examples:

• Instead of flavored yogurts, buy plain yogurt and add your favorite fruit or some homemade simple fruit compote.

• Instead of sugary or diet beverages, use a squeeze of citrus or even a splash of juice to flavor plain sparkling water.

• Start with a plain whole grain breakfast cereal and add your own favorite source of fiber and/or fruit.

• Instead of packaged “energy bars” make your own preferred mixture of nuts, seeds and dried fruit.

• Instead of bottled salad dressing, make a simple one at home with olive oil, vinegar or lemon juice, a dab of mustard and other flavorings of choice, such as garlic, herbs, or honey.

You can adapt this way of thinking to the foods you eat most often by making similar types of swaps. They may seem small, but they will build over time and have an outsized effect on your health.

Michael I Goran receives funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Dr Robert C and Veronica Atkins Foundation. He is a scientific advisor to Eat Real (non-profit promoting better school meals) and has previously served as a scientific advisor to Bobbi (infant formula) and Begin Health (infant probiotics).

– ref. Confused by the new dietary guidelines? Focus on these simple, evidence-based shifts to lower your chronic disease risk – https://theconversation.com/confused-by-the-new-dietary-guidelines-focus-on-these-simple-evidence-based-shifts-to-lower-your-chronic-disease-risk-273701

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Nikki Luke, Assistant Professor of Human Geography, University of Tennessee

As Winter Storm Fern swept across the United States in late January 2026, bringing ice, snow and freezing temperatures, it left more than a million people without power, mostly in the Southeast.

Scrambling to meet higher than average demand, PJM, the nonprofit company that operates the grid serving much of the mid-Atlantic U.S., asked for federal permission to generate more power, even if it caused high levels of air pollution from burning relatively dirty fuels.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright agreed and took another step, too. He authorized PJM and ERCOT – the company that manages the Texas power grid – as well as Duke Energy, a major electricity supplier in the Southeast, to tell data centers and other large power-consuming businesses to turn on their backup generators.

The goal was to make sure there was enough power available to serve customers as the storm hit. Generally, these facilities power themselves and do not send power back to the grid. But Wright explained that their “industrial diesel generators” could “generate 35 gigawatts of power, or enough electricity to power many millions of homes.”

We are scholars of the electricity industry who live and work in the Southeast. In the wake of Winter Storm Fern, we see opportunities to power data centers with less pollution while helping communities prepare for, get through and recover from winter storms.

Data centers use enormous quantities of energy

Before Wright’s order, it was hard to say whether data centers would reduce the amount of electricity they take from the grid during storms or other emergencies.

This is a pressing question, because data centers’ power demands to support generative artificial intelligence are already driving up electricity prices in congested grids like PJM’s.

And data centers are expected to need only more power. Estimates vary widely, but the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab anticipates that the share of electricity production in the U.S. used by data centers could spike from 4.4% in 2023 to between 6.7% and 12% by 2028. PJM expects a peak load growth of 32 gigawatts by 2030 – enough power to supply 30 million new homes, but nearly all going to new data centers. PJM’s job is to coordinate that energy – and figure out how much the public, or others, should pay to supply it.

The race to build new data centers and find the electricity to power them has sparked enormous public backlash about how data centers will inflate household energy costs. Other concerns are that power-hungry data centers fed by natural gas generators can hurt air quality, consume water and intensify climate damage. Many data centers are located, or proposed, in communities already burdened by high levels of pollution.

Local ordinances, regulations created by state utility commissions and proposed federal laws have tried to protect ratepayers from price hikes and require data centers to pay for the transmission and generation infrastructure they need.

Always-on connections?

In addition to placing an increasing burden on the grid, many data centers have asked utility companies for power connections that are active 99.999% of the time.

But since the 1970s, utilities have encouraged “demand response” programs, in which large power users agree to reduce their demand during peak times like Winter Storm Fern. In return, utilities offer financial incentives such as bill credits for participation.

Over the years, demand response programs have helped utility companies and power grid managers lower electricity demand at peak times in summer and winter. The proliferation of smart meters allows residential customers and smaller businesses to participate in these efforts as well. When aggregated with rooftop solar, batteries and electric vehicles, these distributed energy resources can be dispatched as “virtual power plants.”

A different approach

The terms of data center agreements with local governments and utilities often aren’t available to the public. That makes it hard to determine whether data centers could or would temporarily reduce their power use.

In some cases, uninterrupted access to power is necessary to maintain critical data systems, such as medical records, bank accounts and airline reservation systems.

Yet, data center demand has spiked with the AI boom, and developers have increasingly been willing to consider demand response. In August 2025, Google announced new agreements with Indiana Michigan Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority to provide “data center demand response by targeting machine learning workloads,” shifting “non-urgent compute tasks” away from times when the grid is strained. Several new companies have also been founded specifically to help AI data centers shift workloads and even use in-house battery storage to temporarily move data centers’ power use off the grid during power shortages.

Flexibility for the future

One study has found that if data centers would commit to using power flexibly, an additional 100 gigawatts of capacity – the amount that would power around 70 million households – could be added to the grid without adding new generation and transmission.

In another instance, researchers demonstrated how data centers could invest in offsite generation through virtual power plants to meet their generation needs. Installing solar panels with battery storage at businesses and homes can boost available electricity more quickly and cheaply than building a new full-size power plant. Virtual power plants also provide flexibility as grid operators can tap into batteries, shift thermostats or shut down appliances in periods of peak demand. These projects can also benefit the buildings where they are hosted.

Distributed energy generation and storage, alongside winterizing power lines and using renewables, are key ways to help keep the lights on during and after winter storms.

Those efforts can make a big difference in places like Nashville, Tennessee, where more than 230,000 customers were without power at the peak of outages during Fern, not because there wasn’t enough electricity for their homes but because their power lines were down.

The future of AI is uncertain. Analysts caution that the AI industry may prove to be a speculative bubble: If demand flatlines, they say, electricity customers may end up paying for grid improvements and new generation built to meet needs that would not actually exist.

Onsite diesel generators are an emergency solution for large users such as data centers to reduce strain on the grid. Yet, this is not a long-term solution to winter storms. Instead, if data centers, utilities, regulators and grid operators are willing to also consider offsite distributed energy to meet electricity demand, then their investments could help keep energy prices down, reduce air pollution and harm to the climate, and help everyone stay powered up during summer heat and winter cold.

Nikki Luke is a fellow at the Climate and Community Institute. She receives funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She previously worked at the U.S. Department of Energy.

Conor Harrison receives funding from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and has previously received funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

– ref. Data centers told to pitch in as storms and cold weather boost power demand – https://theconversation.com/data-centers-told-to-pitch-in-as-storms-and-cold-weather-boost-power-demand-274604

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Steven R. Fassnacht, Professor of Snow Hydrology, Colorado State University

Watching the Winter Olympics is an adrenaline rush as athletes fly down snow-covered ski slopes, luge tracks and over the ice at breakneck speeds and with grace.

When the first Olympic Winter Games were held in Chamonix, France, in 1924, all 16 events took place outdoors. The athletes relied on natural snow for ski runs and freezing temperatures for ice rinks.

Nearly a century later, in 2022, the world watched skiers race down runs of 100% human-made snow near Beijing. Luge tracks and ski jumps have their own refrigeration, and four of the original events are now held indoors: figure skaters, speed skaters, curlers and hockey teams all compete in climate-controlled buildings.

Innovation made the 2022 Winter Games possible in Beijing. Ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics in northern Italy, where snowfall was below average for the start of the season, officials had large lakes built near major venues to provide enough water for snowmaking. But snowmaking can go only so far in a warming climate.

As global temperatures rise, what will the Winter Games look like in another century? Will they be possible, even with innovations?

Former host cities that would be too warm

The average daytime temperature of Winter Games host cities in February has increased steadily since those first events in Chamonix, rising from 33 degrees Fahrenheit (0.4 Celsius) in the 1920s-1950s to 46 F (7.8 C) in the early 21st century.

In a recent study, scientists looked at the venues of 19 past Winter Olympics to see how each might hold up under future climate change.

They found that by midcentury, four former host cities – Chamonix; Sochi, Russia; Grenoble, France; and Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany – would no longer have a reliable climate for hosting the Games, even under the United Nations’ best-case scenario for climate change, which assumes the world quickly cuts its greenhouse gas emissions. If the world continues burning fossil fuels at high rates, Squaw Valley, California, and Vancouver, British Columbia, would join that list of no longer being a reliable climate for hosting the Winter Games.

By the 2080s, the scientists found, the climates in 12 of 22 former venues would be too unreliable to host the Winter Olympics’ outdoor events; among them were Turin, Italy; Nagano, Japan; and Innsbruck, Austria.

In 2026, there are now five weeks between the Winter Olympics and the Paralympics, which last through mid-March. Host countries are responsible for both events, and some venues may increasingly find it difficult to have enough snow on the ground, even with snowmaking capabilities, as snow seasons shorten.

Ideal snowmaking conditions today require a dewpoint temperature – the combination of coldness and humidity – of around 28 F (-2 C) or less. More moisture in the air melts snow and ice at colder temperatures, which affects snow on ski slopes and ice on bobsled, skeleton and luge tracks.

As Colorado snow and sustainability scientists and also avid skiers, we’ve been watching the developments and studying the climate impact on the mountains and winter sports we love.

Conditions vary by location and year to year

The Earth’s climate will be warmer overall in the coming decades. Warmer air can mean more winter rain, particularly at lower elevations. Around the globe, snow has been covering less area. Low snowfall and warm temperature made the start to the 2025-26 winter season particularly poor for Colorado’s ski resorts.

However, local changes vary. For example, in northern Colorado, the amount of snow has decreased since the 1970s, but the decline has mostly been at higher elevations.

A future climate may also be more humid, which affects snowmaking and could affect bobsled, luge and skeleton tracks.

Of the 16 Winter Games sports today, half are affected by temperature and snow: Alpine skiing, biathlon, cross-country skiing, freestyle skiing, Nordic combined, ski jumping, ski mountaineering and snowboarding. And three are affected by temperature and humidity: bobsled, luge and skeleton.

Technology also changes

Developments in technology have helped the Winter Games adapt to some changes over the past century.

Hockey moved indoors, followed by skating. Luge and bobsled tracks were refrigerated in the 1960s. The Lake Placid Winter Games in 1980 in New York used snowmaking to augment natural snow on the ski slopes.

Today, indoor skiing facilities make skiing possible year-round. Ski Dubai, open since 2005, has five ski runs on a hill the height of a 25-story building inside a resort attached to a shopping mall.

Resorts are also using snowfarming to collect and store snow. The method is not new, but due to decreased snowfall and increased problems with snowmaking, more ski resorts are keeping leftover snow to be prepared for the next winter.

But making snow and keeping it cold requires energy and water – and both become issues in a warming world. Water is becoming scarcer in some areas. And energy, if it means more fossil fuel use, further contributes to climate change.

The International Olympic Committee recognizes that the future climate will have a big impact on the Olympics, both winter and summer. It also recognizes the importance of ensuring that the adaptations are sustainable.

The Winter Olympics could become limited to more northerly locations, like Calgary, Alberta, or be pushed to higher elevations.

Summer Games are feeling climate pressure, too

The Summer Games also face challenges. Hot temperatures and high humidity can make competing in the summer difficult, but these sports have more flexibility than winter sports.

For example, changing the timing of typical summer events to another season can help alleviate excessive temperatures. The 2022 World Cup, normally a summer event, was held in November so Qatar could host it.

What makes adaptation more difficult for the Winter Games is the necessity of snow or ice for all of the events.

Future depends on responses to climate change

In uncertain times, the Olympics offer a way for the world to come together.

People are thrilled by the athletic feats, like Jean-Claude Killy winning all three Alpine skiing events in 1968, and stories of perseverance, like the 1988 Jamaican bobsled team competing beyond all expectations.

The Winter Games’ outdoor sports may look very different in the future. How different will depend heavily on how countries respond to climate change.

This updates an article originally published Feb. 19, 2022, with the 2026 Winter Games.

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

– ref. Climate change threatens the Winter Olympics’ future – and even snowmaking has limits for saving the Games – https://theconversation.com/climate-change-threatens-the-winter-olympics-future-and-even-snowmaking-has-limits-for-saving-the-games-274800

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By David W. Stowe, Professor of Religious Studies, Michigan State University

On Jan. 28, 2026, Bruce Springsteen released “Streets of Minneapolis,” a hard-hitting protest against the immigration enforcement surge in the city, including the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The song is all over social media, and the official video has already been streamed more than 5 million times. It’s hard to remember a time when a major artist has released a song in the midst of a specific political crisis.

Yet some of the most powerful music coming out of Minneapolis is of a much older vintage. Hundreds of clergy from around the country converged on the city in late January to take part in faith-based protests. Many were arrested while blocking a road near the airport. And they have been singing easily recognizable religious songs used during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, like “Amazing Grace,” “We Shall Overcome, and ”This Little Light of Mine.“

I have been studying the politics of music and religion for more than 25 years, and I wrote about songs I called “secular spirituals” in my 2004 book, “How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans.” Sometimes called “freedom songs,” they were galvanizing more than 60 years ago, and are still in use today.

But why these older songs, and why do they usually come out of the church? There have been many protest movements since the mid-20th century, and they have all produced new music. The freedom songs, though, have a unique staying power in American culture – partly because of their historical associations and partly because of the songs themselves.

Stronger together

Some of protest music’s power has to do with singing itself. Making music in a group creates a tangible sense of community and collective purpose. Singing is a physical activity; it comes out of our core and helps foster solidarity with fellow singers.

Young activists working in the Deep South during the most violent years of the Civil Rights Movement spoke of the courage that came from singing freedom songs like “We Shall Overcome” in moments of physical danger. In addition to helping quell fear, the songs were unnerving to authorities trying to maintain segregation. “If you have to sing, do you have to sing so loud?” one activist recalled an armed deputy saying.

And when locked up for days in a foul jail, there wasn’t much else to do but sing. When a Birmingham, Alabama, police commissioner released young demonstrators he’d arrested, they recalled him complaining that their singing “made him sick.”

Test of time

Sometimes I ask students if they can think of more recent protest songs that occupy the same place as the freedom songs of the 1960s. There are some well-known candidates: Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up,” Green Day’s “American Idiot” and Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” to name a few. The Black Lives Matter movement alone helped produce several notable songs, including Beyonce’s “Freedom,” Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright and Childish Gambino’s ”This Is America.“

But the older religious songs have advantages for on-the-ground protests. They have been around for a long time, meaning that more people have had more chances to learn them. Protesters typically don’t struggle to learn or remember the tune. As iconic church songs that have crossed over into secular spirituals, they were written to be memorable and singable, crowd-tested for at least a couple of generations. They are easily adaptable, so protesters can craft new verses for their cause – as when civil rights activists added “We are not afraid” to the lyrics of “We shall overcome.”

And freedom songs link the current protesters to one of the best-known – and by some measures, most successful – protest movements of the past century. They create bonds of solidarity not just among those singing them in Minneapolis, but with protesters and activists of generations past.

These religious songs are associated with nonviolence, an important value in a citizen movement protesting violence committed by federal law enforcement. And for many activists, including the clergy who poured into Minneapolis, religious values are central to their willingness to stand up for citizens targeted by ICE.

Deep roots

The best-known secular spirituals actually predate the Civil Rights Movement. “We Shall Overcome” first appeared in written form in 1900 as “I’ll Overcome Some Day,” by the Methodist minister Charles Tindley, though the words and tunes are different. It was sung by striking Black tobacco workers in South Carolina in 1945 and made its way to the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, an integrated training center for labor organizers and social justice activists.

It then came to the attention of iconic folk singer Pete Seeger, who changed some words and gave it wide exposure. “We Shall Overcome” has been sung everywhere from the 1963 March on Washington and anti-apartheid rallies in South Africa to South Korea, Lebanon and Northern Ireland.

“Amazing Grace” has an even longer history, dating back to a hymn written by John Newton: an 18th-century ship captain in the slave trade who later became an Anglican clergyman and penned an essay against slavery. Pioneering American gospel singer Mahalia Jackson recorded it in 1947 and sang it regularly during the 1960s.

Firmly rooted in Protestant Christian theology, the song crossed over into a more secular audience through a 1970 cover version by folk singer Judy Collins, which reached No. 15 on the Billboard charts. During Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, an initiative to register Black voters, Collins heard the legendary organizer Fannie Lou Hamer singing “Amazing Grace,” a song she remembered from her Methodist childhood.

Opera star Jessye Norman sang it at Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday tribute in London, and bagpipers played it at a 2002 interfaith service near Ground Zero to commemorate victims of 9/11.

‘This little light’

Another gospel song used in protests against ICE – “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine” – has similarly murky historical origins and also passed through the Highlander Folk School into the Civil Rights Movement.

It expresses the impulse to be seen and heard, standing up for human rights and contributing to a movement much larger than each individual. But it could also mean letting a light shine on the truth – for example, demonstrators’ phones documenting what happened in the two killings in Minneapolis, contradicting some officials’ claims.

Like the Civil Rights Movement, the protests in Minneapolis involve protecting people of color from violence – as well as, more broadly, protecting immigrants’ and refugees’ legal right to due process. A big difference is that in the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government sometimes intervened to protect people subjected to violence by states and localities. Now, many Minnesotans are trying to protect people in their communities from agents of the federal government.

David W. Stowe 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. Clergy protests against ICE turned to a classic – and powerful – American playlist – https://theconversation.com/clergy-protests-against-ice-turned-to-a-classic-and-powerful-american-playlist-274585

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Jared Bahir Browsh, Assistant Teaching Professor of Critical Sports Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

Donald Trump, it is fair to assume, will be switching channels during this year’s Super Bowl halftime show.

The U.S. president has already said that he won’t be attending Super Bowl LX in person, suggesting that the venue, Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, was “just too far away.” But the choice of celebrity entertainment planned for the main break – Puerto Rican reggaeton star Bad Bunny and recently announced pregame addition Green Day – didn’t appeal. “I’m anti-them. I think it’s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred. Terrible,” Trump told the New York Post.

National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell likely didn’t have the sensibilities of the U.S. president in mind when the choice of Bad Bunny was made.

One of the top artists in the world, Bad Bunny performs primarily in Spanish and has been critical of immigration enforcement, which factored into the backlash in some conservative circles to the choice. Bad Bunny’s anti-ICE comments at this year’s Grammy Awards will have only stoked the ire of some conservatives.

But for the NFL hierarchy, this was likely a business decision, not a political one. The league has its eyes on expansion into Latin America; Bad Bunny, they hope, will be a ratings-winning means to an end. It has made such bets in the past. In 2020, Shakira and Jennifer Lopez were chosen to perform, with Bad Bunny making an appearance. The choice then, too, was seen as controversial.

Raising the flag overseas

As a teacher and scholar of critical sports studies, I study the global growth of U.S.-based sports leagues overseas.

Some, like the National Basketball Association, are at an advantage. The sport is played around the globe and has large support bases in Asia – notably in the Philippines and China – as well as in Europe, Australia and Canada.

The NFL, by contrast, is largely entering markets that have comparatively little knowledge and experience with football and its players.

The league has opted for a multiprong approach to attracting international fans, including lobbying to get flag football into the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

Playing the field

When it comes to the traditional tackle game, the NFL has held global aspirations for over three-quarters of a century. Between 1950-1961, before they merged, the NFL and American Football League played seven games against teams in Canada’s CFL to strengthen the relationship between the two nations’ leagues.

Developing a fan base south of the border has long been part of the plan.

The first international exhibition game between two NFL teams was supposed to take place in Mexico City in 1968. But Mexican protest over the economy and cost of staging the Olympics that year led the game, between the Detroit Lions and Philadelphia Eagles, to be canceled.

Instead, it was Montreal that staged the first international exhibition match the following year.

In 1986, the NFL added an annual international preseason game, the “American Bowl,” to reach international fans, including several games in Mexico City and one in Monterrey.

But the more concerted effort was to grow football in the potentially lucrative, and familiar, European market.

After several attempts by the NFL and other entities in the 1970s and ’80s to establish an international football league, the NFL-backed World League of Football launched in 1991. Featuring six teams from the United States, one from Canada and three from Europe, the spring league lost money but provided evidence that there was a market for American football in Europe, leading to the establishment of NFL Europe.

But NFL bosses have long had wider ambitions. The league staged 13 games in Tokyo, beginning in 1976, and planned exhibitions for 2007 and 2009 in China that were ultimately canceled. These attempts did not have the same success as in Europe.

Beyond exhibitions

The NFL’s outreach in Latin America has been decades in the making. After six exhibition matches in Mexico between 1978 and 2001, the NFL chose Mexico City as the venue of its first regular season game outside the United States.

In 2005, it pitted the Arizona Cardinals against the San Francisco 49ers at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City. Marketed as “Fútbol Americano,” it drew the largest attendance in NFL history, with over 103,000 spectators.

The following year, Goodell was named commissioner and announced that the NFL would focus future international efforts on regular-season games.

The U.K. was a safe bet due to the established stadium infrastructure and the country’s small but passionate fan base. The NFL International Series was played exclusively in London between 2007 and 2016.

But in 2016, the NFL finally returned to Mexico City, staging a regular-season game between the Oakland – now Las Vegas – Raiders and Houston Texans.

And after the completion of upgrades to Latin America’s largest stadium, Estadio Azteca, the NFL will return to Mexico City in 2026, along with games in Munich, Berlin and London. Future plans include expanding the series to include Sydney, Australia, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2026.

The International Player Pathway program also offers players from outside the United States an opportunity to train and earn a roster spot on an NFL team. The hope is that future Latin American players could help expand the sport in their home countries, similar to how Yao Ming expanded the NBA fan base in China after joining the Houston Rockets, and Shohei Ohtani did the same for baseball in Japan while playing in Los Angeles.

Heading south of the border

The NFL’s strategy has gained the league a foothold in Latin America.

Mexico and Brazil have become the two largest international markets for the NFL, with nearly 40 million fans in each of the nations.

Although this represents a fraction of the overall sports fans in each nation, the raw numbers match the overall Latino fan base in the United States. In recent years the NFL has celebrated Latino Heritage Month through its Por La Cultura campaign, highlighting Latino players past and present.

Latin America also offers practical advantages. Mexico has long had access to NFL games as the southern neighbor to the United States, with the Dallas Cowboys among the most popular teams in Mexico.

For broadcasters, Central and South America offer less disruption in regards to time zones. Games in Europe start as early as 6:30 a.m. for West Coast fans, whereas Mexico City follows Central time, and Brasilia time is only one to two hours ahead of Eastern time.

The NFL’s expansion plans are not without criticism. Domestically, fans have complained that teams playing outside the U.S. borders means one less home game for season-ticket holders. And some teams have embraced international games more than others.

Another criticism is the league, which has reported revenues of over US$23 billion during the 2024-25 season – nearly double any other U.S.-based league – is using its resources to displace local sports. There are also those who see expansion of the league as a form of cultural imperialism. These criticisms often intersect with long-held ideas around the league promoting militarism, nationalism and American exceptionalism.

Bad Bunny: No Hail Mary attempt

For sure, the choice of Bad Bunny as the halftime pick is controversial, given the current political climate around immigration. The artist removed tour dates on the U.S. mainland in 2025 due to concerns about ICE targeting fans at his concerts, a concern reinforced by threats from the Department of Homeland Security that they would do just that at the Super Bowl.

But in sticking with Bad Bunny, the NFL is showing it is willing to face down a section of its traditional support and bet instead on Latin American fans not just tuning in for the halftime show but for the whole game – and falling in love with football, too.

Jared Bahir Browsh 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. Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show is part of long play drawn up by NFL to score with Latin America – https://theconversation.com/bad-bunnys-super-bowl-show-is-part-of-long-play-drawn-up-by-nfl-to-score-with-latin-america-271068

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Julian Givi, Assistant Professor of Marketing, West Virginia University

As Valentine’s Day approaches, finding the perfect words to express your feelings for that special someone can seem like a daunting task – so much so that you may feel tempted to ask ChatGPT for an assist.

After all, within seconds it can dash off a well-written, romantic message. Even a short, personalized limerick or poem is no sweat.

But before you copy and paste that AI-generated love note, you might want to consider how it could make you feel about yourself.

We research the intersection of consumer behavior and technology, and we’ve been studying how people feel after using generative AI to write heartfelt messages. It turns out that there’s a psychological cost to using the technology as your personal ghostwriter.

The rise of the AI ghostwriter

Generative AI has transformed how many people communicate. From drafting work emails to composing social media posts, these tools have become everyday writing assistants. So it’s no wonder some people are turning to them for more personal matters, too.

Wedding vows, birthday wishes, thank you notes and even Valentine’s Day messages are increasingly being outsourced to algorithms.

The technology is certainly capable. Chatbots can craft emotionally resonant responses that sound genuinely heartfelt.

But there’s a catch: When you present these words as your own, something doesn’t sit right.

When convenience breeds guilt

We conducted five experiments with hundreds of participants, asking them to imagine using generative AI to write various emotional messages to loved ones. Across every scenario we tested – from appreciation emails to birthday cards to love letters – we found the same pattern: People felt guilty when they used generative AI to write these messages compared to when they wrote the messages themselves.

When you copy an AI-generated message and sign your name to it, you’re essentially taking credit for words you didn’t write.

This creates what we call a “source-credit discrepancy,” which is a gap between who actually created the message and who appears to have created it. You can see these discrepancies in other contexts, whether it’s celebrity social media posts written by public relations teams or political speeches composed by professional speechwriters.

When you use AI, even though you might tell yourself you’re just being efficient, you can probably recognize, deep down, that you’re misleading the recipient about the personal effort and thought that went into the message.

The transparency test

To better understand this guilt, we compared AI-generated messages to other scenarios. When people bought greeting cards with preprinted messages, they felt no guilt at all. This is because greeting cards are transparently not written by you. Greeting cards carry no deception: Everyone understands you selected the card and that you didn’t write it yourself.

We also tested another scenario: having a friend secretly write the message for you. This produced just as much guilt as using generative AI. Whether the ghostwriter is human or an artificial intelligence tool doesn’t matter. What matters most is the dishonesty.

There were some boundaries, however. We found that guilt decreased when messages were never delivered and when recipients were mere acquaintances rather than close friends.

These findings confirm that the guilt stems from violating expectations of honesty in relationships where emotional authenticity matters most.

Somewhat relatedly, research has found that people react more negatively when they learn a company used AI instead of a human to write a message to them.

But the backlash was strongest when audiences expected personal effort – a boss expressing sympathy after a tragedy, or a note sent to all staff members celebrating a colleague’s recovery from a health scare. It was far weaker for purely factual or instructional notes, such as announcing routine personnel changes or providing basic business updates.

What this means for your Valentine’s Day

So, what should you do about that looming Valentine’s Day message? Our research suggests that the human hand behind a meaningful message can help both the writer and the recipient feel better.

This doesn’t mean you can’t use generative AI as a brainstorming partner rather than a ghostwriter. Let it help you overcome writer’s block or suggest ideas, but make the final message truly yours. Edit, personalize and add details that only you would know. The key is co-creation, not complete delegation.

Generative AI is a powerful tool, but it’s also created a raft of ethical dilemmas, whether it’s in the classroom or in romantic relationships. As these technologies become more integrated into everyday life, people will need to decide where to draw the line between helpful assistance and emotional outsourcing.

This Valentine’s Day, your heart and your conscience might thank you for keeping your message genuinely your own.

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

– ref. Whether it’s Valentine’s Day notes or emails to loved ones, using AI to write leaves people feeling crummy about themselves – https://theconversation.com/whether-its-valentines-day-notes-or-emails-to-loved-ones-using-ai-to-write-leaves-people-feeling-crummy-about-themselves-271805

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Candice Maenza, Research Project Manager, Associate Director of the Center for Translational Neuromechanics in Rehabilitation, Penn State

Stroke survivors often face substantial and long-lasting problems with their arms. Both arms often decline together: When one arm is more severely affected by the stroke, the other becomes more difficult to use as well. Compared with a healthy person’s dominant hand, a stroke survivor may take up to three times longer to complete everyday tasks using their less-impaired arm.

This creates a frustrating reality. People with severe impairment in one arm must rely almost entirely on their other arm for daily activities, such as eating, dressing and household tasks. When that “good” arm works slowly or awkwardly, even simple activities become tiring and discouraging, and some people may begin to avoid them altogether.

But that good arm can be strengthened. In our newly published research in the journal JAMA Neurology, we found that training the less-impaired arm in people living with chronic stroke can improve everyday hand function, in some cases even better than focusing only on the most impaired arm.

What is a stroke?

A stroke occurs when the flow of oxygen-carrying blood to part of the brain is interrupted by a blockage in a blood vessel or by bleeding. Without oxygen, brain cells begin to die.

Because each side of the brain mainly controls the opposite side of the body, a stroke often causes movement problems on the side of the body opposite the brain injury. For this reason, stroke rehabilitation has traditionally focused on restoring movement in the most impaired arm.

However, research over the past few decades has shown that both sides of the brain contribute to controlling movements for both arms, although they play different roles. As a result, damage to one side of the brain can affect movement on both sides of the body.

As expected, the arm opposite the brain injury often has major problems with weakness, stiffness and voluntary control, limiting its use for reaching, grasping and manipulating objects. But the other arm, usually thought to be unaffected from the stroke, is frequently not normal either. Many stroke survivors experience reduced strength, slower movements and poorer coordination in the less-impaired arm.

Training the less-impaired arm

As neuroscientists who study how the brain controls movement after stroke, these findings led us to a simple question: Could training the less-impaired arm help it work better?

In a clinical trial of over 50 patients, we studied people living with chronic stroke who had severe impairments in one arm, making it unusable for everyday tasks. These individuals depended almost entirely on their less-impaired arm to manage daily life.

Participants were randomly assigned to one of two rehabilitation groups: one that trained their most-impaired arm, and one that trained their less-impaired arm. Both received five weeks of therapy that involved challenging, goal-directed hand movements, including virtual reality tasks designed to improve coordination and timing.

Compared to those who trained their most-impaired arm, we found that participants who conditioned their less-impaired arm became faster and more efficient at everyday hand tasks, such as picking up small objects or lifting a cup. These improvements remained six months after training ended.

We believe the lasting benefit of training the less-impaired arm may come from a simple feedback loop: When their arm works better, people naturally use it more, and that extra practice in daily life helps lock in those gains.

Strengthening what remains

Stroke rehabilitation has long focused on the arm that is most visibly impaired. But for many people, full function in that arm never returns. They adapt and rely on their less-impaired arm to get through the day.

“Less-impaired,” however, does not mean unaffected. When this arm becomes the sole tool for daily activities, even mild problems can have major consequences for independence and quality of life. Improving how well this arm works could make everyday tasks faster, easier and less exhausting, even years after a stroke.

Future work will focus on how best to combine training of the less-impaired arm with standard therapy for the more-impaired arm, and how these approaches translate into everyday life at home.

For many survivors, recovery may not mean restoring what was lost but strengthening what remains.

Candice Maenza received salary support from a National Institutes of Health grant.

Robert Sainburg receives funding from the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Child Health and Development, National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense.

– ref. Stroke survivors can counterintuitively improve recovery by strengthening their stronger arm – new research – https://theconversation.com/stroke-survivors-can-counterintuitively-improve-recovery-by-strengthening-their-stronger-arm-new-research-274404

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Sothy Eng, Associate Professor of of Family and Consumer Sciences, University of Hawaii

The U.S. Department of State has announced that starting on Jan. 21, 2026, it has indefinitely stopped issuing immigrant visas for people from 75 countries, claiming concerns that some immigrants may rely on public benefits once they get to the United States.

While applications may still be processed, no immigrant visas will be issued during the pause, including family-based visas for U.S. citizens to sponsor their parents.

This focus leaves little room for recognizing the unpaid caregiving and everyday family support provided by immigrant parents already living in the U.S., support that allows others, including their U.S. citizen children, to remain employed and households to stay stable.

Family-based immigration, particularly visas that allow U.S. citizens to sponsor their parents, strengthens social capital: the networks of care and shared responsibility that allow people to work, stay healthy and raise children who become productive members of society. Weakening these networks risks undermining the social foundations of long-term economic growth.

As a scholar who studies family relationship dynamics and social capital, I have observed how these family ties are not simply private family matters but a public good that sustains community well-being. When parents are present, families are better able to share child care, navigate illness and remain economically active.

Family reunification as social infrastructure

The United States offers no national paid family leave, unlike countries such as Finland and Hungary, which guarantee paid time off to care for children, aging parents or ill family members. Instead, the U.S. provides only unpaid leave under federal law.

Consequently, many families rely on informal caregiving to balance work and care. Research shows that when adequate support is unavailable, workers, especially parents, are more likely to reduce hours or leave the labor force altogether.

This strain is widespread across the U.S.: Roughly 63 million Americans, nearly 1 in 4 adults, provide unpaid care for a family member with a serious health condition or disability, in addition to unpaid child care.

Sponsored immigrant parents often become part of this informal care system. They provide child care, prepare meals and supervise children.

In many U.S. states, the cost of child care now exceeds in-state college tuition, pushing families to reduce formal care or rely on relatives.

Family reunification, therefore, functions as social infrastructure, filling gaps that markets and public systems do not, a role family scholars have emphasized.

Decades of research illustrates this dynamic. In their book “Immigrant America,” sociologists Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut show that immigrant families often rely on close family ties when government support is limited.

Families also pool resources by living together and combining time, skills and income to cover basic needs. These arrangements help households cope with job instability, illness and long work hours. They also reduce reliance on formal child care and paid domestic labor.

Economic development does not happen in isolation from family life. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s framework on measuring well-being emphasizes that economic performance, health, social connections and family support are interconnected rather than separate policy domains. When people are supported and less stressed, they are healthier and more productive.

Sociologist James Coleman similarly has noted that children raised in stable, supportive households are more likely to succeed in school and contribute meaningfully as adults. Family reunification, therefore, is an investment in the social relationships that underpin economic prosperity.

Social capital and child development

Immigrant grandparents and extended kin often play an active role in children’s lives. They help with learning, language development and daily routines.

This kind of family involvement also helps explain what scholars call the “immigrant paradox,” in which many immigrant children achieve better-than-expected academic and emotional results despite socioeconomic challenges.

As of 2023, about 19 million U.S. children, roughly 1 in 4, have at least one parent who is an immigrant. Therefore, policies that restrict family reunification shape the everyday environments in which millions of children grow up. This influences the support they receive at home and the workforce they will help build as adults.

Social capital is not public dependency

Concerns raised by federal policymakers that immigrants will become a “burden on taxpayers” shape restrictions on family-based immigration. These concerns are reflected in federal policy through the Department of Homeland Security’s public charge rule, which allows immigration officials to assess whether applicants are likely to rely primarily on government assistance such as cash welfare or long-term public support for basic needs.

However, analyses of 2022 U.S. Census data show that immigrants overall use public assistance at lower rates than native-born Americans.

In practice, family reunification is less about public dependency and more about sustaining the relationships that allow families and the economy to function.

The question for policymakers is not whether the U.S. can afford to support family reunification, but whether it can afford not to. In a country facing caregiver shortages, rising parental stress and limited public care infrastructure, investing in social capital through family reunification may be one of the most effective and overlooked ways to support long-term economic growth.

Sothy Eng 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. Suspending family-based immigrant visas weakens US families and the economy – https://theconversation.com/suspending-family-based-immigrant-visas-weakens-us-families-and-the-economy-273665