Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Richard Balkin, Distinguished Professor of Counselor Education, University of Mississippi

Two in five Americans have fought with a family member about politics, according to a 2024 study by the American Psychiatric Association. One in five have become estranged over controversial issues, and the same percentage has “blocked a family member on social media or skipped a family event” due to disagreements.

Difficulty working through conflict with those close to us can cause irreparable harm to families and relationships. What’s more, inability to heal these relationships can be detrimental to physical and emotional well-being, and even longevity.

Healing relationships often involves forgiveness – and sometimes we have the ability to truly reconcile. But as a professor and licensed professional counselor who researches forgiveness, I believe the process is often misunderstood.

In my 2021 book, “Practicing Forgiveness: A Path Toward Healing,” I talk about how we often feel pressure to forgive and that forgiveness can feel like a moral mandate. Consider 18th-century poet Alexander Pope’s famous phrase: “To err is human; to forgive, divine” – as though doing so makes us better people. The reality is that reconciling a relationship is not just difficult, but sometimes inadvisable or dangerous, especially in cases involving harm or trauma.

I often remind people that forgiveness does not have to mean a reconciliation. At its core, forgiveness is internal: a way of laying down ill will and our emotional burden, so we can heal. It should be seen as a separate process from reconciliation, and deciding whether to renegotiate a relationship.

But either form of forgiveness is difficult – and here may be some insights as to why:

Forgiveness, karma and revenge

In 2025, I conducted a study with my colleagues Alex Hodges and Jason Vannest to explore emotions people may experience around forgiveness, and how those emotions differ from when they experience karma or revenge.

We defined forgiveness as relinquishing feelings of ill will toward someone who engaged in a harmful action or behavior toward you. “Karma” refers to a situation where someone who wronged you got what they deserved without any action from you. “Revenge,” on the other hand, happens when you retaliate.

First, we prompted participants to share memories of three events related to offering forgiveness, witnessing karma and taking revenge. After sharing each event, they completed a questionnaire indicating what emotions they experienced as they retold their story.

We found that most people say they aspire to forgive the person who hurt them. To be specific, participants were about 1.5 times more likely to desire forgiveness than karma or revenge.

Most admitted, though, that karma made them happier than offering forgiveness.

Working toward forgiveness tended to make people sad and anxious. In fact, participants were about 1.5 times more likely to experience sadness during forgiveness than during karma or revenge. Pursuing forgiveness was more stressful, and harder work, because it forces people to confront feelings that may often be perceived as negative, such as stress, anger or sadness.

Two different processes

Forgiveness is also confusing, thanks to the way it is typically conflated with reconciliation.

Forgiveness researchers tie reconciliation to “interpersonal forgiveness,” in which the relationship is renegotiated or even healed. However, at times, reconciliation should not occur – perhaps due to a toxic or unsafe relationship. Other times, it simply cannot occur, such as when the offender has died, or is a stranger.

But not all forgiveness depends on whether a broken relationship has been repaired. Even when reconciliation is impossible, we can still relinquish feelings of ill-will toward an offender, engaging in “intrapersonal forgiveness.”

I used to practice counseling in a hospital’s adolescent unit, in which all the teens I worked with were considered a danger to themselves or others. Many of them had suffered abuse. When I pictured what “success” could look like for them, I hoped that, in adulthood, my clients would not be focused on their past trauma – that they could experience safety, health, belonging and peace.

Most often, such an outcome was not dependent upon reconciling with the offender. In fact, reconciliation was often ill-advised, especially if offenders had not expressed remorse or commitment to any type of meaningful change. Even if they had, there are times when the victim chooses not to renegotiate the relationship, especially when working through trauma.

Still, working toward intrapersonal forgiveness could help some of these young people begin each day without the burden of trauma, anger and fear. In effect, the client could say, “What I wanted from this person I did not get, and I no longer expect it.” Removing expectations from people by identifying that we are not likely to get what we want can ease the burden of past transgressions. Eventually, you decide whether to continue to expend the emotional energy it takes to stay angry with someone.

Relinquishing feelings of ill will toward someone who has caused you harm can be difficult. It may require patience, time and hard work. When we recognize that we are not going to get what we wanted from someone – trust, safety, love – it can feel a lot like grief. Someone may pass through the same stages, including denial, anger, bargaining and depression, before they can accept and forgive within themselves, without the burden of reconciliation.

Taking stock

With this in mind, I offer four steps to evaluate where you are on your forgiveness journey. A simple tool I developed, the Forgiveness Reconciliation Inventory, looks at each of these steps in more depth.

1. Talk to someone. You can talk to a friend, mentor, counselor, grandma – someone you trust. Talking makes the unmentionable mentionable. It can reduce pain and help you gain perspective on the person or event that left you hurt.

2. Examine if reconciliation is beneficial. Sometimes there are benefits to reconciliation. Broken relationships can be healed, and even strengthened. This is especially more likely when the offender expresses remorse and changes behavior – something the victim has no control over.

3. In some cases, however, there are no benefits, or the benefits are outweighed by the offender’s lack of remorse and change. In this case, you might have to come to terms with processing an emotional – or even tangible – debt that will not be repaid.

4. Consider your feelings toward the offender, the benefits and consequences of reconciliation, and whether they’ve shown any remorse and change. If you want to forgive them, determine whether it will be interpersonal – talking to them and trying to renegotiate the relationship – or intrapersonal, in which you reconcile your feelings and expectations within yourself.

Either way, forgiveness comes when we relinquish feelings of ill will toward another.

Richard Balkin 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. What we get wrong about forgiveness – a counseling professor unpacks the difference between letting go and making up – https://theconversation.com/what-we-get-wrong-about-forgiveness-a-counseling-professor-unpacks-the-difference-between-letting-go-and-making-up-273317

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Michael Blake, Professor of Philosophy, Public Policy and Governance, University of Washington

U.S. President Donald Trump has, for the moment, indicated a willingness to abandon his threat to take over Greenland through military force – saying that he prefers negotiation to invasion. He is, however, continuing to assert that the United States ought to acquire ownership of the self-governing territory.

Trump has repeatedly raised the possibility of using military action, against both Greenland and Canada.

These threats were often taken as fanciful. The fact that he has, successfully, used military force to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from power has lent some plausibility to these threats.

Crucially, these military possibilities have been justified almost exclusively with reference to what Trump’s administration sees as America’s national interests. Anything short of ownership in the case of Greenland, the president has emphasized, would fail to adequately protect American interests.

As a political philosopher concerned with the moral analysis of international relations, I am deeply troubled by this vision of warfare – and by the moral justifications used to legitimize the making of war.

This view of warfare is radically different from the one championed by the U.S. for much of the 20th century. Most notably, it repudiates the legal principle that informed the Nuremberg trials: that military force cannot be justified on the basis of national self-interest alone.

Those trials, set up after World War II to prosecute the leaders of the Nazi regime, were foundational for modern international law; Trump, however, seems to disregard or reject the legal ideas the Nuremberg tribunal sought to establish.

Aggressive war as international crime

The use of warfare as a means by which states might seek political and economic advantage was declared illegal by 1928’s Kellogg-Briand Pact – an international instrument by which many nations, including both Germany and the U.S., agreed to abandon warfare as a tool for national self-interests.

After 1928, invading another country in the name of advancing national interests was formally defined as a crime, rather than a legitimate policy option.

The existence of this pact did not prevent the German military actions that led to World War II. The prosecution for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, accordingly, took two aims as central: reaffirming that aggressive warfare was illegal, and imposing punishment on those who had chosen to use military force against neighboring states.

The first charge laid against the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg was therefore the initiation of a “war of aggression” – a war chosen by a state for its own national interests.

The chief prosecutor in Nuremberg was Robert H. Jackson, who at the time also served as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Jackson began his description of the crime by saying that Germany, in concert with other nations, had bound itself in 1928 to “seek the settlement of disputes only by pacific means.”

More particularly, Jackson noted, Germany had justified its invasion of neighboring countries with reference to “Lebensraum” – living room, or, more generally, space for German citizens – which marked those invasions out as illegal.

Germany used its own national interests as sufficient reason to initiate deadly force against other nations. In so doing, said Jackson, it engaged in a crime for which individual criminal punishment was an appropriate response.

In the course of this crime, Jackson noted, Germany had shown a willingness to ignore both international law and its own previous commitments – and had given itself “a reputation for duplicity that will handicap it for years.”

Jackson asserted, further, that the extraordinary violence of the 20th century required the building of some legal tools, by which the plague of warfare and violence might be constrained.

If such principles were not codified in law, and respected by nations, then the world might well see, in Jackson’s phrase, the “doom of civilization.” Nuremberg’s task, for Jackson, was nothing less than ensuring that aggressive war was forever to be understood as a criminal act – a proposition backed, crucially, by the U.S. as party to the Nuremberg trials.

The morality of warfare

It is fair to say that the U.S, like other nations, has had a mixed record of living up to the legal principles articulated at Nuremberg, given its record of military intervention in places like Vietnam and Iraq.

Trump’s prior statements about Greenland, however, hint at something more extreme: They represent an abandonment of the principle that aggressive war is a criminal act, in favor of the idea that the U.S. can use its military as it wishes, to advance its own national interests.

Previous presidents have perhaps been guilty of paying too little attention to the moral importance of such international principles. Trump, in contrast, has announced that such principles do not bind him in the least.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Trump asserted that he did not “need international law” to know what to do. He would, instead, be limited only by “his own morality” and “his own mind.”

European leaders, for their part, have increasingly decried Trump’s willingness to go back on his word, or abandon previously insisted-upon principles, if such revisions seem to provide him with some particular advantage.

Trump’s statements, however, imply that his administration has adopted a position strikingly similar to that decried by Justice Jackson: The U.S., on this vision, can simply decide that its own moral interests are more important than those of other countries, and can initiate violence against those countries on its own discretion. It can do this, moreover, regardless of either the content of international law or of previously undertaken political commitments.

This vision, finally, is being undertaken in a world in which the available tools of destruction are even more complex – and more deadly – than those available during the Second World War.

It is, indeed, a historic irony that the U.S. of today has so roundly repudiated the moral values it both helped developed and championed globally during the 20th century.

Michael Blake receives funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

– ref. How Trump’s Greenland threats amount to an implicit rejection of the legal principles of Nuremberg – https://theconversation.com/how-trumps-greenland-threats-amount-to-an-implicit-rejection-of-the-legal-principles-of-nuremberg-274018

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Ricky J. Sethi, Professor of Computer Science, Fitchburg State University; Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Have you ever had the experience of rereading a sentence multiple times only to realize you still don’t understand it? As taught to scores of incoming college freshmen, when you realize you’re spinning your wheels, it’s time to change your approach.

This process, becoming aware of something not working and then changing what you’re doing, is the essence of metacognition, or thinking about thinking.

It’s your brain monitoring its own thinking, recognizing a problem, and controlling or adjusting your approach. In fact, metacognition is fundamental to human intelligence and, until recently, has been understudied in artificial intelligence systems.

My colleagues Charles Courchaine, Hefei Qiu and Joshua Iacoboni and I are working to change that. We’ve developed a mathematical framework designed to allow generative AI systems, specifically large language models like ChatGPT or Claude, to monitor and regulate their own internal “cognitive” processes. In some sense, you can think of it as giving generative AI an inner monologue, a way to assess its own confidence, detect confusion and decide when to think harder about a problem.

Why machines need self-awareness

Today’s generative AI systems are remarkably capable but fundamentally unaware. They generate responses without genuinely knowing how confident or confused their response might be, whether it contains conflicting information, or whether a problem deserves extra attention. This limitation becomes critical when generative AI’s inability to recognize its own uncertainty can have serious consequences, particularly in high-stakes applications such as medical diagnosis, financial advice and autonomous vehicle decision-making.

For example, consider a medical generative AI system analyzing symptoms. It might confidently suggest a diagnosis without any mechanism to recognize situations where it might be more appropriate to pause and reflect, like “These symptoms contradict each other” or “This is unusual, I should think more carefully.”

Developing such a capacity would require metacognition, which involves both the ability to monitor one’s own reasoning through self-awareness and to control the response through self-regulation.

Inspired by neurobiology, our framework aims to give generative AI a semblance of these capabilities by using what we call a metacognitive state vector, which is essentially a quantified measure of the generative AI’s internal “cognitive” state across five dimensions.

5 dimensions of machine self-awareness

One way to think about these five dimensions is to imagine giving a generative AI system five different sensors for its own thinking.

• Emotional awareness, to help it track emotionally charged content, which might be important for preventing harmful outputs.
• Correctness evaluation, which measures how confident the large language model is about the validity of its response.
• Experience matching, where it checks whether the situation resembles something it has previously encountered.
• Conflict detection, so it can identify contradictory information requiring resolution.
• Problem importance, to help it assess stakes and urgency to prioritize resources.

We quantify each of these concepts within an overall mathematical framework to create the metacognitive state vector and use it to control ensembles of large language models. In essence, the metacognitive state vector converts a large language model’s qualitative self-assessments into quantitative signals that it can use to control its responses.

For example, when a large language model’s confidence in a response drops below a certain threshold, or the conflicts in the response exceed some acceptable levels, it might shift from fast, intuitive processing to slow, deliberative reasoning. This is analogous to what psychologists call System 1 and System 2 thinking in humans.

Conducting an orchestra

Imagine a large language model ensemble as an orchestra where each musician – an individual large language model – comes in at certain times based on the cues received from the conductor. The metacognitive state vector acts as the conductor’s awareness, constantly monitoring whether the orchestra is in harmony, whether someone is out of tune, or whether a particularly difficult passage requires extra attention.

When performing a familiar, well-rehearsed piece, like a simple folk melody, the orchestra easily plays in quick, efficient unison with minimal coordination needed. This is the System 1 mode. Each musician knows their part, the harmonies are straightforward, and the ensemble operates almost automatically.

But when the orchestra encounters a complex jazz composition with conflicting time signatures, dissonant harmonies or sections requiring improvisation, the musicians need greater coordination. The conductor directs the musicians to shift roles: Some become section leaders, others provide rhythmic anchoring, and soloists emerge for specific passages.

This is the kind of system we’re hoping to create in a computational context by implementing our framework, orchestrating ensembles of large language models. The metacognitive state vector informs a control system that acts as the conductor, telling it to switch modes to System 2. It can then tell each large language model to assume different roles – for example, critic or expert – and coordinate their complex interactions based on the metacognitive assessment of the situation.

Impact and transparency

The implications extend far beyond making generative AI slightly smarter. In health care, a metacognitive generative AI system could recognize when symptoms don’t match typical patterns and escalate the problem to human experts rather than risking misdiagnosis. In education, it could adapt teaching strategies when it detects student confusion. In content moderation, it could identify nuanced situations requiring human judgment rather than applying rigid rules.

Perhaps most importantly, our framework makes generative AI decision-making more transparent. Instead of a black box that simply produces answers, we get systems that can explain their confidence levels, identify their uncertainties, and show why they chose particular reasoning strategies.

This interpretability and explainability is crucial for building trust in AI systems, especially in regulated industries or safety-critical applications.

The road ahead

Our framework does not give machines consciousness or true self-awareness in the human sense. Instead, our hope is to provide a computational architecture for allocating resources and improving responses that also serves as a first step toward more sophisticated approaches for full artificial metacognition.

The next phase in our work involves validating the framework with extensive testing, measuring how metacognitive monitoring improves performance across diverse tasks, and extending the framework to start reasoning about reasoning, or metareasoning. We’re particularly interested in scenarios where recognizing uncertainty is crucial, such as in medical diagnoses, legal reasoning and generating scientific hypotheses.

Our ultimate vision is generative AI systems that don’t just process information but understand their cognitive limitations and strengths. This means systems that know when to be confident and when to be cautious, when to think fast and when to slow down, and when they’re qualified to answer and when they should defer to others.

Ricky J. Sethi has received funding from the National Science Foundation, Google and Amazon.

– ref. Artificial metacognition: Giving an AI the ability to ‘think’ about its ‘thinking’ – https://theconversation.com/artificial-metacognition-giving-an-ai-the-ability-to-think-about-its-thinking-270026

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Michal Kowalewski, Thompson Chair of Invertebrate Paleontology, University of Florida

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

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Where do seashells come from? – Ivy, age 5, Phoenix, Arizona

Seashells are so plentiful that you may sometimes take them for granted.

Scientists have estimated that just one small stretch of beaches along the Gulf of California contained at least 2 trillion shells. That is 2 followed by 12 zeros.

2,000,000,000,000 shells – in just one small stretch of coast! Imagine if every human alive today went there to collect shells. Each of them would be able to claim nearly 1,000 shells.

But where do all these shells come from, and what tales can they tell us?

We are a paleontologist and marine ecologist, and our scientific research involves looking at shells and discovering where they came from and how old they are.

Skeletons on the beach

Shells are simply skeletons of animals, the remains of dead organisms. But unlike humans and most other animals, these mollusks, such as snails, clams, oysters and mussels, have an exoskeleton, meaning it’s on the outside of their bodies.

When people talk about seashells, they usually mean shells of mollusks. And these are, indeed, the most common types of shells we find on the beach today. Many other marine animals also make skeletons, including, among others, echinoids such as sand dollars that make internal skeletons called tests, and brachiopods, also known as “lampshells.”

These marine animals build their own shells to protect their soft bodies from external threats, such as predators or changes that happen around them in their habitat. Shells can also help these sea creatures stay stable on the seafloor, grow bigger or move around more efficiently.

Just as our bones provide a scaffold to which we attach our muscles, shells provide a rigid frame to which sea creatures attach their muscles. Some mollusks, such as scallops, can even swim by using powerful muscles to vigorously flap the two valves that make their shell. Other sea creatures use muscles attached to their shells to quickly bury themselves in the sediment.

Variety is the spice of marine life

The process of making a shell is known as biomineralization. How marine animals build their shells can vary greatly depending on the species, but all of these animals have special tissues to make their shells, just as humans have special tissues to grow and strengthen our bones.

Most marine animals form their shells from calcium carbonate, which is a tough mineral also found in limestone. Some sponges and microorganisms use another compound silica. There is also a group of brachiopods that build shells using calcium phosphate, which we use to build our bones, too.

More than 50,000 mollusk species live today on our planet, and most of them make shells. But each species makes a different shell. This accounts for the huge variety of shapes and sizes in the seashells you find on the beach.

Just as with bones, shells can last for a very long time. The shells of dead animals are moved around by currents and waves. Many eventually wash up on shorelines. Other shells get buried beneath the seafloor. With pressure and time, the buried seafloor sediment becomes a rock, and shells turn into fossils. In fact, seashells are among the most common types of fossils large enough to see with the naked eye.

When an experienced hunter finds a bone in the forest, they know right away whether it came from a deer, rabbit or wild boar. Similarly, when a seashell expert finds a shell, they can tell you what sea creature made it.

What shells can teach us

Besides the sheer number of sea creatures, another reason shells are so prolific is that they last for a very long time. In our research, we use a process called carbon dating to figure out how old a shell is. Mollusks and many other animals use calcium, carbon and oxygen to build their shell. There are three types of carbon – called isotopes – and one of them, known as radiocarbon, is unstable. As a shell ages, its radiocarbon decays at a constant rate. Older shells have less radiocarbon, and we scientists can estimate their age based on that fact.

This process has allowed us and other researchers to date thousands of shells collected from modern beaches and sea bottoms all around the globe. We discovered that many of those shells are hundreds or thousands of years old.

These shells are not just beautiful to look at – they’re also very useful. Like little time machines, these shells carry within them a wealth of information about the past, including details about the habitats in which they lived. Scientists like us can often tell from a shell whether the animal that created it was a predator, a plant eater or even a parasite.

By studying the chemical makeup of the shell, scientists can learn about past climates and environments. We can often even discern how the owner of a shell died and the hazards it faced during its life.

So the next time you admire shells on your favorite beach, inspect them for clues about their past lives. Does the shell contain a round hole? That reveals that the animal was killed by a drilling predator. Does it have a repair scar? It may have survived an attack by a crab. Does the shell belong to an animal that lived in a seagrass meadow that is no longer there?

Each shell is a little diary, and if you know how to read it, it can tell you exciting stories of animals and habitats from the past.

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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.

Michal Kowalewski receives funding from federal agencies (National Science Foundation) and private organizations such as Felburn Foundation and University of Florida Foundation.

Thomas K. Frazer receives funding from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Florida Department of Transportation, and South Florida Water Management District and The Ocean Conservancy.

– ref. Where do seashells come from? – https://theconversation.com/where-do-seashells-come-from-270153

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Mathew Barlow, Professor of Climate Science, UMass Lowell

A severe winter storm that brought crippling freezing rain, sleet and snow to a large part of the U.S. in late January 2026 left a mess in states from New Mexico to New England. Hundreds of thousands of people lost power across the South as ice pulled down tree branches and power lines, more than a foot of snow fell in parts of the Midwest and Northeast, and many states faced bitter cold that was expected to linger for days.

The sudden blast may have come as a shock to many Americans after a mostly mild start to winter, but that warmth may have partly contributed to the ferocity of the storm.

As atmospheric and climate scientists, we conduct research that aims to improve understanding of extreme weather, including what makes it more or less likely to occur and how climate change might or might not play a role.

To understand what Americans are experiencing with this winter blast, we need to look more than 20 miles above the surface of Earth, to the stratospheric polar vortex.

What creates a severe winter storm like this?

Multiple weather factors have to come together to produce such a large and severe storm.

Winter storms typically develop where there are sharp temperature contrasts near the surface and a southward dip in the jet stream, the narrow band of fast-moving air that steers weather systems. If there is a substantial source of moisture, the storms can produce heavy rain or snow.

In late January, a strong Arctic air mass from the north was creating the temperature contrast with warmer air from the south. Multiple disturbances within the jet stream were acting together to create favorable conditions for precipitation, and the storm system was able to pull moisture from the very warm Gulf of Mexico.

Where does the polar vortex come in?

The fastest winds of the jet stream occur just below the top of the troposphere, which is the lowest level of the atmosphere and ends about seven miles above Earth’s surface. Weather systems are capped at the top of the troposphere, because the atmosphere above it becomes very stable.

The stratosphere is the next layer up, from about seven miles to about 30 miles. While the stratosphere extends high above weather systems, it can still interact with them through atmospheric waves that move up and down in the atmosphere. These waves are similar to the waves in the jet stream that cause it to dip southward, but they move vertically instead of horizontally.

You’ve probably heard the term “polar vortex” used when an area of cold Arctic air moves far enough southward to influence the United States. That term describes air circulating around the pole, but it can refer to two different circulations, one in the troposphere and one in the stratosphere.

The Northern Hemisphere stratospheric polar vortex is a belt of fast-moving air circulating around the North Pole. It is like a second jet stream, high above the one you may be familiar with from weather graphics, and usually less wavy and closer to the pole.

Sometimes the stratospheric polar vortex can stretch southward over the United States. When that happens, it creates ideal conditions for the up-and-down movement of waves that connect the stratosphere with severe winter weather at the surface.

The forecast for the January storm showed a close overlap between the southward stretch of the stratospheric polar vortex and the jet stream over the U.S., indicating perfect conditions for cold and snow.

The biggest swings in the jet stream are associated with the most energy. Under the right conditions, that energy can bounce off the polar vortex back down into the troposphere, exaggerating the north-south swings of the jet stream across North America and making severe winter weather more likely.

This is what was happening in late January 2026 in the central and eastern U.S.

If the climate is warming, why are we still getting severe winter storms?

Earth is unequivocally warming as human activities release greenhouse gas emissions that trap heat in the atmosphere, and snow amounts are decreasing overall. But that does not mean severe winter weather will never happen again.

Some research suggests that even in a warming environment, cold events, while occurring less frequently, may still remain relatively severe in some locations.

One factor may be increasing disruptions to the stratospheric polar vortex, which appear to be linked to the rapid warming of the Arctic with climate change.

Additionally, a warmer ocean leads to more evaporation, and because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, that means more moisture is available for storms. The process of moisture condensing into rain or snow produces energy for storms as well. However, warming can also reduce the strength of storms by reducing temperature contrasts.

The opposing effects make it complicated to assess the potential change to average storm strength. However, intense events do not necessarily change in the same way as average events. On balance, it appears that the most intense winter storms may be becoming more intense.

A warmer environment also increases the likelihood that precipitation that would have fallen as snow in previous winters may now be more likely to fall as sleet and freezing rain.

There are still many questions

Scientists are constantly improving the ability to predict and respond to these severe weather events, but there are many questions still to answer.

Much of the data and research in the field relies on a foundation of work by federal employees, including government labs like the National Center for Atmospheric Research, known as NCAR, which has been targeted by the Trump administration for funding cuts. These scientists help develop the crucial models, measuring instruments and data that scientists and forecasters everywhere depend on.

This article, originally published Jan. 24, 2026, has been updated with details from the weekend storm.

Mathew Barlow has received federal funding for research on extreme events and also conducts legal consulting related to climate change..

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

– ref. How the polar vortex and warm ocean intensified a major US winter storm – https://theconversation.com/how-the-polar-vortex-and-warm-ocean-intensified-a-major-us-winter-storm-274243

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Mathew Barlow, Professor of Climate Science, UMass Lowell

A severe winter storm sweeping across the central and eastern U.S. in late January 2026 threatened states from Texas to New England with crippling freezing rain, sleet and snow. Several governors issued states of emergency as forecasters warned of hazardous travel conditions, dangerous wind chills and power outages amid bitter cold expected to linger for days.

The sudden blast may come as a shock to many Americans after a mostly mild start to winter, but that warmth may be partly contributing to the ferocity of this storm.

As atmospheric and climate scientists, we conduct research that aims to improve understanding of extreme weather, including what makes it more or less likely to occur and how climate change might or might not play a role.

To understand what Americans are experiencing with this winter blast, we need to look more than 20 miles above the surface of Earth, to the stratospheric polar vortex.

What creates a severe winter storm like this?

Multiple weather factors have to come together to produce such a large and severe storm.

Winter storms typically develop where there are sharp temperature contrasts near the surface and a southward dip in the jet stream, the narrow band of fast-moving air that steers weather systems. If there is a substantial source of moisture, the storms can produce heavy rain or snow.

In late January, a strong Arctic air mass from the north was creating the temperature contrast with warmer air from the south. Multiple disturbances within the jet stream were acting together to create favorable conditions for precipitation, and the storm system was able to pull moisture from the very warm Gulf of Mexico.

Where does the polar vortex come in?

The fastest winds of the jet stream occur just below the top of the troposphere, which is the lowest level of the atmosphere and ends about seven miles above Earth’s surface. Weather systems are capped at the top of the troposphere, because the atmosphere above it becomes very stable.

The stratosphere is the next layer up, from about seven miles to about 30 miles. While the stratosphere extends high above weather systems, it can still interact with them through atmospheric waves that move up and down in the atmosphere. These waves are similar to the waves in the jet stream that cause it to dip southward, but they move vertically instead of horizontally.

You’ve probably heard the term “polar vortex” used when an area of cold Arctic air moves far enough southward to influence the United States. That term describes air circulating around the pole, but it can refer to two different circulations, one in the troposphere and one in the stratosphere.

The Northern Hemisphere stratospheric polar vortex is a belt of fast-moving air circulating around the North Pole. It is like a second jet stream, high above the one you may be familiar with from weather graphics, and usually less wavy and closer to the pole.

Sometimes the stratospheric polar vortex can stretch southward over the United States. When that happens, it creates ideal conditions for the up-and-down movement of waves that connect the stratosphere with severe winter weather at the surface.

The forecast for the January storm showed a close overlap between the southward stretch of the stratospheric polar vortex and the jet stream over the U.S., indicating perfect conditions for cold and snow.

The biggest swings in the jet stream are associated with the most energy. Under the right conditions, that energy can bounce off the polar vortex back down into the troposphere, exaggerating the north-south swings of the jet stream across North America and making severe winter weather more likely.

This is what was happening in late January 2026 in the central and eastern U.S.

If the climate is warming, why are we still getting severe winter storms?

Earth is unequivocally warming as human activities release greenhouse gas emissions that trap heat in the atmosphere, and snow amounts are decreasing overall. But that does not mean severe winter weather will never happen again.

Some research suggests that even in a warming environment, cold events, while occurring less frequently, may still remain relatively severe in some locations.

One factor may be increasing disruptions to the stratospheric polar vortex, which appear to be linked to the rapid warming of the Arctic with climate change.

Additionally, a warmer ocean leads to more evaporation, and because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, that means more moisture is becoming available for storms. The process of moisture condensing into rain or snow produces energy for storms as well. However, warming can also reduce the strength of storms by reducing temperature contrasts. The opposing effects make it complicated to assess the potential change to average storm strength.

However, intense events do not necessarily change in the same way as average events. On balance, it appears that the most intense winter storms may be becoming more intense. Additionally, a warmer environment increases the likelihood that precipitation that would have fallen as snow in previous winters may now be more likely to fall as sleet and freezing rain.

There are still many questions

Scientists are constantly improving our ability to predict and respond to these severe weather events, but there are many questions still to answer.

Much of the data and research in the field relies on a foundation of work by federal employees, including government labs like the National Center for Atmospheric Research, known as NCAR, which has been targeted by the Trump administration for funding cuts. These scientists help develop the crucial models, measuring instruments and data that scientists and forecasters everywhere depend on.

Mathew Barlow has received federal funding for research on extreme events and also conducts legal consulting related to climate change..

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

– ref. How the polar vortex and warm ocean are intensifying a major US winter storm – https://theconversation.com/how-the-polar-vortex-and-warm-ocean-are-intensifying-a-major-us-winter-storm-274243

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Kelsey Norman, Fellow for the Middle East, Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University

Over the past year, images of masked, heavily armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arresting men, women and children – outside of courts, at schools and homes – have become common across the United States.

The video of an ICE agent shooting and killing Renee Nicole Good – a U.S. citizen – in Minnesota on Jan. 7, 2026, is one example of the brazen, sometimes deadly tactics that the agency employs.

Part of the reason why recent ICE tactics have shocked Americans is because most people haven’t seen them before. Historically, the country’s militarized immigration enforcement practices have played out closer to the U.S.-Mexico border. And for decades, agents with Customs and Border Protection have carried out most deportations near the border, not ICE.

From 2010-2020, nearly 80% of all deportations were initiated at or near the U.S.-Mexico border. During the COVID-19 pandemic, that number jumped to 98%, as both the Trump and Biden administrations utilized Title 42, a public health statute that allowed the government to rapidly deport recently arrived migrants.

But Trump during his second presidency has greatly shifted immigration enforcement north into the interior of the U.S. And ICE has played a central role.

As international migration and human rights scholars, we have examined recent federal immigration policy to determine why ICE has become the main agency detaining and deporting migrants as far away from the southern border as snowy Minnesota.

And we have also explored how the transition in immigration control from the southern border to more Americans’ front lawns could be shifting the public’s views on deportation tactics.

Migration as a threat

ICE is a relatively new agency. The 2002 Homeland Security Act, passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, created the Department of Homeland Security, known as DHS, by merging the U.S. Customs Service – previously under Treasury Department control – and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, formerly under the Justice Department.

DHS has 22 agencies, including three that focus on immigration: Customs and Border Protection, ICE and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which manages legal immigration and naturalization.

There is no inherent reason that immigration enforcement should fall under homeland security. But immigration was deemed a national security matter by the George W. Bush administration after 9/11.

In a 2002 presidential briefing justifying DHS’s creation, Bush said, “The changing nature of the threats facing America requires a new government structure to protect against invisible enemies that can strike with a wide variety of weapons.”

The U.S. government has viewed immigration from this national security perspective ever since.

The full impact of the deportations

The Trump administration in early 2025 set a goal of deporting 1 million people during its first year.

But with so few crossings, and thus deportations, at the U.S.-Mexico border, the administration instead has focused its efforts on the U.S. interior.

Trump’s 2025 tax and budget bill reflected this reprioritization, allocating US$170 billion over four years to immigration enforcement, compared to approximately $30 billion allocated in 2024.

Roughly $67 billion goes toward immigration enforcement at the border, including border wall construction. But the largest percentage of the bill’s immigration funding – at least $75 billion – goes toward arresting, detaining and deporting immigrants already living in the U.S.

The Trump administration did not initiate deportations from the U.S. interior. They have formed part of other administration’s policies, both Democratic and Republican.

Interior border enforcement increased under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s with the introduction of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which widened the criteria for deportations. And former President Barack Obama was referred to as the “Deporter in Chief” after his administration carried out more than 3 million deportations over his two terms, with roughly 69% of deportations occurring at the border.

But the astronomical growth of government funding toward migration control – at the border and in the U.S. – got the country to where it is today.

Between fiscal year 2003 and 2024, for example, Congress allocated approximately $24 toward immigration enforcement carried out by ICE and CBP for every $1 spent on the immigration court system that handles asylum claims.

The new money allocated under the 2025 budget bill, and the reprioritization of immigration enforcement from the border to the interior, partly explains why Americans are now seeing the long-term consequences of border militarization play out directly in their communities.

Americans may not know about the experiences of migrants who are quickly deported near the border, but it is harder to ignore recent images of people snatched up within their own neighborhoods.

Now the visible targets of border enforcement are increasingly immigrants who have built their lives in the U.S. – neighbors, friends, co-workers – as well as anyone who opposes ICE’s tactics, like Renee Good.

Changing political attitudes

In fact, the violence of Trump’s mass deportation campaign may be changing how Americans view immigration.

Just before the 2024 presidential election, a Gallup Poll found that 28% of Americans believed that immigration was the most important problem facing the nation – the highest percentage since Gallup began tracking the topic in 1981. This number dropped to 19% in December 2025, reflecting how more Americans see immigration as a routine issue that the government can manage rather than a crisis that needs to be dealt with.

This is supported in the academic literature. Migration scholars have shown that voters often support strict immigration policies in the voting booth but resist and protest when governments attempt to implement those policies in organized immigrant communities.

In 2002, for example, migration scholar Antje Ellermann documented that immigration officers reported it was more difficult to detain and deport people in Miami – because of resistance by a politicized immigrant community – compared to relatively conservative and less organized communities in San Diego.

But in both places, Republican and Democratic lawmakers were influential in intervening in individual cases to prevent deportations. This is because senior immigration officials, Ellermann noted, were influenced by media attention and pressure by members of Congress to grant relief.

Support for Trump’s handling of immigration is trending downward. Only 41% of Americans approved of Trump’s approach to immigration as of early January 2026, compared to 51% in March of last year, according to CNN polling.

This declining support for Trump’s tactics comes as Republican senators such as Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Joni Ernst of Iowa have criticized ICE and its operations in Minnesota.

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. ICE immigration tactics are shocking more Americans as US-Mexico border operations move north – https://theconversation.com/ice-immigration-tactics-are-shocking-more-americans-as-us-mexico-border-operations-move-north-273741

Source: The Conversation – USA – By John E. Jones III, President, Dickinson College

As Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents continued to use aggressive and sometimes violent methods to make arrests in its mass deportation campaign, including breaking down doors in Minneapolis homes, a bombshell report from the Associated Press on Jan. 21, 2026, said that an internal ICE memo – acquired via a whistleblower – asserted that immigration officers could enter a home without a judge’s warrant. That policy, the report said, constituted “a sharp reversal of longstanding guidance meant to respect constitutional limits on government searches.”

Those limits have long been found in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed Dickinson College President John E. Jones III, a former federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate in 2002, for a primer on the Fourth Amendment, and what the changes in the ICE memo mean.

Okay, I’m going to read the Fourth Amendment – and then you’re going to explain it to us, please! Here goes:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Can you help us understand what that means?

Since the beginning of the republic, it has been uncontested that in order to invade someone’s home, you need to have a warrant that was considered, and signed off on, by a judicial officer. This mandate is right within the Fourth Amendment; it is a core protection.

In addition to that, through jurisprudence that has evolved since the adoption of the Fourth Amendment, it is settled law that it applies to everyone. That would include noncitizens as well.

What I see in this directive that ICE put out, apparently quite some time ago and somewhat secretly, is something that, to my mind, turns the Fourth Amendment on its head.

What does the Fourth Amendment aim to protect someone from?

In the context of the ICE search, it means that a person’s home, as they say, really is their castle. Historically, it was meant to remedy something that was true in England, where the colonists came from, which was that the king or those empowered by the king could invade people’s homes at will. The Fourth Amendment was meant to establish a sort of zone of privacy for people, so that their papers, their property, their persons would be safe from intrusion without cause.

So it’s essentially a protection against abuse of the government’s power.

That’s precisely what it is.

Has the accepted interpretation of the Fourth Amendment changed over the centuries?

It hasn’t. But Fourth Amendment law has evolved because the framers, for example, didn’t envision that there would be cellphones. They couldn’t understand or anticipate that there would be things like cellphones and electronic surveillance. All those modalities have come into the sphere of Fourth Amendment protection. The law has evolved in a way that actually has made Fourth Amendment protections greater and more wide-ranging, simply because of technology and other developments such as the use of automobiles and other means of transportation. So there are greater protected zones of privacy than just a person’s home.

ICE says it only needs an administrative warrant, not a judicial warrant, to enter a home and arrest someone. Can you briefly describe the difference and what it means in this situation?

It’s absolutely central to the question here. In this context, an administrative warrant is nothing more than the folks at ICE headquarters writing something up and directing their agents to go arrest somebody. That’s all. It’s a piece of paper that says ‘We want you arrested because we said so.’ At bottom that’s what an administrative warrant is, and of course it hasn’t been approved by a judge.

This authorized use of administrative warrants to circumvent the Fourth Amendment flies in the face of their limited use prior to the ICE directive.

A judicially approved warrant, on the other hand, has by definition been reviewed by a judge. In this case, it would be either a U.S. magistrate judge or U.S. district judge. That means that it would have to be supported by probable cause to enter someone’s residence to arrest them.

So the key distinction is that there’s a neutral arbiter. In this case, a federal judge who evaluates whether or not there’s sufficient cause to – as is stated clearly in the Fourth Amendment – be empowered to enter someone’s home. An administrative warrant has no such protection. It is not much more than a piece of paper generated in a self-serving way by ICE, free of review to substantiate what is stated in it.

Have there been other kinds of situations, historically, where the government has successfully proposed working around the Fourth Amendment?

There are a few, such as consent searches and exigent circumstances where someone is in danger or evidence is about to be destroyed. But generally it’s really the opposite and cases point to greater protections. For example, in the 1960s the Supreme Court had to confront warrantless wiretapping; it was very difficult for judges in that age who were not tech-savvy to apply the Fourth Amendment to this technology, and they struggled to find a remedy when there was no actual intrusion into a structure. In the end, the court found that intrusion was not necessary and that people’s expectation of privacy included their phone conversations. This of course has been extended to various other means of technology including GPS tracking and cellphone use generally.

What’s the direction this could go in at this point?

What I fear here – and I think ICE probably knows this – is that more often than not, a person who may not have legal standing to be in the country, notwithstanding the fact that there was a Fourth Amendment violation by ICE, may ultimately be out of luck. You could say that the arrest was illegal, and you go back to square one, but at the same time you’ve apprehended the person. So I’m struggling to figure out how you remedy this.

John E. Jones III is affiliated with Keep Our Republic’s Article Three Coalition.

– ref. ‘We want you arrested because we said so’ – how ICE’s policy on raiding whatever homes it wants violates a basic constitutional right, according to a former federal judge – https://theconversation.com/we-want-you-arrested-because-we-said-so-how-ices-policy-on-raiding-whatever-homes-it-wants-violates-a-basic-constitutional-right-according-to-a-former-federal-judge-274164

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Kevin Deane, Professor of Medicine and Rheumatology, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

More than 18 million people worldwide suffer from rheumatoid arthritis, including nearly 1.5 million Americans.

Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune, inflammatory form of arthritis, meaning a person’s immune system attacks their joints, causing substantial inflammation. This inflammation can cause pain, stiffness and swelling in the joints, and in many cases, patients report fatigue and a flu-like feeling.

If left untreated, rheumatoid arthritis can lead to damage of the joints. But even when treated, this condition can lead to significant disability. In highly active disease or advanced stages, patient may have difficulty performing daily tasks, such as preparing food, caring for children and getting dressed.

Up to now, this condition has been treated once patients have already developed symptoms. But a growing body of evidence suggests this disease can be identified earlier – and maybe even ultimately prevented.

I’m a physician specializing in rheumatoid arthritis and a researcher who has conducted a clinical trial on treatments for this condition. I believe this research is moving us toward being able to identify people who are at risk for rheumatoid arthritis before the disease fully develops, and to finding treatments that will delay or prevent it altogether. My hope is that this could lead to changes in how we manage rheumatoid arthritis in the next several years.

Finding the disease before it causes harm

Currently, when someone visits their health care provider because they are experiencing joint pain or other symptoms of an immune attack, health care providers can make a diagnosis by examining the joints for swelling. The health care provider will also run tests to find blood markers called autoantibodies, which help in confirming the diagnosis. While not all people with rheumatoid arthritis will have abnormal blood markers, the two autoantibodies that are seen in up to 80% of people with rheumatoid arthritis are rheumatoid factor and anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide.

But multiple studies have now confirmed that rheumatoid arthritis has a preclinical stage of development. This is a time about three to five years or longer, prior to the onset of swollen joints when markers like rheumatoid factor and anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide are detectable in the blood. The presence of these markers indicates that autoimmunity is occurring, yet the body and organs are still functioning well, and a person who is at risk of getting rheumatoid arthritis may not feel sick yet.

Now that researchers have identified this preclinical stage, health care providers can use markers such as autoantibodies and symptoms like prolonged early morning joint stiffness to identify people who are at risk for rheumatoid arthritis but do not yet have joint inflammation.

At this point, predicting future rheumatoid arthritis is still in the research stage, although the field is working toward established ways to test for risk for rheumatoid arthritis as a routine part of health care. This is akin to how cardiovascular disease risk is assessed through measuring cholesterol levels.

Ongoing research

Because of advances in the ability to predict who may get rheumatoid arthritis in the future, researchers are now working on identifying treatments that can delay or prevent the full-blown condition from developing.

In particular, trials have been performed in people who tested positive for anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide, or who have other risk factors for rheumatoid arthritis. These risk factors include joint pain and subclinical joint inflammation, which is when an imaging study, like magnetic resonance imaging, sees joint inflammation that can’t be seen by a clinician examining the joints.

To date, almost all of these trials have used immune drugs that are commonly used to treat full-blown rheumatoid arthritis, such as methotrexate, hydroxychloroquine and rituximab. Researchers have been testing whether a short course of any of these drugs could lead to a lasting reset of the immune system and prevent rheumatoid arthritis from developing.

While there is not yet an approved drug for rheumatoid arthritis prevention, these studies offer hope that researchers are on track to find the right drug – as well as the right dosage and duration of that drug.

Researching the preclinical stage of rheumatoid arthritis

Some challenges remain to be addressed before preventive treatments become the norm in clinical care.

First, researchers need to better understand the biology of the preclinical stage of disease. Until recently, most studies have focused on patients with full-blown arthritis and generally ignored people at risk for developing the disease.

But now, researchers can use blood markers like anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide antibodies to identify those who are at risk much more easily. And a growing number of studies of people with this marker are informing how scientists understand the biology of rheumatoid arthritis development.

In particular, it is now apparent that the preclinical stage is marked by multiple circulating immune system abnormalities in cells, autoantibodies and inflammation. The hope is that researchers will find interventions that effectively target the immune system abnormalities driving the development of rheumatoid arthritis before the patient’s joints begin to swell.

Researchers are also finding that the abnormalities in the immune system during the preclinical stage may be coming from sites in the body other than the joints. An emerging idea called the mucosal origins hypothesis posits that the early autoimmunity of rheumatoid arthritis is caused by inflammation at mucosal surfaces of the body, such as the gums, the lungs and the gut. According to this theory, the joints are involved only later as the disease progresses.

More research is needed, but the mucosal origins hypothesis may help explain why periodontal disease, emphysema or other forms of lung disease and exposure to tobacco or forest fire smoke are risk factors for rheumatoid arthritis. It would also explain why certain bacteria have been associated with the disease. Future trials targeting interventions to a mucosal process could help researchers better understand the nature of this disease.

Making predictions

But while biomarkers like the anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide antibodies are strongly predictive for future rheumatoid arthritis, one difficulty remains: Some people who test positive for them never develop the full-blown disease.

Studies have shown that about 20% to 30% of people who are positive for anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide antibodies develop rheumatoid arthritis within two to five years, although the presence of combinations of risk factors can identify people who have a greater than 50% risk for developing the condition within one year.

This makes it difficult to find participants for clinical trials for rheumatoid arthritis prevention. If you can’t predict who will get the disease, it’s hard to know whether you’re preventing it.

So far, researchers have tried to recruit people who have already come to their health care provider with early joint symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis but still no swollen joints. That has worked well, but there are likely far more people at risk for rheumatoid arthritis who have not yet sought care. Since health care providers are not yet testing everyone for blood markers for rheumatoid arthritis, researchers will need larger, international networks that can test for risk factors like autoantibodies to identify candidates for participation in prevention trials.

More needs to be done, but it’s exciting to see the field advancing toward the point where prevention may be part of routine clinical care for rheumatoid arthritis.

Dr. Deane has received grant funding from the Arthritis Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, Boehringer Ingelheim, Gilead and ThermoFisher, and has had consulting/advisory board participation with Werfen, Boehringer Ingelheim, AllInBio, and Lilly. Dr. Deane also part of task forces for prediction of rheumatoid arthritis that are sponsored by the American College of Rheumatology and the European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology.

– ref. Rheumatoid arthritis has no cure – but researchers are homing in on preventing it – https://theconversation.com/rheumatoid-arthritis-has-no-cure-but-researchers-are-homing-in-on-preventing-it-268472

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Joanna Fong-Isariyawongse, Associate Professor of Neurology, University of Pittsburgh

If you have ever lifted a weight, you know the routine: challenge the muscle, give it rest, feed it and repeat. Over time, it grows stronger.

Of course, muscles only grow when the challenge increases over time. Continually lifting the same weight the same way stops working.

It might come as a surprise to learn that the brain responds to training in much the same way as our muscles, even though most of us never think about it that way. Clear thinking, focus, creativity and good judgment are built through challenge, when the brain is asked to stretch beyond routine rather than run on autopilot. That slight mental discomfort is often the sign that the brain is actually being trained, a lot like that good workout burn in your muscles.

Think about walking the same loop through a local park every day. At first, your senses are alert. You notice the hills, the trees, the changing light. But after a few loops, your brain checks out. You start planning dinner, replaying emails or running through your to-do list. The walk still feels good, but your brain is no longer being challenged.

Routine feels comfortable, but comfort and familiarity alone do not build new brain connections.

As a neurologist who studies brain activity, I use electroencephalograms, or EEGs, to record the brain’s electrical patterns.

Research in humans shows that these rhythms are remarkably dynamic. When someone learns a new skill, EEG rhythms often become more organized and coordinated. This reflects the brain’s attempt to strengthen pathways needed for that skill.

Your brain trains in zones too

For decades, scientists believed that the brain’s ability to grow and reorganize, called neuroplasticity, was largely limited to childhood. Once the brain matured, its wiring was thought to be largely fixed.

But that idea has been overturned. Decades of research show that adult brains can form new connections and reorganize existing networks, under the right conditions, throughout life.

Some of the most influential work in this field comes from enriched environment studies in animals. Rats housed in stimulating environments filled with toys, running wheels and social interaction developed larger, more complex brains than rats kept in standard cages. Their brains adapted because they were regularly exposed to novelty and challenge.

Human studies find similar results. Adults who take on genuinely new challenges, such as learning a language, dancing or practicing a musical instrument, show measurable increases in brain volume and connectivity on MRI scans.

The takeaway is simple: Repetition keeps the brain running, but novelty pushes the brain to adapt, forcing it to pay attention, learn and problem-solve in new ways. Neuroplasticity thrives when the brain is nudged just beyond its comfort zone.

The reality of neural fatigue

Just like muscles, the brain has limits. It does not get stronger from endless strain. Real growth comes from the right balance of challenge and recovery.

When the brain is pushed for too long without a break – whether that means long work hours, staying locked onto the same task or making nonstop decisions under pressure – performance starts to slip. Focus fades. Mistakes increase. To keep you going, the brain shifts how different regions work together, asking some areas to carry more of the load. But that extra effort can still make the whole network run less smoothly.

Neural fatigue is more than feeling tired. Brain imaging studies show that during prolonged mental work, the networks responsible for attention and decision-making begin to slow down, while regions that promote rest and reward-seeking take over. This shift helps explain why mental exhaustion often comes with stronger cravings for quick rewards, like sugary snacks, comfort foods or mindless scrolling. The result is familiar: slower thinking, more mistakes, irritability and mental fog.

This is where the muscle analogy becomes especially useful. You wouldn’t do squats for six hours straight, because your leg muscles would eventually give out. As they work, they build up byproducts that make each contraction a little less effective until you finally have to stop. Your brain behaves in a similar way.

Likewise, in the brain, when the same cognitive circuits are overused, chemical signals build up, communication slows and learning stalls.

But rest allows those strained circuits to reset and function more smoothly over time. And taking breaks from a taxing activity does not interrupt learning. In fact, breaks are critical for efficient learning.

The crucial importance of rest

Among all forms of rest, sleep is the most powerful.

Sleep is the brain’s night shift. While you rest, the brain takes out the trash through a special cleanup system called the glymphatic system that clears away waste and harmful proteins. Sleep also restores glycogen, a critical fuel source for brain cells.

And importantly, sleep is when essential repair work happens. Growth hormone surges during deep sleep, supporting tissue repair. Immune cells regroup and strengthen their activity.

During REM sleep, the stage of sleep linked to dreaming, the brain replays patterns from the day to consolidate memories. This process is critical not only for cognitive skills like learning an instrument but also for physical skills like mastering a move in sports.

On the other hand, chronic sleep deprivation impairs attention, disrupts decision-making and alters the hormones that regulate appetite and metabolism. This is why fatigue drives sugar cravings and late-night snacking.

Sleep is not an optional wellness practice. It is a biological requirement for brain performance.

Exercise feeds the brain too

Exercise strengthens the brain as well as the body.

Physical activity increases levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, a protein that acts like fertilizer for neurons. It promotes the growth of new connections, increases blood flow, reduces inflammation and helps the brain remain adaptable across one’s lifespan.

This is why exercise is one of the strongest lifestyle tools for protecting cognitive health.

Train, recover, repeat

The most important lesson from this science is simple. Your brain is not passively wearing down with age. It is constantly remodeling itself in response to how you use it. Every new challenge and skill you try, every real break, every good night of sleep sends a signal that growth is still expected.

You do not need expensive brain training programs or radical lifestyle changes. Small, consistent habits matter more. Try something unfamiliar. Vary your routines. Take breaks before exhaustion sets in. Move your body. Treat sleep as nonnegotiable.

So the next time you lace up your shoes for a familiar walk, consider taking a different path. The scenery may change only slightly, but your brain will notice. That small detour is often all it takes to turn routine into training.

The brain stays adaptable throughout life. Cognitive resilience is not fixed at birth or locked in early adulthood. It is something you can shape.

If you want a sharper, more creative, more resilient brain, you do not need to wait for a breakthrough drug or a perfect moment. You can start now, with choices that tell your brain that growth is still the plan.

Joanna Fong-Isariyawongse 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. Your brain can be trained, much like your muscles – a neurologist explains how to boost your brain health – https://theconversation.com/your-brain-can-be-trained-much-like-your-muscles-a-neurologist-explains-how-to-boost-your-brain-health-271331