Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Alessandra Buccella, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University at Albany, State University of New York

Consistent with the general trend of incorporating artificial intelligence into nearly every field, researchers and politicians are increasingly using AI models trained on scientific data to infer answers to scientific questions. But can AI ultimately replace scientists?

The Trump administration signed an executive order on Nov. 24, 2025, that announced the Genesis Mission, an initiative to build and train a series of AI agents on federal scientific datasets “to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.”

So far, the accomplishments of these so-called AI scientists have been mixed. On the one hand, AI systems can process vast datasets and detect subtle correlations that humans are unable to detect. On the other hand, their lack of commonsense reasoning can result in unrealistic or irrelevant experimental recommendations.

While AI can assist in tasks that are part of the scientific process, it is still far away from automating science – and may never be able to. As a philosopher who studies both the history and the conceptual foundations of science, I see several problems with the idea that AI systems can “do science” without or even better than humans.

AI models can only learn from human scientists

AI models do not learn directly from the real world: They have to be “told” what the world is like by their human designers. Without human scientists overseeing the construction of the digital “world” in which the model operates – that is, the datasets used for training and testing its algorithms – the breakthroughs that AI facilitates wouldn’t be possible.

Consider the AI model AlphaFold. Its developers were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the model’s ability to infer the structure of proteins in human cells. Because so many biological functions depend on proteins, the ability to quickly generate protein structures to test via simulations has the potential to accelerate drug design, trace how diseases develop and advance other areas of biomedical research.

As practical as it may be, however, an AI system like AlphaFold does not provide new knowledge about proteins, diseases or more effective drugs on its own. It simply makes it possible to analyze existing information more efficiently.

As philosopher Emily Sullivan put it, to be successful as scientific tools, AI models must retain a strong empirical link to already established knowledge. That is, the predictions a model makes must be grounded in what researchers already know about the natural world. The strength of this link depends on how much knowledge is already available about a certain subject and on how well the model’s programmers translate highly technical scientific concepts and logical principles into code.

AlphaFold would not have been successful if it weren’t for the existing body of human-generated knowledge about protein structures that developers used to train the model. And without human scientists to provide a foundation of theoretical and methodological knowledge, nothing AlphaFold creates would amount to scientific progress.

Science is a uniquely human enterprise

But the role of human scientists in the process of scientific discovery and experimentation goes beyond ensuring that AI models are properly designed and anchored to existing scientific knowledge. In a sense, science as a creative achievement derives its legitimacy from human abilities, values and ways of living. These, in turn, are grounded in the unique ways in which humans think, feel and act.

Scientific discoveries are more than just theories supported by evidence: They are the product of generations of scientists with a variety of interests and perspectives, working together through a common commitment to their craft and intellectual honesty. Scientific discoveries are never the products of a single visionary genius.

For example, when researchers first proposed the double-helix structure of DNA, there were no empirical tests able to verify this hypothesis – it was based on the reasoning skills of highly trained experts. It took nearly a century of technological advancements and several generations of scientists to go from what looked like pure speculation in the late 1800s to a discovery honored by a 1953 Nobel Prize.

Science, in other words, is a distinctly social enterprise, in which ideas get discussed, interpretations are offered, and disagreements are not always overcome. As other philosophers of science have remarked, scientists are more similar to a tribe than “passive recipients” of scientific information. Researchers do not accumulate scientific knowledge by recording “facts” – they create scientific knowledge through skilled practice, debate and agreed-upon standards informed by social and political values.

AI is not a ‘scientist’

I believe the computing power of AI systems can be used to accelerate scientific progress, but only if done with care.

With the active participation of the scientific community, ambitious projects like the Genesis Mission could prove beneficial for scientists. Well-designed and rigorously trained AI tools would make the more mechanical parts of scientific inquiry smoother and maybe even faster. These tools would compile information about what has been done in the past so that it can more easily inform how to design future experiments, collect measurements and formulate theories.

But if the guiding vision for deploying AI models in science is to replace human scientists or to fully automate the scientific process, I believe the project would only turn science into a caricature of itself. The very existence of science as a source of authoritative knowledge about the natural world fundamentally depends on human life: shared goals, experiences and aspirations.

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

– ref. AI cannot automate science – a philosopher explains the uniquely human aspects of doing research – https://theconversation.com/ai-cannot-automate-science-a-philosopher-explains-the-uniquely-human-aspects-of-doing-research-272477

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Pardis Mahdavi, Professor of Anthropology, University of La Verne; University of California, Berkeley

Iran’s current wave of protests continues to spread across the country, as the United States weighs military intervention. Meanwhile, many Iranian people continue to struggle to pay for basic necessities amid a collapsing currency.

The anti-government demonstrations began in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, one of the largest and oldest covered markets in the world, in December 2025. From there, they quickly reached Iran’s university campuses.

The government’s response was swift and familiar: Authorities ordered universities to move classes online, citing weather concerns. When students continued organizing, the regime closed universities entirely.

I am an Iranian-American who has studied Iranian social movements for more than 25 years. As an educator, I have also led American universities, while maintaining ties to Iranian academic institutions.

I also witnessed firsthand the systematic assault on academic freedom during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from 2005 through 2013.

Iran’s universities tell the story of the nation itself: a story of persistent hope confronting relentless repression, and of intellectual life refusing to be extinguished even under extraordinary pressure.

Iranian universities have long been places of political reform and imagination – and where the Islamic Republic’s authoritarian impulses collide with people’s demands for freedom.

The heartbeat of reform

Iran has 316 accredited universities across the country, including the University of Tehran and Islamic Azad University.

Iranian universities have been hubs of political activity and protest since at least the mid-1900s.

Student-led protest movements emerged forcefully in the 1940s following the abdication of Reza Shah, an Iranian military officer who led Iran as its shah, or monarch, from 1925 to 1941.

These groups gained momentum during the oil nationalization movement led by the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Students supported Mossadegh’s promises of a democratic and free Iran, where the benefits of resources – like oil – would be reaped by Iranians first, before extending to the rest of the world.

The United States led a CIA-backed military coup that overthrew Mossadegh and reinstated Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as shah of Iran in 1953.

College campuses again became critical spaces for political consciousness and opposition.

A long-established pattern

This pattern continued for decades. Universities were central to the 1979 revolution, with students joining clerics, leftists and nationalists in overthrowing the monarchy.

Yet once consolidated, the Islamic Republic quickly turned against the institutions that had helped make the revolution possible.

The 1980s and 1990s saw widespread purges of faculty, with the imprisonment of professors in such numbers that the notorious Evin Prison came to be grimly nicknamed “Evin University.”

Academic life was tightly policed, books were routinely banned, and government surveillance became routine. As Azar Nafisi later documented in the 2003 book “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” intellectual engagement often survived only through clandestine reading groups and private gatherings.

Yet repression never succeeded in erasing student activism. When formal organizing became impossible, it moved underground. When campuses were locked down, ideas continued to circulate.

Thaw, reversal and academic repression

The election of Mohammad Khatami in 1997 briefly altered this trajectory of academic repression.

Khatami ran for office as a reformist candidate with strong support from young people. As president, he presided over a limited thaw in academic life. Universities reopened slightly as spaces for debate and research.

I conducted fieldwork on the youth movement and sexual revolution in Iran beginning in 1999 – research that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier.

But the opening proved fragile. Ahmadinejad’s rise to power in 2005 marked a return to aggressive repression. Universities were again treated as ideological threats. Some faculty members were arrested or dismissed, student organizations were dismantled, and coursework and readings were heavily censored.

The irony was stark. By the mid-2000s, Iran had one of the highest literacy rates and highest proportions of college graduates per capita in the region.

Yet the government began restricting which majors women could study and which subjects could be taught. Entire fields, including engineering, education and counseling, were deemed suspect. Professors who resisted faced harassment and dismissal. Student protests were met with force and detention.

Despite this, youth-led mobilization persisted. Every major protest cycle over the past two decades – including the 1999 student uprising – has been driven by young people, many of them university students.

Universities in the current uprising

Recent Iranian university closures underscore the regime’s likely fears of resistance – not simply because of what is taught in classrooms, since curricula can be controlled – but also because of the power that young people can gain when they physically gather in shared spaces.

Dormitories, libraries and cafeterias are where political awareness coalesces, where individual grievances become collective demands, and where dissent acquires momentum.

Today, by systematically alienating young people through economic mismanagement, social repression and the erosion of academic freedom, the government has created its most formidable opposition: young protesters. Analysts have increasingly identified this pattern as one of the regime’s central strategic failures.

Universities are a lens into Iran

What happens inside Iran’s universities today is not a side story – it is one of the clearest indicators of where the country may be headed.

The freedom to teach, read, question and debate mirrors the freedom Iranian citizens seek in public life more broadly. Just as women have pushed back against state control of their bodies one millimeter at a time, universities have pushed back against intellectual confinement one page at a time – expanding the boundaries of permissible thought even under threat of punishment.

For decades, Iranian students and professors have demonstrated extraordinary courage in sustaining these small but vital acts of defiance. They have kept alive what Iranians call “koorsoo”: a small, stubborn flame of hope that endures even in darkness.

History suggests that societies which wage war on their intellectual institutions ultimately lose more than control – they lose legitimacy. Iran’s universities have long been the heartbeat of reform. Today, that heartbeat is growing louder – and it may once again shape the course of the nation’s history.

Pardis Mahdavi 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. Iran’s universities have long been a battleground, where protests happen and students fight for the future – https://theconversation.com/irans-universities-have-long-been-a-battleground-where-protests-happen-and-students-fight-for-the-future-273742

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Christos Makridis, Associate Research Professor of Information Systems, Arizona State University; Institute for Humane Studies

Every few years, you’ll hear a familiar refrain: “Opera is dying.”

National surveys point to slumping attendance at live performances. Audiences are aging, leaving fewer fans to fill seats at productions of “La Bohème,” “Carmen,” “The Magic Flute” and the like, while production costs grow.

I’m a labor economist who studies the economics of art and culture. To
assess the state of opera in the U.S., I analyzed financial data collected by Opera America, an association whose roughly 600 members are overwhelmingly nonprofit opera companies.

After crunching the numbers, as I explained in a 2026 paper published in the Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, I reached a surprising conclusion about the state of those nonprofits.

Funding model is faltering

Although opera companies are experiencing financial stress, opera isn’t a dying art form. Instead, I found that the public’s demand for meaningful, live cultural experiences – including opera – remains strong.

That said, opera’s traditional business model is faltering.

Opera is, for the most part, stuck in the past. Many companies still depend on a business model that relies on season ticket sales and a small circle of big donors. This approach worked better in the 20th century than it does now.

Few opera companies have embraced strategies the rest of the entertainment industry regularly uses: audience data analysis, experimentation with digital content and streaming, and engagement through online platforms rather than brochures.

In other words, opera management practices, metrics and audience development tactics didn’t change much even as the world transitioned into the digital age.

Change is needed because subscriptions and individual ticket sales have declined for many companies, especially those with budgets above US$1 million.

The number of opera tickets those companies sold fell 21% between 2019 and 2023. Ticket revenue fell 22% over the same period.

Meanwhile, opera companies received 19% of their budgets from donations and grants in 2023, down from roughly 25% in 2019, as earned revenue weakened and fundraising failed to fully recover.

Opera companies receive more than twice as much funding from philanthropy as from government sources. Government support was low and relatively stable prior to 2020 and rose sharply during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic before declining again to roughly 8% of operating revenue by 2023.

Managing institutions in trouble

I don’t dispute that opera’s economic woes are troubling. But I don’t see them as a sign that this art form is in cultural decline. Instead, I believe that opera institutions need to modernize how they operate.

Audiences continue to respond to the repertoire when companies find new ways to tell familiar stories.

Productions of canonical works such as La Traviata and Don Giovanni that place well-known narratives in contemporary settings or reframe them through modern staging have drawn strong attendance and critical attention. Crossover projects that bring operatic voices into dialogue with jazz, musical theater or popular musical performance have also sold out limited runs aimed at new audiences.

And smaller-scale formats, including chamber operas and performances staged in studios or alternative venues, have consistently filled seats – even as large main-stage productions struggle to sell tickets.

Those examples point to underlying demand for experiencing operas – even if fewer people are buying season tickets.

To be sure, there are some signs of progress. Some opera companies are taking their digital productions seriously.

Boston Baroque is primarily an orchestra and chorus, but it also produces staged operas. It offered livestreams of its performances during the pandemic to earn extra money.

New York City’s Metropolitan Opera has maintained a standalone direct-to-consumer subscription product, Met Opera on Demand, that anyone in the world can access. But it illustrates the strategic tension many companies face: Digital expansion can broaden reach, but it may also complicate efforts to fill empty seats.

Grappling with an economic problem

Opera’s biggest challenge is structural, not artistic.

Live performance is inherently labor intensive – and expensive. You cannot automate a string quartet or speed up an aria without destroying what makes it valuable.

Notably, opera companies have nearly doubled administrative costs as a share of their budgets since the mid-2000s, while spending on artistic programming has remained flat.

Some of the increase in administrative spending reflects the growing complexity of fundraising, compliance and labor management. But the magnitude of the shift strongly suggests declining organizational efficiency, with managerial and overhead functions expanding faster than opera’s capacity to stage productions or build its audience in the United States.

Meanwhile, ticket sales have declined and the number of major opera donors has declined.

Facing a similar turning point

Financial distress is not unique to opera.

Many U.S. orchestras have confronted serious financial stress, including bankruptcies and closures in places like Honolulu, Syracuse, N.Y. and Albuquerque, N.M..

The orchestras that survived tended to diversify revenue, analyze data and treat innovation as part of their mission – three strategies opera companies have failed to pursue consistently.

Reaching the public where it already is

The assumption that younger generations do not care about classical music is unfounded.

When opera companies put performances on streaming platforms during the pandemic, many younger listeners tuned in.

A 2022 survey of music consumption in the United Kingdom conducted by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Deezer, one of several global services tracking the digital consumption of classical music; and the British Phonographic Industry found that 59% of people under 35 streamed orchestral music during the COVID-19 lockdown, compared with a 51% national average across all age groups.

Meanwhile, classical music streaming rose sharply across digital platforms during the first months of the pandemic. Deezer reported a 17% increase in classical streams in the 12 months beginning in April 2019.

These patterns suggest that younger audiences can become interested in opera and classical music when access to those genres is easy, and that digital formats can meaningfully expand the base of younger listeners.

But younger audiences usually encounter the music they listen to through algorithms or short-form video.

Treating performances as content

The lesson is not that opera should abandon live performance – if anything, everyone needs more, not less, in-person interaction in this hybrid-work era. Instead, I believe that opera companies should treat performances as content that can be accessed both in person and in digital spaces.

That way, they can spread those fixed artistic costs across multiple formats and markets, whether they’re recordings, livestreams, educational licenses or smaller-scale spinoff events.

Opera has survived wars, depressions, technological revolutions and cultural upheavals because it evolved. Today, the risk is not that people have stopped caring about music; it’s that opera companies have presumed that upholding tradition requires a rigidity at odds with their own success.

Christos Makridis is also a co-founder of Living Opera and the Living Opera Foundation and founder of CM Culture Management. He is also an affiliate and contributor to several think tank communities across the aisles.

– ref. Opera is not dying – but it needs a second act for the streaming era – https://theconversation.com/opera-is-not-dying-but-it-needs-a-second-act-for-the-streaming-era-271376

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Donald Heflin, Executive Director of the Edward R. Murrow Center and Senior Fellow of Diplomatic Practice, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

Make Denmark angry. Make Norway angry. Make NATO’s leaders angry.

President Donald Trump’s relentless and escalating drive to acquire Greenland from Denmark, whose government – along with that of Greenland – emphatically rejects the idea, has unnerved, offended and outraged leaders of countries considered allies for decades.

It’s the latest, and perhaps most significant, eruption of an attitude of disdain towards allies that has become a hallmark of the second Trump administration, which has espoused an America First approach to the world.

Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have all said a lot of things about longtime allies that have caused frustration and outright friction among the leaders of those countries. The latest discord over Greenland could affect the functioning and even existence of NATO, the post-World War II alliance of Western nations that “won the Cold War and led the globe,” as a recent Wall Street Journal story put it.

As a former diplomat, I’m aware that how the U.S. treats its allies has been a crucial question in every presidency, since George Washington became the country’s first chief executive. On his way out of that job, Washington said something that Trump, Vance and their fellow America First advocates would probably embrace.

In what’s known as his “Farewell Address,” Washington warned Americans against “entangling alliances.” Washington wanted America to treat all nations fairly, and warned against both permanent friendships and permanent enemies.

The irony is that Washington would never have become president without the assistance of the not-yet-United-States’ first ally, France.

In 1778, after two years of brilliant diplomacy by Benjamin Franklin, the not-yet-United States and the Kingdom of France signed a treaty of alliance as the American Colonies struggled to win their war for independence from Britain.

France sent soldiers, money and ships to the American revolutionaries. Within three years, after a major intervention by the French fleet, the battle of Yorktown in 1781 effectively ended the war and America was independent.

Isolationism, then war

American political leaders largely heeded Washington’s warning against alliances throughout the 1800s. The Atlantic Ocean shielded the young nation from Europe’s problems and many conflicts; America’s closest neighbors had smaller populations and less military might.

Aside from the War of 1812, in which the U.S. fought the British, America largely found itself protected from the outside world’s problems.

That began to change when Europe descended into the brutality of World War I.

Initially, American politicians avoided involvement. What would today be called an isolationist movement was strong; its supporters felt that the European war was being waged for the benefit of big business.

But it was hard for the U.S.to maintain neutrality. German submarines sank ships crossing the Atlantic carrying American passengers. The economies of some of America’s biggest trading partners were in shreds; the democracies of Britain, France and other European countries were at risk.

President Woodrow Wilson led the U.S. into the war in 1917 as an ally of the Western European nations. When he asked Congress for a declaration of war, Wilson asserted the value of like-minded allies: “A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations.”

Immediately after the war, the Allies – led by the U.S., France and Britain – stayed together to craft the peace agreements, feed the war-ravaged parts of Europe and intervene in Russia after the Communist Revolution there.

Prosperity came along with the peace, helping the U.S. quickly develop into a global economic power.

However, within a few years, American politicians returned to traditional isolationism in political and military matters and continued this attitude well into the 1930s. The worldwide Great Depression that began in 1929 was blamed on vulnerabilities in the global economy, and there was a strong sentiment among Americans that the U.S. should fix its internal problems rather than assist Europe with its problems.

Alliance counters fascism

As both Hitler and Japan began to attack their neighbors in the late 1930s, it became clear to President Franklin Roosevelt and other American military and political leaders that the U.S. would get caught up in World War II. If nothing else, airplanes had erased America’s ability to hide behind the Atlantic Ocean.

Though public opinion was divided, the U.S. began sending arms and other assistance to Britain and quietly began military planning with London. This was despite the fact that the U.S. was formally neutral, as the Roosevelt administration was pushing the limits of what a neutral nation can do for friendly nations without becoming a warring party.

In January of 1941, Roosevelt gave his annual State of the Union speech to Congress. He appeared to prepare the country for possible intervention – both on behalf of allies abroad and for the preservation of American democracy:

“The future and the safety of our country and of our democracy are overwhelmingly involved in events far beyond our borders. Armed defense of democratic existence is now being gallantly waged in four continents. If that defense fails, all the population and all the resources of Europe, and Asia, and Africa and Australasia will be dominated by conquerors. In times like these it is immature – and incidentally, untrue – for anybody to brag that an unprepared America, single-handed, and with one hand tied behind its back, can hold off the whole world.”

When the Japanese attacked Hawaii in 1941 and Hitler declared war on the U.S., America quickly entered World War II in an alliance with Britain, the Free French and others.
Throughout the war, the Allies worked together on matters large and small. They defeated Germany in three and half years and Japan in less than four.

As World War II ended, the wartime alliance produced two longer-term partnerships built on the understanding that working together had produced a powerful and effective counter to fascism.

Postwar alliances

The first of these alliances is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. The original members were the U.S., Canada, Britain, France and others of the wartime Allies. There are now 32 members, including Poland, Hungary and Turkey.

The aims of NATO were to keep peace in Europe and contain the growing Communist threat from the Soviet Union. NATO’s supporters feel that, given that wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and in the Ukraine today are the only major conflicts in Europe in 80 years, the alliance has met its goals well. And NATO troops went to Afghanistan along with the U.S. military after 9/11.

The other institution created by the wartime Allies is the United Nations.

The U.N. is many things – a humanitarian aid organization, a forum for countries to raise their issues and a source of international law.

However, it is also an alliance. The U.N. Security Council on several occasions authorized the use of force by members, such as in the first Gulf War against Iraq. And it has the power to send peacekeeping troops to conflict areas under the U.N. flag.

Other U.S. allies with treaties or designations by Congress include Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel, three South American countries and six in the Middle East.

Many of the same countries also created institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Organization of American States and the European Union. The U.S. belongs to all of these except the European Union. During my 35-year diplomatic career, I worked with all of these institutions, particularly in efforts to stabilize Africa. They keep the peace and support development efforts with loans and grants.

Admirers of this postwar liberal international order point to the limited number of major armed conflicts during the past 80 years, the globalized economy and international cooperation on important matters such as disease control and fighting terrorism.
Detractors point to this system’s inability to stop some very deadly conflicts, such as Vietnam or Ukraine, and the large populations that haven’t done well under globalization as evidence of its flaws.

The world would look dramatically different without the Allies’ victories in the two World Wars, the stable worldwide economic system and NATO’s and the U.N.’s keeping the world relatively peaceful.

But the value of allies to Americans, even when they benefit from alliances, appears to have shifted between George Washington’s attitude – avoid them – and that of Franklin D. Roosevelt – go all in … eventually.

_This is an updated version of an article originally published on Feb. 20, 2025. _

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

– ref. Trump’s Greenland ambitions could wreck 20th-century alliances that helped build the modern world order – https://theconversation.com/trumps-greenland-ambitions-could-wreck-20th-century-alliances-that-helped-build-the-modern-world-order-273863

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Nilton O. Rennó, Professor of Climate and Space Sciences Engineering, University of Michigan

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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Are there thunderstorms on Mars? – Cade, age 7, Houston, Texas

Mars is a very dry planet with very little water in its atmosphere and hardly any clouds, so you might not expect it to have storms. Yet, there is lightning and thunder on Mars – although not with rain, nor with the same gusto as weather on Earth.

More than 10 years ago, my planetary science colleagues and I found the first evidence for lightning strikes on Mars. In the following decade, other researchers have continued to study what lightning might be like on the red planet. In November 2025, a Mars rover first captured the spectacular sounds of lightning sparking on the Martian surface.

Lightning on Mars

On Earth, lightning is an electric discharge that begins inside big clouds.

But because Mars is so dry, it doesn’t have clouds of water – instead, it has clouds of dust. With little water to weigh down dirt on Mars, dust clouds can quickly grow into huge, windy dust storms a few times taller than Earth’s tallest thunderstorms.

When smaller dust particles and larger sand particles collide with each other while being whipped around by these storms, they pick up a static charge. Smaller dust particles take on a positive charge, while larger sand particles become negative. The smaller dust particles are lighter and will float higher, while the heavier sand tends to fall closer to the ground.

Because oppositely charged particles don’t like to be apart, eventually the energy building between the negative charges higher up in the dust storm and the positive charges closer to the ground becomes too great and is released as electricity – similar to lightning.

The air around the electricity rapidly warms up and expands – on Earth, this creates the shock waves that you hear as thunder.

Nobody has seen a flash of lightning on Mars, but we suspect it’s more like the glow from a neon light rather than a powerful lightning bolt. The atmosphere near the surface of Mars is about 100 times less dense than on Earth: It’s much more similar to the air inside neon lights.

Releasing radio waves

Besides shock waves and visible light, lightning also produces other types of waves that the human eye can’t see: X-ray and radio waves. The ground and the top of the atmosphere both conduct electricity well, so they guide these radio waves and cause them to produce signals with specific radio frequencies. It’s kind of like how you might tune into specific radio channels for news or music, but instead of different channels, scientists can identify the radio waves coming from lightning.

While nobody has ever seen visible light from Martian lightning, we have heard something similar to the radio waves created by lightning on Earth. That’s the noise that the Perseverance rover reported at the end of 2025. They sound like electric sparks do on Earth. The rover recorded these signals on a microphone as small, sandy tornadoes passed by.

Searching for Martian lightning

When my colleagues and I went hunting for lightning on Mars a decade ago, we knew the red planet emitted more radio waves during dust storm seasons. So, we searched for modest increases in radio signals from Mars using the large radio dishes that NASA uses to talk to its spacecraft. The dishes function like big ears that listen for faint radio signals from spacecraft far from Earth.

We spent from five to eight hours every day listening to Mars for three weeks. Eventually, we found the signals we were looking for: radio bursts with frequencies that matched up with the radio waves that lightning on Earth can create.

To find the particular source of these lightning-like signals, we searched for dust storms in pictures taken by spacecraft orbiting Mars. We matched a dust storm nearly 25 miles (40 kilometers) tall to the time when we’d heard the radio signals.

Learning about lightning on Mars helps scientists understand whether the planet could have once hosted extraterrestrial life. Lightning may have helped create life on Earth by converting molecules of nitrogen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into amino acids. Amino acids make up proteins, tens of thousands of which are found in a human body.

So, Mars does have storms, but they’re far drier and dustier than the thunderstorms on Earth. Scientists are continually studying lightning on Mars to better understand the geology of the red planet and its potential to host living organisms.

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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.

Nilton O. Rennó receives funding from NASA, JPL, DARPA, and IARPA.

– ref. Are there thunderstorms on Mars? A planetary scientist explains the red planet’s dry, dusty storms – https://theconversation.com/are-there-thunderstorms-on-mars-a-planetary-scientist-explains-the-red-planets-dry-dusty-storms-271364

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Mahesh Nepal, Ph.D. Student in Electrical Engineering, Binghamton University, State University of New York

When your winter jacket slows heat escaping your body or the cardboard sleeve on your coffee keeps heat from reaching your hand, you’re seeing insulation in action. In both cases, the idea is the same: keep heat from flowing where you don’t want it. But this physics principle isn’t limited to heat.

Electronics use it too, but with electricity. An electrical insulator stops current from flowing where it shouldn’t. That’s why power cords are wrapped in plastic. The plastic keeps electricity in the wire, not in your hand.

Inside electronics, insulators do more than keep the user safe. They also help devices store charge in a controlled way. In that role, engineers often call them dielectrics. These insulating layers sit at the heart of capacitors and transistors. A capacitor is a charge-storing component – think of it as a tiny battery, albeit one that fills up and empties much faster than a battery. A transistor is a tiny electrical switch. It can turn current on or off, or control how much current flows.

Together, capacitors and transistors make modern electronics work. They help phones store information, and they help computers process it. They help today’s AI hardware move huge amounts of data at high speed.

What surprises most people is how thin these insulating, current-quelling dielectrics are. In modern microchips, key dielectric layers can be only a few nanometers thick. That’s tens of thousands of times thinner than a human hair. A modern phone can contain billions of transistors, so at that scale, slimming them down by even 1 nanometer can make a difference.

As an electrical and material scientist, I work with my adviser, Tara P. Dhakal, at Binghamton University to understand how to make these insulating layers as thin as possible while preserving their reliability.

Thinner dielectrics don’t just shrink devices. They can also help store more charge. But at such scale, electronics get finicky. Sometimes what looks like a breakthrough isn’t quite what it seems. That’s why our focus is not just making dielectrics thin. It’s making them both thin and trustworthy.

What makes one dielectric better than another?

In both capacitors and transistors, the basic structure is simple: They contain two conductors separated by a thin insulator. If you bring the conductors closer, more charge can build up. It’s like two strong magnets with a sheet between them – the thinner the sheet, the stronger the pull.

But thinning has a limit. In transistors, the classic insulator silicon dioxide loses its ability to insulate at about 1.2 nanometers. At that scale, electrons can sneak through a shortcut called quantum tunneling. Enough charge leaks through that the device is no longer practical.

When materials are so thin that they start to leak, engineers have another lever. They can switch to an insulator that stores more charge without being made extremely thin. That ability is described by a metric called the dielectric constant, written as k. Higher-k materials can achieve that storage with a thicker layer, which makes it much harder for electrons to slip through.

For example, silicon dioxide has k of about 3.9, and aluminum oxide has k of about 8, twice as high. If a 1.2-nanometer silicon dioxide layer leaks too much, you can switch to a 2.4-nanometer aluminum oxide layer and get roughly the same charge storage. Because the film is physically thicker, it won’t leak as much.

The breakthrough that wasn’t

In 2010, a team of researchers at Argonne National Laboratory reported something that sounded almost impossible: They’d made an ultrathin coating that apparently had a giant dielectric constant, near 1,000. The material wasn’t a single new compound. It was a nanolaminate – a microscopic layer cake. In nanolaminates, you stack two materials in repeating A-B-A-B layers, hoping their interfaces create properties neither material has on its own.

In that work, the stack alternated aluminum oxide, with a k of about 8, and titanium oxide, with a k of about 40. The researchers built the stack by growing one molecular layer at a time, which is ideal for building and controlling the nanometer-scale layers in a nanolaminate.

When the team made each sublayer less than a nanometer, it found that the entire material was able to hold an incredible amount of charge – thus, the giant k.

The result triggered years of follow-up work and similar reports in other stacks of oxides.

But there’s a twist. In our recent study of the aluminum oxide/titanium oxide nanolaminate system, we found that the apparent giant k value was a measurement error.

In our study, the nanolaminate wasn’t acting like a clean insulator, and it was leaking enough to inflate the k value. Think of a bucket with a hairline crack: You keep pouring, and it seems like the bucket holds a lot, even though the water won’t stay inside.

Once we figured that a leak was behind the giant k result, we set out to solve the larger puzzle. We wanted to know what makes the nanolaminate leak, and what process change could make it truly insulating.

The culprit

We first looked for an obvious culprit: a visible defect. If a film stack leaks, you expect pinholes or cracks. But the nanolaminate looked smooth and continuous under the microscope. So why would a stack that looks solid fail?

The answer wasn’t in the shape, it was in the chemistry. The earliest aluminum oxide sublayers didn’t contain enough aluminum. That meant the film looked continuous, yet was still incomplete at the atomic scale. Electrons could find connected paths and escape through it. It was physically continuous but electrically leaky.

Our process to create these films, called atomic layer deposition, uses tiny, repeatable cycles. You add in two chemicals, one after the other. Each pair is one cycle. For aluminum oxide, the pair is often trimethylaluminium (TMA), which is the aluminum source, and water, which is the oxygen source. Together, they create the aluminum oxide, and one cycle adds roughly a single layer of material – about one-tenth of a nanometer. By repeating the cycles, you can grow the film to the thickness you need: about 10 cycles for 1 nanometer, 25 cycles for 2.5 nanometers, and so on.

But there’s a catch. When you deposit aluminum oxide on top of titanium oxide, the first chemical for aluminum oxide – TMA – can steal oxygen from the titanium oxide layer below. This issue removes some of the sites the aluminum source normally reacts with on the layer’s surface. So, the first aluminum oxide layer doesn’t grow evenly and ends up with less aluminum than it should have.

That problem leaves tiny weak spots where electrons can slip through and cause leakage. Once the aluminum oxide becomes thick enough – around 2 nanometers – it forms a more complete barrier, and those leakage paths are effectively sealed off.

One small change flipped the outcome. We kept the same aluminum source, TMA, but swapped the oxygen source. Instead of water, we used ozone. Ozone is a stronger oxygen source, so it can replace oxygen that gets pulled out during the TMA step. That shut down leakage paths. The aluminum oxide then behaved like a real barrier, even when it was thinner than a nanometer. With the ozone fix, the nanolaminate acted like a true insulator.

The takeaway is simple: When you’re down to a few atomic layers, chemistry can matter as much as thickness. The types of chemical compounds you use can decide whether those early layers become a real barrier or leave behind leakage paths.

Mahesh Nepal 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. An ultrathin coating for electronics looked like a miracle insulator − but a hidden leak fooled researchers for over a decade – https://theconversation.com/an-ultrathin-coating-for-electronics-looked-like-a-miracle-insulator-but-a-hidden-leak-fooled-researchers-for-over-a-decade-272009

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Robert A. Strong, Senior Fellow, Miller Center, University of Virginia

Now that the 2026 midterm elections are less than a year away, public interest in where things stand is on the rise. Of course, in a democracy no one knows the outcome of an election before it takes place, despite what the pollsters may predict.

Nevertheless, it is common for commentators and citizens to revisit old elections to learn what might be coming in the ones that lie ahead.

The historical lessons from modern midterm congressional elections are not favorable for Republicans today.

Most of the students I taught in American government classes for over 40 years knew that the party in control of the White House was likely to encounter setbacks in midterms. They usually did not know just how settled and solid that pattern was.

Since 1946, there have been 20 midterm elections. In 18 of them, the president’s party lost seats in the House of Representatives. That’s 90% of the midterm elections in the past 80 years.

Measured against that pattern, the odds that the Republicans will hold their slim House majority in 2026 are small. Another factor makes them smaller. When the sitting president is “underwater” – below 50% – in job approval polls, the likelihood of a bad midterm election result becomes a certainty. All the presidents since Harry S. Truman whose job approval was below 50% in the month before a midterm election lost seats in the House. All of them.

Even popular presidents – Dwight D. Eisenhower, in both of his terms; John F. Kennedy; Richard Nixon; Gerald Ford; Ronald Reagan in 1986; and George H. W. Bush – lost seats in midterm elections.

The list of unpopular presidents who lost House seats is even longer – Truman in 1946 and 1950, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966, Jimmy Carter in 1978, Reagan in 1982, Bill Clinton in 1994, George W. Bush in 2006, Barack Obama in both 2010 and 2014, Donald Trump in 2018 and Joe Biden in 2022.

Exceptions are rare

There are only two cases in the past 80 years where the party of a sitting president won midterm seats in the House. Both involved special circumstances.

In 1998, Clinton was in the sixth year of his presidency and had good numbers for economic growth, declining interest rates and low unemployment. His average approval rating, according to Gallup, in his second term was 60.6%, the highest average achieved by any second-term president from Truman to Biden.

Moreover, the 1998 midterm elections took place in the midst of Clinton’s impeachment, when most Americans were simultaneously critical of the president’s personal behavior and convinced that that behavior did not merit removal from office. Good economic metrics and widespread concern that Republican impeachers were going too far led to modest gains for the Democrats in the 1998 midterm elections. The Democrats picked up five House seats.

The other exception to the rule of thumb that presidents suffer midterm losses was George W. Bush in 2002. Bush, narrowly elected in 2000, had a dramatic rise in popularity after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The nation rallied around the flag and the president, and Republicans won eight House seats in the 2002 midterm elections.

Those were the rare cases when a popular sitting president got positive House results in a midterm election. And the positive results were small.

Midterms matter

In the 20 midterm elections between 1946 and 2022, small changes in the House – a shift of less than 10 seats – occurred six times. Modest changes – between 11 and 39 seats – took place seven times. Big changes, so-called “wave elections” involving more than 40 seats, have happened seven times.

In every midterm election since 1946, at least five seats flipped from one party to the other. If the net result of the midterm elections in 2026 moved five seats from Republicans to Democrats, that would be enough to make Democrats the majority in the House.

In an era of close elections and narrow margins on Capitol Hill, midterms make a difference. The past five presidents – Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden – entered office with their party in control of both houses of Congress. All five lost their party majority in the House or the Senate in their first two years in office.

Will that happen again in 2026?

The obvious prediction would be yes. But nothing in politics is set in stone. Between now and November 2026, redistricting will move the boundaries of a yet-to-be-determined number of congressional districts. That could make it harder to predict the likely results in 2026.

Unexpected events, or good performance in office, could move Trump’s job approval numbers above 50%. Republicans would still be likely to lose House seats in the 2026 midterms, but a popular president would raise the chances that they could hold their narrow majority.

And there are other possibilities. Perhaps 2026 will involve issues like those in recent presidential elections.

Close results could be followed by raucous recounts and court controversies of the kind that made Florida the focal point in the 2000 presidential election. Prominent public challenges to voting tallies and procedures, like those that followed Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of victory in 2020, would make matters worse.

The forthcoming midterms may not be like anything seen in recent congressional election cycles.

Democracy is never easy, and elections matter more than ever. Examining long-established patterns in midterm party performance makes citizens clear-eyed about what is likely to happen in the 2026 congressional elections. Thinking ahead about unusual challenges that might arise in close and consequential contests makes everyone better prepared for the hard work of maintaining a healthy democratic republic.

Robert A. Strong 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. For 80 years, the president’s party has almost always lost House seats in midterm elections, a pattern that makes the 2026 congressional outlook clear – https://theconversation.com/for-80-years-the-presidents-party-has-almost-always-lost-house-seats-in-midterm-elections-a-pattern-that-makes-the-2026-congressional-outlook-clear-271605

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Kelsey Roberts, Post-Doctoral Scholar in Marine Ecology, Cornell University; UMass Dartmouth

Climate change is already fueling dangerous heat waves, raising sea levels and transforming the oceans. Even if countries meet their pledges to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change, global warming will exceed what many ecosystems can safely handle.

That reality has motivated scientists, governments and a growing number of startups to explore ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or at least temporarily counter its effects.

But these climate interventions come with risks – especially for the ocean, the world’s largest carbon sink, where carbon is absorbed and stored, and the foundation of global food security.

Our team of researchers has spent decades studying the oceans and climate. In a new study, we analyzed how different types of climate interventions could affect marine ecosystems, for good or bad, and where more research is needed to understand the risks before anyone tries them on a large scale. We found that some strategies carry fewer risks than others, though none is free of consequences.

What climate interventions look like

Climate interventions fall into two broad categories that work very differently.

One is carbon dioxide removal, or CDR. It tackles the root cause of climate change by taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

The ocean already absorbs nearly one-third of human-caused carbon emissions annually and has an enormous capacity to hold more carbon. Marine carbon dioxide removal techniques aim to increase that natural uptake by altering the ocean’s biology or chemistry.

Biological carbon removal methods capture carbon through photosynthesis in plants or algae. Some methods, such as iron fertilization and seaweed cultivation, boost the growth of marine algae by giving them more nutrients. A fraction of the carbon they capture during growth can be stored in the ocean for hundreds of years, but much of it leaks back to the atmosphere once biomass decomposes.

Other methods involve growing plants on land and sinking them in deep, low-oxygen waters where decomposition is slower, delaying the release of the carbon they contain. This is known as anoxic storage of terrestrial biomass.

Another type of carbon dioxide removal doesn’t need biology to capture carbon. Ocean alkalinity enhancement chemically converts carbon dioxide in seawater into other forms of carbon, allowing the ocean to absorb more from the atmosphere. This works by adding large amounts of alkaline material, such as pulverized carbonate or silicate rocks like limestone or basalt, or electrochemically manufactured compounds like sodium hydroxide.

Solar radiation modification is another category entirely. It works like a sunshade – it doesn’t remove carbon dioxide, but it can reduce dangerous effects such as heat waves and coral bleaching by injecting tiny particles into the atmosphere that brighten clouds or directly reflect sunlight back to space, replicating the cooling seen after major volcanic eruptions. The appeal of solar radiation modification is speed: It could cool the planet within years, but it would only temporarily mask the effects of still-rising carbon dioxide concentrations.

These methods can also affect ocean life

We reviewed eight intervention types and assessed how each could affect marine ecosystems. We found that all of them had distinct potential benefits and risks.

One risk of pulling more carbon dioxide into the ocean is ocean acidification. When carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater, it forms acid. This process is already weakening the shells of oysters and harming corals and plankton that are crucial to the ocean food chain.

Adding alkaline materials, such as pulverized carbonate or silicate rocks, could counteract the acidity of the additional carbon dioxide by converting it into less harmful forms of carbon.

Biological methods, by contrast, capture carbon in living biomass, such as plants and algae, but release it again as carbon dioxide when the biomass breaks down – meaning their effect on acidification depends on where the biomass grows and where it later decomposes.

Another concern with biological methods involves nutrients. All plants and algae need nutrients to grow, but the ocean is highly interconnected. Fertilizing the surface in one area may boost plant and algae productivity, but at the same time suffocate the waters beneath it or disrupt fisheries thousands of miles away by depleting nutrients that ocean currents would otherwise transport to productive fishing areas.

Ocean alkalinity enhancement doesn’t require adding nutrients, but some mineral forms of alkalinity, like basalts, introduce nutrients such as iron and silicate that can impact growth.

Solar radiation modification adds no nutrients but could shift circulation patterns that move nutrients around.

Shifts in acidification and nutrients will benefit some phytoplankton and disadvantage others. The resulting changes in the mix of phytoplankton matter: If different predators prefer different phytoplankton, the follow-on effects could travel all the way up the food chain, eventually impacting the fisheries millions of people rely on.

The least risky options for the ocean

Of all the methods we reviewed, we found that electrochemical ocean alkalinity enhancement had the lowest direct risk to the ocean, but it isn’t risk-free. Electrochemical methods use an electric current to separate salt water into an alkaline stream and an acidic stream. This generates a chemically simple form of alkalinity with limited effects on biology, but it also requires neutralizing or disposing of the acid safely.

Other relatively low-risk options include adding carbonate minerals to seawater, which would increase alkalinity with relatively few contaminants, and sinking land plants in deep, low-oxygen environments for long-term carbon storage.

Still, these approaches carry uncertainties and need further study.

Scientists typically use computer models to explore methods like these before testing them on a wide scale in the ocean, but the models are only as reliable as the data that grounds them. And many biological processes are still not well enough understood to be included in models.

For example, models don’t capture the effects of some trace metal contaminants in certain alkaline materials or how ecosystems may reorganize around new seaweed farm habitats. To accurately include effects like these in models, scientists first must study them in laboratories and sometimes small-scale field experiments.

A cautious, evidence-based path forward

Some scientists have argued that the risks of climate intervention are too great to even consider and all related research should stop because it is a dangerous distraction from the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

We disagree.

Commercialization is already underway. Marine carbon dioxide removal startups backed by investors are already selling carbon credits to companies such as Stripe and British Airways. Meanwhile, global emissions continue to rise, and many countries, including the U.S., are backing away from their emissions reduction pledges.

As the harms caused by climate change worsen, pressure may build for governments to deploy climate interventions quickly and without a clear understanding of risks. Scientists have an opportunity to study these ideas carefully now, before the planet reaches climate instabilities that could push society to embrace untested interventions. That window won’t stay open forever.

Given the stakes, we believe the world needs transparent research that can rule out harmful options, verify promising ones and stop if the impacts prove unacceptable. It is possible that no climate intervention will ever be safe enough to implement on a large scale. But we believe that decision should be guided by evidence – not market pressure, fear or ideology.

Through his role at Cornell University, Daniele Visioni receives funding from the Quadrature Climate Foundation and the Advanced Research + Invention Agency UK. Daniele Visioni is Head of Data for Reflective, a philanthropically-funded initiative focused on responsibly accelerating sunlight reflection research.

In addition to her primary role as UCSB faculty, Morgan Raven serves as the Chief Science Officer for, and holds minor equity in, a seed-funded startup company exploring applications of biomass-related CDR (Carboniferous). This work was supported by a grant from the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment to UCSB.

Through his role at the Univeristy of Tasmania, Tyler Rohr receives funding from the Australian government and Co-Labs ICONIQ Impact Co-Labs to research impacts and efficeincy of marine carbon dioxide removal.

Kelsey Roberts 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. Climate engineering would alter the oceans, reshaping marine life – new study examines each method’s risks – https://theconversation.com/climate-engineering-would-alter-the-oceans-reshaping-marine-life-new-study-examines-each-methods-risks-270659

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Kent Jones, Professor Emeritus, Economics, Babson College

The future of many of Donald Trump’s tariffs are up in the air, with the Supreme Court expected to hand down a ruling on the administration’s global trade barriers any day now.

But the question of whether a policy is legal or constitutional – which the justices are entertaining now – isn’t the same as whether it’s wise. And as a trade economist, I worry that Trump’s tariffs also pose a threat to “economic democracy” – that is, the process of decision-making that incorporates the viewpoints of everyone affected by the decision.

Founders and economic democracy

In many ways, the U.S. founders were supporters of economic democracy. That’s why, in the U.S. Constitution, they gave tariff- and tax-making powers exclusively to Congress.

And for good reason. Taxes can often represent a flash point between a government and its people. Therefore, it was deemed necessary to give this responsibility to the branch most closely tied to rule of, and by, the governed: an elected Congress. Through this arrangement, the legitimacy of tariffs and taxes would be based on voters’ approval – if the people weren’t happy, they could act through the ballot box.

To be fair, the president isn’t powerless over trade: Several times over the past century, Congress has passed laws delegating tariff-making authority to the executive branch on an emergency basis. These laws gave the president more trade power but subject to specific constitutional checks and balances.

The stakes for economic democracy

At issue before the Supreme Court now is Trump’s interpretation of one such emergency measure, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977.

Back in April 2025, Trump interpreted the law – which gives the president powers to respond to “any unusual and extraordinary threat” – to allow him to impose tariffs of any amount on products from nearly every country in the world.

Yet the act does not include any checks and balances on the president’s powers to use tariffs and does not even mention tariffs among its remedies. Trump’s unrestrained use of tariffs in this way was unprecedented in any emergency action ever taken by a U.S. president.

Setting aside the constitutional and legal issues, the move raises several concerns for economic democracy.

The first danger is in regards to a concentration of power. One of the reason tariffs are subjected to congressional debate and voting is that it provides a transparent process that balances competing interests. It prevents the interests of a single individual – such as a president who might substitute his own interests for that of the wider public interest – from controlling complete power.

Instead it subjects any proposed tariffs to the open competition of ideas among elected politicians.

Compare this to the way Trump’s tariffs were made. They were determined in large part by the president’s own political score-settling with other countries, and an ideological preference for trade surpluses. And they were not authorized by Congress. In fact, they bypassed the role of Congress as a check and balance – and this is not good for economic democracy in my view.

The second danger is uncertainty. Unlike congressional tariffs, tariffs rolled out through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act under Trump have been altered many times and can continue to change in the future.

While supporters of the president have argued that this unpredictability gives the U.S. a bargaining advantage over competitor nations, many economists have noted that it severely compromises any goal of revitalizing American industries.

This is because both domestic and foreign investment in U.S.-based industries depends on stable and predictable import market access. Investors are unwilling to make large capital expenditures over several years and hire new workers if they think tariff rates might change at any time.

Even in the first year of the Trump tariffs, there is evidence of large-scale reductions in hiring and capital investment in the manufacturing sector due to this uncertainty.

The third danger concerns that lack of accountability involved in circumventing Congress. This can lead to using tariffs as a stealth way of increasing taxes on a population.

Importing companies generate revenue for the government through the additional levies they pay on goods from overseas. These costs are typically borne by domestic consumers, through increased prices, and importing companies, through lower profit margins.

Either way, Trump’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act interpretation has allowed him to use tariffs in a way that would – if allowed to stand – bring in additional government revenue of more than US$2 trillion over a 10-year period, according to estimates.

Trump frames the revenue his tariffs have raised as a windfall of foreign-paid duties. But in fact, the revenue is extracted from domestic consumer pockets and producer profit margins. And that amounts to a tax on both.

Corruption concerns

Finally, the way Trump’s used the act to roll out unilateral and changeable tariffs creates an incentive for political favoritism and even bribery.

This is down to what economists call “rent seeking” – that is, the attempt by companies or individuals to get extra money or value out of a policy through influence or favoritism.

As such, Trump can, should he wish, play favorites with “priority” industries in terms of tariff exemptions. In fact, he has already done this with major U.S. companies that import cell phones and other electronics products. They asked for special exemptions for the products they imported, a favor not granted to other companies. And there is nothing stopping recipients of the exemptions offering, say, to contribute to the president’s political causes or his renovations to the White House.

Smaller and less politically influential U.S. businesses do not have the same clout to lobby for tariff relief.

And this tariff-by-dealmaking goes beyond U.S. companies looking for relief. It extends into the world of manipulating governments to bend to Washington’s will. Unlike congressional tariffs under World Trade Organization rules, International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs discriminate from country to country – even on the same products.

And this allows for trade deals that focus on extracting bilateral deals that take place without considering broader U.S. interests. In the course of concluding bilateral Trump trade deals, some foreign governments such as Switzerland and Korea have even offered Trump special personal gifts, presumably in exchange for favorable terms. Presidential side deals and gift exchanges with individual countries are, as many scholars of good international governance have noted, not the best way to conduct global affairs.

The harms of having a tariff system that eschews the normal checks and balances of the American system are nothing new, or at least shouldn’t be.

Back in the late 1700s, with the demands of a tyrannical and unaccountable king at the front of their minds, the founders built a tariff order aimed at maintaining democratic legitimacy and preventing the concentration of power in a single individual’s hands.

A challenge to that order could have worrisome consequences for democracy as well as the economy.

Kent Jones 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. Supreme Court is set to rule on constitutionality of Trump tariffs – but not their wisdom – https://theconversation.com/supreme-court-is-set-to-rule-on-constitutionality-of-trump-tariffs-but-not-their-wisdom-273092

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Spencer Overton, Professor of Law, George Washington University

One year after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, a pattern emerges. Across dozens of executive orders, agency memos, funding decisions and enforcement changes, the administration has weakened federal civil rights law and the foundations of the country’s racially inclusive democracy.

From the start, the U.S. was not built to include everyone equally. The Constitution protected and promoted slavery. Most states limited voting to white men. Congress restricted naturalized citizenship to “free white persons.” These choices were not accidents. They shaped who could belong and who could exercise political power, and they entrenched a racial political majority that lasted for generations.

That began to change in the 1960s. After decades of protest and pressure, Congress enacted laws that prohibited discrimination in employment, education, voting, immigration and housing.

Federal agencies were charged with enforcing those laws, collecting data to identify discrimination and conditioning public funds on compliance. These choices reshaped U.S. demographics and institutions, with the current Congress “the most racially and ethnically diverse in history,” according to the Pew Research Center. The laws did not eliminate racial inequality, but they made exclusion easier to see and harder to defend.

The first year of the second Trump administration marks a sharp reversal.

Cumulative retreat

Rather than repealing civil rights statutes outright, the administration has focused on disabling the mechanisms that make those laws work.

Drawing on over two decades of teaching and writing about civil rights and my experience directing a GW Law project on inclusive democracy, I believe this pattern reflects not isolated administrative actions but a cumulative retreat from the federal government’s role as an enforcer of civil rights law.

Over the past year, the president and his administration have taken a series of connected actions:

• On its first day in office, announced the end of all federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs, including diversity officers, equity plans and related grants and contracts.

• Shut down or sharply cut funding for federal programs aimed at reducing inequality, including offices focused on minority health, minority-owned businesses, fair federal contracting, environmental justice and closing the digital divide in broadband.

• Warned schools that diversity programs could jeopardize their federal funding, opened investigations into colleges offering scholarships to students protected under DACA – the Obama-era policy providing deportation protection for undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children – and signaled that colleges risk losing federal student aid if their accrediting agencies consider diversity.

• Revoked security clearances and access to federal buildings for employees at law firms with diversity policies. The FCC investigated media companies for promoting diversity and threatened to block mergers by companies with similar programs, leading several companies to drop their initiatives.

• Issued a government-wide memo labeling common best practices in hiring, admissions and other selection and evaluation processes – such as compiling diverse applicant pools, valuing cultural competence, considering first-generation or low-income status and seeking geographic and demographic representation – as potentially legally suspect. The memo warned that federal funding could be cut to schools, employers and state and local governments using such practices. Federal prosecutors reportedly investigated federal contractors that consider diversity, characterizing such initiatives as fraud.

• Weakened enforcement against discrimination by ordering agencies to stop using disparate impact analysis. That kind of analysis identifies disparities in outcomes, assesses whether they are justified by legitimate objectives, and intervenes when they are not. The Department of Justice, the EEOC, the National Credit Union Administration and other agencies complied and dropped disparate impact analysis. Because algorithmic systems typically operate without explicit intent, eliminating disparate impact analysis reduces federal agencies’ ability to detect and address discriminatory outcomes produced by increasingly automated government and private-sector decision-making.

• Rescinded an executive order that barred discrimination by federal contractors, required steps to ensure nondiscriminatory hiring and employment, and subjected contractors to federal compliance reviews and record-keeping. This weakened a key mechanism used since 1965 to detect and remedy workplace discrimination.

• Eliminated data used to track inequality, including rolling back guidance encouraging schools to collect data on racial disparities in discipline and special education. The administration also removed data used to identify racial disparities in environmental harms.

• Dismantled or sharply reduced civil rights offices across federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education. About three-quarters of lawyers in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division left.

• Pressured the Smithsonian to remove exhibits about racial injustice, restored Confederate monuments and military base names, and barred schools and teacher training programs from including material the administration labeled divisive, such as unconscious bias.

• Declared English the nation’s only official language, repealed a requirement that federal agencies provide meaningful access to government programs and services for people with limited English proficiency, and prompted the General Services Admininistration and the departments of Justice, Education and other agencies to scale back language-assistance requirements and services.

• Attempted to limit birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, and adopted practices that treat ethnicity and non-English accents as legitimate reasons for immigration stops.

The pattern is hard to miss

Taken together, these shifts have practical consequences.

When agencies stop collecting data on racial disparities, discrimination becomes harder to detect. When disparate impact analysis is abandoned, unfair practices with no legitimate purpose go unchallenged. When diversity programs are chilled through investigations and funding threats, institutions respond by narrowing opportunity. When history and language are recast as threats to unity, truth and freedom of speech and thought are suppressed and undermined.

Administration officials argue that these steps are needed to prevent discrimination against white people, promote unity, ensure “colorblind equality” and comply with a Supreme Court decision that struck down affirmative action in college admissions. But that ruling did not ban awareness of racial inequality, or neutral policies aimed at reducing it. Many of the administration’s actions rely on broad claims of illegality without providing specific violations.

The selective nature of enforcement is also telling.

Books about racism and civil rights were removed from military libraries, while books praising Nazi ideas or claiming racial intelligence differences were left untouched. The administration suspended admissions of refugees – over 90% of whom have been from Africa, Asia and Latin America in recent years – but then reopened the refugee program for white South Africans.

One year in, the pattern is hard to miss.

The administration is not simply applying neutral rules. It is dismantling the systems that once helped the U.S. move toward a more open and equal democracy. It is replacing them with policies that selectively narrow access to economic, cultural and educational participation.

The result is not simply a change in policy, but a fundamental shift in the trajectory of American democracy.

Spencer Overton is the faculty director of a program at GW Law that receives grants from non-profit foundations like the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, Democracy Fund, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

– ref. 12 ways the Trump administration dismantled civil rights law and the foundations of inclusive democracy in its first year – https://theconversation.com/12-ways-the-trump-administration-dismantled-civil-rights-law-and-the-foundations-of-inclusive-democracy-in-its-first-year-273433