Category: The Conversation – USA

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

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Hana Green, Postdoctoral Fellow in Holocaust Studies, Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies, College of Charleston

Travel case in hand, dressed in fashionable clothing and wearing a practiced, coquettish smile, Hela Schüpper Rufeisen sat aboard the train to Warsaw, Poland. No one on board would have suspected that beneath the coat of the young woman were strapped assorted handguns and several cartridge clips.

Schüpper Rufeisen, who was Jewish, relied on this dissonance between appearance and reality to ferry items into, out of and between the Warsaw and Krakow ghettos. Her carefully cultivated “Aryan” image and false papers listing her as Catholic made it possible to cross borders and survive encounters that would otherwise have ended in death.

During the Holocaust, trying to “pass” as non-Jewish was often more feasible for women than men. Some Jewish women, like Schüpper Rufeisen, took the risk in order to join resistance efforts against the Nazis and their collaborators. Most Jews who tried to pass, however, did so simply to remain alive in a system designed to murder them.

Passing took many forms. It enabled some women to transport weapons, papers or messages, while allowing others to work as domestic servants, move between cities, secure food or sleep safely for another night. What united these experiences was the pressure of living under constant threat. Blanca Rosenberg escaped the Kolomyja ghetto – then Polish, now part of Ukraine – in 1942. As she recalled afterward, “I tried to force myself into the mind of the woman I was to impersonate … I was now an Aryan, with a right to life, and no longer a Jewess, hunted like prey.”

Over years of research on Jews who evaded capture during the Holocaust, what struck me most was not the daring of these acts, but how often survivors described them as something done to get through the day alive. A central aim of my work has been to move beyond celebrated figures such as couriers and resistance agents – not to diminish their bravery, but to show how passing functioned as a strategy of survival within a system committed to Jewish annihilation.

Women’s roles

Under Nazism, “passing” meant assuming a non-Jewish identity and performing it convincingly in hostile public places, whereas going into hiding meant concealing one’s physical existence. This required constructing an entirely new self: adopting new names and speech patterns, demonstrating fluency in Christian rituals, and sustaining backstories capable of withstanding scrutiny.

Passing relied on constantly negotiating visibility and concealment, safety and exposure. The stakes were immense. Exposure often meant immediate death, and those who helped risked execution themselves.

Jewish men and women who passed navigated unique dangers. Yet women, often perceived as less of a threat, also had distinct possibilities.

Their mobility was less strictly policed than men’s, and they could assume roles such as domestic workers or caretakers, providing credible explanations for their presence in public spaces. Women could adapt hairstyles, clothing and mannerisms to try to blend in. Men’s circumcisions, on the other hand, might expose them as Jewish, and in some circumstances, being a military-aged man out of uniform could arouse suspicion.

Testimonies from survivors show how many women relied on intuition and social awareness to navigate danger, crafting performances that balanced vulnerability and confidence. These were not advantages born of privilege, but survival strategies shaped by patriarchal and Nazi stereotypes, in which women’s perceived docility became a precarious form of cover.

The experience of Adina Blady-Szwajger reflects this precarious calculus. Traveling under a false Polish passport, the young physician moved between the Warsaw Ghetto and the so-called “Aryan side,” concealing ammunition beneath ordinary goods. When stopped by a gendarme on Żelazna Street, she opened her bag, revealing a heap of potatoes masking ammunition, smiled broadly, and waited. The patrolman glanced inside and ordered only “Los” – “Go.”

At the same time, Jewish women were doubly vulnerable. Living without legal protection, they faced heightened risks of sexual violence and coercion, as well as the potentially fatal consequences of pregnancy. Gender shaped not only how women passed, but the dangers they faced while doing so.

Emotional weight

Passing exacted a heavy psychological toll. Women lived with the constant fear that a single mistake could reveal their true identity. Rosenberg’s account of suppressing her sense of self after escaping the Kolomyja ghetto illustrates how passing fractured identity, producing a self that was at once protective and deeply alien.

Isolation compounded this strain. Cut off from family, unsure whom to trust, and burdened by guilt, many women endured emotional isolation that lingered long after liberation.

Ruth Ackerman, who survived the war by working for a German family under a false name, recalled scanning newly arrived American troops for a single “Jewish face.” The only member of her family to survive, Ackerman searched for other Jews, yearning for connection after years of concealment.

Edith Hahn-Beer, who lived in a displaced persons camp after the war, recalled feeling rejected by survivors who resented that she had emerged “intact,” without the physical suffering, imprisonment and degradation they themselves had endured. Using the false papers of a friend from Vienna, Hahn-Beer survived the war by living as an “Aryan” in Germany, marrying a Nazi officer – choices that complicated how other survivors saw her survival.

Lodzia Silverstein, a courier in Poland, described the postwar shift as “crawling out from the Polish skin and back into my Jewish skin.” This arduous psychological process was complicated by continued antisemitic violence, including the 1946 Kielce pogrom, a blood libel massacre that killed 42 Jews and wounded at least 50 others in the southeastern Polish town.

In some cases, Jews who passed for Christian retained their wartime identities for years, or even for the remainder of their lives, out of fear of continued persecution or a desire to move on.

Lasting lessons

As these women’s struggles show, passing was an ongoing negotiation of selfhood under extreme, and often violent, duress. For Jews who managed to pass, their deception was both a shield and a burden. Every gesture, word and detail of appearance carried the risk of exposure.

Their stories continue to resonate. People displaced by war, persecution or discrimination often alter aspects of their identities to remain safe. Belonging is rigorously policed – from immigration enforcement, racial discrimination and attacks on gender identity in the United States to ethnic violence across the globe. Whether through documents and checkpoints, or everyday scrutiny of language, dress, religion and appearance, people scrutinize each other, drawing lines around who belongs.

During the Holocaust, concealment was a condition of survival under persecution. Survivors’ testimony illuminates both the ingenuity required to endure such pressure and the emotional costs of erasing parts of oneself. In a moment of rising nationalism, antisemitism and mass displacement, their stories carry renewed urgency.

Hana Green has received research funding from the Central European History Society, the Leo Baeck Institute, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the German Historical Institute, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference).

– ref. For some Jewish women, ‘passing’ as Christian during the Holocaust could mean survival – but left scars all the same – https://theconversation.com/for-some-jewish-women-passing-as-christian-during-the-holocaust-could-mean-survival-but-left-scars-all-the-same-268745

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Jeremy David Engels, Liberal Arts Endowed Professor of Communication, Penn State

Before Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, he asked several of his friends to continue his life’s work building what he called “beloved community.” One of the people he invited was the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, poet and mindfulness teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.

My new book, “On Mindful Democracy: A Declaration of Interdependence to Mend a Fractured World,” is inspired by King and Hanh’s friendship. These two men bonded over the shared insight that how we show up for each other matters, as does how we advocate for social change. In his sermon “Loving Your Enemies” King announced, “Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” Hanh taught: There is no way to peace, peace is the way.“

At the heart of beloved community is true democracy. To be agents of change who do not add to the suffering of the world, people must learn to become more loving and peaceful people.

‘The real enemies of man’

Hanh was born in 1926 in central Vietnam. As a young Buddhist monk living in a nation confronted by colonialism, conflict and war, he developed the doctrine of ”engaged Buddhism,“ premised on the belief that working to relieve suffering in the world is enlightenment.

During the mid-1960s, amid the Vietnam War – Vietnamese call it the “American War” – Hanh founded the School of Youth for Social Services to practice engaged Buddhism and help those affected by the bombs raining down on their homes.

On June 1, 1965, Hanh wrote a letter to King to raise awareness of the suffering of the Vietnamese people. He also hoped to correct some common misconceptions about Buddhism.

His overarching point was that Buddhists in Vietnam did not hate Americans. In fact, they did not hate anyone. Their goal was simply to bring an end to war – and an end to the delusions that led to war. “Their enemies are not man. They are intolerance, fanaticism, dictatorship, cupidity, hatred and discrimination which lie within the heart of man,” he wrote. “These are the real enemies of man – not man himself.”

Hanh refused to take a side during the war. He stood for peace. His peace activism earned him a 39-year banishment from his homeland.

Continuing King’s dream

Marc Andrus, author of the 2021 book “Brothers in the Beloved Community,” notes that King and Hanh met in person twice: once in Chicago, on May 31, 1966, and a second time in May 1967, at the World Council of Churches Peace on Earth Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. In Geneva, King shared his understanding of the beloved community with Hanh, inviting him to participate in its construction.

In between these two meetings, King nominated Hanh for the 1967 Nobel Peace Prize, writing in his nomination letter, “I know Thich Nhat Hanh, and am privileged to call him my friend.” No award was given that year, however, perhaps to protest King’s choice to make his nomination letter public. Nominations were typically private, but King used his to call out the injustice of the Vietnam War.

Hanh was crushed when he learned of King’s death in 1968. “I was in New York when I heard the news of his assassination; I was devastated. I could not eat; I could not sleep,” he later recalled. “I made a deep vow to continue building what he called ‘the beloved community’ not only for myself but for him also. I have done what I promised Martin Luther King Jr. And I think that I have always felt his support.”

Building ‘beloved community’

In the years after King’s murder, part of Hanh’s life work was devoted to fulfilling King’s dream and building the “beloved community.”

Beloved community is not an abstraction. It is a loose-knit global community composed of a multitude of smaller, local communities committed to practicing peace, nonviolence, freedom, love and justice. Emerging from King’s activism and Hanh’s engaged Buddhism, these communities are also committed to social change.

In 1982, Hanh and his student Sister Chan Khong established the Plum Village monastery in southern France. In the years since, the Plum Village community has founded dozens of monasteries around the world, including three in the United States: Blue Cliff in upstate New York, Deer Park outside San Diego, and Magnolia Grove in Mississippi.

Hanh’s lay students have established thousands of smaller Plum Village sanghas – communities – in North America and Europe. These monasteries and sanghas serve as practice centers where people learn to embody the ideals of beloved community in their mindfulness practice and daily lives.

Since the time of the Buddha, people committed to the path of mindfulness have agreed to live by a number of “precepts.” These precepts, typically numbering five, provide a moral foundation for action. Hundreds of thousands of people attending Plum Village retreats have agreed to live by the updated, secular version of the precepts that Hanh and his community wrote called the Five Mindfulness Trainings. These include: reverence for life, true happiness, true love, loving speech and deep listening, and nourishment and healing.

The Five Mindfulness Trainings are written to provide people with a practical path to building a shared life based in love, compassion, joy and peace: the type of life that both King and Hanh envisioned for all.

As Hanh told the global Plum Village community in a 2020 letter titled Climbing Together the Hill of the Century: “We have continued that aspiration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and every day, our practice is to generate brotherhood and sisterhood, to cultivate joy and the capacity to help people. This is a concrete way to realize and continue that dream.”

On MLK Day, their friendship and writings are a reminder that democracy rests on the ability of citizens to be present for each other, to recognize their interconnectedness, to embody loving kindness and to disagree without resorting to violence.

Jeremy David Engels 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. Building ‘beloved community’: Remembering the friendship between Martin Luther King Jr. and Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh – https://theconversation.com/building-beloved-community-remembering-the-friendship-between-martin-luther-king-jr-and-buddhist-monk-thich-nhat-hanh-272062

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Geoffrey Propheter, Associate Professor, School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado Denver

The Denver Broncos announced in early September 2025 their plan to build a privately financed football stadium. The proposal received a lot of attention and praise.

Across the five major sports leagues in the U.S. – the NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB and MLS – only 20% of facilities are privately owned.

I’ve studied the intersection of state and local public finance and pro sports for two decades. This experience has led me to approach claims of private financing with suspicion.

Private dollars are often masked as public dollars in these arrangements.

Private vs public dollars

In theory, what counts as private or public dollars is uncontroversial. Dollars are public when government has a legal claim over them – otherwise, they are private.

The public versus private dollar distinction matters when accounting for who is contributing how much to a sports facility. When public dollars are allowed to count as private dollars, a project proposal looks more enticing than it is, in fact.

For instance, lawmakers regularly allow team owners to count public dollars as private dollars. The Sacramento City Council agreed to let the NBA’s Sacramento Kings count their property tax payments for the city-owned arena as private contributions to the overall cost of financing the arena. But property taxes are public dollars that in other instances go toward public services like schools and road repairs.

Team owners building private facilities also typically receive public dollars through tax breaks, which is government spending in disguise. Property tax exemptions, sales and use tax exemptions on materials and machinery, and income tax credits are common forms of government givebacks to sports team owners.

I’ve estimated that property tax exemptions alone, among facilities in the five major leagues, have cost state and local governments US$20 billion cumulatively over the life of teams’ leases, 42% of which would have gone to K-12 education.

Rental payments spent on facilities are not private dollars

Many facilities and their infrastructure are funded through public debt secured in part by team rental payments. Lawmakers, media and consultants often view projects secured by rents as privately financed, in part or whole.

However, rental income in exchange for use or operation of public property should not be counted as private dollars.

Here’s a thought experiment. Suppose state lawmakers allocated the rent paid for use of campground sites in a state park to pay for new campground bathrooms. Are the bathrooms privately funded?

The flaw in concluding “yes” arises from a failure to appreciate that lawmakers, through policy, create legal claims over certain dollars. All dollars start as private dollars, but through the tax system, lawmakers transfer ownership of some dollars to the public.

It is the government landlord’s choice, a policy decision, to spend the rental income on the rented property, a choice available to them only if they own the rental income in the first place.

Yet lawmakers regularly allow teams, both professional and minor league, to count rental payments as private contributions. This accounting makes sports subsidies look less generous than they actually are.

Looking beyond construction

Facilities not only need to be constructed but also operated, maintained and eventually upgraded. Roads, sewer lines, overpasses, game-day security and emergency response and public policies to mitigate gentrification caused by a facility are all common taxpayer-funded touchpoints. In addition, facilities have preconstruction costs such as land acquisition, soil remediation and site preparation, as well as later costs such as demolition and remediation for the land’s next use.

Focusing on privately financed construction and ignoring all other aspects of a project’s development and operation is misleading, potentially contributing to lawmakers making inefficient and expensive policy decisions.

By way of example, the Council of the District of Columbia approved a subsidy agreement last year with the NFL’s Commanders. The stadium would be financed, constructed and operated by the team owner, who would pay $1 in rent per year and remit no property taxes. In exchange for financing the stadium privately, the owner receives exclusive development rights to 20 acres of land adjacent to the stadium for the next 90 years.

The stadium is expected to cost the owner $2.5 billion, with the city contributing $1.3 billion for infrastructure.

But the city also gives up market rental income between $6 billion and $25 billion,depending on future land appreciation rates, that it could make on the 20 acres.

In other words, the rent discount alone means the city gives up revenue equal to multiple stadiums in exchange for the Commanders providing one. It is as if the council has a Lamborghini, traded it straight up for a Honda Civic, and then praised themselves for their negotiation acumen that resulted in a “free” Civic.

The Broncos’ proposed stadium

As of January 2026, Denver taxpayers know only that the Broncos stadium construction will be privately financed and that public dollars will be spent on some infrastructure.

Being enamored with such a proposal is similar to being offered a $1 billion yacht at a 75% discount. In my experience, there are two types of public officials: one will want to spend $250 million to save $750 million, while the other will ask whether $250 million for a yacht is an appropriate use of taxpayer resources given existing needs elsewhere.

My hope is that lawmakers better appreciate the many ways government participation in sports facility development, including privately financed ones, imposes serious risks and costs for current and future taxpayers. What is the expected total cost of the stadium project over its life? How much of the life cost would public resources cover? Could public resources generate greater benefits in an alternative use? How much will it cost to mitigate or compensate those affected by a project’s expected negative side effects, such as gentrification, congestion, pollution and crime?

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Geoffrey Propheter 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. Broncos say their new stadium will be ‘privately financed,’ but ‘private’ often still means hundreds of millions in public resources – https://theconversation.com/broncos-say-their-new-stadium-will-be-privately-financed-but-private-often-still-means-hundreds-of-millions-in-public-resources-270053

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Eduardo Gamarra, Professor of Politics and International Relations, Florida International University

Donald Trump has flagged Venezuelan drug trafficking as a key reason for the U.S. military operation on Jan. 3, 2026, that captured President Nicolás Maduro and whisked him to New York to face federal drug charges.

Trump has described Maduro as “the kingpin of a vast criminal network responsible for trafficking colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States.”

In 2025, the administration presented the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean and repeated strikes on alleged drug trafficking vessels off Venezuela’s coast as necessary to counter the flow of cocaine into the United States.

But as an international relations scholar focused on Latin America, I know that when assessed against hard data on cocaine production and transit, the U.S. pretense for military action against Venezuela falters.

Venezuela has never been a major cocaine producer. That distinction belongs overwhelmingly to Colombia, which accounts for the vast majority of coca cultivation and cocaine processing in the Western Hemisphere.

That means the arrest of Maduro and subsequent U.S. attempts to control Venezuela’s government are unlikely to stem the influx of cocaine into the U.S.

Justifying intervention

While Venezuela’s geography and governance gaps make it a transit country for Colombian products, most U.S. cocaine originates and flows through corridors north and west of Venezuela. This contradicts the claim that Caracas was the central hub of cocaine trafficking into the United States.

Moreover, the opioid overdose crisis in the U.S. today is overwhelmingly driven by synthetic drugs such as fentanyl, which have supply chains rooted in Mexico and Asia, not Venezuela.

So why did Washington elevate Venezuela’s role in narcotics?

The answer, I believe, lies less in illicit markets than in power. By conflating criminal networks with government authority, an act amplified through legal designations and indictments, the Trump administration could justify military intervention without explicit congressional authorization.

Once Maduro was removed, the substance beneath the rhetoric became clearer. The U.S. has not turned power over to an opposition democratic coalition. Instead, it facilitated the swearing-in of Vice President Delcy Rodríguez as interim president, a figure deeply tied to the existing regime and whose network includes people long accused by U.S. authorities of illegal activities.

The release of political prisoners by the interim government and U.S. moves to reopen Venezuela’s oil sector to American interests underscore that what unfolded was not purely a counternarcotics mission but a reconfiguration of governance in Caracas.

Pretext for military action

The role of the Cartel de los Soles – or Cartel of the Suns – in this narrative deserves particular scrutiny. Originally a label for alleged trafficking networks within Venezuela’s security forces, U.S. legal indictments and terrorist designations expanded that concept. That amplified the narrative that Maduro was at the head of a transnational criminal enterprise.

In fact, the Cartel de los Soles is not a structured cartel at all. Yet the narrative of Maduro as head of a narco-terrorist empire was politically and legally potent. It provided a pretext for military action, creating a justification that could be sold domestically and internationally as an effort to defend U.S. citizens from an external criminal threat.

But the U.S. attack in Venezuela was not, in substance, a counternarcotics mission. It was a strategic economic and geopolitical operation framed in the language of law enforcement.

Two days after the Venezuela attack, the Justice Department retreated from its November 2025 claim that Maduro was the head of Cartel de los Soles, underscoring that the link between drug enforcement and regime removal was more instrumental than evidentiary.

Rodríguez said just days after the U.S. attack, “Drug trafficking and human rights were the excuse; the real motive was oil.”

No meaningful reduction

While the U.S. operation in Venezuela undoubtedly disrupted the trafficking networks that operated under Maduro’s umbrella, at least temporarily, the action cannot be convincingly framed as a drug supply intervention.

The reality of drug trafficking itself underscores this point.

Cocaine production and distribution networks are dynamic. When one route is disrupted, traffickers invariably find alternative pathways.

Routes that once used Venezuelan territory have likely rerouted rather than collapsed. This has historically characterized drug flow in Latin America in response to pressure from law enforcement.

Even if Venezuelan transit networks are briefly destabilized, there is no evidence that U.S. intervention will lead to a meaningful reduction in the volume of illegal drugs flowing into the United States. The most significant drivers of U.S. drug problems, including Mexico-based distribution systems and the surge of synthetic opioids, operate largely outside Venezuela.

The U.S. operation may benefit Venezuela politically by toppling a long-standing authoritarian figure. That opens the possibility of political change.

But if the lens through which policymakers view these events is drug policy, they are misreading both the evidence and the incentives. The action was centered on energy and strategic realignment, with counternarcotics rhetoric serving as a justification rather than a driver of the U.S. attack.

And while trafficking networks adapt and survive, these shifts will not reduce the flow of drugs into the United States, which has long been shaped by factors far beyond Venezuela’s borders.

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

– ref. The ‘drug threat’ that justified the US ouster of Maduro won’t be fixed by his arrest – https://theconversation.com/the-drug-threat-that-justified-the-us-ouster-of-maduro-wont-be-fixed-by-his-arrest-273139

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Ian Savage, Professor of Economics, Northwestern University

In 2018, high-speed passenger trains branded as Brightline started running along the formerly freight-only Florida East Coast Railway. Initial service from Miami to West Palm Beach was extended to Orlando in 2023. Unfortunately, the southern end of the line is in the spotlight because of collisions with pedestrians and motor vehicles.

The safety concerns have received extensive coverage in the Miami Herald, Orlando Sentinel, The Atlantic and on local television and radio stations.

To South Floridians, the furor may be novel. But nationally the debate over how to prevent these incidents has been going on for decades.

Most of the risks of railroading fall on pedestrians and motorists. Over the past decade, an average of 900 pedestrians lost their lives each year in the U.S., and another 150 motor vehicle occupants died in collisions at highway-rail grade crossings.

I’m an economist who has studied transportation safety for 40 years. My research has analyzed why motor vehicle risks have fallen substantially, while there has been hardly any progress for pedestrians.

Reducing motor vehicle crashes

In 1966, 1,700 motor vehicle occupants died at railroad crossings. Nowadays, that number is typically less than 150. Over the same period, the number of vehicles on the road has tripled. By these measures, the risk has fallen by an amazing 97%.

What happened?

In part, the risk fell due to better vehicle technology and reduced drunken driving, which have improved overall highway safety.

The rest was due to actions taken starting in the early 1970s in reaction to the high number of deaths. Notably, the responsibility for deciding on safety features at crossings was taken away from the railroads and given to state and local highway authorities.

A design standards handbook and risk analysis tools were developed by the U.S. Department of Transportation. The analysis tools produce a priority listing of the riskiest crossings. The handbook describes the options that engineers can use to reduce risks, such as installing flashing warning lights and barriers across the road. It also suggests when to consider closing or consolidating dangerous crossings. Federal money supplemented spending by railroads and state and local governments to pay for these improvements.

A public information campaign educating drivers about the risks at crossings was established in Idaho in 1972 under the name Operation Lifesaver. By 1986, the program had spread to every state.

Railways closed many unprofitable lines after they were allowed to do so by the Staggers Rail Act of 1980. The reduced number of railroad miles and crossings also dropped the associated risk.

Stagnant risks to pedestrians

A similar analysis of pedestrian deaths is complicated. Pedestrian deaths occur all along the railroad and not just at crossings. Sadly, some deaths are intentional. Federal railroad officials had stopped requiring that suicides be reported in the mid-1950s and resumed doing so only in 2011.

In 1966, there were 730 nonintentional pedestrian deaths. Today, that number is roughly the same. It’s worth noting, however, that the U.S. population is 70% higher than it was in the 1960s, so the risk per person is lower.

Federal data from the past decade shows that about a quarter of the 900 annual pedestrian deaths were ruled by a coroner or medical examiner to be intentional. Coroners often lack sufficient evidence to definitively rule a suicide, so the actual proportion of pedestrians with suicidal intent is likely much higher. My own research in the Chicago area found that about half were confirmed or likely suicides.

Getting to the root cause

While the risk is down, the reduction is nowhere near as large as that of motor vehicles at crossings.

In the past decade the U.S. Department of Transportation has funded development of handbooks on the design of pedestrian crossings and interventions to mitigate risks at places away from crossings.

The latter handbook emphasizes that successful countermeasures need to be tailored to the reasons people are on the tracks in the first place. And, of course, there are many reasons.

Fencing may seem like an obvious countermeasure, but a fence does not prevent access at crossings and stations. Moreover, fences also tend to be destroyed where it is onerous to detour to a formal crossing rather than take a shortcut.

In fact, fencing can be counterproductive if it screens the railroad from public view and encourages nefarious activities, including theft, drug dealing and loitering.

Tackling intentional deaths has been challenging. Countermeasures have focused on signage providing information on mental health services and training rail workers to recognize people displaying symptoms of distress and then intervening or calling for help.

At times, tackling the root of the problem may involve land use and zoning at a local level. For example, a city might decide not to allow a convenience store to be located on the opposite side of the tracks from the population it serves. Or a city or school district might relocate transit or school bus stops to avoid the temptation to take a shortcut.

Florida railroads

South Florida faces several challenges. The primary challenge is its flat land. No hills means there is no natural grade separation between the railroad and intersecting roads and footpaths.

Elevating the railroad would be expensive and would cut communities in two. The effects of such severance should not be underestimated. In fact, the trend in recent times has been to rejoin urban neighborhoods that were bisected by interstate highway construction in the 1960s.

Another challenge comes, ironically, from the original vision behind rail travel in Florida. Standard Oil magnate Henry Flagler developed and built the Florida East Coast Railway in hopes of spurring coastal development. These days, dense communities surround the line, with housing, schools, stores and restaurants scattered on both sides of the tracks.

Development also made it less safe for motor vehicles. Main roads, such as U.S. Route 1 and Dixie Highway, were built parallel to the tracks. Over time, as these roads have become wider and busier, the cross streets have a smaller distance between the railroad and the main road. The space for vehicles waiting to turn onto the main road is limited, and the lights and gates at the railroad crossing must be coordinated with the traffic signals on the main road. This is a major challenge to the state, county and municipal traffic engineers who have inherited these complicated intersections.

It is tempting to suggest that many of these crossings should be consolidated into fewer, well-designed crossings. But this could result in unintended consequences for pedestrians. When too few crossings are available, pedestrians are more likely to take unauthorized shortcuts. Any consolidation of road crossings must be accompanied by alternative ways for pedestrians to cross the tracks safely.

It is important to keep looking for solutions to pedestrian and vehicle safety issues so that South Florida communities can be safer while enjoying the benefits that rail offers, such as reducing the number of trucks on the roads and offering an alternative to passengers who wish to avoid flying or driving on congested Interstate 95.

If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts, you can contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (988) or Crisis Text Line (text “HELLO” to 741741) for immediate support.

I was a volunteer member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine oversight committee as the 2022 “Strategies for Deterring Trespassing on Rail Transit and Commuter Rail Rights-of-Way” handbook was developed. As such we could comment on drafts but were not the authors of the report.

– ref. South Florida’s Brightline has highlighted an old problem – every year for the past decade, 900 pedestrians were killed by trains – https://theconversation.com/south-floridas-brightline-has-highlighted-an-old-problem-every-year-for-the-past-decade-900-pedestrians-were-killed-by-trains-272229

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Paul Bierman, Professor of Natural Resources and Environmental Science, University of Vermont

President Donald Trump’s insistence that the U.S. will acquire Greenland “whether they like it or not” is just the latest chapter in a co-dependent and often complicated relationship between America and the Arctic’s largest island – one that stretches back more than a century.

Americans have long pursued policies in Greenland that U.S. leaders considered strategic and economic imperatives. As I recounted in my 2024 book, “When the Ice is Gone,” about Greenland’s environmental, military and scientific history, some of these ideas were little more than engineering fantasies, while others reflected unfettered military bravado.

But today’s world isn’t the same as when the United States last had a significant presence in Greenland, decades ago during the Cold War.

Before charging headlong into this icy island again, the U.S. would be remiss not to learn from past failures and consider how Earth’s rapidly changing climate is fundamentally altering the region.

Early US plundering of Greenland’s metals

In 1909, Robert Peary, a U.S. Navy officer, announced that he had won the race to the North Pole – a spectacular claim debated fiercely at the time. Before that, Peary had spent years exploring Greenland by dogsled, often taking what he found.

In 1894, he convinced six Greenlanders to come with him to New York, reportedly promising them tools and weapons in return. Within a few months, all but two of the Inuit had died from diseases.

Peary also took three huge fragments of the Cape York iron meteorite, known to Greenlanders as Saviksoah. It was a unique source of metal that Greenlandic Inuit had used for centuries to make tools. The largest piece of the meteorite, Ahnighito, weighed 34 tons. Today, it sits in the American Museum of Natural History, which reportedly paid Peary US$40,000 for the space rocks.

World War II: Strategic location and minerals

World War II put Greenland on the map strategically for the U.S. military. In spring 1941, Denmark’s ambassador signed a treaty giving the U.S. military access to Greenland to help protect the island from Nazi Germany and contribute to the war effort in Europe. That treaty remains in effect today.

New American bases in western and southern Greenland became crucial refueling stops for planes flying from America to Europe.

Hundreds of American soldiers were garrisoned at Ivittuut, a remote town on the southern Greenland coast where they protected the world’s largest cryolite mine. The rare mineral was used for smelting aluminum, critical for building airplanes during the war.

And because Greenland is upwind from Europe, weather data collected on the island proved essential for battlefield forecasts as officers planned their moves during World War II.

Both the Americans and Germans built weather stations on Greenland, starting what historians refer to as the weather war. There was little combat, though allied patrols routinely scoured the east coast of the island for Nazi encampments. The weather war ended in 1944 when the U.S. Coast Guard, and its East Greenland dogsled patrol, found the last of four German weather stations and captured their meteorologists.

Cold War: Fanciful engineering ideas vs the ice

The heyday of U.S. military engineering dreams in Greenland arrived during the Cold War in the 1950s.

To counter the risk of Soviet missiles and bombers coming over the Arctic, the U.S. military transported about 5,000 men, 280,000 tons of supplies, 500 trucks and 129 bulldozers, according to The New York Times, to a barren, northwest Greenland beach – 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) from the North Pole and 2,752 miles (4,430 kilometers) from Moscow.

There, in one top-secret summer, they built the sprawling American air base at Thule. It housed bombers, fighters, nuclear missiles and more than 10,000 soldiers. The whole operation was revealed to the world the following year, on a September 1952 cover of LIFE magazine and by the U.S. Army in its weekly television show, “The Big Picture.”

But in the realm of ideas born out of paranoia, Camp Century and Project Iceworm were the pinnacle.

The U.S. Army built Camp Century, a nuclear-powered base, inside the ice sheet by digging deep trenches and then covering them with snow. The base held 200 men in bunkrooms heated to 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 Celsius). It was the center of U.S. Army research on snow and ice and became a reminder to the USSR that the American military could operate at will in the Arctic.

The Army also imagined hundreds of miles of rail lines buried inside Greenland’s ice sheet. On Project Iceworm’s tracks, atomic-powered trains would move nuclear-tipped missiles in snow tunnels between hidden launch stations – a shell game covering an area about the size of Alabama.

In the end, Project Iceworm never got beyond a 1,300-foot (400-meter) tunnel the Army excavated at Camp Century. The soft snow and ice, constantly moving, buckled that track as the tunnel walls closed in. In the early 1960s, first the White House, and then NATO, rejected Project Iceworm.

In 1966, the Army abandoned Camp Century, leaving hundreds of tons of waste inside the ice sheet. Today, the crushed and abandoned camp lies more than 100 feet (30 meters) below the ice sheet surface. But as the climate warms and the ice melts, that waste will resurface: millions of gallons of frozen sewage, asbestos-wrapped pipes, toxic lead paint and carcinogenic PCBs.

Who will clean up the mess and at what cost is an open question.

Greenland remains a tough place to turn a profit

In the past, the American focus in Greenland was on short-term gains with little regard for the future. Abandoned bases, scattered around the island today and in need of cleanup, are one example. Peary’s disregard of the lives of local Greenlanders is another.

History shows that many of the fanciful ideas for Greenland failed because they showed little consideration of the island’s isolation, harsh climate and dynamic ice sheet.

Trump’s demands for American control of the island as a source of wealth and U.S. security are similarly shortsighted. In today’s rapidly warming climate, disregarding the dramatic effects of climate change in Greenland can doom projects to failure as Arctic temperatures climb.

Recent floods, fed by Greenland’s melting ice sheet, have swept away bridges that had stood for half a century. The permafrost that underlies the island is rapidly thawing and destabilizing infrastructure, including the critical radar installation and runway at Thule, renamed Pituffik Space Base in 2022. The island’s mountain sides are crashing into the sea as the ice holding them together melts.

The U.S. and Denmark have conducted geological surveys in Greenland and pinpointed deposits of critical minerals along the rocky, exposed coasts. However, most of the mining so far has been limited to cryolite and some small-scale extraction of lead, iron, copper and zinc. Today, only one small mine extracting the mineral anorthosite, which is useful for its aluminum and silica, is running.

It’s the ice that matters

The greatest value of Greenland for humanity is not its strategic location or potential mineral resources, but its ice.

If human activities continue to heat the planet, melting Greenland’s ice sheet, sea level will rise until the ice is gone. Losing even part of the ice sheet, which holds enough water to raise global sea level 24 feet in all, would have disastrous effects for coastal cities and island nations around the world.

That’s big-time global insecurity. The most forward-looking strategy is to protect Greenland’s ice sheet rather than plundering a remote Arctic island while ramping up fossil fuel production and accelerating climate change around the world.

Paul Bierman receives funding from the US National Science Foundation.

– ref. US military has a long history in Greenland, from mining during WWII to a nuclear-powered Army base built into the ice – https://theconversation.com/us-military-has-a-long-history-in-greenland-from-mining-during-wwii-to-a-nuclear-powered-army-base-built-into-the-ice-273355

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Layla Bouzoubaa, Doctoral Student in Information Science, Drexel University

When you think of tools for studying substance use and addiction, a social media site like Reddit, TikTok or YouTube probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. Yet the stories shared on social media platforms are offering unprecedented insights into the world of substance use.

In the past, researchers studying peoples’ experiences with addiction relied mostly on clinical observations and self-reported surveys. But only about 5% of people diagnosed with a substance use disorder seek formal treatment. They are only a small sliver of the population who have a substance use disorder – and until recently, there has been no straightforward way to capture the experiences of the other 95%.

Today, millions of people openly discuss their experiences with drugs online, creating a vast collection of raw narratives about drug use. As a doctoral student in information science with a background in public health, I use this material to better understand how people who use drugs describe their lives and make sense of their experiences, especially when it comes to stigma.

These online conversations are reshaping how researchers think about substance use, addiction and recovery. Advances in artificial intelligence are helping make sense of these conversations at a scale that wasn’t possible before.

The hidden population

The vast majority of people diagnosed with a substance use disorder address the issue informally – seeking support from their community, friends or family, self-medicating or doing nothing at all. But some choose to post about their drug use in dedicated online communities, such as group forums, often with a level of candor that would be difficult to capture in clinical interviews.

Their social media posts offer a window into real-time, unscripted conversations about substance use. For example, Reddit, which is comprised of topical communities called subreddits, contains over 150 interconnected communities dedicated to various aspects of substance use.

In 2024, my colleagues and I analyzed how participants in drug-related forums on Reddit connect and interact. We found that they focused on the chemistry and pharmacology of substances, support for drug users, recreational experiences such as festivals and book clubs, recovery help, and harm reduction strategies. We then selected a few of the most active communities to develop a system for categorizing different types of personal disclosures by labeling 500 Reddit posts.

Policymakers and public health experts have expressed concerns that social media encourages risky drug use. Our work did not assess that issue, but it did support the notion that platforms such as Reddit and TikTok often serve as a lifeline for people seeking just-in-time support when they need it most.

When we used machine learning to analyze an additional 1,000 posts, we found that most users in the forums we focused on were seeking practical safety information. Posters often posed questions such as how much of a substance is safe to take, what interactions to avoid and how to recognize signs of trouble.

We observed that these forums function as informal harm reduction spaces. People share not just experiences but warnings, safety protocols and genuine care for each other’s well-being. When community members are lost to overdose, the responses reveal deep grief and renewed commitments to keeping others safe. This is the everyday reality of how people navigate substance use outside medical settings – with far more nuance and mutual support than critics might expect.

We also explored TikTok, analyzing more than 350 videos from substance-related communities. Recovery advocacy content was the most common, depicted in 33.9% of the videos we analyzed. Just 6.5% of the videos showed active drug use. As on Reddit, we frequently saw people emphasizing safety and care.

Why AI is a game changer

Platforms like Reddit, TikTok and YouTube host millions of posts, videos and comments, many filled with slang, sarcasm, regional language or emotionally charged stories. Analyzing this content manually is time-consuming, inconsistent and virtually impossible to do at scale.

That’s where AI comes in. Traditional machine learning approaches often rely on fixed word lists or keyword matching, which can miss important contextual cues. In contrast, newer models – especially large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-5 – are capable of understanding nuance, tone and even the underlying intent of a message. This makes them especially useful for studying complex issues like drug use or stigma, where people often communicate through implication, coded language or emotional nuance rather than direct statements.

These models can identify patterns across thousands of posts and flag emerging trends. For example, researchers used them to detect shifts in how Canadians on X, the social media site formerly called Twitter, discussed cannabis as legalization approached – capturing shifts in public attitudes that traditional surveys might have missed.

In another study, researchers found that monitoring Reddit discussions can help predict opioid-related overdose rates. Official government data, like that from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, typically lags by at least six months. But adding near-real-time Reddit data to forecasting models significantly improved their ability to predict overdose deaths – potentially helping public health officials respond faster to emerging crises.

Bringing stigma into focus

One of the most difficult aspects of substance use to study – and to address – is the stigma.

It’s deeply personal, often invisible and shaped by a person’s identity, relationships and environment. Researchers have long recognized that stigma, especially when internalized, can erode self-worth, worsen mental health and prevent people from seeking help. But it’s notoriously hard to capture using traditional research methods.

Most clinical studies rely on surveys or interviews conducted at regular intervals. While useful, these snapshots can miss how stigma unfolds in everyday life. Stigma scholars have emphasized that understanding its full impact requires paying attention to how people talk about themselves and their experiences over time.

On social media platforms, people often discuss stigma organically, in their own words and in the context of their lived experiences. They might describe being judged by a health care provider, express shame about their own substance use or reflect on how stigma shapes their relationships. Even when posts aren’t directly naming the experience as stigma, they still reveal how stigma is internalized, challenged or reinforced.

Using large language models, researchers can begin to track these patterns at scale, identifying linguistic signals like shame, guilt or expressions of hopelessness. In recent work, my colleagues and I showed that stigma expressed on Reddit aligns closely with long-standing stigma theory – suggesting that what people share on social media reflects recognizable stigma processes, not something fundamentally new or separate from what researchers have long studied.

That matters because stigma is one of the most significant barriers to treatment for people with substance use disorder. Understanding how people who use drugs talk about stigma, harm, recovery and survival, in their own words, can complement surveys and clinical studies and help inform better public health responses.

By taking these everyday expressions seriously, researchers, clinicians and policymakers can begin to respond to substance use as it is actually lived — messy, evolving and deeply human.

Layla Bouzoubaa 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. Reddit and TikTok – with the help of AI – are reshaping how researchers understand substance use – https://theconversation.com/reddit-and-tiktok-with-the-help-of-ai-are-reshaping-how-researchers-understand-substance-use-241730

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Bruce Schneier, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

Eighteen months ago, it was plausible that artificial intelligence might take a different path than social media. Back then, AI’s development hadn’t consolidated under a small number of big tech firms. Nor had it capitalized on consumer attention, surveilling users and delivering ads.

Unfortunately, the AI industry is now taking a page from the social media playbook and has set its sights on monetizing consumer attention. When OpenAI launched its ChatGPT Search feature in late 2024 and its browser, ChatGPT Atlas, in October 2025, it kicked off a race to capture online behavioral data to power advertising. It’s part of a yearslong turnabout by OpenAI, whose CEO Sam Altman once called the combination of ads and AI “unsettling” and now promises that ads can be deployed in AI apps while preserving trust. The rampant speculation among OpenAI users who believe they see paid placements in ChatGPT responses suggests they are not convinced.

In 2024, AI search company Perplexity started experimenting with ads in its offerings. A few months after that, Microsoft introduced ads to its Copilot AI. Google’s AI Mode for search now increasingly features ads, as does Amazon’s Rufus chatbot.

As a security expert and data scientist, we see these examples as harbingers of a future where AI companies profit from manipulating their users’ behavior for the benefit of their advertisers and investors. It’s also a reminder that time to steer the direction of AI development away from private exploitation and toward public benefit is quickly running out.

The functionality of ChatGPT Search and its Atlas browser is not really new. Meta, commercial AI competitor Perplexity and even ChatGPT itself have had similar AI search features for years, and both Google and Microsoft beat OpenAI to the punch by integrating AI with their browsers. But OpenAI’s business positioning signals a shift.

We believe the ChatGPT Search and Atlas announcements are worrisome because there is really only one way to make money on search: the advertising model pioneered ruthlessly by Google.

Advertising model

Ruled a monopolist in U.S. federal court, Google has earned more than US$1.6 trillion in advertising revenue since 2001. You may think of Google as a web search company, or a streaming video company (YouTube), or an email company (Gmail), or a mobile phone company (Android, Pixel), or maybe even an AI company (Gemini). But those products are ancillary to Google’s bottom line. The advertising segment typically accounts for 80% to 90% of its total revenue. Everything else is there to collect users’ data and direct users’ attention to its advertising revenue stream.

After two decades in this monopoly position, Google’s search product is much more tuned to the company’s needs than those of its users. When Google Search first arrived decades ago, it was revelatory in its ability to instantly find useful information across the still-nascent web. In 2025, its search result pages are dominated by low-quality and often AI-generated content, spam sites that exist solely to drive traffic to Amazon sales – a tactic known as affiliate marketing – and paid ad placements, which at times are indistinguishable from organic results.

Plenty of advertisers and observers seem to think AI-powered advertising is the future of the ad business.

Highly persuasive

Paid advertising in AI search, and AI models generally, could look very different from traditional web search. It has the potential to influence your thinking, spending patterns and even personal beliefs in much more subtle ways. Because AI can engage in active dialogue, addressing your specific questions, concerns and ideas rather than just filtering static content, its potential for influence is much greater. It’s like the difference between reading a textbook and having a conversation with its author.

Imagine you’re conversing with your AI agent about an upcoming vacation. Did it recommend a particular airline or hotel chain because they really are best for you, or does the company get a kickback for every mention? If you ask about a political issue, does the model bias its answer based on which political party has paid the company a fee, or based on the bias of the model’s corporate owners?

There is mounting evidence that AI models are at least as effective as people at persuading users to do things. A December 2023 meta-analysis of 121 randomized trials reported that AI models are as good as humans at shifting people’s perceptions, attitudes and behaviors. A more recent meta-analysis of eight studies similarly concluded there was “no significant overall difference in persuasive performance between (large language models) and humans.”

This influence may go well beyond shaping what products you buy or who you vote for. As with the field of search engine optimization, the incentive for humans to perform for AI models might shape the way people write and communicate with each other. How we express ourselves online is likely to be increasingly directed to win the attention of AIs and earn placement in the responses they return to users.

A different way forward

Much of this is discouraging, but there is much that can be done to change it.

First, it’s important to recognize that today’s AI is fundamentally untrustworthy, for the same reasons that search engines and social media platforms are.

The problem is not the technology itself; fast ways to find information and communicate with friends and family can be wonderful capabilities. The problem is the priorities of the corporations who own these platforms and for whose benefit they are operated. Recognize that you don’t have control over what data is fed to the AI, who it is shared with and how it is used. It’s important to keep that in mind when you connect devices and services to AI platforms, ask them questions, or consider buying or doing the things they suggest.

There is also a lot that people can demand of governments to restrain harmful corporate uses of AI. In the U.S., Congress could enshrine consumers’ rights to control their own personal data, as the EU already has. It could also create a data protection enforcement agency, as essentially every other developed nation has.

Governments worldwide could invest in Public AI – models built by public agencies offered universally for public benefit and transparently under public oversight. They could also restrict how corporations can collude to exploit people using AI, for example by barring advertisements for dangerous products such as cigarettes and requiring disclosure of paid endorsements.

Every technology company seeks to differentiate itself from competitors, particularly in an era when yesterday’s groundbreaking AI quickly becomes a commodity that will run on any kid’s phone. One differentiator is in building a trustworthy service. It remains to be seen whether companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic can sustain profitable businesses on the back of subscription AI services like the premium editions of ChatGPT, Plus and Pro, and Claude Pro. If they are going to continue convincing consumers and businesses to pay for these premium services, they will need to build trust.

That will require making real commitments to consumers on transparency, privacy, reliability and security that are followed through consistently and verifiably.

And while no one knows what the future business models for AI will be, we can be certain that consumers do not want to be exploited by AI, secretly or otherwise.

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. Could ChatGPT convince you to buy something? Threat of manipulation looms as AI companies gear up to sell ads – https://theconversation.com/could-chatgpt-convince-you-to-buy-something-threat-of-manipulation-looms-as-ai-companies-gear-up-to-sell-ads-272859

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Grant Tremblay, Federal Astrophysicist and External Relations Lead at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Smithsonian Institution

In 2026, astronauts will travel around the Moon for the first time since the Apollo era, powerful new space telescopes will prepare to survey billions of galaxies, and multiple nations will launch missions aimed at finding habitable worlds, water on the Moon and clues to how our solar system formed.

Together, these launches will mark a turning point in how humanity studies the universe – and how nations cooperate and compete beyond Earth. Coming from one of the world’s largest astrophysical research institutes, I can tell you, the anticipation across the global space science community is electric.

Mapping the cosmos at unprecedented scales

Several of the most ambitious missions slated for launch in 2026 share a common goal: to map the universe on the largest possible scales and reveal how planets, galaxies and the largest cosmic structures evolved over billions of years.

The centerpiece of this effort is NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Construction completed on the Roman telescope in December at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and if all goes well, it could launch as early as fall 2026.

What makes Roman more special than NASA’s other flagship space telescopes is not just what it will see, but how much of the sky it can see at once. Its 300-megapixel camera can capture regions of sky about 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s field of view while maintaining comparable sharpness – like switching from studying individual tiles to surveying the entire mosaic at once.

During its five-year primary mission, Roman is expected to discover more than 100,000 distant exoplanets, map billions of galaxies strewn across cosmic time and help scientists probe dark matter and dark energy – the invisible scaffolding and mysterious forces that together account for 95% of the cosmos.

Roman also carries a coronagraph, a pathfinder instrument that can block out a star’s blinding light to directly photograph planets orbiting around it. The technology could pave the way for future missions, like NASA’s planned Habitable Worlds Observatory, capable of searching for signs of life on Earth-like worlds.

Over in Europe, the European Space Agency’s PLATO mission, short for PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars mission, is scheduled to launch in December 2026 aboard Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket. PLATO will monitor about 200,000 stars using an array of 26 cameras, searching for small, rocky planets in their stars’ habitable zones, while also determining the stars’ ages.

For China, 2026 is expected to mark a milestone of a different kind: the launch of its first large flagship space telescope dedicated to astrophysics. The Xuntian space telescope, also known as the Chinese space station telescope, is currently expected to launch in late 2026. Xuntian will survey enormous regions of the sky with image quality comparable to Hubble’s, but with a field of view more than 300 times larger.

Like NASA’s Roman Space Telescope, Xuntian is designed to tackle some of modern cosmology’s biggest questions. It will hunt for dark matter and dark energy, survey billions of galaxies and trace how cosmic structure evolved over time. Uniquely, Xuntian will co-orbit with China’s Tiangong space station, allowing astronauts to service and upgrade it and, potentially, extending its life for decades.

Together with the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory on the ground, which will repeatedly scan the entire southern sky to capture how the universe changes over time, the Roman, PLATO and Xuntian space telescopes will study the cosmos not just as it is but as it evolves.

Global milestones in human spaceflight

While robotic observatories quietly expand our view of the cosmos, 2026 will also mark a major step forward for human spaceflight.

NASA’s Artemis II mission, now readying for launch as early as April 2026, will send four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the Moon and back. It will be the first time humans have traveled beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in December 1972.

Across the globe, India is preparing to reach a similarly historic milestone. Through its Gaganyaan program, the Indian Space Research Organisation is planning a series of uncrewed test flights in 2026 as it works toward sending astronauts to space. If that happens, India would become only the fourth nation to achieve human spaceflight on its own – a significant technological and symbolic achievement.

Meanwhile, China will continue regular crewed flights to its Tiangong space station in 2026, part of a broader effort to build the experience, infrastructure and technologies needed for its planned human missions to the Moon later in the decade.

In parallel, NASA is relying increasingly on commercial spacecraft to carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station, freeing the agency to focus its own human spaceflight efforts on deep-space missions beyond Earth.

Together, Artemis II, Gaganyaan and China’s ongoing crewed space station missions reflect a renewed global push toward human exploration beyond Earth orbit – one in which governments and commercial partners alike are laying the groundwork for longer missions and a sustained human presence in space.

The origin and geology of the Moon and Mars

Another set of 2026 missions focuses on a more grounded question: how rocky worlds – and the resources they contain – came to be.

Japan’s Martian Moons eXploration mission, slated to launch in late 2026, will travel to Mars, spend three years studying both of its small, potato-shaped moons – Phobos and Deimos – and collect a surface sample from Phobos to bring back to Earth by 2031.

Scientists still debate whether these moons originated as captured asteroids or debris from an ancient giant impact with Mars. Returning pristine material from Phobos could finally settle that question and reshape our understanding of how the inner solar system evolved.

China’s Chang’e 7 mission, expected to launch in mid-2026, will head to the Moon’s south pole, a region of intense scientific and strategic interest. The mission includes an orbiter, lander, rover and a small flying “hopper” designed to leap into permanently shadowed craters, where sunlight never reaches. These craters are thought to harbor water ice, a resource that could one day support astronauts or be converted into rocket fuel for deeper-space missions.

The Chinese and Japanese missions both highlight how planetary science and exploration are becoming increasingly intertwined, as understanding the geology of nearby worlds also informs future human activity.

It’s the Sun’s solar system, we’re just living in it

In 2025, powerful solar storms forced airlines to reroute and ground flights, disrupted radio communications and pushed vivid auroras far beyond their usual polar haunts – lighting up skies as far south as Florida. These events are reminders that space is not a distant abstraction: Activity on the Sun can have immediate consequences here on Earth.

Not all of 2026’s major missions look outward into deep space. Some are focused on understanding the dynamic space environment that surrounds our own planet.

In a notable example of international cooperation, the solar wind magnetosphere ionosphere link explorer, SMILE – a joint mission between the European Space Agency and the Chinese Academy of Sciences – is scheduled for launch in spring 2026.

SMILE will provide the first global images of how Earth’s magnetic field responds to the constant stream of charged particles flowing from the Sun. That interaction drives space weather, including solar storms that can disrupt satellites, navigation systems, power grids and communications.

Understanding those interactions is critical not only for protecting modern infrastructure on Earth but also for safeguarding astronauts and spacecraft operating beyond the planet’s protective magnetic shield.

At a time of growing geopolitical tension in space, the mission also stands out as a rare and consequential example of sustained scientific cooperation between Europe and China.

The global stakes

These missions unfold against a complex geopolitical backdrop. The United States and China are both racing to return humans to the Moon by the end of the decade.

Yet for all the competition, space science remains profoundly collaborative. Japan’s Martian Moons eXploration mission carries instruments from NASA, ESA and France. International teams share data, expertise and the sheer wonder of discovery. The universe, after all, belongs to no one nation.

Having spent my career studying the universe, I see 2026 as a year that reflects both the rivalries and the shared ambitions of space exploration today. Competition is real, but so is cooperation at a scale that would have been hard to imagine a generation ago. From the search for habitable worlds around distant stars to plans for returning humans to the Moon, the work is global – and the sky is shared by all.

Grant Tremblay receives funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

– ref. From a new flagship space telescope to lunar exploration, global cooperation – and competition – will make 2026 an exciting year for space – https://theconversation.com/from-a-new-flagship-space-telescope-to-lunar-exploration-global-cooperation-and-competition-will-make-2026-an-exciting-year-for-space-272010