Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Scott Pace, Professor of the Practice of International Affairs, George Washington University

NASA is once again shooting for the Moon, for the first time since the 1970s. As soon as April 2026, NASA will launch its Artemis II mission, using the Space Launch System heavy lift rocket to send a crewed spacecraft, called Orion, into orbit. From there, the crew will journey to and circle around the Moon over 10 days.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we spoke to Scott Pace, the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. Pace worked with the George W. Bush administration in space policy, and from 2017 served for four years as the executive secretary of the National Space Council during Donald Trump’s first term as president.

In the first paragraph, it makes it sound like the spacecraft is landing on the moon. “From there, the crew to orbit around the Moon over 10 days”

We’re about to send humans in orbit around the Moon again. What’s had to happen to get to this point?

Pace: Let’s go back to the 1980s and 1990s. After the space shuttle Challenger accident, a lot of people were thinking, “What do we do next?”

The space shuttle program was not an economic success. The recurring cost per flight was very expensive. So there was a lot of thinking about different vehicles that could be the shuttles’ successor. NASA pursued some of the higher-risk options, thinking that if they didn’t work out, they could still extend and use the shuttle. Some of those higher-risk ideas were things like single-stage-to-orbit space planes. When they didn’t work, it was OK because NASA was still working on the shuttle.

And then we had the 2003 space shuttle Columbia accident. NASA figured they could either stop for a decade or so and then try to restart a human spaceflight program once they had better technology, or try to transition the infrastructure and industrial base they had with the space shuttle to a new system.

When the second shuttle accident happened, we examined what we had to build a new system with, and we had solid rocket boosters and external tanks. To make something safer, we needed to build crew capsules. A capsule with an escape system onboard was one of the few immediate ways you could increase the likelihood of a crew’s survival.

If your eventual goal is Mars, you’ll then need a really heavy-lift vehicle to launch more crew and a heavier load. All that deliberation led to the current Space Launch System and the Orion capsule.

Four astronauts will be sent on a 10-day mission orbiting the Moon. What’s exciting to you about this mission, and what will you be looking out for?

Pace: The first thing is the performance of the solid rocket boosters on launch. Boosters are very reliable, but if they go bad, they go bad pretty quickly. The next thing is a checkpoint in Earth’s orbit when they’re going to make a decision about whether to do a translunar injection. During the translunar injection, they fire the engine to escape Earth’s orbit and get on the right path to orbit around the Moon.

Before they decide, they’re going to check the environmental control and life support system to make sure the passengers are safe and healthy inside the vehicle. Once you make the commitment to head for the Moon, that life support system is going to be essential. And they haven’t yet done a full flight test on Orion of the environmental control and life support system.

The translunar injection is actually fairly straightforward. In many ways, this is less risky than Apollo 8, which went to the Moon and then fired its engines to get into a stable orbit around the Moon. Then, it fired the engines again to come home.

Artemis II is more like Apollo 13. They’re going up, looping around the Moon and using its gravity to whip around and then come back. In some ways, it’s a less risky trajectory than Apollo 8 because you don’t have to fire the engines as much.

When the crew vehicle comes back, we’re going to look at its heat shield performance. The heat shield has had a long and complicated history. It looks like it’ll be safe, but this is a flight test. And so we’re going to look at how it reenters the atmosphere and how it handles the heat load put on it.

The SLS does come with challenges. One is the high cost. Every time you build one of these vehicles, it costs several billion dollars. The other problem is flight rate.

Some people will argue that beating China to the Moon is really important. Does that matter to you?

Pace: It matters to me if China is the only one showing up and they drive all the standards and the operating norms on the Moon. But the issue of beating China back in the near term doesn’t quite seize me as much as the longer term.

This is part of the problem I have with the term “race.” The U.S. had a space race in the past, but what we have now with China is a long-term competition.

Space is not yet contentious in the way the South China Sea is, or border disputes with India are. But I can see why some people are worried by looking at China’s behavior in other areas.

Part of the stated goal for Artemis is to secure a lasting presence on the lunar surface. Do you think there’s a rationale for nations to stay permanently on the Moon now?

Pace: Humanity’s future in space depends on two sub-questions. First: Can you live off the land and use local resources, or are you always dependent upon Earth? Second: How are you paying? Are you also financially dependent upon Earth – for example, supported by taxpayers?

If you can both use local resources and do something economically useful, then you can build space settlements and get permanent human activity beyond the Earth.

If the answer is no on both counts, then space is like Mount Everest: It’s a place of adventure and symbolism. People can go there and take pictures. But nobody really lives there.

If you can do something useful in space and generate an economic return, but still have to come home to Earth because the environment can’t support life long term, then space is like a North Sea oil platform. It’s a dangerous and difficult place, but a place where you can go for economic reasons.

If you still have to depend on taxpayer money, space may be similar to Antarctica – like going to McMurdo Station. You can do science there and have a human presence, but it’s a constrained environment.

Part of the purpose of exploration is to find out which of these futures is feasible. Some people have faith that space settlements are possible. But we really don’t know.

If it turns out there are economically useful things to do on the Moon, there may be an eventual transition. Activity on the Moon would go from a government-led effort to one led by private sector activities, including mining helium-3 or shipping water back to refueling stations.

If it turns out that none of that really makes sense, we’d still have some science presence there, but we would press on to Mars. I think there’ll be some sort of scientific presence regardless – but its size will depend on economics and markets that we, frankly, don’t understand yet.

The world today in space is much more globalized, much more democratized. Many more countries and entities are involved in space. While the U.S. wants to be the leader in this effort, it knows that simply doing it with a NASA logo is really not sufficient. The Artemis program is meant as an international and commercial partnership effort with others to voluntarily shape what space looks like.

Scott Pace is an advisor for Sierra Space and is a member of the Board of Trustees for the Planetary Science Institute, and the Board of Advisors for the National Security Space Association. He was a political appointee in the Administrations of George W. Bush (2002-2008) and Donald J. Trump (2017-2020). He is the Director of the Space Policy Institute at the Elliott School of International Affairs, at George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

– ref. NASA’s Artemis II mission will take an astronaut crew around the Moon – a space policy expert describes the long road to launch – https://theconversation.com/nasas-artemis-ii-mission-will-take-an-astronaut-crew-around-the-moon-a-space-policy-expert-describes-the-long-road-to-launch-274481

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Anne McNeil, Professor of Chemistry and Macromolecular Science and Engineering, University of Michigan

It seems like every day a new study finds tiny plastic particles called microplastics where they should not be: in our bodies and our food, water and air.

Yet finding and identifying microplastics is extremely challenging, especially given their small size. One microplastic can range from as large as a ladybug to as small as an eighth of a red blood cell.

In addition, it can be hard for researchers to avoid unintentionally contaminating their samples, because these plastics are practically everywhere. As a result, much of this research may be overestimating the number of microplastics.

In a new study published in March 2026, our team found that, even when following established protocols, using certain methods to measure environmental microplastics can potentially contaminate the results.

The study

We are chemists at the University of Michigan working in a collaborative team. We set out to understand how many microplastics Michiganders were inhaling when outside, and whether that depended on where they lived.

When preparing our samples, we followed all the standard protocols while conducting our research – we avoided plastic use in the lab, wore nonplastic clothing and even used a specialized chamber to reduce potential contamination from the laboratory air.

Despite these precautions, we found plastic counts in the air that were over 1,000 times greater than previous reports. We knew these numbers didn’t seem right, so what happened?

The culprit: Lab gloves

After a long path to pinpointing the contamination source, we found that laboratory gloves, which the scientific community recommends using as a best practice, can transfer particles to the surface of our samples – in this case, small metal sheets used to collect material depositing from the air. Moreover, the particles led to an overestimation of microplastic abundance in our study.

Here’s how: The particles, which we identified as stearate salts, are used to help the gloves cleanly release from their mold during the manufacturing process. When gloves are used to handle laboratory equipment, the particles are transferred to anything they touch. Stearate salts are similar to soap molecules – if you eat a lot of them, they’re probably not good for you, but they’re not harmful in the environment in the same way that microplastics are.

While not microplastics themselves, stearate salts are structurally similar to polyethylene, the type of plastic most often found in the environment. This structural similarity makes it difficult to distinguish them using the most common tools scientists use to determine whether a particle is plastic.

Researchers use vibrational spectroscopy to identify microplastics, which entails measuring how the particle interacts with light to produce what scientists call a chemical fingerprint.

Because polyethylene and stearate salts have very similar structures, they also interact with light in a similar way.

As a result, at least some of the time, the particles from gloves are incorrectly identified as microplastics. As more researchers rely on automated methods to speed up their analyses, glove residue may be increasingly mistaken for microplastics, leading to higher reports of microplastics in the environment than in reality.

How widespread is this contamination?

To investigate how prevalent this contamination might be, we looked at different glove types. We mimicked the touch between seven types of gloves while handling laboratory equipment and counted the number of microplastics we would incorrectly attribute to the environment if we followed the most common approaches.

We found that gloves can contribute over 7,000 particles per square millimeter that are misidentified as microplastics. This finding means that researchers could be unknowingly overestimating microplastic abundance in the environment when handling their samples with gloves.

Even more concerning, we found that the particles were largely less than 5 um in size. Microplastics in this size range have larger impacts on human and ecosystem health because they can more easily enter cells. By inflating microplastic counts in this size range, using laboratory gloves may jeopardize the studies that inform future policies and regulations.

Moving forward

To avoid contamination, we suggest scientists avoid glove use while conducting microplastic research. If that is not possible – for example, with biological samples where the researchers must wear gloves to protect themselves – we recommend a glove made without stearates, such as those designed for electronics manufacturing. To recover older, potentially contaminated datasets, we have developed methods to help differentiate the chemical fingerprints.

Science is an iterative process. New areas of research, including environmental microplastics, introduce new challenges to the scientific community. In addressing these new challenges, we will encounter setbacks, such as unforeseen contamination.

While we had to discard our initial dataset, we expect the lessons we learned about glove contamination to reach other scientists. In addition, we plan to continue our research on Michigan’s atmospheric microplastic contamination – but this time without gloves.

It’s important to note that even if the microplastic abundance in the environment is lower than researchers originally thought, any amount of microplastics can be troublesome, given their negative effects on human health and ecosystems.

Anne McNeil receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Vinyl Institute, the University of Michigan, and the State of Michigan Economic Development Corporation.

Madeline Clough receives funding from the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School and the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and The Arts. She is affiliated with the Michigan Microplastics Coalition.

– ref. Scientists may be overestimating the amount of microplastics in the environment – and the culprit is lab gloves – https://theconversation.com/scientists-may-be-overestimating-the-amount-of-microplastics-in-the-environment-and-the-culprit-is-lab-gloves-258545

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Elizabeth Riley, Lecturer in Psychology, Cornell University

Most people think of Alzheimer’s disease as an illness of aging. But in fact, the brain changes that characterize it begin much earlier – sometime around the third decade of life.

In the earliest of these changes, a tangled version of a protein called tau starts building up in a tiny region deep in the brain involved in sleep, attention and alertness, called the locus coeruleus. Tau later spreads to the rest of the brain.

Developing tau tangles doesn’t mean a person has Alzheimer’s disease – in fact, it happens to nearly everyone to varying degrees. But because these changes start in the locus coeruleus, some brain researchers – myself included – see this area as a canary in the coal mine for developing Alzheimer’s disease

We are exploring whether stopping or slowing down tau tangles in this brain region, or otherwise maintaining its health, may be a way to interrupt how the disease ultimately unfolds and to prevent other aspects of cognitive aging.

Emerging research from my lab and others is investigating the idea that a therapy called vagus nerve stimulation, which is already widely used for other health conditions, could be one way of keeping the locus coeruleus functioning properly.

The locus coeruleus and Alzheimer’s disease

The locus coeruleus sits in the brain stem, the lowest part of the brain. Its name, “blue spot,” comes from a pigment called neuromelanin that its cells produce.

The locus coeruleus plays a crucial role in multiple aspects of basic human functioning. It makes virtually all of the brain’s norepinephrine, a chemical critical for sleep, alertness, focus, learning and even immune function. And it receives inputs from nerves originating throughout the brain and body – including from the vagus nerve, which carries information to and from the heart, lungs and other organs.

My research explores this brain region’s structure, how nerve cells pass messages within it and how it connects with other brain regions. I also investigate how those features change throughout life and affect thinking and memory.

Studies suggest that starting in middle age, nerve cells in the locus coeruleus may get damaged by tau buildup, and that damage may correlate with declines in memory. Tau buildup, cell death and loss of function in the locus coeruleus precedes and predicts Alzheimer’s diagnosis and symptoms.

This has led researchers to hypothesize that keeping the locus coeruleus healthy could be a way to protect the rest of the brain, too.

Vagus nerve stimulation and brain health

The vagus nerve carries information between the brain and organs in the chest and abdomen, such as the heart and intestines, helping the brain monitor and regulate many of the body’s essential organs. It is responsible for sending rest and digest messages throughout the brain and body, stimulating digestion and promoting cellular repair.

In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers discovered that stimulating the vagus nerve can help ease epilepsy. They also found that doing so often also had other benefits, such as improving mood and thinking.

Today, vagus nerve stimulation is approved by the Food and Drug Administration not just for treating epilepsy, but also for migraine and depression, as well as to aid with stroke rehabilitation.

Vagus nerve stimulation for epilepsy and depression generally involves implanting an electrical stimulator in the left side of a patient’s chest, where the vagus nerve passes. Noninvasive devices for treating headaches deliver gentle pulses of electricity to certain places on the neck or ear where the vagus nerve is very close to the surface of the skin.

Even before the discovery of locus coeruleus’s link to Alzheimer’s disease, researchers hypothesized that vagus nerve stimulation might help mood and thinking in people with the condition. That’s because vagus nerve stimulation might work in part by raising brain levels of norepinephrine – and people with Alzheimer’s have too little norepinephrine in their brains.

Keeping the pace

Neuroscientists still don’t know exactly how or why vagus nerve stimulation might be beneficial for the brain, but one leading theory is that it helps regulate the activity of nerve cells in the locus coeruleus, enabling it to function properly.

Too much locus coeruleus activity could potentially make people too alert, causing them to feel stressed or even panicked. In fact, a hyperactive locus coeruleus fuels some symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Conversely, too little could cause depression or memory problems.

Some forms of vagus nerve stimulation neither turn up nor turn down locus coeruleus activity. Instead, they seem to affect the timing and pace of firing in its neurons. Other forms of vagus nerve stimulation seem to increase norepinephrine in the brains of rats, and researchers hypothesize that this may also be how vagus nerve stimulation treats epilepsy.

These different findings have led researchers to suggest that vagus nerve stimulation could act as an effective regulator for the locus coeruleus, enabling it to establish just the right level of activity for optimal functioning.

Can vagus nerve stimulation counter memory loss?

Intriguing hints are emerging that vagus nerve stimulation may help the aging brain.

A handful of studies have found that vagus nerve stimulation can prevent memory from worsening, or even improve it, in people with mild cognitive impairment or in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. One trial of 52 people ages 55 to 75 who were diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment reported meaningful improvements in memory and overall cognition after getting vagus nerve stimulation for an hour per day, five days a week for about six months.

Research in healthy adults around age 60 – and in healthy adults age 18 to 25 – has even reported improvements in different aspects of memory after just one session of vagus nerve stimulation.

This work is still very preliminary, but it offers hope for a new way of keeping some of the distressing symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and aging at bay.

Elizabeth Riley receives funding from the National Institute on Aging.

– ref. Vagus nerve stimulation shows promise as a way to counter Alzheimer’s disease- and age-related memory loss – https://theconversation.com/vagus-nerve-stimulation-shows-promise-as-a-way-to-counter-alzheimers-disease-and-age-related-memory-loss-269465

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Brian C. Keegan, Associate Professor of Information Science, University of Colorado Boulder; Harvard University

Paul Ehrlich opened his 1968 book “The Population Bomb” with a scene recounting returning to his hotel through a crowded Delhi neighborhood on a stifling night in the mid-1960s. He described the physical sensation of overpopulation: people eating, washing, arguing, begging – “people, people, people, people.”

From that visceral opening, he declared that famine, conflict and nuclear war would sweep the globe in the 1970s because of overpopulation. Hundreds of millions of people would starve to death regardless of any crash programs launched to prevent it. Ehrlich argued for population control, chillingly describing population growth as a “cancer” that needed to be cut out.

Ehrlich’s predictions were conspicuously wrong – and experts said so at the time. But his logic resonated through the 1970s and ’80s across the political spectrum. Its shadow is evident in today’s anti-immigration campaigns and White House arguments for mass deportation.

We have followed its long afterlife, as a computational social scientist studying contemporary extremism and as a historian whose book “Building the Population Bomb” analyzed Ehrlich’s impact.

Getting it wrong

Demographers and economists in the decades after World War II rejected the idea that Ehrlich was promoting to millions of readers: that population growth is the primary cause of environmental degradation. Instead, the expert consensus showed how pollution and resource depletion are driven far more by extraction and overconsumption than by head count.

Princeton demographer Ansley Coale told the Population Association of America in 1968, the year “The Population Bomb” was published, that attributing national failures to population growth had become fashionable despite most of the country’s problems having little to do with it.

His colleague and former Population Association of America president Frank Notestein demonstrated at the association’s 1970 meeting that increases in pollution had far outpaced increases in population. Notestein called population control in “developed regions” a distraction from the more immediate need to regulate industry.

Ecologist Barry Commoner’s 1971 empirical study confirmed that postwar environmental damage had stemmed almost entirely from new production methods and rising per capita consumption, not from the growing number of people. When the economist Julian Simon challenged Ehrlich in 1980 to a wager on changes in commodity prices over the next decade, Ehrlich accepted – and lost.

In a 2009 retrospective, Ehrlich acknowledged some of “The Population Bomb’s” flaws but did not revisit its central claim. The mass famines he predicted had not materialized in the 1970s because he had not anticipated the Green Revolution, a dramatic expansion of agriculture output. He said the book’s catastrophic scenarios were illustrative exercises, not inevitable forecasts. He dismissed his critics as shills for polluters. Ehrlich’s retrospective concluded, “It was thus a successful tract, and we’re proud of it.”

Origins of the ‘population bomb’ analogy

Ehrlich’s arguments resonated with the popular anxieties of the late 1960s. By tying population growth to the environment, the threat of nuclear war and the sexual revolution, Ehrlich generated left-wing support for population control, which had previously been primarily a concern of the political right.

With the publication of “The Population Bomb,” Ehrlich became a celebrity almost overnight. Though his claims about the consequences of population growth were consistently wrong, Ehrlich had an enormous public impact. A butterfly biologist, he was suddenly booking appearances on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.” He influenced dystopian Hollywood productions, such as “ZPG” (1972), “Soylent Green” (1973) and “Logan’s Run” (1976).

The intellectual genealogy behind “The Population Bomb” ran deeper than Ehrlich’s own career. The “bomb” analogy was borrowed from a 1954 pamphlet by Hugh Moore, a businessman whose population anxieties descended from Guy Irving Burch, the anti-immigrant eugenicist who founded the Population Reference Bureau in 1929.

Burch, worried about “alien or negro stock” replacing Europeans, introduced the phrase “population explosion” to American public discourse in the 1930s as part of a campaign for immigration restriction. Moore updated Burch’s framework for the Cold War, warning that population growth in Africa, Asia and Latin America would produce communist expansion and nuclear war.

Ehrlich’s use of ecological carrying capacity – the idea that any environment has a finite number of resources to support a population before collapsing – justified coercive population control initiatives as foreign and domestic environmental policies in the minds of many Americans.

India’s “Emergency” period from 1975-77 subjected an estimated 8 million people to sterilization under conditions ranging from financial inducement to outright coercion. China’s one-child policy was enforced through fines, forced sterilizations and compelled abortions for nearly three decades. Population control programs in some developing countries imposed contraception and sterilization on women without their consent.

California performed sterilizations on some inmates until the 2010s. Hysterectomies on detainees continued in at least one U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center until 2019.

Ehrlich tied environment to immigration

Within the United States, Ehrlich co-founded the organization Zero Population Growth, which quickly outlasted its original premise. By 1972, the total fertility rate in the United States was already below the replacement level, and ZPG pivoted to immigration restriction as its primary policy target.

David Brower, the first director of the Sierra Club, authored the famous line “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” in the foreword to “The Population Bomb.” He appointed John Tanton, Ehrlich’s ZPG co-founder, to chair the Sierra Club’s national population committee.

Tanton would go on to build a network of groups that would implement the logic Ehrlich had popularized. This logic linked Ehrlich’s ecological carrying capacity, lifeboat ethics – the idea that wealthy nations risked being swamped by immigration – and reactionary anxieties about demographic change.

Tanton’s anti-immigration network became one of the most influential organizations in late-20th-century American politics. In addition to ZPG, Tanton founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in 1979, the Center for Immigration Studies in 1985, The Social Contract Press in 1990 and NumbersUSA in 1996.

This network produced policy research and lobbied for drastic reductions in both legal and illegal immigration. It was also instrumental in repackaging nativism into genteel policy briefs for the 1994 Republican revolution, securing the bipartisan passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, and backing anti-immigration efforts that passed in California and Arizona. Ehrlich served on FAIR’s board of advisers until 2002. He died on March 13, 2026.

Ehrlich, Tanton and Brower, as part of Californians for Population Stabilization, tried to push the Sierra Club to adopt immigration restrictions as an official position, but members of the influential environmentalist group resisted. Ballot measures and board elections for the Sierra Club from the late 1990s into the early 2000s exposed the deep ties to anti-immigration activists – and defeated them.

Overpopulation in politics today

Ehrlich’s population anxieties continue to have a long afterlife as political figures build on the idea that immigration constitutes a form of “replacement” of existing populations. Once-fringe grievances suggesting white people were being replaced by people of color have become part of President Donald Trump’s MAGA allies’ “mass deportation now” agenda.

Fifty years separate India’s sterilization camps from today’s ICE detention warehouses, but we believe the logic connecting them is direct: a population defined as excessive, a government apparatus authorized to reduce it, and a scientific vocabulary used by some of the president’s closest allies to justify the means as an ecological necessity. Ehrlich’s contributions to that vocabulary proved far more durable than his predictions.

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. The long shadow of Paul Ehrlich’s ‘Population Bomb’ is evident in anti-immigration efforts today – https://theconversation.com/the-long-shadow-of-paul-ehrlichs-population-bomb-is-evident-in-anti-immigration-efforts-today-279151

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Jeanne Beatrix Law, Professor of English, Kennesaw State University

Debates about generative AI in higher education have been informed by studies of completed student papers, or self-reported survey data. Research shows that artificial intelligence tools can support learning, but also has raised concerns, including students’ overreliance, cheating, and the potential degradation of critical thinking and engagement.

While these types of studies provide interesting snapshots of reported practices, their methodologies may hide something important: how writing actually unfolds while students are composing with the assistance of AI.

A pilot study I led of undergraduate writers at Kennesaw State University takes a different approach. Using think-aloud protocols – a method where participants verbalize their thoughts while performing – our research captures how students interact with generative AI tools during the writing process itself. This method helps us understand decision-making processes as they occur.

Our preliminary findings suggest a more complex reality than the common narrative that students are simply having AI write their assignments. Instead, many students appear to be negotiating when and how AI belongs in their writing.

Looking inside the writing process

In our study, 20 undergraduate students completed a 20-minute writing session responding to the following prompt:

People spend a lot of time trying to achieve perfection in their personal or professional lives. People often demand perfection from others, creating expectations that may be challenging to live up to. In contrast, some people think perfection is not attainable or desirable.

The assignment was to draft a thesis and evidence-based paragraphs that argue their position on the value of striving for perfection. Students were told they were not expected to complete them but to work through their writing process toward finishing. Students were told there were no right or wrong ways to use AI and were asked to use generative AI exactly as they normally would while writing.

Instead of direct observation, the study relied on post-session screen recordings and analysis of students describing their process. Collecting this data – their actions on the computer and transcripts of the voice recordings – allowed researchers to analyze the writing process without interrupting it. To reduce the possibility that students might alter their behavior if they felt observed, researchers set a timer and left the room during the writing session. The goal was to minimize the Hawthorne Effect, a phenomenon in which people change their behavior because they know they are being watched.

What we found

Across the transcripts, a few qualitative patterns consistently emerged in how students collaborated with AI while writing.

First, many participants turned to AI at the beginning of the writing process to help generate ideas or draft a thesis.

What we see in this practice is the student using AI-generated output to spark and shape their own ideas. One student explained the strategy this way: “After [generating a few ideas,] I usually just use that [output] as a prompt.”

In these moments, AI functioned less as a final answer and more as a brainstorming tool that helped students move past the blank page.

However, students frequently continued drafting independently after generating initial ideas. Many transcripts include statements such as “I think my thesis should be …” or “Let me write this part,” suggesting that some students retained control over their argument.

Editing the bot

Another strong pattern across transcripts is that students rarely accept AI text without editing it. Instead, they actively revise the generated language. As one student described the process, the AI “rewrites” their initial prompts and then the student rewrites the AI’s output. This allows the student to claim “authorship and ownership” of the final draft.

Another participant redirected the AI response when it did not align with the assignment: “AI is not following the prompt … try again.”

These moments show students evaluating AI output critically and treating it almost as a sparring partner, rather than simply copying it.

We also found that some students rejected AI’s suggestions altogether.

In several writing sessions, participants explicitly decided not to use the AI responses. One student reflected on this decision while composing: “I don’t really use AI for my research.”

Other transcripts show students switching back to their own writing when AI responses felt too generic or disconnected from their argument. These moments indicate that students are not only collaborating with AI, but they are also drawing boundaries around where it belongs in their writing process.

Finally, several transcripts showed students turning to AI during moments of uncertainty or when they felt stuck.

As one participant explained, “I used a lot of AI because I was struggling.”

Even in those cases, students often used AI as support as they drafted their essays, rather than directly copying and pasting its responses.

What this says about AI and writing

Our analysis suggests that generative AI is entering student writing not as a wholesale replacement for human authorship, but as part of a negotiated collaboration. The results suggest that AI most often enters the composing process during idea generation, revision and moments of writer’s block, while students maintain control over argument choice, voice and final phrasing.

Understanding how decisions to use AI unfold during the writing process, and not just what appears in the final essay, may help educators design assignments and policies that keep the human writer firmly at the helm.

Because our current findings come from a pilot cohort of 20 undergraduate writers, the results should be interpreted cautiously. To test whether these patterns hold at a larger scale, the research team is expanding the study to 100 undergraduate participants. The expanded study will also examine how neurodivergent writers interact with generative AI during composing, an area that remains largely unexplored in current research.

Undergraduate student researchers at Kennesaw State contributed to the preliminary analysis described in this article: Kylee Johnson, Vara Nath, Ruth Sikhamani and Kaylee Ward.

Jeanne Beatrix Law serves on an OpenAI Educator Advisory Group and on an advisory educator group for BoodleBox AI.

– ref. College students are writing with AI – but a pilot study finds they’re not simply letting it write for them – https://theconversation.com/college-students-are-writing-with-ai-but-a-pilot-study-finds-theyre-not-simply-letting-it-write-for-them-276856

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Peter R. Crabb, Professor of Finance and Economics, Northwest Nazarene University; Institute for Humane Studies

U.S. companies stung by President Donald Trump’s emergency tariffs had hoped for relief when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in February 2026 in their favor. But settling on a remedy – namely, rebate checks from the government – may be an even bigger headache.

Fresh wrinkles are prompting businesses to take different routes as they try to recoup money, with many opting to sue to improve their odds. These lawsuits are also underscoring the complex ways that tariffs worked their way through corporate accounting. In some cases, their cost was a clear line item; in others, the impact was muddier – say, through changed supply lines or selective increases in retail pricing. And some have backed off from a legal fight altogether and sold their refund rights to investment firms, often at a deep discount, figuring that getting something is better than risk getting nothing.

These technicalities didn’t seem to concern most members of the high court. In fact, only one Justice, Brett Kavanaugh, raised the question of the decision’s practical complications in his dissent. But his warning of “substantial” repercussions now looks more prescient by the day.

“The United States may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who have paid the … tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed down costs to consumers or others,” he wrote. “As was acknowledged at oral argument, the refund process is likely to be a ‘mess.’”

We are professors of finance and law who have been following these cases closely. To begin untangling the “mess” this ruling created, it’s helpful to focus on the different ways companies processed these tariffs – and why this means that a quick and clean remedy is unlikely.

To refund or not to refund

In its 6-3 decision, the high court concluded that a broad category of Trump’s tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act exceeded the president’s legal authority. Many companies that had sued for relief in the form of rebate checks cheered the ruling.

Judge Richard Eaton at the Court of International Trade, tasked with overseeing the refund distribution, then ordered the Trump administration to immediately start the process by asking Customs and Border Protection to recalculate its revenues without the tariffs to determine the rebate total – a tally that the agency estimates at about US$166 billion. But no one is sure how long it will take or whether it will work. And that uncertainty is sparking a fresh round of litigation.

Consider the different approaches taken by two businesses that paid the tariffs: logistics giant FedEx and the retail chain Costco. Costco filed suit against the Trump administration before the Supreme Court decision, while FedEx was among the many businesses that sued after the ruling.

Fedex, which saw some of its cross-border business plummet by 25% to 35%, collected tariffs from both U.S. companies importing goods and from U.S. customers ordering from abroad. In this function as broker, it was able to separate out the tariffs as a line item. That means it can more easily calculate what it would pay back to its customers. If Fedex gets the rebates, it has said it will refund all clients who bore the cost.

The accounting for Costco, by contrast, is less straightforward. It paid the duties but reallocated much of the cost internally. For some goods, it shuffled its extensive global supply chains to mitigate the tariffs’ bite or covered the cost by selectively hiking prices on items where demand would be less affected. It has not made as explicit a commitment of repaying its customers, although it has said it will try to honor it.

In both cases, executive pledges of refunds weren’t enough to prevent class action lawsuits by skeptical consumers since the Supreme Court’s decision, arguing they needed a more ironclad guarantee.

Avoiding the fight

Other companies, meanwhile, are waiving a legal fight altogether and selling their refund rights to investment firms, often at only a fraction of what they had paid in levies, in the expectation that full repayment is unlikely.

These companies typically are too small to finance a legal battle but big enough to have sufficient money at stake for Wall Street to take interest. For example, Atlanta-based Kids2, which sources almost all of its toy and infant products in China, sold its rights before the high court’s ruling for about a quarter of what it paid out in the emergency tariffs.

Legal complications aside, logistical snags are also emerging. In response to Eaton’s order, Customs and Border Protection chief Brandon Lord stated in a filing on March 6, 2026, that the government was “not able to comply” due to the “unprecedented volume of refunds” overwhelming the agency’s technology. It’s working on an online system to “streamline and consolidate refunds and interest payments,” to be operational in 45 days of that filing, he wrote.

In response, Eaton paused his order requiring immediate refunds, but he has demanded regular updates on CBP’s progress. On March 19, Lord reported
that the four components of the new online system were between 45% and 80% functional.

New tariffs may loom

While some companies may get relief for levies they already paid, there’s the risk Trump could still make good on his threat to use other federal statutes to impose tariffs. Those laws aren’t an easy workaround for the administration, but they still provide some options for Trump to apply tariffs on imports, including those that had been affected under the emergency levies.

Further uncertainty, in short, is likely.

As the stock market volatility in 2025 after Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement showed, this uncertainty can be costly. And the Supreme Court’s decision hasn’t allayed those fears. Companies have delayed investment, stockpiled inventory and diverted resources into compliance and legal review since the tariff wars kicked off.

Such actions can tie up capital that could otherwise fund new employment, higher wages or product innovation. Trump’s trade policy is, in fact, underscoring the basic economic lesson that tariffs don’t eliminate trade but simply make it more expensive, research shows.

Businesses have to decide to either pass these import taxes along to consumers via higher prices or absorb higher input costs themselves. Trump’s experiment is no different. According to fresh research from the New York Federal Reserve, as the average tariff rate jumped from 2.6% to 13% from January through November 2025, almost 90% of the burden hit consumers and businesses.

That’s why tariffs are a rare point of consensus among economists: They harm economic growth and are more costly today than ever before, given how interconnected global supply chains have become. And as the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling shows, undoing their effect is a lot messier than tariff boosters would admit.

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. Supreme Court’s tariff decision still leaves a ‘mess’ for companies trying to grab refunds – https://theconversation.com/supreme-courts-tariff-decision-still-leaves-a-mess-for-companies-trying-to-grab-refunds-276822

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Alejandro N. Flores, Professor of Geoscience, Boise State University

Across much of the Western United States, winter 2026 was the year the snow never came. Many ski resorts got by with snowmaking but shut down their winter operations early. Fire officials and water supply managers are worried about summer.

Where I live in Boise, Idaho, temperatures hit the low 80s Fahrenheit (high-20s Celsius) in mid-March. The same heat dome sent temperatures soaring to 105 F (40 C) in Phoenix.

Ordinarily, water managers and hydrologists like me who study the Western U.S. expect the mountain snowpacks to be at their fullest around April 1. Snowpacks are natural reservoirs of water that farms and communities depend on through the hot, dry summer. Their snow water equivalent, meaning the amount of liquid water in the snowpack, is seen as a bellwether for water supplies.

But the 2026 water year has been anything but ordinary. In fact, its snow drought has few historical analogs.

Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service shows that out of approximately 70 river basins across the Western U.S., only five are at or above the 1991-2020 median snow water equivalent for this time of year. Most of those are clustered around the Yellowstone region of western Wyoming and eastern Idaho.

By contrast, 11 basins have less than 25% of the 1991-2020 median, and more than half are below 50%. The headwaters of critically important rivers, including the Colorado, the Columbia and the Missouri, are peppered with basins that are far below historical averages.

Other important measures of snow water storage and ecosystem health, including which areas have snow cover in the Western U.S and how long it’s been there, also point toward snow reserves that are far below recent years.

How did we get here?

Just because the Western U.S. is in a snow drought doesn’t mean it isn’t getting precipitation. Temperatures have been high enough since the start of the water year in October that a lot of what normally would have fallen as snow fell as rain instead.

The West experienced a very warm December at all but the highest elevations, but strong storms also drenched large parts of the region. Washington state was swamped with rain that triggered flooding and melted the existing snowpack.

Temperatures in January were less extreme but still warmer than historical averages. However, precipitation in January was far below the 1991-2020 average throughout much of the region. February brought precipitation conditions closer to historical averages, but temperatures were much warmer than normal.

The Western U.S., therefore, got a triple whammy: Two of the three critical snow-accumulation months were too warm, and the third was too dry.

Water worries ahead

So what does this mean for water supplies and river flows?

A recent assessment of drought conditions from NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System suggests 2026 will be a tight year for water supplies.

Water managers in Wyoming and Washington are already signaling that some water rights holders – cities, irrigation districts, individual farms and industries can take limited amounts of water from rivers, canals and aquifers – can expect to receive less than their full allotment of water in 2026. It’s not unreasonable to expect other states to soon follow suit.

Throughout the Western U.S., water rights are administered according to the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation – those who hold the oldest legitimate claims to water from a river, reservoir or aquifer are entitled to receive their allotments first.

Junior water rights holders who may be at risk of receiving less than their full allotment of water likely have difficult decisions ahead related to the planting and management of their crops. The challenges are compounded by the likelihood of increases in fertilizer and transportation costs associated with the ongoing war in Iran.

In the Colorado River Basin, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s most probable forecast indicates water levels in Lake Powell falling below the minimum power pool elevation in December 2026. That’s bad news for power supplies, because below that level, the Glen Canyon Dam can’t produce hydroelectric power. The dam contributes power for millions of customers across seven states.

What the snow drought means for fire season

Another big concern is whether the historic snow drought is setting up the West for a bad fire season. That’s still an open question.

Rain has meant moisture is available now for plants to grow, but the lack of snowpack that normally keeps meltwater flowing through summer raises concerns about whether those plants will dry out, leaving them ready to burn.

Fire is a historically important feature of the forest and rangeland ecosystems of the West, and these ecosystems are to some degree adapted to large swings in conditions from year to year and season to season.

Because precipitation across much of the West is close to historical averages, there is snow in some of the highest-elevation mountains. And at lower elevations, some of the precipitation that fell as rain likely remains in the soils.

Weather conditions in the late spring and summer – how much rain falls and how hot and dry conditions become – will play critical roles in determining the shape forests and rangelands will be in for fire season.

What this winter suggests about the future

The record-low snowpack may be a harbinger of what a warmer future will look like in the region. Many researchers have investigated how climate change will influence snowpacks and water supply throughout the Western U.S., but questions and critical challenges remain.

Among them: In years like this, with near-normal precipitation but low snowpack, are there difficult-to-observe stores of water in the deeper subsurface that can help buffer against loss of snow for periods of time? That’s one of several questions my colleagues and I have been working on.

This year’s snow drought presents a timely, albeit high-stakes, stress test for the West. Everyone will be watching.

Alejandro N. Flores receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the US Bureau of Reclamation, and the USDA Agricultural Research Service.

– ref. 2026’s historic snow drought brings worries about water, wildfires and the future in the West – https://theconversation.com/2026s-historic-snow-drought-brings-worries-about-water-wildfires-and-the-future-in-the-west-279163