Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Ji Y. Son, Professor of Psychology, California State University, Los Angeles

The nonprofit ARC Prize Foundation on May 1, 2026, released the results of a new benchmark: a test of an AI system’s ability to solve a game. The results were striking – humans scored 100%, while the most advanced AI systems scored under 1%.

At first glance, this may be surprising to users of AI who are impressed by its polished essays, codebases and multistep projects generated in seconds. How can these brilliant AI systems struggle with these simple Tetris-shape puzzles?

That confusion points to a risk: AI is becoming integrated into everyday life faster than people can make sense of it.

We are cognitive psychologists who study how to teach difficult concepts. To recognize the limits and risks of today’s AI agent systems, it’s important for people to grasp that the systems can both accomplish superhuman feats and make mistakes few humans would. To that end, we propose a new way to think about AIs: as button-pushing explorers.

Mental models for AI

We teach college students, a group rapidly incorporating AI tools into their daily routines. That gives us regular opportunities to ask what they think is going on with AI. The answers vary widely. One student said that someone at OpenAI or Anthropic is reading and approving every response the system generates. Another, more succinctly, said, “It’s magic.”

These responses illustrate two tempting ways of making sense of AI. At one extreme, AI is treated as an inscrutable black box – a powerful but ultimately mysterious force. At another, people explain it using the same assumptions they use to understand other humans: that its outputs reflect reasoning or judgment.

The worry is that these misinterpretations don’t go away as users gain more experience interacting with AI, and they might get reinforced. When AI performs well, its output can feel like evidence of understanding or confirmation that it really is something like magic. That apparent success makes it harder to question what the system is actually doing. Biases can seem logical or inevitable; harmful behavior can look like a deliberate choice or even fate, as if it could not have gone any other way.

Saying that AI models are shaped by patterns in data, training processes and system design is true, but that’s too abstract to tell people when to trust the systems’ outputs or when they might fail. To help people avoid misplaced trust in AI, AI literacy efforts will need to include some mechanistic understanding of what produces their behavior – explanations that are perhaps not perfectly accurate but useful. Statistician George Box once wrote, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

Researchers have come up with several mental models for large language models. One is “stochastic parrot,” which shows that the models use statistical methods – stochastic refers to probabilities – to mimic responses with no understanding of meaning. Another is “bag of words,” which emphasizes that the models are collections of words – for example, all English words found on the internet – with a mechanism for giving you the best set of words based on your prompt.

These ways of thinking about large language models were never meant to be complete accounts of the systems. But the metaphors serve an important cognitive purpose: They push back against the idea that fluent language is necessarily caused by humanlike understanding.

But as the AI systems people use are increasingly powerful agents capable of stringing together actions on their own, it’s important for people to have a different kind of mental model: one that explains how they act. One place to find such a model is in earlier research on AI systems that learned to play Atari 2600 games. These systems didn’t understand the games the way humans do, but they still managed to rack up a lot of points.

The simple loop: Act, observe, adjust

Imagine a neural network, a relatively simple kind of AI model, placed into a video game it has never seen before. It does not “understand” the game like a human would. It has no idea whether it’s shooting space invaders or navigating an ancient pyramid. It doesn’t know the goals or rules.

Instead, it learns to play through a simple loop: Take an action – move left, jump, shoot – observe what changes, and then adjust. If an action leads to a good outcome, such as gaining points, it adjusts to become more likely to take similar actions in similar situations. If it leads to a bad outcome, such as losing a life, it adjusts in the opposite direction.

Even this simple mechanism can produce surprisingly capable behavior. Over time, by repeating this loop, the neural networks learned to play a wide range of Atari games – but not all games.

There is one game that famously stumped these early neural networks: Montezuma’s Revenge. To make progress, a player must carry out a long sequence of actions – climbing ladders, avoiding obstacles, retrieving keys – before receiving any reward at all. Unlike simpler games, most actions offer very little immediate feedback. The game required something like goal-directed, long-term planning.

Early neural networks would try a few actions, receive no reward and fail to make further progress through Montezuma’s underground pyramid. From the system’s perspective, all actions looked equally useless. But researchers made a breakthrough by changing the feedback signal. Instead of rewarding only success, they also rewarded the system for doing something new. The rewards were for visiting parts of the game it had not seen before or trying actions it had not previously taken. This tweak encouraged exploration.

With that change, performance improved dramatically. The neural network began navigating obstacles, taking multiple steps toward goals and adapting when things went wrong. From the outside, this kind of behavior can look like planning or problem-solving. But what looks like planning was not caused by sophisticated planning abilities. The underlying mechanism is still the same simple loop: act, observe, adjust.

This kind of system isn’t a stochastic parrot or a bag of words. It’s closer to a button-pushing explorer: something that doesn’t understand the world in a human sense but moves forward by pushing buttons, seeing what happens and adjusting what it does next.

From video games to modern AI agents

Today’s AI systems can do far more than play games like Montezuma’s Revenge. They can coordinate tools, write and run code, and carry out multistep projects. The range of possible actions is much larger, and the environments in which they operate are increasingly complex.

But these agents are still fundamentally button-pushing explorers. The behavior can be sophisticated, but the process that produces it is not. Humans can often infer how a new environment works after just a few observations. Systems that rely on these feedback loops cannot. They need to try many actions and see what happens before they can make progress.

This helps explain both the strengths of these AI systems and some of their most concerning failures. What these agents learn depends on what is being rewarded. And in real-world systems, those reward signals are often imperfect.

AI systems that conduct negotiations aim to maximize their client’s interests, sometimes with deceptive tactics. Rental pricing software used by landlords ends up price fixing. Marketing tools generate persuasive but misleading reviews.

These systems aren’t trying to be evil or greedy. They are adjusting to the signals they are given. From the button-pushing explorer perspective, these failures are downright predictable.

Effective AI literacy means holding two ideas at once: These systems can do surprisingly complex things, and they are not doing them the way humans do. If AI is seen as humanlike or magical, its outputs feel authoritative. But if it is understood, even imperfectly, as a button-pushing explorer shaped by feedback, people are likely to ask better questions: Why is it doing this? What shaped this behavior? What might it be missing?

That’s the difference between being impressed by AI and being able to reason about it.

Ji Y. Son receives research funding from the Gates Foundation and Valhalla Foundation.

Alice Xu 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. Button-pushing explorers: How to grasp that AI agents can do amazing things while knowing nothing – https://theconversation.com/button-pushing-explorers-how-to-grasp-that-ai-agents-can-do-amazing-things-while-knowing-nothing-281498

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Christian Waugh, Professor of Psychology, Wake Forest University

Picture Gigi, having a chat with her boss, when the meeting takes a sharp turn. Gigi’s boss tells her that her work has been lacking recently and that maybe she needs to stay late a couple of evenings to make it up. Surprised by her boss’s remarks, she feels the rumblings of anxiety rising in her mind and body. Psychology research suggests that Gigi feels anxious because she interpreted her boss’s remarks as something threatening that perhaps she can’t handle.

Just as Gigi starts frantically looking online for new jobs, she spies the “employee of the month” plaque on her desk from last year. She thinks to herself that maybe she can get back to her old form. She has changed her initial view of the situation (need to run away from a threat) to a new one (let’s rise to the challenge), causing her anxiety to subside. Psychologists call this process reappraisal.

Studies show that reappraising emotional situations is a powerful way to change how you feel. When you find the silver linings in bad situations or give others and yourself the benefit of the doubt, it can help you feel better.

I’m a psychology researcher who’s interested in how people change their emotions. Gigi may feel a little less anxious in the moment, but does she truly believe that she can make up the work on time and regain her former glory? My colleagues and I set out to investigate whether it’s possible to start the process of reappraisal without going all the way through with it. Are people getting the full benefit from trying to think differently about their emotions?

Reappraisal has multiple steps

When my colleague Kateri McRae and I first started thinking about what it means to fully reappraise emotional experiences, we were struck by something we saw in the emotion regulation research. Almost all of the studies treated reappraisal as a one-step process. Researchers would ask participants to “reappraise this to make yourself feel better” and then measure the effects.

However, theories about how people regulate their emotions suggest that, like any effortful psychological process, reappraisal involves multiple steps.

When you want to change how you’re feeling, you first generate a reappraisal. You bend and stretch your mind to come up with some alternative way to look at the situation. For Gigi, seeing the employee of the month plaque helped. She could have also thought of her boss’s previous compliments or how it felt to get projects done early.

After you generate a reappraisal, it might seem like you’re done, but you’re not. That alternative interpretation is fragile and must compete with your original take that’s driving your emotion. Somehow you need to strengthen that reappraisal so it can stick.

We call this implementation – when you focus and elaborate on that reappraisal to really change your mind about the situation. For Gigi, she may continue to think about all the ways that she can be a great employee so that it lodges firmly in her mind and makes her anxiety truly disappear.

We tested this idea in a study. We showed 89 undergraduate participants images of negative situations and asked them to first just generate a reappraisal of the image that could help them feel better about it. For example, they might see a picture of a frail man in a hospital bed and tell themselves that the man is getting good treatment and will be better soon. Then, we showed them the image again and asked them to focus and elaborate in their mind on their reappraisal.

Participants felt a little better after generating a reappraisal, but they felt much better after implementing it by focusing and fleshing out the details. In a follow-up study, we showed that these emotional boosts persisted when viewing the images later.

Choosing to commit to feeling better

So we experimentally showed that people reappraise their feelings in two steps. So what? That’s probably what everyone does naturally, anyway, right?

This was the next question we sought to answer. We conducted a study with 52 undergraduate participants like the earlier one, but with a twist. This time, after participants generated a reappraisal, we gave them a choice to continue the reappraisal process by implementing it or to stop the process by distracting themselves.

Participants chose to continue reappraising their emotions only about half the time. Even though reappraisal made participants feel better about the emotional images, there were still many times when they stopped the process prematurely and did not enjoy its full benefits.

In real life

These studies showing the benefits of fully following through on emotional reappraisals are lab experiments, but they have implications for how people try to help themselves feel better in real life.

First, it’s hard to intentionally change how you think about something, and people tend to dislike continuing to do hard things. Indeed, in our choice study, people opted to give up on reappraising when they weren’t feeling its benefits early on. Knowing this human tendency might give you the best chance of continuing reappraisal even when it doesn’t feel like it’s working or is hard.

Second, people often get reappraisals from others, and it’s tempting to think that hearing a new perspective is all you need. Indeed, we have unpublished data that shows that participants feel pretty good when receiving a reappraisal from someone else about their own situation. But other people cannot change your mind for you. You must do that yourself if you want to truly feel better.

Next time you’re in an unpleasant situation like Gigi’s, don’t just cursorily think that you can rise to the challenge. Really think through the situation and let your new perspective become your only one.

Christian Waugh receives funding from National Institutes of Health.

– ref. You can change your emotions – but it’s a 2-step process that takes some effort – https://theconversation.com/you-can-change-your-emotions-but-its-a-2-step-process-that-takes-some-effort-280000

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Marc Zimmer, Professor of Chemistry, Connecticut College

Fingerprinting transformed police investigations by making it possible to place a suspect at a crime scene with physical evidence. Similarly, genome sequencing has changed how disease detectives study outbreaks by allowing them to read a pathogen’s genes as a biological record of where it came from and how it spread.

One way to think about sequencing is to imagine a virus or bacteria’s genome as a recipe book. Each gene is a recipe for making a protein. When scientists sequence a pathogen, they read the order of the genetic letters in those recipes.

Over time, small changes appear in the recipes as the pathogen mutates. By comparing those changes in samples collected from different places and times, researchers can determine which infections are related and estimate when and where the pathogen entered a population.

Scientists have used sequencing in this way to track outbreaks of COVID-19, Ebola, mpox and foodborne illnesses. This information helps public health investigators connect cases that might otherwise seem unrelated.

Still, genomic sequencing has limits. It can show that different pathogen strains are related, but it cannot fully explain why an outbreak began in one place, why it spread in a particular direction, or how human behavior shaped its course. Answering those questions requires combining genomic data with historical records, archaeological artifacts, trade records and epidemiological investigations.

I am a chemist and the author of “Diseases Without Borders: Plagues, Pandemics, and Beyond,” a book for young adults on infectious disease and the ways it has shaped human history. In my research, I’ve found that while the genome can help researchers trace the evolutionary trail of a pathogen, other fields are needed to explain the environmental conditions that allowed this trail to become an outbreak.

Ancient DNA tells only part of the story

Advances in DNA sequencing and extraction over the past decade have made it possible to recover fragments of ancient DNA from bones and teeth. Researchers can use these genomes to study a metaphorical molecular fossil record of microbial evolution.

The Black Death, one of the deadliest pandemics in history, shows both the power and the limits of sequencing.

The infectious disease behind the Black Death, plague, is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. DNA recovered from the teeth of people buried more than 5,000 years ago in what is now Sweden revealed the existence of an ancestral form of Y. pestis that had not yet adapted to fleas.

About 2,000 years later, the bacterium made an important evolutionary shift: It gained the ability to survive in fleas and pass back and forth between humans, rats and other mammals via flea bites. That change made the pathogen far more dangerous and helped pave the way for three great plague pandemics that followed: the Justinianic Plague from the sixth to eighth century; the Black Death and later waves from the 1300s into the 1700s; and the third pandemic from the 19th to mid-20th centuries.

But how and why did plague emerge and move through human societies with such devastating results? Genetic results alone are not enough to answer these questions.

When gravestones become genetic evidence

Geneticists needed archaeologists, paleoclimatologists and historians to complete the picture of the plague pandemics. The genome revealed the lineage. Other disciplines supplied the historical and environmental context.

Two 14th-century graveyards in what is now Kyrgyzstan provide a striking example of how historical evidence can guide genetic investigations into the origins of a pandemic.

Historian Philip Slavin noticed archival records pointing to an unusual number of gravestones from 1338 and 1339. Some of those tombstones explicitly referred to a pestilence as the cause of death.

That clue led to the next stage of the investigation, where archaeologist Maria Spyrou and her team extracted and sequenced ancient DNA from the skeletal remains of seven people buried in the graves and found genetic traces of Yersinia pestis in three of the skeletons. These strains were close precursors of the strain linked to the Black Death and ancestors of several modern Y. pestis lineages.

This major finding was still not the whole story. It could explain where the Black Death pandemic began but not how the disease spread across Asia to Europe. Researchers found a potential answer to this question in artifacts buried at the site, which included pearls from the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean coral and foreign coins. Those objects suggested that the region was connected to long-distance trade networks.

Once the gravestones, skeletal remains, written records and trade goods were considered together, a richer picture emerged. Researchers could place the pathogen in a specific time and place and connect it to the networks of human movement that may have carried plague westward.

Sequencing provided the biological clue, revealing the pathogen’s identity and ancestry. History and archaeology turned that clue into a plausible narrative.

From ancient DNA to modern outbreaks

Genomic sequencing isn’t limited to examining outbreak cold cases. It is also researchers’ tool of choice for understanding new diseases.

When the first reported COVID-19 cases emerged in 2019, researchers quickly sequenced the virus and found that it was closely related to the virus that caused the 2002 SARS outbreak. This placed the new virus within a known family of pathogens.

Later genomic sequencing helped reveal the scale of a major superspreading event: the 2020 Biogen conference in Boston.

The biotech company Biogen brought together about 175 European and American executives at a moment when COVID-19 was only beginning to spread in the United States. In Europe, COVID-19 was also escalating, with northern Italy reporting locally transmitted clusters just days before the meeting. After the meeting, many Massachusetts cases were linked to the conference.

Researchers then analyzed thousands of viral genomes from patients in Massachusetts and elsewhere. One viral genome carried a unique genetic signature traceable to a European attendee at the conference. It matched viruses circulating in Europe but also had an additional mutation that appeared to have arisen during the attendee’s travel to Boston or early in the conference.

Because that altered sequence appeared only in people with direct or indirect ties to the meeting, it served as a genetic marker for the COVID-19 strain originating at the Biogen conference. By comparing it with other viral sequences in national databases, researchers tracked the strain associated with the conference to 29 states and several other countries.

Interviews and contact tracing alone couldn’t have made that chain of infection so clear because people may not know exactly when they were exposed, especially when infections spread through brief encounters, via travel or large meetings.

When genomes join the investigation

Genome sequencing has rewritten the history of disease by giving scientists a way to read a pathogen’s own record of change.

It can link ancient graves to later pandemics and trace a modern outbreak from one conference room to cases across a continent.

But the greatest strength of genome sequencing lies in partnership. Sequencing does not replace history, archaeology or public health investigation. It gives them a new molecular partner.

Combining work from these fields produces a fuller and more accurate account of how disease moves through the world.

Marc Zimmer 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. Genome sequencing is rewriting the history of disease outbreaks – but without social context, it can tell only part of the story – https://theconversation.com/genome-sequencing-is-rewriting-the-history-of-disease-outbreaks-but-without-social-context-it-can-tell-only-part-of-the-story-279963

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Margaret Bender, Professor of Anthropology, Wake Forest University

If you wanted to learn the Cherokee language in the 1990s, there weren’t many written resources: three dissertations from the 1970s and ’80s, one textbook and a handful of college classes in North Carolina and Oklahoma. Even on most Cherokee land, it was unusual to see street or building signs in this endangered Indigenous language.

There are nearly 500,000 enrolled members in the three federally recognized Cherokee Tribes: the Cherokee Nation and United Keetoowah Band, both based in Oklahoma, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, based in North Carolina. Only about 2,000 of those members speak Cherokee as a first language.

But over the past few decades, opportunities for learners of all ages have exploded. One of the authors of this article, Thomas Belt – a first-language speaker from Oklahoma – has been honored to play a role in that resurgence, working as a teacher, curriculum developer and language consultant. Today there is bilingual signage throughout the Eastern Cherokee reservation, in the Cherokee Nation capital of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and on tribal buildings and some private businesses throughout Cherokee country.

Cherokees of all ages and in communities across the U.S. are working to revitalize the language in new ways, from apps, games and videos to social media, music and immersion schools.

Amid all this innovation, there is also a 200-year-old resource that language learners turn to: the Cherokee translation of the Christian Bible.

New writing system

Translating the Bible into Cherokee began early in the 19th century, shortly after Protestant missionaries arrived in the Cherokee Nation – centered mainly in what are now western North Carolina, north Georgia and eastern Tennessee.

In 1821, the brilliant Cherokee Sequoyah invented a writing system for the Cherokee language. First, he identified all the vowels, consonants and combinations of them used in the Cherokee language. He then invented and taught characters for every syllable – making his writing system a syllabary rather than an alphabet that assigns a character to each individual consonant or vowel.

The elegance of the system made it easy for speakers to learn, and Cherokee literacy rates were reportedly high soon after its invention. The 1828 launch of the bilingual Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper in the U.S., is testimony to the writing system’s popularity.

It also made it easy for the Cherokee to read the Bible, once it had been translated. Teams of Euro-American missionaries and Cherokee converts produced a Cherokee version of the Book of John in 1824. A complete Cherokee New Testament and most of the Old Testament emerged in the following decades.

3 options

For language learners today, the Cherokee Bible is much more than a source of words. In our 2025 book “The New Voice of God,” we found that the text captures the cross-cultural encounter that produced it. The translation does more than show how the Cherokee interpreted Christian theology; it is a window into the Cherokee worldview.

At the time, Cherokee did not have words for many of the concepts found in the Bible – hypocrisy, poverty, power and king, to name just a few. In such situations, translators have three options.

One is to use loan words, borrowed from the foreign language. Texts heavy with loan words, though, often require special training or guides in order for the general public to read them. We did not find any true loan words in the parts of the Bible we studied.

A second option is semantic extension: using a word whose meaning is similar in some way, creating a kind of cross-cultural metaphor. This happens frequently in the Cherokee translation. For example, sheep and shepherds appear frequently in the Bible, but sheep are not indigenous to the Americas. Instead, the translation uses the word for deer, “ahwi,” to translate sheep and represents a shepherd as “ahwi diktiya,” or deer-watcher.

The third option is to create a new descriptive word, a process also seen throughout the translation. For example, the Cherokee word for idols is “unehlanvhi diyelvhi,” meaning imaginary gods.

Cultural differences

In some cases, translators’ challenges suggested deep differences between a Western worldview and their own.

Christian missionaries’ culture drew a clear distinction between the sacred and the secular. In Cherokee culture, however, science, ritual and belief are tightly intertwined.

Specialized Christian terms such as resurrection, repentance, sin, purity, baptism, salvation and blessing didn’t translate well into that worldview. The expression of those concepts in Cherokee thus reads as more ordinary and accessible than in English.

‘Child’ of God

Major differences between the grammars of Cherokee and English also shaped how Cherokee Christians reframed biblical concepts. For example, Cherokee has no gendered pronouns: no equivalents of he, she, him, her, his or hers. This means that beings who are not clearly recognizable as human men or women, such as angels, devils and God, come across as gender-neutral in the Cherokee translation.

God becomes masculine only when referred to as a father, as in “ogidoda,” “our father.” Instead, the Cherokee Bible most commonly translates God as “unehlanvhi,” which is usually interpreted as meaning a gender-neutral creator. Jesus is described as the “uwetsi,” or child, of God – even though there is a fuller Cherokee phrase, “uwetsi atsusa,” boy child, that could have clearly identified Jesus as the son of God.

In English, some speakers consider “mankind” to refer to both men and women. But in Cherokee, the word for man, “asgaya,” is not interpreted that way. Whenever the word man appears in English translations of the Bible, the Cherokee word “yvwi,” person, is used, or occasionally “kilo,” someone. This inclusivity would have resonated much better with traditional Cherokee culture, which was more egalitarian and matrilineal, with ancestry and property passed down through mothers.

Learning today

The Bible plays various roles in today’s Cherokee language learning, including as a source of vocabulary. For example, the most widely used online Cherokee dictionary gives Genesis 28:18 as its sample text for the word “go’i,” oil. But it also models how to form fluent phrases and sentences, mark transitions, narrate events and correctly use Cherokee’s complex grammar.

Perhaps even more importantly, the Cherokee Bible offers invaluable insight into Cherokee-specific meanings, interpretations of social and spiritual concepts, and a benchmark for understanding how the language has changed. Though the history of the relationship between Christian missionaries and Indigenous people is complex, this historic text is supporting an impressive contemporary wave of cultural and linguistic renewal.

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 Cherokee Bible, one of the language’s first books, is a window between worldviews – https://theconversation.com/the-cherokee-bible-one-of-the-languages-first-books-is-a-window-between-worldviews-271717

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Wil Burns, Professor of Research in Environmental Policy, American University School of International Service

Innovators who are working on ways to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to fight climate change are having a tough time lately.

Their biggest supporter, Microsoft, recently began telling partners that it is pausing its carbon removal purchases. To get a sense of how big of a deal this is, look at the numbers: The tech company alone has purchased approximately 80% of the contracted cumulative volume of carbon removals to date. Its retrenchment is viewed as potentially a major blow to the sector.

However, there may be a bright spot for this industry, and it comes from an unexpected source: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency quietly decided in March to grant a research permit under the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act to a Houston-based carbon removal startup.

The company, Carboniferous, aims to assess the potential to durably lock up greenhouse gases by harvesting plants that took in carbon dioxide on land and sinking them to the bottom of the ocean.

This approach is often called “ocean biomass sinking,” or marine anoxic carbon storage.

Ocean biomass sinking is one of several carbon removal approaches involving the ocean known as “marine carbon dioxide removal.” Other marine approaches include adding alkaline materials that react with seawater to increase the uptake of carbon dioxide, seeding oceans with iron to stimulate the growth of phytoplankton that can take up carbon dioxide, and farming seaweed to also take up carbon dioxide and sink it.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which compiles research on climate change from scientists around the world, calls carbon dioxide removal “unavoidable” if the world hopes to keep rising temperatures in check and achieving the targets of the Paris climate agreement.

But is sinking biomass in the ocean the answer?

I am the co-founding director of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University, and I have reviewed several of these projects. I see both pros and cons to ocean carbon removal techniques.

How ocean biomass sinking works

Carboniferous plans to carry out its field experiment in the Orca Basin off the coast of Louisiana. The basin is anoxic, meaning devoid of oxygen, and has a higher concentration of salt that most seawater. The EPA permit lets the company sink 20 burlap sacks containing sugarcane residue and monitoring equipment to the bottom of the sea there to study what happens.

Globally, land vegetation, including trees and crops, sequesters approximately 60 billion tons of carbon per year. However, a large portion of this carbon is quickly released back into the atmosphere – often within months to years – when the vegetation dies and decomposes, or is burned.

Ocean biomass sinking aims to lock up that carbon on the ocean floor in low-oxygen areas, where decomposition is much slower. Anaerobic processes, such as fermentation, may leave the biomass largely intact for centuries or millennia. Colder water environments can also slow the rate of biomass decay.

The concerns

Two questions that arise are whether this approach would be effective at the scale needed and what risks it might pose to ocean ecosystems.

Recent studies have estimated that ocean biomass storage projects could durably store somewhere between 0.1 and 1 gigatons of carbon dioxide annually. That sounds like a lot, but humanity may need to remove 7 to 9 gigatons of carbon dioxide each year from the atmosphere by the middle of the century and up to 20 gigatons per year by 2100 to meet global climate goals and avoid dangerously high temperatures.

A bigger concern is that substantially increasing organic matter in deep ocean environments might stimulate the growth of anaerobic bacteria, which can produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas that could offset much of the benefits of this approach.

Proponents of ocean biomass storage counter that the absence of vertical mixing among the water layers in ocean ecosystems would prevent any additional methane releases from ultimately escaping to the atmosphere. Further research is clearly required to know the risks.

Ocean biomass storage might also pose environmental and economic risks. As biomass descends in the water column, it has the potential to release particulates or organic matter, which could alter the activities of microbes as well as the food supply and oxygen in the ocean mesopelagic zone. The zone is a busy region of high productivity and home to a million undescribed species. The result could harm commercial fisheries and other species.

It’s also unclear how seafloor communities, such as bacteria, other microbes and fungi, might respond to the introduction of massive amounts of biomass.

And the introduction of large amounts of additional biomass in deep-ocean regions might attract species that feed on dead plant material, or their predators, which could alter species interactions in ecosystems that scientists know very little about. Those effects could be further exacerbated by decaying biomass reducing oxygen in seafloor environments and potentially increasing the release of hydrogen sulfide, methane, nitrous oxide and nitrogen and phosphorus compounds.

Other ways to store carbon in the oceans

Carboniferous is not the only company focused on ocean biomass storage. Israel-based Rewind is currently experimenting with burying waste plant matter from farms and cities in an anoxic Black Sea region off the coast of Romania, as well as beneath seabed sediments in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Haifa in Israel. The company believes that it could sink 1 million tons of biomass residue annually by 2030.

Another Israeli company, BlueGreen Water Technologies, takes a very different approach. Instead of collecting biomass from terrestrial sources, it uses a solution of hydrogen peroxide to kill, and ultimately sink, toxic harmful algal blooms made up of cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae. This approach may also eliminate blooms that can devastate aquatic environments by creating low-oxygen dead zones. And because algae sequester substantial amounts of carbon, the company claims that this approach could also remove billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere in ocean and freshwater ecosystems.

The world’s oceans are by far Earth’s largest carbon sink, storing roughly 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere and 20 times more than terrestrial forests and soils combined. This provides a compelling case to explore marine carbon removal options.

However, as is the case with all marine-based approaches, ocean biomass storage raises an array of questions that need to be resolved before the world can consider deploying it on a large scale. Carboniferous’ research program is one piece of this puzzle.

Wil Burns 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. A deep-ocean climate plan wins rare EPA approval, but is sinking plants in the sea the answer? – https://theconversation.com/a-deep-ocean-climate-plan-wins-rare-epa-approval-but-is-sinking-plants-in-the-sea-the-answer-282361

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Amanda Moniz, David M. Rubenstein Curator of Philanthropy, Smithsonian Institution

John Hancock did something revolutionary 250 years ago when the Massachusetts merchant signed the Declaration of Independence, announcing to the world that 13 English colonies were freeing themselves from Great Britain and from monarchy.

About a decade later, he signed up as a member of a charity aiding drowning strangers.

That endeavor was revolutionary, too.

As I explain in my 2016 book, “From Empire to Humanity,” the American Revolution transformed how Americans, and also Britons, engaged in giving. Many Americans turned to philanthropy after gaining independence to pursue their ideals of life, liberty and happiness for the new nation.

And while curating the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History’s “Giving in America” exhibition, for which I collect objects telling stories about Americans’ volunteering, donating and working to aid others, I’m often reminded that Americans still pursue these ideals through their everyday philanthropy.

Charity in North American colonies

Hancock, who was born in Braintree, Massachusetts, on Jan. 23, 1737, grew up in a world where men like his uncle Thomas Hancock dominated charitable activity. Thomas Hancock had made a fortune in business ventures, including the slave trade and military contracting. When he died, he left an array of charitable bequests, including one used for Communion silver for his church.

By having Thomas Hancock’s name engraved on the silver plates, the church leaders highlighted what colonial Americans knew: Leadership in philanthropy, as in society at large, was in the hands of elite white men.

That uncle raised John after his father’s death, educating him so he would be prepared for business and civic leadership.

When colonists fell on hard times, they might be eligible for an early form of governmental benefits, known as “poor relief.” They could also turn to their churches, to one another or to a small number of ethnic aid societies, such as Boston’s Scots Society, for support.

In the mid-1700s, Americans founded a number of new welfare and educational institutions, including colleges and charity schools. Benjamin Franklin, a leading philanthropic innovator, helped establish the Pennsylvania Hospital with mixed public and private funding. That funding model would later become common for charitable institutions.

The Revolutionary War interrupted these developments. After independence was won in 1783, the number of charitable organizations and institutions would soon soar.

Humane societies to protect people

U.S. charitable institutions began to rapidly change in the 1780s, as Americans sought to reform society by establishing organizations to support people in need.

One of those groups was the charity dedicated to rescuing drowning victims and aiding shipwrecked sailors that John Hancock joined, along with Paul Revere. It was known as the Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and, like other similar groups, offered rewards or honors to motivate people to undertake the risky work of saving people from watery graves.

Americans in several cities, along with their peers in the British Isles, the Caribbean and Europe, worked together by publicizing resuscitation techniques, sharing information on effective methods and offering each other moral support.

“Humane” was a popular word in the names of charities dedicated to an array of causes in this era, long before it became associated with the protection of animal welfare.

Philanthropy’s meaning at the time

Throughout the 1700s and much of the 1800s, the word “philanthropy” referred to a sentiment – the love of humanity. That reflected the word’s origins: It’s derived from the Greek words for “love” – “philos” – and “anthropos” – “man.”

For Americans of the founding generation, philanthropy meant, above all else, aiding strangers – people outside their local, religious or ethnic community. Spurred by African Americans’ advocacy, some prominent white Americans, such as Alexander Hamilton, joined antislavery societies, while Northern states gradually began passing antislavery laws.

Making maritime travel safer for people of all backgrounds and nationalities was another way to uphold this value of universal benevolence. Humane societies’ rescuers and rescued people alike included African Americans and foreign mariners, including some from Asia and the Spanish empire. African Americans received awards from anti-drowning groups using the same criteria applied to white people.

In 1794, one of the highest honors went to Dolphin Garler, a Black man in Plymouth, Massachusetts, who had risked his life to rescue a young boy from drowning. Many Americans at this time saw benevolence as a criteria for citizenship. By lauding Garler, the leaders of the Massachusetts Humane Society were challenging other white Americans to recognize Black Americans’ humanity.

Like humane societies, other charities innovated by giving aid across ethnic or denominational lines as Americans built bonds in the new nation. Among them was New York Hospital, which had “charity to all” as its motto and had a diverse patient population. Many were British, Irish and German, with small numbers of people, probably mariners, from places like Portugal and South Asia. The hospital also treated African Americans in segregated wards.

Another new charity embracing this new more universal approach was the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, established in New York City in 1797. It supported poor widows with small children and helped the widows find jobs. While the organization excluded African American women, it innovated by aiding white women without regard to their ethnic or religious background.

New leaders with new causes

The Widows Society, as it was known, was notable for another reason. It was one of the first charities founded and led by women in the new United States.

Before the late 1780s, women made charitable donations to institutions run by men and gave personal alms, but women didn’t lead organizations.

In New York, Scottish immigrant Isabella Graham and other women challenged traditional roles by founding the Widows Society in 1797. That they came together from various Protestant backgrounds was notable at the time.

Within a few years, Eliza Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton’s wife, would join and help lead the Orphan Asylum Society of the City of New York, which grew out of the Widows Society.

And yes, that’s the orphanage Eliza Hamilton sings about in “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s award-winning musical.

Black Americans likewise broke ground by creating charities and independent churches in the founding era. Black men like Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, for example, created the Free African Society, a mutual aid organization, in 1787 in Philadelphia.

In addition to supporting members of the Black community at times of need, the Free African Society led to the creation of independent Black churches as African Americans struggled for inclusion.

Revolutionizing charity management

Founding charities was one thing. Running them was another.

Americans applied managerial skills acquired from operating business, churches and households to caring for people in distress. They also became pros at the business of fundraising: cultivating donors, hosting fundraising events and publishing annual reports, including names of donors.

In short, Americans developed the critical skills to make philanthropy work.

Philadelphia doctor and signer of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush was one of the most skilled philanthropic communicators. As he undertook one humanitarian endeavor after another, Rush collaborated with philanthropic leaders like Isabella Graham and Richard Allen.

Like others of his generation, Rush devoted himself to reforming the country and world. Medical philanthropy, education, antislavery, prison reform – he was engaged in all of them.

He routinely placed excerpts of his letters with other humanitarian leaders in newspapers. Publicity documents, he knew, helped build momentum for humanitarian causes.

Many others shared his belief in the power of philanthropy to help make the world anew.

The Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ “provision made for Ship-wrecked Marriners is also highly estimable in the view of every philanthropic mind,” George Washington said in 1788. “These works of charity & goodwill towards men … presage an æra of still farther improvements.”

This goodwill could go global. Cooperating across the Atlantic in this cause and others helped Americans and Britons reaffirm and reimagine their bonds.

Bedrock of the American experiment

It was only when rich Americans like steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and oil baron John D. Rockefeller began to make massive donations and set up their own foundations in the late 1800s and early 1900s that the word philanthropy would come to be associated with giving on a massive scale.

As Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I believe it’s worth remembering that the founding generation embraced civic engagement, organizational innovation and generosity as essential pillars in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.

For that generation, philanthropy – love of humanity – was the bedrock of the American experiment in republican government.

Amanda Moniz has received funding from the William L. Clements Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for research on Isabella Graham.

– ref. How America’s independence from England revolutionized US philanthropy – https://theconversation.com/how-americas-independence-from-england-revolutionized-us-philanthropy-279504

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Cristina Bodea, Professor of Political Science, Michigan State University

Kevin Warsh is now likely to secure Senate approval as the next Federal Reserve chair – and become arguably the most powerful central banker in the world. But when Warsh appeared before the Senate Banking Committee for his confirmation hearing in April, one punchy question underscored the dilemma that Warsh, lawmakers and the Fed all face:

“Are you going to be the president’s human sock puppet?” asked Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana.

On one level, the question reflects President Donald Trump’s intense pressure on the central bank to cut rates, with current Chair Jerome Powell often the target of his ire. But it also points to Warsh’s own inconsistency on inflation.

Earlier in his career, he was a “hawk,” pushing for interest rate hikes to curb inflation and opposing the novel crisis management authorities that the Fed took on after the 2008 financial meltdown. Now, Warsh supports the interest rate cuts that Trump has exhorted as a way to juice growth.

Warsh has also come under fire for his deep ties to the financial sector, where he once worked. Lawmakers such as Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have cited the potential conflict of interest posed by his undisclosed assets, even though in theory they’ll be divested as part of Warsh’s arrangements with the government’s ethics watchdogs if he becomes chair.

As scholars who study central banks and the politics of finance, we understand why concerns about Warsh’s credibility have persisted. But perhaps counterintuitively, we also believe that once he’s confirmed, his finance background could reinforce his prior hawkish leanings, leading to more independence from Trump on inflation and interest rates.

Is past prologue?

If confirmed as chair, as expected, Warsh and his colleagues on the Fed’s policy-setting committee would wield enormous power. Not only does the central bank set the benchmark rate that determines short-term lending, but the Fed also oversees a US$6.7 trillion balance sheet, mostly in government bonds, that partially affects longer-term borrowing costs. Guided by its mandate to control inflation, the Fed’s decisions impact everything from grocery prices to mortgage rates.

Along with Warsh’s prior stints in government and on the Fed’s policymaking board as a governor, he worked for the investment firm Morgan Stanley and the hedge fund Duquesne Capital. In those positions, Warsh advanced his career in an industry that has long preferred hawkish Fed policies, even at the cost of job growth: Wall Street is generally “conservative” in that it favors lower inflation and higher interest rates on grounds that those policies can support bigger bank profits and higher prices for bank shares, while reducing the risks brought by disinflation policies.

While serving as a Fed governor in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Warsh’s comments reflected this outlook. He talked extensively about inflation being a “choice” – that is, the result of poor policy decisions, rather than broader structural forces.

He also questioned the Fed’s massive bond purchases, which were meant to stimulate the economy and reduce high unemployment by pushing long-term borrowing rates lower. The Fed revived those bond buys during the pandemic recession, while waiting too long, in the eyes of many economists, to hike rates once inflation began rising in 2021.

More recently, Warsh has focused his criticism on the central bank’s “bloated” balance sheet as well as its inflation record. Those legacies, along with the stimulative government spending under President Joe Biden, prompted Warsh to warn in February 2022 that “extraordinary excesses in monetary and fiscal policy caused the inflation dragon to resurface after 40 years of dormancy.”

Which Warsh will show up?

Given that long record, many Fed watchers looked at his turnaround in the second Trump administration with some skepticism. When he was a finalist for the nomination to chair the central bank in summer 2025, he told CNBC that the Fed’s hesitancy to cut rates – which was already drawing Trump’s wrath – was “quite a mark against them.”

“The specter of the miss they made on inflation, it has stuck with them,” he added. “So one of the reasons why the president … is right to be pushing the Fed publicly is we need regime change in the conduct of policy.”

Warsh’s rhetorical shift has led many to ask whether he can reconcile his responsibilities with political pressure. But the worsening inflation outlook for both the U.S. and world, driven by spiking oil prices, may force his hand regardless.

The spike in oil prices from the Iran war, in particular, has economists raising their inflation forecasts for the U.S. At his last Fed meeting as chair, Powell indicated that the central bank could be a long way off from lowering rates given inflation concerns. The Bank of England and the European Central Banks are also bracing for possible rate hikes if inflation doesn’t ease.

Trump ramp ups the pressure

For his part, Trump has used unprecedented means to bend the Fed since returning to office.

Those tactics include trying to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook and threatening to fire Powell – who just announced he will stay on as a governor on the Fed’s board after his chairmanship ends. Those kinds of pressure tactics – which effectively seek to restaff the Fed’s leadership with more members favoring interest rate cuts – are more often seen in countries like Turkey or Argentina.

So why do we believe that Warsh won’t be the “human sock puppet” some fear?

In our view, it’s his background in finance that leads us to think he’ll be able to resist political pressure once on the job. After all, when Powell was appointed by Trump during his first term, he had also worked in that sector – and he has demonstrated independence from both Trump and Biden.

This is not just a theory. Political scientist Chris Adolph has identified a pattern in which Wall Street is the “shadow principal” of the central bankers who shuffle in and out of the financial sector. Similarly, economist Adam Posen has described finance as the interest group with the most prominent lobbying role over monetary policy.

In practical terms, this means that Warsh has long been steeped in ideas about inflation that have traditionally held sway over the financial sector, and he may well be more open about these preferences once confirmed. Moreover, he’s likely to return to finance once his term at the Fed ends. Together, we believe these factors may give Warsh the intrinsic motivation and enough incentives to resist overt political pressure from the president.

Of course, being too beholden to Wall Street is also a risk, as pointed out by Warren and others. The Fed is meant to support Wall Street in times of crisis – and even more so since the 2010 Dodd-Frank reform. However, the Dodd-Frank Act also asked the Fed to monitor risks to the entire financial system by supervising and regulating financial institutions. That requirement requires the Fed to prevent crises, not just bail out Wall Street when a crisis hits.

As it happens, the Fed today is quietly but surely moving to water down the rules put in place after 2008 – a deregulatory shift that Warsh strongly supports.

Fed independence from government, as a matter of law and of norms, is deeply important for the health of the U.S. economy. And Warsh’s rhetorical shifts on monetary policy raise serious questions about its fate under his chairmanship. Senators have been right to push him as a nominee on this matter. However, the Fed also faces pressure from the finance industry, often pulling policy in the opposite direction. As such, we believe that Warsh’s professional history in finance may bolster his autonomy from Trump on rates once he’s confirmed.

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. Why Kevin Warsh might still prove to be an independent Federal Reserve chair – https://theconversation.com/why-kevin-warsh-might-still-prove-to-be-an-independent-federal-reserve-chair-281720