Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Michael Oxman, Professor of the Practice of Sustainable Business, Georgia Institute of Technology

Some major oil companies such as Shell and BP that once were touted as leading the way in clean energy investments are now pulling back from those projects to refocus on oil and gas production. Others, such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron, have concentrated on oil and gas but announced recent investments in carbon capture projects, as well as in lithium and graphite production for electric vehicle batteries.

National oil companies have also been investing in renewable energy. For example, Saudi Aramco has invested in clean energy while at the same time asserting that it’s unrealistic to phase out oil and gas entirely.

But the larger question is why oil companies would invest in clean energy at all, especially at a time when many federal clean energy incentives are being eliminated and climate science is being dismantled, at least in the United States.

Some answers depend on whom you ask. More traditional petroleum industry followers would urge the companies to keep focused on their core fossil fuel businesses to meet growing energy demand and corresponding near-term shareholder returns. Other shareholders and stakeholders concerned about sustainability and the climate – including an increasing number of companies with sustainability goals – would likely point out the business opportunities for clean energy to meet global needs.

Other answers depend on the particular company itself. Very small producers have different business plans than very large private and public companies. Geography and regional policies can also play a key role. And government-owned companies such as Saudi Aramco, Gazprom and the China National Petroleum Corp. control the majority of the world’s oil and gas resources with revenues that support their national economies.

Despite the relatively modest scale of investment in clean energy by oil and gas companies so far, there are several business reasons oil companies would increase their investments in clean energy over time.

The oil and gas industry has provided energy that has helped create much of modern society and technology, though those advances have also come with significant environmental and social costs. My own experience in the oil industry gave me insight into how at least some of these companies try to reconcile this tension and to make strategic portfolio decisions regarding what “green” technologies to invest in. Now the managing director and a professor of the practice at the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business at Georgia Tech, I seek ways to eliminate the boundaries and identify mutually reinforcing innovations among business interests and environmental concerns.

Diversification and financial drivers

Just like financial advisers tell you to diversify your 401(k) investments, companies do so to weather different kinds of volatility, from commodity prices to political instability. Oil and gas markets are notoriously cyclical, so investments in clean energy can hedge against these shifts for companies and investors alike.

Clean energy can also provide opportunities for new revenue. Many customers want to buy clean energy, and oil companies want to be positioned to cash in as this transition occurs. By developing employees’ expertise and investing in emerging technologies, they can be ready for commercial opportunities in biofuels, renewable natural gas, hydrogen and other pathways that may overlap with their existing, core business competencies.

Fossil fuel companies have also found what other companies have: Clean energy can reduce costs. Some oil companies not only invest in energy efficiency for their buildings but use solar or wind to power their wells. And adding renewable energy to their activities can also lower the cost of investing in these companies.

Public pressure

All companies, including those in oil and gas, are under growing pressure to address climate change, from the public, from other companies with whom they do business and from government regulators – at least outside the U.S. For example, campaigns seeking to reduce investment in fossil fuels are increasing along with climate-related lawsuits. Government policies focused on both mitigating carbon emissions and enhancing energy independence are also making headway in some locations.

In response, many oil companies are reducing their own operational emissions and setting targets to offset or eliminate emissions from products that they sell – though many observers question the viability of these commitments. Other companies are investing in emerging technologies such as hydrogen and methods to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

Some companies, such as BP and Equinor, have previously even gone so far as rebranding themselves and acquiring clean energy businesses. But those efforts have also been criticized as “greenwashing,” taking actions for public relations value rather than real results.

How far can this go?

It is even possible for a fossil fuel company to reinvent itself as a clean energy operation. Denmark’s Orsted – formerly known as Danish Oil and Natural Gas – transitioned from fossil fuels to become a global leader in offshore wind. The company, whose majority owner is the Danish government, made the shift, however, with the help of significant public and political support.

But most large oil companies aren’t likely to completely reinvent themselves anytime soon. Making that change requires leadership, investor pressure, customer demand and shifts in government policy, such as putting a price or tax on carbon emissions.

To show students in my sustainability classes how companies’ choices affect both the environment and the industry as a whole, I use the MIT Fishbanks simulation. Students run fictional fishing companies competing for profit. Even when they know the fish population is finite, they overfish, leading to the collapse of the fishery and its businesses. Short-term profits cause long-term disaster for the fishery and the businesses that depend on it.

The metaphor for oil and gas is clear: As fossil fuels continue to be extracted and burned, they release planet-warming emissions, harming the planet as a whole. They also pose substantial business risks to the oil and gas industry itself.

Yet students in a recent class showed me that a more collective way of thinking may be possible. Teams voluntarily reduced their fishing levels to preserve long-term business and environmental sustainability, and they even cooperated with their competitors. They did so without in-game regulatory threats, shareholder or customer complaints, or lawsuits.

Their shared understanding that the future of their own fishing companies was at stake makes me hopeful that this type of leadership may take hold in real companies and the energy system as a whole. But the question remains about how fast that change can happen, amid the accelerating global demand for more energy along with the increasing urgency and severity of climate change and its effects.

In the past, Michael Oxman has worked with Chevron and consulted with other oil/gas companies. The views expressed in this article are his and do not necessarily reflect the views of Georgia Institute of Technology.

– ref. Why do big oil companies invest in green energy? – https://theconversation.com/why-do-big-oil-companies-invest-in-green-energy-260855

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Jeffrey H. Cohen, Professor of Anthropology, The Ohio State University

Billions of people regularly eat insects. In the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, chapulines – toasted grasshoppers – stand out as a beloved seasonal treat that follows the start of the rainy season, a period that runs from late May through September.

My new book, “Eating Grasshoppers: Chapulines and the Women who Sell Them,” dives into the history and cultural significance of entomophagy (eating insects) and this unique snack.

Chapulineras – the women who sell chapulines – often learn their craft from their mothers and grandmothers. Most will use nets or mesh bags to capture grasshoppers in their “milpa” – alfalfa and maize fields – during the cool, early morning hours.

Teresa Silva, whom I spoke with at her home in Zimatlán, Oaxaca, shared some of her experience:

“I began with my husband’s family, following their traditions after we married. My husband would bring me chapulines in large quantities, and with him and my in-laws’ support, I started to cook and sell [them]. It wasn’t easy at first … but I liked the money I made. Now, I have been selling chapulines for 23 years.”

Prepping chapulines isn’t hard. A dip in boiling water turns the grasshoppers a rich, deep red. Then you toss them on the “comal” – a ceramic or metal cooking surface – with a little garlic, lemon, chile and “sal de gusano,” a mixture of ground agave worms, salt and other seasonings. In a few minutes, the grasshoppers are ready to eat.

Culture and cuisine in Oaxaca

Chapulines have been a staple food for thousands of years. Like other insects and their by-products – including honey – grasshoppers are easily digestible, high in protein and an excellent source of vitamins and minerals.

They are also plentiful. Archaeologist Jeffrey Parsons estimates that harvests before the arrival of European settlers might have included 3,900 metric tons of insects and their eggs, if not more, annually.

One of the earliest references to chapulines appears in Franciscan Friar Bernardino de Sahagún’s 1577 “General History of the Things of New Spain.” Sometimes called the “first anthropologist,” Sahagún describes their importance as a beloved seasonal food in the local diet.

High praise. But perhaps it isn’t surprising that Spanish colonists largely ignored grasshoppers and other Indigenous foods while introducing new crops, animals and unique ways of eating. The Spanish also reorganized life according to the casta system – a racially based hierarchy that restricted the rights and opportunities of Indigenous people.

While chapulines and other insects remained critical to the local diet, the Spanish preferred eating dishes made from the animals and crops they’d brought with them, including wheat and cattle.

Nor were these new foods readily adopted by locals. Indigenous cuisine lacked Spanish parallels. Grains and livestock were not suited to local dishes; furthermore, even as the Spanish colonists had locals grow these new crops, they usually prohibited them from keeping any of the harvest.

An old reliable

Of course, with time, the introduced crops and livestock took hold, and local cuisine incorporated these foods into many of the dishes the world knows today as Mexican.

However, whenever there’s not enough to eat – whether due to discrimination, a natural disaster or a human-made crisis – Mexicans often fall back on edible insects. They were critical following floods and famines in the 18th and 19th centuries. And when Oaxacans fled their homes and farmland during the Mexican Revolution, they turned to chapulines as a replacement for more typical proteins like chicken, turkey, beef tripe and pork.

Most recently, when the COVID-19 lockdowns made it nearly impossible to shop for foods, chapulineras created a touchless economy that connected vendors and customers through messaging services like WhatsApp. Some chapulineras also provided no-interest loans to people who could not cover the costs of their orders.

Carmen Mendoza, whom I interviewed at Mercado Benito Juárez in Oaxaca City, described her experience of the lockdown:

“When the pandemic hit, I said to myself, ‘Look, you need to keep selling, but from home.’ I know where I am, and I know my clients. I also know how much people want, how many kilos of chapulines they will buy. So people came to my house. Sometimes they would bring me their harvest, other times they would call and ask for two or three kilos. I could do that.”

The meaning, use and value of chapulines are changing, as Oaxaca has become a popular tourist destination and has been commemorated as a UNESCO heritage site. For foodies and tourists, tasting chapulines is a way to consume and experience the past.

Chapulineras will happily sell to foodies who want to “eat bugs.” But they also know tourists cannot support their market. Visitors usually swoop in for a few days, buy a small handful of chapulines and leave. Most will never return.

And so chapulineras continue to depend on locals whose families have been eating the insects for generations. Many chapulineras have achieved financial security through their efforts, earning incomes that exceed that of most rural women in Oaxaca.

In Oaxaca, just as it was 3,000 years ago, chapulines are “what’s for dinner.”

Jeffrey H. Cohen received funding from the National Science Foundation (Household Producer Effects of Rural Diet Transformation, BCS award 1918324), National Geographic, Fulbright and the Ohio State University Institute for Population Studies to support this research.

– ref. Would you eat a grasshopper? In Oaxaca, it’s been a tasty tradition for thousands of years – https://theconversation.com/would-you-eat-a-grasshopper-in-oaxaca-its-been-a-tasty-tradition-for-thousands-of-years-263868

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Zachary W. Schulz, Senior Lecturer of History, Auburn University

Each year in the U.S., tens of thousands of deaths are categorized as “preventable” — meaning, in theory, they did not need to happen. A missed cancer screening, a fatal asthma attack or a death from untreated infection might all be counted as preventable.

The term is commonly used in public health reports, policy documents and local news coverage, and it generally implies that something went wrong and could have been prevented.

But it’s also deceptively simplistic. Researchers have noted that definitions of preventable death are often imprecise and shaped by subjective judgment. In clinical settings like intensive care units, reviews of mortality frequently focus on individual decisions or errors, while broader systemic issues — like hospital understaffing or regional disparities in access — may go unexamined.

I’m a historian of public health who studies how U.S. health systems have developed over time, especially in rural and underserved areas. I study how structural decisions — about Medicaid, dental care and regional health investment — shape health access and outcomes today.

The language of preventability is widely used and often well-intentioned. But it can make certain deaths appear to be caused by regrettable choices or the failures of an overburdened health system. This, in turn, can lead to policy choices based on mistaken assumptions about where responsibility lies and how solutions should be designed.

What does ‘preventable death’ really mean?

In epidemiology, a preventable death typically refers to a death that could have been avoided with timely and effective medical care, public health intervention or behavioral change. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses the term to describe deaths from conditions like heart disease, diabetes, respiratory illness and certain infections — illnesses that can often be managed or averted with adequate care.

This definition is useful: It helps health departments set priorities, allocate funding and measure progress.

But when the term circulates outside that context — in news articles, political speeches or everyday conversation — it often loses its technical grounding. In those settings, “preventable” can imply that prevention is merely a matter of personal knowledge or access, obscuring the deeper structural forces at play.

For example, a person who dies from untreated high blood pressure might be counted in preventable death statistics, since their death could likely have been avoided with routine medical care, effective treatment and support for managing blood pressure.

Health outcomes shaped by policy

But the label overlooks some deeper causes. For example, it doesn’t reflect whether a patient had stable health insurance, lived near a provider or faced cost barriers to filling a prescription. And it doesn’t show whether they were one of the millions of Americans living in states that have not expanded Medicaid, which provides government-supported health insurance for low-income Americans under the Affordable Care Act. These variables can be the determining factor for whether someone is able to receive the care they need that could have made the death preventable.

Since 2010, states have had the option to expand Medicaid, and many states did. But a number of states — primarily in the South — have chosen not to. This policy choice has left many low-income adults without access to affordable health coverage, especially in Southern and rural regions.

Research shows that these decisions have real consequences. Numerous studies have linked Medicaid expansion with lower rates of premature death, better cancer outcomes and improved management of chronic diseases.

Similarly, dental care is one of the most consistently under-resourced parts of the health system. Medicare does not include dental benefits, and Medicaid dental coverage varies widely by state. Dental disease can lead to serious medical complications, including infections that can become life-threatening — yet dental deserts, especially in rural America, leave many without timely access to care.

Rural hospitals and clinics also face persistent underinvestment. According to the Chartis Center for Rural Health, more than 141 rural hospitals have closed since 2010, with hundreds more at risk. Many rural areas struggle to attract and retain health care workers, leaving residents with long travel times and limited emergency coverage.

A pattern, not a fluke

National health statistics reflect these structural gaps. According to the CDC, rates of potentially preventable death are significantly higher in the South than in other regions of the U.S. They are also higher among Black, Native and Hispanic populations compared with white populations — disparities that track closely with differences in poverty rates, insurance coverage and local health infrastructure.

In other words, when one looks more closely at who is dying from so-called preventable causes — and where — consistent patterns emerge. These are not random tragedies, but outcomes that follow familiar policy lines. They are, in many cases, the foreseeable result of long-standing policy decisions and predictable outcomes shaped by structural inequities.

Yet the language of “preventable death” rarely points directly to those decisions. Instead, it implies that the right care simply wasn’t accessed — but not why it wasn’t available or affordable in the first place.

How language shapes perception

In public health, the terms used matter — they shape how both the public and the health system perceives risk, attribute responsibility and support reform.

Without context, calling a death preventable can imply individual failure — that someone didn’t eat right, didn’t take their medication, didn’t go to the doctor in time. The word erases the conditions that make such behaviors difficult or impossible, miscasting structural faults as personal shortcomings. Someone without transportation to a clinic, or without health insurance to cover basic treatment, may not be positioned to “prevent” anything. In that sense, the death is only preventable in theory — not in practice.

As public health experts increasingly embrace the importance of structural barriers to health, some are proposing alternatives to the phrase or are calling for clearer explanations when it is used.

As the health system grapples with widening inequities and eroding trust, speaking clearly about how individual choices interact with the systems in which people make them will help guide stronger policies, more equitable health systems and genuine access to health care. For patients and families, that clarity can mean something as basic as knowing a local clinic will be open when they need it, or that cost won’t keep them from filling a prescription.

Zachary W. Schulz 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. Calling deaths ‘preventable’ can obscure barriers to health care access and shift blame to individuals – https://theconversation.com/calling-deaths-preventable-can-obscure-barriers-to-health-care-access-and-shift-blame-to-individuals-260915

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Tazeen M. Ali, Assistant Professor of Religion and Politics, Washington University in St. Louis

For over a century, Hollywood has tended to portray Muslim men through a remarkably narrow lens: as terrorists, villains or dangerous outsiders. From shows such as “24” and “Homeland” to procedural dramas such as “Law and Order,” this portrayal has seldom allowed for complexity or relatability.

Such depictions reinforce Orientalist stereotypes – a colonial worldview that treats cultures in the East as exotic, irrational or even dangerous.

However, recent years have seen a noticeable increase in Muslim-led storytelling across platforms in the U.S. and U.K. While still a minority, these stories depart from decades of misrepresentation.

As a scholar of Islam and gender who has conducted research on masculinity, sexuality and national belonging in Muslim entertainment media, I analyze a new wave of critically acclaimed shows where Muslim characters are at the center of the narrative.

Historical stereotypes

Scholar of media and race Jack Shaheen has documented the systematic vilification of Arabs and Muslims in Western media. In his 2001 book “Reel Bad Arabs,” he analyzed over a thousand films and found that the vast majority depicted Arab and Muslim men almost exclusively as fanatics, oil-rich villains and misogynists.

More recently, a 2021 study from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative looked at 200 popular movies and found that Muslim characters were either completely missing or shown as violent.

Despite the consistency of negative representations of Muslims on television following the rise in Islamophobia, the post-9/11 climate actually saw the introduction of more diverse Muslim characters. Such portrayals promoted the idea of the U.S. as a tolerant, liberal society.

Scholar of popular culture Evelyn Alsultany writes that Hollywood introduced Muslim characters who were often law-abiding citizens or patriotic allies. She explains that despite these positive attempts, these characters were still depicted in simplistic ways, as either “good Muslims” or “bad Muslims.” The “good Muslim/bad Muslim” framework was coined by scholar of postcolonialism Mahmood Mamdani to describe how Muslims are understood across this binary. The “good Muslims” distance themselves from their faith and align themselves with Western liberal values to gain acceptance.

Expanding on this theme, Islamic studies scholar Samah Choudhury explains how the mainstream success of South Asian Muslim male comedians such as Hasan Minhaj, Kumail Nanjiani and Aziz Ansari is shaped by their adoption of secular ideals.

Even so-called “positive” characters, such as Muslim FBI agents or loyal informants in shows like “NCIS” or “Homeland,” ultimately served to normalize state surveillance and justify the global war on terrorism, a global campaign initiated by the U.S. following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. These brown and sometimes Black Muslim characters are portrayed as “good” only when aligned with U.S. state power.

Effort in contemporary television

Hulu’s comedy drama series “Ramy” is a milestone in Muslim storytelling. Created by actor-comedian Ramy Youssef, the series, which debuted in 2019, follows a young Egyptian-American Muslim navigating family, faith and relationships in New Jersey.

Ramy is devoid of storylines about national security. Instead, the show foregrounds its main character’s grappling with religiosity, dating and identity. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, the protagonist’s religious devotion is never a punchline but a part of his everyday experience.

For instance, Ramy prays five times a day – at the mosque and at home, fasts during Ramadan, and abstains from alcohol as a matter of Islamic observance. At the same time, he also partakes in hookup culture and wrestles with guilt for falling short of Islamic ideals. By showcasing this duality, the show illuminates internal debates within American Muslim communities, including on gendered norms around marriage and sexual ethics.

Across the Atlantic, the BBC comedy series “Man Like Mobeen,” created by comedian-actor Guz Khan, offers a layered portrayal of Muslim life in inner-city Birmingham, England. The show follows Mobeen, a reformed British Pakistani gangster, striving and often failing to leave his criminal past behind and live as a devout Muslim while raising his teenage sister.

The show explores the struggles of the working class. It situates Muslim communities within broader class and racial dynamics whereby working-class Black and brown men are vulnerable to racial profiling by law enforcement and gang violence.

With incisive and dark humor, it challenges British racism against Muslims and offers social and political commentary on U.K. society. This includes critiques of British far-right movements and their racism, as well as the failures of the National Health Service.

Muslim women on screen

The flip side of stereotypical portrayals of Muslim men as violent and misogynist is the equally reductive portrayal of Muslim women as passive or oppressed. When Muslim women appear on screen, they are often presented as submissive or “liberated” only by a white non-Muslim male romantic interest. This process of liberation usually involves removing their hijab or distancing themselves from Islam.

A refreshing departure from such storytelling norms can be found in the British Channel 4 comedy “We Are Lady Parts,” created by filmmaker and writer Nida Manzoor, which debuted in 2021.

The show follows an all-female Muslim punk band in London. The bandmates are funny, creative and rebellious. While they defy Western views of Muslim women, they do not appear to be written solely to shatter stereotypes.

They reflect the contradictions that many Muslims live with, juggling faith, identity and politics in their music. The band’s songs include feminist themes but are diverse, subverting Islamophobic stereotypes against women with humor with songs like “Voldemort Under My Headscarf,” or lusting after a love interest in “Bashir with the good beard.”

The band members are also often seen engaged in ritual prayer together, a unified display of worship among women who otherwise have very different personalities, fashion sensibilities and goals in life. The show also addresses queerness, Islamophobia and intergenerational conflict with nuance and humor.

I explore all of these themes in further detail in my forthcoming book, in which I examine how this new wave of Muslim media offers insights about the lived religious experiences of American and British Muslims.

Narrative authority

What unites these series is their rejection of reductive and stereotypical narratives. Muslim characters in these shows are not defined by violence, trauma or assimilation. Nor do they serve as spokespeople for all Muslims; they are written as flawed and evolving individuals.

This wave of nuanced portrayals of Muslim life includes other recent productions such as Netflix’s 2022 series “Mo” and Hulu’s 2025 reality series “Muslim Matchmaker,” which centers real people whose lives and romantic journeys showcase American Muslim life in authentic ways. Muslims in the show are depicted as having various professions, levels of faith and life experiences.

These series and their creators signal that real progress comes when Muslim voices are telling their own stories, not simply reacting to the gaze of outsiders or the pressures of political headlines. By foregrounding daily ritual, spiritual aspiration and even awkwardness and desire, “Ramy,” “Man Like Mobeen” and “We Are Lady Parts” all refuse the burden of “representation.”

By moving away from the binary of “threatening other” versus “assimilated citizen,” this new wave of media challenges the legacy of Orientalism. Instead, they offer characters who reflect the complex realities of Muslim lives that are messy, joyful and evolving.

Tazeen M. Ali 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. Muslim men have often been portrayed as ‘terrorists’ or ‘fanatics’ on TV shows, but Muslim-led storytelling is trying to change that narrative – https://theconversation.com/muslim-men-have-often-been-portrayed-as-terrorists-or-fanatics-on-tv-shows-but-muslim-led-storytelling-is-trying-to-change-that-narrative-263404

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Tom Anchordoquy, Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

When the first cells appeared on Earth approximately 3.8 billion years ago, viruses were already here to greet them. Ever since, viruses have been devising ways to infect cells, and cells have been responding by evolving ways to stop these infections. This evolutionary dance eventually led to the development of your immune system.

A key aspect of your immune system is to distinguish “self” from “nonself” so it can destroy and remove foreign materials from your body. While this immune reaction protects you from viruses, it also has implications for how well foreign materials such as medications work.

I am a researcher studying ways to make drugs work better, including how to get them to the site of disease within the body before being removed or destroyed. One way to do this is to encapsulate drugs in nanoparticles – materials small enough to be taken up by cells. While these materials still trigger an immune response to get them out of the body, scientists like me have found that this reaction could actually be used to improve the effectiveness of cancer treatment.

The immune system and drug delivery

In addition to detecting pathogens, your immune system also responds to tissue damage. You might observe this reaction as inflammation – such as redness and swelling – when drugs are injected into your body with a needle.

Typically this inflammatory response is minimal. But the potential for a sustained reaction increases when drugs are administered slowly over a prolonged period of time, such as during chemotherapy infusions that can take an hour or more. For this reason, some patients are given anti-inflammatory medications before infusion to reduce the potential for an adverse immune response during treatment.

The most recent breakthroughs in getting drugs into the body is using nanoparticles. These materials – which can be made from lipids, proteins, gold or other components – have the advantage of being very small: The diameter of a typical nanoparticle is about 10-thousandths of a millimeter. Their small size allows diseased cells to easily take them up. So when nanoparticles contain drugs, they can act as a drug delivery system.

Despite being so small, nanoparticles can hold a large number of drug molecules, allowing them to deliver a potent cargo of treatment directly into a cell. They can also deliver drugs made of DNA and RNA. The most well-known example of this technology is the COVID-19 vaccine, which uses nanoparticles made of modified fat molecules to deliver mRNA that teaches the immune system to protect itself against COVID-19 infection.

Your innate immune system also identifies nanoparticles as foreign invaders when they are injected into your body. As a result, some patients experience an initial inflammatory reaction when the body tries to attack the nanoparticle.

But what if this reaction could actually be used to improve treatment?

Exploiting the innate immune response

For the past 30 years, my laboratory at the University of Colorado has been studying how nanoparticles deliver drugs. More recently, we have focused on understanding how the innate immune system responds to an injection of nanoparticles. While this immune reaction is typically considered a drawback, we wanted to explore whether it could enhance therapy.

In a 2022 study on how nanoparticles affect the immune response in mice, we found that the innate immune response triggered by an initial dose of nanoparticles carrying a drug will also reduce the effects of a second dose if it is injected shortly afterward – typically within days. It does this by clearing the drug out from the body more quickly. This reaction is similar to how an initial viral infection would trigger a short-term protective response against a subsequent infection from another virus.

One critical aspect of this protective effect involves the production of a protein called interferon lambda. This molecule “interferes” with the infection process by restricting viruses from gaining access to different tissues in the body. Researchers have previously tested this protein as a potential antiviral drug to treat COVID-19.

Similarly, the interferon lambda made in response to the first dose of nanoparticles limits the ability of the second dose to deliver the drug to healthy tissues in the body. However, it did not affect the nanoparticle’s ability to access tumors, possibly because tumors can impair the immune response.

In conventional cancer treatment, chemotherapy drugs are used to kill the tumor. Because these drugs are also toxic to healthy cells, patients often experience side effects such as hair loss, gastrointestinal problems and skin rashes. Using nanoparticles to deliver cancer treatment could help reduce these side effects, and combining them with interferon lambda could allow the nanoparticle-encapsulated drug to stay in the body long enough to have its full effects.

Our team is studying whether directly injecting interferon lambda before chemotherapy with nanoparticles could help limit the amount of drug that ends up in healthy tissues while increasing their concentration in tumors. In an initial test of this strategy in mice with colon cancer, all mice that received interferon lambda saw increased survival time and reduced weight loss. A better understanding of how this effect happens could help researchers eventually test this approach to cancer treatment in human patients.

Scientists have a long way to go in developing nanoparticles that are as efficient as viruses at getting into cells. But our hope is that exploiting an immune response that evolved approximately a billion years ago to prevent viral infections could help reduce the toxic side effects from treatment while improving its effectiveness.

Tom Anchordoquy receives funding for this work from the Nationals Institutes of Health through grant # RO1 CA289447.

– ref. Your immune system attacks drugs like it does viruses – paradoxically offering a way to improve cancer treatment – https://theconversation.com/your-immune-system-attacks-drugs-like-it-does-viruses-paradoxically-offering-a-way-to-improve-cancer-treatment-249824

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Ari Koeppel, Earth Sciences Postdoctoral Scientist and Adjunct Associate, Dartmouth College

NASA’s search for evidence of past life on Mars just produced an exciting update. On Sept. 10, 2025, a team of scientists published a paper detailing the Perseverance rover’s investigation of a distinctive rock outcrop called Bright Angel on the edge of Mars’ Jezero Crater. This outcrop is notable for its light-toned rocks with striking mineral nodules and multicolored, leopard print-like splotches.

By combining data from five scientific instruments, the team determined that these nodules formed through processes that could have involved microorganisms. While this finding is not direct evidence of life, it’s a compelling discovery that planetary scientists hope to look into more closely.

To appreciate how discoveries like this one come about, it’s helpful to understand how scientists engage with rover data — that is, how planetary scientists like me use robots like Perseverance on Mars as extensions of our own senses.

Experiencing Mars through data

When you strap on a virtual reality headset, you suddenly lose your orientation to the immediate surroundings, and your awareness is transported by light and sound to a fabricated environment. For Mars scientists working on rover mission teams, something very similar occurs when rovers send back their daily downlinks of data.

Several developers, including MarsVR, Planetary Visor and Access Mars, have actually worked to build virtual Mars environments for viewing with a virtual reality headset. However, much of Mars scientists’ daily work instead involves analyzing numerical data visualized in graphs and plots. These datasets, produced by state-of-the-art sensors on Mars rovers, extend far beyond human vision and hearing.

Developing an intuition for interpreting these complex datasets takes years, if not entire careers. It is through this “mind-data connection” that scientists build mental models of Martian landscapes – models they then communicate to the world through scientific publications.

The robots’ tool kit: Sensors and instruments

Five primary instruments on Perseverance, aided by machine learning algorithms, helped describe the unusual rock formations at a site called Beaver Falls and the past they record.

Robotic hands: Mounted on the rover’s robotic arm are tools for blowing dust aside and abrading rock surfaces. These ensure the rover analyzes clean samples.

Cameras: Perseverance hosts 19 cameras for navigation, self-inspection and science. Five science-focused cameras played a key role in this study. These cameras captured details unseeable by human eyes, including magnified mineral textures and light in infrared wavelengths. Their images revealed that Bright Angel is a mudstone, a type of sedimentary rock formed from fine sediments deposited in water.

Spectrometers: Instruments such as SuperCam and SHERLOC – scanning habitable environments with Raman and luminescence for organics and chemicals – analyze how rocks reflect or emit light across a range of wavelengths. Think of this as taking hundreds of flash photographs of the same tiny spot, all in different “colors.” These datasets, called spectra, revealed signs of water integrated into mineral structures in the rock and traces of organic molecules: the basic building blocks of life.

Subsurface radar: RIMFAX, the radar imager for Mars subsurface experiment, uses radio waves to peer beneath Mars’ surface and map rock layers. At Beaver Falls, this showed the rocks were layered over other ancient terrains, likely due to the activity of a flowing river. Areas with persistently present water are better habitats for microbes than dry or intermittently wet locations.

X-ray chemistry: PIXL, the planetary instrument for X-ray lithochemistry, bombards rock surfaces with X-rays and observes how the rock glows or reflects them. This technique can tell researchers which elements and minerals the rock contains at a fine scale. PIXL revealed that the leopard-like spots found at Beaver Falls differed chemically from the surrounding rock. The spots resembled patterns on Earth formed by chemical reactions that are mediated by microbes underwater.

Together, these instruments produce a multifaceted picture of the Martian environment. Some datasets require significant processing, and refined machine learning algorithms help the mission teams turn that information into a more intuitive description of the Jezero Crater’s setting, past and present.

The challenge of uncertainty

Despite Perseverance’s remarkable tools and processing software, uncertainty remains in the results. Science, especially when conducted remotely on another planet, is rarely black and white. In this case, the chemical signatures and mineral formations at Beaver Falls are suggestive – but not conclusive – of past life on Mars.

There actually are tools, such as mass spectrometers, that can show definitively whether a rock sample contains evidence of biological activity. However, these instruments are currently too fragile, heavy and power-intensive for Mars missions.

Fortunately, Perseverance has collected and sealed rock core samples from Beaver Falls and other promising sites in Jezero Crater with the goal of sending them back to Earth. If the current Mars sample return plan can retrieve these samples, laboratories on Earth can scrutinize them far more thoroughly than the rover was able to.

Investing in our robotic senses

This discovery is a testament to decades of NASA’s sustained investment in Mars exploration and the work of engineering teams that developed these instruments. Yet these investments face an uncertain future.

The White House’s budget office recently proposed cutting 47% of NASA’s science funding. Such reductions could curtail ongoing missions, including Perseverance’s continued operations, which are targeted for a 23% cut, and jeopardize future plans such as the Mars sample return campaign, among many other missions.

Perseverance represents more than a machine. It is a proxy extending humanity’s senses across millions of miles to an alien world. These robotic explorers and the NASA science programs behind them are a key part of the United States’ collective quest to answer profound questions about the universe and life beyond Earth.

Ari Koeppel previously received funding from NASA science grants. He is affiliated with The Planetary Society. Any views represented in this article are those of the author. The budget cuts do not directly affect the author’s work and he is not currently formally connected to the rover campaign.

– ref. Mars rovers serve as scientists’ eyes and ears from millions of miles away – here are the tools Perseverance used to spot a potential sign of ancient life – https://theconversation.com/mars-rovers-serve-as-scientists-eyes-and-ears-from-millions-of-miles-away-here-are-the-tools-perseverance-used-to-spot-a-potential-sign-of-ancient-life-265144