Source: United States Senator for Michigan Gary Peters
Ahead of Final Passage, Peters Delivered Speech on Senate Floor to Voice His Opposition to the Bill
WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Senator Gary Peters (MI) released the following statement after Senate Republicans passed a bill that would add more than $3 trillion to the deficit, increase our skyrocketing national debt, and take away health care and food assistance from millions of Americans, including hundreds of thousands of Michiganders, in order to cut taxes for billionaires:
“The bill that Republicans just passed will rip health care away from hundreds of thousands of Michiganders, make it harder for families across the country to afford food and pay their energy bills, and balloon our deficit by trillions of dollars. Democrats did everything in our power to stop this legislation, but President Trump and Republicans in Congress are dead set on selling out hardworking Michiganders so they can pay for a massive tax cut for billionaires. This bill is reckless, irresponsible, and an unconscionable betrayal of American families. I voted no.”
nvitamos al público a una serie de seminarios web gratuitos que incluyen conversaciones con defensores de los derechos de personas con discapacidades, expertos, e influencers que compartirán la información más reciente sobre el acceso a la educación y el empleo, desafiando las percepciones sobre las personas con discapacidades y explicando cómo eliminar las barreras.
Según la fecha, los temas son:
8 de julio: Luchando por el acceso a la educación y la equidad para los estudiantes con discapacidades
15 de julio: Trabajando por la igualdad de acceso al empleo para las personas con discapacidades
22 de julio: Hannah y Shane Burcaw, los anfitriones del canal de YouTube Squirmy y Grubs (enlace en inglés) presentarán acerca de cambiar las percepciones sobre las discapacidades
29 de julio: El camino de Oregon hacia la accesibilidad: eliminando barreras
La serie de seminarios web gratuitos será presentada por la Comisión de Discapacidades de Oregon (Oregon Disabilities Commission, ODC por sus siglas en inglés), el Departamento de Servicios Humanos de Oregon (Oregon Department of Human Services), el Centro Noroeste de ADA (Northwest ADA Center-enlace en inglés) y Disability Rights Oregon para conmemorar y celebrar el aniversario 35 de la Ley de Estadounidenses con Discapacidades (Americans with Disabilities Act, ADA por sus siglas en inglés-enlace en inglés).
“La Ley de Estadounidenses con Discapacidades fue una gran victoria en la lucha por los derechos civiles. Creó la base para más igualdad e independencia. El aniversario de la ley es una oportunidad para reflexionar sobre el progreso que hemos logrado y para renovar nuestro compromiso de lograr un Oregon más inclusivo y accesible para las personas con discapacidades,” dijo Mark King, director de ODC. “Agradecemos a nuestros coanfitriones por su colaboración en las presentaciones de la próxima serie de seminarios web. Trabajar juntos nos ayuda a seguir educando, involucrando y abogando en formas que honran el espíritu y el impacto de la ADA.”
Los seminarios web serán todos los martes de julio de las 11:30 a.m. a la 1:00 p.m. hora del Pacífico, e iniciarán el 8 de julio. Las sesiones están abiertas al público y la inscripción está abierta en la página web del evento en Zoom (enlace en inglés).
La serie será accesible para las personas con discapacidades y se traducirá al español. También se brindarán subtítulos y Lengua de Señas Americana. Para preguntas sobre la accesibilidad de la serie de seminarios web o para pedir una adaptación, comuníquese con OregonDisabilities.Commission@odhsoha.oregon.gov.
Se compartirá más información sobre la serie, incluyendo las biografías de los presentadores y folletos para compartir en la página web del evento de la ADA del Departamento de Servicios Humanos de Oregon.
01 JULY 2025 – Equinor and its partners are investing NOK 13 billion in the third phase of Johan Sverdrup, one of the world’s most carbon-efficient oil fields. New subsea infrastructure will increase recovery by 40–50 million barrels of oil equivalent (boe).
“By building on the technologies, solutions, and infrastructure from phases 1 and 2 of Johan Sverdrup, we can carry out an efficient development with a rapid start-up of production. The project increases the recovery rate and value creation from Johan Sverdrup, one of the world’s most carbon-efficient oil and gas fields. At the same time, it contributes to stable energy supplies to Europe,” says Trond Bokn, senior vice president for project development in Equinor.
Increased value creation and innovation
The development includes two new subsea templates which will be tied into existing infrastructure via new pipelines. The investment will increase recoverable volumes from the field by 40–50 million boe, with production expected to start in the fourth quarter of 2027.
To ensure optimal resource utilisation, the project leveraged artificial intelligence to analyse field layouts and well paths. This technology has enabled faster decision-making and resulted in cost savings of NOK 130 million for the phase 3 project.
The project also facilitates future value creation at Johan Sverdrup by adding extra well slots, and opportunities for connecting additional subsea templates.
Contract awards
The Johan Sverdrup field contributes significantly to value creation and ripple effects in society and has driven important industrial development in Norway.
For the phase 3 project, TechnipFMC has been awarded the contract for engineering, procurement, construction, and installation (EPCI) for the subsea development, with a contract value of approximately NOK 5.3 billion. Additional contracts, including platform modifications and the drilling of eight wells, are planned to be awarded later in 2025.
Increased recovery and production
Safe and efficient operations at Johan Sverdrup are delivering results, with systematic efforts to maximise recovery. Phase 3 of the development will create additional value.
The expected recovery rate from Johan Sverdrup is already world-class at 66 percent. The phase 3 project is an important step towards achieving our ambition of 75 percent. The average for the Norwegian continental shelf (NCS) is 47 percent.
“In 2024, Johan Sverdrup set a production record with 260 million barrels of oil, the highest annual oil production ever from a Norwegian field. Every third barrel of oil from the Norwegian continental shelf now comes from the field. Phase 3 is an important contribution to maintaining high production from Johan Sverdrup in the years to come,” says Marianne Bjelland, vice president for Johan Sverdrup.
Equinor aims to maintain a high level of oil and gas production on the NCS towards 2035. Johan Sverdrup phase 3 is one of several projects receiving an investment decision this year that supports this ambition.
The partnership has submitted a notification to the authorities in accordance with the existing plan for development and operation (PDO). The notification is subject to governmental approval.
Johan Sverdrup phase 3
Location: Johan Sverdrup is located in the Utsira High area of the North Sea, 160 kilometres west of Stavanger, in water depths of 110–120 metres, covering an area of 200 square kilometres.
Production capacity: 755,000 barrels per day, approximately one-third of Norway’s total oil production at current levels.
Economic impact: In 2024, the operation of the Johan Sverdrup field alone contributed over 4,400 full-time equivalents and Norwegian deliveries worth NOK 7 billion.
Electrification: Johan Sverdrup is powered by electricity from shore, with CO₂ emissions of 0.67 kilograms per barrel of oil produced – approximately 5% of the global average.
Phase 3 development: Comprises two new subsea templates in the Kvitsøy and Avaldsnes areas with six well slots each, totalling eight wells (seven oil production wells and one water injection well), tied back to existing templates and pipelines to the P2 platform for processing and export.
Future-proofing: The project enables future value creation by including extra well slots, spare capacity in the control cable, and opportunities for connecting additional subsea templates.
Ownership interests: Equinor Energy AS 42.6267% (operator), Aker BP ASA 31.5733%, Petoro AS 17.36%, and TotalEnergies EP Norge AS 8.44%.
Source: United States House of Representatives – Representative Jonathan Jackson – Illinois (1st District)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CHICAGO, IL — Congressman Jonathan L. Jackson (IL-1) today issued the following statement in strong opposition to the Senate’s passage of the so-called “One Big Ugly Bill,” and pledged to vote against the legislation and do everything in his power to prevent it from becoming law:
“Today, the U.S. Senate narrowly passed the ‘One Big Ugly Bill,’ a sweeping measure that threatens the economic security, health, and dignity of working families in Chicago and across the nation. I want to make it absolutely clear: I will vote NO on this bill, and I will fight with every tool at my disposal to stop this reckless attack on our communities.
This legislation would slash $290 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), putting over 205,000 Illinoisans—including tens of thousands of my constituents in Chicago—at risk of losing the food assistance they rely on to feed their families. It would impose new work requirements on adults ages 55–64, a change that could force thousands of older Chicagoans—many of whom are already struggling to find work—off SNAP and into food insecurity. Local food pantries like Irving Park Community Food Pantry and Meals on Wheels Chicago are already stretched thin; these cuts would mean more of our neighbors going hungry, and more pressure on nonprofits that are already struggling to keep up with rising demand.
The bill also slashes nearly $700 billion from Medicaid, jeopardizing health coverage for more than 300,000 Illinois residents, including children, seniors, and people with disabilities. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 10.9 million Americans would lose health insurance coverage under this bill, with low-income and working-class families bearing the brunt of these cuts.
Meanwhile, this bill delivers massive new tax breaks to the wealthiest households and corporations, while adding $2.8 trillion to the national debt. The increase in the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap overwhelmingly benefits the top 5% of earners, while ordinary Chicagoans see their benefits slashed and their cost of living rise.
In Chicago, where nearly one in five households relies on SNAP and more than 40% of children are covered by Medicaid, the impact of this bill would be devastating. Families will face impossible choices between paying for food, medicine, and rent. Our city’s most vulnerable—children, seniors, people with disabilities—will be left to fend for themselves.
I urge my colleagues in the House to reject this cruel and shortsighted legislation. Chicagoans deserve better than a bill that takes from those with the least to give to those with the most. I will stand with our families, our seniors, and our children—and I will do everything in my power to ensure this bill never becomes law.”
Congressman Jackson is also seeking cosponsors for the following amendments to the “One Big Ugly Bill” to protect families from its most damaging provisions:
Amendment to strike Section 10102, which expands SNAP work requirements to seniors ages 55 to 65.
Amendment to strike Section 10107, which would eliminate funding for all SNAP-Ed (SNAP Education) programs.
“These amendments are essential to safeguard our seniors from punitive work requirements and to preserve vital nutrition education programs that help families make healthy choices,” said Jackson. “I call on my colleagues to join me in defending the basic dignity and well-being of our constituents.”
Source: United States House of Representatives – Representative Jonathan Jackson – Illinois (1st District)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CHICAGO, IL — Congressman Jonathan L. Jackson (IL-1) today issued the following statement in strong opposition to the Senate’s passage of the so-called “One Big Ugly Bill,” and pledged to vote against the legislation and do everything in his power to prevent it from becoming law:
“Today, the U.S. Senate narrowly passed the ‘One Big Ugly Bill,’ a sweeping measure that threatens the economic security, health, and dignity of working families in Chicago and across the nation. I want to make it absolutely clear: I will vote NO on this bill, and I will fight with every tool at my disposal to stop this reckless attack on our communities.
This legislation would slash $290 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), putting over 205,000 Illinoisans—including tens of thousands of my constituents in Chicago—at risk of losing the food assistance they rely on to feed their families. It would impose new work requirements on adults ages 55–64, a change that could force thousands of older Chicagoans—many of whom are already struggling to find work—off SNAP and into food insecurity. Local food pantries like Irving Park Community Food Pantry and Meals on Wheels Chicago are already stretched thin; these cuts would mean more of our neighbors going hungry, and more pressure on nonprofits that are already struggling to keep up with rising demand.
The bill also slashes nearly $700 billion from Medicaid, jeopardizing health coverage for more than 300,000 Illinois residents, including children, seniors, and people with disabilities. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 10.9 million Americans would lose health insurance coverage under this bill, with low-income and working-class families bearing the brunt of these cuts.
Meanwhile, this bill delivers massive new tax breaks to the wealthiest households and corporations, while adding $2.8 trillion to the national debt. The increase in the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap overwhelmingly benefits the top 5% of earners, while ordinary Chicagoans see their benefits slashed and their cost of living rise.
In Chicago, where nearly one in five households relies on SNAP and more than 40% of children are covered by Medicaid, the impact of this bill would be devastating. Families will face impossible choices between paying for food, medicine, and rent. Our city’s most vulnerable—children, seniors, people with disabilities—will be left to fend for themselves.
I urge my colleagues in the House to reject this cruel and shortsighted legislation. Chicagoans deserve better than a bill that takes from those with the least to give to those with the most. I will stand with our families, our seniors, and our children—and I will do everything in my power to ensure this bill never becomes law.”
Congressman Jackson is also seeking cosponsors for the following amendments to the “One Big Ugly Bill” to protect families from its most damaging provisions:
Amendment to strike Section 10102, which expands SNAP work requirements to seniors ages 55 to 65.
Amendment to strike Section 10107, which would eliminate funding for all SNAP-Ed (SNAP Education) programs.
“These amendments are essential to safeguard our seniors from punitive work requirements and to preserve vital nutrition education programs that help families make healthy choices,” said Jackson. “I call on my colleagues to join me in defending the basic dignity and well-being of our constituents.”
Source: United Kingdom – Executive Government & Departments
An unpublished conference abstract presented at the ESHRE 41st Annual Meeting in Paris looks at microplastics in human reproductive fluids.
Prof Oliver Jones, Professor of Chemistry, RMIT University, said:
“It is hard to say much at all about this study without knowing the full details of the methods used and the precautions taken against background contamination. All we have to go on is a very brief abstract, not a peer-reviewed paper. Many previous scary-sounding headlines on microplastics in blood and food have turned out to be measurement errors by people unfamiliar with the problems of microplastic measurements1,2 and/or background contamination3. I don’t think lab contamination can be ruled out in this case. The most common plastic found, PTFE, is very widely used in laboratories, including IVF labs, and background contamination makes all forms of microplastic analysis extremely technically challenging.
“Even if we assume no measurement errors, the results are from a total of 51 individuals, so they are far from conclusive (a limitation acknowledged by the authors), and this study does not claim to demonstrate any harm. We would need these findings to be replicated, ideally in other laboratories around the world, before we could tell if this was a one-off event or not. So, while the data are certainly interesting, they are at best preliminary. I don’t think people who may be trying to conceive, either naturally or via IVF, need to be concerned.”
2 Mühlschlegel, P. et al. Lack of evidence for microplastic contamination in honey. Food Additives & Contaminants: Part A 2017, 34 (11), 1982-1989, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28665769/
Dr Channa Jayasena, Associate Professor in Reproductive Endocrinology, Imperial College London, said:
“Microplastics are able to interfere with how cells in different bits of the body speak to each other, and can cause cell damage. Unfortunately, it is no longer a surprise that microplastics find their way into the fluids which are essential for men and women to reproduce. This study was very small, and did not report fertility outcomes in the study participants. But it was well-designed study using state-of-the-art technology to show just how commonly microplastics enter reproductive fluids. They showed that most of the studied samples in men and women contained microplastics. Some previous studies have reported that microplastic exposure is associated with lower-than-normal fertility in men. The results contribute to a growing concern for public health – we don’t know what the impact of all types of microplastics are on reproductive function in men and women. Understanding this will help us understand how big a problem microplastics post for fertility in society.”
Dr Stephanie Wright, Associate Professor in Environmental Toxicology, Imperial College London, said:
“Without information on the sizes of the microplastic particles observed, it is challenging to interpret how meaningful this data is. There is a high potential for samples to become contaminated with microplastic throughout the sampling, laboratory processing, and analysis procedures. If stringent steps to minimise this are taken, other clues such as the size of the particles observed can be used to rule out such contamination, with there being a greater likelihood for smaller particles ( 0.01 mm) being absorbed and redistributed around the body. It is not a surprise that microplastics have been found – they are everywhere, even in the lab – but the data provided do not support that they are there as a result of human exposure as opposed to methodological artefact and must be interpreted with caution at this early stage.”
Prof Fay Couceiro, Professor of Environmental Pollution, and Head of the Microplastics Research Group, University of Portsmouth, said:
“As this is not peer reviewed and there is no detailed methodology it is difficult to give specific information on quality etc. Here are some general comments:
“The study is very interesting and considering the global reduction in fertility rates, looking at possible causes is very topical and timely. As the authors state, finding microplastics is not that surprising as we have found them in lots of other areas of our bodies. Presence is also not the same as impact and the authors are clear that while they have found microplastics in the reproductive fluids of both men and women, we still don’t know how they are affecting us. As a preliminary study the work is interesting, but more information is required on numbers of microplastics found, sizes, method blanks and any plastics used during the medical procedures before any real conclusions can be made. I look forward to reading the full article once it is ready. (A method blank is when you run the experimental steps, but with clean water, and then analyse that to see if you have any microplastics in it. This would let you know if there is any external contamination, and if the microplastics in the samples are from the reproductive fluid, or introduced from the digestion and analysis steps. It would be very unusual not to see any microplastics in the blanks if they are looking below 10 micrometres in size range. At that size, microplastics are in the air and very hard to get away from. If they only analysed larger particles then you tend to find less in your method blanks, but it is common practice to give these in a full paper so that people can see if the number you are finding in your samples is higher than in the blanks.)
Does the press release accurately reflect the science?
“To the extent of which data is available it does, it is clear this is only looking at the presence of microplastics and not impacts.
Is this good quality research? Are the conclusions backed up by solid data?
“Very hard to judge without more in depth information on methods, numbers found in blanks, size ranges of microplastics etc.
Is there enough data available to be able to judge the quality of this work?
“At this stage I would say no – as above the methods really need to be more detailed. Microplastics are everywhere and even with the best methods you find some in the blanks at the smaller sizes (less than 10 um). They say they looked in the containers but the method blank data is missing as are the actual numbers found, e.g. is it 10 microplastics per ml of SF? Is 10 significantly greater than what was found in the method blank? Size range is also very important and not mentioned anywhere I can see.
Is this a peer-reviewed journal publication or more preliminary?
“Preliminary.
How does this work fit with the existing evidence?
“It is expected as microplastics have been found in all bodily fluids/organs tested.
Have the authors accounted for confounders? Are there important limitations to be aware of?
“It is unclear if there is any plastic used in the collection of the samples as I am unfamiliar with the procedures – the storage vessel is glass but is plastic used in the follicular aspiration? Many medical instruments are made from plastic, is that the case here?
What are the implications in the real world? Is there any overspeculation?
“No – they are clear this is just a presence/absence experiment and that further work needs to take place to determine any impacts.”
Abstract title: ‘Unveiling the Hidden Danger: Detection and characterisation of microplastics in human follicular and seminal fluids’ by E. Gomez-Sanchez et al.It will be presented at the ESHRE 41st Annual Meeting in Paris, and the embargo lifted at 23:01 UK time on Tuesday 1 July 2025.
There is no paper.
Declared interests
Prof Oliver Jones: “I am a Professor of Chemistry at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. I conduct research into environmental pollution, including microplastics. I have no conflicts of interest to declare.”
Dr Channa Jayasena: “None.”
Dr Stephanie Wright: “Own research: MRC, NERC, NIHR, Common Seas, Minderoo Foundation, LECO;
To attend scientific meetings: American Chemistry Council – to attend a workshop on microplastic reference materials (2022); Minderoo Foundation – to attend workshops on microplastic measurement in human tissue (2024, 2025);
Current or previous advisory roles or committee membership: ILSI Europe, PlasticsEurope (BRIGID project), Cefic LRI projects advisory roles, have been a temporary member of UK Air Quality Expert Group;
Previous employment in companies: none.”
Prof Fay Couceiro: “I work in the field of microplastics but I was not involved in the study and I am not working with the authors. I am unaware of any conflict of interest.”
Eight new Industry Skills Boards (ISBs) will give industry a strong voice in work-based learning, ensuring the system delivers the right skills, in the right places, for a growing economy, Vocational Education Minister Penny Simmonds says.
“The Government promised to disestablish Te Pūkenga and return decision-making to local providers and industry. The Industry Skills Boards are a key part of delivering on that promise,” Ms Simmonds says.
“This is all part of our plan to make sure that the training people receive is aligned to what industry needs, and skills are matched to ensure they are fit-for-purpose, paving the way for economic growth. We want to ensure our workforce across key growth sectors are ready to hit the ground running.
“The ISBs will be led by industry experts who know their trades and sectors best. They will set training standards, oversee quality, and make sure apprenticeships and traineeships match what employers and students need.”
The eight Industry Skills Boards will begin operating from 1 January 2026 once the legislation is passed later this year. They will also temporarily manage work-based training currently overseen by Te Pūkenga. Backed by industry consultation, they will cover:
Automotive, transport, and logistics
Construction and specialist trades
Food and fibre (including aquaculture)
Infrastructure
Manufacturing and engineering
Services
Health and community
Electrotechnology and information technology
Industry Skills Boards will have three main funding sources. They will receive some core public funding, they can choose to charge fees to fund their quality assurance functions, and industries can also choose to support ISBs through a levy.
Around 250,000 learners enter the vocational education system each year — half learning on campus or online, and half through work-based training.
“Whether you’re learning on the job or in a classroom, these changes will make your training more relevant and valuable,” Ms Simmonds says.
“We want every apprentice and trainee to be confident their qualifications will be recognised by employers. Employers can trust the system to deliver skilled workers ready to step into roles.
“This is a win for apprentices, trainees, employers, and the economy. We’re building a modern, connected work-based learning system that supports quality jobs and drives the economic growth powering New Zealand’s future.”
The appointment of Scott O’Donnell to the KiwiRail board will bolster its freight expertise Minister for Rail Winston Peters says.
“Railways have no shortage of potential for New Zealand, and we expect to see sustained growth in earnings, revenue, volumes, reliability, and safety to turn this business into something great.”
Mr O’Donnell is a current director of HW Richardson Group and was its managing director from 2006 to 2015. The Group owns 46 companies, employing 2000 people across six sectors including road freight.
“Mr O’Donnell, new Chair Sue Tindal and the Treasury have established a conflict-of-interest management plan which will be reviewed and monitored.
“The company’s road freight operation is primarily south of Oamaru, and as such Mr O’Donnell will recuse himself from KiwiRail activities in this part of New Zealand.
“Mr O’Donnell has resigned as chair of HW Richardson-owned Dynes Transport but remains on its board, noting this company is receiving Government co-investment for a rail siding into a new Mosgiel road and rail freight hub,” Mr Peters says.
Term: 1 September 2025 – 31 August 2028
Biography: Scott O’Donnell is a Director of the HW Richardson (HWR) Group and was previously Managing Director of the Group from 2006 to 2015. In addition to his directorship, Mr O’Donnell spearheads the HWR Group Property portfolio that is responsible for various projects across New Zealand. Mr O’Donnell has led HWR Group through a decade of considerable growth, in both company size, business growth and diversification. His deep expertise both operational and governance in property management, transport, freight, and logistics as well as his commercial nous will add important strategic insights to KiwiRail’s business.
Source: US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Note: The expiration time in the watch graphic is amended if the watch is replaced, cancelled or extended.Note: Click for Watch Status Reports. SEL2
URGENT – IMMEDIATE BROADCAST REQUESTED Severe Thunderstorm Watch Number 482 NWS Storm Prediction Center Norman OK 405 PM MDT Tue Jul 1 2025
The NWS Storm Prediction Center has issued a
* Severe Thunderstorm Watch for portions of Western Nebraska Western South Dakota Northeast Wyoming
* Effective this Tuesday afternoon and evening from 405 PM until 1100 PM MDT.
* Primary threats include… Scattered large hail and isolated very large hail events to 2 inches in diameter possible Isolated damaging wind gusts to 70 mph possible
SUMMARY…Isolated to widely scattered severe storm development, potentially including a couple of high-based supercells, is expected regionally through early evening, with the possibility that a loosely organized cluster could evolve later this evening.
The severe thunderstorm watch area is approximately along and 70 statute miles east and west of a line from 65 miles north of Rapid City SD to 50 miles east of Sidney NE. For a complete depiction of the watch see the associated watch outline update (WOUS64 KWNS WOU2).
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS…
REMEMBER…A Severe Thunderstorm Watch means conditions are favorable for severe thunderstorms in and close to the watch area. Persons in these areas should be on the lookout for threatening weather conditions and listen for later statements and possible warnings. Severe thunderstorms can and occasionally do produce tornadoes.
&&
OTHER WATCH INFORMATION…CONTINUE…WW 481…
AVIATION…A few severe thunderstorms with hail surface and aloft to 2 inches. Extreme turbulence and surface wind gusts to 60 knots. A few cumulonimbi with maximum tops to 550. Mean storm motion vector 29025.
…Guyer
SEL2
URGENT – IMMEDIATE BROADCAST REQUESTED Severe Thunderstorm Watch Number 482 NWS Storm Prediction Center Norman OK 405 PM MDT Tue Jul 1 2025
The NWS Storm Prediction Center has issued a
* Severe Thunderstorm Watch for portions of Western Nebraska Western South Dakota Northeast Wyoming
* Effective this Tuesday afternoon and evening from 405 PM until 1100 PM MDT.
* Primary threats include… Scattered large hail and isolated very large hail events to 2 inches in diameter possible Isolated damaging wind gusts to 70 mph possible
SUMMARY…Isolated to widely scattered severe storm development, potentially including a couple of high-based supercells, is expected regionally through early evening, with the possibility that a loosely organized cluster could evolve later this evening.
The severe thunderstorm watch area is approximately along and 70 statute miles east and west of a line from 65 miles north of Rapid City SD to 50 miles east of Sidney NE. For a complete depiction of the watch see the associated watch outline update (WOUS64 KWNS WOU2).
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS…
REMEMBER…A Severe Thunderstorm Watch means conditions are favorable for severe thunderstorms in and close to the watch area. Persons in these areas should be on the lookout for threatening weather conditions and listen for later statements and possible warnings. Severe thunderstorms can and occasionally do produce tornadoes.
&&
OTHER WATCH INFORMATION…CONTINUE…WW 481…
AVIATION…A few severe thunderstorms with hail surface and aloft to 2 inches. Extreme turbulence and surface wind gusts to 60 knots. A few cumulonimbi with maximum tops to 550. Mean storm motion vector 29025.
…Guyer
Note: The Aviation Watch (SAW) product is an approximation to the watch area. The actual watch is depicted by the shaded areas. SAW2 WW 482 SEVERE TSTM NE SD WY 012205Z – 020500Z AXIS..70 STATUTE MILES EAST AND WEST OF LINE.. 65N RAP/RAPID CITY SD/ – 50E SNY/SIDNEY NE/ ..AVIATION COORDS.. 60NM E/W /57W DPR – 43E SNY/ HAIL SURFACE AND ALOFT..2 INCHES. WIND GUSTS..60 KNOTS. MAX TOPS TO 550. MEAN STORM MOTION VECTOR 29025.
LAT…LON 44980162 41090068 41090336 44980448
THIS IS AN APPROXIMATION TO THE WATCH AREA. FOR A COMPLETE DEPICTION OF THE WATCH SEE WOUS64 KWNS FOR WOU2.
Watch 482 Status Report Message has not been issued yet.
Note: Click for Complete Product Text.Tornadoes
Probability of 2 or more tornadoes
Low (10%)
Probability of 1 or more strong (EF2-EF5) tornadoes
Low ( 65 knots
Low (10%)
Hail
Probability of 10 or more severe hail events
Mod (50%)
Probability of 1 or more hailstones > 2 inches
Mod (30%)
Combined Severe Hail/Wind
Probability of 6 or more combined severe hail/wind events
High (70%)
For each watch, probabilities for particular events inside the watch (listed above in each table) are determined by the issuing forecaster. The “Low” category contains probability values ranging from less than 2% to 20% (EF2-EF5 tornadoes), less than 5% to 20% (all other probabilities), “Moderate” from 30% to 60%, and “High” from 70% to greater than 95%. High values are bolded and lighter in color to provide awareness of an increased threat for a particular event.
Source: Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission
Most people will never see Antarctic sea ice up close, but its presence or absence affects our day-to-day lives. Now scientists are questioning whether a ‘regime shift’ to a new state of diminished Antarctic sea-ice coverage is underway, due to recent record lows. If so, it will have impacts across climate, ecological and societal systems, according to new research published in PNAS Nexus.
These impacts include ocean warming, increased iceberg calving, habitat loss and sea-level rise, and effects on fisheries, Antarctic tourism, and even the mental health of the global human population. Led by Australian Antarctic Program Partnership oceanographer Dr Edward Doddridge, the international team assessed the impacts of extreme summer sea-ice lows, and the challenges to predicting and mitigating change. “Antarctic sea ice provides climate and ecosystem services of regional and global significance,” Dr Doddridge said. “There are far reaching negative impacts caused by sea-ice loss. “However, we do not sufficiently understand the baseline system to be able to predict how it will respond to the dramatic changes we are already observing. “To predict future changes, and to potentially mitigate the negative impacts of climate change on Antarctica, we urgently need to improve our knowledge through new observations and modelling studies.” What’s at stake? While sea-ice loss affects many things, the research team identified three key impacts:
Reduced summer sea-ice cover exposes more of the ocean to sunlight. This leads to surface water warming that promotes further sea-ice loss. Ocean warming increases melting under glacial ice shelves, which could lead to increased iceberg calving. Warmer water also affects the flow of deep-water currents that help move ocean heat around the globe, influencing the planet’s climate. Sea-ice loss exposes the ice shelves that fringe the Antarctic continent to damaging ocean swells and storms. These can weaken the ice shelves, leading to iceberg calving. As ice shelves slow the flow of ice from the interior of the Antarctic continent to the coast, iceberg calving allows this interior ice flow to speed up, contributing to sea-level rise. Sea ice provides breeding habitat for penguin and seal species, and a refuge for many marine species from predators. It is also an important nursery habitat and source of food (sea-ice algae) for Antarctic krill – an important prey species for many Southern Ocean inhabitants. Adverse sea-ice conditions that persist over several seasons could see population declines in these sea-ice dependent species.
The research team also identified socio-economic and wellbeing impacts, affecting fisheries, tourism, scientific research, ice-navigation, coastal operations, and the mental health (climate anxiety) of the global population. For example, shorter sea-ice seasons will reduce the window for over-ice resupplies of Antarctic stations. There could also be increased shipping pressures on the continent, including from alien species incursions, fuel spills and an increase in the number and movement of tourist vessels to and from new locations. Research co-author and sea-ice system expert, Dr Petra Heil, from the Australian Antarctic Division, said the paper highlighted the need for ongoing, year-round, field-based and satellite measurements of circumpolar sea-ice variables (especially thickness), and sub-surface ocean variables. This would allow integrated analyses of the Southern Ocean processes contributing to the recent sea-ice deficits. “As shown in climate simulations, continued greenhouse gas emissions, even at reduced rate, will further accelerate persistent deficits of sea ice, and with it a lack of the critical climate and ecosystem functions it provides,” Dr Heil said. “To conserve and preserve the physical environment and ecosystems of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean we must prioritise an immediate and sustained transition to net zero greenhouse gas emissions. “Ultimately our decison for immediate and deep action will provide the maximum future proofing we can have in terms of lifestyle and economic values.” Learn more about Antarctic sea ice in our feature ‘Sea ice in crisis’. This content was last updated 8 minutes ago on 2 July 2025.
The Justice Department announced today that it has filed a Statement of Interest in the lawsuit Equality State Policy Center v. Chuck Gray, defending Wyoming’s legitimate interest securing its voting process from fraud by requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Longstanding Supreme Court precedent recognizes that states have a significant interest in preventing fraud and safeguarding voter confidence in the election process. Wyoming’s documentary proof of citizenship law is a mechanism to enforce laws that prohibit non-citizen voting and ensure that only eligible voters cast ballots.
“It is a crime for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, and it is important that the American people have confidence in the integrity of our elections.” said Deputy Assistant Attorney General Michael Gates of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Requiring documentary proof of citizenship is common sense and ensures that only citizens vote.”
The Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section enforces the civil provisions of federal statutes that protect the integrity of the vote, including the Voting Rights Act, National Voter Registration Act, Help America Vote Act, and the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.
The Justice Department announced today that it has filed a Statement of Interest in the lawsuit Equality State Policy Center v. Chuck Gray, defending Wyoming’s legitimate interest securing its voting process from fraud by requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Longstanding Supreme Court precedent recognizes that states have a significant interest in preventing fraud and safeguarding voter confidence in the election process. Wyoming’s documentary proof of citizenship law is a mechanism to enforce laws that prohibit non-citizen voting and ensure that only eligible voters cast ballots.
“It is a crime for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, and it is important that the American people have confidence in the integrity of our elections.” said Deputy Assistant Attorney General Michael Gates of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Requiring documentary proof of citizenship is common sense and ensures that only citizens vote.”
The Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section enforces the civil provisions of federal statutes that protect the integrity of the vote, including the Voting Rights Act, National Voter Registration Act, Help America Vote Act, and the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.
With burgers sizzling and classic rock thumping, many Americans revel in summer cookouts – at least until that wayward cousin asks for a “pop” in soda country, or even worse, a “coke” when they actually want a Sprite.
Few American linguistic debates have bubbled quite as long and effervescently as the one over whether a generic soft drink should be called a soda, pop or coke.
The word you use generally boils down to where you’re from: Midwesterners enjoy a good pop, while soda is tops in the North and far West. Southerners, long the cultural mavericks, don’t bat an eyelash asking for coke – lowercase – before homing in on exactly the type they want: Perhaps a root beer or a Coke, uppercase.
As a linguist who studies American dialects, I’m less interested in this regional divide and far more fascinated by the unexpected history behind how a fizzy “health” drink from the early 1800s spawned the modern soft drink’s many names and iterations.
The process of carbonating water was first discovered in the late 1700s. By the early 1800s, this carbonated water had become popular as a health drink and was often referred to as “soda water.” The word “soda” likely came from “sodium,” since these drinks often contained salts, which were then believed to have healing properties.
Given its alleged curative effects for health issues such as indigestion, pharmacists sold soda water at soda fountains, innovative devices that created carbonated water to be sold by the glass. A chemistry professor, Benjamin Stillman, set up the first such device in a drugstore in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1806. Its eventual success inspired a boom of soda fountains in drugstores and health spas.
These flavored, sweetened versions gave rise to the linking of the word “soda” with a sweetened carbonated beverage, as opposed to simple, carbonated water.
Seltzer – today’s popular term for such sparkling water – was around, too. But it was used only for the naturally carbonated mineral water from the German town Nieder-Selters. Unlike Perrier, sourced similarly from a specific spring in France, seltzer made the leap to becoming a generic term for fizzy water.
So how did “soda” come to be called so many different things in different places?
It all stems from a mix of economic enterprise and linguistic ingenuity.
The popularity of “soda” in the Northeast likely reflects the soda fountain’s longer history in the region. Since a lot of Americans living in the Northeast migrated to California in the mid-to-late 1800s, the name likely traveled west with them.
As for the Midwestern preference for “pop” – well, the earliest American use of the term to refer to a sparkling beverage appeared in the 1840s in the name of a flavored version called “ginger pop.” Such ginger-flavored pop, though, was around in Britain by 1816, since a Newcastle songbook is where you can first see it used in text. The “pop” seems to be onomatopoeic for the noise made when the cork was released from the bottle before drinking.
A jingle for Faygo touts the company’s ‘red pop.’
Linguists don’t fully know why “pop” became so popular in the Midwest. But one theory links it to a Michigan bottling company, Feigenson Brothers Bottling Works – today known as Faygo Beverages – that used “pop” in the name of the sodas they marketed and sold. Another theory suggests that because bottles were more common in the region, soda drinkers were more likely to hear the “pop” sound than in the Northeast, where soda fountains reigned.
As for using coke generically, the first Coca-Cola was served in 1886 by Dr. John Pemberton, a pharmacist at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in Atlanta and the founder of the company. In the 1900s, the Coca-Cola company tried to stamp out the use of “Coke” for “Coca-Cola.” But that ship had already sailed. Since Coca-Cola originated and was overwhelmingly popular in the South, its generic use grew out of the fact that people almost always asked for “Coke.”
Due to the growing popularity of soda water concoctions, eventually “soft drink” came to mean only such sweetened carbonated beverages, a linguistic testament to America’s enduring love affair with sugar and bubbles.
With the average American guzzling almost 40 gallons per year, you can call it whatever you what. Just don’t call it healthy.
Valerie M. Fridland 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.
The 1925 Scopes trial, in which a Dayton, Tennessee, teacher was charged with violating state law by teaching biological evolution, was one of the earliest and most iconic conflicts in America’s ongoing culture war.
Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” published in 1859, and subsequent scientific research made the case that humans and other animals evolved from earlier species over millions of years. Many late-19th-century American Protestants had little problem accommodating Darwin’s ideas – which became mainstream biology – with their religious commitments.
But that was not the case with all Christians, especially conservative evangelicals, who held that the Bible is inerrant – without error – and factually accurate in all that it has to say, including when it speaks on history and science.
One hundred years after the trial, and as we have documented in our scholarly work, the culture war over evolution and creationism remains strong – and yet, when it comes to creationism, much has also changed.
Holding to biblical inerrancy, these “fundamentalists” believed in the creation account detailed in chapter 1 of Genesis, in which God brought all life into being in six days. But most of these fundamentalists also accepted mainstream geology, which held that the Earth was millions of years old. Squaring a literal understanding of Genesis with an old Earth, they embraced either the “day-age theory” – that each Genesis day was actually a long period of time – or the “gap theory,” in which there was a huge gap of time before the six 24-hour days of creation.
This nascent fundamentalist movement initiated a campaign to pressure state legislatures to prohibit public schools from teaching evolution. One of these states was Tennessee, which in 1925 passed the Butler Act. This law made it illegal for public schoolteachers “to teach any theory that denies the story of divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”
The American Civil Liberties Union persuaded John Thomas Scopes, a young science teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, to challenge the law in court. The WCFA sprang into action, successfully persuading William Jennings Bryan – populist politician and outspoken fundamentalist – to assist the prosecution. In response, the ACLU hired famous attorney Clarence Darrow to serve on the defense team.
Inside the courtroom, the trial became a verbal duel between Bryan and Darrow regarding science and religion. But as the judge narrowed the proceedings to whether or not Scopes violated the law – a point that the defense readily admitted – it seemed clear that Scopes would be found guilty. Many of the reporters thus went home.
But the trial’s most memorable episode was yet to come. On July 20, Darrow successfully provoked Bryan to take the witness stand as a Bible expert. Due to the huge crowd and suffocating heat, the judge moved the trial outdoors.
The 3,000 or so spectators witnessed Darrow’s interrogation of Bryan, which was primarily intended to make Bryan and fundamentalism appear foolish and ignorant. Most significant, Darrow’s questions revealed that, despite Bryan’s’ assertion that he read the Bible literally, Bryan actually understood the six days of Genesis not as 24-hour days, but as six long and indeterminate periods of time.
American lawyer and politician William Jennings Bryan during the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn. Hulton Archive/Getty Image
The very next day, the jury found Scopes guilty and fined him US$100. Riley and the fundamentalists cheered the verdict as a triumph for the Bible and morality.
The fundamentalists and ‘The Genesis Flood’
But very soon that sense of triumph faded, partly because of news stories that portrayed fundamentalists as ignorant rural bigots. In one such example, a prominent journalist, H. L. Mencken, wrote in a Baltimore Sun column that the Scopes trial “serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land.”
The media ridicule encouraged many scholars and journalists to conclude that creationism and fundamentalism would soon disappear from American culture. But that prediction did not come to pass.
Instead, fundamentalists, including WCFA leader Riley, seemed all the more determined to redouble their efforts at the grassroots level.
But as Darrow’s interrogation of Bryan made obvious, it was not easy to square a literal reading of the Bible – including the six-day creation outlined in Genesis – with a scientific belief in an old Earth. What fundamentalists needed was a science that supported the idea of a young Earth.
“The Genesis Flood” and its version of flood geology remains ubiquitous among fundamentalists and other conservative Protestants.
Young Earth creationism
Today, opinion polls reveal that roughly one-quarter of all Americans are adherents of this newer strand of creationism, which rejects both mainstream geology as well as mainstream biology.
AiG’s tourist sites – the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, and the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky – have attracted millions of visitors since their opening in 2007 and 2016. Additional AiG sites are planned for Branson, Missouri, and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
Presented as a replica of Noah’s Ark, the Ark Encounter is a gigantic structure – 510 feet long, 85 feet wide, 51 feet high. It includes representations of animal cages as well as plush living quarters for the eight human beings who, according to Genesis chapters 6-8, survived the global flood. Hundreds of placards in the Ark make the case for a young Earth and a global flood that created the geological strata and formations we see today.
Besides AiG tourist sites, there is also an ever-expanding network of fundamentalist schools and homeschools that present young Earth creationism as true science. These schools use textbooks from publishers such as Abeka Books, Accelerated Christian Education and Bob Jones University Press.
The Scopes trial involved what could and could not be taught in public schools regarding creation and evolution. Today, this discussion also involves private schools, given that there are now at least 15 states that have universal private school choice programs, in which families can use taxpayer-funded education money to pay for private schooling and homeschooling.
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.
Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Charles J. Russo, Joseph Panzer Chair in Education and Research Professor of Law, University of Dayton
The parents who brought the case had requested that their children be excused when books with LGBTQ+ characters were used in class.SDI Productions/E+ via Getty Images
The Supreme Court tends to save its blockbuster orders for the last day of the term – and 2025 was no exception.
Among the important decisions handed down June 27, 2025, was Mahmoud v. Taylor – a case of particular interest to me, because I teach education law. Mahmoud, I believe, may become one of the court’s most consequential rulings on parental rights.
An interfaith coalition of Muslim, Orthodox Christian and Catholic parents in Montgomery County, Maryland – including Tamer Mahmoud, for whom the case is named – questioned the school board’s refusal to allow them to opt their young children out of lessons using picture books with LGBTQ+ characters. Ruling in favor of the parents, the court found that the board violated their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion by requiring their children to sit through lessons with materials inconsistent with their faiths.
Case history
The parents in Mahmoud challenged the use of certain storybooks that the board had approved for use in preschool and elementary school. “Pride Puppy!” for example – a book the schools later removed – portrays a family whose pet gets lost at a LGBTQ+ Pride parade, with each page devoted to a letter of the alphabet. The book’s “search and find” list of words directs readers to look for terms in the pictures, including “(drag) queen” and “king,” “leather” and “lip ring.” Other materials included stories about same-sex marriage, a transgender child, and nonbinary bathroom signs.
Initially, school administrators agreed to allow opt-outs for students whose parents objected to the materials. A day later, however, educators changed their minds. School officials cited concerns about absenteeism, the feasibility of accommodating opt-out requests, and a desire to avoid stigmatizing LGBTQ+ students or families.
In August 2023, a federal trial court rejected the parents’ claim that officials had violated their fundamental due process right to direct the care, custody and education of their children. The following year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit affirmed in favor of the board, finding that officials did not violate the parents’ rights to the free exercise of their religious beliefs, as protected by the First Amendment.
On appeal, a 6-3 Supreme Court reversed in favor of the parents. Justice Samuel Alito, who authored the court’s opinion, was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, plus Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
Supreme Court
In brief, the court held that by denying the parental requests to opt their children out of instruction inconsistent with their beliefs, school officials violated their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.
Alito largely grounded the court’s rationale in a dispute from 1925, Pierce v. Society of Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus and Mary, and even more heavily on 1972’s Wisconsin v. Yoder. Both cases recognize the primacy of parental rights to direct the education of their children. According to Pierce’s famous dictum, “the child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”
In Yoder, Amish parents – an Anabaptist Christian community that avoids using many modern technologies – objected to sending their children to school after eighth grade because this would have violated their religious beliefs. The justices unanimously agreed with the parents that their children received all of the education they needed in their communities. The justices added that requiring the children to attend high school would have violated the parents’ rights to direct their children’s religious upbringing.
Accordingly, the court acknowledged that the parental right “to guide the religious future and education of their children” was “established beyond debate.”
Similarly, in Mahmoud the court declared that “the Board’s introduction of the ‘LGBTQ+-inclusive’ storybooks, along with its decision to withhold opt-outs, places an unconstitutional burden on the parents’ rights to the free exercise of their religion.”
Thomas agreed fully with the court, yet wrote a separate concurrence, which emphasized “an important implication of this decision for schools across the country.” Citing Yoder, Thomas contended that rather than support inclusion, the board’s policy “imposes conformity with a view that undermines parents’ religious beliefs, and thus interferes with the parents’ right to ‘direct the religious upbringing of their children.’”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, feared “the result will be chaos for this Nation’s public schools. Requiring schools to provide advance notice and the chance to opt out of every lesson plan or story time that might implicate a parent’s religious beliefs will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools.”
Supporters of LGBTQ+ rights demonstrate outside the U.S. Supreme Court during oral arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor on April 22, 2025. Oliver Contreras/AFP via Getty Images
She maintained that “simply being exposed to beliefs contrary to your own” does not violate a person’s free exercise rights. Insulating children from different ideas, she wrote, denies them of an experience that is crucial for democracy: “practice living in our multicultural society.”
Implications
After the decision was handed down, Montgomery County’s Board of Education issued a statement promising to “analyze the Supreme Court decision and develop next steps in alignment with today’s decision, and as importantly, our values.”
Mahmoud raises challenging questions about the scope or reach of how far parents can question curricular content.
On the one hand, parents should not be able to micromanage curricular content via the “heckler’s veto,” because this can lead to larger issues. Moreover, while Mahmoud concerns religious rights, what happens if parents question teachings based on another type of sincerely held belief – discussing war if they are pacifist, for example, or capitalism if they are socialists? While Mahmoud dealt with free-exercise rights, it may open the door to other types of First Amendment challenges from parents wishing to exempt their children from lessons.
On the other hand, Mahmoud highlights the need to take legitimate parental concerns into consideration. While educators typically control instruction, how can they be respectful of parents’ rights as primary caregivers of their children when conflicts arise?
Mahmoud may go a long way in defining parents’ free-exercise rights in public schools. Still, such disputes are likely far from over in America’s increasingly diverse religious culture.
Charles J. Russo 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.
“Bill Moyers? He’s spectacular!” George Clooney said – and no wonder.
I mentioned this legendary television journalist to the actor and filmmaker after Clooney emerged from the Broadway theater where he just had been portraying another news icon: Edward R. Murrow. Or as the Museum of Broadcast Communications put it in a tribute to Moyers, he was “one of the few broadcast journalists who might be said to approach the stature of Edward R. Murrow. If Murrow founded broadcast journalism, Moyers significantly extended its traditions.”
Moyers, who died at 91 on June 26, 2025, was among the most acclaimed broadcast journalists of the 20th century. He’s known for TV news shows that exposed the role of big money in politics and episodes that drew attention to unsung defenders of democracy, such as community organizer Ernesto Cortés Jr..
Despite his prominence, Moyers was the same down-to-earth guy in person as he seemed to be on the screen. In 1986, he was commanding a television audience of millions, and I was a historian at home with a preschooler, teaching the occasional college course in a dismal job market. Seeing that Moyers would be speaking at the conference on President Lyndon B. Johnson where I would be giving a paper, I wrote to him.
To my utter amazement, he replied and then showed up to hear my paper, on Johnson’s experiences as a young principal of the “Mexican” school in Cotulla, Texas, where he championed his students but also forged links to segregationists. Cotulla was “seminal” to LBJ’s development, Moyers said. In 1993, he recommended me for a grant that helped me finish a book: “LBJ and Mexican Americans: The Paradox of Power.
A few years later, he asked me to head up a project researching the documents related to his time in Johnson’s administration. His memoir of the Johnson years never materialized. Instead, I edited the bestselling ”Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times.“
Part of what always impressed me about Moyers was his belief that what matters is not how close you are to power, but how close you are to reality.
‘Amazing Grace’
Moyers didn’t just dwell on politics and policy as a journalist. He also delved into the meaning of creativity and the life of the mind. Many of his most moving interviews spotlighted scientists, novelists and other exceptional people.
He was also arguably among the best reporters on the religion beat. Even if it wasn’t always the main focus of his work or what comes to mind for those familiar with his legacy, still, he was a lifelong spiritual seeker.
He once told me that his favorite of the many programs that he produced was the PBS documentary ”Amazing Grace.“ It featured inspiring renditions of this popular Christian hymn as performed by country legend Johnny Cash, folk icon Judy Collins, opera diva Jessye Norman and other musical geniuses. As they share with Moyers their personal connections to this song of redemption, he draws viewers into the stirring saga of its creator, John Newton: a slave trader who became an abolitionist through “amazing grace.”
Bill Moyers interviews Judy Collins about singing ‘Amazing Grace,’ following the production of his PBS special about the hymn.
Life’s ultimate questions
This appreciation of the ineffable clearly informed Moyers’ blockbuster TV series exploring life’s ultimate questions, “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth.”
To my surprise, Moyers knew about this Trappist monk, telling me, “I always wished that I could have interviewed Merton,” who died in 1968.
It turned out that Moyers had been introduced to Merton by Sargent Shriver, founding director of the Peace Corps, where Moyers was a founding organizer and the deputy director.
Mentored by LBJ
Moyers characterized his Peace Corps years as the most rewarding of his life. When Johnson, his mentor, became president, he asked Moyers to join the White House staff. Moyers turned down the offer, so Johnson made it a presidential command.
The wunderkind – Moyers was 29 years old in 1963, when Johnson was sworn in after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination – coordinated the White House task forces that created the largest number of legislative proposals in American history. Among the programs and landmark reforms established and passed during the Johnson administration were Medicare andMedicaid, a landmark immigration law, the Freedom of Information Act, the Public Broadcasting Act and two historic civil rights laws.
Johnson’s war on poverty, in addition, introduced several path-breaking programs, such as Head Start.
Moyers served as one of Johnson’s speechwriters and was a top official in Johnson’s 1964 presidential campaign. The following year, the Johnson administration began escalating U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and Johnson named a new press secretary: Bill Moyers. Again, the young man tried to decline, but the president prevailed.
As Moyers had feared, he could not serve two masters – journalists and his boss – especially as the administration’s Vietnam War policies became increasingly unpopular.
Moyers left the Johnson administration in 1967, turning to journalism. He became the publisher of Newsday, a Long Island, New York, newspaper, before becoming a producer and commentator at CBS News. His commentaries reached tens of millions of viewers, but the network refused to provide a regular time slot for his documentaries. He had previously worked at PBS. In 1987, he decamped there for good.
Moyers’ programs won many journalism awards, including over 30 Emmys, along with the Lifetime Emmy for news and documentary productions.
He helped millions of Americans appreciate the world around them. As he reflected in 2023, in one of the last interviews he gave, to PBS journalist Judy Woodruff at the Library of Congress: “Everything is linked, and if you can find that nerve that connects us to other things and other places and other ideas – and television should be doing it all the time – we’d be a better democracy.”
Judy Woodruff interviews Bill Moyers about his life’s work in government and the media, including his contributions to the launch of PBS, at the Library of Congress.
“It takes time, commitment” to dig below the surface and discover the deeper meaning of people’s lives, Moyers noted. He sought to understand, for example, why so many folks in his own hometown of Marshall, Texas, have become much more suspicious – resentful, even – of outsiders than when he gave these folks voice in his poignant, prize-winning 1984 program Marshall, Texas; Marshall, Texas.
In this era of growing threats to democracy, what can a young person do who aspires to follow in Bill Moyers’ footsteps – whether in journalism or public life?
Woodruff asked Moyers that question, to which he responded: “You can’t quit. You can’t get out of the boat! Find a place that gives you a sense of being, gives you a sense of mission, gives you a sense of participation.”
Today, with the future of journalism – and of democracy itself – at stake, I think it would help everyone to take to heart the insights of this late, great American journalist.
Julie Leininger Pycior edited the book “Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times.” She also was hired by Moyers to direct the 18-month “LBJ Years” research project.
In addtion, she served as an unpaid, informal historical adviser for some of his public television programs.
Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old woman from Georgia who had been declared brain-dead in February 2025, spent 16 weeks on life support while doctors worked to keep her body functioning well enough to support her developing fetus. On June 13, 2025, her premature baby, named Chance, was born via cesarean section at 25 weeks.
Smith was nine weeks pregnant when she suffered multiple blood clots in her brain. Her story gained public attention when her mother criticized doctors’ decision to keep her on a ventilator without the family’s consent. Smith’s mother has said that doctors told the family the decision was made to align with Georgia’s LIFE Act, which bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and bolsters the legal standing of fetal personhood. A statement released by the hospital also cites Georgia’s abortion law.
“I’m not saying we would have chosen to terminate her pregnancy,” Smith’s mother told a local television station. “But I’m saying we should have had a choice.”
The LIFE Act is one of several state laws that have passed across the U.S. since the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision invalidated constitutional protections for abortion. Although Georgia’s attorney general denied that the LIFE Act applied to Smith, there’s little doubt that it invites ethical and legal uncertainty when a woman dies while pregnant.
Smith’s case has swiftly become the focus of a reproductive rights political firestorm characterized by two opposing viewpoints. For some, it reflects demeaning governmental overreach that quashes women’s bodily autonomy. For others it illustrates the righteous sacrifice of motherhood.
In my work as a gender and technology studies scholar, I have cataloged and studied postmortem pregnancies like Smith’s since 2016. In my view, Smith’s story doesn’t fit straightforwardly into abortion politics. Instead, it points to the need for a more nuanced ethical approach that does not frame a mother and child as adversaries in a medical, legal or political context.
Birth after death
For centuries, Catholic dogma and Western legal precedent have mandated immediate cesarean section when a pregnant woman died after quickening, the point when fetal movement becomes discernible. But technological advances now make it possible sometimes for a fetus to continue gestating in place when the mother is brain-dead, or “dead by neurological criteria”– a widely accepted definition of death that first emerged in the 1950s.
The first brain death during pregnancy in which the fetus was delivered after time on life support, more accurately called organ support, occurred in 1981. The process is extraordinarily intensive and invasive, because the loss of brain function impedes many physiological processes. Health teams, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, must stabilize the bodies of “functionally decapitated” pregnant women to buy more time for fetal development. This requires vital organ support, ventilation, nutritional supplements, antibiotics and constant monitoring. Outcomes are highly uncertain.
Adriana Smith’s baby was delivered by cesarian section on June 13, 2025.
Smith’s 112-day stint on organ support ranks third in length for a postmortem pregnancy, with the longest being 123 days. Hers is also the earliest ever gestational age from which the procedure has been attempted. Because time on organ support can vary widely, and because there is no established minimum fetal age considered too early to intervene, a fetus could theoretically be deemed viable at any point in pregnancy.
Postmortem pregnancy as gender-based violence
Over the past 50 years, critics of postmortem pregnancy have argued that it constitutes gender-based violence and violates bodily integrity in ways that organ donation does not. Some have compared it with Nazi pronatalist policies. Others have attributed the practice to systemic sexism and racism in medicine. Postmortem pregnancy can also compound intimate partner violence by giving brain-dead women’s murderers decision-making authority when they are the fetus’s next of kin.
From the perspective of reproductive rights advocates, postmortem pregnancy is the bottom of a slippery slope down which anti-abortion sentiment has led America. It obliterates women’s autonomy, pitting living and dead women against doctors, legislators and sometimes their own families, and weaponizing their own fetuses against them.
A medical perspective on rights
Viewed through a medical lens, however, postmortem pregnancy is not violent or violating, but an act of repair. Although care teams have responsibilities to both mother and fetus, a pregnant woman’s brain death means she cannot be physically harmed and her rights cannot be violated to the same degree as a fetus with the potential for life.
This response does not necessarily stem from conscious sexism or anti-abortion sentiment, but from reverence for vulnerable patients. If physicians declare a pregnant woman brain-dead, patienthood often automatically transfers to the fetus needing rescue. No matter its age and despite its survival being dependent on machines, just like its mother, the fetus is entirely animate. Who or what counts as a legal person with privileges and protections might be a political or philosophical determination, but life is a matter of biological fact and within the doctors’ purview.
Even the Supreme Court recognized this entangled duality in their 1973 ruling on Roe v. Wade, which established both constitutional protections for abortion and a governmental obligation to protect fetal life. Whether a fetus is considered a legal person or not, they wrote, pregnant women and fetuses “cannot be isolated in their privacy” – meaning that reproductive rights issues must strike a balance, however tenuous, between maternal and fetal interests. To declare postmortem pregnancy unequivocally violent or a loss of the “right to choose” fails to recognize the complexity of choice in a highly politicized medical landscape.
Second, maternal-fetal competition muddles the right course of action. In the U.S., competent patients are not compelled to engage in medical care they would rather avoid, even if it kills them, or to stay on life support to preserve organs for donation. But when a fetus is treated as an independent patient, exceptions could be made to those medical standards if the fetus’s interests override the mother’s.
For example, pregnancy disrupts standard determination of death. To protect the fetus, care teams increasingly skip a necessary diagnostic for brain death called apnea testing, which involves momentarily removing the ventilator to test the respiratory centers of the brain stem. In these cases, maternal brain death cannot be confirmed until after delivery. Multiple instances of vaginal deliveries after brain death also remain unexplained, given that the brain coordinates mechanisms of vaginal labor. All in all, it’s not always clear women in these cases are entirely dead.
Ultimately, women like Adriana Smith and their fetuses are inseparable and persist in a technologically defined state of in-betweenness. I’d argue that postmortem pregnancies, therefore, need new bioethical standards that center women’s beliefs about their bodies and a dignified death. This might involve recognizing pregnancy’s unique ambiguities in advance directives, questioning default treatment pathways that may require harm be done to one in order to save another, or considering multiple definitions of clinical and legal death.
In my view, it is possible to adapt our ethical standards in a way that honors all beings in these exceptional circumstances, without privileging either “choice” or “life,” mother or fetus.
This research was supported by a grant from The Institute for Citizens and Scholars.
Yelp’s Black-owned tag was designed to help business owners like Don Studvent attract more customers. His restaurant closed in 2018 after nine years in business.AP Photo/Carlos Osorio
When the online review platform Yelp added a “Black-owned” tag in 2020, it boosted the visibility of Black-owned restaurants in Detroit. It also caused their ratings to drop, according to our recent study.
Both local and nonlocal reviewers who showed awareness of a restaurant’s Black ownership rated restaurants 3.03 stars on average. Those who did not acknowledge Black ownership gave a rating of 3.78 stars on average. The tag seems to have caused the average rating to drop by attracting more reviewers who were aware of Black ownership.
Why it matters
Technology companies often introduce new features and tools to influence user behavior and make their platforms more usable.
Although Yelp intended to support Black communities with the Black-owned tag, the design intervention was harmful to Black restaurant owners in Detroit because Yelp failed to consider platform and community-based factors that significantly shape user interactions.
Yelp’s user base is predominantly white, educated and affluent. Making Detroit’s Black-owned restaurants more visible to Yelp users may have amplified cross-cultural interactions and frictions. For example, non-Black users sometimes mentioned “slower” and “rude” service as justifications for lower ratings. Close readings of these reviews hinted at intercultural and communicative clashes.
Even if Black-owned restaurants businesses didn’t select the tag, they appeared in searches for “Black-owned restaurants,” in 2022 when we conducted the study and as recently as 2025. Businesses can remove the “Black-owned” tag, but Yelp doesn’t provide a way for them to opt out of search results.
How we did our work
To examine the local impacts of Yelp’s Black-owned tag, we collected over 250,000 Yelp reviews of Black- and non-Black-owned restaurants in Detroit and Los Angeles.
We identified Black-owned restaurants through community-sourced lists for Detroit and Los Angeles and then generated a random sample for the non-Black-owned restaurants.
We then identified reviews that explicitly noted “Black ownership” for closer analysis.
Detroit’s Black-owned businesses saw a greater loss in business compared with “ownership-unreported” restaurants during the COVID-19 pandemic. This means they also potentially had more to gain from the new tag.
We found the awareness of Black ownership on Yelp significantly increased following Yelp’s addition of the Black-owned tag in June 2020. A year after the tag was added, reviews in Detroit mentioned Black ownership 4.3% more often than a year before it was rolled out.
Detroit Black-owned restaurants also saw a small temporary spike in their number of reviews, largely around the time Yelp added the Black-owned tag. At the same time, the restaurants’ average star ratings dropped from 3.91 to 3.88. In contrast, non-Black-owned restaurants’ ratings stayed relatively steady at 3.90.
This metric is an aggregate of all Detroit restaurants’ Yelp reviews over their entire existence, so a .03-star rating change is small but significant.
Adding obstacles in digital platforms serves to reproduce and amplify inequalities these businesses already face, rather than alleviate them. For example, Black-owned businesses have a harder time getting loans and are relatively underrepresented in Michigan as a whole.
These findings may seem surprising given that Detroit is a majority Black city. However, Black users on Yelp are a minority. Keeping in mind the skewed user base of Yelp, we hypothesize the lower reviews for businesses featuring a Black-owned tag reflect existing racial and digital divides in the city.
Generally, our study provides additional evidence that digital interventions are not “one-size-fits-all,” nor is digital visibility inherently positive for all businesses.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
_This article was updated to clarify how labels are added to profiles.
This research was supported by a research grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
Matthew Bui 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.
Cameron Moy 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.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Mike Shriberg, Professor of Practice & Engagement, School for Environment & Sustainability, University of Michigan
Invasive Asian carp are spreading up the Mississippi River system and already clog the Illinois River.AP Photo/John Flesher
In his second term, President Donald Trump has not taken many actions that draw near-universal praise from across the political spectrum. But there is at least one of these political anomalies, and it illustrates the broad appeal of environmental protection and conservation projects – particularly when it concerns an ecosystem of vital importance to millions of Americans.
In May 2025, Trump issued a presidential memorandum supporting the construction of a physical barrier that is key to keeping invasive carp out of the Great Lakes. These fish have made their way up the Mississippi River system and could have dire ecological consequences if they enter the Great Lakes.
It was not a given that Trump would back this project, which had long been supported by environmental and conservation organizations. But two very different strategies from two Democratic governors – both potential presidential candidates in 2028 – reflected the importance of the Great Lakes to America.
Perhaps nothing alarms Great Lakes ecologists more than the potential for invasive carp from Asia to establish a breeding population in the Great Lakes. These fish were intentionally introduced in the U.S. Southeast by private fish farm and wastewater treatment operators as a means to control algae in aquaculture and sewage treatment ponds. Sometime in the 1990s, the fish escaped from those ponds and moved rapidly up the Mississippi River system, including into the Illinois River, which connects to the Great Lakes.
Invasive carp are generally not eaten in the U.S. and are not desirable for sportfishing. In fact, silver carp have a propensity to jump up to 10 feet out of the water when startled by a boat motor. That can make parts of the Illinois River, which is packed with the invasive fish, almost impossible to fish or even maneuver a boat.
Look out! Silver carp fly out of the water, obstructing boats and hitting people trying to enjoy a river in Indiana.
The Brandon Road Lock and Dam solution
Originally, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River were not connected to each other. But in 1900, the city of Chicago connected them to avoid sending its sewage into Lake Michigan, from which the city draws its drinking water.
The most complete way to block the carp from invading the Great Lakes would be to undo that connection – but that would recreate sewage and flooding issues for Chicago, or require other expensive infrastructure upgrades. The more practical, short-term alternative is to modify the historic Brandon Road Lock and Dam in Joliet, Illinois, by adding several obstacles that together would block the carp from swimming farther upriver toward the Great Lakes.
The barrier, estimated to cost US$1.15 billion, was authorized by Congress in 2020 and 2022 after many years of intense planning and negotiations. For the first phase of construction, the project received $226 million in federal money from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to complement $114 million in state funding – $64 million from Michigan and $50 million from Illinois.
On the first day of Trump’s second term, however, he paused a wide swath of federal funding, including funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. And that’s when two different political strategies emerged.
A brief documentary explains the construction of a connection between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River basin.
Trump’s support for the project was a rare moment of political unity and an extremely unusual example of leading Democrats being on the same page as Trump. I attribute this surprising outcome to two key factors.
First, the Great Lakes region holds disproportionate power in presidential elections. Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have backed the eventual winner in every presidential race for the past 20 years. This swing state power has been used by advocates and state political leaders to drive funding for Great Lakes protection for many years.
Second, Great Lakes are the uniting force in the region. According to polling from the International Joint Commission, the binational body charged with overseeing waterways that cross the U.S.-Canada border, there is “nearly unanimous support (96%) for the importance of government investment in Great Lakes protections” from residents of the region.
And perhaps the governors have identified a new area for unity in a divided United States: Conservation and environmental issues have broad public support, particularly when they involve iconic natural resources, shared values and popular outdoor pursuits such as fishing and boating. Even when political strategies diverge, the results can bring bipartisan satisfaction.
Mike Shriberg was previously the Great Lakes Regional Executive Director of the National Wildlife Federation, which entailed being a co-chair (and, for part of the time, Director) of the Healing Our Waters – Great Lakes Coalition.
Agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted a series of raids throughout Los Angeles and Southern California in early June 2025, sparking protests in downtown Los Angeles and other cities, including New York, Chicago and Austin, Texas.
Some demonstrators expressed growing frustration with ICE by showcasing the Mexican flag, which has become the defining symbol of the protests in Los Angeles.
The use of the flag has also become the subject of intense debate in the media.
Research published in 2010 found that even though the public was more likely to be bothered by protesters waving the Mexican flag than the U.S. flag, that difference was largely absent once you divided the public into subgroups, including white people, Latinos and immigrants.
To reexamine public attitudes toward protesters waving the Mexican flag, we conducted an online survey experiment among 10,145 U.S. adults in 2016.
We found that even though much of the public continued to be less bothered by the American flag than the Mexican flag, there were also important and perhaps surprising differences in protest attitudes between white Americans and other racial and ethnic groups.
A demonstrator holds a Mexican flag in front of law enforcement during a protest on June 13, 2025, in Los Angeles. AP Photo/Wally Skalij
More or less bothered
In the study, we randomly divided respondents into two groups: a treatment group and a control group. Respondents in the treatment group were shown an image of protesters waving a Mexican flag. Respondents in the control group were shown an image of protesters waving the U.S. flag. After viewing the image, respondents were then asked about the extent to which they supported or were bothered by the protests.
Overall, 41% of the respondents said they were bothered by protesters waving the Mexican flag, and 28% said protesters waving the U.S. flag bothered them.
Our results show important differences in opinion between racial and ethnic groups.
White respondents were more likely than any other racial and ethnic group to say they were bothered by protesters waving Mexican flags. Sixty-nine percent of white respondents said they were bothered, 31 percentage points more than the average of nonwhite respondents.
However, 51% of white respondents were also bothered by the image of protesters waving U.S. flags. By contrast, just 20% of Latinos, 33% of Black Americans and 34% of Asian Americans said they were bothered by protesters waving U.S. flags.
Put differently, large majorities of nonwhite respondents were supportive of showing U.S. flags at protests despite their more positive views toward Mexican flags.
What explains racial differences?
When taking a deeper look at what causes Americans to feel bothered about protesters waving Mexican flags, some clear patterns emerge.
On average, older Americans were more likely to be bothered relative to younger Americans. This was particularly true for Americans over 40 years of age compared with millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, and Gen Z respondents, born between 1997 and 2012.
However, there are some nuances when examining age groups and whether they had attended a protest, march or rally in the previous year.
Our findings suggest that older Americans who had not engaged in protests were most likely to be bothered when they saw images of protesters waving Mexican flags. Millennials and Gen Z respondents who participated in a protest were least likely to be bothered.
Given that this issue intersects nationality, race, ethnicity, gender and citizenship status, it’s logical that these factors explained why Americans supported or opposed the use of Mexican flags at immigration protests.
A woman carrying a flag with details of the United States and Mexican flags walks past members of the United States Marine Corps on June 14, 2025, in Los Angeles. Cristopher Rogel Blanquet/Getty Images
For example, racial minorities who have a stronger sense of ethnic or racial identity were more likely to be supportive of protesters waving Mexican and U.S. flags. In other words, group identity is a strong predictor of support for protests in general, regardless of what flag is being flown.
However, minorities who lack a sense of ethnic pride and identity were most likely to be upset when they saw others expressing their First Amendment right to peaceably assemble.
The reality is that recent immigration protests across the country are the first time many of the Latino youth who are citizens have participated in these types of protests. Anyone under age 22 would not have memory of, or been alive during, the last large pro-immigrant protests in 2006.
The Mexican flag represents more than nationalistic pride. It represents their parents’ heritage, hard work and their binational experience as Americans engaged in politics.
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.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Kassem Fawaz, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Many apps and social media platforms collect detailed information about you as you use them, and sometimes even when you’re not using them.Malte Mueller/fStop via Getty images
You wake up in the morning and, first thing, you open your weather app. You close that pesky ad that opens first and check the forecast. You like your weather app, which shows hourly weather forecasts for your location. And the app is free!
But do you know why it’s free? Look at the app’s privacy settings. You help keep it free by allowing it to collect your information, including:
What devices you use and their IP and Media Access Control addresses.
Information you provide when signing up, such as your name, email address and home address.
App settings, such as whether you choose Celsius or Fahrenheit.
Your interactions with the app, including what content you view and what ads you click.
Inferences based on your interactions with the app.
Your location at a given time, including, depending on your settings, continuous tracking.
What websites or apps that you interact with after you use the weather app.
Information you give to ad vendors.
Information gleaned by analytics vendors that analyze and optimize the app.
This type of data collection is standard fare. The app company can use this to customize ads and content. The more customized and personalized an ad is, the more money it generates for the app owner. The owner might also sell your data to other companies.
Many apps, including the weather channel app, send you targeted advertising and sell your personal data by default. Jack West, CC BY-ND
You might also check a social media account like Instagram. The subtle price that you pay is, again, your data. Many “free” mobile apps gather information about you as you interact with them.
As an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and a doctoral student in computer science, we follow the ways software collects information about people. Your data allows companies to learn about your habits and exploit them.
It’s no secret that social media and mobile applications collect information about you. Meta’s business model depends on it. The company, which operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is worth US$1.48 trillion. Just under 98% of its profits come from advertising, which leverages user data from more than 7 billion monthly users.
Before mobile phones gained apps and social media became ubiquitous, companies conducted large-scale demographic surveys to assess how well a product performed and to get information about the best places to sell it. They used the information to create coarsely targeted ads that they placed on billboards, print ads and TV spots.
Mobile apps and social media platforms now let companies gather much more fine-grained information about people at a lower cost. Through apps and social media, people willingly trade personal information for convenience. In 2007 – a year after the introduction of targeted ads – Facebook made over $153 million, triple the previous year’s revenue. In the past 17 years, that number has increased by more than 1,000 times.
Five ways to leave your data
App and social media companies collect your data in many ways. Meta is a representative case. The company’s privacy policy highlights five ways it gathers your data:
First, it collects the profile information you fill in. Second, it collects the actions you take on its social media platforms. Third, it collects the people you follow and friend. Fourth, it keeps track of each phone, tablet and computer you use to access its platforms. And fifth, it collects information about how you interact with apps that corporate partners connect to its platforms. Many apps and social media platforms follow similar privacy practices.
Your data and activity
When you create an account on an app or social media platform, you provide the company that owns it with information like your age, birth date, identified sex, location and workplace. In the early years of Facebook, selling profile information to advertisers was that company’s main source of revenue. This information is valuable because it allows advertisers to target specific demographics like age, identified gender and location.
And once you start using an app or social media platform, the company behind it can collect data about how you use the app or social media. Social media keeps you engaged as you interact with other people’s posts by liking, commenting or sharing them. Meanwhile, the social media company gains information about what content you view and how you communicate with other people.
Advertisers can find out how much time you spent reading a Facebook post or that you spent a few more seconds on a particular TikTok video. This activity information tells advertisers about your interests. Modern algorithms can quickly pick up subtleties and automatically change the content to engage you in a sponsored post, a targeted advertisement or general content.
Your devices and applications
Companies can also note what devices, including mobile phones, tablets and computers, you use to access their apps and social media platforms. This shows advertisers your brand loyalty, how old your devices are and how much they’re worth.
Because mobile devices travel with you, they have access to information about where you’re going, what you’re doing and who you’re near. In a lawsuit against Kochava Inc., the Federal Trade Commission called out the company for selling customer geolocation data in August 2022, shortly after Roe v Wade was overruled. The company’s customers, including people who had abortions after the ruling was overturned, often didn’t know that data tracking their movements was being collected, according to the commission. The FTC alleged that the data could be used to identify households.
Information that apps can gain from your mobile devices includes anything you have given an app permission to have, such as your location, who you have in your contact list or photos in your gallery.
If you give an app permission to see where you are while the app is running, for instance, the platform can access your location anytime the app is running. Providing access to contacts may provide an app with the phone numbers, names and emails of all the people that you know.
Cross-application data collection
Companies can also gain information about what you do across different apps by acquiring information collected by other apps and platforms.
The settings on an Android phone show that Meta uses information it collects about you to target ads it shows you in its apps – and also in other apps and on other platforms – by default. Jack West, CC BY-ND
This is common with social media companies. This allows companies to, for example, show you ads based on what you like or recently looked at on other apps. If you’ve searched for something on Amazon and then noticed an ad for it on Instagram, it’s probably because Amazon shared that information with Instagram.
Companies, including Google, Meta, X, TikTok and Snapchat, can build detailed user profiles based on collected information from all the apps and social media platforms you use. They use the profiles to show you ads and posts that match your interests to keep you engaged. They also sell the profile information to advertisers.
Meanwhile, researchers have found that Meta and Yandex, a Russian search engine, have overcome controls in mobile operating system software that ordinarily keep people’s web-browsing data anonymous. Each company puts code on its webpages that used local IPs to pass a person’s browsing history, which is supposed to remain private, to mobile apps installed on that person’s phone, de-anonymizing the data. Yandex has been conducting this tracking since 2017, while Meta began in September 2024, according to the researchers.
What you can do about it
If you use apps that collect your data in some way, including those that give you directions, track your workouts or help you contact someone, or if you use social media platforms, your privacy is at risk.
Aside from entirely abandoning modern technology, there are several steps you can take to limit access – at least in part – to your private information.
Read the privacy policy of each app or social media platform you use. Although privacy policy documents can be long, tedious and sometimes hard to read, they explain how social media platforms collect, process, store and share your data.
Check a policy by making sure it can answer three questions: what data does the app collect, how does it collect the data, and what is the data used for. If you can’t answer all three questions by reading the policy, or if any of the answers don’t sit well with you, consider skipping the app until there’s a change in its data practices.
Remove unnecessary permissions from mobile apps to limit the amount of information that applications can gather from you.
Be aware of the privacy settings that might be offered by the apps or social media platforms you use, including any setting that allows your personal data to affect your experience or shares information about you with other users or applications.
These privacy settings can give you some control. We recommend that you disable “off-app activity” and “personalization” settings. “Off-app activity” allows an app to record which other apps are installed on your phone and what you do on them. Personalization settings allow an app to use your data to tailor what it shows you, including advertisements.
Review and update these settings regularly because permissions sometimes change when apps or your phone update. App updates may also add new features that can collect your data. Phone updates may also give apps new ways to collect your data or add new ways to preserve your privacy.
Use private browser windows or reputable virtual private networks software, commonly referred to as VPNs, when using apps that connect to the internet and social media platforms. Private browsers don’t store any account information, which limits the information that can be collected. VPNs change the IP address of your machine so that apps and platforms can’t discover your location.
Finally, ask yourself whether you really need every app that’s on your phone. And when using social media, consider how much information you want to reveal about yourself in liking and commenting on posts, sharing updates about your life, revealing locations you visited and following celebrities you like.
This article is part of a series on data privacy that explores who collects your data, what and how they collect, who sells and buys your data, what they all do with it, and what you can do about it.
Kassem Fawaz receives funding from the National Science Foundation. In the past, his research group has received unrestricted gifts from Meta and Google.
Jack West 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.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Anna Erickson, Professor of Nuclear and Radiological Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
An image from Iranian television shows centrifuges lining a hall at Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility in 2021.IRIB via APPEAR
When U.S. forces attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 21, 2025, the main target was metal tubes in laboratories deep underground. The tubes are centrifuges that produce highly enriched uranium needed to build nuclear weapons.
Inside of a centrifuge, a rotor spins in the range of 50,000 to 100,000 revolutions per minute, 10 times faster than a Corvette engine’s crankshaft. High speeds are needed to separate lighter uranium-235 from heavier uranium-238 for further collection and processing. Producing this level of force means the rotor itself must be well balanced and strong and rely on high-speed magnetic bearings to reduce friction.
Over the years, Iran has produced thousands of centrifuges. They work together to enrich uranium to dangerous levels – close to weapons-grade uranium. Most of them are deployed in three enrichment sites: Natanz, the country’s main enrichment facility, Fordow and Isfahan. Inside of these facilities, the centrifuges are arranged into cascades – series of machines connected to each other. This way, each machine yields slightly more enriched uranium, feeding the gas produced into its neighbor to maximize production efficiency.
As a nuclear engineer who works on nuclear nonproliferation, I track centrifuge technology, including the Iranian enrichment facilities targeted by the U.S. and Israel. A typical cascade deployed in Iran is composed of 164 centrifuges, working in series to produce enriched uranium. The Natanz facility was designed to hold over 50,000 centrifuges.
Iran’s early intentions to field centrifuges on a very large scale were clear. At the peak of the program in the early 2010s it deployed over 19,000 units. Iran later scaled down the number of its centrifuges in part due to international agreements such as the since scrapped Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed in 2015.
Legacy of enrichment
Iran has a long history of enriching uranium.
In the late 1990s, it acquired a Pakistani centrifuge design known as P-1. The blueprints and some components were supplied via the A.Q. Khan black market network – the mastermind of the Pakistani program and a serious source of nuclear proliferation globally. Today, the P-1 design is known as IR-1. IR-1 centrifuges use aluminum and a high-strength alloy, known as maraging steel.
About one-third of the centrifuges that were deployed at the sites of the recent strike on June 21 are IR-1. Each one produces on the order of 0.8 separative work units, which is the unit for measuring the amount of energy and effort needed to separate uranium-235 molecules from the rest of the uranium gas. To put this in perspective, one centrifuge would yield about 0.2 ounces (6 grams) of 60%-enriched uranium-235 per year.
A typical uranium-based weapon requires 55 pounds (25 kilograms) of 90%-enriched uranium. To get to weapons-grade level, a single centrifuge would produce only 0.14 ounces (4 grams) per year. It requires more work to go higher in enrichment. While capable of doing the job, the IR-1 is quite inefficient.
The author explains the uranium enrichment process to CBS News.
More and better centrifuges
Small yields mean that over 6,000 centrifuges would need to work together for a year to get enough material for one weapon such as a nuclear warhead. Or the efficiency of the centrifuges would have to be improved. Iran did both.
Before the strike by U.S. forces, Iran was operating close to 7,000 IR-1 centrifuges. In addition, Iran designed, built and operated more efficient centrifuges such as the IR-2m, IR-4 and IR-6 designs. Comparing the IR-1 with the latest designs is like comparing a golf cart with the latest electric vehicles in terms of range and payload.
Iran’s latest centrifuge designs contain carbon fiber composites with exceptional strength and durability and low weight. This is a recipe for producing light and compact centrifuges that are easier to conceal from inspections. According to the international nuclear watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency, before the strike Iran was operating 6,500 IR-2m centrifuges, close to 4,000 IR-4 centrifuges and over 3,000 IR-6 centrifuges.
With each new generation, the separative work unit efficiency increased significantly. IR-6 centrifuges, with their carbon fiber rotors, can achieve up to 10 separative work units per year. That’s about 2.8 ounces (80 grams) of 60%-enriched uranium-235 per year. The International Atomic Energy Agency verified that the IR-6 cascades have been actively used to ramp up production of 60%-enriched uranium.
The most recent and advanced centrifuges developed by Iran, known as IR-9, can achieve 50 separative work units per year. This cuts down the time needed to produce highly enriched uranium for weapon purposes from months to weeks. The other aspect of IR-9 advanced centrifuges is their compactness. They are easier to conceal from inspections or move underground, and they require less energy to operate.
Advanced centrifuges such as the IR-9 drive up the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation significantly. Fortunately, the International Atomic Energy Agency reports that only one exists in testing laboratories, and there is no evidence Iran has deployed them widely. However, it’s possible more are concealed.
Bombs or talks?
Uranium enrichment of 60% is far beyond the needs of any civilian use. The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that Iran stockpiled about 880 pounds (400 kilograms) of highly enriched uranium before the attack, and it might have escaped intact. That’s enough to make 10 weapons. The newer centrifuges – IR-2m, IR-4 and IR-6 – would need a bit over eight months to produce that much.
It’s not clear what the U.S. attack has accomplished, but destroying the facilities targeted in the attack and hindering Iran’s ability to continue enriching uranium might be a way to slow Iran’s move toward producing nuclear weapons. However, based on my work and research on preventing nuclear proliferation, I believe a more reliable means of preventing Iran from achieving its nuclear aims would be for diplomacy and cooperation to prevail.
Anna Erickson receives funding from Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) related to nuclear nonproliferation technologies. She has previously served on the Board of Directors of the American Nuclear Society.
Can a monkey, a pigeon or a fish reason like a person? It’s a question scientists have been testing in increasingly creative ways – and what we’ve found so far paints a more complicated picture than you’d think.
Imagine you’re filling out a March Madness bracket. You hear that Team A beat Team B, and Team B beat Team C – so you assume Team A is probably better than Team C. That’s a kind of logical reasoning known as transitive inference. It’s so automatic that you barely notice you’re doing it.
It turns out humans are not the only ones who can make these kinds of mental leaps. In labs around the world, researchers have tested many animals, from primates to birds to insects, on tasks designed to probe transitive inference, and most pass with flying colors.
As a scientist focused on animal learning and behavior, I work with pigeons to understand how they make sense of relationships, patterns and rules. In other words, I study the minds of animals that will never fill out a March Madness bracket – but might still be able to guess the winner.
Logic test without words
The basic idea is simple: If an animal learns that A is better than B, and B is better than C, can it figure out that A is better than C – even though it’s never seen A and C together?
In the lab, researchers test this by giving animals randomly paired images, one pair at a time, and rewarding them with food for picking the correct one. For example, animals learn that a photo of hands (A) is correct when paired with a classroom (B), a classroom (B) is correct when paired with bushes (C), bushes (C) are correct when paired with a highway (D), and a highway (D) is correct when paired with a sunset (E). We don’t know whether they “understand” what’s in the picture, and it is not particularly important for the experiment that they do.
In a transitive inference task, subjects learn a series of rewarded pairs – such as A+ vs. B–, B+ vs. C– – and are later tested on novel pairings, like B vs. D, to see whether they infer an overall ranking. Olga Lazareva, CC BY-ND
One possible explanation is that the animals that learn all the tasks create a mental ranking of these images: A > B > C > D > E. We test this idea by giving them new pairs they’ve never seen before, such as classroom (B) vs. highway (D). If they consistently pick the higher-ranked item, they’ve inferred the underlying order.
What’s fascinating is how many species succeed at this task. Monkeys, rats, pigeons – even fish and wasps – have all demonstrated transitive inference in one form or another.
The twist: Not all tasks are easy
But not all types of reasoning come so easily. There’s another kind of rule called transitivity that is different from transitive inference, despite the similar name. Instead of asking which picture is better, transitivity is about equivalence.
In this task, animals are shown a set of three pictures and asked which one goes with the center image. For example, if white triangle (A1) is shown, choosing red square (B1) earns a reward, while choosing blue square (B2) does not. Later, when red square (B1) is shown, choosing white cross (C1) earns a reward while choosing white circle (C2) does not. Now comes the test: white triangle (A1) is shown with white cross (C1) and white circle (C2) as choices. If they pick white cross (C1), then they’ve demonstrated transitivity.
In a transitivity task, subjects learn matching rules across overlapping sets – such as A1 matches B1, B1 matches C1 – and are tested on new combinations, such as A1 with C1 or C2, to assess whether they infer the relationship between A1 and C1. Olga Lazareva, CC BY-ND
The change may seem small, but species that succeed in those first transitive inference tasks often stumble in this task. In fact, they tend to treat the white triangle and the white cross as completely separate things, despite their common relationship with the red square. In my recently published review of research using the two tasks, I concluded that more evidence is needed to determine whether these tests tap into the same cognitive ability.
Small differences, big consequences
Why does the difference between transitive inference and transitivity matter? At first glance, they may seem like two versions of the same ability – logical reasoning. But when animals succeed at one and struggle with the other, it raises an important question: Are these tasks measuring the same kind of thinking?
The apparent difference between the two tasks isn’t just a quirk of animal behavior. Psychology researchers apply these tasks to humans in order to draw conclusions about how people reason.
For example, say you’re trying to pick a new almond milk. You know that Brand A is creamier than Brand B, and your friend told you that Brand C is even waterier than Brand B. Based on that, because you like a thicker milk, you might assume Brand A is better than Brand C, an example of transitive inference.
But now imagine the store labels both Brand A and Brand C as “barista blends.” Even without tasting them, you might treat them as functionally equivalent, because they belong to the same category. That’s more like transitivity, where items are grouped based on shared relationships. In this case, “barista blend” signals the brands share similar quality.
Researchers often treat these types of reasoning as measuring the same ability. But if they rely on different mental processes, they might not be interchangeable. In other words, the way scientists ask their questions may shape the answer – and that has big implications for how they interpret success in animals and in people.
This difference could affect how researchers interpret decision-making not only in the lab, but also in everyday choices and in clinical settings. Tasks like these are sometimes used in research on autism, brain injury or age-related cognitive decline.
If two tasks look similar on the surface, then choosing the wrong one might lead to inaccurate conclusions about someone’s cognitive abilities. That’s why ongoing work in my lab is exploring whether the same distinction between these logical processes holds true for people.
Just like a March Madness bracket doesn’t always predict the winner, a reasoning task doesn’t always show how someone got to the right answer. That’s the puzzle researchers are still working on – figuring out whether different tasks really tap into the same kind of thinking or just look like they do. It’s what keeps scientists like me in the lab, asking questions, running experiments and trying to understand what it really means to reason – no matter who’s doing the thinking.
Olga Lazareva 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.
In November 1922, archaeologist Howard Carter peered through a small hole into the sealed tomb of King Tutankhamun. When asked if he could see anything, he replied: “Yes, wonderful things.” Within months, however, Carter’s financial backer Lord Carnarvon was dead from a mysterious illness. Over the following years, several other members of the excavation team would meet similar fates, fuelling legends of the “pharaoh’s curse” that have captivated the public imagination for just over a century.
For decades, these mysterious deaths were attributed to supernatural forces. But modern science has revealed a more likely culprit: a toxic fungus known as Aspergillus flavus. Now, in an unexpected twist, this same deadly organism is being transformed into a powerful new weapon in the fight against cancer.
Aspergillus flavus is a common mould found in soil, decaying vegetation and stored grains. It is infamous for its ability to survive in harsh environments, including the sealed chambers of ancient tombs, where it can lie dormant for thousands of years.
When disturbed, the fungus releases spores that can cause severe respiratory infections, particularly in people with weakened immune systems. This may explain the so-called “curse” of King Tutankhamun and similar incidents, such as the deaths of several scientists who entered the tomb of Casimir IV in Poland in the 1970s. In both cases, investigations later found that A flavus was present, and its toxins were probably responsible for the illnesses and deaths.
Despite its deadly reputation, Aspergillus flavus is now at the centre of a remarkable scientific finding. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered that this fungus produces a unique class of molecules with the potential to fight cancer.
These molecules belong to a group called ribosomally synthesised and post-translationally modified peptides, or RiPPs. RiPPs are made by the ribosome – the cell’s protein factory – and are later chemically altered to enhance their function.
While thousands of RiPPs have been identified in bacteria, only a handful have been found in fungi – until now.
The process of finding these fungal RiPPs was far from simple. The research team screened a dozen different strains or types of aspergillus, searching for chemical clues that might indicate the presence of these promising molecules. Aspergillus flavus quickly stood out as a prime candidate.
The researchers compared the chemicals from different fungal strains to known RiPP compounds and found promising matches. To confirm their discovery, they switched off the relevant genes and, sure enough, the target chemicals vanished, proving they had found the source.
Purifying these chemicals proved to be a significant challenge. However, this complexity is also what gives fungal RiPPs their remarkable biological activity.
The team eventually succeeded in isolating four different RiPPs from Aspergillus flavus. These molecules shared a unique structure of interlocking rings, a feature that had never been described before. The researchers named these new compounds “asperigimycins”, after the fungus in which they were found.
The next step was to test these asperigimycins against human cancer cells. In some cases, they stopped the growth of cancer cells, suggesting that asperigimycins could one day become a new treatment for certain types of cancer.
The team also worked out how these chemicals get inside cancer cells. This discovery is significant because many chemicals, like asperigimycins, have medicinal properties but struggle to enter cells in large enough quantities to be useful. Knowing that particular fats (lipids) can enhance this process gives scientists a new tool for drug development.
Further experiments revealed that asperigimycins probably disrupt the process of cell division in cancer cells. Cancer cells divide uncontrollably, and these compounds appear to block the formation of microtubules, the scaffolding inside cells that are essential for cell division.
Tremendous untapped potential
This disruption is specific to certain types of cells, so this may in turn reduce the risk of side-effects. But the discovery of asperigimycins is just the beginning. The researchers also identified similar clusters of genes in other fungi, suggesting that many more fungal RiPPs remain to be discovered.
Almost all the fungal RiPPs found so far have strong biological activity, making this an area with tremendous untapped potential. The next step is to test asperigimycins in other systems and models, with the hope of eventually moving to human clinical trials. If successful, these molecules could join the ranks of other fungal-derived medicines, such as penicillin, which revolutionised modern medicine.
The story of Aspergillus flavus is a powerful example of how nature can be both a source of danger and a wellspring of healing. For centuries, this fungus was feared as a silent killer lurking in ancient tombs, responsible for mysterious deaths and the legend of the pharaoh’s curse. Today, scientists are turning that fear into hope, harnessing the same deadly spores to create life-saving medicines.
This transformation, from curse to cure, highlights the importance of continued exploration and innovation in the natural world. Nature has in fact provided us with an incredible pharmacy, filled with compounds that can heal as well as harm. It is up to scientists and engineers to uncover these secrets, using the latest technologies to identify, modify and test new molecules for their potential to treat disease.
The discovery of asperigimycins is a reminder that even the most unlikely sources – such as a toxic tomb fungus – can hold the key to revolutionary new treatments. As researchers continue to explore the hidden world of fungi, who knows what other medical breakthroughs may lie just beneath the surface?
Justin Stebbing does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
At some point between conception and early childhood, pain makes its debut. But when exactly that happens remains one of medicine’s most challenging questions.
Some have claimed that foetuses as young as twelve weeks can already be seen wincing in agony, while others have flat-out denied that even infants show any true signs of pain until long after birth.
New research from University College London offers fresh insights into this puzzle. By mapping the development of pain-processing networks in the brain – what researchers call the “pain connectome” – scientists have begun to trace exactly when and how our capacity for pain emerges. What they discovered challenges simple answers about when pain “begins”.
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The researchers used advanced brain imaging to compare the neural networks of foetuses and infants with those of adults, tracking how different components of pain processing mature over time. Until about 32 weeks after conception, all pain-related brain networks remain significantly underdeveloped compared with adult brains. But then development accelerates dramatically.
The sensory aspects of pain – the basic detection of harmful stimuli – mature first, becoming functional around 34 to 36 weeks of pregnancy. The emotional components that make pain distressing follow shortly after, developing between 36 and 38 weeks. However, the cognitive centres responsible for consciously interpreting and evaluating pain lag far behind, and remain largely immature by the time of birth, about 40 weeks after conception.
This staged development suggests that while late-term foetuses and newborns can detect and respond to harmful stimuli, they probably experience pain very differently from older children and adults. Most significantly, newborns probably can’t consciously evaluate their pain – they can’t form the thought: “This hurts and it’s bad!”
These findings represent the latest chapter in a long-running scientific debate that has swung dramatically over the centuries, often with profound consequences for medical practice.
For most physiologists in the 18th and 19th centuries, the perceived delicacy of the infant’s body meant that it must be exquisitely sensitive to pain, so much so that some have had their doubts if infants ever felt anything else. Birth, in particular, was imagined to be an extremely painful event for a newborn.
However, advances in embryology during the 1870s reversed this thinking. As scientists discovered that infant brains and nervous systems were far less developed than adult versions, many began questioning whether babies could truly feel pain at all. If the neural machinery wasn’t fully formed, how could genuine pain experiences exist?
This scepticism had troubling practical consequences. For nearly a century, many doctors performed surgery on infants without anaesthesia, convinced that their patients were essentially immune to suffering. The practice continued well into the 1980s in some medical centres.
Towards the end of the 20th century, public outrage about the medical treatment of infants and new scientific results turned the tables yet again. It was found that newborns exhibited many of the signs (neurological, physiological and behavioural) of pain after all, and that, if anything, pain in infants had probably been underestimated.
The ambiguous brain
The reason why there has been endless disagreement about infant pain is that we cannot access their experiences directly.
Sure, we can observe their behaviour and study their brains, but these are not the same thing. Pain is an experience, something that’s felt in the privacy of a person’s own mind, and that’s inaccessible to anyone but the person whose pain it is.
Of course, pain experiences are typically accompanied by telltale signs: be it the retraction of a body part from a sharp object or the increased activity of certain brain regions. Those we can measure. But the trouble is that no one behaviour or brain event is ever unambiguous.
The fact that an infant pulls back their hand from a pin prick may mean that it experiences the pricking as painful, but it may also just be an unconscious reflex. Similarly, the fact that the brain is simultaneously showing pain-related activity may be a sign of pain, but it may also be that the processing unfolds entirely unconsciously. We simply don’t know.
Perhaps the infant knows. But even if they do, they can’t tell us about their experiences yet, and until they can, scientists are left guessing. Fortunately, their guesses are becoming increasingly well informed, but for now, that is all they can be – guesses.
What would it take to get certainty? Well, it would require an explanation that connects our brains and behaviour to our conscious experiences. But so far, no scientifically respectable explanation of this kind has been forthcoming.
Laurenz Casser receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Rosa Busquets, Associate Professor, School of Life Sciences, Pharmacy and Chemistry, Kingston University
Thirst: In Search of Freshwater, an exhibition at Wellcome Collection.Benjamin Gilbert., CC BY-NC-ND
A new exhibition in London (open until February 2026) called Thirst: In search of freshwater highlights how civilisations have treasured – and been intrinsically linked to – safe, clean water.
Synthetic toxic chemicals are introduced into the environment from the products we make, use and dispose of. This wasn’t a problem centuries ago, where we had a totally different manufacturing industry and technologies.
Some, such as PFAS from stain-resistant textiles or nonstick materials such as cookware, can be particularly difficult to remove from wastewater. PFAS don’t degrade easily, they resist conventional heat treatments and can easily pass through wastewater treatments, so they contaminate rivers or lakes that are sources of our drinking water.
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Testing for pollutants is even more critical in developing nations that lack sanitation and face drought or flooding.
Having to protect and conserve drinking water and its sources is as relevant today as it always has been.
For this exhibition, curator at the Wellcome Collection in London, Janice Li, has selected 125 historical objects, photographs and feats of engineering that link to drought, rain, glaciers, rivers and lakes. These three artefacts from Thirst illustrate how our relationship with water contamination has evolved:
1. Ancient water filters
Made from natural materials such as clay, water jug filters have been used for hundreds of years in every continent by ancient civilisations. They show that purifying water for drinking was commonplace. The sand and soil particles that naturally get suspended in water and removed by these filters would have carried microbes.
Water jug filters with Arabic inscription, found in Egypt, dating back to 900-1,200. Victoria and Albert Museum London/Wellcome Collection, CC BY-NC-ND
But in ancient times, pharmaceuticals and other drugs, pesticides, forever chemicals and microplastics would not have been a problem. Those filters could work relatively well despite being made of simple materials with wide pores.
Today, those ancient filters would no longer be effective. Modern water filters are made using more advanced materials which typically have small pores (called micropores and mesopores). For example, filters often include activated carbon (a highly porous type of carbon that can be manufactured to capture contaminants) or membranes that filter water. Only then is it safe for people to drink.
Lead water pipes (known as fistulae) were useful parts of a relatively advanced plumbing system that distributed drinking water throughout Roman cities. They are still common in water systems in our cities today. In the US, there are about 9.2 million lead service lines in use. Exposure to lead causes severe humanhealth problems. Lead exposure, not necessarily from drinking water only, was attributed to more than 1.5 million deaths in 2021.
A Roman lead water pipe that dates back to 1-300CE. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection/Science Museum Group., CC BY-NC-ND
It’s now understood that lead is neurotoxic and it can diffuse or spread from the pipes to drinking water. Lead from paints and batteries, including car batteries, can also contaminate drinking water.
To protect us from lead leaching or flaking off from pipes, some government agencies are calling for the replacement of lead pipes with copper or plastic pipes. Water companies routinely add phosphates (mined powder that contains phosphorus) to drinking water to help capture potential lead contamination and make it safe to drink.
3. The horror of unhealthy water
One caricature titled The Monster Soup by artist William Heath (1828) is part of the Wellcome Trust’s permanent collection. The graphics read “microcosms dedicated to the London Water companies” and “Monster soup, commonly called Thames Water being a correct representation of the precious stuff doled out to us”. The cartoon shows a lady so terrified at the sight of microbes in river water from the Thames that she drops her cup of tea.
Monster Soup by William Heath. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection., CC BY-NC-ND
By 2030, 2 billion people will still not have safely managed drinking water and 1.2 billion will lack basic hygiene services. Drinking water will still be contaminated by bacteria such as E. coli and other dangerous pathogens that cause waterborne diseases. So advancing technologies to filter out contamination will be just as crucial in the future as it has been in the past.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Rosa Busquets receives funding from UKRI/ EU Horizons MSCA Staff exchanges Clean Water project 101131182, DASA, project ACC6093561. She is affiliated with Kingston University, UCL, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, UNEP EEAP.
There is a strange and worrying parallel between the breakneck speed at which Donald Trump has operated in the first few months of his presidency and the ever-accelerating pace at which information moves on social media platforms. Where in his first term he used Twitter, now, the 47th US president is using his own platform, TruthSocial, to announce changes of direction that are sometimes so fundamental that they change decades of US policy.
Social media has become a key tool of governing for Trump’s administration. He uses it both to make announcements and to drum up support for those announcements. His social media posts can move the markets and make or break careers. They can even, it seems, stop wars.
So when he used TruthSocial to announce a ceasefire between Israel and Iran on June 23, giving the two countries a deadline to stop firing missiles, it appears that neither of the antagonists were fully aware of the situation, given they carried on attacking each other. So an all-caps message followed: “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS,” he posted. “BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!” – adding, just in case anyone had any doubt he was serious: “DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.”
Trump’s use of his TruthSocial platform began as he sought to re-establish himself from the political wilderness after the insurrection of January 6 2021. It has now become a tool of his extreme power and his willingness to use (and abuse) it – globally as well as domestically.
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FDR’s “fireside chats”, broadcast on the radio throughout the US in the 1930s, reached an estimated 80% of the population, showing he understood the key media principle of reach. Roosevelt would address his listeners as “my friends” and Americans came to understand them as seemingly intimate conversations with their president.
FDR dominated the airwaves at a time when many Americans hardly understood the important role that the federal government played in their own lives – and millions of households were only just getting mains electricity (thanks to the Rural Electrification Act of 1936). But radios were becoming a common mass medium and FDR perfectly understood how to use it. If you listen to the fireside chats, FDR may sound patrician – and at times formal – but his tone is also friendly, thoughtful and reassuring.
In Germany at around the same time, Adolf Hitler’s massive stadium speeches were very effective for people who were in the stadium and being lifted by the intensity of the crowd and all the carefully thought out visual cues. But when broadcast on radio, Hitler had nothing like Roosevelt’s ability to connect with people on a personal level.
Roosevelt was hardly the first leader – or even the first US president – to speak on the radio. But he was the first to master the medium. He figured out how to use its potential to deliver a key implicit message: that his government should and did take on a central role in people’s lives.
Equally, John F. Kennedy can be said to have “discovered” political television. Not just as a medium for political campaigns, debates and speeches – but also for putting across to a mass audience his role as the embodiment of American decency, beauty and masculinity: JFK’s White House as Camelot.
JFK was considered a master of the fast-growing medium of television.
Both Roosevelt and Kennedy were in several ways physically disabled and lived with chronic illness, yet through the “new medium” of their time were able to project an image of quintessentially American strength and trustworthiness. In part this was their own doing – but it’s also a testament to the power of the media they used for their time.
Mastering the medium
These possibilities of a medium used to its best advantage – for example, to be heard around the US, but still to project a sense of intimacy – have become known as the “affordances” of a medium. The medium afforded Roosevelt space to be authentic without showing his disability. Kennedy appeared young, fit and handsome – even when dependent on painkillers.
When a new medium is introduced, people start to play around with its affordances – and this applies to politicians too. Political leaders who develop a special aptitude for using the new medium to emphasise their unique style can become particularly successful, as has Donald Trump with his use of social media.
The US president rose to power helped by his adept use of many of Twitter’s attributes – the imposed brevity of his messages, the ease of retweeting, the tendency for other users to “pile on” (and the user anonymity, which tends to encourage pile-ons) to polarise American public debate.
Trump was forced off Twitter after the Capitol Hill insurrection of January 6 2021. So he came back with his own platform, TruthSocial, where he can also make the rules. And now he uses the platform to make foreign policy, trumpeting his positions (which can change with bewildering speed) on TruthSocial well before they can be announced by the White House press team, which often has to scramble to catch up.
When Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan penned his famous phrase: “The medium is the message” in his groundbreaking 1964 study, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he meant to say that media form and content are not as distinct from one another as one might think and that the form of a medium of communication can shape society as much as its content. In Donald Trump’s use of social media, we are seeing this idea at work.
Sara Polak does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Shopping for clothes online is a risky business. How do you know if that top will be a good fit, or those shoes will definitely be the right colour? One popular solution to this predicament is to order lots of tops and lots of shoes, try them on at home, and send back all the ones you don’t want – often at no cost.
But that tactic can be expensive for the fashion retailer, which needs to pay for all those deliveries and returns. And now Asos, which sends millions of shipments every month, has started banning some customers for over-returning items – prompting something of a backlash.
The response by the retail giant, which says it wants to maintain a “commitment to offering free returns to all customers across all core markets”, also raises questions about the sustainability of the online fashion business model which Asos helped to create.
Many online retailers rely on the emotional highs of shopping. The excitement of placing an order, the anticipation of delivery, and the dopamine hit of unpacking a purchase is central to its popular customer experience.
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Online shopping generally has thrived on impulsive buying, with the option of returning items treated as a normal part of the process. Of course, even in the days before online shopping there would be customers who routinely returned items.
But by digitising and simplifying the process, the likes of Asos have helped this to happen on a massive scale. Shoppers have become completely used to ordering multiple sizes or styles with the express intention of returning most of the items they receive. Their homes effectively become fitting rooms.
And those customers could reasonably argue that online retailers often use digital strategies which encourage multi-item purchases.
Some sites remind shoppers of recently viewed products and provide suggestions of similar items, for example. There may be are prompts and nudges towards clothes which are frequently bought together.
Items are then sometimes temporarily reserved in a shopper’s basket for 60 minutes, creating a sense of urgency. Targeted emails and limited time offers drive bulging shopping baskets, encouraging more risk purchases and returns.
Yet returned items carry a significant cost. They may be unfit for resale and ultimately disposed of, which beyond the financial burden, has an environmental price.
In addition to creating landfill, each delivery and return has a carbon footprint. And although many younger consumers express support for sustainable practices, their buying behaviour continues to prioritise price and convenience.
But free returns have become part of the online fashion industry landscape. Research suggests that customers are simply more likely to buy something if returns are free.
And today’s tricky financial climate, marked by inflation and rising living costs will surely have made consumers even more cautious. Many will be reluctant to buy items that incur delivery and return costs.
Shopping around
Frustrations can then arise from unclear return policies, often buried in lengthy terms and conditions documents. Some of those banned by Asos say they were confused about the rules.
Automated customer service systems offering generic responses may then leave shoppers with no clear way to challenge these decisions.
Perhaps the wider issue here is that online shopping cannot fully replicate the benefits of shopping in store. In physical shops, customers can try on items before deciding.
But online, this can’t happen, so returns become fundamental to the decision-making process. For cost-conscious shoppers, avoiding unnecessary spending is essential. But if returns policies become harder to access, they may turn to other retailers which offer more certainty.
For example, retailers such as Zara and H&M, with a business model which mixes online convenience with a high street (or shopping mall) presence, offer the option to order online and then return in person.
This hybrid (or “omni-channel”) model appears to be driving consumers to physical shops for a blended experience which provides convenience and helps reduce return costs.
For Asos, doing something similar would require major investment (in bricks and mortar) and increased operational costs – so is perhaps an unlikely solution for the company.
But to balance sustainability, cost and customer satisfaction, Asos could explore other options. These might include clearer, more visible communication regarding “fair use” policies and their consequences. It could aim for more human interactions and better dialogue with customers it plans to ban.
Offering physical retail locations or return collection points to simplify the process and reduce the environmental impact and costs will provide customer flexibility. Overall, these areas will help create a better customer service experience.
Ultimately, Asos and other similar online clothing retailers must evolve. With changing consumer expectations, a challenging economic climate and rising operational costs, the model that defined these retailers’ early success cannot remain unchanged.
If they make adjustments, they may emerge stronger. If they do not, they risk sparking a customer exodus that would be hard to reverse.
Nic Sanders does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Self-determination theory (SDT) is one of the most well established and powerful approaches to wellbeing in psychological research literature. Yet it doesn’t seem to have broken through into popular discussions about wellbeing, happiness and self-help. That’s a shame, because it has so much to contribute.
A foundational idea in self-determination theory is that we have three basic psychological needs: for autonomy, competence and relatedness.
Autonomy is the need to be in control of your own life rather than being controlled by others. Competence is the need to feel skilful at the tasks one values or needs to thrive. Relatedness refers to feeling loved and cared for, and a sense of belonging to a group that provides social support.
If our basic psychological needs are met, then we are more likely to experience wellbeing. Symptoms include emotions such as joy, vitality and excitement because we’re doing the things we love, for example. We’ll probably have a sense of meaning and purpose because we live within a community whose culture we value.
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Conversely, when our basic needs are thwarted we should see symptoms of illbeing. Anger, frustration and boredom grow when our behaviour is controlled by parents, bureaucrats, bosses or other forces that press our energies towards their ends instead of ours.
Depression is liable when we our competence is overwhelmed by failure. And anxiety is often a social emotion that arises when we’re worried about whether our group cares for us.
So we should cultivate our basic psychological needs – but how? You need to discover what you want to do with your life, what skills to become competent in, who to relate to and what communities to contribute to.
Using motivation to find your way
Here’s where the second foundational idea in SDT can be super helpful, as I explain in my new book, Beyond Happy: How to rethink happiness and find fulfilment. SDT proposes a motivational spectrum running from extrinsic at one end to intrinsic at the other. Finding out where you are on the spectrum for a certain activity or task can help you work out how to be happier.
The more extrinsically motivated something is, the more self-regulation it requires. For example, when refugees flee their homes due to encroaching war, there is often a large part of them that wants to stay. Willpower is required to act. In contrast, intrinsically motivated behaviour springs spontaneously from us. You don’t need willpower to get stuck into your hobbies.
Each type of motivation comes with different emotional signals and deciphering them can help us find what values, behaviour and groups suit us.
The spectrum of motivation according to self-determination theory. CC BY-NC
“Identified” motivation, for example, sits between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. It occurs when we value an activity but don’t inherently enjoy it. That’s why success in identified behaviour is usually met with a feeling of accomplishment or the warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you do the right thing, like going a bit out of your way to put your rubbish in a bin.
In contrast, “introjected” motivation is where you value something contingent to the behaviour itself. Many of us loathe the gym, for example, but we want to be healthy. A child might not want to practice the cello, but they do want their parent’s approval.
Because introjection is relatively extrinsic, it requires willpower, and probably a bit more of it than for identified behaviour. Completion of an introjected activity is often met with relief rather than accomplishment and little desire to keep going.
Sometimes things that are dependent on introjected behaviour can make us unhappy. In teen dramas, for example, the protagonist often does something because they want to be popular, but when they win the approval of the cool kids they realise those kids are mean and lame.
Why money, power and status won’t make you happy
If that’s how you feel, you’ve found something inauthentic to you. Then there’s very little chance the introjected activity will lead to your wellbeing. In fact, SDT has identified some common values. You’ll recognise them immediately: popularity, fame, status, power, wealth and success.
They’re extrinsic because they’re not peculiar to you. If you get rich doing the thing you love, that’s great, but many of us never even think about what we love because we’re too busy thinking about how to get rich.
Extrinsic pursuits are ultimately bad for our wellbeing because they’re all poor substitutes for basic psychological needs. When our autonomy is thwarted by strict parents or disciplinarian teachers, we crave power. When we don’t know what sort of life to build and thus what skills we need competence in, we adopt other people’s notions of success instead.
Extrinsic pursuits often emerge from a wounded place and a defensive reaction. When we’re lonely or feel unloved for who we are, for example, we might compensate by seeking fame or popularity. We’ll start talking about our accomplishments on LinkedIn, for example.
The problem is that the people this attracts don’t value you specifically, only your power, status or money. You sense that if you ever lost those things, you would lose these people too.
SDT can help you learn to listen to your emotions and interpret your motivations instead, and use them to guide you towards the values, activities and people that are right for you.
For example, if you feel joyful and fulfilled when you solve a complex puzzle, perhaps consider a career that involves that activity, such as law or engineering. If such puzzles feel like torture, that’s a signal too. Perhaps something more relational or intuitive, like social work, would work better.
When you pursue things that are authentic to you it will nourish your sense of autonomy. You’ll build competence in those activities because they’re intrinsically motivated. And you’ll form deep relationships with the people you encounter because you genuinely like each other. Wellbeing will follow.
Mark Fabian does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The James Bond franchise has lain dormant for four years, since Daniel Craig’s swansong as 007, No Time to Die. A legal quarrel between Bond’s producers, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, and Amazon Studios resulted in a stalemate and production on a new Bond film has remained in limbo.
Nevertheless, speculation has been rife about which actor will next play Ian Fleming’s super-spy (the latest actor to be associated with the role is former Spider-man Tom Holland).
When news surfaced in February 2025 that Amazon MGM (Amazon purchased MGM in 2021) had effectively become Bond’s new custodians, critics and audiences alike expressed concern – to put it lightly. Many feared that Jeff Bezos was more interested in stimulating Amazon Prime membership by driving multiple content streams through spin-offs and merchandising than protecting Fleming’s legacy.
However, last week’s announcement that Denis Villeneuve has been appointed as the director of the 26th Bond film is a savvy move. It’s a declaration of intent that seeks to promote and market Amazon MGM as safe harbour for the Bond franchise.
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The announcement positions the next era of Bond as a prestigious exercise helmed by “a cinematic master”, not a journeyman director. Villeneuve was previously offered the opportunity to direct No Time to Die, but turned the role down because of his commitment to the Dune films.
By appointing Villeneuve, Amazon has managed to radically shift the public debate. Villeneuve is “much more than a technical director”, wrote Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw. “He is an alpha-grade auteur in the same league as Christopher Nolan.”
Other critics have pointed to his rare ability to “combine blockbuster momentum (and ticket sales) with the finer, more nuanced sensibilities of a filmmaker always concerned with slowing down, honing in on character and theme”.
Although Sam Mendes, director of Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015), came with artistic status, Villeneuve is something different – a marquee name frequently described as an auteur.
Villeneuve talks about his love for Bond.
Since his transition from making mostly low-key independent films in his native Canada to his arrival in Hollywood with Prisoners, starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal (2013), Villeneuve has amassed an impressively eclectic filmography.
He has proven that he is as comfortable shooting realistic crime thrillers (Sicario, 2015) and surrealist cinema that David Lynch would be proud of (Enemy, 2013), as he is with science fiction (Arrival, 2016, Blade Runner 2049, 2017, and the Dune films, 2021 and 2024).
Villeneuve’s Bond
Although Sicario may be the closest in terms of genre to the Bond films, establishing Villeneuve as a director who can expertly shoot action sequences, it is nevertheless difficult at this stage to conceptualise what a Villeneuve Bond film might be like.
Some critics have suggested that the director’s cinematic resume, eclectic as it is, might not bode well for Bond. The Hollywood Reporter’s film critic Benjamin Svetkey, for instance, worries that Villeneuve’s “lugubrious, meditative filmmaking” is sorely lacking in humour – which could be fatal for 007. “A certain amount of wit and winking is critical to the character,” he claims.
It is early days for Amazon MGM and Villeneuve. As yet, there is reportedly no treatment, no script, no writer and – more pointedly – no actor appointed to the role. Whatever happens, the 26th Bond film is likely to be a hard reboot that wipes the slate clean (again) after the fate of 007 in No Time to Die.
Villeneuve’s choice for Bond is unlikely to be as cartoonish as Pierce Brosnan’s iteration.
Although Villeneuve has said that he intends to honour tradition and that Bond is “sacred territory” for him, Bond’s capacity for revision and regeneration has been key to the franchise’s longevity.
As socoiologists Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott argue in their seminal study, Bond and Beyond, the figure of Bond has over the past six decades “been differently constructed at different moments,” with “different sets of ideological and cultural concerns”.
So what kind of Bond film Villeneuve ends up directing largely depends on the story and whichever actor is anointed as the next James Bond. It is doubtful that audiences will expect a campy pantomime Bond like Roger Moore, or a Bond with an invisible car, like Pierce Brosnan in the cartoonish Die Another Day (2002). Villeneuve’s choice of Casino Royale as his favourite 007 may provide a clue. But it is also unlikely that the director will be satisfied with slavishly repeating the past.
William Proctor does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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