There is something cosy and appealing about settling down next to a roaring fire in winter but, every year, nearly 61,000 premature deaths in Europe are caused by air pollution as a result of people burning wood or coal to heat their homes.
Wood-burning stoves are often considered safer, cleaner and more attractive than open fires. This may, in part, explain why from 2021 to 2022, sales of wood-burning stoves increased by 40% in the UK.
Wood burning produces a complex chemical mixture of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and gases, which can be breathed deep into the lungs. The specific contents vary based on the type of stove and the type of fuel, but chemicals can include carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen and a range of volatile organic compounds, such as cancer-causing formaldehyde and benzene.
Exposure to this pollution also leads to loss of work days, reduced productivity, higher expenses on healthcare and increased hospital admissions.
The risks are higher for people over 65, children, pregnant women and people with existing heart or lung conditions. Chronic wood smoke inhalation has been associated with systemic inflammation, which can make the lungs more vulnerable to infections, such as flu and COVID.
In the UK and Ireland, solid fuel heating is the main source of outdoor PM2.5 during wintertime. While wood is the dominant solid fuel in the UK, peat burning is regularly found to make the largest contribution to PM2.5 in Ireland.
Under cold, stagnant weather conditions, air pollution, even in small rural towns, can be as high as that found in very polluted parts of north India.
Exposure to outdoor air pollution caused by wood burning is an obvious health risk. But the pollution also finds its way into homes, worsening indoor air quality. Also, when lighting or refuelling a wood stove, large quantities of PM2.5 escape into the indoor air. Depending on how effective the home ventilation is, the PM2.5 levels can take hours to reduce.
Looks aren’t everything
In surveys carried out in Ireland and the UK, it was found that most people using solid fuel stoves did it for the aesthetics and the “homely feel”. The desire to save money or necessity came next.
Most people who use indoor wood burning in London are in wealthier neighbourhoods, while those most affected by the consequent air pollution are in poorer areas.
Educational campaigns regarding the effect of wood-burning stoves on health and the environment can be an important tool to reduce their usage. New initiatives, such as the Clean Air Night held in the UK and Ireland, are valuable in raising awareness and possibly changing long-term heating habits.
Encouraging users to move to more efficient and renewable heating technologies like heat pumps can reduce emissions and harm to health. This move even works out to be cheaper, except for people who source their own wood.
Communities can also be provided with information on their local air quality, allowing them to visualise real-time effects of their actions. For example, the PM2.5 sensor network map for Cork is freely accessible to the community and identifies locations and times when PM2.5 pollution is unhealthy.
If you have a wood burner, you could check that the pollution levels aren’t too high before you fire it up.
How to reduce emissions
People who rely on solid fuel stoves as their only source of home heating can adopt the following measures to reduce emissions. Use low-emission labelled stoves that reduce pollution. When burning, have small hot fires, with enough air supply and do not let the fire smoulder.
Choose carefully what is burnt, in compliance with relevant regulations. Do not burn garbage, plastics, cardboard, treated or painted wood in your stoves. These items increase exposure to toxic pollutants.
Ensure that stoves are installed and maintained annually by professionals. And, when lighting up or refuelling, make sure that the room the stove is in is well ventilated. This means open windows, no blocked vents, and exhaust fans or kitchen hoods can be used for additional ventilation.
People who use solid fuel stoves as a secondary source of heating could consider using the stove less or even stopping using it altogether. That really would be a breath of fresh air.
Asit Kumar Mishra is a DOROTHY co-fund Fellow and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101034345.
John Wenger has previously received funding from several governmental organisations in Ireland for research into solid fuel burning, including the EPA and Irish Research Council.
Burnt. Smoky. Medicinal. Each of these represents a subcategory of “peaty” whisky in the Scotch Whisky Research Institute’s brightly coloured flavour wheel.
A more chemistry-focused flavour wheel might include names like lignin phenols, aromatic hydrocarbons or nitrogen-containing heterocycles. Perhaps less appealing, but these chemicals define the flavours of Scotch whisky and represent just a few of the many types of organic carbon that are stored in peatlands.
However, when peat is burned for the production of whisky, ancient carbon is released into the atmosphere. Approximately 80% of Scotch whisky is made using peat as a fuel source for drying barley during the malting process. The aromas of the burning peat, or “reek” as it is known in the industry, are steeped into the grains providing the intense smoky flavours associated with many Scotch whiskies.
Historically, peat was a critical fuel resource for Scotland – a nation famously rich in peatlands with few trees for wood-burning. But as the industry has modernised, peat burning in whisky manufacturing has become less a story of adapting to resource limitations and more one of tradition and distinctive flavouring.
There is little debate about the importance of peat burning in generating some of the most highly sought-after flavours in the world of whisky. Some enthusiasts identifying as “peat heads” track the parts per million (ppm) of peaty compounds in their favourite brands. The ppm measure represents phenol concentrations (a group of aromatic organic compounds) in the malted barley. But this does not represent how peaty your whisky will taste as much will get lost in subsequent processes. Nor does the ppm represent how much peat was burned in production.
Most of the peat that is extracted in Scotland is used in horticulture as compost to grow things like mushrooms, lettuce and houseplants. However, both the Scottish and UK governments are making efforts to reduce peat extraction for gardening needs.
The Scotch whisky industry makes up about 1% of total peat use in Scotland. But, as horticulture practices change, this may represent a larger portion of peat use in the future.
In 2023, the Scotch whisky industry outlined a long-term sustainability plan that expresses goodwill but lacks clearly defined goals towards peatland restoration.
Such policies that ban or limit the use of peat in certain industries have followed an increased awareness of how important peatlands are to locking carbon away instead of releasing it into our atmosphere. Despite making up only about 3% of Earth’s land surfaces, peatlands store more carbon than all the world’s forests.
So, should you worry about the climate consequences of peat use in Scotch whisky?
No matter how you slice it, harvesting peat is not good for the environment – and getting your hands on a nice dry slab of peat to extract those smoky flavours is no easy task. Peat is formed by waterlogged, oxygen-poor conditions that slow the natural breakdown process of plant material.
While it is critical for healthy peatlands, excess water is not ideal for burning or transporting peat. Hence, peat extraction usually involves the extensive draining of peatlands. This halts the natural peat accumulation process and releases greenhouse gases from the now-degraded peats into the atmosphere.
Some recovery efforts are being made, and it has been suggested that the whisky industry can offset their peat degradation by investing in peat restoration. But, peatland restoration is a long-term and imprecise solution that might take decades to properly assess, while existing peatlands are needed as a natural carbon sink now.
Flavour innovations
There are reasons for “peat heads” (both whisky fans and climate warriors) to feel optimistic about the future of this industry.
For decades, the barley malting industry has focused on extracting the most flavour out of the least peat. Innovations in enhanced peat burning efficiency and investigations into peat flavouring alternatives are just some of the ways that the whisky industry is decreasing its peat footprint.
Change in this sector takes time. Any innovations in whisky made today must age for at least three years before being ready for the “flavour wheel”. This delay underscores the urgency of developing new methods as it will take time to find the perfect eco-friendly recipe that compromises neither the taste nor tradition of Scotch whisky.
In the meantime, whisky drinkers can seek out distilleries that are taking active steps to decrease their environmental impact and try drinking peat-free or peat-efficient whiskies.
To continue celebrating the uniqueness of peat as a flavour in whisky, we need to better acknowledge the effect it has on peatland degradation and continue to advocate for positive changes in the industry.
The story of peat use in Scotch whisky will continue to evolve. But while experimenting with future flavours, Scotland must preserve one of this nation’s most precious environmental resources.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Toby Ann Halamka receives funding from the CERES (Climate, Energy and Carbon in Ancient Earth Systems) UKRI grant at the University of Bristol.
Mike Vreeken 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.
Just before assuming office as the 47th president of the United States, Donald Trump introduced his meme coin – $Trump. The digital token attracted lots of attention, and a couple of days after its launch the combined value of the coins was nearly US$8.5 billion (£6.9 billion).
Trump venturing into meme coins is perhaps not surprising, given his history of branding everything from sneakers to bibles. The first lady followed suit with a meme coin of her own ($Melania, which briefly outperformed her husband’s coin).
History shows us that speculative hypes like this are not new. Hype can distort rational decision-making, with investors often neglecting due diligence and failing to ask the usual important questions of their investment.
In 17th-century Netherlands, tulip bulbs became status symbols. Rare varieties could fetch six times a typical salary – until the bubble burst, leaving many financially devastated. Similarly, the South Sea Bubble of the 18th century saw the South Sea Company’s stock price skyrocket based on speculative frenzy (and a high-profile figurehead in King George I) before crashing back down. And the dotcom bubble of the early 2000s saw unproven tech startups achieve sky-high valuations on sheer optimism until the inevitable crash.
The rise of meme coins, including the Trump ventures, bears similarities to the frenzy surrounding these past phenomena. They are driven by hype, the perception of scarcity and the promise of high returns. These factors can inflate the value irrationally and lead to significant financial risks for those who invest.
Meme coins thrive on the power of hype. Prominent figures like Trump and viral sensations such as internet star Haliey Welch’s failed cryptocurrency have the power to generate enormous buzz. Like the tulip mania of the 1600s, these digital tokens don’t hold any intrinsic value but instead rely on public sentiment to drive prices up. The hype can quickly make them seem indispensable and highly valuable, even though they have no physical existence.
The ease of access to meme coins also boosts their popularity. People can buy them online using simple apps or websites – much like shopping for any other product – without the need for a broker or intermediary. This autonomy appeals to modern investors, allowing them to manage their assets from the comfort of their homes. However, the simplicity and convenience often mask the high risks involved.
Social media amplifies the excitement surrounding meme coins, creating a community vibe that fuels their popularity. The constant buzz on platforms and among influencers generates Fomo (fear of missing out), pressuring people to join the bandwagon in pursuit of the potential gains. But this rush can lead to ill-informed decisions.
Meme coins are seen as opportunities for quick and substantial profits – an anonymous buyer (the so-called Lucky Crypto Trader) reportedly made US$100 million within hours on Trump’s coin. But these successes are rare and unpredictable. For most consumers, investing in meme coins is like gambling, with no guarantees of returns and a high likelihood of losses.
Cryptocurrencies remain largely unregulated, leaving investors without protection. So the influence of prominent figures like the Trumps hyping these assets raises questions of accountability and fairness. This lack of oversight puts inexperienced consumers at significant financial risk, which only serves to underline the need for caution.
The parallels with past speculative bubbles offer valuable lessons. From tulip mania to the dotcom bust, history shows us the dangers of unchecked hype and speculative investments. Consumers should learn from these events to avoid repeating the same mistakes in the cryptocurrency era. There are some basic principles would-be buyers should bear in mind.
To navigate the risks associated with meme coins and cryptocurrencies, consumers should find out more about the technology and become more aware of the trends and performance of the coins. Managing expectations is crucial; speculative investments are unpredictable and the hype can die away quickly. Diversifying investments rather than concentrating all funds in one asset or market can spread risk and provide greater financial stability.
Education is equally important – taking the time to read the fine print on investment opportunities, such as Trump’s coin disclaimer that it is not an investment vehicle, is essential to understanding the true nature of these assets.
Trump’s venture into meme coins is the latest in a long history of speculative financial trends, and he will probably not be the last to capitalise on this craze.
But until regulatory frameworks catch up, consumers should tread carefully, ensuring that their pursuit of profits does not come at the expense of their financial security.
Emmanuel Mogaji 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.
Learn about Kindergarten registration in the Yukon jlutz
The Department of Education is hosting a Zoom webinar to provide information about Kindergarten registration and Early French Immersion Kindergarten programs for the 2025–2026 school year.
The session will be held on Wednesday, January 22, at 7 pm.
All Yukon parents and guardians are invited to attend this information session to learn about the registration process, program details and to have their questions answered by department staff.
Yukon children who will be five years old by December 31, 2025, are eligible to start Kindergarten this coming school year.
Kindergarten registration details:
Whitehorse Schools: Online registration opens Tuesday, February 4, 2025. This includes French Immersion Kindergarten programs (at École Selkirk Elementary and École Whitehorse Elementary), First Nation School Board schools (Takhini Elementary and Grey Mountain Primary) and Catholic schools (Christ the King Elementary and Holy Family Elementary)
Registration for all Whitehorse schools is online at yukon.ca/register-child-school.
French Immersion Kindergarten programs: The deadline to register is Sunday, February 16, 2025.
Rural Schools: Registration is in person at the school and can be done at any time before the school year starts.
The 2024 general election was the first in the UK’s history to be run under a system of voter ID. When heading to the polling station, people could only vote if they proved their identity first. This was the result of a law brought in in 2023 and that had already applied to local elections in England that year.
Using data from the British Election Study, we tracked people eligible to vote between 2023 and 2024 and found that 5% of people eligible to vote – nearly 2 million people – didn’t own any recognised voter identification. This lack of ID was concentrated among poorer and less educated voters.
Of course, lacking photographic ID is not necessarily a permanent state. Some people will have been in the process of renewing passports and driving licences during this period. All of these people would also have been eligible for a voter authority certificate, a form of identification brought in with the new law – although we found take up of these was low.
We found that around 0.5% of all voters reported being turned away at polling stations as a result of lacking ID in the local elections of 2023. We also found that four times as many people (around 2%) reported not voting because they knew they didn’t have the right ID.
The equivalent figures were slightly lower at the general election of 2024, but a meaningful contingent still did not participate. Around 1.3% of electors – or over half a million people – were turned away or didn’t show up at all because of voter identification requirements.
While administrative records can provide accurate numbers about how many people were turned away at the polling station, they tell us little about people who were discouraged from even trying to vote because they didn’t have the right ID. So it is clear from our analysis that the impact of voter ID on turnout is likely larger than previous estimates based on polling station returns.
Who benefits?
We also found that the Conservatives were more likely to benefit from the voter ID law than other parties.
This is not surprising when we consider demographic factors. As our research shows, Conservative voters are more likely to own ID, because they are more likely to be older and more affluent. Despite changes in social patterns of party support since the 2016 Brexit referendum, this pattern still holds true.
The types of identification which are allowed under the new law – and especially the decision to allow older people but not younger people to use travel passes – exacerbates these differences.
Who didn’t have ID?
Percentage of party supporters (general election vote intention) without photo ID, May 2023 (lighter column) and 2024 (darker column) British Election Study, CC BY-ND
The chart above shows the percentage lacking photo ID by general election vote intention, as measured in May 2023 (lighter bars) and May 2024 (shaded bars), shortly before the general election was called.
In 2024, only 2.4% of Conservative supporters were likely to not have photo ID, while 3.8% of Labour supporters and 4.1% of Reform supporters were lacking.
One notable difference is an increase in Liberal Democrats and non-voters with no photo identification in 2024, although this is almost entirely due to a change in the number of people supporting the Liberal Democrats or deciding not to vote rather than changes in people’s actual ownership of ID.
Liberal Democrat voters had the lowest proportion of supporters without voter ID in 2023 (1.3%), but in 2024, the Liberal Democrat rate exceeded that of the Conservatives (2.9%).
There are still opportunities to mitigate the risks posed by voter ID. Ahead of the next election the new government should extend the forms of identification allowed (especially for those younger than state pension age).
Improving public awareness around the law and the availability of voter authority certificates is another important step. There are also suggestions that a system of allowing people to vouch for others who don’t have voter ID would be an option.
In an electorate of 49 million, if almost two million aren’t able to vote because they don’t have the right ID, there is a problem. Those interested in building trust in our democracy should consider not only minimising electoral fraud but reducing this number by as much as possible.
Ralph Scott receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust and has previously received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.
Ed Fieldhouse receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.
The Government is announcing a new action plan for an inclusive and equal society. The action plan aims to further strengthen efforts to support rights and opportunities for LGBTIQ people by consolidating, supplementing and mobilising these efforts.
“LGBTIQ people must be able to live lives in which their rights and identities are fully respected. Although progress has been made, sadly we see that challenges such as discrimination, threats, hatred and violence remain. These are things we will never accept,” says Minister for Gender Equality and Working Life Paulina Brandberg.
”All LGBTIQ people have the right to safety and security. It is especially important that we ensure that young LGBTIQ people have the right to a safe and secure upbringing, free from discrimination, violence and other violations. This action plan is an extraordinarily important tool in our continued efforts to gaurantee equal rights and opportunities for all,” says Minsiter for Social Services Camilla Waltersson Grönvall.
“The Government is continuing its long-term, systematic and strategic work for LGBTIQ rights and freedoms. With the new action plan, we are taking the next steps in our efforts to ensure that everyone can be who they are and love who they want,” says Minister for Public Administration Erik Slottner.
The new action plan complements the existing strategy for equal rights and opportunities regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression, and the efforts will be stepped up with concrete measures until 2027 .
Eight focus areas and new strategic agencies
The following focus areas are considered to be of continued vital importance in efforts to support rights and opportunities for LGBTIQ people: violence, discrimination and other violations; health, health care and social services; working life; young LGBTIQ people; older LGBTIQ people; private and family life; civil society; and cultural life.
The new action plan includes goals for each focus area based on various policy areas. To ensure a consolidated, structured and long-term approach to measures within the focus areas, a number of government agencies have been designated as strategic LGBTIQ agencies. These are the Ombudsman for Children in Sweden, the Public Health Agency of Sweden, the Forum for Living History, the Swedish Gender Equality Agency, the Swedish Migration Agency, the Family Law and Parenthood Support Authority, the Swedish Agency for Youth and Civil Society, the Swedish Police Authority, the National Board of Health and Welfare, the Swedish Arts Council, and the Swedish National Agency for Education.
The Government has also designated the Swedish Work Environment Authority and the Swedish Agency for Work Environment Expertise as strategic agencies for the working life focus area, which had previously lacked strategic agencies.
The Government will also task the Swedish Defence Research Agency with surveying the prevalence of LGBTIQ hostility in digital environments and spreading knowledge compiled within the framework of the assignment.
The Public Health Agency of Sweden will be given an expanded assignment to coordinate, support and follow up the work of the LGBTIQ strategic agencies.
Source: United Kingdom – Executive Government & Departments 2
Professor Rowland Kao has been appointed as the Chair of Defra’s Science Advisory Council
The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has appointed Professor Rowland Cao as Chair of the Science Advisory Council (SAC). This will be for a term of 3 years from 8 January 2025 until 7 January 2028.
The appointment has been made in accordance with the Governance Code on Public Appointments.
Biography
Professor Rowland Kao is Professor of Veterinary Epidemiology and Data Science at the University of Edinburgh. Kao’s research focusses on infectious disease dynamics, mainly with respect to the role of demography in the spread and persistence of infectious diseases in wildlife, humans and livestock.
Rowland previously served as a member of the Science Advisory Council (SAC) from 2018 to 2024.
Notes to editors:
Defra’s Science Advisory Council is an advisory non-departmental public body who provide expert independent advice on science policy and strategy to the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
All appointments are made on merit and political activity plays no part in the selection process.
As wildfires swept through neighborhoods on the outskirts of Los Angeles in January 2025, stories about residents there helping their neighbors and total strangers began trickling out on social media.
Businesses, including fitness centers, opened their facilities so evacuees could shower or charge their phones. Organizations that routinely work with homeless populations quickly mobilized their members to help ensure people living on the streets and in camps could get to secure, safe locations away from the fires and hazardous air quality.
Disasters, by definition, overwhelm local resources, making civilian responders like these essential. Sixty years of research at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center and by others examining the social aspects of disaster has repeatedly shown effective disaster management requires mobilizing community resources far beyond official channels.
Often the response happens through local groups that form in response to a clear need in the community and with shared skills and interests. And this is exactly what we are witnessing in Los Angeles.
Civilians helping often number in the thousands
The number of those who step up to help during disasters varies by event, but it can be tremendous.
Following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, over 6,800 volunteers worked with the Red Cross on the response. That same year, volunteers responding to the Kobe earthquake in Japan logged more than 1 million person-days of activity, a measure of the number of people times the hours they contributed.
People use garden hoses to try to prevent homes from catching fire in Altadena, Calif., on Jan. 8, 2025. Neighbors rushed to help neighbors as the wind blew burning embers into neighborhoods. Mario Tama/Getty Images
In an in-depth study of the Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center attacks, we interviewed local residents who used their retired fireboat to pump water for the firefighters at ground zero. Operators of tug, ferry and tour boats in and around New York City immediately responded to quickly evacuate 500,000 people in the area from danger. In fact, the majority of the boats involved belonged to private companies. Other volunteers queued evacuees and organized supplies and rides to get people home.
Over 900 people, most acting in unofficial capacities, were awarded medals or ribbons for their efforts in just the marine response after the World Trade Center attack.
A survey of residents after the 1985 Mexico City earthquake found that nearly 10% of local residents volunteered in the first three weeks of the response. Following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, in California, a survey of residents in Santa Cruz and San Francisco counties found that two-thirds of the public were involved in response activities.
Local businesses are often quick to help in disasters. Greg Dulan, center, who runs a soul food restaurant and food truck, hands out hot meals to wildfire evacuees at a church in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 15, 2025. Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
However, much of the work local residents contribute during and after disasters goes unaccounted for in official reports.
There is no mechanism to quantify the full extent to which a neighbor or a complete stranger helps someone flee from peril. Yet when people are trapped and minutes count, research shows it is family, friends and neighbors who are already on the scene and are most likely to save lives. It’s often everyday citizens who also take on immediate tasks such as debris removal. Providing a phone, a car, a place to do laundry, or a little bit of elbow grease can fill a gap and let firefighters and other formal responders focus on critical operations.
Getting the right help to where it’s needed
Every study of a large-scale disaster conducted by the Disaster Research Center has revealed some level of emergent, informal helping behavior.
The lack of public understanding about the large number of local residents already involved, often including disaster victims themselves, can lead to an influx of outsiders eager to help. Their arrival can actually pose challenges for the disaster response.
Local groups such as the Pasadena Community Job Center organize volunteers to send them where help is requested. This group is removing debris from streets in Pasadena, Calif., in the wake of the Eaton Fire on Jan. 14, 2025. Zoë Meyers/AFP via Getty Images
So, what can you do to best support these local efforts?
Making a financial contribution to a trusted disaster response or local organization can go a long way to providing the support communities actually need. Organizations such as the American Red Cross or Feeding America, or local community-based groups that routinely work in the area, are often best suited to help where it’s needed the most.
Skilled help will be needed for the long term
Also, remember that disasters don’t end when the emergency is over. Survivors of the Los Angeles-area fires face years of confusing and frustrating recovery tasks ahead.
Offering help after the immediate threat has passed – particularly skilled help, such as experience in construction or expertise in managing insurance and FEMA paperwork – is just as important.
For example, after fires in 1970 destroyed hundreds of homes in the San Diego area, local architects, engineers and contractors donated their time and skills to help people rebuild. Their work was coordinated by a local architect and member of the Chamber of Commerce to ensure projects were assigned to reputable volunteers.
As we recognize the important ways that neighbors and strangers helped those around them, the broader community can support wildfire victims by responding to offering the right help as recovery needs emerge. Just about every skill that is useful in calm times will be needed in these difficult months and years ahead.
Tricia Wachtendorf receives funding from the National Science Foundation and Arnold Ventures Foundation.
James Kendra receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Source: State University Higher School of Economics – State University Higher School of Economics –
Lyceum of the Higher School of Economics was recognized as the winner of the All-Russian Award of the Year – 2024 of the Moscow International Education Fair in the nomination “School of the Year in Digital”. The expert jury highly praised the official website of the lyceum, the activity and engagement of the audience in social networks, and interaction with the media.
The MMSO Award of the Year was created to recognize educational organizations that pay special attention to the formation of their mission and, using digital tools, build communication with the professional community, their employees, students, graduates, parents, founders, and partners.
Who can be nominated for the MMSO Award of the Year?
General education organizations (schools, educational centers)
Organizations implementing additional education programs for children
This year, over 550 applications from 81 subjects of the Russian Federation were submitted for 11 award nominations, and over 20 thousand votes were cast in the online voting process.
The awarding of the HSE Lyceum with the prestigious All-Russian prize confirms that an effective system of communication and brand positioning has been built here. Not only official social networks are working — TG channel And community page in VK, but also separate thematic channels – “Lyceum applicants“for applicants, channel of extracurricular activities and events”Lyceum frequency” A channel for the professional community has been launched “Lyceum to schools“There is a network of channels of the Lyceum Olympiad Camps (LOS(ь)) – an off-site additional educational program organized jointly by the Lyceum and Faculty of Pre-University Training Vyshki. The Lyceum Olympiad Camp also became a finalist for the “MMSO Award of the Year” in the nomination “Brand of the Year in Supplementary Education”.
“Communication is the most important component of success for us. The extent to which we are open and understandable to our future applicants and their families determines their choice of the Lyceum, and subsequently our university, to implement their educational trajectory,” says Valentina Setezheva, Deputy Director of the HSE Lyceum. “The building of trusting relationships and the preservation of an atmosphere of co-creation within the Lyceum depend on how close we are to our Lyceum students, how much we support their initiatives, including in the media space. Our internal professional growth also depends on how open we are to the teaching and expert community, because dialogue, exchange of experience and knowledge allows us to adopt best practices and solve tasks more effectively.”
Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.
ADVISORY – Harrisburg University, Auditor General DeFoor, Members 1st Federal Credit Union to Launch 12th Annual Student Financial Literacy Scholarship Competition
What: Harrisburg University of Science and Technology (HU) Interim President, David Schankweiler; Pennsylvania Auditor General, Timothy L. DeFoor; and Members 1st Federal Credit Union Assistant Vice President of Community Relations, Sara Firestone, will announce the launch of a student scholarship competition aimed at increasing financial literacy in Pennsylvania. The student competition will give six Pennsylvania students a chance to win cash prizes from Harrisburg University, as well as a scholarship if and when they enroll at HU.
When: Friday, January 24, 2025, 10:00 AM
Where: Harrisburg University of Science and Technology Auditorium, 14th Floor 326 Market Street Harrisburg, PA 17101
MEDIA CONTACT April Hutcheson – Pennsylvania Department of the Auditor General: 717.787.1381 or News@PAAuditor.gov Jessica Warren – Harrisburg University: 717.901.5159 or JWarren2@HarrisburgU.edu Sara Weiser – Members 1st Federal Credit Union: 717.678.8683 or WeiserS@Members1st.org
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Corinna Jentzsch, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Leiden University
Mozambique’s parliament and its new president, Daniel Chapo, were sworn in in mid-January 2025 after a tumultuous post-election period of protests, barricades and police violence.
The 9 October 2024 elections prompted countless reports of fraud, leading the European Union election observer mission to note
irregularities during counting of votes and unjustified alteration of election results.
Based on this, and other accounts of fraud, the opposition candidate Venâncio Mondlane claimed to have won the elections and coordinated several weeks of protests across the country.
These were met with a harsh police response. Over 4,200 people were reportedly arrested, 730 shot and 300 killed with live ammunition between 21 October 2024 and 16 January 2025.
After spending several weeks abroad, Mondlane returned to Mozambique on 9 January to join ongoing political talks between the government and opposition parties.
To get out of its political crisis will not be easy. It will require the party in power, Frelimo, to fundamentally change how it deals with disagreement and discontent. Buying off political opposition elites, as has been done in the past, will not calm this political storm.
Based on my research into political violence, I suggest that the cycles of violence in the country can only be broken if the new president addresses three issues related to state repression. He needs to do this in dialogue with opposition forces to earn trust and public support for the new government.
The three issues are:
putting an end to violence perpetrated by the police and army
ending political assassinations and ensuring accountability for the ones that have taken place
protecting media freedom and ending violence against journalists.
No more blind eye to police (and army) violence
Human rights experts urged the government in November 2024 to end the post-election violence and allow thorough investigations. Experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council expressed concerns about
violations of the right to life, including of a child, deliberate killings of unarmed protesters and the excessive use of force by the police deployed to disperse peaceful protests.
Such extensive repression has been a common response by the Mozambican security forces over the past years, with severe consequences for the evolution of conflict. For example, state repression has been a major contributor to armed conflict in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, where an Islamist insurgency has been raging since 2017. Victims of violence by security forces are an important source of recruits for the insurgency.
Accountability for political assassinations
Mozambique has suffered from targeted killings of political opposition figures. The most recent, high-profile political assassinations took place after the elections in October. Elvino Dias, Mondlane’s lawyer, and Paulo Guambe, an official of Podemos, the political party that supported Mondlane’s run for president, were shot dead in Maputo by unknown gunmen.
Dias was preparing a court case challenging the election results.
Mozambique has a long history of such political assassinations. These have rarely been investigated and no one has been held accountable. The government and police regularly deny any involvement, and people have come to speak of “death squads” seeking to intimidate the political opposition and civil society.
Freedom of the press and civil society
The ability of the press in Mozambique to hold people accountable for their actions has been severely constrained. Its ability to report and investigate those involved in state-sanctioned violence has been a challenge for a long time.
In its annual report for 2023 the Media Institute of Southern Africa documented the extent to which journalists had been intimidated and attacked. It reported that such incidents increased during election periods.
This was indeed the case in the 2024 pre-election period. Journalists faced arrests when, for example, reporting on police trying to disrupt opposition parties’ events.
Mozambique enjoys a diverse media landscape, including multiple private and local media outlets. Nevertheless, press freedom has been curtailed. An example has been the treatment of journalists investigating the armed conflict in Cabo Delgado. Soon after the conflict began in October 2017, the government barred journalists from visiting the province, and many of those reporting nevertheless were detained and held for extended periods or arrested for unsubstantiated charges.
The case of Amade Abubacar made headlines in 2019 when he was detained and held for 13 days in military barracks without access to a lawyer. He was then charged with “violation of state secrets” and “public instigation to crime”.
What Abubacar did was report on the insurgency. Since then, the situation has got worse for the media. Last year, the Cabo Delgado governor Valige Tauabo accused unnamed journalists of colluding with the insurgents.
As I was writing this, news reached me that Arlindo Chissale, a journalist and political activist from Nacala, had been arrested, tortured and killed by the “death squads” mentioned earlier on 7 January 2025. Arlindo worked with me on researching the conflict in Cabo Delgado.
Freedom of the press is important to hold the new government accountable for the promises it has made to the Mozambican people.
The way forward
Chapo delivered a well-crafted inauguration address on 15 January. It was well crafted because, as some analysts commented, he incorporated many of the policies being advocated by Mondlane.
He said in his speech that he had heard what the protesters were telling him during the demonstrations. And he promised to promote unity, human rights and political dialogue to (re-)create social and political stability.
Chapo is also aware of the waves being made by Mondlane, who has recognised the political power of mobilising people around the issue of police violence. On his return to Mozambique, Mondlane presented the government with a list of demands to be implemented in the first 100 days of the new government. The first was that steps needed to be taken to stop the violence against the population.
Since his return he has also met victims of violence at the hands of the police and army.
The challenge is that Chapo’s party, Frelimo, which has been in power since independence in 1975, is strong and can severely curtail the president’s ability to introduce relevant reforms.
It’s therefore far from clear whether Chapo can pursue any of his suggested policy goals.
Dialogue with Mondlane is necessary. But if this leads to another “elite bargain” that might get him a cabinet position but does not benefit the common people, Mozambicans will not calm down. Any agreement must address the lack of accountability for police violence, stop political assassinations, and allow journalists to investigate political violence.
SHENZHEN, CHINA, Jan. 24, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — China Medical System Holdings Limited (the “Company”, together with its subsidiaries, the “Group” or “CMS”) is pleased to announce that on 24 January 2025, the Group through subsidiaries of the Company entered into a Collaboration Agreement with Hunan Mabgeek Biotechnology Co., Ltd. (“Mabgeek Biotechnology”) and its subsidiary for Class 1 innovative drug anti-IL-4Rα humanized monoclonal antibody injection MG-K10 (“MG-K10” or the “Product”). The Group has obtained the co-development right as specifically agreed upon in the Agreement and exclusive commercialization right to the Product in Mainland China, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Macao Special Administrative Region, Taiwan Region and Singapore (the “Territory”); Mabgeek Biotechnology will support the commercialization activities and is responsible for the sale and supply of the Product. The collaboration term is perpetual.
IL-4Rα is considered a key target for the treatment of type 2 inflammatory diseases, such as atopic dermatitis (AD), asthma, prurigo nodularis, etc. Anti-IL-4Rα monoclonal antibodies are among the best-selling biologics in this field. MG-K10 is an innovative long-acting anti-IL-4Rα humanizedmonoclonal antibody that simultaneously blocks the signaling of key type 2 inflammatory cytokines IL-4 and IL-13. Following Fc mutation, MG-K10 allows long dosing interval owing to its prolonged half-life, and it is expected to be the first long-acting anti-IL-4Rαmonoclonal antibody marketed in China. Currently marketed anti-IL-4Rα drugs require dosing every two weeks, whereas MG-K10 only requires dosing every four weeks, demonstrating good efficacy and safety. MG-K10 has the potential to be the Best-in-Class (BIC).
This collaboration marks another significant milestone for Dermavon (formerly known as CMS Skinhealth)’s layout in the dermatology field. MG-K10 will enrich the global differentiated innovative pipeline of Dermavon, and will strongly synergize with the existing product portfolio, such as marketed innovative drug ILUMETRI (tildrakizumab injection), marketed exclusive drug Hirudoid (mucopolysaccharide polysulfate cream) and dermatology-grade skincare products of Heling soothing product series (developed for AD patients), and innovative pipeline drugs ruxolitinib cream (for the topical treatment of mild to moderate AD and non-segmental vitiligo) and povorcitinib (for the treatment of non-segmental vitiligo, hidradenitis suppurativa, prurigo nodularis and chronic spontaneous urticaria), etc. Leveraging its proven clinical development and commercialization capabilities, the Group will fully cooperate with Mabgeek Biotechnology to promote the approval of MG-K10 in China, bringing a new treatment option with lower dosing frequency, good efficacy and safety to patients with type 2 inflammatory diseases in China.
More information about MG-K10 MG-K10 is a Class 1 innovative drug anti-IL-4Rα humanized monoclonal antibody injection that used for the treatment of type 2 inflammatory diseases, including AD, asthma, prurigo nodularis, allergic rhinitis, chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps, eosinophilic esophagitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and so on. It holds substance patents in specific countries/regions within the Territory.
MG-K10 has entered Phase III clinical trials in China for AD, asthma, and prurigo nodularis. In the completed Phase II clinical trials for adult moderate-to-severe AD and moderate-to-severe asthma, MG-K10 has demonstrated good efficacy and safety[1-2]. Additionally, MG-K10 has obtained IND approval for eosinophilic esophagitis, chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps, and seasonal allergic rhinitis in China.
According to Frost & Sullivan, the global market for treatments targeting IL-4Rα is expected to reach US$28.7 billion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.8% from 2020 to 2030. In China, the market is projected to reach US$4.08 billion by 2030, with a CAGR of 76.8% from 2020 to 2030.
About AD indication MG-K10’s first indication, AD, is a chronic inflammatory skin condition characterized by severe itching. It is the most burdensome non-fatal skin disease globally, with at least 230 million people affected worldwide[3]. AD is also a prevalent and high-burden chronic disease in China, with the prevalence showing an upward trend[3]. According to the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019, the number of AD patients in China increased by 25.65% from 1990 to 2019[3]. It is estimated that there are approximately 36.09 million AD patients in China[3], with approximately 9.625 million suffering from moderate-to-severe AD[4].
Current treatment options for AD primarily include topical and systemic treatments. For moderate-to-severe AD, topical medications are often insufficient to achieve disease control, necessitating the initiation of systemic treatments. However, due to the limitations in efficacy and safety of traditional systemic therapies for AD, moderate-to-severe AD patients often experience delays in systemic treatment initiation, poor compliance, and suboptimal disease control, leaving a significant unmet need in clinical practice[3]. MG-K10, with its extended dosing interval of once every four weeks, is expected to improve patient adherence and provide a new, effective, and safe systemic treatment option for patients with moderate-to-severe AD.
AboutMabgeek Biotechnology Mabgeek Biotechnology was founded in 2016 and has always adhered to the research and development concept of “innovation, efficiency and safety”, focusing on the fields of allergic inflammatory diseases and autoimmune diseases. Mabgeek Biotechnology is equipped with a research and development team composed of top industry experts. With excellent research capabilities and deep industry experience, Mabgeek Biotechnology uses its unique TEADA high-throughput antibody screening platform to develop innovative antibody drugs with high biological activity, excellent druggability, and differentiation. Mabgeek Biotechnology is committed to providing safer, more effective and more convenient treatment solutions for patients worldwide. For more information about Mabgeek Biotechnology and its products, please visit: https://www.mabge.com/.
About CMS CMS is a platform company linking pharmaceutical innovation and commercialization with strong product lifecycle management capability, dedicated to providing competitive products and services to meet unmet medical needs.
CMS focuses on the global first-in-class (FIC) and best-in-class (BIC) innovative products, and efficiently promotes the clinical research, development and commercialization of innovative products, enabling the continuous transformation of scientific research into clinical practices to benefit patients.
CMS deeply engages in several specialty therapeutic fields, and has developed proven commercialization capabilities, extensive networks and expert resources, resulting in leading academic and market positions for its major marketed products. CMS continues to promote the in-depth development of its advantageous specialty fields and expand business boundaries. While strengthening the competitiveness of the cardio-cerebrovascular/gastroenterology business, CMS independently operates its dermatology and medical aesthetics business, and ophthalmology business, aiming to gain leading positions in specialty therapeutic fields, whilst enhancing the scale and efficiency. At the same time, CMS has expanded its business territory to the Southeast Asian market, striving to become a “bridgehead” for global pharmaceutical companies to enter the Southeast Asian market, further escorting the sustainable and healthy development of the Group.
Chinese Society of Dermatology, China Dermatologist Association. Clinical pathway for the diagnosis and treatment of moderate to severe atopic dermatitis in China (2023): an expert consensus[J]. Chinese Journal of Dermatology, 2023, 56(11): 1000-1007. DOI: 10.35541/cjd.20230247.
Mao, Dandan et al. Prevalence and risk factors of atopic dermatitis in Chinese adults: a nationwide population-based cross-sectional study. Chinese medical journal vol. 136,5 604-606. 5 Mar. 2023, DOI:10.1097/CM9.0000000000002560
CMS Disclaimer and Forward-Looking Statements This press release is not intended to promote any products to you and is not for advertising purposes. This press release does not recommend any drugs, medical devices and/or indications. If you want to know more about the diagnosis and treatment of specific diseases, please follow the opinions or guidance of your doctor or other medical and health professionals. Any treatment-related decisions made by healthcare professionals should be based on the patient’s specific circumstances and in accordance with the drug package insert.
This press release which has been prepared by CMS does not constitute any offer or invitation to purchase or subscribe for any securities, and shall not form the basis for or be relied on in connection with any contract or binding commitment whatsoever. This press release has been prepared by CMS based on information and data which it considers reliable, but CMS makes no representation or warranty, express or implied, whatsoever, and no reliance shall be placed on, the truth, accuracy, completeness, fairness and reasonableness of the contents of this press release. Certain matters discussed in this press release may contain statements regarding the Group’s market opportunity and business prospects that are individually and collectively forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Any forward-looking statements and projections made by third parties included in this press release are not adopted by the Group and the Company is not responsible for such third-party statements and projections.
Source: United States Senator for Idaho Mike Crapo
Washington, D.C.–U.S. Senator Jim Risch Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Jim Risch (R-Idaho), Tim Sheehy (R-Montana) and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming) introduced the Protect Equality and Civics Education (PEACE) Act to prohibit the use of taxpayer dollars to promote politically divisive concepts, such as Critical Race Theory, through the U.S. Department of Education’s American History and Civics Education program.
The PEACE Act codifies the Trump Administration’s definition of “divisive concepts” as outlined in the 2020 Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping, ensuring our education standards reflect America’s founding principles and reject extreme ideology.
“Teaching children they are inherently ‘bad’ or ‘good’ based on conditions they cannot control is destructive and unproductive,” said Crapo. “Schools should get back to quality education that will allow the next generation of leaders to thrive.”
“For too long, the radical left has tried to rewrite American history and indoctrinate future generations with their woke agenda,” said Risch. “My PEACE Act ensures taxpayer dollars are not used to promote Critical Race Theory or subject students to a divisive and misguided political agenda.”
“It’s disgraceful that the Biden Administration spent the last four years using taxpayer money to force their radical, woke agenda onto our kids. I appreciate the work of my colleagues to put an end to this nonsense so the next generation can learn how to think, instead of what to think, and focus on preparing for success after graduation,” said Sheehy.
“Rather than focusing on the safety and prosperity of our nation, the Biden administration spent the last four years funding and forcing far-left ideology on students across the United States,” said Lummis. “I am proud to join my colleagues to combat this radical agenda in our public schools and focus on quality education.”
?
Mozambique’s parliament and its new president, Daniel Chapo, were sworn in in mid-January 2025 after a tumultuous post-election period of protests, barricades and police violence.
The 9 October 2024 elections prompted countless reports of fraud, leading the European Union election observer mission to note
irregularities during counting of votes and unjustified alteration of election results.
Based on this, and other accounts of fraud, the opposition candidate Venâncio Mondlane claimed to have won the elections and coordinated several weeks of protests across the country.
These were met with a harsh police response. Over 4,200 people were reportedly arrested, 730 shot and 300 killed with live ammunition between 21 October 2024 and 16 January 2025.
After spending several weeks abroad, Mondlane returned to Mozambique on 9 January to join ongoing political talks between the government and opposition parties.
To get out of its political crisis will not be easy. It will require the party in power, Frelimo, to fundamentally change how it deals with disagreement and discontent. Buying off political opposition elites, as has been done in the past, will not calm this political storm.
Based on my research into political violence, I suggest that the cycles of violence in the country can only be broken if the new president addresses three issues related to state repression. He needs to do this in dialogue with opposition forces to earn trust and public support for the new government.
The three issues are:
putting an end to violence perpetrated by the police and army
ending political assassinations and ensuring accountability for the ones that have taken place
protecting media freedom and ending violence against journalists.
No more blind eye to police (and army) violence
Human rights experts urged the government in November 2024 to end the post-election violence and allow thorough investigations. Experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council expressed concerns about
violations of the right to life, including of a child, deliberate killings of unarmed protesters and the excessive use of force by the police deployed to disperse peaceful protests.
Such extensive repression has been a common response by the Mozambican security forces over the past years, with severe consequences for the evolution of conflict. For example, state repression has been a major contributor to armed conflict in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, where an Islamist insurgency has been raging since 2017. Victims of violence by security forces are an important source of recruits for the insurgency.
Accountability for political assassinations
Mozambique has suffered from targeted killings of political opposition figures. The most recent, high-profile political assassinations took place after the elections in October. Elvino Dias, Mondlane’s lawyer, and Paulo Guambe, an official of Podemos, the political party that supported Mondlane’s run for president, were shot dead in Maputo by unknown gunmen.
Dias was preparing a court case challenging the election results.
Mozambique has a long history of such political assassinations. These have rarely been investigated and no one has been held accountable. The government and police regularly deny any involvement, and people have come to speak of “death squads” seeking to intimidate the political opposition and civil society.
Freedom of the press and civil society
The ability of the press in Mozambique to hold people accountable for their actions has been severely constrained. Its ability to report and investigate those involved in state-sanctioned violence has been a challenge for a long time.
In its annual report for 2023 the Media Institute of Southern Africa documented the extent to which journalists had been intimidated and attacked. It reported that such incidents increased during election periods.
This was indeed the case in the 2024 pre-election period. Journalists faced arrests when, for example, reporting on police trying to disrupt opposition parties’ events.
Mozambique enjoys a diverse media landscape, including multiple private and local media outlets. Nevertheless, press freedom has been curtailed. An example has been the treatment of journalists investigating the armed conflict in Cabo Delgado. Soon after the conflict began in October 2017, the government barred journalists from visiting the province, and many of those reporting nevertheless were detained and held for extended periods or arrested for unsubstantiated charges.
The case of Amade Abubacar made headlines in 2019 when he was detained and held for 13 days in military barracks without access to a lawyer. He was then charged with “violation of state secrets” and “public instigation to crime”.
What Abubacar did was report on the insurgency. Since then, the situation has got worse for the media. Last year, the Cabo Delgado governor Valige Tauabo accused unnamed journalists of colluding with the
insurgents.
As I was writing this, news reached me that Arlindo Chissale, a journalist and political activist from Nacala, had been arrested, tortured and killed by the “death squads” mentioned earlier on 7 January 2025. Arlindo worked with me on researching the conflict in Cabo Delgado.
Freedom of the press is important to hold the new government accountable for the promises it has made to the Mozambican people.
The way forward
Chapo delivered a well-crafted inauguration address on 15 January. It was well crafted because, as some analysts commented, he incorporated many of the policies being advocated by Mondlane.
He said in his speech that he had heard what the protesters were telling him during the demonstrations. And he promised to promote unity, human rights and political dialogue to (re-)create social and political stability.
Chapo is also aware of the waves being made by Mondlane, who has recognised the political power of mobilising people around the issue of police violence. On his return to Mozambique, Mondlane presented the government with a list of demands to be implemented in the first 100 days of the new government. The first was that steps needed to be taken to stop the violence against the population.
Since his return he has also met victims of violence at the hands of the police and army.
The challenge is that Chapo’s party, Frelimo, which has been in power since independence in 1975, is strong and can severely curtail the president’s ability to introduce relevant reforms.
It’s therefore far from clear whether Chapo can pursue any of his suggested policy goals.
Dialogue with Mondlane is necessary. But if this leads to another “elite bargain” that might get him a cabinet position but does not benefit the common people, Mozambicans will not calm down. Any agreement must address the lack of accountability for police violence, stop political assassinations, and allow journalists to investigate political violence.
Corinna Jentzsch has received research funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
Four photographs by celebrated artist Sally Mann were recently removed from the walls of an exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth at the behest of local Republican officials, who claimed they constituted child pornography. The Fort Worth Police Department is now investigating the allegation.
Those photographs – taken more than 30 years ago – feature Mann’s children posing in the nude on the family’s isolated farm in rural Virginia. They were included in an exhibition titled “Diaries of Home,” which also featured images by renowned photographers LaToya Ruby Frazier, Nan Goldin and Catherine Opie, among others.
One of the seized photographs depicts her son’s naked torso dripping with a melted popsicle, suggesting the innocence and messiness of childhood. In another, Mann’s naked daughter tiptoes across a tabletop, evoking both her strength and vulnerability.
For decades, these works have elicited admiration and, yes, condemnation.
I’m an art historian, and my most recent book documents the rise of art censorship following passage of the nation’s first federal anti-obscenity law in 1873, which became known as the Comstock Act after its chief lobbyist, the Christian evangelical activist Anthony Comstock.
Today, the Comstock Act is in the news mostly because it prohibits abortion medication, which was considered a form of obscenity alongside erotic images, sculptures and sex toys. But in the law’s early years, it was used to confiscate vast quantities of art and literature deemed lewd, obscene or erotic. Though this form of censorship has since been deemed unconstitutional by various U.S. Supreme Court decisions, debates over what constitutes obscenity, child pornography and artistic expression persist.
To me, the events surrounding the removal of Mann’s photographs echo those of a censorious past.
Evangelical underpinnings
Throughout Comstock’s career, evangelical Christians served as the most fervent supporters of his work; they were behind the creation of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which funded his investigations.
In Fort Worth, objections originated from local Christian activists and organizations. Chief among them was the Danbury Institute, which penned an open letter to the Fort Worth museum, accusing Mann’s photographs of “normalizing pedophilia” and the exhibition more generally of “promoting “the breakdown of the God-ordained definition of family” through its depiction of LGBTQ parents. In its mission statement, the institute declares that “Scripture is authoritative, inerrant, infallible, and sufficient.”
Comstock similarly believed that “God’s Law” ought to be the guiding standard for American jurisprudence. To justify seizing and destroying an enormous array of images and objects during his 43-year career, Comstock often claimed to be battling Satan.
His efforts were broadly popular when it came to the sexually explicit images that tended to circulate in bars and saloons. But he eventually ran afoul of Americans’ more liberal and pluralistic attitudes when he targeted art and popular culture.
Courts expand freedom of expression
Over the course of the 20th century, the Comstock Act lost most of its teeth.
Judges and juries increasingly upheld civil liberties claims in cases concerning freedom of expression, vastly expanding the scope of the First Amendment.
In 1973, the Supreme Court established the current three-part “test” for obscenity. The final prong of that test dictates that a work is not obscene if it has “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”
In my view, there’s no credible claim that Mann’s long-celebrated photographs do not have serious artistic value.
Following the removal of Mann’s photographs, arts advocates were quick to point out that the seized images are featured on prominent museum websites around the country. The National Coalition against Censorship and Artists at Risk organization issued strong statements in support of the exhibition of Mann’s photographs.
The Fort Worth sheriff’s office, which is holding the images, is reportedly evaluating whether they violate Texas’ child pornography statute. But because Mann’s photographs do not depict any sexual acts, the only phrase in this state law that could be deemed relevant is “lewd exhibition,” with “lewd” defined as an intent to stimulate sexual desire.
Here, context is key. As one critic of the removal of Mann’s works pointed out, “Most everyone reading this can easily make a distinction between going to a museum and opening Pornhub.”
By selectively removing a few of Mann’s photographs from the exhibition and suggesting they may be child pornography, Texas officials stripped them of their context as works of art. In doing so, they introduced the photographs to an audience that would never have seen them in an art museum but that now may search for them online with prurient intent.
Once again, I can’t help but see a connection to Comstock’s crusades. His efforts backfired, to a degree, in that the targets of his ire, from student drawings of nude models to birth control literature, ended up getting more publicity than they otherwise would have.
Curators also play a role
Despite legal protections, curators are still sensitive to how works of art may offend viewers and have developed a set of practices to accommodate these sensitivities.
Three years ago, I interviewed curators and directors in academic art museums and galleries across the country as a fellow at the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement.
My research focused on how museum professionals deal with the exhibition of potentially controversial artwork. They spoke to me about a variety of best practices. For example, prominently displayed content warnings allow viewers to choose to opt in or avoid the exhibition altogether. Thoughtful placement of the works and supplemental commentary add more context and provoke thought and discussion.
Fort Worth’s Modern Art Museum, where Mann’s photographs were displayed. Michael Barera, CC BY-SA
The curators of “Diaries of Home” clearly followed these best practices.
They stated the objective of their exhibition: to “examine conceptions of home in all their complexity,” and to feature the perspectives of women, LGBTQ and nonbinary artists and subjects. A content warning was visible to audiences before they entered the gallery: “This exhibition features mature themes that may be sensitive for some viewers.” Museum staff provided wall labels, tours and artist discussions.
These contributions situate the exhibited artworks within a broader conversation about families in America today, which are diverse in makeup, in definition and in lifestyle.
In other words, they show how these are serious, thoughtful works of art.
Although I can’t imagine any sort of successful criminal prosecution will take place, I do think damage has been done. This may have been a goal from the start.
Threatening legal action undoubtedly has a chilling effect. The Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth must grapple with a potential loss of donors. It takes time, money and effort to respond to official and public critics.
In Comstock’s era, civil liberties activists, artists and arts organizations rose to the challenge of defending their freedom of speech.
Those who value artistic expression today will have to follow in their footsteps.
Amy Werbel receives funding from the State University of New York and the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement.
Through conversations with colleagues and students, I discovered an urgent need: a course that demystifies AI and provides students with tools to navigate a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
AI-driven social media algorithms – used by Facebook and TikTok, for example – and content generation tools like ChatGPT can amplify certain voices while obscuring others.
Those using AI tools maliciously can also create entirely false content, such as deepfake videos or misleading AI-generated news articles. By understanding these dynamics, students can become more discerning consumers and responsible users of information.
They include machine learning – how computer systems imitate the way humans learn – and deep learning, which uses artificial neural networks to learn from data.
We also delve into generative AI – a type of AI that can produce images, videos and other forms of data – and prompt engineering, which designs prompts to guide AI models.
What does the course explore?
The course explores two themes: AI literacy and building resilience to misinformation.
Students learn AI technologies such as natural language processing, which allows machines to understand and generate human language, and generative AI. They explore how these tools influence the ways information is created, shared and interpreted.
We then delve into the ethical implications of AI, from data privacy to bias and algorithmic transparency – the principle of making AI decision-making processes understandable and open for review.
The idea is to foster a nuanced understanding of AI’s potential benefits. One example is AI tools that personalize educational content by adapting lessons to a student’s learning pace and style.
We also examine its potential pitfalls. Some AI hiring tools, for example, have discriminated against specific demographic groups, such as systems that disproportionately rejected women’s resumes for technical jobs.
The course also explores cognitive biases, or systematic patterns of deviation from rationality in judgment, which can make people more susceptible to misinformation.
We look at confirmation bias, the inclination to search for information that supports one’s preexisting beliefs. We also examine recency effect, the tendency to give more weight to recent information over earlier data.
Students experiment with AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and NotebookLM. They do so to examine misinformation case studies and participate in discussions on some complex questions.
They include: When does AI assist in learning? When does it hinder learning? How can AI be used more responsibly? How can we know when it’s being manipulated?
Why is this course relevant now?
AI tools are increasingly embedded in social media and news content. This makes it critical for students to discern credible sources from misleading content.
As AI technologies evolve, so too do the methods for spreading misinformation.
They include AI-generated images and synthetic media, which is digitally created or altered content designed to appear authentic.
All of these technologies can be difficult to identify and authenticate. This course gives students the tools to make informed decisions in a digital age.
What’s a critical lesson from the course?
Many students are surprised to learn that AI-powered platforms tailor content to match their interests.
For example, watching a series of videos on a particular topic can lead to being shown increasingly similar content, reinforcing existing beliefs. This, in turn, can shape perceptions and distort reality.
To address this, we introduce students to practical techniques for broadening their information sources. They also learn to cross-reference facts and scrutinize AI-curated content.
For instance, we practice a technique called “lateral reading,” where students verify information by examining multiple sources simultaneously.
Besides academic journal articles, we draw extensively from articles and videos published by The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major news outlets to analyze misinformation stories. These sources offer ample real-life examples, enabling students to engage with timely and relevant case studies.
The goal is to empower students to approach digital information with a critical and informed mindset. This will position them as responsible citizens in a world increasingly shaped by AI.
The course will also help students feel more confident when identifying credible sources, cross-checking information and making sense of AI-powered content. These skills will serve students well in their academic and personal lives.
Mozhdeh Khodarahmi 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 controversy over this move indicates that many well-intentioned people still struggle to understand what exactly constitutes antisemitism and when anti-Israel rhetoric crosses the line.
Medieval Christians added other myths, such as the blood libel – the lie that Jews ritually murdered Christian children for their blood. Other myths accused them of poisoning wells or desecrating the consecrated host of the Eucharist to reenact the murder of Christ; some even claimed that Jews had inhuman biology such as horns or that they suckled at the teats of pigs.
Such lies led to violent persecution of Jews over many centuries.
Modern antisemitism
In the 19th century, these myths were supplanted by the additional element of race – the claim that Jewishness was immutable and could not be changed via conversion. Though this idea first appeared in 15th-century Spain, it was deeply connected to the rise of modern nationalism.
Nineteenth-century ethno-nationalists rejected the idea of a political nation united in a social contract with each other. They began imagining the nation as a biological community linked by common descent in which Jews might be tolerated but could never truly belong.
Finally, in 1879, the German journalist Wilhelm Marr pushed the term “antisemitism” to reflect that his anti-Jewish ideology was based on race, not religion. Marr imagined the Jews as a foreign, “semitic” race, referring to the language group that includes Hebrew. The term has since persisted to mean specifically anti-Jewish hostility or prejudice.
The myth of a Jewish conspiracy
Modern antisemitism built on those premodern foundations, which never completely disappeared, but was fundamentally different. It emerged as part of the new politics of the democratic modern era.
Antisemitism became the core platform of new political parties, which used it to unite otherwise opposing groups, such as shopkeepers and farmers, anxious about the modernizing world. In other words, it was not merely prejudice; it was a worldview that explained the entire world to its believers by blaming all of its faults on this scapegoat.
Unlike earlier anti-Jewish hatred, this was less about religion and more about political and social issues. Antisemites believed the conspiracy theory that Jews all over the world controlled the levers of government, media and banking, and that defeating them would solve society’s problems.
Thus, one of the most important features of modern antisemitic mythology was the belief that Jews constituted a single, malevolent group, with one mind, organized for the purpose of conquering and destroying the world.
Negative traits attributed to Jews
Antisemitic books and cartoons often used claws or tentacles to symbolize the “international Jew,” a shadowy figure they blamed for leading a global conspiracy, strangling and destroying society. Others depicted him as a puppet master running the world.
This myth that Jews constitute an international creature plotting to harm the nation has inspired massacres of Jews since the 19th century, beginning with the Russian pogroms of 1881 and leading up to the Holocaust.
More recently, in 2018, Robert Bowers murdered 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh because he was convinced that Jews, collectively under the guidance of Soros, were working to destroy America by facilitating the mass migration of nonwhite people into the country.
Modern antisemites ascribe many immutable negative traits to Jews, but two are particularly widespread. First, Jews are said to be ruthless misers who care more about their allegedly ill-gotten wealth than the interests of their countries. Second, Jews’ loyalty to their countries is considered suspect because they are said to constitute a foreign element.
Since Israel’s establishment in 1948, this hatred has focused on the accusation that Jews’ primary loyalty is to Israel, not the countries they live in.
Antisemitism and anti-Zionism
In recent years, the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism has taken on renewed importance. Zionism has many factions but roughly refers to the modern political movement that argues Jews constitute a nation and have a right to self-determination in that land.
Some activists claim that anti-Zionism – ideological opposition to Zionism – is inherently antisemitic because they equate it with denying Jews the right to self-determination and therefore equality.
Others feel that there needs to be a clearer separation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. They argue that equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism leads to silencing criticism of Israel’s structural mistreatment of Palestinians.
Zionism in practice has meant the achievement of a flourishing safe haven for Jews, but it has also led to dislocation or inequality for millions of Palestinians, including refugees, West Bank Palestinians who still live under military rule, and even Palestinian citizens of Israel who face legal and social discrimination. Anti-Zionism opposes this, and critics argue that it should not be labeled antisemitic unless it taps into those antisemitic myths or otherwise calls for violence or inequality for Jews.
This debate is evident in these competing definitions of antisemitism. Remarkably, the three main definitions tend to agree on the nature of antisemitism except regarding the relationship of anti-Israel rhetoric to antisemitism. The IHRA definition, which is by design vague and open to interpretation, allows for a wider swath of anti-Israel activism to be labeled antisemitic than the others.
The Jerusalem Declaration, in contrast, understands rhetoric to have “crossed the line” only when it engages in antisemitic mythology, blames diaspora Jews for the actions of the Israeli state, or calls for the oppression of Jews in Israel. IHRA defenders use that definition to label a call for binational democracy – meaning citizenship for West Bank Palestinians – to be antisemitic. Likewise, they label boycotts, even of West Bank settlements that most of the world considers illegal, to be antisemitic. The Jerusalem Declaration does not.
In other words, the key to identifying whether anti-Israel discourse has masked antisemitism is to see evidence of antisemitic mythology. For example, if Israel is described as leading an international conspiracy, or if it holds the key to solving global problems, all three definitions agree this is antisemitic.
Equally, if Jews or Jewish institutions are held responsible for Israeli actions or are expected to take a stand one way or another regarding them, again all three definitions agree that this crosses the line because it is based on the myth of a global Jewish conspiracy.
Identity and pride
Critically, for many Jews living in other countries, Zionism is not primarily a political argument about the state of Israel. It instead constitutes a sense of Jewish identity and pride, even a religious identity. In contrast, many protests against Israel and Zionism are focused not on ideology but on the Israeli government and its real or alleged actions.
This disconnect can lead to confusion if protests conflate Jews with Israel just because they are Zionist, which is antisemitic. On the other hand, Jews sometimes take protests against Israel in defense of Palestinian rights to be attacks on their Zionist identity and thus antisemitic, when they are not. There are certainly gray areas, but in general, calls for Palestinian equality, I believe, are legitimate even when they upset people with Zionist identities.
Harvard’s statement captures this distinction. It posted a statement that, “For many Jewish people, Zionism is a part of their Jewish identity,” and added that Jews who subscribe to this identity must not be excluded from campus events on that basis.
This does not mean that Jews are protected from hearing contrary views, any more than they are protected from hearing Christian preachers on campus or professors who teach secular views of the Bible. It means that they cannot be excluded based only on those beliefs.
This does not, however, require an adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which goes much further. Many advocates of the IHRA definition use it to label political calls for Palestinian equality as antisemitic, as well as accusations against Israel that they consider wrong or unfair.
Joshua Shanes 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.
Red light therapy is increasingly viewed as a promising treatment for wrinkles, acne, psoriasis, scars and sun-damaged skin, and as a supportive therapy for some kinds of cancer. But does red light therapy live up to the hype that it’s practically a panacea for all sorts of ailments?
Praveen Arany is a professor of oral biology, biomedical engineering and surgery at the University of Buffalo and an expert on the uses of light and lasers for medical purposes. He explains how red light therapy works, for what diseases and conditions it may be most useful, and if red light home devices are effective.
Red light is easily the most popular of the photobiomodulation therapies. That’s primarily due to its availability – the treatment has been around more than three decades.
The professional laser in the doctor’s office may be more effective than at-home LED devices.
How does red light therapy work?
Put simply, red light stimulates the cells in your body, energizing them while initiating blood flow to the affected area. That, in turn, spurs healing, similar to how your body responds to a cut by clotting the blood to heal a wound.
The treatment is simple and painless. The patient, either seated or lying comfortably, is exposed to the red light for three to 15 minutes. They may experience a feeling of warmth during treatment, but it should not be uncomfortable or hot. The clinician will likely recommend eye shields.
Used correctly, red light therapy is very safe. Overdosing – staying under the light too long or receiving treatments at very high power – does not necessarily cause harm, but it might reduce or slow benefits. However, just as some people are more prone to sunburn than others, some patients may be more sensitive to this light and might see redness in the skin. Those patients should receive lower light doses during treatment.
What medical conditions can the therapy help?
Randomized, controlled clinical trials show that red light therapy can reduce pain, inflammation and tissue damage. Because all of these things are prevalent in many illnesses, photobiomodulation may be a powerful adjunct for treating a wide range of diseases.
A word of caution, however: Red light therapy may not work for all the medical conditions that proponents say it does. Red light therapy is also used for cardiovascular health, elevating mood, relieving anxiety, improving muscle performance and recovery from sports injuries, and providing anti-aging benefits to the skin. While there’s some evidence to support these types of treatments, rigorous research studies are still missing.
Research indicates that red light therapy could help with myopia in children and macular degeneration.
What about its commercial use?
This is a rapidly evolving field. Both LED and laser devices – beds, lamps, helmets and face masks – are readily available in clinical and nonclinical settings, such as medical spas, gyms and beauty salons. They’re also available for at-home use.
Laser devices are more powerful and are typically found at a hospital, clinic or doctor’s office. An LED, or light-emitting diode, is less powerful and more often used in commercial or home settings.
The general consensus is that LEDs are OK to use in commercial establishments like beauty salons and medical spas, provided practitioners receive the appropriate training. But the use of laser devices should be relegated to clinical specialists. That’s because lasers, in untrained hands, have the potential to do more damage than LEDs.
As for some home products, their quality and reliability may be questionable; they might not meet minimum quality standards of output power or wavelength.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration appears to be moving toward more rigorous evaluations of these products, especially with lasers, but there is a critical need for a certifying agency or body to take this on. These agencies would test the devices to make sure they’re actually meeting specifications. That hasn’t happened yet, but as it stands now, severalscientific and professionalorganizations are exploring the possibilities.
Praveen Arany consults for Wndrhlth and has cofounded two companies, OptiMed Technologies and Directed Energy Therapeutics. He has received funding from Univeristy at Buffalo, NIH, AFOSR and various PBM companies including Summus Medical, Kerber Applied Research, Thor Photomedicine, Vielight. He is affiliated with Optica, IADR-AADOCR, ASLMS, WALT, NAALT, WFLD and ALD.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Lorelei Kelly, Research Lead, Modernizing Congress, McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University
Tracking one of these items to your door has been possible since 2017 – tracking the other is all new.FTiare/iStock / Getty Images Plus
On a typical day, you can’t turn on the news without hearing someone say that Congress is broken. The implication is that this dereliction explains why the institution is inert and unresponsive to the American people.
There’s one element often missing from that discussion: Congress is confounding in large part because its members can’t hear the American people, or even each other. I mean that literally. Congressional staff serve in thousands of district offices across the nation, and their communications technology doesn’t match that of most businesses and even many homes.
Members’ district offices only got connected to secure Wi-Fi internet service in 2023. Discussions among members and congressional staff were at times cut short at 40 minutes because some government workers were relying on the free version of Zoom, according to congressional testimony in March 2024.
Congressional testimony discusses meetings being cut off at 40 minutes.
The information systems Congress uses have existed largely unchanged for decades, while the world has experienced an information revolution, integrating smartphones and the internet into people’s daily personal and professional lives. The technologies that have transformed modern lifeand political campaigning are not yet available to improve the ability of members of Congress to govern once they win office.
Slow to adapt
Like many institutions, Congress resists change; only the COVID-19 pandemic pushed it to allow online hearings and bill introductions. Before 2020, whiteboards, sticky notes and interns with clipboards dominated the halls of Congress.
Electronic signatures arrived on Capitol Hill in 2021 – more than two decades after Congress passed the ESIGN Act to allow electronic signatures and records in commerce.
The nation spends about US$10 million a year on technology innovation in the House of Representatives – the institution that declares war and pays all the federal government’s bills. That’s just 1% of the amount theater fans have spent to see ‶Hamilton“ on Broadway since 2015.
It seems the story of American democracy is attractive to the public, but investing in making it work is less so for Congress itself.
The chief administrative office in Congress, a nonlegislative staff that helps run the operations of Congress, decides what types of technology can be used by members. These internal rules exist to protect Congress and national security, but that caution can also inhibit new ways to use technology to better serve the public.
The House Natural Resources Committee was also an early adopter of technology for collaborative lawmaking. In 2020, members and committee staff used a platform called Madison to collaboratively write and edit proposed environmental justice legislation with communities across the country that had been affected by pollution.
Governments in Finland, the U.K., Canada and Brazil are already piloting deliberative technologies. In Finland, roughly one-third of young people between 12 and 17 participate in setting budget priorities for the city of Helsinki.
In May 2024, 45 U.S.-based nonprofit organizations signed a letter to Congress asking that deliberative technology platforms be included in the approved tools for civic engagement.
A panel discussion of various ideas for modernizing how Congress hears from the American people.
Finding benefits
Modernization efforts have opened connections within Congress and with the public. For example, hearings held by video conference during the pandemic enabled witnesses to share expertise with Congress from a distance and open up a process that is notoriously unrepresentative. I was home in rural New Mexico during the pandemic and know three people who remotely testified on tribal education, methane pollution and environmental harms from abandoned oil wells.
New House Rules passed on Jan. 3, 2025, encourage the use of artificial intelligence in day-to-day operations and allow for remote witness testimony.
In 2022, what is now called ”member-directed spending“ returned to Congress with some digital improvements. Formerly known as “earmarks,” this is the practice of allowing members of Congress to handpick specific projects in their home districts to receive federal money. Earmarks were abolished in 2011 amid concerns of abuse and opposition by fiscal hardliners. Their 2022 return and rebranding introduced publicly available project lists, ethics rules and a search engine to track the spending as efforts to provide public transparency about earmarks.
Some recent improvements are already familiar. Just as customers can follow their pizza delivery from the oven to the doorstep, Congress in late 2024 created a flag-tracking app that has dramatically improved a program that allows constituents to receive a flag that has flown over the U.S. Capitol. Before, different procedures in the House and Senate caused time-consuming snags in this delivery system.
For over a century, presidents have pursued initiatives to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of government, couching those efforts in language similar to Trump’s.
Many of these, like Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, which he appointed billionaire Elon Musk to run, have been designed to capitalize on the expertise of people outside of government. The idea often cited as inspiration for these efforts: The private sector knows how to be efficient and nimble and strives for excellence; government doesn’t.
But government, and government service, is about providing something that the private sector can’t. And outsiders often don’t think about the accountability requirements that the laws and Constitution of the United States impose on government workers and agencies.
Congress, though, can help address these problems and check inappropriate proposals. It can also stand in the way of reform.
Charles E. Merriam, left, and Louis Brownlow, members of the President’s Reorganization Committee, leave the White House after discussing government reorganization with President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Sept. 23, 1938. Harris & Ewing, photographer, Library of Congress
Proposing reform is nothing new
Perhaps the most famous group to work with a president on improving government was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Committee on Administrative Management, established in 1936.
That group, commonly referred to as the Brownlow Committee, noted that while critics predicted Roosevelt would bring “decay, destruction, and death of democracy,” the executive branch – and the president who sat atop it – was one of the “very greatest” contributions to modern democracy.
The committee argued that the president was unable to do his job because the executive branch was badly organized, federal employees lacked skills and character, and the budget process needed reform. So it proposed a series of changes designed to increase presidential power over government to enhance performance. Congress went along with some of these proposals, giving the president more staff and authority to reorganize the executive branch.
Since then, almost every president has put together similar recommendations. For example, Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed former President Herbert Hoover to lead advisory commissions designed to recommend changes to the federal government. President Jimmy Carter launched a series of government improvement projects, and President George W. Bush even created scorecards to rank agencies according to their performance.
In his first term, Trump issued a mandate for reform to reorganize government for the 21st century.
Most presidential proposals generally fail to come to fruition. But they often spark conversations in Congress and the media about executive power, the effectiveness of federal programs, and what government can do better.
Most presidents have tried the same thing
Historically, most presidents and their advisers – and indeed most scholars – have agreed that government bureaucracy is not designed in ways that promote efficiency. But that is intentional: Stanford political scientist Terry Moe has written that “American public bureaucracy is not designed to be effective. The bureaucracy arises out of politics, and its design reflects the interests, strategies, and compromises of those who exercise political power.”
A common presidential response to this practical reality is to propose government changes that make it look more like the private sector. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan brought together 161 corporate executives overseen by industrialist J. Peter Grace to make recommendations to eliminate government waste and inefficiency, based on their experiences leading successful corporations.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton authorized Vice President Al Gore to launch an effort to reinvent the federal government into one that worked better and cost less.
The Clinton administration created teams in every major federal agency, modeled after the private sector’s efficiency standards, to move government “From Red Tape to Results,” as the title of the administration’s plan said.
An introductory page from the 1993 National Performance Review executive summary, commissioned by the Clinton administration. CIA.gov
Presidential attempts to make government look and work more like people think the private sector works often include adjustments to the terms of federal employment to reward employees who excel at their jobs.
In 1905, for example, President Theodore Roosevelt established a Committee on Department Methods to examine how the federal government could recruit and retain highly qualified employees. One hundred years later, federal agencies still experienced challenges](https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-03-2.pdf) related to hiring and retaining people who could effectively achieve agency missions.
President Bill Clinton applauds as Vice President Al Gore speaks at a press conference on March 3, 1994, at which Gore gave Clinton a report of the National Performance Review. Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images
So why haven’t these plans worked?
At least the past five presidents have faced problems in making long-term changes to government.
In part, this is because government reorganizations and operational reforms like those contemplated by Trump require Congress to make adjustments to the laws of the United States, or at least give the president and federal agencies the money required to invest in changes.
Consider, for example, presidential proposals to invest in new technologies, which are a large part of Trump and Musk’s plans to improve government efficiency. Since at least 1910, when President William Howard Taft established a Commission on Economy and Efficiency to address the “unnecessarily complicated and expensive” way the federal government handled and distributed government documents, presidents have recommended centralizing authority to mandate federal agencies’ use of new technologies to make government more efficient.
But transforming government through technology requires money, people and time. Presidential plans for government-wide change are contingent upon the degree to which federal agencies can successfully implement them.
To sidestep these problems, some presidents have proposed that the government work with the private sector. For example, Trump announced a joint venture with technology companies to invest in the government’s artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Yet as I have found in my previous research, government investment in new technology first requires an assessment of agencies’ current technological skills and the impact technology will have on agency functions, including those related to governmental transparency, accountability and constitutional due process. It’s not enough to go out and buy software that tech giants recommend agencies acquire.
The things that government agencies do, such as regulating the economy, promoting national security and protecting the environment, are incredibly complicated. It’s often hard to see their impact right away.
Recognizing this, Congress has designed a complex set of laws to prevent political interference with federal employees, who tend to look at problems long term. For example, as I have found in my work with Paul Verkuil, former chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States, Congress intentionally writes laws that require certain government positions to be held by experts who can work in their jobs without worrying about politics.
Congress also writes the laws the federal employees administer, oversees federal programs and decides how much money to appropriate to those programs each year.
So by design, anything labeled a “presidential commission on modernizing/fixing/refocusing government” tells only part of the story and sets out an impossible task. The president can’t make it happen alone. Nor can Elon Musk.
Jennifer L. Selin has received funding and/or support for her research on the executive branch from the Administrative Conference of the United States. The views in this piece are those of the author and do not represent the position of the Administrative Conference or the federal government.
The current Supreme Court has upended historic precedent on abortion protections and drawn scrutiny for ethics conflicts, while its docket remains packed with high-profile cases set to dominate headlines in the months ahead.
Yet one of its lesser-known departures from the past lies in its approach to punctuation.
Justice Neil Gorsuch boldly departed from court tradition in 2017 with his first Supreme Court opinion. In 11 pages, he used 15 contractions. He even used one in the first paragraph: “That’s the nub of the dispute now before us,” he casually stated.
Gorsuch’s predecessor, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, was known as a gifted, dramatic writer. Scalia thought that contractions – combining two words with an apostrophe into a shorter form, such as “don’t” in place of “do not” – were “intellectually abominable.”
Gorsuch’s strikingly informal phrasing signaled a shift toward a more modern, conversational writing style by all nine justices.
While the court’s politics have veered right, the justices’ prose has arguably shifted left, becoming more liberal and accessible. Today’s Supreme Court unanimously and actively embraces a progressive writing style, rebelling against old-school grammar rules, according to my study of 10,000 pages of opinions from the past decade.
Twitter touts #GorsuchStyle
The first opinion assigned to new justices is usually a slog. In a kind of hazing tradition, they are typically assigned to write on a tedious legal issue that easily wins unanimous agreement.
Gorsuch used his short opinion on the dry topic of debt collection to declare a more colloquial style. In Henson v. Santander, the Harvard Law graduate spoke directly to readers, using “you” and variations of that personal pronoun 17 times, something his colleagues rarely did. Gorsuch wrote with apparent nonchalance, calling a debt collector “the repo man.”
Now, most of the justices use contractions. Arguing that creativity would be stifled in a copyright infringement case, Justice Elena Kagan insisted: “And there’s the rub. (Yes, that’s mostly Shakespeare.).”
Hey, you − I’m talking to you
While Gorsuch might have sharpened the quill of the court’s writing revolution, all nine justices now write more casually to reach an increasingly savvy public. A few justices even drop oh-so-casual exclamation marks in their opinions.
In its 2023-24 term, my research finds, the justices appealed to readers using “you” and variations of it nearly 300 times in their 60 opinions – up 40% from five years ago.
“A police officer can seize your car if he claims it is connected
to a crime committed by someone else,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor told readers, dissenting in a 2024 seizure case.
Deploying both “you” and a contraction, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recently quipped in a 2024 criminal bribery decision: “But you don’t have to take my word for that.”
Given that many good writers – lawyers, academics and journalists among them – avoid personal pronouns as a matter of style, the justices’ new direction shows a surprising lack of formality.
The writing style of the justices today starkly contrasts that of their predecessors, who commonly used dense wording and labyrinthine sentences. Take this 1944 line from Justice Robert H. Jackson, whom several justices name as the writer they admire most:
“But here is an attempt to make an otherwise innocent act a crime merely because this prisoner is the son of parents as to whom he had no choice, and belongs to a race from which there is no way to resign.”
His writing feels lyrical and powerful but is in no way playful or personal.
Chief Justice John Roberts, known for his rhetorical prowess, has long lamented that the media must summarize and translate the court’s lengthy opinions for the public. In 2017, he praised the monumental desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education, for its brevity.
At just 10 pages, Roberts said, newspapers “had to publish the whole thing so that people could read it. They didn’t get to say, ‘Oh, this is what this means.’”
Good, clear writing has power
The court’s embrace of a more accessible writing style comes as its own popularity is plummeting. While 80% of Americans viewed the court favorably in the mid-1990s, only about 50% do now.
For the Roberts Court, the challenge ahead lies in securing its legitimacy among a deeply polarized American public. The justices making their opinions more approachable may be a small gesture in that direction.
“The thing about the Supreme Court that I think is so magnificent is that the justices get to actually explain their votes,” Jackson told NPR on Sept. 4, 2024. “We are the one branch of government in which that is the standard.”
Can clear, powerful arguments presented in plain, straightforward language help rebuild trust in the institution? The justices’ subtle shift toward modernizing their writing suggests they believe it might.
Jill Barton 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.
Long before Roe v. Wade was overturned, reproductive justice advocates had been sounding the alarm about the increasing number of women subjected to criminal investigation for suspected abortion, stillbirth or miscarriage. These cases were often initiated by health care providers and bolstered by state laws used to prosecute women for having abortions.
Newer laws, however, incentivize people outside of health care, including friends and family members, to report someone they suspect of having an abortion or helping someone else with an abortion. Coupled with the unprecedented access that authorities now have to digital information, these laws create new avenues for prosecution.
In the post-Roe era, people capable of pregnancy face growing threats. Health care providers, family, friends, information on personal devices and virtually any activity that can be observed or recorded pose privacy risks that can lead to prosecution. I study online privacy. This vast scope for potential surveillance and privacy intrusion is a key focus of the research my colleagues and I conduct.
In a recent paper, we surveyed reproductive health care providers about their privacy and security practices. We used the results to map the path of a hypothetical “Jane” to illustrate how people can identify privacy risks in their own situations. This choose-your-adventure approach helps readers navigate the potential legal, digital and personal challenges involved in accessing reproductive health care – and reveals the grim stakes.
Privacy protections
Historically, health care providers who opposed abortion have been the primary sources for reporting patients suspected of seeking abortions. While they remain a significant threat, additional risks to patient privacy have emerged. For example, state laws increasingly compel providers to hand over medical records.
This circumvents new Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act protections meant to shield protected reproductive health information from use in investigations when people seek abortions in states where the procedure is legal. Authorities might also be able to access records across state lines where abortion is legal – for example, when different electronic health record systems can share data.
It is also possible that, in the future, electronic health records could be seized across state lines. Last year, in a letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 19 state attorneys general protested the new federal data privacy rules. Texas followed up with a lawsuit against the Biden administration over the rule.
Even so-called shield laws adopted by some states meant to protect people seeking abortions from record seizures have loopholes.
Under the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services added a privacy rule to protect reproducitve health data.
Privacy vulnerabilities
Despite some protections offered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, additional gaps in safeguarding reproductive health information persist. Data captured outside medical portals, such as from apps or pharmacy transactions, often falls outside the federal law’s scope.
It’s important to note that apps that capture consumer reproductive health data, like period trackers, do not necessarily pose a greater risk than informants. But the dystopian potential of governments reaching into personal intimate data, and the simplicity of the remedy – deleting an app – draw disproportionate attention.
While it’s not entirely clear whether period trackers are definitively good or bad from a digital privacy perspective, they do offer potential benefits, such as helping people prevent unwanted pregnancies and thus avoid prosecution.
Additionally, laws that incentivize family, friends and partners to report suspected abortions create a threat of surveillance from intimate associates. These dynamics are exacerbated by new laws that criminalize “trafficking” minors – transporting them across state lines – for abortion services.
Providers’ role protecting privacy
In our research, my colleagues and I found that reproductive health care providers can play a critical role in guiding patients on adopting privacy strategies and helping them navigate an increasingly complex landscape of privacy threats. Clinics are trusted spaces for affordable, progressive care that often shield patients from judgment or harm.
Based on our interviews with reproductive health care providers, the protocols they use to manage communications, billing and other aspects of patient interactions have proved effective at protecting privacy, especially for vulnerable populations like minors or people with abusive partners. However, people seeking abortions face more nuanced threats. Providers tend to overlook digital risks and threats of prosecution tied to patients’ devices and records.
This gap in awareness leaves patients without critical guidance for protecting their privacy. Our initial research conducted in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision revealed that people capable of pregnancy express profound concerns about reproductive privacy, yet often feel inadequately prepared to navigate its complexities.
Findings from our forthcoming research suggest that many patients take extensive precautions, yet it’s not clear how effectively they can prioritize their digital strategies. At the same time, these people place significant trust in their reproductive health care providers, especially because they often deem existing guidance on privacy untrustworthy or insufficient.
Although providers may currently be less attuned to the newer privacy risks, they could play a crucial role in addressing them. By incorporating digital privacy and threat modeling into their care, providers can help patients navigate a complex landscape of threats in an environment of pervasive surveillance.
Nora McDonald 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 Holocaust was the first mass atrocity to be heavily photographed.
The mass production and distribution of cameras in the 1930s and 1940s enabled Nazi officials and ordinary people to widely document Germany’s persecution of Jews and other religious and ethnic minorities.
I co-direct an international research project to collect every available image documenting Nazi mass deportations of Jews, Roma and Sinti, as well as euthanasia victims, in Nazi Germany between 1938 and 1945. The most recently discovered series of images will be unveiled on Jan. 27, 2025 – Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In most cases, these are the very last pictures taken of Holocaust victims before they were deported and perished. That fact gives the project its name, #LastSeen.
A few of the images we’ve tracked down were taken by Jewish people, not Nazi officials, offering a rare glimpse of Nazi mass deportations from a victim’s perspective. As descendants of survivors help our researchers identify the deportees in these images and tell their stories, we give previously faceless victims a voice.
The #LastSeen project is a collaboration between several German academic and educational institutions and the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in the United States. When it began in late 2021, researchers knew of a few dozen deportation images of Jews from 27 German towns that had been gathered for a 2011-2012 exhibition in Berlin.
After contacting 1,700 public and private archives in Germany and worldwide to find more, #LastSeen has now collected visual evidence from 60 cities and towns in Nazi Germany. Of these, we’ve analyzed 36 series containing over 420 images, including dozens of never-before-seen photo series from 20 towns.
Most photographs of Nazi mass deportations from local archives published in our digital atlas were taken by the perpetrators, who documented the event for the police or municipality. That has heavily shaped our visual understanding of these crimes, because they display victims as a faceless mass. When individuals were depicted, it was most often through an antisemitic lens.
The LastSeen digital atlas shows locations of deportations where visual documentation has been uncovered. Screenshot, LastSeen, CC BY-SA
We have, however, obtained a handful of images taken from a victim’s perspective. In January 2024, the #LastSeen team shared newly discovered photographs showing the Nazi deportations in what was then Breslau, Germany – today Wroclaw, Poland.
They were sent to us for analysis by Steffen Heidrich, a staff member of the Regional Association of Jewish Communities in Saxony, Germany, who came across an envelope titled “miscellaneous” while reorganizing his archive. It contained 13 deportation photographs – the last images taken of dozens of Jewish victims before they were transported from Breslau to Nazi-occupied Lithuania and massacred in November 1941.
Jewish resistance
Many of these pictures in this series show a large, mixed age group of men and women wearing the yellow star – the notorious Nazi-mandated sign for Jews – gathering outside with bundles of their belongings. Some are taken from a peculiar angle, from behind a tree or a wall, suggesting they were snapped clandestinely.
Given the deportation assembly point for the Breslau Jews, a guarded local beer garden, our researchers knew that only a person with permission to access that property could have shot these pictures.
For these two reasons, we concluded that an employee of the Jewish community of Breslau must have documented the Nazi crimes – most likely Albert Hadda, a Jewish architect and photographer who clandestinely photographed the November 1938 pogrom in Breslau.
Hadda’s marriage to a Christian partially protected him from persecution. Between 1941 and 1943, the city’s Jewish community tasked him with caring for the deportees at the assembly point until their forced removal.
These 13 recently discovered pictures constitute the most comprehensive series illuminating the crime of mass deportations from a victim’s perspective in Nazi Germany. Their unearthing is testimony to the recently rediscovered widespread individual resistance by ordinary Jews who fought Nazi persecution.
Documenting Fulda
Our project has also identified new deportation photos taken in the German town of Fulda in December 1941, during a snowstorm.
Previously, historians knew of only three pictures of this deportation event. Preserved in the city archive, they show the deportees at the Fulda train station during heavy snowfall.
We discovered two new images of the same Nazi deportation, apparently taken by the same photographer, in a videotaped survivor interview in the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles.
In 1996, the Shoah Foundation interviewed Miriam Berline, née Gottlieb, the daughter of a successful Orthodox Jewish merchant in Fulda. At the end of the two-hour interview, Berline held two photographs up to the camera. They clearly show the same snowy deportation in Fulda.
Berline, born in 1925, escaped Nazi Germany in 1939. She did not remember how her family obtained the images but recalled the photographer as Otto Weissbach, a “wonderful” man who had helped Fulda’s Jewish families.
Our researchers investigated and learned his name was Arthur Weissbach, a non-Jewish neighbor of the Gottliebs. The factory he owned still exists. Descendants of Jewish families have since confirmed that he kept valuables for them and took care of elderly relatives who stayed behind.
Weissbach’s niece said he was a passionate hobby photographer. Since Weissbach kept contact with survivors after the war, he might have given the images to the Gottlieb family. Today, the family’s copies are lost, but their existence is preserved in Berline’s video interview at the USC Shoah Foundation.
The pictures show the Jews at the Fulda train station on Dec. 9, 1941 – revealing how Nazi deportations happened in plain view.
The day before, Jewish men and women from around Fulda had been summoned and spent the night at a local school gym. In the morning, they were taken to the train station and forced by police to board a train to Kassel, in central Germany, and then eastward onto Riga, in Nazi-occupied Latvia.
In total, 1,031 Jews were deported from Kassel to Riga. Only 12 from Fulda survived.
Identifying the deportation victims
It is difficult to identify the people in the photos we discover. So far, we’ve published 279 biographies in the digital atlas.
In the future, artificial intelligence may help us identify more people from the photos in our collection. But for now, this process takes exhaustive research with the help of local researchers and descendants of survivors, whose names are known from archived transport lists.
Families often struggle to recognize individuals in these images, but sometimes they have family photos that help us do so.
Take, for example, this posed family portrait of two young girls. They are Susanne and Tamara Cohn.
Relatives of the Cohn family had this photo. It, along with data from the local Nazi transport list, established that two girls photographed in one of his Breslau deportation shots were the daughters of Willy Cohn.
Cohn, a well-known German-Jewish medieval historian and high school teacher in Breslau, kept a detailed diary about the persecution of the town’s Jews from 1933 to 1941. It was unearthed and published in the 1990s.
This photo, below, may be the last picture ever taken of his children with their mother, Gertrud.
The #LastSeen research project is generating new insights into the history of Nazi mass deportations, new methodologies for photo analysis and new tools for Holocaust education.
In addition to the digital atlas, which has been visited by more than 50,000 people since its launch in 2023, we have developed severalaward-winning educational tools, including an online game that invites students to search for clues, facts and images of Nazi deportations in an artificial attic.
In workshops for teachers and seminars with students, #LastSeen teaches the history of Nazi deportations and demonstrates how historical photo research works. In Fulda, for example, high schoolers helped us locate the exact places where the photographs were taken.
Those pictures will be published in our atlas on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2025. A public commemoration in Fulda will feature the local students’ contributions.
Depending on fundraising, we hope to extend the #LastSeen project beyond Germany. Collecting images from all 20-plus European countries annexed or occupied by the Nazis will help us better understand these crimes and advance research and education in new ways.
Wolf Gruner is the director of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide, which is a partner of the multiinstitutional research project #LastSeen.
As space travel gains traction and astronauts spend increasing amounts of time in space, studying its effects on health has become increasingly critical.
Is space travel truly safe? Far from it – research has shown that the effects of space radiation and microgravity on the human body are both detrimental and long-lasting. Creating space conditions on Earth, however, could potentially help researchers treat cancer.
Microgravity is a condition where gravity is extremely weak and objects are almost weightless. This occurs in space, where Earth’s gravity barely affects astronauts.
Being in a microgravity environment for an extended period of time can lead to several health issues, including bone loss, muscle weakness, face puffiness and heart changes. Even after astronauts return to Earth, their bodies do not completely go back to normal.
Studying how cells, organs and tissues respond to microgravity can help scientists better understand how to address any related harmful changes to the body. However, conducting research on lab samples in space faces significant challenges.
In addition to monitoring lab samples, astronauts have no small number of other tasks to attend to while in space. NASA/AP Photo
It is costly to launch equipment and samples, and experiments need to be planned around weightless conditions and the force of launch. Strict deadlines, limited access to space missions and dependence on astronauts to conduct experiments increase the complexity of these studies, making accuracy and cooperation crucial for success.
Accessing samples after they have been sent to space can also be difficult. They risk being damaged while in the harsh conditions of space and during transport back to Earth.
The process of planning and carrying out a lab study in space can be time-consuming, limiting the practicality of frequent experimentation.
Studying microgravity on Earth
To address these issues, scientists have developed equipment capable of simulating microgravity conditions on Earth.
One such device is the clinostat, a machine that continuously spins samples to mimic the effects of low gravity. By constantly rotating, it spreads the effects of gravity evenly so that the sample is “weightless” or close to it. To mimic the effects of microgravity, the clinostat must rotate at just the right speed – fast enough that the sample doesn’t react to gravity, but not so fast that it feels other strong forces.
Another method called dielectrophoresis places particles such as cells in a nonuniform electric field. Unlike a uniform electric field, which is the same strength and direction everywhere, a nonuniform electric field changes in strength or direction at different points. This uneven field causes cells to move based on differences in their electrical properties compared with the liquid surrounding them, enabling researchers to separate and study them. While this technique has been widely used on Earth, exploring its application in microgravity environments could allow researchers to more precisely manipulate particles and conduct research not feasible under Earth’s gravity.
Tools such as clinostats and dielectrophoresis provide an easier, cheaper and faster way to study microgravity’s effects on cells compared with space missions. They are cost-effective and portable, requiring less expensive equipment and a smaller volume of samples to quickly generate reliable data.
This video demonstrates particles separating via dielectrophoresis.
Microgravity and cancer
While microgravity can cause cancer, it could also potentially help researchers better understand and treat cancer.
Cancer is one of the most challenging diseases to treat because it evolves rapidly and often becomes resistant to available treatments. By observing cancer cells in microgravity, researchers can study how they grow, divide and respond to drugs under different conditions. In simple terms, we are taking cancer cells out of their comfort zone to see how they react to an unknown environment.
For example, researchers have observed that cancer cells have improved survival under microgravity. They also saw changes to their electrical properties. Other studies have shown that microgravity can alter immune cell function and how cells communicate with each other.
Our team and others hypothesize that cancer cells may respond more effectively to certain drugs when exposed to a weightless environment. We’re looking into whether we can use microgravity to manipulate cancer cells to behave less aggressively and become more vulnerable to treatment.
This research is still in its infancy. But if successful, these insights could help researchers develop new treatments that are more effective back here on Earth.
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.
A hundred years ago, astronomer Edwin Hubble dramatically expanded the size of the known universe. At a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January 1925, a paper read by one of his colleagues on his behalf reported that the Andromeda nebula, also called M31, was nearly a million light years away – too remote to be a part of the Milky Way.
Hubble’s work opened the door to the study of the universe beyond our galaxy. In the century since Hubble’s pioneering work, astronomers like me have learned that the universe is vast and contains trillions of galaxies.
Nature of the nebulae
In 1610, astronomer Galileo Galilei used the newly invented telescope to show that the Milky Way was composed of a huge number of faint stars. For the next 300 years, astronomers assumed that the Milky Way was the entire universe.
Charles Messier also produced a catalog of over 100 prominent nebulae in 1781. Messier was interested in comets, so his list was a set of fuzzy objects that might be mistaken for comets. He intended for comet hunters to avoid them since they did not move across the sky.
As more data piled up, 19th century astronomers started to see that the nebulae were a mixed bag. Some were gaseous, star-forming regions, such as the Orion nebula, or M42 – the 42nd object in Messier’s catalog – while others were star clusters such as the Pleiades, or M45.
A third category – nebulae with spiral structure – particularly intrigued astronomers. The Andromeda nebula, M31, was a prominent example. It’s visible to the naked eye from a dark site.
The Andromeda galaxy, then known as the Andromeda nebula, is a bright spot in the sky that intrigued early astronomers.
Astronomers as far back as the mid-18th century had speculated that some nebulae might be remote systems of stars or “island universes,” but there was no data to support this hypothesis. Island universes referred to the idea that there could be enormous stellar systems outside the Milky Way – but astronomers now just call these systems galaxies.
In 1920, astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis held a Great Debate. Shapley argued that the spiral nebulae were small and in the Milky Way, while Curtis took a more radical position that they were independent galaxies, extremely large and distant.
At the time, the debate was inconclusive. Astronomers now know that galaxies are isolated systems of stars, much smaller than the space between them.
Hubble makes his mark
Edwin Hubble was young and ambitious. At the of age 30, he arrived at Mount Wilson Observatory in Southern California just in time to use the new Hooker 100-inch telescope, at the time the largest in the world.
He began taking photographic plates of the spiral nebulae. These glass plates recorded images of the night sky using a light-sensitive emulsion covering their surface. The telescope’s size let it make images of very faint objects, and its high-quality mirror allowed it to distinguish individual stars in some of the nebulae.
Estimating distances in astronomy is challenging. Think of how hard it is to estimate the distance of someone pointing a flashlight at you on a dark night. Galaxies come in a very wide range of sizes and masses. Measuring a galaxy’s brightness or apparent size is not a good guide to its distance.
Hubble leveraged a discovery made by Henrietta Swan Leavitt 10 years earlier. She worked at the Harvard College Observatory as a “human computer,” laboriously measuring the positions and brightness of thousands of stars on photographic plates.
She was particularly interested in Cepheid variables, which are stars whose brightness pulses regularly, so they get brighter and dimmer with a particular period. She found a relationship between their variation period, or pulse, and their intrinsic brightness or luminosity.
Once you measure a Cepheid’s period, you can calculate its distance from how bright it appears using the inverse square law. The more distant the star is, the fainter it appears.
Hubble worked hard, taking images of spiral nebulae every clear night and looking for the telltale variations of Cepheid variables. By the end of 1924, he had found 12 Cepheids in M31. He calculated M31’s distance as a prodigious 900,000 light years away, though he underestimated its true distance – about 2.5 million light years – by not realizing there were two different types of Cepheid variables.
His measurements marked the end of the Great Debate about the Milky Way’s size and the nature of the nebulae. Hubble wrote about his discovery to Harlow Shapley, who had argued that the Milky Way encompassed the entire universe.
“Here is the letter that destroyed my universe,” Shapley remarked.
Always eager for publicity, Hubble leaked his discovery to The New York Times five weeks before a colleague presented his paper at the astronomers’ annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
An expanding universe of galaxies
But Hubble wasn’t done. His second major discovery also transformed astronomers’ understanding of the universe. As he dispersed the light from dozens of galaxies into a spectrum, which recorded the amount of light at each wavelength, he noticed that the light was always shifted to longer or redder wavelengths.
Light from the galaxy passes through a prism or reflects off a diffraction grating in a telescope, which captures the intensity of light from blue to red.
It seemed that these redshifted galaxies were all moving away from the Milky Way.
Hubble’s results suggested the farther away a galaxy was, the faster it was moving away from Earth. Hubble got the lion’s share of the credit for this discovery, but Lowell Observatory astronomer Vesto Slipher, who noticed the same phenomenon but didn’t publish his data, also anticipated that result.
Hubble referred to galaxies having recession velocities, or speeds of moving away from the Earth, but he never figured out that they were moving away from Earth because the universe is getting bigger.
Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre made that connection by realizing that the theory of general relativity described an expanding universe. He recognized that space expanding in between the galaxies could cause the redshifts, making it seem like they were moving farther away from each other and from Earth.
Lemaitre was the first to argue that the expansion must have begun during the big bang.
Edwin Hubble is the namesake for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which has spent decades observing faraway galaxies. NASA via AP
NASA named its flagship space observatory after Hubble, and it has been used to study galaxies for 35 years. Astronomers routinely observe galaxies that are thousands of times fainter and more distant than galaxies observed in the 1920s. The James Webb Space Telescope has pushed the envelope even farther.
The current record holder is a galaxy a staggering 34 billion light years away, seen just 200 million years after the big bang, when the universe was 20 times smaller than it is now. Edwin Hubble would be amazed to see such progress.
Chris Impey 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.
Should the London Fire Brigade’s catering have more plant-based options?
Can sustainable food be required in every Free School Meal?
How vegan-friendly is City Hall’s procurement chain?
To jumpstart the Mayor of London’s plant-based policies and celebrate Veganuary, Zack Polanski, Green Party Londonwide Assembly Member, brought together environmental campaigners, animal welfare advocates, procurement advisors, policy officers, and food science academics for a night of networking and brainstorming.
Zack’s event was co-hosted by Viva!, the UK’s leading vegan campaigning charity.
Following the event, Zack will now compile and consolidate ideas shared at the event and present a core set of plant-based proposals to London’s Mayor.
Reflecting on the night’s success, Green Party London Assembly Member Zack Polanski said:
“Thank you to everyone who came out to celebrate Veganuary! People coming together with a plan for how to make our city better and kinder – It really felt like London and democracy at it’s very best.
“I look forward to taking some of these incredible ideas to the Mayor next month, and continuing to push for a more animal friendly, sustainable London.”
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Robert Kubinec, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of South Carolina
The fall of Bashar Assad’s dictatorship in December 2024 has ushered in a nerve-wracking time of hope and fear for Syrians concerning future governance in the long-war-torn country.
While it’s unclear what exact political path Syria will take, the dilemmas the country faces are similar to the experiences of other Arab countries more than a decade ago. In the winter of 2010, an outbreak of protests in Tunisia spread across the region, toppling several regimes in what became known as the Arab Uprisings.
While some countries – Egypt and Tunisia – became democracies, albeit briefly, others, like Yemen, Libya and Syria, descended into violence.
In the intervening years, political science scholars from across the world have examined these political transformations, looking at why so many of Arab Uprising countries failed to continue down the path of democratic reform. As a political scientist with expertise in the region, I have distilled this research into five key lessons that could help guide Syria now, as it seeks to build a stable and democratic state.
1. Islamist politicians are politicians first, Islamists second
One of the most pressing questions when considering Syria’s post-Assad political direction is the role played by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebel group that led the overthrow of Assad.
For example, the Tunisian Islamist group Ennahda stalwartly defended democracy and helped write a liberal constitution after the country ousted Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011. Similarly, in Egypt after strongman leader Hosni Mubarak was removed the same year, the Muslim Brotherhood, a once-banned Islamist movement, competed successfully and fairly in the democratic process, though, of course, it faced the same challenges of any governing party in implementing policies once in power.
But nor is such a path predetermined. Turkey’s recent democratic backslide and embrace of authoritarianism shows that Islamist politicians like President Recep Tayyip Erdogan can also undermine democracy when it serves their interests.
If Syria becomes a democracy, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham will, I believe, likely have to continue to embrace moderation. But whether the group backs democracy depends on the organization’s calculation of what its future looks like in democracy versus more authoritarian forms of governance. Broad negotiations that involve all parties in Syria can help convince Hayat Tahrir al-Sham that continuing on a path of moderation is in their best interests. While no one can forecast with certainty what Syria’s new institutions will look like, research shows that Islamists are just as likely as secular parties to support democratic norms.
2. Ending corruption is all important
One of the drivers of the Arab Spring and the Syrian revolution was anger over corrupt business deals. Indeed, relatives and cronies of Assad owned de facto monopolies over lucrative industries like cellphone networks. Unwinding these corrupt legacies and opening industries to competition and licensing should be an overriding priority for those seeking a less autocratic future.
Syria’s diaspora has many capable businesspeople who can return and found innovative companies if the new government opens up investment and entrepreneurship beyond people with political connections.
3. Political disagreement is OK
Many hope that Syria’s new government will be freely and fairly elected. For democracy to work, though, it must successfully implement changes in response to voters’ concerns.
While Syria’s opposition has a lot of experience with waging war, it has relatively little in the way of running campaigns and building strong party brands. These more mundane goals are the key connective tissue that makes democracy work.
4. Bureaucracies should serve the public
Elections choose leaders, but lasting, popular change also requires bureaucrats who implement new policies – what is known as “horizontal accountability.” Egypt’s post-2011 democratic government left many state institutions untouched and later faced a revolt from autonomous anti-democratic agencies. Meanwhile, in Sudan, which saw a brief interlude of liberalization after the ouster of its longtime dictator, Omar al-Bashir, in 2019, democratic reformers launched an ambitious overhaul of state institutions that still failed because bureaucrats lobbied politicians for support.
The Hayat Tahrir al-Sham-led government in Syria has already started reforming bureaucracies by prosecuting high-ranking officials from the prior regime while retaining the rank and file. Effective oversight, though, requires participation of elected leaders with the legitimacy to demand accountability from bureaucrats. For those who want to be involved in Syria’s transition, providing technical assistance to quickly rebuild ministries is one way to increase the odds of a successful transition.
Political transitions are too complex to embark on easy forecasts. But the experience of nations who saw democracy rise and fall in the Arab Spring and subsequent winter can help Syria’s new leaders avoid costly political mistakes.
Ultimately, though, the fate of the country rests with its own people. They are the ones who survived Assad’s regime – and who will make the most important decisions for Syria’s future.
I know and have co-authored with people who wrote some of the studies that are linked to in this article.
Source: United Kingdom – Executive Government & Departments
Mr Edward Roberts has been appointed His Majesty’s Ambassador to the Republic of Costa Rica, and His Majesty’s non-resident Ambassador to the Republic of Nicaragua in succession to Mr Ben Lyster-Binns.
Edward Roberts
Mr Edward Roberts has been appointed His Majesty’s Ambassador to the Republic of Costa Rica, and His Majesty’s non-resident Ambassador to the Republic of Nicaragua in succession to Mr Ben Lyster-Binns who will be transferring to another Diplomatic Service appointment. Mr Roberts will take up his appointment during autumn 2025.
Curriculum vitae
Full name: Edward John Roberts
Year
Role
2025
Pre-posting training (including Spanish language training)
2023 to 2024
FCDO, Europe Group, Directorate Flexible Resource
2022 to 2023
College of Europe, Bruges, MA in EU International Relations and Diplomacy Studies
2019 to 2022
Kathmandu, Deputy Ambassador
2017 to 2019
Department for Exiting the European Union, Policy Manager, Security Partnership
2016 to 2017
Cabinet Office, Senior Policy Adviser, Migration and EU Asylum Cooperation
2013 to 2016
Kinshasa, Consul and Second Secretary Political and Prosperity
2011 to 2013
FCO, Desk Officer, EU Institutions and Treaty Change Bill
2010 to 2011
European Commission, Brussels, DG AIDCO, Seconded National Expert, Human Development and Migration
2009 to 2010
Department for Education, Policy Officer, Early Years Improvement Support
2008 to 2009
Brussels, European Commission, DG AIDCO, Stagiaire, Human Development and Migration
2007 to 2008
Department for Education, Policy Officer, Education and Skills Bill
2006 to 2007
Department for Education, Policy Officer, Strategy for Learners with Learning Difficulties
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Yap Boum, Professor in the faculty of Medicine, Mbarara University of Science and Technology
Walking through the crowded streets of the Pakadjuma neighbourhood in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, I am struck by the vibrant atmosphere around me.
Children play happily in puddles, surrounded by piles of plastic bags and open ditches of sewage. Shacks patched together from pieces of corrugated iron crowd the settlement. Loud rumba music blasts through the air as young people enjoy themselves in open bars, waiting for grilled pork or chicken to be served. Sex workers sit outside tin shacks in narrow alleyways, calling for customers.
Nearby a Médecins Sans Frontières triage centre is the only reminder that this slum area is the epicentre of the mpox epidemic in Kinshasa. There are no posters, no pamphlets or banners warning residents of the dangers of this viral disease that was declared a continental and global emergency in August last year.
At the clinic, patients suspected to have mpox are sent to one of three dedicated mpox centres in the city. Common symptoms include fever, headache, muscle ache, chills, exhaustion, swollen lymph nodes and lesions. With symptomatic care most patients get better in 7 to 35 days, depending on the severity of the case.
Mpox has historically been a rural disease in the DRC. This microcosm of Kinshasa sheds light on the complex challenges of managing the outbreak in a city.
Fighting on two fronts
With a population of more than 17 million, Kinshasa is Africa’s biggest megacity. Pakadjuma is one of the city’s many overcrowded areas where people live in extreme poverty.
Kinshasa, often called “Kin la Belle”, faces a unique crisis in the fight against mpox. Both strains of the virus, clade Ia and clade Ib, are circulating in the city simultaneously. This is first time this has happened.
Clade Ia, which is primarily transmitted from animal to human and then within households through touch, has been endemic to Africa for decades.
Clade Ib is a new strain and contracted predominantly through sexual contact. It is the strain that has spread rapidly across 21 African countries during the current epidemic in east and central Africa.
Grilled meat for customers.
This dual transmission makes the fight against mpox even more complicated: how does one tackle a public health crisis rooted in both intimate human connections and structural inequities such as living in overcrowded areas?
Although the strains are treated similarly clinically, their spread and transmission differ.
Clade Ia is mainly associated with zoonotic transmission (from animals to humans) in rural areas. Animal surveillance and community education are required to control spillovers.
Clade Ib, with higher human-to-human transmissibility, necessitates intensified contact tracing, vaccination, and preventive measures in urban and peri-urban areas.
Tailoring strategies to these differences is key to containing the outbreak.
When condoms don’t work
Pakadjuma, in the north-east of the city, is known for poverty and high crime rates. For many girls and young women the sex trade is their only option if they want to survive.
One of the most pressing challenges to combat the virus in the area is curbing sexual transmission.
Unlike HIV, where condoms can significantly reduce the risk of spread, mpox poses a different challenge: because the virus is spread by touch there is no practical preventive measure for sexual transmission apart from complete abstinence.
Mpox lesions start in the groin, making any movement excruciating. For these sex workers, though, abstinence is not an option. It would mean losing their livelihood and the ability to feed their children.
For their clients, who come from all over the city, it would require altering a core aspect of their lives for a disease they perceive as less lethal than Ebola. There are no easy answers to this dilemma.
Patients are tested for mpox at this Médecins Sans Frontières triage centre
Tracing the spread
Contact tracing, a cornerstone of outbreak control, is another hurdle.
Identifying and tracing the contacts of sex workers is complex. As a result only a fraction of mpox cases are confirmed with laboratory analysis.
On average, each mpox case has about 20 contacts, yet tracing clients in a highly confidential sexual network is next to impossible.
Without effective contact tracing, infected individuals remain in the community, often seeking treatment only when their condition worsens. From discussions with Médecins Sans Frontières staff in the triage zone, it emerges that suspected mpox cases usually arrive in advanced stages of the disease, when symptoms are clearly visible. Many patients first attempt other remedies such as traditional healing methods, before seeking medical care.
Fortunately Kinshasa benefits from a strong laboratory network led by the Institut National de la Recherche Biomédicale and test results are available within 48 to 72 hours. This state-of-the-art institute was pioneered by Dr Jean Jacques Muyembe, the microbiologist who first discovered Ebola.
In the first week of January 2025 there were 1,155 confirmed cases and 27 deaths in the city, according to the DRC Ministry of Health.
Even for those who seek care at the dedicated mpox centres, navigating the chaotic, congested roads is a nightmare. Yellow minibuses – ominously known locally as the “Spirit of Death” – are crammed and it can take hours to get to a destination.
With increasing patient numbers, mpox centres in the city are overwhelmed.
Pakadjuma, one of the poorest districts in the city.A goods train passing through.
The fight on all fronts
Addressing the mpox outbreak in Kinshasa requires a multifaceted approach which includes:
Vaccination: Blanket vaccination drives offer the strongest hope for controlling the outbreak in hotspots such as Pakadjuma where contact tracing is almost impossible. In these cases the whole community needs to be vaccinated.
This could break transmission chains while allowing individuals at risk, such as sex workers, to continue plying their trades.
Prevention and control: Home care is essential, particularly in informal settlements like Pakadjuma. Providing food and material support to patients and their families and encouraging the isolation of infected relatives will help to limit the spread of the disease.
These measures require new thinking, however, when people are trying to survive from day to day.
Talking to the community: This is difficult because of the stigma around the disease, but it must be at the heart of the response.
Amplifying the message: The media, local leaders and trusted community members need to be engaged to spread the word loud and clear.
This all needs to happen immediately or the epidemic will be almost impossible to contain in this vast, sprawling city. The consequences would be dire.
Walking through the crowded streets of the Pakadjuma neighbourhood in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, I am struck by the vibrant atmosphere around me.
Children play happily in puddles, surrounded by piles of plastic bags and open ditches of sewage. Shacks patched together from pieces of corrugated iron crowd the settlement. Loud rumba music blasts through the air as young people enjoy themselves in open bars, waiting for grilled pork or chicken to be served. Sex workers sit outside tin shacks in narrow alleyways, calling for customers.
Nearby a Médecins Sans Frontières triage centre is the only reminder that this slum area is the epicentre of the mpox epidemic in Kinshasa. There are no posters, no pamphlets or banners warning residents of the dangers of this viral disease that was declared a continental and global emergency in August last year.
At the clinic, patients suspected to have mpox are sent to one of three dedicated mpox centres in the city. Common symptoms include fever, headache, muscle ache, chills, exhaustion, swollen lymph nodes and lesions. With symptomatic care most patients get better in 7 to 35 days, depending on the severity of the case.
Mpox has historically been a rural disease in the DRC. This microcosm of Kinshasa sheds light on the complex challenges of managing the outbreak in a city.
Fighting on two fronts
With a population of more than 17 million, Kinshasa is Africa’s biggest megacity. Pakadjuma is one of the city’s many overcrowded areas where people live in extreme poverty.
Kinshasa, often called “Kin la Belle”, faces a unique crisis in the fight against mpox. Both strains of the virus, clade Ia and clade Ib, are circulating in the city simultaneously. This is first time this has happened.
Clade Ia, which is primarily transmitted from animal to human and then within households through touch, has been endemic to Africa for decades.
Clade Ib is a new strain and contracted predominantly through sexual contact. It is the strain that has spread rapidly across 21 African countries during the current epidemic in east and central Africa.
This dual transmission makes the fight against mpox even more complicated: how does one tackle a public health crisis rooted in both intimate human connections and structural inequities such as living in overcrowded areas?
Although the strains are treated similarly clinically, their spread and transmission differ.
Clade Ia is mainly associated with zoonotic transmission (from animals to humans) in rural areas. Animal surveillance and community education are required to control spillovers.
Clade Ib, with higher human-to-human transmissibility, necessitates intensified contact tracing, vaccination, and preventive measures in urban and peri-urban areas.
Tailoring strategies to these differences is key to containing the outbreak.
When condoms don’t work
Pakadjuma, in the north-east of the city, is known for poverty and high crime rates. For many girls and young women the sex trade is their only option if they want to survive.
One of the most pressing challenges to combat the virus in the area is curbing sexual transmission.
Unlike HIV, where condoms can significantly reduce the risk of spread, mpox poses a different challenge: because the virus is spread by touch there is no practical preventive measure for sexual transmission apart from complete abstinence.
Mpox lesions start in the groin, making any movement excruciating. For these sex workers, though, abstinence is not an option. It would mean losing their livelihood and the ability to feed their children.
For their clients, who come from all over the city, it would require altering a core aspect of their lives for a disease they perceive as less lethal than Ebola. There are no easy answers to this dilemma.
Tracing the spread
Contact tracing, a cornerstone of outbreak control, is another hurdle.
Identifying and tracing the contacts of sex workers is complex. As a result only a fraction of mpox cases are confirmed with laboratory analysis.
On average, each mpox case has about 20 contacts, yet tracing clients in a highly confidential sexual network is next to impossible.
Without effective contact tracing, infected individuals remain in the community, often seeking treatment only when their condition worsens. From discussions with Médecins Sans Frontières staff in the triage zone, it emerges that suspected mpox cases usually arrive in advanced stages of the disease, when symptoms are clearly visible. Many patients first attempt other remedies such as traditional healing methods, before seeking medical care.
Fortunately Kinshasa benefits from a strong laboratory network led by the Institut National de la Recherche Biomédicale and test results are available within 48 to 72 hours. This state-of-the-art institute was pioneered by Dr Jean Jacques Muyembe, the microbiologist who first discovered Ebola.
In the first week of January 2025 there were 1,155 confirmed cases and 27 deaths in the city, according to the DRC Ministry of Health.
Even for those who seek care at the dedicated mpox centres, navigating the chaotic, congested roads is a nightmare. Yellow minibuses – ominously known locally as the “Spirit of Death” – are crammed and it can take hours to get to a destination.
With increasing patient numbers, mpox centres in the city are overwhelmed.
The fight on all fronts
Addressing the mpox outbreak in Kinshasa requires a multifaceted approach which includes:
Vaccination: Blanket vaccination drives offer the strongest hope for controlling the outbreak in hotspots such as Pakadjuma where contact tracing is almost impossible. In these cases the whole community needs to be vaccinated.
This could break transmission chains while allowing individuals at risk, such as sex workers, to continue plying their trades.
Prevention and control: Home care is essential, particularly in informal settlements like Pakadjuma. Providing food and material support to patients and their families and encouraging the isolation of infected relatives will help to limit the spread of the disease.
These measures require new thinking, however, when people are trying to survive from day to day.
Talking to the community: This is difficult because of the stigma around the disease, but it must be at the heart of the response.
Amplifying the message: The media, local leaders and trusted community members need to be engaged to spread the word loud and clear.
This all needs to happen immediately or the epidemic will be almost impossible to contain in this vast, sprawling city. The consequences would be dire.
Yap Boum 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.
