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Category: Global

  • MIL-OSI Global: How does REACH, the EU regulation governing chemical substances, work?

    Source: The Conversation – France – By Johanna Berneron, Toxicologue reglementaire, Agence nationale de sécurité sanitaire de l’alimentation, de l’environnement et du travail (Anses)

    Adopted by the European Union in 2006, the REACH regulation (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals) governs the manufacture and use of chemical substances in Europe. Despite its importance, REACH has often been criticised for being slow and complex. These concerns prompted calls for reform as part of the European Green Deal, though the European Commission ultimately postponed the revision. Various NGOs have called for this reform, and in early 2024, the French National Assembly’s European Affairs Committee reignited the conversation, with a resolution currently under review.

    Nevertheless, REACH remains an ambitious and indispensable regulation that protects human health and the environment from the hazards posed by chemical substances. While it’s not perfect, it represents progress in comparison with previous regulatory frameworks. One notable success is the ban on bisphenol A (BPA), a controversial chemical previously used in baby bottles.

    Understanding the REACH process

    REACH is straightforward if you break down its steps:

    • Substance registration: Manufacturers must submit detailed information on the chemical, toxicological and environmental properties of substances they produce or import. If no data exists, they are required to generate it. Unlike previous regulations and directives, REACH places the burden of proof on companies. To comply with the regulation, companies must identify and adequately manage the risks associated with the substances they manufacture and market in the EU. In particular, they must demonstrate how the substances can be used safely and communicate risk management measures to users.

    • Compliance checks: The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) ensures that the registration dossiers are complete and meet regulatory requirements. This is known as compliance analysis.

    • Substance evaluation: If concerns arise, a substance undergoes further evaluation to assess risks to human health and the environment. This procedure is conducted by the member states (with ANSES representing France) and enables the authorities to request additional information from industries.

    Member states, including ANSES, carry out these evaluations, focusing on national health priorities. Substances flagged for further assessment are added to the Community Rolling Action Plan (CoRAP), a three-year plan outlining substances to be evaluated by member states.

    If additional safety measures are needed, several outcomes are possible:

    • SVHC identification: Substances of Very High Concern (SVHC) may require authorisation for continued use.

    • Restrictions: Can limit or ban certain uses of a substance.

    • Classification: Hazardous substances may be classified as carcinogenic, toxic to reproduction or in other such categories and must be labelled for these hazardous properties.

    Bisphenol A: a case study

    Bisphenol A (BPA) exemplifies REACH’s impact. In 2017, Germany initiated an evaluation of BPA, resulting in its classification as a reprotoxic substance under the EU’s Classification, Labelling and Packaging (CLP) regulation. BPA was also identified as an SVHC due to its endocrine-disrupting properties, which pose risks to human health and the environment.

    Although these various management measures have faced legal challenges from industry, including through appeals, all have been upheld. They have proven effective, as highlighted by a European Environment Agency (EEA) report showing that BPA concentrations in Europeans’ urine are decreasing, in contrast to other bisphenols.

    The role of ANSES

    ANSES plays a key role in implementing the EU’s REACH regulation, supporting French authorities in managing chemical risks. Among its responsibilities, ANSES can identify a substance as an SVHC, preparing dossiers that can lead to these substances being added to Annex XIV of REACH. Once listed, the substances are restricted, and their use is only allowed if the European Commission specifically authorises it. Such authorisations are granted when it’s proven that the risks are controlled or the socioeconomic benefits outweigh them.

    Before a substance is included in Annex XIV, it must first be identified as an SVHC. This step is aimed at encouraging the gradual replacement of these hazardous chemicals with safer alternatives, protecting both human health and the environment.

    ANSES also prepares restriction dossiers, evaluating the socioeconomic impact of limiting or banning substances that pose unacceptable risks. These restrictions can apply to chemicals in their pure form, in mixtures, or within products.

    Additionally, ANSES produces harmonised classification dossiers for chemicals like carcinogens, mutagens, and reproductive and respiratory sensitizers, for instance. Once included in Annex VI of the CLP regulation, industries must label their products accordingly, alerting users – especially workers – about potential hazards and ensuring proper precautions are taken.

    Room for improvement

    Despite improvements, the REACH regulation still faces significant challenges. Many industries, and particularly smaller companies, struggle to comply due to the high cost of registration. In 2018, the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) reported that 31% of chemical substances produced in or imported into the EU in quantities over 1,000 tonnes per year failed to meet REACH requirements.

    In response, ECHA has enhanced its chemical data management, but industries remain unsatisfied, accusing ECHA of pushing for classifications or requesting new tests without robust toxicological justifications. These requests often aim to address data gaps in industry-provided dossiers while minimising animal testing.

    REACH’s main limitation is its dependence on industry-submitted data to evaluate chemical risks. These data can be incomplete, outdated or missing, forcing regulators to request additional information, which delays risk assessments and decision-making.

    Consequently, the evaluation of substances and review of authorisation requests are often slow, delaying the entry of safer, innovative chemicals. Many potentially hazardous substances remain on the market without adequate regulation, a persistent concern from a public health standpoint.

    A revision of REACH is expected to streamline processes, improve efficiency and impose stricter penalties on non-compliant industries, potentially revoking their REACH registration numbers. This would prevent the sale of substances without the necessary data.

    These changes align with the European Commission’s strategy for a toxic-free environment under the European Green Deal. However, there is concern that lobbying could undermine this vital regulation, a global standard in chemical safety.

    Despite its complexities, REACH remains a critical safeguard for European public health and environmental protection.

    Johanna Berneron ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

    – ref. How does REACH, the EU regulation governing chemical substances, work? – https://theconversation.com/how-does-reach-the-eu-regulation-governing-chemical-substances-work-241931

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Abortion and marijuana ballot measures may bring out Florida Democrats, but the GOP has 1M more active voters in the Sunshine State

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Daniel A. Smith, Professor of Political Science, University of Florida

    Could ballot initiatives bring more Democrats to the polls in Florida? Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

    The number of voters registered as Democrats has tumbled in recent years in Florida, effectively removing the Sunshine State as a battleground and placing it firmly in the red column.

    At least that’s the dominant narrative found in many media outlets. And it is true that Republican Donald Trump won the state in both 2016 and 2020.

    Still, Nikki Fried, the Florida Democratic party chair, thinks Florida Democrats are making a “clear resurgence.”

    Buoyed by broad support for two statewide initiatives on the ballot – the legalization of recreational marijuana and the establishment of a constitutional right to abortion up to viability – Fried is predicting robust turnout of Democratic voters this November despite concerns hurricanes Helene and Milton may suppress turnout.

    Fried suggests that Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Debbie Mucarsel-Powell will benefit from the two hot issues on the ballot. A ban on most abortions after six weeks went into effect in Florida on May 1, 2024, with the state Supreme Court at the same time deciding to put the issue to voters.

    The marijuana ballot measure looks likely to pass, while support for the abortion access measure is more uncertain. But the point is that these are the types of issues that bring Democrats – and unaffiliated voters – out to the polls.

    I’ve written extensively on direct democracy and Florida politics. My research shows how ballot measures can have what I call “educative effects,” not only bolstering turnout but also priming voters to choose candidates who support the same initiatives they do.

    This goes a long way to explain Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to thwart both measures, going so far as to use taxpayers’ dollars to oppose the abortion amendment.

    Florida’s abortion amendment needs to pass with 60% of the vote, so turnout is key.
    Rebecca Blackwell/AP Photo

    Active voters

    But Fried and the Democrats face a major hurdle – a widening voter registration gap – as Florida Republicans are quick to point out. Over the past several years, the GOP steadily narrowed the Democratic Party’s lead in voter registrations in the Sunshine State, finally surpassing Democrats’ plurality of active registered voters in 2021.

    Fried thinks the widening gap between registered Republicans and Democrats is a mirage. She claims that the Republican advantage is an artifact of a shift in state law that more aggressively reclassifies voters as being “inactive” if they don’t vote in two general election cycles or keep their information on file with local supervisors of elections.

    There is no question that the law, which went into effect in 2022, has deflated Democratic registration numbers. Here are the stats.

    According to the Florida secretary of state’s website, updated on Oct. 7, 2024, there are more than 1 million more registered Republicans (5,455,480) than Democrats (4,400,561) in Florida, followed by no party affiliation (3,584,982) and those registered with minor parties (404,890). That is, Republicans appear to account for more than 39% of registered voters in the Sunshine State, while Democrats make up less than 32%.

    However, the numbers posted on Florida’s official website, which amount to nearly 13.7 million registered voters, are misleading: They tally only active voters in the state.

    There are more than 2.5 million inactive voters on the rolls as of Aug. 1, 2024, according to my calculation of publicly available raw voter files. This brings the total number of registered voters in Florida to more than 16 million people.

    Inactive and unaffiliated voters

    Inactive registered voters have every right to cast ballots just like active voters. The main difference between the two groups is that inactive voters didn’t vote in 2020 or 2022.

    There are hundreds of thousands more inactive Democrats and unaffiliated voters than Republicans on the rolls. This is likely the result of lackluster campaigns in the state for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in 2020 and for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist in 2022. Uninspired Democrats and unaffiliated voters didn’t show up to the polls, particularly in 2022.

    Currently, according to the publicly available Florida voter rolls, there are over 900,000 inactive Democrats and over 921,000 inactive unaffiliated voters, compared with fewer than 643,000 inactive Republicans. So, while Republicans account for 39% of active voters, they account for only 25% of inactive voters.

    To sharpen the point: 1 in 10 Republicans are currently inactive, whereas nearly 2 in 5 of all registered Democrats and more than 1 in 5 unaffiliated voters in Florida are inactive. These inactive voters tend not to receive the same attention from parties and groups trying to mobilize registered voters to the polls.

    There’s no question that the fortunes of the Florida Democratic Party have tumbled over the past decade. Twelve years ago, just prior to the 2012 general election, Democrats accounted for 40% of all active registered voters. It’s been a sharp decline down to 32%.

    But the difference has not been made up by Republicans. From 2012 to 2024, the share of active voters registered as Republicans increased by only 3 percentage points, from 36% to 39%.

    The biggest increase in the share of active voters over the same period is with unaffiliated voters, whose share jumped 5 percentage points, from less than 21% in 2012 to 26% in 2024. These unaffiliated voters in Florida tend to be younger and Hispanic, many of whom likely have been turned off by the toxic political landscape in the state.

    But back to the November election and Fried’s prognostications.

    Will the two statewide ballot measures – Amendment 3 on recreational marijuana and Amendment 4 on reproductive rights – offset the rise in Republican voter registration in Florida? Is the sizable lead of Republican active voters a mirage, only to disappear as Election Day nears?

    It will come down to turnout and whether inactive Democratic and unaffiliated voters’ support for Amendment 3 and Amendment 4 primes them to back the Democratic ticket.

    Daniel A. Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Abortion and marijuana ballot measures may bring out Florida Democrats, but the GOP has 1M more active voters in the Sunshine State – https://theconversation.com/abortion-and-marijuana-ballot-measures-may-bring-out-florida-democrats-but-the-gop-has-1m-more-active-voters-in-the-sunshine-state-239538

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Misinformation is more than just bad facts: How and why people spread rumors is key to understanding how false information travels and takes root

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Kate Starbird, Professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington

    Spreading rumors is problematic but understandable. H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Archive Photos via Getty Images

    On Sept. 20, 2024, a newspaper in Montana reported an issue with ballots provided to overseas voters registered in the state: Kamala Harris was not on the ballot. Election officials were able to quickly remedy the problem but not before accusations began to spread online, primarily among Democrats, that the Republican secretary of state had purposefully left Harris off the ballot.

    This false rumor emerged from a common pattern: Some people view evidence such as good-faith errors in election administration through a mindset of elections being untrustworthy or “rigged,” leading them to misinterpret that evidence.

    As the U.S. approaches another high-stakes and contentious election, concerns about the pervasive spread of falsehoods about election integrity are again front of mind. Some election experts worry that false claims may be mobilized – as they were in 2020 – into efforts to contest the election through tactics such as lawsuits, protests, disruptions to vote-counting and pressure on election officials to not certify the election.

    Our team at the University of Washington has studied online rumors and misinformation for more than a decade. Since 2020, we have focused on rapid analysis of falsehoods about U.S. election administration, from sincere confusion about when and where to vote to intentional efforts to sow distrust in the process. Our motivations are to help quickly identify emerging rumors about election administration and analyze the dynamics of how these rumors take shape and spread online.

    Through the course of this research we have learned that despite all the discussion about misinformation being a problem of bad facts, most misleading election rumors stem not from false or manipulated evidence but from misinterpretations and mischaracterizations. In other words, the problem is not just about bad facts but also faulty frames, or the mental structures people rely on to interpret those facts.

    Misinformation may not be the best label for addressing the problem – it’s more an issue of how people make sense of the world, how that sensemaking process is shaped by social, political and informational dynamics, and how it begets rumors that can lead people to a false understanding of events.

    Rumors – not misinformation

    There is a long history of research on rumors going back to World War II and earlier. From this perspective, rumors are unverified stories, spreading through informal channels that serve informational, psychological and social purposes. We are applying this knowledge to the study of online falsehoods.

    Though many rumors are false, some turn out to be true or partially true. Even when false, rumors can contain useful indications of real confusions or fears within a community.

    Rumors can be seen as a natural byproduct of collective sensemaking – that is, efforts by groups of well-meaning people to make sense of uncertain and ambiguous information during dynamic events. But rumors can also emerge from propaganda and disinformation campaigns that lead people to misinterpret or mischaracterize their own and others’ experiences.

    University of Washington’s Kate Starbird explains rumors as collective sensemaking.

    Evidence, frames and (mis)interpretations

    Prior research describes collective sensemaking as a process of interactions between evidence and frames. Evidence includes the things people see, read and hear in the world. Frames are mental schema that shape how people interpret that evidence.

    The relationship between evidence and frames flows in two directions. When people encounter novel events or new evidence, they try to select the best frame from their mental filing cabinets. The selected frame then determines what evidence they focus on and what evidence they exclude in their interpretations. This evidence-frame view of collective sensemaking can help researchers understand rumors and disinformation.

    Everyone has their own ways of interpreting events based on their unique experiences. But your frames are not yours alone. Frames are shaped, sometimes intentionally, by information from media, political leaders, communities, colleagues, friends, neighbors and family. Framing – the process of using, building, reinforcing, adapting, challenging and updating frames – can be a deliberate strategy of political communication.

    Frames play a role in generating rumors, shaping how people interpret emerging events and novel evidence. False rumors occur when sensemaking goes awry, often due to people focusing on the wrong piece of evidence or applying the wrong frame. And disinformation, from this perspective, is the intentional manipulation of the sensemaking process, either by introducing false evidence or distorting the frames through which people interpret that evidence.

    In 2020, we saw these dynamics at work in a rumor about Sharpie pens in Arizona. In the lead-up to the election, President Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly alleged that the election would be rigged – setting a powerful frame for his followers. When voters noted that the Sharpie pens provided by election officials were bleeding through their ballots, many interpreted their experiences through the frame of a “rigged election” and became concerned that their ballots would not be counted.

    A Maricopa County, Arizona, election worker counts ballots in the 2020 election as false rumors that Sharpie pens were ruining ballots spread online.
    AP Photo/Matt York

    Some people shared those experiences online, where they were soon amplified and given meaning by others, including online influencers. Concerns and suspicions grew. Soon, members of Trump’s family were repeating false claims that the bleed-through was systematically disenfranchising Republican voters. The effect was circular and mutually reinforcing. The strategic frame inspired misinterpretations of evidence – real bleed-through falsely seen as affecting ballot counting – that were shared and amplified, strengthening the frame.

    Social media sensemaking

    Collective sensemaking is increasingly taking place online, where it is profoundly shaped by social media platforms, from features such as repost and like buttons to algorithmic recommendations to the connections between accounts.

    Not so long ago, many people hoped that the internet would democratize information flows by removing the historical gatekeepers of information and disrupting their ability to set the agenda – and the frames – of conversation. But the gatekeepers have not been erased; they have been replaced. A group of newsbrokering influencers have taken their place, in part by gaming the ways online systems manipulate attention.

    Many of these influencers work by systematically seeking out and amplifying content that aligns with prevailing political frames set by elites in politics and media. This gives creators the incentive to produce content that resonates with those frames, because that content tends to be rewarded with attention, the primary commodity of social media.

    These dynamics were at work in February 2024, when an aspiring creator produced a man-on-the-street video interviewing migrants to the U.S. that was selectively edited and captioned to falsely claim to show undocumented migrants planning to vote illegally in U.S. elections. This resonated with two prominent frames: the same rigged-election frame from 2020 and another that framed immigration as harmful to the U.S.

    The video was shared across multiple platforms and exploded in views after being amplified by a series of accounts with large followings on X, formerly Twitter. X CEO Elon Musk commented with an exclamation point on one post with the embedded video. The creator soon found himself on Fox News. He currently has hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok and Instagram and continues to produce similar content.

    Interactions between influencers and online audiences result in content that fits strategic frames. Emerging events provide new evidence that people can twist to fit prevailing frames, both intentionally and unintentionally. Rumors are the byproducts of this process, and online attention dynamics fuel their spread.

    Collective sensemaking and election 2024

    Heading into the 2024 election, false and misleading claims about election integrity remain widespread. Our team has tracked more than 100 distinct rumors since the beginning of September. The machinery for quickly converting perceived evidence from elections into widely shared rumors and conspiracy theories is increasingly well oiled.

    Experts discuss election integrity and efforts to undermine voter confidence.

    One concerning development is an increase in so-called election integrity organizations that seek to recruit volunteers who share the rigged-election frame. The groups aim to provide volunteers with tools to streamline the collection and amplification of evidence to support the rigged-election frame.

    One worry is that these volunteers may misinterpret what they see and hear on Election Day, generating additional rumors and false claims about election integrity that reinforce that increasingly distorted frame. Another is that these false claims will feed lawsuits and other attempts to contest election results.

    However, we hope that by shedding light on some of these dynamics, we can help researchers, journalists, election officials and other decision-makers better diagnose and respond to rumors about election integrity in this cycle. Most importantly, we believe that this collective sensemaking lens can help us all to both empathize with well-meaning people who get caught up in sharing false rumors and see how propagandists manipulate these processes for their gain.

    Kate Starbird receives funding from the National Science Foundation, Knight Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies.

    Stephen Prochaska has received funding from the National Science Foundation, Knight Foundation, and Hewlett Foundation.

    – ref. Misinformation is more than just bad facts: How and why people spread rumors is key to understanding how false information travels and takes root – https://theconversation.com/misinformation-is-more-than-just-bad-facts-how-and-why-people-spread-rumors-is-key-to-understanding-how-false-information-travels-and-takes-root-241748

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Simple science summaries written by AI help people understand research and trust scientists

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By David Markowitz, Associate Professor of Communication, Michigan State University

    Smoothing out the complexity can help with comprehension. kislev/iStock via Getty Images Plus

    Artificial intelligence-generated summaries of scientific papers make complex information more understandable for the public compared with human-written summaries, according to my recent paper published in PNAS Nexus. AI-generated summaries not only improved public comprehension of science but also enhanced how people perceived scientists.

    I used a popular large language model, GPT-4 by OpenAI, to create simple summaries of scientific papers; this kind of text is often called a significance statement. The AI-generated summaries used simpler language – they were easier to read according to a readability index and used more common words, like “job” instead of “occupation” – than summaries written by the researchers who had done the work.

    In one experiment, I found that readers of the AI-generated statements had a better understanding of the science, and they provided more detailed, accurate summaries of the content than readers of the human-written statements.

    I also investigated what effects the simpler summaries might have on people’s perceptions of the scientists who performed the research. In this experiment, participants rated the scientists whose work was described in the simpler texts as more credible and trustworthy than the scientists whose work was described in the more complex texts.

    In both experiments, participants did not know who wrote each summary. The simpler texts were always AI-generated, and the complex texts were always human-generated. When I asked participants who they believed wrote each summary, they ironically thought the more complex ones were written by AI and simpler ones were written by humans.

    It can feel like you need a Ph.D. to understand science research published in a journal.
    R.Tsubin/Moment via Getty Images

    Why it matters

    Have you ever read about a scientific discovery and felt like it was written in a foreign language? If you’re like most Americans, new scientific information is probably hard to understand – especially if you try to tackle a science article in a research journal.

    In an era where scientific literacy is crucial for informed decision-making, the abilities to communicate and grasp complex ideas are more important than ever. Trust in science has been declining for years, and one contributing factor may be the challenge of understanding scientific jargon.

    This research points to a potential solution: using AI to simplify science communication. By making scientific content more approachable, this work demonstrates that AI-generated summaries may help to restore trust in scientists and, in turn, encourage greater public engagement with scientific issues. The question of trust is particularly important, as people often rely on science in their daily lives, from eating habits to medical choices.

    What still isn’t known

    As AI continues to evolve, its role in science communication may expand, especially if using generative AI becomes more commonplace or sanctioned by journals. Indeed, the academic publishing field is still establishing norms regarding the use of AI. By simplifying scientific writing, AI could contribute to more engagement with complex issues.

    While the benefits of AI-generated science communication are perhaps clear, ethical considerations must also be considered. There is some risk that relying on AI to simplify scientific content may remove nuance, potentially leading to misunderstandings or oversimplifications. There’s always the chance of errors, too, if no one pays close attention.

    Additionally, transparency is critical. Readers should be informed when AI is used to generate summaries to avoid potential biases.

    Simple science descriptions are preferable to and more beneficial than complex ones, and AI tools can help. But scientists could also achieve the same goals by working harder to minimize jargon and communicate clearly – no AI necessary.

    David Markowitz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Simple science summaries written by AI help people understand research and trust scientists – https://theconversation.com/simple-science-summaries-written-by-ai-help-people-understand-research-and-trust-scientists-241105

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Fighting antibiotic resistance at the source – using machine learning to identify bacterial resistance genes and the drugs to block them

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Abdullahi Tunde Aborode, Mississippi State University

    Current methods of identifying resistance mutations in microbes can miss other ways resistance can develop. koto_feja/iStock via Getty Images Plus

    Antibiotic resistance is a growing public health problem around the world. When bacteria like E. coli no longer respond to antibiotics, infections become harder to treat.

    To develop new antibiotics, researchers typically identify the genes that make bacteria resistant. Through laboratory experiments, they observe how bacteria respond to different antibiotics and look for mutations in the genetic makeup of resistant strains that allow them to survive.

    While effective, this method can be time-consuming and may not always capture the full picture of how bacteria become resistant. For example, changes in how genes work that don’t involve mutations can still influence resistance. Bacteria can also exchange resistance genes between each other, which may not be detected if only focusing on mutations within a single strain.

    My colleagues and I developed a new approach to identify E. coli resistance genes by computer modeling, allowing us to design new compounds that can block these genes and make existing treatments more effective.

    Identifying resistance

    To predict which genes contribute to resistance, we analyzed the genomes of various E. coli strains to identify genetic patterns and markers associated with resistance. We then used machine learning algorithms trained on existing data to highlight novel genes or mutations shared across resistant strains that might contribute to resistance.

    E. coli is one of many bacterial species developing resistance to common antibiotics.
    National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases/National Institutes of Health via Flickr, CC BY-NC

    After identifying resistance genes, we designed inhibitors that specifically target and block the proteins these genes produce. By analyzing the structure of the proteins these genes code for, we were able to optimize our inhibitors to strongly bind to these specific proteins.

    To reduce the likelihood that bacteria would evolve resistance to these inhibitors, we targeted regions of their genome that code for proteins critical to their survival. By interfering with how bacteria carry out important functions, it makes it more difficult for them to develop mechanisms to compensate. We also prioritized compounds that work differently from existing antibiotics to minimize cross-resistance.

    Finally, we tested how effectively our inhibitors could overcome antibiotic resistance in E. coli. We used computer simulations to assess how strongly a number of inhibitors bind to target proteins over time. One inhibitor called hesperidin was able to strongly bind to the three genes in E. coli involved in resistance that we identified, suggesting it may be able to help combat antibiotic-resistant strains.

    A global threat

    The World Health Organization ranks antimicrobial resistance as one of the top 10 threats to global health. In 2019, bacterial antibiotic resistance killed an estimated 4.95 million people worldwide.

    By targeting the specific genes responsible for resistance to existing drugs, our approach could lead to treatments for challenging bacterial infections that are not only more effective but also less likely to contribute to further resistance. It can also help researchers keep up with bacterial threats as they evolve.

    Some microbes can transfer resistance to other microbes.

    Our predictive approach could be adapted to other bacterial strains, allowing for more personalized treatment strategies. In the future, doctors could potentially tailor antibiotic treatments based on the specific genetic makeup of the bacteria causing the infection, potentially leading to better outcomes.

    As antibiotic resistance continues to rise globally, our findings may provide a crucial tool in the fight against this threat. Further development is needed before our methods can be used in the clinic. But by staying ahead of bacterial evolution, targeted inhibitors could help preserve the efficacy of existing antibiotics and reduce the spread of resistant strains.

    Nothing to disclose.

    – ref. Fighting antibiotic resistance at the source – using machine learning to identify bacterial resistance genes and the drugs to block them – https://theconversation.com/fighting-antibiotic-resistance-at-the-source-using-machine-learning-to-identify-bacterial-resistance-genes-and-the-drugs-to-block-them-237919

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Time to freak out? How the existential terror of hurricanes can fuel climate change denial

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jamie Goldenberg, Professor of Psychology and Area Director, Cognitive, Neuroscience and Social Psychology, University of South Florida

    Hurricane Milton flooded parts of the Tampa Bay region just days after Hurricane Helene made landfall nearby. Bryan R. Smithy/AFP via Getty Images

    As TVs across Florida broadcast the all-too-familiar images of a powerful hurricane headed for the coast in early October 2024, people whose homes had been damaged less than two weeks earlier by Hurricane Helene watched anxiously. Hurricane Milton was rapidly intensifying into a dangerous storm, fueled by the Gulf of Mexico’s record-breaking temperatures.

    Many residents scrambled to evacuate, clogging roads away from the region. Officials urged those near the coast who ignored evacuation warnings to scrawl their names on their arms with indelible ink so their corpses could be identified.

    The two hurricanes were among the most destructive in recent memory. They are also stark reminders of the increasingly extreme weather events that scientists have long warned would be the consequence of human-driven climate change.

    Still, many people deny that climate change is a worsening threat, or that it exists at all. As its impacts grow more visible and destructive, how is this possible?

    Views of Hurricane Milton’s damage across Florida.

    One answer lies in a unique facet of human psychology – specifically, in how people manage the fear aroused by existential threats. For many people, denying the existence of a climate crisis is not only convenient, but may feel psychologically necessary.

    Terror management theory

    The Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist Ernest Becker put it this way: “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else … to overcome it by denying it in some way is the final destiny for man.”

    In plain terms, he was saying that most people struggle to accept their mortality and take pains to distort their perception of reality to avoid confronting it.

    In the 1980s, social psychologists developed “terror management theory,” showing the lengths people go to deny death. Hundreds of experiments have tested its implications. In a common method, participants reflect on their own death, while control groups consider less threatening topics, like dental pain. The key question: What does death awareness do to people?

    After writing about death, people tend to quickly move on, pushing thoughts of it from consciousness with distractions, rationalizations and other tactics. Health care professionals see this every day. For example, people often dodge screenings and diagnostic tests to avoid the frightening possibility of discovering cancer.

    Skidmore College psychologist Sheldon Solomon discusses Ernest Becker’s ‘The Denial of Death’ and terror management theory in the context of humanity’s history of brutal behavior.

    But here’s the rub: Terror management theory suggests that when people are not thinking about death, it nevertheless holds influence. The unconscious mind lingers on the problem even after people have used strategies to quiet the fear by pushing it from awareness.

    Social psychology experiments show that people often cope with the specter of death by attaching themselves to cultural ideologies, such as religious, political or even sports fandom. These worldviews imbue life with meaning, values and purpose. And that can ease the terror of mortality by connecting people to an enduring and comforting web of ideas and beliefs that transcend one’s own existence.

    When people are made aware of death, those systems of meaning become even more critical to their psychological functioning. Existential threats make us cling even tighter to the meaning systems that sustain us.

    Climate denial as a defense mechanism

    Much like a terror management lab experiment – or the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic – natural disasters like hurricanes Helene and Milton trigger death anxiety.

    Rising sea levels, warming oceans and intensifying storms – all tied to global warming fueled by human actions – represent an existential threat.

    From our perspective, it is not surprising that climate-related disasters disappear from the public consciousness almost as soon as they have passed. Google Trends data exemplifies this: Incoming storms instigated an uptick in searches for “climate change” and “global warming” in the days before Hurricane Helene made landfall on Sept. 25, 2024, and Hurricane Milton on Oct. 9, 2024. Then those searches quickly declined as people shifted their focus away from the threat.

    Unfortunately, climate change isn’t going away, no matter how hard anyone tries to deny it.

    While climate denial allows people to protect themselves from feelings of distress, terror management theory suggests that denying death is just the tip of the iceberg. For some people, accepting the reality of climate change would necessitate reevaluating their ideologies.

    Terror management theory predicts that individuals whose ideologies conflict with environmental concerns may ironically double down on those beliefs to psychologically manage the existential threat posed by climate-related disasters. It’s similar to how mortality reminders can lead people to engage in risky behavior, such as smoking or tanning. Hurricanes may reinforce denial and commitment to a worldview that rejects climate change.

    A path forward: Building new worldviews

    Although denial may be a natural psychological response to existential threats, the U.S. may be getting to a point where even deniers can’t ignore the existential threat associated with climate change.

    Again and again, Americans are gobsmacked by the devastation – from hurricanes to severe flooding, wildfires and more.

    A terror management analysis suggests that overcoming this crisis requires weaving a solutions-focused narrative into the ideologies that people rely on for comfort. As psychologists who work on terror management, we believe the fight against climate change should be framed not as an apocalyptic battle that humanity is destined to lose, but as a moral and practical challenge that humanity can collectively overcome.

    Tampa, Florida, meteorologist Denis Phillips had the right idea as the two hurricanes headed for his community: His fact-based social media updates eschew partisan critique, encourage neighbors to support one another and emphasize preparedness and resilience in the face of incoming storms.

    As Milton approached, Phillips told residents to remember his Rule #7: Don’t freak out. That doesn’t mean do nothing – it means evaluate risks without letting emotion interfere, and take action.

    Shifting the narrative from helplessness to collective empowerment and action can help people confront climate change without triggering the existential anxieties that lead to denial – offering a vision for a future that is both secure and personally meaningful.

    The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Time to freak out? How the existential terror of hurricanes can fuel climate change denial – https://theconversation.com/time-to-freak-out-how-the-existential-terror-of-hurricanes-can-fuel-climate-change-denial-242390

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Nationalism is not patriotism: 3 insights from Orwell about Trump and the 2024 election

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Mark Satta, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Law, Wayne State University

    Donald Trump hugs an American flag as he arrives at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 24, 2024, in Baltimore. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

    Shortly after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States in January 2017, George Orwell’s 1949 novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” shot to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list. Apparently, lots of people thought Orwell had something relevant to say in that political moment.

    Nearly eight years later, the United States once again faces the prospect of a Trump presidency.

    In 2016, many Americans were caught off guard by Trump’s win, leading them to grapple with the potential consequences of a Trump presidency only after he was elected. But this time, more people seem to be thinking about the ramifications of such an outcome in advance.

    In my work as a professor of philosophy and law, I’ve spent a lot of time studying Orwell’s writing. I think people were correct eight years ago to conclude that Orwell could provide insight into a Trump presidency.

    Here are three such insights that I think are useful for Americans to keep in mind as they prepare to vote for their next president.

    Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as they try to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.
    Brent Stirton/Getty Images

    Nationalism is not patriotism

    In his 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism,” Orwell distinguishes between the terms nationalism and patriotism.

    For Orwell, nationalism was “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.”

    He was quick to point out that this was distinct from the concept of patriotism, which he defined as “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.”

    To understand Orwell’s conception of patriotism, I find it useful to consider an analogy. Many parents think that their kids are the best kids in the world. This doesn’t mean that they think there are objective metrics that could be used to rank children. Most parents recognize that there is no such thing, and they don’t go around saying other children aren’t as good as theirs. Yet there is still a real sense in which they see their own kids as the very best.

    There is something similar in the attitude of Orwell’s patriot. They may think that their country or their way of life is the best, but – and this may be the most important part – they have no wish to force their views or way of life on others.

    Not so with the nationalist. Orwell claims, “Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.” The nationalist is like a parent who goes around tearing other people’s kids down in order to lift theirs up.

    Mere love of country is not inherently dangerous. Making advancement of one’s nation or culture one’s top priority is extremely dangerous. Patriotism sticks to the former. Nationalism goes in for the latter.

    Orwell insightfully recognizes that when the nationalist makes advancement of their way of life their top priority, they inevitably end up placing that goal “beyond good and evil.” This makes the nationalist susceptible to endorsing unethical means for advancing their own way of life.

    A prime example of such a nationalist mentality was Trump’s response to losing the 2020 presidential election. He sought to subvert the election results by lying and by encouraging insurrection.

    Similarly, Trump’s supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were embracing a nationalist mentality. They engaged in an unethical means of trying to advance their own political agenda.

    Donald Trump does exactly what Orwell predicts the nationalist will do. He conceptualizes everything, as Orwell put it, “in terms of competitive prestige” and “his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations.”

    Fixation on competitive prestige is not patriotic. It’s unadulterated nationalism.

    An autocrat is easy to underestimate

    In a 1942 essay written during the middle of World War II and reflecting on his experiences as a volunteer soldier in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell wrote that “our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens,” and that “we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run.”

    Orwell was worried by these optimistic instincts because he thought they ran counter to the evidence. The evidence, on the contrary, suggested that things typically don’t turn out right on their own. Rather, social improvements normally require concerted effort and vigilance against backsliding.

    In another essay from the same year, Orwell criticized various intellectuals who treated Hitler as “a figure out of comic opera, not worth taking seriously.” And he criticized many English-speaking countries for being places where it was “fashionable to believe, right up to the outbreak of war, that Hitler was an unimportant lunatic and the German tanks made of cardboard.”

    As numerous commentators and news outlets have noted, Trump routinely speaks like an autocrat.

    Yet many Americans excuse such talk, failing to treat it as the evidence of a threat to democracy that it is. This seems to me to be driven in part by the tendency Orwell identified to think that truly bad things won’t happen – at least not in one’s own country.

    Orwell thought it was worth taking the possibility of bad outcomes seriously. This is one way to understand what he was up to in his most famous books, “Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Americans would benefit from taking potential threats to U.S. democracy seriously, too.

    George Orwell, whose writings from the middle of the 20th century have relevance in 2024.
    Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

    Nationalism can attack within

    You can read “Nineteen Eighty-Four” as Orwell’s attempt to think about what a ruling political party completely captured by nationalism might look like.

    In “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” orthodox party members in the fictional nation of Oceania are obsessed with “competitive prestige” and “the desire for power.” Activities such as the Two Minutes Hate, where party members were encouraged to scream and jeer at a video of a political opponent, prompt party members to focus their thoughts on “victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations.”

    A notable feature of the party is how often it turns on its own members through kidnapping, torture and murder. The occurrence was so frequent in Oceania that it had a name: being “vaporized.” Nationalists are a threat not only to those outside the nation but also to those inside the nation who don’t fully support the nationalist’s pursuit of power at any cost.

    From this perspective, Trump’s threats against those whom he views as “the enemy from within” reveal his own nationalistic desire to turn on Americans who threaten his pursuit of power.

    Orwell’s writing suggests that voters should take such threats seriously.

    Mark Satta does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Nationalism is not patriotism: 3 insights from Orwell about Trump and the 2024 election – https://theconversation.com/nationalism-is-not-patriotism-3-insights-from-orwell-about-trump-and-the-2024-election-241883

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: People with blindness and low vision are squeezed by high costs of living − new research

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Zachary Morris, Associate Professor of Social Welfare, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)

    A young blind man prepares to board a Denver RTD light rail train in 2019. Robert Alexander/GettyImages

    Colin Wong, a blind Ph.D. student, can’t forget having to pay US$100 for an Uber when he needed to take a standardized test. There was no testing center in San Francisco, where he lived, that could accommodate his disability.

    That kind of expensive hassle isn’t unusual. It costs nearly $7,000 more per year to live in the U.S. with his disability, according to research I, a social work scholar, conducted with four experts at the American Foundation for the Blind – a nonprofit dedicated to promoting equality and inclusion for people with blindness or low vision.

    For our research, we looked at survey data from a representative sample of Americans, focusing on how people with visual impairments answered. We considered anyone who said they live with a vision disability – or said that they have a lot of trouble seeing or can’t see at all, even with glasses – as a person with low vision or blindness.

    We calculated that people with blindness or low vision spend, on average, 27% of their household income on expenses related to their disability – about $7,000 per year.

    Low-income Americans with disabilities are shouldering an even bigger burden. The people who took this survey and were earning less than $25,000 per year said they spent about 40% of their income on costs related to their disability, on average, compared with 16% for those with higher incomes.

    That leaves them with less money for other essentials such as food and housing. About 1 in 4 of the people we surveyed said they spent less on food to cover their expenses associated with their disability.

    And about 2 in 3 of the people we surveyed said they frequently go without goods and services they need, including medical care, assistive technologies and transportation to get to school or go to work.

    Why it matters

    Cost-of-living issues rank at the top of all Americans’ concerns, according to a recent Gallup survey. And people with disabilities, including those with physical or mental health conditions, tend to have more trouble making ends meet than the average person.

    That includes the roughly 7 million Americans with blindness or vision loss who are among the more than 1 in 4 people in this country with a disability.

    One reason for the higher costs of living is that people with disabilities tend to incur many other extra expenses, such as spending more on transportation, prepared foods and grocery delivery services. Others struggle to afford the prescription and over-the-counter drugs and supplements they need.

    Politicians and policymakers appear to be paying more attention to this problem, which my research team calls the “disability squeeze.” Vice President Kamala Harris, for example, announced in October 2024 a proposal to expand Medicare to cover the long-term care needs for older adults and people with disabilities.

    Denise Chamberlin and her guide dog, Ridley, emerge from a Toronto subway station.
    AP Photo/Business Wire

    What still isn’t known

    Our survey included 288 people with blindness or low vision. Studies with larger numbers of participants could greatly expand upon what’s known about this problem and what can be done about it.

    Expanding accessible public transit, making assistive technologies more affordable and increasing disability benefits might be enough for some people with disabilities to have an opportunity to thrive, but not for others.

    Future research could shed a brighter light on the cracks in the U.S. health and social welfare systems. For example, researchers could look into why people with health insurance from Medicaid or Medicare told us they had more unmet needs rather than fewer than those with coverage through private insurers. Other studies could examine how the disability squeeze affects the health and employment of people with disabilities over the long term.

    The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

    Zachary Morris’ research presented here is funded from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The contents of this survey do not necessarily represent the policy of the federal government or any government agency.

    – ref. People with blindness and low vision are squeezed by high costs of living − new research – https://theconversation.com/people-with-blindness-and-low-vision-are-squeezed-by-high-costs-of-living-new-research-241752

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Religion in the workplace is tricky – but employers and employees both lose when it becomes a total taboo

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Christopher P. Scheitle, Associate Professor of Sociology, West Virginia University

    Many offices make a point to celebrate diversity, but what does that look like when it comes to faith? FatCamera/E+ via Getty Images

    Since we spend so much of our lives at our jobs, it’s only natural that conversations with colleagues go beyond the work in front of us. People share interests and hobbies, family struggles, health concerns, and hopes or goals, from the silly to the serious.

    The topic of religion, however, can provoke anxiety. Many people might second what the Muslim CEO of a technology company told us: “If you want to express faith, do it! Just do it on your own time.” Uncertainty surrounding religion’s role in the workplace tends to lead to silence. Even among researchers who study workplaces, religion is often ignored.

    Yet for many people, faith is a core component of their identity – part of the “whole self” that employees are increasingly encouraged to bring to work. It’s an important piece of diversity but one that managers often tiptoe around. And for many Americans, faith is part of why they show up at their job each day: 1 in 5 consider their work a spiritual calling.

    We are social scientists who spent the past five years conducting research on the role of faith at work. Our findings – from more than 15,000 surveys with a nationally representative population, and nearly 300 in-depth interviews with some of those workers – confirm that there are many challenges when religion comes into the workplace. However, the costs of ignoring or suppressing workers’ faith often exceed those risks and challenges.

    Conflict and discrimination

    The most common concern we heard about bringing up religion in the workplace is that it will lead to conflict – including conflict from people trying to change each other’s beliefs. A Catholic woman who works in eldercare told us, “I think we shouldn’t talk about religion at work because that’s when the problems arise. I’m going to defend what I think, and they will defend what they think, their way of being, their religion.”

    Several other people we interviewed also expressed concerns that some forms of religious expression could make people uncomfortable, or even turn into harassment. A nonreligious security guard noted that during Christmas and Easter some of his Christian co-workers will say, “‘God bless,’ ‘Let’s pray,’ and stuff like that. It becomes very uneasy for me, uncomfortable.”

    Asking workers to bottle up their faith when they start the workday may seem like the easiest way to avoid these problems. Some workers we interviewed agreed with this sentiment. As one Muslim federal employee told us, “If I wear my religion as a badge on my shoulder, it will rub somebody the wrong way. So, why do that?”

    What’s more, silence around religion may seem like a neutral request. If no one expresses their faith, after all, then no one can be discriminated against, no one can be offended, and no one is seen as getting special treatment for their religious beliefs.

    Not so neutral

    There are a few problems with this logic, however.

    First, employers are legally required to provide reasonable accommodations tied to workers’ religion. Under most conditions, this includes things such as providing time off for religious observances. It also generally includes accommodating dress and grooming practices tied to one’s religion, such as wearing Sikh turbans or Christian crosses.

    What’s more, vague expectations about not acknowledging faith at work aren’t necessarily so neutral and often tend to disproportionately harm minority groups.

    In our survey, we asked individuals whether they “conceal their religious beliefs at work for fear of others’ perceptions.” Nineteen percent of Jewish workers, 51% of Hindus, 29% of Muslims and 28% of Buddhists said they did. By contrast, only 9% of evangelical Protestants, 15% of nonevangelical Protestants and 13% of Catholics reported that they conceal their faith at work.

    A Jewish project manager at an engineering firm told us how she has tried to conceal her faith from others: “The times that I did have to pray, I actually walked outside into a closed corner in the hallway to do it.”

    In the same survey, we asked individuals if they “have been treated unfairly” at work due to their “religion or non-religion.” Overall, 31% of U.S. adults agreed, and such experiences are most common among Muslim and Jewish workers.

    One Muslim woman we interviewed described how her colleagues made life extremely difficult for her, calling her names that were derisive, and said she’s received little support from her employer. Indeed, during one meeting her boss “got up and talked a lot about me being Muslim, and it was all negative.”

    Satisfaction and belonging

    Whether their co-workers or managers like it, many U.S. adults do see their work and faith as interwoven.

    One of our surveys, for example, asked workers whether they “turn to faith for support through stressful times in their work life.” Nearly half agreed.

    For many Americans, faith is also part of why they do their work in the first place. According to another one of our surveys, 20% of U.S. adults “see their work as a spiritual calling.” This percentage is higher among certain groups, such as evangelical Protestants and Muslims: 33% and 30%, respectively. Viewing work in spiritual terms is also more likely among women, at 24%, and Black workers, at 31%.

    And it is not just workers in explicitly religious jobs who view their work this way. One marine biologist explained to us, “I think that all truth is from God and, as a scientist, I try to understand and reveal the truth of how the world works.”

    Importantly, our research finds that individuals who feel a sense of spiritual connection to their work report greater job satisfaction, find more meaning in their work and better manage negative experiences they encounter in the workplace.

    Social science research has found that people’s well-being, social interactions and performance are harmed when they feel the need to suppress an important part of themselves within a group or organization. In other words, everyone suffers when individuals are not allowed to bring their whole selves to work.

    Welcome at work

    Despite such evidence, our research finds that many organizations are not taking even basic steps to accommodate individuals’ religious lives.

    In one survey, we asked workers whether their “workplace provides accommodations that allow people to practice their religion.” Almost one-fifth of workers disagreed. This percentage was highest among Muslim workers: 54%.

    Workers appreciate when their employers take active steps to let employees know that religious accommodations are available and that religious expression in general is not forbidden. Having upfront conversations about what is or is not appropriate – not only legally but socially – can go a long way toward setting boundaries.

    A Muslim optometry technician we interviewed, for example, recounted how appreciative she was when her boss told her, “If you ever do prayers or anything, feel free to go to that room – it can be your space, you can leave your mat in there.”

    Ideally, however, organizations would take active steps to establish and communicate policies to all employees, rather than reacting to situations as they arise.

    While we recognize the challenges when it comes to addressing individuals’ faith in the workplace, proactively engaging in conversations about the appropriate role of religion at work is better for workers and workplaces.

    Christopher P. Scheitle receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

    Denise Daniels receives funding from the Lilly Endowment.

    Elaine Howard Ecklund receives funding from the Templeton Religion Trust and the Lilly Endowment.

    – ref. Religion in the workplace is tricky – but employers and employees both lose when it becomes a total taboo – https://theconversation.com/religion-in-the-workplace-is-tricky-but-employers-and-employees-both-lose-when-it-becomes-a-total-taboo-239996

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: What the presidential candidates have done − and where they stand − on education

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Robert Shand, Assistant Professor of Education, American University

    Donald Trump and Kamala Harris present dueling platforms for U.S. education. Getty Images

    When it comes to education policy, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris not only have mostly distinct visions but also distinct track records.

    Harris is calling for a wider role for the federal government and larger investment to improve educational opportunities. Trump is focused on reducing the federal role in education and relying upon states, localities and parents to make educational decisions and investments.

    At the same time, there are some commonalities, including the growing importance of career and technical education. What follows is a review of what the two candidates have done in the world of education while in office.

    On higher education

    The candidates share a concern about the high cost of higher education. But they have different visions for how to address those costs. As California’s attorney general, Harris secured a US$1.1 billion judgment against Corinthian Colleges for false advertising. The judgment provides refunds for students who were misled by claims about job placement rates, program offerings and military affiliations.

    Whereas Harris has pursued for-profit colleges for fraud, Trump has focused on promoting innovation by reducing regulation and expanding alternatives to traditional higher education. This includes making it easier for online, faith-based and for-profit institutions to be accredited.

    As part of the Biden administration, Harris has pursued student loan debt forgiveness. She has also strongly signaled her support for expanding access to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. This follows her having co-sponsored legislation for debt-free college as a United States senator.

    The administration has faced challenges to the constitutionality of the loan forgiveness initiative on the grounds that the president does not have the authority under present law to unilaterally cancel debt. Opponents have also said any debt forgiveness would have to be authorized by Congress. Critics say further that loan forgiveness does not address the root causes of rising costs of higher education. Loan forgiveness could cause further price increases if institutions thought that students would care less about the cost of college in anticipation of having their debt forgiven.

    Trump created two entities to advise the federal government on workforce development and training needs: a council of federal officials and an advisory board of business leaders.

    In 2019, Trump signed a bipartisan bill to make permanent $250 million in annual federal funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs, that was previously subject to annual renewal.

    Harris has called for reducing degree requirements for federal jobs. She also promoted job training programs as an alternative to incarceration in her Back on Track initiative as attorney general of California from 2011 to 2017.

    As attorney general and then a U.S. senator from California, she called for greater oversight of advertising by for-profit colleges and debt forgiveness for former students of for-profit colleges. She also supported expanding federal aid to public and nonprofit colleges, including free community colleges and large grants to HBCUs.

    On K-12 education

    The 2024 Trump campaign platform calls for sweeping changes to K-12 education policy. This includes universal school choice and more parental control over schools, which would entail allowing parents across the country to use educational funds to pay for private school through vouchers or tax credits if they chose. It also features a drastically reduced federal role in education. In fact, Trump wants to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. Many of these plans, such as direct election of school principals by parents, are unlikely to come to fruition due to the fact that schools in the United States are mainly under state and local control.

    Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, Trump expanded college savings 529 plans to allow parents to save up to $10,000 per year tax-free for K-12 private school tuition.

    While president, Trump made several other proposals that could foreshadow his future plans. These proposals include creating a $5 billion federal tax credit for private school tuition, cutting the budget for the U.S. Department of Education in annual budget requests and turning the Title I allocation for supplemental services for students in poverty, such as smaller classes or tutoring, into a block grant to states.

    The Biden administration has sought to expand federal funding for full-service community schools.
    Full-service community schools are public schools that receive additional funding and staffing to help address the academic needs of students as well as factors outside of school, such as access to health care and healthy food, that affect learning.

    The Biden administration also expanded Title IX gender discrimination protections to include sexual orientation and gender identity.

    As a candidate for the presidential nomination in 2019, Vice President Harris also called for federal funding to provide teachers with an average of a $13,500 raise, though she has not made a similar call in this campaign.

    As California attorney general, Harris made reducing chronic absenteeism a signature issue when she led the In School and On Track anti-truancy initiative. This initiative included additional funding to districts and schools to use data to better understand and monitor absenteeism and to communicate with parents about the importance of school attendance.

    The data and communication-focused approach was an evolution from her initial approach as San Francisco district attorney, which placed more emphasis on prosecuting parents for truancy.

    On early childhood learning

    Neither Trump nor Harris has a significant record of tangible actions when it comes to early childhood education. Project 2025, which Trump has disavowed but was written by close allies of the former president, calls for eliminating Head Start, a federally funded, locally run, early childhood learning program to support low-income families.

    Although Trump made several similar proposals to cut funding for the Child Care and Development Block Grant by about 5%, they were not passed into law by Congress.

    Harris has made calls for free, universal prekindergarten for all 4-year-olds, but the Biden administration was not able to get its early childhood proposals through Congress.

    More recent studies of some universal pre-K programs have raised questions about how long the academic gains from early childhood programs persist. On net, however, the evidence from the highest-quality studies for high-quality early childhood programs in general, and the Head Start program in particular, suggests that they improve cognitive skills among children.

    Robert Shand does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. What the presidential candidates have done − and where they stand − on education – https://theconversation.com/what-the-presidential-candidates-have-done-and-where-they-stand-on-education-239555

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Scholar’s new rap album seeks to turn the tables on the ‘masters’ from the Old South

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By A.D. Carson, Associate Professor of Hip-Hop, University of Virginia

    Could the path to the Ph.D. run through the recording studio? Ratchapon Supprasert via iStock / Getty Images Plus

    Usually when a rap artist comes out with a new album, it’s released by a record label as part of their career as an entertainer. For Dr. A.D. Carson, a professor of hip-hop at the University of Virginia, his latest album – “Owning My Masters (Mastered): The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions” – represents a capstone in his academic career.

    Published and released in October 2024 by University of Michigan Press, the album and digital archive features two volumes of hip-hop music, an annotated timeline, several videos and a digital book. The album – originally submitted to Clemson University in South Carolina as Carson’s doctoral dissertation – has been mastered. In the following interview with The Conversation U.S., Carson explains the significance of the project and what it means for hip-hop in the world of academe.

    ‘Owning My Masters’ seems like a deep play on words. Is it?

    Yes. The Latin word “magister” was used to describe a master or teacher in ancient Rome. I earned a master’s degree before enrolling in my doctoral program, so I own that. People probably know that the final step in the process of composing an album is called mastering. In that process, a master version of the recording is created. This is what gets duplicated and released on streaming services, vinyl or whatever way you receive music.

    It’s not always guaranteed that an artist owns the rights to those recordings, but I own all of my music.

    Also, the album was written in South Carolina at Clemson University, which is located on a former plantation owned by the slaveholding U.S. politician John C. Calhoun. Buildings there are named for people who had owned, enslaved and trafficked people; fought in the Civil War to preserve the right to traffic people; and lynched Black people. Earning a terminal degree from a place with that kind of reprehensible history seemed like a way to figuratively own those so-called slave masters and so-called masters and teachers.

    Who is your audience for this album?

    I’m always thinking about multiple audiences. For lovers of hip-hop, the album demonstrates the power and promise I feel listening to albums that have influenced me. For academics, I believe it is the future of research. Academic credentials have been used by folks to perpetuate the idea that expertise looks and sounds a certain way, and this project infiltrates that system to disprove that idea.

    If you’re interested in learning about hip-hop, academia and how arguments are made, the album can be instructive, challenging, entertaining and educational.

    The album had to pass through a doctoral dissertation defense committee and then academic peer review. But before then, I posted drafts on SoundCloud to get feedback from regular folks who use that site to listen to new music.

    What kind of themes does the album address?

    My Ph.D. is in rhetorics, communication and information designs, so it’s also about rap rhetorics – including emphasis on the local and how hip-hop can preserve information like histories and counter-histories.

    Since I had moved to Clemson, and was feeling anxiety about leaving home in Illinois, I wrote “Dissertation (Part 1: The Introduction)” early on in the process. And because I lived in that South Carolina college town, “See the Stripes” is a song about Clemson’s history and its present. The song and its video moved through Clemson’s communities, but then, as protests were happening on campuses across the world, it found national and global audiences with whom the subject matter resonates. When students were finally able to get Calhoun’s name removed from the honors college in 2020, they acknowledged their work was continuing efforts since “See the Stripes.”

    More generally, the album is about form and content. With its form, it demonstrates knowledge production using hip-hop creative and compositional practice. The contents interrogate ideas of home, history, historical imagination, citizenship, political contradictions, race and humanness.

    The album is presented in chronological order from the time I arrived on campus in 2013 until I finished my coursework and submitted the 34-song project to my dissertation committee.

    Owning My Masters (Mastered) Vol. One by A.D. Carson

    Owning My Masters (Mastered) Vol. Two by A.D. Carson

    How would you measure its success?

    I would say earning a Ph.D., earning tenure and having the album count as my academic work qualify as success. Those are things that sound kind of selfish, but I think are incredibly significant for hip-hop and for the ways we think about expertise and success in the culture.

    To me, success is being able to make a living creating challenging and thought-provoking music that doesn’t have to abide by traditional notions of success like sales charts or commercial music awards. I also measure success by the inquiries and applications of students who want to do similar kinds of critical thinking and making. When those people are able to launch and sustain careers, that’s a measure of success in my eyes as well.

    Why haven’t we seen more albums in academia?

    Change in academia comes at a glacial pace, it seems.

    Audiences associate expertise, especially regarding subjects that are considered academic, with how people have demonstrated their understanding of the matters in writing, like traditional theses, dissertations, books and essays. I believe this is connected to the histories in the U.S. that link credibility with formal education and literacy. This is difficult to separate from the history of Black folks being legally prohibited from learning to read.

    While music has long been one of the ways information is recorded and passed from one generation to the next, in my experience, music itself is still not taken as seriously as a form of scholarship as writing books or essays about music.

    These previously excluded forms of scholarship can change the ways people regard academia. In my mind, music sits alongside other scholarly forms that emphasize academic prose. I believe universities should make space and resources available for students to explore it the same way. More generally, I think citing more albums as scholarship – the same way journal articles and academic monographs are cited – would also be transformative.

    A.D. Carson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Scholar’s new rap album seeks to turn the tables on the ‘masters’ from the Old South – https://theconversation.com/scholars-new-rap-album-seeks-to-turn-the-tables-on-the-masters-from-the-old-south-241895

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: The ‘Courage Tour’ is attempting to get Christians to vote for Trump − and focused on defeating ‘demons’

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Michael E. Heyes, Associate Professor and Chair of Religion, Lycoming College

    Evangelist Lance Wallnau addresses people at the ‘Courage Tour’ rally. Michael E. Heyes, CC BY

    As a scholar of religion, I attended the “Courage Tour,” a series of religious-political rallies, when it made a stop in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, from Sept. 27-28, 2024.

    From what I observed, the various speakers on the tour used conservative talking points – such as the threat of communism and LGBTQ+ “ideologies” taking over education – and gave them a demonic twist. They told people that diabolical forces had overtaken America, and they needed to expel them by ensuring Donald Trump was elected.

    The tour is attempting to get those Christians to vote for Trump. The tour has moved through several battleground states such as Arizona, Michigan and Georgia, drawing several thousand people at every site.

    The tour is not only focused on defeating Democrats but also on defeating demons. The idea that demons exert a hold over the material world is a key feature of the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, worldview. The NAR is a loose group of like-minded charismatic Christian churches and religious leaders – sometimes termed “prophets” – who want to see Christians dominate all walks of life.

    As someone who recently finished a book on the intersection of demons and politics, “Demons in the USA: From the Anti-Spiritualists to QAnon,” I was eager to see this combination for myself. I believe it would be a mistake to think that the New Apostolic Reformation is a fringe group with no real influence.

    The influence and reach

    The group has an associated nonprofit organization known as Ziklag – named for a town in the Hebrew Bible that is an important site associated with David’s kingship – with deep pockets for the movement’s goals. A ProPublica investigation found that the group had already spent US$12 million “to mobilize Republican-leaning voters and purge more than a million people from the rolls in key swing states, aiming to tilt the 2024 election in favor of former President Donald Trump.”

    The Southern Poverty Law Center calls the New Apostolic Reformation “the greatest threat to U.S. democracy that you have never heard of.”

    The diffuse nature of NAR membership and its rapid growth make it difficult to gauge followers: Estimates have placed the number of NAR adherents between 3 million and 33 million, but individuals who may not label themselves as part of the NAR might nevertheless agree with the group’s theology.

    Moreover, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance’s presence at the meeting I attended is also a tacit and significant endorsement for this group.

    The ‘Seven Mountain Mandate’

    According to NAR’s theology, there are “seven mountains” that govern areas of worldly influence, and Christians are destined to occupy all of them. These mountains are religion, government, family, education, media, entertainment and business.

    Known as the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” this “prophecy” first rose to prominence in 2013 with the publication of “Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate,” written by Bill Johnson, lead pastor of Bethel Church in Redding, California, and member of the NAR, and Lance Wallnau, NAR prophet and one of the founders of the Courage Tour. In the book, the Seven Mountain Mandate is trumpeted as a message received directly from God.

    The NAR perceives the majority of these mountains as currently occupied by diabolical spiritual forces. To counter these forces, the NAR engages in “spiritual warfare,” which are acts of Christian prayer that are used to defeat or drive out demons.

    As religion scholar Sean McCloud writes, these prayers can be taken from “handbooks, workshops and hands-on participation in deliverance sessions.” Deliverance sessions involve diagnosing and expelling demons from an individual.

    Alternatively, it is not uncommon for pastors to incorporate spiritual warfare into church services. For example, in a much-reported sermon, Paula White-Cain, the former spiritual adviser to Trump, commanded all “satanic pregnancies to miscarry.” In the sermon’s context, satanic pregnancies were not literal pregnancies. Instead, White-Cain was praying for the failure of satanic plots “conceived” by the devil.

    In NAR theology, all Christians are embattled by demons, and spiritual warfare is a necessary part of life. As scholar of religion André Gagné writes, the NAR sees spiritual warfare as happening on three “levels.”

    The ground level occurs in a case of individual exorcism or deliverance, a kind of “one-on-one” battle with demons. The second level is the occult level, in which believers seek to counter what they believe to be demonic movements such as shamanism and New Age thought. Finally, there is the strategic level in which the movement does battle with powerful spirits whom they believe control geographic areas at the behest of Satan.

    Friday night on the Courage Tour.

    The Courage Tour

    The Courage Tour is part of a strategic-level act of spiritual warfare: Stumping for Trump is really about exerting Christian influence over the “government mountain” that followers of the NAR believe to be occupied by the devil.

    According to the speakers on the tour, America is in trouble: It is currently being run by “the Left,” or Democrats, a group that is slowly pushing the U.S. toward communism, a system of government in which private property ceases to exist and the means of production are communally owned.

    It claims that the Left wants to see this shift occur because it is populated by “cultural Marxists.” This is part of a far-right conspiracy theory that suggests all progressive political movements are indebted to the ideas of Karl Marx, whose Communist Manifesto is most closely associated with communism.

    In more extreme forms of communism, nation-states disappear – an idea reflected in speakers’ frequent criticism of “globalism,” which was generally defined as a single, worldwide governmental structure. The group rejects globalism on the grounds that God instituted nation-states as a divinely ordained form of government.

    Wallnau described globalism as a sign of the beast and the end of days, and claimed that “the intent of that Marxist element in our country is to collapse our borders.”

    Promotional sign on the Courage Tour for My Faith Votes, an organization that encourages voters to vote biblically.
    Michael E. Heyes, CC BY

    Demonizing queerness

    The speakers further claimed that this demonic Marxism was perverting the educational system in the United States. For example, numerous speakers criticized schools for supposedly indoctrinating or “evangelizing” children with “LGBTQ ideologies.”

    Wallnau even suggested that the “trans movement” began “in the days of Noah” when the fallen angels of Genesis 6 married human women and had hybrid children. This echoes a discussion Wallnau and Rick Renner had on the “Lance Wallnau Show,” linking such “ideologies” to fallen angels and the Apocalypse.

    This negative view of nontraditional gender and sexual orientations is a long-lived feature of the group. John Weaver, a scholar of religion, notes in his book “The New Apostolic Reformation” that the group’s ideas are indebted to conservative theologian Rousas John Rushdoony, who supported the death penalty for homosexuals.

    Likewise, religion scholar Damon T. Berry writes that members of the movement believe that “demonic spirits” are “acting to subvert the will of God through aspects of culture like the toleration of homosexuality, abortion, addiction, poverty and political correctness.”

    Wallnau encouraged the audience on the Courage Tour to “fight for your families because I don’t want to leave behind a demonic train wreck for my children.”

    As hard as it is to believe, one of the most important questions of the election might well be – how many Americans believe in demons?

    Michael E. Heyes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. The ‘Courage Tour’ is attempting to get Christians to vote for Trump − and focused on defeating ‘demons’ – https://theconversation.com/the-courage-tour-is-attempting-to-get-christians-to-vote-for-trump-and-focused-on-defeating-demons-241335

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Why vote for Harris or Trump? A cheat sheet on the candidates’ records, why their supporters like them and why picking one or the other makes sense

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Amy Lieberman, Politics + Society Editor, The Conversation

    Voters cast their ballots in Dearborn, Mich., on Oct. 29, 2024. Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

    If you are still undecided and mulling your pick for president, there are clear differences between Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris that are important to understand.

    The Conversation has published stories from more than a dozen scholars looking at the records of the two candidates.

    We had an anthropologist provide our readers with a window into why both Trump and Harris supporters favor their presidential pick.

    And we have also looked at why, even if you don’t like either candidate, it still doesn’t make sense to sit out the election.

    Here is a roundup of stories to help you evaluate the candidates:

    Kamala Harris and running mate Tim Walz campaign in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Oct. 28, 2024.
    Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

    Harris’ and Trump’s records

    It’s no surprise that Harris and Trump have contrasting records on policy issues like LGBTQ+ rights and gun violence. The differences don’t stop there.

    While Harris has consistently supported protecting and expanding abortion rights, Trump took actions while president that made it harder for people to get an abortion, explains legal scholar Rachel Rebouché.

    And while Harris has consistently opposed the death penalty, Trump has supported it, explains political science scholar Austin Sarat.

    In other cases, their differences are not as clear-cut. Both candidates have supported restricting immigration to the U.S., writes immigration scholar William McCorkle. And both of them tried to lower drug prices, writes pharmacy practice scholar C. Michael White.

    Here are some stories to explain the candidates’ records on other issues: education, space policy, the Ukraine war, artificial intelligence, science research funding, clean energy, drug prices, health care, oil and gas production, foreign policy and labor.

    Donald Trump and running mate JD Vance appear at a 9/11 memorial event in New York City on Sept. 11, 2024.
    Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

    Why people like Trump and Harris

    Alex Hinton, an anthropologist who researches both the far right and political polarization in the U.S., helped answer why, after all of the controversies and alleged wrongdoing, people still support Trump.

    “Many people have thoughtful reasons for voting for Trump, even if their reasoning – as is also true for those on the left – is often inflamed by populist polarizers and media platforms,” Hinton writes.

    There are a few central factors that keep Trump’s supporters loyal. These include the fact that some people recall – whether accurately or not – having more money when Trump was president, and that the economy seemed better. They are upset about immigration. And some supporters like his outlandish persona.

    And then there’s the other side to understand: Why people are voting for Harris. Hinton explained that many people deeply dislike and distrust Trump, as well as the extreme direction they think he can take the country.

    “In contrast, they contend that Harris combines steady leadership with a message of change, calm, honesty and hope for a better future,” he writes.

    Harris’ support of abortion rights and health care, as well as her commitment to international alliances and bipartisan governing, are other reasons people want her as their president.

    “Some voters also support Harris because they see her as a candidate of change,” Hinton writes. After Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee, “voters across a range of demographics were immediately galvanized by her relative youth, biracial identity, articulateness and positive message of change and possibility, as opposed to fear.”

    A woman drops off her ballot in Norwalk, Calif., on Oct. 28, 2024.
    Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

    Why it still makes sense to vote

    It’s possible that none of this information resonates with undecided voters and that they are considering backing a third-party candidate instead, or not voting at all.

    But the logic that an individual vote won’t matter anyway is not accurate, according to behavioral economics scholar Daniel F. Stone.

    Every single vote matters, especially in an election like this one that is incredibly close in all of the important swing states, Stone says. This matters if the difference between Harris and Trump is just 5,000 votes in a state like Pennsylvania, for example.

    “So, if the 10,000 unhappy voters do vote for one of the two major-party candidates, they can swing the election,” Stone writes.

    Even if someone boycotts an election and doesn’t support either of the two viable candidates, “One of them is going to win whether you like it or not,” Stone writes.

    .

    – ref. Why vote for Harris or Trump? A cheat sheet on the candidates’ records, why their supporters like them and why picking one or the other makes sense – https://theconversation.com/why-vote-for-harris-or-trump-a-cheat-sheet-on-the-candidates-records-why-their-supporters-like-them-and-why-picking-one-or-the-other-makes-sense-242437

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Mining must become more responsible and sustainable. Where hi-tech solutions fit in

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Rennie Naidoo, Professor of Information Systems, University of the Witwatersrand

    Digital technologies can make mining more sustainable. Sunshine Seeds/Shutterstock/For editorial use only

    If you visit a commercial mining operation anywhere in the world today, some sights and sounds – workers descending in elevators to underground shafts, the roar of truck engines – will be much the same as they have been for decades.

    But, like many other industries, mining is changing. Digital mining involves the use of digital technologies to make mining operations more efficient, safer, and sustainable. This industry emerged about a decade ago and has developed quickly over the past few years. This uptick is the result of recent advances in sensor technology, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), including machine learning.

    However, while technology improves, old problems persist. Large-scale mining causes massive deforestation in regions like the Amazon. It also threatens and displaces communities, as in the case of Brazil’s Xikrin and Kayapó people. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the mining of cobalt, copper and coltan (all crucial for modern technology) contaminates local water supplies and puts workers – including children – in danger.



    Read more:
    What coltan mining in the DRC costs people and the environment

    Is it time to make mining obsolete? This is not a realistic solution, at least not in the near future. Many modern technologies, like smartphones, electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines, depend on minerals extracted through mining. The global move towards renewable energy and low-carbon technologies means demand for minerals like lithium and cobalt is rising.

    So, while mining has environmental costs, it’s also critical in the shift to a greener economy. And mining is economically important in many parts of the world. In African countries it supports millions of jobs and contributes significantly to GDP.

    This is why sustainable mining is crucial. I am a professor of information systems. I investigate the complex interactions between technology, people and organisations in achieving sustainability goals. In a recent paper with a co-author, I examined how digital technologies could help mining operations to balance economic objectives with environmental and social sustainability.

    The findings make it clear that digital technologies can transform mining practices and achieve sustainability goals at the same time.

    Economic outcomes

    Our paper took the form of a case study. We interviewed professionals from a leading digital mining solutions company. It has operations in South Africa, Australia, Brazil, Chile and the United States. The interviewees were engineers, senior managers and executives. They offered a glimpse into how their large-scale mining clients were using digital technologies like automated haul trucks and collision avoidance systems.

    We wanted to know how their clients saw the role of digital technology in balancing business and other goals. They outlined some successful cases and others where companies were struggling to align all their aims.

    It was clear that the company and its clients recognised the importance of safety and environmental issues in their work. But they saw these issues through the lens of business sustainability. For instance, while some mining companies pursued safety improvements, they did it primarily to boost productivity and bring down costs.

    One interviewee gave the example of collision avoidance systems. Companies valued these because they reduced downtime and improved productivity. They focused on immediate business needs.

    A balancing act

    It’s time for mining companies that are serious about sustainability to shift their focus. Rather than simply looking to make immediate profits, they need to consider environmental and social impacts – and the role digital technology can play.

    As a simple example, AI can predict when machinery is likely to fail. This allows companies to carry out timely maintenance. Equipment lifespan is extended. Downtime and repair costs are reduced. And worker safety is improved because there are fewer unexpected breakdowns. This is the kind of sustainable approach, underpinned by digital technology, that can help mining companies tick all the right boxes.

    Mining leaders must not exclude employees and stakeholders when considering these issues. Environmental advocates have a role to play, too: companies must work with these groups and with local communities. A shared understanding of how digital technologies can meet both financial and sustainability targets is key.

    Mining companies are more likely to change if there are clear financial benefits or penalties tied to sustainability. Governments can help by introducing stricter environmental regulations and offering incentives to adopt sustainable digital technologies. In South Africa, for instance, there are tax incentives and subsidies to encourage the use of renewable energy in mining. These measures, expanded recently in response to the country’s energy crisis, have sparked significant investment in solar power.



    Read more:
    Africa doesn’t have a choice between economic growth and protecting the environment: how they can go hand in hand

    When paired with digital monitoring systems, renewable energy solutions can enhance efficiency by optimising energy consumption and reducing carbon emissions. Technologies like AI-driven energy management systems can help mines integrate renewable sources with less energy wastage. Thus, tax breaks or subsidies for digital solutions that support green energy adoption could motivate companies to embrace greener and more tech-driven mining practices.

    Consumers and investors, meanwhile, should invest in those mining companies that demonstrate responsible practices. Ethical investment funds need to support companies with strong environmental, social, and governance credentials.

    Rennie Naidoo 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.

    – ref. Mining must become more responsible and sustainable. Where hi-tech solutions fit in – https://theconversation.com/mining-must-become-more-responsible-and-sustainable-where-hi-tech-solutions-fit-in-240558

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Africa’s flagship universities have a proud history – but are they serving local communities?

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By James Ransom, Researcher: societal challenges, UCL

    Students pictured in 1955 in a reading room at what is today the University of Ibadan. Flagship universities have long histories. Evans/Three Lions/Getty Images

    Universities play a number of crucial roles in society. They educate students, research solutions to problems and serve as spaces for national debate. This is especially true for large public institutions, often referred to as flagship universities. A number were launched with great fanfare around the time of a country’s independence from colonial rule. They were tasked with driving national development by training skilled graduates to fill workforce gaps and conducting applied research to address societal challenges. Many have done well in their historic national missions. But how are they performing today when it comes to serving their local communities?

    Higher education researcher James Ransom set out to answer this question in his new book, Revisiting Africa’s Flagship Universities: Local, National and International Dynamics. He analysed local engagement at ten African flagship universities: Ethiopia’s University of Addis Ababa; Makerere University in Uganda; the universities of Ghana, Namibia, Rwanda, Mauritius, Zambia and Zimbabwe; the University of Cape Town in South Africa and Nigeria’s University of Ibadan. He tells The Conversation Africa what he learned.

    What is a flagship university?

    They are pillars of the nation: their campuses are intertwined with history as sites of protest and revolution; their researchers lead the way in publications and research; their students are tomorrow’s leaders.

    Sometimes there is one flagship in a country. Sometimes a country will be home to several. In Nigeria, the University of Ibadan is joined by the University of Nigeria at Nsukka.

    Small, specialist institutions and private universities all play important roles in national higher education systems. But flagships are the trendsetters. They often mentor new universities by seconding senior staff to lead them, and helping design the curricula. Their staff sit on government committees. They have international partnerships and projects.

    The term “flagship” has been used elsewhere in the world, not just in post-colonial countries. In the book I focused on Anglophone sub-Saharan Africa, including countries that were not traditional colonial states, such as Ethiopia.



    Read more:
    The untold story of how Africa’s flagship universities have advanced

    What made you write this book and why now?

    In the UK, where I live, we have seen a shift in the expectations placed upon universities.

    The “redbrick” universities, such as Birmingham and Liverpool, are a good example. They were founded in the 19th century to meet local needs. Then they developed strong global ambitions over the next hundred years, excelling in world-leading research and innovation.

    During the past couple of decades, the local question returned: what are you doing to serve your local community? The redbricks (and many others) have responded – nudged along by national policies and frameworks – with serious programmes of civic engagement. These include projects designed with communities, seconding staff into local planning organisations, and opening up their campuses to communities – from 5-a-side football pitches to photography exhibitions.

    The shift I witnessed in the UK, and mirrored in my work across Europe and Canada, made me wonder: has a similar shift, from a historic national mission to a local one, taken place for African universities?

    The question is timely. Societal challenges may be national or global in scale. But they need local knowledge and local partnerships to solve at the local level. This means universities working with local government, which is a key focus of my work. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has calculated that 100 of the 169 UN Sustainable Development Goal targets can only be achieved if local governments are involved. Universities can play an important supporting role.

    What did you find?

    It is clear that flagship universities’ local work is growing and will continue to grow. For instance, Addis Ababa University established a railway engineering centre to train engineers to maintain the city’s light rail transit system, with students employed by the Ethiopian Railway Corporation. The University of Ghana runs satellite campuses in all ten regional capitals. This allows it to reach remote areas and to establish a local presence in different regions.

    Successful projects often emerge from deep links with local communities. Ibadan has worked closely with a few communities over many decades. These “field laboratories” include a community health programme in the village of Ibarapa, which began in the early 1960s with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and technical support from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

    The programme has trained hundreds of medical students in community medicine through practical work in rural areas, while also improving health services and conducting research on health issues in the Ibarapa community. An example is studying and addressing neglected tropical diseases such as onchocerciasis (river blindness) and guinea worm.

    In 2020 the University of Ibadan signed a memorandum of understanding with the local government on the Ibarapa programme. Over half a century after it began, local partnerships continue to sustain the programme.

    However, a national focus continues to dominate at all ten institutions I studied. This is perhaps best illustrated by the University of Rwanda. Local engagement activity is secondary to the nation’s development strategy spearheaded by its Vision 2050, an ambitious effort to become an upper-middle income country in the next 25 years.

    There is some local activity, of course. Students provide health services to the community, staff run community workshops on informal housing, and there are plans to open model farms to showcase irrigation and agricultural mechanisation. But all of this ultimately serves the national vision.

    Rwanda is a small country, but this finding – of national priorities dominating at the expense of local programmes – was consistent across all the flagships I studied, in large countries like Nigeria as well as in other small countries like Mauritius and Namibia.

    What can other universities on the continent learn from your findings?

    Flagships are complex institutions, with rich histories and often complicated relationships with government. They are survivors, skilled at balancing multiple roles. There is much that other universities can learn from flagships, and that flagships can learn from each other – and more of these partnerships are needed.

    But one senior staff member at a flagship university told me that many African university heads

    feel rather oppressed by the narratives from higher education leaders in other parts of the world

    They were talking about international benchmarking, unequal research partnerships, and models of “best practice”. These constrain the local role of flagships, creating identikit institutions. The result is a race to local irrelevance. Relevance can only emerge from an approach that reflects the local and national context.

    Universities that capture the work they do locally, effectively communicate this, and can demonstrate how it is relevant to society, will be in a good place to chart their own path as a pillar of the nation.

    James Ransom 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.

    – ref. Africa’s flagship universities have a proud history – but are they serving local communities? – https://theconversation.com/africas-flagship-universities-have-a-proud-history-but-are-they-serving-local-communities-240813

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Six poems that tell stories about monsters and monstrosity

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jon Stone, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Anglia Ruskin University

    Master1305/Shutterstock

    Poetry isn’t a medium typically associated with towering beasts. Lyric poems tend to be short, tender and concerned with minor everyday incidents. That, or abstract concepts like love and death. Poems also tend to be thought of, wrongly or not, as true accounts – the inverse of creature feature films with preposterous special effects.

    But poets, like everyone else, live in a world of disastrous events bigger than themselves. And the monster – particularly the giant monster – is an archetype that goes right back to ancient myth.

    Talos, the bronze guardian of Crete, and Humbaba, the ogre of the Epic of Gilgamesh, are just two dangerous titans of literary history. It’s tempting to think that today we know enough about our surroundings to no longer be awed by the possibility of giants. But the truth is that there is still much that makes us feel small and vulnerable. Writing about huge monsters is one way of confronting that.

    Two different anthologies of monster poetry are published this month in the UK. Ten Poets Defend Their Cities from Giant, Strange Beasts is edited by myself and Kirsten Irving and published by Sidekick Books. In it, poets envisage the outcomes of giant monster attacks on London, Cambridge, Glasgow and Liverpool, among other cities. These confrontations are frequently surreal, or representations of other kinds of epic battle.

    Alex Adams and Aaron Kent’s Devastation Songs, meanwhile, is a compilation of writing about kaiju, the Japanese term for gargantuan fantasy creatures. In the foreword, Adams writes about how the monster movie is often used as a vehicle for “powerfully resonant social and political ideas”, pointing to recent Oscar winner Godzilla Minus One (2024) as an example.

    Here are six more poems that deal in different ways with giant monsters:

    1. Beowulf

    Beowulf is an Anglo-Saxon epic poem about the defeat of Grendel – a creature whose exact form is still debated. Depending on which translation you read, Grendel is either a “grim demon”, a berserker, a “miscreated thing in man’s form”, or a “horrible stranger”.

    Two things are certain, though: he is very large, and he is a violent murderer who must be destroyed.



    Read more:
    Publishing Tolkien’s Beowulf translation does him a disservice

    2. La Géante (The Giantess) by Charles Baudelaire

    This poem is from Baudelaire’s collection Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1840-1867), which was dubbed “an insult to public decency” on publication.

    The Giantess reflects some of the book’s controversial themes, revelling in erotic fascination. Far from opposing the giantess, the poem’s narrator wants to see her “grow without restraint”, imagining an expedition across her vast body. Here, Baudelaire proposes monstrosity as a realm of wonder and temptation.

    The Jabberwock, as illustrated by John Tenniel, (1871).
    Wiki Commons

    3. Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll

    One of Carroll’s (1832-1989) most famous poems, Jabberwocky is teeming with nonsense words (manxome, whiffling, burbled). This strange language keeps the titular Jabberwock obscured even as its fiery approach and defeat is recounted.

    It makes for a faithful representation of monstrosity as a quality: we can perceive it, dream up words for it, even kill it, but we can never fully understand it.

    4. The Man-Moth by Elizabeth Bishop

    The epigraph to The Man-Moth explains that it was inspired by a misspelling of the word “mammoth”. Bishop’s man-moth isn’t necessarily a giant, but several lines allude to his having a giant’s perspective (“The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat”, “He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky”).

    He is a sad, lonely creature who sheds a tear at the end of the poem. Bishop often wrote about the darkness in the human psyche, and her take on the subway-dwelling city beast is an allegory for urban alienation.

    5. The Loch Ness Monster’s Song by Edwin Morgan

    Scottish poet Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) specialised in linguistic play. The Loch Ness Monster’s Song is almost unintelligible – a brief burst of transcribed watery noises. But it could easily be a poem written in another language.

    It challenges us to recognise that what we call “monstrous” might just be unfamiliar – not a threat, but an opportunity for connection.

    6. Dragons by Matthew Francis

    Every line of this poem, from Francis’ 2001 collection of the same title, ends in the word “dragons”. But the narrative is one of failing to find a single dragon.

    This contrast is used to illustrate how monsters and creatures of myth loom large in our minds primarily as the result of our imaginations. In other words, we invent them to fill the gaps in reality. We need them, because without them there are too many clues pointing nowhere.

    The poem isn’t available to read online, but you can read my own pastiche of it (framed as a “DVD extra”).


    Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

    Jon Stone is an editor at Sidekick Books.

    – ref. Six poems that tell stories about monsters and monstrosity – https://theconversation.com/six-poems-that-tell-stories-about-monsters-and-monstrosity-239335

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Ali Smith’s new novel Gliff is a dystopian nightmare with flashes of fairytale enchantment

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sarah Annes Brown, Professor of English Literature, Anglia Ruskin University

    Ali Smith’s Gliff is set “once upon a time, not very far from now”. It is a kind of fairytale of the future in which two children, Briar and Rose, navigate a world which seems increasingly baffling and hostile.

    Gliff is the first of a planned pair of novels – the second to be called Glyph. Although the two words sound identical, their meanings are quite different. The Scottish word “gliff” means a shock, fright or sudden glimpse. A “glyph”, meanwhile, is a written character or symbol. There’s similarly insistent wordplay in Gliff. It reflects its preoccupation with how meaning is created – and destroyed.

    Smith’s latest novel shares many of the same concerns as her recent Seasonal Quartet (2016-2020): the effects of climate change, the plight of refugees, the growth of intolerance and authoritarianism. But Gliff is set in a dystopian Britain where all these problems have intensified in frightening ways. Smith therefore follows in the footsteps of a growing number of literary novelists who have turned to science fiction in recent years, as boundaries between genres become less rigid.

    Some of the predictions – extreme surveillance, blistering summers, widespread penal servitude – are familiar science fiction themes. But other elements of Gliff are more surreal and fantastical. A particularly strange plot element is the use of a device called the “supera bounder”, a clunky machine which “looked like an invention made by an amateur for a joke”. This is used to spray red paint around houses, people, vehicles and animals which are targeted for removal or destruction.

    When Briar and Rose find a red paint circle around first their house, then their campervan, they are forced into hiding. They lurk on the margins of society, hoping they can escape being packed off to a “reeducation centre”.

    Exploring marginalisation

    The sinister red paint circles are an effective symbol for the more subtle ways in which societies exclude or marginalise “undesirables” of various types. The device fits in with a long tradition of science fiction writers offering the reader a distorted reflection of the ways in which inequality and prejudice operate in society. The invisible barriers which separate rich from poor, for example, are often reimagined as literal walls or fences.

    Smith gives a horrifying vision of a future world of work in which unprotected or unwanted children are forced to scavenge metal from waste in dangerous conditions and adult workers are ruthlessly surveilled, punished, fined and controlled.

    One reason this is so shocking is because the novel is set solely in Britain. Under globalisation, we are already dependent on goods produced under similar conditions – but in countries which are safely remote from us. Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy can be read as a similar parable of globalisation.

    Gliff can be compared with other recent works of speculative fiction which combine dystopian themes with more surreal or fantastical elements. Rumaan Alam’s acclaimed Leave the World Behind (2020), for example, uses a mysterious, undefined national emergency as the springboard for reflections on racism, over-reliance on technology, and climate change. But it also draws on fairytale motifs.

    Separated from their parents, Briar and Rose resemble a science fictional Hansel and Gretel. Towards the end of the novel – through both its themes and landscapes – there are also echoes of Alan Garner’s powerful children’s fantasies. And Gliff the horse is invested with an almost mythical charge, harking back to Smith’s earlier use of magical tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in her novel Girl Meets Boy (2007).

    Gliff demonstrates Ali Smith’s characteristic strengths as a novelist. The narrative is accessible and engaging, yet at the same time complex and subtle. Many puzzles are set for the reader – only some are resolved.


    Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

    Sarah Annes Brown 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.

    – ref. Ali Smith’s new novel Gliff is a dystopian nightmare with flashes of fairytale enchantment – https://theconversation.com/ali-smiths-new-novel-gliff-is-a-dystopian-nightmare-with-flashes-of-fairytale-enchantment-237693

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Political sectarianism is fracturing America

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Simon Mabon, Professor of International Relations, Lancaster University

    Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Gardens in New York City on Sunday, October 27 was called a “carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism” by the New York Times. The event, which came just over a week before the election, was a hostile and partisan affair. Trump doubled down on his assertion that one of America’s gravest threats is from “the enemy within”.

    Trump’s rhetoric is a manifestation of the increasingly polarised nature of US politics, whereby hostility from one group towards their perceived enemies is amplified across social media platforms. Yet Trump’s comment about an insidious “threat” hints at a darker undercurrent of division, with the threat of violence.

    A June 2024 poll by the University of Chicago suggested that there was more support for violence against Trump than in his favour – 10% of respondents agreed that “the use of force is justified to prevent Trump becoming president”, compared to 6.9% who believed violence was justified “to restore Trump to the presidency”. Two months earlier, a Marist poll revealed that 47% of Americans believed that another civil war was likely in their lifetime.

    As a report from Chatham House recently observed, the US is more divided “along ideological and political lines than at any time since the 1850s”. And according to another report from UK-based think tank, the Foreign Policy Centre, Americans have “increasingly grown to hate supporters of the other party, viewing their capture of political power as not merely unfortunate but illegitimate”.

    Americans have regularly articulated a preference for living among people who share their political outlook. And they have expressed a stronger aversion to dating, living, working or socialising with supporters of another party. These views point to a state suffering the ills of sectarianism.

    Those who have observed sectarianism around the world know all too well the chaos that such divisions can wreak. In the Middle East, for example, politically charged religious difference has had a devastating impact on political, economic and social life. Hundreds of thousands have been killed and millions displaced from their homes across Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Libya because of violence along sect-based lines.

    The US may be a long way from these scenarios, but there are some early warning signs. Competing forms of what American social theorist Irving Howe calls “epistemological authoritarianism” – or a sense of certainty that is zero-sum and rejects those of the other – can be easily seen across America’s political landscape.

    Protests and counter-protests have played out both on the streets and online over abortion, gun laws and LGBTQ+ rights, as well as on university campuses over the war in Gaza. Elite entrepreneurs with political capital have also positioned themselves on opposite sides of sensitive issues to cultivate support.

    Take, for example, Donald Trump’s false allegations that Democratic states executed babies after birth, or that migrants in Springfield, Ohio, have been eating pets. Such comments quickly spread across social media, regardless of their veracity. For Trump’s followers, truth matters less than the ability to justify their position on a particular issue. The stance taken by political communities is increasingly polemic and predictable.

    Such dynamics are, of course, also shaped by local contexts. But the growing politicisation of social identities in recent years, and the increasing political importance of social issues, has created a landscape where difference is broadly antagonistic.

    In this situation, grievance becomes a means of reinforcing in-group cohesion and disdain for the other. In such a landscape, society becomes divided into mutually distrustful camps set apart by a form of emotional polarisation that takes on political meaning.

    It is the emotional dimension that is key here, as this is the foundation upon which political and social enmity is built. Supreme Court decisions, for example, relating to emotionally charged issues such as abortion, have strong mobilising potential on both left and right.

    Entrenched differences

    Elections often exacerbate uncertainty and division, as the 2020 US presidential election and its fallout demonstrate. According to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (Acled), a research group that analyses occurrences of political violence around the world, demonstrations and far-right activity peaked around the 2020 election. This reached a crescendo with the events of January 6 2021 when Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol building.

    Far-right activity has dropped during Biden’s administration. But a number of far-right groups have recently become active in the run-up to the election. Meanwhile, divisions over abortion, LGBTQ+ mobilisation, and the war in Gaza have contributed to a precarious environment.

    Indeed, a vast majority do not think that next week’s election will solve the issues that America faces. In a recent poll, 70% of respondents believe that things in the US are going “in the wrong direction” – a view shared more by Republican respondents (94%) than Democrat respondents (41%). And 19% of Republicans think that if Trump loses the election, he should declare the results invalid and do whatever it takes to assume office.

    Pro-Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in Washington DC on January 6 2021.
    lev radin / Shutterstock

    The schisms across the US are real and the pieces are not easily put back together. Narratives of division will continue to spread as election fever increases, further deepening the rifts in American society. And sectarianism will become the broad frame through which political and social life is viewed.

    This need not necessarily become violent. But it can easily become entrenched. The increasingly hostile exclusion of “the other” in all its forms, along with a growing willingness to breach established norms and rules, requires a step back from the brink before it is too late.

    Simon Mabon receives funding from Carnegie Corporation of New York. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.

    – ref. Political sectarianism is fracturing America – https://theconversation.com/political-sectarianism-is-fracturing-america-242327

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Perimenopause linked with increased risk of bipolar and major depression

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lisa Shitomi-Jones, Research Assistant & PhD Candidate at the Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics, Cardiff University

    The potential effect of perimenopause on mental health has been under-researched. My Ocean Production/Shutterstock

    Women going through perimenopause – the transition period surrounding the menopause – are more than twice as likely to develop bipolar disorder for the first time according to our research. Our study is the first to investigate the link between perimenopause and the onset of severe psychiatric conditions.

    Many people think of menopause as a single event that happens around a woman’s early 50s, the average age for her last period. But it’s a gradual process that typically occurs between the ages of 45 and 55.

    Perimenopause is the phase leading up to and following menopause, during which hormonal changes affect the menstrual cycle. This stage differs from person to person and can last several years. Symptoms may include hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings and irregular periods.

    While physical symptoms are common, the potential effect of perimenopause on mental health – including mood changes and severe psychiatric disorders – is less understood and has been under-researched.

    We were inspired to conduct our research by the patients at Professor Di Florio’s mental health clinic. It offers a free clinical service providing second opinions for people experiencing severe psychiatric disorders associated with reproductive events.

    Many of the women in the clinic had never experienced severe mental health problems before menopause. But something seemed to shift during perimenopause. Suddenly many found themselves grappling with these conditions. However, upon reviewing the research, it appeared that the experiences of these women were not documented or explored in scientific literature.

    To address this research gap and find answers, we conducted research using a large database called UK Biobank. This is a resource which gives approved researchers secure access to anonymous medical and genetic data from half a million volunteers. It aims to improve our understanding of how to prevent, diagnose and treat many serious conditions.

    What we found

    Perimenopause is the phase surrounding the menopause.
    Arda_ALTAY/Shutterstock

    Using the data, we investigated how many participants had new onsets of psychiatric conditions during the perimenopause. We then compared this to the number of new onsets during the late reproductive stage, which are the years before the perimenopause.

    The data we examined came from 128,294 women in the UK. We wanted to explore how the years around the final menstrual period may trigger serious mental health issues, including bipolar and major depressive disorders. We discovered a 112% increase in new cases of bipolar disorder. We also found a 30% rise in major depressive conditions during this time, compared to earlier stages of the late reproductive period.

    Our study was the first of its kind to investigate first onsets of bipolar disorder during the perimenopause. It validates the experiences of women who were previously essentially invisible in the world of research.

    Although some hypotheses exist as to why perimenopause and hormones may play a role in psychiatric disorders, much more research is required to better understand why this affects some people but not others. Researchers also need to uncover the best treatment options for these women.

    We hope that our research paves the way for more research on women’s mental health at perimenopause, as well as further investigations into the underlying biological mechanisms.

    The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Perimenopause linked with increased risk of bipolar and major depression – https://theconversation.com/perimenopause-linked-with-increased-risk-of-bipolar-and-major-depression-238797

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Three judges announced for The Conversation Prize for writers

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jo Adetunji, Executive Editor – Partnerships

    L-R: Miriam Frankel, Priya Atwal, Alice Hunt. CC BY

    The Conversation UK, Curtis Brown and Faber are pleased to announce our three judges for The Conversation Prize for writers: Miriam Frankel, senior science editor at The Conversation UK, Priya Atwal, historian, broadcaster and community history fellow at the University of Oxford, and Alice Hunt, professor of early modern literature and history at the University of Southampton.

    Our competition is looking for the best longform article and nonfiction book idea aimed at a general audience from our community of academics. For your chance to win £1,000, publication on The Conversation Insights and mentorship from a literary agent and book publisher then enter your 2,000-word story and book idea.

    About our judges

    Miriam Frankel.

    Miriam Frankel is senior science editor at The Conversation UK. She is co-author of Are You Thinking Clearly? 29 Reasons You Aren’t and What To Do About It, a book investigating the many factors that influence and manipulate the way we think, from genetics, biology, bias and personality to time perception, culture, language, advertising and technology. Miriam also writes on a freelance basis for a number of publications including New Scientist, The Observer, BBC Future and BBC Science Focus magazine.

    Priya Atwal is a historian of monarchy, empire and cultural politics in Britain and South Asia. Her first book, Royals and Rebels: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire, was published in 2020 and was one of BBC History Magazine’s Best Books of the Year. Priya is an active champion for public history and community empowerment in historical research. She is currently building a new Community History Hub at the University of Oxford, and regularly consults on a wide range of creative historical projects, from working on Netflix’s Bridgerton, to supporting the development of inclusive history curricula for UK state schools.

    Alice Hunt.

    Alice Hunt is professor of early modern literature and history at the University of Southampton. She was awarded a Leverhulme Trust fellowship to research her first trade book, Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649-1660, which was published by Faber in 2024. Alice is also the author of The Drama of Coronation and has previously written about the Tudors and James I.

    How to Enter

    Submissions are open to academics employed or affiliated to a university or approved research institution (IRO) in the UK, Europe or Commonwealth, including PhD candidates under supervision by an academic. Submissions should be in the following areas: History, Arts + Culture, Business + Economy, Education, Environment, Health, Politics + Society, Science + Technology or World.

    To enter, please email your 2,000-word article, plus the following information, to uk-prize@theconversation.com:

    Name

    Institution

    Country

    Email

    Telephone no.

    Your book idea [max 350 words]
    Please provide a brief summary of a trade nonfiction book idea based on your article. Tell us why this topic deserves a deeper dive and why it would appeal to an audience of non-academic readers.

    About you [max 100 words]
    Tell us a little about you – your current academic role or affiliation, your area of expertise and any relevant research to your book idea. Why would you be the right author for this book?

    Please disclose any conflicts of interest that should be mentioned in relation to your article or book idea.

    Terms & Conditions [Pdf] – please read carefully.

    You can read more about what we’re looking for here [Pdf].

    – ref. Three judges announced for The Conversation Prize for writers – https://theconversation.com/three-judges-announced-for-the-conversation-prize-for-writers-242505

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Deep sea rocks suggest oxygen can be made without photosynthesis, deepening the mystery of life

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lewis Alcott, Lecturer in Geochemistry, University of Bristol

    chaylek/Shutterstock

    Oxygen, the molecule that supports intelligent life as we know it, is largely made by plants. Whether underwater or on land, they do this by photosynthesising carbon dioxide. However, a recent study demonstrates that oxygen may be produced without the need for life at depths where light cannot reach.

    The authors of a recent publication in Nature Geoscience were collecting samples from deep ocean sediments to determine the rate of oxygen consumption at the seafloor through things like organisms or sediments that can react with oxygen. But in several of their experiments, they actually found oxygen was increasing as opposed to decreasing as they would have expected. This left them questioning how this oxygen was being produced.

    They found that this “dark” oxygen production at the seafloor seems to only happen in the presence of mineral concentrates called polymetallic nodules and deposits of metals called metalliferous sediments. The authors think the nodules have the right mixture of metals and are densely packed enough for an electrical current to pass through for electrolysis, creating enough energy to separate the hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O) from water (H₂O).

    The authors also suggested that the amount of oxygen created may fluctuate depending on the number and mixture of nodules on the ocean floor.

    This research team was trying to understand the implications of mining metals from the deep-sea floor such as lithium, cobalt or copper, funded by an extractions company in an effort to ensure deep sea mining leads to a net benefit to humanity and the Earth system. Lithium and cobalt are used, for example, to make rechargeable batteries for mobile phones, laptops and electric vehicles. Copper is vital for electrical wiring in devices like TVs and radios and for roofing and plumbing.

    The investigation was focused on the Clarion-Clipperton zone of the Pacific Ocean, a vast plain between Hawaii and Mexico where millions of tons of these metals have been found. However, scientists believe mining on this scale is potentially unpredictable and can destroy habitats vital to ocean ecosystems. Deep-sea mining can also introduce harmful sediment plumes to fragile ecosystems leading to a growing number of countries calling for a moratorium.

    Dark oxygen for life

    The implications for this finding may also play a role in life elsewhere.

    Oxygen is essential to complex life as we know it. Complex life has evolved and expanded alongside photosynthesisers, which actually produce oxygen as a waste product. Yet this oxygen allows organisms’ metabolisms to be much more efficient than without it.

    Without photosynthetic bacteria, the reliance that Earth’s life has on oxygen may well have never happened, in addition to the evolutionary pathway to biodiversity as we know it. But this study shows that rich-nodules on the seafloor may have provided an additional source of oxygen to the biosphere – the zone of life on Earth encompassing all living organisms.

    We can’t understand how these nodules may have affected evolution until we understand more about how they formed deeper in time. At the moment, all we really know it that we these nodules would have needed oxygen themselves to form.

    Studies like this show how much the origin of life on Earth is still a mystery.

    Lewis Alcott 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.

    – ref. Deep sea rocks suggest oxygen can be made without photosynthesis, deepening the mystery of life – https://theconversation.com/deep-sea-rocks-suggest-oxygen-can-be-made-without-photosynthesis-deepening-the-mystery-of-life-238937

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: New insights from Shakespeare’s England reveal striking parallels to contemporary climate change

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Madeline Bassnett, Professor of Early Modern English Literature, Western University

    Unprecedented storms and devastating drought. Flash floods and wildfires ignited by the air’s dry heat. This is the experience for many in our modern world. But it was also the experience for those living amid England’s Little Ice Age.

    The Little Ice Age is a period from around 1300 to 1850, when global temperatures dropped significantly. While the exact cause of this phenonemon is unknown, theories range from volcanic eruptions to European colonization of the Americas.

    Our research into England’s Little Ice Age during the 16th and 17th centuries has unearthed more than 1,800 unique pieces of weather observations, hidden in documents like diaries and letters. Local and national chronicles embedded reports of extreme weather among accounts of war and monarchs. Extreme weather pamphlets publicized tragic effects of earthquakes, floods and storms, much like our media today.

    Our team has created an open access database called the Weather Extremes in England’s Little Ice Age 1500-1700. This database visually maps both extreme and temperate weather in the age of Shakespeare and can help to advance modern climate science.

    More fundamentally, these experiential accounts provide a fascinating window into a world not too different from our own. While the causes of the climate change of today are well known, and likely different from that of the Little Ice Age, the experiences of living through both events are at times eerily similar. Understanding these past experiences can help us to better understand our present day and to develop more robust policies in the here and now.



    Read more:
    The Canadian Arctic shows how understanding the effects of climate change requires long-term vision

    Frosts and freezes

    Frost fairs on the River Thames have become a familiar cultural reference point for England’s Little Ice Age. Our data shows that the river froze over a mere four times in the 16th century — in 1516, 1537, 1564 and 1590 — and there were only intermittent observations of unusual cold or snow.

    The 17th century was markedly different. Reports of cold came thick and fast, with the exception of a few years between 1620 and 1643.

    Title page from The Great Frost: ‘Cold doings in London, except it be at the lotterie. With newes out of the country. A familiar talk betwene a country-man and a citizen touching this terrible frost and the great lotterie, and the effects of them.’ Printed at London: For Henry Gosson, 1608. Attributed to Thomas Dekker.
    (Houghton Library, Harvard University)

    This was the century of frost fairs on the Thames. With the first 17th century fair in 1608, these events were celebrated by English playwright Thomas Dekker in his pamphlet The Great Frost.

    Drinking, barbering and games were on display as London’s citizens marvelled at the novelty of entertainment on the ice. The freezes were frequent enough to become an institution.

    By the winter of 1683-1684, the frost fair had become a city within a city, expanding across the ice with avenues of booths, bear and bull-baiting rings and boats-turned-chariots pulled by enterprising watermen across the now solid river.

    But these iconic events were just one aspect of Little Ice Age weather in England.

    Storms and floods

    In the 16th century, severe rain storms were far more common than cold snaps.

    On Oct. 5, 1570, “a terrible tempest of wind and raine” caused flooding from Lincolnshire to London as rivers overflowed their banks, drowning towns, fields, crops and cattle. Storm surges inundated the coastline.

    Four years later, towns from Newport to St. Ives suffered “raging floods,” and a “giant sea fish” (whale) washed up in the Thames from a massive surge up river. In May 1594, “soddane showres of haile [and] raine” destroyed houses, iron mills, crops and cattle in Sussex and Surrey. September of that year saw another deluge, with bridges taken down in Cambridge and Ware.

    This all changed in the 17th century, following the Great Flood that struck Bristol and surrounding areas in 1607. Extreme cold spells then became more frequent, and major storm events were less common. The winter of 1612-1613 saw a number of violent storms recorded in the pamphlet Wonders of this Windie Winter, with livestock lost from Newcastle to Dover and bodies from shipwrecks washing aground in the Thames.

    In the next 40 years, though, only the years of 1626 and 1637 contain reports of significant storm events causing loss of life or livestock. Instead of extreme storms, this century was marked more by regular but moderate rainfall, consistent with colder, wetter conditions normally associated with the Little Ice Age.

    Fire and heat

    If colder, wetter weather was a new normal for 17th century Britons, the hot, dry spring of 1666 caught Londoners unprepared. The Great Fire of London was one of the worst disasters of the age, and diarist John Evelyn recounts that “the heate … had even ignited the aire,” a comment reminiscent of descriptions of wildfire spread today.

    Yet periods of extreme heat were surprisingly frequent during the previous century, especially in the England that Shakespeare knew. More than a dozen droughts were recorded across England in the 16th century, usually broken by extreme storms or floods. It never rained, it seems, but it poured. The Thames dried up completely in 1592.

    As Thomas Short wrote in his Chronological History of English Weather, “an excessive drought, great death of cattle from want of water; springs and brooks were dried up; horsemen could ride the Thames.” Locals went into the mud to retrieve items long lost to the river.

    Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon was nearly destroyed by fire twice, in 1594 and 1595, due to severe drought and heat. The warning signs were there for Londoners to beware of hot spells in the next century, but frost fairs and wet weather may have bred complacency.

    Lessons for today

    The Weather Extremes in England’s Little Ice Age 1500-1700 database is revealing a picture of the world of Shakespeare and early modern England that upends a simplified picture of the Little Ice Age. More than just a world of frosts and freezes, the English Little Ice Age could be known as well as an age of fire and rain.



    Read more:
    The B.C. election could decide the future of the province’s species at risk laws

    The documents in our database are the reports of people who lived in a climatically changing world and saw its shifts firsthand. It shows how important weather crowd-sourcing can be, even centuries later. Contemporary projects like the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network, or the Northern Tornadoes Project, continue in the spirit of this work.

    But our data could also provide insight into today’s extreme weather. Historical flooding patterns might provide reference points to better manage and understand the unstable weather experienced in the British Isles today.

    Madeline Bassnett has received funding from SSHRC for the Weather Extremes in England’s Little Ice Age 1500-1700 project.

    Laurie Johnson 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.

    – ref. New insights from Shakespeare’s England reveal striking parallels to contemporary climate change – https://theconversation.com/new-insights-from-shakespeares-england-reveal-striking-parallels-to-contemporary-climate-change-240755

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Commonwealth takes bold step to protect freedom of expression

    Talamua Media

    The Commonwealth Heads of Government adopted the Commonwealth Principles on Freedom of Expression and the Role of the Media in Good Governance at their summit meeting in Apia, Samoa, last week.

    These Principles highlight the importance of freedom of expression and media freedom to democracy.  They state that Commonwealth governments “should consider repealing or amending laws which unduly restrict the right to freedom of expression”.

    The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and the Commonwealth Journalists Association called on states to take practical and effective steps to end arbitrary and excessive restrictions on free expression. The Commonwealth as a whole must audit progress and engage with civil society to ensure that these Principles are implemented in reality.

    Freedom of expression is not just a right in itself — it is the foundation that allows us to exercise and defend all other human rights, and is safeguarded under international law.

    However, as we know all too well, this right is under threat.

    According to UNESCO, in Commonwealth countries alone, 178 journalists were killed between 2006 and 2020. Furthermore, the impunity rate for the killings of journalists during that same time is 96 percent — which is notably higher than the global impunity rate of 87 percent.

    Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has documented 547 journalists imprisoned globally as of the end of 2023, with legal harassment often used as a tool to stifle dissent and investigative reporting.

    Restrictive, colonial-era laws
    Many Commonwealth countries still maintain restrictive, colonial-era laws that curtail free expression, suppress diverse voices, and inhibit the transparency that is essential for democracy.

    In the Commonwealth:

    • 41 countries continue to criminalise defamation; 48 countries still retain laws related to sedition; and
    • 37 still have blasphemy or blasphemy-like laws.
    Who Controls The Narrative? cover. Image: APR screenshot

    These details are set out in a soon to be released report by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) and the Commonwealth Journalists Association (CJA), with other Commonwealth partners, entitled Who Controls the Narrative? Legal Restrictions on Freedom of Expression in the Commonwealth.

    “These laws, often enforced through criminal sanctions, have a chilling effect on activists, journalists, iand others who fear retaliation for speaking truth to power”, said William Horsley of the Commonwealth Journalists Association.

    “This has led to an alarming rise in self-censorship and a decline in the independent and dissenting voices that are vital for holding governments accountable.”

    Civil society response
    The Principles were first put forward by a group of civil society organisations in response to  a general deterioration in legal protections and the working environment for journalists.

    The CJA convened other civil society organisations, including the CHRI, Commonwealth Lawyers Association and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, before Commonwealth member states reviewed and adopted the Principles in the form which was adopted by heads of government at the 2024 CHOGM.

    States are “urged to take concrete and meaningful steps to implement them within their domestic frameworks, as set out in the CHOGM Samoa Communiqué“.

    The joint report Who Controls the Narrative? Legal Restrictions on Freedom of Expression in the Commonwealth reveals the increasing use of criminal law provisions, including those related to defamation, sedition, blasphemy, and national security, to restrict freedom of expression and media freedom within the Commonwealth.

    The report is the product of extensive collaboration between Commonwealth partners, legal experts, academics, human rights advocates, and media professionals, and provides a comprehensive analysis of the legal frameworks governing freedom of expression and outlines clear pathways for reform.

    In addition to analysing legal restrictions on free speech in Commonwealth states, the report puts forward actionable recommendations for reform.

    These include regional and national-level proposals, as well as broader Commonwealth-wide recommendations aimed at strengthening legal frameworks, promoting judicial independence, encouraging media pluralism, and enhancing international accountability mechanisms.

    Reforms essential
    These reforms are essential for establishing an environment where free expression can thrive, allowing individuals to speak without fear of reprisal.

    “While many member states share a colonial legal legacy that includes repressive laws still in effect today, they also share a commitment to democratic governance and the rule of law as set out in the Commonwealth Charter,” said Sneh Aurora, director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative.

    “The Commonwealth has the potential to lead by example in promoting freedom of expression through legal reform, ensuring that criminal laws are not misused to silence dissent.

    “The Principles provide an important opportunity for Commonwealth governments to bring their national laws in line with international human rights laws.”

    Republished with permission from Talamua Online.

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Global: RFK Jr.’s pivot to Trump is a journey taken by many populists swept along the left-to-right alternative media pipeline

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Rachel Meade, Lecturer of Political Science, Boston University

    When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ended his independent presidential run in August 2024 and endorsed Republican Donald Trump, it might have seemed a surprising turn of events.

    Kennedy began his presidential run as a Democrat and is the scion of a Democratic dynasty. Nephew to former President John F. Kennedy and the son of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Kennedy spent most of his career as a lawyer representing environmental groups that sued polluting corporations and municipalities.

    Yet Kennedy, 70, has long held positions that put him at odds with the Democratic mainstream. He pushes public health misinformation around vaccines and HIV/AIDS, opposes U.S. military involvement in foreign wars, including in Ukraine, and claims that the CIA assassinated his uncle.

    Kennedy’s ideologically mixed politics are hard to categorize in traditional left-right terms.

    My political science research finds that Kennedy’s journey from left-aligned skepticism into Trumpism is part of a broader trend of contemporary left-to-right populist transformations happening across the United States.

    Rise of the populist alternative media

    Populism is a political story that presents the good “people” of a nation as in a struggle against its “elites,” who have corrupted democratic institutions to further their own selfish interests. It cuts across the ideological spectrum, often combining left-wing economic critiques with right-wing cultural ones.

    Based on my research, I find that Kennedy uses a populist style of speech that matches the rhetoric of today’s online alternative media, also known as the “alternative influence network.”

    If populism cuts across the ideological spectrum, so does the alternative media.

    This network of politically diverse independent podcasters, YouTube hosts and other creators connects with young, politically disaffected audiences by mixing politics with comedy and pop culture, and presenting themselves as embattled defenders of free thinking – in opposition to mainstream media and mainstream parties.

    Top-rated shows include “Breaking Points,” “Stay Free with Russell Brand,” “The Joe Rogan Experience,” The Culture War with Tim Pool and “This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von.”

    While many of these shows have been around since the 2010s, the network expanded throughout the Trump era. Their popularity skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when public distrust in government, anger over pandemic restrictions and vaccine skepticism surged.

    These shows hosted Kennedy frequently throughout his presidential run in 2023 and 2024.

    Kennedy finds his audience

    I analyzed a set of Kennedy’s appearances for this story. Both Kennedy and alternative media hosts claim to care about “the real issues” facing Americans such as war, corporate and political malfeasance and economic troubles. They condemn the “mainstream” for promoting frivolous “culture war” topics related to race and identity politics.

    Kennedy and the alternative media hosts also combine left and right arguments in a typically populist way. They claim that corporations control the government and that liberals and corporations censor free speech.

    For example, on a May 2024, episode of “Stay Free with Russell Brand,” Brand asserted that corrupt institutions are backed by the “deep state.” He asked Kennedy how he would fight these powerful interests.

    “The major agencies of government have all been captured by the industries they’re supposed to regulate and act as sock puppets serving the mercantile interests of these big corporations,” responded Kennedy. “I have a particular ability to unravel that because I’ve litigated against so many of these agencies.”

    My research found that Kennedy often bonded with his alternative media hosts over his perception that liberal media sources – allegedly controlled by the Democratic National Committee or the CIA – were censoring his campaign.

    Like Kennedy, alternative media hosts often identify as former or disaffected Democrats. Many used to work at mainstream left news sites, where they say they experienced censorship.

    ‘This little island of free speech’

    In a June 2023 episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Rogan explained that he no longer identifies as a liberal because of the “orthodoxy it preaches” around issues like vaccines. He then cited YouTube’s removal of some of Kennedy’s vaccine-related videos for violating its COVID-19 misinformation policy.

    Kennedy had just spent 90 minutes outlining his journey toward vaccine skepticism, which started with meeting a mother who believed vaccines caused her son’s autism.

    “If a woman tells you something about her child, you should listen,” he said.

    Kennedy also described being convinced by a set of studies that public health officials had ignored.

    “Trust the experts is not a function of science, it’s a function of religion,” he said. “I’ve been litigating 40 years; there’s experts on both sides.”

    Afterward, he thanked Rogan for maintaining “this little island of free speech in a desert of suppression and of critical thinking.”

    Kennedy reiterated this point in the Aug. 23, 2024, speech that ended his campaign, saying the “alternative media” had kept his ideas alive, while the mainstream networks had shut him out despite his historically high third-party poll numbers of 15% to 20%.

    “The DNC-allied mainstream media networks maintained a near-perfect embargo on interviews with me,” Kennedy said.

    Speaking directly to the reporters in the room, he added, “Your institutions and media made themselves government mouthpieces and stenographers for the organs of power.”

    Left-to-right pipeline

    Trust in a range of U.S. institutions is at historical lows. Americans on both the right and the left are skeptical of power and crave radical change.

    Alternative media hosts tap into this desire, helping to push some disaffected listeners down the same left-to-right pipeline that landed Kennedy in Trump’s orbit.

    Trump and his allies are adept at harnessing the power of the alternative media ecosystem. Trump has appeared on male-centric shows like “This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von and ”The Joe Rogan Experience,“ and he founded the alternative social media platform Truth Social.

    Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon hosts an influential podcast called the “War Room” on another MAGA alternative media platform, Rumble. Known for its fiery populist rhetoric, the “War Room” broadcasts live for an astonishing 22 hours a week.

    Until recently, Democrats have largely embraced traditional media. During the first months of her 2024 presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” ABC’s “The View” and MSNBC’s “Stephanie Ruhle.”

    Then, on Oct. 12, Harris appeared on “Call her Daddy.” Spotify’s second-most popular podcast, it has a young, female audience. Days later, she sat down for an interview with Fox News and is reportedly in talks to appear on Joe Rogan’s show.

    Kennedy might approve of all this aisle-crossing.

    “Step outside the culture war!” he tweeted in July 2024. “Step outside the politics of hating the other side!”

    Rachel Meade does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. RFK Jr.’s pivot to Trump is a journey taken by many populists swept along the left-to-right alternative media pipeline – https://theconversation.com/rfk-jr-s-pivot-to-trump-is-a-journey-taken-by-many-populists-swept-along-the-left-to-right-alternative-media-pipeline-236828

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: On foreign policy, Trump opts for disruption and Harris for engagement − but they share some of the same concerns

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Garret Martin, Senior Professorial Lecturer, Co-Director Transatlantic Policy Center, American University School of International Service

    Who will represent the U.S. better on the global stage? Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

    According to conventional wisdom, U.S. voters are largely motivated by domestic concerns and especially the economy.

    But the upcoming presidential election may be somewhat of an outlier. In a September 2024 poll, foreign policy actually ranks quite high in voters’ concerns – with more Democrats and Republicans combined saying it was “very important” to their vote than, say, immigration and abortion.

    As such, understanding where Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic rival Kamala Harris stand on the significant international issues of the day is important. And we can do so by looking at the records of their respective administrations in the three regions they prioritized: the Indo-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.

    Donald Trump: Disrupter-in-chief

    In his 2017 inaugural address, Trump painted a dark picture of the U.S. In his telling, his country was being taken advantage of by other nations, especially in trade and security, while neglecting domestic challenges.

    To disrupt this, Trump promised an “America First” approach to guide his administration.

    And in practice, his foreign policy certainly proved disruptive. He showed a clear willingness to buck traditions and undid some of former President Barack Obama’s signature policies, such as the Iran nuclear deal, which exchanged sanctions relief for restrictions on Tehran’s domestic nuclear program, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.

    In so doing, he ruffled the feathers of allies and foes alike.

    Trans-Atlantic relations were tense under Trump, especially because of his hostility toward NATO. After deriding the Atlantic alliance on the campaign trail, Trump stuck to the same tune while in office. He routinely insulted allies at high-level summits and allegedly came close to withdrawing from the alliance altogether in 2018.

    While NATO did make inroads in bolstering its Eastern flank in that period, the alliance was primarily defined by internal turmoil and limited cohesion during Trump’s time in office. U.S. relations with the European Union hardly fared better. In 2018, the U.S. imposed steel and aluminum tariffs on the European Union, citing national security concerns.

    Trump also broke with previous U.S. presidents in his administration’s Asia policy. One of his first moves in 2017 was to abandon the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal negotiated by Obama. Trump’s late 2017 national security strategy also announced a major shift toward China, labeling it as a “strategic competitor” – implying a greater emphasis on containing China as opposed to cooperating with it.

    This hawkish turn played out especially in the field of trade. Trump’s administration imposed four rounds of tariffs in 2018-19, affecting US$360 billion of Chinese goods. Beijing, of course, responded with tariffs of its own. The two countries did sign a so-called phase-one deal in January 2020 that sought to lower the stakes of this trade war. But the COVID-19 pandemic nullified any chance of success, and relations soured further with each Trump utterance of the pandemic being a “Chinese virus.”

    Trump showcased somewhat contradictory impulses toward the Middle East and other issues. He pushed for disengagement and to undo Obama’s major policies. Besides withdrawing from the Paris climate accords in 2017, Trump abandoned the Iran nuclear deal in 2018. His administration also signed a deal to end the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, and it withdrew forces from northern Syria.

    But at the same time, Trump continued the bombing campaign against the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq and authorized the killing of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani in 2020. The latter was consistent with a policy that aimed to pressure and isolate Iran economically and diplomatically. The key example of the diplomatic pressure came through especially via the Abraham Accords through which Trump helped facilitate the establishment of normal diplomatic ties between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco.

    Kamala Harris: Alliance and engagement

    Although not taking a driving role in foreign policy, Harris has been part of an administration that has committed the U.S. to repairing alliances and engaging with the world.

    This came across by undoing some major actions from the Trump administration. For example, the U.S. quickly rejoined the Paris climate accords and overturned a decision to leave the World Health Organization.

    But in other areas, the Biden administration has shown more continuity with Trump than many expected.

    For instance, the U.S. under Biden has not fundamentally deviated from strategic competition with China, even though the tactics have differed a little. The administration maintained Trump’s tariff approach, even adding its own targeted rounds against Beijing on electric vehicles.

    Moreover, it cultivated different diplomatic platforms in the Indo-Pacific to act as a counterweight to China. This included the cultivation of the Quad dialogue with Australia, India and Japan, and the AUKUS deal with Australia and the U.K., both of which attempted to further the Biden administration’s strategy of containing China’s influence by enlisting regional allies. Finally, the Biden administration did maintain some channels of communication with China at the highest level as well, with Biden meeting Xi Jinping twice during his presidency.

    Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy walks alongside Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House compound on Sept. 26, 2024.
    Tom Brenner/Getty Images

    The Biden administration’s Middle Eastern policy displayed significant continuity with Trump’s approach – at first. While it turned out to be chaotic, the U.S. completed the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan in summer 2021, as had been agreed under Trump. The Biden administration also embraced the format and goals of the Abraham Accords. It even tried to build on them, with the goal of fostering Israeli-Saudi diplomatic ties.

    Of course, the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, in Israel completely changed the equation in the Middle East. Preventing the spiral of violence in the region has become an all-consuming task. Since then, Biden and Harris have tried, largely unsuccessfully, to balance support for Israel with mediation efforts to liberate the hostages and to ensure a cease-fire.

    Trans-Atlantic relations, however, are an area where there were marked differences in the past four years. The tone of the Biden-Harris administration has been in sharp contrast with that of Trump, reaffirming frequently its clear commitment to NATO. And once Russia launched its illegal invasion in February 2022, the U.S. placed itself at the forefront of supporting Ukraine.

    Harris has suggested that she would continue Biden’s policy of providing Kyiv with extensive and continuous military support. In conjunction with allies, the White House of Biden and Harris also implemented a broad range of sanctions against Russia. But the U.S. under Biden has not yet been willing to support Ukraine’s immediate entry into NATO.

    What next?

    Based on their records, what could we expect of a Trump or Harris presidency?

    It’s unlikely either candidate will abandon strategic competition with China. But Trump is more likely to seriously escalate the trade war, promising extensive tariffs against Beijing. Trump’s commitment to defending Taiwan is also more ambiguous in comparison with Harris’ pledges.

    U.S. policy toward Europe will largely depend on the results of the election. Harris has frequently underlined her steadfast support for NATO, as well as for Ukraine. Trump, on the other hand, is showing signs that he is unwilling to further aid the regime in Kyiv.

    And for the Middle East, it remains to be seen whether either Trump or Harris would be able to better shape events in the region.

    Garret Martin receives funding from the European Union for the research institute he co-directs, the Transatlantic Policy Center.

    – ref. On foreign policy, Trump opts for disruption and Harris for engagement − but they share some of the same concerns – https://theconversation.com/on-foreign-policy-trump-opts-for-disruption-and-harris-for-engagement-but-they-share-some-of-the-same-concerns-238847

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: For an estimated 4 million people with felony convictions, restoring their right to vote is complicated – and varies state by state

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Naomi F. Sugie, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles

    Desmond Meade, right, registers to vote in Florida on Jan. 8, 2019. after completing his sentence on a federal conviction. Phelan M. Ebenhack for The Washington Post via Getty Images

    People who are convicted of felonies might think they can’t vote.

    Even in California, where they do have the right to vote, people convicted of felonies cite cases in Florida and Texas where people with felonies who have completed their sentences have been arrested and sentenced to prison for trying to vote illegally.

    It’s almost an article of faith that a person loses their right to vote once they have been convicted.

    But that’s not universally true.

    Since 1997, 26 states and Washington have passed reforms that have expanded voting eligibility to over 2 million people with felony convictions.

    The reforms reflect the growing recognition by some politicians that felony disenfranchisement laws often excluded people from voting long after they served their sentences. Rooted in historical racism that restricted access to the ballot box, these laws are at odds with the idea that punishment should end after someone completes their sentence.

    But with these reforms comes a new challenge – ensuring that people who have the right to vote are aware that they can.

    Different states, different laws

    A popular assumption among the general public, and even among those convicted of felonies, is that they can’t vote for life.

    During our research, we conducted interviews and focus groups with 137 people, as well as text message conversations with over 1,800 people across five states (California, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas). Delia, a 40-year-old Hispanic woman in Texas, explained: “It’s very confusing on purpose. The majority of people that I know, who get booked in and are going to jail, one of the biggest things is, you can’t ever vote again. Right. And so, that’s what I believed.”

    Laws on felony disenfranchisement vary by state]. In some instances, people with convictions can still vote while they are serving time in Maine, Vermont and Washington, D.C.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced on Oct. 18, 2022, that the state’s new Office of Election Crimes and Security was in the process of arresting 20 individuals for voter fraud.
    Joe Raedle/Getty Images

    According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, those convicted of felonies have their rights automatically restored in 23 states when released from prison. But in 10 other states, those convicted of certain felonies can lose rights indefinitely or require a governor’s pardon for voting rights to be restored.

    Making matters even more confusing is that state laws make different distinctions on who can and cannot vote. In some cases, the distinctions are based on whether the conviction was a felony or misdemeanor.

    Other states distinguish between the timing of the end of imprisonment, parole or probation – and whether all fines and fees have been paid.

    The Florida eligibility question

    In 2018, for example, Florida voters approved a ballot initiative that “restores the voting rights of Floridians with felony convictions after they complete all terms of their sentence including parole or probation.”

    Known as Amendment 4, the measure excluded people who committed murder or a felony sex offense.

    But before the measure went into effect, a legal dispute arose over the definition of what it meant to complete a sentence. In 2019, Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed a law that required payment of outstanding fees and fines before a person convicted of a felony conviction could regain their voting rights.

    Though the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the constitutionality of the law in court, a federal appellate court backed the Republican lawmakers.

    As a result, an estimated 730,000 Floridians who have completed their sentences remain disenfranchised.

    Extending voting rights

    Over the past nearly 30 years, many states have moved to make it easier for those convicted of felonies to regain their voting rights, starting in 1997 in Texas, where lawmakers eliminated a two-year waiting period before a person convicted of a felony regained their right to vote.

    As a result, the number of people with felonies who had lost their right to vote dropped from a high of 6.1 million in 2016 to an estimated 4 million in this election, according to the Sentencing Project. During the U.S. presidential election in 2020, that number was 5.2 million.

    So far in 2024 alone, officials in three states have tinkered with their laws on voter eligibility requirements for people convicted of felonies.

    In Virginia, lawmakers approved on April 5 a new law that allows registered voters who are imprisoned while awaiting trial or have been convicted of a misdemeanor to vote by absentee ballot.

    A month later, in May, Oklahoma lawmakers clarified their existing laws by passing a measure that allows people convicted of felonies to vote under certain conditions, such as receiving a pardon or a reduction of their felony conviction to a lesser misdemeanor.

    Though passed by state lawmakers in April 2024, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled on Oct. 16 that the new law could take effect. The law eliminates the two-year waiting period following the completion of a prison sentence before voting rights could be restored.

    Increasing voter turnout

    Numerous studies of those with felony convictions have shown that they believe the voting process is unclear and confusing.

    In our study of voting behavior of people with convictions, we interviewed Raymond, a 49-year-old Black man in Michigan. When asked about the process of registering to vote, he told us: “I ain’t going to say scary, but it was unfamiliar. It can be overwhelming for people who don’t want to do it. You don’t know where to go, you don’t know who to really vote for.”

    To get the word out to newly eligible voters, community organizations across the U.S. have launched grassroots operations to inform people with convictions of their voting rights and help guide them through the registration process.

    As part of that effort, community organizations such as Alliance for Safety and Justice and TimeDone are working with academic researchers to further understand how different methods of outreach can increase voter turnout among people with felony convictions.

    With many people newly eligible to vote in their first presidential election this year, I believe providing them with accurate information about voting and their state’s felony voting laws is critical to ensuring that the idea of a second chance includes the right to vote.

    Naomi F. Sugie receives funding from the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Council on Library and Information Resources, Orange County, Alliance for Safety and Justice, Crankstart, and Public Agenda.

    – ref. For an estimated 4 million people with felony convictions, restoring their right to vote is complicated – and varies state by state – https://theconversation.com/for-an-estimated-4-million-people-with-felony-convictions-restoring-their-right-to-vote-is-complicated-and-varies-state-by-state-239681

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: How Trump’s racist talk of immigrant ‘bad genes’ echoes some of the last century’s darkest ideas about eugenics

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Shannon Bow O’Brien, Associate Professor of Instruction, The University of Texas at Austin

    Donald Trump speaks at Madison Square Garden in New York on Oct. 27, 2024. John Salangsang/Invision/AP

    Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly denounced immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally and the danger he says that poor immigrants of color pose for the U.S. – often using hateful language to make his point.

    In early October 2024, Trump took his comments a step further when he questioned immigrants’ faulty genes, saying without support that “Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they are now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

    It was far from the first time Trump has invoked eugenics – a false, racist theory that some people, and even some races, are genetically superior to others.

    In 1988, for example, Trump told Oprah Winfrey during an interview: “You have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.”

    In 2016, Trump said that his German roots are the reason behind his greatness:

    “I always said that winning is somewhat, maybe, innate. Maybe it’s just something you have; you have the winning gene. Frankly it would be wonderful if you could develop it, but I’m not so sure you can. You know, I’m proud to have that German blood, there’s no question about it. Great stuff.”

    And in 2020, Trump again alluded to his belief that bloodlines convey excellence:

    “I had an uncle who went to MIT who is a top professor. Dr. John Trump. A genius. It’s in my blood. I’m smart.”

    Trump’s repeated and countless comments about white people’s racial superiority to people of color have prompted some comparisons to the Nazis and their ideology of racial superiority.

    The Nazis are indeed the most infamous believers of the false idea that white, blue-eyed, blonde-haired people were superior to others – and that the human population should be selectively managed to breed white people.

    But the Nazis didn’t originate these ideas. In fact, the Nazis were so impressed with many American eugenic ideas that they incorporated them into their racist, antisemitic laws.

    Root of eugenics

    The British scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of the evolutionist Charles Darwin, first developed the theory of eugenics in the 1860s, and it gained a foothold in the U.S. and Britain around this time.

    Eugenics sets racial identity, and especially white identity, as the most desirable and worthy.

    By the dawn of the early 1900s, much of the American eugenics scholarship looked down on American immigrants from any place other than Scandinavia, thus coining the term “Nordicism.”

    In the late 19th and early 20th century, immigration to the U.S. was at its peak. In 1890, 14.8% of people living in the U.S. were immigrants. Many people felt concerned about immigration in the U.S., and there were many prominent eugenicists in America. Two of the most famous were Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.

    Both were avowed white supremacists who advocated for scientific racism. They wrote popular and widely read books that helped shape American and German law in the 1920s and 1930s.

    Grant, Stoddard and other theorists in the U.S. embraced eugenics as a way to justify racial segregation, restrict immigration, enforce sterilization and uphold other systemic inequalities.

    Stoddard attacked the United States’ immigration policies in his 1920 book, “The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy.” He wrote: “If the present drift is not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed. … We now know that men are not, and never will be equal. We now know that environment and education can only develop what heredity brings.”

    Another prominent eugenicist was Harry H. Laughlin, an educator and superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, a now-defunct research group that gathered biological and social information about the American population.

    Laughlin wrote an influential 1922 book, “Eugenical Sterilization in the United States,” which included a chapter on model sterilization laws. The Third Reich used his book and laws as a template when implementing them in Germany during the height of the Nazi period.

    Laughlin also regularly testified before U.S. Congress, with this 1922 testimony representative of his message to lawmakers: “Immigration is essentially and fundamentally a racial and biological problem. There are many factors to consider, but, from the standpoint of the future, immigration is primarily a long time national investment in human family stocks.”

    Eugenicists, including Laughlin, have long been specifically preoccupied with Norwegian genetics – believing that America is under attack when immigration occurs from non-Nordic countries.

    In November 1922, Laughlin said, “Some of our finest and most desirable immigrants are from Norway.”

    In 1924, Congress approved the Immigration Act, which severely limited immigration to the U.S., established quotas for immigrants based on nationality and barred immigrants from Asia.

    It was only following the end of World War II and the Holocaust that eugenics fell out of favor and lost its prominence in American thinking.

    Trump’s recycling of history

    Fears over foreign immigrants weakening the U.S. were popular a century ago, and Trump and many of his followers still embrace them today.

    Trump has promised that he will carry out mass deportations of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, forcibly detaining immigrants in camps and removing 1 million people a year.

    In April 2024, Trump used dehumanizing language to express his apparent belief that immigrants are unworthy of empathy. “The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals.’”

    Trump has also promoted eugenicists’ obsession with Scandinavia and the superiority of white people.

    In 2018, Trump spoke about immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa, saying “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”

    In the same meeting, Trump also reportedly suggested that the U.S. should instead draw in more people from countries like Norway.

    In April 2024, Trump again embraced this idea of Scandinavian superiority, saying that he wants immigrants from “Nice countries. You know, like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”

    A dangerous flash to the past

    A person running for president in 1924 would seem more likely than a candidate in 2024 to espouse this now-discredited point of view.

    President Calvin Coolidge ran for election on an “America First” platform in 1924, with the slogan only falling out of favor after groups like the Ku Klux Klan embraced it around the same time.

    The idea of America First, at the time, denoted American nationalism and exceptionalism – but also was linked to anti-immigration and fascist movements.

    When Coolidge signed the heavily restrictive 1924 Immigration Act into law he stated, “America must remain American.”

    One hundred years later, Trump calls to mind an America First mentality, including when he regularly reads the lyrics to a song called “The Snake” during his rallies as a way to explain the dangers of welcoming immigrants into the U.S. The civil rights activist Oscar Brown wrote this poem in 1963, and his family has said that Trump misinterprets the song’s words.

    ‘I saved you,’ cried that woman.

    ‘And you’ve bit me even, why’

    ‘You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die.’

    ‘Oh shut up, silly woman,’ said the reptile with a grin,

    ‘You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.’

    I have written a book on this and I used many of my citations in Chapter 4 to help develop this piece though I reworded or reframed it.

    – ref. How Trump’s racist talk of immigrant ‘bad genes’ echoes some of the last century’s darkest ideas about eugenics – https://theconversation.com/how-trumps-racist-talk-of-immigrant-bad-genes-echoes-some-of-the-last-centurys-darkest-ideas-about-eugenics-241548

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Cannabis legalization may hit a ‘red wall’ at the ballot box

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By William Garriott, Professor of Law, Politics and Society, Drake University

    Early voting runs from Oct. 21 through Nov. 3 in Florida. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

    Cannabis legalization is on the ballot again this November.

    Voters in Florida, North Dakota and South Dakota will decide whether to allow adults 21 and up in their states to use cannabis recreationally.

    Voters in Nebraska will decide whether to allow medical access under a doctor’s care.

    Voters in Arkansas will see a question about medical access on their ballot, but the state supreme court ruled that the votes can’t be counted because the name and title of the measure were “misleading.”

    The results of these ballot measures obviously matter to residents of each state, but they also will be telling for the future of the cannabis legalization movement. That’s because these states are all so-called red states where Republicans dominate state politics. They are part of the legalization movement’s biggest obstacle – what I call the “red wall.”

    And because federal legalization is unlikely in the next few years, red wall states are now the front line of the fight over cannabis reform.

    A bipartisan coalition in the beginning

    Cannabis legalization hasn’t always been so partisan.

    In fact, bipartisanship has been key to the success of the contemporary legalization movement, which began in the 1990s.

    How do I know? Because I’ve been told as much by the people who made it happen.

    Since 2014, I’ve been researching cannabis legalization in the U.S.. I’ve been trying to understand the contemporary legalization movement’s success and what it means for the future of U.S. drug policy. As an anthropologist, my process is to go where the action is and talk to people with lived experience.

    And so I’ve been talking to people in Colorado. In 2012, it became one of the first two states to legalize recreational use of cannabis, also called “adult use.”

    Today, 48 states and Washington D.C. have approved cannabis for some kind of medical use, although 10 of those states have legalized only the limited use of oils containing low levels of THC, the active compound in cannabis. Adult use for anyone 21 and older is now allowed in 24 states and Washington.

    This is a dramatic change that is undoing decades of prohibition.

    Any political movement takes thousands of people to be successful, but it also takes leaders. In Colorado, attorney Brian Vicente and activist Mason Tvert played a pivotal role. With support from the Marijuana Policy Project, they spent most of the 2000s building the movement that made recreational legalization possible in Colorado.

    When I asked Vicente and Tvert how they made it happen, they emphasized the same thing: To be effective, they had to build a new kind of coalition. They had to appeal to people who had no personal interest in consuming cannabis.

    Brian Vicente, left, and Mason Tvert, center, celebrate the passage of medical marijuana in Colorado in 2012.
    Karl Gehring/The Denver Post via Getty Images

    In Colorado, they made the case that marijuana should be regulated like alcohol, with tax money going to schools. The fact that Colorado allowed ballot initiatives was also key. It let activists take the issue directly to voters, bypassing opposition from the governor and other elected officials.

    The strategy worked.

    Liberals liked the social justice arguments. Conservatives liked that it enhanced individual liberty. And a broad cross section of voters liked that it would generate tax revenue and let the criminal justice system focus on more serious threats to public safety.

    These voters made for a powerful coalition. And for years, such coalitions helped legalization measures pass in blue states like Oregon and California, and in red states like Alaska and Montana.

    Hitting the red wall

    But since 2020, legalization has become more partisan.

    Of the 26 states where cannabis remains illegal for adult use, 20 are red states with a Republican trifecta, meaning that Republicans control both chambers of the state legislature and the governor’s office.

    Another four – Kansas, Wisconsin, Kentucky and North Carolina – have Republican-controlled state legislatures and Democratic governors.

    Pennsylvania is the only state in the nation where legislative control is split. Medical cannabis was legalized there in 2016, but recreational use is not allowed.

    And Hawaii is the lone blue state that has yet to legalize recreational cannabis. A slimmer majority of voters support it than in other blue states, and there are unique concerns such as the potential impact on the tourist economy.

    All told, 92% of the states where adult use is still illegal are dominated – if not completely controlled – by Republicans who are much less likely to support legalization than either Democrats or independents. This is true of both elected leaders and rank-and-file party members.

    What’s more, 16 of the 26 states that have not legalized adult use cannabis don’t have a ballot initiative process, so supporters can’t take the issue directly to voters. The states with measures on the ballot this November are part of the minority that do.

    Voters in states without ballot initiatives have no choice but to wait on their state legislatures to act. But most Republican-controlled legislatures have shown little interest in the issue, even when the majority of voters in the state support it – like in Iowa.

    Will the red wall hold this November?

    Could the third time be the charm for recreational pot in North Dakota?
    Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

    Based on polling and precedent, the red wall will likely hold during the 2024 election.

    In South Dakota, most voters oppose adult use legalization, so the measure is likely to fail for the third time.

    Voters in conservative North Dakota have also rejected adult use legalization twice before, which makes success this year unlikely. On the other hand, it has more support from Republican state legislators than in other states, and more voters are undecided on the issue.

    The medical measure in Nebraska is likely to pass, but its future is uncertain. It faces an ongoing legal challenge spurred in part by the state’s Attorney General Mike Hilgers who is a staunch opponent of cannabis legalization.

    And even if it survives legal challenge, that does not mean recreational legalization is around the corner. The most recent polling of Nebraskans shows lower support for recreational use than medical use, particularly among Republicans.

    Florida could go either way

    The wild card is Florida. It has already legalized medical cannabis, and supporters have been trying for years to get adult use on the ballot.

    Polling this summer showed a majority of Republicans supported it, but more recent polls show a slim majority now oppose the referendum.

    It still probably has the votes to pass, but it faces a few obstacles.

    First, it must pass with 60% of the vote.

    Second, it has divided party leaders, with the state’s two highest-profile Republicans, Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis, taking different positions on the issue. Trump says he’s voting yes, while DeSantis is a strong no.

    And third, it has drawn the ire of some legalization supporters for potentially giving disproportionate control of the market to a small group of large cannabis companies. The concern is that the amendment as written does not require the state to increase the number of licensed businesses. Only already-licensed businesses would be guaranteed the opportunity to expand into the recreational cannabis market.

    These same companies are the primary funders of the initiative, with Trulieve alone donating most of the more than US$90 million raised by the Yes campaign. The company already runs more than 150 medical dispensaries in Florida and is one of the largest cannabis companies in the U.S..

    Ironically, DeSantis’ No campaign has put concerns about corporate control at the center of its own messaging, creating a potential coalition between people who oppose adult use legalization under any circumstances and those who oppose it when there’s too much corporate control.

    Trulieve, for its part, has filed a defamation suit against the Republican Party of Florida over the claims.

    Where the movement goes from here

    Unless there are significant surprises this November, legalization supporters will need to find a new strategy to appeal to red state voters and legislators. They will need to take concerns over public health and safety seriously, address the persistence of racial disparities in cannabis arrests in legalization states, tackle the growing corporate influence within the movement, and respond to the moral critiques of people like former Alabama Senator and U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions who feel that, simply put, “good people don’t smoke marijuana.”

    William Garriott’s research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

    – ref. Cannabis legalization may hit a ‘red wall’ at the ballot box – https://theconversation.com/cannabis-legalization-may-hit-a-red-wall-at-the-ballot-box-241738

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Grow fast, die young? Animals that invest in building high-quality biomaterials may slow aging and increase their lifespans

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Chen Hou, Associate Professor of Biology, Missouri University of Science and Technology

    Allocating more energy for growth versus for maintenance comes with longevity trade-offs. Matthias Clamer/Stone via Getty Images

    Fancy, high-quality products such as Rolex watches and Red Wing boots often cost more to make but last longer. This is a principle that manufacturers and customers are familiar with. But while this also applies to biology, scientists rarely discuss it.

    Researchers have known for decades that the faster an animal grows, the shorter its lifespan, at least among mammals. This holds across species of different sizes. Ecophysiologists like me have been studying the trade-offs between allocating energy for growth or for maintenance, and how those trade-offs affect aging and lifespan.

    One explanation is that since animals have a limited amount of energy available, investing more energy in growth will reduce the energy they have left to maintain their health, therefore leading to faster aging.

    Another explanation is based on the observation that metabolism – all the physical and chemical processes that convert or use energy – fuels growth. Some researchers have suggested that fast growth is associated with high metabolism, in turn causing stress that speeds up aging.

    However, these two explanations may not capture the whole picture of the trade-off between growth and longevity. For example, certain species allocate a larger fraction of their energy to maintenance but don’t have better resistance to stress than species that allocate less energy to those processes. This finding indicates that the amount of energy allocated to maintenance may not be the only thing that determines its quality.

    Meanwhile, I found that this negative association still strongly holds even after accounting for metabolic rate. That means the higher metabolism associated with faster growth cannot completely explain faster aging. There had to be other missing links to consider.

    What have scientists overlooked? My recently published research suggests that the energy cost it takes to make biological materials, or the biosynthetic cost, also affects lifespan.

    Whales have some of the longest lifespans among mammals.
    lisabskelton/iStock via Getty Images Plus

    Cost of making biomass

    It costs energy to make biological materials, or biomass, such as assembling individual amino acids into whole proteins. It also costs energy to check newly synthesized materials for errors, break down and rebuild materials with errors, and transport finished materials to where they need to be.

    To measure the energy investment in building biomass across species, I derived a mathematical relationship between biosynthetic cost and rates of growth and metabolism. I based my equation on the first principle of energy conservation, which states that energy is neither created nor destroyed, and data on the growth and metabolism rates of different mammals routinely measured by other researchers in the field.

    While researchers previously believed that the cost of synthesizing new biomass was the same across species, my analysis of data from 139 different animals found that there is a great difference in biosynthetic cost between species. For example, a naked mole rat has a biosynthetic cost that is over three times as that of a mouse with the same body mass. While the naked mole rat has a lifespan of 30 years, the mouse’s lifespan is only two to three years.

    My findings suggest that some species spend more energy than others to make one unit of biomass. This is perhaps partially due to living in a more dangerous environment. Animals that grow faster are more likely to reach reproductive maturity than animals that grow more slowly, but the price to pay is low-quality biomaterials.

    Biosynthetic cost and aging

    If everything else is kept the same, the more expensive growth is, the lower the growth rate will be. But how does this energy cost contribute to the aging process?

    I used what I call a cost-quality hypothesis to answer this question. At the cellular level, biosynthetic cost is in part determined by the cell’s tolerance for errors in making materials. Take proteins as an example. Research has repeatedly suggested that protein homeostasis – the collective processes that maintain protein level, structure and function – plays a key role in the aging process. In simple terms, the accumulation of proteins with errors leads to aging.

    Protein synthesis and folding is imperfect. Researchers have estimated that 20% to 30% of new proteins are rapidly degraded after they’re made due to errors. Different species have different degrees of error tolerance and protein quality control. For example, the mouse proteome has two- to tenfold higher levels of proteins with incorrect amino acids relative to the proteome of naked mole rats.

    Let’s consider two species, where one is picky about protein errors and the other not so much. The picky species will break down and remake a protein when it finds an error, constantly using protein quality control mechanisms to proofread, quickly unfold and refold, degrade or resynthesize proteins. Not only do these processes cost energy, they also slow down an animal’s overall biomass growth rate. A pickier species would spend more energy for a unit of net new biomass synthesized than a species with high tolerance, growing more slowly overall.

    On the other hand, a species with higher tolerance to errors would have a lower biosynthetic cost because it would just incorporate the faulty protein into their new biomass. Because this species can function with faulty proteins, it is more resistant to stress and therefore lives longer.

    Naked mole rats live the longest among rodents – their lifespans can push past 30 years.
    Tennessee Witney/iStock via Getty Images Plus

    Making things last

    An animal’s ability to maintain homeostasis not only depends on the amount of energy it allocates to maintenance but also on the quality of the tissue it produces. And the quality of that tissue is at least partially due to the energy it invests in making biomass.

    In other words, fancy stuff costs more to make but lasts longer.

    My hope is that these results could be used as a framework to investigate how differences in a person’s development and growth rate affect their health, risk for aging-related diseases and lifespan. It also opens a door to a new research area: Could we manipulate the mechanisms that determine the energetic cost of biosynthesis and slow aging?

    Chen Hou does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Grow fast, die young? Animals that invest in building high-quality biomaterials may slow aging and increase their lifespans – https://theconversation.com/grow-fast-die-young-animals-that-invest-in-building-high-quality-biomaterials-may-slow-aging-and-increase-their-lifespans-240517

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Making a Snickers bar is a complex science − a candy engineer explains how to build the airy nougat and chewy caramel of this Halloween favorite

    Source: The Conversation – USA – By Richard Hartel, Professor of Food Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison

    From their caramel centers to chocolatey coatings, several widely used candy-making processes go into the production of a single Snickers bar. NurPhoto / Contributor via Getty Images

    It’s Halloween. You’ve just finished trick-or-treating and it’s time to assess the haul. You likely have a favorite, whether it’s chocolate bars, peanut butter cups, those gummy clusters with Nerds on them or something else.

    For some people, including me, one piece stands out – the Snickers bar, especially if it’s full-size. The combination of nougat, caramel and peanuts coated in milk chocolate makes Snickers a popular candy treat.

    As a food engineer studying candy and ice cream at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I now look at candy in a whole different way than I did as a kid. Back then, it was all about shoveling it in as fast as I could.

    Now, as a scientist who has made a career studying and writing books about confections, I have a very different take on candy. I have no trouble sacrificing a piece for the microscope or the texture analyzer to better understand how all the components add up. I don’t work for, own stock in, or receive funding from Mars Wrigley, the company that makes Snickers bars. But in my work, I do study the different components that make up lots of popular candy bars. Snickers has many of the most common elements you’ll find in your Halloween candy.

    Let’s look at the elements of a Snickers bar as an example of candy science. As with almost everything, once you get into it, each component is more complex than you might think.

    Snickers bars contain a layer of nougat, a layer of caramel mixed with peanuts and a chocolate coating.
    istarif/iStock via Getty Images Plus

    Airy nougat

    Let’s start with the nougat. The nougat in a Snickers bar is a slightly aerated candy with small sugar crystals distributed throughout.

    One of the ingredients in the nougat is egg white, a protein that helps stabilize the air bubbles that provide a light texture. Often, nougats like this are made by whipping sugar and egg whites together. The egg whites coat the air bubbles created during whipping, which gives the nougat its aerated texture.

    A boiled sugar syrup is then slowly mixed into the egg white sugar mixture, after which a melted fat is added. Since fat can cause air bubbles to collapse, this step has to be done last and very carefully.

    The final ingredient added before cooling is powdered sugar to provide seeds for the sugar crystallization in the batch. The presence of small sugar crystals makes the nougat “short” – pull it apart between your fingers and it breaks cleanly with no stretch.

    Chewy caramel

    On top of the nougat layer is a band of chewy caramel. The chewiness of the caramel contrasts the nougat’s light, airy texture, which provides contrast to each bite.

    Caramel stands out from other candies as it contains a dairy ingredient, such as cream or evaporated milk. During cooking, the milk proteins react with some of the sugars in a complex series of reactions called Maillard browning, which imparts the brown color and caramelly flavor.

    Maillard browning starts with proteins and certain sugars. The end products of these reactions include melanoidins, which are brown coloring compounds, and a variety of flavors. The specific flavor molecules depend on the starting materials and the conditions, such as temperature and water content.

    Commercial caramel, like that in the Snickers bar, is cooked up to about 240-245 degrees Fahrenheit (115-118 degrees Celsius), to control the water content. Cook to too high a temperature and the caramel gets too hard, but if the cook temperature is too low, the caramel will flow right off the nougat. In a Snickers bar, the caramel needs to be slightly chewy so the peanuts stick to it.

    Chocolate coating

    To make chocolate, raw cocoa beans are harvested from cacao pods and then fermented for several days. After the fermented beans are dried, they are roasted to develop the chocolate flavor. As in caramel, the Maillard browning reaction is an important contributor to the flavor of chocolate.

    The milk chocolate coating on the Snickers bar happens through a process called enrobing. The naked bar, arranged on a wire mesh conveyor, passes through a curtain of tempered liquid chocolate, covering all sides with a thin layer. Tempering the chocolate coating makes it glossy and gives it a well-defined snap.

    The enrobing process in action.

    The flow of the tempered chocolate needs to be controlled precisely to give a coating of the desired thickness without leading to tails at the bottom of the candy bar.

    The Snickers bar

    When done right, the result is a delicious Snickers bar, a popular Halloween – or anytime – candy.

    With about 15 million bars made each day, getting every detail just right requires a lot of scientific understanding and engineering precision.

    Richard Hartel has previously consulted for Mars Wrigley, but not in the past decade, and does not receive funding from them nor own shares in their company.

    – ref. Making a Snickers bar is a complex science − a candy engineer explains how to build the airy nougat and chewy caramel of this Halloween favorite – https://theconversation.com/making-a-snickers-bar-is-a-complex-science-a-candy-engineer-explains-how-to-build-the-airy-nougat-and-chewy-caramel-of-this-halloween-favorite-241534

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –