This photo of asteroid Bennu is composed of 12 Polycam images collected on Dec. 2, 2024, by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.NASA
A bright fireball streaked across the sky above mountains, glaciers and spruce forest near the town of Revelstoke in British Columbia, Canada, on the evening of March 31, 1965. Fragments of this meteorite, discovered by beaver trappers, fell over a lake. A layer of ice saved them from the depths and allowed scientists a peek into the birth of the solar system.
Nearly 60 years later, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned from space with a sample of an asteroid named Bennu, similar to the one that rained rocks over Revelstoke. Our research team has published a chemical analysis of those samples, providing insight into how some of the ingredients for life may have first arrived on Earth.
Born in the years bracketing the Revelstoke meteorite’s fall, the two of us have spent our careers in the meteorite collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Natural History Museum in London. We’ve dreamed of studying samples from a Revelstoke-like asteroid collected by a spacecraft.
Then, nearly two decades ago, we began turning those dreams into reality. We joined NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission team, which aimed to send a spacecraft to collect and return an asteroid sample to Earth. After those samples arrived on Sept. 24, 2023, we got to dive into a tale of rock, ice and water that hints at how life could have formed on Earth.
To learn about an asteroid – a rocky or metallic object in orbit around the Sun – we started with a study of meteorites.
Asteroids like Bennu are rocky or metallic objects in orbit around the Sun. Meteorites are the pieces of asteroids and other natural extraterrestrial objects that survive the fiery plunge to the Earth’s surface.
We really wanted to study an asteroid similar to a set of meteorites called chondrites, whose components formed in a cloud of gas and dust at the dawn of the solar system billions of years ago.
The Revelstoke meteorite is in a group called CI chondrites. Laboratory-measured compositions of CI chondrites are essentially identical, minus hydrogen and helium, to the composition of elements carried by convection from the interior of the Sun and measured in the outermost layer of the Sun. Since their components formed billions of years ago, they’re like chemically unchanged time capsules for the early solar system.
So, geologists use the chemical compositions of CI chondrites as the ultimate reference standard for geochemistry. They can compare the compositions of everything from other chondrites to Earth rocks. Any differences from the CI chondrite composition would have happened through the same processes that formed asteroids and planets.
CI chondrites are rich in clay and formed when ice melted in an ancient asteroid, altering the rock. They are also rich in prebiotic organic molecules. Some of these types of molecules are the building blocks for life.
This combination of rock, water and organics is one reason OSIRIS-REx chose to sample the organic-rich asteroid Bennu, where water and organic compounds essential to the origin of life could be found.
Evaporites − the legacy of an ancient brine
Ever since the Bennu samples returned to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023, we and our colleagues on four continents have spent hundreds of hours studying them.
The instruments on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made observations of reflected light that revealed the most abundant minerals and organics when it was near asteroid Bennu. Our analyses in the laboratory found that the compositions of these samples lined up with those observations.
The samples are mostly water-rich clay, with sulfide, carbonate and iron oxide minerals. These are the same minerals found in CI chondrites like Revelstoke. The discovery of rare minerals within the Bennu samples, however, surprised both of us. Despite our decades of experience studying meteorites, we have never seen many of these minerals.
We found minerals dominated by sodium, including carbonates, sulfates, chlorides and fluorides, as well as potassium chloride and magnesium phosphate. These minerals don’t form just when water and rock react. They form when water evaporates.
Bennu’s rocks formed 4.5 billion years ago on a larger parent asteroid. That asteroid was wet and muddy. Under the surface, pockets of water perhaps only a few feet across were evaporating, leaving the evaporite minerals we found in the sample. That same evaporation process also formed the ancient lake beds we’ve seen these minerals in on Earth.
Bennu’s parent asteroid likely broke apart 1 to 2 billion years ago, and some of the fragments came together to form the rubble pile we know as Bennu.
These minerals are also found on icy bodies in the outer solar system. Bright deposits on the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest body in the asteroid belt, contain sodium carbonate. The Cassini mission measured the same mineral in plumes on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
We also learned that these minerals, formed when water evaporates, disappear when exposed to water once again – even with the tiny amount of water found in air. After studying some of the Bennu samples and their minerals, researchers stored the samples in air. That’s what we do with meteorites.
Unfortunately, we lost these minerals as moisture in the air on Earth caused them to dissolve. But that explains why we can’t find these minerals in meteorites that have been on Earth for decades to centuries.
Until scientists were able to conduct a controlled sample return with a spacecraft and carefully curate and store the samples in nitrogen, we had never seen this set of minerals in a meteorite.
An unexpected discovery
Before returning the samples, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft spent over two years making observations around Bennu. From that two years of work, researchers learned that the surface of the asteroid is covered in rocky boulders.
We could see that the asteroid is rich in carbon and water-bearing clays, and we saw veins of white carbonate a few feet long deposited by ancient liquid water. But what we couldn’t see from these observations were the rarer minerals.
We used an array of techniques to go through the returned sample one tiny grain at a time. These included CT scanning, electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction, each of which allowed us to look at the rock at a scale not possible on the asteroid.
Cooking up the ingredients for life
From the salts we identified, we could infer the composition of the briny water from which they formed and see how it changed over time, becoming more sodium-rich.
This briny water would have been an ideal place for new chemical reactions to take place and for organic molecules to form.
While our team characterized salts, our organic chemist colleagues were busy identifying the carbon-based molecules present in Bennu. They found unexpectedly high levels of ammonia, an essential building block of the amino acids that form proteins in living matter. They also found all five of the nucleobases that make up part of DNA and RNA.
Based on these results, we’d venture to guess that these briny pods of fluid would have been the perfect environments for increasingly complicated organic molecules to form, such as the kinds that make up life on Earth.
When asteroids like Bennu hit the young Earth, they could have provided a complete package of complex molecules and the ingredients essential to life, such as water, phosphate and ammonia. Together, these components could have seeded Earth’s initially barren landscape to produce a habitable world.
Without this early bombardment, perhaps when the pieces of the Revelstoke meteorite landed several billion years later, these fragments from outer space would not have arrived into a landscape punctuated with glaciers and trees.
Timothy J McCoy receives funding from NASA.
Sara Russell receives funding from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
In 1764, Horace Walpole published the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, set in a labyrinthine castle surrounded by woods. The novel features the supernatural, with a dark secret from the past at its core. Today, 260 years later, gothic is still with us in the form of “contemporary gothic”plays, fiction, films, music and computer games.
Central to the popularity of gothic is the way it affects its audiences. It is supposed to unsettle, to make the flesh creep and provoke feelings of claustrophobia. Soundtracks for gothic films are integral to creating such effects, building suspense and unease while amplifying the visceral impact of sudden jump scares.
Alejandro Amenábar’s soundtrack for The Others (2001), for example, weirds its listeners out. The hollow but reverberant timbre of brushed piano strings evokes the spaces of the house, conjuring up the old-fashioned alienness of the place. Action, set and music sympathetically resonate.
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The soundtrack for The Substance (2024) shrieks with the strings and sudden dissonances of The Nightmare and Dawn (taken from Bernard Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece, Vertigo). Then, it deepens the sense of disquiet with the sinister incantations and medieval-sounding harmonies of Swedish composer Anna von Hausswolff‘s Ugly and Vengeful.
Both soundtracks impressively succeed in doing what we expect gothic music to do: provoke unease, create suspense and drive home the horror elements.
But has the music of the gothic always been called upon to unsettle and scare? Has it always sounded so, well, gothic? These are questions I explore in my new book The Music of the Gothic 1789–1820.
Over the last few years, I’ve been rummaging through archives in London, Oxford and Dublin searching for settings of songs from novels and music associated with gothic plays such as The Mysteries of the Castle (1795). I uncovered many treasures, some of which probably haven’t been performed for a couple of centuries.
Thanks to a grant from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, I was able to bring some of this music to audiences once more with the help of a group of wonderful musicians, headed by Seb Gillot, who performed the tracks you can hear in this article. You can see them performing live below.
The gothic novels and plays of the 1790s were populated by sweet-singing heroines and heroes. Among the music I encountered was a song by the composer and singer Harriet Abrams (c. 1758-1821), in which a woman imprisoned in a madhouse sweetly pleads with her cold-hearted jailer.
I also found music for gothic plays by the Northumbrian William Shield (1748-1829) and the Irish tenor Michael Kelly (1762-1826), who wrote songs about jolly mariners , comic poachers_ and young peasant girls on their way back from market.
None of this material sounded remotely what we would now describe as gothic. Even the music accompanying the entrance of a blood-covered ghost in The Castle Spectre (1798) was warm and stately – and singularly unterrifying.
I realised that none of the music from the 1790s – a period when gothic was phenomenally popular – was intended to scare. On the contrary, it was called upon to provide relief from the scare. In late 18th-century gothic plays such as The Italian Monk (1797), music was associated with romance, comedy and sublime religious experience, but not horror or terror.
At what point then did the kind of gothic music we know today come into being? The evidence can be found in books such as Remick Folio of Moving Picture Music (1914) which contains music for silent film accompanists. With names like Mysterioso, or Forboding and Wind Storm, or Hurry, they were evidently designed for scenes of suspense and mystery.
Such music is indebted to the music of Victorian melodrama, but what I wanted to know was when melodrama acquired its distinctive gothic sounds.
Digging into the past of gothic
Very often in research you discover that things happen gradually. There is trial and experiment, a series of influences, a slow accumulation of examples, and then a tipping point. But when it comes to gothic music, that is not the case. There is a definite date when a specific kind of music erupted onto the entertainment scene. The date was 1802, and the occasion a new dramatic production – a “melo-drame” or musical drama called A Tale of Mystery with music by Thomas Busby.
Busby’s music was conceptualised very differently to the music of the 1790s. For a start it was intended to add to, not to provide relief from, the gothic elements of the play.
Most crucially, it was not part of the imagined world of the drama. The fictional characters did not sing it – they did not even “hear” it: Busby’s music was directed at the audience. Instrumental music calculated to disturb, it was chaotic and unnerving, with lots of fast, disjointed short phrases, disturbing chords and cliffhanger endings.
Instantly recognised as new and revolutionary, it caused a sensation. After audiences had a taste of the new gothic in A Tale of Mystery, music on the page and on the stage soon became something darker and more troubling.
The older kind of music didn’t disappear overnight, of course, but melodrama took hold and the music of gothic was transformed. Not just on stage but also on the page. Gothic music was no longer uplifting but sinister.
As seen in The Woman in Black (2012), there’s nothing like a music box in a deserted house to terrify audiences. And who doesn’t thrill to the sound of the diabolically thundering organ in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera?
Emma McEvoy received a research grant from the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust for the project “The Music of Gothic Literature and Theatre 1790-1820”.
South African poetry, rich with history, has long been an underappreciated cornerstone of the country’s cultural landscape. But a new free-to-access digital archive is helping change that.
Focused on the poets published by a small but important press in a town called Makhanda in the Eastern Cape province, the Deep South Books and Archive initiative seeks to elevate their voices by offering an archive of background information about their work and lives as well as extensive excerpts from their books. It’s a rare window into a vital but overlooked tradition of South African literature.
Robert Berold, after spending a decade as editor for New Coin journal, set up Deep South in 1995. For decades he has had a quiet influence on the South African poetry scene. His impulse to publish emerged from a place of need and outrage that some of the talented young black poets he was publishing in New Coin couldn’t get their books published in the new, democratic South Africa.
Many of these poets had been using their words to fight for freedom, while a new generation of young poets was emerging with democracy. Ever since, Deep South has been an important arena where South African poets and their poems could speak to one another.
My work on African literary production shows the importance of small presses in creating local literary ecologies.
To publish what was considered to be innovative and risk-taking South African poetry, regardless of market limitations.
His many endeavours as a publisher, editor and teacher have been linked by the effort to rescue from oblivion, to supply context, to indicate points of continuity while insisting on the diversity of the South African experience.
After 30 years of publishing, Berold is now sharing a vast catalogue and archive that would otherwise remain unknown. Even though the African Poetry Digital Portal, hosted by the University of Nebraska in the US, was created as a resource for the study of the history of African poetry from antiquity to the present, it does not give direct reference to particular communities.
In bringing this archive to the internet, Berold is revealing the process and method of how contemporary South African poetry has been shaped into being.
Behind the poems
Much of the archive material is what Berold accumulated in dealing with the poets – correspondence, manuscripts, reviews. This is also physically deposited at the Amazwi South African Museum of Literature. He explains:
I got into correspondence with everyone who sent in poems, trying to give helpful criticism, recommending poets for them to read. There was a certain inappropriateness about this at times, and some arrogance too on my part, but mostly people appreciated the feedback.
The “difficult miracle of Black poetry”, as US poet June Jordan once remarked, is that it persists, published or not, loved or unloved. In racially segregated South Africa during apartheid, publishing spaces were few and far between.
Black poets were often censored, banned or exiled as their work confronted the injustices of a racist system. This digital archive recasts the story of South African poetry as insurgent, independent and driven to define a distinct aesthetic.
Deep South has, furthermore, made a particular impression by fostering a unique aesthetic in South African poetry through its investments in typography and design. As a small, independent press situated away from culture capitals – Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg – it has had the freedom to experiment.
Deep South Books and Archive is therefore a significant tribute to the persistence of South African poetry, despite many historical and structural inequalities. It is a catalogue and a digital archive that provides a unique entry point into modern South African poetry.
Clicking through the carousel of finely designed book covers leads one to excerpts, book reviews, interviews available as PDF files, as well as links to other multimedia resources.
Rampolokeng’s work may be iconoclastic, experimental, unclassifiable but he found a home with this press. He has publishedseveral of his groundbreaking collections with them. Defying category, they bend and shift, and culminate into a remarkable linguistic virtuoso. His interviews are an extension of his art, reflexive, autobiographical, and works in themselves.
Unrecognised poets
Then there are poets like Motadinyane and Zhuwao who died far too early, leaving behind only single collections. Luckily, even if their portraits and writings are fragmentary, we’re at least witness to the poetic geniuses that might have been. This is the superpower of this archive, to serve as a memorial for a canon (or collection of literary texts) that wasn’t even close to being fully blossomed.
Historically, canon construction is the work of the few, foremost among them academics who edit anthologies and design syllabuses. Most of these poets do not feature in scholarly journals. As a result they almost exist in the underground, unremarked. Berold, now in his 70s and approaching retirement, has decided to do something about that with a digital archive that surfaces the voices of lesser-known poets.
The lack of recognition for these poets is bothersome for him:
Why nobody in academe has registered the importance of these poets is beyond me. It really makes me wonder whether these professional literary people are able to read.
This is mostly an indictment of systems that undervalue black expression.
This project may be for preservation, but there is another lesson: African literature demands constant acts of recovery. In this case, the internet serves as a kind of rear view mirror, which allows us a backward glance at poets and their works that have been overlooked or underappreciated, forgotten or misunderstood.
Tinashe Mushakavanhu 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.
In January 2024, a coalition of organisations across the east African nation organised multi-city public marches to call for government action against these deaths. A year later, President William Ruto established a 42-member taskforce to address gender-based violence. What is its potential to lead to real change for women and girls? Feminist and security studies professor Awino Okech explores the issue.
What do you make of the Kenyan government’s response to gender-based violence?
Femicide is the specific act of men killing women because they are women. Gender-based violence focuses on the gender power relations that create conditions for violence. This does not always result in loss of life. Gender-based violence includes men killed by other men because of their sexuality, widows disenfranchised by property laws, female genital mutilation and forced marriage.
Unlike in the past, Kenya has seen increasing reports of women being murdered. The country doesn’t have a proper data management system for such incidences. Nevertheless, the numbers recorded by organisations such as Femicide Count show the scale of the problem. In 2023 it recorded 152 femicides based on cases reported in the media. Africa Uncensored, an investigative journalism media house, estimates that 500 women were killed between 2017 and 2024. Kenya’s law enforcement agencies recorded 97 cases of femicide between September and November 2024. Globally, UN Women reported that in 2023 alone, one woman was killed every 10 minutes in intimate partner and family-related murders.
What is the likelihood of the presidential working group’s success?
First, at face value, any public action taken by a government to illustrate that it is listening to its citizens is an important first step.
Third, there is a history in Kenya of setting up task forces with financial resources largely directed at remunerating members and conducting “consultations”, only to tell the country what was already known. Consultations are critical for legitimacy and a base for action. But there are more expedient ways to do this work.
This includes analysing existing reports, statements and recommendations offered by women’s rights organisation over the decades, including a 2024 statement on ending femicide. An insistence on a large task force in the light of the government’s austerity drive only raises questions about where limited resources should be directed.
Finally, I am concerned that some of the leading voices on femicide in the last 10 years are missing from this task force. It is the activism of the coalition of actors organising under EndFemicideKE that recentred the conversation on femicide with some of the organisations leading urgent response work in their communities. The task force must not ignore this expertise.
What steps should Kenya be taking to address femicide?
Invest in programmes that emphasise positive masculinities. This means raising a generation of men whose idea of manhood is not based on hatred of or violence against women. This work is an important counter measure to the growing “manosphere” in Kenya. The manosphere refers to websites, blogs and online forums focused on promoting misogyny and opposition to feminism. These online spaces have grown globally and are viewed as central to grooming men to commit femicide.
Increase resources to programmes aimed at women who are at risk of violence. The signs of violence predate the act of violence and murder. Providing resources to create safe physical and online spaces – such as hotlines for women to get the support they need to secure their lives, or effective investigative services – is key. Central to this action is the role of the police service in taking seriously and investigating any claims of potential threats of violence. People need to feel safe going to the police to report threats of harm and have trust in their capacity to deliver justice. This action requires trust building between communities and the police service.
Deal with the structural causes of femicide. At the heart of this targeted violence against women are the underlying patriarchal assumptions about how women should act relative to men in society. We cannot ignore the importance of building people’s consciousness about the deep biases they have been socialised to believe in. This work must be led by community champions who value the sanctity of human life.
What needs to be done to hold institutions accountable?
First, the relevant state institutions, such as public hospitals and clinics, the police and judiciary, need money and people with the right skills, so they can intervene in the root causes and symptoms of gender-based violence.
Second, Kenya needs to create a national database on femicide. This would indicate where and how to deploy resources.
Third, there needs to be an annual and public report on the state of gender-based violence that tracks where money has gone, and shows the relationship between actions and outcomes. An initial increase in cases might not indicate failure but rather heightened awareness. With the right interventions, numbers should drop over time.
The right to peaceful protest is enshrined in Kenya’s constitution. When the police respond with violence to peaceful women protesters talking about the murder of women, how can citizens trust officers’ ability to take dead women seriously?
Awino Okech receives funding from Open Society Foundations
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Helga Dickow, Senior Researcher at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institut, Freiburg Germany, University of Freiburg
Chad held parliamentary elections in late December 2024. The final results released on 21 January 2025 gave the well-established former ruling party, the Movement Patriotique du Salut (MPS), 124 seats out of 188.
The result has meant that Mahamat Déby has given himself a degree of legitimacy as president through elections. He can comfortably remain in power for at least another five or even ten years.
I have been following Chad’s politics from inside and outside the country for more than 15 years. In my view, Mahamat Déby’s actions during the transition, with the help of the transitional authorities and his late father’s old teams, were aimed at keeping him in power. The December 2024 parliamentary elections were a formality. The poll was not won on polling day. It was clear from the run-up that, as was the case with the May 2024 presidential elections, every effort was being made to minimise the success of the opposition.
Four factors stand out. They are the composition of the electoral authorities, lack of an up-to-date electoral register, violence against dissenting voices, and high costs of participation in the election.
In my view Chadians’ trust in the democratic process has ceased completely. This bodes ill for a country that ranks as one of the poorest. It is also one of the most corrupt. The consolidation of Mahamat Déby’s power could widen the social divide and lead to violent conflict between different groups in Chad, which is highly stratified along ethnic and religious lines.
Dissatisfaction with his decades of autocratic rule characterised Idriss Déby’s reign. Political-military movements challenged him regularly, and the last attack led to his death.
This dissatisfaction will continue and could once again lead to violent conflicts.
Mahamat Déby and the Movement Patriotique du Salut took a number of steps to secure victory in the election.
Firstly, the presidents of the electoral authority ANGE (Agence Nationale de Gestion des Élections) and of the constitutional court nominated by Mahamat Déby were responsible for organising and for validating elections (and will continue to be responsible until 2031). Having been loyal to Idriss Déby and now to his son, they cannot be trusted to be objective and independent in their pronouncements and final decisions.
Secondly, the electoral register was last updated in August 2024. Therefore, young people who had just turned 18 could not vote. In Chad, the majority of the population is under 25. Young people in particular in the south support the opposition.
Thirdly, the transitional regime’s violent crackdown on opposing voices played a role in the final outcome of the election.
The transition was initially characterised by peace talks with the political-military movements and by expanding the security sector to secure its rule. In October 2022, several hundred mainly young people were killed by security forces while demonstrating against the extension of the transition and Mahamat Déby’s candidacy for presidency.
In February 2024 Yaya Dillo, a cousin of Mahamat Deby and a potential rival in the presidential elections, was shot dead by security forces.
In May 2024, Mahamat Déby was elected president. In December 2024 he took on the title of marshal – previously held only by his father.
The opposition was also hampered in participating in the poll for financial reasons. Taking part in the elections is expensive. Each candidate in the parliamentary election had to pay 500,000 CFA (US$785) to the treasury. Candidates for the provincial election paid 200,000 CFA (US$314). In poverty-stricken Chad, without regular funding for political parties, it was particularly difficult for smaller parties to meet these criteria.
The situation was different for the ruling party, founded by Idriss Déby. For decades it has benefited from state resources. It is the only party with a nationwide presence. Other parties are mainly active in the regions of their founders.
Opposition parties called for a boycott. The Groupe de Concertation des Acteurs Politiques, a coalition of nine parties, criticised the new electoral law and the lack of transparency of the count at the polling stations.
Succès Masra, leader of Les Transformateurs, a former prime minister who came second in the 2024 presidential elections, also called for a boycott. He accused the government of falsifying the results of the parliamentary election beforehand and of having the final lists saved in a computer. His party did not participate in the poll.
The results of the parliamentary elections presented on 11 January 2025 by Ahmed Barticheret, president of the electoral commission, and confirmed by the constitutional court on 21 January, therefore revealed no surprises.
Alongside the huge victory of the Movement Patriotique du Salut, two other parties not really in opposition won 12 and 7 seats respectively. The other successful parties won just one seat each. Chad has over 300 political parties, of which 38 are represented in the new parliament.
Movement Patriotique du Salut has an overwhelming majority in parliament. This means that there are no checks and balances. Like his father, Mahamat Déby can continue to rule without any parliamentary control.
He is already used to that. Since 2021, he has appointed members of the transitional parliament by presidential decree. The few voices of individual members of parliament belonging to the “real” opposition have no influence.
As the low turnout – put at 40% on election day – shows, the majority of voters did not expect the election result to change the political situation. On the other hand, supporters of the ruling party continue to benefit from proximity to power and state resources.
As dissatisfaction continues, the possibility of renewed attacks by dissidents cannot be ruled out. If it is not a military attack, frustrated individuals might try to target the presidency or other symbols of the regime.
In early January 2025 a group of unidentified young people reportedly attacked the presidency. The incident was played down by the government spokesman, leaving plenty of room for speculation.
But it was a reminder that a peaceful future is not assured.
Helga Dickow 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.
DeepSeek burst on the scene – and may be bursting some bubbles.AP Photo/Andy Wong
State-of-the-art artificial intelligence systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude have captured the public imagination by producing fluent text in multiple languages in response to user prompts. Those companies have also captured headlines with the huge sums they’ve invested to build ever more powerful models.
An AI startup from China, DeepSeek, has upset expectations about how much money is needed to build the latest and greatest AIs. In the process, they’ve cast doubt on the billions of dollars of investment by the big AI players.
I study machine learning. DeepSeek’s disruptive debut comes down not to any stunning technological breakthrough but to a time-honored practice: finding efficiencies. In a field that consumes vast computing resources, that has proved to be significant.
Where the costs are
Developing such powerful AI systems begins with building a large language model. A large language model predicts the next word given previous words. For example, if the beginning of a sentence is “The theory of relativity was discovered by Albert,” a large language model might predict that the next word is “Einstein.” Large language models are trained to become good at such predictions in a process called pretraining.
Pretraining requires a lot of data and computing power. The companies collect data by crawling the web and scanning books. Computing is usually powered by graphics processing units, or GPUs. Why graphics? It turns out that both computer graphics and the artificial neural networks that underlie large language models rely on the same area of mathematics known as linear algebra. Large language models internally store hundreds of billions of numbers called parameters or weights. It is these weights that are modified during pretraining.
Large language models consume huge amounts of computing resources, which in turn means lots of energy.
Pretraining is, however, not enough to yield a consumer product like ChatGPT. A pretrained large language model is usually not good at following human instructions. It might also not be aligned with human preferences. For example, it might output harmful or abusive language, both of which are present in text on the web.
The pretrained model therefore usually goes through additional stages of training. One such stage is instruction tuning where the model is shown examples of human instructions and expected responses. After instruction tuning comes a stage called reinforcement learning from human feedback. In this stage, human annotators are shown multiple large language model responses to the same prompt. The annotators are then asked to point out which response they prefer.
It is easy to see how costs add up when building an AI model: hiring top-quality AI talent, building a data center with thousands of GPUs, collecting data for pretraining, and running pretraining on GPUs. Additionally, there are costs involved in data collection and computation in the instruction tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback stages.
All included, costs for building a cutting edge AI model can soar up to US$100 million. GPU training is a significant component of the total cost.
The expenditure does not stop when the model is ready. When the model is deployed and responds to user prompts, it uses more computation known as test time or inference time compute. Test time compute also needs GPUs. In December 2024, OpenAI announced a new phenomenon they saw with their latest model o1: as test time compute increased, the model got better at logical reasoning tasks such as math olympiad and competitive coding problems.
Slimming down resource consumption
Thus it seemed that the path to building the best AI models in the world was to invest in more computation during both training and inference. But then DeepSeek entered the fray and bucked this trend.
DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the tech financial ecosystem.
Their V-series models, culminating in the V3 model, used a series of optimizations to make training cutting edge AI models significantly more economical. Their technical report states that it took them less than $6 million dollars to train V3. They admit that this cost does not include costs of hiring the team, doing the research, trying out various ideas and data collection. But $6 million is still an impressively small figure for training a model that rivals leading AI models developed with much higher costs.
The reduction in costs was not due to a single magic bullet. It was a combination of many smart engineering choices including using fewer bits to represent model weights, innovation in the neural network architecture, and reducing communication overhead as data is passed around between GPUs.
It is interesting to note that due to U.S. export restrictions on China, the DeepSeek team did not have access to high performance GPUs like the Nvidia H100. Instead they used Nvidia H800 GPUs, which Nvidia designed to be lower performance so that they comply with U.S. export restrictions. Working with this limitation seems to have unleashed even more ingenuity from the DeepSeek team.
DeepSeek also innovated to make inference cheaper, reducing the cost of running the model. Moreover, they released a model called R1 that is comparable to OpenAI’s o1 model on reasoning tasks.
They released all the model weights for V3 and R1 publicly. Anyone can download and further improve or customize their models. Furthermore, DeepSeek released their models under the permissive MIT license, which allows others to use the models for personal, academic or commercial purposes with minimal restrictions.
Resetting expectations
DeepSeek has fundamentally altered the landscape of large AI models. An open weights model trained economically is now on par with more expensive and closed models that require paid subscription plans.
The research community and the stock market will need some time to adjust to this new reality.
Many of us feel pressure to transform ourselves. Just spend a few minutes scrolling social media, and you’re likely to come across several videos telling you about various challenges and tips to help you have a “glow-up”. Most of these tips are about physical appearance – drinking more water to clear your skin, or spending 75 days doing hardcore workouts.
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With political support historically from all parties and civil society — including faith organizations and community groups — private sponsorship is an affordable, sustainable and effective way to protect and support people whose lives are at risk.
Safe haven for refugees
For 45 years, Canada’s Private Sponsorship of Refugees (PSR) program has provided safety to refugees from around the world, bringing together Canadian individuals and communities who volunteer their time and raise funds to support refugee newcomers to Canada.
Everyday Canadians have stepped up to provide funds for newcomers’ basic expenses, to help find housing and to connect people to health, education and language services. More than 327,000 refugees have come to Canada through the program, supported by citizen action from coast to coast.
The pause, in place until Dec. 31, 2025, was cited as “preventing further growth of the application inventory” that far exceeds the current spaces allotted for privately sponsored refugees in the 2025-2027 Immigration Levels Plan, which is 23,000 for 2025.
This pause does not apply to all sponsorship applications, like those submitted by sponsorship agreement holders, the Blended Visa Office-Referred Program or the one-year window provision. However, data from 2022 indicate that the G5 and CS groups represented 60 per cent of private refugee sponsorships, meaning these streams are significant contributors to the program.
The inevitable result of this action will be longer wait times for applicants at risk, and longer periods of separation for refugees who have landed as permanent residents and urgently want to bring family or community members who remain in danger to safety — and have no other pathway to do so.
Between 2017 and 2020, our research team (led by geography professor Jennifer Hyndman) interviewed more than 100 people in five provinces across Canada, with participants from both urban and rural settings. Our focus was on long-term sponsors — people who had participated in sponsorship programs several times over a minimum of five years, often decades. Many of these had been part of the G5 group, which allows private citizens to collectively resettle refugees from abroad.
Our findings revealed that many G5 sponsors are driven by deep commitment to global solidarity with refugees. G5 sponsors are often in diaspora communities and former refugees themselves who want to help family members or close kin in dangerous circumstances to safety.
The program’s ability to facilitate these connections and the protection they afford is vital, driving the sustainability of private refugee sponsorship. The suspension of new applications for G5 will not only prolong family separation but also extend the wait times for refugees trapped in war zones.
Our research shows that a large proportion of former refugees and sponsors knew specific individuals still at risk whom they wished to sponsor. This process of “naming,” which allows sponsors to nominate individuals for resettlement, is a unique and integral feature of the PSR program.
Undermining refugee protection
As government-led initiatives provide only limited resettlement pathways, civil society has relied on the full range of sponsorship categories, including private sponsorship by G5, to ensure equitable refugee protection.
The pause on G5 and CS streams narrow the possibilities for pathways to protection, which in turn threatens to make refugee protection more inequitable. This is especially the case for refugees displaced by conflicts that have historically not aligned with Canadian government priorities but still drive high numbers of displacement, including those in Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea.
In the United Nations Global Refugee Compact, released in 2018, Canadian sponsorship was cited as a promising practice for expanding refugee protection across the world.
A recent Senate report, Ripped From Home: The Global Crisis of Forced Displacement, praises the PSR program for providing individuals and organizations with the opportunity to sponsor refugees. It also recommends the federal government increase private sponsorship.
The recent announcement to cut this program is at odds with these recommendations and undercuts Canada’s reputation as a leader in the protection of refugees internationally.
Call to action
The pause on new intake of G5 and CS applications for sponsorship disrupts a system that has successfully empowered communities in Canada and across the world to come together and save lives.
We urge the government to reconsider its decision and explore alternative solutions, such as allocating additional resources to clear backlogs, rather than halting applications.
Anna Lise Purkey is affiliated with the Canadian Association for Refugee and Forced Migration Studies.
Biftu Yousuf and Dawit Demoz 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.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Gabrielle Clark, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Law, California State University, Los Angeles
Jimmy Carter shakes riders’ hands in a Mexican American parade while campaigning in Southern California in 1976.AP Photo
President Donald Trump promised during his three presidential campaigns to deport as many immigrants living in the U.S. without legal authorization as possible.
His second administration got underway less than one month after former President Jimmy Carter died in December 2024. This sequence of events brings to mind, for me – a public law scholar who studies the historical role of foreign workers in the U.S. – the legacy of Carter’s immigration policy and its stark contrast with Trump’s agenda.
Carter left several lasting markers on immigration policy. Among them was that he reformed the H-2 visa, a permit that allows foreigners to legally and temporarily work in the United States for one employer for one year. He did so by striking a new balance between satisfying the needs of employers and protecting American workers from foreign labor competition.
Trump, by contrast, intends to undertake mass deportations. He has stated that his administration will remove millions of immigrants living in the U.S. without legal authorization.
I’m writing a book about the long-standing conflict between employers and workers over allowing foreigners to legally work in the U.S. Despite Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, I won’t be surprised if Republicans follow in Carter’s footsteps by making it easier for more low-wage migrants to get short-term authorization to hold U.S. jobs.
Replacing the Bracero Program
When Carter became president in January 1977, 13 years had passed since the end of the Bracero Program, which let Mexican men legally get short-term jobs on U.S. farms. Demand for that labor persisted after the Bracero program ended, so large farms hired Mexican immigrants living in the U.S. illegally instead.
The AFL-CIO, an umbrella group that most U.S. unions belong to, and the United Farm Workers, a labor union, pressured the Carter administration for immigration enforcement. They were engaged in heated organization campaigns in the fields and wanted to reduce competition from foreign workers.
Carter, a former peanut farmer and a pragmatist, had the Immigration Naturalization Service authorize 5,000 new H-2 foreign labor visas in June 1977. Over 800 of the visas went to onion, melon, pepper and cotton farms in south Texas.
Congress had created the H-2 guest worker visa in 1952 on behalf of owners of large farms and other employers who wanted a path around immigration restrictions and access to a seasonal labor force. In 1965, however, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s secretary of labor, W. Willard Wirtz, had limited H-2 certifications to Florida sugar farms and East Coast fruit orchards.
Carter saw things differently than Johnson and Wirtz.
“I believe it is possible to structure this program so that it responds to the legitimate needs of both employees, by protecting domestic employment opportunities, and of employers, by providing a needed workforce,” he told Congress on Aug. 4, 1977.
Mexican migrant workers, employed under the Bracero Program to harvest crops on California farms, are shown working in a field in 1964. AP Photo
For employers, they were a boon: For the first time, agricultural employers were entitled to hire foreign workers under the law.
The secretary of labor could no longer eliminate whole crop areas from the program, as Wirtz had done. The reasoning behind the change was simple: The Carter administration wanted to help farms switch from workers living in the U.S. without legal authorization to migrants holding H-2 visas.
Yet, the Carter administration also expanded protections for migrant farmworkers. Their employers now needed to offer them higher wages and better working conditions. The regulations also mandated that employers seeking authority to use the H-2 program try harder to recruit Americans.
United Farm Workers President Cesar Chavez, seen here at a rally in 1985, played a key role in immigration reform efforts over several decades. Bettmann/Getty Images
Carter and the immigration Reform and Control Act
In 1986, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act. While that immigration reform law is best known for providing immigrants living in the U.S. without legal authorization a path to citizenship, it also split the H-2 visa program into two parts. From then on, foreign workers could obtain an H-2A visa for agriculture work or an H-2B visa for other kinds of jobs.
The new law kept Carter’s employer obligations in place for H-2As. The AFL-CIO and several civil rights organizations had objected to guest workers having to depend on their employer for their immigration status, which could make them more vulnerable to exploitation.
President Ronald Reagan prepares to sign a landmark immigration reform bill in 1986. Behind him were members of Congress and Vice President George H.W. Bush. Bettmann/Getty Images
Reforming immigration policies vs. mass deportations
The population of foreign laborers working on U.S. farms with H-2A visas soared from around 26,000 in 1989 to more than 340,000 in 2023. Because the number of H-2A visas the government can issue is unlimited, this arrangement has become an alternative to employing workers living in the U.S. without legal authorization.
The number of foreign workers with H-2B visas is much smaller.
This is because Congress limited the number of people who could get them to 66,000 per year in 1990 as a way to limit competition for American workers seeking or holding down low-wage jobs. In 2017, Congress gave the president the authority to double the maximum number of H-2B visas.
As Trump’s deportations get underway in 2025, I believe that the maximum number of H-2B visas available is likely to become a point of contention among Republicans as Trump and many GOP members of Congress face Carter’s dilemma.
Many Americans, perhaps a majority, want immigration laws enforced. But employers will continue to demand low-wage labor for jobs that U.S. citizens may be reluctant or unwilling to do.
Maintaining a compromise
This time, the mismatch between the government’s efforts to deport foreigners living in the U.S. without authorization and employers’ desires for low-cost labor will be greatest outside of agriculture: 69% of those workers without papers today are employed in construction, food services and other parts of the hospitality industry.
In my view, guest worker visas, like the H-2A and H-2B, are never ideal. They can displace American workers and make migrants vulnerable to exploitation by their employers.
However, the U.S. is likely to continue to expand employer access to the visas because they provide an alternative to foreign workers seeking to get jobs in the U.S. without authorization. In this way, Trump’s presidency may end up having something in common with Carter’s time in the White House.
Gabrielle Clark receives funding from the National Endowment of Humanities for her immigration research.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Timothy Gabrielli, Gudorf Chair in Catholic Intellectual Traditions, University of Dayton
A cardinal opens the Holy Door of the Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica in Rome on Jan. 1, 2025, one of the events starting the Jubilee year.AP Photo/Andrew Medichini
Pope Francis has proclaimed a Jubilee year in the Catholic Church, which began on Dec. 24, 2024, and will continue through Jan. 6, 2026. But what is a Jubilee, and what is this year’s about?
Biblical roots
The Hebrew Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament, offers instructions about celebrating a Jubilee every 50 years. The Jubilee has roots in the Jewish practice of Sabbath rest every seven days, connected to the creation story in which God created the world in six days and rested on the next.
This rest is not merely about “taking a break,” but orienting life to what is most important. The prohibition of work on the Sabbath prompts people to look beyond productive work, helping them to see all activity in light of the eternal.
The biblical books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy outline what’s called a “sabbatical year,” extending that practice of periodic rest to every seventh year. During that sabbatical, the texts call for forgiving debts and freeing enslaved people. Even the land is supposed to get rest, since farmers are told to let their fields lie fallow – a check against unfettered, and destructive, desires for productivity.
The Jubilee extends this logic. Held every 50 years, the Holy Year follows a Sabbath of Sabbaths, “seven times seven years.” During the Jubilee, the Book of Leviticus instructs, “you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants.” Again, even the land must be freed. Each plot bought and sold over the previous 49 years must be returned to the tribe with which it was originally associated.
Like all the other forms of Sabbath rest, the overriding emphasis is that everyone and everything belongs to God: that the Earth is not simply for humans to do with as they please, especially if it creates injustice. People inhabit the Earth like wayfarers. Indeed, the Bible regularly reminds the Israelites that they were once enslaved in Egypt and, once freed, were wanderers.
Medieval traditions
Scholars are not quite sure if and how Jubilees were actually put into practice in the ancient world, though they are referred to in the New Testament. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus sums up his mission with verses about the Jubilee from the Book of Isaiah: “He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Some of the practices of the church’s modern Jubilees, however, come from the late Middle Ages, a time when Christian grassroots efforts promoted pilgrimages to Rome. As much political as religious and recreational, these pilgrimages demonstrated to power-hungry monarchs that the eternal city was beyond royal control and, by implication, that pilgrims’ identity was more than subjects of a crown.
In 1300, Pope Boniface VIII endorsed these initiatives by instituting a 13th centennial celebration of Christ’s birth. Central to the celebration were pilgrimages to Roman basilicas. Boniface promised that pilgrims could receive an “indulgence”: reparation for their sins.
A fresco in the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran, depicting Pope Boniface VIII proclaiming the Jubilee in 1300. Sailko/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Often misunderstood, an indulgence is distinct from forgiveness. The Catholic tradition teaches that people who sincerely repent of their sins are forgiven and reconciled to God. Ordinarily, this happens through rites such as the Sacrament of Reconciliation, which involves confession to a priest.
Once a sin is forgiven, however, reparation remains. Suppose you’ve thrown a ball through a neighbor’s window. Even if they forgive you, you’re still responsible for the window’s repair. In other words, there’s still a consequence for your action.
Catholics believe that indulgences remit the repair, removing the temporal punishment. In the analogy, you might not have fixed the window, but instead you completed another holy and satisfactory act in its place. Indulgences can be granted to Catholics for actions like completing specific prayers, making a pilgrimage or performing acts of charity.
Boniface’s decree included no reference to the biblical Jubilee. Over time, however, the link between the biblical Jubilee and these Roman celebrations was articulated and strengthened. The intervening time between Jubilees was reduced to 50 years to resonate with the ancient text. Eventually, Jubilees came to be inaugurated every 25 years to increase the opportunity for participation.
As they developed, Jubilee celebrations kept their link to pilgrimages and reparation. Both are meant to be reminders that human beings are made for the eternal, not merely the productive.
The Catholic Church’s last ordinary Jubilee celebration, which took place in 2000, was deemed a “Great Jubilee” by then-Pope John Paul II, commemorating two millennia since the birth of Christ. Famously, during a Mass that year, he sought forgiveness of the church for atrocities committed across its history, including injustice toward Jews, Indigenous peoples and women, among others.
The 2000 Jubilee continued the practice of indulgences for making a pilgrimage, emphasizing that “a pilgrimage evokes the believer’s personal journey” of faith, following in Christ’s footsteps.
Catholics in Mexico City take part in a ceremony marking the beginning of the Jubilee year at the Metropolitan Cathedral on Dec. 29, 2024. AP Photo/Ginnette Riquelme
In addition to the typical emphases on pilgrimage and indulgences, Francis has identified hope as a particular focus for this Jubilee year. In Christian theology, hope is not optimism. It is an insistence to seek the good, anchored in God: to see difficulties clearly, yet to pursue action rather than despair.
Thus, Francis has called for several specific acts of hope throughout the Jubilee year. The papal bull proclaiming the Jubilee urges peacemaking, a spirit of welcome toward migrants, and openness toward having children. Francis also issues a call for affluent nations to forgive debts, and a general call for both repentance and mercy.
Jubilees ask people to reorient life toward the eternal – a theme that might seem to minimize attention to the specific social ills of our moment. In tune with the long tradition of Jubilees, however, Francis emphasizes that the more people see the world as God sees it, the more people will act against injustice.
Timothy Gabrielli 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.
Michigan has one of the highest eviction filing rates in the country, tied with Mississippi. Fourteen percent of all Michiganders who rent homes were threatened with eviction between 2006 and 2016.
Social epidemiologists like me are interested in naming specifically who and what is accountable for inequities in the health of different population groups. I’m interested in documenting root causes of community ill health to provide data-driven analysis to inform policy change, interventions and social activism.
My project on evictions in metro Detroit is called the SECURE Study. Contributing to the study is a team of trainees, early-career researchers and a multigenerational community advisory board of Black women. Members of the board are local and international leaders from multiple sectors, including some who have lived experience with evictions.
Reproductive justice is focused on a set of interconnected human rights. It includes the ability to choose whether to have children. And for parents it protects the right to raise your children in safe and sustainable communities. Evictions can undermine reproductive justice.
My research uses numbers and stories to document, for the first time, the scope and impact of court-ordered and illegal residential evictions among Black women, families and communities in metro Detroit.
The available court-ordered eviction data, while alarming, underestimates the true extent of the housing crisis caused by eviction. In fact, my study shows only 55% of the evictions experienced by Black women in metro Detroit were court-ordered, which means the other 45% were illegal.
How the process works legally
Residential evictions are not events that unfold in easily predictable ways. Rather, they are complicated processes that often drag out.
Eviction policy varies by jurisdiction, but in Michigan it is illegal for a landlord to take any action to force the removal from or prevent the entry into or the use of a rental property by a tenant without a court order.
Even legal evictions can involve some illegal activity by landlords or property managers. For example, landlords may repeatedly threaten to evict tenants through the courts and force residents out of their home before a formal eviction judgment occurs.
Court-ordered evictions usually start with a landlord notifying a tenant of a lease violation – but this can happen only if a formal lease exists. As part of our work, we collected data about how prevalent renting without a lease or formal agreement is for our participants, and we plan to release this data in the coming months.
Illegal evictions are forced residential moves and can include – but are not limited to – a landlord’s use of strong-arm lockouts or threats to force a tenant to leave a rental property.
Focusing on those most impacted
Here’s how my study worked. My team and I recruited 1,470 reproductive-age Black women, most of whom have biological children, from July 2021 to July 2024 and asked them to share their experiences. Women completed surveys, participated in focus groups and in-depth interviews, and answered questions about both individual and neighborhood-level impacts of court-ordered and illegal evictions.
After the surveys were complete, I conducted 55 in-depth interviews in 21 days with survey participants who experienced an illegal eviction.
We focused on Black women between the ages of 18 and 45 because this group is disproportionately impacted by eviction, yet their unique experiences are understudied and therefore insufficiently understood.
More than 50% of our survey participants reported being evicted in their lifetime.
What’s missing from this stat and much of the official data are recent numbers and in-depth accounts of how people experience illegal evictions.
I know of only one other quantitative study examining illegal evictions, and it is over a decade old. It was based on limited evidence collected in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, between 2009 and 2011. The researchers looked at a group of 1,086 low-income adults of all racial, ethnic or age groups and found that 48% of all evictions in their study were illegal. The study concluded that illegal evictions are significantly less expensive and more efficient than court-ordered evictions for landlords.
Preliminary data from our own study, which included women from all socioeconomic groups – unlike the work done in Wisconsin – found that 45% of all evictions experienced by SECURE Study participants were illegal.
Problem bigger than it seems
While the data tells part of the story, the stories of those who have experienced an illegal eviction tell a much richer tale.
One woman I interviewed told me how it felt to lose her home after an illegal eviction. “My God, a whole house worth of stuff: kids’ beds, clothes, toys, my stuff,” she said. “It’s material, yes, but when you have to literally walk away and like, close the door and leave everything you own … you leave a piece of yourself.”
Research ethics do not allow me to name the SECURE Study participants.
Some of the most frequently reported ways Black women told us they experienced illegal evictions were having their belongings removed from the property, being illegally locked out or having utilities shut off, and being forced to relocate because their landlord failed to provide a habitable residence.
Female renters face sexual harassment
Many of the women who participated in our study experienced threats or actual violence and sexual harassment.
“Me being a single female, they go to the threatening tactics,” one study participant told me. “I think they know … I can’t fight against … a man, I can’t beat you.”
“Me and my children got to pack up and move out of the house to avoid my house being shot up or somebody tells me they gonna drag me and my children out of the house by gunpoint,” one participant said. “Now I gotta stress. I’ll move my children.”
“He would ask me personal questions,” another said. “Am I dating, or, where’s my kid’s father? And then, that kind of escalated into him, OK, well, if we do this, then you don’t have to give me the money for the rent.”
“I feel like they’re preying on people like, they know you’re a single mom,” another woman said. “Oh, yeah. Come on in here with that Section 8. So, we can not fix nothing to get this guaranteed money. Come on in here with you working three jobs and your kids is at home all the time, and you got that teenage daughter, she kinda cute.”
“I couldn’t afford for my children to be homeless, so he took advantage,” said another participant.
The role that discrimination plays in evictions is not well understood, so we collected data on this. Forty percent of our participants reported experiencing housing discrimination. These experiences were connected to multiple factors, including their race, economic status, family size, ethnicity, age and relationship status.
Six months after completing those interviews, with the help of weekly therapy and various other self-care and self-soothing interventions, I am finally beginning to feel my nervous system restabilize after hearing so many violent stories.
Asylum seekers wait at Catholic Charities in McAllen, Texas, for humanitarian aid on Jan. 18, 2025. Associated Press/Eric Gay
“Animals,” “aliens” and “people with bad genes” – President Donald Trump and his supporters often use this kind of dehumanizing language to describe immigrants.
In the 2024 presidential debate between Trump and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, Trump falsely referred to Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, as “eating the pets of the people that live there.” And in his Jan. 20, 2025, inaugural address, Trump spoke of “dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions,” who have illegally entered the U.S. “from all over the world.”
Using hateful, polarizing language to gain a political advantage or make an argument against a group of people, like immigrants, is not unique to the U.S.
The use of this language is associated with populist shifts in many parts of the world.
In the first few days of the new Trump administration, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers began raids to detain immigrants living in the U.S. illegally and increased their number of arrests and deportations of immigrants, including those without violent criminal records.
Tom Homan, the U.S. border czar, has said that the government’s mass immigration deportation plans – which he said could include raids on schools, churches and other places previously considered havens – is “all for the good of this nation.”
My hate speech research shows that, as the world has seen to its horror again and again, words that slander and strip people of their voices and humanity are often a first step toward discriminatory and violent policies. At its most extreme, speaking of people as dirty and polluting and saying they lack humanity makes it easier to kill them.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents handcuff a detained immigrant in Maryland on Jan. 25, 2025. Associated Press/Alex Brandon
Echoes from the fascist past
There is nothing new about the hateful political rhetoric that has become common today.
In the lead-up to and during World War II, fascist leaders in Europe targeted Jews, Roma, gay people and other groups as sources of “social pollution,” as beyond being human, while describing themselves as noble and decent, embodying a pure, uncorrupted nation.
In 1920, well before the German Nazi Party came to power in 1933, its platform declared that “Only someone of German blood, regardless of faith, can be a citizen.”
Viktor Klemperer, a literary scholar who was a close observer of Nazism, wrote in a diary published posthumously in 1995 that the Third Reich’s demonizing language against Jews and other marginalized groups helped create its culture and justify its mass killings. Nazis consequently assumed the mantle of liberators as they killed those whom they saw as corrupting the “pure race,” in accordance with ideas of “racial hygiene.”
The Nazis’ hateful language was not limited to Europe. Fritz Kuhn, a German Nazi activist, served in the late 1930s and early 1940s as leader of the German American Bund, an organization of ethnic Germans and Nazi sympathizers living in the U.S. He addressed a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1939.
Kuhn said during his speech that American citizens with American ideals are “determined to protect ourselves, our homes, our wives and children against the slimy conspirators who would change this glorious republic into the inferno of a Bolshevik paradise.”
The U.S. government stripped Kuhn of his U.S. citizenship in 1943 and deported him to Germany in 1945 because of his pro-Nazi allegiance.
In 2018, Matteo Salvini, then the deputy prime minister who now holds the same position, denounced the Roma people, an ethnic minority. He called for their removal through a “mass cleansing street by street, piazza by piazza, neighborhood by neighborhood.”
Salvini has directed his most virulent language, however, toward the tens of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers, mostly from Africa, who attempt to reach Italy via the Mediterranean Sea.
Salvini, perhaps more than any other populist leader in the world, has turned his hateful language and use of misinformation into action. Italian authorities under Salvini’s direction have detained ships working to help rescue migrants who are in danger at sea, preventing them from carrying out those rescues.
In September 2024, an Italian prosecutor requested a six-year jail term for Salvini, accusing him of kidnapping 147 migrants by preventing them from landing at a port in Italy for several weeks.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks during a press briefing on Jan. 28, 2025, alongside an image of an alleged criminal detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
What to expect
We can’t be certain at this point what Trump’s and his supporters’ hateful language against immigrants, minorities and political opponents will yield.
Judging by Italy’s example and other instances, it’s possible that laws will be broken in implementing Trump’s immigration and asylum policies.
A federal judge temporarily halted Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order that told federal agencies to not process identification documents for babies born to parents who are living in the country illegally, among other scenarios.
It’s not clear how these policies will continue to unfold. What is clear is that words of hate have been used in many times and places as a justification for illegal arrests and, in some cases, as a prelude to state-sanctioned mass violence.
Ronald Niezen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Dominik Stecuła, Assistant Professor of Communication and Political Science, The Ohio State University
Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy Jr., on Capitol Hill on Jan. 9, 2025. Jon Cherry/Getty Images
The many controversial people appointed to the Trump administration, from Elon Muskto Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have at least one thing in common: They dislike and distrust experts.
While anti-intellectualism and populism are nothing new in American life, there has hardly been an administration as seemingly committed to these worldviews.
Take President Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Kennedy, a well-known vaccine skeptic, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy, whose Senate confirmation hearing is Jan. 29, 2025, epitomizes the new American political ethos of populismand anti-intellectualism, or the idea that people hold negative feelings toward not just scientific research but those who produce it.
For instance, Trump denigrated scientific experts on the campaign trail and in his first term in office. He called climate science a “hoax” and public health officials in his administration “idiots.”
Trump and Kennedy have cast doubt on vaccine safety and the medical scientific establishment. As far back as the Republican primary debates in 2016, Trump falsely asserted that childhood vaccines cause autism, in defiance of scientific consensus on the issue.
Kennedy’s long-term vaccine skepticism has also been well documented, though he himself denies it. More recently, he has been presenting himself as “pro-vaccine safety,” as one Republican senator put it, on the eve of Kennedy’s confirmation hearing.
If confirmed, Kennedy has vowed to turn this anti-intellectual rhetoric into action. He wants to replace over 600 employees in the National Institutes of Health with his own hires. He has also suggested cutting entire departments.
During one interview, Kennedy said, “In some categories, there are entire departments, like the nutrition department at the FDA, that are – that have to go.”
Populism across political spectrum
In lockstep with this anti-intellectual movement is a version of populism that people like RFK Jr. and Trump both espouse.
Populism is a worldview that pits average citizens against “the elites.” Who the elites are varies depending on the context, but in the contemporary political climate in the U.S., establishment politicians, scientists and organizations like pharmaceutical companies or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are frequently portrayed as such.
For instance, right-wing populists often portray government health agencies as colluding with multinational pharmaceutical companies to impose excessive regulations, mandate medical interventions and restrict personal freedoms.
Left-wing populists expose how Big Pharma manipulates the health care system, using their immense wealth and political influence to put profits over people, deliberately keeping lifesaving medications overpriced and out of reach – all of which has been said by politicians like Bernie Sanders.
The goal of a populist is to portray these elites as the enemy of the people and to root out the perceived “corruption” of the elites.
This worldview doesn’t just appeal to the far right. Historically in the United States, populism has been more of a force on the political left. To this day, it is present on the left through Sanders and similar politicians who rail against wealth inequality and the interests of the “millionaire class.”
In short, the Trump administration’s populist and anti-intellectual worldview does not map cleanly onto the liberal-conservative ideological divide in the U.S. That is why Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat and nephew of a Democratic president, might become a Cabinet member for a Republican president.
The cross-ideological appeal of populism and anti-intellectualism also partly explains why praise for Trump’s selection of Kennedy to head the Department of Health and Human Services came from all corners of society. Republican senators Ron Johnson and Josh Hawley lauded the move, as did basketball star Rudy Gobert and Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis.
Why, then, is disdain for scientific experts appealing to so many Americans?
Much of the public supports this worldview because of perceived ineffectiveness and moral wrongs made by the elites. Factors such as the opioid crisis encouraged by predatory pharmaceutical companies, public confusion and dissatisfaction with changing health guidance in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the frequently prohibitive cost of health care and medicine have given some Americans reason to question their trust in science and medicine.
Populists have embraced popular and science-backed policies that align with an anti-elite stance. Kennedy, for example, supports decreasing the amount of ultra-processed foods in public school lunches and reducing toxic chemicals in the food supply and natural environment. These stances are backed by scientific evidence about how to improve public health. At the same time, they point to the harmful actions of a perceived corrupt elite – the profit-driven food industry.
It is, of course, reasonable to want to hold accountable both public officials for their policy decisions and scientists and pharmaceutical companies who engage in unethical behavior. Scientists should by no means be immune from scrutiny.
Examining, for example, what public health experts got wrong during the COVID-19 pandemic would be tremendously helpful from the standpoint of preparing for future public health crises, but also from the standpoint of rebuilding public trust in science, experts and institutions.
However, the Trump administration does not appear to be interested in pursuing good faith assessments. And Trump’s victory means he gets to implement his vision and appoint people he wants to carry it out. But words have consequences, and we have seen the impact of anti-vaccine rhetoric during the COVID-19 pandemic, where “red” counties and states had significantly lower vaccine intent and uptake compared with the “blue” counterparts.
Therefore, despite sounding appealing, Kennedy’s signature slogan, “Make America Healthy Again,” could – in discouraging policies and behaviors that have been proven effective against diseases and their crippling or deadly outcomes – bring about a true public health crisis.
Dominik Stecuła receives funding from the National Science Foundation.
Kristin Lunz Trujillo receives funding from the National Science Foundation.
Matt Motta receives funding from the National Science Foundation.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Krittika Goyal, Assistant Professor of Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering Technology, Rochester Institute of Technology
Wearable devices have become a big part of modern health care, helping track a patient’s heart rate, stress levels and brain activity. These devices rely on electrodes, sensors that touch the skin to pick up electrical signals from the body.
Creating these electrodes isn’t as easy as it might seem. Human skin is complex. Its properties, such as how well it conducts electricity, can change depending on how hydrated it is, how old you are or even the weather. These changes can make it hard to test how well a wearable device works.
Additionally, testing electrodes often involves human volunteers, which can be tricky and unpredictable. Everyone’s skin is different, meaning results aren’t always consistent. Testing also takes time and money. Plus, there are ethical concerns about asking people to participate in these experiments, including making sure they are informed about the risks and benefits and can voluntarily participate.
Scientists have tried to create artificial skin models to avoid some of these problems, but existing ones haven’t been able to fully mimic the way skin behaves when interacting with wearable sensors. To address these limitations, my colleagues and I have developed a tool called a biomimetic skin phantom – a model that mimics the electrical behavior of human skin, making testing wearable sensors easier, cheaper and more reliable.
What is a skin phantom?
Our biomimetic skin phantom is made of two layers that capture the nuances of both the skin’s surface and deeper tissues. “Biomimetic” means it imitates something from nature – in this case, human skin. “Phantom” refers to a physical model or device made to mimic the properties of something real, like human tissues, so it can be used for research instead of relying on actual people.
Your skin is made up of multiple layers of cells. OpenStax, CC BY-SA
The bottom layer mimics the deeper tissues under the skin. It is made from a gel-like substance called polyvinyl alcohol cryogel, which can be adjusted to have similar softness and electrical conductivity to real biological tissues. We chose this material because these qualities, along with its durability and wide use in biomedical research, make it a good stand-in for the deeper layers of skin.
The top layer mimics the outermost part of the skin, known as the stratum corneum. It is made from a silicone-like materialcalled PDMS, which is mixed with special additives to match the skin’s electrical properties. Also widely used in biomedical research, PDMS is flexible and easy to shape to closely replicate the skin’s outer layer.
One unique feature of our skin phantom is its ability to mimic different levels of skin hydration. Hydration affects how well skin conducts electricity. Dry skin has higher resistance, meaning it opposes the flow of electricity. This makes it harder for wearable devices to pick up signals. Hydrated skin conducts electricity more easily because water improves the movement of charged particles, leading to better signal quality. Improving how dry skin is modeled and tested can lead to better electrode designs.
To replicate the effects of skin hydration, we introduced adjustable pores into the top PDMS layer of the skin phantom. By precisely changing the size and density of the pores, the model can mimic dry or hydrated skin conditions.
Testing the skin phantom
My team and I tested our skin phantom in several ways to see whether it could truly replace human skin in experiments.
First, we used a method called impedance spectroscopy to study the phantom’s electrical properties. This technique applies alternating electrical signals at different frequencies and measures the material’s resistance to electrical flow, providing a detailed profile of its electrical behavior. Results from the experiments we conducted on five volunteers showed that the phantom’s impedance response closely mirrored that of human skin across both dry and hydrated conditions, with a difference of less than 20% between real skin and the phantom.
We also tested whether wearable devices could pick up signals from the skin phantom and how signal quality changed with different skin conditions. To do this, we recorded eletrocardiogram signals on phantoms designed to mimic dry and hydrated skin. The results showed clear differences in signal quality: The phantom simulating dry skin had a lower signal-to-noise ratio, while the hydrated skin phantom showed better signal clarity. These findings are consistent with previous studies from other researchers.
Together, our skin phantom closely replicates the way human skin responds to wearable sensors across a range of conditions, including dry and hydrated states. This accuracy makes it an optimal stand-in for real skin in the lab.
Wearable technology
The skin phantom is more than just a testing tool – it’s a step forward for wearable health technology.
By removing the unpredictability of human testing, scientists can design and improve wearable devices more quickly and effectively. They can also use it to study how skin interacts with medical devices, such as patches that deliver medicine or advanced diagnostic tools.
Our skin phantom is also simple and inexpensive. Each phantom costs less than US$3 and can be made with standard lab materials and tools. It can be reused multiple times within the same day without significant changes in its electrical properties, though extended use over several days may require adjustments, such as rehydration, to maintain stable performance. This affordability and reusability make the phantom more accessible for labs with limited budgets or resources.
As wearable technology becomes more common in health care, tools such as the skin phantom can help make devices more reliable, accessible and personalized for everyone.
Krittika Goyal 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.
Assistant professor Frank Cackowski, left, and researcher Steven Zielske at Wayne State University in Detroit became suspicious of a paper on cancer research that was eventually retracted.Amy Sacka, CC BY-ND
Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research, undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives.
It is exceedingly difficult to get a handle on exactly how big the problem is. Around 55,000 scholarly papers have been retracted to date, for a variety of reasons, but scientists and companies who screen the scientific literature for telltale signs of fraud estimate that there are many more fake papers circulating – possibly as many as several hundred thousand. This fake research can confound legitimate researchers who must wade through dense equations, evidence, images and methodologies only to find that they were made up.
Even when the bogus papers are spotted – usually by amateur sleuths on their own time – academic journals are often slow to retract the papers, allowing the articles to taint what many consider sacrosanct: the vast global library of scholarly work that introduces new ideas, reviews other research and discusses findings.
These fake papers are slowing down research that has helped millions of people with lifesaving medicine and therapies from cancer to COVID-19. Analysts’ data shows that fields related to cancer and medicine are particularly hard hit, while areas like philosophy and art are less affected. Some scientists have abandoned their life’s work because they cannot keep pace given the number of fake papers they must bat down.
The problem reflects a worldwide commodification of science. Universities, and their research funders, have long used regular publication in academic journals as requirements for promotions and job security, spawning the mantra “publish or perish.”
But now, fraudsters have infiltrated the academic publishing industry to prioritize profits over scholarship. Equipped with technological prowess, agility and vast networks of corrupt researchers, they are churning out papers on everything from obscure genes to artificial intelligence in medicine.
These papers are absorbed into the worldwide library of research faster than they can be weeded out. About 119,000 scholarly journal articles and conference papers are published globally every week, or more than 6 million a year. Publishers estimate that, at most journals, about 2% of the papers submitted – but not necessarily published – are likely fake, although this number can be much higher at some publications.
While no country is immune to this practice, it is particularly pronounced in emerging economies where resources to do bona fide science are limited – and where governments, eager to compete on a global scale, push particularly strong “publish or perish” incentives.
As a result, there is a bustling online underground economy for all things scholarly publishing. Authorship, citations, even academic journal editors, are up for sale. This fraud is so prevalent that it has its own name: paper mills, a phrase that harks back to “term-paper mills”, where students cheat by getting someone else to write a class paper for them.
The impact on publishers is profound. In high-profile cases, fake articles can hurt a journal’s bottom line. Important scientific indexes – databases of academic publications that many researchers rely on to do their work – may delist journals that publish too many compromised papers. There is growing criticism that legitimate publishers could do more to track and blacklist journals and authors who regularly publish fake papers that are sometimes little more than artificial intelligence-generated phrases strung together.
To better understand the scope, ramifications and potential solutions of this metastasizing assault on science, we – a contributing editor at Retraction Watch, a website that reports on retractions of scientific papers and related topics, and two computer scientists at France’s Université Toulouse III–Paul Sabatier and Université Grenoble Alpes who specialize in detecting bogus publications – spent six months investigating paper mills.
This included, by some of us at different times, trawling websites and social media posts, interviewing publishers, editors, research-integrity experts, scientists, doctors, sociologists and scientific sleuths engaged in the Sisyphean task of cleaning up the literature. It also involved, by some of us, screening scientific articles looking for signs of fakery.
What emerged is a deep-rooted crisis that has many researchers and policymakers calling for a new way for universities and many governments to evaluate and reward academics and health professionals across the globe.
Just as highly biased websites dressed up to look like objective reporting are gnawing away at evidence-based journalism and threatening elections, fake science is grinding down the knowledge base on which modern society rests.
As part of our work detecting these bogus publications, co-author Guillaume Cabanac developed the Problematic Paper Screener, which filters 130 million new and old scholarly papers every week looking for nine types of clues that a paper might be fake or contain errors. A key clue is a tortured phrase – an awkward wording generated by software that replaces common scientific terms with synonyms to avoid direct plagiarism from a legitimate paper.
Frank Cackowski at Detroit’s Wayne State University was confused.
The oncologist was studying a sequence of chemical reactions in cells to see if they could be a target for drugs against prostate cancer. A paper from 2018 from 2018 in the American Journal of Cancer Research piqued his interest when he read that a little-known molecule called SNHG1 might interact with the chemical reactions he was exploring. He and fellow Wayne State researcher Steven Zielske began a series of experiments to learn more about the link. Surprisingly, they found there wasn’t a link.
Meanwhile, Zielske had grown suspicious of the paper. Two graphs showing results for different cell lines were identical, he noticed, which “would be like pouring water into two glasses with your eyes closed and the levels coming out exactly the same.” Another graph and a table in the article also inexplicably contained identical data.
Zielske described his misgivings in an anonymous post in 2020 at PubPeer, an online forum where many scientists report potential research misconduct, and also contacted the journal’s editor. Shortly thereafter, the journal pulled the paper, citing “falsified materials and/or data.”
“Science is hard enough as it is if people are actually being genuine and trying to do real work,” says Cackowski, who also works at the Karmanos Cancer Institute in Michigan. “And it’s just really frustrating to waste your time based on somebody’s fraudulent publications.”
Wayne State scientists Frank Cackowski and Steven Zielske carried out experiments based on a paper they later found to contain false data. Amy Sacka, CC BY-ND
He worries that the bogus publications are slowing down “legitimate research that down the road is going to impact patient care and drug development.”
The two researchers eventually found that SNHG1 did appear to play a part in prostate cancer, though not in the way the suspect paper suggested. But it was a tough topic to study. Zielske combed through all the studies on SNHG1 and cancer – some 150 papers, nearly all from Chinese hospitals – and concluded that “a majority” of them looked fake. Some reported using experimental reagents known as primers that were “just gibberish,” for instance, or targeted a different gene than what the study said, according to Zielske. He contacted several of the journals, he said, but received little response. “I just stopped following up.”
The many questionable articles also made it harder to get funding, Zielske said. The first time he submitted a grant application to study SNHG1, it was rejected, with one reviewer saying “the field was crowded,” Zielske recalled. The following year, he explained in his application how most of the literature likely came from paper mills. He got the grant.
Today, Zielske said, he approaches new research differently than he used to: “You can’t just read an abstract and have any faith in it. I kind of assume everything’s wrong.”
Legitimate academic journals evaluate papers before they are published by having other researchers in the field carefully read them over. This peer review process is designed to stop flawed research from being disseminated, but is far from perfect.
Reviewers volunteer their time, typically assume research is real and so don’t look for signs of fraud. And some publishers may try to pick reviewers they deem more likely to accept papers, because rejecting a manuscript can mean losing out on thousands of dollars in publication fees.
“Even good, honest reviewers have become apathetic” because of “the volume of poor research coming through the system,” said Adam Day, who directs Clear Skies, a company in London that develops data-based methods to help spot falsified papers and academic journals. “Any editor can recount seeing reports where it’s obvious the reviewer hasn’t read the paper.”
With AI, they don’t have to: New research shows that many reviews are now written by ChatGPT and similar tools.
María de los Ángeles Oviedo-García, a professor of marketing at the University of Seville in Spain, spends her spare time hunting for suspect peer reviews from all areas of science, hundreds of which she has flagged on PubPeer. Some of these reviews are the length of a tweet, others ask authors to cite the reviewer’s work even if it has nothing to do with the science at hand, and many closely resemble other peer reviews for very different studies – evidence, in her eyes, of what she calls “review mills.”
PubPeer comment from María de los Ángeles Oviedo-García pointing out that a peer review report is very similar to two other reports. She also points out that authors and citations for all three are either anonymous or the same person – both hallmarks of fake papers. Screen capture by The Conversation, CC BY-ND
“One of the demanding fights for me is to keep faith in science,” says Oviedo-García, who tells her students to look up papers on PubPeer before relying on them too heavily. Her research has been slowed down, she adds, because she now feels compelled to look for peer review reports for studies she uses in her work. Often there aren’t any, because “very few journals publish those review reports,” Oviedo-García says.
An ‘absolutely huge’ problem
It is unclear when paper mills began to operate at scale. The earliest article retracted due to suspected involvement of such agencies was published in 2004, according to the Retraction Watch Database, which contains details about tens of thousands of retractions. (The database is operated by The Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent nonprofit of Retraction Watch.) Nor is it clear exactly how many low-quality, plagiarized or made-up articles paper mills have spawned.
But the number is likely to be significant and growing, experts say. One Russia-linked paper mill in Latvia, for instance, claims on its website to have published “more than 12,650 articles” since 2012.
An analysis of 53,000 papers submitted to six publishers – but not necessarily published – found the proportion of suspect papers ranged from 2% to 46% across journals. And the American publisher Wiley, which has retracted more than 11,300 compromised articles and closed 19 heavily affected journals in its erstwhile Hindawi division, recently said its new paper-mill detection tool flags up to 1 in 7 submissions.
Day, of Clear Skies, estimates that as many as 2% of the several million scientific works published in 2022 were milled. Some fields are more problematic than others. The number is closer to 3% in biology and medicine, and in some subfields, like cancer, it may be much larger, according to Day. Despite increased awareness today, “I do not see any significant change in the trend,” he said. With improved methods of detection, “any estimate I put out now will be higher.”
The paper-mill problem is “absolutely huge,” said Sabina Alam, director of Publishing Ethics and Integrity at Taylor & Francis, a major academic publisher. In 2019, none of the 175 ethics cases that editors escalated to her team was about paper mills, Alam said. Ethics cases include submissions and already published papers. In 2023, “we had almost 4,000 cases,” she said. “And half of those were paper mills.”
Jennifer Byrne, an Australian scientist who now heads up a research group to improve the reliability of medical research, submitted testimony for a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Science, Space, and Technology in July 2022. She noted that 700, or nearly 6%, of 12,000 cancer research papers screened had errors that could signal paper mill involvement. Byrne shuttered her cancer research lab in 2017 because the genes she had spent two decades researching and writing about became the target of an enormous number of fake papers. A rogue scientist fudging data is one thing, she said, but a paper mill could churn out dozens of fake studies in the time it took her team to publish a single legitimate one.
“The threat of paper mills to scientific publishing and integrity has no parallel over my 30-year scientific career …. In the field of human gene science alone, the number of potentially fraudulent articles could exceed 100,000 original papers,” she wrote to lawmakers, adding, “This estimate may seem shocking but is likely to be conservative.”
In one area of genetics research – the study of noncoding RNA in different types of cancer – “We’re talking about more than 50% of papers published are from mills,” Byrne said. “It’s like swimming in garbage.”
When retractions do happen, it is often thanks to the efforts of a small international community of amateur sleuths like Oviedo-García and those who post on PubPeer.
Jillian Goldfarb, an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Cornell University and a former editor of the Elsevier journal Fuel, laments the publisher’s handling of the threat from paper mills.
“I was assessing upwards of 50 papers every day,” she said in an email interview. While she had technology to detect plagiarism, duplicate submissions and suspicious author changes, it was not enough. “It’s unreasonable to think that an editor – for whom this is not usually their full-time job – can catch these things reading 50 papers at a time. The time crunch, plus pressure from publishers to increase submission rates and citations and decrease review time, puts editors in an impossible situation.”
In October 2023, Goldfarb resigned from her position as editor of Fuel. In a LinkedIn post about her decision, she cited the company’s failure to move on dozens of potential paper-mill articles she had flagged; its hiring of a principal editor who reportedly “engaged in paper and citation milling”; and its proposal of candidates for editorial positions “with longer PubPeer profiles and more retractions than most people have articles on their CVs, and whose names appear as authors on papers-for-sale websites.”
“This tells me, our community, and the public, that they value article quantity and profit over science,” Goldfarb wrote.
In response to questions about Goldfarb’s resignation, an Elsevier spokesperson told The Conversation that it “takes all claims about research misconduct in our journals very seriously” and is investigating Goldfarb’s claims. The spokesperson added that Fuel’s editorial team has “been working to make other changes to the journal to benefit authors and readers.”
That’s not how it works, buddy
Business proposals had been piling up for years in the inbox of João de Deus Barreto Segundo, managing editor of six journals published by the Bahia School of Medicine and Public Health in Salvador, Brazil. Several came from suspect publishers on the prowl for new journals to add to their portfolios. Others came from academics suggesting fishy deals or offering bribes to publish their paper.
In one email from February 2024, an assistant professor of economics in Poland explained that he ran a company that worked with European universities. “Would you be interested in collaboration on the publication of scientific articles by scientists who collaborate with me?” Artur Borcuch inquired. “We will then discuss possible details and financial conditions.”
A university administrator in Iraq was more candid: “As an incentive, I am prepared to offer a grant of $500 for each accepted paper submitted to your esteemed journal,” wrote Ahmed Alkhayyat, head of the Islamic University Centre for Scientific Research, in Najaf, and manager of the school’s “world ranking.”
“That’s not how it works, buddy,” Barreto Segundo shot back.
In email to The Conversation, Borcuch denied any improper intent. “My role is to mediate in the technical and procedural aspects of publishing an article,” Borcuch said, adding that, when working with multiple scientists, he would “request a discount from the editorial office on their behalf.” Informed that the Brazilian publisher had no publication fees, Borcuch said a “mistake” had occurred because an “employee” sent the email for him “to different journals.”
Academic journals have different payment models. Many are subscription-based and don’t charge authors for publishing, but have hefty fees for reading articles. Libraries and universities also pay large sums for access.
A fast-growing open-access model – where anyone can read the paper – includes expensive publication fees levied on authors to make up for the loss of revenue in selling the articles. These payments are not meant to influence whether or not a manuscript is accepted.
The Bahia School of Medicine and Public Health, among others, doesn’t charge authors or readers, but Barreto Segundo’s employer is a small player in the scholarly publishing business, which brings in close to $30 billion a year on profit margins as high as 40%. Academic publishers make money largely from subscription fees from institutions like libraries and universities, individual payments to access paywalled articles, and open-access fees paid by authors to ensure their articles are free for anyone to read.
The industry is lucrative enough that it has attracted unscrupulous actors eager to find a way to siphon off some of that revenue.
Ahmed Torad, a lecturer at Kafr El Sheikh University in Egypt and editor-in-chief of the Egyptian Journal of Physiotherapy, asked for a 30% kickback for every article he passed along to the Brazilian publisher. “This commission will be calculated based on the publication fees generated by the manuscripts I submit,” Torad wrote, noting that he specialized “in connecting researchers and authors with suitable journals for publication.”
Apparently, he failed to notice that Bahia School of Medicine and Public Health doesn’t charge author fees.
Like Borcuch, Alkhayyat denied any improper intent. He said there had been a “misunderstanding” on the editor’s part, explaining that the payment he offered was meant to cover presumed article-processing charges. “Some journals ask for money. So this is normal,” Alkhayyat said.
Torad explained that he had sent his offer to source papers in exchange for a commission to some 280 journals, but had not forced anyone to accept the manuscripts. Some had balked at his proposition, he said, despite regularly charging authors thousands of dollars to publish. He suggested that the scientific community wasn’t comfortable admitting that scholarly publishing has become a business like any other, even if it’s “obvious to many scientists.”
The unwelcome advances all targeted one of the journals Barreto Segundo managed, The Journal of Physiotherapy Research, soon after it was indexed in Scopus, a database of abstracts and citations owned by the publisher Elsevier.
Along with Clarivate’s Web of Science, Scopus has become an important quality stamp for scholarly publications globally. Articles in indexed journals are money in the bank for their authors: They help secure jobs, promotions, funding and, in some countries, even trigger cash rewards. For academics or physicians in poorer countries, they can be a ticket to the global north.
Consider Egypt, a country plaguedbydubiousclinical trials. Universities there commonly pay employees large sums for international publications, with the amount depending on the journal’s impact factor. A similar incentive structure is hardwired into national regulations: To earn the rank of full professor, for example, candidates must have at least five publications in two years, according to Egypt’s Supreme Council of Universities. Studies in journals indexed in Scopus or Web of Science not only receive extra points, but they also are exempt from further scrutiny when applicants are evaluated. The higher a publication’s impact factor, the more points the studies get.
With such a focus on metrics, it has become common for Egyptian researchers to cut corners, according to a physician in Cairo who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. Authorship is frequently gifted to colleagues who then return the favor later, or studies may be created out of whole cloth. Sometimes an existing legitimate paper is chosen from the literature, and key details such as the type of disease or surgery are then changed and the numbers slightly modified, the source explained.
It affects clinical guidelines and medical care, “so it’s a shame,” the physician said.
Ivermectin, a drug used to treat parasites in animals and humans, is a case in point. When some studies showed that it was effective against COVID-19, ivermectin was hailed as a “miracle drug” early in the pandemic. Prescriptions surged, and along with them calls to U.S. poison centers; one man spent nine days in the hospital after downing an injectable formulation of the drug that was meant for cattle, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As it turned out, nearly all of the research that showed a positive effect on COVID-19 had indications of fakery, the BBC and others reported – including a now-withdrawn Egyptian study. With no apparent benefit, patients were left with just side effects.
“There’s a huge academic incentive and profit motive,” says Lisa Bero, a professor of medicine and public health at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and the senior research-integrity editor at the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization that produces evidence reviews about medical treatments. “I see it at every institution I’ve worked at.”
But in the global south, the publish-or-perish edict runs up against underdeveloped research infrastructures and education systems, leaving scientists in a bind. For a Ph.D., the Cairo physician who requested anonymity conducted an entire clinical trial single-handedly – from purchasing study medication to randomizing patients, collecting and analyzing data and paying article-processing fees. In wealthier nations, entire teams work on such studies, with the tab easily running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Research is quite challenging here,” the physician said. That’s why scientists “try to manipulate and find easier ways so they get the job done.”
Institutions, too, have gamed the system with an eye to international rankings. In 2011, the journal Science described how prolific researchers in the United States and Europe were offered hefty payments for listing Saudi universities as secondary affiliations on papers. And in 2023, the magazine, in collaboration with Retraction Watch, uncovered a massive self-citation ploy by a top-ranked dental school in India that forced undergraduate students to publish papers referencing faculty work.
The root – and solutions
Such unsavory schemes can be traced back to the introduction of performance-based metrics in academia, a development driven by the New Public Management movement that swept across the Western world in the 1980s, according to Canadian sociologist of science Yves Gingras of the Université du Québec à Montréal. When universities and public institutions adopted corporate management, scientific papers became “accounting units” used to evaluate and reward scientific productivity rather than “knowledge units” advancing our insight into the world around us, Gingras wrote.
This transformation led many researchers to compete on numbers instead of content, which made publication metrics poor measures of academic prowess. As Gingras has shown, the controversial French microbiologist Didier Raoult, who now has more than a dozen retractions to his name, has an h-index – a measure combining publication and citation numbers – that is twice as high as that of Albert Einstein – “proof that the index is absurd,” Gingras said.
Worse, a sort of scientific inflation, or “scientometric bubble,” has ensued, with each new publication representing an increasingly small increment in knowledge. “We publish more and more superficial papers, we publish papers that have to be corrected, and we push people to do fraud,” said Gingras.
In 2024, Landon Halloran, a geoscientist at the University of Neuchâtel, in Switzerland, received an unusual job application for an opening in his lab. A researcher with a Ph.D. from China had sent him his CV. At 31, the applicant had amassed 160 publications in Scopus-indexed journals, 62 of them in 2022 alone, the same year he obtained his doctorate. Although the applicant was not the only one “with a suspiciously high output,” according to Halloran, he stuck out. “My colleagues and I have never come across anything quite like it in the geosciences,” he said.
According to industry insiders and publishers, there is more awareness now of threats from paper mills and other bad actors. Some journals routinely check for image fraud. A bad AI-generated image showing up in a paper can either be a sign of a scientist taking an ill-advised shortcut, or a paper mill.
The Cochrane Collaboration has a policy excluding suspect studies from its analyses of medical evidence. The organization also has been developing a tool to help its reviewers spot problematic medical trials, just as publishers have begun to screen submissions and share data and technologies among themselves to combat fraud.
This image, generated by AI, is a visual gobbledygook of concepts around transporting and delivering drugs in the body. For instance, the upper left figure is a nonsensical mix of a syringe, an inhaler and pills. And the pH-sensitive carrier molecule on the lower left is huge, rivaling the size of the lungs. After scientist sleuths pointed out that the published image made no sense, the journal issued a correction. Screen capture by The Conversation, CC BY-ND This graphic is the corrected image that replaced the AI image above. In this case, according to the correction, the journal determined that the paper was legitimate but the scientists had used AI to generate the image describing it. Screen capture by The Conversation, CC BY-ND
“People are realizing like, wow, this is happening in my field, it’s happening in your field,” said the Cochrane Collaboration’s Bero”. “So we really need to get coordinated and, you know, develop a method and a plan overall for stamping these things out.”
What jolted Taylor & Francis into paying attention, according to Alam, the director of Publishing Ethics and Integrity, was a 2020 investigation of a Chinese paper mill by sleuth Elisabeth Bik and three of her peers who go by the pseudonyms Smut Clyde, Morty and Tiger BB8. With 76 compromised papers, the U.K.-based company’s Artificial Cells, Nanomedicine, and Biotechnology was the most affected journal identified in the probe.
“It opened up a minefield,” says Alam, who also co-chairs United2Act, a project launched in 2023 that brings together publishers, researchers and sleuths in the fight against paper mills. “It was the first time we realized that stock images essentially were being used to represent experiments.”
Taylor & Francis decided to audit the hundreds of articles in its portfolio that contained similar types of images. It doubled Alam’s team, which now has 14.5 positions dedicated to doing investigations, and also began monitoring submission rates. Paper mills, it seemed, weren’t picky customers.
“What they’re trying to do is find a gate, and if they get in, then they just start kind of slamming in the submissions,” Alam said. Seventy-six fake papers suddenly seemed like a drop in the ocean. At one Taylor & Francis journal, for instance, Alam’s team identified nearly 1,000 manuscripts that bore all the marks of coming from a mill, she said.
And in 2023, it rejected about 300 dodgy proposals for special issues. “We’ve blocked a hell of a lot from coming through,” Alam said.
Fraud checkers
A small industry of technology startups has sprung up to help publishers, researchers and institutions spot potential fraud. The website Argos, launched in September 2024 by Scitility, an alert service based in Sparks, Nevada, allows authors to check if new collaborators are trailed by retractions or misconduct concerns. It has flagged tens of thousands of “high-risk” papers, according to the journal Nature.
Fraud-checker tools sift through papers to point to those that should be manually checked and possibly rejected. solidcolours/iStock via Getty Images
The fraudsters have not been idle, either. In 2022, when Clear Skies released the Papermill Alarm, the first academic to inquire about the new tool was a paper miller, according to Day. The person wanted access so he could check his papers before firing them off to publishers, Day said. “Paper mills have proven to be adaptive and also quite quick off the mark.”
Given the ongoing arms race, Alam acknowledges that the fight against paper mills won’t be won as long as the booming demand for their products remains.
According to a Nature analysis, the retraction rate tripled from 2012 to 2022 to close to .02%, or around 1 in 5,000 papers. It then nearly doubled in 2023, in large part because of Wiley’s Hindawi debacle. Today’s commercial publishing is part of the problem, Byrne said. For one, cleaning up the literature is a vast and expensive undertaking with no direct financial upside. “Journals and publishers will never, at the moment, be able to correct the literature at the scale and in the timeliness that’s required to solve the paper-mill problem,” Byrne said. “Either we have to monetize corrections such that publishers are paid for their work, or forget the publishers and do it ourselves.”
But that still wouldn’t fix the fundamental bias built into for-profit publishing: Journals don’t get paid for rejecting papers. “We pay them for accepting papers,” said Bodo Stern, a former editor of the journal Cell and chief of Strategic Initiatives at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a nonprofit research organization and major funder in Chevy Chase, Maryland. “I mean, what do you think journals are going to do? They’re going to accept papers.”
With more than 50,000 journals on the market, even if some are trying hard to get it right, bad papers that are shopped around long enough eventually find a home, Stern added. “That system cannot function as a quality-control mechanism,” he said. “We have so many journals that everything can get published.”
In Stern’s view, the way to go is to stop paying journals for accepting papers and begin looking at them as public utilities that serve a greater good. “We should pay for transparent and rigorous quality-control mechanisms,” he said.
Peer review, meanwhile, “should be recognized as a true scholarly product, just like the original article, because the authors of the article and the peer reviewers are using the same skills,” Stern said. By the same token, journals should make all peer-review reports publicly available, even for manuscripts they turn down. “When they do quality control, they can’t just reject the paper and then let it be published somewhere else,” Stern said. “That’s not a good service.”
Better measures
Stern isn’t the first scientist to bemoan the excessive focus on bibliometrics. “We need less research, better research, and research done for the right reasons,” wrote the late statistician Douglas G. Altman in a much-cited editorial from 1994. “Abandoning using the number of publications as a measure of ability would be a start.”
Despite the declaration, metrics remain in wide use today, and scientists say there is a new sense of urgency.
“We’re getting to the point where people really do feel they have to do something” because of the vast number of fake papers, said Richard Sever, assistant director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, in New York, and co-founder of the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv.
Stern and his colleagues have tried to make improvements at their institution. Researchers who wish to renew their seven-year contract have long been required to write a short paragraph describing the importance of their major results. Since the end of 2023, they also have been asked to remove journal names from their applications.
That way, “you can never do what all reviewers do – I’ve done it – look at the bibliography and in just one second decide, ‘Oh, this person has been productive because they have published many papers and they’re published in the right journals,’” says Stern. “What matters is, did it really make a difference?”
Shifting the focus away from convenient performance metrics seems possible not just for wealthy private institutions like Howard Hughes Medical Institute, but also for large government funders. In Australia, for example, the National Health and Medical Research Council in 2022 launched the “top 10 in 10” policy, aiming, in part, to “value research quality rather than quantity of publications.”
Rather than providing their entire bibliography, the agency, which assesses thousands of grant applications every year, asked researchers to list no more than 10 publications from the past decade and explain the contribution each had made to science. According to an evaluation report from April, 2024 close to three-quarters of grant reviewers said the new policy allowed them to concentrate more on research quality than quantity. And more than half said it reduced the time they spent on each application.
Gingras, the Canadian sociologist, advocates giving scientists the time they need to produce work that matters, rather than a gushing stream of publications. He is a signatory to the Slow Science Manifesto: “Once you get slow science, I can predict that the number of corrigenda, the number of retractions, will go down,” he says.
At one point, Gingras was involved in evaluating a research organization whose mission was to improve workplace security. An employee presented his work. “He had a sentence I will never forget,” Gingras recalls. The employee began by saying, “‘You know, I’m proud of one thing: My h-index is zero.’ And it was brilliant.” The scientist had developed a technology that prevented fatal falls among construction workers. “He said, ‘That’s useful, and that’s my job.’ I said, ‘Bravo!’”
Labbé receives funding from the European Research Council.
He has also received funding from the French National Research Agency (ANR), and the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.
Labbé has been in touch with most of the major publishers and their integrity officers, offering pro-bono consulting regarding detection tools to various actors in the field including STM-Hub and Morressier.
Cabanac receives funding from the European Research Council (ERC) and the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). He is the administrator of the Problematic Paper Screener, a public platform that uses metadata from Digital Science and PubPeer via no-cost agreements. Cabanac has been in touch with most of the major publishers and their integrity officers, offering pro bono consulting regarding detection tools to various actors in the field including ClearSkies, Morressier, River Valley, Signals, and STM.
Frederik Joelving 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.
Under the UK’s Pharmacy First initiative, people are encouraged to see their pharmacist before consulting their GP – especially for minor ailments. It’s a tough four-year course to become a pharmacist in the UK, so you’re in good hands if you seek their advice.
However, on stepping in to any community pharmacy, you might be surprised by the welter of products on sale – from decongestant drugs to homeopathic remedies – that have little or no evidence to support their effectiveness.
For example, oral phenylephrine has been shown to be ineffective as a nasal decongestant. Following a review of the evidence, late last year, the US Food and Drug Administration advised that oral versions of the drug (pills, soluble powders and syrups) should no longer be sold as a treatment for a blocked nose.
Phenylephrine is the main decongestant ingredient in many over-the-counter cold remedies.
Meanwhile, the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency’s chief safety officer, Alison Cave, said there are “no safety concerns” over phenylephrine products and “people can continue to use as directed”. Although safety is not what’s in question. Effectiveness is.
The flu drug oseltamivir also has little evidence of effectiveness – at least in otherwise healthy people. The UK government, however, still recommends its use in seasonal flu outbreaks.
A recent meta-analysis of 33 clinical trials, with a combined 19,000 patients, showed that oseltamivir, and similar antivirals, might be useful if given to patients who are at a high risk of severe disease. However, they only worked if given within 48 hours of exposure to the flu virus. These drugs had little or no effect on most people who are at low risk or who look for treatments after the 48-hour window.
In 2017, the World Health Organization (WHO) downgraded the status of oseltamivir from “essential” to “complementary”.
The WHO strongly advises against giving oseltamivir to people with “suspected or confirmed non-severe seasonal influenza virus infection”. The drug doesn’t seem to help people at low risk of severe flu and can have unpleasant side-effects.
What about supplements and other non-medicines?
Of course, pharmacies don’t just sell drugs. They also sell supplements, such as vitamins and minerals, herbal medicines and homeopathic remedies.
Although more than half the UK population takes a multivitamin or dietary supplement, scientists still debate their benefits. A recent large study found that taking a daily multivitamin doesn’t appear to be associated with a mortality benefit.
On the other hand, taking a vitamin D supplement is recommended for those with a deficiency – especially during the dark winter months. Studies have shown that it may reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes in older people. And people with periods can benefit from vitamin C as it helps with iron absorption.
Medicines in the UK must demonstrate safety, quality and efficacy – but these criteria don’t apply to supplements, herbal medicines and homeopathic products. These products only have to demonstrate safety and quality.
The Royal Pharmaceutical Society states that there is “no evidence from randomised controlled trials for the efficacy of homoeopathy over placebo, and no scientific basis for homoeopathy”. However, it was only as recently as 2017 that the NHS agreed to cease providing homeopathic treatments.
If the evidence says that they don’t work, why do people take these products?
Placebo effects may be part of the reason. The person may believe that the treatment will work and this may lead to them thinking that they feel better. Most of these products are sold for self-limiting conditions and are aimed at helping people feel better while they recover.
Many of these products are sold for self-limiting conditions. fizkes/Shutterstock
Pharmacies have always sold complementary therapies, although these products have changed with the times. You won’t find tonic wine anymore, and there’s much less call for malt extract with cod liver oil.
So why do UK pharmacies sell products with little or no evidence of effectiveness?
Data from Community Pharmacy England suggests that 90% of the income of the average pharmacy comes from the NHS. But, over the last ten years, that funding has seen a 30% real-term cut, even in the face of new services, such as Pharmacy First.
Is it any wonder then that community pharmacies are moving into private services, such as weight loss, and expanding the range of lifestyle products they sell?
Also, many pharmacists work for larger companies and these companies might value profit over evidence-based treatments. Their shops can be crammed with dubious products with high profitability.
This conflict between pharmacies making a profit and providing the best treatment options and advice is not new and is something that Australia struggled with quite recently, leading to calls for pharmacies to drop products that lack evidence.
As long as pharmacies face NHS spending cuts and have to rely on the sale of products that have little or no evidence for their efficacy to remain afloat, the situation is unlikely to change. In the meantime, ask questions about anything you are considering buying. You can be reassured that if a product isn’t right for your condition, your pharmacist will tell you.
The Conversation offered the Royal Pharmaceutical Society the right of reply and Elen Jones, the society’s director for England and Wales wrote:
“Community pharmacies are the ideal place for open conversations with patients to ensure they make informed decisions about their health, including discussing any questions about the evidence of a product’s clinical effectiveness …
“In the case of homeopathy, the RPS is clear that it has no scientific evidence to support its clinical efficacy beyond a placebo effect and does not endorse it as a form of treatment. Pharmacists should advise people considering homeopathic products about their lack of efficacy beyond placebo and also advise that individuals do not stop taking their prescribed medicines when considering using a homeopathic product.
“Offering a variety of products can be an opportunity for patients to access the pharmacy as a ‘gateway to healthcare,’ encouraging them to seek advice for conditions because they trust their pharmacist. Pharmacists play a crucial role in providing evidence-based care daily, guiding patients towards treatments that are safe and clinically effective, with patient care and safety always as the highest priority.”
Colin Davidson has previously received funding from the NIH (USA) and the European Community for projects related to drug abuse. He is currently a consultant on novel psychoactive substances for the UK Defence Science Technology Labs and is a member of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (UK). He was Head of School of Pharmacy & Biomedical Sciences at the University of Central Lancashire from 2017-2023.
Cathryn Brown is a pharmacist and a member of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. She is currently a member of the Labour party, and regularly donates to Sense about Science.
The pursuit of nuclear fusion as a clean, sustainable energy source represents one of the most challenging scientific and engineering goals of our time. Fusion promises nearly limitless energy without carbon emissions or long-living radioactive waste.
However, achieving practical fusion energy requires overcoming significant challenges. These come from the heat generated by the fusion process, the radiation produced, the progressive damage to materials used in fusion devices and other engineering hurdles. Fusion systems operate under extreme physical conditions, generating data at scales that surpass the ability of humans to analyse.
Nuclear fusion is the form of energy that powers the Sun. Existing nuclear energy relies on a process called fission, where a heavy chemical element is split to produce lighter ones. Fusion works by combining two light elements to make a heavier one.
While physicists are able to initiate and sustain fusion for variable periods of time, getting more energy out of the process than the energy supplied to power the fusion device has been a challenge. This has so far prevented the commercialisation of this hugely promising energy source.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a powerful and essential tool for managing the inherent challenges in fusion research. It holds promise for handling the complex data and convoluted relationships between different aspects of the fusion process. This not only enhances our understanding of fusion but also accelerates the development of new reactor designs.
By addressing these hurdles, AI offers the potential to significantly compress timelines for the development of fusion devices, paving the way for the commercialisation of this form of energy.
AI is reshaping fusion research across academic, government and commercial sectors, driving innovation and progress toward a sustainable energy future. For example, it can play a transformative role in addressing the challenges of developing materials for fusion reactors, which must withstand extreme thermal and neutron environments while maintaining structural integrity and functionality.
By connecting datasets from different experiments, simulations and manufacturing processes, AI-driven models can generate reliable predictions and insights that can be acted on. A form of AI called machine learning can significantly accelerate the evaluation and optimisation of materials that could be used in fusion devices.
These include the doughnut-shaped vessels called tokamaks used in magnetic confinement fusion (where magnetic coils are used to guide and control hot plasma – a state of matter – allowing fusion reactions to occur). The superheated plasma can damage the materials used in the interior walls of the tokamak, as well as irradiating them (making them radioactive).
Machine learning involves the use of algorithms (a set of mathematical rules) that can learn from data and apply those lessons to unseen problems. Insights from this form of AI are critical for guiding the selection and validation of materials capable of enduring the harsh conditions within fusion devices. AI allows scientists to develop detailed simulations that enable the rapid evaluation of materials performance and their configurations within a fusion device. This helps ensure long-term reliability and cost efficiency.
AI tools can help narrow the range of candidate materials for testing, characterise them based on their properties and perform real-time monitoring of those installed in fusion reactors. These capabilities enable the rapid screening and development of radiation-tolerant materials, reducing reliance on traditional, time-intensive approaches.
Controlling plasma
AI also offers a way to better control the plasma in fusion reactors. As discussed, a key challenge in magnetic confinement fusion is to shape and maintain the high-temperature plasma within the fusion device, often a tokamak vessel.
However, the plasmas in these machines are inherently unstable. For example, a control system needs to coordinate the tokamak’s many magnets, adjust their voltage thousands of times per second to ensure the plasma never touches the walls of the vessel. This could lead to the loss of heat and potentially damage the materials inside the tokamak.
Researchers from the UK-based company Google DeepMind have used a form of AI called deep reinforcement learning to keep the plasma steady and be used to accurately sculpt it into different shapes. This allows scientists to understand how the plasma reacts under different conditions.
Meanwhile, a team at Princeton University in the US also used deep reinforcement learning to forecast disturbances in fusion plasma known as “tearing mode instabilities”, up to 300 milliseconds before they appear. Tearing instabilities are a leading form of disruption that can occur, stopping the fusion process. They happen when the magnetic field lines within a plasma break and create an opportunity for that plasma to escape the control system in a fusion device.
My own collaboration with the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) addresses critical challenges in materials performance and structural integrity by integrating a variety of techniques, including machine learning models, for evaluating what’s known as the residual stress of materials. Residual stress is a measure of performance that’s locked into materials during manufacturing or operation. It can significantly affect the reliability and safety of fusion reactor components under extreme conditions.
A key outcome of this collaboration is the development of a way of working that integrates data from experiments with a machine learning-powered predictive model to evaluate residual stress in fusion joints and components.
This framework has been validated through collaborations with leading institutions, including the National Physical Laboratory and UKAEA’s materials research facility. These advancements provide efficient and accurate assessments of materials performance and have redefined the evaluation of residual stress, unlocking new possibilities for assessing the structural integrity of components used in fusion devices.
This research directly supports the European Demonstration Power Plant (EU-DEMO)
and the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) project, which aim to deliver a demonstration fusion power plant and prototype fusion power plant, respectively, to scale. Their success depends on ensuring the structural integrity of critical components under extreme conditions.
By using many AI-based approaches in a coordinated way, researchers can ensure that fusion systems are physically robust and economically viable, accelerating the path to commercialisation. AI can be used to develop simulations of fusion devices that integrate insights from plasma physics, materials science, engineering and other aspects of the process. By simulating fusion systems within these virtual environments, researchers can optimise reactor design and operational strategies.
Tan Sui would like to acknowledge funding from the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering under the Industrial Fellowships programme.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Rabia Qusien, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Alliance for a Sustainable Future, George Washington University, George Washington University
It isn’t just hazy — it’s suffocating. During smog season in Lahore, Pakistan, something as simple as breathing can become a major health risk. People keep their windows shut to protect themselves, yet they can smell smoke even indoors.
When we speak to family and colleagues in Pakistan by phone, they often have to break off, unable to speak because they are coughing and gasping due to the smog and particulate-laden air.
This is normal for residents of many major cities in Pakistan. The smog has worsened in recent years. Fine particulate air pollution known as PM2.5 increased by 25% in 2024 compared to 2023.
Smog started engulfing all major cities in Punjab, bringing life to a halt in major metropolitans. In November 2024, 129,229 patients visited hospitals due to respiratory diseases.
Pakistan is the fourth most polluted country in the world, thanks mostly to the smog that descends on cities such as Lahore and Sheikhupura every winter. Conditions are so bad that life expectancy in these cities is seven years shorter than when World Health Organization’s air quality guideline are met.
Our research into media representations of climate issues shows that the media has an important role in informing the public about the dangers and causes of smog. But often, the reporting leaves out the human toll and ignores the impacts on health and lifestyle.
Clouded narratives
We analysed 356 news stories related to smog in Pakistan during 2017 and 2019, which appeared in six newspapers. We found that the public health implications of smog were discussed in only 15% of stories – that includes any mention of precautionary measures such as wearing masks, moisturising skin (to build a barrier effect against environmental substance), eating a balanced diet (to maintain a healthy immune system), and reducing time spent outdoors when smog is heavy.
Our research highlights how Pakistani media treats smog as a seasonal inconvenience, rather than a major public health emergency requiring urgent and sustainable attention.
As we collected data, we found that news articles related to smog started appearing after the issue intensified in both English and Urdu newspapers. Most news editors, especially in Urdu newspapers, only seemed interested in smog-related stories during smog season which is from October to February, though haze hangs in the sky throughout the year.
Pakistani media tended to attribute smog to local factors, including urbanisation, industrialisation, vehicle emissions, and the burning of waste or crops. The media remained critical of government efforts to reduce smog impacts but did not mention many sustainable policy options.
There are other regional issues at play here, too. Given the ongoing India-Pakistan conflict, the Pakistani media blames smoke from stubble burning on the Indian side of the border for smog outbreaks, irrespective of the direction of prevailing winds.
The media often covers the disastrous effects of smog, such as the strain on the economy, closure of schools, transport delays and utility supply disruptions. More than 20% of news reports in each newspaper were about such effects.
However, the media published far fewer stories about the knock-on effects on human health and about communities that were vulnerable to smog, such as daily wage labourers working outdoors and inhaling toxic air.
Smog through a solutions lens
By adopting a more human-centred and solutions-journalism approach (rigorous reporting that’s focused on responses to particular social and environmental challenges), the media landscape in Pakistan could become much more comprehensive.
Solutions-focused reporting of smogs should ideally cover environmental justice by showcasing how vulnerable communities are more affected by smog. With more human-centred story angles, the media can explain the health implications of smog.
Linking routine actions, such as burning fossil fuels, crops and waste, to major health issues, such as respiratory disease is essential. Powerful storytelling can emphasise how mitigating those effects can benefit human health.
Burning of crops to clear stubble after the harvest contributes to air pollution. Haani Pasha/Shutterstock
Media coverage of sustainable solutions could be increased. Currently, the media focuses mainly on stories about short-term policy actions. That includes emphasising the ban on outdoor activities and holidays in schools or publishing stories about the number of registered cases against farmers burning crops. Stories might also cover tickets issued to smoke-emitting vehicles, industrial units sealed during smog season and the temporary pause to development projects to control smog.
The 2019 media coverage we analysed highlighted sustainable solutions in just 12 instances. That included stories about tree planting, rooftop gardening and urban forestry. Although people mostly read and understand Urdu, the number of stories based on solutions journalism in Urdu newspapers is lower than in English newspapers.
Solution-focused journalism can help demonstrate how stern policy action reduces environmental challenges and creates opportunities. For example, using crop stubble for cement production and knowing which trees are best for reducing air pollution.
The road to improving public understanding of smog starts with increasing the scientific and environmental literacy of journalists in Pakistan. Once reporters and editors are more comfortable with the science, they will feel better equipped to craft solutions-focused narratives that engage their audiences in powerful stories about what is happening to air quality in Pakistan and other developing countries.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Gabriel Silva Huland, Teaching Fellow, School of International Studies, University of Nottingham
Brics has emerged as a significant international force since 2009 when it was established at a summit in Russia. What began as a five-member group encompassing Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, is now expanding with the integration of five new members and eight new partner countries. Even more countries may be joining in the next few years.
This growth raises essential questions about whether Brics will challenge the leadership of traditional powers such as the US, UK and the European Union.
But analysts are also questioning how united the bloc really is and whether a perceived lack of unity constitutes an obstacle to the bloc’s expansion. Brics is undoubtedly diverse. Iran and Saudi Arabia compete as regional powers in the Middle East, Egypt and Ethiopia have had different conflicts around the Nile’s governance, and the skirmishes between China and India are well known.
Yet, the bloc’s strength may reside in its capacity to integrate this diverse array of countries that are not fully aligned. Building loose international organisations might be the key to navigating international politics in these times of increasing polarisation.
The rise of Brics must be contextualised within the ongoing competition between the US and China. The rivalry between the world’s two largest economies is likely to intensify in the coming years, shaping the contemporary global order. China’s announcement of a record US$1 trillion (£804 billion) trade surplus for 2024 and its solid 5% economic growth have bolstered the narrative that its development model represents an alternative to the US-sponsored neoliberal policies that have dominated much of the world in the past four decades.
Political leaders and economic elites worldwide are closely observing the US-China competition – and most countries strive to maintain an equidistant approach. Countries traditionally within the US sphere of influence, including Brazil and Peru, have been cautiously moving towards China, attracted by the economic opportunities the Asian giant offers. Others previously in China’s orbit, like Vietnam, are working to maintain or expand their ties with the US.
Brics countries represent 45% of the world’s population and about 35% of global GDP. Sunflowerr/Shutterstock
China is unquestionably the driving force that holds Brics together. Without China, it wouldn’t have come into existence. All Brics countries share two key characteristics. They are global south countries that do not belong to the traditional group of hegemonic powers. And they have significant economic ties with China, especially through trade relations.
Belt and road
The official Brics narrative emphasises multilateralism, cooperation and fair global development. But in fact the group serves primarily as an instrument for China to project its power and influence. China achieves this through a combination of rhetoric and by using the bloc as a special trade platform linked to the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI).
Brics seeks to position itself as an alternative to US hegemony, promoting free trade and multilateralism. In times of political turbulence and the growth of illiberal forces, this narrative serves as a powerful legitimising tool for the group globally. But the group’s diversity also poses significant challenges to its rise as an alternative to the US-led global order. It is unlikely that Brics will evolve into a unified military alliance like Nato or a free trade area like Asean or the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA – formerly Nafta). The group’s diversity prevents it from acquiring these characteristics.
Aware of this, China strategically uses Brics to increase its business opportunities and international influence. It maintains a fine balance between a loose bloc and a more solidified military or economic alliance. Contrary to the Cold War era, when the two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, had well-defined spheres of influence, the current world order appears to be shaped by loose, interconnected international blocs.
Many of Brics member states are also partners with China in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Net Vector/Shutterstock
China’s prominence within Brics is clear and unlikely to change. It accounts for two-thirds of both the group’s GDP and intra-Brics trade. The country is the primary trade partner for Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Iran. China also holds significant investments in these nations. Russia is the largest recipient of Chinese foreign direct investment within the Brics with an accumulated stock of more than USU$10 billion.
Most Brics member states are also directly or indirectly involved in BRI. While the major BRI projects may not be located within Brics countries – they are primarily in central, south and southeast Asia – Egypt, Ethiopia, South Africa, Saudi Arabia and Iran also host BRI initiatives. Though not an official BRI member, Brazil has become a key partner due to its role as a central food supplier to China.
These figures highlight that expanding Brics is one of China’s foreign policy priorities. The country uses the group to project both economic and ideological influence. Donald Trump’s plans to impose trade tariffs on several countries, including China, is likely to prompt China to intensify this policy. It is a distinct possibility that the recent episode with Colombia, where the US president reportedly threatened to impose tariffs if Colombia continued to push back against deportation flights, could encourage more countries to seek closer trading relationships with China.
Strategic friendships
Some analysts correctly claim that Brics is divided between anti-western states and those that prefer to remain nonaligned. While the anti-western group, led by Russia, advocates for a confrontational stance towards the US, the nonaligned countries – including India and Brazil – favour a more nuanced approach.
Analysts argue that the US should try to develop closer relations with non-aligned countries to influence internal Brics debates. But this overlooks the fact that China is not only the de-facto leader of Brics but also has an unequivocal strategy of favouring a nuanced approach towards the west, based on multilateralism and free trade. So, despite what Russia may want, it’s unlikely that Brics will assume a confrontational stance towards the west.
China knows that a non-confrontational approach is the best way to attract more countries and solidify the Brics as a loose bloc that advocates for more democratic global governance.
So far, this strategy appears to be working.
Gabriel Silva Huland 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.
In 1764, Horace Walpole published the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, set in a labyrinthine castle surrounded by woods. The novel features the supernatural, with a dark secret from the past at its core. Today, 260 years later, gothic is still with us in the form of “contemporary gothic”plays, fiction, films, music and computer games.
Central to the popularity of gothic is the way it affects its audiences. It is supposed to unsettle, to make the flesh creep and provoke feelings of claustrophobia. Soundtracks for gothic films are integral to creating such effects, building suspense and unease while amplifying the visceral impact of sudden jump scares.
Alejandro Amenábar’s soundtrack for The Others (2001), for example, weirds its listeners out. The hollow but reverberant timbre of brushed piano strings evokes the spaces of the house, conjuring up the old-fashioned alienness of the place. Action, set and music sympathetically resonate.
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The soundtrack for The Substance (2024) shrieks with the strings and sudden dissonances of The Nightmare and Dawn (taken from Bernard Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece, Vertigo). Then, it deepens the sense of disquiet with the sinister incantations and medieval-sounding harmonies of Swedish composer Anna von Hausswolff‘s Ugly and Vengeful.
Both soundtracks impressively succeed in doing what we expect gothic music to do: provoke unease, create suspense and drive home the horror elements.
But has the music of the gothic always been called upon to unsettle and scare? Has it always sounded so, well, gothic? These are questions I explore in my new book The Music of the Gothic 1789–1820.
Over the last few years, I’ve been rummaging through archives in London, Oxford and Dublin searching for settings of songs from novels and music associated with gothic plays such as The Mysteries of the Castle (1795). I uncovered many treasures, some of which probably haven’t been performed for a couple of centuries.
Thanks to a grant from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, I was able to bring some of this music to audiences once more with the help of a group of wonderful musicians, headed by Seb Gillot, who performed the tracks you can hear in this article. You can see them performing live below.
The gothic novels and plays of the 1790s were populated by sweet-singing heroines and heroes. Among the music I encountered was a song by the composer and singer Harriet Abrams (c. 1758-1821), in which a woman imprisoned in a madhouse sweetly pleads with her cold-hearted jailer.
I also found music for gothic plays by the Northumbrian William Shield (1748-1829) and the Irish tenor Michael Kelly (1762-1826), who wrote songs about jolly mariners , comic poachers_ and young peasant girls on their way back from market.
None of this material sounded remotely what we would now describe as gothic. Even the music accompanying the entrance of a blood-covered ghost in The Castle Spectre (1798) was warm and stately – and singularly unterrifying.
I realised that none of the music from the 1790s – a period when gothic was phenomenally popular – was intended to scare. On the contrary, it was called upon to provide relief from the scare. In late 18th-century gothic plays such as The Italian Monk (1797), music was associated with romance, comedy and sublime religious experience, but not horror or terror.
At what point then did the kind of gothic music we know today come into being? The evidence can be found in books such as Remick Folio of Moving Picture Music (1914) which contains music for silent film accompanists. With names like Mysterioso, or Forboding and Wind Storm, or Hurry, they were evidently designed for scenes of suspense and mystery.
Such music is indebted to the music of Victorian melodrama, but what I wanted to know was when melodrama acquired its distinctive gothic sounds.
Digging into the past of gothic
Very often in research you discover that things happen gradually. There is trial and experiment, a series of influences, a slow accumulation of examples, and then a tipping point. But when it comes to gothic music, that is not the case. There is a definite date when a specific kind of music erupted onto the entertainment scene. The date was 1802, and the occasion a new dramatic production – a “melo-drame” or musical drama called A Tale of Mystery with music by Thomas Busby.
Busby’s music was conceptualised very differently to the music of the 1790s. For a start it was intended to add to, not to provide relief from, the gothic elements of the play.
Most crucially, it was not part of the imagined world of the drama. The fictional characters did not sing it – they did not even “hear” it: Busby’s music was directed at the audience. Instrumental music calculated to disturb, it was chaotic and unnerving, with lots of fast, disjointed short phrases, disturbing chords and cliffhanger endings.
Instantly recognised as new and revolutionary, it caused a sensation. After audiences had a taste of the new gothic in A Tale of Mystery, music on the page and on the stage soon became something darker and more troubling.
The older kind of music didn’t disappear overnight, of course, but melodrama took hold and the music of gothic was transformed. Not just on stage but also on the page. Gothic music was no longer uplifting but sinister.
As seen in The Woman in Black (2012), there’s nothing like a music box in a deserted house to terrify audiences. And who doesn’t thrill to the sound of the diabolically thundering organ in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera?
Emma McEvoy received a research grant from the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust for the project “The Music of Gothic Literature and Theatre 1790-1820”.
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Lawrence O. Gostin, University Professor; Founding Linda D. & Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Global Health Law, Georgetown University
In the executive order putting the withdrawal process in place, Trump also paused the transfer of US funds, support and resources to the WHO.
Trump’s executive order is his second attempt to pull the US out of the agency. He has also complained that the US financial contribution to the international organisation is “onerous”.
The biggest impacts will come from the loss of US funding. The US is by far the WHO’s largest state donor, contributing approximately 18% of the agency’s total funding.
The WHO’s funding is split into two tranches.
There are assessed contributions: countries’ membership fees, to which all WHO members agree and over which the WHO has full control. The US accounts for 22%, or US$264 million of these, for the current 2024/25 budget. The US is yet to pay the WHO its assessed contributions for 2024 and 2025. Withdrawing from the organisation without paying these fees would violate US law and must be challenged in the US courts.
Then there are voluntary contributions: donations by member countries, foundations and other sources, usually earmarked to that donor’s priorities. The US contributes 16%, or US$442 million, of all voluntary contributions.
In the case of the US, these priorities include HIV/AIDS, polio eradication and health emergencies.
As experts in global health law, we are deeply concerned about the impacts of this order, which will be far reaching.
The US withdrawal from the WHO threatens core health programmes in Africa. It will weaken the ability of African countries to respond to health emergencies, and could lead to increases in death and illness on the continent.
It will also have broader implications for leadership and governance in global health.
Impact on core programmes
Trump’s decision to withdraw comes at a time when the WHO’s health priorities in Africa were already underfunded. Eight of 12 areas were funded less than 50% earlier this year.
Twenty-seven percent of all US funding through the WHO for the African region goes to polio eradication, 20% supports improved access to quality essential health services, and much of the balance goes to pandemic preparedness and response.
The WHO/US partnership has long supported the HIV/AIDS response in Africa, but the redirection and reduction in funds could reduce the availability of prevention, testing and treatment programmes across the continent. This threatens progress to end AIDS by 2030.
The funding gap will also have an impact on programmes designed to increase
access to quality essential health services, including the prevention and treatment of tuberculosis and malaria, and child and maternal health services.
If the WHO is forced to cut back on these services due to a lack of financing, it could lead to increases in mortality and morbidity in Africa.
European countries filled the financing gap in 2020 when Trump last withheld US funding from the WHO. But it is unlikely that they will be able to do so again, as countries across Europe are facing their own geopolitical and financial challenges.
The WHO’s budget was already thinly spread, and its mandate keeps growing.
Through its new investment round, the WHO raised US$1.7 billion in pledges, and is expecting another US$2.1 billion through partnerships and other agreements. Yet even before the US president’s executive order, this left a funding gap of approximately US$3.3 billion (or 47%) for the WHO’s 2025-2028 strategy.
If the gap left by the loss of US funding cannot be filled from other sources, it will fall to African nations to fund health programmes and services that are cut, placing a greater strain on governments reckoning with limited fiscal space.
Weakened response to health emergencies
Trump’s decision comes at a pivotal moment for health in Africa, which is experiencing major outbreaks.
The US has been a key actor supporting WHO-led emergency responses to outbreaks.
But now US health officials have been instructed to immediately stop working with the WHO, preventing US teams in Africa from responding to Marburg virus and mpox.
Even before these outbreaks, the US supported WHO-led emergency responses to COVID-19, Ebola and HIV/AIDS. The US withdrawal could lead to increased transmission, sickness and death in vulnerable regions.
US experts have supported nearly half of all WHO joint external evaluation missions to assess countries’ pandemic preparedness and response capacities under the International Health Regulations. This is a binding WHO agreement to help countries prepare for, detect and initially respond to health emergencies globally.
The US withdrawal from the WHO risks eroding these efforts, though it may also accelerate a regionalisation of health security already underway in Africa, led by the African Union through the Africa CDC.
Restructuring of governance
The US was instrumental in establishing the WHO and shaping WHO norms and standards, in particular driving amendments to the International Health Regulations adopted in June 2024. This included improved obligations to facilitate the rapid sharing of information between the WHO and countries.
The US has also been a key figure in ongoing negotiations for a new international treaty, a Pandemic Agreement. This would create new rights and obligations to prevent, prepare for and respond to pandemics with elements that go beyond the International Health Regulations. These include obligations on the equitable sharing of vaccines.
Trump’s executive order would prevent these instruments from being implemented or enforced in the US.
This would only entrench inequitable dynamics when the next global health emergency breaks out, given the concentration of global pharmaceutical companies in the US.
The order also pulls the US out of the Pandemic Agreement negotiations. This will inevitably create new diplomatic dynamics. Optimistically, this could provide enhanced opportunities for African nations to strengthen their position on equity.
The US departure from the WHO will create a leadership vacuum, ushering in a restructuring of power and alliances for global health.
This vacuum could cede influence to US adversaries, opening the door to even greater Chinese influence on the African continent.
But it also presents opportunities for greater African leadership in global health, which could strengthen African self-reliance.
Trump has directed the US to find “credible and transparent” partners to assume the activities the WHO would have performed. And yet there is no substitute for the WHO, with its worldwide reach and stature.
For more than 75 years, the WHO has been, and remains, the only global health organisation with the membership, authority, expertise and credibility to protect and promote health for the world’s population.
For this reason, the African Union, among scores of other bodies and leaders, has already urged Trump to reconsider.
It is now time for the global community to stand up for the WHO and ensure its vital health work in Africa and beyond can thrive.
Lawrence O. Gostin is the Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. He is also a member of the WHO Committee on Amendments to the International Health Regulations
Alexandra Finch 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.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife agents inspect a shipment of reptiles at the Port of Miami.U.S. GAO
When people think of wildlife trade, they often picture smugglers sneaking in rare and endangered species from far-off countries. Yet most wildlife trade is actually legal, and the United States is one of the world’s biggest wildlife importers.
New research that weanda team of colleagues published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that, over the last 22 years, people in the U.S. legally imported nearly 2.85 billion individual animals representing almost 30,000 species.
Some of these wild animals become pets, such as reptiles, spiders, clownfish, chimpanzees and even tigers. Thousands end up in zoos and aquariums, where many species on display come directly from the wild.
The largest number of imported species are birds – 4,985 different species are imported each year, led by Muscovy ducks, with over 6 million imported. Reptiles are next, with 3,048 species, led by iguanas and royal pythons. These largely become pets.
Not all wildlife are wild
We found that just over half of the animals imported into the U.S. come from the wild.
Capturing wildlife to sell to exporters can be an important income source for rural communities around the world, especially in Africa. However, wild imported species can also spread diseases or parasites or become invasive. In fact, these risks are so worrying that many imported animals are classed as “injurious wildlife” due to their potential role in transmitting diseases to native species.
Captive breeding has played an increasingly dominant role in recent years as a way to limit the impact on wild populations and to try to reduce disease spread.
However over half the individual animals from most groups of species, such as amphibians or mammals, still come from the wild, and there is no data on the impact of the wildlife trade on most wild populations.
Sustainable wildlife trade is possible, but it relies on careful monitoring to balance wild harvest and captive breeding.
Data is thin in many ways
For most species in the wildlife trade, there is still a lot that remains unknown, including even the number of species traded.
With so many species and shipments, wildlife inspectors are overwhelmed. Trade data may not include the full species name for groups like butterflies or fish. The values in many customs databases are reported by companies but never verified.
Macaques, used in medical research, are the most-traded primates globally, according to an analysis of U.S. Fish and Wildlife data. Davidvraju, CC BY-SA
In our study, we relied on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Law Enforcement Management Information System, a wildlife import-export data collection system. However, few countries collate and release data in such a standardized way; meaning that for the majority of species legally traded around the world there is no available data.
For example, millions of Tokay geckos are imported as pets and for medicine, and are often reported to be bred in captivity. However, investigators cannot confirm that they weren’t actually caught in the wild.
Why tracking the wildlife trade is important
Biodiversity has a great number of economic and ecological benefits. There are also risks to importing wildlife. Understanding the many species and number of animals entering the country, and whether they were once wild or farmed, is important, because imported wildlife can cause health and ecological problems.
The most-traded mammals worldwide are minks, which are valued for their fur but can spread viruses to humans and other species. About 48 million minks are legally traded annually, about 2.8% wild-caught and the majority raised, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife data. Colin Canterbury/USFWS
Species that aren’t native to the U.S. may also escape or be released into the wild. Invasive species can cause billions of dollars in damage by consuming and outcompeting native wildlife and spreading diseases.
We believe better data on the wildlife trade could be used to set management goals, such as harvest quotas or no-take policies for those species in their country of origin.
What’s next
The researchers involved in this study come from institutes around the world and are all interested in improving data systems for wildlife trade.
Some of us focus on how e-commerce platforms such as Etsy and Instagram have become hotspots of wildlife trade and can be challenging to monitor without automation. Esty announced in 2024 that it would remove listings of endangered or threatened species. Others build tools to help wildlife inspectors process the large number of shipments in real time. Many of us examine the problems imported species cause when they become invasive.
Michael Tlusty is a founding member of the Wildlife Detection Partnership and co-developed the Nature Intelligence System, which assists governments in collecting more accurate wildlife data..
Andrew Rhyne is currently on sabbatical funded by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), focused on the wildlife trade data. He is a founding member of the Wildlife Detection Partnership and co-developed the Nature Intelligence System, which assists governments in collecting more accurate wildlife data.
Alice Catherine Hughes 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.
Almost A$1 trillion (US$600 billion) was wiped off the value of artificial intelligence microchip maker Nvidia overnight on Monday, when a little-known Chinese startup, DeepSeek, threatened to upend the US tech market.
While Nvidia suffered the biggest one-day loss in sharemarket history, other tech giants – Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon, who are investing heavily in competing AI tools including ChatGPT and Gemini – were also hit.
The rout was caused by investors’ shock at the claimed performance of DeepSeek’s new R1 chatbot. The Chinese AI was reported to be more advanced than its competitors and less expensive to develop.
DeepSeek R1 has soared, becoming the top free downloaded app on Apple’s app store, as US technology and related stock prices fell dramatically.
Why tech stocks took a deep dive
The market was surprised by DeepSeek providing what amounts to cheaper technology but comparable performance.
This has dramatically changed the market’s expectations of computing power, showing more can be done for less. It has also compromised the competitiveness of the US tech companies’ existing AI products and developments.
Stock prices are driven by market expectations. The claimed performance of DeepSeek R1 prompted a major revision of expectations about what was technologically possible and about how cheaply AI could be developed and operated.
Investors have rapidly incorporated the news of a low-cost Chinese AI competitor into stock prices, anticipating this new entrant could disrupt the market and erode the competitive advantage of existing leaders.
Who is DeepSeek and what is R1?
DeepSeek was founded in 2023 by Chinese hedge fund High Flyer, which had been exclusively using AI in trading since 2021.
DeepSeek develops large language models (LLMs) that can underpin chatbots and other AI-based tools. R1 is the latest iteration of DeepSeek’s chatbot and underlying model. It builds on earlier versions of generative AI models developed by DeepSeek, and considerable amounts of data, but is a surprising leap forward in performance and cost.
The model underlying R1 operates in a much less intensive manner. It is much cheaper to develop and run, requiring less data and computing power.
The training of the model was possible despite the US export ban preventing Chinese companies such as DeepSeek from accessing chips from US companies such as Nvidia. The Biden administration had introduced laws restricting the sale of certain computer chips and machinery to China, in a move intended to block its rival from accessing some of the world’s most advanced technology.
The training data and data uploaded to R1 sit on servers in China. Given concerns about data privacy and intellectual property have already been raised about US-based companies, having data under jurisdiction of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is arguably even more concerning.
The chatbot program code is free to download, read and modify, unlike ChatGPT. This is however somewhat a false transparency – what matters more is the underlying model, not the Chatbot code.
R1 is known to censor its responses in line with Chinese Communist Party values.
The future of AI and tech stocks
It is unknown whether this crash in price of tech stocks is an irrational panic that will reverse, or whether it simply reflects correct pricing. The future costs and benefits of AI are still uncertain.
This is both a technological and an economic question.
In technological terms, it is yet to be seen whether R1 really does require less computing power and less data to train and use.
Economically, there are potential winners and losers. AI users may win with cheaper access to AI, and LLMs in particular, leading to increased adoption and associated productivity gains. Existing producers such as Nvidia may lose out in what was a market with few real competitors.
More broadly, society may benefit from less computationally intensive, and therefore more energy-efficient, AI. However, the geopolitical risk of a single country capturing the market, together with concerns about data privacy, intellectual property and censorship may outweigh the benefits.
Michael J. Davern has previously received funding from CPA Australia for industry research into Artificial Intelligence.
Matt Pinnuck 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.
It all begins innocently – a late-night peek at your favourite social media site before bed. You catch a headline that grabs your attention with “breaking news” you can’t afford to miss.
Like following digital breadcrumbs, one click leads to another. Before you know it, you’re tumbling down a rabbit hole of endless updates and emotionally charged social media posts. Two hours later, your shoulders are tense, your stomach is in knots, but you can’t put your phone down.
This endless scrolling through bad news – known as “doomscrolling” – sneaks up on us.
It’s important to stay in touch with what’s happening in the world. Being informed helps us make better decisions, engage meaningfully in our communities, and respond effectively to changes that affect our lives and those around us.
But just like a healthy diet, we must be smart about our news consumption to avoid it taking a toll on our health.
The good news is there are proven ways to stay informed without letting it take over your life. Research shows setting clear boundaries around your news consumption can make a huge difference. So, how can you strike the right balance?
How to set boundaries with news consumption
It’s worth considering why you feel compelled to stay constantly informed. Ask yourself: “will this information change what I can do about it?”.
Research shows scrolling through negative news can disrupt your sleep and increase anxiety. To make sure your media consumption is intentional, there are a few steps you can take.
Be picky with the news sources you read. Choose a few trusted outlets instead of letting social media algorithms decide what you see. It’s like sticking to a balanced meal plan, but for your mind.
While engaging with the news, pay close attention to how you’re feeling. When you notice physical signs of anxiety or emotional distress, that is your cue to take a break.
Set aside time earlier in the day with clear boundaries around your news consumption: maybe with your morning coffee or during your lunch break, whatever works for your schedule. Consider implementing a “digital sunset”, too. This is a cut-off time for news and social media, ideally an hour or two before bedtime, to give your mind time to process what you have learned without disrupting your sleep.
The world will always be there, but you will be in a better head space to process what is happening.
You don’t have to feel helpless
Taking breaks from consuming news is not burying your head in the sand – it’s practising self care. Studies have shown that people who set healthy boundaries around news consumption are often better equipped to engage meaningfully on important issues and take constructive action when needed.
When you check the news, be an active consumer. Instead of endless scrolling:
choose one or two in-depth articles to read thoroughly
discuss the news with colleagues, friends and family to process your feelings
look for solution-focused news stories that highlight positive change
take meaningful action on issues you care about.
There are also various apps and tools that can help you form healthier digital habits. Productivity apps use various approaches to help you stay focused, providing ways to snap you out of mindless scrolling.
News curation apps and apps that allow you to save articles to read later can help you establish a balanced news diet, and remove the urgent need to read everything immediately.
Many smartphones now come equipped with screen time management features, such as Apple’s Screen Time or Android’s Digital Wellbeing. You can use these to monitor your scrolling habits and to manage how much time you spend on social media or news apps.
One useful feature is to block apps from use during certain times of day or after you’ve used them for a set amount of time.
Screen time management features allow you to pause or block apps from use. The Conversation
Stay mindful, stay engaged
Staying informed doesn’t mean staying constantly connected. By mindfully setting boundaries and using supportive tools, you can keep up with important events while protecting your wellbeing.
If you’re trying productivity apps and other tools, start small. Choose one tool that resonates with you rather than trying everything at once. Set realistic goals that fit your life, and use these apps’ insights to understand your habits better.
Pay attention to what triggers your doomscrolling and adjust your settings accordingly. Remember, these tools work best when combined with offline activities you enjoy.
The goal isn’t to disconnect completely, but to find a sustainable balance between staying informed and maintaining peace of mind. With thoughtful boundaries and the right support tools, you can stay engaged with the world while keeping your mental health intact.
Lisa Harrison 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.
Administration officials and Trump allies have described all this action as a “shock and awe” campaign intended to “flood the zone.” Translation: It’s both an effort to demonstrate autocratic power and an effort to overwhelm and exhaust people who might resist the changes.
The Conversation U.S. has published several articles – many from Donald Trump’s first term as president – that spell out how autocrats, and those who want to be autocrats, behave and why. Here are some key points to know.
1. Seize executive power
The move toward autocracy starts with wielding unyielding power over not only people but democratic institutions, explained Shelley Inglis, a scholar of international law at the University of Dayton. In a checklist of 10 items for wannabe authoritarians, the first task, she wrote, is being strong:
“The mainstay of today’s authoritarianism is strengthening your power while simultaneously weakening government institutions, such as parliaments and judiciaries, that provide checks and balances. The key is to use legal means that ultimately give democratic legitimacy to the power grab.”
When a leader’s supporters are more loyal to the person than their political party, that creates what is called a “personalist party,” as scholars of political science Erica Frantz at Michigan State University, Joe Wright at Penn State and Andrea Kendall-Taylor at Yale University described. That creates a danger to democracy, they wrote:
“(W)hat matters for democracy is not so much the ambitions of power-hungry leaders, but rather whether those in their support group will tame them. … (W)hen personalist ruling parties hold legislative majorities and the presidency … there is little that stands in the way of a grab for power.”
Many Republican Party members back Trump, in part because other party leaders signal their own support. AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki
3. Sideline the public
In a democracy, the public has power. But if the people choose not to exercise it, that leaves room for an authoritarian leader to take more control, warned Mark Satta, a professor of philosophy and law at Wayne State University in an article comparing George Orwell’s book “Nineteen eighty-four” to modern events:
“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.”
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
4. Depend on complacency
Another scholar delivered a warning of a possible future. Vickie Sullivan, a political science scholar at Tufts University, studies Renaissance writer Niccolò Machiavelli, who lived from 1469 to 1527.
He is perhaps most widely known for encouraging “sole rulers – his phrase for authoritarians or dictators – … to use force and fraud to gain and maintain power,” she wrote. But Machiavelli had advice for the public, too, Sullivan explained:
“He instructs republican citizens and leaders … to recognize how vulnerable the governments they cherish are and to be vigilant against the threats of tyranny. … If republican citizens and leaders fail to be vigilant, they will eventually be confronted with a leader who has accumulated an extremely powerful and threatening following. At that point, Machiavelli says, it will be too late to save the republic.”
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Linda J. Bilmes, Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Public Finance, Harvard Kennedy School
Howard Lutnick, left, is President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Commerce Department.AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Established as a distinct entity in 1913, it has evolved into a sprawling organization with 13 bureaus spanning a wide variety of critical areas that include weather forecasting, conducting the census, estimating gross domestic product, managing fisheries, promoting U.S. exports, setting standards for new technology and allocating radio frequency spectrum. It is even home to one of America’s eight uniformed military services, the NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps with its own fleet of ships, aircraft and 321 commissioned officers. Its main mission is to monitor oceans, waterways and the atmosphere in support of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
As a result, there is no other Cabinet position that has to engage with lawmakers in Congress across so many disparate technical issues, committees and stakeholders. This medley reflects both the historical evolution of the U.S. economy and a degree of political happenstance.
I served at the Commerce Department in several roles, including as chief financial officer and assistant secretary for administration, management and budget, and have watched several administrations attempt to craft an overarching strategic narrative around this diverse set of missions.
Besides the difficult job of formulating a unifying strategy for the department’s many activities, I believe there are three specific challenges in particular that await the next secretary, a position that requires Senate confirmation.
The Commerce Department manages salmon as part of its National Marine Fisheries Service. AP Photo/Manuel Valdes
Commerce: A sprawling bureauocracy
From its earliest days, the Commerce Department has collected trade statistics, overseen lighthouses and issued patents and trademarks. But since then, its portfolio has expanded significantly.
In 1970, NOAA was placed inside Commerce, partly as a result of a feud between President Richard Nixon and his interior secretary, Wally Hickel, over the Vietnam War. NOAA now accounts for more than half the department’s US$11 billion budget and has created some peculiar departmental overlaps.
As President Barack Obama joked in his 2011 State of the Union speech, “The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they’re in freshwater, but the Commerce Department handles them when they’re in saltwater.”
Due to the department’s broad interests, the commerce secretary has a role in nearly every important issue facing the country.
He or she needs to be a quick study who is able to multitask, respond to congressional inquiries on a myriad of topics, as well as manage a 50,000-strong workforce including economists, scientists, statisticians, meteorologists and other experts.
One example of the caliber of experts Commerce oversees is the National Institute for Standards and Technology, which does cutting-edge research in bioscience, artificial intelligence, materials science and industrial measurement standards. The institute currently has five Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry on its staff and is on the front lines on cybersecurity and national defense.
While it’s unclear how Trump nominee Howard Lutnick plans to unify Commerce’s work, the previous secretary, Gina Raimondo, outlined five strategic goals for her department, including driving U.S. global competitiveness, using data to find new opportunities and modernizing its services and capabilities.
The census counts every person living in the U.S. and five U.S. territories. Census data is used to apportion the number of seats each state has in the House of Representatives and to adjust or redraw electoral districts, as well as to apportion federal funding allotted to each district. Consequently, the census receives huge attention in Congress. It will be an especially hot topic because the data collected in the 2020 censushad errors due to the pandemic.
Conducting the census is highly labor intensive and takes many years of planning and preparation, which ramp up now.
The Commerce Department must hire 500,000 temporary workers, open local offices and run large-scale field tests, award billions of dollars in contracts, and work with every state, local, county and tribal government in the country to map where people live. This includes dorms, homeless shelters, nursing homes, prisons, oil rigs, boats, tents, hospitals and mobile homes as well as houses and apartments.
Trump administration policies, such as ongoing efforts to round up and deport undocumented migrants, will make it even more challenging to count immigrants and other historically hard-to-reach groups. During his first term, President Donald Trump sought to prevent unauthorized immigrants from being counted at all – but ran out of time.
A NOAA crew on a reconnaissance flight into the eye of Hurricane Milton in October 2024. Sim Aberson/NOAA via AP
Challenge No. 2: NOAA on the front lines of climate change fight
It tracks rising sea levels, ocean acidification and extreme weather events, and forecasts their impact on fisheries, shipping, marine protected areas and habitats. It also runs the National Weather Service and issues severe storm warnings. These and many other NOAA activities are vital to monitoring the pace of climate change and helping Americans adapt.
NOAA’s mission and its budget are sure to be scrutinized by the Trump administration, which has already reversed a variety of policies meant to slow the pace of climate change. Trump himself has called climate change a “hoax.” That and policy proposals that seek to break up or privatize NOAA suggest many of NOAA’s climate-related activities could be under threat.
Unlike most federal agencies, the Patent and Trademark Office is funded by user fees collected from applicants rather than from tax revenue. This is supposed to make it more efficient and easier to hire staff quickly, but the model is under stress due to a shortage of patent examiners with skills in assessing science, technology, engineering and math applications. The agency currently has a backlog of over 800,000 unexamined patent applications – near an all-time high.
The backlog is likely to continue to grow as artificial intelligence and other state-of-the-art technologies accelerate the discovery cycle, but the slow process of patent approval – two years on average – can throw a wrench in it.
On top of this, Elon Musk, whose companies hold large numbers of patents and who already holds tremendous sway in the Trump administration, says “patents are for the weak” and compared them with landmines in warfare. “They don’t actually help advance things,” he said. “They just stop others from following you.”
In addition to these three areas, Commerce’s roles in international trade, telecommunications, industrial security and other matters could also become epicenters of any global crisis.
This all adds up to an uncomfortable mix of political and operational challenges for the next secretary.
Linda J. Bilmes is affiliated with the Harvard Kennedy School. She served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Department of Commerce from 1997-1998 and as CFO and Assistant Secretary for Management, Budget and Administration from 1999-2001.
But as a federal election looms this year, it’s a good time to take a closer look at Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system, examine why it’s seen by many as unfair and to think about how an alternative system, like Ireland’s proportional representation model, could better serve Canadians.
Canada has what’s known as a single-member plurality electoral system, commonly referred to as first-past-the-post. The country is divided into electoral districts called ridings, each of which has one representative.
The winning candidate in each riding is the one who receives the most votes, although not necessarily the majority of votes. The system is “winner-takes-all” because only those candidates who come first in each riding gain a seat in Parliament.
Ireland has a proportional representation system that’s very different from first-past-the-post. Each voter has a single transferable vote, and each constituency elects several candidates. Voters can rank all the candidates on the ballot in order of their preference.
To be successful, a candidate must reach the constituency’s quota, which is calculated based on the total number of votes and the number of seats. When a candidate reaches or exceeds the quota on the first count, they are elected, and their surplus votes are distributed among the other candidates, based on voters’ second or lower preferences.
If nobody reaches the quota on the first count, as often happens, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated and their votes are distributed among the other candidates. The process continues until all seats are filled.
Risks to Canadian democracy
Canada’s system poses two major challenges to democracy.
The first is voter disengagement. Under the first-past-the-post system, a candidate does not need to win more than 50 per cent of the votes; they just need to win more than their opponents. All the votes cast in favour of other candidates are discounted.
This can result in a significant disparity between a party’s share of votes and its share of seats in Parliament.
A party with less than 50 per cent of the vote share can form a majority government and dominate the parliamentary agenda until the next election.
This happened in the United Kingdom’s 2024 election (also a first-past-the-post system) — Labour received only 34 per cent of the popular vote, but took 63 per cent of the seats in British Parliament and formed a majority government. The 2019 election in Canada also illustrates the distortion produced by this system — the Conservatives won the popular vote, but the Liberals took 36 more seats and won a minority government.
From the voter’s point of view, it’s easy to see how the system causes disillusionment. If they vote for anyone other than the winning candidate, they may feel their vote is discounted and will have no bearing on the makeup of Parliament, and wonder what’s the point of casting a ballot.
The second challenge exacerbated by the first-past-the-post system is increasing polarization in politics. In a winner-takes-all system, there is no incentive for candidates to try to appeal to voters to become their second or third choice. This leads to a much more adversarial style of politics.
Malaise, polarization reduced
The Irish system mitigates against both democratic malaise and political polarization.
Under proportional representation, the voter’s first preference is always counted. But in contrast to the Canadian system, even if their first-choice candidate is eliminated — or elected on the first count with a surplus — their vote is not wasted. Instead, it’s transferred to their next choice of candidate.
These transfers often determine the outcome of the election. Elections in Ireland tend to produce parliaments that correlate much more closely to the proportion of votes a party has received than under first-past-the-post systems in Canada and the U.K.
In addition, the Irish system helps combat polarization, because candidates’ success or failure often hinges on their ability to attract transfers from supporters of other parties. Centrist candidates will be more likely to appeal to a broader base of voters and attract more transfers than candidates that seek to motivate a base of voters with extremist rhetoric.
The recent Irish general election shows how this system helps avoid excessive polarization. Research has found that countries with proportional representation systems tend to have lower levels of polarization.
Local focus?
It’s sometimes argued that proportional representation encourages parliamentarians to focus on issues in their constituency rather than national issues.
The system greatly facilitates the election of independent candidates. The incoming Irish government, for example, will consist of a coalition of the two main centrist parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, with the support of a group of independents, some of whom make no secret that their priority is their own constituency.
It can be argued, however, that responsiveness to local issues isn’t a negative — and it’s not prevented Ireland from playing an outsize role on the international stage in recent years.
Supporters of first-past-the-post argue that it produces stronger, more stable majority governments.
Even though Ireland’s party system has undoubtedly become more fragmented over the past decade, however, coalition governments have proved capable of staying the course.
Of course, Irish politics has its share of challenges. The recent election of Micheál Martin as Taoiseach (prime minister) was delayed a day after rancorous exchanges in Irish Parliament around opposition speaking time, and the country still has a stubbornly low proportion of female parliamentarians (only three women were appointed to the new cabinet as senior ministers, out of 15).
But this doesn’t change the fact that a proportional representation system still produces a parliament more reflective of voter’s choices than first-past-the-post.
Politically disengaged and polarized voters in Canada and an unrepresentative Parliament won’t help the country respond to the challenges posed by the next four years of a second Donald Trump presidency.
A new system with an element of proportionality could help curb polarization, ensure fairer representation for Canadians and transform Canadian democracy for the better.
Seána Glennon 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.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife agents inspect a shipment of reptiles at the Port of Miami.U.S. GAO
When people think of wildlife trade, they often picture smugglers sneaking in rare and endangered species from far-off countries. Yet most wildlife trade is actually legal, and the United States is one of the world’s biggest wildlife importers.
New research that weanda team of colleagues published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that, over the last 22 years, people in the U.S. legally imported nearly 2.85 billion individual animals representing almost 30,000 species.
Some of these wild animals become pets, such as reptiles, spiders, clownfish, chimpanzees and even tigers. Thousands end up in zoos and aquariums, where many species on display come directly from the wild.
The largest number of imported species are birds – 4,985 different species are imported each year, led by Muscovy ducks, with over 6 million imported. Reptiles are next, with 3,048 species, led by iguanas and royal pythons. These largely become pets.
Not all wildlife are wild
We found that just over half of the animals imported into the U.S. come from the wild.
Capturing wildlife to sell to exporters can be an important income source for rural communities around the world, especially in Africa. However, wild imported species can also spread diseases or parasites or become invasive. In fact, these risks are so worrying that many imported animals are classed as “injurious wildlife” due to their potential role in transmitting diseases to native species.
Captive breeding has played an increasingly dominant role in recent years as a way to limit the impact on wild populations and to try to reduce disease spread.
However over half the individual animals from most groups of species, such as amphibians or mammals, still come from the wild, and there is no data on the impact of the wildlife trade on most wild populations.
Sustainable wildlife trade is possible, but it relies on careful monitoring to balance wild harvest and captive breeding.
Data is thin in many ways
For most species in the wildlife trade, there is still a lot that remains unknown, including even the number of species traded.
With so many species and shipments, wildlife inspectors are overwhelmed. Trade data may not include the full species name for groups like butterflies or fish. The values in many customs databases are reported by companies but never verified.
Macaques, used in medical research, are the most-traded primates globally, according to an analysis of U.S. Fish and Wildlife data. Davidvraju, CC BY-SA
In our study, we relied on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Law Enforcement Management Information System, a wildlife import-export data collection system. However, few countries collate and release data in such a standardized way; meaning that for the majority of species legally traded around the world there is no available data.
For example, millions of Tokay geckos are imported as pets and for medicine, and are often reported to be bred in captivity. However, investigators cannot confirm that they weren’t actually caught in the wild.
Why tracking the wildlife trade is important
Biodiversity has a great number of economic and ecological benefits. There are also risks to importing wildlife. Understanding the many species and number of animals entering the country, and whether they were once wild or farmed, is important, because imported wildlife can cause health and ecological problems.
The most-traded mammals worldwide are minks, which are valued for their fur but can spread viruses to humans and other species. About 48 million minks are legally traded annually, about 2.8% wild-caught and the majority raised, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife data. Colin Canterbury/USFWS
Species that aren’t native to the U.S. may also escape or be released into the wild. Invasive species can cause billions of dollars in damage by consuming and outcompeting native wildlife and spreading diseases.
We believe better data on the wildlife trade could be used to set management goals, such as harvest quotas or no-take policies for those species in their country of origin.
What’s next
The researchers involved in this study come from institutes around the world and are all interested in improving data systems for wildlife trade.
Some of us focus on how e-commerce platforms such as Etsy and Instagram have become hotspots of wildlife trade and can be challenging to monitor without automation. Esty announced in 2024 that it would remove listings of endangered or threatened species. Others build tools to help wildlife inspectors process the large number of shipments in real time. Many of us examine the problems imported species cause when they become invasive.
Michael Tlusty is a founding member of the Wildlife Detection Partnership and co-developed the Nature Intelligence System, which assists governments in collecting more accurate wildlife data..
Andrew Rhyne is currently on sabbatical funded by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), focused on the wildlife trade data. He is a founding member of the Wildlife Detection Partnership and co-developed the Nature Intelligence System, which assists governments in collecting more accurate wildlife data.
Alice Catherine Hughes 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.
You wake up at 7:00 and reflexively reach for your phone. Between the stream of emails, WhatsApps and breaking news alerts, you see a worrying reminder: you averaged 11 hours of daily screen time last week. You swipe the notification away and open TikTok, where a woman in a matching athleisure set and glossy, slicked-back ponytail urges you to “get ready with me for my 5-9 before my 9-5”.
You think about getting out of bed for a workout or meditation before you start answering those emails. But before you know it, it’s 8:57 – and if you don’t get off the apps and onto your computer, you’ll be late.
Sound familiar? Though many people have more leisure time now than in the past, paradoxically, more free time comes with increased time pressure. For many of us, it feels as if we don’t have control over our time – rather, time is controlling us. This is because our collective experience of time both comes from and governs society.
Instead of saving us time, the pace of modernity has led to many of us feeling as if our time is slipping away. And any time we “gain back”, we devote – by necessity or choice – to making more money, maybe through a side hustle. Losing control over time can have negative consequences for both physical and mental wellbeing.
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We are trapped in a perpetual cycle of rushing to survive and consume. But consumption also takes time, so the time available to enjoy our newly acquired possessions declines. You buy a faster new computer, but then need to spend multiple, frustrating hours configuring it to your preferences.
Even trying to save time by mastering a productivity hack or reading a self-help book takes (you guessed it) time.
As time use researchers, we often grapple with an uncomfortable truth – your time is not fully yours – it belongs to us all. Time is a network good. We live in a web of time: giving, taking and sharing time with everyone around us. In other words, the decisions and actions of the people around you shape how much time you have.
This presents a catch-22. Friends, family, colleagues and even neighbours require our time, and we need theirs, too. We share time with our social network members because we need strong ties for our wellbeing. However, building lasting relationships means that we have to control our time in order to share it with others.
Unfortunately, we don’t all have the same amount of control. Socioeconomic and demographic factors – gender, financial circumstances, age, race, and where you live – all influence how you can make decisions about time. These factors shape how we can interact with others.
Even seemingly mundane choices, such as how many extra minutes of sleep you give yourself in the morning, are shaped by societal expectations, power structures and economic constraints. If your job starts at 8am and your commute is two hours, it is unlikely that you can afford extra time to sleep in the mornings. If you are a parent, you might have to wake up even earlier to make sure that everyone has their breakfast and lunch packed for school.
This is why the hundreds of self-help articles telling you how to optimise your time by carefully budgeting every minute of it never manage to give you full control.
Breaking this vicious cycle starts with understanding, then practising self-compassion in the face of the demands on your time.
Get in control
Gaining control over your time starts with “why”. We don’t all have the luxury of saying no to tasks we deem unnecessary or unpleasant.
We can, however, ask ourselves why we are spending our time on certain things. Before your next decision, big or small, try asking yourself: why am I doing this?
If the answer is rooted in social pressure, outdated norms, or an obligation toward someone who does not deserve the gift of your precious time, consider how you could switch to doing something else.
Try to spend your time on activities and with people who nourish you, enriching your moments. You may not be able to completely avoid spending part of your time as your boss dictates. But understanding the larger power dynamics shaping your personal situation and your time will help you approach decisions with conscious intention, giving you greater control over this irreplaceable resource.
Regularly questioning the reason behind your actions will reveal the social patterns driving your decision-making processes. Why did you agree to do something, only to regret it later? Why are you always the one donating time to emotional labour at the office?
Consistently asking “why” creates a habit of mindfulness, and will give you the insight needed to begin to make more informed choices that reflect your true priorities. Ultimately, gaining more control over your time is not about rigidly adhering to a schedule or productivity hacks. It is impossible to subject every minute of your existence to your will – time is not yours to hold on to.
But you can make the most of the time you do have control over by making conscious decisions that align with your own desires and goals. Like one of our research participants, you may soon find yourself looking in the mirror and proclaiming: “I love time! Time lets me become!”
Boróka Bó receives funding from Enterprise Ireland. She has previously received funding from the National Science Foundation and held a Soros Fellowship.
Kamila Kolpashnikova receives funding from SSHRC (Insight Grant number: 435-2023-1060).
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Caroline Fowler, Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program, Clark Art Institute, and lecturer in Art History, Williams College
The so-called golden age of Dutch painting in the 1600s coincided with an economic boom that had a lot to do with the transatlantic slave trade. But how did the slave trade shape the art market in the Netherlands? And how is it reflected in the paintings of the time?
This is the subject of a new book called Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art by art historian Caroline Fowler. We asked about her study.
What was Dutch art about before slavery and what was the golden age?
The earliest paintings that would be called Dutch were predominantly religious. They were made for Christian devotion. In the 1500s, major divisions in the church led to a fragmentation of Christianity called the Reformation.
In this new religious climate, artists began to create new types of paintings, studying the world around them. They included landscapes, seascapes, still lifes, and interior scenes of their homes. Instead of working for the church, many painters began to work within an art market. There was a rising middle class that could afford to buy paintings.
Historically, this period in Dutch economic prosperity has been called the “golden age”. This is when many of the most famous Dutch painters worked, such as Rembrandt van Rijn and Johannes Vermeer.
Their work was made possible by a strong Dutch economy built on global trade networks. This included the transatlantic slave trade and the rise of the middle class. Although artists did not directly paint the transatlantic slave trade, in my book I argue that it is central to understanding the paintings produced in the 1600s as it made the economic market possible.
In turn, many of the types of painting that developed, like maritime scenes and interior scenes, are often obliquely or directly about international trade. The slave trade is a haunting presence in these images.
How did this play out within Dutch colonialism?
The new “middle class” consisted of economically prosperous merchants, artisans, lawyers and doctors. For many of the wealthiest merchants, their prosperity was fuelled by their investments in trade overseas. In land and plantations, and also commodities such as sugar, salt, mace and nutmeg.
Slavery was illegal within the boundaries of the Dutch Republic on the European continent. But it was widely practised within Dutch colonies around the world. Slavery was central to their trade overseas – from the inter-Asian slave network that made possible their domination in the export of nutmeg, to the use of enslaved labour on plantations in the Americas. It also contributed in less visible ways to Dutch economic prosperity, like the development of maritime insurance.
What was the relationship between artists and Dutch colonies?
In the new school of painting, artists would sometimes travel to the Dutch colonies. For example, Frans Post travelled to Dutch Brazil and painted the sugar plantations and mills. Another artist named Maria Sibylla Merian went to Dutch Suriname, where she studied butterflies and plants on the Dutch sugar plantations.
Both depict landscapes and the natural world but don’t directly engage with the profound dehumanisation of slavery, and an economic system dependent on enslaved labour. But this doesn’t mean that it’s absent in their sanitised renditions.
Among the sources that I used to think about the presence of the transatlantic slave trade in a culture that did not overtly depict it were inventories of paintings and early museum collections. Often the language in these sources differed from the painting in important ways. They demonstrate how the violence of the system emerges in unexpected places.
One inventory that describes paintings by Frans Post, for example, also narrates the physical punishment meted out if the enslaved tried to run away from the Dutch sugar plantations. This isn’t depicted in the painting, but it is part of the inventory that travelled beside the painting.
These moments reveal the profound presence of this system within Dutch painting, and point to the ways in which artists negotiated making this structure invisible in their paintings although they were not able to completely erase its presence.
How do you discuss Rembrandt’s paintings in your book?
Historically, studies of the transatlantic slave trade in early modern painting (about 1400-1700) have looked at paintings that directly depict either enslaved or Black individuals.
One of the points of this book is that this limits our understanding of the transatlantic slave trade in Dutch painting. A focus on blackness, for example, precludes understanding how whiteness is constructed at the same time. It fails to recognise the ways in which artists sought to diminish the presence of the slave trade in their sanitised rendition of Dutch society.
One painting that I use to think about this is Rembrandt van Rijn’s very famous work called Syndics of the Draper’s Guild. It’s a group portrait of wealthy, white merchants gathered around a table looking at a book of fabric samples.
Although there aren’t enslaved or black individuals depicted, this painting would be impossible without the transatlantic slave trade. Cloth from the Netherlands was often exchanged for enslaved people in west Africa, for example.
In my book, I draw attention to these understudied histories to understand how certain assumptions around whiteness, privilege, and wealth developed in tandem with an emerging visual vocabulary around blackness and the transformation of individual lives into chattel property.
What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
I hope that readers will think about how many of our ideas about freedom, the middle class, art markets, and economic prosperity began in the 17th-century Dutch Republic. As this book demonstrates, a central part of this narrative that has been overlooked was the transatlantic slave trade in building this fantasy.
This is in many ways an invention that traces back to the paintings of overt consumption and wealth produced in the Dutch Republic – like Vermeer’s interiors of Dutch homes.
My aim with this book is to present not only a more complex view of Dutch painting but also a reconsideration of certain dogmas today around prosperity and the art market. The rise of our current financial system, art markets and visible celebration of landscapes, seascapes and interior scenes are all inseparable from the transformation of individual lives into property. We live with this legacy today in our systems built on racial, economic and gendered inequalities.
Caroline Fowler 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.
