Leettaschmidt

Astronomers now routinely discover planets orbiting stars outside of the solar system – they’re called exoplanets. But in summer 2022, teams working on NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite found a few particularly interesting planets orbiting in the habitable zones of their parent stars.

One planet is 30% larger than Earth and orbits its star in less than three days. The other is 70% larger than the Earth and might host a deep ocean. These two exoplanets are super-Earths – more massive than the Earth but smaller than ice giants like Uranus and Neptune.

I’m a professor of astronomy who studies galactic cores, distant galaxies, astrobiology and exoplanets. I closely follow the search for planets that might host life.

Earth is still the only place in the universe scientists know to be home to life. It would seem logical to focus the search for life on Earth clones – planets with properties close to Earth’s. But research has shown that the best chance astronomers have of finding life on another planet is likely to be on a super-Earth similar to the ones found recently.

Common and easy to find

Most super-Earths orbit cool dwarf stars, which are lower in mass and live much longer than the Sun. There are hundreds of cool dwarf stars for every star like the Sun, and scientists have found super-Earths orbiting 40% of cool dwarfs they have looked at. Using that number, astronomers estimate that there are tens of billions of super-Earths in habitable zones where liquid water can exist in the Milky Way alone. Since all life on Earth uses water, water is thought to be critical for habitability.

Based on current projections, about a third of all exoplanets are super-Earths, making them the most common type of exoplanet in the Milky Way. The nearest is only six light-years away from Earth. You might even say that our solar system is unusual since it does not have a planet with a mass between that of Earth and Neptune.

Another reason super-Earths are ideal targets in the search for life is that they’re much easier to detect and study than Earth-sized planets. There are two methods astronomers use to detect exoplanets. One looks for the gravitational effect of a planet on its parent star and the other looks for brief dimming of a star’s light as the planet passes in front of it. Both of these detection methods are easier with a bigger planet.

Super-Earths are super habitable

Over 300 years ago, German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued that Earth was the “best of all possible worlds.” Leibniz’s argument was meant to address the question of why evil exists, but modern astrobiologists have explored a similar question by asking what makes a planet hospitable to life. It turns out that Earth is not the best of all possible worlds.

Due to Earth’s tectonic activity and changes in the brightness of the Sun, the climate has veered over time from ocean-boiling hot to planetwide, deep-freeze cold. Earth has been uninhabitable for humans and other larger creatures for most of its 4.5-billion-year history. Simulations suggest the long-term habitability of Earth was not inevitable, but was a matter of chance. Humans are literally lucky to be alive.

Researchers have come up with a list of the attributes that make a planet very conducive to life. Larger planets are more likely to be geologically active, a feature that scientists think would promote biological evolution. So the most habitable planet would have roughly twice the mass of the Earth and be between 20% and 30% larger by volume. It would also have oceans that are shallow enough for light to stimulate life all the way to the seafloor and an average temperature of 77 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius). It would have an atmosphere thicker than the Earth’s that would act as an insulating blanket. Finally, such a planet would orbit a star older than the Sun to give life longer to develop, and it would have a strong magnetic field that protects against cosmic radiation. Scientists think that these attributes combined will make a planet super habitable.

By definition, super-Earths have many of the attributes of a super habitable planet. To date, astronomers have discovered two dozen super-Earth exoplanets that are, if not the best of all possible worlds, theoretically more habitable than Earth.

Recently, there’s been an exciting addition to the inventory of habitable planets. Astronomers have started discovering exoplanets that have been ejected from their star systems, and there could be billions of them roaming the Milky Way. If a super-Earth is ejected from its star system and has a dense atmosphere and watery surface, it could sustain life for tens of billions of years, far longer than life on Earth could persist before the Sun dies.

Detecting life on super-Earths

To detect life on distant exoplanets, astronomers will look for biosignatures, byproducts of biology that are detectable in a planet’s atmosphere.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope was designed before astronomers had discovered exoplanets, so the telescope is not optimized for exoplanet research. But it is able to do some of this science and is scheduled to target two potentially habitable super-Earths in its first year of operations. Another set of super-Earths with massive oceans discovered in the past few years, as well as the planets discovered this summer, are also compelling targets for James Webb.

But the best chances for finding signs of life in exoplanet atmospheres will come with the next generation of giant, ground-based telescopes: the 39-meter Extremely Large Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope and the 24.5-meter Giant Magellan Telescope. These telescopes are all under construction and set to start collecting data by the end of the decade.

Astronomers know that the ingredients for life are out there, but habitable does not mean inhabited. Until researchers find evidence of life elsewhere, it’s possible that life on Earth was a unique accident. While there are many reasons why a habitable world would not have signs of life, if, over the coming years, astronomers look at these super habitable super-Earths and find nothing, humanity may be forced to conclude that the universe is a lonely place.

Chris Impey receives funding from the National Science Foundation.

Sen. Lindsey Graham has proposed a national U.S. abortion ban barring the procedure after 15 weeks. This push to restrict abortion access across the country follows a rash of new state laws passed by Republicans after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.

If American history is any guide, these efforts will ultimately neither reduce abortions nor remain settled law.

I am a historian who has studied American culture and law in the wake of the 1873 Comstock Act – the first U.S. effort to restrict access to birth control and abortions. My research finds that previous state and federal efforts to regulate the sexual expression and reproduction of Americans led to unintended consequences – and, in the long term, these laws failed.

Already, I see signs that new anti-abortion laws are triggering a similarly undermining backlash.

How ‘obscene’

In 1873, Congress hurriedly passed a law making it illegal to send “obscenities” through the U.S. mail. The legislation was branded the Comstock Act after its most vigorous proponent: Anthony Comstock, a U.S. postal inspector and evangelical Christian who believed sexual activity was a sin unless it occurred between a married man and woman for the purpose of procreation.

Birth control and substances used to induce abortion were included in the definition of “obscenity,” because Comstock and his supporters believed that life and death were God’s decisions. The law also banned mailing erotic images and literature. In Comstock’s expansive view, this category included images of athletes wearing tights.

State versions of the original Comstock Law soon swept the United States. By 1900, 42 states had passed similar legislation outlawing the production, sale, possession or circulation of “obscene” matter in their own jurisdictions.

These statutes ruled until the Supreme Court declared a right to privacy in medical decision-making nearly 100 years later, in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965).

This is the same ruling that was cited eight years later to protect the right to have an abortion in the now defunct Roe v. Wade.

Impractical enforcement

Comstock zealously enforced the laws he’d advocated for, both as a detective for the privately funded New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and as an inspector for the U.S. Post Office Department. In attempting to eradicate contraceptives – including condoms and early forms of diaphragms – Comstock organized the arrests of numerous defendants.

However, he had difficulty getting prosecutors, juries and judges to see the seriousness of many of the “crimes” he investigated. In the late 19th century, wealthier Americans already regularly used birth control.

“Of all the indictments prior to 1878, pending in the Court of General Sessions, not one has been tried the past year,” Comstock wrote in his 1879 annual report for the society.

In one of these cases, The New York Times reported, Comstock was chastised by a New York City district attorney named Phelps for his “sharp practice” in investigating Dr. Sarah Blakeslee Chase. These included his posing as a client to obtain birth control products and repeatedly harassing the suspect. A grand jury threw out the case, stating that it “did not think it for the public good.”

Even when Comstock obtained a conviction, many defendants were pardoned immediately.

Enforcing new anti-abortion laws is similarly unpopular with many legal professionals today. Shortly after the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Dobbs, more than 80 elected prosecutors vowed not to bring indictments in cases involving abortion.

As they recognize, conservative courts in jurisdictions with zealous anti-abortion prosecutors – who in some states are already enforcing new laws – will soon be filled with a host of extremely sympathetic defendants: relatives who assist children who are victims of rape in obtaining an illegal abortion, doctors saving the lives of mothers at risk, and those who choose to help pregnant cancer patients in making the best possible decisions for their health.

Enforcement of America’s new Comstock laws will likely once again make witnesses and defendants more sympathetic in the eyes of judges and jurors – and the public – undermining whatever support remains for these laws.

Beyond prosecutions, the tactics necessary to prevent women from obtaining abortions are even less practical today than they were in the late 19th century.

Enforcing anti-abortion laws may include restricting interstate travel, blocking interstate and international postal services and attempting to censor information about sexual health. All of these would require laborious investigations and extensive cooperation from law enforcement agencies and private corporations who will likely have little desire to involve themselves in unpopular prosecutions.

And that’s assuming that any of these methods survive court challenges.

Uniting disparate factions

By the time of Anthony Comstock’s death in 1915, backlash to his zealous overreach had provoked growing solidarity among activists and attorneys determined to defeat his agenda.

Women’s rights activists, including Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman and Mary Ware Dennett – formerly focused on competing goals and strategies – joined in common cause to repeal the Comstock laws. Their efforts led to the creation of new and powerful national civil liberties organizations, including Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union. Both used lobbying and lawsuits to contribute to the death of the original Comstock laws.

These groups are still fighting new abortion restrictions today. And once again, post-Dobbs, disparate individuals and groups are raising their voices in common cause.

Obstetricians from around the country have begun lobbying politicians and forming their own pro-choice political action committees for the first time. TikTok influencers like Olivia Julianna are rallying young citizens to vote for pro-choice politicians. And diverse podcasters, from one-time provocateur Howard Stern to the hosts of the true crime show “My Favorite Murder,” are sharing resources with their listeners and expressing support for abortion rights.

Ballot box backlash

Newly registered and energized voters are turning out to support candidates and ballot initiatives that reflect the nation’s majority support for abortion rights.

Kansas roundly rejected an anti-abortion referendum in August 2022. And more states will soon vote on state constitutional protections for abortion, including Michigan.

The Comstock laws were not repealed quickly. And it’s now clear that American women’s right to reproductive health care remained tenuous after their demise.

Viewing the past as prologue, however, suggests that, once again, unpopular anti-abortion laws will cause unintended consequences that, in the long run, will render them both ineffective and ultimately futile.

Amy Werbel 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.

As a historian of racism and white supremacy in the United States, I’ve become accustomed to callous actions like those of Republican governors who organized transportation for Latin American migrants to states run by their political opponents.

Governors Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida are following the playbook of segregationists who provided one-way bus tickets to Northern cities for Black Southerners in the 1960s. At that time, the fight for racial equality was attracting national attention and support from many white Americans, inspiring some to join interracial Freedom Rides organized by civil rights groups to challenge segregation on interstate bus lines.

Then, as now, the message Southern racists aimed to send with their “reverse freedom rides” was, “Here, you love them so much, you take care of them.”

But these acts were more than just political stunts designed to embarrass Northern political leaders who sympathized with the civil rights movement. They were part of a broader effort by white supremacists to remove Black Americans from their communities and avoid dealing with the social consequences of centuries of racial discrimination.

Slavery, sharecropping and displacement

In the slavery and Jim Crow eras, racist policies backed by extreme violence limited access to education and economic opportunities for Black people to ensure that they had few options other than working for white employers.

Black sharecropping families in the early 20th century depended on their landlords to provide food, clothing and housing throughout the year until harvest time, when the costs of these goods were deducted from their share of the money made from sales of the crop. Plantation owners controlled the process, frequently using it to cheat workers out of their earnings and keep them perpetually in debt.

By the 1960s, however, most of these workers were no longer needed. Mechanization eliminated millions of agricultural jobs and generated massive unemployment in rural Southern communities. Rather than invest in job training programs or other initiatives to help displaced farm laborers, political leaders enacted policies designed to drive poor people out.

Strict eligibility requirements and arbitrary administration of state public assistance programs excluded many Black families from receiving aid. State legislators were slow to take advantage of federal funds that were available to expand anti-poverty programs, arguing that these were ploys to force integration on the South.

Government inaction left thousands of people without homes or income and exacerbated the suffering of the unemployed.

Segregationists’ ‘final solution’

Civil rights workers who came to the South to help local Black activists with desegregation and voter registration efforts were shocked by the economic deprivation that existed in the communities they visited. They reported seeing widespread hunger, dilapidated housing, unsanitary conditions, high infant mortality rates and other adverse health effects.

Raymond Wheeler, a doctor who visited Mississippi in 1967, described the state as “a vast concentration camp, in which live a great group of poor uneducated, semi-starving people, from whom all but token public support has been withdrawn.”

Others took the analogy to Nazi Germany further, arguing that this was white supremacists’ “final solution to the race question.” By denying Black Americans access to the basic means of survival, they left them with no options but to migrate away.

Political and economic motivations

The motivations behind these policies were both political and economic. White racists understood that providing assistance to displaced workers would encourage Black people to stay in the South. That posed a threat to their power, especially after passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 enabled more Black people to register to vote, participate in elections and run for office.

Moreover, the candidates Black Southerners supported ran on platforms that advocated policies to ensure racial and economic justice: investment in schools and other public services, enhanced assistance for unemployed people, more affordable health care and a stronger social safety net for those who were unable to work.

These proposals were anathema to wealthy white people who would face higher tax rates to pay for them. Warning of the consequences should Black Southerners be allowed to vote, Mississippi Citizens’ Council leader Ellett Lawrence asserted that property owners could see tax increases of “100%, 200% or more” if Black people were elected to office.

In a study of Wilcox County, Alabama, the National Education Association found that many landowners were afraid “the Negro majority will obtain control and raise land taxes to finance education and other services.” It concluded that this group showed “little taste for the anti-poverty programs of the sixties because it is more anxious to solve its problems through outmigration than it is to improve all of its people.”

White supremacy then and now

In many ways, Republicans like Abbott and DeSantis are the political descendants of Southern segregationists whose cruelty horrified other Americans in the 1960s.

Immigration scholars have noted how U.S. foreign policies contributed to the poverty and violence in Central and South America that migrants are fleeing. Yet rather than acknowledge this – along with assuming the moral responsibilities it entails – some GOP leaders denigrate and dehumanize refugees to win support from voters drawn to xenophobic messaging.

Watching this resurgent nativism, racism and disregard for human rights gaining strength in the 21st century is an ominous sight for anyone familiar with where these ideas have led in the past.

Greta de Jong 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.

Banned Books Week, an annual event that teachers and librarians across the U.S. mark with a combination of distress and defiance, is here again. The theme of this year’s event, which takes place Sept. 18-24, is “Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us.”

It comes amid regular high-profile efforts to remove allegedly controversial or inappropriate reading material from libraries and schools. Nowadays, the small groups of parents who traditionally spearhead such efforts are joined by politicians authoring legislation that would outlaw or criminalize making controversial books available to children.

I teach a class on banned books at the University of Southern California, so I’m prone to notice headlines on the topic, but this isn’t just perception bias. The American Library Association reports that in 2021, it tracked 729 challenges to library, school and university materials, targeting a total of 1,597 books. That’s the highest number of attempted book bans since tracking began more than 20 years ago. This year is on course to surpass 2021’s record with 681 challenges as of Aug. 31, 2022.

Increasingly, bans have targeted books written by or featuring LGBTQ people and people of color. But perennial classics like “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Huckleberry Finn” and “Grapes of Wrath” also have been challenged by parents concerned about their racist language and marginalization of Black characters.

“Book banning doesn’t fit neatly into the rubrics of left and right politics,” reminds Pulitzer prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen.

What unites these challenges is a professed desire to protect young readers from dangerous content. But attempts to ban books are frequently motivated by misapprehensions about how children consume and process literature.

How children read

Many adults presume that exposure to particular literary content will invariably produce particular effects.

Christian author and editor David Kopp acknowledged as much when he addressed the controversy around the 1989 children’s book “Heather Has Two Mommies.”

“[T]he deeper dilemma for many Christians who oppose this book is often not a theological one, but an emotional one. It has to do with what we fear,” he wrote on the faith-focused website BeliefNet in 2001. “We fear our kids will be indoctrinated somehow. We fear they’ll come to consider homosexuality as normal and then … the part we don’t say … become one.”

Kopp found this fear “absurd.” He insisted that a “book, well intentioned or otherwise, isn’t likely to change our child’s sexual orientation.”

Many scholars would agree. Research shows that children’s reading experiences are complex and unpredictable. As scholar Christine Jenkins explains in an article about censorship and young readers, “Readers respond to and are affected by texts in ways specific to each reader in the context of a specific time and place.”

Put simply, children co-create their own reading experiences. Their interpretation of books is informed by their personal and cultural histories, and those interpretations may change over time or when readers encounter the same stories in different contexts.

Neither the supposedly healthy nor the supposedly dangerous effects of childhood reading, then, can be taken for granted. Children are not merely empty vessels waiting to be filled by a text’s messages and images, despite how adults tend to portray young readers as helplessly in thrall to the stories they consume.

Wall Street Journal contributor Meghan Cox Gurdon has argued that parents must be ever-vigilant against books that would “bulldoze coarseness [and] misery into their children’s lives.” Earlier this year, an Ohio school board vice president accused Jason Tharp, author of “It’s Okay to Be a Unicorn,” of “pushing LGBTQ ideas on our most vulnerable students.”

Who children are

Such perceptions reflect pervasive stories American society tells about children and the nature of childhood. These stories are the focus of an undergraduate class I teach called “Boys and Girls Gone Wild,” in which we explore themes of childhood innocence and deviance through texts such as “Lord of the Flies,” “When They See Us” and “The Virgin Suicides.”

On the first day, I ask students to brainstorm on common traits of children. They frequently choose words like “innocent,” “pure” and “naive” – although babysitters and students with younger siblings are more likely to acknowledge that children can also be “mischievous” and “strange.”

My students are usually surprised to learn that the Western notion of children as innocents in need of protection is a relatively recent idea, stemming from economic and social changes in the 17th century.

English philosopher John Locke’s late-17th-century idea that humans were born as “tabulae rasae,” or blank slates, had incalculable influence. The child with no innate traits must be carefully molded. Thus “childhood became a period of intense governance and control,” according to scholar Alyson Miller.

Some groups held divergent views, such as 18th- and 19th-century evangelical Christians, who believed children were born imbued with original sin. But the narrative of the inherently pure, helpless child came to shape fields as diverse as biology and political theory.

Perhaps no disciplines were influenced as powerfully as the intertwined fields of literature and education.

The value of ‘unsafe’ books

Book bans gain traction in cultures that imagine themselves as upholding a barrier between the purity of children and the corruption of the world.

But this effort can have unintended consequences, argue scholars like Kerry H. Robinson. In her 2013 book on sexuality and censorship, she writes that “the regulation of children’s access to important knowledge … has undermined their development as competent, well-informed, critical-thinking and ethical young citizens.”

Debates about challenging books would go differently if participants understood young child readers as active participants in the discovery and creation of knowledge.

Jason Reynolds, the Library of Congress’ national ambassador for young people’s literature and author of the oft-targeted “All American Boys,” which depicts a racially charged police beating, offers a different – and, I’d argue, healthier – way to conceive of children’s relationship to reading.

“There’s no better place for a young person to engage and wrestle with ideas that may or may not be their own than a book,” he told CNN for an in-depth June 2022 feature on book banning in America. “These stories are meant to be playgrounds for ideas, playgrounds for debate and discourse. Books don’t brainwash. They represent ideas.”

For Reynolds and the other authors, librarians, readers, parents and educators commemorating Banned Books Week 2022, adults have a right to disagree with those ideas. But rather than fear the uncomfortable “conversations young people bring home,” adults can actively encourage them.

“If the adults are doing their jobs,” Reynolds says, the discomfort that often accompanies growth “doesn’t have to feel like danger.”

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

The world’s billionaires—only 3,311 individuals—represent almost $11.8 trillion in wealth. The global billionaire population continued to grow in 2021, increasing by 3%. Over the same period, billionaire wealth also increased by 18%.

This map uses data from the Wealth-X Billionaire Census to visualize where the world’s billionaires live and breaks down their collective wealth.

Billionaires by Region

We’ll begin by zooming out to look at how various continents and world regions rank in terms of their billionaire population.

Related: Mapped: The Wealthiest Billionaires in Each U.S. State in 2022

North America is home to most billionaires, worth $4.6 trillion. The U.S., unsurprisingly, accounts for the majority of this wealth, with 975 billionaires and a collective net worth of $4.45 billion.

In regional terms, Europe’s billionaire wealth is growing the fastest, up 22% year-over-year in 2021. In contrast, the year-over-year change in the Middle East was -12.5%.

Asia is inching towards Europe, holding almost a quarter of all billionaire wealth worldwide, compared to Europe’s 26.5%.

Wealth in Africa will also be important to watch in coming years. Although only home to 46 billionaires currently, the change in billionaire wealth increased by almost 17% year-over-year. Additionally, while they no longer live there, a number of the world’s billionaires hail from African countries originally.

Billionaires by Country

Now, let’s look at the ranking broken down by the top 15 countries:

China is an obvious second in billionaire wealth to the United States, with famous billionaires like Zhang Yiming ($44.5 billion) of TikTok and Zhong Shanshan ($67.1 billion), whose wealth primarily comes from the pharmaceutical and beverages industries.

That said, Chinese billionaire wealth actually decreased 2% last year. It was India that came out on top in terms of growth, seeing a 19% increase in 2021.

Billionaires by City

Looking at cities, New York is home to the most billionaires—with 13 added billionaire residents last year—followed by Hong Kong.

Billionaire Wealth in 2022

Billionaires have significant power and influence, not in the least because their collective wealth is equivalent to about 11.8% of global GDP.

In recent billionaire news, Gautam Adani’s wealth has been soaring, most recently hitting the $145 billion mark, making him the third-richest person in the world according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index. However, not all billionaires are holding on to their wealth. Patagonia founder, Yvon Chouinard, recently transferred ownership of his company to an organization that fights climate change.

Over the last decade, billionaires have been grown their fortunes considerably, with wealth increasing at a faster rate than the growth in the number of billionaires themselves. According to Wealth-X, collective billionaire net worth grew by an astonishing 90% in the last 10 years.

But in the shorter term, the situation is often more volatile. With markets reeling in 2022, Bloomberg reported that billionaires lost a record $1.4 trillion over the first half of the year. Once the year is over and the final numbers are in, it will be interesting to see how the billionaire landscape shapes up in comparison to the more long-term trend.

Story attributed to Visual Capitalist.

The post Mapped: The World’s Billionaire Population, by Country appeared first on ModernGlobe.

It is difficult to understand the ease with which we have accepted a major proportion of the Australian population getting infected with COVID in just a matter of months. Many have been infected multiple times, potentially exposing them to long COVID and other problems we are only beginning to understand. In the past 75 years, only the second world war has had a greater demographic impact on Australia than COVID in 2022.

As of September 12, Australia had reported more than 10 million cases of COVID. Of those, 96% were reported in 2022, coinciding with a succession of various Omicron sub-variants and the removal of most protective measures. What’s more, the number of reported cases is probably an underestimate.

While the midsummer wave of Omicron led to the highest number of reported cases since the pandemic began, the subsequent winter waves have killed thousands more people.

Between January 5 and March 16 this year, 3,341 Australians died with COVID, compared with 8,034 between April 4 and September 16, with August being the most deadly month of the pandemic for Australia. One often forgotten impact of these deaths is that an estimated 2,000 Australian children have lost at least one parent as a result of the COVID pandemic.

Rather than national cabinet looking at pandemic leave and under pressure to cut isolation periods, what’s needed is a shared vision and a strategic COVID plan that acknowledges it is not “just like the flu”.

A disease evolving quicker than our defences

The deadly July-August wave happened despite greatly increased immunity from third- and fourth-dose vaccination, natural infection, and lifesaving therapies introduced in April this year.

In other words, Omicron has evolved faster than the tools we are using to combat it. So far in 2022, more than 12,000 Australians have died with COVID, six times the number of deaths in the previous two years.

This is a disease so significant it has reduced global life expectancy, one of the best measures of human development.

No other war or disease has done that in more than 65 years, not even the HIV pandemic. The global estimates have been reinforced in several countries, including the United States, where life expectancy has fallen by almost three years since 2019.

Changes in life expectancy only happen when very large numbers of people die “before their time”. In Australia there were 17% more deaths reported this year to the end of May by the Australian Bureau of Statistics than the five-year average. This does not count our most recent and lethal BA.5 wave.

The ABS report shows two things. First, COVID is killing large numbers of people both directly and indirectly. At this rate, we can expect to lose many more lives by year’s end. Second, people are dying earlier than they otherwise would have, meaning our life expectancy trajectory will take a hit.

Then there is all we know about long COVID and its effects on the lungs, heart, brain, kidneys and immune system. It affects at least 4% of those infected with Omicron, including those vaccinated and those with mild initial illness.

We are being warned to prepare for what is effectively a mass disabling event with no known cure or end point.

Read more: Long COVID should make us rethink disability – and the way we offer support to those with 'invisible conditions'

Not ‘like the flu’

How did we come to this point? A key reason we have become so complacent is the common narrative comparing COVID to influenza – in the sense that we should live with COVID in the same way we do with the flu.

The statistics demonstrate a different picture. From the start of this year to August 28, there had been just under 218,000 reported cases of flu and 288 deaths this year. There have been 44 times as many COVID cases and 42 times as many related deaths. (It is worth noting here authorities are urging caution when comparing this flu season to previous years, given COVID measures and changes in health behaviour.)

Around 1,700 people have been hospitalised with the flu this year. Yet on just one day in July, 5,429 COVID patients were in hospital.

In Australia, we have just had our worst COVID wave in terms of the number of deaths and people admitted to hospital, a wave that is ongoing with thousands still in hospital and around 360 people dying each week.

Government health advisers are warning of another COVID wave in the coming months. Independent MP Monique Ryan is calling for a national COVID summit and more transparency regarding planning. In contrast, this year’s influenza wave looks to be over.

Read more: 5 virus families that could cause the next pandemic, according to the experts

Expendable lives

This has been a devastating year for older Australians. More than 3,000 residents of aged care facilities have died of COVID, triple the combined number who died in 2020 and 2021. As things stand, these lives appear invisible and expendable.

The most important discussion now is not about changes to any one intervention. It is one of overall strategy, one that focuses on reducing the spread of the virus.

Immunity from infection is, of course, real. It’s why people usually recover from infection, why waves disappear, and indeed what drives viral evolution to “escape immunity”.

But the more important questions are how much protection it offers, for how long, and at what cost? We now know immunity from Omicron infection is relatively poor and short-lived and is outpaced by rapid viral evolution, even in the face of vaccination.

Although vaccination vastly reduces the risk of serious illness, waves of infection continue to sweep through large populations, with many susceptible to reinfection within months. This continues to damage our short and long-term health, our health system, and our society.

COVID is nothing at all like the flu. It is causing a vastly worse scale of damage. We must change our tactics to dramatically cut transmission. In addition to a more vigorous campaign to increase vaccine booster coverage, we need to invest in indoor ventilation and actively promote the benefits of wearing high-quality masks in crowded indoor settings.

And we need a powerful messaging campaign to wake us from our “just like the flu” slumber.

Read more: The pandemic changed what it means to have a 'good death'

Michael Toole receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Brendan Crabb and the Institute he leads receives research grant funding from the National Health & Medical Research Council of Australia and other Australian federal and Victorian State Government bodies. He is the Chair of The Australian Global Health Alliance and the Pacific Friends of Global Health, both in an honourary capacity. And he serves on the Board of the Telethon Kids Institute

The United States may regard itself as a “leader of the free world,” but an index of development released in July 2022 places the country much farther down the list.

In its global rankings, the United Nations Office of Sustainable Development dropped the U.S. to 41st worldwide, down from its previous ranking of 32nd. Under this methodology – an expansive model of 17 categories, or “goals,” many of them focused on the environment and equity – the U.S. ranks between Cuba and Bulgaria. Both are widely regarded as developing countries.

The U.S. is also now considered a “flawed democracy,” according to The Economist’s democracy index.

As a political historian who studies U.S. institutional development, I recognize these dismal ratings as the inevitable result of two problems. Racism has cheated many Americans out of the health care, education, economic security and environment they deserve. At the same time, as threats to democracy become more serious, a devotion to “American exceptionalism” keeps the country from candid appraisals and course corrections.

‘The other America’

The Office of Sustainable Development’s rankings differ from more traditional development measures in that they are more focused on the experiences of ordinary people, including their ability to enjoy clean air and water, than the creation of wealth.

So while the gigantic size of the American economy counts in its scoring, so too does unequal access to the wealth it produces. When judged by accepted measures like the Gini coefficient, income inequality in the U.S. has risen markedly over the past 30 years. By the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s measurement, the U.S. has the biggest wealth gap among G-7 nations.

These results reflect structural disparities in the United States, which are most pronounced for African Americans. Such differences have persisted well beyond the demise of chattel slavery and the repeal of Jim Crow laws.

Scholar W.E.B. Du Bois first exposed this kind of structural inequality in his 1899 analysis of Black life in the urban north, “The Philadelphia Negro.” Though he noted distinctions of affluence and status within Black society, Du Bois found the lives of African Americans to be a world apart from white residents: a “city within a city.” Du Bois traced the high rates of poverty, crime and illiteracy prevalent in Philadelphia’s Black community to discrimination, divestment and residential segregation – not to Black people’s degree of ambition or talent.

More than a half-century later, with characteristic eloquence, Martin Luther King Jr. similarly decried the persistence of the “other America,” one where “the buoyancy of hope” was transformed into “the fatigue of despair.”

To illustrate his point, King referred to many of the same factors studied by Du Bois: the condition of housing and household wealth, education, social mobility and literacy rates, health outcomes and employment. On all of these metrics, Black Americans fared worse than whites. But as King noted, “Many people of various backgrounds live in this other America.”

The benchmarks of development invoked by these men also featured prominently in the 1962 book “The Other America,” by political scientist Michael Harrington, founder of a group that eventually became the Democratic Socialists of America. Harrington’s work so unsettled President John F. Kennedy that it reportedly galvanized him into formulating a “war on poverty.”

Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, waged this metaphorical war. But poverty bound to discrete places. Rural areas and segregated neighborhoods stayed poor well beyond mid-20th-century federal efforts.

In large part that is because federal efforts during that critical time accommodated rather than confronted the forces of racism, according to my research.

Across a number of policy domains, the sustained efforts of segregationist Democrats in Congress resulted in an incomplete and patchwork system of social policy. Democrats from the South cooperated with Republicans to doom to failure efforts to achieve universal health care or unionized workforces. Rejecting proposals for strong federal intervention, they left a checkered legacy of local funding for education and public health.

Today, many years later, the effects of a welfare state tailored to racism is evident — though perhaps less visibly so — in the inadequate health policies driving a shocking decline in average American life expectancy.

Declining democracy

There are other ways to measure a country’s level of development, and on some of them the U.S. fares better.

The U.S. currently ranks 21st on the United Nations Development Program’s index, which measures fewer factors than the sustainable development index. Good results in average income per person – $64,765 – and an average 13.7 years of schooling situate the United States squarely in the developed world.

Its ranking suffers, however, on appraisals that place greater weight on political systems.

The Economist’s democracy index now groups the U.S. among “flawed democracies,” with an overall score that ranks between Estonia and Chile. It falls short of being a top-rated “full democracy” in large part because of a fractured political culture. This growing divide is most apparent in the divergent paths between “red” and “blue” states.

Although the analysts from The Economist applaud the peaceful transfer of power in the face of an insurrection intended to disrupt it, their report laments that, according to a January 2022 poll, “only 55% of Americans believe that Mr. Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud.”

Election denialism carries with it the threat that election officials in Republican-controlled jurisdictions will reject or alter vote tallies that do not favor the Republican Party in upcoming elections, further jeopardizing the score of the U.S. on the democracy index.

Red and blue America also differ on access to modern reproductive care for women. This hurts the U.S. gender equality rating, one aspect of the United Nations’ sustainable development index.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Republican-controlled states have enacted or proposed grossly restrictive abortion laws, to the point of endangering a woman’s health.

I believe that, when paired with structural inequalities and fractured social policy, the dwindling Republican commitment to democracy lends weight to the classification of the U.S. as a developing country.

American exceptionalism

To address the poor showing of the United States on a variety of global surveys, one must also contend with the idea of American exceptionalism, a belief in American superiority over the rest of the world.

Both political parties have long promoted this belief, at home and abroad, but “exceptionalism” receives a more formal treatment from Republicans. It was the first line of the Republican Party’s national platform of 2016 and 2020 (“we believe in American exceptionalism”). And it served as the organizing principle behind Donald Trump’s vow to restore “patriotic education” to America’s schools.

In Florida, after lobbying by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state board of education in July 2022 approved standards rooted in American exceptionalism while barring instruction in critical race theory, an academic framework teaching the kind of structural racism Du Bois exposed long ago.

With a tendency to proclaim excellence rather than pursue it, the peddling of American exceptionalism encourages Americans to maintain a robust sense of national achievement – despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

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

Boing Boing contributor Clive Thompson has a specialty search engine which allows you to search on public domain books published prior to 1924.

Clive is a big proponent of "rewilding" our attention and offers serendipity searches into weird old books as part of that noble effort. — Read the rest

Unless you’ve been avoiding the internet entirely, you’ve probably heard about people buying and selling non-fungible tokens — or NFTs — unique data tokens that link to digital files, including artworks and other types of copyrightable works.

CC has been following how people are creating and trading NFTs, and how the marketplace of creative works is transforming. We keep seeing NFTs linked to works published with CC’s open licenses or the CC0 public domain dedication — so often that CC0 NFTs have their own hashtag: #cc0summer. We know that there are many in the CC community trying to figure out how CC tools interact with NFTs — as are many others who are hearing about CC for the first time as they explore NFTs.

While we always welcome contributions to the public commons, we want to ensure everyone understands how these new tools and practices might align with our legal tools and the global open commons that CC legal tools enable. Having spoken with some NFT artists and platform team members, we know there is widespread misunderstanding about what a CC license or CC0 dedication means. When a CC license or CC0 is used to share a work, the rights to reuse that work are widely or completely shared, with limited or no rights reserved.

To help clarify how NFTs are already leveraging CC legal tools, we have added a new section to our FAQ on using CC licenses and the CC0 public domain dedication with NFTs. This FAQ is intended to provide basic guidance for those who are already using NFTs and want to know how to use CC licenses and legal tools with NFT projects. We will continue to update our FAQ as our understanding and interpretation develops.

CC’s licenses and legal tools are intentionally general-purpose: we designed them to be applicable to a wide variety of contexts and works. While some may believe NFTs are a special case that call for new copyright licenses, we believe CC licenses and CC0 work well to contribute works to the public commons when used with NFTs. NFTs may introduce new relationships around who holds the rights to related works and how such rights are transferred as NFTs change hands, but those are contractual questions best handled outside open licenses or a release to the public domain.

If your creative work is linked to an NFT, you may apply one of the existing CC licenses or CC0 to let others know how they may share and reuse your work, separate from the ownership of a related token. And where this is used with intention, there are many possibilities for vibrant sharing and reuse where these works are in the public commons, with the ownership of the rights completely removed from the ownership of the token.

We are aware of other efforts in the space, including some that say they are inspired by CC’s work but are incompatible with the material already available in the commons. (In particular, some of the licenses recently produced by a16z, which claim direct inspiration but were not developed in consultation with CC.) While the approach may be similar, the effect is different: the terms of most of these licenses are incompatible with the CC licenses and with most other free and open content licenses; users of these terms will find that their works are remixable only within the narrow space of others using the same terms, rather than the much broader spectrum of works using the CC licenses and compatible licenses. This is not true of all other licensing efforts: some simply add terms about the sale and transfer of the token as an addition to a CC license or public domain release.

NFTs, and the distributed web movement they are a part of, are new and still evolving. NFTs are also hotly debated. We know many in the CC community embrace NFTs as a new way to support and enable creators. Many others offer strong and convincing criticism. Whatever your opinions about NFTs, CC licenses and the CC0 dedication are being used widely in conjunction with NFTs and works they reference. CC has a responsibility to our mission and our community to clarify how our work connects to these emerging tools and practices. At CC we are watching closely, focused on how NFTs may help or hinder better sharing: sharing that is inclusive, just and equitable — where everyone has wide opportunity to access content, to contribute their own creativity, and to receive recognition and rewards for their contributions.

Please read and share the more detailed discussion in our FAQ.

The post New FAQ on NFTs and CC0 appeared first on Creative Commons.

In countries such as the UK, US and Canada, ultra-processed foods now account for 50% or more of calories consumed. This is concerning, given that these foods have been linked to a number of different health conditions, including a greater risk of obesity and various chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease and dementia.

Ultra-processed foods are concoctions of various industrial ingredients (such as emulsifiers, thickeners and artificial flavours), amalgamated into food products by a series of manufacturing processes.

Sugary drinks and many breakfast cereals are ultra-processed foods, as are more recent innovations, such as so-called “plant-based” burgers, which are typically made of protein isolates and other chemicals to make the products palatable.

The intense industrial processes used to produced ultra-processed foods destroy the natural structure of the food ingredients and strip away many beneficial nutrients such as fibre, vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals.

Many of us are well aware that ultra-processed foods are harmful for our health. But it’s been unclear if this is simply because these foods are of poor nutritional value. Now, two new studies have shown that poor nutrition may not be enough to explain their health risks. This suggests that other factors may be needed to fully explain their health risks.

The role of inflammation

The first study, which looked at over 20,000 health Italian adults, found that participants who consumed the highest number of ultra-processed foods had an increased risk of dying prematurely from any cause. The second study, which looked at over 50,000 US male health professionals, found high consumption of ultra-processed foods was associated with a greater risk of colon cancer.

What’s most interesting about these studies is that the health risks from eating a diet high in ultra-processed foods remained even after they had accounted for the poor nutritional quality of their diets. This suggests that other factors contribute to the harms caused by ultra-processed foods.

It also implies that getting the right nutrients elsewhere in the diet may not be enough to cancel out the risk of disease from consuming ultra-processed foods. Similarly, attempts by the food industry to improve the nutritional value of ultra-processed foods by adding a few more vitamins may be side-stepping a more fundamental problem with these foods.

So what factors may explain why ultra-processed foods are so harmful to our health?

The Italian study found that inflammatory markers – such as a higher white blood cell count – were higher in groups that ate the most ultra-processed foods. Our bodies may trigger an inflammatory response for any number of reasons – for example, if we catch a cold or get cut. The body responds by sending signals to our immune cells (such as white blood cells) to attack any invading pathogens (such as bacteria or viruses).

Usually, our inflammatory response resolves quite quickly, but some people may develop chronic inflammation throughout their body. This can cause tissue damage, and is involved in many chronic diseases – such as cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Many studies have found that poor diets can increase inflammation in the body, and that this is linked to higher risk of chronic diseases. Given that signs of inflammation were seen in participants of the Italian study who ate the most ultra-processed foods, this could suggest that inflammation may contribute to why ultra-processed foods increase disease risk. Some food additives common in ultra-processed foods (such as emulsifiers and artificial sweeteners) also increase inflammation in the gut by causing changes to the gut microbiome.

Some researchers have theorised that ultra-processed foods increase inflammation because they are recognised by the body as foreign – much like an invading bacteria. So the body mounts an inflammatory response, which has been dubbed “fast food fever”. This increases inflammation throughout the body as a result.

Although the US colon cancer study did not establish if inflammation increased in the men consuming the most ultra-processed foods, inflammation is strongly linked with an increased risk of colon cancer.

Research shows that other mechanisms – such as impaired kidney function and toxins in packaging – may also explain why ultra-processed foods cause so many dangerous health problems.

Since inflammatory responses are hard-wired in our bodies, the best way to prevent this from happening is by not eating ultra-processed foods at all. Some plant-based diets high in natural, unprocessed foods (such as the Mediterranean diet) have also been shown to be anti-inflammatory. This may also explain why plant-based diets free from ultra-processed foods can help ward off chronic diseases. It’s currently not known to what extent an anti-inflammatory diet can help counteract the effects of ultra-processed foods.

Simply reducing your intake of ultra-processed foods may be a challenge. Ultra-processed foods are designed to be hyper-palatable – and together with persuasive marketing, this can make resisting them an enormous challenge for some people.

These foods are also not labelled as such on food packaging. The best way to identify them is by looking at their ingredients. Typically, things such as emulsifiers, thickeners, protein isolates and other industrial-sounding products are a sign it’s an ultra-processed food. But making meals from scratch using natural foods is the best way to avoid the harms of ultra-processed foods.

Richard Hoffman is the author of three books on the Mediterranean diet: The Mediterranean Diet: Health and Science (2011), More Healthy Years - Why a Mediterranean Diet is best for you and for the planet (2020) and Implementing the Mediterranean diet (2022).

Alongside death and taxes, one of life’s great certainties is a constant flow of absurd copyright claims. Here’s one from the world of live videogame streaming on the popular Twitch platform, owned by Amazon.  A group of Spanish-speaking streamers organized a gaming event featuring “Project Zomboid“, a zombie survival role-playing game. TorrentFreak explains how copyright spoilt their fun:

The issue was first raised by Menos Trece, who has over a million subscribers on Twitch and over two million on YouTube. After streaming Project Zomboid gameplay to tens of thousands of viewers, Twitch informed him that he had broadcasted copyright-infringing audio.

As it turns out, there was no problem with copyrighted music. Instead, a police or ambulance siren sound effect used in the Project Zomboid game was the culprit. This sound was claimed by an entity named “Dr. Sound Effects,” who apparently own the rights to a police car siren.

As the TorrentFreak post explains, the company that created the Zomboid game, The Indie Stone, insists that the siren sound effect under discussion is theirs, not someone else’s. The current copyright claim isn’t an isolated problem. The NME site reported in 2020:

The sounds effects that have reportedly violated DMCA regulations include grandfather clock chimes from Emily Wants To Play, gusts of wind in World Of Warcraft, police sirens in Persona 5, and bird and insect noises in Hitman: Blood Money.

Leaving aside the absurdity of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) being invoked for sound effects such as these, which are hardly shining examples of artistic creativity that copyright is supposed to protect, the underlying problem is the following, reported here by TorrentFreak:

Twitch uses the third-party filtering tool Audible Magic to spot infringements and can’t easily make changes to that. Instead, it advised affected users to challenge the takedown.

Audible Magic is one of the few upload filtering systems that is available and relatively well established. In the light of the EU Copyright Directive’s requirement that larger sites allowing user-uploaded material will need to adopt filtering, it is likely that some, perhaps many, will turn to Audible Magic. The problems already encountered by Twitch will inevitably be replicated on other platforms, because of the inherently imperfect nature of upload filters.

The quotation above notes that it is not easy to make changes to Audible Magic’s filter, which means that people in the EU will be subject to unjustified blocks of legitimate material. Moreover, it is likely that the only option will be to “challenge the takedown” – something that few ordinary users will have the time or energy to do.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon. Originally posted to Walled Culture.

When Columbus landed in 1492, the Americas had been settled for tens of thousands of years. He wasn’t the first person to discover the continent. Instead, his discovery was the last of many discoveries.

In all, people found the Americas at least seven different times. For at least six of those, it wasn’t so new after all. The discoverers came by sea and by land, bringing new genes, new languages, new technologies. Some stayed, explored, and built empires. Others went home, and left few hints they’d ever been there.

From last to first, here’s the story of how we discovered the Americas.

7. Christopher Columbus: AD 1492

In 1492, Europeans could reach Asia by the Silk Road, or by sailing the Cape Route around the southern tip of Africa. Sailing west from Europe was thought to be impossible.

The ancient Greeks had accurately calculated that the circumference of the Earth was 40,000 km, which put Asia far to the west. But Columbus botched his calculations. An error in unit conversion gave him a circumference of just 30,000 km.

Read more: Four amazing astronomical discoveries from ancient Greece

This mistake, with other assumptions born of wishful thinking, gave a distance of just 4,500 km from Europe to Japan. The actual distance is almost 20,000 kilometres.

So Columbus’s ships set sail without enough supplies to reach Asia. Fortunately for him, he hit the Americas. Columbus, thinking he’d found the East Indies, called its people “Indios”, or Indians. He ultimately died without realising his mistake. It was the navigator Amerigo Vespucci who realised Columbus had found an unknown land and in 1507 the name America was applied in Vespucci’s honour.

6. Polynesians: AD 1,200

Around 2,500 BC, a seafaring people sailed from Taiwan to find new lands. They sailed south through the Philippines, east through Melanesia, then out into the vast South Pacific. These people, the Polynesians, were master navigators, reading wind, waves and stars to cross thousands of kilometres of open ocean.

Using huge double canoes, the Polynesians settled Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, and the Cook Islands. Some went south to New Zealand, becoming the Maori. Others went east to Tahiti, Hawaii, Easter Island, and the Marquesas. From here, they at last hit South America. Then, having explored most of the Pacific, they gave up exploration and forgot South America entirely.

But evidence of this remarkable voyage remained. The South Americans acquired chickens from Polynesians, while the Polynesians may have picked up South American sweet potatoes. And they shared more than food. Eastern Polynesians have Native American DNA. Polynesians didn’t just meet Native Americans, they married them.

5. Norse: AD 1,021

According to Viking sagas, around AD 980, Eric the Red, fierce Viking and cunning salesman, named a vast, icy wasteland “Greenland” to entice people to move there. Then, in AD 986, a boat from Greenland spotted the coast of Canada.

Around AD 1,021, Erik’s son Leif established a settlement in Newfoundland. The Vikings struggled with the harsh climate, before war with Native Americans ultimately forced them back to Greenland. These stories were long dismissed as myths, until 1960, when archaeologists dug up the remains of Viking settlements in Newfoundland.

4. Inuit: AD 900

Just before the Vikings, the Inuit people travelled from Siberia to Alaska in skin boats. Hunting whales and seals, living in sod huts and igloos, they were well adapted to the cold Arctic Ocean, and skirted its shores all the way to Greenland.

Curiously, their DNA is closest to native Alaskans, implying their ancestors colonised Asia from Alaska, then went back to discover the Americas again.

3. Eskimo-Aleut: 2,000-2,500 BC

The Inuit descend from an earlier migration: that of speakers of the Eskimo-Aleut languages. These are distinct from other Native American languages, and might even be distantly related to Uralic languages such as Finnish and Hungarian.

This, with DNA evidence, suggests the Eskimo-Aleut was a distinct migration. They came across the Bering Sea from present-day Russia to Alaska, perhaps 4,000-4,500 years ago, partly displacing and mixing with earlier migrants: the Na-Dene people.

2. Na-Dene: 3,000-8,000 BC

Another group, the Na-Dene, crossed the Bering Sea to Alaska around 5,000 years ago, although other studies suggest they settled the Americas as long as 10,000 years ago.

DNA from their bones links them not to modern people in the Eskimo-Aleut group, but to Native Americans speaking the Na-Dene language family, such as the Navajo, Dene, Tlingit, and Apache people. Na-Dene languages are closest to languages spoken in Siberia, suggesting again that they represent a distinct migration.

1. First Americans: 16,000-35,000 years ago

Almost all Native American tribes – Sioux, Comanche, Iroquois, Cherokee, Aztec, Maya, Quechua, Yanomani, and dozens of others – speak similar languages. That suggests their languages evolved from a common ancestor tongue, spoken by a single tribe entering the Americas long ago. Their descendants’ low genetic diversity suggests this founding tribe was small, maybe less than 80 people.

How did they get there? Before the last ice age ended 11,700 years ago, so much water was locked up in glaciers that sea levels fell. The bottom of the Bering Sea dried out, creating the Bering Land Bridge. America’s first people just walked from Russia to Alaska. But the timing of their migration is controversial.

Archaeologists once thought the Clovis people, living 13,000 years ago, were the first settlers of America. But evidence now suggests humans arrived in the Americas much earlier.

Finds in Washington, Oregon, Texas, the east coast of the US, and Florida suggest people reached the Americas long before the Clovis people.

Read more: Fossil footprints prove humans populated the Americas thousands of years earlier than we thought

Footprints in New Mexico date to 23,000 years ago. Stone tools in a Mexican cave may date to 32,000 years ago. A butchered mammoth from Colorado dates to 31,000-38,000 years ago. And traces of fire put humans in Alaska 32,000 years ago.

Some of these dates could be incorrect, but with each new discovery it seems increasingly unlikely that they’re all wrong.

An early migration would neatly solve a major mystery. 13,000 years ago, a vast glacier, the Laurentide Ice Sheet, buried Canada in ice up to three kilometres thick. If people arrived in North America then, how did they cross the ice? Southeast Alaska’s rugged coast, full of glaciers and fjords, was likely impassible, and early Americans probably lacked boats. But 30,000 years ago, the ice sheet hadn’t fully formed.

Before the ice spread, people could have hunted mammoths and horses east from Alaska into the Northwest Territories, then south through Alberta and Saskatchewan into Montana. Remarkably, humans may have settled the Americas before western Europe. Yet that might make sense. Alaska’s Arctic is harsh, but Europe had potentially hostile Neanderthals.

The end of discovery

1492 was the last discovery of the Americas. Following the voyages of Columbus, Magellan, and Cook, the scattered descendants of humanity’s diaspora were finally reunited. Aside from a few uncontacted tribes, everywhere was known to everyone. Discovery was impossible.

But the story of the Americas’ settlement is still being written, and our understanding is evolving. The Eskimo-Aleut may have been two different migrations, not one. Genes hint at the possibility of other, early founding populations. And given how little evidence the Polynesians and Norse left of their visits, it’s conceivable there were other migrations, ones of which we have little evidence.

There’s so much we don’t know. No one can discover the Americas anymore, but there’s a lot left to discover about their discovery.

Nicholas R. Longrich 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.

Doomscrolling can be a normal reaction to living through uncertain times. It’s natural to want to understand dramatic events unfolding around you and to seek out information when you’re afraid. But becoming absorbed in bad news for too long can be detrimental.

A newly published study has found that people with high levels of problematic news consumption are also more likely to have worse mental and physical health. So what can you do about it?

We spoke to Australians in the state of Victoria about their lengthy lockdown experiences and found how they managed to stop doomscrolling. Here are some tips to help you do the same.

Doomscrolling – unhelpful and harmful

“Doomscrolling” describes what happens when someone continues to consume negative news and information online, including on social media. There is increasing evidence that this kind of overconsumption of bad news may have negative impacts.

Research suggests doomscrolling during crises is unhelpful and even harmful. During the early COVID-19 pandemic, consuming a lot of news made people feel overwhelmed. One study found people who consumed more news about the pandemic were also more anxious about it.

Research into earlier crises, like 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombings, also found that sustained exposure to news about catastrophes is linked to negative mental health outcomes.

Read more: Doomscrolling COVID news takes an emotional toll – here's how to make your social media a happier place

Choosing to take control

During the peak of COVID-19 spread, many found themselves doomscrolling. There was lots of bad news and, for many people, lots more spare time. Several studies, including our own, have found that limiting news exposure helped people to cope.

Melbourne, the state capital of Victoria, experienced some of the longest-running lockdowns in the world. Wanting to know how Victorians were managing their news consumption during this time, we launched a survey and held interviews with people who limited news consumption for their own wellbeing.

Read more: When too much news is bad news: is the way we consume news detrimental to our health?

We found that many people increased their news consumption when the lockdowns began. However, most of our participants gradually introduced strategies to curb their doomscrolling because they realised it was making them feel anxious or angry, and distracted from daily tasks.

Our research found these news-reduction strategies were highly beneficial. People reported feeling less stressed and found it easier to connect with others. Here are some of their strategies, which you might want to try.

1. Make a set time to check news

Rather than checking news periodically across the day, set aside a specific time and consider what time of day is going to have the most positive impacts for you.

One participant would check the news while waiting for her morning cup of tea to brew, as this set a time limit on her scrolling. Other participants preferred saving their news engagement for later in the day so that they could start their morning being settled and focused.

2. Avoid having news ‘pushed’ to you

Coming across news unexpectedly can lure you into a doomscrolling spiral. Several participants managed this by avoiding having news “pushed” to them, allowing them to engage on their own terms instead. Examples included unfollowing news-related accounts on social media or turning off push notifications for news and social media apps.

3. Add ‘friction’ to break the habit

If you find yourself consuming news in a mindless or habitual way, making it slightly harder to access news can give you an opportunity to pause and think.

One participant moved all her social media and news apps into a folder which she hid on the last page of her smartphone home screen. She told us this strategy helped her significantly reduce doomscrolling. Other participants deleted browser bookmarks that provided shortcuts to news sites, deleted news and social media apps from their phones, and stopped taking their phone into their bedroom at night.

4. Talk with others in your household

If you’re trying to manage your news consumption better, tell other people in your household so they can support you. Many of our participants found it hard to limit their consumption when other household members watched, listened to, or talked about a lot of news.

In the best cases, having a discussion helped people come to common agreements, even when one person found the news comforting and another found it upsetting. One couple in our study agreed that one of them would watch the midday news while the other went for a walk, but they’d watch the evening news together.

Staying informed is still important

Crucially, none of these practices involve avoiding news entirely. Staying informed is important, especially in crisis situations where you need to know how to keep safe. Our research shows there are ways of balancing the need to stay informed with the need to protect your wellbeing.

So if your news consumption has become problematic, or you’re in a crisis situation where negative news can become overwhelming, these strategies can help you strike that balance. This is going to remain an important challenge as we continue to navigate an unstable world.

Read more: When tragedy becomes banal: Why news consumers experience crisis fatigue

James Meese currently receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Meta. He is also a member of the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network.

Kate Mannell 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.

Since Amazon announced actors of colour among the cast of its new series The Rings of Power in February this year, criticisms of their inclusion have gained media attention.

The coverage typically positions criticisms of The Rings of Power as “backlash” from true, “diehard” fans resisting so-called “wokeness”.

This misrepresents the situation. There are also fans who welcome the increased diversity over what is seen in Tolkien’s novels and previous adaptations. Racist abuse of actors of colour and a “review bombing” campaign against The Rings of Power suggest that there is more going on than just fan disagreement about Tolkien’s world.

As Tolkien researcher Craig Franson explains, far-right political actors are whipping up the controversy, weaponising it to help get fascist talking points into the mainstream. Franson shows that the right-wing “outrage machine” stirred up “a massive hate mob” through mainstream right-wing press.

Fans who feel they are defending Tolkien’s legacy are being used as pawns to serve dangerous anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian agenda and siding, whether they mean to or not, with racist extremists.

Fascist appropriation of Tolkien’s work may seem surprising given his anti-Nazi statements, which include calling Hitler a “ruddy little ignoramus.” It is not new, however. In the 1970s, the books became a favourite of Italian fascists who even held a Camp Hobbit festival to promote their politics.

In the early 2000s, the now former extremist Derek Black Jr started a chat forum dedicated to the Lord of the Rings on a major white supremacist website when Peter Jackson’s films came out. He told The New York Times:

I figured you could get people who liked with such a white mythos, a few turned on by white nationalism.

Not all racism is fascist (a specific political ideology), but the far-right always has racist elements in its ideologies.

Why do racists like Tolkien and Middle-Earth?

Tolkien made statements against Nazis and also apartheid, but this is not the same as being anti-racist or pro-equality. His condemnation of Hitler, he wrote in the same letter, was for

ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making forever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to preserve in its true light.

The comment shows that he believed that some people were essentially different to and better than others. This notion is foundational to racism.

Tolkien’s belief in racial difference translated to Middle-earth. Within the imaginary species (elves and humans in particular) there are hierarchies. Some humans are inherently better than others; we see this when Faramir talks about “High, Men of the West… the Middle Peoples, Men of the Twilight… the Wild, the Men of Darkness” in The Two Towers.

Individuals from “High” races may have moral failings and become evil, but collectively they do not serve it. Physical characteristics (like hair and skin colour) are linked to non-physical traits in ways that reflect the logics of real-world racism.

There are traces of evidence that Tolkien did not imagine “good” peoples as exclusively white. The ways these are expressed still sometimes reinforce racial hierarchies. In The Return of the King, some people who fight against Sauron are counted as

men of Gondor, yet their blood was mingled, and there were short and swarthy folk among them" because some of their ancestors are not “High, Men of the West.

"Good” species and races in Middle-Earth are constructed through references to European cultures (especially northwestern Europe), and the “bad” races are constructed through orientalist stereotypes. Tolkien’s letters show the ways that real-world ideas about race influenced Middle-Earth. He wrote “I do think of the ‘Dwarves’ like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations.”

In a 1958 letter about a film treatment of The Lord of the Rings he wrote:

Orcs are … squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol types.

There is evidence that he revised his representation of Dwarves between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to try move away from anti-Semitic stereotypes. There is no such evidence for Orcs even though he wrestled with the moral problem of a purely “evil” species of beings.

Read more: The new Lord of the Rings prequel, The Rings of Power, is set in the Second Age of Middle-Earth - here's what that means

The combination of racial stereotypes and hierarchies built into Middle-Earth make Tolkien’s work appealing to racists and a useful political tool for the far-right. There is, however, more to the world and stories he created.

Being troubled by racism is also not just a new “woke” reading of Tolkien’s writing. C.S. Lewis wrote a review in 1955 of Lord of the Rings that reported some readers “imagine they have seen a rigid demarcation between black and white people” draw along clear moral lines.

Given Lewis was Tolkien’s friend, it’s not surprising that he defended the books. A letter in the fanzine Xero from 1963 expressed concern about “subtle racism,” hierarchies within humanity, and “monochromatic” representation of elves and orcs in Middle-Earth.

The contradiction in Tolkien’s world

The need to overcome differences to form alliances and make the world better is a central theme in Tolkien’s writing. Evil is defeated only when different peoples of Middle-Earth, such as Elves, Dwarves and Humans, fight against it together.

The prosocial values of cooperation and acting for the good of others are embedded in Tolkien’s stories of Middle-earth. They are also at odds with racism and fascism which see “others” as not only different but inferior, dangerous, not to be trusted, that is, as enemies.

Scholar and fan Dimitra Fimi has written:

Tolkien’s racial prejudices are implicit in Middle-Earth, but his values – friendship, fellowship, altruism, courage, among many others – are explicit, which makes for a complex, more interesting world.

Protecting Tolkien’s legacy

Casting actors of colour to play Elves, Dwarves and Harfoots in The Rings of Power does not insert beings who are not white into the imaginary world of Middle-Earth. They were already there, constructed through out-dated (even for Tolkien’s time) concepts of racial difference among humans and false stereotypes about real peoples.

Tolkien’s imagination was vast and varied, but it was not without limits. The world he created reflected some of the worst aspects of reality with its racist stereotypes and hierarchies.

All adaptations, including of Tolkien’s writings, change their source material in ways that reflect the time and place in which they are made.

With The Rings of Power, Amazon, the Tolkien Estate (headed by his grandson Simon) and their partners have decided to protect the positive, humane aspects of Tolkien’s legacy which represented the best, rather than the limits, of his imagination.

Helen Young 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.

Meet Big Tex, the "World's Tallest Cowboy," who stands at 55 feet and is the mascot of the State Fair of Texas—he's greeted visitors entering the fairgrounds in Dallas since 1952. The State Fair of Texas website has a terrific overview of Big Tex, which provides information about his history (he was created in 1949 to play the role of the 'world's largest Santa Claus' in Kerens, Texas), his silver screen fame (he was in the 1962 remake of the film "State Fair," which was shot in 1961), his outfitters (his clothes were sewn in the original Dickies plant in Fort Worth, and his boots were designed by Lucchese), and his size and measurements (he has a 33-foot, 9-inch chest; his jeans are sized 434 waist x 240 inseam; his hat is 95 gallons; his belt is 33 feet long; his boots are size 96). — Read the rest

Last month, a study published by The Galaxy examined the top 25 most valuable NFT projects and found that, despite many understanding that NFTs transferred either the copyright or the license in the original work, only 1 in 25 of those projects even attempted to do as such.

The reason for that, as I pointed out in my article on the subject, was that NFTs were never about copyright and, instead, were about creating scarcity of digital goods. 

While there have been attempts to marry copyright licensing (or transfer) to the NFT process, they’ve largely been on the edges and none have seen major traction. 

However, now the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is hoping to change that. In a blog post published last week and covered by Adi Robertson at The Verge yesterday, the firm is introducing what it calls “Can’t Be Evil” (CBE) licenses, a series of licenses that can be affixed to NFTs to clearly indicate what rights the NFT creator transfers to the buyer.

The project is patterned heavily after the Creative Commons approach, providing a series of six licenses, each marked by an abbreviation and a series of rights that are either granted or not.

While the system looks simple and promising, once you dig down, there are a series of difficult problems with the approach that could frustrate both NFT artists and their buyers.

To understand those problems, we have to first look at how they work and the issues that the licenses are trying to solve. 

Understanding the “Can’t Be Evil” Licenses

Though the licenses are, at first blush, very similar to the Creative Commons system, these licenses are ultimately very different both in terms of how they work and what they cover.

For a start, Creative Commons licenses are between a creator and the public at large. Anyone can exploit a work licensed under a Creative Commons license. The point is to avoid the requirement of each individual user asking for permission separately and, instead, give a blanket license to everyone.

CBE licenses are between the creator of the NFT and the person who purchased it. No one else is involved. Any rights or permissions granted under a CBE license only apply to the NFT purchaser and holder.

To that end, there are six licenses, each with slightly different permissions and requirements.

• Exclusive Commercial Rights (ECR): This one is the most straightforward. The NFT creator grants the purchaser (or holder) the exclusive rights to copy, display, modify and distribute the work for commercial purposes. The original creator retains no exploitation rights.
• Non-Exclusive Commercial Rights (NECR): Similar to the ECR license, but the original creator retains their rights as well. This means that both the creator and the purchaser can exploit those rights.
• Non-Exclucive Commercial Rights + Termination for Hate Speech (NECR-HS): The same as the NECR license, but the purchaser’s license is terminated if the work is used for hate speech.
• Personal Use License (PR): This license grants no commercial rights to the buyer and only allows them to copy, display and distribute the work for personal purposes. 
• Personal Use License + Termination for Hate Speech (PR+HS): Similar to the PR license but with a termination clause should the work be used in hate speech.
• Creative Commons 0 (CC0): This is essentially the Creative Commons Zero license, which is seen as largely a public domain dedication. This means that anyone, not just the buyer, is free to use the media connected with the NFT is any way that they want.

The idea is fairly simple. The creator of an NFT attaches one of these licenses to their NFT and, as a result, they clearly communicate what rights they are and are not granting the buyer. 

This is designed to solve the issue of NFT sellers either not addressing copyright or using bespoke licenses that are confusing, incomplete or otherwise may be problematic. 

However, this approach has its own problems, and it’s not difficult to spot at least some of them.

Some of the Problems with Can’t Be Evil Licenses

The first problem is that there is no “All Rights Reserved” option. While normally that would just be the default and not need to be spelled out, with NFTs there’s often an assumption of SOME rights transfer, making it more necessary.

If the goal is to be completely clear about what rights are and are not being transferred, an All Rights Reserved option is likely necessary. 

However, when one drills down into the terms and conditions of the licenses, there are some real issues with the licenses themselves. 

First, as pointed out by Robertson, all the non-CC0 licenses are sub-licensable. This means, for example, a buyer of a Bored Apes NFT could license the media to be featured to a film studio or another visual artist to make new works based upon it (with certain licenses).

While that is fine and not unusual, if the NFT is sold or otherwise transferred, all the sublicenses terminate immediately.  Given that NFTs can be sold (or even stolen) on a whim, this creates a great deal of uncertainty for those trying to obtain and exploit those sublicenses.

In short, their sublicenses could literally be terminated at any point and there is nothing that they can do under these terms. While many sublicenses can be revoked, there are usually terms and conditions about such a revocation. This license imposes no such conditions.

Another is the issue of hate speech. First, the hate speech revocation clause doesn’t just cover hate speech, in addition to speech that is, “unlawful, defamatory, harassing, abusive, racist hateful or cruel” it also covers language that is, “vulgar, fraudulent, illegal or obscene.”

Obviously, it’s very possible for speech to be seen as fraudulent or vulgar, but not hate speech. This makes the hate speech clause something of a misnomer. 

But the bigger issue is that all of these terms are very subjective. This raises the question of who makes the determination of what is “hate speech” under this license. 

According to the terms, that decision is “as determined in Creator’s sole discretion.” In short, the creator and the creator alone determines what is hate speech under this clause. Though these licenses are generally irrevocable by creators, this is a crucial exception that could, theoretically, be triggered at any time.

Finally, these licenses are limited to copyright only. This means that other, connected, rights may not transfer. For example, if an NFT contains trademarked media, that trademark would not be covered. Likewise, if people are featured in the media, there may or may not be publicity rights.

These issues are shared between CBE and Creative Commons licenses. However, one gaping hole in the CBE license structure is the lack of handling of moral rights.

In most countries, moral rights are a set of rights that a creator has in a work beyond the ones granted by copyright. They include the right to be attributed, right to object to derogatory treatment of the work (including destroying it) and others. 

Creative Commons actually addresses moral rights in their licenses, requiring signers to wave their moral rights as it pertains to the license. However, the CBE licenses don’t mention moral rights at all. This raises serious questions about what happens when and if moral rights and the rights granted by a CBE license collide.

There is no obvious answer to that question at this time.

Bottom Line

The big idea here is both very interesting and potentially good. The idea of providing Creative-Commons-style licenses to NFTs to clearly indicate what rights are being transferred is, in general, positive.

However, this kind of licensing is extremely difficult. In its 20 years of existence, Creative Commons has gone through four different versions of its licenses. Simply put, it’s difficult to draft copyright licenses that are easy to understand, international in application and can be applied to a wide variety of works.

To that end, the CBE licenses fall short. Though their goal is to create greater certainty for buyers and sellers of NFTs, the licenses, through both omissions and choices, actually create less certainty in many areas, especially for sublicensees.

This isn’t to say that many of these issues can’t be fixed in future updates of the licenses. Instead, this points to the complexities that one faces in trying to deal with copyright and NFTs.

Simply put, licensing and transferring copyrighted works is hard under the best of circumstances and, when you mix the complexities of NFTs into the process, things get even more challenging.

The post My Concerns with the ‘Can’t Be Evil’ NFT Licenses appeared first on Plagiarism Today.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ HB 233 created the Intellectual Diversity Survey in July 2021 with the goal of protecting conservative viewpoints on campuses. The results of this survey were published Aug. 11, disproving DeSantis’ highly publicized thesis that Florida colleges discourage conservatism.   

The characterization of college campuses — in addition to public schools — as liberal indoctrination factories was negated by the results of the study, a thesis pushed by the governor as a reelection strategy in time for the 2022 gubernatorial elections.

Priorities for the bill have been made clear, with DeSantis as emphasizing patriotism in civics instruction and fighting “indoctrination in education,” according to a legislative session from April 30, 2021.

Of the over 368,120 students in the Florida public university system that received the survey, less than 2.4% took it, according to the Florida State University System’s Draft. Those that did respond paint a very different picture from DeSantis’.

In the survey, 85% of students either agreed or strongly agreed that their university allowed for free expression of ideas, opinions and beliefs, with 19% responding neutrally. Of those surveyed, 58% agreed or strongly agreed that their university encouraged students to consider a wide variety of viewpoints, with 16% responding neutrally.

These pithy results are no great loss to DeSantis, who merely used the survey as a stepping stone in his anti-liberal propaganda campaign leading up to the 2022 gubernatorial election. Among his greatest hits thus far are the Don’t Say Gay bill, the Anti-Critical Race Theory curriculum and the Stop Woke Act, to name a few. 

He positions these laws as “curriculum transparency” in his 2022 reelection ads, the undertones suggesting there is something insidious hidden in modern public school curriculum, and he expands on this idea in the media.

“We believe in education, not indoctrination,” DeSantis said in an April press conference. 

By preaching that there is critical race theory being taught at their kid’s school or that gay instructors are teaching about their sex lives with no evidence, DeSantis is fearmongering conservatives and moderates into voting for him this fall.

Florida voters should see through DeSantis’ disingenuous scheme and instead look for a leader who focuses less on optics and more on the issues that genuinely affect Floridians.

A creepy and toxic orange animal with bad hair has returned to Florida. According to the Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida, "Puss Caterpillars," frequently found in the fall and spring, should be avoided as the insect's fur contains "extremely toxic spines." — Read the rest

Fears of polio gripped the U.S. in the mid-20th century. Parents were afraid to send their children to birthday parties, public pools or any place where children mingled. Children in wheelchairs served as a stark reminder of the ravages of the disease.

To prevent polio outbreaks, government officials used tactics now familiar in the era of COVID-19: They closed public spaces and shut down restaurants, pools and other gathering places.

In 1952, two years prior to the introduction of a trial polio vaccine, there were an estimated 58,000 cases of polio and 3,145 deaths due to polio in the U.S.. These cases included children who were paralyzed for life. But those numbers dropped dramatically following a widespread vaccination campaign against polio, beginning in 1955.

By the 1970s, there were fewer than 10 cases of paralysis due to polio in the U.S., and the polio virus was considered eliminated from the U.S. by 1979. Since then, collective fear of the virus has been mostly lost to history – many people alive today are lucky enough not to know someone who has experienced polio.

So when news broke in July 2022 that an unvaccinated adult man in New York had contracted polio – the first case in the U.S. since 2013 – and developed paralysis from the disease, it sent a ripple of fear throughout the public health community and raised the question of whether an old foe was making a comeback.

I am a virologist and a professor of immunology and microbiology and have spent my career both teaching about and doing research on how viruses can cause disease.

There is no cure for polio. The only treatment is prevention. And the tool for prevention is vaccination, the same tool that eliminated polio in the U.S. in the first place.

Life cycle of the poliovirus

Polio – or poliomyelitis – the disease, is caused by the poliovirus, which is passed from person to person through the mouth. And while no one would knowingly ingest a virus, touching a contaminated object like a spoon or a glass or accidentally swallowing contaminated water can unknowingly lead to infection.

When someone is infected with the poliovirus, they shed the infectious virus in their feces. This is why recent reports that poliovirus has been circulating in New York City wastewater for months and that the virus now has been detected in three New York counties are particularly concerning.

In August 2022, New York State Health Commissioner Mary Basset said that the state health department is “treating the single case of polio as just the tip of the iceberg of much greater potential spread.”

“Based on earlier polio outbreaks,” she added, “New Yorkers should know that for every one case of paralytic polio observed, there may be hundreds of other people infected.”

A single case of polio reflects a larger potential spread of the virus because most people infected either don’t show any symptoms or have a very mild illness with symptoms similar to the flu. But even without symptoms, an infected person is still excreting virus in their feces, which means they can be a source of infection to others.

The virus, which is very stable in the environment, is easily spread through surface contamination. For this reason, hand-washing is a critical prevention tool. Although many disinfecting agents, such as alcohol or diluted Lysol, fail to inactivate the virus, chlorine bleach does destroy it. This is why public health officials started chlorinating swimming pools decades ago in order to inactivate the polio virus.
Typically, the human body uses stomach acid to protect against ingested viruses. But poliovirus can survive stomach acid to travel to your gastrointestinal tract. There, the virus reproduces itself to establish an infection.

What is paralytic polio?

Unfortunately, one person out of about 200 people infected with poliovirus will develop paralysis. Scientists still don’t know why one person is susceptible to the paralytic disease while most are not.

In the small subset of people that get paralytic polio, the virus can attack the lower motor neurons found in the brain stem and spinal cord, which are important for controlling muscles. Infection of those neurons leads to the muscle paralysis that is characteristic of paralytic polio. The legs are typically affected – often on only one side of the body – and paralysis can range from mild to severe. Other muscle groups can also be affected.

In the worst cases of paralytic polio, the virus can damage the centers of the nervous system that control breathing. Respirators known as “iron lungs” were early medical devices that aided those with damaged respiratory muscles, helping them breathe until their muscles healed enough to work on their own. Patients could die when the paralysis was severe and sustained.

Levels of severity

Although polio can be devastating for those who contract the severe form of it, most people’s immune systems are well-equipped to combat it. When someone recovers from polio, researchers can detect poliovirus-fighting antibodies in the blood.

But even long-term survivors of paralytic polio can develop late-onset muscle weakness and fatigue, which is known as post-polio syndrome. While the muscular effects of post-polio syndrome are well-recognized, a number of other symptoms can be associated with post-polio syndrome, including chronic pain, sleep disturbances, cold intolerance and difficulty swallowing.

Because post-polio syndrome is diagnosed only based on symptoms, there is no consensus on the number of polio survivors who develop it, but estimates range from 15% to upward of 80%.

Prevention of polio is key

The decline in polio in the U.S. and globally is a direct result of the introduction of vaccines and the willingness of the public to accept them. In 1988, the World Health Organization, in partnership with Rotary International, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other national governments, launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative with the goal to wipe out polio worldwide, as is the case with smallpox.

When this initiative was launched, there were still an estimated 350,000 children with polio in 125 countries. In 2021, there were only six reported cases.

Two types of polio vaccine are in use worldwide. The one used in the U.S. since 2000 is an injection made from inactivated poliovirus. Inactivation kills the virus and prevents it from spreading. Children in the U.S. get this shot at 2 months, 4 months and between 6 to 15 months of age, and it essentially provides lifelong protection from polio.

The second vaccine type, still in use in many parts of the world, is an attenuated – or weakened – form of the virus that is taken orally. In places where community transmission remains significant, like Pakistan, the oral vaccine is preferred because it prevents people from getting polio and also stops person-to-person transmission. In the U.S., where person-to-person transmission of the poliovirus has been virtually nonexistent for decades, the inactivated vaccine is preferred since the focus is on preventing disease in the vaccinated person and there’s less concern about spreading the virus.

But in extremely rare cases, the vaccine virus mutates after it’s been excreted in feces. And if immunization levels fall below a critical threshold – as is the case in some areas of the world – this poliovirus can cause disease. The recent New York polio case has been traced back to a mutated vaccine-derived poliovirus thought to be acquired overseas.

Most people in the U.S. are vaccinated through routine childhood vaccinations. Because immunity to polio following vaccination is lifelong, the CDC is not recommending booster vaccinations for the general population for people who completed the full series. However, the CDC does recommend that anyone who has not been vaccinated against polio virus get vaccinated, including adults.

In my office, I keep a painting of Dr. Jonas Salk, the virologist who developed the first polio vaccine. It serves as my reminder of the importance of biomedical research to help eliminate human suffering caused by infectious diseases.

Rosemary Rochford receives funding from National Institutes of Health.

Canada is a highly urbanized country, with more than 80 per cent of residents living in urban centres. The urban population is growing by more than 400,000 annually, and these new urban residents need housing.

With affordable housing in decline, there are loud calls to massively increase the number of homes being built. Unfortunately, conventional residential development destroys large amounts of green space. The average greenness of urban areas across Canada declined five percentage points between 2001 and 2019, and even more in larger cities.

The loss of urban green space leads to increases in urban heat and flooding, which are amplified by climate change, and can threaten human health and well-being, and property. They also degrade natural ecosystems and the biodiversity they support.

Perversely, poorly planned cities themselves contribute to climate change. As Canadian cities move to tackle the housing shortage, they should take care not to worsen climate change and its impacts.

Urbanization and climate change

Heat waves can lead to heat-related illness and death, some of which might be avoided with increased urban tree canopy. Urban flooding due to increasingly severe storms can be reduced through well-designed green infrastructure, including green spaces. And urban green spaces can maintain biodiversity, including insects, birds and fish.

Although many Canadians consider a detached house to be their dream home, conventional residential development may worsen climate change. Most residential developments, whether infill or in previously open spaces, remove existing vegetation. This process releases stored carbon into the atmosphere and undermines future carbon storage potential.

A recent study found that each year, Canadian urban forests remove over 660 kilotonnes of carbon from the atmosphere. These climate change mitigation benefits are reduced when urban trees and green spaces are removed. Even when new landscaping is put in place, young trees and lawns do not provide the heat mitigation, flood protection and biodiversity support of more mature landscapes.

Most conventional residential developments also add large amounts of sealed surfaces, such as roads, sidewalks, driveways, patios and roofs to the urban environment. Rainfall runs off these sealed surfaces instead of being caught by vegetation or seeping into the ground.

The manicured lawns surrounding houses do not help much, and may contribute runoff polluted with fertilizer, pesticides and sediment. Runoff from sealed surfaces and lawns often flows into creeks, rivers and lakes, where it decreases water quality.

Alternatively, runoff may be collected in engineered storm water management ponds, which can be effective if managed well. But if poorly designed and managed, they can be a significant source of urban greenhouse gas emissions including methane, further intensifying climate change.

What cities do to fight climate change

By early 2022, over 600 Canadian municipalities had declared a climate emergency. Some of them are taking action by conserving natural ecosystems and better integrating them into their operations. Others are beginning to use green development standards to guide developers in building more sustainable communities.

Even so, 78 per cent of large Canadian cities have continued to lose tree canopy over the past 20 years. This may be because green space conservation and creation are not well incentivized in the planning and development process.

Municipal governments are accountable for their financial expenditures to their local residents, and residential development is a business that needs to generate a profit. But while improved green spaces may generate small premiums for environmentally oriented home buyers, land developers are not compensated for the public goods these green spaces provide.

Cities need new ideas that go beyond green infrastructure checklists that incentivize developers only to fulfil minimum expectations and do not take the future climate change performance of these natural assets into consideration.

Research must help cities fight climate change

To address this problem, we need better data on the impact of residential developments on the natural environment. We need to create carefully and rigorously designed studies that address the wicked problem of the housing, climate and biodiversity crises.

These studies must assess residential developments, vegetation changes, water flows, greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity impacts — all integrated into one complex system. They must assess building sites before and after development, projecting and comparing future environmental conditions. And they must support the development of reasonable and economically feasible residential plans that incentivize developers to choose designs that minimize environmental impacts or enhance the urban natural environment.

To drive change toward more environmentally friendly residential developments, we must go beyond typical scientific studies and instead present results in formats that are useful for municipal decision-makers, developers and future home buyers. Cities can then work with developers to identify the best elements of landscape design to implement into the development of the site.

Tools that show how natural assets such as trees and green spaces will perform in the future will highlight those developments that will make strong environmental contributions. This will provide progressive developers with a marketing and reputational edge.

This approach gives municipalities the evidence they need to argue for more environmentally friendly landscape designs. It gives developers the opportunity to innovate. And it gives future home buyers the chance to choose houses that help them lead more sustainable lives.

As a society, we should not solve the housing crisis by amplifying the climate and biodiversity crises. We can and must do better.

Michael Drescher receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and the Municipal Natural Assets Initiative.

Dawn Parker has received related funding from the Chesapeake Watershed Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit/National Park Service (US), US National Science Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Rebecca Rooney receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, masking has been one of the key public health measures put in place to combat the disease. Since March 2020, billions of disposable surgical masks have been used around the world, raising the question: What happens to all those used masks?

As researchers in single use plastic and microplastic pollution, the onset of a global wave of plastic debris pollution became evident to us in the early days of the pandemic — we could see the evidence even during lockdowns when exercise was limited to short daily walks in the neighbourhood. Masks and gloves were on the ground, fluttering in the wind and hanging on fencing.

As ecologists, we were also aware of where the debris would end up — in nests, for example, or wrapped around the legs or in the stomachs of wildlife.

In Canada, a team of researchers led by conservation biologist Jennifer Provencher studied how plastic debris impacts wildlife. In a study conducted during a canal cleanup in The Netherlands, biologists at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center documented that Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) debris would interact with wildlife in the same way as other plastics.

Effects on wildlife

There’s a cartoon circulating on the internet that goes like this: a rat comes home carrying bags of groceries to see two rats laying in bunk beds made from medical grade masks. The rat in the bottom bunk exclaims, “Free hammocks, all over town. It’s like a miracle!”

We shared this cartoon with our colleagues at the beginning of the pandemic, while we were conducting surveys of PPE litter around Toronto streets and parking lots.

We found that within the area that we were surveying — which covered an area of Toronto equivalent to about 45 football fields — over 14,000 disposable masks, gloves or hand wipes accumulated by the end of the year. That’s a lot of rat hammocks.

We set out to understand the breadth of the harm that PPE is doing to wildlife. What we learned is just how many other people were equally concerned.

Jarring images

We conducted a global survey using social media accounts of wildlife interactions with PPE debris. The images are jarring: A hedgehog wrapped in a face mask, the earloops tangled in its quills. A tiny bat, with the earloops of two masks wrapped around its wing. A nest, full of ivory white eggs, insulated with downy feathers and a cloth mask.

Many of these animals are dead, but most were alive at the time of observation. Some were released from their plastic entanglement by the people who captured the photo.

In total, we found 114 cases of wildlife interactions with PPE debris as documented on social media by concerned people around the world. Most of the wildlife were birds (83 per cent), although mammals (11 per cent), fish (two per cent), invertebrates such as an octopus (four per cent) and sea turtles (one per cent) were also observed.

The majority of observations originated in the United States (29), England (16), Canada (13) and Australia (11), likely representing both the increase in access to mobile devices and our English-language search terms. Observations also came from 22 other countries, with representation from all continents except Antarctica.

Weighing costs and benefits

With an estimated 129 billion face masks used monthly around the world, how do we, as ecologists and environmental researchers, tell a global population experiencing a global pandemic to use fewer masks? We don’t.

N95 masks have been essential in reducing the transmission of COVID-19 and, although they are more environmentally harmful than cloth masks, the benefit to health is demonstrably superior.

So, what could we have done better? One thing we noted during our PPE litter surveys is the abundance of discarded masks and gloves in close proximity to public garbage bins.

We hypothesize that a lack of clear messaging from municipalities and provinces about safe ways to dispose of PPE, along with our reluctance to gather near sources of discarded PPE, may have contributed to this global pollution event.

These are lessons that can still be implemented as we continue to cycle through waves of this pandemic; the use of masks is not yet behind us. Our surveys continue as we track an accumulation of PPE debris that will likely find its way into more nests and tangled around the bodies of more animals.

The rise of single use plastic use due to COVID-19 may not have been avoidable. But the rise in plastic pollution could have been mitigated with some investment in public outreach and modifications to waste management infrastructure to allow for masks and other PPE to be disposed of and processed correctly with minimal leakage to the environment.

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

In the Latvian capital of Riga, an 80-metre concrete obelisk came crashing down in late August to the loud cheers of a nearby crowd. It was created to commemorate the Soviet Army’s capture of Latvia in 1944. Days earlier in Estonia, another Soviet monument, this time of a tank adorned with the communist red star, was removed and taken to reside in a museum.

Such scenes are happening all over central and eastern Europe – in Poland, Lithuania and Czechia. The removal or destruction of Soviet-era monuments is a powerful reminder of the complex relationship that exists between history, memory and politics.

Monuments are powerful instruments of propaganda, making the events of the past visible in the present. Public art of this type defines the heroes of history and writes the story of a nation’s identity. But these objects being removed reflect (and create) conflicting histories and interpretations of the aftermath of war. Public memory is not uniform or static.

Statues and memorials erected in the years after the second world war are prime examples. Intended to commemorate liberation from Nazism, they were also symbols of Soviet power and presence in eastern Europe and political and military occupation.

As a result, memorials, statues and monuments that appear to propagate communism or commemorate the Soviet past have also been subject either to government-sanctioned removal or, more commonly, defacement, marginalisation or repurposing. Their removal is not a destruction or an erasure of history, but a creation of a new way of remembering.

De-communisation of public space

In Ukraine, the “de-communisation” law passed in April 2015 prohibited the use of communist symbols and propaganda in monuments, places and street names. More than 2,000 monuments to Ukraine’s communist past were removed between 2015 and 2020, following the Russian annexation of Crimea.

An updated law on de-communisation in Poland in 2017 enforced the removal of monuments and memorials to individuals and events that symbolised communism or other forms of totalitarianism. Driven by the Russian war in Ukraine, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance intensified its efforts to de-communise public spaces. In March 2022 its head, Karol Nawrocki, called for swift action to remove symbols that might promote communism from public spaces.

Soviet-era monuments have also been removed from public places in Estonia, to ensure – in the words of the prime minister, Kaja Kallas – that Russia would be denied any opportunity to “use the past to disturb the peace”.

In Latvia’s capital, Riga, as the Soviet war memorial was demolished, The city’s mayor, Mārtiņš Staķis, argued that the monument had glorified Russian war crimes, and should be demolished physically and “in the hearts as well”.

But the removal of visible memorials to the Soviet era has been divisive. Such monuments and imagery were a prominent part of the landscape, and their removal has fuelled arguments about national identity and history. For some observers, de-communisation was necessary to prevent the rise of oppressive regimes.

For others, the disappearance of statues and military monuments was a visible, forceful and unjustified attempt to erase a nation’s past, however troubled it was. Among them was a spokesman for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who condemned the removal of Soviet-era monuments as a “war against history”.

The condemnation of memory

When statues are toppled and monuments are torn down, we witness a physical assault on both the object and the people and events that it symbolises. Destruction is intended to break our link with the past, defacement shows the object – and what or who it symbolises – to be powerless, unable to defend itself.

The destruction of public monuments has a long history. “Damnatio memoriae” (the condemnation of memory) summarises the practice of the Roman world, in which the emperor, Senate or wider populace could act to condemn the actions and memory of previous rulers.

Statues were pulled down, coins melted, and written records destroyed. In the Panegyrici Latini, the writer and philosopher Pliny the Elder describes participants’ delight when vengeance was enacted upon the hated dead.

But were the condemned dead forgotten, their memory and history “wiped out” by such actions? Or do we remember them, just in a different interpretation of the past?

Read more: Ukraine war prompts Baltic states to remove Soviet memorials

We can observe such competing narratives in the interpretation of the ruins of medieval monasteries that remain visible on the English landscape. For many Protestant reformers of the 16th and 17th centuries, these “bare ruined choirs” were a monument to the successful suppression of “false religion” (Catholicism) in England. But opponents of religious change viewed those same ruins with nostalgia, and mourned the lost monastic life.

Likewise, the statue of King George III, installed by the British in Bowling Green park in New York, was toppled and melted in 1776 after the reading of the Declaration of Independence. But the empty plinth and surrounding fence remain as a monument to a different historical narrative, that commemorates the revolutionaries’ successful defeat of an oppressive British state.

“De-communisation” in Ukraine created new physical and mental spaces, with some monuments destroyed and others replaced with religious figures, flowers, or left empty. Dust and rubble remind us of what once stood on that same spot.

Statues and monuments commemorate the past for a present and future audience. They build a landscape and environment that is made up of layers of human culture and memory, which can be both created and destroyed. But empty spaces left by statues communicate a message that is as powerful as the propaganda of the statue itself.

The destruction of material objects and the destruction of human memory are not the same. History, memory and politics are, and always have been, closely intertwined and the link between remembering and forgetting is stronger than we might think.

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

The history of abortion in the U.S. guided some of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s arguments in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. Alito argued that abortion has never been a “deeply rooted” constitutional right in the United States.

But as a historian of medicine, law and women’s rights, I think Alito’s read of abortion history is not only incomplete, it is also inaccurate.

Alito argued in the opinion that abortion has always been a serious crime, but there were no laws about abortion at all in Colonial America. Beginning in the 19th century, most states barred it only after “quickening,” when a pregnant woman can first feel the fetus move, typically around the fourth to sixth month of pregnancy.

Abortion is indeed deeply rooted in the American experience and law. American women have always tried to personally determine the size of their families. Enslaved Black women used contraception and abortion as specific strategies of resistance against their physical and reproductive bondage.

The very passage of the 13th and 14th amendments, which ended slavery and guaranteed citizenship for all, is evidence that the Constitution actually does protect bodily autonomy. The 14th Amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses have long been the legal basis for gender equality cases. If, as the Supreme Court’s ruling suggests, the right to abortion is not constitutionally protected via the 14th Amendment, it opens up the possibility that other settled law concerning gender and racial equality also has the potential to be reversed.

Instead of examining abortion through the lens of past cases of gender law, however, Alito instead refers to the opinions of 17th-century male legal theorists, who believed in witches and the right of husbands to rape their wives. He also cites as evidence the passage of 19th-century state abortion laws by all-male legislatures, which criminalized abortion and birth control. The Comstock Postal Act of 1873 also made possessing or selling all sexual information and contraceptive items a federal crime.

Meanwhile, Alito’s opinion does not discuss the women’s rights movement in the 1800s or women’s ordinary, daily perspectives on abortion at the time. In this landmark decision, the court has skipped one of the biggest parts of U.S. history on abortion, creating a glaring gap in an understanding of how abortions and abortion law in the country worked in the past.

Voluntary motherhood

Considering how suffragists like the Black journalist and activist Ida B. Wells and other prominent women’s rights activists in the 19th century thought about rights to their own bodies is an overlooked part of this history.

Suffragists in the 19th century focused on a woman’s right to vote – and did not openly support legalizing abortion or birth control.

The reason why reproductive rights were omitted from the suffragist campaign is complex.

Suffragists argued that legalizing birth control and abortion would hurt women, who already had few legal rights at the time. They said that men would then use these legal freedoms to further abuse and control women.

Instead, suffragists embraced an idea they termed “voluntary motherhood.” This meant that women had the right to reject unwanted sex and could choose if and when they had children.

Even in happy marriages, many women in the 1800s could not necessarily control the number of pregnancies they had. Marital rape was legal, and enslavers had total control over enslaved women’s bodies.

The idea of voluntary motherhood – meaning that women should have full control over their own bodies – was a powerfully radical idea.

This notion appealed to women across race and class lines, and it helped drive the emergent women’s rights movement, beginning in the 1840s.

What suffragists said about abortion

Suffragist reformers recognized that the right to vote meant little if they did not have control of their bodies or reproductive lives. Black suffragists like Wells and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, for example, spoke eloquently about the constant dangers Black women faced from white men raping and assaulting them.

They and White women suffragists like Lucy Stone argued that gaining the right to vote would help women have more power to combat these problems.

These activists recognized that women turned to contraceptives and abortion to control their own reproduction. But they also said that unscrupulous manufacturers and people who performed abortions sometimes took advantage of women, by selling them ineffective or harmful contraceptives or charging them large sums for abortions. Substances used to induce abortion, or abortifacients, also often contained harmful and poisonous ingredients that killed women, while surgical abortions were incredibly risky in an era where germ theory and understandings of infection were rudimentary at best.

Reformers also openly blamed harsh anti-abortion laws for contributing to these problems – driving women to desperate measures while still allowing men to have sex freely and shirk their responsibilities of fatherhood.

Suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage agreed, writing in a suffrage newspaper in 1868 that “this crime of … abortion … lies at the door of the male sex.”

Using history for today’s arguments

Today, some anti-abortion rights women’s groups look to the suffragist movement to make the case that abortion should be limited or banned.

Feminists for Life and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, for example, have long rested their funding and advocacy campaigns on attempting to prove that suffragists were “pro-life.” But research shows that their argument is an incomplete reading of suffragists’ complex views of abortion, while also falsely presuming that suffragists would have supported current laws banning abortion today.

There is ample primary source evidence in suffrage newspapers like “The Revolution” or in the private letters of the suffragists showing that they repeatedly insisted that anti-abortion laws punished women, without actually eliminating the practice of abortion.

White suffragists like Anthony held overtly racist and eugenic views, and their support for women who sought abortions often incorporated ideas of eliminating disability and what they deemed undesirable offspring. They prioritized rights for white, middle-class women and ignored or outright rejected Black reformers’ urgent pleas for reproductive justice.

But that messy, complex past nonetheless remains central to understanding Americans’ experiences with abortion and abortion law.

Alito wrote that women’s role in abortion history is too “conflicting” to be useful. Yet considering women’s historical attitudes about reproductive rights – and the reasons behind these views – was a critical omission in the court’s historical considerations of the role of abortion in Americans’ lives.

Lauren Thompson 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.

When Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine by land, air and sea on Feb. 24, 2022, the images of war were conveyed to dismayed onlookers around the world. Far from the action, many of us became aware of the unprovoked aggression by reading online coverage or watching TV to see explosions and people running from danger and crowding into underground bunkers.

Half a year later, the violence continues. But for those who have not been directly affected by the events, this ongoing war and its casualties have been shifting to the periphery of many people’s attention.

This turning away makes sense.

Being attentive to realities like war is often painful, and people are not well-equipped to keep a sustained focus on ongoing or traumatic occurrences.

In addition, since the war in Ukraine began, many other events have arisen to occupy the world’s attention. These include droughts, wildfires, storms tied to global warming, mass shootings and the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

As the philosopher-psychologist William James asked, “Does not every sudden shock, appearance of a new object, or change in a sensation, create a real interruption?”

Ongoing tragic events, like the assault on Ukraine, can recede from people’s attention because many may feel overwhelmed, helpless or drawn to other urgent issues. This phenomenon is called “crisis fatigue.”

Roots of crisis fatigue

Malevolent actors and authoritarians like Putin are aware of public fatigue and use it to their advantage. “War fatigue is kicking in,” the Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, said. “Russia is playing on us getting tired. We must not fall into the trap.”

In a speech to marketing professionals in Cannes, France, the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, asked them to keep the world focused on his country’s plight. “I’ll be honest with you – the end of this war and its circumstances depend on the world’s attention …,” he said. “Don’t let the world switch to something else!”

Unfortunately, many of us have already changed the channel. The tragic has become banal.

I became interested in the phenomenon of fatigue as a result of my scholarly research into moral attentiveness. This idea was articulated by the 20th-century French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil.

According to Weil, moral attention is the capacity to open ourselves up fully – intellectually, emotionally and even physically – to the realities that we encounter. She described such attention as vigilance, a suspension of our ego-driven frameworks and personal desires in favor of a Buddhist-like emptiness of mind. This mindset receives, raw and unfiltered, whatever is presented without avoidance or projection.

Not surprisingly, Weil found attention to be inseparable from compassion, or “suffering with” the other. There is no avoiding pain and anguish when one attends to the afflicted; hence, she wrote that “thought flies from affliction as promptly and irresistibly as an animal flies from death.”

The sensitivity involved in attending to crises can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, attention can put people in touch with the unvarnished lives of others so the afflicted are truly seen and heard. On the other, such openness can overwhelm many of us through vicarious trauma, as psychologists Lisa McCann and Laurie Pearlman have noted.

The difficulty of sustained focus on events like the war is due not only to the inherent fragility of moral attention, however. As cultural critics like Neil Postman, James Williams and Maggie Jackson have noted, the 24/7 news cycle is one of many pressures clamoring for our attention. Our smartphones and other technology with incessant communications – from trivial to apocalyptic – engineer environments to keep us perpetually distracted and disoriented.

Why audiences tune out

Aside from the threats to people’s attention posed by our distracting technologies and information overload, there is also the fact of crisis fatigue leading readers to consume less news.

This year, a Reuters Institute analysis showed that interest in news has decreased sharply across all markets, from 63% in 2017 to 51% in 2022, while a full 15% of Americans have disconnected from news coverage altogether.

According to the Reuters report, the reasons for this differ, in part, with political affiliation. Conservative voters tend to avoid the news because they deem it untrustworthy or biased, while liberal voters avoid news because of feelings of powerlessness and fatigue. Online news, with its perpetual drive to keep eyes trained on screens, is unwittingly undermining its own goals: to provide news and keep the public informed.

Taking a new tack

How might we recover a capacity for meaningful attention and responses amid incessant, disjointed and overwhelming news? Scholars have made a variety of recommendations, usually focused on reining in digital device usage. Beyond this, readers and journalists might consider the following:

1. Limiting the daily intake of news can help people become more attentive to particular issues of concern without feeling overwhelmed. Cultural theorist Yves Citton, in his book “The Ecology of Attention,” urges readers to “extract” themselves “from the hold of the alertness media regime.” According to him, the current media creates a state of “permanent alertness” through “crisis discourses, images of catastrophes, political scandals, and violent news items.” At the same time, reading long-form articles and essays can actually be a practice that helps with cultivating attentiveness.

2. Journalists can include more solutions-based stories that capture the possibility of change. Avenues for action can be offered to readers to counteract paralysis in the face of tragedy. Amanda Ripley, a former Time magazine journalist, notes that “stories that offer hope, agency, and dignity feel like breaking news right now, because we are so overwhelmed with the opposite.”

Weil, who was committed to the responsibility of moral attentiveness but did not romanticize tragedy, wrote, “Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good.”

Rebecca Rozelle-Stone 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.

As statewide primaries continue through the summer, many Americans are beginning to think about which candidates they will support in the 2022 general election.

This decision-making process is fraught with difficulties, especially for inexperienced voters.

Voters must navigate angry, emotion-laden conversations about politics when trying to sort out whom to vote for. Americans are more likely than ever to view politics in moral terms, meaning their political conversations sometimes feel like epic battles between good and evil.

But political conversations are also shaped by, obviously, what Americans know – and, less obviously, what they think they know – about politics.

In recent research, I studied how Americans’ perceptions of their own political knowledge shape their political attitudes. My results show that many Americans think they know much more about politics than they really do.

Knowledge deficit, confidence surplus

Over the past five years, I have studied the phenomenon of what I call “political overconfidence.” My work, in tandem with other researchers’ studies, reveals the ways it thwarts democratic politics.

Political overconfidence can make people more defensive of factually wrong beliefs about politics. It also causes Americans to underestimate the political skill of their peers. And those who believe themselves to be political experts often dismiss the guidance of real experts.

Political overconfidence also interacts with political partisanship, making partisans less willing to listen to peers across the aisle.

The result is a breakdown in the ability to learn from one another about political issues and events.

A ‘reality check’ experiment

In my most recent study on the subject, I tried to find out what would happen when politically overconfident people found out they were mistaken about political facts.

To do this, I recruited a sample of Americans to participate in a survey experiment via the Lucid recruitment platform. In the experiment, some respondents were shown a series of statements that taught them to avoid common political falsehoods. For instance, one statement explained that while many people believe that Social Security will soon run out of money, the reality is less dire than it seems.

My hypothesis was that most people would learn from the statements, and become more wary of repeating common political falsehoods. However, as I have found in my previous studies, a problem quickly emerged.

The problem

First, I asked respondents a series of basic questions about American politics. This quiz included topics like which party controls the House of Representatives – the Democrats – and who the current Secretary of Energy is – Jennifer Granholm. Then, I asked them how well they thought they did on the quiz.

Many respondents who believed they were top performers were actually among those who scored the worst. Much akin to the results of a famous study by Dunning and Kruger, the poorest performers did not generally realize that they lagged behind their peers.

Of the 1,209 people who participated, around 70% were overconfident about their knowledge of politics. But this basic pattern was not the most worrying part of the results.

The overconfident respondents failed to change their attitudes in response to my warnings about political falsehoods. My investigation showed that they did read the statements, and could report details about what they said. But their attitudes toward falsehoods remained inflexible, likely because they – wrongly – considered themselves political experts.

But if I could make overconfident respondents more humble, would they actually take my warnings about political falsehoods to heart?

Poor self-assessment

My experiment sought to examine what happens when overconfident people are told their political knowledge is lacking. To do this, I randomly assigned respondents to receive one of three experimental treatments after taking the political knowledge quiz. These were as follows:

1. Respondents received statements teaching them to avoid political falsehoods.

2. Respondents did not receive the statements.

3. Respondents received both the statements and a “reality check” treatment. The reality check showed how respondents fared on the political quiz they took at the beginning of the survey. Along with their raw score, the report showed how respondents ranked among 1,000 of their peers.

For example, respondents who thought they had aced the quiz might have learned that they got one out of five questions right, and that they scored worse than 82% of their peers. For many overconfident respondents, this “reality check” treatment brought them down to earth. They reported much less overconfidence on average when I followed up with them.

Finally, I asked all the respondents in the study to report their levels of skepticism toward five statements. These statements are all common political falsehoods. One statement, for example, asserted that violent crime had risen over the prior decade – it hadn’t. Another claimed the U.S. spent 18% of the federal budget on foreign aid – the real number was less than 1%.

I expected most respondents who had received my cautionary statements to become more skeptical of these misinformed statements. On average, they did. But did overconfident respondents learn this lesson too?

Reality check: Mission accomplished

The results of the study showed that overconfident respondents began to take political falsehoods seriously only if they had experienced my “reality check” treatment first.

While overconfident respondents in other conditions showed no reaction, the humbling nature of the “reality check,” when they realized how wrong they had been, led overconfident participants in that condition to revise their beliefs. They increased their skepticism of political falsehoods by a statistically significant margin.

Overall, this “reality check” experiment was a success. But it reveals that outside of the experiment, political overconfidence stands in the way of many Americans’ ability to accurately perceive political reality.

The problem of political overconfidence

What, if anything, can be done about the widespread phenomenon of political overconfidence?

While my research cannot determine whether political overconfidence is increasing over time, it makes intuitive sense that this problem would be growing in importance in an era of online political discourse. In the online realm, it is often difficult to appraise the credibility of anonymous users. This means that false claims are easily spread by uninformed people who merely sound confident.

To combat this problem, social media companies and opinion leaders could seek ways to promote discourse that emphasizes humility and self-correction. Because confident, mistaken self-expression can easily drown out more credible voices in the online realm, social media apps could consider promoting humility by reminding posters to reconsider the “stance,” or assertiveness, of their posts.

While this may seem far-fetched, recent developments show that small nudges can lead to powerful shifts in social media users’ online behavior.

For example, Twitter’s recent inclusion of a pop-up message that asks would-be posters of news articles to “read before tweeting” caused users to rethink their willingness to share potentially misleading content.

A gentle reminder to avoid posting bold claims without evidence is just one possible way that social media companies could encourage good online behavior. With another election season soon upon us, such a corrective is urgently needed.

Ian Anson 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.

I’m not lawn people.

I mean, I can appreciate a carpet of grass from an aesthetic perspective, but only because I find its unnatural smoothness and homogeneity both pleasing and unsettling. If the Uncanny Valley has plants, they are all putting green grass.

When we purchased this place, we also become responsible for several thousand square feet of lawn. I should probably put lawn in scare quotes, because it’s less “lawn” than it is an amalgamation of grasses and weeds that look just enough like grass from a distance. The “Hello, fellow kids” of grass, if you will.

Grass is also a major drain on the local environment here. While its vital to areas like the African savannah, keeping it lawn-perfect requires too much water, fertilizer, pesticide, and either gas or electricity to mow. I say “too much,” because grass gives virtually nothing back when it’s confined to a postage-stamp of lawn. You can’t eat it, it’s too short to weave into anything useful, and mown grass is too tiny and insubstantial to make decent fuel. Lawns aren’t even good at feeding wildlife. If grass were allowed to go to seed, it could feed birds, but maintaining a lawn means cutting it short long it before it gets to that point. All lawns do is take, take, take. In a place where droughts are likely to become both more severe and commonplace, and habitat loss drives away native species, lawns can suck it.

Besides, all grass lawns are are socio-economic symbols. The ability to use a property for aesthetics and leisure alone signifies a certain level of economic security, which, back in History Times, was pretty much a form of rich people gloating. Turning the land around your fancy estate into an immaculate green carpet meant that everyone could see and marvel at your fancy estate. Having a grass lawn around your house, as a concept, is pretty new.

“But j,” you might be saying, “Flowers are grown for aesthetics, too!” This is true, but not entirely. Flowers are pretty, but they also feed pollinators. Grass is wind-pollinated, so it barely even feeds bugs. Flowers are also often the precursor to edible fruit. Even roses fruit, and they’re good for you!

I have a patch of soil at my disposal, so it feels more responsible to use it for the production of either food (if not for humans, than for wildlife) or native habitat. I don’t have a homeowner’s association, so nobody can tell me what to do with the dirt and I am free to create the habitat my wretched little goblin heart desires.

I also have very specific feelings regarding the stewardship of a yard. It’s land that was taken, carved into a suburb, had all of the native flora scrubbed off of it, and made to grow a boring, repetitive lawn. It just feels more respectful to the people, plants, and animals who once called it home to turn it back into something… I don’t know. More nourishing. Less sterile. More diverse. Abundant. Comfier. Sustainable, and sustaining in turn. Even if I live here until I die, this place will outlast me. I gotta do right by it.

I’m fortunate that not everything here is grass, though. On the margins of the property, you can see where the people who lived here before made a mark. There’s a rose bush, rue, a potted sedum, crape myrtle, and azaleas. Tucked away, there are some blueberries, an apple tree, a young persimmon, and a red maple. Like islands in squares of lawn, there are two tiny, tiny Japanese maples.

All of this is to explain why most of my front yard is currently a black tarp. Even if we’d needed to have a grass lawn for some reason, the front yard is about 50% actual grass, and 50% other kinds of plants (mostly invasives) that just kind of moved in when the intense light and heat killed off patches of the grass. Doing anything useful with the grassy areas pretty much involves going scorched earth — literally.

I spent a lot of time researching different ways to get rid of — and subsequently replace — an entire lawn, and this is the solution that seemed to be the best for our situation. A black tarp, when placed over closely cropped grass, captures a lot of heat. This, coupled with the deprivation of moisture and sunlight, kills the plants under it. They break down over a period of weeks, and you get a nice, nutritious patch of soil for growing better plants on. Right now, the plan is to replace everything with a mixture of sun-loving local groundcovers and plants that can pull double-duty as ornamentals and sources of food — Passiflora incarnata, for example, which produces these amazingly alien-looking blooms followed by tasty fruit. I’d also like to adopt the custom of growing edible plants near front gates and fences for passers-by. Even if people don’t want them, the birds will.

The tarp thing is just one method of grass assassination (or grassassination, if you would). We’re also using the “lasagna method” in other areas, which entails mowing the grass short, covering it in layers of paper and cardboard, and smothering that in compost, mulch, and soil. The grass dies, it and the paper break down, and you’ve got the foundation for a very fancy raised bed. (So far, this method is working very well for some bee balm and elderberry plants I put down in one corner of the yard, but more on that another time.)

So, if you’ve been reading here and wondering why I haven’t been posting, it is not because I’ve been kept busy with paid writing or have abandoned society and gone on a bender in a forest. I have been battling one of my greatest foes: LAWNS.

_{This is for that summer you made me spend on prednisone, you little green S.O.Bs.}