Leettaschmidt

As a surgeon who specializes in treating patients with voice problems, I routinely record my patients speaking. For me, these recordings are incredibly valuable. They allow me to track slight changes in their voices from visit to visit, and it helps confirm whether surgery or voice therapy led to improvements.

Yet I’m surprised by how difficult these sessions can be for my patients. Many become visibly uncomfortable upon hearing their voice played back to them.

“Do I really sound like that?” they wonder, wincing.

(Yes, you do.)

Some become so unsettled they refuse outright to listen to the recording – much less go over the subtle changes I want to highlight.

The discomfort we have over hearing our voices in audio recordings is probably due to a mix of physiology and psychology.

For one, the sound from an audio recording is transmitted differently to your brain than the sound generated when you speak.

When listening to a recording of your voice, the sound travels through the air and into your ears – what’s referred to as “air conduction.” The sound energy vibrates the ear drum and small ear bones. These bones then transmit the sound vibrations to the cochlea, which stimulates nerve axons that send the auditory signal to the brain.

However, when you speak, the sound from your voice reaches the inner ear in a different way. While some of the sound is transmitted through air conduction, much of the sound is internally conducted directly through your skull bones. When you hear your own voice when you speak, it’s due to a blend of both external and internal conduction, and internal bone conduction appears to boost the lower frequencies.

For this reason, people generally perceive their voice as deeper and richer when they speak. The recorded voice, in comparison, can sound thinner and higher pitched, which many find cringeworthy.

There’s a second reason hearing a recording of your voice can be so disconcerting. It really is a new voice – one that exposes a difference between your self-perception and reality. Because your voice is unique and an important component of self-identity, this mismatch can be jarring. Suddenly you realize other people have been hearing something else all along.

Even though we may actually sound more like our recorded voice to others, I think the reason so many of us squirm upon hearing it is not that the recorded voice is necessarily worse than our perceived voice. Instead, we’re simply more used to hearing ourselves sound a certain way.

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A study published in 2005 had patients with voice problems rate their own voices when presented with recordings of them. They also had clinicians rate the voices. The researchers found that patients, across the board, tended to more negatively rate the quality of their recorded voice compared with the objective assessments of clinicians.

So if the voice in your head castigates the voice coming out of a recording device, it’s probably your inner critic overreacting – and you’re judging yourself a bit too harshly.

Neel Bhatt 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.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, a partisan divide has existed over the appropriate government response to the public health crisis. Democrats have been more likely to favor stricter policies such as prolonged economic shutdowns, limits on gathering in groups and mask mandates. Republicans overall have favored less stringent policies.

As political scientists and public health scholars, we’ve been studying political responses to the pandemic and their impacts. In research published in the summer of 2020, we found that “sub-governments,” which in the U.S. means state governments, tended to have a bigger impact on the direction of pandemic policies than the federal government. Now, as data on last year’s case and death rates emerge, we’re looking at whether the political party in the governor’s office became a good predictor of public health outcomes as COVID-19 moved across the country.

Looking at states’ COVID-19 case and death rates, researchers are finding the more stringent policies typical of Democratic governors led to lower rates of infections and deaths, compared to the the pandemic responses of the average Republican governor. In preparation for future pandemics, it may be worth considering how to address the impact that a state government’s partisan leanings can have on the scope and severity of a public health crises.

Comparing responses by Democratic and Republican governors

To compare and chart our state-by-state COVID-19 policy stringency data, we’ve developed our “Protective Policy Index.” To calculate this index, we took into account the types of policies state governments adopted over the course of the pandemic, such as school closings, lockdowns and mandatory mask mandates. We combined the adopted measures for each state over time to calculate the index. Higher values of the index indicate states adopted more stringent measures.

When we charted the policy responses of Democratic and Republican governors between May 1 and July 31, 2020, they revealed that heading into May, states led by Democrats generally took more stringent measures than those led by Republicans. Over the next eight weeks or so, as Democratic-led states began to slowly reopen, they continued to maintain more stringent measures on average than Republican-led states. By July, Democratic governors began to roll back their reopenings amid some signs of a new pandemic wave, while Republican-led states largely maintained the same level of stringency.

With that information established, we could begin to explore whether there was a relationship between COVID-19 policy stringency in different states, and their rates of pandemic cases and deaths.

According to a study released in March, both case and death rates were higher on average in states led by Republican governors during the second half of 2020. The first map represents rates of COVID-19 cases between June 1 and July 31, 2020 as reported by the CDC. The second map represents CDC estimates of excess mortality rates – the number of deaths above the average norm – between June 1 and August 31, 2020. The taller spikes indicate higher case and death rates.

Next, to study the relationship between the stringency of a state’s pandemic responses and its rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths, we mapped each state’s rating on the Protective Policy Index to the same CDC data. The results show that more stringent policies were generally associated with fewer cases and deaths.

All of these findings, in conjunction with those of our own research, suggest that amid the current deep divide in U.S. politics, it’s possible to forecast public health outcomes based on whether a state is led by a Republican or a Democrat. For large chunks of time in 2020, states led by Republicans overall had higher average case and death rates from COVID-19, in part due to their state governments adopting less stringent policies to quell the virus. It is important to note, however, that not all states fit perfectly into this pattern. For example, Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, adopted relatively stricter measures and this likely led to better health outcomes.

America’s polarized health care politics

The differences we discovered between red and blue states in our analysis did not surprise our team. After all, a partisan divide over health care in the U.S. existed before COVID-19. During President Bill Clinton’s administration in the 1990s, there was a clear and growing partisan divide over health care reform. During President Barack Obama’s administration, Democrats supported the Affordable Care Act and the federal government’s response to the H1N1 virus, while nearly all Republicans opposed both measures.

We already know that partisan divisions over health care in the U.S. can worsen public health. For example, despite the evidence that the ACA has had a positive effect on individual health care outcomes, Republicans have consistently fought against it. Republican-led states that chose not to adopt Medicaid expansion have not experienced all the positive benefits of the Affordable Care Act.

For example, states such as Texas, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi that have not expanded Medicaid have the largest relative percentage of uninsured residents in the country. In some Republican-led states that did opt for Medicaid expansion, it was adopted with new restrictions. This has ultimately led to worse outcomes.

These long-established partisan divisions have also influenced Americans’ polarized views of the government’s proper role in addressing the pandemic. This divide grew so wide during 2020 that at some points it was as if people were living in alternate realities based on their partisan leanings. At times an American’s political affiliation indicated whether or not they would acknowledge even that a pandemic was really happening.

Where we go from here

Now that mass vaccination against COVID-19 is underway across the country, Americans have hope that life will soon get “back to normal.” But until enough people are vaccinated to halt the spread of the virus, public health officials are warning that we are not quite there yet. They are encouraging states to maintain some restrictions that slow the spread of the virus, especially considering that there are more contagious variants spreading across the country.

Overwhelming evidence suggests that differences between Republican and Democratic officials on health policy have had life-or-death consequences during the pandemic. But recent history suggests that in the next public health crisis, governments across the U.S. may once again focus more on politics than on policies grounded in the best available science. Experience also suggests that even when this leads to bad health outcomes, Americans aren’t likely to rethink the partisan divide over health care.

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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.

Beau Ouimette, better known by his YouTube handle Aquachigger, has a 13+ year history of posting videos of him finding valuable, strange and/or unusual things underwater as well as doing metal detection and other kinds of adventuring. He’s amassed a sizable audience, 1.3 million subscribers, and has a successful and ongoing Patreon campaign.

However, right now he is worried that his YouTube career may be coming to an end.

In his most recent video, entitled “Aquachiggers YouTube Termination Notice: Someone Stole My Videos and YouTube Is Terminating Me!” Ouimette outlines a recent exchange with YouTube where after filing a copyright complaint on a “reaction” video featuring his content, YouTube is now threatening to take action against his channel unless he either retracts his claim or proves that he owns the video he uploaded.

In the video, he outlines the story involving his channel and a much larger Saudi Arabian YouTuber that hosts a “reaction” video channel. YouTube, through its internal copyright system, notified Ouimette that one of his videos had been copied and uploaded on this other channel, which has over 6.3 million subscribers. He filed a copyright notice through the system, something he has done many times before without problem, but this time was different.

YouTube sent him a letter back saying that they were “concerned that some of the information in your takedown request may be fraudulent” and that he had seven days to provide a detailed explanation with additional information or retract his claim. Either way, his YouTube account may be terminated for filing a false takedown notice.

Ouimette, worried that his account may be terminated by the end of the week, said that he may simply stop making videos if that happens and that, if he does continue, it will only be on his Patreon and Facebook accounts.

As of this writing, the infringing video he was referring to has been removed due to a copyright claim by him, signaling that YouTube likely realized what was going on decided to take the video down.

However, that doesn’t mean the story can be dismissed out of hand. There really shouldn’t have been a story here at all and the fact that YouTube let it get to this point points to the flaws in not just their copyright system, but their abuse systems in general.

YouTube’s Long, Troubled History

To be clear, Ouimette’s account was not/is not in the extreme danger he feared. Yes, the letter has threatening language in it, but it’s also boilerplate. As long has he provided proof that he owns the content, it’s most likely that YouTube would take his side (as they seemingly have) and the matter would be resolved in his favor.

That said, his level of fear is perfectly understandable. Not only are we talking about a YouTube channel that he has spent thirteen years growing, but YouTube is so notorious for being bad at handling copyright claims that termination certainly seems like a reasonable outcome.

To make matters worse, how does one provide more proof that they own a video that features them in front of the camera, was uploaded to their YouTube channel before the infringement, which was identified by YouTube’s own copyright system? It’s unlikely that Ouimette has copyright registrations for each of his videos so what further details can he provide?

It’s easy to see why he was frustrated and worried. He had every right to be.

To that end, we’ve talked a great deal about copyright issues on YouTube. We’ve discussed how it’s a confusing two-tiered system that is constantly shifting and changing how it approaches the issue.

Ouimette is far from the first to have his content taken by a much larger account. In 2018, there were multiple stories of exactly that happening, usually with accounts in different languages to the original video, as with Ouimette. The reaction video controversy has also been happening since at least 2016, with many YouTubers decrying such videos as theft while others claim it is a separate and legitimate art form.

Literally none of the issues raised in Ouimette’s case were new. These are all challenges that YouTube has faced for years and still struggles to deal with. Sadly, they are problems that YouTube can’t likely solve, at least not on a mass level.

However, for some YouTubers, that isn’t an issue. As it has become clear, once you’ve hit a certain size, you get a very different YouTube experience than most.

The Haves and Have Nots of YouTube

Ouimette is no YouTube slouch. with 1.3 million subscribers, his channel is far larger than most, including the majority of channels he previously filed copyright claims against. According to his screenshot, most of the other channels had only a few dozen or a few hundred subscribers.

But in a land of haves and have nots, there is always someone bigger and that’s what Ouimette ran into with this claim, a Saudi Arabian react channel about 5x his size.

YouTube has a long history of showing favoritism to its bigger stars and channels. In August 2019, this came to a head as the Washington Post aired the concerns of many YouTube moderators that claimed popular channels were allowed to flout the rules regularly and continue to not only operate but earn revenue from their videos.

Where a new YouTuber can struggle to even get a human to look at a dispute, larger YouTubers are eligible to be connected with a Partner Manager that provides one-on-one support for a variety of issues.

To be clear, YouTube can’t provide this level of service to everyone. There are too many channels, most of which make little to no money. However, this means that most of us struggle under a deeply flawed and largely-automated system for rules enforcement, including copyright, while others at least have access to human beings that can help them resolve complex issues.

Even if large YouTube channels are technically held to the same rules, they don’t live in the same world and can often get away with things that smaller channels can’t, simply because of that personal element.

Different systems will always produce different outcomes. That’s a simple reality that YouTubers are still coming to grips with.

Sadly, for most of us, there’s nothing we can do. Until a real competitor enters this space, YouTube and YouTube alone sets the rules we must follow and creates the systems under which those rules are enforced. For most of us, that means dealing with a deeply-flawed, mostly-automated enforcement system that will continue to wreak havoc on channels big and small.

Bottom Line

In the end, pointing out the problem is easy, it’s finding a solution that is hard. YouTube, much like Amazon and Facebook are platforms that are “too big to police” and require automated solutions to provide any level of enforcement.

One simply can’t “hire more people” and get rid of Content ID. There’s simply too much content being uploaded every minute of every day. Automated tools are necessary. To make matters worse, even the relatively small number of appeals likely can’t be handled by humans either, the number is still too great.

But there are a few things that they could do. One would be to ensure that partner managers can not intervene in any way on community standards and copyright disputes.

Second, they could provide greater transparency across the entire enforcement process (including clearly indicating which decisions are automated versus human) and offer an independent and external tribunal to hear extreme disputes.

Though obviously not every dispute could reach such a tribunal, a transparent “Supreme Court” for YouTube that is both independent of YouTube and of the creators, could help bring some consistency by establishing clearer rules and it could hold YouTube accountable to its own standards.

What we most want to avoid is situations like Ouimette’s where a YouTube reports an infringing video and ends up fearing punishment for it. This was a clear breakdown of YouTube’s most basic systems, but better infrastructure behind those systems could prevent it from reaching the point that it did.

This never should have happened but, if it had to happen, it should have been clear what the next steps were for Ouimette. There is no reason that he should have been in as much reasonable fear for his channel and we can only hope that this is a lesson YouTube learns from.

Once upon a time there was a company called Oxford Insect Technologies, or Oxitec, that came up with a brilliant solution to reduce the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses: more mosquitoes. Specifically, legions of mutated male Aedes aegypti that have been genetically modified (and EPA-approved! — Read the rest

I was lying on the jungle floor of a Malaysian rainforest with a wasp nest dangling 10cm from my nose. I had painted each wasp with a few coloured spots so that I could tell one from another.

I’d been watching these wasps for several weeks: I saw them being born, I saw them fight for a place in society, I saw some rise to motherhood as queen, and others fall to a life of hard labour as workers. I was here to study the unfolding of social behaviour in the insects best suited to show us – the hover wasps. This was probably the moment I got over my long-held horror of small stinging and biting insects.

Hover wasps live in very small societies of around five to ten individuals. They don’t chase you and they can barely sting. This makes them a good “entry-level” wasp (perhaps you’re tempted?).

All these individual wasps are capable of reproducing but choose instead to live in a group, where most members sacrifice personal reproduction to help raise the brood of a relative. This is the first rung of the oft-named “social ladder” of evolution. Understanding how and why group living evolves in these simplest of societies may provide critical glimpses into the evolution of more complex stages of social behaviour (as found in the yellowjacket wasps, hornets and honeybees).

This story is part of Conversation Insights
The Insights team generates long-form journalism and is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects to tackle societal and scientific challenges.

Watching my painted hover wasps gave me a unique invitation into the plot of an evolutionary soap opera: there were dominations, submissions, enforced celibacy, births, deaths. The characters were woven together by a matrix of genetic relatedness and pulled apart by temptations outside the family home. Evolution had already decided how the genetic fitness books would be balanced, and the social interactions were my clues to deciphering it. I was hooked.

Twenty years later, I’m still studying social evolution and behaviour, but have welcomed to my stage a broader cast of characters, including some of the most feared and impressive characters of the wasp world, from the much-maligned yellowjacket and hornets to a range of tropical paper wasps, with names that depict a devilish nature – such as Polistes satan.

Twenty years later, I am still justifying why I study wasps for a living to both friends and strangers.

Why should we care about wasps?
What do they do for us?
Why don’t I do something more useful … like study bees?

My personal love story with wasps and their evolutionary soap operas, it seems, is not enough.

Humanity has always had a rocky relationship with wasps. They are one of those insects that we love to hate. We value bees (which also sting) because they pollinate our crops and make honey. We go out of our way to “rescue” a bee from inside a window; but we don’t flinch as we slam a rolled-up magazine over a wasp in the same situation. Our prejudice against wasps is culturally engrained. It stems from our ignorance about what wasps do in ecosystems and how that is beneficial to us.

In 2018, an undergraduate student Georgia Law, a fellow wasp-loving colleague, Dr Alessandro Cini, and I set about finding out whether people really did hate wasps, compared with bees – and if so why. We asked members of the public to rate how they felt about bees, wasps, butterflies and flies (on a scale of one to ten) and to rate how important these insects are as pollinators and predators.

As expected, bees and butterflies were very much loved, and both were recognised for their importance as pollinators. Flies and wasps were very much loathed, but wasps elicited stronger negative feelings of hatred and fear, while flies were merely bothersome, noisy and dirty. No real surprises there.

The shocking result was that no one seemed to know that wasps are important predators. We were quite surprised, especially as the very same respondents had a clear appreciation of the ecological role that bees fill as pollinators. People hate wasps because they don’t understand the important role they have in ecosystems. No wonder I am regularly asked: “What’s the point of wasps?”

This was a eureka moment for me. I’d been singing wasp-evangelism from the wrong hymn book. Most people don’t care about behaviour, they care about what wasps can do for them. And scientists have failed to tell them.

Beyond bees and butterflies

To better justify conserving and managing natural resources, scientists try to define their value to us (humans) in terms of their “ecosystem services”: that is, functions or goods provided by nature that directly or indirectly support the quality of human life, and are therefore of value to society.

Some of these you’ll be very familiar with – like the value of pollination services by bees without which, we’d be hand-pollinating our crops; others you may be less aware of – like the value of soil as a means of recycling nutrients necessary for maintaining the air we breathe and by being the literal bedrock of agriculture.

Insects are renowned for their contributions to ecosystem services. Correction. Certain insects are renowned for their contributions to ecosystem services. For example, up to 88% of flowering plants are pollinated by insects such as bees, butterflies and flies, and we can even put a price on this “service” – greater than US$250 billion (£180 billion) a year, worldwide. Once a price tag is attached to a natural resource, we have a reason to value it and look after it – a kind of minimum wage for nature.

But there are many facets of the natural world that haven’t had a price tag attached. The lack of a price tag doesn’t mean they are worthless, it just means we’ve not bothered to work out which part of mother nature’s jigsaw they belong to. At a time of heightened concern about the global status of insect populations, turning our attention to the forgotten fauna – like wasps – has never been more important.

In the US alone, services provided by bees through pollination and honey production are worth around US$20 billion annually. What’s the economic value of wasps? We don’t know. We know (anecdotally) that wasps eat a lot of insects, many of which may be agricultural pests. But scientists have not calculated how many tonnes of insect pests wasps remove from agricultural landscapes.

The idea that wasps could have an economic value is not at all new. Early entomologists conceded the useful role of wasps in the environment, but lamented the lack of evidence.

In his 1868 book British Social Wasps, physician and amateur entomologist Edward Latham Ormerod acknowledges the predatory role of wasps in ecosystems, but his call to quantify their impact remains unanswered to this day: “It would be difficult to prove absolutely that wasps have a sensible influence in diminishing the number flies and other insects.”

He follows with what remains one of the best lines of evidence in favour of wasps as natural biocontrol agents, albeit anecdotal:

The practical result of destroying all the wasps on Sir T Brisbane’s estate was, that in two years’ time the place was infested, like Egypt, with a plague of flies.

You’d have thought that after 150 years, some enterprising entomologists would have tried to replicate this experiment in a scientifically rigorous manner. Sadly not.

The problem is not a lack of acknowledgement of the possible importance of wasps nor a shortage of talented entomologists. Rather, it is likely to be the ingrained cultural prejudice we have against wasps. Even entomologists shun wasp research in favour working on bees or butterflies.

Here we can learn a lot from the success story of the bees. We have exploited the natural resources of honeybees for millennia. It’s only in the last few decades that scientists have properly turned their attention to the other 22,000 species of bees which we haven’t (yet) semi-domesticated. We are finally starting to properly understand the value and importance of ecosystem services provided by these insects, beyond that of honeybees.

In this spirit, for the last few years, I’ve been trying to put the value of wasps on the map. The public deserves to know how useful these insects really are. What we lacked was a comprehensive review of the evidence that wasps are in fact useful.

And so together with two of my fellow wasp-enthusiasts, Ryan Brock from UEA and Alessandro Cini from UCL and the University of Florence in Italy, we scoured the literature for evidence on the ecological value of wasps. Now, 500 academic papers later, we have arrived at some answers. So what did we learn? Here are some highlights – and some evidence-based reasons why we are wrong to undervalue wasps.

1. Nature’s pest controllers

Wasps are spectacular pest controllers: over 30,000 species of solitary and social wasps hunt a diversity of invertebrates from bugs and spiders to roaches and flies. They are likely to be as effective at regulating the populations of these organisms as are other top predators like insectivorous birds, mammals and amphibians. And what’s more, their short lives and fast reproduction mean they can match fluctuations in prey populations closely.

Solitary wasps tend to be fussy about their prey, focusing their efforts on a single order, or even a single genus. For example, the Pompylidae only hunt spiders and the Eumeninae hunt mostly Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies). But collectively, the solitary wasps (from across 15 families) were found to hunt prey from across 14 different arthropod orders, indicating that as a group, solitary wasps are important in maintaining balanced ecosystems.

Conversely, social wasps are generalists, who opportunistically cease a diverse range of prey. For example, the yellow-jacket wasps (genus Vespula) alone catch prey from at least 15 different orders to feed to hungry sibling larvae in their colony.

Why should we care about the predatory power of wasps?

There is now no doubt that the chemicals we use to keep our crops free of insect pests are detrimental to wildlife and ecosystems. Although pesticides are designed to kill specific insect species, a wealth of research now reveals the non-lethal effects that pesticides have on non-target insects. We need to be looking for more sustainable approaches to agriculture.

Employing the services of natural enemies, like predatory wasps, is one such solution. Insects have a long economic history in their use as biocontrol agents of crop pests: this is valued at an estimated US$417 billion, and parasitoid wasps (which lay their eggs in or on insect hosts in situ, rather than moving them to a nest) feature heavily in this. But this figure almost completely overlooks the potential contributions of the hunting wasps.

Read more: Insects might soon be trained to protect our crops

As specialist predators, solitary wasps have great potential as biocontrol agents. Surprisingly, only four species of solitary wasps are commercially available for biological control (the most well-known is the Emerald jewel wasp, Ampulex compressa, which is famous for zombiefying cockroaches). Introductions of solitary wasps to non-native regions have not been very successful, possibly because their life histories are not understood well enough.

A more successful approach may be to exploit local species, and especially social species. Over 100 years ago, colonists in the West Indies toyed with the idea of using social wasps on plantations, reporting anecdotally that crops appeared to be less plagued by pests and there was less need for pesticides when wasp populations were encouraged. But apart from a handful of mid-20th century studies and some encouraging opinion articles, the suggestive potential for using social wasps in biocontrol has largely been forgotten.

Together with some enterprising Brazilians, we provided some tantalising evidence for the biocontrol promise of social wasps a couple of years ago. We showed that levels of crop damage and pest populations of the fall army worm (a pest of maize, which causes billions of dollars in crop yield losses every year) were significantly reduced when wasps were allowed to access them.

2. Wasps are pollinators

A whopping 75% of human-cultivated crops are partly dependent on insects for pollination. So it’s not surprising that insect pollination services are estimated to be worth over US$235billion a year worldwide. That’s 9.5% of the value of world agricultural production.

Although wasps hunt prey to feed to growing offspring, the adult hunters are herbivores, just like bees, who visit flowers for carbohydrates in the form of sugar. Much of the year adult social wasps are fed by their larvae, which provide the adults with a nutritious sugar solution in return for the meat they are fed. It’s only when larvae numbers are low (in spring and late summer) that you’re likely to see social wasps visiting flowers. You’ll see solitary wasps, on the other hand, on flowers throughout the year because they don’t benefit from the larval nutrition that their social cousins enjoy.

Some plants are completely reliant on wasps for pollination; we counted 164 plant species across six families. Most of these are orchids which have evolved to mimic female wasp pheromones – some even look like the back end of a female wasp. Males of the Scoliidae and Thynnidae are duped into copulating with a sexy-looking orchid, during which pollen is attached to him and transferred to another flower as he flits from one sexy deceptor to the next.

The vast majority of wasp-plant interactions are, however, non-specific. We identified 798 plant species across 106 families that were visited by wasps. The social wasps in particular appear to be extremely unfussy about what flower they will visit, so long as they can reach the nectar.

To date, there are no studies that allow even a rough estimate of the value of wasps as pollinators. But, given the importance of natural pollinators to our food security and the apparent declines of well-recognised pollinators like bees and hover flies, now would be a good time to start taking wasp pollination a bit more seriously.

This is especially true given that some species of social wasp appear to be relatively resilient to anthropogenic change. In a recent analysis of museum and contemporary biological records, we showed that populations of social wasp species had changed very little over the last 100 years. The yellowjacket wasps in particular appear to be resilient to anthropogenic challenges, like urbanisation and agriculture. Other species, like the hornet, may be more affected by pollutants and loss of habitat.

We need a better understanding of what life history traits make certain species resilient and others vulnerable to our changing planet in order to manage the potential pollinating power of wasps.

3. Grocers and pharmacists

When trying to put a value on insects, one rarely thinks beyond pollination and predation. In fact, these are only part of the services that insects, including wasps, might offer us.

Most obviously, wasps are quite delicious, tossed in a little chilli oil, and they’re surprisingly nutritious. Promoting entomophagy – insects as food for humans – is surely the solution to sustainable food security.

Insects are high in protein and essential amino acids. They use less space and water, emit fewer greenhouse gases and ammonia than livestock. This means that farming them is very efficient. For example, it takes 12 times fewer resources to “rear” a gram of protein from insects compared to beef.

Over 2 billion people around the world consume insects as part of their diet, with 109 species being eaten across 19 countries. And wasps account for 4.8% of all insect species eaten globally.

Wasp larvae have an exceptional dry protein mass (46%-81%) and provide around 70% of our required amino acids, with a low-fat content. The Japanese are especially appreciative of wasp larvae or pupae. With a market price of US$100/kg, demand is so great that sellers have to supplement their supplies with wasp nest imports from abroad.

If you’re not taken by the idea of fried wasp larvae, then perhaps you might appreciate the honey stored in the nest of a honey wasp, Brachygastra mellifica. Or the fact that brewers’ yeast sit out the cold winter in the cosy intestines of an overwintering wasp queen. When the queen wakes up in spring, the yeast hitch a ride to a nearby sugar source (remember that wasps like flowers?).

When we humans are not thinking about our stomachs, we’re thinking about our health. Wasps – specifically wasp venom – can help out here, too. The venom of solitary and social wasps is packed with antibiotics which keeps their prey disease-free and fresh. Larval secretions of social wasps are also rich in antimicrobials, which wasp workers smear over their bodies, brood and nest.

Many of these antimicrobials have potential benefits for human health. They are effective against disease-causing bacteria, and some take specific action against Mycobacterium abscessuss, an important multi-drug-resistant bacterium.

Even the nests of wasps hold medicinal potential, with antibiotic properties effective against Streptococcus mutans (a bacterium associated with dental decay), Actinomyces and Lactobacillus found in the combs of social wasps like Polistes. The solitary mud-dauber wasps (such as Sceliphron) incorporate essential minerals into their clay nests, making them rich sources of magnesium, calcium, iron and zinc – pregnant women and children in parts of rural Africa feast on these “insect earths”.

Many of these antimicrobials have potential benefits for human health. The practical potential of these buzzing medicine cabinets has yet to be picked up by the pharmaceutical world.

But perhaps the most exciting medical potential of wasps are the cancer-cell killing properties of mastoparan found in the venom of social wasps. These are a family of amphipathic peptides which preferentially target cancerous cells over healthy cells. But this too is still far from practical application.

These are persuasive reasons to appreciate the wasp, but are just the tip of the iceberg. For example, wasps also disperse seeds, clean up rotting flesh, and hold promise as environmental monitoring tools.

My love affair with wasps arose out of their fascinating behaviour. The turbulent lives of such tiny beings drew me in and seduced me. I didn’t need to know if they were of “value” to human society or how big their price-tag might be. I cared about them because their mini-dramas unfold chapters in our understanding of social evolution – one of the most perplexing and phenomenal products of the natural world.

Twenty years on, I get that not everyone shares this obsession and fascination. But now, I hope we’ve laid out the evidence for the potential value of wasps, from pest-control to pollination, cancer treatments to sustainable food production. Wasps matter to us. I will challenge anyone who fails to agree that wasps deserve the same attention and respect as the more beloved insects (like bees) that we openly value and protect.

Wasps are important facets of the natural world and have much to offer us, if we’d only take more notice.

For you: more from our Insights series:

• There aren’t enough trees in the world to offset society’s carbon emissions – and there never will be

• Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap

• How we discovered a hidden world of fungi inside the world’s biggest seed bank

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Seirian Sumner receives funding from NERC.

Many years ago, talk show hostess Oprah Winfrey had actor Don Cheadle and a couple of other guests on her TV programme to debate racism, including the unresolved question of the N-word. Arguably, by the end of the show, there was no resolution of the status of the word in American society, the country where it has caused so much anguish and turmoil.

“Negro”, under slave conditions, quite apart from being a neutral racial category, became a term of absolute dehumanisation. Africans stolen by the millions and transported to the New World had to be divested of their humanity, individuality and variety.

A word had to be invested with the powers of dehumanisation, on the one hand, and absolve the racist oppressor of culpability, on the other. Since the period of US plantation slavery from the 1600s to the 1800s, the word of terror – invested with so much vitriol, hate and revulsion – wended its venomous way through the veins of the black community, polluting the entire body politic.

A word is as delicate as an egg and had to be treated so accordingly.

A state of white supremacy

After the defeat of slavery, the end of the American Civil War, systemic lynching, Jim Crow segregation of the early 1900s, and the successes of the civil rights movement, the terrible word was still loose in American society, evoking dusky trauma and spectres of toxins. It was a word that was not dead and buried. It had acquired a life of its own and had become as complex as the deceit and illusions of the ongoing age of mass incarceration.

American authors Richard Wright in Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison in The Invisible Man (1952) evoke the terror and soul destroying anonymity through which blackness had to exist under white supremacy. The reality of blackness entailed a continual recoil into nameless shadows, opprobrium and silence. Finally, it entailed a state of enforced non-being even if it was artificially constructed.

Read more: Comparing black people to monkeys has a long, dark simian history

Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian cultural critic and literary theorist, popularised the notion of the carnivalesque – a concept that became well-known in his country in the 1960s and much later in the West. It has been subsequently adopted as a means of deconstructing figures and institutions of tyrannical power by ordinary people.

Power, in arbitrary and irresponsible forms, is not often to be confronted head on. Instead, it is more judicious to puncture its bombastic façade using the weapons of humour, evasion and other similar sleights of hand. And thus the sheer terror of unaccountable power is defanged by the instrumentality of humour and the carnivalesque. In that manner, we are able to laugh at the state of abjectness that power imposes upon us in order to endure yet another day.

The N-word lives within the black community like a volcano, ready to erupt at any time, fed constantly by the bitter flares of history, humiliation and dehumanisation. But it also has to be appeased, detoxified and inverted for black folk to remain human and resilient.

Taking venom from a snake

And just as black folk have been able to create astounding works of beauty out of unbearable abjection – think of 1940s bebop music from the brothels and after hours clubs of the American Chitlin’ circuit and hip hop from the derelict precincts of the Bronx – the odious, life-crushing word was made to undergo a rebirth, a reinvention and was as such infused with new music and sinuousness.

In this way, the victims and descendants of racial oppression wouldn’t have to live with tainted shadows, befouled blood and nightmares every moment of their lives. They had to perform an act similar to daredevilry, which is, to extract and detoxify venom from a snake without being bitten.

When Tupac raps, “I’d ratha be your N.I.G.G.A” and makes it cool to do so, it is easy to gloss over the tribulations, bloodshed and heartbreaks it took to reach this stage of supposedly post-racial, post-Martin Luther King casual hipness.

Yet this seemingly benign scenario has to be juxtaposed with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement – including its contradictions and disenchantments. It rose due to the alarming cases of police brutality aimed at often unarmed black men and the apparent inaction of the political establishment in curbing these new forms of racial discrimination and injustice.

Rivers of blood

The word of abjection – regardless of its sordid and tortuous past itinerary – had to be appeased with endless rivers of blood. It would be a demonstration of a lack of empathy for a non-black person to throw the epithet around casually.

In this case, “non-blacks” are those who do not possess a direct or ancestral link to the transatlantic slave trade as primary victims. In the case of South Africa, non-blacks would apply to those who benefited most directly from the apartheid regime of racial stratification.

It is necessary to take into cognisance the multitude of crushed bones, shredded bodies and defeated spirits – in short, the genocidal ordeal – it took for the word to become hip and cool within only black communities.

In other words, it took horrifying crucibles for it to become a specific term of endearment, invariably, a consequence of astronomical costs. It is the inadequate recognition of this excruciating history by non-black persons that rankles the black community.

We need to be constantly reminded that social transformation isn’t complete as long as blacks are vilified, oppressed and murdered simply because of the colour of their skin. Recent cases in point, Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.

It’s not helpful to adopt a trivialisation of the essence of racial rainbowism without its accompanying historical realities. What precisely are we to achieve by flippantly discarding the humanism we have been nurtured by to acquire a stunted, uncertain version of something that continually seems to elude us? What is the benefit of the new if it fosters a form of ahistorical barbarism?

Hands off the word

So the N-word, regardless of its current chic hip hop-speak, is perennially a double-edged sword, thoroughly Manichean, with Jekyll and Hyde properties. Non-blacks would do well to appreciate this ever-shifting duality and are perhaps better off eschewing it.

It took black folk unimaginable resources of creativity, humanity, humour and generosity to detoxify it for their own collective sanity. Nonetheless a non-black de-contextualised appropriation of it remains, as always, a seismic volcano. A volcano kept active by the flickering embers of racism.

Osha is the author of several books including Postethnophilosophy (2011) and Dust, Spittle and Wind (2011), An Underground Colony of Summer Bees (2012) and On a Sad Weather-Beaten Couch (2015).

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

In a recent post on the Writer Beware Blog, a blog sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Victoria Strauss told a bizarre tale about how a plagiarist not only copied her content, but backdated it to before the original post and filed a DMCA notice with Google to get the original post removed.

The story starts a few weeks ago when she logged into her rarely-used Gmail account and noticed she had an article that was removed from the blog over a copyright claim.

The original post, which was published on September 28, 2018, detailed the implosion of Fiery Seas Publishing. She had written the article herself and couldn’t figure out what was infringing about it.

However, when she checked out the “Original URL”, it took her to a post on a blog named Comusa and operated by a person known as Bella Andreas. However, the post was dated to September 3, 2018, 25 days before the real original post went live.

Strauss then realized that the plagiarist clearly backdated the post and then filed a DMCA notice to make it look as if she was the infringer. She then went through other posts on the blog (which has been inactive for nearly a year now) and found that every post on the site followed that pattern, copied wholesale from another site and backdated.

Strauss further noticed that many of the post dates on her site actually predate the registration of her domain, with some going as far back as 2014 and the domain being registered in 2016.

It’s also worth noting that, according to the Lumen Database, Andreas is an active DMCA filer, having submitted 10 DMCA notices since December last year over content on her site. All the notices in the database were sent to Google, however, other hosting providers may or may not participate in submitting notices there.

In short, Strauss is not the only one to have this experience.

But all of this begs a simple question: Why? What could anyone gain from copying and backdating posts, especially older posts, and sending DMCA notices over it? To that, we can only speculate.

A Bizarre Tale

If we set the copyright notices aside for a second, the idea seems fairly straightforward. The site is copying posts and hoping that, by backdating them, they will fool the search engines into thinking that THEY are the original site.

This is not an uncommon technique among spammers but it rarely works. Google organically tracks when pages make it online and isn’t likely to be fooled by a backdated post. That said, it almost certainly improves the odds at least some.

As for the site itself, though the domain was registered in October 2016, it most likely didn’t become an active site until December 2020 as that was when it moved to its current host, which is in Russia. Unfortunately, the Internet Archive has no older copies of the site to verify or debunk this.

All in all, it’s a standard spam blog, complete with misspellings in the tag line and name. It doesn’t have ads or outbound links, but if the site was only launched in December 2020. The operator is likely waiting until it is performing better to add them.

What makes this case unique is the DMCA notices. Why would a spammer want to send DMCA notices against the original authors and draw more attention to themselves? Though it’s impossible to know for certain, there are a few reasons one might.

Speculation Station

Here, we have to enter Speculation Station as reading into the intent of a spammer is an incredibly difficult thing to do.

Strauss may have simply had bad luck. The Writer Beware blog is hosted on Google’s Blogspot service. Most of the other sites that were targeted are not but the owner site notices to Google anyway. The aim wasn’t to get these posts taken down, but to get them removed from Google.

That, in turn, makes things much more clear. The site is sending out notices for content it copied so that, once those are removed from Google, their site will hopefully be seen as the “original” host for the content.

In short, they are likely trying to remove the original articles from Google so their plagiarized and infringing ones will become the new default for the relevant terms.

Once again, this is pure speculation but given the pattern of the notices and the setup of the site itself, this is the most probable explanation. As someone with 20 years of experience dealing with such sites, this fits well with what I’ve seen elsewhere.

That said, it is still VERY unusual and rare for such sites to file takedown notices against the sites they copied from. Spammers are usually hoping to fool the Google bots but avoid detection from the humans.

This is doing quite the opposite.

Bottom Line

Over the years we’ve talked a great deal about the struggles of battling bad DMCA notices. To be clear, most bad DMCA notices are simple mistakes and are usually easily corrected. But when someone abuses the law maliciously, there needs to be consequences.

However, as we saw in the Lenz v. Universal case, pursuing and winning a lawsuit over a dubious DMCA notice is difficult, expensive and generally not worthwhile. Even when people publicly admit that they filed the notice maliciously, it can be tough to see any justice.

The DMCA is in desperate need of reform and one of the things that is needed is an effective system to target those that maliciously abuse it. The upcoming Copyright Small Claims Court may provide some help with that, but it remains to be seen how useful and practical it will be in these cases.

The good news is that, for right now. stories like this one are rare. However, if these spammers find success in this approach, it may just be the first drops before the dam bursts.

Luckily, at least judging by Google’s indexing of the site (or rather, lack thereof), it did not work in this case and may have even backfired. If so, let’s hope it’s a lesson others take to heart.

Australians are eating and inhaling significant numbers of tiny plastics at home, our new research shows.

These “microplastics”, which are derived from petrochemicals extracted from oil and gas products, are settling in dust around the house.

Some of these particles are toxic to humans — they can carry carcinogenic or mutagenic chemicals, meaning they potentially cause cancer and/or damage our DNA.

We still don’t know the true impact of these microplastics on human health. But the good news is, having hard floors, using more natural fibres in clothing, furnishings and homewares, along with vacuuming at least weekly can reduce your exposure.

What are microplastics?

Microplastics are plastic particles less than five millimetres across. They come from a range of household and everyday items such as the clothes we wear, home furnishings, and food and beverage packaging.

We know microplastics are pervasive outdoors, reaching remote and inaccessible locations such as the Arctic, the Mariana Trench (the world’s deepest ocean trench), and the Italian Alps.

Our study demonstrates it’s an inescapable reality that we’re living in a sea of microplastics — they’re in our food and drinks, our oceans, and our homes.

Read more: We estimate up to 14 million tonnes of microplastics lie on the seafloor. It's worse than we thought

What we did and what we found

While research has focused mainly on microplastics in the natural environment, a handful of studies have looked at how much we’re exposed to indoors.

People spend up to 90% of their time indoors and therefore the greatest risk of exposure to microplastics is in the home.

Our study is the first to examine how much microplastic we’re exposed to in Australian homes. We analysed dust deposited from indoor air in 32 homes across Sydney over a one-month period in 2019.

We asked members of the public to collect dust in specially prepared glass dishes, which we then analysed.

We found 39% of the deposited dust particles were microplastics; 42% were natural fibres such as cotton, hair and wool; and 18% were transformed natural-based fibres such as viscose and cellophane. The remaining 1% were film and fragments consisting of various materials.

Between 22 and 6,169 microfibres were deposited as dust per square metre, each day.

Homes with carpet as the main floor covering had nearly double the number of petrochemical-based fibres (including polyethylene, polyamide and polyacrylic) than homes without carpeted floors.

Conversely, polyvinyl fibres (synthetic fibres made of vinyl chloride) were two times more prevalent in homes without carpet. This is because the coating applied to hard flooring degrades over time, producing polyvinyl fibres in house dust.

Microplastics can be toxic

Microplastics can carry a range of contaminants such as trace metals and some potentially harmful organic chemicals.

These chemicals can leach from the plastic surface once in the body, increasing the potential for toxic effects. Microplastics can have carcinogenic properties, meaning they potentially cause cancer. They can also be mutagenic, meaning they can damage DNA.

Read more: Why ocean pollution is a clear danger to human health

However, even though some of the microplastics measured in our study are composed of potentially carcinogenic and/or mutagenic compounds, the actual risk to human health is unclear.

Given the pervasiveness of microplastics not only in homes but in food and beverages, the crucial next step in this research area is to establish what, if any, are safe levels of exposure.

Read more: You're eating microplastics in ways you don't even realise

How much are we exposed to? And can this be minimised?

Roughly a quarter of all of the fibres we recorded were less than 250 micrometres in size, meaning they can be inhaled. This means we can be internally exposed to these microplastics and any contaminants attached to them.

Using human exposure models, we calculated that inhalation and ingestion rates were greatest in children under six years old. This is due to their lower relative body weight, smaller size, and higher breathing rate than adults. What’s more, young children typically have more contact with the floor, and tend to put their hands in their mouths more often than adults.

Children under six inhale around three times more microplastics than the average — 18,000 fibres, or 0.3 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per year. They would also ingest on average 6.1 milligrams of microplastics in dust per kg of body weight per year.

For a five-year-old, this would be equivalent to eating a garden pea’s worth of microplastics over the course of a year. But for many of these plastics there is no established safe level of exposure.

Our study indicated there are effective ways to minimise exposure.

First is the choice of flooring, with hard surfaces, including polished wood floors, likely to have fewer microplastics than carpeted floors.

Also, how often you clean makes a difference. Vacuuming floors at least weekly was associated with less microplastics in dust than those that were less frequently cleaned. So get cleaning!

Mark Patrick Taylor received research support for this project via an Australian Government Citizen Science Grant, CSG55984, ‘Citizen insights to the composition and risks of household dust’ (the DustSafe project). Participant questionnaires for collecting meta-data were approved by Macquarie University’s ethics panel, project ID 2446. Cochlear Sydney provided access to their Nicolet iN10-MX FTIR instrument to undertake the research.

Neda Sharifi Soltani receives funding from the Australian Government as a Research Training Program (RTP) scholarship no.2017678.

Scott Wilson receives funding from the Total Environment Centre and NSW EPA to conduct research on microplastics in the environment. He is the Research Director of the Australian Microplastic Assessment Project (AUSMAP), which is a citizen science focussed program.

I am a 78-year-old woman with a loving husband, three sons, seven grandchildren and three great grandchildren. However, I was recently diagnosed with cancer. The initial surgery was successful, but I was left wondering whether I should opt for further treatment, and all the suffering it might cause, or take my chances without it. I have, after all, lived a long and happy life. While I have now thankfully been cured, I am still left wondering: do we have a moral obligation to live for as long as possible? Ann, Tarbert, Scotland

There are many answers to this question - especially during a pandemic - and probably no clear solution. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about it. Indeed, by considering such questions we can discover some of the most enlightening perspectives on life.

So let me approach this issue as a philosopher – and define first exactly what we mean by a “moral obligation”. A moral obligation or a moral duty is a morally required form of conduct. Obligations can be perfect, leaving us no wriggle room – for instance, the duty not to kill unjustly. Obligations can also be imperfect, giving us some flexibility in when and how we honour them, such as the duty to be beneficent. Obligations can be context-specific, such as the duty to meet someone at 3pm as promised. And, they can be general, including the duty not to steal without necessity or the duty to try to save someone’s life when we can do so at little cost to ourselves.

In my view, we cannot have a blanket moral obligation to live for as long as possible regardless of our circumstances. Each life is unique and, for some people, continuing to live is a horrific experience. But, we can have an obligation to prolong our lives when certain conditions are met.

This article is part of Life’s Big Questions
The Conversation’s new series, co-published with BBC Future, seeks to answer our readers’ nagging questions about life, love, death and the universe. We work with professional researchers who have dedicated their lives to uncovering new perspectives on the questions that shape our lives.

To add some clarity, here are some thoughts on two different sets of circumstances: living in isolation and living with others. These cases rely on some imagination, but then imagination is the tool that allows us to see dilemmas from alternative perspectives.

Imagine I am a solitary person, stranded on a distant and deserted island surrounded by a vast expanse of ocean. I have no one to love, no one who misses me, and my only hope of escaping the island and meeting another person again lies wrecked in the waves: the ship that brought me here. Now, I will likely want to survive, but that is a different thing. What we need to consider is whether, given my plight, I have an obligation to live for as long as possible.

I might, if my duties to respect myself include me prolonging my life. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative states that we have a duty to treat all people including ourselves as ends to be respected and not merely as means. But respecting myself need not entail striving to live an impressively long life. I have a duty to care for my mind and my body and, as a result, I may live healthily for a long time. But that doesn’t mean that living for as long as possible must be my aim or responsibility.

Even so, I might still have an obligation to prolong my life for a different reason. The people who raised me and were sufficiently invested in my fortunes to ensure I survived into adulthood might have a claim on me. This would suggest that this Robinson Crusoe version of me should care for myself now, to honour their investment.

In his book Happiness, the Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard quotes the words spoken by a mother to her son shortly before her death:

Don’t think you’re paying me some kind of great tribute if you let my death become the great event of your life. The best tribute you can pay to me as a mother is to go on and have a good and fulfilling life.

But living a “good and fulfilling life” is not the same as living for as long as possible. Indeed, living a good life, not a long life, may be the best way to honour our guardians’ investment in us.

And what if those who raised me have passed away – do they still have a claim? Similarly, what if they are living, but will never know how I fared? Will their lives be worse if I don’t prolong my life indefinitely? Probably not. They likely think I am already lost forever.

Legacies

But perhaps I am a remarkable person – Mozart, say – and I have been abandoned on this island. I have a musical genius that arguably I shouldn’t squander, even though the music I compose in my head here will never be heard. My potential to craft masterpieces might give me an obligation to prolong my life but, of course, only for as long as I can create divine music.

Indeed, even if my talents aren’t “divine”, I might have an obligation to “use up” the talents or blessings I have been given. The American humourist Erma Bombeck, for example, wrote that:

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me’.

It’s an inspiring approach to life – but, as the 17th-century British poet John Milton argued: “God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best … They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Ultimately, as Milton suggests, no one of us has any greater claim to life than another – even if we have no talents, choose to ignore the talents we do have, or simply “stand and wait”, we still fulfil our purpose.

Dependants

Of course, most of us do not live alone on deserted islands. We don’t exist in isolation, but with and among others, at least until the pandemic forced us behind our front doors. Consequently, perhaps we have an obligation to prolong our lives for the sake of the people we love and who love us.

When we have dependants, particularly young children in our care, we arguably do have a duty to try to keep ourselves safe and healthy for as long as they need us. But that doesn’t mean we have an obligation to live for as long as possible when they no longer depend on us. S Matthew Liao, a bioethicist at New York University, has argued that children have a human right during childhood to be loved, and that we all have a duty to ensure that children are loved because this is crucial to their lives and development. Once they have grown, our love-giving duties subside, but do not entirely disappear.

There’s a flip side to this, too. When we become dependent on our loved ones as we age, do we have an obligation to prolong our life or, alternatively, to end it – so that we’re not a financial or emotional anchor or an additional burden on our overcrowded, exhausted planet?

This question is an easy one to answer. People should never think of themselves as a “burden” or a “problem to be solved”. Every human being has a right to life and to lead a life that is at least minimally decent, free from degradation, cruelty, undue harm and unfairness. No one person has any more entitlement than any other to live in this world. We are all worthy of a place here, and older people should be treasured by their families, friends and societies.

Yet not everyone accepts this. The pandemic has held up a moral mirror to our treatment of older people and found it to be abysmal. Even though many countries have taken an age-attentive approach to vaccinations, older people have nonetheless borne much of the brunt of COVID-19.

Doing versus allowing

One final thorny question concerns doing versus allowing. Sometimes it’s unclear whether I am actively doing something, such as prolonging my life or seeking to end it, or simply allowing things to happen to me, such as letting doctors pursue a course of treatment (or not) with the result that my life extends or comes to a close.

The availability of various medical options can make the people who love me feel that they have failed me: “I should have convinced her to have surgery. I shouldn’t have let the medical staff opt for comfort-care only. I should have been her advocate. I should have pushed for her to stay in the hospital longer.” But, there is a natural arc to a life well lived, and well-being is not the same thing as biological self interest or longevity.

I have written all of this in the language of obligation since that was the language in which you posed your question. But the language of obligation is a strong one.

We might do better to ask whether we have good reasons to prolong our lives or whether we act virtuously if we seek to prolong our lives. Courage is a virtue that figures centrally at the end of life. To quote the poet Dylan Thomas, it takes courage to “rage against the dying of the light”. But it also takes courage to bear our mild yoke and, contradicting Thomas, opt to “go gentle into that good night”.

Whatever your choices are going forward, I wish you and your family courage, grace, and happiness. And remember: life is yours to live and “death shall have no dominion”.

If you’ve been affected by anything in this article and don’t know who to turn to there are free helplines available to support you.

In the UK and Ireland – call Samaritans UK at 116 123.

In the US – call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or IMAlive at 1-800-784-2433.

In Australia – call Lifeline Australia at 13 11 14.

In other countries – visit IASP or Suicide.org to find a helpline in your country.

To get all of life’s big answers, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value evidence-based news by subscribing to our newsletter. You can send us your big questions by email at bigquestions@theconversation.com and we’ll try to get a researcher or expert on the case.

More Life’s Big Questions:

• Have humans evolved beyond nature and do we even need it?

• Death: can our final moment be euphoric?

• Love: is it just a fleeting high fuelled by brain chemicals?

Kimberley Brownlee receives funding from the AHRC, ISRF, Leverhulme Trust, and Canadian government.

Today marks the 21st annual World Intellectual Property Day. The event is held each year on the 26th of April to commemorate the day the WIPO Convention, which established the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), entered into force in 1970. The theme of this year’s World IP Day is “IP & SMEs: Taking Your Ideas to Market,” and events are being held around the world to highlight the critical role of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to bringing creative innovations to the marketplace. As President Biden noted in his World IP Day proclamation, small businesses “make up 90 percent of businesses in the United States, employ nearly half of America’s private sector workers, and create two-thirds of new jobs, and bring opportunity to every corner of our Nation.”

CPIP Executive Director Sean O’Connor spoke about the importance of IP for med tech SMEs at a World IP Day event organized by the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, Japan. The event, entitled “Patents to Patients: The Role of Intellectual Property in Innovative Healthcare,” brought together leading experts to discuss how Japanese SMEs can take advantage of intellectual property rights. Traditionally, Japanese SMEs have often foregone IP protection because of the expense and uncertainty about its value. But as this sector increasingly relies on venture capital and commercialization based on licensing throughout the value chain, secure IP rights to define and convey the developing innovation are a necessity.

There are several events in the Washington, D.C., area this week that will underscore the success stories of SMEs and discuss the IP resources that are available to help them with their IP needs. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, along with several other organizations, is hosting an event today to discuss the role of IP in supporting the creativity and innovation of small businesses. The U.S. Copyright Office is likewise holding an event today to discuss the importance of SMEs in copyright, the economy, and our culture. Also today, the Licensing Executives Society (LES) has organized an event to celebrate the ingenuity and creativity embodied in SMEs, and the Intellectual Property Owners (IPO) Education Foundation is holding an event to discuss different approaches to bring ideas to the market. The Copyright Alliance is hosting two panel presentations later this week on how IP and advocacy can help creative small businesses to grow and succeed.

We are thrilled to see these and many other events celebrate the power of intellectual property to help small businesses succeed in the global economy.

When Adrienne Conde picked up a phone call in February from a mother whose daughter, a freshman at USF, had just been in a car accident, she didn’t hesitate hopping in her car to help the student.

“She was crying on the side of the road and her mom called me and was like, ‘My daughter’s on the side of the road, she was in a wreck,’ and I went and picked her up, talked to the police officer, and the man she hit was being mean so I kind of set him straight,” Conde said. “And I was like, ‘You know, she’s crying. Can’t you see?’ And then I drove her home.”

Her business “Proxy Momma” typically consists of delivering treats to USF students whose parents aren’t close enough to visit. Living by her slogan, “There for your Bull when you can’t be,” Conde said she will do whatever a situation calls for to help out a student.

Conde guided and supported freshman Malena Pacheco through the situation after Pacheco burned her hand at home and then got into a car accident on her way to urgent care. She said she put herself in the shoes of Karen Kathleen, Pacheco’s mother, and hoped that if her daughter were to find herself in that situation, someone would help her.

Kathleen — who lives in Jupiter, and decided to contact Proxy Momma based on recommendations she had seen on Facebook groups — was grateful for the help her daughter received and described Conde as a “Godsend.”

“There are not enough positive words in this world to explain how much it meant to me and my daughter for her to show up and help,” Kathleen said.

“She gave my daughter a hug, and even drove the car back to campus to make sure that it drove OK. Afterwards, she called me to give me peace of mind and let me know how everything turned out.”

The service Conde provided was inspired by her eight years working as a missionary in Chile and by the aid she has given to others through her church. When she established Proxy Momma on Facebook in September 2019, she knew she wanted to continue helping people with her business.

Since then, her services have spread by word of mouth. She has clients from Egypt, Singapore, Argentina, England, Brazil, Peru, El Salvador and South Africa that found her through Facebook. She said she feels grateful by how much Proxy Momma has grown over the past year.

“I have people from everywhere contact me and it’s just amazing, kind of surreal,” Conde said. “You’re like, ‘How did this all happen?’ That’s just a blessing. I just can’t get over it sometimes, like I have to pinch myself.”

On regular workdays, Conde receives orders from parents who want to send their children sweets or snacks for birthdays, exam weeks and holidays. Her daughter — who came up with the slogan — and her husband have helped her with scheduling and delivering orders. Conde and her family live just 0.3 miles from the Tampa campus, making the trip to help students easy.

While she doesn’t charge for all of her services, her food items and flowers are all assigned a variety of prices. Some of her most inexpensive treats and parfaits are just $10 apiece, while her most expensive items, charcuterie boards, can cost over $60.

Personalizing the treats for students by attaching cards with messages from their parents or surprising them with snacks and food whenever they are sick made Conde feel satisfied with the business she created.

“It’s a neat feeling,” Conde said. “The parents, they feel at peace knowing that somebody is here to take care of their students. So it brings a lot of peace of mind.”

Her clients have recommended her to other parents because of her quick responses. In Facebook reviews, many have said they trust her services. Maureen Cunningham, one of the clients, has lost track of the number of times she has ordered from Proxy Momma. She said her favorite order was her daughter’s birthday cake which was personalized based on her major.

“She asked what my daughter was majoring in and I said environmental science, and she made the most beautiful cake,” Cunningham said.

“It was different color blues to look like the ocean and then she used, I guess it must be sugar or something, but she made it brown and put it on the chocolate cake so it looked like sand. And then she made white chocolate shells, and put those on top of the cake.”

The order shocked Victoria Hart, Cunningham’s daughter, who said she didn’t think she would get something from her mother, who lives in Key West, on her birthday. She was happy when she received it.

“I loved it so much, it made my birthday very special,” Hart said. “And I definitely was not expecting something from my mom, or the Proxy Momma.”

Hart said Proxy Momma’s services are thoughtful and, from her experience, well executed.

“She puts a lot of work and effort into the thing she makes, and she’s really genuine about it,” Hart said. “She is always in a good mood and she always says she has the biggest smile on her face when she gives the kid the package.”

Based on her interactions with Conde, Cunningham said she feels she can rely on her to surprise her daughter. She said Proxy Momma is a mother to everyone and described her as a “good person with a big heart.”

“She does it because she loves the college adults, and I just trust her,” Cunningham said. “I mean, she [has] done some incredible things. She [has] helped students that are broken down on the side of the highway … and she just loves doing what she does. So I know I can depend on her to get the job done.”

Conde said her job is a blessing. She is grateful to have people recognize the effort she puts into being the Proxy Momma.

“It blows my mind … people just recommending me,” Conde said. “A parent will put out there ‘How can I send flowers to my daughter or my son who’s having a hard time?’ and somebody will put a florist and all of a sudden somebody will put my name and then … within a few minutes, 10 to 15 people put ‘Proxy Momma, Proxy Momma, Proxy Momma.’

“It makes me feel proud of what I’m doing and that people, they appreciate it.”

This week, the Philippines is marking a significant event in the history of European colonialism in the Asia-Pacific region — the 500th anniversary of the death of Portuguese explorer Fernão de Magalhães (more commonly known as Ferdinand Magellan).

The Philippines government is hosting a series of events to mark the role that Indigenous people played in Magellan’s contested first circumnavigation of the earth in the 16th century.

European history books celebrate the expedition as a three-year Spanish-led voyage, carrying 270 men on five ships. But Filipino commemorations remind audiences that Magellan died halfway through the expedition in the Philippines and that only one ship with just 18 survivors limped home to Seville.

In particular, Filipinos remember how Lapu Lapu, the datu (leader) of the island of Mactan, inspired a force of Indigenous warriors to defeat Magellan’s crew — and the Spanish threat to their sovereignty — on April 27, 1521.

The Filipino commemorations show what an Indigenous-centred government approach to imperial history in the Pacific can look like. They also sit in stark contrast to the exhibitions, reenactments and publications that marked the 250th anniversary of James Cook’s arrival in Australia and New Zealand in recent years.

These commemorations mostly upheld the unique bravery of the British navigator, sidelining potentially deeper discussions of the violence to Indigenous people he and his crew also brought.

What happened to Magellan in 1521

Magellan reached what are now the Philippines in March 1521 after an arduous 100-day Pacific crossing. He set about using a combination of diplomacy and force to get local leaders and their followers to convert to Catholicism and submit to the authority of the far-away Spanish king.

Rajah Humabon of Cebu and other local rulers embraced an alliance with the Spanish, hoping to gain an advantage against their rivals.

Read more: 500 years after Ferdinand Magellan landed in Patagonia, there's nothing to celebrate for its indigenous peoples

Magellan decided to attack Mactan, however, when Lapu Lapu refused to negotiate. About 60 European sailors and soldiers joined forces with Humabon and attacked Mactan at dawn, but they were met on the beach by Lapu Lapu and his armed warriors.

Weighed down by their armour, the Europeans stumbled in the shallows under arrow fire. Filipino folk histories say that an army of sea animals were also part of the resistance. Octopus wound their tentacles around the legs of the invaders, dragging them to their deaths. The battle was over within an hour.

Celebrating the victory at Mactan

The events organised by the Filipino government’s National Quincentennial Committee to mark Magellan’s death include a drone show, military parade and the televised unveiling of a new shrine to Lapu Lapu. All of these commemorations are designed to pay “tribute and recognition to Lapu Lapu and the Mactan heroes”.

The NQC also sponsored a national art competition centred on four themes connected to the Mactan victory — sovereignty, magnanimity, unity and legacy.

Matthius B. Garcia’s painting, Hindi Pasisiil (Never to be Conquered), recently took the grand prize in the “sovereignty” category.

In his work, the viewer’s eyes are drawn to the strong figure of Lapu Lapu. He is covered in Visayan tattoos and wears the bright red bandana and thick gold chains of a warrior and ruler. He leaps into the centre of the canvas, kampilan (sword) raised above his head, leading the charge of men rushing at the European invaders.

Magellan and his men, decked out in armour over puffy sleeves and stockings, fall over each other and into the sea to their deaths.

The artwork is Indigenous-centred because it was crafted by a Filipino artist for a Filipino audience. It is telling the story of what happened at Mactan from the point of view of the locals rather than the strangers.

Ordinary Filipinos have also been sharing their own artistic representations of the battle of Mactan on the NQC’s Facebook page, such as 5-year-old Miguel Alfonso Manzano Noriel’s painting, entitled The Battle of Mactan, below.

The NCQ has also encouraged children to print paper doll figures of Lapu Lapu and Magellan so they can re-enact the battle of Mactan at home.

In contrast to Garcia and Noriel’s fiery scenes of mayhem, the winning entries in the art competition’s “magnanimity” section remember the compassion that Filipinos showed to the explorers.

In Romane Elmira D. Contawi’s prize-winning painting, a local man holds out fruit to a bedraggled, hollow-eyed white man. The work illustrates the key role locals played in the expedition, giving provisions to Magellan’s fleet and sharing their expert knowledge on surviving the dangerous seas.

Remembering Cook in Australia and NZ

From 2018–20, the Australian and New Zealand governments also sponsored events related to a significant anniversary of European incursion into their lands — the arrival of Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, in 1769–70.

Some did aspire to take an Indigenous-centred viewpoint. But the majority ended up pushing, at best, a “shared histories” approach. They encouraged audiences to consider “both sides” of the beach when the Endeavour docked on Indigenous shores.

Read more: Explorer, navigator, coloniser: revisit Captain Cook’s legacy with the click of a mouse

National institutions in Australia held exhibitions entitled “Cook and the Pacific” or “Cook and the First Australians”. The New Zealand centrepiece event was a six-vessel flotilla — three European, three Pasifika — that stopped off at 14 communities to instigate “a balanced telling of a shared Māori and Pākehā history.”

In these performances, Cook was made to forego some of the limelight, but never to step off his pedestal entirely.

Other memorials did not achieve even this fuzzy sense of mutuality. Pre-existing statues of Cook, for instance, not only remained standing through the anniversary years, they were often protected from being defaced. In the case of the Cook statue in Sydney’s Hyde Park, this came in the form of dozens of police officers.

Decolonised public histories

The Philippines’ approach to a more Indigenous-focused and critical form of public history is imperfect. The government has come under attack for silencing “unpatriotic” criticism" of national leaders today — and in the past.

And the government was criticised for its handling of the death of another Ferdinand – the Philippines’ former president Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the country through martial law for nearly a decade. He was given a hero’s burial to the outrage of many.

Similarly, public histories that happily remember 16th-century rebellions against Spanish conquistadors so as to “uplift the cultural confidence of the Filipino people” can render invisible some modern Indigenous struggles for autonomy, particularly in the Philippines’ Islamic south. There is only room for patriotic versions of the country’s history that emphasise unity.

Read more: Cooking the books: how re-enactments of the Endeavour's voyage perpetuate myths of Australia's 'discovery'

Despite these serious concerns, the Filipino approach to the era of European expansion offers a refreshing contrast to the dominant stories about Cook in Australia and New Zealand. It is not simply adding in Indigenous voices or awarding Indigenous people co-star status on commemorative occasions.

Rather, the Filipino attitude to Magellan flips colonial history on its head by focusing on Indigenous resistance.

The promise of decolonised public histories in the Pacific is not to punish, shame or settle scores. It is instead intended to help forge as-yet undreamed futures for the region that place original sovereigns at their heart.

Kate Fullagar has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

Kristie Patricia Flannery 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.

Most vaccines have side-effects and COVID vaccines are no different. The public are being reassured that if they experience a sore arm where the needle went in, or tiredness, a headache, fever or nausea, these are merely signs that the immune system is working as it should. This has left some people wondering: if that’s the immune system doing what it’s supposed to do, does a lack of side-effects mean my immune system hasn’t been primed to protect me?

Rest assured, it means no such thing. The vaccine clinical trials conducted by Pfizer show that 50% of the participants did not experience significant side-effects during the trial, yet 90% of the participants developed immunity against the virus. And the advice on the Moderna vaccine says that common side-effects may be experienced by one in ten people, yet the vaccine protects 95% of those who take it.

This can be explained by considering the way the immune system develops protective immunity against viruses when triggered to do so by a vaccine. Most COVID vaccines, including several that have been authorised, use a viral protein found on the outer envelope of the coronavirus, known as the spike protein, to mimic a natural viral infection and initiate an immune response.

The branch of the immune response known as innate immunity responds almost immediately to the viral spike protein. It launches an attack against it by initiating inflammation, the cardinal signs of which are fever and pain. So it’s the innate immune response that causes the common side-effects that people experience a day or two after they’ve had the jab.

Long-lasting specific immunity, which is the ultimate goal of any vaccination, is achieved only by activating the second branch of the immune response: adaptive immunity. Adaptive immunity is triggered with the aid of the innate immune components and results in the generation of T cells and antibodies, which protect against infection on subsequent exposure to the virus.

Unlike innate immunity, adaptive immunity can’t initiate inflammation, though recent studies suggest that it can contribute to it significantly. In some people, this inflammatory response by both the innate and adaptive immune systems is exaggerated and manifests as a side-effect. In others, although it is working normally, it is not at levels that can cause noticeable side-effects. Either way, immunity against the virus is established.

What causes a different immune response?

Scientists have noticed that people above the age of 65 are having fewer side-effects to the vaccine. This can be attributed to the gradual age-related decline in immune activity. Although this has can be related to lower antibody levels they still have immunity against the virus.

Sex can also play a role. In a US study, 79% of reports of side-effects were from women. This sex bias could have something to do with testosterone. Testosterone tends to dampen inflammation and hence the side-effects associated with it. Men have more testosterone than women, which might contribute to fewer reports of side-effects in men.

People suffering from chronic inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and multiple sclerosis, who are on immunosuppressive drugs to control their symptoms, may experience fewer side-effects due to a dampened inflammatory response. Although the immune response is dampened, it does not mean that it is nonexistent. In a 2020 study that compared antibody levels in people who were on immunosuppressive drugs to those who were not, it was determined that people on immunosuppressive drugs produced lower levels of antibody but none of them were devoid of antiviral antibodies.

Vaccine side-effects shouldn’t be taken as a measure of the effectiveness of the vaccine. Despite the varied immune response to vaccines, most people achieve immunity against the coronavirus on vaccination, regardless of the presence, absence and severity of side-effects.

Veenu Manoharan 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.

A creek running through the city of Ames in central Iowa was officially renamed from Squaw Creek to Ioway Creek in February 2021, after a yearlong process that involved local and federal agencies. The previous name is now considered an offensive reference to Native American women. The creek’s new name honors the original Indigenous inhabitants of the area, the Ioway or Baxoje nation.

(I have used the full earlier name of the creek, only this one time, for clarity. Later in the piece I will refer to it as “sq—w,” to emphasize that it is a slur.)

The City Council of Ames had voted unanimously in January 2020 to change the name. Its decision affirmed a similar vote earlier that month by the Story County Board of Supervisors. These votes were in response to a petition filed by an Ames resident, which itself was preceded by long-standing interest from Native American students in initiating a change.

As a scholar of American and Indigenous history, I have studied representations of Native American cultures in American public history and memory. While seemingly a minor local issue affecting residents of a few counties in Iowa, the renaming of Ioway Creek is part of a larger trend throughout the Midwest and the country.

This trend involves changing Native-inspired place names from slurs or markers of Euro-American conquest to names that reflect Indigenous languages, histories and mapmaking.

Respect for Native history

One example of this occurred in 2016 in the Black Hills of South Dakota, an area with religious and political significance to the Lakota and other Native nations. Harney Peak – named after a U.S. general infamous for killing Native Americans – was renamed Black Elk Peak, honoring a revered Lakota leader.

A similar change occurred in Minnesota, home to Dakota and Anishinaabe communities. The largest lake in Minneapolis had been named after John C. Calhoun, the Southern politician who supported slavery and the dispossession of Native Americans from their homelands in the South through the 1830 Indian Removal Act. The Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed in 2020 that the Department of Natural Resources had the authority to rename the lake Bde Maka Ska, meaning “White Earth Lake” in Dakota.

Replacing racist and sexist slurs

Media studies scholar Debra Merskin has studied the use and effects of the term “sq—w” in literature and public discourse. She argues that language is never neutral, and that the derogatory term evokes stereotypes of Native women as servile – confined to a life of drudgery and sexual favors.

This is especially important considering what some activists describe as an epidemic of violence against Native American women. They are 2.5 times more likely than members of any other ethnic group to experience intimate partner violence. As documented by legal scholar Sarah Deer, a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, this is due in part to jurisdictional issues that limit the prosecution of non-Native men who assault Native American women on reservations.

Native American women also face higher rates of murder, prompting the creation of a federal unit to address the issue.

Some opponents to the Ioway Creek name change have pointed out that the term “sq—w” originally was not offensive. Historical sources support this point. The 1910 Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, published by the Smithsonian Institution, contains an entry for “sq—w.”

According to this entry, it was derived from a term used by the Narragansetts, whose original homelands are on the Eastern Seaboard, to refer to “an Indian woman.” This source notes that Euro-Americans picked up the term from the Narragansetts and spread it beyond its original context – which is not uncommon when different linguistic groups come into contact.

However, the original meaning of words can shift over time, and “sq—w” has developed derogatory connotations since the mid-20th century. In its notes on usage, the Oxford American Dictionary explains that “the word cannot now be used in any sense without being offensive.”

In 2015, the now-defunct news site Vocativ conducted a study of place names that include racial slurs and found that those containing “sq—w” were the most pervasive.

This particular slur has engendered multiple name changes throughout the U.S. in recent years — among them a ski resort in California, a lake in Wisconsin, a road in Pennsylvania and a mountain peak in Massachusetts.

Name changes reflect cultural changes

The U.S. Board of Geographic Names, or BGN, holds a long-established authority over geographic place names in the U.S. It considers changes for names that are derogatory or offensive and does not approve any new place names that fall into those categories.

In 1963, the BGN decided that any place names containing the derogatory slur used to refer to African Americans would be changed. It made a similar decision for the slur referring to Japanese people in 1974.

All other offensive terms must go through the process followed in Ames: An individual submits an official request that the BGN then considers, with input from local entities.

A collective of geoscientists is currently advocating for a more proactive process for updating racist names. The Reconciliation in Place Names Act, introduced in 2020 by then-U.S. Rep. Debra Haaland, would require the BGN to identify and change racist place names instead of waiting for individual proposals.

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While the BGN is the official federal clearinghouse and arbiter of name changes, it does rely on input from civic, county, state and tribal governments. Many states have their own advisory committees that respond to requests received by the BGN. When deliberating the Ioway Creek name change, officials in Ames and Story County consulted with tribal historic preservation officers, local experts and residents. This reflects a growing trend of collaboration and consultation among civic and state governments with tribal nations.

Ultimately, the goal of this process is not to erase history. Rather, it’s to include a fuller representation of stakeholders in deliberations about the significance of sites with shared – and sometimes conflicting – cultural significance.

Sarah Dees 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 concerns grow regarding the protection of USF’s Forest Preserve against future development, community members are rolling up their sleeves to make sure their voices are heard and the land remains untouched for years to come.

The Hillsborough Board of County Commissioners voted unanimously Wednesday afternoon to begin investigations on the conservation value and acquisition of USF’s northern property, which includes the USF Forest Preserve, through the Jan K. Platt Environmental Lands Acquisition and Protection Program (ELAPP).

The commissioners expressed concern about the wetlands and sandhills located within the preserve. They noted they would be cautious when evaluating whether or not the land could be recommended for the ELAPP program, which would help permanently preserve the land, since the land is owned by USF.

Despite concerns, the commissioners were unanimously in favor of extending the offer to USF to see if it needed assistance or advice in its initiatives while not swaying the university in either direction in light of the Request for Information (RFI).

The university submitted April 1 the RFI, a document to gather interest from developers for potential future area development, to request “information only” responses from outside developers for potential projects to develop the area comprising the USF golf course The Claw, as well as the USF Forest Preserve.

The purpose of the RFI was to aid the university in gauging interest and obtain information on potential projects that could “provide greater financial resources to support the university’s mission and benefit our students, faculty and staff,” according to university spokesperson Adam Freeman.

Concerns about the preserve’s conservation were also brought to Wednesday’s Faculty Senate meeting, during which David Lewis, a professor of integrative biology, gave a presentation on the importance of the area to protect endangered animal species and plant habitats as well as conserve its cultural heritage. He said the area contains several archaeological artifacts representing the history of Indigenous people in the area.

During his presentation, Lewis emphasized the implications that future development could have beyond the area’s biodiversity.

“Much of that biodiversity, much of that cultural heritage and much of our opportunity to learn about the way all of those are integrated across the landscape are really imperiled by the development and I think that would be a loss for scholarship, learning and USF’s ability to serve its student community,” Lewis said.

Out of the preserve’s 769-acre area, Lewis said the only part that could be developed is its upland scrub habitat, consisting of a 118-acre parcel. While the area is small in size, he said its value to the Tampa Bay area is immeasurable as it makes up more than 50% of Hillsborough County’s scrub habitat.

“The only logistically feasible area to develop would be the sandhill habitat,” Lewis said in an interview with The Oracle. “You’re talking about diminishing something that is already super rare, so there is simply no way to do any kind of development out there that really respects the need to preserve endangered species.”

While the RFI suggests the university’s interest to develop in the area, Freeman said the university will evaluate the proposals without having to take any actions that would lead to a project development.

“USF is not required to take action on any of the proposals submitted by developers,” Freeman said in an email to The Oracle. “The university is only gauging demand and listening to proposals at this time.”

He said the funds generated annually from a ground lease on the property could be invested in an endowment, which could potentially be used for scholarships, recruitment as well as research.

For Lewis, the idea behind submitting an RFI has other meanings.

“This idea of only gauging interest or only gauging demand … I don’t know what the ‘only’ is in that sentence means,” he said. “Gauging demand means that they’re interested in having that land developed and seen some loss of what is already an incredibly rare habitat for endangered species.”

As the USF Forest Preserve is designated as federal wetlands, which includes protected species ranging from gopher tortoises to bobcats, Freeman said any proposal submitted to the university by outside developers would need to abide by existing restrictions focused on preservation.

“Proposals received by the university must consider options for mitigation, protecting wildlife and preserving unique natural features of the property in order to minimize any environmental impacts,” he said.

“Any potential project would have to fall within existing restrictions for the development of the property pursuant to USF’s master plan, City of Tampa codes and ordinances and the requirements of other agencies.”

Any development in the preserve, according to Lewis, would lead to “a net loss of habitat.”

Lewis said USF’s stewardship of the land covering the preserve helps protect hundreds of plant and animal species that are either endangered, threatened or imperiled in terms of their abundances.

“There are over 400 plant species that have been documented out there, and probably an equivalent number of animal species when you include insects, and who knows how many microorganisms about diversity that you find that extends well beyond just a list of species,” he said.

Within the preserve, he said, there are also many stages of Indigenous occupancy dating back 10,000 years. He said the area has a significant value not only for its biodiversity but also for its archeological artifacts.

“Archaeologists suspect that there are many stages of Indigenous occupancy of this area so it’s mostly just that there were some people there at the time of European contact … The place hosts many layers of human history as far as we’re aware, some of which may date back more than 10,000 years,” Lewis said.

“That’s the kind of stuff that one finds out there. A lot of cultural heritage and biodiversity whether you’re counting endangered species or considering the way they’re all connected to one another.”

The university’s interest to hear proposals for a potential development at the preserve led to a community backlash — including the creation of a petition with thousands of signatures.

The petition, created by environmental policy student Ryan Hurley on April 10, has garnered more than 15,000 signatures in less than two weeks. The petition advocates for the implementation of a conservation easement “on the land and preserve in perpetuity.”

The last time Hurley visited the preserve was in March, a month before he heard the news of the RFI and decided to create the petition.

“So I just been out there, taking a bunch of pictures, just exploring and enjoying the nature, and then I see this request for information that says ‘USF wants to develop it,’” he said. “Being an environmental student, I have been to many classes at USF that teach me about this kind of ecosystem and this environment, why we need to be preserving them … so to see USF kind of turn around and say, ‘Hey, let’s develop this property,’ felt very hypocritical.

“And it also kind of felt like a betrayal to a lot of the environmental students who know about this kind of place and this ecosystem and know how important it is.”

Among their requests, students are demanding the university “immediately” withdraw its RFI as well as establish a conservation easement to limit the development “on all wetlands and upland habitats.” In addition, the group also requests the designation of a full-time land manager for the preserve.

During the meeting, some faculty proposed the passing of a resolution supporting the preservation of the USF Forest Preserve in perpetuity, however, Richard Manning, a philosophy professor and member of the Faculty Senate, said the Faculty Senate should “hear the other side” before announcing a stance on the issue.

“I do think I would love us to pass a resolution. I think it would be more effective if we did so having offered the opportunity to speak to anyone who is in the works trying to push forward the development,” Manning said.

“We should at least hear the other side, if there is another side. If anybody has a case to be made for development, we should at least hear it before we declare ourselves. It would put us in a rhetorically much stronger position.”

The university administration, including USF President Steven Currall and Provost Ralph Wilcox, will meet with faculty “to better understand the genesis of this RFI and the process that would be followed was this to advance.”

In response to faculty concerns, Wilcox reaffirmed USF’s commitment to the area’s conservation while keeping the door open for potential projects that could strengthen the institution.

“At the moment I can tell you, I will be a strong advocate … for utilizing the university’s existing resources to support our students, our faculty and our core academic mission at the university,” he said.

“That having been said, there are leaders who rightfully believe that it’s their responsibility to explore, on occasion, available assets of the university, and perhaps even how those assets might be monetized responsibly to benefit the [university].”

While there are no plans set in stone yet, Wilcox said the process won’t be rushed.

“I have been assured on a number of levels now that there is no intention to accelerate this. And I accept my responsibility pretty seriously when it comes to such matters.”

The meeting, which will be held “at the end of the week,” will include Senior Vice President for Business and Financial Strategy David Lechner to speak on the RFI’s intent and its process.

When it comes to the RFI, Hurley said the preservation of the USF Forest Preserve outweighs the financial interests the area’s development might bring.

“I understand how they could see we could potentially financially benefit, but we can’t always look at everything from a financial standpoint. And this ecosystem provides way more for the university than money,” Hurley said. “I just hope the leadership at USF can recognize that.”

The preserve is far from being considered “undeveloped,” according to Lewis.

“I think it is a highly developed area as a resource for our university. It’s a critical teaching resource,” he said.

The preserve has enabled students, as well as USF researchers, to further enhance their knowledge in the field of science, according to Lewis.

“The [USF Forest Preserve] has provided the scientific community with much of what it knows. So it’s not just a local resource that’s convenient for us but it has been critical to the scientific community for understanding things like gopher tortoises and fire ecology and stuff like that,” he said.

“The area also provides a lot of free benefits for society that we don’t have to pay for. We don’t have to pay for expensive carbon capture technology, we don’t have to pay for expensive water filtration services. The Forest Preserve does it for us.”

Among the “ecosystem services” provided by the preserve, it also includes the storage of around 20,000-25,000 tons of carbon, water filtration from the wetlands as well as scrubbing pollution from the air, according to Lewis. He said the financial savings can sum up to anywhere around $1.5-$2 million.

The issue around preservation should be made a priority, according to Lewis. In his view, USF’s position regarding the preserve’s future can determine how it is viewed as an institution beyond campus borders.

“I am optimistic that the university recognizes the value of the Forest Preserve and I think that by recognizing the Forest Preserve and putting the principle of preservation in the foreground it will benefit USF and the wider region very positively,” Lewis said.

“I think by keeping an intact preserve, this allows the university to show its leadership as a steward of land and heritage.”

USF announced April 1 that it is allowing companies to send proposals to develop on 769 acres of untouched land it owns, called the USF Forest Preserve, between the USF’s golf course The Claw and Riverfront Park, potentially destroying ecosystems crucial to the survival of many species in the area. 

Although the university has yet to announce if it will build on the land, ecologists are already aware of the damages construction would cause environmentally and economically, hurting the Native American land on which the preserve exists and the endangered species that live within. 

The Hillsborough Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) voted unanimously April 21 to have staff investigate ways to protect the land through the Jan K. Platt Environmental Lands Acquisition and Protection Program. This program would allow the state to acquire the land and continue to preserve it, which would be the ideal solution for the environmental activists and students who are outraged by USF’s announcement. 

The land must be preserved to allow USF to reap the environmental, economic and ethical benefits of the Forest Preserve’s protection. 

The preserve, which is used for research by USF’s environmental, biology and botany students, is inhabited by rare ecosystems and animals. The sandhill crane, a federally protected bird under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, inhabits 31 acres of the Forest Preserve, making it illegal for developers to kill or capture the endangered species. 

Other endangered animals that live on the land which cannot risk being killed or displaced include the gopher tortoise, fox squirrel, Florida mouse, eastern indigo snake, little blue heron and ceraunus blue butterfly, according to information provided in a letter to the USF administration by some of the university’s doctoral students and sent to The Oracle. 

There are also over 400 species of plant life on the preserve of which nine are endangered, 13 exist only in Florida and four exist nowhere else in Hillsborough County, according to the letter. 

Most of the 769 acres is federally protected due to its rare floodplain wetlands, according to the letter by doctoral students who have studied the land, meaning development on the preserve would be detrimental to the limited intact wetlands Florida still holds and may even be illegal to destroy.

It is legal to conduct controlled propagation, or the legal movement of wild animals to new habitats, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services, but USF’s developers would not be able to relocate all of the animals and plants that rely on the land since much of the plants and wildlife that are endangered on the preserve have limited habitable locations. 

Preserving the 769 acres would also benefit USF economically. Through USF’s graduate students, the university receives an annual S-STEM grant of $1 million to continue its research, which is conducted on the Forest Preserve.

Doctoral candidate in the Department of Integrative Biology Stephen Hesterberg, one of the doctoral students who worked on the open letter, confirmed that preserving the land could be financially beneficial through a conservation easement, a legal agreement with the state to ban the development on the protected property.

“Designating some portions of the property as preserved through a legally binding conservation easement could actually reduce the property taxes or provide direct revenue so long as the land was left undeveloped,” said Hesterberg in an interview with The Oracle. 

“Unfortunately, rather than try to seek financial benefit from the property through innovative and sustainable ways they are instead trying to do the opposite.”

There is no negative economic impact if the university continues to protect and preserve the land. Instead, it could be potentially saving money through tax breaks and grants. 

USF’s Northern Property, where the Forest Preserve is located, is also home to nine recorded Native American archeological sites, according to research collected by the doctoral students protesting USF’s potential development. To build on top of Indigenous land is a continuation of the erasure of culture Americans have contributed to for hundreds of years. 

The land contains historical artifacts and resources that, if built on top of, will be lost forever due to the carelessness of USF. 

After USF submitted a Request for Information on April 1 asking developers to pitch proposals for the land’s potential, USF students and faculty showed disdain for the university’s decision to demolish the preserve through the creation of a petition created by environmental policy student Ryan Hurley and protesting through social media. The petition had received almost 17,000 signatures as of Wednesday evening.

While USF continues to pursue its options for the land’s development, students, faculty and Tampa Bay residents must fight back through protests and petitions to stop the university from destroying the habitat of hundreds of plant and animal species. 

The Forest Preserve may end up in the hands of the state through the Jan K. Platt Environmental Lands Acquisition and Protection Program, but USF’s lack of awareness for the environmental and ethical weight of the land is contradictory to its common praise for the university’s social consciousness.

On April 21, the Times Higher Education’s 2021 Impact Rankings ranked USF third in a national analysis of 45 public universities and their contributions to sustainable development. The university also ranked 20th on an international level out of 1,115 other public universities. 

If USF wants to live up to the praise of prestigious rankings and its own preeminent title, it needs to work with the BOCC to preserve the land and discontinue plans for development.

USF’s untouched 769 acres of land is home to plants, animals and Indigenous artifacts that the state cannot risk being damaged for environmental and ethical reasons. The university would benefit morally and economically by leaving the Forest Preserve as it is and working with the state government to gain a conservation easement, protecting the land and its inhabitants. 

Earlier this week, songwriter/composer Jim Steinman passed away at age 73. While perhaps best known as the goth-metal classicist behind "Total Eclipse Of The Heart," "It's All Coming Back," and Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell album, Steinman also spent 4 years working on an as-yet-unproduced Batman musical — the demos of which can still be found online. — Read the rest

Sorting through the vast amount of information created and shared online is challenging, even for the experts.

Just talking about this ever-shifting landscape is confusing, with terms like “misinformation,” “disinformation” and “hoax” getting mixed up with buzzwords like “fake news.”

Misinformation is perhaps the most innocent of the terms – it’s misleading information created or shared without the intent to manipulate people. An example would be sharing a rumor that a celebrity died, before finding out it’s false.

Disinformation, by contrast, refers to deliberate attempts to confuse or manipulate people with dishonest information. These campaigns, at times orchestrated by groups outside the U.S., such as the Internet Research Agency, a well-known Russian troll factory, can be coordinated across multiple social media accounts and may also use automated systems, called bots, to post and share information online. Disinformation can turn into misinformation when spread by unwitting readers who believe the material.

Hoaxes, similar to disinformation, are created to persuade people that things that are unsupported by facts are true. For example, the person responsible for the celebrity-death story has created a hoax.

Though many people are just paying attention to these problems now, they are not new – and they even date back to ancient Rome. Around 31 B.C., Octavian, a Roman military official, launched a smear campaign against his political enemy, Mark Antony. This effort used, as one writer put it, “short, sharp slogans written on coins in the style of archaic Tweets.” His campaign was built around the point that Antony was a soldier gone awry: a philanderer, a womanizer and a drunk not fit to hold office. It worked. Octavian, not Antony, became the first Roman emperor, taking the name Augustus Caesar.

The University of Missouri example

In the 21st century, new technology makes manipulation and fabrication of information simple. Social networks make it easy for uncritical readers to dramatically amplify falsehoods peddled by governments, populist politicians and dishonest businesses.

Our research focuses specifically on how certain types of disinformation can turn what might otherwise be normal developments in society into major disruptions.

One sobering example we’ve reviewed in detail is a situation you might remember: racial tensions at the University of Missouri in 2015, in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri. One of us, Michael O'Brien, was dean of the university’s College of Arts and Science at the time and saw firsthand the protests and their aftermath.

Black students at the university, just over 100 miles to the west of Ferguson, raised concerns about their safety, civil rights and racial equity in society and on campus. Unhappy with the university’s responses, they began to protest.

The incident that got the most national attention involved a white professor in the communication department pushing student journalists away from an area where Black students had congregated in the center of campus, yelling, “I need some muscle over here!” in an effort to keep reporters at bay.

Other events didn’t get as much national coverage, including a hunger strike by a Black student and the resignations of university leaders. But there was enough publicity about racial tensions for Russian information warriors to take notice.

Soon, the hashtag #PrayforMizzou, created by Russian hackers using the university’s nickname, began trending on Twitter, warning residents that the Ku Klux Klan was in town and had joined the local police to hunt down Black students. A photo surfaced on Facebook purporting to show a large white cross burning on the lawn of the university’s library.

A Twitter user claimed the police were marching with the KKK, tweeting: “They beat up my little brother! Watch out!” and a picture of a black child with a severely bruised face. This user was later found to be a Russian troll who went on to spread rumors about Syrian refugees.

These were a rich mix of different types of false information. The photos of the burning cross and the bruised child were hoaxes – the photos were legitimate, but their context was fabricated. A Google search for “bruised black child,” for example, revealed that it was a year-old picture from a disturbance in Ohio.

The rumor about the KKK on campus started as disinformation by Russian hackers and then spread as misinformation, even ensnaring the student-body president, a young Black man who posted a warning on Facebook. When it became clear the information was false, he deleted the post.

The fallout

Undoubtedly, not all of the fallout from the Mizzou protests was the direct result of disinformation and hoaxes. But the disruptions were factors in big changes in student numbers.

In the two years following the protests, the university saw a 35% drop in freshman enrollment and an overall enrollment drop of 14%. That caused campus university officials to cut about 12% – or US$55 million – from the university’s budget, including significant layoffs of faculty and staff. Even today, the campus is not yet back to what it was before the protests, financially, socially or politically.

The take-home message is clear: the world is a dangerous place, made all the more so by malevolent intent, especially in the online age. Learning to recognize misinformation, disinformation and hoaxes helps people stay better informed about what’s really happening.

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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.

With the news that all U.S. adults are now eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, the holy grail of infectious disease mitigation – herd immunity – feels tantalizingly close. If enough people take the vaccine, likely at least 70% of the population, disease prevalence will slowly decline and most of us will safely get back to normal. But if not enough people get vaccinated, COVID-19 could stick around indefinitely.

The urgency of reaching that milestone has led some to claim that individuals have a civic duty or moral obligation to get vaccinated.

As a moral philosopher who has written on the nature of obligation in other contexts, I want to explore how the seemingly straightforward ethics of vaccine choice is in fact rather complex.

The simple argument

The discussion of whether or not one should take the COVID-19 vaccine is often framed in terms of individual self-interest: The benefits outweigh the risk, so you should do it.

That’s not a moral argument.

Most people likely believe that others have wide latitude in determining how they care for their own health, so it can be permissible to engage in risky activities – such as motorcycling or base jumping – even when it’s not in one’s interest. Whether one should get vaccinated, however, is a moral issue because it affects others, and in a couple of ways.

First, effective vaccines are expected to decrease not only rates of infection but also rates of virus transmission. This means that getting the vaccine can protect others from you and contribute to the population reaching herd immunity.

Second, high disease prevalence allows for more genetic mutation of a virus, which is how new variants arise. If enough people aren’t vaccinated quickly, new variants may develop that are more infectious, are more dangerous or evade current vaccines.

The straightforward ethical argument, then, says: Getting vaccinated isn’t just about you. Yes, you have the right to take risks with your own safety. But as the British philosopher John Stuart Mill argued in 1859, your freedom is limited by the harm it could do to others. In other words, you do not have the right to risk other people’s health, and so you are obligated to do your part to reduce infection and transmission rates.

It’s a plausible argument. But the case is rather more complicated.

Individual action, collective good

The first problem with the argument above is that it moves from the claim that “My freedom is limited by the harm it would cause others” to the much more contentious claim that “My freedom is limited by very small contributions my action might make to large, collective harms.”

Refusing to be vaccinated does not violate Mill’s harm principle, as it does not directly threaten some particular other with significant harm. Rather, it contributes a very small amount to a large, collective harm.

Since no individual vaccination achieves herd immunity or eliminates genetic mutation, it is natural to wonder: Could we really have a duty to make such a very small contribution to the collective good?

A version of this problem has been well explored in the climate ethics literature, since individual actions are also inadequate to address the threat of climate change. In that context, a well-known paper argues that the answer is “no”: There is simply no duty to act if your action won’t make a meaningful difference to the outcome.

Others, however, have explored a variety of ways to rescue the idea that individuals must not contribute to collective harms.

One strategy is to argue that small individual actions may actually make a difference to large collective effects, even if it’s difficult to see.

For instance: Although it appears that an individual getting vaccinated doesn’t make a significant difference to the outcome, perhaps that is just the result of uncareful moral mathematics. One’s chance of saving a life by reducing infection or transmission is very small, but saving a life is very valuable. The expected value of the outcome, then, is still high enough to justify taking it to be a moral requirement.

Another strategy concedes that individual actions don’t make a meaningful difference to large, structural problems, but this doesn’t mean morality must be silent with regard to those actions. Considerations of fairness, virtue and integrity all might recommend taking individual action toward a collective goal – even if that action did not by itself make a difference.

In addition, these and other considerations can provide reasons to act, even if they don’t imply an obligation to act.

The contours of obligation

There is yet another challenge in justifying an obligation to get vaccinated, which has to do with the very nature of obligations.

Obligations are requirements on actions, and, as such, those actions often seem demandable by members of the moral community. If a person is obligated to donate to charity, then other members of the community have the moral standing to demand a percentage of their income. That money is owed to others.

The relevant question here, then, is: Are there moral grounds to demand another person get vaccinated?

Philosopher Margaret Little has argued that very intimate actions, such as sex and gestation – the continuation of a pregnancy – are not demandable. In my own work, I’ve suggested that this is also true for deciding how to form a family – for example, adopting a child versus procreating. The intimacy of the actions, I argue, make it the case that no one is entitled to them. Someone can ask you for sex, and there are good reasons to adopt rather than procreate; but no one in the community has the moral standing to demand that you do either. These sorts of examples suggest that particularly intimate actions are not the appropriate targets of obligation.

Is getting vaccinated intimate? While it may not appear so at first blush, it involves having a substance injected into your body, which is a form of bodily intimacy. It requires allowing another to puncture the barrier between your body and the world. In fact, most medical procedures are the sort of thing that it seems inappropriate to demand of someone, as individuals have unilateral moral authority over what happens to their bodies.

The argument presented here objects to intimate duties because they seem too invasive. However, even if members of the moral community don’t have the standing to demand that others vaccinate, they are not required to stay silent; they may ask, request or entreat, based on very good reasons. And of course, no one is required to interact with those who decline.

The upshot

I am certainly not trying to convince anyone that it’s OK not to get vaccinated. Indeed, the arguments throughout indicate, I think, that there is overwhelming reason to get vaccinated. But reasons – even when overwhelming – don’t constitute a duty, and they don’t make an action demandable.

Acting as though the moral case is straightforward can be alienating to those who disagree. And minimizing the moral stakes when we ask others to have a substance injected into their body can be disrespectful. A much better way, I think, is to engage others rather than demand from them, even if the force of reason ends up clearly on one side.

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Travis N. Rieder 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.

Last week, the chief executive of Pfizer said anyone who receives its COVID-19 vaccine will probably need to have a third dose within 6-12 months after being fully immunised, and then likely one dose every year going forward.

We’ll need these because it’s likely that, for many of us, immunity will begin to wane within that time frame. The vaccine will also need to be tweaked to cover new coronavirus variants as they emerge.

The advantage of mRNA vaccines like Pfizer’s is they’re much easier to update than the “viral vector” vaccines like AstraZeneca’s. We should still use AstraZeneca now for over-50s, but our best long-term strategy is to use mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, and therefore to develop the capacity to manufacture them here in Australia.

Immunity to coronaviruses doesn’t last

We know our immunity to different coronaviruses wanes over time. This is true for the four common cold (endemic) coronaviruses that circulate all the time — there are always sufficient numbers of people who have lost their immunity to ensure these viruses can persist and continue to cause respiratory illnesses.

Our immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, also seems to wane quickly, although the rate at which this happens can be quite variable. Data suggest immunity acquired from the Pfizer shot is pretty robust for six months, but it isn’t clear how quickly our immunity is lost after that. However, it’s reasonable to predict that within 12 months of a population being vaccinated, a substantial number of people will have likely lost protection against SARS-CoV-2. This will particularly be the case if the prevalent SARS-CoV-2 strain circulating at that time is substantially different from the virus against which people were originally vaccinated.

This relates to the fact that some coronavirus variants have mutations that reduce the effectiveness of vaccine-induced immunity. They’ve been described as “variants of concern” and include a virus that originated in South Africa, which has reduced the efficacy of both the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines. As the pandemic surges around the world, more variants will certainly crop up.

Both waning immunity and viral variants will conspire to reduce our protection over time. So we’ll need booster shots, ideally updated to deal with the viral variant that poses the greatest threat.

Using AstraZeneca is not our best long-term solution

I understand why Australia’s government originally prioritised getting the AstraZeneca vaccine. It’s easier to manufacture, store and distribute. It made sense in the early stages of the pandemic. And it’s still an effective vaccine that people, here and abroad, should be receiving as soon as possible — any immunity is better than none and you will certainly be protected from severe COVID-19.

But as time goes on, using the AstraZeneca shot isn’t the best long-term strategy.

One reason for this is what immunologists call “vector immunity”. The AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines use a viral vector, which is an inactivated (cannot replicate) form of a common type of virus called an “adenovirus”. They use this adenovirus as a delivery vehicle to get DNA into our cells to give them the instructions to develop immunity against the coronavirus. However, you can’t be repeatedly immunised with this type of vaccine because you’ll likely develop immunity to the adenovirus vector (the delivery vehicle) itself. When that happens your immune system interferes with the delivery vehicle getting into your cells and the effectiveness of these vaccines would erode over time.

What’s more, in a very, very small number of people, this viral vector seems to be linked with an extremely rare but serious blood clotting syndrome. In these people, it’s thought that a consequence of the immune response to the viral vector is their immune systems make “auto-antibodies”. These are antibodies that, in addition to fighting a foreign invader (or targeting the adenovirus-based vector used in the AstraZeneca vaccine), also attack our own cells. In this case, these auto-antibodies are attacking blood cells called platelets, leading to the blood clots and low platelet counts seen in around 1 in 250,000 people vaccinated with the AstraZeneca shot.

There are also clotting concerns with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is also an adenovirus-vector-based vaccine, after six women developed the condition in the United States out of 6.8 million given the shot. However, this link is yet to be proven for this vaccine.

À lire aussi : What is thrombocytopenia, the rare blood condition possibly linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine?

By contrast, mRNA vaccines like Pfizer’s (and Moderna’s) can be updated much more quickly. Pfizer just needs to rework its RNA sequence to cover variants, which is a minor modification. Nothing changes about the delivery system of the vaccine, so reapproval will likely be much easier. Regulatory bodies have indicated there will be a quick path for approval for vaccines updated for variants.

À lire aussi : Why we'll get COVID booster vaccines quickly and how we know they're safe

The mRNA vaccines consist of a lipid-based delivery system that protects the mRNA and gets it into cells. Then, the cells can start manufacturing the spike protein to present to your immune system. There’s no protein in the vaccine itself, so there’s no chance of developing immunity to the vaccine components.

mRNA vaccines are our best bet going forward

There’s a fear among researchers, including myself, that we’ll be chasing our tails with these new variants. We’ll identify a new variant and set out to update our vaccines against it, but by the time the formulation is updated, approved, manufactured and distributed, we may already be dealing with another variant, or many variants across different locations.

It’s absolutely vital Australia develops the ability to make mRNA vaccines onshore, particularly if new variants pop up here or in our region. This will be far more effective than waiting months to get new shots from overseas.

À lire aussi : Australia may miss out on several COVID vaccines if it can't make mRNA ones locally

Federal health minister Greg Hunt has indicated Australia is interested in developing this capacity.

Right now, the AstraZeneca vaccine still has a role in Australia’s current vaccine strategy. We have it and we can make more of it, so let’s get it out there for over-50s as well as give those under 50 the opportunity to make an informed choice to have this vaccine.

So few Australians currently have immunity to the virus, we remain vulnerable to outbreaks. If there are new outbreaks, we would have to rely on lockdowns, masks and other strategies again, and could find ourselves back to where we were last year. And let’s not forget people will become ill and some will die. The vaccine rollout is lagging, and we really need to catch up as soon as possible.

But as time goes on, the AstraZeneca vaccine will become less attractive, and mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer’s should eventually take its place.

Nathan Bartlett 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.

The killings of African Americans at the hands of police officers has continued unabated in the United States. In the past year, the deaths of Breonna Taylor in her bed and George Floyd by public asphyxiation are two of the most egregious.

As the officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck was being tried for the killing in court, another officer shot and killed Daunte Wright.

Scholarly research has begun to document the traumatic consequences of police killings on African Americans. One study finds the effects on Black males meet the “criteria for trauma exposure,” based on the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, used for psychiatric diagnoses.

Besides police use of force in North America, one of the trajectories of my research focuses on armed insurgency in sub-Saharan Africa. I am beginning to observe in the U.S. some of the social conditions necessary for the maturation and rise of an armed insurgency. The U.S. is at risk of armed insurgencies within the next five years if the current wave of killings of unarmed Black people continues.

Conditions for insurgency

To begin, the armed insurgencies would not have a defined organizational structure. They may look like Mexico’s Zapatista movement or the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta in Nigeria.

Entities operating independently will spring up, but over time, a loose coalition may form to take credit for actions of organizationally disparate groups for maximum effect. There will likely be no single leader to neutralize at the onset. Like U.S. global counter-terrorism efforts, neutralizing leaders will only worsen matters.

Using research and contextual experience from the developing world to make predictions about the U.S. in this regard is apt. There are many interrelated conditions for the rise of an armed insurgency. None of them in and of itself can lead to an armed insurgency, but requires a host of variables within social and political processes.

Transgenerational oppression of an identifiable group is one of the pre-conditions for an armed insurgency, but this is hardly news. What the U.S. has managed to institute on a national and comprehensive scale is what sociologist Jock Young calls “cultural inclusion and structural exclusion.”

A strong sense of injustice, along with significant moments, events and episodes — like the killings of Taylor and Floyd — are also important.

The racialized trauma from police killings adds to the growing sense of alienation and frustration felt by African Americans, but police killings aren’t the only way they experience disproportionate death rates.

African Americans have the second highest per capita death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic: 179.8 deaths per 100,000 (second only to Indigenous Americans with 256.0 deaths per 100,000). They are also at a higher risk of death from cancer, for example. The pandemic has compounded these deaths, adding to the disproportionately high unemployment rate and the impact of layoffs during the pandemic.

Potential insurgents

There is another, related variable: The availability of people willing and able to participate in such insurgency. The U.S. has potential candidates in abundance. Criminal records — sometimes for relatively minor offences — that mar Black males for life, have taken care of this critical supply. One study estimates that while eight per cent of the U.S. general population has felony convictions, the figure is 33 per cent among African American males.

Some of these men may gradually be reaching the point where they believe they have nothing to lose. Some will join for revenge, others for the thrill of it and many for the dignity of the people they feel have been trampled on for too long. Although 93 per cent of protest against police brutality is peaceful and involves no major harm to people and property, there is no guarantee that future protests about new police killings will remain peaceful.

The legitimacy of grievances of Black Americans among their fellow citizens is also an important variable. Their grievances appear to have found strong resonance and increasing sympathy within the broader population. Many Latino, Native American and white people see the injustices against Black people and are appalled. Black Lives Matter protests are now major multicultural events, particularly among young adults.

Read more: Derek Chauvin trial begins in George Floyd murder case: 5 essential reads on police violence against Black men

A sense that there are no legitimate channels to address the grievances or that those channels have been exhausted is also crucial. This is evident in the failure to convict or even try police officers involved in several of the incidents. A grand jury could not indict the officer whose chokehold led to the death of Eric Garner, despite video evidence. Such cases have led to a troubling loss of trust in the criminal justice system.

Mode of operation

Any anti-police insurgency in the U.S. will likely start as an urban-based guerrilla-style movement. Attacks may be carried out on sites and symbols of law enforcement. Small arms and improvised explosive devices will likely be weapons of choice, which are relatively easy to acquire and build, respectively. The U.S. has the highest number of civilian firearms in the world with 120.5 guns per 100 persons or more than 393 million guns.

Critical infrastructure and government buildings may be targeted after business hours. The various groups will initially seek to avoid civilian casualties, and this may help to garner a level of support among the socially marginal from various backgrounds. The public would be concerned but relatively secure in understanding that only the police are being targeted. Escalation may ensue through copycat attacks.

The U.S. government will seem to have a handle on the insurgency at first but will gradually come to recognize that this is different. African American leaders will likely be helpless to stop the insurgency. Anyone who strongly denounces it in public may lose credibility among the people. Authenticity would mean developing a way to accommodate the insurgents in public rhetoric while condemning them in private.

Moving forward

I am often amazed that many people appear unaware that Nelson Mandela was co-founder of uMkhonto we Sizwe, the violent youth wing of the African National Congress, which carried out bombings in South Africa. The rationale provided in court by Mandela regarding his use of violence is instructive. Mandela told a South African court in 1963:

I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people…. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.

To predict that an armed insurgency may happen in the U.S. is not the same as wishing for it to happen: It is not inevitable, and it can and should be avoided.

Police reform is a first step. A comprehensive criminal justice overhaul is overdue, including addressing the flaws inherent in trial by jury, which tends to produce mind-boggling results in cases involving police killings. Finally, the judgment in the trial of Derek Chauvin for George Floyd’s death will have an impact on the trajectory of any possible future events.

Temitope Oriola and his research team received SSHRC funding for research on police use of force in Canada.

As mass vaccination continues to be rolled out, the UK is beginning to see encouraging signs that the number of COVID deaths is reducing, and that the vaccines may be reducing the transmission of coronavirus.

While this is very welcome news, a mass vaccination programme is unlikely to be enough to eliminate the virus, so we need to turn our thoughts towards the ethics of the long-term management of COVID-19.

One strategy would be to aim for the elimination of the virus within the UK. New Zealand successfully implemented an elimination strategy earlier in the pandemic and is now in a post-elimination stage.

An elimination strategy in the UK would require combining the mass vaccination programme with severe restrictions on international travel to stop new cases and variants of the virus being imported. However, the government has been reluctant to endorse an elimination strategy, given the importance of international trade to the UK economy.

One of the main alternatives to the elimination strategy is to treat coronavirus as endemic to the UK and to aim for long-term suppression of the virus to acceptable levels. But adopting a suppression strategy for the long term will require us to make a societal decision about the harms we are and are not willing to accept.

The liberty, equality and mortality trilemma

The first year of the pandemic has taught us that, without suppression measures, coronavirus will lead to significant death and harm, including long COVID. But evidence suggests that mitigation measures, such as lockdowns and effective test, trace and isolate systems, may be effective in reducing transmission of the virus.

These measures have their own costs. Lockdowns significantly restrict civil liberties and cause a wide range of other harms, including significant non-COVID mortality and morbidity. Recent models suggest that in the long term, the mitigation of the pandemic could lead to 100,000 non-COVID deaths. On the figures from this model, deaths from the virus itself may come to only account for about 54% of the overall death toll of the outbreak in the UK.

The extent of some of the costs of mitigation measures could be lessened by targeting these interventions at certain groups, such as those who have not been vaccinated, or those who have a particularly high risk of death from COVID, such as those over the age of 65. However, these targeted strategies involve forms of unequal treatment and possible discrimination.

This is the fundamental trilemma of the long-term suppression strategy. The societal decision we make about the acceptable level of viral suppression involves a choice about which of three competing values we should prioritise and which we must compromise. We can maximise one or two of these values, but we can’t have all three.

We might be able to reduce COVID deaths while safeguarding equality, but only if we are willing to accept the potential need for future lockdowns, severe travel restrictions, and the costs to freedom and general health that entails. We might be able to reduce COVID deaths while protecting the freedom of those who do not pose a transmission risk by introducing COVID certificates or passports, but only if we are willing to accept the inequality that such schemes involve.

Finally, we can give everyone in society as much freedom as possible, but only if we are willing to accept the increased COVID deaths it will probably involve if the virus has not yet been sufficiently suppressed in other ways.

The moral question about the suppression strategy has been framed as one concerning how many COVID deaths we should be willing to accept each year. This invites comparisons between COVID and annual deaths from other infectious diseases, such as influenza, which has caused fewer than two deaths per 100,000 people per year in European countries since 2000, and those that we have lived with in the past, such as tuberculosis, which caused around 100 deaths per 100,000 people per year in England and Wales at the beginning of the 20th century.

These comparisons are illuminating because they provide a baseline for the number of deaths from an infectious disease that we have historically found acceptable to live with. If we accept a bad flu year with over 22,000 deaths in England without imposing significant societal restrictions, then perhaps we will come to accept the same number of deaths with COVID.

But these comparisons are relevant to only one of the key ethical values. In the context of COVID, we might have to risk a higher number of COVID deaths in the absence of significant societal restrictions or inequality.

To decide what is acceptable on the suppression strategy, we have to confront the fundamental conflict between values in the COVID trilemma.

Jonathan Pugh works for The University of Oxford. This work was supported by the UKRI/ AHRC funded UK Ethics Accelerator project, grant number AH/V013947/1.’ The UK Ethics Accelerator project can be found at https://ukpandemicethics.org/

Dominic Wilkinson receives funding from the Wellcome Trust and the the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of the UK Research and Innovation rapid response to Covid-19 (AH/V013947/1).

Julian Savulescu receives funding from the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education, NHMRC, Wellcome Trust, Australian Research Council, UK Research and Innovation (Arts and Humanities Research Council) as part of the Ethics Accelerator Award AH/V013947/1, WHO. He is a Partner Investigator on an Australian Research Council Linkage award (LP190100841, Oct 2020-2023) which involves industry partnership from Illumina. He does not personally receive any funds from Illumina.

Amid the disturbing rise in attacks on Asian Americans since March 2020 is a troubling category of these assaults: Black people are also attacking Asian Americans.

White people are the main perpetrators of anti-Asian racism. But in February 2021, a Black person pushed an elderly Asian man to the ground in San Francisco; the man later died from his injuries. In another video, from New York City on March 29, 2021, a Black person pushes and beats an Asian American woman on the sidewalk in front of a doorway while onlookers observe the attack, then close their door on the woman without intervening or providing aid.

As the current president of the Association for Asian American Studies and as an ethnic studies and critical race studies professor who specializes in Asian American culture, I wanted to address the climate of anti-Asian racism I was seeing at the start of the pandemic. So in April 2020, I created a PowerPoint slide deck about anti-Asian racism that my employer, the University of Colorado Boulder, turned into a website. That led to approximately 50 interviews, workshops, talks and panel presentations that I’ve done on anti-Asian racism, specifically in the time of COVID-19.

The point I’ve made through all of those experiences is that anti-Asian racism has the same source as anti-Black racism: white supremacy. So when a Black person attacks an Asian person, the encounter is fueled perhaps by racism, but very specifically by white supremacy. White supremacy does not require a white person to perpetuate it.

It’s not just white people

White supremacy is an ideology, a pattern of values and beliefs that are ingrained in nearly every system and institution in the U.S. It is a belief that to be white is to be human and invested with inalienable universal rights and that to be not-white means you are less than human – a disposable object for others to abuse and misuse.

The dehumanization of Asian people by U.S. society is driven by white supremacy and not by any Black person who may or may not hate Asians.

During the pandemic, “yellow peril” rhetoric that blamed China for COVID-19 led to a 150% rise in anti-Asian harassment incidents reported to police in 2020. In particular, East Asian Americans or anyone who appeared to be of East Asian heritage or descent became targets for the misplaced anger of people blaming Chinese people or those they thought looked Chinese, even if they were of other ethnic backgrounds, like Japanese, Taiwanese, Korean, Burmese, Thai or Filipino.

A fear of disease

White supremacy as the root of racism can be seen in the Latino man in Texas stabbing a Burmese family in March 2020, claiming he did so because they were Chinese and bringing the coronavirus into the U.S. Though the suspect may have mental health problems, his belief that this family posed a threat is driven by the white supremacist ideas of Chinese people being to blame for COVID-19.

This same rhetoric of blaming anyone perceived to be Chinese for COVID-19 and attacking them has been found in countless reports of harassment, including one by a Vietnamese American woman who was spat at by a white man as she tried to enter a grocery store in March 2021. Four days later, video footage showed a 76-year-old Chinese woman who was punched in the face by a 39-year-old white man, on the same day that a white man killed eight people, including six Asian women, in Atlanta.

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Stories of individual harassment and violence perpetrated against Asian Americans by white assailants don’t always get the same attention as the viral videos of Black aggression toward Asians.

But underlying all these incidents is white supremacy, just as white supremacy is responsible for Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes: White supremacy made Floyd into a Black male threat rather than a human being.

Understanding the depth and reach of this ideology of racism can be challenging, but doing so brings each person, and the nation as a whole, closer to addressing systemic inequity. It’s not Black people whom Asian Americans need to fear. It’s white supremacy.

Jennifer Ho is affiliated with the Association for Asian American Studies.

When a man consults a doctor about pain, he will hope to be taken seriously: to convince the doctor that the pain is real, and a problem that needs addressing. The experience is different for women, who may suspect that gender stereotypes could lead their doctor to conclude they’re not in as much pain as they say they are.

Unfortunately, this suspicion is valid. Evidence suggests that healthcare staff routinely underestimate patients’ pain, and particularly women’s pain, based on a number of biases and beliefs that have little to do with their actual testimony.

Now, a new study has found gender stereotypes are particularly decisive in the estimation of patients’ pain. Because of the false belief that women are oversensitive to pain, and express or exaggerate it more easily, healthcare staff, both men and women, often discount women’s verbal reports and nonverbal behaviour expressing pain.

Not only do they tend to underestimate women’s pain but, on the basis of their underestimate, they often under-treat pain – and even recommend psychological rather than analgesic treatment to women.

Gendered pain

The new study ingeniously separates potential sources of observer bias in underestimating women’s pain: beliefs about women’s sensitivity to pain (“pain threshold”), about their willingness to report it, and their capacity to endure it (“pain tolerance”) – all, of course, compared to men as the norm or ideal.

Researchers used brief video clips of real patients undergoing painful examinations, with supporting information about patients’ ratings of their own pain, and a quantification of their pain expression.

Male and female lay participants watched a selection of these videos and, after each, recorded the patient’s sex, estimated their pain on a numerical scale, and rated their pain expressiveness too.

Compared with the patient’s own rating of their pain, observers of both genders consistently underestimated women’s pain and overestimated men’s pain. When men and women showed exactly the same amount of pain in their facial expression, women were thought to be in less pain than men.

An additional experiment showed that stereotypes drove these judgements: men’s pain was estimated higher by those who believed that the typical man endured pain better than the typical woman, and women’s pain was estimated lower by those who thought that women were more willing to report pain than men.

Consistent findings

The gender effect in pain estimation is surprisingly strong. In 2016, a study in my lab examined whether clinicians’ pain estimations were affected by patients’ depression history and their “trustworthiness” – an automatic judgement we make of other people’s faces.

What emerged was a strong underestimation of women’s pain, again by participants of both sexes. If women were perceived to be untrustworthy, this further disadvantaged them – but untrustworthiness had little effect on estimates of men’s pain.

Read more: Five everyday myths that make it hard to understand pain

These stereotypes do not necessarily help men, and serious studies of men’s pain are rare. While men’s pain may be estimated by clinicians closer to their pain self-ratings, being less than stoical can attract adverse judgements of being unmanly or weak, while the expectation of stoicism may encourage men to present symptoms to medical scrutiny later than they should.

Judging pain

Pain expression is complex: though partly hard-wired by evolution, it is affected by many personal factors, including your personal history of pain and your social context. The observer’s task of interpreting pain expression is also complex, modulated by their personal qualities, by social context, and by broader factors, such as gender, age and cultural norms.

Read more: Why the way healthcare professionals measure patient pain might soon be changing

Several studies of young children show that while boys and girls playing together have similar numbers of accidents (falls, collisions, conflicts) that might cause pain, and express their distress largely similarly, girls may be offered more physical comfort than boys.

Although findings are not entirely consistent, and may be mediated by girls expressing distress more vocally, they do demonstrate that gender stereotypes about pain may take root early in our lives. And in these cases, differences in judgement may lie more in observers’ responses to the children than in any differences in behaviour from the children themselves.

The gender bias effect even holds when observers are watching the same expression of pain. In one simple experiment, observers watched a video of a five year old having blood drawn from a finger, expressing pain. Observers for whom the child was described as “Samuel” rated the child’s pain higher than those for whom the same child was described as “Samantha”.

Further, participants believed that girls were more sensitive to pain, and were more willing to show it. Given how frequent minor painful incidents are for small children, as is the parental or other adult response, this is a surprisingly neglected area of enquiry.

Pain bias

Unfortunately, the pain expression database upon which many pain experiments are conducted consists mainly of middle-aged Canadian Caucasians. This provides little opportunity to explore another very consistent bias in pain assessment and treatment: discounting of the pain of black and Asian or other non-white patients, leading, in research studies, to shocking shortcomings in treatment.

There is much to be done by clinicians to abolish the inequalities in pain care – and many more inequalities, based on false stereotypes, to be unearthed through research. But this latest study, confirming that gender stereotypes inform our estimation of others’ pain, should help healthcare staff reflect on the social and personal bias they may bring to their practice.

Amanda C de C Williams 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.

Millions of gallons of water laced with fertilizer ingredients are being pumped into Florida’s Tampa Bay from a leaking reservoir at an abandoned phosphate plant at Piney Point. As the water spreads into the bay, it carries phosphorus and nitrogen – nutrients that under the right conditions can fuel dangerous algae blooms that can suffocate sea grass beds and kill fish, dolphins and manatees.

It’s the kind of risk no one wants to see, but officials believed the other options were worse.

About 300 homes sit downstream from the 480-million-gallon reservoir, which began leaking in late March 2021. State officials determined that pumping out the water was the only way to prevent the reservoir’s walls from collapsing. They decided the safest location for all that water would be out through Port Manatee and into the bay.

Florida’s coast is dotted with fragile marine sanctuaries and sea grass beds that help nurture the state’s thriving marine and tourism economy. Those near Port Manatee now face a risk of algal blooms over the next few weeks. Once algae blooms get started, little can be done to clean them up.

The phosphate mining industry around Tampa is just one source of nutrients that can fuel dangerous algae blooms, which I study as a marine biologist. The sugarcane industry, cattle ranches, dairy farms and citrus groves all release nutrients that often flow into rivers and eventually into bays and the ocean. Sewage is another problem – Miami and Fort Lauderdale, for example, have old sewage treatment systems with frequent pipe breaks that leak sewage into canals and coastal waters.

All can fuel harmful algal blooms that harm marine life and people. Overall, blooms are getting worse locally and globally.

The problem with algae blooms

Just down the coast from Port Manatee, the next three counties to the south have had algae blooms in recent weeks, including red tide, which produces a neurotoxin that feels like pepper spray if you breathe it in. Karenia brevis, a dinoflagellate, is the organism in red tide and produces the toxin.

This part of Florida’s Gulf Coast is a hot spot for red tide, often fueled by agricultural runoff. A persistent red tide in 2017 and 2018 killed at least 177 manatees and left a trail of dead fish along the coast and into Tampa Bay. If the coastal currents carry today’s red tide father north and into Tampa Bay, the toxic algae could thrive on the nutrients from Piney Point.

Even blooms that are not toxic are still dangerous to ecosystems. They cloud the water, cutting off light and killing the plants below. A large enough bloom can also reduce oxygen in the water. A lack of oxygen can kill off everything in the water, including the fish.

This part of Florida has extensive sea grass meadows, about 2.2 million acres (8.9 billion square meters) in all, which are important habitat for lots of species and serve as nurseries for shrimp, crabs and fish. Scientists have argued that sea grass is also a major carbon sink – the grass sucks up carbon and pumps it down into the sediments.

Once the nutrients are in a large body of water, there isn’t much that can be done to stop algae growth. Killing the algae would only release the nutrients again, putting the bay back where it started. Algae blooms can remain a problem for years, finally declining when a predator population develops to eats them, a viral disease spreads through the bloom or strong currents and mixing disperse the bloom.

Agriculture runoff poses risks to marine life

The phosphate mining industry around Tampa is a large source of nutrient-rich waste. On average, more than 5 tons of phosphogypsum waste are produced for every ton of phosphoric acid created for fertilizer. In Florida, that adds up to over 1 billion tons of radioactive waste material that can’t be used, so it’s stacked up and turned into reservoirs like the one now leaking at Piney Point.

The reservoirs are obvious in satellite photos of the region, and they can be highly acidic. To get the phosphate out of the minerals, the industry uses sulfuric acid, and it leaves behind a highly acid wastewater. There have been at least two cases where it ate through the limestone below a reservoir, creating huge sinkholes hundreds of feet deep and draining wastewater into the aquifer.

Since saltwater had previously been pumped into the Piney Point reservoir, acidity is less of an issue. That’s because the seawater would buffer the pH. There is some radioactivity, but only slightly above regulatory standards, according to state Department of Environmental Protection, and probably not much of a health hazard.

But the nutrients are a risk. In 2004, water releases from the Piney Point reservoir contributed to an algae bloom in Bishop Harbor, just south of the current release site. In 2011, it released over 170 million gallons into Bishop Harbor again after a liner broke.

Another significant source of algae-feeding nutrients is agriculture, particularly cattle ranching and the sugarcane industry. Nutrient runoff from cattle ranches and dairy farms north of Lake Okeechobee end up in the lake. South of the lake, much of the northern third of the Everglades was converted to sugarcane farms, and those fields back-pumped runoff into the lake for decades until the state started cracking down in the 1980s. Their legacy nutrients are still in the lake.

The nutrient-rich water in the lake then pours down the Caloosahatchee River and into the Gulf of Mexico near Fort Myers, south of Tampa. That’s likely feeding the current red tide off the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River.

When water from the Everglades region’s agriculture is pumped south instead, huge blooms tend to appear in Florida Bay at the southern tip of the state. Some scientists believe it may be damaging coral reefs there, though there’s debate about it. During times that flow of water from the farms increased, reefs throughout the Florida Keys have been harmed. Those reefs have become overgrown with algae.

With the current red tide, the coastal currents have carried it north as far as Sarasota already. If they carry it farther north, it will run into the Piney Point area.

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Larry Brand has received funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, National Park Service, Department of Energy, Office of Naval Research, Army Corps of Engineers, Florida Department of Health, Dade County Department of Environmental Resources Management, Cove Point Foundation, and Hoover Foundation.

I saw a meme online recently that struck a chord in me.

A man asks the question: How should we treat others?

And the answer: There are no others.

I’ve spoken about oneness and connection a lot over the last 15 years. We all come from the same Source, we are all loving tendrils of Source consciousness, what happens to one of us happens to all of us.

We are not separate, though we may appear to be here on Earth. On the other side, we are each a note in the song of the Universe. Everyone matters.

I’ve also talked about the idea that Source drops us off on this planet like a parent takes their child to the playground. “Have fun, and don’t hurt other people” is the commandment we lay upon our children when they enter the playground.

As it turns out, this concept is found in nearly all religions and major belief systems going back to ancient times.

“Do unto others as you would have done unto you.”

“An it harm none, do as thou wilt.”

“Love they neighbor like yourself.”

“One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one’s own self. This, in brief, is the rule of dharma.”

“Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.”

“Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.”

This is the whole of the law. Live the way you want to live and don’t hurt other people in the process.

This week, take a very mindful approach to your actions. See if you are treating others in a way you would not want to be treated and instead actively seek to treat others the way you enjoy being treated. See what happens.

Imagine what would happen if we all remembered to treat others like there are no others, like we are all in this together, because we are. Whatever we put into this world is what we get back. Consciously place your actions upon others and do no harm.

The mass rollout of COVID-19 vaccines has led to concerns from some people that can be described as rational: What are the side effects? How effective will the shot be? And then there are those who are worried that the vaccine will brand people with the “mark of the beast” as described in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation.

The mark of the beast – a cryptic mark in Revelation which indicates allegiance to Satan – has been invoked by fringe Christian figures throughout the pandemic in reference to what they deem to be the evil of masks and vaccines. It ranges from the seemingly metaphorical likening of vaccine passports by a Republican House representative to something like “Biden’s mark of the beast” to the more literal interpretation that those getting a vaccine would be marked as followers of Satan.

It is tempting to dismiss such beliefs out of hand. After all, it is a fringe idea promoted by conspiracy theorists. But the idea has gained enough traction that some medical establishments have felt the need to address it head on. Minneapolis-based Hennepin Healthcare, for example, states in an online fact sheet that “the COVID-19 vaccines do not contain … The Mark of the Beast.”

As a scholar of early Christian literature, I would note that the mark of the beast in Revelation has throughout history been misunderstood as referring to various events and phenomena. Its connection to the COVID-19 vaccine is but the latest example of such misunderstanding.

Moreover, I argue that the mark in Revelation is best understood in the first-century context in which it was used, as a polemic against the Roman Empire.

Reading Revelation with first-century eyes

The Book of Revelation is a complicated text. Written toward the end of the first century by an author who calls himself John, the text is filled with symbolic imagery that has mystified readers for centuries.

Using visions of angels and demons, death and destruction, John tells a story of an ongoing cosmic battle between good and evil that will end with good triumphing eventually. The beast and its mark are both understood by this author to be evil, and they are some of the most well-known and most misunderstood parts of his story.

In Revelation 13, John describes the beast as having seven heads and 10 horns, a leopard’s body, the feet of a bear and a lion’s mouth. The beast in this text is powerful, Satanic and is an object of worship.

There is also a second beast that promotes worship of the first. The most notable thing about the second beast is that it causes people to receive a mark on their forehead or right hand with “the name of the beast or the number of its name.”

John concludes this chapter with a riddle: “Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred sixty-six.” (Rev 13:18).

The beast and the empire

Throughout history, this number has been used to demonize phenomena that readers are either wary of or don’t fully understand. It should come as no surprise, then, that some have tried to connect the COVID-19 vaccine to the mark in a similar way.

This interpretation is problematic, however, and for two reasons: First, the COVID-19 vaccines are modern phenomena that the author of Revelation and his earliest readers would have no familiarity with. Second, there is another explanation for the beast and its number that makes far more sense historically.

Many biblical scholars maintain that the first beast is a symbolic representation of first-century Roman emperors. In this reading, each head would represent one emperor. While there is some debate in scholarship on which specific emperors the author of Revelation is alluding to, there is fairly widespread agreement that Emperor Nero is one of them.

This conclusion is drawn not only from other references to Nero in Revelation, but also from his reputation in the first century for persecuting Christians in Rome.

In A.D. 64, when Nero was emperor, a great fire took hold in Rome and burned for nearly a week. Roman historians Suetonius, Cassius Dio and Tacitus claim that Nero himself was the one responsible for igniting the blaze, Tacitus adds that Nero attempted to free himself of blame by placing guilt on the Christians living in the city.

Nero’s number

There are a number of other points in Revelation where the author seems to allude to Nero. There is a possible reference to the great fire of Rome later in the text, for example, in Revelation 17:16. John’s description of one of the beast’s heads being “wounded” may likewise be a reference to Nero’s death, which Suetonius describes as a self-inflicted stab to the neck.

But perhaps the clearest reference to Nero in Revelation is the infamous “666,” the number of the beast that constitutes the beast’s mark.

Past, not future

Although there has been much speculation over the number’s significance in the past, there is a growing body of scholars who believe it to be a direct reference to Nero.

There is a well-known practice in the ancient world called “gematria,” in which letters are assigned numerical values. This allows authors to refer to individuals by using “the number of their name,” rather than their actual name. And biblical scholars have long noted that in Hebrew characters, the numerical value of Nero’s formal title – Caesar Nero – is 666.

This, along with the other allusions to Nero in Revelation, leaves little doubt, I argue, as to who the author is referencing with this number.

There is, however, one piece of this riddle left, and that is what exactly the mark of the beast in Revelation is. Given the symbolic nature of the book as a whole, the reference to being marked on the forehead or hand is likely not something to be taken at face value.

More important is John’s claim that no one would be able to buy or sell anything without having the mark that bears the name of the beast. So, what does one need to buy and sell that would also have the name of the beast on it? One possible answer to that question is money – and we have numerous examples in the archaeological record of Roman coinage that bears the name Caesar Nero.

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One of the reasons that Revelation is often confusing to those trying to interpret the book today is that they frequently are trained to see it as a book about the future, when in fact it is primarily a book about the past. Clearly, John and his first-century readers would have been able to know the answer to “What is the mark of the beast?” in their first-century context. Otherwise the text wouldn’t have made much sense to anyone when it was first written.

In other words: when John gives his “number of the beast” riddle to readers in the first century, he anticipates that it is a riddle they will be equipped to solve in the first century.

While some may have lingering questions about COVID-19 vaccines, the question of whether those vaccines are linked to the mark of the beast shouldn’t be one of them.

Eric M. Vanden Eykel 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.

When a rosary was made for King Henry VIII in 1509, it was hand-carved in intricate detail by a master artisan. By contrast, many of the rosaries around today are made from the same plastic that goes into mass-produced objects such as children’s toys or water bottles.

It doesn’t matter much to the faithful; for devoted Catholics, praying with plastic is just as good as praying with a great work of art.

But it does pose a dilemma for us. As librarians at the University of Dayton’s Marian Library, we help curate a collection of religious artifacts that, depending on how you count it, numbers in the hundreds of thousands. It includes postage stamps, wine labels, books, statues and rosaries. Many of the items are Catholic and have been gifted to the library by charitable individuals looking to do the right thing with a family heirloom or the collection of a recently deceased loved one. Donations could include anything from medieval manuscripts to a car air freshener featuring Our Lady of Guadalupe.

In many cases, donations are welcome. But we struggle with what to do when donations duplicate items we already have, or if the gifted item is not of particular value. And this happens frequently, especially with mass-produced items such as rosaries or cheap plastic statues.

Mass-produced cards

Another example is the holy card. Holy cards or prayer cards are in many ways the religious equivalent to baseball trading cards – they even attract the same type of fanatical collecting. The front usually includes an image of a saint or a religious scene, while the back often has a particular prayer, or the biography of the saint. Early examples of holy cards might be printed on silk or colored by hand. Some can look a bit like the fanciest Valentine’s Day card, with lace borders and room for personal messages.

With advances in printing processes, mass production of holy cards accelerated in the 19th century and continues today, with millions being produced each year. Today, you can purchase 100 new holy cards for less than US$20, and they’re common to pick up at funerals, baptisms or special Masses.

With the mass production and wide distribution of items like holy cards and rosary beads, donations to our collection can multiply quickly. Most months we receive unsolicited gifts of mass-produced materials in the mail. And we are not alone – other libraries, archives and museums likewise receive such gifts.

A widely used guide for running a Catholic church by liturgical scholar G. Thomas Ryan suggests that objects no longer needed should be donated to an archive or museum. But often institutions are short on both staff to process the gifts and space to house them.

Anything can be blessed

Our first step with an unwanted donation is to try to return it to the donor. But that is not always possible when materials appear anonymously or the donor does not want them back.

Someone who has driven several hours to deposit Grandma’s statues unannounced often just wants to drive away unencumbered. So, we look for good homes for items when possible, such as local Catholic schools or parishes.

When regifting isn’t an option, we are presented with a problem. While some unwanted nonreligious donations to libraries might be able to go straight into the trash, that is not an option with many religious objects. As a result, we have needed to investigate the correct way to dispose of religious objects.

According to canon law of the Catholic Church, certain types of especially sacred material, such as holy water and holy oil, must be treated with care and disposed of in specific ways.

The law explains that “sacred objects, set aside for divine worship by dedication or blessing, are to be treated with reverence.” But the law does not explicitly define which objects count as sacred.

Catholic convention is that discarding objects such as statues, rosaries or the palms from Palm Sunday should be by means of respectful burning or burial. But this is not normal practice for most libraries, and the burning of books and artwork has worrying associations with censorship or even war crimes.

But in Catholicism, it would be more scandalous to throw certain religious objects in the trash or sell them for a profit than it would be to burn or bury them, even if no one wants them and they do not fit in our collection.

In addition to protocols around specific types of object, many other Catholic artifacts could be considered sacred depending on how they have been used. This is especially the case if they have been prayed with or blessed.

It can be impossible for us as librarians to know the history of how an object has been used by previous owners – especially if passed to us from a third party. Any holy card, statue or painting could have been blessed as an image and therefore designated as sacred.

In addition to blessings for objects designated for sacred purposes, the Catholic Church literally has a “blessing of anything,” meaning any object could have been blessed by a priest. While this does not necessarily render an object sacred, it does indicate the freedom with which blessings are distributed.

Burn after reading room?

So what are curators supposed to do, given the ongoing mass production, wide distribution and frequent donation of such objects?

The best solution we have found is to remember that intention matters. Our intentions as stewards of these items are good: We communicate up front that not all donations can be accepted, and we try to find new homes for objects that do not belong in the Marian Library – whether by offering items for free to the community or communicating with another library that might be a better fit.

Disposal would be a last resort. To date, we have yet to have a prayerful, respectful fire to destroy duplicate holy cards – but we are not ruling it out.

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