In 2025, the Japanese character – worth around US$4 billion (£3.1 billion) a year to the company that owns her – is due to star in a live-action movie. A new amusement park and resort are also planned.

Her 50th year has been celebrated at events in Japan, Singapore, the US and the UK, where she received a birthday message from King Charles at a state banquet in Buckingham Palace.

Quite the party then, for a character with two black-dotted eyes, no mouth and a yellow button nose. Designed in 1974 by Yuko Shimizu (who is not believed to have made much money from her creation), Hello Kitty first appeared on a clear, vinyl coin purse – and has since grown into a merchandise empire consisting of over 50,000 different items sold across 130 countries.

Hello Kitty’s longevity is partly down to her inherent simplicity. In terms of design, she is composed of a few basic shapes, six short marks for whiskers, and a red bow. She is easy to recognise and cheap to reproduce.

The character also epitomises “Kawaii”, the Japanese term for cute. According to Professor Joshua Dale, a pioneer in the field of “cuteness studies”, perceiving objects as cute triggers psychological instincts for care and protection.

With Hello Kitty, children relate to the small, rounded character as being safe. Like others (see Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse and many, many more), she provides a sense of innocence and comfort, which attracts fans from an early age – and continue into adulthood among those longing for nostalgia.

Part of this comes down to people’s abiding enthusiasm for anthropomorphism – the notion of endowing animals and other non-humans with human-like characteristics. Some would argue that this is also a key element of the infantilisation of society more generally.

Hello Kitty also has an easily relatable storyline that resonates with consumers. According to her biography, Hello Kitty – full name Kitty White – is a cheerful little girl (so officially not actually a cat) who lives in the suburbs of London with her family. She is described as being “five apples tall” and “three apples” in weight. She apparently loves to bake cookies, and her other hobbies include travelling, listening to music and making new friends.

Corporate kitty

But away from the baking and friend-making, Hello Kitty has a very serious business side to her character. Sanrio, the Japanese firm that owns her, has employed some astute strategies to build and sustain such a successful brand.

Collaborating with other firms has been a big part of this. In 1996, Sanrio launched began its first collaboration with an electronics retail chain in Hong Kong. But things really developed three years later when the company joined up with McDonald’s to offer a Hello Kitty meal deal.

The promotion started a craze in Hong Kong with similar success in Taiwan, Japan and Singapore – where the launch in 2000 led to massive queues and even fights. Customers reportedly threw away the hamburgers as they were only interested in the special edition wedding design toy set featuring Hello Kitty and her boyfriend Dear Daniel.

This year, a 50th anniversary collection of McDonald’s toys in Singapore quickly sold out and were soon being resold online.

Elsewhere, the commercial success of Hello Kitty has been linked to licensed collaborations with big brands including Nike, Adidas, Crocs and the Italian fashion label Blumarine.

Hello Kitty products have progressed from stationery and stickers to microwave ovens, toasters and vacuum cleaners. She has appeared on Fender Stratocaster electric guitars and Swarovski jewellery.

There are also two officially licensed theme parks in Japan, Sanrio Puroland (in Tokyo) and Harmonyland (in Ōita), with another due to open on China’s Hainan island in 2025.

And to add to the animated series and films, comics, books and video games, next year Hello Kitty will follow in Barbie’s footsteps and appear in a (partly) live-action movie produced by Warner Bros. The co-director of the film, Jennifer Coyle, says the release will “spread the message of love, friendship and inclusivity that Hello Kitty stands for”.

Yet despite all of these projects, Sanrio is diversifying away from the character. Hello Kitty now accounts for 60% of the company’s business in North America (it was 99% in 2013) and just 30% worldwide. Other characters are moving on to Kitty’s patch.

According to the Sanrio 2024 character popularity ranking, Hello Kitty occupies fifth place, with Cinnamoroll (a dog with pink cheeks) sitting at the top.

Other younger creations such as Gudetama (an apathetic egg yolk) and Aggretsuko (an angry red panda) mark a notable shift from Sanrio’s emphasis on cute characters towards ones which reflect social concerns. Aggretsuko, for example, faces gender discrimination, social anxiety and a poor work-life balance. Gudetama reflects the struggles and aspirations of young people in Japan.

But as new characters come and go, Hello Kitty’s familiar expression will no doubt remain unchanged, as it has for 50 years. An inscrutable gaze looking back on five decades of incredible commercial success.

Sameer Hosany, Professor of Marketing, Royal Holloway University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In the wake of the 2024 U.S. elections, everyday people and political pundits alike have been trying to make sense of the results and the related observation that many Americans seem to be experiencing very different realities. These realities are shaped by very different media ecosystems.

Democrats tend to trust institutional media and network news more than Republicans. In contrast, Republicans have developed what they see as a more trustworthy and explicitly partisan alternative media ecosystem that has rapidly evolved and flourished in the internet era.

Cultivating robust alternative media has been a political strategy of the right for decades. Given the interactive nature of social media and ongoing investments by the right in digital media, the right-wing media ecosystem has become a highly participatory space filled with influencers, political elites and audiences.

These players engage in year-round conversations that inspire and adapt political messaging. The collaborations are not tightly scripted but improvised, facilitated by the interactivity of digital media.

For all these reasons, we, as researchers of information ecosystems and influencer culture, find it useful to think of right-wing media as a kind of improv theater. This metaphor helps us understand the social and digital structure, culture and persuasive power of right-wing influence, which is reshaping politics in the U.S. and around the world.

Elements of improv in right-wing media

Influencers are the performers in this real-life improv show that plays out on a stage of social media newsfeeds, podcasts, cable newsrooms and partisan online media outlets. The performers include political pundits and media personalities as well as a dynamic group of online opinion leaders who often ascend from the audience to the stage, in part by recognizing and exploiting the dynamics of digital media.

These influencers work together, performing a variety of roles based on a set of informal rules and performance conventions: sharing vague but emotionally resonant memes, “just asking questions” to each other, trolling a journalist, “evidencing” claims with data or photos – sometimes taken out of context – all the while engaging each other’s content.

Just as in improv, performers work daily to find a game from their audience, internet forums and each other. The “game” in improv is a concept or story with a novel element around which a performance revolves. Once a compelling game is found, performers “raise the stakes,” another improv concept where the plot intensifies and expands.

Performers follow a loose script, collaborating toward a shared goal. Digital media environments provide additional infrastructure — the platform features, networks and algorithms — that shapes the performances.

Their performances, both individual and in interaction with each other, help influencers attract and curate an audience they are highly in tune with. As in improv shows, the political performers may use a technique called a callback: referencing a previous line, exchange or game that the audience is familiar with. Or performers might react to calls from an engaged audience that cheers, jeers and steers the actors as the show unfolds. The audience may also prompt an entire skit by bringing a story to the attention of influencers or politicians.

From this perspective, influence doesn’t just flow from influencers on stage and out to the audience, but also flows from the audience to the influencers. These dynamics make the right-wing media ecosystem extremely reactive. Feedback is instant, and the right “bits” get laughs and likes. Influencers — and political leaders — can quickly adapt their messaging to their audiences’ tastes, preferences and grievances, as well as to the events and trends of the day, unencumbered by the lag of traditional news media.

Actors and audiences in right-wing media also engage in transgressive, controversial or even offensive bits, as they test the boundaries of their shared tastes, expectations and — for the political performers — ideologies.

Like a lot of improv shows, these performances feel intimate and authentic. Audience members can talk to the performers after and sometimes during the show. They can also be invited “on stage” when an influencer elevates their content.

It may be just for a single scene, but there is also opportunity for lucky, savvy or persistent contributors to become part of the theater of influencers. This increases the motivation to participate, the excitement and the sense among audience members that they are truly part of the show.

‘They’re eating the pets’

One example of right-wing media as improv came in fall 2024 when then-candidate Donald Trump baselessly claimed from a debate stage that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating pets.

Prior to Trump referencing them, rumors of pet-eating had been circulating in local Springfield Facebook groups. These claims were amplified when a local neo-Nazi leader discussed the issue in a recorded town hall meeting, which circulated in apps like Telegram and Gab. Influencers who monitor these channels elevated the story, finding a new game with a novel element.

A Reddit post of a photo of a man holding a bird walking down the street was taken out of context by influencers and falsely used as “evidence” of immigrants eating pets. Memes, particularly those made by artificial intelligence, started spreading rapidly, catching the attention of politicians including Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who shared them. This raised the stakes of the improv game by tying these smaller memes to a larger political narrative about needing to stop migration at the southern border.

The improv act reached its zenith when Trump and then vice presidential candidate JD Vance elevated the claims during the week of the September debate. They presented the claims with both seriousness and a bit of a tongue-in-cheek awareness that the point of the story was not necessarily about immigrants but about the attention the narrative garnered. Vance even acknowledged the whole thing could “turn out to be false.” Veracity was not the point of this improvisation.

Growing body of research

The metaphor of right-wing media as improv emerged through research, conversation and collaboration facilitated by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, where we work.

One of us, Kate Starbird, and colleagues studied the role of political influencers in election-denying rumors after the 2020 election, finding right-wing political campaigns to be participatory efforts that were largely improvised. In related work, media researcher Anna Beers described how a “theater of influencers” on the right could be identified through their interactions with a shared audience.

Doctoral student Stephen Prochaska and colleagues built on sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s work to characterize the production of election fraud narratives in 2020 as “deep storytelling” – telling stories with strong emotional resonance – between right-wing influencers and their online audiences.

In her study of right-wing influencers, one of us, Danielle Lee Tomson, described the performative collaboration between influencers as kayfabe, a performance convention in professional wrestling of wrestlers agreeing on a story arc before a seemingly real wrestling match.

These studies all draw on different theories and apply different methods, but they converge on the ideas of improvisation, style and participatory audiences as integral to the success of right-wing media ecosystems.

A persuasive performance

In political improv, factuality is less important than the compelling nature of the performance, the actors, the big story arc and the aesthetic. The storylines can be riveting, engaging and participatory, allowing audiences to play their own role in a grand epic of American activism.

When considered this way, the persuasive power of right-wing media to everyday Americans comes into fuller focus. When there is a 24/7 chorus of collaborative internet influencers engaging their audiences directly, institutional media begins to feel too far removed and disengaged to have a comparable effect.

Danielle Lee Tomson, Research Manager, Center for an Informed Public, University of Washington and Kate Starbird, Professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Some prospective members of Trump’s team, including anti-immigration advisers Stephen Miller and Thomas Homan, have said they intend to stop issuing federal identification documents such as Social Security cards and passports to infants born in the U.S. to undocumented migrant parents, according to The New York Times.

This first step down a path to deny citizenship to some individuals born in the United States reflects a conflict that’s been going on for nearly 200 years: who gets to be an American citizen.

Debates in American history over who gets citizenship and what kind of citizenship they get have always involved questions of race and ethnicity, as we have learned through our individual research on the historical status of Native Americans and African Americans and joint research on restricting Chinese immigration.

Nonetheless, even in the highly racialized political environment of the late 19th century, the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed an expansive view of birthright citizenship. In an 1898 ruling, the court decreed that the U.S.-born children of immigrants were citizens, regardless of their parents’ ancestry.

That decision set the terms for the current controversy, as various Republican leaders, U.S. Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, as well as Vice President-elect JD Vance, have claimed that they will possess the power to overturn more than a century of federal constitutional law and policy and deny birthright citizenship.

Citizenship by birth

Most citizens of the U.S. are born, not made. Before the Civil War, the U.S. had generally followed the English practice of granting citizenship to children born in the country.

In 1857, though, the Supreme Court had decided the Dred Scott v. Sandford case, with Chief Justice Roger Taney declaring that people of African descent living in the U.S. – whether free or enslaved, and regardless of where they were born – were not actually U.S. citizens.

After the Civil War, Congress explicitly rejected the Dred Scott decision, first by passing legislation reversing the ruling and then by writing the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which specified that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

This broad language intentionally included more than just the people who had been freed from slavery at the end of the Civil War: During legislative debate, members of Congress decided that the amendment should cover the children of other nonwhite groups, such as Chinese immigrants and those identified at the time as “Gypsies.”

Still barring some people from citizenship

This inclusive view of citizenship, however, still had an area judges hadn’t made clear yet – the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” In 1884, the Supreme Court had to interpret those words when deciding the case of a Native American who wanted to be a citizen, had renounced his tribal membership and attempted to register to vote.

The justices ruled that even though John Elk had been born in the U.S., he was born on a reservation as a member of a Native American tribe and was therefore subject to the tribe’s jurisdiction at his birth – not that of the United States. He was, they ruled, not a citizen.

In 1887, Congress did pass a law creating a path to citizenship for at least some Native Americans; it took until 1924 for all Native Americans born on U.S. soil to be recognized as citizens.

The text of the 14th Amendment also became an issue in the late 19th century, when Congress and the Supreme Court were deciding how to handle immigrants from China. An 1882 law had barred Chinese immigrants living in the U.S. from becoming naturalized citizens. A California circuit court, however, ruled in 1884 that those immigrants’ U.S.-born children were citizens.

In 1898, the Supreme Court took up the question in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, ultimately ruling that children born in the U.S. were, in the 14th Amendment’s terms, “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, so long as their parents were not serving in some official capacity as representatives of a foreign government and not part of an invading army. Those children were U.S. citizens at birth.

This ruling occurred near the peak of anti-Chinese sentiment that had led Congress to endorse the idea that immigration itself could be illegal. In earlier rulings, the court had affirmed broad powers for Congress to manage immigration and control immigrants.

Yet in the Wong Kim Ark ruling, the court did not mention any distinction between the children of legal immigrants and residents and the children of people who were in the United States without appropriate documentation. All people born in the United States were automatically simply citizens.

The long reach of Wong Kim Ark

Since the Wong Kim Ark ruling, birthright citizenship rules haven’t changed much – but they have remained no less contentious. In 1900 and 1904, leaders of several Pacific islands that make up what is now American Samoa signed treaties granting the U.S. full powers and authority to govern them. These agreements, however, did not grant American Samoans citizenship.

A 1952 federal law and State Department policy designates them as “non-citizen nationals,” which means they can freely live and work in the U.S. but cannot vote in state and federal elections.

In 2018, several plaintiffs from American Samoa sued to be recognized as U.S. citizens, covered by the 14th Amendment’s provision that they were born “within” the U.S. and therefore citizens. The district court found for the plaintiffs, but the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, ruling that Congress would have to act to extend citizenship to territorial residents.

A new debate has ignited over whether Congress has the power to alter birthright citizenship, and even over whether the president, either through an executive order or through directing the State Department not to recognize some individuals as citizens, can change the boundaries around who gets to be a citizen. Efforts to alter birthright citizenship are sure to provoke legal challenges.

Trump is just the latest in a long line of politicians who have objected to the fact that Latin American immigrants who come to the U.S. without legal permission can have babies who are U.S. citizens. Most legal scholars, even those who are quite conservative, see little merit in claims that the established rules can be altered.

At least until now, the courts have continued to uphold the centuries-long history of birthright citizenship, dating back to before the Constitution itself and early American court rulings. But if the Trump administration pursues the policies that key figures have discussed, the question seems likely to reach the Supreme Court again, with the fundamental principle hanging in the balance.

This article includes material previously published on Jan. 15, 2020.

Carol Nackenoff, Richter Professor Emerita of Political Science, Swarthmore College and Julie Novkov, Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University at Albany, State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

But as a linguist who studies how English has changed over the centuries, I can promise that, while it might feel like nails screeching on a blackboard, the use of nonliteral “literally” developed as an organic and dynamic outgrowth of the very human desire to communicate emotion and intensity.

The literal past

The word literal first appeared in English in the late 14th century, borrowed from French. In turn, French “literal” came from Latin “littera,” with the original meaning of “pertaining to alphabetic letters.” It is this same root that delivered to English the words “literate” and “literature,” both harking back to the idea of knowing one’s “letters.”

In early English use, literal referred to the straightforward meaning recoverable from reading a religious text, as in this example from the Wycliffe Bible dating to 1383, “Holy scripture hath iiij vndirstondingis; literal, allegorik, moral, and anagogik.” The word literal as used here contrasts a direct – literal – reading of scripture’s meaning to other more symbolic or metaphorical ones.

By the late 16th century, though, literal begins to be used not just in reference to a type of reading but also as a way to emphasize that one wants one’s words to be taken literally.

This development is already a semantic leap in that, when used this way – as in, “John literally died of thirst” – the word provides no meaning contribution other than emphasizing to a listener that a speaker means it precisely as said. After all, assuming John did indeed die owing to a lack of hydration, what does a speaker really gain by saying “He literally died of thirst” versus simply “He died of thirst”?

The advantage is that using “literally” signals that what was said was unusual, unbelievable or remarkable in some way, steering a listener toward a literal rather than a perhaps more likely figurative interpretation.

After all, dying of thirst is not something you hear about every day, though suffering from thirst to the point where one feels like dying is a more universal experience. Such pragmatic enhancement of the word’s original meaning hints at how its modern marking of strong emphasis came into play.

Bleached beyond recognition

The second piece of the puzzle of how “literally” became nonliteral requires a brief foray into how word meanings organically evolve over time as they are put to work by speakers.

A very germane example comes from “very,” a word in which its most common meaning – “extremely” – is but a shadow of its original sense.

In Middle English, “very” carried the meaning of “actual” or “true,” as in being “verray in worde and dede” – that is, true in word and deed. Yet, when something is true, particularly when used in its “actual” sense, it suggests that it embodies the highest degree of whatever quality is described as true.

So, for instance, if someone is a “true fool,” they exhibit such a high degree of foolishness they are taken for an actual fool. Used this way, two distinct but related meanings – “true” and “to an extreme degree” – come to coexist.

By the 16th century, intensity rather than trueness had become the word very’s primary sense, through a process that linguists refer to as “semantic bleaching.” Interestingly, words whose meanings involve truth, such as very, really and truly, are particularly prone to semantic bleaching. And “truth,” as in “exactly as said or written,” takes us back to “literally.”

A little less literal

Recall that “literally” once pertained only to contrasting a literal versus metaphorical reading.

But, as with “very,” by the 16th century, its meaning shifts away from this purely referential meaning to a more rhetorical one: “Literally” had shifted to emphasizing a speaker’s literalness and flagging it as remarkable in some way.

At that point, providing expressivity rather than a true or literal reading had become its primary role. Just consider an argument between spouses, where one says “I literally called you three times.” The purpose of “literally” here is really only one of underscoring the implication that calling three times was excessive and unusual.

From there to hyperbolically saying “I was literally dying of thirst” is just one step further down the road of semantic bleaching. The figurative reading becomes more and more possible, as speakers capitalize exclusively on the expressive force rather than the word’s former shell of literality.

This is really no different than saying something like “I am truly dying over here” when one is frustrated, but is, in fact, not actually dying. It is intensity conveyed, not imminent death, as “truly” has moved from marking truth to marking emphasis.

Sign of the times

But what of using “literally” to mean something seemingly contradictory to its original meaning?

On that front, it is certainly far from the first word in English to have shifted toward its opposite. For instance, when in 1667’s “Paradise Lost” John Milton writes, “The Serpent … with brazen Eyes And hairie Main terrific,” the word “terrific” is absolutely intended in its original sense of “terrifying”“ as opposed to our modern "fabulous” take.

Sometimes, conflicting senses even exist at the same time. Think of how “clipping” can be about cutting something away or pulling something together. Likewise, consider the often oppositionally employed verb “to cleave,” with which one either tears apart or sticks together. In this bigger semantic picture, using “literally” nonfiguratively is really nothing to get worked up over.

The gist is that language changes because of how it finds itself most gainfully employed by speakers as it winds its way through time.

Literally’s main problem is that, unlike “terrific” or “very,” its semantic past has not yet faded from collective memory. But for those who still cling to its literalness despite the fact that Frances Brooke, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain all embraced its figurative glory, it may simply be time to literally let go.

Valerie M. Fridland, Professor of Linguistics, University of Nevada, Reno

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The country is, however, becoming more split along party lines.

This work started as a curiosity project. Back in 2000, most maps of election results showed states colored either red or blue depending on which side had more votes in that state – Republican George W. Bush or Democrat Al Gore. But that one-or-the-other approach didn’t match up with an election that was so close, it was ultimately decided by 537 votes in Florida.

Shortly after the election in November 2000, the USA Today newspaper published a county-by-county map in which each county was colored red or blue, based on which candidate won that county.

I live in Belle Mead, New Jersey, which is 8 miles north of Princeton, where I teach. I’m in Somerset County; Princeton is in Mercer County. Mercer County was blue in that election, but neighboring Somerset was red.

That inspired me to look at the actual data used for the map. In Somerset County, about 51% of the votes were for Bush and about 48% for Gore.

To me, that was disappointing: Why paint Somerset County red when it was almost a tie?

I wanted to write a computer program to make my own county-by-county map showing not just the winner, but the mix of voter preferences. At the time, I was teaching a course called “Computer Methods for Problem Solving.” I thought it could be an interesting final project for that class to have the students make a map that used shadings of red or blue based on vote totals for each party’s candidate.

My colleague Alain Kornhauser helped me get geographic data about each county in the country, so I could match them up with vote totals, which I have mostly gotten from data compiled by Dave Leip. I wrote my own code to create such a map, but I didn’t actually use that idea as the final project for the class that year. I was thinking I would use it as the final project the next year.

But I did put my “Purple America” map on my university webpage. And there it sat for four years, largely unnoticed.

A look through time

About four years later, someone discovered my Purple America webpage. When I looked at the traffic data, I found it had gone viral.

Ever since, after each presidential election, I’ve been making that year’s version of the map. I went back and did all the elections since 1960 as well. As I’ve written on my own website, these maps are still potentially misleading because a densely populated area like New York City takes up a small area, while a sparsely populated area like Montana takes up a lot of space. But they still show a clearer picture of a country that is not just red or blue.

Over time, those maps have shown the U.S. becoming more geographically polarized. In 2024, most counties lean strongly toward either red or blue. Some are still purple, but there are fewer of them, and they’re less purple than they used to be.

Robert J. Vanderbei, Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Princeton University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Illegal immigrants streamed in, and some leaders had seen enough.

Nationalists among the Chickasaw Nation called for a mass deportation of white U.S. citizens. One Chickasaw leader, Judge Overton Love, wrote that undocumented whites should be “placed under arrest immediately and hustled out of the country with strict orders not to return.”

Muskogee leaders reported intruders to the federal government. U.S. marshals escorted white migrants to Arkansas and hit them with a US$1,000 fine. But they returned, again and again.

Illegal invasion

Among those intruders was my great-great-grandfather, Bill Hogan. Bill was an illiterate white sharecropper in Yell County, Ark. He migrated with his family to the Muskogee Nation sometime around 1900, probably following a new railroad line.

Predatory landowners in the South made life difficult for poor white people like Bill, and nearly impossible for Black people. But freed slaves founded prosperous all-Black towns like Boley, just down the road from Bill’s homestead near Eufaula.

The illegal invasion of sovereign nations by white American citizens occurred all over the West, from Texas to South Dakota. Mexican authorities even worried about a flood of U.S. citizens re-introducing slavery into the republic, and banned U.S. immigration in 1830.

This did nothing to stop the flood of Americans from claiming land. A treaty prohibiting U.S. citizens from settling in the Great Sioux Reservation was blatantly violated by hundreds of gold prospectors in the 1870s.

When Oklahoma became a state in 1907, the U.S. effectively closed a chapter on 100 years of invasions and illegal land seizures in the western United States. A century later, conservative leaders have been claiming the U.S. is now the nation under threat of invasion, conveniently ignoring this long and complicated history.

White supremacy doctrine

It is common to hear that the U.S. immigration system is broken, but it was never fixed. Migration to and from sovereign Indigenous nations, Mexico and even Canada has always been subject to waves of xenophobia and fear. A political wind of change can turn intruders into pioneers, as happened on a massive scale among the Five Tribes in Indian Territory.

Bill Hogan may have been in the Muskogee Nation illegally, but he was accepted by his Muskogee neighbours by 1901. The Indigenous-published Indian Journal reported on his travels around Indian Territory in local news, and his son, Jordan, started to achieve some prosperity. The Hogans intermarried and my grandmother lived with a Choctaw man. She is buried next to a Muskogee family in the Checotah cemetery.

Editors and politicians back in the States noticed this unique mixture of native governance, poor white subsistence farming and Black town-building. They were not impressed. It was anathema to white “civilization.” The tri-racial experiment of Indian Territory was crushed by a doctrine of white supremacy established in new state laws.

Unlike today’s unauthorized immigrants, white intruders had political power and influence to change the law. The Indian Appropriations Act of 1902 made it illegal “to remove or deport any person from the Indian Territory who is in lawful possession of any lots or parcels of land in any town or city…which has been designated as a townsite.”

Just like that, ownership of land now protected white intruders like my ancestor if they owned land. Imagine the shoe on the other foot today: U.S. Congress passes a law protecting unauthorized immigrants from deportation because they own some real estate in an Oklahoma suburb.

There is a crucial difference between Bill Hogan crossing into Indian Territory and the current wave of migrants arriving in the United States. These new “intruders” do not want land.

The few stories of Latin American migrants seeking to claim land through squatters’ rights have little legal credibility. Unlike the settlers that pushed the Cherokees, Chickasaws and others off their allotted lands in Oklahoma, the new migrants are not really settlers at all. They are labourers.

The story of Leo Bennett

The U.S. Marshall tasked with enforcing migration laws in Indian Territory, Leo Bennett, found himself in the crosshairs of some who wanted mass deportation and others who wanted the termination of Indigenous governance.

Bennett was married to a Cherokee woman and empathized with Indigenous leaders who resented the intruders. Bennett promised to deport known law-breakers, but he resisted the calls to ban all migrants.

Chickasaw leaders were rightly afraid of people like the notorious outlaw Dan “Dynamite Dick” Clifton. But Dynamite Dick did not represent the majority, and so Bennett would not enforce mass deportation. Most Indigenous leaders agreed with him.

Some of the whites milked cows, ran hotels and serviced the trains. If all whites were deported, they would only return again, hungrier and more determined. Bennett wrote in a local paper that “equity as well as law must be so administered that justice shall be tempered with mercy.” He wanted “fairness toward all concerned,” but fairness, then as now, was easily reframed as weakness.

Those ideals — equity, mercy and fairness — require a historical reckoning over how the United States acquired its contemporary boundaries in the first place. Those ideals also require compassion for newcomers, whether they’re white men from Arkansas in 1901 or a Haitian family in Springfield, Ohio in 2024.

Russell Cobb, Associate Professor of Latin American Studies, University of Alberta

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Orange is an ancient colour variety. Ginger cats are evident in Egyptian tomb artworks and some mummified cats may have been gingers. From Garfield and Puss in Boots to Hermione Granger’s Crookshanks and Goose the Flerken in the Marvel universe, ginger (or orange) cats are everywhere in popular culture today.

Orange isn’t the most typical coat colour in cats. Most cats are non-orange, usually brown or grey tabbies with some pattern of black stripes, swirls or spots, or black or blue solid-coloured cats.

Tortoiseshell cats have a brindling pattern (mixture) of orange and non-orange hairs throughout the coat, with some areas mostly orange or non-orange. Calico cats have distinct patches of orange and non-orange, in addition to extensive regions of white. Gingers are mostly male, while tortoiseshells are typically female.

Now, after more than 110 years, two new studies finally reveal the gene and the variant for orange coat colour.

A visionary theory

In 1912, before the XX/XY sex-determining system was discovered in cats, American geneticist Clarence Cook Little proposed a visionary theory to explain how cats inherit orange and non-orange coat colours.

He built on the idea of a “sex-producing factor”, symbolised as X, that was gaining acceptance at that time (mainly from work on sex-determination in insects). He proposed:

1. let’s suppose female cats have two copies (XX) of the sex-producing factor X, while male cats have just one copy (X—)
2. let’s also suppose there is something associated with the sex-producing factor X that affects coat colour and exists in two forms: normal (the non-orange form) and variant (the orange form).

This theory predicts that tortoiseshell cats have one of each form of the X factor, in which case they must be XX, and therefore must be female. Because males have only one X factor, they will be either orange or non-orange, but never tortoiseshell.

Little’s theory also explains the common observation that ginger cats are mostly male. If matings are not arranged on the basis of coat colour, and if we assume, for example, that 20% of male cats are ginger (having just one X factor of the orange form), the proportion of female ginger cats is expected to be much lower, as they need to receive two copies of the orange X factor.

Mathematically this can be calculated as 20% x 20% = 4%, meaning that we would expect only 4% of female cats to be orange.

Eventually, the X factor was revealed as the X chromosome, and the “—” as the Y chromosome.

Tortoiseshell and calico males do sometimes occur, but it’s usually due to an abnormality of the number of sex chromosomes, such as one too many X chromosomes (XXY), which also causes sterility.

Modern science confirms Little’s visionary theory

Little’s set of assumptions gave rise to predictions that have actually worked in practice for more than 110 years. This is a great example of the power and utility of what might have initially appeared to be an extraordinary theory.

The newly posted, not yet peer-reviewed reports of independent discoveries by a Japanese team and an American team have now found the something that Little proposed to be associated with the sex-producing factor X.

It’s a gene that’s part of the X chromosome. It produces a protein whose name is a bit of a mouthful: RHO GTPase-Activating Protein 36. The official gene symbol ARHGAP36 is not very descriptive, so we will simply call it the Orange gene.

The Orange gene has a known role in hair follicle development, but scientists didn’t previously know it is also involved in pigment production. This means that a new pathway for pigment production has been discovered, opening the way for exciting and important research into a basic biological process. Ivan Lopatin/Unsplash

A curious bit of deleted DNA

The other important discovery by these research teams is that the orange form proposed by Little is a large DNA deletion (loss of genetic material) of part of the Orange gene, and the non-orange form is the unchanged or “wild-type” version of that same gene.

While the deletion does not appear to change the protein that is produced by the gene, it does seem to impact when and where the protein is produced. Both discovery teams showed the Orange gene is persistently switched on in orange areas but is mostly switched off in non-orange areas of a cat’s coat.

Even though much remains to be discovered, ginger cats and their owners around the world can rejoice – the genetic basis of their distinctive coat colour has finally been worked out, more than 110 years after it was first proposed.

Frank Nicholas, Emeritus Professor of Animal Genetics, University of Sydney; Imke Tammen, Associate Professor Animal Biotechnology, University of Sydney, and Leslie A. Lyons, Gilbreath-McLorn Endowed Professor of Comparative Medicine, University of Missouri-Columbia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Chomsky suffered a stroke in June 2023 that has severely limited his movement, impaired his speech and impeded his ability to travel. His birthday provides an occasion to consider the tremendous corpus of works that he created over the years and to reflect on the many ways that his texts and recordings still critically engage with contemporary discussions all across disciplines and realms.

Chomsky’s vast body of work includes scientific research focused on language, human nature and the mind, and political writings about U.S. imperialism, Israel and Palestine, Central America, the Vietnam War, coercive institutions, the media and the many ways in which people’s needs are subjugated in the interest of profit and control.

As a scholar of humanities and law, I’ve engaged with Chomsky’s work from an array of perspectives and authored a biography called “Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent” and a book on Chomsky’s influence called “The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower.” One important theme in his broad corpus is his lifelong fascination with human creativity, which helps explain his vociferous attacks on those who seek to keep the rabble in line.

Early days

Avram Noam Chomsky was born on Dec. 7, 1928, in Philadelphia. He and his younger brother, David Chomsky, were raised in a lively household by Elsie Simonofsky and William (Zev) Chomsky, progressive educators who were deeply immersed in wide-ranging Jewish and Zionist cultural activities.

Chomsky often dates his own interest in teaching and learning to his close readings of Hebrew works with his parents and to the lively educational experiences he enjoyed at the Oak Lane County Day School, an experimental school that subscribed to John Dewey’s approach to immersive learning and promoted individual creativity over competition with other students.

A precocious learner, Chomsky at 12 years old read the proofs for his father’s book about a 13th-century Hebrew grammarian named David Kimhi. It was an auspicious beginning to a life immersed in philology, philosophy and the study of language and the mind. From very early on, he sought to understand innate human propensities for freedom, dignity and creativity, which inspired his interest in fostering those properties of human nature.

While Chomsky’s parents were what he called normal Roosevelt Democrats, he was drawn to more radical approaches to society and to the promotion of noncoercive social structures. At age 10, he read about the Spanish Civil War, which inspired him to write an editorial about the fall of Barcelona for his school’s newspaper. This was an early harbinger of his public intellectual work and his vociferous challenges to systems of oppression and illegitimate authority.

As a young man, Chomsky joined a socialist wing of the Zionist youth movement that opposed a Jewish state, and from his readings and discussions he came to favor Arab-Jewish class cooperation in a socialist Palestine. His deep knowledge of Palestine and Israel, bolstered by his ability to read and speak Arabic and Hebrew, helped inform his many vehement critiques of Israeli state power.

Radical pedagogy

After an early education focused on self-discovery and free-ranging exploration, Chomsky was introduced in high school to rote learning, competition with other students and a mainstream system of values. In reaction, he began to make regular trips to New York City, where he explored bookstores. He also made regular visits with a relative who ran a newsstand on 72nd Street that served as a lively intellectual center for emigrés interested in more radical approaches to society.

In 1944, Chomsky completed high school and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania. Although he has expressed some dismay about the structures of conformity and status quo thinking he encountered there, he did find inspiration in courses with philosopher C. West Churchman, linguist Giorgio Levi Della Vida and, moreover, linguist Zellig Harris. Chomsky knew members of the Harris family because Zellig Harris’ father hosted Jewish services in the Harris home that the Chomsky family occasionally attended.

Chomsky’s father’s approach to the study of language bore similarities to Zellig Harris’ work in Semitics, the study of Arabic, Hebrew and other Semitic languages. Harris invited Noam to read the proofs of his “Methods in Structural Linguistics.” This highly anticipated book was rooted in the idea that the function and the meaning of linguistic elements are determined by their their relationship to other components that make up sentences. After working hard to understand Harris’ linguistics paradigm, Chomsky eventually abandoned it, but he remained fascinated by Harris’ political views and by the unstructured, lively and creative debates that he promoted.

Chomsky met Carol Doris Schatz at the Hebrew School where her mother taught and Chomsky’s father was principal. Years later, when they were both students at the University of Pennsylvania, they started dating. They were married in 1949, and four years later they decided to move to an Israeli kibbutz, or communal agricultural settlement. They had expected to find a culture of creative free thinking there. Instead, they were deeply disappointed to find what Chomsky described as ideological conformity to Stalinist ideology. They returned to the U.S. after only six weeks.

The young couple settled in Boston and started a family. Noam pursued graduate work, while Carol paused her own studies to raise the children. She later returned to research on language acquisition, which she eventually taught and researched at MIT and Harvard. Carol Chomsky died in 2008. Noam remarried in 2014, to the Brazilian translator Valeria Wasserman Chomsky.

Chomskian revolution

When Chomsky was a student, most academic psychologists described human language as a system of habits, skills or dispositions to act that are acquired through extensive training, induction, generalization and association. By this account, language grows incrementally with experience, reinforced by a system of rewards and punishments.

This framework was at the heart of a structuralist paradigm, which analyzed the form and meaning of texts as different parts of the same thing. Any language, from this standpoint, restricts how phonemes and morphemes – the smallest units of sound and meaning in language – and other constituents are assembled and distributed. By this view, humans have the capacity to learn language in ways akin to how they acquire other kinds of knowledge.

Chomsky’s Ph.D. work, the resulting 1957 book “Syntactic Structures” and his New York Review of Books review of B.F. Skinner’s “Verbal Behaviour” challenged this paradigm and heralded the Chomskian linguistics revolution.

Chomsky’s starting point was that humans are endowed with universal grammar, which is activated by exposure to natural language. Children gain proficiency in a language by building on innate knowledge. This means that the capacity for language quite literally grows in the mind in a manner akin to how organs develop in the body.

Chomsky’s interest in innate human abilities draws in part from a range of philosophical treatises penned in the 17th and 18th centuries and associated with the Port Royal system of logic and Enlightenment philosophy, which emphasized science, individual liberty and the rule of law. He developed these ideas in a book called “Cartesian Linguistics,” which outlined his intellectual debt to the writings of, among others, Descartes, Kant, Rousseau and Wilhelm von Humboldt.

By the early 1960s, Chomsky’s work had gained him recognition in linguistics, philosophy and psychology. His own research, and that conducted by the growing number of linguists who adopted his approach, led to significant advances in the study of syntax, generative grammar, language and the mind, semantics, form and the interpretation of language.

His political engagement was documented in what I believe is a remarkable collection of interviews and books about U.S. imperialism, the Cold War, the Middle East, Central America and Southeast Asia, including “Problems of Knowledge and Freedom” and “For Reasons of State.” Puzzled by Americans’ spirit of resigned consensus, he began to collaborate with Edward S. Herman on books including “Counter-Revolutionary Violence,” “The Political Economy of Human Rights” and “Manufacturing Consent,” which was turned into a popular film by the same name.

Common thread

The common thread connecting Chomsky’s many intellectual projects are four “problems” that were the focus of much of his life’s work. One is Plato’s problem, which considers why it is that humans, whose contact with the world is brief and limited, can come to know so much. The second is Orwell’s complementary problem, which asks how is it that human beings know so little given the amount of information to which they have access. The third is Descartes’ problem, which pertains to the human capacity to freely express thoughts in constantly novel ways over an infinite range by means that are appropriate to circumstances but not caused by them. Finally, there’s Humboldt’s problem, which focuses on what constitutes language.

These problems are connected in different ways to how people learn, what impedes human development, and to speculations about the initial state of the language faculty, which he outlined in a range of texts, including “Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use,” “Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures,” “The Minimalist Program” and “Why Only Us? Language and Evolution,” with Robert C. Berwick.

Chomsky’s legacy

Remarkably tenacious and active, Chomsky continued to publish and to speak out on contemporary issues into his mid-90s. His ideas evolved but were rooted in a series of deeply seated ideas about the nature of the human mind. He is one of the most cited intellectuals in history, and he was voted the leading living public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll. Millions of people have watched his debates and discussions with William F. Buckley, Angela Davis, Alan Dershowitz, Michel Foucault, Howard Gardner, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Perle, Jean Piaget, Briahna Joy Gray and even Ali G.

As the figure widely viewed as the founder of cognitive sciences, Chomsky has been critical of the hype surrounding big data, artificial intelligence and ChatGPT.

As a voice for the downtrodden and the oppressed, he has spoken from the perspective of human rights, intellectual self-defense and the popular struggle through independent thinking against structures of power and subjugation.

Chomsky’s extraordinary achievements resonate far and wide – and are likely to continue to do so into the future.

Robert F. Barsky, Professor of Humanities and Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Each year, roughly 17,000 of these fireballs not only enter Earth’s atmosphere, but survive the perilous journey to the surface. This gives scientists a valuable chance to study these rocky visitors from outer space.

Scientists know that while some of these meteorites come from the Moon and Mars, the majority come from asteroids. But two separate studies published in Nature today have gone a step further. The research was led by Miroslav Brož from Charles University in the Czech Republic, and Michaël Marsset from the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

The papers trace the origin of most meteorites to just a handful of asteroid breakup events – and possibly even individual asteroids. In turn, they build our understanding of the events that shaped the history of the Earth – and the entire solar system.

What is a meteorite?

Only when a fireball reaches Earth’s surface is it called a meteorite. They are commonly designated as three types: stony meteorites, iron meteorites, and stony-iron meteorites.

Stony meteorites come in two types.

The most common are the chondrites, which have round objects inside that appear to have formed as melt droplets. These comprise 85% of all meteorites found on Earth.

Most are known as “ordinary chondrites”. They are then divided into three broad classes – H, L and LL – based on the iron content of the meteorites and the distribution of iron and magnesium in the major minerals olivine and pyroxene. These silicate minerals are the mineral building blocks of our Solar System and are common on Earth, being present in basalt.

“Carbonaceous chondrites” are a distinct group. They contain high amounts of water in clay minerals, and organic materials such as amino acids. Chondrites have never been melted and are direct samples of the dust that originally formed the solar system.

The less common of the two types of stony meteorites are the so-called “achondrites”. These do not have the distinctive round particles of chondrites, because they experienced melting on planetary bodies.

The asteroid belt

Asteroids are the primary sources of meteorites.

Most asteroids reside in a dense belt between Mars and Jupiter. The asteroid belt itself consists of millions of asteroids swept around and marshalled by the gravitational force of Jupiter.

The interactions with Jupiter can perturb asteroid orbits and cause collisions. This results in debris, which can aggregate into rubble pile asteroids. These then take on lives of their own.

It is asteroids of this type which the recent Hayabusa and Osiris-REx missions visited and returned samples from. These missions established the connection between distinct asteroid types and the meteorites that fall to Earth.

S-class asteroids (akin to stony meteorites) are found on the inner regions of the belt, while C-class carbonaceous asteroids (akin to carbonaceous chondrites) are more commonly found in the outer regions of the belt.

But, as the two Nature studies show, we can relate a specific meteorite type to its specific source asteroid in the main belt.

One family of asteroids

The two new studies place the sources of ordinary chondrite types into specific asteroid families – and most likely specific asteroids. This work requires painstaking back-tracking of meteoroid trajectories, observations of individual asteroids, and detailed modelling of the orbital evolution of parent bodies.

The study led by Miroslav Brož reports that ordinary chondrites originate from collisions between asteroids larger than 30 kilometres in diameter that occurred less than 30 million years ago.

The Koronis and Massalia asteroid families provide appropriate body sizes and are in a position that leads to material falling to Earth, based on detailed computer modelling. Of these families, asteroids Koronis and Karin are likely the dominant sources of H chondrites. Massalia (L) and Flora (LL) families are by far the main sources of L- and LL-like meteorites.

The study led by Michaël Marsset further documents the origin of L chondrite meteorites from Massalia.

It compiled spectroscopic data – that is, characteristic light intensities which can be fingerprints of different molecules – of asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. This showed that the composition of L chondrite meteorites on Earth is very similar to that of the Massalia family of asteroids.

The scientists then used computer modelling to show an asteroid collision that occurred roughly 470 million years ago formed the Massalia family. Serendipitously, this collision also resulted in abundant fossil meteorites in Ordovician limestones in Sweden.

In determining the source asteroid body, these reports provide the foundations for missions to visit the asteroids responsible for the most common outerspace visitors to Earth. In understanding these source asteroids, we can view the events that shaped our planetary system.

Trevor Ireland, Professor, School of the Environment, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The anonymously sent messages, which may have numbered up to 500,000, varied in their specific language but had similarly menacing themes. Some referred to recipients as “selected for slavery” and ordered them to a plantation to pick cotton. Others said they’d be picked up for deportation or sent to a reeducation camp.

The threats lacked details on timing, location and the like. Some addressed recipients by name, while others contained no greeting or personal identifier. They seemed to be targeting Black people, immigrants and LGBTQ people but may have been dispatched indiscriminately to a wide swath of Americans.

Information technology experts have expressed confidence that the perpetrators will be identified. Yet it’s not clear to me as a professor of constitutional and criminal law that they can be prosecuted. The First Amendment generally protects free speech, even when it’s heinous.

Free expression rules supreme

Several Supreme Court decisions have established that speech may not be punished just because it is offensive or hateful.

“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable,” the justices wrote in Texas v. Johnson, a 1989 case that affirmed flag burning is protected expression.

Snyder v. Phelps, a 2010 case involving anti-LGBTQ protesters who carried hateful signs at the funerals of fallen soldiers, strengthened that precedent.

“Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and – as it did here – inflict great pain,” the justices wrote. Nonetheless, they concluded, “We cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course – to protect even hurtful speech.”

Limits to free speech

The Supreme Court has been cautious in recognizing exceptions to the freedom of speech because of its importance to democracy and individual autonomy. Under special circumstances, however, some types of speech can be illegal.

One recognized exception is a “true threat.”

In the 2023 case Counterman v. Colorado, the Supreme Court held that for speech to cross over the true threat line, the speaker must both express an intent to commit violence and recklessly disregard “a substantial risk that his communications would be viewed as threatening violence.”

An example of a true threat under the Counterman case would be for a scorned lover to barrage their ex with messages promising to kill or maim them.

This standard is so new that it has not been tested thoroughly in the lower courts, making predictions risky at best. In my analysis, however, a message mass distributed to thousands of recipients indicating that they had been “selected” to be a slave might not meet the Counterman standard.

Additionally, “slave” is a legal status that hasn’t existed for over 150 years, so the threat to force someone into enslaved labor likely lacks both the peril of physical harm and the plausibility of harmful action. The anonymity of the senders may add to this implausibility.

Courts may also find that the communications didn’t create a “significant” risk that a “reasonable” recipient would feel threatened. An anonymous mass message may be interpreted as spam, or trolling.

Accordingly, the messages probably would not rise to the level of “true threat” exceptions to First Amendment protections.

Other exceptions recognized by the Supreme Court are speech that incites others to imminent lawlessness and “fighting words.”

Yet the November messages didn’t call others to violence, nor were their words likely to provoke it – the two hallmarks of incitement. “Fighting words,” meanwhile, require face-to-face communication that is likely to incite a violent reaction. This did not happen in the November messages, either.

So were any laws broken?

There’s another problem with any legal case against the culprits behind the November messages: What crime would they even be charged with?

The law enforcement officials who’ve pledged to get to the bottom of the matter have expressed outrage and concern, but they have not identified what law they believe was broken.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost is an exception.

“Other people have no First Amendment right to your phone, and free speech doesn’t protect telephone harassment,” Yost said in a post on X on Nov. 7 when he opened an inquiry into the hateful texts received by an an unspecified number of Ohioans.

Yost was likely referring to a 2011 Ohio statute that criminalizes telecommunications that are “threatening, intimidating, menacing, coercive, or obscene with the intent to abuse, threaten, or harass the recipient.”

The intersection of telephone harassment and the First Amendment is less clear, in my analysis. Laws vary by state, but illegal harassment and stalking typically involves physical conduct, which is not protected by the First Amendment – for example, repeated unwanted visits to someone’s home or workplace. Continually following someone in a manner intended to cause fear – or which recklessly causes fear or emotional distress – would be another example.

Could a text or email be characterized as conduct rather than speech? That is unsettled law. And where the law is unclear, novel legal strategies can set a new precedent.

If a court were to decide that the act of sending the November messages was “pure conduct,” rather than protected speech, then anti-harassment laws might be used to prosecute the senders.

Private action

Criminal law aside, people are not powerless against vile communications.

Telecommunications companies are free to block messages, both before they are received and in response to customer requests. After the wave of hateful texts in November, many did just that by closing accounts identified as sources of those messages.

If a blocked sender continues to send similar communications to a target, the elements of harassment would be met. A court could determine that to be expressive conduct or simply speech not protected by the First Amendment.

The U.S. draws the boundary widely around free speech because it enables wide, controversial discussions of politics, law and society. In this case, the senders ran up to the line of protected speech but quite possibility didn’t cross it.

“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels,” the author H.L. Mencken once said. “For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

Daniel Hall, Professor of Political Science & Justice and Community Studies, Miami University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Questions like these have been asked of diviners around the world throughout history – and still are today. From astrology and tarot to reading entrails, divination comes in a wide variety of forms.

Yet they all address the same human needs. They promise to tame uncertainty, help us make decisions or simply satisfy our desire to understand.

Anthropologists and historians like us study divination because it sheds light on the fears and anxieties of particular cultures, many of which are universal. Our new exhibition at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Oracles, Omens & Answers, explores these issues by showcasing divination techniques from around the world.

Here are five examples of divination techniques different cultures have developed to cope with life’s uncertainties.

1. Spider divination

In Cameroon, Mambila spider divination (ŋgam dù) addresses difficult questions to spiders or land crabs that live in holes in the ground.

Asking the spiders a question involves covering their hole with a broken pot and placing a stick, a stone and cards made from leaves around it. The diviner then asks a question in a yes or no format while tapping the enclosure to encourage the spider or crab to emerge. The stick and stone represent yes or no, while the leaf cards, which are specially incised with certain meanings, offer further clarification.

The movements of the spider or crab rearrange these objects, so that if a leaf card is moved to the stone or the stick, the answer emerges.

The answer is not always clear, however. If neither the stick nor the stone are selected (or both are chosen), interpretive work is required. The diviner and client must resolve the ambiguity, or decide that in this case the spider wasn’t saying anything at all.

2. Palmistry

Reading people’s palms (palmistry) is well known as a fairground amusement, but serious forms of this divination technique exist in many cultures. The practice of reading the hands to gather insights into a person’s character and future was used in many ancient cultures across Asia and Europe.

In some traditions, the shape and depth of the lines on the palm are richest in meaning. In others, the size of the hands and fingers are also considered. In some Indian traditions, special marks and symbols appearing on the palm also provide insights.

Palmistry experienced a huge resurgence in 19th-century England and America, just as the science of fingerprints was being developed. If you could identify someone from their fingerprints, it seemed plausible to read their personality from their hands.

One person who had their palm read at this time was Oscar Wilde. His reader, Edward Heron-Allen, published a sketch of Wilde’s hands, explaining that his palms indicated “extraordinary brain power” and a “great power of expression”.

3. Bibliomancy

If you want a quick answer to a difficult question, you could try bibliomancy. Historically, this DIY divining technique was performed with whatever important books were on hand.

Throughout Europe, the works of Homer or Virgil were used. In Iran, it was often the Divan of Hafiz, a collection of Persian poetry. In Christian, Muslim and Jewish traditions, holy texts have often been used, though not without controversy.

There are a few ways to do it. In south-east Asia, you might push a sharp object through the pages of the book to see where its tip reaches.

Alternatively, you could open a page at random and see where your gaze falls. Although it might need some careful interpretation, the passage is thought to hold an answer to your dilemma.

4. Astrology

Astrology exists in almost every culture around the world. As far back as ancient Babylon, astrologers have interpreted the heavens to discover hidden truths and predict the future.

To cast horoscopes – essentially maps of the planets and stars as seen from a particular place and time on earth – astrologers need access to accurate astronomical observations. For this reason, pre-modern astrology was closely connected to astronomy.

Astrologers might cast horoscopes for a person’s birth, for the moment at which a client asks a query, or even a date in the future to determine whether it was good timing for a particular event.

The planets and zodiac signs each carry meanings, which are augmented by their relations to each other on a horoscope. Astrologers’ readings of these charts have long helped people seeking guidance, providing answers to pressing questions and aiding decision making.

In many historical cultures, astrologers also held prominent positions in royal courts and governments, making forecasts about the health and prosperity of their realm and the likelihood of impending disasters.

5. Calendrical divination

Calendars have long been used to divine the future and establish the best times to perform certain activities. In many countries, almanacs still advise auspicious and inauspicious days for tasks ranging from getting a haircut to starting a new business deal.

In Indonesia, Hindu almanacs called pawukon explain how different weeks are ruled by different local deities. The characteristics of the deities mean that some weeks are better than others for activities like marriage ceremonies.

In pre-conquest Mesoamerica (which roughly covered modern day central Mexico south to the north-western border of Costa Rica) your nature, fate and even your name were determined by the day on which you were born. Calendar priests in Mexico could forecast the success of a marriage by using a sacred, 260-day divination calendar. Interpreting the signs, the priest could tell whether a partnership would be happy, challenging or doomed – as well as how many children would result.

Oracles, Omens & Answers is at Oxford’s Bodleian Library at Oxford until April 27 2025.

David Zeitlyn, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford and Michelle Aroney, Research Fellow in Early Modern History, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Here are some more striking figures (all converted into Australian dollars). The average price of a ransom: $560,000. The payout to families if one of their loved ones dies in an act of terrorism (in Australia) $75,000. The average price of saving a life through strategic philanthropy: $6,000. And the price of buying a cadaver: $7,600.

Kleeman’s book investigates the many ways decision-makers find themselves putting a price on the priceless.

In her quest to discover how our modern world fixes a price to human life in a wide variety of contexts, she also investigates the costs and consequences of life insurance, the sale of body parts, and the inside details of government policy-making, compensation for murder and more.

As an ethicist, I enjoyed wrestling with the many surprising questions Kleeman’s fascinating book opens, even when I disagreed with some of her answers.

Who decides?

Of course, the amusing variations between the numbers Kleeman uncovers aren’t wholly unexpected: the prices affixed to human life in these contexts provide answers to very different questions. The hitman, for example, isn’t pricing that $30,000 based on how much they think a human life is worth. (Being the type of person who genuinely asks that question of themselves probably precludes that career path.) Instead, they are pricing the personal risks to them of committing the crime.

As this suggests, Kleeman’s book is not just concerned with how and why a human life is priced, but on who decides that price. Kleeman’s question encourages her to look in strange places and talk to interesting people, opening the readers’ eyes to decisions and calculations often hidden – sometimes deliberately so – from public view.

It spills over with fascinating characters: contract killers, police detectives, military jet pilots, philanthropists, life insurance investigators and government policy-makers. This is one of the book’s most delightful features. Her conversations with these varied characters are always engaging – because pricing life requires wading through deep ethical waters.

Ironically, Kleeman began work on the book in 2019. Back then, she – like so many of us – could comfortably avoid thinking about putting a price on human life and health. But that was pre-COVID. By early 2021, the question of what we are willing to pay to save lives was pressed onto us and our political leaders, in urgent and public ways.

‘Quality adjusted life years’

Confronting questions about what we will pay to save a life makes Kleeman’s subject especially vivid and urgent. Here, she meets strange ideas and stranger people: QALYs and effective altruists.

“QALYs” refers to Quality Adjusted Life Years – roughly, a year of human life lived in good health.

If pricing a life is to be done in any meaningful way, the QALY (or something like it) is a vital step in that direction. It lets decision-makers have a measure of consistency in allocating scarce resources.

For example, she discovers that the United Kingdom’s National Health Service will cover drugs that run to £30,000 (A$60,000) per QALY. More expensive treatments don’t present enough value per dollar invested. With a limited amount of funds to spend, it makes a kind of sense to spend them in the way that will do the most good possible, even if it involves making hard decisions.

It’s not just governments that try to carefully quantify the impacts of their dollars on human wellbeing.

Inspired by the writings of utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, effective altruism is a philosophy that focuses on doing the most good possible with the available resources.

It made headlines last year, when (now disgraced) crypto king and loud-and-proud effective atruist Sam Bankman-Fried claimed he needed “infinite dollars” because he planned to address existential risks facing humanity.

The philosophy has been particularly influential with Silicon Valley philanthropists like Bankman-Fried, and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, a major funder of the charity Open Philanthropy. Kleeman interviews the latter “OpenPhil” team, who explain how they try to direct the charity’s billions of dollars towards the most cost-effective ways of saving human lives.

Organisations like OpenPhil and GiveWell estimate it takes around A$6,000 to save a life.

A reluctant journey?

At the start of her journey, Kleeman was profoundly disquieted about pricing human life. She raises this concern consistently.

She notes that the effective altruists she interviews in San Francisco, for example, ignore the homeless people living on nearby streets. Instead, they maximise the life impact of their philanthropy by dispassionately directing their charity to far-off Africans.

By the book’s end, though, Kleeman finds herself more open to some of the ways a price is put on human life. Is this moral progress? Or – she wonders – has she simply become used to talking and thinking in these ways?

Kleeman writes best when she is struggling with these difficult questions. When she is cocksure, sneering at the cost of weapons systems as she claims the money could be better spent addressing climate change, her sweeping ethical statements seemed – to this ethicist at least – glib and unserious.

But when she wrestles squarely with the seeming need for pricing life, and the simultaneous horror of doing so, she brings the reader along on her challenging but illuminating journey.

Putting a price on life

To get to a price on life, two conceptual steps need to be made.

The first step is to judge that – in some ways at least – human lives are commensurable. That is, we can add up the value (the goodness, or happiness, or worthwhileness) of one life and numerically compare it to another.

This is controversial – but many would argue it can, or even must, be done. This is what QALYs aim to do. The ethical theory of utilitarianism, which tells us to maximise the sum total of happiness in the world, also urges us to do it.

Indeed, we all do something like this in our everyday lives. Whenever we decide to make the world a better place by helping other people, we are implicitly judging that the good we do for them will outweigh the possible risks or costs we impose on them.

The second step in pricing a life is fully converting those “commensurable” numbers, which represent the value of people’s lives, into monetary terms. This seems self-evidently morally awful. Humanity can’t be reduced to a fungible resource that allows it to be weighed alongside – and traded with – other market goods.

To me, what Kleeman’s book demonstrates – despite its title – is that almost no one actually does this. For almost all the people she interviews, the question is not: “what is the overall objective worth of a person, expressed in dollars?”

Instead, the questions they confront are more like: how much do I as an individual owe this person? How much should we as a community support this person? Given the extent of resources available, how do we save as many lives as possible? How much will my family need to be supported if I die?

None of those questions are morally objectionable. Sometimes they might need to be answered in dollar terms.

Sometimes, the money is symbolic

Kleeman suggests people will be morally outraged at the difference in numbers between, say, the payouts given to the families of victims of the 2017 London Bridge terrorist attack. In this horrifying tragedy, terrorists used a van to mount the London Bridge kerb and mow down pedestrians (including many tourists), before leaving the vehicle to murder other civilians, using knives they had strapped to their wrists.

In the aftermath, the families of victims struck by the vehicle were able to sue the deep pockets of the rental company’s insurer. The families of those stabbed on the street had only the highly variable payouts their native countries give to victims of terrorism.

But is this really a moral affront? There is no infinite slush fund to compensate for the bad things that happen to people. We can’t judge policy as if there were. This inevitably means the extent of compensation available to victims will depend on how they were harmed, who is legally responsible, and – yes – how deep their pockets are.

Even the variability between nations in payouts for victims of terrorism is understandable. Most of these payments are not designed to compensate for life lost. How could they be? Instead, they aim to show community concern and offer some basic support. These are factors that might reasonably lead to different outcomes.

Do dollars deny humanity?

Kleeman’s abiding question remains. What is gained, and what is lost, from answering difficult moral questions in quantified monetary terms?

Kleeman has strong views on the costs of doing so. Too easily, decision-makers can forget the human being represented by the numbers they work with. This can empower them to make hard, dispassionate judgements they likely would never make – could never make – to a person in front of them. Dollar amounts can be traded off easily, in ways human beings should never be.

Kleeman worries this dispassionate application of dollar sums to human problems requires a denial of humanity.

There are reasonable worries here, but Kleeman seems unduly cynical about moral perspectives that don’t match her own. (To the point where she wonders if San Francisco’s tech philanthropists actually prefer giving to Africans rather than homeless locals, because the former seem less blameworthy for their condition.)

But my own research shows we have good reason to think there is actually an astounding variety of reliable and fulfilling ways of being moral. Rather than deplore the diverse psychological motives that can drive people to philanthropic giving, we should simply celebrate the fact of their doing so.

Justice in numbers?

But enough on the costs. The really intriguing question is: are there moral goods to these numbers?

Kleeman seems unwilling to grant that the numbers might improve efficiency and effectiveness in morally important ways.

The effective altruists might seem to be perversely applying a mathematical and engineering perspective to matters of conscience. However, it is hard to deny they are literally saving more lives than they would using other approaches. On any ethical reckoning, it must matter that those abstract numbers eventually culminate in real human beings, who are living today because of these calculations.

Perhaps more surprisingly, there is also a sense of justice in these bare numbers.

As Kleeman’s thinking evolves, she occasionally gestures towards this possibility. There is a reason the statue of “Lady Justice” used to embody justice is often presented as blindfolded. It illustrates there are things that should not be taken into account in fair decision-making. Sometimes, personal, humanising details are morally inappropriate.

A good place to start

Kleeman recounts the heartwarming story of a child who was marginally ineligible for a lifesaving medical treatment to be funded by the UK health system. By going public with his story, his mother humanised her child and pushed the National Health Service to extend coverage for the treatment to her child, and more widely.

Yet equally, we all must know in our hearts that a similar story could be told – perhaps should be told – for all dying children, including the ones whose parents are unable to mount campaigns on their behalf.

At some point, the sterility of numbers seems not just expedient, but right. It reminds us that in important ways, we are all of equal moral worth, no matter whose stories seize national attention.

Ultimately, for those wondering how much numbers should be part of the solution to the moral problems we confront, Kleeman’s book presents a great place to start looking for answers.

Hugh Breakey, Deputy Director, Institute for Ethics, Governance & Law, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

People often think of these musical memories as fixed snapshots of the past. But recent research my team and I published suggests music may do more than just trigger memories – it might even change how you remember them.

I’m a psychology researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Along with my mentor Thackery Brown and University of Colorado Boulder music experts Sophia Mehdizadeh and Grace Leslie, our recently published research uncovered intriguing connections between music, emotion and memory. Specifically, listening to music can change how you feel about what you remember – potentially offering new ways to help people cope with difficult memories.

Music, stories and memory

When you listen to music, it’s not just your ears that are engaged. The areas of your brain responsible for emotion and memory also become active. The hippocampus, which is essential for storing and retrieving memories, works closely with the amygdala, the brain’s emotional center. This is partly why certain songs are not only memorable but also deeply emotional.

While music’s ability to evoke emotions and trigger memories is well known, we wondered whether it could also alter the emotional content of existing memories. Our hypothesis was rooted in the concept of memory reactivation – the idea that when you recall a memory, it becomes temporarily malleable, allowing new information to be incorporated.

We developed a three-day experiment to test whether music played during recall might introduce new emotional elements into the original memory.

On the first day, participants memorized a series of short, emotionally neutral stories. The next day, they recalled these stories while listening to either positive music, negative music or silence. On the final day, we asked participants to recall the stories again, this time without any music. On the second day, we recorded their brain activity with fMRI scans, which measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow.

Our approach is analogous to how movie soundtracks can alter viewers’ perceptions of a scene, but in this case, we examined how music might change participants’ actual memories of an event.

The results were striking. When participants listened to emotionally charged music while recalling the neutral stories, they were more likely to incorporate new emotional elements into the story that matched the mood of the music. For example, neutral stories recalled with positive music in the background were later remembered as being more positive, even when the music was no longer playing.

Even more intriguing were the brain scans we took during the experiment. When participants recalled stories while listening to music, there was increased activity in the amygdala and hippocampus – areas crucial for emotional memory processing. This is why a song associated with a significant life event can feel so powerful – it activates both emotion- and memory-processing regions simultaneously.

We also saw evidence of strong communication between these emotional memory processing parts of the brain and the parts of the brain involved in visual sensory processing. This suggests music might infuse emotional details into memories while participants were visually imagining the stories.

Musical memories

Our results suggest that music acts as an emotional lure, becoming intertwined with memories and subtly altering their emotional tone. Memories may also be more flexible than previously thought and could be influenced by external auditory cues during recall.

While further research is needed, our findings have exciting implications for both everyday life and for medicine.

For people dealing with conditions such as depression or PTSD, where negative memories can be overwhelming, carefully chosen music might help reframe those memories in a more positive light and potentially reduce their negative emotional impact over time. It also opens new avenues for exploring music-based interventions in treatments for depression and other mental health conditions.

On a day-to-day level, our research highlights the potential power of the soundtrack people choose for their lives. Memories, much like your favorite songs, can be remixed and remastered by music. The music you listen to while reminiscing or even while going about your daily routines might be subtly shaping how you remember those experiences in the future.

The next time you put on a favorite playlist, consider how it might be coloring not just your current mood but also your future recollections as well.

Yiren Ren, Adjunct Researcher in Cognitive Brain Science, Georgia Institute of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For the first lunar landing mission, called Artemis III, the SLS will launch four astronauts on Nasa’s Orion crew capsule. Orion will then travel to the Moon. Once in lunar orbit, Orion will dock with Elon Musk’s Starship vehicle (which has been launched separately). Two astronauts will float into Starship, which undocks from Orion and travels down to the lunar surface.

After walking on the Moon, the two astronauts return to lunar orbit in Starship, which docks with Orion. The two moonwalkers rejoin their crewmates and go home on Orion, leaving Starship in orbit around the Moon.

The US space journalist Eric Berger recently posted on X: “To be clear we are far from anything being settled, but based on what I’m hearing it seems at least 50-50 that Nasa’s Space Launch System rocket will be cancelled.”

No official announcements have been made. However, such a move could be in line with previous speculation that the Trump administration could gut Nasa, forcing it to contract out much of its work to the private companies.

But could another rocket easily take the place of the SLS? This question goes to the heart of what America wants to achieve amid an emerging 21st-century space race. China has pledged to send its astronauts to the lunar surface by 2030. Unlike the US, China is usually conservative in its estimates, so we can assume deadline slippage is unlikely. Meanwhile, several elements of Artemis are holding up the schedule.

One of these delayed elements is Musk’s Starship, which acts as the lander on Artemis III. It still needs to demonstrate key milestones including refuelling in space and performing a landing on the Moon without crew. Some in the space community believe that if China were to get to the Moon first this century, it would deal a significant blow to US ambitions in space.

Musk has been brought into the incoming administration as one of two chief cost cutters, aiming to make reductions of up to US$2 trillion (£1.57 trillion) from the federal budget. Some observers have been alarmed by Elon Musk’s closeness to Trump and by comments by the president-elect about shifting focus towards a crewed Mars mission.

These comments seem to mirror the views of Musk, who has focused much of his energy on ambitions to settle the red planet, not the Moon. The billionaire has said he wants to send humans on a trip to Mars using his Starship vehicle by 2028 – a timeline that some view as unrealistic.

It was actually the first Trump administration that established the Artemis programme in 2017. After initial missions to the lunar surface, the programme aims to establish a permanent base where astronauts can learn how to live and work on the Moon, carrying out cutting-edge research.

However, the schedule has been slipping. US astronauts were to have landed on the Moon this year. Nasa now says the first landing, during the Artemis III mission, will not take place until Autumn 2026.

Delays have been introduced by redesigns to spacesuits, problems with Orion’s heat-shield and life support systems and, as mentioned, with Starship. An upgraded mobile launch tower for the SLS has also been plagued by cost overruns and schedule slippage.

Notably, an element that isn’t contributing to delays is the SLS, which performed very well during the Artemis I mission in 2022. Many billions of dollars have already been invested in designing and building the SLS and associated infrastructure at Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Nasa says the SLS is “the only rocket that can send Orion, astronauts, and cargo directly to the Moon in a single launch”. But its expense has been criticised: each SLS launch is estimated to cost more than US$2 billion (£1.6 billion).

News of delays and technical issues with Artemis have coincided with hugely positive PR for Musk’s SpaceX – especially around its test flights of Starship. This included last month’s feat, where the vehicle’s massive booster stage was caught in a pair of robotic arms as it fell back from space to the company’s launchpad in Texas – wowing space enthusiasts around the world. Unlike many launch vehicles, Starship is designed to be fully reusable. Its cost efficiency could greatly benefit future crewed missions.

If the SLS were to be cancelled, could Musk’s Starship replace it? Under this scenario, the SpaceX vehicle could presumably serve both as the launcher to send astronauts on their way to lunar orbit and as the lander to take them down to the surface. This is technically feasible, but would be far from a straightforward, like-for-like replacement. The SLS is already an operational rocket, whereas Starship is still in its testing phase and has key steps still to achieve before astronauts can board it.

Another SpaceX rocket that has previously been touted as a contender to launch Orion is the Falcon Heavy. However, engineers would need to modify both the rocket and procedures for assembly and launch. This would carry many uncertainties, and with it the risk of further, significant delays to the Artemis schedule. This all suggests that there is not a lot of time to make major changes to Nasa’s Moon programme if the US is to get ahead in this 21st-century space race.

Rocket launches require specific designs to meet mission requirements, as well as extensive planning for carrying astronauts, spacecraft and payloads. The aims of Artemis are not just to land astronauts on the Moon, but to be able to land in a variety of regions on the lunar surface, including the relatively unexplored south pole.

The planning and development required is hugely complex and ambitious. It remains to be seen whether SpaceX, or any other commercial launch companies, are ready for such a major undertaking and commitment.

With tens of billions of dollars already invested in the SLS, it does not seem economically beneficial to completely scrap the rocket. As indicated by Nasa’s willingness to seek an innovative approach and work with commercial companies on future Artemis missions, there could be other ways for commercial space players to get involved.

It’s understandable for the incoming Trump administration to raise questions and query cost models in Nasa programmes. But it would be advisable for them to carefully consider the trade offs before making decisions with such wide-ranging consequences.

It might fall down to whether the priority is winning the new space race. Whatever goals that the new administration chooses to prioritise or target, it may have to carefully justify that decision to other legislators and to the American public.

Yang Gao, Professor of Robotics, Head of Centre for Robotics Research, King's College London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In new research, we have for the first time tracked one of these pulsating signals back to its source: a common kind of lightweight star called a red dwarf, likely in a binary orbit with a white dwarf, the core of another star that exploded long ago.

A slowly pulsing mystery

In 2022, our team made an amazing discovery: periodic radio pulsations that repeated every 18 minutes, emanating from space. The pulses outshone everything nearby, flashed brilliantly for three months, then disappeared.

We know some repeating radio signals come from a kind of neutron star called a radio pulsar, which spins rapidly (typically once a second or faster), beaming out radio waves like a lighthouse. The trouble is, our current theories say a pulsar spinning only once every 18 minutes should not produce radio waves.

So we thought our 2022 discovery could point to new and exciting physics – or help explain exactly how pulsars emit radiation, which despite 50 years of research is still not understood very well.

More slowly blinking radio sources have been discovered since then. There are now about ten known “long-period radio transients”.

However, just finding more hasn’t been enough to solve the mystery.

Searching the outskirts of the galaxy

Until now, every one of these sources has been found deep in the heart of the Milky Way.

This makes it very hard to figure out what kind of star or object produces the radio waves, because there are thousands of stars in a small area. Any one of them could be responsible for the signal, or none of them.

So, we started a campaign to scan the skies with the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope in Western Australia, which can observe 1,000 square degrees of the sky every minute. An undergraduate student at Curtin University, Csanád Horváth, processed data covering half of the sky, looking for these elusive signals in more sparsely populated regions of the Milky Way.

And sure enough, we found a new source! Dubbed GLEAM-X J0704-37, it produces minute-long pulses of radio waves, just like other long-period radio transients. However, these pulses repeat only once every 2.9 hours, making it the slowest long-period radio transient found so far.

Where are the radio waves coming from?

We performed follow-up observations with the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa, the most sensitive radio telescope in the southern hemisphere. These pinpointed the location of the radio waves precisely: they were coming from a red dwarf star. These stars are incredibly common, making up 70% of the stars in the Milky Way, but they are so faint that not a single one is visible to the naked eye.

Combining historical observations from the Murchison Widefield Array and new MeerKAT monitoring data, we found that the pulses arrive a little earlier and a little later in a repeating pattern. This probably indicates that the radio emitter isn’t the red dwarf itself, but rather an unseen object in a binary orbit with it.

Based on previous studies of the evolution of stars, we think this invisible radio emitter is most likely to be a white dwarf, which is the final endpoint of small to medium-sized stars like our own Sun. If it were a neutron star or a black hole, the explosion that created it would have been so large it should have disrupted the orbit.

It takes two to tango

So how do a red dwarf and a white dwarf generate a radio signal?

The red dwarf probably produces a stellar wind of charged particles, just like our Sun does. When the wind hits the white dwarf’s magnetic field, it would be accelerated, producing radio waves.

This could be similar to how the Sun’s stellar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetic field to produce beautiful aurora, and also low-frequency radio waves.

We already know of a few systems like this, such as AR Scorpii, where variations in the brightness of the red dwarf imply that the companion white dwarf is hitting it with a powerful beam of radio waves every two minutes. None of these systems are as bright or as slow as the long-period radio transients, but maybe as we find more examples, we will work out a unifying physical model that explains all of them.

On the other hand, there may be many different kinds of system that can produce long-period radio pulsations.

Either way, we’ve learned the power of expecting the unexpected – and we’ll keep scanning the skies to solve this cosmic mystery.

Natasha Hurley-Walker, Radio Astronomer, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Inflation has since come down to levels close to normal thanks in large part to a steep rise in interest rates. But in an ironic twist, some of Trump’s own policies – which he heavily promoted on the campaign trail – could send inflation soaring once more if enacted. Specifically, economists caution that his proposed policies on tariffs, immigration and taxes may do more to exacerbate inflation than curb it.

In my introductory economics classes, I teach my students about the unintended consequences of policies and how they can sometimes be counterintuitive. Common-sense economics often falls short, and this is evident in several policies proposed by Trump, where the expected outcomes may not align with their actual impacts.

Stagnant real wages

Exit poll data reveals that Americans felt the sting of rising prices in recent years, as inflation-adjusted wages strained household budgets.

Even as the Federal Reserve has managed to bring inflation much closer to its 2% target, many Americans continue to describe prices as “too high,” an echo of the past several years’ cost increases that persistently outpaced wage growth.

When inflation outpaces wage growth, the purchasing power of each dollar erodes, leaving workers struggling to afford the same goods and services. This erosion has been felt particularly hard in recent years, but it’s part of a long-term trend of sluggish wages.

Inflation-adjusted wages have been largely stagnant for decades, with certain metrics revealing a dismal reality. For example, the federal minimum wage, created in 1938 and set at US$7.25 since 2009, is now worth less than half of what it was over 50 years ago. Back in the late-1960s, the minimum wage was worth the equivalent of $14.50 per hour in today’s money after adjusting for inflation.

Median weekly earnings paint a similarly bleak picture. Today’s median weekly real earnings for men, adjusted for inflation, are below their level from the mid-1970s. This stagnation has been a critical factor in voters’ recent concerns, with inflationary pressures intensifying the burden on low- and middle-income households.

Trump’s campaign promised swift action to end what he called the “inflation nightmare.” But the following three Trump’s economic policies may have the opposite effect of what his supporters hope for.

1. Tariffs: Americans usually pay the bill

Protectionist policies, such as tariffs on imported goods, tend to increase costs for consumers by limiting supply and raising prices.

In Trump’s first term, tariffs on Chinese imports caused domestic prices to increase across various sectors, from consumer electronics to agricultural products. His renewed interest in protectionism could exacerbate inflation by restricting competition and limiting the availability of affordable goods.

In his second term, Trump has said he would increase tariffs on Chinese goods to as high as 60%, tariff rates significantly higher than the 7.5%-25% imposed on China during his first term.

Many voters express support for tariffs, often viewing them as a way to protect American jobs and industries from foreign competition. However, many might not realize that tariffs function much like sales taxes and are ultimately paid by American consumers rather than the countries exporting goods to the U.S.

Here’s how tariffs work: When the U.S. imposes a tariff on imports, it essentially adds an extra cost to those foreign goods. This cost is passed along the supply chain, leading to higher prices for American companies and consumers who buy these products.

Economists widely agree that tariffs can drive inflation by increasing consumer costs and limiting the availability of affordable options. This basic lesson from Economics 101 underscores how protectionist policies like tariffs, while appealing in principle, often bring unintended consequences for everyday shoppers.

In addition, imposing tariffs on imports risks retaliation from other countries, which may impose their own trade restrictions on U.S. exports. This can reduce demand for American goods, especially in industries like agriculture and manufacturing, slowing economic growth and potentially leading to job losses.

For example, in mid-2018, the U.S. and China engaged in a series of escalating tariffs on each other’s goods, targeting billions of dollars in imports and leading to reciprocal trade restrictions that significantly hurt both economies. A series of studies highlighted the costly economic toll of the U.S.-China trade war, including estimated job losses of nearly 300,000.

In short, tariffs could backfire, hurting both our exports and economy.

2. Deporting millions of migrants could create a labor shortage

Trump’s plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants also may unintentionally drive inflation higher, as employers across key industries like food production and hospitality would likely face a labor shortage.

Immigrants play a vital role in these sectors, often taking on roles that are difficult to fill. For example, immigrants make up a significant portion of the workforce in agriculture, food processing and hospitality, where they perform essential tasks to keep costs low for American consumers. And they play a key role in the construction industry, including in building new homes.

If deportations proceed as proposed, employers in these industries may be forced to raise wages to attract new workers or lower the supply, leading to higher prices. These added expenses would ultimately trickle down to consumers, increasing prices on everyday items like fruits and vegetables, as well as services like dining out and hotel accommodations.

In short, the loss of this critical workforce could contribute to inflation, making basics like groceries and restaurant meals more expensive for American households.

3. Tax cuts risk fueling too much demand – and price hikes

Economists are also worried about the inflationary impact of tax cuts.

Trump’s tax plans include extending the trillions of dollars in cuts his administration signed into law in his first term – most of which are set to expire in 2025 – and eliminating or reducing other taxes.

While cutting taxes can temporarily boost disposable income by increasing the money households have on hand, it can also drive up inflation by increasing what economists call “aggregate demand” – that is, the total demand for goods and services across the economy.

When this rises sharply, it can put pressure on prices, especially if the supply of goods and services can’t keep up. This imbalance risks fueling inflation, as businesses raise prices to keep up with the surge in demand.

This dynamic is similar to what we observed after the COVID-19 pandemic, when pent-up desire to buy goods and services — built up after months of lockdowns and restrictions — was unleashed. Households, eager to spend, drove up demand in areas like travel, dining and consumer goods.

But businesses faced challenges: supply chain disruptions, labor shortages and limited production capacity. With demand outpacing supply, inflation soared as prices spiked in many sectors.

Could the ‘inflation nightmare’ return?

Expectations that inflation is once again on the rise could have another result that would be painful for consumers: higher interest rates.

The pace of inflation came down from about 9% in the summer of 2022 to 2.4% in September 2024 after the Fed began aggressively hiking its benchmark interest rate. By driving up borrowing costs on everything from car loans to mortgages, the Fed forced many consumers to cut back on spending and priced many Americans out of the housing market.

The drop in inflation, coupled with concerns about the strength of the economy, prompted the central bank to switch course a few months ago and cut rates twice by a total of 0.75 of a percentage point, bringing some relief to consumers. But if the Fed believes inflation is headed higher due to these new policies, it may have to reverse course again and raise rates to fight it.

This, of course, would make it harder for Americans to afford a home – especially when coupled with a labor shortage in the construction industry.

Taken together, many of Trump’s proposed policies may inadvertently fuel another “inflation nightmare.”

Veronika Dolar, Associate Professor of Economics, Pace University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It made sense, therefore, to study the source of the ideology that supposedly shaped this strange new world. Right near the beginning, in Genesis chapter 11, he found the intriguing story of the Tower of Babel, a myth on the origin of linguistic and cultural confusion.

It tells of a time when all people spoke the same language, and out of pride, they built a tower to the heavens so it would be seen from wherever they went. God realised if they continued to collaborate, nothing could stop them:

If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.

The tower was abandoned – and the people scattered across the earth, with many different languages.

Many years later, when Shen contemplated the way his life and his wife’s life had been shaped by ideology and circumstance, he remembered the lesson of the Tower of Babel

Settling in Bob Hawke’s Australia

In June 1989, when student demonstrations in Beijing resulted in the Tiananmen Square massacre, Jiawei Shen was in Australia. As all affected Chinese citizens were granted asylum by then Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, he was able to settle in Sydney.

He was soon joined by his wife, fellow artist Lan Wang, and their baby daughter, Xini. While Lan Wang worked as a cleaner, Jiawei Shen started his Australian career by drawing portraits for tourists at Circular Quay. Most art competitions are by invitation only, but in 1993 when he entered the open-entry Archibald Prize with a portrait of Professor John Clarke, his work was hung.

He soon became an Archibald favourite. The smooth, almost photographic finish that characterised his style made him a popular artist for portrait commissions. In 1995, he was awarded the Mary MacKillop Art Award. His interpretation of the future saint pleased the conservative hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1997, Shen and Wang bought a small fisherman’s cottage at Bundeena on the edge of the Royal National Park. After the changing political climate in China saw his art (which had been out of favour) come into fashion once more, Jiawei Shen considered the nature and impact of ideology.

He thought again of the story of Babel – and how it could be seen as a metaphor for what had happened to the original ideals of Communism.

On October 30 2017, exactly 100 years after the Bolshevik Revolution, Shen began to paint his magnum opus, The Tower of Babel. The painting is so large it fills the walls of the three storey house that was built to contain it.

James Bradley’s documentary, Welcome to Babel, records both the painstaking process of making the painting – as well as the contradictions and commonalities of Jiawei Shen and Lan Wang’s lives in both China and Australia.

A vision to build the communist mansion

The painting itself (which remains in Shen’s possession) is divided into four parts, one for each wall: Utopia, Internationale, Gulag and Saturnus.

The images are drawn from both historic documents and copies of works of art made by artists identifying with Communism. Utopia, the first painting, starts with Lenin and the ideals of the Bolshevik revolution, which evolved into the tyranny of Stalin and, in China, Mao.

Portraits of the great men evolve into images based on the propaganda they spread about the new society they were creating. As their ideas spread around the world, they influenced many artists – such as Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera – who came to admire the idealism of this brave new world.

Shen was a child of Mao’s revolution. Born in Shanghai in 1948, he was the son of loyal party members. In his childhood he knew “we were building the Communist mansion”. He still honours the idealism of the those thinkers who imagined a world where all can flourish.

His childhood within the Party is contrasted with Lan Wang’s experience of childhood as a daughter of a despised “Rightist”. Throughout the film, her sometimes tart observations give essential leavening to her husband’s heroic narrative.

The third wall, “Gulag”, shows the cost of unthinking ideology. He remembers being hungry in Mao’s Great Famine, when overeager Party figures falsified production numbers to please their leader and people starved. Wang remembers seeing the dead.

As with other students, they were both sent to work in the country alongside peasant farmers. But while Shen remembers this as “the happiest time in my life”, Wang was sent to a remote northern province where it was cold and people starved.

‘He didn’t experience the suffering’

Jiawei Shen’s career as an artist came from his time in the country when his painting, Standing Guard for our Great Motherland, attracted the attention of Madam Mao.

His status as a heroic worker artist ended after Mao’s death, and he became an art student. The same event also freed “children of the dogs” like Lan Wang, to be educated, and so she become an artist. Her painting is whimsical and decorative, with a sense of fantasy that is absent from her husband’s work.

Wang’s experiences, as well as Shen’s own time spent out of favour, colour the wall he calls Saturnus – the dark side of the revolution. The great art featured here is Goya’s Saturn devouring his son. Shen argues China’s Cultural Revolution and the French Revolution have a great deal in common, wherein “good intentions bring about the most evil results”.

The success of Welcome to Babel largely comes from the contrast between Jiawei Shen and Lan Wang’s approach to their new life. He is the showman, turning his memories, and those of others, into a giant collage – a painting that will be his legacy “for the people of China”.

Wang grows a small garden behind the imposing new house. “He is able to create this work because he didn’t experience the suffering,” she says.

Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Culture and Communication. Editor in chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Perhaps one of the most stunning aspects of the unfolding case is the large number of people who may have been witnesses to the alleged crimes. Most of these assaults allegedly occurred at crowded social events and parties since at least 2001.

Combs’ trial is scheduled to begin in May 2025. This case raises important questions about observers who witness sexual exploitation and how they respond – or stay silent.

Sexual exploitation involves using someone sexually for one’s own advantage without their permission – for example, through physical force, threat of harm, misuse of authority or when they are incapacitated from drugs or alcohol. This can encompass acts that are sometimes labeled as sexual harassment, sexual assault or rape.

We know from research that many observers do nothing when they witness sexual exploitation.

People often do not realize that their inaction may contribute to more sexual exploitation occurring.

It is helpful to understand why people often do nothing when they see sexual exploitation by distinguishing three rough categories of observers: people who enable exploitation, people who are complicit in the abuse and others who actively participate in the wrongdoing.

Those who enable

Social scientists, including the three of us, have long known that it is typical for people who see or know of sexual exploitation to respond by ignoring it, rationalizing it or minimizing it.

These people, whom we could call enablers, do not directly participate in sexual exploitation. But their silence and passivity contribute to the exploitation continuing or escalating.

Enabling sometimes happens because of power dynamics, or because people fear negative career or social repercussions from the exploiter. Others who do nothing may not recognize that the incidents are exploitative, or they may convince themselves that what they are seeing is no big deal – or it isn’t their business.

By not acting to prevent harm, enablers commit wrongdoing through omission.

Those who are complicit

Other observers become complicit in sexual exploitation and aid in the crime by helping the perpetrator commit the act in some way.

Complicity could include encouraging a perpetrator to engage in the exploitation or helping cover up evidence that it occurred. It can also mean trying to silence or shame the victim.

Complicity might look like a fraternity brother who helps his friend get a woman drunk so that he can take advantage of her, or a teammate who convinces a victim not to report the sexual exploitation perpetrated by the star quarterback because it will cost him his scholarship.

Many people do not realize that this kind of help can result in the complicit party being charged with the central crime in some cases, or with lesser charges that still carry legal culpability.

Not all complicity may reach the level of illegal activity – but from our perspective, complicity represents a failure to contribute to maintaining a safe and civil society, even if it is not technically illegal.

Those who join in the abuse

The most egregious kind of nonintervention is committed by people who actively join in perpetrating sexual acts. Often this happens when victims are incapacitated by alcohol or drugs. Several of the allegations against Combs mention victims who were reportedly intoxicated and for whom there were alleged co-perpetrators.

When more than one person engages in sexual acts with someone who is unconscious from drugs or alcohol, it is sometimes referred to as gang rape.

Most typically, co-perpetration involves two perpetrators, although occasionally there are more people involved.

Our recent research shows that among Americans who experienced an act of illegal sexual exploitation, 19% of them reported that at least one of the sexual crimes against them included more than one perpetrator.

The first step forward

All of these behaviors actively contribute to sexual exploitation, protect perpetrators from negative consequences, discourage victims from getting support or justice – and ultimately serve to maintain alarmingly high levels of sexual exploitation.

We know that individuals are much more likely to intervene to help someone who is injured or experiencing a medical emergency than someone who is being sexually exploited.

We think that we must acknowledge that sexual exploitation is an emergency requiring a response. This recognition is, perhaps, the first step in acting together to intervene and address sexual exploitation.

Zoe D. Peterson, Director of the Sexual Assault Research Initiative at the Kinsey Institute and Professor of Applied Psychology in Education and Research Methodology, Indiana University; Mary P. Koss, Regents' Professor of Public Health, University of Arizona, and RaeAnn Anderson, Assistant professor in health sciences, University of Missouri-Kansas City

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Discoveries in eastern Africa of tracks made by hominins – our ancient relatives – are telling paleontologists like ourselves about the behavior of hominin species that walked on two feet and resembled us but were not yet human like we are today. Our new research focuses on footprints that amazingly record two different species of hominins walking along the same Kenyan lakeshore at the same time, roughly 1.5 million years ago.

Studying ancient tracks like these fills in exciting pieces of the human evolution story because they provide evidence for hominin behavior and locomotion that scientists cannot learn from fossilized bones.

Finding first fossilized footprints in Kenya

The first discovery of tracks of early hominins in Kenya’s Lake Turkana region happened by chance in 1978. A team led by one of us (Behrensmeyer) and paleoecologist Léo Laporte was exploring the geology and fossils of the rich paleontological record of East Turkana. We focused on documenting the animals and environments represented in one “time slice” of widespread sediments deposited about 1.5 million years ago.

We collected fossils from the surface and dug geological step trenches to document the sediment layers that preserved the fossils. The back wall of one of the trenches showed deep depressions in a layer of solidified mud that we thought might be hippo tracks. We were curious about what they looked like from the top down – what scientists call the “plan view” – so we decided to expose 1 square meter of the footprint surface next to the trench.

When I returned from more fossil bone surveys, Kimolo Mulwa, one of the expert Kenyan field assistants on the project, had carefully excavated the top of the mudstone layer and there was a broad smile on his face. He said, “Mutu!” – meaning “person” – and pointed to a shallow humanlike print in among the deep hippo tracks.

I could hardly believe it, but, yes, a humanlike footprint was clearly recognizable on the excavated surface. And there were more hominin tracks, coming our way out of the strata. It was awe-inspiring to realize we were connecting with a moment in the life of a hominin that walked here 1½ million years ago.

We excavated more of the surface and eventually found seven footprints in a line, showing that the hominin had walked eastward out of softer mud onto a harder, likely shallower surface. At one point the individual’s left foot had slipped into a deep hippo print and the hominin caught itself on its right foot to avoid falling – we could see this clearly along the trackway.

Even today on the shore of modern Lake Turkana, it’s easy to slip into hippo prints, especially if the water is a bit cloudy. We joked about being sorry our hominin track-maker didn’t fall on its hands, or face, so we could have a record of those parts, too.

Another set of tracks

Over four decades later, in 2021, paleontologist Louise Leakey and her Kenyan research team were excavating hominin fossils discovered in the same area when team member Richard Loki uncovered a portion of another hominin trackway. Leakey invited one of us (Hatala) and paleoanthropologist Neil Roach to excavate and study the new trackway, because of our experience working on other hominin footprint sites.

The team, including 10 expert Kenyan field researchers led by Cyprian Nyete, excavated the surface and documented the tracks with photogrammetry – a method for 3D imaging. This is the best way to collect track surfaces because the sediments are not hard enough – what geologists call lithified – to remove from the ground safely and take to a museum.

The newly discovered tracks were made approximately 1.5 million years ago. They occur at an earlier stratigraphic level than the ones we found in 1978 and are about a hundred thousand years older, based on dating of volcanic deposits in the East Turkana strata.

Who was passing through?

These footprints are especially exciting because careful anatomical and functional analysis of their shapes shows that two different kinds of hominins made tracks on the same lakeshore, within hours to a few days of each other, possibly even within minutes!

We know the footprints were made very close together in time because experiments on the modern shoreline of Lake Turkana show that a muddy surface suitable for preserving clear tracks doesn’t last long before being destroyed by waves or cracked by exposure to the Sun.

This is the first time ever that scientists have been able to say that Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei – one our likely ancestor and the other a more distant relative – actually coexisted at the same time and place. Along with many different species of mammals, they were both members of the ancient community that inhabited the Turkana Basin.

Not only that, but with the new tracks as references, our analyses suggest that other previously described hominin tracks in the same region indicate that these two hominins coexisted in this area of the Turkana Basin for at least 200,000 years, repeatedly leaving their footprints in the shallow lake margin habitat.

Other animals left tracks there as well – giant storks, smaller birds such as pelicans, antelope and zebra, hippos and elephants – but hominin tracks are surprisingly common for a land-based species. What were they doing, returning again and again to this habitat, when other primates, such as baboons, apparently did not visit the lakeshore and leave tracks there?

These footprints provoke new thoughts and questions about our early relatives. Were they eating plants that grew on the lakeshore? Some paleontologists have proposed this possibility for the robust Paranthropus boisei because the chemistry of its teeth indicate a specific herbivorous diet of grasslike and reedlike plants. The same chemical tests on teeth of Homo erectus – the ancestral species to Homo sapiens – show a mixed diet that likely included animal protein as well as plants.

The lake margin habitat offered food in the form of reeds, freshwater bivalves, fish, birds and reptiles such as turtles and crocodiles, though it could have been dangerous for bipedal primates 4 or 5 feet (1.2 to 1.5 meters) tall. Even today, people living along the shore occasionally are attacked by crocodiles, and local hippos can be aggressive as well. So, whatever drew the hominins to the lakeshore must have been worth some risk.

For now it’s impossible to know exactly how the two species interacted. New clues about their behavior could be revealed with future excavations of more trackway surfaces. But it is fascinating to imagine these two hominin “cousins” being close neighbors for hundreds of thousands of years.

Ancient footprints you can visit

Earlier excavations of hominin trackways near a village called Ileret, 25 miles (40 km) to the north of our new site, are being developed as a museum through a project by the National Museums of Kenya. The public, the local Daasanach people, educational groups and tourists will be able to see a large number of 1.5-million-year-old hominin footprints on one excavated surface.

That layer preserves tracks of at least eight hominin individuals, and we now believe they represent members of both Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei. Among these is a subset of individuals, all about the same adult size, who were moving in the same direction and appear to have been traveling as a group along the lake margin.

The museum built over the track site is designed to prevent erosion of the site and to protect it from seasonal rains. A community outreach and education center associated with the museum aims to engage local educational groups and young people in learning and teaching others about this exceptional record of human prehistory preserved in their backyard. The new site museum is scheduled to open in January 2025.

Anna K. Behrensmeyer, Senior Research Geologist and Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, Smithsonian Institution; Kevin Hatala, Associate Professor of Biology, Chatham University, and Purity Kiura, Chief Research Scientist in Archaeology and Heritage, National Museums of Kenya

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Since the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt over 100 years ago, the contents have been examined countless times. But new details continue to surprise archaeologists.

Recently, a team at the University of York has been investigating the pierced ears of Tutankhamun’s burial mask. It’s a feature that, the team claims, was usually reserved for female or young royalty.

Tutankhamun was born in around 1341BC – an unusual time in Ancient Egyptian history. His father, the so-called heretic pharaoh Akhenaten and his stepmother, the famed Nefertiti, had been ruling from their new city in middle Egypt, Akhetaten (modern day Tell el-Amarna). There, they elevated the new state god, the sun god Aten, above all others.

The resulting changes to religious protocol meant that power was taken from the high-ranking priests of the supreme god Amun, along with the political control they were accustomed to having. After Akhenaten’s death, events are somewhat obscure, although many scholars believe that Nefertiti may have continued to rule in her own right.

Tutankhamun became pharaoh at the age of nine, and died when he was around 18 or 19 years old. During his own rule, Tutankhamun took the court back to the traditional capital cities of Thebes and Memphis, and reinstated Amun and the priests. These changes mean that discussions and conclusions about the Amarna period (1353-1322BC) during which Tutankhamun and his father ruled are not straightforward.

Royal tomb equipment

Tutankhamun’s resting place in the Valley of the Kings is relatively small. This has led to speculation that it was originally meant for a noble, queen or a princess.

The long-held belief that Tutankhamun died suddenly and had to be buried in a hurry has informed most of the ideas around his tomb and equipment. It’s also been taken to explain why so much material from other royals and nobles was reused.

However, Aidan Dodson, a professor of Eqyptology and author of several books on the Amarna period, makes a slightly different argument. Akhenaten’s successor, Pharaoh Neferneferuaten (who was most likely his wife, Nefertiti), never received a kingly burial. So, it’s likely that her material was repurposed for Tutankhamun very early in his reign. This would mean his burial equipment was already essentially completed by his early death, rather than put together in a hurry.

Tutankhamun’s actual tomb, however, was probably still incomplete, meaning that he was probably given an existing tomb that had been intended for a noble or lesser royalty.

The reuse of tomb equipment was common in this period, including coffins and burial vaults, so this in itself is not unusual. In 2015, Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves argued that these objects probably included the king’s gold burial mask. This is based on the fact that the mask is made of two parts.

Now, the University of York team are suggesting that the mask’s original face was removed and replaced, but the “female” ears left intact.

What are the implications?

The University of York team is not the first to propose that the pierced ears on Tutankhamun’s mask are significant.

The original burial place of Nefertiti has still not been discovered, although a mummy which may be the queen has been. In 2015, Reeves proposed that Nefertiti’s burial place lies behind a wall of Tutankhamun’s tomb. But remote-sensing investigations have since debunked these claims.

As far as the question of the mask being repurposed, an analysis in 2015 by the metal conservator Christian Eckmann demonstrated that, while it was indeed made in two parts, this was actually the normal way such masks were made. Eckmann found no trace of the face having been replaced.

The mummies of Tutankhamun and other kings still display pierced ears, so the representation of the piercings on such portraits as the gold mask should come as no surprise.

Therefore, I believe there is no real basis for the York team’s proposals, as far as the piercings or any significance for the history of the mask are concerned. Nevertheless, discussion of the mask’s features proves that over 100 years after Tutankhamun’s rediscovery, the afterlife of the young king continues to inspire the public imagination and scholarship.

Claire Isabella Gilmour, PhD Candidate, Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sextius argued that humans can get all the nutrition we need from eating plants. This means that killing animals for food is done purely for the pleasure derived from eating meat. Sextius believed that killing animals for pleasure makes people develop the habit of cruelty. Morally speaking, people shouldn’t develop the habit of cruelty, so we shouldn’t kill animals just for the pleasure of eating meat.

This argument is different from most modern arguments for vegetarianism, which usually focus on animal rights, arguing that animals deserve care or that killing them causes unnecessary suffering.

The habit of cruelty argument does not focus on the animals at all. Rather it focuses how eating meat affects the people doing the eating. It warns us that by making cruelty a habit, eating meat harms people’s character.

Even if we theoretically agree that you can get all the nutrition you need from plants and that people morally shouldn’t develop the habit of cruelty, there are still a couple of problems with this argument.

You might ask: “who is developing the habit of cruelty?” Most meat eaters are not doing killing the animals they eat themselves. So, arguably, it’s those doing the killing that are developing cruel habits. Most of us aren’t these people, but likely wouldn’t want anyone to become cruel because of our own pleasure-seeking behaviour either.

All this depends, however, on whether killing animals for meat does in fact develop the habit of cruelty. Certainly, taking pleasure in killing for its own sake could. But most people don’t enjoy killing animals, only eating them.

The transmigration of souls argument

Seneca discusses another argument, which he learned from the biographer Sotion, and which went back to Pythagoras (yes, the one with the theorem).

Pythagoras believed that each soul passed from one body to another after death. He called this “transmigration”. So, when your parent dies, for example, their soul might move into the body of an animal. If you then kill that animal for food, you would have accidentally killed your parent.

You might reply: “Well I don’t believe in the soul” or “I don’t believe that it passes from one body to another”. Sotion has a counter argument. Even if you don’t believe in transmigration, it is still possible that transmigration is true. And if there’s any chance at all that an animal might house the soul of a loved one, that chance alone should be enough to make you avoid eating meat.

Are you persuaded? It is interesting that Sotion argues that you don’t need to accept transmigration to refrain from eating meat. You just need to think that transmigration is possible.

But even if you believe in transmigration, I don’t personally think this argument means you should stop eating meat. Suppose transmigration is true and you kill the animal that happens to have your loved one’s soul. Well, your loved one is fine – their soul simply moves to another body.

Maybe if you think that each soul only gets a limited number of lives, you might worry that by ending the animal’s life you destroy the soul of your parent. But this depends on the version of transmigration you believe in.

Even if it fails, there is something compelling behind the transmigration argument. The thought behind Pythagoras’ transmigration view is that humans and animals are alike. If a human soul can enter an animal body, humans and animals must be very similar kinds of creature. And if animals really are like us, why are we prepared to kill animals for food, but not other humans?

Vegetarianism wasn’t common in the ancient world. But it did have some adherents, often from religious sects, such as the Pythagoreans. But eating meat was associated with religious observance too and there was a sophisticated debate between philosophers about eating animals.

We know this from Porphry’s book-length defence of ethical vegetarianism On Abstinence from Animal Food (3rd century AD), which is a great place to find out more about ancient arguments for vegetarianism.

Matthew Duncombe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, University of Nottingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Now known as the Denisovans (De-NEES-ovans), after the Denisova cave in which the finger bone was found, the past few years have seen numerous other discoveries about these people. I’ve recently co-published a paper collating everything we know so far.

So who were the Denisovans, where did they live, and why are they important to the story of humanity?

Around 600,000 years ago, early humans in Africa diverged into groups. Some migrated out of Africa, becoming Neanderthals in eastern and western Eurasia and Denisovans in eastern Eurasia.

Modern humans later evolved in Africa, spread across the globe, and encountered Neanderthals, Denisovans and possibly other unknown archaic human groups. Yet by 40,000 years ago, only modern humans remained on the archaeological record.

The genetic legacy

Unlike Neanderthals, whose fossils are relatively abundant, Denisovan remains continue to be very scarce. Apart from that Siberian finger bone, the main other discovery was a jawbone found in China, in a limestone cave located on the northeastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. It had been believed that the Denisovans had been confined to Siberia, but this jawbone demonstrated that they had lived much further afield.

Their DNA has enabled scientists to build on this insight, since it survives in contemporary populations, particularly in Oceania, parts of Asia, and even Indigenous American populations. This shows that the Denisovans were widely distributed across these areas.

Strikingly, recent studies reveal that Denisovans interbred with modern humans multiple times. For instance, east Asians harbour ancestry from at least two distinct Denisovan populations. Also, the people of Papua New Guinea, which retain up to 5% Denisovan ancestry, a much higher proportion than other groups, interbred with at least two Denisovan groups at different times.

Additionally, research has shown that some populations from the Philippines carry a distinct Denisovan ancestry compared to their neighbouring groups. These various genetic differences highlight that the interbreeding between modern humans and Denisovans has a complex history.

Adaptations

While much about the Denisovans’ lifestyle, appearance and culture remains unknown, the discovery of the Tibetan jawbone showed that these people lived in diverse environments, and that they must have been very adaptable. Sure enough, we now know that Denisovan ancestry in modern humans has contributed to adaptive traits, particularly in challenging environments.

A notable example is the EPAS1 gene. Inherited from Denisovans, it helps regulate the body’s response to low oxygen levels, giving Tibetans a physiological advantage in the high altitudes of the Tibetan plateau.

Other human adaptations possibly derived from Denisovan interbreeding relate to being able to tolerate cold weather, and being able to metabolise lipids, which include fats and oils. These may have been beneficial for populations in northern regions, such as the Arctic. For example, Inuit populations carry Denisovan genes that help to regulate body fat and maintain warmth.

Some genes that aid in fighting infections also appear to have Denisovan origins. These immune-related genes might have played crucial roles in protecting ancient and modern humans from south and east Asia, the Americas and Papua New Guinea against specific pathogens, illustrating how Denisovan heritage continues to affect human health today.

Unanswered questions

Many questions about the Denisovans remain unanswered. For instance, how genetically distinct were these populations, and how many distinct groups existed? We know that at least four distinct Denisovan populations interbred with modern humans. However, with further analyses, this number might increase, revealing an even more complex story.

We’re also looking for a better understanding of the biological impact of Denisovan DNA in modern humans. While many beneficial traits have been identified as derived from Neanderthals, only a few have been found for Denisovans so far. Many other potential contributions remain to be explored.

This will be possible only if additional Denisovan remains are discovered and DNA is extracted and sequenced. We need more data, especially from diverse geographical regions and time periods, to provide new insights into these people’s adaptations, interactions with other hominins, and lasting legacy in human evolution.

To address these questions, our research capabilities will need to improve. For example, we need new tools to more accurately distinguish Denisovan genetic material from Neanderthal and modern human DNA.

Additionally, studying Denisovan ancestry in populations beyond east Asia and Oceania, such as Indigenous Americans, could shed light on exactly which Denisovan sources have contributed to modern humans genomes.

The discoveries to date highlight the power of genetic studies in uncovering hidden chapters of our past. Each discovery brings us closer to understanding who the Denisovans were and how their lives and adaptations continue to affect humans today.

Linda Ongaro, Research Fellow in Genetics, Trinity College Dublin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Moana is a seagoing adventure portraying the courage of its Pacific characters. I see many aspects of Māori communities represented in the film: our elders, our voyaging history, our language and culture, our ability to adapt, our sense of spirituality and our hope.

I see the characters in my own whānau (extended family). My nephew is similar to the character of Māui, the demigod voiced by Dwayne Johnson. He’s a likeable “big-boned” fulla with a quick wit – an overly confident rascal who draws others to him with a playfulness that gets him into (and out of) trouble.

At the same time, movies like Moana – in which non-Indigenous creators try to tell Indigenous stories – raise sensitive questions about authenticity, cultural appropriation and veiled forms of continuing colonisation.

Disney’s bottom line is to develop characters and storylines that suit a global market and will ultimately be financially viable. Perhaps this is why it missed so many key characteristics of Māui as he is known to the Polynesian people.

In Moana, there is a mystique around Māui’s demigod status; he sits in the space between the gods and humanity. Like the Māui of Polynesia, he can shapeshift, wields a magic hook and is courageous.

Yet this Hollywood Māui would have no chance against the Māui of Polynesia, who is not a god to be worshipped, but a spirit – a set of characteristics identified through the actions of a person. Māui’s spirit lives today and can be activated by his descendants to do extraordinary things.

A Māori view of Māui

Māui’s biggest muscles were in his head and stomach (where Māori believe the core being of a person is located). However, there is no record of him having an appearance that made him stand out in the community.

When Māui decided to rejoin his birth family as a young man, he lined up with his brothers, and his mother was unable to see a difference between the siblings’ physical builds. This is in contrast with his unusually large build in Moana.

He also wasn’t the playful, reckless larrikin depicted in Moana. He saw the world through clear eyes and calculated his way forward, courageously approaching challenges as opportunities to demonstrate his mastery.

He was innovative, intelligent, confident and resourceful – and most of what he did would benefit the whole community. That said, he could also be devious, cruel and jealous as he pushed to achieve his goals.

One of his names is “Māui-pōtiki”, or “Māui the youngest sibling”, which signals the characteristics of someone who challenged the status quo – a free thinker and a clever trickster.

Supernatural power leads to supernatural deeds

Māui faced a series of challenges. Some were forced on him, such as surviving his infancy. At birth he was presumed dead (or near death) and was abandoned to the sea. His grandfather rescued and raised him, teaching him skills, knowledge and karakia – the spiritual means to bend the laws of the universe in his favour.

He faced many challenges in his world, and his responses conveyed important social and life lessons. For instance, the days were too short and people were unable to complete their work before nightfall. So Māui’s answer was to slow the Sun’s journey across the sky. He convinced his sceptical brothers to help him and they went to the pit where the Sun rose each day.

Armed with plaited ropes, infused with spiritual power to hold the Sun, as well as the sacred jawbone of his ancestor (which he also used as a hook), they stationed themselves around the pit and waited.

As the Sun rose into the morning sky, the brothers pulled their ropes to form a tight net, trapping the Sun. Māui quickly climbed onto the Sun and began to beat him (the Sun is personified and thought to be masculine in Māori belief) with his ancestor’s jawbone.

Dazed and battered, the Sun asked Māui the reason for the attack, who then gave him an ultimatum: “Slow your movement across the sky (or I’ll be back)!” The Sun, from fear and injury, slowed down, providing a useful length of daylight for the people.

While violence may not be a justifiable approach to change, there’s still much to learn from this incident. When you need to get something done, you should have a plan, build a team, make use of the resources available to you, be courageous and go for it.

Stories spread across the seas

Māui is credited with many other exploits. He hauled islands up across the Pacific. He spoke with the gods and creatures of the Earth. He even brought fire to the world from the goddess Mahuika and came close to conquering death.

Each story contains layers of knowledge, explaining important aspects of the world and human behaviour. This information was so significant that these stories have been passed down through generations for hundreds of years – spread with our voyaging ancestors across the Pacific, the largest continent in the world.

As such, Māui pops up in stories all across Polynesia, reaching into Melanesia and Micronesia. While the tales about the character, attitude, aptitude and mana (the spiritual lifeforce) are similar, variations exist across Polynesia.

Moana aims to entertain and speak to us and our children. Perhaps the sequel will now reawaken Māui-based discussions on marae (Māori communal spaces) and other Pacific forums. Or perhaps the spirit of Māui will see this “harmless rascal” persona as a launch pad to galvanise his descendants into addressing the ills that face them today.

Kia ara ake anō te kawa a Māui – let the spirit of Māui arise. And enjoy the movie.

Mike Ross, Head of School, Te Kawa a Māui, School of Māori Studies, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This is the one rule spelled out on a sign in Lance Walker’s barbershop in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where political discussion between clients can get heated.

Three weeks before the election, on Oct. 14, 2024, I watched as Walker interviewed Michele Jansen, a conservative local talk show host, and Don Marritz, a liberal legal aid attorney also living in Pennsylvania, in his podcast studio.

Jansen and Marritz discussed the difficulties they had faced in the preceding months as they struggled to draft a document called Declaration Rejecting Political Violence. Eventually, more than 250 community leaders and citizens in Franklin and Adams counties in Pennsylvania signed on.

This effort – part of a project focused on preventing political violence run by the nonprofit group Urban Rural Action, or UR Action – almost fell apart over an argument over including the word “insurrection.”

Indeed, words have become contentious on the American political landscape. They turn dinner conversations into battlefields. And they provide politicians with fuel to stoke the flames of polarization.

An anthropologist, I have long studied international political violence and its prevention. More recently, I have done related research in the U.S. that resulted in a 2021 book, “It Can Happen Here.”

Now I’m studying toxic polarization in the U.S. and ways to reduce it. I have attended Make America Great Again events and spoken to voters who supported Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.

I have also observed the work of groups such as UR Action that try to bridge political divides.

During this research, I have found that some words are often understood differently by those on opposite sides of the political aisle. As a result, misunderstandings create tension and sometimes provoke anger.

Becoming aware of how and why certain words upset those with different political views, then, is a key step in reducing polarization. Here are five that can trigger Trump supporters and further isolate them from liberal Americans.

‘Incitement’ and ‘insurrection’

The suggestion that Trump incited an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol sparked the fight over the wording of the political violence denunciation.

Jansen later explained to me that she was concerned about widespread accusations that Trump incited violence at the U.S. Capitol – and that, more broadly, “people on the right are more targeted as hateful and using hate speech.”

Chad Collie, another conservative member of the UR Action declaration team, told me in an interview that Trump supporters “take offense” when the terms “incitement” and “insurrection” are used to describe Trump’s Jan. 6 rally. In their view, he added, Trump’s rally near the White House was a largely peaceful “protest” hijacked by a small number of violent people who stormed the Capitol.

More broadly, many Trump voters believe that the president-elect is the victim of “lawfare,” meaning efforts to unjustly use laws to attack political opponents.

As evidence, some Trump supporters point to the defeat of both of his impeachments and various criminal court cases brought against Trump, most of which have been paused or dismissed after he won the 2024 election.

Wokeness triggers like ‘they-them’ and ‘equity’

“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Attack ads that feature phrases like this don’t necessarily win elections.

But gender identity was a nonstop talking point at the dozen or so MAGA events I attended ahead of the election. Speakers there constantly mocked the use of nonbinary pronouns and blasted the “radical left” for “transgender insanity.” This “insanity,” in their view, includes issues such as transgender people using bathrooms that match their gender identity and participating in sports competitions.

The word “equity” – along with related terms such as “diversity,” “critical race theory,” “social justice,” “privilege” and “DEI,” short for “diversity, equity and inclusion” – can also anger a Trump supporter.

They associate these words with a “woke” or even “communist” agenda that they think the “radical left” is trying to impose on them.

While some people think that these terms speak to efforts to recognize that groups of marginalized people, including people of color and women, have long faced discrimination, many Trump supporters think that related “woke” policies threaten their free speech and individual and family rights.

‘Racist’

Trump supporters were called “deplorables” by former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.

But my interviews and observations show that no word, not even “fascist,” stings Trump supporters as much as being called a “racist,” an accusation that is widely used against them.

As Matt Schlapp, the head of the conservative group Conservative Political Action Committee, which runs the annual CPAC conference, laments in a book, “There is no way to escape its putrid stink.” The “racist” label, Schlapp explains from experience, shames, stigmatizes and makes a person afraid to speak.

More broadly, the use of “racist” and related terms plays into many Trump voters’ perceptions and anger that Democrats are elitist liberals who they think look down upon and even hate them.

Trump and Republican influencers frequently play on this resentment. Trump, for example, wore an orange and yellow safety vest as he sat in a garbage truck after Biden referred to them as “garbage.” Trump’s supporters soon started wearing vests and even garbage bags to his preelection events to show their support for Trump.

No one, however, wore a shirt to a Trump rally emblazoned with the word “racist.”

Words are like bees

America’s political division is intertwined with how language – sometimes a single word – can be understood differently by liberals and conservatives and trigger a negative reaction.

This reality has policy implications.

For example, when Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement, an organization seeking to enhance civic and democratic life, examined perceptions of civic terms starting in 2019, they found that using certain works such as “equity” is often perceived as “liberal and college educated.” Their survey found that conservatives view terms such as “diversity,” “social justice,” “racial equity” and “activism” much more negatively than liberals.

These findings have led organizations that try to decrease political polarization in the U.S. to modify their messaging and more often use terms such as “unity,” “citizens” and “liberty,” which the civics language study found appeals to both liberals and conservatives.

Words don’t just provoke, then. They can also provide a path forward.

As the saying goes, “Words are like bees; some create honey, but others leave a sting.”

Alex Hinton, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology; Director, Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University - Newark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Throughout our workshop, my colleagues in the Cree Nation of Iiyiyiu Aschii shared their excitement about a “great journey” their youth were undertaking: the Journey of Nishiyuu. A group was traveling 1,000 miles on foot in the dead of winter – all the way from their homes in Whapmagoostui First Nation, on the shores of Hudson Bay, to Parliament Hill in Ottawa, the capital of Canada.

For Indigenous activists, walking the land can take on powerful spiritual and political significance. It has been, and continues to be, an important way Indigenous nations pursue healing, environmental stewardship and diplomacy across Turtle Island, the name many Indigenous groups use to refer to North America.

I am a Canadian scholar whose ancestry stems from Western Europe. I now teach in San Diego, on Kumeyaay territory. My scholarship focuses on Indigenous spiritualities and social movements. Over the past several years, I have worked with Whapmagoostui First Nation – a remote, fly-in community in northern Québec – on research about the Journey of Nishiyuu.

Healing journey

The Journey of Nishiyuu – which translates to"human beings" or “new people” – took place from January-March 2013. More broadly, that season was known as the winter of Idle No More, a movement in support of First Nations’ rights in Canada.

Led by Indigenous women, Idle No More arose when the Canadian government passed C-45, legislation that they feared would reduce environmental protections and weaken consultation with Indigenous communities. The winter of 2012-13 was also when Theresa Spence, the chief of Attawapiskat First Nation, held a hunger strike near Parliament Hill – an effort to hold the government accountable for its treaty obligations and to address the inadequate living conditions in northern reservations.

The Nishiyuu walkers announced that they were walking the land to demonstrate that the Iiyiyiuch are still “keepers” of their “language, culture, and tradition,” and honoring their ancestors. Many individual walkers also spoke about the experience as a healing journey.

“For the youth here there is no better place to be than out on the land,” said David Kawapit, the young walker who initiated the journey, when I interviewed him in Whapmagoostui.

The walkers started off their journey in snowshoes, traveling along traditional trap lines and trading routes. As they moved farther south, the trail turned to highways, and walkers exchanged moccasins and snowshoes for boots and running shoes. Throughout the journey, walkers were hosted by other Iiyiyiu, as well as other Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, where they shared stories, food and prophecies with one another.

When the group set off in January, it consisted of only six young walkers from Whapmagoostui and their elder guide, the late Isaac Kawapit. By the time they reached Parliament Hill, however, the movement had grown to approximately 270 people of many ages and cultural backgrounds.

This was not just a walk for the Cree Nation. The journey was also intended to strengthen inter-Indigenous relations across Canada during Idle No More. The Nishiyuu walkers embarked on their journey to emphasize the important role land plays in shaping their sense of well-being, their culture and their communities’ political autonomy.

Walking land and lakes

The Journey of Nishiyuu is one of many Indigenous-led social justice movements that engage in walking the land. In 1978, for example, the American Indian Movement led a 3,000-mile walk from Alcatraz Island in San Francisco all the way to Washington, D.C.

Activists who participated in this “Longest Walk” did so to hold the U.S. government accountable to its treaty obligations. The United States signed approximately 374 treaties with Indigenous nations from 1778 until 1871, but Native American groups argue the government has often eroded rights these treaties were meant to protect.

The Longest Walk helped prevent the passage of 11 bills in Congress that would have restricted Native communities’ jurisdiction and social services and diminished their land and water rights, among other consequences.

In 2008, Indigenous activists embarked on a second Longest Walk and once more made the long journey from Alcatraz to Washington. This time, the walkers called attention to the need to respect sacred sites, protect the environment and create better futures for young people.

Other walks have brought together Indigenous activists from Canada and the U.S., such as the Mother Earth Water Walkers. The late Josephine Mandamin, an Anishinaabe Grandmother and member of Wikwemikong First Nation, initiated the first Water Walk on Easter morning in 2003. She walked the entire perimeter of Lake Superior, on the U.S.-Canada border – an act of prayer and an effort to live out her obligations to care for and heal the waters.

Mandamin was joined by other “water walkers” who have kept her traditions and teachings alive. They have continued to walk around numerous bodies of water, including Lake Ontario in 2006, Lake Erie in 2007 and the Menominee River in 2016. Their walks embody an Anishinaabe perspective that water is a sacred medicine, and also aim to educate the public on the importance of Indigenous peoples’ access to water and jurisdiction over their ancestral waterways.

Affirming freedom

When Indigenous activists walk the land, they are restoring their firsthand knowledge of place and reknitting their relationships with plants, animals and other human beings. They are also revitalizing traditional forms of governance and diplomacy through visits with other Indigenous nations along the way – and sometimes inviting non-Indigenous people to walk with them. These invitations offer non-Indigenous walkers opportunities for reconciling their own relationships to land and to the Indigenous peoples whose territories they inhabit.

Part of such walks’ significance stems from history. For centuries, the United States and Canada attempted to control Indigenous peoples’ freedom of movement – often with support from religious institutions. In the U.S., the reservation system segregated Indigenous nations and allocated them to small portions of land. In Canada, the pass system mandated that Indigenous people present a travel document to an appointed Indian agent in order to leave and return from their reservations.

Boarding schools in the United States and residential schooling in Canada separated children from their lands, families and communities. Federal relocation programs encouraged or forced Indigenous people to move to cities and urban centers in an attempt to assimilate them.

While these social movements commemorate history, and try to heal from it, they are also a reminder that the past is present.

By walking the land, Indigenous people assert their sovereignty and carry out their sacred obligations to care for their lands and waters – which I believe can inspire a more just and beautiful future.

Meaghan Weatherdon, Assistant Professor of Theology and Religious Studies, University of San Diego

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Recently, however, spices have been getting a bad rep.

In September 2024, Consumer Reports, a nonprofit organization created to inform consumers about products sold in the U.S., investigated more than three dozen ground cinnamon products and found that 1 in 3 contained lead levels above 1 part per million, enough to trigger a recall in New York, one U.S. state that has published guidelines for heavy metals in spices.

The Food and Drug Administration issued three alerts throughout 2024, warning consumers about lead in certain brands of cinnamon products. Such notices rightfully put consumers on alert and have people wondering if the spice products they buy are safe – or not.

As an environmental epidemiologist with training in nutritional sciences, I have investigated the relationship between nutritional status, diets and heavy metal exposures in children.

There are several things consumers should be thinking about when it comes to lead – and other heavy metals – in cinnamon.

Why is lead found in cinnamon?

Most people are familiar with cinnamon in two forms – sticks and ground spice. Both come from the dried inner bark of the cinnamon tree, which is harvested after a few years of cultivation. For the U.S. market, cinnamon is largely imported from Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India and China.

One way that lead could accumulate in cinnamon tree bark is when trees are cultivated in contaminated soil. Lead can also be introduced in cinnamon products during processing, such as grinding.

When ground cinnamon is prepared, some producers may add lead compounds intentionally to enhance the weight or color of the product and, thus, fetch a higher sale price. This is known as “food adulteration,” and products with known or suspected adulteration are refused entry into the U.S.

However, in the fall of 2023, approximately 600 cases of elevated blood lead levels in the U.S., defined as levels equal to or above 3.5 micrograms per deciliter – mostly among children – were linked to the consumption of certain brands of cinnamon apple sauce. The levels of lead in cinnamon used to manufacture those products ranged from 2,270 to 5,110 parts per million, indicating food adulteration. The manufacturing plant was investigated by the FDA.

More broadly, spices purchased from vendors in the U.S. have lower lead levels than those sold abroad.

There is some evidence that cinnamon sticks have lower lead levels than ground spice. Lead levels in ground cinnamon sold in the U.S. and analyzed by Consumer Reports ranged from 0.02 to 3.52 parts per million. These levels were at least 1,500 times lower than in the adulterated cinnamon.

There are no federal guidelines for lead or other heavy metals in spices. New York state has proposed even stricter guidelines than its current level of 1 part per million, which would allow the New York Department of Agriculture and Markets to remove products from commerce if lead levels exceed 0.21 parts per million.

What does it mean that ‘the dose makes the poison’?

The current FDA guideline on daily intake of lead from diets overall is to limit lead intake to 2.2 micrograms per day for children. For women of reproductive age, this value is 8.8 micrograms.

The lead dose we are exposed to from foods depends on the level of lead in the food and how much of that food we eat. Higher doses mean more potential harm. The frequency with which we consume foods – meaning daily versus occasionally – also matters.

For spices like cinnamon, the amount and frequency of consumption depends on cultural traditions and personal preference. For many, cinnamon is a seasonal spice; others use it year-round in savory dishes or sauces.

Cinnamon is beloved in baked goods. Take a cinnamon roll recipe calling for 1.5 tablespoons (slightly less than 12 grams) of the spice. If a recipe yields 12 rolls, each will have around 1 gram of cinnamon. In the Consumer Reports investigation, some cinnamon products were classified as “okay to use” or “best to use.”

The highest value of lead in cinnamon products in the “okay to use” category was 0.87 parts per million, and in the “best to use” category, it was 0.15 parts per million. A child would have to consume 2.5 or more rolls made with the “okay to use” cinnamon to exceed the FDA guideline on limiting lead intake from foods to 2.2 micrograms per day, assuming that no other food contained lead. To exceed this guideline with “best to use” cinnamon, a child would have to eat 15 or more rolls.

Can cinnamon contribute to elevated blood lead levels?

Because of lead’s effects on development in early life, the greatest concern is for exposure in young children and pregnant women. Lead is absorbed in the small intestine, where it can latch onto cellular receptors that evolved to carry iron and other metals.

The impact of a contaminated spice on a person’s blood lead level depends on the dose of exposure and the proportion of lead available for intestinal absorption. For several spices, the proportion of available lead was 49%, which means that about half of the lead that is ingested will be absorbed.

Lead absorption is higher after a fast of three hours or more, and skipping breakfast may contribute to higher blood lead levels in children.

People who have nutritional deficiencies, such as iron deficiency, also tend to absorb more lead and have higher blood lead levels. This is because our bodies compensate for the deficiency by producing more receptors to capture iron from foods. Lead takes advantage of the additional receptors to enter the body. Young children and pregnant women are at higher risk for developing iron deficiency, so there is good reason for vigilance about lead in the foods they consume.

Studies show that among children with lead poisoning in the U.S., contaminated spices were one of several sources of lead exposure. Studies that estimate blood lead levels from statistical models suggest that consuming 5 micrograms of lead or more from spices daily could substantially contribute to elevated blood lead levels.

For occasional or seasonal consumption, or lower levels of contamination, more research is needed to understand how lead in spices would affect lead levels in the blood.

For people who have other sources of lead in their homes, jobs or hobbies, additional lead from foods or spices may matter more because it adds to the cumulative dose from multiple exposure sources.

How to test for elevated blood lead levels

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that children at risk for lead exposure get a blood lead test at 1 and 2 years of age. Older children can also get tested. Finger-prick screening tests are often available in pediatric offices, but results may need to be confirmed in venous blood if the screening result was elevated.

Adults in the U.S. are not routinely tested for lead exposure, but concerned couples who plan on having children should talk to their health care providers.

What to consider when using or buying cinnamon or other spices

If the product is on an FDA Alert or the Consumer Reports “don’t use” list, discard it.

Other questions to consider are:

• Does your household use spices frequently and in large amounts?
• Do young children or pregnant women in your household consume spices?
• Do you typically consume spices on breakfast foods or beverages?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then buy good-quality products, from large, reputable sellers. Think about using cinnamon sticks if possible.

And continue to enjoy spices!

Katarzyna Kordas, Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Environmental Health, University at Buffalo

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Given the scale of the world’s problems, it might feel like the small acts of human connection and solidarity that you do have control over are like putting Band-Aids on bullet wounds. It can feel naive to imagine that small acts could make any global difference.

As a psychologist, human connection researcher and audience member, I was inspired to hear musician Hozier offer a counterpoint at a performance this year. “The little acts of love and solidarity that we offer each other can have powerful impact … ” he told the crowd. “I believe the core of people on the whole is good – I genuinely do. I’ll die on that hill.”

I’m happy to report that the science agrees with him.

Research shows that individual acts of kindness and connection can have a real impact on global change when these acts are collective. This is true at multiple levels: between individuals, between people and institutions, and between cultures.

This relational micro-activism is a powerful force for change – and serves as an antidote to hopelessness because unlike global-scale issues, these small acts are within individuals’ control.

Abstract becomes real through relationships

Theoretically, the idea that small, interpersonal acts have large-scale impact is explained by what psychologists call cognitive dissonance: the discomfort you feel when your actions and beliefs don’t line up.

For example, imagine two people who like each other. One believes that fighting climate change is crucial, and the other believes that climate change is a political ruse. Cognitive dissonance occurs: They like each other, but they disagree. People crave cognitive balance, so the more these two like each other, the more motivated they will be to hear each other out.

According to this model, then, the more you strengthen your relationships through acts of connection, the more likely you’ll be to empathize with those other individual perspectives. When these efforts are collective, they can increase understanding, compassion and community in society at large. Issues like war and oppression can feel overwhelming and abstract, but the abstract becomes real when you connect to someone you care about.

So, does this theory hold up when it comes to real-world data?

Small acts of connection shift attitudes

Numerous studies support the power of individual acts of connection to drive larger-scale change.

For instance, researchers studying the political divide in the U.S. found that participants self-identifying as Democrats or Republicans “didn’t like” people in the other group largely due to negative assumptions about the other person’s morals. People also said they valued morals like fairness, respect, loyalty and a desire to prevent harm to others.

I’m intentionally leaving out which political group preferred which traits – they all sound like positive attributes, don’t they? Even though participants thought they didn’t like each other based on politics, they also all valued traits that benefit relationships.

One interpretation of these findings is that the more people demonstrate to each other, act by act, that they are loyal friends and community members who want to prevent harm to others, the more they might soften large-scale social and political disagreements.

Even more convincingly, another study found that Hungarian and Romanian students – people from ethnic groups with a history of social tensions – who said they had strong friendships with each other also reported improved attitudes toward the other group. Having a rocky friendship with someone from the other group actually damaged attitudes toward the other ethnic group as a whole. Again, nurturing the quality of relationships, even on an objectively small scale, had powerful implications for reducing large-scale tensions.

In another study, researchers examined prejudice toward what psychologists call an out-group: a group that you don’t belong to, whether based on ethnicity, political affiliation or just preference for dogs versus cats.

They asked participants to reflect on the positive qualities of someone they knew, or on their own positive characteristics. When participants wrote about the positive qualities of someone else, rather than themselves, they later reported lower levels of prejudice toward an out-group – even if the person they wrote about had no connection to that out-group. Here, moving toward appreciation of the other, rather than away from prejudice, was an effective way to transform preconceived beliefs.

So, small acts of connection can shift personal attitudes. But can they really affect societies?

From one-on-one to society-wide

Every human being is embedded in their own network with the people and world around them, what psychologists call their social ecology. Compassionate change at any level of someone’s social ecology – internally, interpersonally or structurally – can affect all the other levels, in a kind of positive feedback loop, or upward spiral.

For instance, both system-level anti-discrimination programming in schools and interpersonal support between students act reciprocally to shape school environments for students from historically marginalized groups. Again, individual acts play a key role in these positive domino effects.

Even as a human connection researcher, I’ve been surprised by how much I and others have progressed toward mutual understanding by simply caring about each other. But what are small acts of connection, after all, but acts of strengthening relationships, which strengthen communities, which influence societies?

In much of my clinical work, I use a model called social practice — or “intentional community-building” – as a form of therapy for people recovering from serious mental illnesses, like schizophrenia. And if intentional community-building can address some of the most debilitating states of the human psyche, I believe it follows that, writ large, it could help address the most debilitating states of human societies as well.

Simply put, science supports the idea that moving toward each other in small ways can be transformational. I’ll die on that hill too.

Liza M. Hinchey, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Psychology, Wayne State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Scott’s film will undoubtedly capture the thrills of this spectacle. But as someone who studies the Roman world, I think it’s worth remembering that its cultural legacy goes beyond the cinematic pleasures of the big screen.

You might be surprised to learn that there are threads that tie together gladiators, Christian martyrs and the sense of persecution that exists among many U.S. evangelicals today.

Fan clubs and heartthrobs

Gladiatorial fights likely began as part of the funeral rites of wealthy Roman families. Over time, the fights became mass public events, regulated by the state and elites.

They included three sets of events: wild beast fights, the executions of criminals, and gladiatorial fights. The gladiators were the main event, with their forthcoming battles hyped on the walls of Roman cities. These advertisements often mentioned the names of the famous fighters, the number of gladiators fighting, and whether there would be fights to the death. Not all gladiators fought to the death: The gladiator Hilarus, for example, won 12 times but fought in 14 fights.

Gladiators were, by law, required to be slaves.

Their enslavers invested time and money in their training and upkeep. Roman games were put on at the expense of local elites, or even the emperor. Well-trained gladiators meant better shows for the sponsors and bigger profits for their owners. A gladiator who died in his first fight was not good for business. Meanwhile, a successful gladiator – meaning one who had made his enslaver a lot of money – could hope to be freed or be given an opportunity to buy his freedom.

Those who won could also expect to become beloved celebrities, which somewhat offset the dishonor of being enslaved. In Pompeii, multiple inscriptions mention the Thracian gladiator Celadus, calling him a heartthrob. Gladiatorial fan clubs were common. One group was likely responsible for a riot that broke out during a set of games in Pompeii in 59 C.E. There’s even evidence of gladiatorial cosplay. One Roman senator was said to have fought duels with a woman in a leopard costume at Ostia.

Meanwhile, the tombstones of gladiators in Roman-controlled Greece celebrated their prowess using language drawn from ancient athletics, which were sports that were only available to freeborn citizens. These gladiators gave themselves stage names evoking mythological heroes or their courage and bravery.

These stage names were not just for entertainment; they were attempts to immortalize their respectability. By casting themselves as athletes and not enslaved fighters, they presented themselves as participants in a noble, athletic tradition.

Christians embrace ancient athletics

Early Christians used descriptions of sports and athletics because they could be easily understood by Roman society.

Ancient athletic competitions shaped how people thought about beauty, the body, self-control, education and competition. For victorious gladiators, the outcast and the slave could paradoxically embody the ideals of Roman virtue.

In the Christian New Testament, the apostle Paul famously describes himself as a runner and a boxer and even as a gladiator. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews speaks of running a race before a heavenly crowd of witnesses.

By embracing this imagery, early Christians positioned themselves as outsiders who nonetheless championed Roman ideals and culture.

Gladiator as martyr

Some early Christians followed Paul’s example and wrote themselves into the culture of ancient sports, particularly in a genre of Christian writing focused on martyrdom.

It is commonly thought that the earliest Christians were regularly and systematically persecuted by the Roman government. But the widespread persecution of ancient Christians under the Roman Empire is a myth that modern historians have debunked. Local persecutions did happen from time to time: There were a few short periods where the imperial government targeted Christians. However, for the most part, the Romans paid little attention to Christians.

So why were Christians so focused on telling stories of martyrs?

Ancient Christians wrote violent stories about martyrs because they functioned as morality plays that taught virtue and vice.

One example is the account of the “Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne,” written sometime at the end of the second century C.E. In the story, those condemned to death in the arena are described as “noble athletes” and “noble competitors.” The author characterizes Christians – who are dying not as athletes or gladiators, but as common criminals – as those who possess the elite virtues of great athletes. The reversal of expectations gives the story its force.

You can see this in the character of Blandina, an enslaved woman who is described in the account as a noble athlete and as one who has put on Christ, the “mighty and powerful athlete.” The author instructs the audience to see her as a hero, not as a slave or a criminal: through her, “Christ showed that the things that appear worthless, obscure, and despicable among men are considered worthy of great glory with God.”

In another martyr narrative, a woman named Perpetua has a dream in which she transforms into a gladiator before her martyrdom. These early Christian martyr accounts envision games in which enslaved people display noble courage and virtue; those condemned to torture, beatings and violent deaths are unfazed. Instead, they’re self-possessed athletes who strive for imperishable crowns.

Forever persecuted

The draw of stories in which Christians are “thrown to the lions” has remained powerful. Most ancient martyr accounts were written after Christianity became legal in the Roman Empire. But Christians continued to write stories about martyrs even after they became the majority of the population.

In the U.S. today, evangelical, charismatic and conservative Christians continue to tap into the martyrdom mythology. Even as they’ve become a powerful force in national politics, many influential wings of conservative U.S. Christians have come to characterize themselves as a persecuted minority. And they keep writing martyr stories.

High school football coach Joe Kennedy became an evangelical hero for fighting for the right to pray on the field at public high school football games. Kennedy had been fired for leading postgame prayers on the field, in violation of school policy. His supporters viewed him as a champion of religious freedom who was being unfairly persecuted for his beliefs. Kennedy ultimately fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor.

Other conservative Christians have also returned to the arena. This time, they’re the gladiatorial fighters and not the murdered martyrs.

The popular internet meme of Marine Todd taps into this particular fantasy: The fictional Marine gets so fed up with his atheist university professor that he punches him in front of the class. Meanwhile, the gallows and crosses that accompanied the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol juxtaposed fantasies of violence with Christian fears of persecution. While less ominous, the recent film “The Carpenter” puts Jesus ringside, telling the story of how Jesus takes on an apprentice and teaches him how to fight, MMA-style, in ancient Nazareth.

In depictions like these, Christians are no longer dying in the arena. It’s where they fight back.

Cavan W. Concannon, Professor of Religion and Classics, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.