The Conversation

Philly Whole Foods store becomes first to unionize – a labor expert explains what’s next and how Trump could stall workers’ efforts

Written by Paul F. Clark, Professor of Labor and Employment Relations, Penn State

Workers at a Whole Foods store in Philadelphia voted 130-100 to unionize.Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Whole Foods workers at the Philadelphia flagship store in the city’s Art Museum area voted to unionize on Jan. 27, 2025. They are the first store in the Amazon-owned grocery chain to do so.

Paul Clark, a professor of labor and employment...

Bennu asteroid reveals its contents to scientists − and clues to how the building blocks of life on Earth may have been seeded

Written by Timothy J McCoy, Supervisory Research Geologist, Smithsonian Institution

This photo of asteroid Bennu is composed of 12 Polycam images collected on Dec. 2, 2024, by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.NASA

A bright fireball streaked across the sky above mountains, glaciers and spruce forest near the town of Revelstoke in British Columbia, Canada, on the evening of March 31, 1965. Fragments of this meteorite, discovered by beaver...

Problematic Paper Screener: Trawling for fraud in the scientific literature

Written by Guillaume Cabanac, Professor of Computer Science, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse

Have you ever heard of the Joined Together States? Or bosom peril? Kidney disappointment? Fake neural organizations? Lactose bigotry? These nonsensical, and sometimes amusing, word sequences are among thousands of “tortured phrases” that sleuths have found littered throughout reputable scientific journals.

They typically result from...

Why building big AIs costs billions – and how Chinese startup DeepSeek dramatically changed the calculus

Written by Ambuj Tewari, Professor of Statistics, University of Michigan

DeepSeek burst on the scene – and may be bursting some bubbles.AP Photo/Andy Wong

State-of-the-art artificial intelligence systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude have captured the public imagination by producing fluent text in multiple languages in response to user prompts. Those companies have...

Fake papers are contaminating the world’s scientific literature, fueling a corrupt industry and slowing legitimate lifesaving medical research

Written by Frederik Joelving, Contributing editor, Retraction Watch

Assistant professor Frank Cackowski, left, and researcher Steven Zielske at Wayne State University in Detroit became suspicious of a paper on cancer research that was eventually retracted.Amy Sacka, CC BY-ND

Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus...

Rest, reorientation and hope – the pillars of 2025’s Catholic Jubilee year

Written by Timothy Gabrielli, Gudorf Chair in Catholic Intellectual Traditions, University of Dayton

A cardinal opens the Holy Door of the Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica in Rome on Jan. 1, 2025, one of the events starting the Jubilee year.AP Photo/Andrew Medichini

Pope Francis has proclaimed a Jubilee year in the Catholic Church, which began on Dec. 24, 2024, and will continue through Jan. 6, 2026. But what is a Jubilee, and what is this...

President Carter had to balance employers’ demands for foreign workers with pressure to restrict immigration – and so does Trump

Written by Gabrielle Clark, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Law, California State University, Los Angeles

Jimmy Carter shakes riders' hands in a Mexican American parade while campaigning in Southern California in 1976.AP Photo

President Donald Trump promised during his three presidential campaigns to deport as many immigrants living in the U.S. without legal authorization as possible.

His second administration got underway less than one month after forme...

Skin phantoms help researchers improve wearable devices without people wearing them

Written by Krittika Goyal, Assistant Professor of Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering Technology, Rochester Institute of Technology

Skin 'phantoms' are an inexpensive alternative to testing on people. Diana Bachu/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Wearable devices have become a big part of modern health care, helping track a patient’s heart rate, stress levels and brain activity. These devices rely on electrodes, sensors that touch the skin to pick up electrical signals from...

Almost half of evicted women and families in metro Detroit say they were illegally pushed out of their homes

Written by Shawnita Sealy-Jefferson, Associate Professor of Social Epidemiology, The Ohio State University

Every year, 2.7 million households nationwide face a court-ordered eviction filing.

Michigan has one of the highest eviction filing rates in the country, tied with Mississippi. Fourteen percent of all Michiganders who rent homes were threatened with eviction between 2006 and 2016.

Due to historical and contemporary structural racism in the U.S., Bla...

‘Aliens’ and ‘animals’ – language of hate used by Trump and others can be part of a violent design

Written by Ronald Niezen, Professor of Practice in Sociology, University of San Diego

Asylum seekers wait at Catholic Charities in McAllen, Texas, for humanitarian aid on Jan. 18, 2025. Associated Press/Eric Gay

“Animals,” “aliens” and “people with bad genes” – President Donald Trump and his supporters often use this kind of dehumanizing language to describe immigrants.

In the 2024...