The Conversation

Birutė Galdikas: The last of the ‘angels’ in primatology’s most extraordinary chapter

Written by Mireya Mayor, Director of Exploration and Science Communication, Florida International University

Birute Galdikas carries an orangutan named Isabel in Borneo, Indonesia. The 2011 film 'Born To Be Wild 3D' followed her work.AP Photo/Irwin Fedriansyah

Primatologist Birutė Galdikas died on March 24, 2026, and an era of science that began in the forests of Tanzania, Rwanda and Borneo studying humanity’s closest living relatives more than...

War in the Middle East made the case for renewables – what’s happening in each country tells a harder story

Written by Ezgi Canpolat, Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University

Saudi Arabia has built large solar power plants while continuing to invest heavily in fossil fuels.Giuseppe Cacace/AFP via Getty Images

The oil-dependent world is in crisis. Ship traffic in the Strait of Hormuz – through which more than a quarter of global seaborne oil trade and a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas flow –...

Cameras have quietly appeared in thousands of US cities – now, their integration with AI is sounding alarms

Written by Jess Reia, Assistant Professor of Data Science, University of Virginia

A small, black license plate recognition camera is mounted on a light pole in Boulder, Colo.Matthew Jonas/MediaNews Group/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images

For decades, cars dictated urban planning in the United States.

Few could have predicted that they would one day also double as nodes for surveillance.

In thousands of towns and cities across...

Two verdicts in two days: How American courts are rewriting the rules for Big Tech and children

Written by Carolina Rossini, Professor of Practice and Director for Program, Public Interest Technology Initiative, UMass Amherst

Judge Bryan Biedscheid of New Mexico could order significant changes to how Instagram and Facebook operate.Nathan Burton/Santa Fe New Mexican via AP, Pool

Within 48 hours, the legal landscape governing social media and children shifted in ways that will take years to fully understand and verify.

On March 24, 2026, a Santa Fe jury ordered Meta to pay...

I went to CPAC and found Trump supporters unhappy about Iran, Epstein files and the economy, even while the fans at the MAGA conference celebrate his immigration policies

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

Attendees wearing MAGA merch stand next to an image of Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Grapevine, Texas, on March 25, 2026.Leandro Lozada AFP/Getty Images

There is a pall over the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement. Donald Trump overpromised. His public support has fallen. Some “America First” die-hards...

Mosquitoes carrying malaria are evolving more quickly than insecticides can kill them – researchers pinpoint how

Written by Jacob A Tennessen, Research Scientist in Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Harvard University

_Anopheles darlingi_, a key carrier of malaria, is rapidly evolving resistance to insecticides.Romuald Carinci and Pascal Gaborit/Duchemin lab/Institut Pasteur de la Guyane, CC BY-SA

The fight against infectious disease is a race against evolution. Bacteria become resistant to antibiotics. Viruses adapt to spread more quickly. Diseases transmitted...

Millions are protesting – but boycotts might be key to changing government policies

Written by Lisa Schirch, Professor of the Practice of Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame

The 'No Kings' protests have drawn millions of Americans and may grow even larger.Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

The organizers of the estimated 3,000 “No Kings” protests, rallies and other events planned for March 28, 2026, say they expect that the protests will be the largest such mass mobilization in U.S. history.

As scholars...

The long shadow of Paul Ehrlich’s ‘Population Bomb’ is evident in anti-immigration efforts today

Written by Brian C. Keegan, Associate Professor of Information Science, University of Colorado Boulder; Harvard University

The idea of overpopulation has been used to argue against immigration.Pandagolik/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Paul Ehrlich opened his 1968 book “The Population Bomb” with a scene recounting returning to his hotel through a crowded Delhi neighborhood on a stifling night in the mid-1960s. He described the physical sensation of overpopulation:...

Why do basketball players miss shots they’ve made a thousand times before? Neuroscience has an answer

Written by David Van den Heever, Associate Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Mississippi State University

Every March Madness it happens. A player steps to the line, takes the shot and misses. And just like that, there goes your perfect bracket.

These are elite players. The player has made that shot thousands of times before. So what went wrong this time?

Research from my lab has found that the difference between making and missing a shot may come down...

NASA’s Artemis II mission will take an astronaut crew around the Moon – a space policy expert describes the long road to launch

Written by Scott Pace, Professor of the Practice of International Affairs, George Washington University

NASA's Space Launch System rocket will launch a crewed capsule into orbit and then on a mission around the Moon. AP Photo/John Raoux

NASA is once again shooting for the Moon, for the first time since the 1970s. As soon as April 2026, NASA will launch its Artemis II mission, using the Space Launch System heavy lift rocket to send a crewed...