The Conversation

How satellites and AI help fight wildfires today

Written by John W. Daily, Research Professor in Thermo Fluid Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder

The wind and terrain can quickly change how a fire, like this one near Los Angeles in January 2025, behaves.AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

As wind-driven wildfires spread through the Los Angeles area in January 2025, fire-spotting technology and computer models were helping firefighters understand the rapidly changing environment they were facing.

That...

Why Trump’s meme coin is a cash grab

Written by Maximilian Brichta, Doctoral Student of Communication, University of Southern California

The Trump meme coin has already attracted over a half-million buyers.Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Three days before his presidential inauguration, Donald Trump launched a meme coin, a type of cryptocurrency whose value is buoyed by social media and internet culture, rather than any sort of functionality or intrinsic...

Stricter abortion laws may cause increased infant deaths − 2 maternal and child health researchers explain the data

Written by Almut Winterstein, Distinguished Professor of Pharmaceutical Outcomes & Policy, University of Florida

Many babies born with severe birth defects die within the first few days or weeks of life.shironosov/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Infant mortality in the U.S. has increased by 7% since the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson U.S. Supreme Court decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion, according to an October 2024 study.

Those findings followed...

‘We painted our fear, hope and dreams’ − examining the art and artists of Guantánamo Bay

Written by Alexandra Moore, Professor of Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies, Binghamton University, State University of New York

Sailing ships are a common feature of Moath al-Alwi's art.Moath al-Alwi, 2016, CC BY-SA

When Moath al-Alwi left Guantánamo Bay for resettlement in Oman, accompanying him on his journey was a cache of artwork he created during more than two decades of detention.

Al-Alwi was detainee number “028” – an indication that he was...

Gen Z seeks safety above all else as the generation grows up amid constant crisis and existential threat

Written by Yalda T. Uhls, Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers and Assistant Adjunct Professor in Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles

Asked to rate the importance of 14 personal goals, Gen Z reported 'to be safe' as the top goal.Darya Komarova/Getty Images

After many years of partisan politics, increasingly divisive language, finger-pointing and inflammatory speech have contributed to an environment of fear and uncertainty, affecting not just political dynamics but also the...

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...