The Conversation

Native Hawaiians believe volcanoes are alive and should be treated like people, with distinct rights and responsibilities

Written by Richard W Stoffle, Professor of Anthropology, University of Arizona

Hawaii's Mauna Loa's volcano is erupting for the first time in nearly 40 years.Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Hawaii’s largest and oldest volcano, Mauna Loa, began erupting on Nov. 27, 2022, with lava flowing miles away downhill. The last eruption, which lasted three weeks, was nearly 40 years ago.

It is not clear how long this...

Early and mail-in voting: Research shows they don't always bring in new voters

Written by Jan Leighley, Professor of Government, American University School of Public Affairs

More than 110 million votes were cast in the U.S. midterm elections of November 2022.Hill Street Studios/Digital Vision via Getty Iag

SciLine interviewed Jan Leighley, professor of government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 4, 2022. Leighley discussed how early voting affects turnout, how turnout...

What’s really driving ‘climate gentrification’ in Miami? It isn’t fear of sea-level rise

Written by Richard Grant, Professor of Geography and Urban Studies, University of Miami

Residents of Miami’s Little Haiti have been fighting plans for a luxury development for several years.AP Photo/Lynne Sladky

Miami’s Little Haiti has been an immigrant community for decades. Its streets are lined with small homes and colorful shops that cater to the neighborhood, a predominantly Afro-Caribbean population with a median...

Supreme Court signals sympathy with web designer opposed to same-sex marriage in free speech case

Written by Mark Satta, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Wayne State University

Supreme Court case pits LGBTQ rights against right to discriminate.AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

In front of the Supreme Court justices on Dec. 5, 2022 was 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis – a major case regarding LGBTQ rights and free speech.

The petitioner, Colorado-based web designer Lorie Smith, is looking to expand her business, 303 Creative, by...

Georgia runoff elections are exciting, but costly for voters and democracy

Written by John A. Tures, Professor of Political Science, LaGrange College

Sen. Raphael Warnock, the incumbent Democrat, is up against Republican challenger Herschel Walker in a runoff election to choose who will represent Georgia in the U.S. Senate.AP Photo

In Georgia, if no candidate receives 50% of the general election vote for a statewide or congressional district race, there’s a runoff between the top two...

How does a television set work?

Written by Jay Weitzen, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UMass Lowell

The TV in your home is very different from the television sets of just a few years ago.moodboard/Image Source via Getty Images

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

How does a TV work? – Caden, age 11

Look at your modern-day...

Shorter days affect the mood of millions of Americans – a nutritional neuroscientist offers tips on how to avoid the winter blues

Written by Lina Begdache, Associate Professor of Health and Wellness Studies, Binghamton University, State University of New York

For those prone to seasonal affective disorder, a shift in the sleep cycle can impact energy levels.Ben Akiba/E+ via Getty Images

The annual pattern of winter depression and melancholy – better known as seasonal affective disorder, or SAD – suggests a strong link between your mood and the amount of light you get during the day.

To put...

Pharma's expensive gaming of the drug patent system is successfully countered by the Medicines Patent Pool, which increases global access and rewards innovation

Written by Lucy Xiaolu Wang, Assistant Professor of Resource Economics, UMass Amherst

Drug patents don't necessarily spur companies to innovate so much as restrict access to their IP.Andrii Zastrozhnov/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Biomedical innovation reached a new era during the COVID-19 pandemic as drug development went into overdrive. But the ways that brand companies license their patented drugs grant them market monopoly,...

Text-to-image AI: powerful, easy-to-use technology for making art – and fakes

Written by Hany Farid, Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley

A synthetic image generated by mimicking real faces, left, and a synthetic face generated from the text prompt ‘a photo of a 50-year man with short black hair,’ right.Hany Farid using StyleGAN2 (left) and DALL-E (right), CC BY-ND

Type “Teddy bears working on new AI research on the moon in the 1980s” into any of the...

A judge in Texas is using a recent Supreme Court ruling to say domestic abusers can keep their guns

Written by April M. Zeoli, Associate Professor of Public Health, University of Michigan

Taking guns from abusers saves lives.Kameleon007 via Getty Images

For a large part of the history of the United States, domestic abuse was tolerated under the nation’s legal system. There were few laws criminalizing domestic violence, and enforcement of the existing laws was rare.

It was only in the past few decades that laws criminalizing...