The Conversation

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...

Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's pending promotion sheds new light on his overlooked fight for equal rights after the Civil War

Written by Anne Marshall, Associate Professor of History, Mississippi State University

General Grant stands in front of his campaign tent at his headquarters in Virginia in 1865.Bettmann/Getty Images

Tucked away in an amendment to the FY2023 U.S. defense authorization bill is a rare instance of congressional bipartisanship and a tribute to U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant.

If approved, the measure would posthumously promote Grant to...

Orthodox Judaism can still be a difficult world for LGBTQ Jews – but in some groups, the tide is slowly turning

Written by Orit Avishai, Professor of Sociology, Fordham University

Acceptance of LGBTQ identities is growing in some parts of Orthodox Judaism, but slowly.motimeiri/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Yeshiva University, the storied modern Orthodox Jewish university in New York City, is in the midst of a legal battle over its refusal to recognize the YU Pride Alliance, an undergraduate club.

While YU does not object to...

This course takes college students out of this world – and teaches them what it takes to become space pioneers

Written by Joshua D. Ambrosius, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Dayton

Going to space requires more than just rocket science.John Lamb via Getty Images

Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.

Title of course:

“Space Exploration: Toward a Spacefaring Society”

What prompted the idea for the course?

The idea came from a desire to...

Weasels, not pandas, should be the poster animal for biodiversity loss

Written by David Jachowski, Associate Professor of Wildlife Ecology, Clemson University

A short-tailed weasel in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.Jacob W. Frank, NPS/Flickr

At the United Nations biodiversity conference that opens in Montreal on Dec. 7, 2022, nations aim to create a new global framework for transforming humanity’s relationship with nature. The conference logo features a human reaching to embrace a panda –...