On the top of Mount Everest, in the Mariana Trench, in the human placenta, and babies’ feces: Plastics are everywhere. They are built to last, and last they do: A plastic bag can endure for 20 years in the environment, and a disposable diaper, soiled or not, up to 200.

When they do finally break down into microplastics—smaller than 1 micrometer, or about 1/70th the diameter of a human hair—they can become difficult to detect. These microplastics are so ubiquitous in the environment that some scientists think we should track how they cycle through the global oceans, atmosphere, and soil much in the same way we track carbon and phosphorus.

Through soil, wind, and water, they even get into our food: Scientists have found microplastics in beer, honey, salt and most of the proteins we consume—everything from seafood to sirloin steak and even plant-based meat alternatives. We keep looking for plastics, and we keep finding them in new and surprising places. Below, five recent discoveries that expand our knowledge of our plastic footprint.

A liter of bottled water contains around 240,000 detectable plastic fragments.

Clouds: Researchers recently collected 28 samples of liquid from clouds at the top of Mount Tai in eastern China. They found microplastic fibers—from clothing, packaging, or tires—in their samples. Lower altitude clouds contained more particles. The older plastic particles, some of which attract elements like lead, oxygen, and mercury, could lead to more cloud development, according to a paper published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

Rocks: Have you heard of plastistones? That’s the name scientists have given to a new type of sedimentary rock formed when molten plastic from burning trash cools down and fuses with minerals from the environment. These plastitones have now been found in 11 countries on five continents. They can wreak havoc on microbial communities, especially in the ocean, where the rocks may be mistaken for algae. They could also reshape the geological record of our planet. 

Bottled water: Scientists recently found that on average, a liter of bottled water contains around 240,000 detectable plastic fragments—10 to 100 times greater than previous estimates. Their research, published in the journal PNAS, focused on the tiniest plastic particles—nanoplastics. These particles can cross into the brain, gut, heart, and through the placenta to babies in utero.

Farm fertilizers: We’re making progress on the circular waste economy by using treated sewage sludge as fertilizer. But that sludge has now been found to be packed with microplastics. A study in the journal Environmental Pollution estimates that the “practice of spreading sludge on agricultural land could potentially make them one of the largest global reservoirs of microplastic pollution.”

Glaciers: You might think of the glaciers of Antarctica as some of the last wild and pristine places on Earth. But scientists recently found plastics there for the first time in the remote Collins glacier on King George Island—probably brought in by gusty winds. Plastics in glaciers and sea ice could increase the rate at which they melt, because plastic absorbs more heat than ice does. “Our results also show that plastic pollution, even if only in small quantities, reaches remote areas with few human settlements,” they write.

This article There’s even plastic in clouds is featured on Big Think.

It was 1869, and something needed to be done.

With the price of ivory skyrocketing, billiard ball manufacturers were scrambling for an alternative. The prized material derived from elephant tusks was being used to craft such things as knife handles, piano keys, dice, dominoes, chessmen, and yes, billiard balls. Now, with elephants growing scarce from overhunting, the wonder material was becoming difficult to procure and unreasonably expensive. After all, one tusk would yield just four or five balls. Leading pool table manufacturer Phelan and Collender offered $10,000 ($225,000 today) to any inventor who could discover a replacement for ivory.

Albany inventor John Wesley Hyatt answered the call, molding together camphor, nitrocellulose, and alcohol under extreme pressure. His concoction, called celluloid, was one of the first synthetic plastics. While Hyatt’s creation proved an unwieldy material for billiard balls — insufficiently durable and mildly explosive when struck — it inspired others to formulate something better. A few decades later, American chemist Leo Baekeland came up with the petroleum-derived Bakelite. It became the first commercially successful synthetic plastic, and very likely saved elephants from extinction.

More than a century later, this story has morphed into an intriguing irony…With their creation, plastics probably saved countless species — both plants and animals — from extinction. Derived from byproducts of fossil fuel production, which had previously gone unused, the invention of synthetic plastics meant that humans no longer had to pillage the living natural world to produce various products for a technologically advancing global society. Fast-forward to today: Plastics are demonized for eroding the environment and endangering human health, prompting many to wonder if we’d be better off without them.

Plastics are made of polymers, long chains of repeating macromolecules. They can have various properties depending upon their chemical ingredients, but they all generally can be heated and molded into a wide variety of shapes at minimal cost. They’re also quite durable, hence their immense usefulness.

It is not an understatement to say that plastics enabled the technological growth that defines modern society, providing the forms for appliances and electronics. (Imagine if all electronics were made of metal or wood…) Look around you and you’ll notice that plastics are everywhere. PET, polyethylene terephthalate, is in your food containers and your clothing. HDPE, high-density polyethylene, makes milk and laundry detergent containers. PVC, polyvinyl chloride, is in pipes and medical devices. LDPE, low-density polyethylene, makes plastic bags. PP, polypropylene, is in food packaging and diapers. PS, polystyrene, makes up styrofoam cups and plates as well as various home construction materials. These six types account for 90% of yearly plastic production, which hit 460 million metric tons in 2019.

The problem now, as almost everyone knows, is that once plastics are produced, they don’t really decompose. Rather, they just break down into smaller and smaller bits — microplastics and even nanoplastics. These pervasive particles pollute pretty much everything, including drinking water, soil, living tissues, and even our blood, with deleterious effects, the full extent of which remains unknown.

Moreover, despite claims that plastics are recyclable, really only PET and HDPE (types 1 and 2 in North America) can be readily reused. In total, only 9% of plastic is melted and reformed. The rest goes into landfills or the wider environment.

Plastic pollution

What is the effect of omnipresent plastic pollution? According to the Minderoo-Monaco Commission report on Plastics and Human Health, published in 2023, the yearly economic cost reaches into the trillions of dollars. Plastic’s nefarious reach poisons human health, climate, agriculture, waterways, oceans, and wildlife.

According to the authors of the report, plastic additives may be the most pernicious. These substances augment plastics to make them more useful to consumers: stronger, more pliable, less flammable, non-stick, etc. However, large observational studies and research in lab animals indicate they are harming human health.

The substances could be increasing cancer rates, reducing birth weights, inhibiting antibody responses to vaccines, raising blood pressure, and contributing to infertility. These compounds include polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE), phthalates, bisphenol A (BPA), and per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).

Philip J. Landrigan, a professor, pediatrician, and Director of the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good at Boston College, is the lead author of the Minderoo-Monaco Commission report. He spoke with Big Think about the potential harms of plastic additives.

Landrigan was a pediatrician during the 1970s, when lead in gasoline, paints, and toys was secretly poisoning children. He says chemicals leaching from plastics constitute a similar threat: As they’re not chemically bound to the plastic matrix, they can easily escape into the environment. PBDEs, added as flame retardants in furniture and other products, have been found in house dust and are neurotoxic, he says.

“The thousands of chemicals in plastics—monomers, additives, processing agents, and non-intentionally added substances—include amongst their number known human carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, neurotoxicants, and persistent organic pollutants,” Landrigan and his fellow authors wrote in the report.

Given these negative effects, it may seem as if plastic is a fire-breathing dragon. While it began as an ally, it has now turned against us. If we don’t get the dragon back under control, it could spell our downfall.

To respond to threats from plastics, the experts on the Minderoo-Monaco Commission called for a Global Plastics Treaty comparable to the Paris Climate Agreement to combat climate change. As part of the treaty, they insist that a “cap on global plastic production with targets, timetables, and national contributions” is needed. Global plastic use is estimated to nearly triple by 2060.

But while other experts acknowledge that plastic waste is a problem, they counter that plastics’ harms to health are so far unknown.

“The truth is that determining the possible health consequences of nanoparticle exposure is a more challenging problem than going to the moon,” Dr. Joe Schwarcz, a chemistry instructor at McGill University and Director of the institution’s Office for Science and Society, told Big Think in an email.

“Feed phthalates to rats and you can track what happens. But that doesn’t tell us anything about a risk to a child who plays on vinyl flooring that has phthalate plasticizers or chews on a PVC duck that has been plasticized.”

Although Landrigan admits that the pernicious effects of plastics are often invisible in a clinical setting, he says they are very real. Findings suggest tens of thousands of premature deaths due to heightened rates of cardiovascular disease, a few points of IQ loss in children on average, and thousands of cases of infertility, particularly in males. These add up, causing societies to stagnate.

The hidden benefits of plastics

Still, plastics’ harms must be compared with their incalculable benefits to health, and yes, even the environment.

“The pharmaceutical, personal care product, sporting equipment, clothing, food production and electronics industries could not exist without the use of plastics. Neither could airplanes, cars, hospitals, cell phones, or sex toys,” Schwarcz wrote in an article. “The benefits of plastics greatly outweigh any associated risks, but those risks are not zero.”

Plastics allow clean drinking water to be safely transported to areas where infrastructure is absent or compromised. Their use in food packaging reduces food waste and food-borne illnesses. Single-use plastics are indispensable to modern medicine. Studies repeatedly show that disposable sanitary products are much less likely to transmit infection than re-used ones because cleaning isn’t perfect. Plastics are used to make IV tubes, dissolvable stents, blood bags, and syringes — all essential for saving lives.

Owing to their light weight, plastics make vehicles and aircraft more fuel efficient, reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions. Their widespread use in clothing — more than 60% of the fibers produced worldwide are synthetic — means that animal furs are unnecessary and we don’t need to get all our textiles from farming silk and cotton. We also don’t require tracts of rubber plantations when synthetic rubber is available, thus preventing deforestation.

“Consider what the planet would look like if all plastics used for rubber, textiles, and wood finishes had to be sourced from renewable resources,” Angela Logomasini, an adjunct fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute specializing in environmental risk, wrote. “If we switched to paper over plastic, we would need more forests to harvest timber, and shifting to metal food containers over plastic would require more mining. As a result, we would need more pesticides, water, and energy to access plastics from renewable resources.”

In short, synthetic plastics prevent widespread habitat destruction.

“The collective demand for land to meet humanity’s demands for food, fuel, and other products of living nature is — and always has been — the single most important threat to ecosystems and biodiversity,” Logomasini added.

It’s for this reason that bio-plastics, plastics made from renewable feedstocks such as corn, might never supplant synthetic plastics, even though scientists have been working on them for decades. These alternatives do decompose much more quickly in the environment, on timelines of months or years rather than centuries. However, they require much more natural resources to produce — so much that they might be even more environmentally intensive. One study found that replacing all synthetic plastics with natural ones would increase worldwide water demand by 3 to 18%.

While Landrigan told Big Think that he loves the concept of bioplastics, it’s still too early to see if they will work. “The devil is in the details,” he said.

Maximizing benefits and minimizing costs

So if plastics are so integral to human society and likely the best option we have for the health of both humans and the natural world, how do we keep their environmental costs in check? Plastic waste, after all, is piling up.

Landrigan recalled visiting Africa and seeing plastic bags blowing around everywhere like tumbleweeds. China stopped being the leading repository for the world’s plastic waste in 2018 after implementing an import ban. So now, spent plastics are being shipped to other countries, many of them poor and less developed.

Doing away with plastic bottles would be a good start. More than 500 billion are produced and sold each year. Other single-use plastics also need to go, Landrigan says. And the dangerous additives should be phased out.

But ultimately, scientists may need to provide a solution. Saliva from plastic-eating worms could be used to decompose plastics in the environment. Rapidly degrading plastics could be utilized for fishing nets. And new processes that make recycling more types of plastics economical could drastically reduce demand for virgin materials. Last year, researchers from the University of Wisconsin described in the journal Science a novel chemical method to transform low-value plastic waste into high-value materials, essentially spinning straw into gold.

George Huber, a professor of chemical and biological engineering, and one of the architects of the breakthrough, was effusive.

“There are so many different products and so many routes we can pursue with this platform technology,” he said. “There’s a huge market for the products we’re making. I think it really could change the plastic recycling industry.”

Plastics aren’t going anywhere, so we will have to learn to live with them sustainably. That means maximizing their benefits while minimizing the costs.

This article The plastic paradox: How plastics went from elephant saviors to eco-villains is featured on Big Think.

In his book Development as Freedom Amartya Sen says that in functioning multiparty democracies “rulers have the incentive to listen to what people want if they have to face their criticism and seek their support in elections”.¹

Sen made this point in the context of food crises, famously pointing out that famines tend not to happen in democracies. But his argument is general, and the idea that strong democratic institutions can improve social outcomes is very popular in international development circles.

What do we know about the empirical support that links democracy and population health?

The cross-country correlation between democracy and health

The chart shows the cross-country correlation between an aggregate measure of health – life expectancy – and an aggregate measure of democracy, the Liberal Democracy Index.

The Liberal Democracy Index is produced by the Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg. The index is based on a qualitative and quantitative assessment of elections and suffrage rights; freedom of expression and association; equality before the law; and judicial and legislative constraints on the executive. It is measured in a continuous scale where more democratic regimes obtain higher scores.²

As we can see, there is a general correlation: in 2022, the countries with a Liberal Democracy Index of at least 0.7 also enjoyed life expectancy of at least 70 years; and conversely, all countries whose life expectancy was less than 60 years had a Liberal Democracy Index of at most 0.51.

This correlation holds for other measures of health and democracy; and several studies have found that it also holds after controlling for other factors such as national income or human capital. In a recent paper published in The Lancet, a group of researchers looked at data covering 170 countries over the period 1970 to 2015, and they concluded that democracies were better than autocracies at reducing mortality — especially in those causes of mortality that had not been heavily targeted by foreign aid and required health-care delivery infrastructure.³

But of course, correlation is not causation. Does democratization actually causeimproved health outcomes?

The causal impact of democratization on health outcomes

Controlled experiments are a popular way to establish causality. If we could randomly pick some countries and make them more democratic, we could then take two groups, use one as a control, and wait 30 years to evaluate the impact of democracy on health. While such an experiment is obviously out of the question, sometimes there are ‘natural experiments’ that enable us to learn about causal relationships following a similar logic.

One such natural experiment was the introduction of electronic voting in Brazil’s complex elections. Under paper balloting, less educated and poorer voters often made mistakes and so had their votes invalidated. In 1998, electronic voting was introduced, but only to municipalities with at least 40,500 registered voters. By comparing municipalities that were just below and above this arbitrary cutoff, Thomas Fujiwara found that electronic voting dramatically reduced the percentage of invalid votes, and this effectively enfranchised millions of voters, most of whom were less educated and poor. This enhanced political participation of the poor led, in turn, to increased spending on public healthcare, with such positive outcomes as fewer low-weight births and increased prenatal visits by healthcare professionals to pregnant women.⁴

Other studies have also found consistent evidence in other contexts. Masayuki Kudamatsu studied the 1990s wave of democratization in sub-Saharan Africa, and looked at individual-level data for 27,000 mothers who gave birth both before and after the year of democratization. He found that when multiparty elections produced a new leader infant mortality fell. However, there was no such reduction in infant mortality in countries where the dictator held multiparty elections and stayed in power, or where leadership change took place in a nondemocratic way.⁵

Democracy and public service delivery

The above-mentioned research from Thomas Fujiwara suggests that public service delivery was the key channel through which democracy affected health outcomes in Brazil. So what do we know about the link between democracy and public service delivery more generally?

Several studies have found a link between democratic elections and spending on public goods.⁶

But the impact of democracy on public service delivery seems to go beyond higher spending. Robin Burgess and coauthors, for example, found that electoral competition can help reduce favoritisms in spending, which can improve social outcomes by reducing biases in public service delivery.⁷ This is important because democracy often goes together with improved governance, including more control of corruption and better administrative effectiveness and state capacity.⁸

The correlation between democracy and government effectiveness is shown in the scatter plot, using data from the Government Effectiveness Index, produced by the World Bank as part of the Worldwide Governance Indicators project. Here, government effectiveness captures “perceptions of the quality of public services, the quality of the civil service and the degree of its independence from political pressures, the quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to such policies”.⁹

Considering the evidence as a whole, the conclusion is that (i) there is a strong raw cross-country correlation between population health outcomes and the strength of democratic institutions; (ii) there is evidence that these correlations also hold if you control for other variables, but there are some studies that suggest conditional correlations are less robust; (iii) going beyond correlations, there is good evidence suggesting the observed cross-country correlations are likely causal, hence suggesting that democratization leads to better health; and (iv) the causal mechanism is likely driven by a mix of both higher expenditure on public services, and better public service delivery.

This article Does democracy lead to better health? is featured on Big Think.

Electric vehicles (EVs) have undeniably entered the mainstream in the United States. According to estimates from Kelley Blue Book, more EVs were sold last year than were sold between 2011 and 2018. The roughly 1.2 million new EVs put into service in 2023 represented 7.6% of the total U.S. car market. Cox Automotive’s Economics and Industry Insights team boldly predicted that this share will climb to 10% in 2024.

EVs’ impressive growth has played out even though they remain significantly more expensive to purchase than gasoline-powered cars, with only a handful of options priced below $40,000. EV proponents counter this drawback by claiming that EVs are actually cheaper to own over the long term, with lower fuel and maintenance costs making up for the higher sticker price. Studies examining cars’ total cost of ownership back their assertions.

However, these studies (and there are many) are only as reliable as their completeness. After all, a wide variety of expenses factor into a vehicle’s lifetime cost, and excluding or miscalculating one could drastically skew the calculation. That’s why researchers at the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems reviewed the dozens of “total cost of ownership” studies to craft their own. Published on January 3rd in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, their analysis aimed to correct for the shortcomings of previous research.

A closer look at EV costs

Maxwell Woody, a research assistant pursuing Ph.Ds in resource policy and behavior and mechanical engineering, led the effort. He and his colleagues accounted for all the usual costs, such as purchase price, fuel, maintenance, repairs, insurance, annual fees, and financing. Unlike prior analyses, however, they also:

• adjusted for the effect of temperature on fuel efficiency
• tracked vehicles over 25-year lifetimes
• categorized vehicles by size, range, and type
• accounted for different EV charging behaviors, and explored the cost of ownership in 14 cities from across the U.S.

The findings broadly challenge the optimistic cost-of-ownership assessments frequently touted by EV enthusiasts. The researchers found that while small and low-range EVs capable of traveling around 200 miles are indeed less expensive to own than their gas-powered counterparts, larger, long-range EVs that can cover 400 miles are more expensive. Midsize SUV EVs — currently the top-selling models by far — only reach cost parity if government incentives are applied.

“EVs are more competitive in cities with high gasoline prices, low electricity prices, moderate climates, and direct purchase incentives, and for users with home charging access, time-of-use electricity pricing, and high annual mileage,” the researchers summarized.

Since EVs are broadly more expensive to purchase upfront than comparable gas vehicles, the best way to assess whether an EV will ultimately be cheaper to own over the long term is by looking at its break-even time: when its lower recurring costs make up for its higher upfront cost. Woody and his team found that 200-mile range compact and midsize electric sedans reach this point in 3 to 7 years, while 300-mile range variants take nine to 20 years to break even. Electric SUVs and trucks with 300 miles of range generally take more than 20 years, while 400-mile range EVs will never break even over their lifetimes.

Keep in mind, however, that this assessment did not include the Federal EV tax credit, which reduces the purchase price of certain EVs by $3,750 or $7,500. When included, the affordability scale tips decidedly toward EVs.

“For 200-mile range BEVs, the breakeven time is under 2 years for compact vehicles and sedans, and under 5 years for small and midsize SUVs in each city,” the researchers reported. “Small 300-mile range vehicles break even in under 10 years in each city, and larger 300-mile range vehicles break even in under 10 years in many cities…there are a few cities in which 400-mile BEV compact and midsize sedans will break even with [gas-powered] counterparts after 15−20 years.”

Cost parity down the road

Still, there are numerous unknowns in the assessment, such as whether a substantial number of EVs will require battery replacements outside of their warranties, mandated to be a minimum of 8 years and 100,000 miles. Also unknown is how the costs of gasoline and electricity will change in the future. The study also didn’t compare vehicle costs in rural areas.

Overall, the greatest factor in determining whether an EV will be cheaper to own than a gas vehicle is the ability to charge at home, where electricity is cheapest. (In their analysis, the researchers assumed that EV owners charge at home 80% of the time and at public charging stations 20% of the time.) Without home charging, an EV will likely never be cheaper over its lifetime.

“Home charging access reduces the lifetime cost by approximately $10,000 on average, and up to $26,000,” Woody and his team reported.

The study is just a snapshot in time, the researchers noted. An EV’s battery constitutes a significant portion of its upfront cost. With battery prices predicted to continue steadily declining in the coming years, the math is likely to shift more in favor of EVs.

This article Are electric vehicles really cheaper to own? Maybe not. is featured on Big Think.

We parked an SUV in Las Vegas. This doesn’t typically justify an entire article, but the thing is, we weren’t in the car. We were remotely controlling it from an operating station as it navigated to the parking spot.

It was a demo of BMW’s new “valet parking” concept, which was featured at the company’s booth at this year’s CES.

The operation station we controlled the car from, several yards away from the vehicle, looked like a gaming setup you’d see in an old arcade or a racing enthusiast’s living room: a seat, pedals, and a steering wheel facing two computer screens. The large screen displayed a variety of visual information on the car, such as the front-view and rearview mirror views and overhead displays. The second, smaller screen served as a dashboard with a speedometer, gear shift, and the like.

If you ignore the lack of a driver, the car looks like a standard BMW iX SUV. And that’s because it basically is one.

“We found it’s possible to remote drive with the technology already in vehicles [such as the iX],” Felix Przioda, innovation manager for the valet concept, told Freethink. “There’s no additional hardware needed. You just tweak the software.”

Those software tweaks, however, make for one unique driving experience.

A new kind of remote-controlled car

As long as the car is connected to a cellular network, the driver can turn over control of the car to a remote operator. As said operator, all we had to do was press the brake and hit an on-screen button. A simulated rev of the engine, and we were in the metaphorical driver’s seat.

And then we proceeded to immediately set off an alarm.

Because of how the car had been previously parked — and, ahem, through no fault of the operator’s skills — the vehicle came close to a course barrier, and this happy accident allowed us to demo some of the system’s safety features.

Kevin Dickinson remotely takes control of a BMW iX SUV with the press of a button. (Credit: Robert Chapman-Smith / Freethink)

Some of these are fairly common in newer vehicles. An overhead view on the heads-up display showed nearby obstacles and offered directional projections. However, based on the information the car read from the environment — like the proximity to the nearby barrier — it could adjust the allowable speed. It also wouldn’t start moving forward until it was sure the path was clear (which created some lag that did take some getting used to).

“What you’re actually doing is giving the car a direction, and the car always checks to see if that direction is possible,” Przioda explained.

Once we got out of the parking spot and onto the course proper, the system let us put pedal to metal and open it up to a top speed of 10 kilometers per hour (6 mph) — again for safety, as you don’t want (or need) valets Tokyo drifting your car into the garage. We tested the safety features further by driving closer to the course edge, and the car slowed down despite us not easing up on the pedal. To Przioda’s credit, he didn’t blink.

When we finished our test drive, we parked it and relinquished control to anyone who wanted to get in and take it for an actual drive.

The touch screen near the steering wheel serves as the operation stations dashboard. The large screen at the top provides visual information such as an overhead view and what the car is seeing out the front window. (Credit: Robert Chapman-Smith / Freethink)

Thinking beyond the valet

Currently, BMW is positioning the concept for valet services. You drive up to the restaurant, get out of your car, and a remote operator parks it for you. When you’re finished dining, you signal that you’re ready to go, and the remote operator returns your car to the restaurant for pickup.

The technology has many more applications though, even in its current state. For instance, rental car companies could use it for fleet management, while warehouses and shipping yards could use it for logistics. Before that, however, the next steps for the concept are regulatory approval and for BMW to create an internal timeline.

Looking ahead, Przioda pointed out that, with some software tweaks and hardware additions to the vehicle, the concept can expand much further. You could create remote operating centers of trained drivers ready to take you or your vehicle anywhere you need it to go. 

Maybe you’re too tired to drive: Have an operator remote taxi you home in your car. Or you can send your car to pick up a family member from the airport if you’re stuck at work. And for people who can’t drive themselves, the technology can still give them access to a personal vehicle.

As long as there’s a cellular network and power in the car, there would theoretically be nowhere the vehicle couldn’t be remotely operated. “Level 4 [high-driving automation] is expensive in vehicles. If you can offer the customer the same service with remote operation with less cost and earlier application, that would be great,” Przioda said.

This article We test-drove BMW’s life-sized remote-controlled car is featured on Big Think.

For all the incredible advances in virtual reality devices, the worlds they generate still feel more virtual than real. That’s because much of the current development has focused on how those worlds look and sound. But humans experience the real world through many other senses — importantly touch.

“What if you want to realistically simulate something like cracking an egg?” Linda Jacobson, director of marketing at HaptX, asked Freethink. “It’s one thing to do it visually and to create a sound. But it’s a whole other thing if you want to simulate the rigidity of the eggshell and then couple that with the collapse of the breaking shell and the liquidy yolk spilling out. How do you do that in a way that doesn’t break the suspension of disbelief?”

HaptX’s answer to that question is a haptic glove that simulates high-fidelity touch in the virtual world. HaptX gave Freethink the opportunity to try the device at this year’s CES show in Las Vegas, and the experience was wild.

Getting in touch with the virtual world

According to Joe Michaels, HaptX’s chief revenue officer, the company has spent more than a decade developing its advanced “microfluidic” technology. 

It starts with compressed air, which is filtered into a device called an air controller. When a user interacts with an object in a virtual space, this controller sends air to specific points on the glove. The air fires actuators housed inside the glove that press against the user’s palm and fingertips, providing tactile feedback that mimics “touching” the object. A “tendon system” also generates a resistive force that simulates the virtual object’s size and shape.

In our demo, we were placed in a virtual room with a giant desk and allowed to play around. We opened draws, flicked switches, spun a globe, and wrote our names with a pen. Each object felt similar to how it should be in real life. In a standout moment, we placed a giant clock gear on our finger and rolled it across the desk. When we rolled it across the fingertips of our other hands, we could discern each of the gear’s individual teeth as they traveled across our skin.

Petting a cat and a bonsai tree at the same time is as challenging in the virtual world as the real one. (Credit: Robert Chapman-Smith / Freethink)

At another point in the demo, we used one hand to pet a cat and the other to stroke a bonsai tree (as one does). The glove was able to provide differing sensations for each hand simultaneously. The cat was smooth and continuous, while the tree poked us with individual prickly points. 

Michaels noted that the upcoming HaptX Gloves G1 version of the tech — which was not available for demo at CES — will add vibration feedback to create finer distinctions in textures. So, next time we pet the cat, it may feel more like petting soft fur. And, who knows, it may even purr warmly in response.

Training through touch

For those hoping to add HaptX to their dream gaming rig, we have some bad news for you: The company is currently developing the technology specifically for industrial, manufacturing, and government. While the technology has a wide range of applications in these sectors, the biggest one is training.

“For any kind of VR content where you’re trying to teach someone how to use their hands, this is an ideal tool,” Michaels pointed out. “When you’re learning to do something, you need to build muscle memory. You need to repeat a motion over and over until you know how to do it. That’s only possible when you’ve got realistic touch feedback.”

For instance, HaptX is currently working with the US Army to provide training for future medics. Inside simulated combat environments, these trainees can learn battlefield procedures such as tying tourniquets and injecting needles. With the Glove GI, their virtual patients can offer feedback that is more immediate and practical than a rubber dummy.  

“You don’t want to train on a mannequin if you can help it,” Michaels says, adding, “You certainly don’t want to train on your buddy.”

Using the gloves alongside the VR headset. (Credit: Robert Chapman-Smith / Freethink)

Other training opportunities include teaching pilots to fly planes, surgeons to perform surgery, and technicians to perform tricky repairs. If paired with a large language model AI, such simulated environments could help professionals like physical therapists hone the hands-on and social aspects of the job simultaneously.

Another area Haptx is exploring is the field of robotics. A robot outfitted with dexterous, human-like hands could be sent onto a site that is too dirty, dangerous, or distant for a human. If the operator is outfitted with the G1 Glove, they could feel what the robot feels, offering them more precision and immersion in their work while also keeping them safe. In fact, HaptX is already working with Sanctuary AI, a company that designs general-purpose robots, to advance this application.

“You can operate a robot, and place your skills, and yourself, anywhere in the world,” Michaels said.

A new virtual dimension?

Looking ahead, HaptX plans to fine-tune its current dev kit to make it more effective. They also aim to begin developing the technology that immerses the body more fully.

For instance, when lifting something in real life, we don’t only use our fingertips. We use our whole arms. To get a better sense of that weight, HaptX needs to find a way to provide feedback to the arm and, if the virtual object is heavy or large enough, the upper body too. Ultimately, the company’s goal is to find a way to immerse the whole body into the virtual world so virtual reality applications like training become even more useful to the user. 

“What’s real, and what’s virtual? That’s where we’re going, and it’s going to get there sooner than you think,” Michaels concluded.

Before that future arrives, however, it’s still fascinating how even the relatively simple touch HaptX has managed at this early stage already expands the virtual space with whole new dimension.

“It’s amazing when you think about how important it is to touch the world around us,” Jacobson said. “It’s such a deep, meaningful experience.”

This article We tested the most advanced haptic gloves in the world is featured on Big Think.

Will there ever be another Harry Potter? Between 1997 and 2007, it seemed like every child (and even their parents) was reading J.K. Rowling’s timeless fantasy novels about a skinny, bespectacled teenager’s adventures at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Kids worldwide attended midnight parties for the launch of new installments, dressed as witches and wizards for Halloween, and spent long hours reading the thick hardcovers two, three, four, or more times.

But since the dawn of the 21st century, when digital reading of website articles, blogs, emails, social media posts, and chats began supplanting print reading, the rate of children who read for fun has plummeted. We may never again see another book series capture kids’ attention as Harry Potter did.

In addition to lessening books’ influence in the youth cultural zeitgeist, the broader switch to digital reading may be having a more pernicious effect: adversely affecting kids’ reading comprehension skills, a recently published meta-analysis finds.

Digital reading and comprehension

In 2011, scientists reviewed 99 studies exploring the effect of print reading on children’s comprehension skills. As one would expect, they found a sizable one. The more that kids were exposed to print reading, the better able they were to understand and recall what they were reading. Moreover, print reading appeared to promote a virtuous cycle: As young readers consumed longer and more complex texts, their reading skills improved, prompting them to pursue even more complex written works, further boosting their abilities.

For the new meta-analysis, scientists at the University of Valencia in Spain aggregated 26 studies with close to 470,000 participants. Each study explored the effect of leisure-time digital reading on comprehension. They found that digital reading improves comprehension skills, but the beneficial effect is between six and seven times smaller than print reading, and it’s smallest for children.

“Great [exposure] to digital reading activities… may detract early readers from building a strong reading foundational base… in a critical period when they are shifting from learning to read to reading to learn,” the authors wrote.

Why does digital reading appear to be far less beneficial? The authors cited numerous speculations from the literature. First, the linguistic quality of digital text tends to be of much lower quality. When chatting, we often use informal language with simplified vocabulary, and we ignore grammar rules. Content is also typically far shorter, not requiring the focus and retention to understand and fully enjoy longer works with intricate narratives and numerous characters.

According to Naomi S. Baron, an emerita professor of world languages and cultures at American University, a book’s physical properties might also uniquely boost information retention.

“With paper, there is a literal laying on of hands, along with the visual geography of distinct pages. People often link their memory of what they’ve read to how far into the book it was or where it was on the page,” she wrote.

The physical properties of a book or magazine — the smell, the looks, the feel — can also make reading more pleasurable, she added in an email interview with Big Think.

“If readers find pleasure in a reading medium, it wouldn’t surprise me that such pleasure would lead to greater comprehension. For sure, as many study participants informed us, print led to becoming more absorbed in stories.”

Lastly, when reading content on digital sources, distractions from social media, YouTube, and video games are often just a click away, hampering full comprehension of texts. In a recent study of undergraduates at West Virginia University, two-thirds admitted checking social media “often” or “very often” while reading. Just over half of respondents said that social media negatively impacted their reading habits, while 45% said it had a neutral effect and 2.5% said it had a positive effect.

Because youth tend to have impaired impulse control, they can be more susceptible than adults to distractions when engaging in digital reading. They also are less likely to have mastered vocabulary and grammar rules, meaning they will be exposed to more rudimentary writing on social media and in chats with friends. It’s for these reasons that the authors recommend that parents and teachers limit kids’ time with digital content, or at least emphasize printed works or using basic e-readers with ink-screens. (A 2019 study for the most part showed no difference in reading comprehension when reading works in print form versus on a Kindle, though readers were not as efficient at locating events in the temporality of the story.)

Reading into the future

Will teens follow their elders’ advice? Baron cited data suggesting they might.

“Recent data from the American Library Association point up some surprising choices by today’s Generation Z (ages 13-25) compared with those of Millennials (ages 26-40). According to their study, Gen Zers are not only reading more books per month (presumably for pleasure) than are Millennials, but are reading more print than their older brethren.”

She also noted some of her own research showing that most students readily acknowledge that they learn and concentrate better when reading print.

Could subsequent generations come back to print? Time will tell.

This article The loss of deep reading: How digital texts impact kids’ comprehension skills is featured on Big Think.

Sustainability is humanity’s North Star. Make sure current generations have opportunities for a good life, shrink our environmental impact so that future generations have the same (or better) opportunities, and let wildlife flourish alongside us. That’s the dream. And it’s one I believe we can achieve in our lifetimes.

No generation has done this before. ‘Sustainability’ has two halves. Our ancestors were never sustainable because they never achieved the first half – meeting the needs of the current generation. Half of all children died, preventable disease was common and nutrition was often poor.

Over the last century the world has made unprecedented progress in improving living standards across the world. In some places progress has been slower, but every country has improved in health, education, nutrition and other important indicators of well-being. Of course, we’re not done. The world is still terrible in many ways: children and mothers die from preventable diseases, nearly one in ten go hungry, and not every child gets the opportunity to go to school. We’ve got serious work to do. But many of the solutions are at our fingertips – we know what to do, and many countries have done it already. It’s possible to achieve this everywhere over the next few decades if we commit to it.

The second half is making sure we leave the environment in a much better state than we found it. We’ve travelled through seven big problems, looking at where we are, how we got here, and what we need to do next. For every one of them, we’re either at the turning point to a lower impact, or have already passed it.

Air pollution kills millions of people every year, but it doesn’t have to be this way. We know how to get levels of air pollution very low. I am breathing the UK’s cleanest air for centuries, if not millennia. The solution is simple: stop burning stuff. Make sure that people have access to electricity for cooking and heating, stop burning crops and fossil fuels, regulate industrial plants, and focus on clean public transport networks. These changes can be fast: China nearly halved its air pollution in just seven years. Other countries might not be as fast, but a dramatic reduction in air pollution is achievable in the next few decades. This will only get easier as clean energy gets cheaper; poorer countries can skip straight to the good stuff without burning fossil fuels along the way.

Leapfrogging a long fossil-fuel-powered development path will also be essential if we’re to tackle climate change. Rich countries built their wealth on economies run on fossil fuels. It brought countless benefits to human well-being. But it obviously came at a climate cost. Moving forward, we need to make sure that everyone can move through this pathway to prosperity, but on a low-carbon energy source. This option was never there for our ancestors. It was wood, fossil fuels or nothing. That’s not the case today. The price of renewable energy has plummeted, and the same goes for batteries and electric vehicles. Soon the low-carbon pathway will be the cheap one. There used to be a trade-off: burn fossil fuels or stay poor. We’ll be the first generations that don’t have to face this dilemma. Things are already changing and will seem unrecognisable by the middle of the century.

The trade-off for energy was also true for forests. First, for firewood and building materials, then to clear land for agriculture. You either cut down the forest or run out of land to grow food. Crop yields have increased three-, four-, five-fold in the last century, breaking this deadlock. We can grow more food without using more land. Global deforestation peaked in the 1980s, has now also peaked in our most precious forests such as the Amazon, and many emerging economies have committed to ending deforestation by 2030. In the next few decades, deforestation will hit zero if we continue to invest in productive crops and make better decisions on what food to eat. We’ve lost one-third of the world’s forest over the last 10,000 years. This loss is slowing and can be stopped, and then we’ll see more of the world’s forgotten forests return.

We won’t solve climate change, stop deforestation or protect biodiversity without changes to how we eat. Hunger rates have fallen quickly over the last 50 years, but one in 10 people still don’t get enough food to eat. It’s not because we can’t grow enough food. It’s because we feed it to livestock, put it into cars, or in the bin where it gets wasted. That’s good news: it means the power to reshape the food system is in our hands. Technologies are changing the way we make food. We can produce products just like meat, without the environmental impact or the animal slaughter. That would save an incredible amount of resources and help alleviate global malnutrition at the same time. We just need to make these products nutritious, tasty and cheap enough for the global stage. In 50 years, we won’t be using half of the world’s land to grow food, or raising and slaughtering billions of animals every year to feed ourselves. Everyone in the world can be well fed on a planet that isn’t eating itself alive.

Humans have always been at war with other life on the planet. We were either hunting them or fighting them for space. What’s changed is that wildlife now faces a diverse list of threats: not just hunting but also climate change, deforestation, nutrient pollution from farming, competition with livestock, plastics, ocean acidification and overfishing. It really is ‘death by a thousand cuts’. Tackling biodiversity loss on its own might seem impossible, but we won’t tackle it in isolation; we’ll get most of the way there by fixing the other problems. Do this in the next few decades and we’ll see a great wildlife turnaround. Thousands of years of humans versus other species will end, and both will be able to flourish at the same time.

Plastic pollution is the most tractable problem. That is, stopping plastic leaking into the environment and 1 million tonnes flowing into the ocean every year. Invest in waste-management systems and we could stop this. The biggest barrier is money. Most of the world’s plastic pollution now comes from low- and middle-income countries. Rich countries have a responsibility as manufacturers and trade partners to help other countries make landfills and recycling centres a priority. Work together, and plastic pollution will be solved in the next few decades. If it was higher on the agenda, it’s one problem we could solve in just a fraction of that time.

Our final problem is overfishing. Overfishing is almost inevitable in seas with many fishermen and no way to monitor the health of fish populations below the surface. Knowing how many fish there are, and how this is changing, is essential to knowing how much we can sustainably catch. We weren’t fishing beyond our means when our societies were small, but we’ve become experts in plundering the oceans. However, we are getting a grip on the problem: rates of overfishing have slowed, fish farms allow us to produce more fish with less pressure, and in some regions our iconic species of fish are making a recovery. It only took a decade or two for these species to stage their comeback. We can do it at this pace – or faster – everywhere.

The problems we’re facing are tightly interconnected. The worry is that this gives us impossible trade-offs; we’ll be forced to prioritise one problem at the expense of another. But it isn’t the case; instead, these interdependencies mean we can solve a lot in one go. Move to renewable or nuclear energy to improve air pollution and climate change; eat less beef to improve climate, deforestation, land use, biodiversity and water pollution. Improve crop yields to benefit the climate and humans.

The other commonality between our environmental problems is that their historical arc is the same. We’ve told ourselves that all of our environmental problems are recent. We believe they’ve been created in the last few decades through an exploding population and greed. In reality, nearly all of them have a long history. Humanity’s environmental impacts date back hundreds of thousands of years. This damage was not deliberate – our ancestors often had no other option. But their actions had consequences for the environment and the species we shared it with.

What these problems also have in common is that progress is happening, and it’s happening quickly. Not as fast as we would like, but, nevertheless, attitudes, investments and attention have shifted dramatically. Sustainable solutions are becoming the cheapest option. People are demanding action from political leaders, who can no longer ignore these calls.

There is a real opportunity to solve all of these problems in the next 50 years. All going well, that should be in my lifetime. I’ll be old but still pushing for change, right to the finish line.

This article Sustainability is humanity’s North Star — and it is within our reach is featured on Big Think.

For the first time, NASA has used lasers to send data from deep space to Earth — and the data for the history-making demonstration was a cat video.

Deep space communication: Sending data from spacecraft to Earth or vice versa using radio signals can take a long time — NASA sometimes waits several hours for a single high-resolution photo from a Mars rover to fully arrive.

That not only limits the amount of data our spacecraft can send us, it could also be dangerous when we start sending people to Mars and beyond. If something goes wrong, they might need to send a video or lots of other data to Earth and have it arrive rapidly.

The idea: NASA believes that optical communication systems, which send information over invisible laser beams, could dramatically improve communication with spacecraft or astronauts in deep space, which is generally defined as anything farther away than the moon.

“The signals travel at the speed of light, so they come just as fast as they do for the microwaves, but you could send more data in the same time of a pass for the same spacecraft resources,” said Bill Klipstein, a principal member of technical staff at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA.

NASA had never tested such a system before, though — the farthest it had sent messages over lasers was 22,000 miles using the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) in orbit above Earth.

What’s new? To test the potential of optical systems to revolutionize deep space communication, NASA incorporated the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment into Psyche, a mission to study a distant metal asteroid up close.

Before launching Psyche, NASA equipped the spacecraft with an instrument called a “flight laser transceiver” — this device is expected to be capable of transmitting data from deep space at rates 10 to 100 times greater than would be possible using radio.

On December 11, when Psyche was 19 million miles from Earth, NASA instructed the instrument to begin beaming a 15-second high-def video, loaded prior to launch, back to Caltech’s Palomar Observatory — and the process took just 101 seconds.

“Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections,” said Ryan Rogalin, the project’s receiver electronics lead at JPL.

“In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space,” continued Rogalin.

Famous feline: The contents of the video didn’t matter for the experiment, so the team decided to have a little fun, using a cat video featuring JPL employee Joby Harris’ pet “Taters” chasing a laser pointer, along with graphics related to the Psyche mission.

“Nothing on Psyche generates video data, so we usually send packets of randomly generated test data,” said Klipstein, the demo’s project manager. “But to make this significant event more memorable, we decided to work with designers at JPL to create a fun video, which captures the essence of the demo as part of the Psyche mission.”

Looking ahead: NASA plans to make contact with the flight laser transceiver on Psyche at least once a week for a total of two years of demonstrations (there will be a hiatus between July 2024 and January 2025, as Psyche will be too far away).

The most distant transmissions are expected to occur when Psyche is about 240 million miles from Earth, performing a gravity-assist near Mars.

“The biggest thing now is to show the reliability and the robustness,” Malcolm Wright, flight laser lead at JPL, told The Washington Post. “So it’s not just a novelty, a one-off, but it can be a workhorse. We want to show the capability.”

This article NASA beams home cat video from 19 million miles away is featured on Big Think.

Americans like to think their country is exceptional — an unequaled bastion of freedom and opportunity. However, when it comes to human rights, a new report suggests the United States is anything but exceptional. Compiled by the Global Rights Project (GRIP) at the University of Rhode Island and the CIRIGHTS data project, the 2023 GRIP Annual Report assesses and ranks 195 countries on their dedication to 25 individual human rights. These are divided into four categories:

• Physical integrity: the right of citizens to not be unnecessarily harmed by state agencies
• Empowerment: the right to live and speak freely
• Worker rights: the right to decent-paying and safe work
• Justice rights: the right to fair laws

Credit: The Global Rights Project

Unfortunately, the report showed that countries generally don’t respect human rights: 60% of nations received a score of less than 60 out of 100, corresponding to an “F” letter grade.

“We think these findings make it clear that there’s a lot of work to do in terms of ensuring that all people have a chance to live a life of dignity and respect,” Skip Mark, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island and director of the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies, remarked.

Scoring a 64, the U.S. barely avoided a failing grade, ranking 59th overall. Compared to the country’s neighbors in the Americas, it ended up 14th out of 31. Among developed countries, the U.S. ranked sixth worst.

Why, when it comes to human rights, does America not seem to be living up to the lofty ideals upon which it was founded? While the architects of the report lauded the United States for its generally strong civil and political rights, they noted that the nation comes up short in a few areas: torture, extrajudicial killings, and labor rights.

U.S. law enforcement agencies far too often utilize interrogation techniques that cross over into torture, the report’s authors explained. Police also kill more than 1,000 people every year, disproportionately black Americans. Moreover, “the lack of effort to pass policing reform at the federal level, failure to develop national tracking of police killings, and failure to update use-of-force laws to comply with international standards” signal that these deaths seem to be accepted by policymakers as status quo.

As for deficits in U.S. labor rights, the report’s authors cited “obstacles to unionization and collective bargaining, as well as failures to guarantee safe working conditions, decent wages, and benefits.” They also noted that there is frequent use of child labor, particularly in agriculture, where children as young as 12 years old can work up to 60 hours per week.

The authors also warned that any democratic backsliding in the U.S. would almost certainly cause human rights within its borders to further deteriorate.

On the bright side, the United States scores well in human rights compared to other populous countries, which tend to perform far worse compared to less populated nations. The U.S. also features far better human rights than its chief geopolitical rivals, China and Russia, which respectively scored just 20 and 24.

Human rights slightly declined overall since the turn of the century, the report found. The five top countries for human rights were Finland, Australia, Estonia, Sweden, and Austria. The bottom five were Iran, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, and Egypt.

This article Why the U.S. scored a “D” for human rights in a new report is featured on Big Think.

Recently, two mafia groups in northeast India exchanged gunfire—and torched a half dozen earthmover machines—in a war over a natural resource. They weren’t battling over diamonds or oil: The groups were both trying to get their hands on sand. Sometimes called “the new gold,” sand is the second most exploited natural resource in the world after fresh water. The world uses about 50 billion tons each year—twice the amount created annually in nature—and demand continues to grow. At the current rate, experts say we will run out of sand by 2050. That’s because sand goes into nearly everything people build: cement, concrete, roads, glass, and even the silicon chips in our laptops and phones. “Without sand, there’s no modern civilization,” says Vince Beiser, author of The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization. “Our cities are literally built out of sand: Every apartment, every office tower, every shopping mall, every road is made with sand.”

Hundreds of people have reportedly died in conflicts over sand.

The intensity of demand, coupled with weak regulation, has made sand mining an easy target for mafias, especially in Cambodia, Kenya, Nigeria, and India. Almost all sand mining operations in these countries are illegal, says Arpita Bisht, a researcher at The International Institute of Social Studies, in The Netherlands, where she studies resource extraction. India likely has the highest incidence of mafia violence and illegality related to sand extraction, she says, though it’s challenging to quantify because of the lack of government tracking and reporting. Journalists who report on sand mafia activity often put their lives at risk: In one of the most extreme cases, a journalist was burnt to death in 2019 for his consistent reporting on sand mafia activity in northern India.“

There’s not nearly enough corporate responsibility around it,” says Bisht. The lack of oversight is partly due to the fact that, unlike other mining resources such as oil or coal, sand is relatively easy to access, and because the biggest consumers are rapidly developing countries with weak environmental policies and enforcement. For example, less than 4 percent of the 80 million tons of sand that Singapore imported from Cambodia between 2009 and 2019 was documented.Sand might seem like an inexhaustible resource—after all, our deserts are full of it. But desert sand is too fine to be used in construction materials. Though some of the sand used by industry comes from oceans, estuaries, and beaches, most of it derives from riverbeds. Sometimes miners will simply park a barge in the middle of a river and use a giant tube to suck up the sand like a straw and deposit it on their boats. But these sand straws often suck up plants and creatures living in the river, as well, and destroy their habitats. The churning of the river water can prevent sunlight from reaching aquatic plants that need it or even choke resident fish, and the depression of riverbeds can cause erosion and kill vegetation along riverbanks and floodplains.

At the current rate, experts say we will run out of sand by 2050.

In India’s Kulsi river, the already-endangered Gangetic river dolphin is losing habitat to wide scale sand mining. Similar ecological damage has been reported in the Mekong River, a boundary river in East Asia and Southeast Asia, where massive sand extraction operations have upended a biodiverse river ecosystem, Bisht says. Illegal sand extraction also has massive social impacts. Damage to riverbeds can imperil local infrastructure such as bridges, and pollution from equipment fuel spills can destroy fisheries and threaten water for drinking and for agriculture. Along a part of the coastline of Tamil Nadu in India, entire villages have been abandoned due to the threat of erosion.

Mafias also threaten, intimidate, and abuse people living in the communities where they work—not just journalists, but farmers, NGO workers, community leaders, and even some local police officers. Hundreds of people have reportedly died in conflicts over sand in India, Kenya, and Nigeria. For sand mining laborers, working conditions are dangerous. Drowning is a big risk. “In the case of Vasai Creek in Mumbai,” Bisht says, “miners report that their fellow miners have sometimes got buried in underwater sand dunes and simply never returned from sub-creek mining operations.” Beiser points out that even though sand has built almost everything in modern life, few people realize the extent of its use—or the violence kicked up by its extraction.

This article Sand mafias battle for the new gold is featured on Big Think.

About twice a month, many of Australia’s wind farms receive an important visit from dogs and their handlers. The dogs are professionals and know exactly what they’re there for. Eagerly, they run along transects under the wind turbines, sniffing until they catch a scent then lying down, sitting or freezing once they’ve located their targets: the carcasses of bats and birds that were killed by turbine collisions.

For nearly two decades, wind and wildlife ecologist Emma Bennett’s company, Elmoby Ecology, has been using canines to count the victims of wind turbines in southern Australia. The numbers are troubling. Each turbine yields four to six bird carcasses per year, part of an overall death toll from wind turbines that likely tops 10,000 annually for the whole of Australia (not including carcasses carried away by scavengers). Such deaths are in the hundreds of thousands for North America. Far worse are the numbers of dead bats: The dogs find between six and 20 of these per turbine annually, with tens of thousands believed to die each year in Australia. In North America, the number is close to a million.

In fact, some experts predict that turbine collisions could drive certain bat species to extinction. “It’s the number one threat facing our small microbats,” Bennett says.

Numbers like these have caused strife in environmentalist circles, pitting those pushing for a rapid build-out of renewable energy — necessary to combat climate change — against those who oppose turbines due to their impact on wildlife; some bird conservation groups have frequently obstructed wind energy projects.

But experts stress that wildlife deaths from wind turbines aren’t inevitable. Over the past few decades, scientists have been investigating how and why collisions occur, through in-depth studies into bird and bat ecology and how the creatures sense obstacles in their path.

In doing so, the scientists have discovered a number of methods to prevent the animals from crashing into wind turbines — ranging from simple fixes like limiting the activity of turbines to refining their design. If implemented widely, these solutions might allow wind turbines to peacefully coexist with airborne wildlife.

Fatal attraction

For Bennett, getting wind farms to adopt methods of avoiding bat collisions has long been a priority. The flying critters — comprising a fifth of all mammal species — play vital roles in eating pest insects, dispersing seeds and pollinating plants. Their slow reproduction rate (they typically birth just one pup a year) makes them especially vulnerable to population declines.

And for reasons nobody fully understands, bats are attracted to turbine towers, perhaps because they see them as potential roosting sites, places to find insect prey, scent-marking posts or spots to congregate. “Unlike birds, bats are actually investigating wind turbines and spending more time around them, which makes them at higher risk for mortality,” says Sara Weaver, a wildlife ecologist with Bowman Consulting, a Virginia-based engineering services firm that, among other things, advises energy companies on ways to reduce their environmental impacts. This attraction means that even when turbines are intentionally erected in places with little to no bat activity, the animals still often end up flying there and getting killed.

The most effective solution, many experts agree, is to limit the times when the turbines are active. Ecologists have noticed that small bat species in particular are most likely to get struck by the blades when wind speeds are relatively low, around 2 to 5 meters per second (about 4.5 to 11 miles per hour). These small bats, weighing less than a Snickers bar, can’t fly if conditions get much windier. So at night, when the bats are out and about, setting wind turbines spinning only when higher wind speeds have been reached — an approach called curtailment — can help. For example, a two-year study at a Pennsylvania wind farm found that raising the wind speed at which turbines start to spin from 3.5 meters per second to 5 or 6.5 meters per second reduced bat deaths by between 44 percent and 93 percent.

Because most wind power is generated at high wind speeds anyway, the impact of curtailment on energy production is minimal, Bennett says. When she tested a very modest curtailment — raising the cut-in speed from 3 meters per second to 4.5 meters per second — she and her colleagues saw bat mortality decline by around 54 percent, while the Australian wind farm in question lost less than 0.1 percent of revenue. “Any small increase in this cut-in speed actually has a massive effect on bat survival,” Bennett says.

However, a common concern around curtailment is that it could make wind farms significantly less viable at sites that have lower wind speeds overall, Weaver says. In such situations — and in cases where curtailment might just not be effective enough — another strategy may be useful: deterring bats with disorienting noises in the ultrasonic range, audible to bats but not to humans.

The approach stems partly from studies of tiger moths — popular bat snacks — which emit ultrasonic clicks that disorient bats. In a study published in 2020, Weaver and her colleagues tested an ultrasonic deterrent at a wind farm in south Texas, where she saw a 54 percent reduction in deaths of Brazilian free-tailed bats and a 78 percent reduction in deaths of hoary bats, two heavily affected species at that site. After the wind energy company saw the results, “they retrofitted all 255 wind turbines at their site with ultrasonic acoustic deterrents,” Weaver says.

For other species, Weaver either didn’t observe benefits or didn’t have enough data to assess them; much more research is needed to make ultrasonic deterrents more effective, she says. “It isn’t necessarily the right strategy for all species in all places.”

Scientists are exploring a number of ways to reduce the impact of wind turbine facilities on wildlife. Some solutions — such as curtailment — are ready to be implemented, while others are still under investigation.

Visual aids for birds

There are also growing efforts to avoid bird collisions at wind farms. Turbine deaths account for many times fewer bird deaths than killings by domestic cats or collisions with buildings, vehicles and power lines. But in an age where many bird populations are declining, any cause of mortality needs to be tackled, says Tom Will, a conservation ornithologist retired from the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

And some birds are more affected than others, he adds, such as slow-to-reproduce birds of prey, which hunt in the same open, windy areas that are popular for wind farm development. For some raptors like golden eagles, where populations are barely stable or declining, Will says, “any mortality is significant.”

Avoiding siting wind farms in high-risk areas — like ridgetops, where many bird species concentrate during migration and raptors in particular use the uplifting winds — can help, Will adds. But where bird activity can’t be entirely avoided, there might be a relatively simple solution: painting the turbine blades.

This idea goes back to experiments that began in the late 1900s by the bird vision scientist William Hodos of the University of Maryland. He found that as American kestrels get closer to rotating blades, the spinning becomes too fast for their eyes to capture, producing an invisible blur. But Hodos discovered that painting a single blade black can make the turbines more visible to the birds. And sure enough, when scientists recently tested this approach in Norway, they found that black blades reduced death rates by 70 percent for 19 bird species.

The approach needs more testing, notes Shilo Felton, who leads the Renewable Energy Wildlife Institute’s wind-wildlife research program; the nonprofit is currently testing the painted blades at a large wind farm in Wyoming to see if it helps to avoid eagle collisions. And it’s possible that the strategy might need tweaking for offshore wind turbines, which are currently expanding in the UK and Europe, notes Alex Banks, an ornithologist working on bird conservation with the UK government’s conservation watchdog Natural England. For instance, many birds that forage at sea, like black-legged kittiwakes and lesser black-backed gulls, may be especially unlikely to see or avoid wind turbines.

“Their evolution, I suppose, hasn’t primed them necessarily to expect obstacles in their foraging space,” Banks says. These species may benefit from painting the turbine towers as well as the blades with noticeable patterns, he says.

Other solutions are also in development. Banks is involved in an effort to use laser-based tools and GPS tracking to measure the flying altitude of various seabird species. The goal is to inform offshore turbine developers so they can decide on turbine heights that reduce collisions with birds flying low above the sea. And at some offshore wind farms in the Netherlands, scientists are using a model to predict the passing of migratory bird species in advance, so the turbines can be turned off while the birds move through.

Meanwhile, back on land, the Renewable Energy Wildlife Institute is testing a system that uses video cameras to detect incoming eagles and other species, and then emits acoustic signals to deter them; the same system can be used to turn the turbines off. At some wind farms the institute partners with, humans go out and watch for eagles. If they see one, individual turbines posing a risk to the bird will be slowed or stopped.

A regulatory question

Some wind energy companies have willingly collaborated with scientists to find and test new solutions, or have voluntarily adopted mitigation measures that already exist, Weaver says. But there’s an urgent need for more wind companies to take action; too many practice mitigation measures like curtailment only when they’re required to do so — for instance, when they affect endangered or protected species.

It’s critical, Weaver says, to find ways of incentivizing companies to also protect common species, to help ensure that they don’t become endangered in the future. In countries where wind developments are funded by global banks, making mitigation a requirement for securing funds could also help, Bennett says. Stronger regulation across the board would be ideal, she adds; Germany, for instance, has long required all new wind turbines to practice curtailment to avoid unnecessary bat deaths.

“I think we can get to a solution,” Weaver says. But getting there, she says, will require conversations between government agencies, local jurisdictions, wind energy companies and conservationists, as well as scientists, to ensure that existing and new mitigation strategies are put to use properly. “It’s going to take absolutely everybody coming to the table.”

This article How wind turbines could coexist peacefully with bats and birds is featured on Big Think.

Give people a barrier, and at some point they are bound to smash through. Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947. Yuri Gagarin burst into orbit for the first manned spaceflight in 1961. The Human Genome Project finished cracking the genetic code in 2003. And we can add one more barrier to humanity’s trophy case: the exascale barrier.

The exascale barrier represents the challenge of achieving exascale-level computing, which has long been considered the benchmark for high performance. To reach that level, however, a computer needs to perform a quintillion calculations per second. You can think of a quintillion as a million trillion, a billion billion, or a million million millions. Whichever you choose, it’s an incomprehensibly large number of calculations.

On May 27, 2022, Frontier, a supercomputer built by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, managed the feat. It performed 1.1 quintillion calculations per second to become the fastest computer in the world.

But the engineers at Oak Ridge weren’t done yet. Frontier still had a few tricks up its sleeves — or, rather, its chipsets. The supercomputer recently used machine learning to gain the super boost necessary to set yet another speed record.

Breaking the exascale barrier

The first thing to know about Frontier is that it’s massive. It contains more than 9,400 nodes, and each node is essentially a self-contained, 150-teraflop supercomputer. These are spread through 74 interconnected cabinets. According to Bronson Messer, the director of science at Oak Ridge, each cabinet is the size of a commercial refrigerator and weighs around 8,000 pounds (or, he jokes, two Ford F-150s if we’re measuring in East Tennessee Units).

The second thing to know is that Frontier’s initial speed record was set using a format called double precision. Double precision requires 64 bits to represent numbers, and that amount of information allows for the calculations to contain a wide range of numerical values compared to single precision (which uses 32 bits). 

“Think of the difference between measuring a circle by calculating pi with two decimal places versus 10, 20, or more decimals,” said Feiyi Wang, an Oak Ridge National Laboratory computer scientist.

However, while double precision can perform calculations with a high level of numerical accuracy, those extra bits come at the cost of computational resources such as processing power. To calculate faster, Frontier would need to lower its precision to free up those resources. This is where machine learning comes into play.

“It’s not so much that we went to plant another flag out further,” Messer told Freethink. “[This] benchmark was exercising hardware specifically designed to do AI and machine learning. We wanted to make sure that it was working at the very limits of its capability as well.” 

Importantly, this hardware wasn’t used in Frontier’s initial record-breaking run.

Frontier goes hypersonic

During benchmark tests, Frontier is asked to solve a bunch of linear algebra equations all at once. These equations contain patterns — certain steps that recur over and over — and Frontier’s machine-learning algorithm can learn to recognize these patterns. Once recognized, it can then determine which equations require what level of precision.

If the equation requires a high level of numerical accuracy, Frontier uses double precision. But if the equation does not require such heightened accuracy, the supercomputer can throttle the precision back to 32, 24, or even 16 bits. This strategy is known as mixed-precision.

Messer compares this strategy to shopping at the grocery store. Double precision is the equivalent of checking every aisle to make sure you get everything on your list. It’s thorough, but time and energy consuming. However, once you learn to see patterns in the grocery store’s layout, you can make your trips more efficient by only visiting certain aisles and grabbing specific items.

“Traditionally, high-performance computing has been all about doing everything in double precision, and there are good reasons for that,” Messer said. “A lot of problems need to calculate something that’s happening because of the influence of two countervailing forces. Climate is a good example of that. You’ve got input from the sun, atmospheric chemistry, all kinds of stuff.”

But, Messer adds, in other cases that extra accuracy doesn’t matter because the calculations don’t require such large numbers. When a supercomputer learns to throttle back for those calculations, it results in huge cost savings of computational resources. 

And Frontier did just that. Using mixed-precision, the supercomputer clocked a mind-boggling speed of 9.95 quintillion calculations per second. That’s roughly eight times faster than the calculation speeds that broke the exascale barrier — the equivalent of going from Mach 1 to hypersonic speeds in about a year.

Expanding the frontier of science and research

But can it run Crysis? Yes, it can, Messer laughs.

Frontier could run Crysis — or any other video game for that matter — at full frame rate 10,000 times over. However, since the team isn’t allowed to play games, mine cryptocurrency, or check their social media feeds on Frontier, they are instead using its amazing processing powers to advance science and research.

The supercomputer is currently helping GE engineers study turbulence and design rotor blades for an open-fan jet engine. Such engines could theoretically improve fuel efficiency by 20%, making air travel cheaper and cleaner.

Frontier is also being used to model worldwide cloud formations. The models were part of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model — a project that aims to combine Frontier’s speedy calculations with new software to create climate models that accurately predict decades of change. For their efforts, the team working on these simulations won the 2023 Gordon Bell Special Prize for Climate Modeling.

“We finally have climate models that are at a high enough resolution to resolve clouds for climate simulations at a rate of one simulated year per day. That means you can do a 40-year climate run in about a month, which is a remarkable achievement,” Messer said. “[After all], you want to make sure that you can run your simulations faster than the climate actually changes.”

Frontier also has the potential to help researchers arrange new protein structures for medical therapies, simulate natural disasters to aid emergency planning and forewarning, or make nuclear reactor designs safer by generating high-fidelity models of reactor phenomena.

“There’s no scientific discipline that doesn’t get touched by supercomputing in some way,” Messer said. “We’re going to have projects ranging from the biggest to the smallest scales — from simulations of the universe to quarks being held in nuclei. It’s this ability to attack scientific problems across the spectrum of human inquiry that gets me up and jazzed every morning.”

He added: “That’s our mission: To enable those questions that can’t be answered anywhere else. If they didn’t have that much computing power, they wouldn’t even be able to ask the question.”

And by combining those questions with Frontier’s calculating speed, who knows what other barriers we might one day break through.

This article Supercomputer Frontier sets new record with 9.95 quintillion calculations per second is featured on Big Think.

The average number of children per family in the United States has fallen dramatically, from seven in 1800 to fewer than two in 2018. That’s good news for kids’ cognitive development, suggests a recently published study.

Over the past few decades, scientific research has shown that children in larger families perform worse in school, score lower on cognitive tests, and attain fewer years of education than kids in smaller families. Researchers theorize that additional children stretch parental resources thin, leaving parents with less time, energy, and money to devote to their kids’ development. For example, parents might read to children less, not have the time to ensure school attendance, or lack the savings to pay for tutors or after-school programs.

Family size and childhood development

Yet some researchers contend these results might be spurious, shaped by confounding variables such as parenting style or age. After all, parents with more children are likely to be younger and have different personalities compared to parents who have fewer.

To control for these factors, Professor Wei-hsin Yu, a social demographer and vice chair of the sociology department at UCLA, and Hope Xu Yan, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Maryland, tracked the children of all 6,283 women enrolled in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ NLSY79 study. Over 30 years, these kids were regularly given a standardized vocabulary test to track their cognitive development. Mothers were also asked to periodically assess their children’s behavior with age-appropriate surveys. Researchers particularly watched for antisocial, anxious, hyperactive, dependent, and antagonistic behaviors.

Tallying the results, Yu and Yan confirmed the results of prior studies: the larger the family, the lower the kids’ average cognitive scores. Later-born siblings scored worse at the same age than did their older siblings, suggesting that parents allocate less time to their development as time and money grow strained with extra children. The researchers also found that older siblings’ cognitive scores deteriorate as they gain siblings. This effect weakens for later-born siblings.

“Earlier children experience the greatest reductions, because they lose the most parental attention,” the researchers explained. “Because parental resources become increasingly restricted as family size grows, third- and later-born children are likely to receive so little nonessential resources that their share can barely be diluted by a new, younger sibling.”

Cognitive development vs behavior

While cognitive development took a hit, kids’ behaviors were assessed as better on average in larger families. This was primarily true for younger siblings, however. First- and second-born kids displayed slightly more behavioral problems as they gained siblings, perhaps due to reduced parental attention.

These results lead to two interesting takeaways. First, being the last-born in a large family has a notable benefit: These children are often the best behaved, at least according to mothers’ assessments. (Although, it’s possible they could have rose-colored glasses for their youngest.) Second, while having only one child is unpopular in the U.S., as parents presume that these kids’ cognitive and behavioral development suffers from growing up “alone,” the data doesn’t support this assumption.

“Our analysis indicates that first-born children score lower on cognitive tests and exhibit more behavioral problems with the arrival of the next sibling,” Yu and Yan wrote.

The researchers are confident that their analysis resolves the academic dispute about the effect of family size on children’s cognitive abilities.

“Short of setting up an experiment to assign people to have different numbers of children, our analysis has provided as strong evidence as possible to settle the debate about the effect of sibship size on intellectual development.”

This article A larger family worsens kids’ cognitive development, suggests 30-year study is featured on Big Think.

Democracies are intentionally slow-moving. Millions of people vote for hundreds of representatives, who then spend months debating a single law change. The strength of democracy is that it moves carefully, after great thought, and usually in a reversible way should things turn out badly. For most of history, this has more or less worked out, with technology and science moving slowly enough for democratic governments to keep up. But then came large language models. Say what you want about ChatGPT, but it has not moved slowly.

At the start of 2022, only tech-curious journalists, AI researchers, or Silicon Valley insiders would have known what a large language model was. Today, we’re talking about the robot apocalypse or sci-fi utopia, depending on your predilections. At the very least, most people agree that AI has developed to the extent that it will irreversibly change how society works, which poses a huge problem for governments: How can they make informed decisions on issues that will be, by tomorrow, old news? How can a democracy keep up with OpenAI?

To talk about some of the problems in regulating AI, Big Think reached out to Professor Nick Jennings, Vice-Chancellor and President of Loughborough University and an internationally recognized authority in AI, autonomous systems, cyber-security, and agent-based computing. Professor Jennings is also an advisor to the UK government on the issue of AI as part of their AI Council.

Here are two problems and two potential solutions to the issue of regulating AI.

Problem: The genie is out of the bottle

“When I give talks on AI,” Professor Jennings said, “I challenge the audience and say, ‘Think of an area where you don’t think AI can be applied’. And, you know, I’ll almost always give a counterexample.” Jennings’ point is that AI is everywhere. AI has been commonplace in many sectors for decades before OpenAI and LLMs burst onto the scene. The difference now is the scale, speed, and impact AI will have on society. Like it or not, though, the AI genie is out of the bottle. As Adam Smith argued centuries ago, the markets move far faster than any government can hope to keep up with, and Jennings agrees. Industries have already adapted AI and will continue to use it in ways that most people reading this cannot even imagine.

As Jennings told Big Think, “If a regulator says, ‘I want to regulate large language models,’ for example, they’re barking up the wrong tree. By the time you’ve got any form of regulation, that technology will have moved on.”

Another problem lurks in the rampantly pervasive application of AI: Different sectors require different regulations. Data protection in health, for example, has far broader and stricter rules than those found in social media terms and conditions. So, a government doesn’t simply have to “regulate AI,” but regulate AI in health, social media, defense, government, transport, policing, and so on.

Solution: Broader principles

If regulating individual technologies or sectors is barking up the wrong tree, an alternate strategy is to develop broader umbrella principles that will capture all or most iterations of a technology — general rules that can apply to any fast-changing innovation.

We asked Jennings to provide two examples of what these principles might look like. The first centers on accountability. Autonomous vehicles serve as a good point of comparison: They operate on an AI system, and many countries now regulate their use in some form. For a long time, the legislative problem has been: Who is legally responsible in case of a crash? With autonomous AI, you have a piece of hardware manufactured by a certain company in a certain country. Legal responsibility is debatable but easier to isolate. The problem is harder for software-based AI like OpenAI. Who is responsible for an LLM’s output? Is it the user and the quality of their prompts? Or is it the company, their training set, and the invisible limitations they’ve placed? For Jennings, one of the first principles is establishing legal culpability for software use.

The second example concerns transparency. “We should have an idea of the kinds of data that [an LLM] has been trained on,” Jennings said. “Even if it can’t list every single website, article, and artifact that it’s used, they at least should be giving some degree of transparency around that.” LLMs give all sorts of answers — often brilliant, creative, and useful — but we often have no idea where those answers have come from. Transparency on that is a key second principle.

Problem: Regulatory capture

Regulatory capture refers to when a government’s legislative body, like a congress or parliament, is being steered or manipulated by a single, often minority, force. In other words, the regulators have been “captured” by the vested interests of a few when the democratic majority might benefit in a different direction.

The worry is that this is happening with AI regulation. Not only are tech companies multi-billion-dollar, multi-national entities, but they are the ones in charge of releasing data about AI in the first place. Everything we know about AI is either a press release or a product release. What’s actually happening occurs behind closed doors and NDAs. There’s a risk of tech companies grading their own work. As Jennings put it, “I can speak most clearly about the UK, and I observe that the tech companies are exceedingly influential in what goes on in UK politics and the UK narrative around AI. The UK used to have an AI council that was an independent voice with many independent people on it… The whole Bletchley Park event and the AI Safety Institute that’s [replaced it] are very much driven by a few individuals rather than greater governance and perhaps consensus.”

Solution: Global consensus

The answer, according to Jennings, is not to rely on any one country’s legislative body. To do so would be pointless anyway. AI software and technology are borderless. “However big and powerful an individual country’s AI systems and companies might be, those companies will all want to operate outside individual countries as well,” Jennings said. The world is currently dealing with many global issues that require multilateral policy decisions: terrorism, global warming, the energy crisis, and so on. AI is just one addition to the agenda for intergovernmental organizations to grapple with.

It has been done before

Still, Jennings is not an AI doomer. “AI will overall be a net benefit to society for individuals, society, and the planet. I think the promise and the things that we’re going to use it for will be a net benefit,” he said. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be used for great harm. We will still need to regulate, ban, and control AI use in certain areas. The problem is not fundamentally different from the problems we’ve faced with other emerging technologies throughout history. Jennings noted that we should not “try to treat AI differently to other types of software… there’s often that exceptionalism that we have to do something because this is an AI software system as opposed to a non-AI software system.”

This article We asked a government advisor about 2 key problems (and solutions) in AI regulation is featured on Big Think.

“Everyone has a price,” the cynical saying goes. In other words, there’s always an amount of money that would convince someone to do something they otherwise wouldn’t, like give up a prized possession, betray a friend, or behave immorally.

Researchers based out of Princeton University and the University of Barcelona recently explored whether this statement applies to democracy. Is there a price at which citizens of a country with free elections would give up their fundamental right to choose their representatives? The scientists’ findings, published November 20th in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest there is indeed such a price — but reassuringly, it is quite high.

The value of democracy

Authors Alicia Adserà, Andreu Arenas, and Carles Boix surveyed 6,000 people in total — 2,000 each from the U.S., France, and Brazil. They presented these nationally representative groups with numerous pairs of hypothetical societies and asked participants to choose and rate which society they preferred. In each pair, there was a choice of a society without free elections. The societies were also varied by other metrics such as respondents’ personal monthly income, collective wealth, income inequality, and the presence of public health insurance.

The researchers were particularly interested in the interaction between individual income and the presence or absence of democratic elections. “Because we randomize the assignment of individual income, we can quantify the monetary value of democracy, that is, the price citizens demand to prefer a society without free elections,” they explained.

When the authors tallied the data, they discovered that respondents placed a very high value on democracy, far more than any of the other societal qualities. Participants from France and the U.S., whose countries each have hosted free and fair elections for over two hundred years, required raises of 236% and 219%, respectively, to choose to live in a non-democratic society over a democratic one. Participants from Brazil, whose country only returned to democracy in 1988, needed a 168% pay hike to give up the right to vote — slightly less, but still considerable.

To put America’s result into context, the average monthly income in the U.S. is roughly $6,000 (or $72,000 annually). Thus, the average American would need to make $19,165 per month ($230,000 annually) to choose to live in an authoritarian society rather than a democratic one.

Is democracy in trouble?

The results counter the prevailing media and societal narrative that democracy is endangered, the researchers say. An NPR/Ipsos poll conducted in late 2021 found that 64% of Americans believed U.S. democracy “is in crisis and at risk of failing.”

“A strong majority of our respondents seem unwilling to live in a society where leaders do not respect the fundamental tenets of democracy,” the authors wrote. “This, in turn, should make it hard for political incumbents to violate central democratic norms and institutions while sustaining their initial electoral coalition, at least in middle- and high-income democracies.”

Their findings join the frenzy of research on “democratic backsliding”, which has attracted lots of academic attention in the past five years. A survey of 2,200 Americans published in September 2022 showed that both Democrats and Republicans overwhelming believe in the tenets of democracy and were uncomfortable with the idea of subverting it for political gain. Another study published earlier this year, focusing on democracy worldwide, found that incumbent politicians across the globe continue to lose and peacefully transfer power at rates consistent with past rates.

That doesn’t mean that citizens of democratic nations shouldn’t remain vigilant. In a recent expert panel discussion hosted by Yale University, Susan Stokes, the Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago, noted two pernicious trends occurring in the U.S. over the past eight years.

“The U.S., like about two dozen other democracies around the world, has experienced a decline in both horizontal accountability, which means the ability of coequal branches of government to monitor and influence the actions of the executive branch, and vertical accountability, by which we mean the ability of voters to be well-informed, and to use elections to make decisions about who their leaders are going to be.”

If the public allows politicians and parties to further this erosion, Stokes and other experts are concerned that democratic systems could be hollowed out, leaving many countries democracies in name only.

This article $230,000: The price at which the average American would give up democracy is featured on Big Think.

Feminism has a bit of a PR problem. Despite the movement’s success in securing suffrage, property rights, marital equality, fairer pay, and reproductive autonomy for women, among many other things, feminists themselves are often viewed negatively. In a 2022 global Ipsos survey, one-third of men and even one-fifth of women opined that feminism does more harm than good. A 2020 Pew survey of Americans found that 45% view the movement as “polarizing.”

Stereotyped as man-hating lesbians

“A key factor in the continued derision of feminism is the widely endorsed stereotype that feminists are man-haters,” an international group of researchers wrote in a recent study published in the journal Psychology of Women Quarterly. “Qualitative investigations show that feminists are seen as unfeminine, man-haters, and lesbians. Likewise, quantitative evidence suggests feminists are negatively stereotyped as disliking men or ‘anti-male.’ Many studies including those with diverse samples show that this stereotype deters women from identifying as feminist.”

That group, consisting of dozens of researchers from around the world, was led by Aífe Hopkins-Doyle at the University of Surrey, Aino Petterson at the University of Oslo, and Robbie Sutton at the University of Kent. Over the last couple of years, they put the “man-hating” stereotype to the test. Across five studies, they interviewed thousands of people around the world, gauging their levels of feminism and their feelings toward men.

In the first, the researchers interviewed 1,664 women in Italy, Poland, the U.S., and the UK. They found that women who scored high on measures of feminism were no more hostile toward men than non-feminist women. They then repeated the study but with 3,892 participants in China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The results were the same: Feminists reported no less liking and trust of men than non-feminists.

While feminist participants might explicitly state that they bear no ill will toward men, perhaps their subconscious reactions reveal the opposite. So the researchers recruited 189 women to take an implicit association test. While sitting at computers, participants were quickly flashed words associated with maleness (such as “he,” “mister,” “Kevin”), along with good (“wonderful,” “celebrating”) and bad (“terrible,” “horrible”) evaluative words and asked to sort the words into their respective categories. Sometimes, subjects were told to group good/male words together and other times bad/male words together. Feminists and non-feminists both performed similarly at these grouping tests, indicating that feminists don’t implicitly associate maleness with negative qualities.

In the final two studies, each with about 2,000 participants, the authors surveyed people in the U.S., UK, and Poland about their perceptions of both feminists and men. They found that subjects measuring higher in feminism tended to view men as more threatening. This is an understandable belief. A top cause of death for pregnant and postpartum women is homicide, most often committed by their male partners. One out of every six women in the U.S. has been the victim of a completed or attempted rape. Four in five have experienced some form of sexual harassment.

Stereotype debunked

Participants in the surveys also greatly underestimated feminists’ feelings of warmth toward men, further evincing how entrenched “anti-male” stereotypes of feminists are.

While the researchers broadly debunked the stereotype that feminists dislike men, they do not deny that certain groups of feminists might hold misandrist feelings. Cultural feminists, who advocate for so-called feminine values concerning gentleness and peace, and radical feminists, who see men as oppressors, are more likely to be negative toward men.

By extension, the study shows that men have no need to fear the feminist movement. Almost a quarter of men globally think that “feminism has resulted in men losing out in terms of economic or political power or socially.” Feminists, who can be male or female, aren’t out to get men; they’re simply advocating for gender equality.

As self-avowed feminist and former U.S. president Barack Obama wrote in a 2016 essay, “When everybody is equal, we are all more free.”

This article Do feminists actually dislike men? is featured on Big Think.

In October, the French collectively freaked out over bed bugs. Social media erupted with supposed pictures of the parasites in cinemas, trains, and subways. Pest control agencies, exterminators, and owners of bed bug-sniffing dogs were inundated with panicked calls. Politicians breathlessly demanded rapid government action. Of Paris, uncritical media reports declared that the “entire city is infested with bed bugs.”

Google Trends data shows the mass paranoia in chart form.

The thing is, it doesn’t appear that the country’s bed bug “problem” warranted such a swift and sudden panic, which seemed to have started with a few social media posts that went viral. The insects’ population didn’t erupt overnight. Instead, the French were likely gripped by a social panic.

An overreaction?

Dr. Robert Bartholomew is a sociologist specializing in mass hysteria and social panic. He teaches at the University of Auckland.

“What has been reported in Paris looks like something from a Grade B monster movie,” he told Big Think. “Going by press accounts, you would think they were everywhere — and that is not the case.”

Most French are not bed bug experts, and are likely mistaking ticks, carpet beetles, or some other creepy crawly for bed bugs, Bartholomew added.

Michael F. Potter, an emeritus professor of entomology at the University of Kentucky, knows exactly what bed bugs look like.

“Adult bed bugs are reddish-brown, with oval, flattened bodies. Their coloration is similar to an apple seed although their size is closer to a lentil,” he described.

Like vampires, bed bugs feast on blood and avoid the light, spending their days hiding in mattresses, box springs, bed frames, and headboards. At night, they crawl to their unsuspecting, sleeping victims and gorge themselves on blood for three to ten minutes, then scurry back to their cozy crevices. Bed bugs don’t transmit diseases to humans, and their bites are painless. The nips can leave red, itchy welts, however.

Relative to human pests like mosquitoes, ticks, and fleas, bed bugs are rather innocuous. But the fact that they covertly invade your bed — a place of privacy, comfort, and safety — to suck your blood as you sleep makes them uniquely unsettling.

Their stealthy, squirm-worthy reputation undoubtedly fueled France’s collective anxiety.

“There is a real psychosis,” Jean-Michel Bérenger, an entomologist at Mediterranean University Hospital Infection Institute in Marseille, told the New York Times. “This is the first time people have called to ask me to come to their home to check for bedbugs when they haven’t been bitten, they haven’t traveled, but they are afraid they have them since they saw things on the internet.”

According to a representative of the bed bug canine detection agency ATN, two-thirds of calls to exterminators during the present period of panic are quickly dismissed. Callers think they’ve got a bed bug infestation, but they really don’t. Moreover, many of the posts on social media depict insects that clearly are not bed bugs. France’s Transport Minister Clément Beaune said in early October that of all of the bed bug reports that were checked “zero are proven.”

“In the past a bus traveler may have sat next to one and not paid much notice. But now, Parisians are hyper-aware of any bug, especially while on public transport and in public places like the cinema – and low and behold, people are seeing them everywhere,” Bartholomew explained.

As Brooke Borel, author of Infested: How the Bed Bug Infiltrated Our Bedrooms and Took Over the World, recently reminded readers in an article at Scientific American, there was another bed bug panic in New York City back in 2010.

According to estimates from France’s national pest control trade association, there has been a 10% uptick in calls to exterminators this year, but this slight jump was expected. Bed bug populations crashed during COVID-19 when nobody was traveling, so a population spike was inevitable when things opened up. The insects also increase in prevalence when the weather is hot and humid and in places where people frequently travel. This year, France, and especially Paris, saw lots of both.

French fears of bed bugs were seemingly given credence earlier this year when a government report revealed that one in 10 households had bed bugs between 2017 and 2022. That might seem bad, but this rate is actually lower than in the United States.

Bed bug populations have grown significantly since the 1960s, when they were virtually eliminated in developed countries through the widespread use of the insecticide DDT. DDT is no longer widely utilized because of its negative, downstream environmental effects. At the same time, bed bugs have developed resistance to other insecticides. Global travel has also drastically increased in the prior decades, allowing bed bugs to hitchhike near and far. So the 21st century has been a bit of a renaissance for the parasites.

Bed bug fear in France is sure to abate as media sources change their frenetic focus, but it does seem to be spreading to South Korea. Local reports are full of stories about bed bug sightings in subways and people flocking to public health centers to have their insect bites checked.

Is it possible that Parisian travelers brought bed bugs to Korea? Certainly. But it’s more likely that the social panic has just moved on. Fear spreads much more easily than bed bugs.

This article The French have lost their minds over bed bugs is featured on Big Think.

A game that challenges pedestrians to avoid being detected by an AI could ensure tomorrow’s self-driving cars “see” all the people around them, regardless of what they look like or what they’re doing.

The challenge: Self-driving cars could make our streets safer by eliminating human error from the transportation equation, but training the AIs that control them is a huge undertaking.

Not only do these systems need to understand traffic laws, they also need to be able to adapt to variables such as construction, emergency vehicles, inclement weather, and pedestrians of all shapes and sizes.

“There could be children on the street who are dressed up. It could be someone carrying a box. It could be people in wheelchairs,” said Daniel Coppen, creative director of design / art unit Playfool. “All these different use cases … they’re so vast, and they’re so unpredictable, and this sort of data is so hard to catch and predict.”

The idea: Coppen recently teamed up with media artist Tomo Kihara to develop “How (not) to get hit by a self-driving car,” a street-based game designed to get people thinking about the existing limitations of self-driving cars — and potentially help overcome them.

“We really hope that our experience will … allow these self-driving car systems to become smarter and safer,” said Coppen.

How it works: The game challenges passersby to make it from one end of a play area to the other without being identified as a pedestrian by a camera linked to an object-detection algorithm.

A large screen displays what the AI “sees” while players try to fool it with cartwheels, disguises, and other evasive maneuvers.

Players who beat the AI can choose to have their anonymized footage deleted or retained by the game’s makers, who are now looking for research institutions to share the dataset with in the hope it will be used to train self-driving cars.

Note: Just because you can fool the AI in the game doesn’t mean one of today’s self-driving cars would actually hit you if you crab-walked toward it.

The researchers don’t know for sure that any self-driving car developers are using the same object-detection algorithm — the Single Shot Detector (SSD) — that’s in the game to train their vehicles. However, they also aren’t ruling it out.

“[E]xperts suggest that [developers] train their systems based on algorithms like SSD or YOLO, a similar detection algorithm,” they write. “These are two of the most known algorithms in object detection, both of which have undergone extensive testing and benchmarking.”

Looking ahead: “How (not) to get hit by a self-driving car” debuted on the streets of Bristol in July. The researchers are now preparing to follow up that five-day installation with a deployment at Science Gallery London on November 17.

Their ultimate goal is to do a “world tour” with the game so that they can collect the widest variety of data possible.

“We want to do the same game, but on the bustling streets of Mumbai or really crowded streets in Tokyo, see what kind of data it’ll generate, what kind of play that will result in,” said Kihara.

This article You win this street game by getting “hit” by a self-driving car is featured on Big Think.

America’s socioeconomic classes are sharply siloed. The rich and poor live in different neighborhoods, work at different employers, shop at different stores, and learn at different schools. And the divide has widened as wealth inequality has ballooned over the past six decades.

However, as a new analysis shows, there are still places in society where CEOs, bankers, and doctors brush up next to cashiers, cooks, and housekeepers: low-price, full-service, chain restaurants. We’re talking establishments like Applebee’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, IHOP, Chili’s, and Olive Garden.

Rich dad, poor dad

Maxim Massenkoff, an assistant professor in manpower and economics at the Naval Postgraduate School, and Nathan Wilmers, an associate professor in work and organization studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teamed up to conduct the research. The duo used anonymous, nationwide cell phone-tracking data to observe where people from rich and poor neighborhoods spend their time during the day.

Unsurprisingly, people living in areas that are among the wealthiest 20% visit golf courses, country clubs, home furnishing stores, fitness centers, breweries, Starbucks, and wineries far more often than people living in the poorest 20%. People from the poorest areas, on the other hand, spend much more of their time at dollar stores, tire shops, correctional institutions, wireless carriers, and credit unions.

More broadly, the rich also visit more full-service dining restaurants. They also spend far less time than the poor at drug stores and gas stations. While rich and poor alike both spend a lot of time at churches, supermarkets, and parks, they don’t frequent the same ones, further isolating the socioeconomic classes.

The big sort

Also surprisingly isolating are fast food restaurants and drug stores. Although most people tend to enjoy a satisfying McDonald‘s breakfast and have prescriptions to fill, these establishments are numerous and nestled within rich and poor areas. Thus, when people visit them, they stay close to home — and, thus, they remain among those of similar socioeconomic standing.

Overall, socioeconomic isolation tends to be more prevalent in urban and suburban areas, a finding that makes perfect sense to journalist Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.

“Given an opportunity, people go to church, join clubs, work with, sing with people like themselves. In small towns, you don’t have a choice. If you are a Presbyterian, there’s one church,” he told Big Think.

At Olive Garden, you’re family

Yet, Massenkoff and Wilmers found there are still places where all of America comes together: affordable, sit-down restaurants like Olive Garden and Applebee’s. There are numerous factors to their broad appeal. They are generally located near major traffic corridors and shopping areas, their menus are broadly appealing and reasonably priced, and they tend to be spacious with relatively quick service.

A few other establishments also promote mixing of America’s socioeconomic classes, such as the thrift store Goodwill, the low-priced grocery chain ALDI, arts and crafts store Hobby Lobby, and tool store Ace Hardware.

Massenkoff and Wilmers conducted further analysis showing that these cross-class encounters may also result in friendships. “In ZIP codes where poor people encounter a higher share of rich people in their daily activities, there’s a higher degree of cross-class friendships as measured in the Facebook data,” they wrote.

That’s heartening, because the rich and poor are also frequently divided along ideological lines as well, a function of media echo chambers and social media algorithms. However, at restaurants like Olive Garden, Buffalo Wild Wings, Chili’s, and Applebee’s they can share space and witness their shared humanity while enjoying cheap drinks and scarfing inexpensive appetizers. Never ending soup, salad, and breadsticks, anybody?

This article One of the few places where America’s rich and poor mingle: Olive Garden and ALDI is featured on Big Think.

Large language models like ChatGPT are immensely powerful — the first artificial intelligences to produce truly human-like content. They are already being used to provide customer service, write software, and aid in drug discovery, among many other applications. But despite their genuine potential to change how society works and functions, large language models get trounced by young children in basic problem-solving tasks testing the ability to innovate, according to new research.

Doctoral students Eunice Yiu and Eliza Kosoy and their laboratory lead Dr. Alison Gopnik recently detailed the findings in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. The trio of developmental psychologists at the University of Berkeley investigated exactly how children acquire “sophisticated understandings and representations of the causal world around them.”

In their experiment, they challenged children ages three to seven with various problems testing their ability to innovate with tools. Kids were presented with a variety of situations where they were asked to complete a task without the proper tool: drawing a circle without a compass, for example. They were then asked to choose one of three other objects to complete the task at hand: one that was associated with, but not functionally relevant to, the context; one that was superficially dissimilar but had the same causal properties as the tool needed; and a totally irrelevant object.

In the case of trying to draw a circle, kids were asked to choose between a ruler, a teapot, and a stove. The teapot is the correct answer because one can simply trace its base to create a circle. Young children were very good at sussing out the correct answer in these tests, getting them correct about 85% of the time.

But when Yiu, Kosoy, and Gopnik presented the same problems in written form to numerous large language models including ChatGPT, the AIs faltered, unable to match the children’s success. GPT-4 came the closest with 76% correct. None of the others, including OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s FLAN-T5 were in the ballpark, often opting for a ruler to draw a circle.

The authors speculated on large language models’ lackluster performance.

“Discovering novel functions in everyday tools is not about finding the statistically nearest neighbor from lexical co-occurrence patterns. Rather, it is about appreciating the more abstract functional analogies and causal relationships between objects that do not necessarily belong to the same category or are associated in text. In these examples, people must use broader causal knowledge, such as understanding that tracing an object will produce a pattern that matches the object’s shape to produce a novel action that has not been observed or described before.”

Imitation versus innovation

The experiment reveals a key weakness of large language models: While they are remarkable imitation engines, repurposing and spreading what’s already known and created, they do not introduce novel ideas. To illustrate, if large language models existed in a world where the only things that could fly were birds, and you asked one to devise a flying machine, they would never come up with an airplane.

“The best way to think of these systems is as powerful new cultural technologies, analogous to earlier technologies such as writing, print, libraries, the Internet, and even language itself,” the authors wrote.

Could large language models ever become innovation engines? If so, their programmers should try to emulate how children learn, Yiu, Kosoy, and Gopnik contend.

“What [AI] systems would need is some kind of embodied active, curious intervention and experimentation on the real world,” Gopnik told Big Think in an email interview. “There are some beginnings of this in robotics, but it is still far away.”

Gopnik and her co-authors provided additional detail in the paper.

“Although we do not know the details of children’s learning algorithms or data, we do know that, unlike large language and language-and-vision models, children are curious, active, self-supervised, and intrinsically motivated. They are capable of extracting novel and abstract structures from the envi- ronment beyond statistical patterns.”

“Babies seem to learn much more general and powerful kinds of knowledge than AIs do, from much less and much messier data. In fact, human babies are the best learners in the universe,” Gopnik wrote in a 2019 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

It’s a wonderful irony: When AIs become more childlike, that’s when their abilities might truly explode, with world-changing ramifications.

This article Young children trounce large language models in a simple problem-solving task is featured on Big Think.

The history of error in criminal justice often begins and ends with an arrogant certainty of belief: the Grand Inquisitor knowing heresy when he sees it, the detective who believes with bedrock confidence that he can spot a lie or a guilty perp, the prosecutor who knows the truth and is thereby justified in withholding evidence that could potentially exculpate a suspect.

That history, along with other threads of human fallibility — from an innocent failure of memory to an over-weaning belief in the power of the systems we build — are at the heart of our book of collaborative art and reporting, First Meal. Together we show and tell the stories of 25 wrongfully convicted people.

We’re not a society that readily acknowledges or rewards uncertainty in any field, from politics to commerce. In a courtroom especially, a prosecutor or expert witness who tentatively qualifies the evidence is probably doomed from the beginning. Jurors want certainty and definitive authority.

But consider the case of Kristine Bunch.

Bunch spent nearly 17 years in prison after jurors believed the state’s reconstruction of what happened on June 30, 1995, when a fire broke out in the trailer where she was living with her three-year-old son, Anthony, in Decatur County, Indiana. At the trial, a chemist and expert witness for the prosecution testified that he had found evidence of an accelerant in the boy’s bedroom. And that evidence, prosecutors said, showed Bunch to be a killer. The jury agreed and Bunch, then 22 years old and pregnant, was sentenced to 60 years in prison.

When the truth finally broke, it refuted everything the learned, credentialed scientific expert had said. “It was almost 12 years later when my attorneys got a subpoena for that file and discovered the original report said nothing had been found in my son’s bedroom,” Bunch said.

Why did the chemist say what he did? Why did he go beyond the evidence, to declare more than the facts could bear? Bunch will probably never know.

“He died a couple months before I got out,” she said. “So you wonder if it’s just, you know, he was in a job and felt like he was untouchable and he was doing the right thing for what he thought was right. I don’t know.”

Memory can also be a path to error. What we recall, or think we do, is a dangerous and easily manipulated property of the human mind, as fortune tellers, politicians, novelists and detectives have known for centuries. One exoneree in First Meal, who chose to remain anonymous, lived through that nightmare of error after being wrongfully identified by a rape victim.

Memory gets bolstered by emotion, and by the praise that can be heaped on a witness for standing up and doing the right thing. Feeling good makes us more confident of what we saw, however uncertain we might have initially felt. And the impact of a confident witness is overwhelming.

“When that person says, ‘that’s who did it, there’s no doubt in my mind,’ you know, with the trembling finger pointing at them, then a trial is usually over right there,” said Mike Ware, the executive director of the Texas Innocence Project. “I don’t care if they do have an ironclad alibi; the jury is not going to believe the ironclad alibi. They’re going to believe the eyewitness with the trembling hand.”

Our very faith in ourselves, and the integrity of the systems of justice we build, can lead us astray too. In the case against a man named Juan Rivera, prosecutors pushed the jury’s faith in the criminal justice system to the breaking point, and destroyed Rivera in the process. He was accused of raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl named Holly Staker.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” said an assistant state’s prosecutor in the closing arguments to Rivera’s trial in 1998, “we’ve been together for over a half a month, and the evidence in this case shows not beyond just a reasonable doubt, not beyond a shadow of a doubt, beyond any doubt, beyond any question, that the defendant, Juan Antonio Rivera, brutally butchered, murdered, and raped Holly Staker. There is no question about it. There’s none.”

What proved that guilt even more, the prosecutor continued, was the suggestion by the defense, and by Rivera’s protests during his interrogation, that inappropriate pressure had been applied to extract a confession. Only guilty people would ever say such a thing, the prosecutor suggested.

“Why is he convinced at that time that the police are trying to pin this on him? It’s not because of anything that they’ve done. It’s because he knows he did it,” the prosecutor said.

And yet, to read the trial transcripts now, after the complete rebuke of the prosecution’s case by an appeals court in 2011, is to see nothing but doubt and uncertainty. An appellate court, ruling nearly 20 years after Holly’s murder, said the errors committed against Rivera were so grave that his conviction was “unjustified and cannot stand.” 

Cynicism, faith’s opposite, can come easily in reading court transcripts and interviewing legal experts and exonerees in cases like these. But for all the darkness, there are also reasons for cautious optimism. Knowing how error can come about, and having tools by which to fight it — and, indeed, bear witness to it — is part of how we might reduce error in the future.

“We’re moving the ball, slowly but surely,” said Cynthia Garza, the conviction integrity unit director at the Dallas district attorney’s office. The Dallas unit, established in 2007, was one of the nation’s first departments set up specifically to second-guess and re-check — internally, with access to documents and evidence — whether past convictions were correct. Similar units have since spread across the nation.

Some state legislatures, if only from the growing awareness that wrongful convictions can also be hugely expensive in civil damages, have also made important structural changes. Two laws in Texas make it harder for police and prosecutors to withhold information that could be of potential use to a defendant. The Illinois legislature passed a law in 2021 banning police from using deception when interrogating a person under age 18. Such techniques — suggesting, for example, that evidence had already been produced when investigators had almost none, or making false promises of leniency — have played a role in almost a third of wrongful convictions that were later cleared by DNA evidence, according to The Innocence Project.

Believing in systems of law doesn’t mean surrendering to blind faith that they always work, and trying to make those systems better and fairer doesn’t require a cynical dismissal that they are corrupt. Our law enforcement system, despite its flaws and errors, does by and large function; honest, good intent runs through it. All that, too, emerged clearly from our work on First Meal, along with the realization that the acceptance of human imperfection makes us stronger, not weaker. Through humility, the old arrogance of infallibility crumbles. And in that there is genuine hope.

This article Arrogant certainty is the reason for wrongful convictions. Here’s how to fix it is featured on Big Think.

For 99.9% of Homo sapiens‘ 250,000 years on planet Earth, our population has remained below one billion individuals, and for much of that time, our species’ growth curve was relatively flat. Since 1800, however, the human population has exponentially ballooned to 8.1 billion from just under one billion. We now occupy almost all parts of the globe and ravenously consume resources beyond what Earth can sustainably provide for the long term.

As eminent ecologist William E. Rees argues in an ominous new paper, this is a recipe for impending disaster.

Boom and bust cycles

For 40 years, Rees taught at the University of British Columbia, focusing on planning related to global environmental trends and sustainable socioeconomic development. His most notable academic contribution is the concept of the “ecological footprint,” the “amount of environmental resources needed to produce the goods and services that support an individual’s lifestyle.”

As an ecologist, Rees is well aware that all sorts of species frequently go through boom and bust cycles. When resources are plentiful and threats are low, they reproduce and multiply. But when resources dry up, perhaps from over-consumption or environmental change, species’ populations will precipitously fall.

Rees’ painfully simple proposition in his new paper is that humans are no different from any other species. Thus, we are just as vulnerable to population busts as we are prone to booms. “Homo sapiens is an evolving species, a product of natural selection and still subject to the same natural laws and forces affecting the evolution of all living organisms,” he wrote.

And make no mistake, we are at the peak of a boom on the precipice of a bust, he says. Human population’s 700% rise, along with a 100-fold expansion of real world product, over the last two centuries are anomalies unlocked by rampant use of fossil fuels, deforestation, mining, and arable land destruction. This has propelled us into an ecological state of “overshoot,” where we are consuming more resources than can be replenished and producing more waste than can be handled by ecosystems. The only question is when humanity’s bubble will collapse. Rees portends it will happen in our lifetimes.

“The global economy will inevitably contract and humanity will suffer a major population ‘correction’ in this century,” he wrote.

A population “correction”

How bad will it be? Rees cites estimates suggesting that the number of humans that Earth can support for the long term is between 100 million and 3 billion people. So, the population and civilization collapse he forecasts will be quite bad, indeed. He even briefly painted a bleak picture of how it might happen.

“As parts of the planet become uninhabitable, we should expect faltering agriculture, food shortages, and possibly extended famines. Rising sea levels over the next century will flood many coastal cities; with the breakdown of national highway and marine transportation networks other cities are likely to be cut off from food-lands, energy, and other essential resources. Some large metropolitan areas will become unsupportable and not survive the century.”

After the population correction, Rees portends a more primitive future.

“It may well be that the best-case future will, in fact, be powered by renewable energy, but in the form of human muscle, draft horses, mules, and oxen supplemented by mechanical water-wheels and wind-mills.”

A false prophet of doom?

Rees’ opinion is not destiny, of course. If it sounds familiar, it’s because much of it is simply a rehashed version of what Paul Ehrlich wrote in 1968 in his book The Population Bomb. Thomas Malthus made the same argument in 1798. For the past 225 years, reality has proven them wrong. There is no convincing evidence to suggest that conditions on Earth have changed so much that a human population collapse is inevitable or even likely. Indeed, as productivity has increased and technology has advanced, we are creating more things but using fewer resources.

Besides, demographers at the United Nations forecast that the human population will peak in the mid-2080s at around 10.4 billion people, after which it will level off and decline. Rather than due to a catastrophic collapse, this natural slow-down will be the result of higher standards of living, birth control, and shifting perspectives on sustainability, among other reasons. In short, the UN, along with most other scientists, predict that humans will effectively choose to dwindle in number rather than have the choice made for us in dramatic and deadly fashion.

In places, Rees’ paper reads like the rantings of a dour old ecologist, understandably angered by the damage humanity has done to the natural world. Sprinkled throughout the article are opinionated barbs aimed at various targets: short-sighted politicians, naive techno-optimists, and overly hopeful scientists. He also reserves a fair amount of irritation for those who insist that climate change is the greatest problem that humanity faces, when the real problem is us — or rather too many of us.

Still, Rees’ arguments should not be ignored entirely. The accomplished ecologist has distinguished himself through decades of scholarship. He also draws on history to correctly note that many major civilizations throughout human history have collapsed and suffered die-offs, often stemming from ecological overshoot within their respective habitats. He believes that, if we aren’t careful, the same will happen again. Let’s be sure to prove him wrong.

This article Ecologist says the human population is a bubble that will collapse this century. Is he right? is featured on Big Think.

In mid-September, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that American Bully XL dogs would be banned under the Dangerous Dogs Act by the end of the year, calling them “a danger to our communities.” The move came in the wake of the death of a 52-year-old man after he was attacked by two American Bully XLs while walking on the sidewalk.

Once banned, American Bully XLs will be prohibited from being bred or sold in England, Wales, and Scotland. Any of these dogs currently owned will have to be neutered and insured, as well as muzzled and leashed when in public.

The large, muscular, big-headed dogs weighing in excess of 100 pounds were bred by mixing Pit Bull Terriers with other stocky breeds, including various bulldogs and the American Staffordshire Terrier. American Bully XLs will join Pit Bull Terriers, Japanese Tosas, Dogo Argentinos, and Fila Brasileiros on the UK’s ban list.

Unverified reports blame the breed for a significant proportion of the UK’s couple dozen or so deaths from dog bites since 2021. American Bully XLs, which aren’t recognized by The Kennel Club in the UK or the American Kennel Club, have exploded in popularity of late, especially after the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Identifying dog breeds

The American Bully XL’s lack of recognition as a distinct breed underscores what will be a key problem with the ban: identifying the dogs. As with the other breeds currently prohibited in the UK, American Bully XLs will be singled out by dog legislation officers purely based on appearance, which means that a lot of muscular-looking mixed-breed canines will also face onerous restrictions as well, even if they are not “purebred” American Bully XLs.

On her blog, the eminent dog behaviorist Dr. Patricia McConnell, who is “adamantly against” breed bans, shared a story about how a group of dog experts at the Interdisciplinary Forum for Applied Animal Behavior was asked to look at a couple dozen photos of dogs and assess whether the pups were purebred or mixed, and to identify their breeds. Despite their prodigious expertise, the experts didn’t do very well. The architect of the survey, Dr. Victoria Voith, a Professor of Animal Behavior at Western University, shared the dogs’ genetics, and most were highly cross-bred, hailing from all sorts of breeds. The takeaway? It’s exceedingly difficult to recognize a dog’s breed from appearance alone.

Thus, even if a dog looks a lot like an American Bully XL, it’s impossible to be sure that it is one. When the ban rolls out, chances are good that a lot of large, muscular, and big-headed dogs and their owners will be sanctioned. This could very well be the intended purpose of the UK’s ban, of course.

Breed and behavior

Scientists have previously compared the behavior of banned dogs and permitted dogs. In one study, researchers performed behavior evaluations on 61 shelter dogs, 21 of whom had been identified as “pit bulls.” The pit bull types showed no more aggression over food or handling than the non-pit dogs, although the bully-type dogs were more easily aroused.

Another study compared the behavior of banned dogs with the behavior of Golden Retrievers, perhaps the quintessential family dog. No statistically significant difference was found in aggressive behavior.

Last year, a team of scientists examined a large database of dog genetics to study whether breed is linked to behavior. They found only a paltry association. Environment and upbringing seem to play larger roles than breed.

“Every dog should be evaluated as an individual,” McConnell wrote. “I have met stupid, slow Border collies, and incredibly aggressive Golden Retrievers.”

A legitimate point in favor of the ban is that when powerful, large-jawed dogs like American Bully XLs do bite, they can inflict far greater harm.

“In [American bullies] it’s a crushing or a tearing injury,” Richard Baker, an NHS consultant surgeon, told BBC News. “Once they grip they don’t let go. That kind of injury is more damaging than smaller dogs.”

Still, the overall effectiveness of breed bans is far from certain. Since the Dangerous Dogs Act was passed back in 1991, dog bites in the UK have continued to increase with no sign of slowing.

In public parks in the UK, even in busy London, it’s very common for dogs to be off-leash, while in the U.S., free-ranging dogs in city parks are frowned upon and often expressly prohibited. Moreover, in the UK, dogs are not required to be registered while most U.S. cities mandate licensing. To reduce dog bites, the UK might need to re-examine its cultural relationship with canines rather than unscientifically blaming specific breeds.

This article The American Bully XL and the problems with banning dog breeds is featured on Big Think.

Are humans more prone to generosity or selfishness? For decades, scientists have beaten around the bush when attempting to answer that question. In low-stakes economic games, they’ve given participants small amounts of money and tasked them with allocating those funds between themselves and a partner. Researchers have conducted hundreds of these studies, and when aggregated, they show that humans give away about 28% of their money on average. Again, however, the stakes are low in these experiments — subjects are often gifted around $10 or less to distribute.

Would humans show the same amount of generosity if gifted a far greater sum of money? With the help of a pair of wealthy donors, researchers affiliated with the University of British Columbia, Yale University, and Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) ran an experiment to find out.

A high-stakes generosity experiment

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the team broadcasted via TED’s social media channels an offer to apply for a vague “mystery” experiment. People located across the globe signed up. Two hundred from Brazil, Indonesia, Kenya, Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom were eventually selected, and they were no doubt elated when they learned what the experiment entailed.

The experimenters were going to give them $10,000, with the only conditions being that they spend all of it in three months, don’t save or invest any of it, and report to the researchers precisely how they spent it. Half were further stipulated to regularly share on social media how they used the money.

So how did they spend the windfall? Did they share it with others or hoard it for themselves? As the researchers found, generosity reigned. Participants spent 68% of their cash prosocially, benefiting others and sometimes simultaneously themselves (paying for a shared vacation or dinner, for example). On average, they also donated a fifth to charities or other causes.

“For example, one participant from Canada donated $1,200 to an organization that provides construction training to marginalized people so they can enter the workforce, and another participant in Indonesia gave $1,500 to the family of a friend who had passed away to help cover basic necessities,” the researchers wrote.

As another participant shared on Medium, she gave away all $10,000 via twenty $500 mini-grants to people in her local community for activities like creating a mural, revitalizing a community garden, and setting up a free food stand for the homeless.

Even though the $10,000 gift represented just a 10% boost to the income of participants from wealthy countries (Australia, Canada, the U.S., and the UK) and a 125% boost for participants from poorer countries (Kenya, Indonesia, and Brazil), there was no difference in prosocial spending between the two groups. Participants from high-income countries did spend significantly more on charitable donations, however.

Participants who were instructed to share how they spent the money on social media donated 23% of their gift to charity. In comparison, subjects without that requirement only donated 15%, suggesting that social pressure can increase generosity. The result barely missed statistical significance, however, so it could have been due to chance.

With members of the wealthy Baby Boomer generation beginning to pass away, an unprecedented transfer of wealth is about to unfold.

“As much as $36 trillion will be passed down to future generations as gifts in the form of inheritances over the coming decades in the United States alone,” the researchers note.

If the present study is any indication, a significant amount of money could soon be spent for the public good.

This article Researchers gave 200 people $10,000 each to study generosity is featured on Big Think.

One of the most common reasons for jail detention in the U.S. is not drunk driving, theft, or any violent crime. It is missing a court date. Most of these “failures to appear” are for non-violent misdemeanors like traffic violations or park trespassing.

Poor defendants are particularly likely to miss court dates and be sent to jail, and less likely to be able to afford bond once in jail. Locating, processing, and housing such defendants is a hassle for police and courts and a financial burden for local municipalities. Incarceration may also increase the chance that someone will reoffend in the future. 

“In addition to punishing the individual, it’s a huge cost to the system,” says Alissa Fishbane, Managing Director at ideas42, a nonprofit that aims to address social problems through behavioral science. “It affects not only the courts but also the attorneys, police, and sheriff’s office who all are involved when warrants are issued for missed court appearances. It costs states 10s of millions of dollars per year — just for low-level, non-violent criminal cases.”

But recent work by Fishbane and colleagues at the (Un)Warranted initiative is promising. Their work, recently published in Science, finds that simply changing how defendants are informed about their court dates can substantially reduce failures to appear.

Minor infractions, missed court dates, and jail

Every year, millions of people are summoned to appear in court for low-level offenses ranging from littering to drug possession to traffic violations. Unfortunately, upward of 30% of people miss their court date. In many jurisdictions, failure to appear automatically triggers the court to issue an arrest warrant.   

Perhaps ironically, failure-to-appear rates — and in turn, arrest-warrant numbers — are highest for low-level infractions. One estimate suggests that of the more than 2 million outstanding warrants at any given time in the U.S., around 1 million are for felonies, while only 100,000 are for serious violent crimes. Indeed, rape, and murder defendants are the least likely to miss court dates. 

Failure-to-appear laws are partly based on the idea that people who miss court do so intentionally. Indeed, the first federal statute punishing failure to appear was a response to four convicted felons “jumping bail” and fleeing the jurisdiction. Arrest warrants are thus justified as a way to punish and deter intentional bad behavior. 

This matches most people’s intuitions. According to a lab study by Fishbane and her colleagues (experiment three), most people believe that failing to show up for court is done more intentionally than failing to complete other important tasks, like paying an overdue bill or attending a doctor’s appointment.

But do people really miss court on purpose?

Interestingly, the study also found that judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys reported that failing to appear in court is generally not more intentional than missing other important obligations. Why, then, do so many people fail to appear? 

According to Fishbane, most no-shows are unintentional. “People generally want to be there. They want to resolve the case and move on.” Still, people don’t show up for many reasons. First, it can be difficult to get to court. Many people, especially the poor and the working class, can’t get time off work, have childcare obligations, or struggle to find transportation. 

Second, some don’t realize they had a mandatory court date in the first place. To understand how this can happen, it’s helpful to remember the process of handing out court summonses. Usually a police officer “catches” someone doing something unlawful, so the defendant is often nervous or distressed. Then, the officer gives the defendant a paper citation, which is often long, jargony, and may not mention the court date until the end. Even people who are aware of their court date may not recognize that they must attend in person.

Third, some people simply forget. Court dates are often scheduled 60 or 90 days after the citation. This gives people plenty of time to lose their citations or simply forget they must attend. “It’s like a doctor’s appointment,” Fishbane says. “They’re missed at similar rates. We just think of them differently — one is rescheduled, the other is a criminal offense.”

How can we reduce failure to appear?

To address this costly problem, Fishbane teamed up with the New York City Mayor’s Office and Police Department, as well as New York State’s Office of Court Administration, to conduct two field studies in New York City.

Study 1: A clearer summons. When the study began, New York City’s only way of informing defendants about the need to appear was through the two-page paper court summons issued at the time of the offense. The summons resembled a receipt. The front page focused on the personal characteristics of the defendant (date of birth, address, eye color) and the alleged offense (time, place, and violation type). The requirement to appear in court was not mentioned until the bottom of the page.

Fishbane and her colleagues worked with officials to redesign the summons in order to better highlight the relevant information. For example, the new summons moved instructions to appear in court to the top of the front page, used bold letters to notify recipients that a warrant for arrest could be issued if they didn’t attend, began the back of the page with a concise “What You Need to Do” section, and cut unnecessary information like the defendant’s personal characteristics.

Lab testing. Lab experiments verified that participants who saw the new (versus old) summons forms found the court date and time information more quickly, remembered the court date and location information at higher rates, and were more likely to recall that failing to appear could result in an arrest warrant.

Real-world use. Starting in 2016, police officers began to adopt the new forms over several months, staggering the adoption to account for potential seasonal variations in crime and no-show rates. The new forms seemed to significantly reduce failure-to-appear rates from about 47% to 41% — a relative drop of about 13%. Fishbane summarizes, “Don’t forget the importance of forms!” 

Study 2: Text reminders. About 11% (over 23,000) of defendants in New York City also opted to provide their cell phone numbers to the citing police officer. Fishbane and colleagues randomly divided these defendants into four groups. The control group received no text messages. The other groups were texted seven, three, and one day before their court date with information about the court date and location. Some texts also included a reminder that a warrant would be opened if they failed to appear (Consequences group), a prompt to plan how to get to court (Plan group), or both reminders related to consequences and planning (Combination group).  

Overall, text reminders reduced failure-to-appear rates by an absolute drop of 8%, from 38% in the control group to 30% in the reminder groups. (Defendants who provided their phone numbers had slightly lower no-show rates at baseline.) This corresponds to a relative drop of 21%. The Consequences and Combination groups were even more effective, reducing failures to appear by nearly 9% and 10%, respectively.

Over a three-year period, from 2016 to 2019, the form redesign and the text reminders helped prevent nearly 30,000 arrest warrants from being issued for failure to appear, the authors estimated.

A cheap solution to an expensive problem

These types of simple nudges seem to significantly reduce failures to appear. This suggests that defendants aren’t missing court on purpose; instead, they may not realize they have to appear in the first place, or they may simply forget. 

Led by academics, prosecutors, and judges, similar reforms are popping up in several other states. Methods vary slightly. For example, some remind people via phone calls or postcards instead of texts. But across the board, the results are consistent: Even simple reminders can lead to a significant decrease in the number of missed court dates. This in turn results in savings for state and local governments. For example, an Oregon county’s program to call defendants to remind them of their hearing reduced no-shows by 37%. The county’s $20,000 upfront cost was offset by over $210,000 in estimated savings in just six months.  

“We’re working with jurisdictions in six different states,” says Fishbane. “Regardless of political affiliation — whether you want to reduce racial disparities, reduce crime, or simply save time and money — the reaction is positive from nearly everyone involved.” 

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In 2017, citizens of Catalonia voted in a referendum on whether the northeastern region of Spain should break away from the rest of the country and become its own republic. As the Spanish political establishment held its breath, so did the sports industry. If Catalonia achieved its long-desired independence, then Catalonian clubs like F.C. Barcelona would no longer be able to compete in Spain’s national league — a move its president, Javier Tebas, told ESPN would hurt both the club and soccer in general.

Tebas’ warning intimidated many separatists, who hold Barça as dear to their heart as Catalonia itself. Still, they saw the league president for what he was: an outspoken critic of Catalonian independence who used the power of his non-political profession to push an obviously political agenda. The referendum took place, and 92% of voters elected to secede. But secede they never did, as Spain’s central government and courts declared the outcome illegal.

The history of Catalonian independence

For many outside Spain, this is the last they heard of the Catalonian independence movement — a movement that can be traced back all the way to the Middle Ages when the region, then part of the powerful kingdom of Aragon, joined with the equally powerful Crown of Castile in 1479. Catalonia failed to regain its independence during the subsequent War of the Spanish Succession, and although it has been an official part of Spain for centuries, it has — much like the nearby Basques — retained a distinct culture and language.

They even have their own unofficial flag, the Estelada, whose white star and red and yellow stripes can be found in many pubs, street corners, and stadiums, especially on the National Day, La Diada, which falls on September 11, and on St. Jordi, the day of their patron saint, April 23. As with the Basques, resistance against Spanish authority has become a key feature of their identity: “If you think it’s all over,” a local told Foreign Policy in the aftermath of the failed referendum, “you really don’t understand anything about Catalan society.”

Catalonians suffered heavily under the rule of Francisco Franco, the Spanish military dictator who for much of the 20th century tried to weaken and suppress independence movements throughout the country. Even after receiving a statute of autonomy shortly after Franco’s death in 1975, Catalonia has found itself forced to give in to unfavorable demands from Madrid in exchange for political and economic support. Moreover, Catalonia finds itself at the mercy of political currents in the capital. In 2006, a left-leaning parliament agreed to extend the 1970s statute, granting even greater degrees of self-determination, only for conservative parties, leveraging their support in the Spanish Constitutional Court, to reverse the decision in 2010.

Whenever Catalonian autonomy is threatened, calls for secession grow stronger. By 2012, a poll from the Center of Opinion Studies (CEO), run by the Catalonian government, measured support for independence at 57% — a number that would continue to climb until the 2017 referendum, when it reached its peak. At the same time, parties on both sides of the political spectrum, normally pitted against each other, formed a historic coalition based on their shared desire for independence.

For years, the Catalonian independence movement permeated every aspect of Catalonian society, including soccer. Barça’s motto, Mes que un club (“More than a club”), has a uniquely nationalist connotation, as does its official song, the Cant del Barça. The club, whose former president Joan Laporta is now involved in Catalonian politics and lobbying for secession, stands in stark opposition to Barcelona’s Spanish team, RCD Espanyol, which until 1995 used the Castilian spelling Español.

A deflated balloon

When the Spanish courts rejected the outcome of the 2017 referendum, Catalonians everywhere took to the streets in protest. National and Civil Guards took up residence in Catalonian cities, breaking up demonstrations, confiscating ballots, and arresting independence leaders. One of those leaders, Carles Puigdemont, managed to flee the country and has been living in exile ever since, waiting for an opportunity to return home without being sent straight to jail.

At this point, the movement began to fall apart. Anti-independence, pro-union parties, which had joined greater Spain in boycotting the vote, grew louder and larger. Once a sizable minority, they now outnumber their pro-independence, anti-union counterparts in many parts of the region: A CEO poll determined that, by July 2022, support for secession had fallen to around 40%.

When Foreign Policy asked Mei Francisco how she felt about the current state of the independence movement, the local retiree pointed to the fading colors of her Estelada flag before imitating a deflating balloon. The reasons for this deflation are manifold. The magazine mentions internal division among pro-independence parties, with the Republican Left of Catalonia trying to reopen dialogue with Madrid’s left-of-center government, and the Popular Unity Candidacy and center-right Junts wanting to cut off all communication.

Foreign Policy proposes a second, equally interesting hypothesis: “a growing perception of a world that is growing more hostile to small nations.” The medical emergency of the coronavirus pandemic, along with the threat posed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rising tensions between the U.S. and China, might have convinced some Catalonians that they are better off under the protection of a united Spain, even if that means giving up some of their autonomy in the process.

Last but not least, the Spanish government has improved its reputation in Catalonia since the crackdown on the referendum. It has mitigated the cost-of-living crisis, which worsened after the pandemic, by keeping electricity bills low even as prices skyrocketed elsewhere in Europe. Earlier this year, in January, Madrid took another step toward reconciling relations with Catalonia by scrapping sedition laws from its constitution, thus dropping some of the charges against separatist leaders.

Although the Catalonian independence movement may have lost momentum, it has not disappeared completely. The Council of the Catalan Republic, created in 2018 as the region’s government in exile, continues to lobby EU members in Brussels. Catalonia’s most recent municipal elections foreshadow an ambiguous future: It was won jointly by the Socialist party, which opposes independence, and Esquerra Republicana, which supports independence. For the moment, Catalonia is split between itself and Spain.

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On Sunday, July 16, 2023, a hulking mystery object the size of a small car was dragged ashore by a curious couple in Western Australia. Greenhead, a town previously known for its wildflowers and pristine beaches, is now abuzz with an international mystery. Theories about the identity of the object have raged on the internet—from a piece of a passing ship, to a pressurized tank, to a part of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, which went missing over the Indian Ocean in 2014.

The encrusted object is now being held in a secure storage facility for further investigation. The Australian Space Agency subsequently tweeted: “The object could be from a foreign space launch vehicle and we are liaising with global counterparts who may be able to provide more information.”

European Space Agency engineer Andrea Boyd says experts now believe it is a piece of an engine from an Indian rocket, and could be up to 20 years old, according to an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. These rockets have been used in more than 50 missions since the 1990s. John Crassidis, a space junk expert at the University of Buffalo in New York, agrees with that conclusion. “I think that’s a pretty safe assumption at this point,” he says. “It didn’t seem like it had any burn marks, so it probably didn’t even hit space.”

A Reddit user posted side-by-side images to conclude that it came from the third stage of India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle rocket system, though experts are hesitant to comment on that.

This Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) C45 launched in April 2019 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in India. (INDIAN SPACE RESEARCH ORGANIZATION / GOVERNMENT OPEN DATA LICENSE-INDIA (GODL))

Some rocket launches fail and fall into the ocean. In successful launches, a variety of engines might be used to get a rocket into orbit, but are discarded before the craft reaches space. (No one can say yet which might apply to this case.) Typically this debris falls into the ocean, and should be retrieved by whoever launched it; the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs’ 1966 Outer Space Treatydictates that every nation is responsible for its own space-related waste. But the treaty is rather outdated at this point, and it’s long been clear that not every country is picking up after itself. Much of the space junk that returns on Earth is unregulated, says Crassidis.

The bigger concern, according to Crassidis and a chorus of other experts, is the constantly multiplying mass of space debris that actually reaches orbit. NASA is currently tracking about 47,000 objects in the space around Earth. “And it’s growing,” says Crassidis.

This could eventually lead to a kind of orbit doomsday scenario, known as the Kessler Syndrome, proposed by NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in the late 1970s. The more objects there are in orbit, the more likely collisions become. When objects collide they break into many more, sometimes untrackable, pieces, which can be moving at 17,000 miles per hour. Kessler worried that eventually Earth orbit will grow so clogged with space junk that it will be impossible to launch new satellites, which our financial, medical, and other communications systems depend on.

“If Kessler Syndrome comes true it’s game over,” says Crassidis. “And I think if we don’t do anything, easily in the next 50 years, we’ll probably be there.”

The Skylab space station plummeted to Earth in 1979, scattering debris, including this large chunk, in rural Australia. (RYCHO626 / PUBLIC DOMAIN)

When it comes to cleaning up orbit, “There’s lots of ideas to get rid of space junk,” he says, including harpooning it. “Unfortunately, nothing is feasible at this point, no matter what people say.” Crassidis is hopeful for a few futuristic methods, but they are at least 15 years off. “We gotta let today’s science fiction become a reality, and we need to buy that time.”

Back on Earth, Crassidis is less concerned. Launches typically drop their debris over oceans or sparsely populated areas. And most objects descending to Earth from orbit burn up as they pass through the atmosphere. Those that get through—such as Sputnik IV, which landed in Wisconsin, and Skylab, which scattered debris across rural Australia—such as aren’t much of a safety problem, statistically speaking. “Getting hit by lightning is orders of magnitude more likely than getting hit by a piece of space debris,” says Crassidis. “It just doesn’t happen very often.”

Usually, larger pieces of space debris, which are tracked, can be steered toward remote corners of the Pacific Ocean, sometimes known as the Spacecraft Cemetery. The depth’s haul includes many satellites, containers full of astronaut poop, and possibly most of Mir, the decommissioned Russian space station.

The Mir space station in 1998, three years before it was decommissioned and reentered the atmosphere in 2001. What remains of it now lies scattered across the bottom of the South Pacific. (NASA/WIKIMEDIA/PUBLIC DOMAIN)

Moriba Jah, an aerospace engineer at the University of Texas, Austin, is concerned about what this growing collection represents. “I think it’s messed up,” he says. “It’s the status quo of space exploration.” Jah practices what he calls “space environmentalism and sustainability” through a lens of traditional ecological knowledge—and a long-term view. “The behaviors on land and ocean are being replicated in space,” he says, “and it’s going to be to our detriment.”

“The oceans are big,” he adds. “This idea that it eventually becomes diluted—it’s a mentality of entitlement and ignorance. How many ducks have to land on a pond before people say, ‘You know what, maybe I shouldn’t just dip my glass in it?’”

Jah estimates about half a dozen objects come back through the atmosphere daily, and many are coming back beyond human control. As we launch more and more objects, he’s afraid it’s only a matter of time before space junk, either ejected on the way out to space or coming back in from space, impacts people on the ground in a profound way.

Luckily, the not-entirely-mysterious space debris that washed up in Australia was secured without bodily harm—despite locals gathering for photos. Though authorities warned people to not approach the unidentified object, Crassidis assumes this one was quite harmless, and would have released toxic chemicals only at extremely high heat. But he’s no stranger to the danger fallen space junk can pose; he warns that if you find something you think might be from space, don’t touch it. “There’s dangerous stuff on satellites,” says Crassidis. “Satellites can kill you.”

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Religion has been retreating across the world since the beginning of the 21st century. According to results from the World Value Survey, conducted between 2007 and 2019, the importance of God declined on average in 39 of the 44 countries analyzed. Moreover, the percentage of people identifying as nonreligious has risen by more than 10% in nations like Singapore, Iceland, Chile, and South Korea over the past decade.

The decline of religion is most striking in the United States. Between 1940 and 2000, church membership hovered around 70%, according to Gallup. But as the new millennium got underway, it fell off a cliff. By 2020, church membership had cratered to 47%. Between 2007 and 2020, the proportion of Americans not affiliated with any religion grew from 16% to 30%.

Belief in and worship of supernatural beings, gods, and deities has been a fundamental facet of human existence for thousands of years, yet the decline of religion is playing out in a historical blink of an eye! What could explain this upheaval in global society?

Vanishing religiosity

Technological advancement attracts a lot of attention from scholars as a potential explanation. In the past, people would turn to religious belief to seek answers and solve problems. Now we have technology.

“When people can use technology to predict the weather, diagnose and treat illness, and manufacture resources, they may rely less on religious beliefs and practices,” an international team of researchers recently wrote in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

But if technology is negating the need for religion, then why didn’t we see a massive drop in belief during the Industrial Revolution, the Space Race, or rise the of personal computers? Why has the decline of religion become so widespread and rapid only recently?

The researchers offered a hypothesis: It’s not technology by itself that reduces religiosity, but specifically automation in the form of robotics and artificial intelligence, which only became prominent in the 21st century.

“This claim is based on recent research on lay perceptions of automation,” they wrote. “Such studies show that people ascribe automation technology with abilities that border on supernatural.”

“Historically, people have deferred to supernatural agents and religious professionals to solve instrumental problems beyond the scope of human ability. These problems may seem more solvable for people working and living in highly automated spaces.”

Automation and the decline of religion

To test their supposition, the researchers conducted four experiments. In the first, they tracked religious decline between 2006 and 2019 across 68 countries via a yes-or-no survey question with more than 2 million respondents: “Is religion an important part of your daily life?” They then correlated this data with each nation’s yearly operational stock of industrial robots.

“Robotics exposure was robustly and negatively associated with religiosity across the globe,” they reported. The association held when controlling for GDP per capita, telecom development, and energy development.

In the next experiment, the scientists focused solely on the decline of religion in the United States, comparing religiosity and robotics growth in metropolitan areas between 2008 and 2016.

“Metropolitan areas with higher levels of robotics growth (+1 standard deviation) experienced an approximately 3% yearly decline in religion each decade,” they reported.

For the third experiment, the researchers followed 46,680 individuals in a community between 2009 and 2020, measuring their self-reported belief in God and their exposure to automation at their jobs. They found that individuals who worked at jobs with higher exposure to AI and robotics reported significantly greater drops in religiosity over time.

“People with jobs that were one standard deviation higher than the mean on occupational exposure to AI were 45% less likely to believe in God compared to people in occupations that had a mean level of exposure to AI,” the authors wrote.

Experiment four was conducted at the most local level. The researchers followed 238 employees within a single organization over time, directly measuring their exposure to AI and their religiosity. AI exposure was linked to a decrease in religious belief.

All of the completed studies are correlative and thus do not prove causation. But taken together, they strongly support the authors’ contention that automation reduces religious belief.

“Our studies demonstrate that automation is linked to religious decline across multiple religious traditions (e.g., Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist), world regions (e.g., North America, South Asia, and Oceania), and levels of analysis,” they commented.

Their findings line up with the musings of other scholars, including Neil McArthur, the Director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba. Writing in The Conversation earlier this year, he predicted that some people may soon worship AI in lieu of gods. Generative AI like ChatGPT, for example, already has traits often associated with deities, such as immortality, seemingly limitless intelligence, and a lack of human vulnerabilities like pain and hunger. As AI grows in prominence and power, the global decline of religion may continue and even accelerate.

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The concept of human rewilding offers novel ideas about addressing the impending threat of global climate change and future pandemics, using evidence of how humans best lived and adapted through periods of climate instability, guided by perspectives from today’s Native communities and the observations of anthropologists.

As I learned through trial and error, a fully rewilded lifestyle seems preposterous and dangerous to most of my peers and family members. Debating its merits has thus become a regular occurrence in my life, and some themes have emerged. At one skills gathering, I met a photographer who pressed me to admit that a lot of rewilding practices don’t scale. “Earth’s 7.2 billion people can’t hunt and gather anymore,” he said. “There isn’t enough quality habitat, and there are too many of us to live in ecological balance.” 

I responded that it is true that we civilized folks vastly out-number our nomadic forebears. But the idea of “scaling” is a concept based on agricultural civilization and popularized by tech. It assumes a mechanical replicability, which is only something industry can do. The immediate-return lifestyle doesn’t scale; it grows according to the carrying capacity of the environment, and it adapts based on the particular species available in that ecosystem. The more important point, I said, was that not everyone needs to rewild right now. We just need some portion of the population to retain wild skills and the ability to forage in whatever radically different environment emerges from future global upheaval. 

Others lament that we can’t possibly feed everyone on the planet with wild food. But this statement is based on an illusion that we’re feeding everyone on the planet right now with industrial agriculture, which we most certainly are not. We have enormous rates of malnourishment and hunger. 

Ethnobotanist Kyle Chamberlain once took on this argument, saying that it assumes that the only thing we can do is commit to the trajectory of the industrial food system and that figuring things out for yourself somehow denies other people the food they need. “But we’re already starving millions of people,” he said. “Why can’t individuals or small groups figure out how to get wild food? They will either figure it out, or they won’t. The real issue is guilt, which these people feel because they’re hoarding a disproportionate share of the world’s resources.” 

While it’s doubtful that a large mass of people can successfully rewild, it is certain that not everyone on the planet can consume like we do in wealthy countries. But as I found, rewilding in an immersive, total sense is not yet a reality even for committed individuals, let alone for everyone. Most Western consumers — including my closest family and friends — won’t be able to disengage from modern comforts, conveniences, and addictions without some tragic precipitating cause. 

Another point that comes up frequently questions the legality of rewilding practices. Someone like Philip Stark, the Berkeley forager, can talk about himself as a “scofflaw” when it comes to picking up greens from the side of the road, but the same wouldn’t be true for someone who didn’t look like the professorial type. Penalties are always harsher on the poor and people of color. Hunting and fishing without proper licenses is illegal. Harvesting food from public or private land is trespassing, and simply collecting rainwater is not officially permitted in most areas. Native American communities have suffered the consequences of laws made against subsistence throughout colonization and into today, and they have paid dearly for this in the loss of their vital traditions. 

Others ask about the consequences of masses of rewilders going out onto the landscape. We’ve already seen populations of highly desired wild foods like ramps, mushrooms, and seaweeds declining in areas where people are going out to forage them for the commercial market. There could be so much more damage from this approach, which is about extraction rather than regeneration. 

If human rewilding is to happen, we have to respect the lands by planting back, ensuring the reproduction of native species, and providing a positive benefit to ecosystems as humans once did across the earth. The consequences would be devastating if a generation of wannabe wilderness wanderers decimated our already taxed landscapes by pulling up all the edible roots, killing all the tastiest fauna, and mishandling their own waste. The land has to have the capacity to regenerate from our impact, which means our footprints must spread widely, with low population density. If there is no reciprocity and regeneration that comes from humans living off the land, then there is no rewilding, only more destruction and domestication. 

As writer Paul Shepard recommended, we must take our cues for how to live from primal cultures, who have the longest time-tested wisdom traditions. We have to rewild our minds and ask ourselves in any situation: What would a hunter-gatherer do? Then we must do our best to approximate that. Whittle your social group down to 25 key players. Pursue good relationships, not money. Eat wild food. Make your kids play outside, and spend as much time as you can outside yourself. Don’t buy stuff that you can make yourself, even if it takes more time than tapping and swiping on your Amazon app. 

Try to master a few skills of our ancestors, even if you only use them on those long, minimalist camping trips. The notion that hunter-gatherers live a heathier and more balanced life than we do in civilization becomes an opportunity to imagine what a better life might look like and allows us to critique the shortcomings of our consumer habits and industrial dependency. If more of us understood how humans lived for most of our tenure on Earth, we could make better decisions about how to live now. 

What I know for sure is that the more I unleash myself from the tethers of domestication, the happier I feel. Though I still live in a single-family home far from my relatives, get many of my basic goods from strangers, and use the best hours of my day to work for money, I know better how to return to a state of connectedness in nature, and I live in a mutually supportive community. Knowing that civilized life is just the most recent, flawed iteration of how humans have chosen to live helps me lessen the power that institutional ideas have over my choices. I’m grateful that I now live in a place where no one thinks it’s strange that I pick berries from the roadside, carry a tarp in my trunk in case I find a deer on the high- way, and feed my chickens acorns from the tree above their coop instead of buying feed at the store. I hang out with my neighbors every day, whether we’re riding horses, building gardens, or playing card games late into the night.

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